by Ray Hudson
Well, I guess everything here is underground, I said to myself as the path now followed the stream deeper into the mountain. A few hundred feet on, this stream met another beneath a stone bridge that vibrated slightly as the combined streams tumbled over a waterfall below it.
The trail narrowed and angled upward. The roar of water diminished until the only sound was my own panting and my muffled footsteps on the grass matting as the path changed into steps, dozens and then hundreds, climbing higher and higher. The corridor grew warmer. Any dampness in the air evaporated. The steps widened into a series of ascending ledges until they formed a single gentle slope of smooth stone that terminated at a broad landing. Stone benches lined the walls, and a circular grass mat of astonishing workmanship covered the floor. Anna stood hypnotized by the carpet, but I sank onto a bench.
“Up!” the woman ordered. We went to a door of black polished stone.
“I know,” Anna said under her breath, “Obsidian.”
She was right.
The immense door swung out at the woman’s touch, and sweet air swept in. We stepped onto a wide landing. Before us, a stone bridge arced over a dark chasm. I followed Anna across. I would have closed my eyes if there had been guardrails, but there weren’t, so I didn’t. I stayed to the center and held my breath as warm air rushed up from both sides. It seemed ages before we stepped off and under a stone archway into a narrow hall. The Volcano Woman parted a hanging mat and there was Ash, standing at a bench and polishing a long black spear.
“So, they are back again?”
“But without their good luck charm or that young chief,” the Volcano Woman said.
Anna caught my eye, and I knew she missed Vasilii as much as I did. He might have been as mystified by Volcano Woman and her surroundings as we were, but he had possessed a bit more knowledge and, probably, a lot more courage.
I saw thin stone blades clearly as sharp as razors on Ash’s workbench. Lashed wooden handles held other blades in a variety of styles. All of them made me nervous.
“Good to see you,” he said and laughed.
“Yeah, right,” Anna replied as we followed the woman down a passage lit by glowing stalactites. We came to the large room from which we had escaped. The notched pole was still up. Soft light hovered at the high entrance and told me it wasn’t yet night. The woman ushered us behind a grass mat and down another passage that curved to the right before it broadened slightly. She paused before a door fashioned from a huge slab of whalebone with a small square opening near the top. It pivoted open on obsidian hinges.
I started to follow Anna in, but the woman stopped me and pulled the door shut.
I was taken to the next cell. Before she left, she held out her hand.
I knew what she wanted.
She flexed her fingers impatiently. I took out the bookmark.
To my relief, she refused to take it.
“I thought I had destroyed it,” she said.
“It’s—” I started to explain as I showed her both sides.
“I know what it is.”
Then she pulled the door shut and left me by myself. A coarse grass mat carpeted the floor. There was a bedframe of lashed and pegged driftwood, with a mattress and a soft fur blanket folded at one end. In a corner of the room, a stone sink was continuously refreshed by a trickle that fell from a narrow spout. I studied the walls and saw that the whole room had been hollowed out of pumice. Irregular pores speckled the rock. I flattened my palms against the rough stone and fingered a few of the openings. Selecting the largest pore within reach, I placed my mouth near it and whistled through the honeycomb of stone.
“Booker?” Anna answered.
“Are you okay?”
“Considering,” she said. “How’s it over there?”
“Comfortable. Surprisingly nice. What about you?”
“Wait,” she said. I heard her door open. I looked around again.
It’s like sitting inside a petrified sponge, I thought. I heard her door close and saw mine open.
Ash set a plate of fish and some kind of rice at the end of the bed. “Thank you,” I said. “So what do you think will happen to us?”
“At first I thought you were done for. She looked furious when she brought you in. Now, I don’t know,” he smiled briefly. “She’s been chuckling to herself.”
20. Anna
I sat down on the cot and devoured the meal of salmon and rice from the Kamchatka lily that Ash had brought. What a treat! But my enthusiasm over the food was overpowered by irritation when I realized where I was.
I returned the fox, I thought, more than a little peeved, and ended up a prisoner. We had escaped once; we could do it again. While I ate, I mentally backtracked the route we had taken up through the volcano, trying to recall every passage in detail so I could lead the way once we figured out the how and the when.
From deep inside the mountain’s core, a gentle rumbling wrapped itself around me.
It’s like an idling motor, I thought. While I listened, a thin, melodic line wove through it like a metallic thread.
How had Booker known the young fox was a person? I should have known that. And was it the right fox? Old Man Peter had said a boy needed the carving, a boy named Chakna according to Fevronia and her daughter. A boy who would drown without it. Chakna? I smiled at the thought of anybody stuck with a name that meant “Stink.”
The melody continued, strong, sharp, and keening. It was sad, but strangely comforting. I curled up in the luxurious sea otter blanket. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
One thing soon became clear: this was a jail like no other. The first morning after I awoke, I went to the door and found it was unlocked. Booker was already out in the hall, and together we started exploring. It wasn’t long before we found the workshop where Ash was busy shaping what he said was a sea otter spear. We sat down and watched. That afternoon Ash took us outside for fresh air and exercise. Well, I guess it was only for air. There wasn’t enough flat land to do much more than walk around a bit. The food at lunch was fresh and fragrant salmon, steamed roots and rice. Real Unanga food.
