The Storyteller Trilogy

by Sue Harrison

  “I’m strong enough,” Star said.

  “You may be,” Chakliux told her, “but what about Snow-in-her-hair? What about Yaa?”

  “Let them stay here with Sok. He can care for them. I need to get back to my lodge. My baby is growing, and soon I will not walk so easily.”

  Chakliux sighed. He slipped on his parka and boots. When Star was in such a mood, there was no way to reason with her. But perhaps she was right. They were only four, five days from the winter village. Why not allow most of the people to go on to the village? Why should everyone stay for the few who were too weak to travel? The women needed time to repair their lodges for winter, and the men needed to divide out the caribou among the families.

  As Chakliux started toward Sok’s lean-to, Star crawled out after him, whining that he should fill the boiling bag and bring more wood for the fire.

  “If you are well enough to walk to the winter village, you are well enough to feed yourself,” he told her, and grabbed several strips of dried meat from a rack at the side of the tent, ate as he walked.

  When he drew closer to Sok’s lean-to, he heard Owl Catcher’s voice, thin and broken, chanting a mourning song. Suddenly the meat Chakliux had eaten was like something rotten in his belly. He threw the rest of it to one of the dogs tied beside the tent, then he went inside. He wrapped his arms around Sok and let his tears join his brother’s.

  THE FOUR RIVERS VILLAGE

  “I think you are wrong about K’os,” Red Leaf said to Cen. She would have never spoken to Sok in such a way, but Cen was a man who would listen to a woman, even his wife.

  “She’s not a good woman,” he told her. “You do not know K’os like I do.”

  “She makes beautiful parkas.”

  “You make beautiful parkas.”

  “Think how much you will get if both of us are making parkas for you to trade.”

  She saw Cen raise his eyebrows at the thought, and her heart beat hard in hope.

  But then he said, “I lived with her once. In her lodge in the Cousin Village. I intended to take her as wife, but one day when I came home, she was in her bedding furs with another man.”

  “She was not your wife, you said.”

  “It would have been no different if she had been. The hunters laughed at my anger, told me she welcomed any man into her bed if he had enough beads or furs.”

  “So let her sleep with them,” Red Leaf said. “When she’s your wife, what she gets in beads and furs will belong to you. You will have more to trade.”

  She thought Cen would be angry with her for saying such a thing, but to her surprise, he laughed. Then he stood and pulled off her caribou hide shirt. He pushed her back into his bed. She opened her legs to him, and for a little while she did not think about K’os.

  Chapter Forty-one

  THE NEAR RIVER PEOPLE

  DII’S FIRST THOUGHT WAS to go to Sun Caller. He was an elder; he would know what to do. Perhaps she should also get Blue Flower. But when she looked again at her husband, shrunken in death, lying in a pool of his own blood and feces, she knew they would guess he had been poisoned.

  And who would believe K’os had done it? She had left them so long ago. Dii still bore the marks of Anaay’s beating. It would not be difficult to think she had taken revenge.

  She could steal one of the dogs. She had food and her tent…. No. The Near Rivers would come after her. The people had to avenge his death. Would Anaay’s spirit be any more forgiving than Anaay had been?

  Dii went outside, looked up at the stars. She still had most of the night left, and Anaay owned three strong dogs, two travois. Dii was small, did not eat much. With Anaay’s share of the caribou, with fish she had caught and dried and the supplies they had brought with them, there was enough to get her back to the Cousin Village. What was that from here? Four, five days’ walk. Perhaps a little more.

  She packed the travois carefully, tied Anaay’s weapons and his walking stick to the largest. Then she used lengths of babiche to bind Anaay’s joints so his spirit could not harm her, then to tie him and his mess into the grass mats she rolled around his body. She layered the travois with spruce branches from the tent floor and dragged Anaay to it. She tied him to the poles, took down her tent and draped it over him, bound it and the tent poles to the travois.

  She crept through the village to Anaay’s tent, took it down also. She had wanted to leave it, but who would believe a man as selfish as Anaay would leave without taking his lean-to, even battered as it was by the caribou’s hooves?

  It took Dii four trips to carry everything back to the travois. She harnessed the strongest dog, a golden-eyed male, to the travois that held Anaay’s body, then tied the other male to the second travois. The third dog, a young female, she loaded with packs that held Anaay’s bedding and his extra clothing.

  Before the sun rose, she led the dogs in a wide circle around the camp, away from the sea and east toward the Cousin River Village. She would travel most of the day, find a place to leave Anaay’s body, then return to her own people. Perhaps a woman with three dogs and two travois would find a man willing to take her as wife. If not, surely one of the old women would welcome her.

  And who among the Near Rivers would doubt that Anaay had chosen to live somewhere else rather than admit he had claimed caribou where there were none?

  THE COUSIN RIVER HUNTERS

  “She is dead,” Chakliux said.

  Aqamdax glanced up at him, was suddenly frightened that he looked so tired, so small.

  “Snow?”

  “Snow. How is Yaa?”

  “Stronger.”

  “Strong enough to travel to the winter village if we make a travois for her? Sky Watcher says he will pull it.”

  “You will leave before the mourning is ended?”

