by Hilari Bell
Despite the weather, most of the tourists crowded the outside decks, recording scenery and birds and whatever the captain talked about over the ship’s com system.
Jase pulled out his com pod and tuned the small screen to an auto-tech series he’d been working his way through whenever he had time.
His school councilors were nagging him to start making career choices—and when Jase named his only preference, they promptly tried to discourage him with the amount of math and physics you had to know for automotive design. And it wasn’t like Jase’s other grades were better than the solid B– he got in math and science. He was never sure if they tried to discourage him because his father had hinted that he wanted his son to do something else, or if it was simply that graduates of Murie Prep weren’t supposed to become mechanics.
Eventually the boat chugged into the dock, and Jase gathered up his stuff and disembarked. The area around the resort was thoroughly familiar, and his overnight bag wasn’t heavy. He ignored the sprawling timber-and-glass “lodges” scattered up the hillside, and took the path that ran beside the tram track. Past the golf course—empty in this weather—and around a jutting slope to what the resort called an Authentic Alaska Native Village. The local Ananut called it the Disney Village—when they didn’t call it something worse.
No one lived in any of the houses, of course, but even in the rain a few tourists wandered from one craft demonstration to the next, and all the shops were open. Jase considered stopping at the coffee shop, but with any luck his grandmother would be home to let him in and feed him. And maybe persuade his grandfather to talk to him calmly, for once, instead of demanding that Jase take sides. In a fight that had begun when he was three, and been settled completely by the time he was seven. His father had won. His grandfather lost. It was time they both got over it.
Past the Disney Village the graveled path gave way to a rocky muddy trail, but it wasn’t narrow or brushed over. Most of the women from the real village and a lot of the men—all of them, when they weren’t allowed to fish—worked for the resort in some capacity.
It had kept the real village alive, his father said. When his father was young, half the houses had been abandoned, with the village meetinghouse all but falling apart. Now . . . Well, it wasn’t the upper slope of Flattop Mountain, but the small weathered houses were in good repair. Some even had modern glass in their windows, though the old glass wasn’t that bad. One of Jase’s earliest memories was lying on the floor in his grandparents’ living room, surrounded by toys, with the heat of the sun streaming through on his back in a way polarizing glass never permitted.
His grandfather claimed the resort had completed the destruction of the Ananut Way of Life. It might even be true, at least in part. There were new restrictions on hunting and fishing, but it was a hunting/fishing resort! They had to offer their guests the best sport, in the best seasons.
The new village house, which the resort had built as part of the agreement his father had negotiated, had not only modern glass, but enough room for all the Ananut Corporation’s offices, as well as the big meeting hall. The villagers must finally have accepted it, because as Jase passed he noticed well-tended flower beds around it, which couldn’t have been planted by resort-paid gardeners. After the resort’s first attempts to “help out in the local community” had been so furiously rejected, they’d fulfilled their contracts, but otherwise left “the locals” on their own.
But whatever the Ananut felt about the resort-provided village house, they hadn’t changed their opinion of the deal that produced it. The rain was keeping people inside, so Jase had to ignore only a few hostile glares as he made his way down the street to his grandmother’s house. Her house, by ancient Ananut tradition, so if she was home his grandfather would have to let Jase in. If Jase told the old man he’d come seeking a shaman’s advice, surely a shaman couldn’t turn him away.
As he stepped onto the crumbling concrete walk, his grandfather came out and stood on the porch, arms folded, barring the way.
Jase had been told that he looked just like his grandfather had in his youth, but Jase thought that if he lived to be a hundred he could never look as formidable as that grim old man.
He had to try.
“Hey, Gramps. I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to—”
“The sport fishermen are out,” said his grandfather. “So your father’s masters told us to stay home. Are you prepared to admit he was wrong?”
Evidently, his grandmother wasn’t home. Jase sighed.
“Do we always have to start with that? Aren’t there supposed to be two sides to every—”
His grandfather went into the house, closing the door behind him.
“Carp.” If he hadn’t needed information, Jase would have turned and left. His love for his father, his own self-respect, demanded it. But Jase did need information, and his grandfather was the only shaman he knew.
He climbed the steps and knocked on the door. He didn’t expect an answer, so he waited only a moment before he called, “Gramps, I know you’re listening.” He hoped his grandfather was listening. “Look, there’s something I need to ask about. It’s an Ananut thing.”
The door didn’t move. Jase pressed his ear against it; not a sound.
“It’s a shaman thing,” he called, a bit more loudly. So what if everyone on the street was opening their windows to listen. “And it’s important. I need your advice. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t need help, you stubborn—”
The canned chatter of d-vid came through the door. Jase gritted his teeth and tried the knob.
Locked.
Jase kicked the door, turned and left. He should have known his grandfather wouldn’t put aside his grudges, even to be a shaman. Not for the traitor’s son.
Jase stalked down the street, water from the puddles leaking into his shoes. He could feel the glares now. One surly old woman actually spat at him as he went by, and sneered when he hopped aside.