After lunch, Ash took me to the main room, the room from which we had once escaped.
“Look around, if you want,” he said before leaving me alone. “I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere. You’d get awfully wet if you did. There’s a storm coming.”
The room was like a museum. The baskets were phenomenal. Some of them were woven in a way I had never seen before, but others were like the open fish baskets at the museum back home. I examined one that resembled the one the girl on the beach at Unalaska had used. I returned it to the shelf and picked up an oval bentwood bowl.
Even though the islands have no trees, I thought, my people must have known a lot about wood.
I turned it over to examine the bottom.
“It was carved and then steamed,” Volcano Woman said as she stepped from behind a hanging mat.
I pressed my hands into it to keep it from slipping away.
“Your people had great skills,” she said. “Skills shared by no other people.”
I knew that. I didn’t need to be told.
“I admire your courage,” she said and actually smiled a bit.
I don’t know if it was courage or craziness, but I looked right at her and asked, “How long are you going to keep us here?”
Instead of answering, she said, “Things disappear. One variation follows another. Ash knows more than his grandfather did about some things. About other things, he knows less.”
I knew that. I didn’t need to be told that.
“Of course not,” she said.
Yikes, I thought, she’s also a mind reader.
“When I saw the way you were looking at things, I assumed you were interested in the ways of your ancestors.”
“I was,” I said. “I mean, I am.”
If I could master even one Unanga skill and bring it back home, how terrific would that be! As though to confirm my thoug
ht, she asked, “What would you most like to learn?”
I had actually thought about that quite a bit, so it didn’t take me long to answer.
“I’d like to weave a basket.”
“A good place to start,” she said.
“Like one of these,” I said as I put the bentwood bowl down and picked up a fish basket.
She held out her hands, and I gave it to her. As I did so, she looked at my palms. The stains had darkened and spread to my wrists. The jagged lines like writing had almost disappeared under a general blur. Once more she whispered that strange word, “Qalngaa,” and then she looked at me as though there was something I should understand.
I turned my hands away.
“And after basketry?” she asked. “Gut-sewing and appliqué? Perhaps. You may not have the patience for bending and painting wood or for carving ivory.”
“Those all sound great,” I said.
“And fighting,” she added. “Fighting above all.”
She started to hand the basket back, but the quiver in my hands had erupted into shaking.
“Fighting?”
“Do you know what has happened?” she asked as she put the basket down. “What is happening?”
“What hasn’t happened?” I tried to quiet my hands. She smiled briefly.
“You are fated to do something remarkable,” she said.
“Fated?”
“Destined, perhaps,” she said. I knew what fated meant. “Fated may be too strong a word. It may be that you will need to make a decision.”
She was talking in riddles.
“And decisions have consequences.”
She wasn’t making sense.
“Because of this?” and I thrust out my darkening palms.
“Little Raven,” she said. “Partial raven. You need to be careful.”
21. Booker
Even though I’m good at math, it was hard keeping track of the days inside the volcano. I’d wake up and think it was morning, but it wasn’t. It was only when we were taken outside and I could see the sun that I had any sense of the time of day. Of course, that didn’t help with knowing what day it was. Yesterday had been stormy and today was just as bad. I had gone to Ash’s workshop where he was concentrating on a bentwood visor. Anna was kung-fuing the air and letting out a little grunt with each thrust.
“You look ridiculous, Anna,” I said.
“Hah-raah!” she shouted and leveled a kick in my direction. I jumped aside and she knocked over a low shelf of tools.
I helped her pick them up. She quit her martial arts practice and sat down beside a pile of long yellow grass. I picked up a long thin piece of wood, something like a branch. It was going to be a spear. Ash had started shaping it, and then he had given it to me with brief instructions on how to scrape it with a curved stone blade. It was supposed to end up as a gently tapered shaft. He had shown me a finished spear, and it was amazing. I was pretty much at a complete loss as to what to do, but Anna seemed comfortable with the grass she was working on.
“I learned this at Camp Qungaayu, the summer Unanga culture camp at home, at Humpy Cove,” she said. “You separate the stalks into the inner, middle, and outer blades. Those are the ones you use when weaving.”
The pile of discarded blades was soon much bigger than the usable ones.
I turned the wood every time I scraped it, the way Ash had demonstrated, in order to keep it round. Even so, I kept leaving little gouges. He came over to inspect.
“This is an odd sort of prison,” I said.
“Don’t scrape too hard. You want to keep it balanced.”
He handed it back.
“It’s not a prison.”
“Might as well be,” Anna said.
She was right. This whole island was a prison as far as we were concerned.
“Have you looked around?”
We had. We had explored a number of hallways and rooms.
“A bit,” I said.
