The World Above the Sky (7 page)

Keswalqw cut and knotted the cord. She wrapped the little corpse in the soft skin. She held the bundle aloft.

“
Akaia
,” she chanted quietly. “
Akaia
.”

Mid-day sun flooded the meadow. The black stone's surface rippled with heat. Birds took up their song, their warble and trill rattling air heavy with the scent of sweetgrass, dense as mist with the resins of fir and pine.

• • •

Henry established camp on a terrace of land overlooking the estuary of the great bay's central river. As the full moon tide fell,
Reclamation
exposed her belly for repairs.

Ignorance was sweet relief to Eugainia as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Latin, French, the Highland Scots Gaelic of Clan Sinclair's household and the Old West Norse dialect well known to Henry, as liegeman to the crown of Norway—all these tongues were familiar to Eugainia from the first days of her youth. The language of The People made no sense to her whatsoever. She put her urge to understand aside. She felt as though the gentle voices and their tongue's whispered sibilance washed her clean.

Early one still evening, light northeasterlies carried faint drumming across the waters from the low red island. Laughter rose and fell. Evening stretched into night. The night was half gone when fresh bursts of drumming and high-pitched chant/song woke Sir Athol Gunn. Shortly after dawn, he petitioned Prince Henry.

“This red island should be explored.”

“The festivities may be sacred, Athol.” Henry knew his cousin's fondness for dance and drink. “Let's determine the nature of the
fÍte
before inviting ourselves.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk was not a shy man when it came to communication. It was soon established through gesture and repetition that the massive exodus to the red isle was occasion for both celebration and hard work. Its shores were rich with shellfish, its uninhabited interior rich with small game. The People perennially celebrated the first of the summer's great collecting cycles on the island. When Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk came to understand Athol's request (the great man was ham-fisted when it came to mime or gesture), he signed he'd be happy to lead Sir Athol across the strait, so long as he manned his own canoe and stayed down wind.

Despite misgivings at what had passed between Eugainia and Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk at their first encounter, Henry had taken an immediate liking to the young warrior. Though standing alone, and in spite of himself, Henry laughed aloud when Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk in the sleek canoe swung back and paddled circles around Sir Athol Gunn. Sir Athol struggled to keep pace with Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk. Henry felt a rush of admiration when Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk sped ahead—all grace and power. He couldn't decipher the details of Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's shouted good-natured challenge, though both he and Athol caught a whiff of mockery.

Athol dug deep. He closed the distance. With no apparent effort, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk stepped up his rhythm, and sped away as though propelled by a great wind under full sail.

Eugainia advanced from strength to strength in Keswalqw's care. As the days passed, the rudiments of a common vocabulary grew. Simple, direct, subject on occasion to speculation, and some verbal misadventure, their communion became efficient and intense. The best way to tell, they agreed at this stage of their acquaintance, was to show, say and then show again.

From the top of the hill on which Eugainia and Keswalqw stood, a mated pair of golden eagles took to the air from a gnarled old starrigan pine. The People depended upon their feathered brothers and sisters to carry their prayers up to the Great Spirit. The Lady of the Grail felt the air around her tremble when Keswalqw offered gratitude for Eugainia's healing and petitioned the Great Spirit to maintain The People. Up spiralled the stately birds until, small black specks tracing lines of supplication up from the Earth World, they dissolved in the blue barrier that separates the Sky World from the World Above the Sky.

Keswalqw showed Eugainia the name of the three-pronged bay—the open claw of the spirit bird its inspiration—and evoked the peculiarities of the surrounding territories. Looking eastward, toward the open sea, the most arresting feature of this rolling landscape was the low, rounded old mountain from the side of which issued the thin band of black smoke Henry had first identified the day the
Reclamation
arrived.

Keswalqw pointed. “Those ridges running the length of the valley? We say a great serpent grinds through the earth, its back cutting furrows where it rises through the ground to breathe before plunging back below the surface. We call this big snake
Jipijka'maq
.”

“
Jipijka'maq
,” Eugainia ventured, the staccato rhythm of the word suiting the image Keswalqw created.

