Corridor of Storms

by neetha Napew

  A man must know many women in his life. If he is lucky, he will find one good woman to warm him in the night and keep his fire and cook his meat as—“

  Naiapi hissed like a jealous, threatened goose, lowering her head, spitting at Mahnie with her eyes. “You would like to cook Karana’s meat, eh?”

  Her double meaning did not pass Grek, who nearly struck her. “Watch your tongue, Naiapi. This man might yet cut it from your mouth and make you eat it!”

  Silence settled, along with the threat. The sounds of the temporary night camp were all around them: man talk, woman chatter, yawns, sighs, snores. The sound of the mist like rain falling ever so softly upon the hide tarpaulins of many small lean-tos.

  Dusk had yielded to dark as Grek and his women had talked. The night was young, the rolling contours of the barren land silhouetted against it. Mahnie had no appetite. She gave the last of her mammoth meat to Wallah, who grimaced as she ate it. Mahnie smiled. She loved Wallah. She snuggled down between her and Grek, closing her eyes, pretending that Naiapi was not with them tonight, not a part of their family at all. Perhaps Navahk would take her back one day. She would ask the spirits for that. And for Karana.

  She slept without dreams of spirits or handsome youths to disturb her.

  The rain stopped. Low clouds veneered the night. A day had passed since the last of the hunters had returned from the killing site. Despite the huge communal fire of bones and turf that had been built within the center of the great encampment, the air was cold and damp. Smells of roasting meat and fat steamed and dripped, but the enormous blaze reeked of the sulfurous ash that had fallen with the rain. Accompanied by a beating drum, Lorak, Sondahr, Navahk, and the rest of the magic men, all in ceremonial attire, came down from the Hill of Dreams to join the assembled people. The climax to a night of feasting was about to commence. The shouting stopped, and the storytelling was about to begin.

  Sondahr, regal and beautiful—albeit very pale in her shaggy, mammoth-hide dress, feather robe, and circlet of down—took her place amid the magic men. Navahk, in the skin of the wanawut, stood behind her.

  Sondahr stared straight ahead as the women of the various headmen hurried forward to bring bone plates piled high with meat and fat to her and the others of her rank. Her mouth was dry and her skin hot. She had been chilled by the rain during her invocations at the scene of the kill, and fasting had weakened her. She licked her lips. She could not remember ever having been made ill by an extended exposure to the weather, but she was a mammoth eater, and it had been too long since she had tasted of the flesh that gave her strength and power. The blood and meat that she tasted at the killing site had restored much of her flagging strength. Her vision was returning, along with a sharpened insight.

  Lonit was not with the others who came forward; no doubt Torka had not allowed her to take part in the butchering, and what Lonit had not prepared with her own hands, she could not bring as an offering to the shamans. Sondahr hoped that there would be no trouble over it; yet she knew there would be. Lorak was too envious of Karana to overlook the slightest infraction on his part or on the part of his people.

  Her attention was drawn to the generous offerings of two women who brought meat to her from the fire of a man they called Grek. She had noticed him on the hunt and remembered him instantly. A member of Navahk’s band, he was past his prime, yet he was as strong and steady as he had been as a youth, and was an exceptionally good man with a spear.

  The first woman came very close, as though she feared being overheard as she whispered a request that was not unusual. “For Mahnie, daughter of Grek, Wallah asks Sondahr to speak to the spirits that bring a woman’s first blood, so that Wallah’s child may become a woman in this good camp, with Sondahr to share the secrets of woman wisdom with her and oversee the ritual of first blood.”

  “Sondahr would be honored,” she replied.

  The other woman took the place of the first and spoke her request softly but forthrightly. “Across the world of men, Sondahr’s name is known. Praise the spirits in the name of Naiapi, Magic Woman, so that she might come to share the meat and keep the fire of the man she would have.”

  The woman named Wallah looked at Naiapi with an expression of disgust. Sondahr accepted the offering but not as graciously as she had accepted the generously piled plates of others. There was something about Naiapi that put her on guard as the eyes of the woman strayed past her to Navahk, who stood at her back. Women always looked at Navahk, but she could not blame them, even though now, in the skin of the wanawut, he wore upon his back the physical manifestation of his inner ugliness for all to see.