He nodded for us to follow him. We left his workshop and started down a long set of steps that began just off the stone bridge. We were occasionally separated from the abyss by stone walls; at other times, we were right at the edge where jagged rocky pillars loomed up. The dark chasm was made even darker by jets of steam. We came to a landing that opened onto a hallway along which were a dozen rooms. The first one was filled with whale vertebrae. This was followed by a room with shelves lined with wooden boxes containing feathers, beads, and small pieces of bone or ivory. There were small stone bowls holding dry pigments. The shelves in yet another room were stacked with flattened grass baskets and rolled mats.
“Who made all this stuff?” I asked.
Anna gave a snort in reply.
“The best pieces, she made herself,” Ash explained. “And the others, well, they came from Kagamil and elsewhere.”
The next room stored gut and bird-skin work. There were raincoats and parkas. Near the door was a shelf with small containers like envelopes made from what Ash said was both seal and sea lion intestine. Some were pretty fancy. I had to pull Anna out of the room. We walked into an elaborate kitchen with its own storage closets and prep spaces. All the heat feeding the open grills and ovens had been channeled from somewhere deep inside the volcano. An assortment of wood and stone tools hung on pegs and rested inside cavities hollowed out of the walls. A muscular woman sat on a stool scraping the skin off a long yellow root.
“The Woman-with-Six-Sea-Lion-Sons,” Ash said, introducing her. “She is an amazing cook, as you have already experienced.”
He was right. The meals had been delicious.
Her eyes sparkled at the compliment. She gave a slight tilt to her head causing the flesh on her frame to vibrate like custard. She smelled, I thought, like fresh bread.
As we started back, Anna asked him, “Did you hear about the ivory fox?”
“That you gave it away?”
“Without your help,” she said. “And now you’ll be asked to steal it back. How do you like being a hired thief?”
Good grief. But, he didn’t take the bait. He simply said, “There are more important things.”
“Like getting home,” I said.
“Will you do it?” she asked. Totally obnoxious.
He didn’t answer.
Back in his workshop, I picked up my would-be spear. “Can I use this when it’s done?”
“First things first,” he said. “I’ll take you down to the shore where you can stand in the sea. That’s a beginning.”
Anna’s laugh evaporated when Volcano Woman walked in and pointed at her three neat piles of separated grass blades.
“Take those to the kitchen.”
And cook them like spaghetti? I wondered.
As Anna gathered up the three piles of grass, the Volcano Woman said, “The Woman-with-Six-Sea-Lion-Sons will show you how to braid them together.”
“What do you think, Ash?” she asked after Anna left the room. “Auklet or raven or something else?”
Then she looked at me and asked, still speaking to Ash, “Will he do?”
“He’s young,” Ash said and nodded a smile at me.
My stomach contracted. Young as in “tender turkey breast,” I wondered?
I tried to sit a bit straighter and look a bit tougher.
“Well,” she said, “even I was young once upon a time. May I see it again?” She looked at me. This time she didn’t hesitate to take the bookmark.
“What does it say?” I asked.
Instead of answering, she said, “Stories become clouded once they are written down. They lose most of their power when confined within sentences.”
I asked again, “Can you tell me what it says?”
I felt like I couldn’t exhale until she said, “It’s incomplete.”
She glanced at it again. “It’s not Raven’s favorite story. It embarrasses him.”
I started to breathe.
“Enough,” she said. “He doesn’t like that story. It foretells his dea
th.”
“Real Raven lives out west,” Ash said. “A long ways from here.”
“But I give the disgusting creature a place to stay when he drops in,” the Volcano Woman said. “He does what he wants. I don’t bother him.”
“The story is,” Ash continued, “that a man took the form of a Whiskered Auklet.”
“A whiskered what?”
The glare from Volcano Woman suggested I should just keep quiet.
“A small bird, tiny, but fierce. It was his guardian spirit. Taking the form of the auklet, the man was able to escape from Real Raven. Not only escape, but eventually kill him.”
She handed the bookmark back to me. I studied it.
“And this says all that?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “It tells some of the story. What you have there says, The man hurried down to the spirits that Raven kept in a cave and they told him how Raven used to live, what Raven used to do. And when he heard this, he got scared.”
“And what does this have to do with Anna?”
“You’ve seen that yourself,” she said. “Something that was in those words has escaped and entered her. With luck, she will become what she has always wanted to be.”
I looked from her to Ash.
“If she survives,” he said.
Volcano Woman turned to leave. “Her guardian spirit will eventually make itself known.”
“But if the raven is already dead—”
“Was dead. In the story,” she practically spat out the words. “But now he isn’t.”
It was right then that I started to appreciate the way Ash kept his cool. “The power of the man who killed Raven in that story,” he said very calmly, “has started to flow into your friend.”
“That is one possibility,” Volcano Woman said. “The other is that she is becoming a raven herself.”
Ash looked away, like he was considering that possibility.
“Or something close to that,” she ended.
“Is she or isn’t she?” I asked. “Does she know?”