“
Jipijka'maq
lays bare the soft black rocks we burn to set the clay when we shape our pots.”

The black rock—coal, Eugainia gathered—was periodically ignited by lightning. Streams of run-off water from higher elevations overflowed into the crevasses, making a quick end to the mountain's sooty fussing. All would be quiet until the next storm re-ignited the coal. Rain fell, water pooled, the earth dried; clouds gathered, lightning struck and the cycle began anew.

Between the extremes of the Smoking Mountain's smoke and steam cycle, sulphurous vapours escaped from crevasses in faint wisps. Yet the air was normally sweet and clean. Prevailing winds carried the unpleasant odours south and east over the wide peninsula where they were absorbed by the great primeval forests, ancient stands of oak, maple and soaring white pine. The forest hills were the mothers of the bay's three rivers, Keswalqw explained. Below the trees, thick mats of moss regulated water extirpated by root, branch and leaf. Excess flowed into collector pools. Overflowing pools drained in rivulets. Rivulets deepened into streams. Streams expanded into creeks. Crystal-clear, nutrient-rich water coursed down the flanks of the Smoking Mountain, and her sister hills, to Claw of Spirit Bird Bay in three broad river systems.

Nothing was as it seemed at first glance. Below them, and a little to the west, Keswalqw indicated the elevated Meadow of the Singing Stone, the great black obelisk barely visible at this distance. In her agony, the stone had seemed enormous to Eugainia, saturated as she was with its primeval power. From this height and distance it was simply an odd feature in a benign landscape. She struggled to remember its significance.

All things in this strange land were infused with what Keswalqw called
Kji-kinap
—which translated, as far as Eugainia could tell, as Power. She felt its force, as ancient and particular as any Eugainia sensed in northern Europe, the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, or the vast arid territories her ancestor walked, as described in the New Testament, which Eugainia experienced firsthand when she and Morgase had travelled the way of the Cross some ten years past. Eugainia felt great
Kiji-kinap
in her current companion. Keswalqw's power was indistinguishable from the bays, mountains and rivers—the terrain into which she, the Great Mother of The People, had been born.

Secure in its circling nest of low mountains, aligned on a northeast axis, the great bay opened to the strait through a narrow gut. Wind, sun and the push and pull of the moon churned fresh water from the hills and salt gulf waters into the bay's life-sustaining broth. Its marshland fringe thronged with life. Aquatic mammals and waterfowl came and went at the bidding of the four distinct seasons that regulated the lives of The People.

They began their descent to The People's summer camp along well-trod paths. Keswalqw regarded the village tucked in the curve of the east bank below as an extension of the rivers and their creatures, all beings sentient as herself, possessed of their own
Kiji-kinap
, a tangle of life requiring care and tending, a sentient being deserving care and respect. The entire system was enriched, each species serving another in a generative web where land and sea, forest, river and sky functioned as one breathing, flowing entity. The estuary's waters, within an easy walk of the lodges, offered the richest fishing of the entire bay. Ocean fish fat with roe driven to spawn in fresh waters collected here in early spring en route from the open sea. Mammals designed by nature to harvest the fish followed, feasted and, in their turn, fed The People.

The river transformed The People's lives seasonally as it was itself transformed. Keswalqw and her tribe followed game inland to winter camps when the brutal northern winter rode south, its killing winds riling the sea, turning bays and their estuaries to cracked plains of ice. The slick, stone-hard highway of ice the rivers became carried hunters deep inland to take moose, caribou, beaver and bear. The women followed, butchered the carcasses, hauled meat and raw hides to the winter camp, their toboggans' wooden runners watered slick with ice.

In spring great depths of packed snow gave way to the warming rays of Grandfather Sun. The old man he'd become over winter was reborn, a virile young shaman/warrior and provider. Power pulsed from his rejuvenated loins. His implacable stare—all melting fire—transformed ice and snow into clear running water. Spring floods cleansed the winter hunting grounds. Snowmelt rushed in torrents through the summer camp, cleansing it of the previous summer's dross, scrubbing the earth clean for the season of plenty to come.