  She had told him that just before leaving the Hill of Dreams to join the others at the feast fire. He had come alone from the council house of bones to block her exit from her own hut.. ..

  The moon had stood behind his back, cauled within the clouds, shadowing him, making the moment as cold as the eyes of the man who stood before her.

  “We meet again, Sondahr,” he had said. “Only this time it is Navahk who walks into your world. This time it is Navahk who will be Sondahr’s teacher. Behold. Navahk is headman of his band, and shaman. Navahk will be supreme elder of the Great Gathering soon. Yes, perhaps Navahk will yet wear the feather of Sondahr, for while Sondahr wastes her time with one who is nothing—nothing—Navahk will make her see that he is all that she believed he could never be.”

  “No, Navahk,” she had told him quietly. “You may lead your people, but you are not headman—not by right. A headman leads his band for the good of all, not only to serve his own needs. And you will never be a shaman. Never. You are a magic man, a man of the smokes, a trickster and a liar. A manipulator and, yes, a man who has taken the life of others. You are everything that I knew you must be. You will never wear the feather of Sondahr....”

  The memory was one she would like to forget, but the presence of the man was still a shadow over her. She could see his face reflected in the eyes of the woman who called herself Naiapi as she set the woman’s offering with the others before her. When she straightened, she felt restless and irritable. The brew of willow leaves and mammoth’s blood that she had made for herself earlier in the day had yet to lessen her fever. She wished that the night were over so she could retire to the privacy of her hut and rest, as any other woman would be able to do if she felt weak with illness. But she was not any other woman. She was Sondahr. And the night was young.

  “Look at me when you speak to me, Naiapi, woman of Grek. Sondahr’s power lies only in Seeing and in her knowledge of the ways of healing. Sondahr will praise the spirits in Naiapi’s name, but in truth, Naiapi must know that they have already smiled upon her if Naiapi is the woman of Grek.”

  But Naiapi would not look at her. She ducked away and, with Wallah, joined the others at the women’s side of her circle.

  Sitting with the other women, with a restless Summer Moon on her lap, Lonit thought that the giving of meat to the magic men and to Sondahr was going to last forever. It seemed that nearly everyone had special requests for those men and the one woman who they believed could commune with the spirits on their behalf.

  As the last man and woman returned to the main body of the assemblage, Lonit was shocked to see a thoroughly intoxicated Pomm, still in her flowing headdress of feathers, teetering on her feet. She brought no gift of meat to the magic woman as she paused before her and announced belligerently: “Sondahr is magic woman, but so, too, is Pomm of Zinkh’s band magic woman. Pomm should not sit with other women. Pomm will take her place here. She is not like other women who come and go as their men say. Pomm will not be given away to old men by young boys! Pomm will sit here with magic-making people!” And this she did, huffing as she seated herself so abruptly that it appeared as though someone had knocked her down. Her legs folded under her, her arms crossed, and her enormous belly, hips, and bottom expanded around her. “Who will say no to Pomm?”

  Lonit saw Lorak’s face collapse about his nose in shock as he wheeled and
pointed at Zinkh. “This woman is of your band?”

  Zinkh wilted under his censorious glare. He nodded. Words refused to leave his mouth.

  “She is a magic woman?” Lorak demanded an answer.

  Pomm responded before Zinkh could find his tongue. “No woman in the world be such a wonderful magic woman as Pomm! If the sick woman of Torka be left to me, long ago would she be better, and the baby in belly would be in belly no more, but would be loud and noisy and making good, stinking baby messes in its swaddling moss!”

  Lonit stared, aghast, knowing that the fat woman had been sipping at her berry brew again. As on the night of the plaku, it had loosened her tongue. But this time it had not weakened her self-confidence, and now Pomm’s arrogance had put her life in jeopardy. All around her, eyes had gone suddenly wide. Mouths gaped. A murmuring went through the assembly. Lonit wished that Torka had not insisted that she attend the celebrations of the mammoth eaters. She felt frustrated by her inability to help Pomm, and worse than that, it was all she could do to keep her eyes averted from Navahk.