Jase refused to run, but he was alert for sounds on the trail behind him, and some of the tension went out of his shoulders when he entered the Disney Village, full of neutral witnesses. His pace had slowed by the time he reached the golf course. There were still no golfers, but resort workers used this path, and you never knew when a tourist tram might whiz by.
Jase checked his pod for the time—over an hour before the resort’s shuttle arrived to take him back to Valdez, and almost two hours on the water after that. It would be late to start driving after it docked, but if he checked into a motel in Valdez he wouldn’t be able to sleep, anyway. He felt like driving, late into the sunlit summer night, drowning frustration and humiliation in speed. After midnight, the highway patrollers thinned out. If he chose the right stretch of road he could let the Tesla out till the wind roared past and he could hear the turbine howl of the electric motor. It did make a noise when he really ran it up. Jase wondered how many drivers ever went fast enough to hear it. Maybe he would, tonight.
Jase sank onto one of the benches at the shuttle dock. The resort had put up a canopy, so he could pull back his hood and not get drenched, but he kept his raincoat on. Even in the summer, Alaskan rain wasn’t warm.
He’d been there less than five minutes, when his grandmother came up and sat beside him.
She didn’t say anything, waiting for Jase to speak, but from her it didn’t feel like pressure. More like acceptance of whatever he did or didn’t want to say.
“The speed of small-town gossip,” Jase said. “Someone warned him that I was coming too.”
“I got it from Helen, in the coffee shop,” said his grandmother. “Or I’d have been home when you got there. I’d guess one of the shuttle crew called your grandfather. They’re mostly off-work fishermen this time of year. Or their children. And he didn’t call me either, the stubborn old fart! Your mother’s not with you?”
“No, I came on my own—for all the good it did! He won’t even give me a chance to explain, much less give Dad a chance! How can he aban
don his own son over a . . . a political difference?”
“Not all political differences are trivial,” his grandmother said. “The fact that it was his own son who broke the Native corporations, and then turned around and represented the resort . . . It made the whole thing much worse than if it had been some stranger. And he didn’t blame you for it. He tried . . .”
The memory of camping in bug-filled woods, being hideously seasick in a fishing boat that tossed like a cork on the Arctic Ocean, and dozens of feasts, dances, and ceremonies in the village house rose up between them. Jase had been uncomfortable and embarrassed in turn, until one day . . . He’d been, what, twelve? Thirteen? One day he’d made some gaffe in the meeting hall, which he still didn’t understand, and his grandfather had explained for what felt like the hundredth time that Jase was “one of the lost ones,” and his grandfather was going to heal his spirit and make him whole. Jase’s temper finally snapped. At least he’d had the sense to drag his grandfather outside before he told him that he wasn’t “lost” at all. That his father had been right. That it was ridiculous to live in the Stone Age when you had other choices.
Later, after his grandfather had called his mother to come pick him up, Jase had tried to point out that the resort had poured money into the area, and provided people with more paths than they’d had before.
“The only paths he can see are the ancient ones,” he told his grandmother bitterly. “And if you can’t allow new paths to be created, then Dad’s right and it’s time to abandon the whole thing for a good career and a—”
“A life in the real world,” his grandmother finished. “You shouldn’t be afraid to say it to me, love. I’ve been listening to your father and grandfather fight since your father was your age. Younger! But the problem wasn’t that your grandfather couldn’t expand the old beliefs to take in modern choices. It’s that he wanted his son to take the shaman’s path too. And your father is a trader.”
“I suppose that’s one way to think of a lawyer,” Jase admitted.
“All the paths have different aspects, different branches.” A weary note crept into his grandmother’s voice. “He was so set on his son’s becoming a shaman, he wouldn’t even teach him the proper way of the trader. If he had . . .”
“Dad would have been an even sharper lawyer than he is,” Jase said, hoping to lighten her mood. “I know what they said about Ananut traders: If you see one coming, hold on to your trade goods with both hands!”
His grandmother laughed. “I was thinking about the other one, that an Ananut trader will clean you out faster than a whole pack of squirrels. But that’s not the truth. Do you know the first rule of the trader path?”
“No.”
“It’s that a good trade must respect the craftsmen’s work, on both sides, so everyone leaves the deal proud and satisfied. It’s balanced. Equal. The best traders could walk around the entire trade circle, coming home without a single item they left with, but the value would be exactly equal. Because if you came back with goods that were more valuable, you insulted the craftsmen whose goods you’d set out with, implying the craftsmen of other tribes did better work. And if you came back with lesser value, that implied the trade goods your own people made were so shoddy you practically had to give them away!”
“So, this way, whatever he brought back, the trader claimed the value was equal? Because no craftsman would ever admit that other people did better work. So no matter what he came back with, no one bitched at the trader.”
“No one ever claimed the Ananut traders were stupid.” Laughter glinted in the old dark eyes. “And who can really say if a sharp halibut hook is more valuable than a good pair of boots? Or a satchel of dried salmon worth more or less than a bladder of seal oil? But the part about the trade being balanced . . . Your father never learned that.”