Her pleasure in the ordered beauty of the village lay undisguised on Keswalqw's face. Three sorts of structures were positioned with regard to space and privacy along the inside curve of the cove where tidal and fresh waters met. Cone-shaped wigwams rose from a circular base. Round-roofed domes and more familiar rectangular peaked-roof buildings formed a loose perimeter. Eugainia learned the wigwams, cone-shaped or dome-roofed, were primarily sleeping quarters sheltering three, often four, generations. The long rectangular edifices housed stores and sheltered communal activities.

Each wigwam was distinguished by particular bird, animal or landscape forms. Narrow bands and sharp points of white pigment made of powdered clamshell and seal fat drew the eye to subtle, often geometric highlights. Red ochre. Yellow sulphur. Blue mussel shell. Grey or black ash. The palette was at once subtle and intense. On the door flap of a particular wigwam in which Keswalqw took pride, a spot of white, intense in this clear day's morning sun, highlighted the black eye of a boldly painted loon.

“My totem,” Keswalqw explained. “She lives in three worlds and carries her young upon her back.”

Keswalqw unlaced the neck of a distended moose bladder. Eugainia recoiled at its contents—putrid fat with a foul fishy odour. The seal oil water-proofed the wigwam's skin and kept it supple. Keswalqw leaned into the skin wall and inhaled. She indicated Eugainia do the same. The seal oil once applied lost its repulsive pungence. The sun's rays and sea air transformed the foul odour into a pleasant aroma, not unlike the scent of forest moss or fallen leaves.

Keswalqw held a lustrous hank of her blue black hair under Eugainia's nose. It carried the same woodland aroma. The oil, she explained, in combination with the aromatic oils of conifers, prevented infestations of common head and body parasites. This held particular interest to the visitors. Keswalqw made a host of friends when she shared the seal fat. Head and body lice had flourished in the confines of the voyage. Clouds of the New World's blood-sucking black flies, which plagued the Europeans to swollen-eyed, puff-faced near madness, kept their distance.

The wigwam's interior glowed opalescent. For the first time since the birth of her poor misshapen child, the Living Chalice of the Holy Grail smiled. Eugainia recalled Garathia in her Selkie manifestation, the fullness of her sleek cream-coloured belly and the comfort she'd found within. In her delirium, Eugainia had yearned to be with her mother again, flying through the sea; in Keswalqw's wigwam, her entire body felt soothed, as though she floated up to the top of a pail of warm cream.

Keswalqw opened the smoke flap. A shaft of sunlight shot through, the convergent poles casting radiating shadows like spokes on a wheel on the fresh-cut, artfully laid spruce-and-fir-bough floor. The soft green needles, the lungs of all conifers, exhaled their fragrance in the mid-day heat as Eugainia moved. She pulled scented air deep into her lungs. Tree Power entered her blood.

Sleeping robes of lustrous beaver fur, carefully rolled and stowed for all but the coolest nights of summer, ringed the perimeter of the wigwam. Eugainia counted fifteen in all. A blackened circle of sunken stone in the centre located the wigwam's hearth. Nearby, a small pile of dry tinder sat ready to ignite a larger blaze. Elegant woven baskets hung from thongs lashed to the poles. Smaller pouches of softened hide, their drawstrings tied, dangled in a jumble from a single braided rope. Eugainia touched one. Keswalqw placed it in her hand. Inside, Eugainia found a clamshell, three blue feathers and a small polished stone.

Under a spread of elms and maples at the camp's perimeter, up the slight slope from the tidal shore, cooking pots scoured clean by sand and moss rested inverted on wooden stakes. Communal cooking hearths under smoke-cured hide awnings showed evidence of recurrent use. At a well-trodden area near the edge of the woods shaded by an old elm, scraping tools, chipping flints and circular stone knives, all carefully wrapped in leather, each bundle stored in oiled hide boxes, awaited the hands that would wield them. Hide pouches protecting smaller tools were secured with drawstrings fashioned from tree-root tendrils. The French word
atelier
came to Eugainia's mind. This
petit quartier
had the universal feel of a craft guild, a highly ordered workshop where invention eased the toil of daily life.