  Navahk. There he stood, behind Sondahr, as though deliberately overshadowing her. Lonit felt sick. Even in the hideous skin of the wind spirit, he set her heart racing—a heart sworn to Torka, to the one man whom she would ever love .. . but not the only man she desired. Shame filled her. All that she feared was coming true. If her eyes met Navahk’s, if he came to her and held out his hand to her .. . She looked at Pomm again, and her heart went out to the fat woman. To love and not to be loved in return—who else could understand the pain that Pomm was enduring if not Lonit? If only Karana had not insulted her! There he sat, glowering beside Torka. He must know that his thoughtless dismissal of her was the talk of the encampment. He had actually given her away to another man! In front of others he had made it clear that he was glad to be rid of her. Surely the youth had not meant to hurt her, only to put her in her place; he was too immature to understand that this was the one place that Pomm could never bear to be.

  To Lonit’s left, Wallah shook her head as a flustered Zinkh rose and stepped forward to stand directly before Lorak and admit that, among his people, Pomm was considered a magic woman.

  “It has been so for a long time, yes. Pomm will be first always to tell everyone that she knows everything! Especially when she has been sucking at a bladder of her special berry juice .. . and this she does much too often these days—but it is very good juice, yes!” He tittered, cocking his head to one side in obsequious deference to the supreme elder. “Perhaps if Pomm she gives her bladder flask of juice to Lorak, he would drink and know that it has made a usually pretty good

  woman silly enough to assume that she might join those upon the Hill of Dreams and—“

  Pomm cut him off with a wave of her hand and a snowstorm of goose feathers. “Silly? Bah! If one magic woman sits among men, so, too, will Pomm sit. Sondahr, you move over now and make room for Pomm. This woman will be afraid no more of you!”

  Lonit could not believe her eyes as the fat woman forcibly unseated Sondahr with a wide sideways swing of her hip. Rather than be knocked off the piled skins that had been arranged for the magic men and magic woman, Sondahr rose just as Zinkh and a skinny, terribly flustered little elder hurried forward. Magic men stepped aside to make way for them. They gripped Pomm by her elbows, hoping to carry the offending fat woman away. They might as well have tried to heft a mammoth. Grunting, they staggered against the weight of her rigid form as she told them, through gritted teeth, that if they did not put her down at once, later in the night they would find their crotches as flat as a woman’s.

  It was Navahk who laughed and broke the stunned silence of the onlookers. “Wait. Perhaps Lorak will agree when Navahk says that any woman brave enough to seek so blatantly her place among the shamans must indeed be worthy of her own recommendation?”

  From where Lonit sat, Pomm looked more surprised than anyone else. She blinked and pursed her tiny lips, looking at Navahk suspiciously out of bleary, drink-reddened little eyes. He smiled back at her, so sweetly that she sagged, overwhelmed by his beauty. Lorak’s face was still a bundle of wrinkles. He made an effort to focus on Navahk as that magic man’s words brought a smile to his time-ruined mouth and a terrible feeling of dread to Lonit.

  “Perhaps it is time that Sondahr was not the only woman to dwell upon the Hill of Dreams,” suggested Navahk. “Perhaps this—Pomm is it?--is more worthy of a place among us. Later, when Lorak has told us the mighty tales of his people, when the feasting is over and the last song of the hunters has been sung, we will see who should be magic woman among the mammoth hunters: Sondahr, Pomm, or perhaps neither of them?”

  Torka observed as Lorak, no longer dressed in bird skins but clad entirely in shaggy mammoth hide, lifted his drum and struck it hard with the time-smoothed beater of thong wrapped tusk.

  “Now is the time for story chanting! Now is the time to sing the songs of mammoths and mammoth eaters! Now is the time to remember the way of our people, to ask the angry spirits to look past those who have offended them in this camp, and to remember always those among us who have praised them!” Again he struck the drum.