“Lawyers don’t do balance,” said Jase. “It’s the system as a whole that’s supposed to provide that, by having a lawyer on each side.”
His father had told his grandfather, over and over, that the Ananut corporation needed a better lawyer.
“But you let me in, anyway,” Jase went on. “You let Mom in.”
“I’d let your father in, if he’d overcome his own stubborn pride and come home,” said his grandmother. “They’re very alike, in that way.”
They were. Jase sighed.
“Why did you come?” his grandmother asked. “After the last time, I thought it would be at least six months before you came back. And Helen said that Nadia said you were shouting something about ‘shaman business.’ I thought you thought that kind of thing was . . . quaint.”
“I did. I do! But . . . Gima, did those old Native shamans have some sort of magic? Really?”
He felt ridiculous just asking the question, in the modern rainy reality of the shuttle dock.
His grandmother was silent for a moment. Then she said, “My grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, could whistle for wind. I saw her do it, when I was a girl, out berrying. We’d climbed the hill behind the village to that big berry patch. I took you there once, remember?”
Jase did. He’d been stung by a bee and rubbed a blister on his heel.
“She brought a blanket,” his grandmother continued, “and four big plastic buckets. All of us, me and Leah and Janny and your great-uncle Arthur, we picked and picked. When the buckets were full, she spread out the blanket and made us sit on the corners to hold it, even though there was no wind. It was one of those misty days, when the fog drifts and everything is still.”
The patter of rain on the canopy sounded very loud.
“Then she began to whistle,” his grandmother said. “Not the sharp whistle you use to call someone back from the beach, but soft and breathy. The notes went up and down, very simple. But the wind came. First it ruffled my bangs. Then it began to blow harder and we all put on our jackets, and Arthur put his hands over his ears to keep them warm. Janny’s ponytail got all tangled, and later, when Mother was combing it out, she said that Grandee did it.”
His grandmother smiled, but the wonder was there in her eyes.
“When the wind was very strong, strong enough to make my jacket whip, she lifted up the buckets we’d filled and poured out the berries, and as they fell the wind blew all the leaves and bugs and twigs away, so only the hard round berries fell to the blanket. After she’d spilled out the last bucket she stopped whistling, and the wind died away. And we poured the berries out of the blanket and back into the buckets, and went home and froze them. Later, my mother and Aunt Mishka made them into jam. She was an old woman, and I was only four, but I remember.”
If anyone else had told that story Jase wouldn’t have believed it. His grandmother . . .
“Thanks, Gima. That helps. That helps a lot.”
She smiled and let the silence return. She was better at silence than Jase, and a moment later he started talking about how his parents were doing, and asked about her knitting co-op. She asked him about school, about his driving job, and if he’d paid off “that car” yet.
But all the while, the back of Jase’s mind was assimilating the fact that if Native magic was real, if their wise women could summon the wind, if their spirits could shift from girl to bird and back again—then maybe Raven was telling the truth. And if she was . . .
He wanted no part of it.
***
It was just past noon the next day, and the sun was shining down on Anchorage, when Jase pulled into his own driveway. He’d finally stopped driving and taken a room at Tok, but he’d still had trouble sleeping. When he wasn’t carrying on an imaginary argument with his grandfather (in which the old man was forced to admit he was wrong on every point) Jase thought about Raven.
If magic really existed, could she be telling the truth about the rest of it?
Alien shapeshifters, at war with his own world over . . . What was it? Leys?
Jase had been so shocked by her transformation, he hadn’t paid enough attention to what she’d said. And e
ven if Gima’s grandmother could whistle up the wind, that didn’t mean there really were shapeshifters. From another dimension, that shared rivers of magical power with this world. Right.
Maybe she’d hypnotized him?
After a restless night, from which he woke way earlier than he’d wanted to, Jase resolved again to let the whole thing go.
Which didn’t stop adrenaline from slamming into his bloodstream when Raven stepped around the side of his garage and waited for him to pull the car up.
He had to stop to raise the garage door, and on a day this beautiful the top was down.
“Where have you been?” Exasperation poured off her in waves. And where he went was none of her business. Jase didn’t owe her any explanations. But as she leaned over the passenger door, he couldn’t help but notice that her top was both tighter and lower cut than the others she’d worn.
“I thought I’d give you a night to think it over,” she continued with less heat. “And that maybe we should talk somewhere quieter than your school. But when I got here the next morning you’d vanished! I’ve been checking back since yesterday.”
“My parents will be here,” Jase said. His heart was pounding. Fear? Or something else, mixed with it.
“They left about an hour ago,” she said. “With a couple of tall bags of shiny metal rods, with thick blades on the ends.”
“Golf clubs.” The fact that she didn’t seem to know what they were added weight on the alien side of the scale, and despite his wariness, Jase’s curiosity roused. He put the garage door up and saw that his mom’s car and both parents’ golf bags were gone.
Raven stood away from the car as he drove in and parked. He kept an eye on her in the rear-vision projector, and saw that although she took a step toward the garage, she didn’t follow him in. He could put the door down. Escape into the locked house.
She was giving him the choice.