  Torka flinched. He sat between Karana and Grek, cross legged with the other hunters on the men’s side of the circle. The incident with old Pomm had been unsettling. And now the supreme elder stared at him, and it was as though the strike of the tusk had been not against the drum but against Torka. His head went up defensively.

  Lorak’s drum was very large, round, and flat. Its inflexible frame of bone had been softened with water, then bent into a hoop nearly as broad as Pomm’s midsection. Held upright before the fire in the old man’s hand, its tough skin was nearly transparent. Lorak was obviously feeling strong after hours of gorging himself upon mammoth meat within the council house. When he struck the drum again, he hit it so hard, it seemed that the blunted tip of the time-yellowed tusk would pierce the skin. It did not, but Lorak’s eyes pierced Torka, then moved to where Karana sat beside him and pierced the young man as well.

  The youth glowered as Lorak whirled away around the feast fire. “I told you that I should have stayed away,” he hissed out of the side of his mouth to Torka.

  Torka whispered back, “You were commanded to attend. If you had refused, there would have been trouble.”

  “There is trouble anyway, and there will be more before this night is done.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Hrrmph!” exhaled Karana with disgust, as though he and not Torka were the adult attempting to reason with a stubborn youth.

  Lorak was dancing vigorously now, striking the beater against the drum skin repeatedly, rousing a loud, flat vibration that resonated across the minds of all of the magic men and the assembled people. They watched in anticipation as he danced on one foot, then on the other. He intended grace, but what he achieved was the hopping movements of an inebriated, flightless bird trying to leap over hot coals. The men of the assembly clapped their hands against their thighs and exhaled loud, guttural shouts that matched the cadence of the drum.

  From where he sat, Torka had an excellent view of the section reserved for the magic men. In the hideous skin of the wanawut, Navahk was easy to recognize. Torka saw him smile. It was an illusory expression, a mere tightening of his jawline. Torka knew that there was contempt in Navahk’s eyes for what he must surely perceive as the pathetic performance of the old man. Long ago, in the firelight of Supnah’s fire, Torka had seen Navahk dance. He doubted if any magic man or shaman could equal that display.

  The old man strutted before them, beating the drum, his voice as harsh and atonal as the “music” that he made. He chanted praises to the life spirits of the mammoths that had died in the bog. He told the story of how his people had become mammoth hunters, how they had been favored above all men by the forces of Creation when Father Above personally spoke to their forefathers and told them the secret route along which the mammoths traveled to their far and forbidden winter grazing grounds wit
hin the face of the rising sun. He told of the construction of the wall of bones in the time beyond beginning, when men first hunted mammoths together and joined at the Great Gathering along the migration route. He told how the herds walked across the world in the last of the days of light and vanished into the sun itself, disappearing over the edge of the world into a land where no men might follow.

  Torka frowned. He had followed the game over the edge of the world and had returned to tell of it. Lorak knew this. Was the supreme elder hoping to instigate him by deliberately calling him a liar? Beside him Karana drew in a low breath as though about to speak. A well-placed elbow told him to keep silent as Lorak’s tale continued.

  The supreme elder looked at Torka as he spoke of how only fearful men chose to hunt bison and caribou, moose and elk, camel, yak, and musk oxen. Torka and Karana were not the only men to scowl as he turned to his own hunters and proclaimed that only the bravest men chose to hunt mammoths. The hunters who found themselves in this category-and they were the majority by far—nodded vigorously, pleased at the expense of others as Lorak sonorously chanted on about the many ways men found to kill the great mammoths: of bog traps and blinds and ravines staked with sharpened bones onto which panicked beasts were driven. He told how his people often drove the mammoths ahead of lightning sparked fires. His face shone as he told of how the summer tundra sometimes burned at the command of Father Above and how the great tusked ones screamed and ran before the flames, only to be killed by men.

  “Gifts are they to men from Father Above, from male to male, not from Mother Below to females, who feed only when their men say “Eat!” “ He hurled the words as an accusation against Sondahr, and nearly everyone gasped in surprise at his obvious hostility toward her as he beat his drum in her direction, waiting for her to rise to his baiting.