  “I cannot,” he said. “I’ll stay with Sok, but why keep everyone four days in this place when we are so close to the village?”

  “I’ll stay. Yaa and Ghaden and I. It’s better not to move Yaa.”

  “If she’s strong enough, it would be best to have her at the village. Ligige’ is there. Her medicine is good. She might have been able to save Snow. I should have sent a hunter for her. I should…”

  Aqamdax stood and lifted a hand to Chakliux’s face. “The river took her, Chakliux,” she said softly. “Do not waste your days in regret. Your brother needs you. He has lost much.”

  “All things were going so well, Aqamdax, until that time we were at the river. Perhaps by what we did—”

  Aqamdax placed her fingers over his mouth, stopped his words. How could she bear to hear what he said? What they did was a betrayal to Night Man and Star. Not to anyone else. Why should Snow be punished? Or Yaa?

  “We have lost our luck, you and I,” Chakliux said.

  “No,” said Aqamdax. “Nothing has changed for us. How many times in a hunt do people die? Hunters drown; women become sick. Children are lost in the traveling. Yet on this hunt, only one has died. Do not say our luck is gone. I’ll go to the winter village, and when I get there, I’ll throw away Night Man. When you and Sok return, then I will be your wife.”

  She leaned close to him, and he put his arms around her. When she went back to the tent to prepare Yaa for the journey, Aqamdax was crying.

  Chakliux helped the people load their supplies, and though Star whined and pleaded to stay with him, he sent her back with the others. Sky Watcher pulled Yaa’s travois and fended off Star, who thought she should ride with Yaa. Once, Aqamdax looked back at Chakliux, then she set her eyes on the trail and did not turn. Ghaden and Biter walked beside her. She carried her own packs and some of Star’s.

  With their loads, it would take them five days, Chakliux thought—at least that with Star causing trouble and Yaa on the travois.

  Chakliux watched until trees and hills hid them from his view, then he went back to his brother, to the bundle that was Snow-in-her-hair. The women had made a short mourning for her, had washed her and dressed her in the best clot
hing they could find in the camp—boots from one woman, leggings from another, a necklace given, a stone from an amulet. But now only he and Sok remained to mourn, and Chakliux wondered if, without the women, a proper mourning could be made. Perhaps Aqamdax was right. She should have stayed.

  He had set several charred coals on the hearth stones. When they were cool, he used the handle of his sleeve knife to pound them into powder. He sifted the powder into a bowl of rendered caribou fat and used his fingers to knead the mixture until it was smooth. Then he blackened his face, watched as Sok did the same.

  Sok pulled a knife from his belt scabbard, lay his left hand on a rock, held the blade, trembling, over his smallest finger.

  Chakliux reached out, caught Sok’s wrist. “No,” he said. “You would honor the ways of the North Tundra People to mourn your wife?”

  As Dzuuggi, Chakliux knew those stories of the men who crossed the North Sea to trade with the River People and the Walrus Hunters. He had heard how they mutilated themselves to show mourning. “Will she know it is from you, that finger?” Chakliux asked his brother. “She will think some Tundra hunter remembers his dead wife.”

  Chakliux took the knife, pushed up his parka sleeve and slashed his forearm, once, twice. He stood and allowed the blood to drip into the fire, to rise with the smoke in honor of Snow-in-her-hair. He gave the knife to Sok, watched as Sok slashed his arm four times. Then Chakliux began the mourning chants.

  A storm found the Cousin People during their second day of walking. By midmorning, the wind whipped the snow until it blasted their faces like sand. The dogs fought their harnesses, and women fell under loads made heavier by the weight of ice.

  At noon they found a strand of black spruce to shelter them. The men helped the women set up their lean-tos, but even in the lee of the trees, the wind and cold made tent poles splinter.

  Aqamdax dug a cave in the snow, and the ice-hardened crust cut its way through her caribou hide mittens to score her hands. When she reached bare ground, she made a flooring of haired caribou hides, warming the hides with her breath and hands, then unfolding them slowly so they did not crack in the cold. She unharnessed Night Man’s dogs, set the packs around the snow cave like a wall, then she and Star, Night Man, Ghaden and Yaa huddled together, sharing each other’s warmth. Her thoughts carried her back to Sok and Chakliux, alone with Snow-in-her-hair, and she prayed for their safety.

  Chakliux’s dreams seemed to come to him from the snow, and they filled his mind with fear. He watched as though he were an eagle, seeing all things from the sky. He saw himself walking with Sok, and together they dragged a travois. It was filled with packs, and also a body wrapped in the way of the dead, knees drawn up to the chin, arms crossed and tucked close to the chest. The head was covered with a caribou hide, and as they walked, the wind lifted the hide. Then Chakliux saw that the dead one was not Snow-in-her-hair but Aqamdax.

  He woke to his own cries and was afraid to return to sleep. How could he risk that his dreams would again find Aqamdax and steal away her spirit?

  THE FOUR RIVERS VILLAGE

  The men had cut her lodge poles, and K’os paid them well for their work. They showed her the sunken ground, dug out long ago by the first one to put a lodge there. Even stones and sand were still in place for the hearth. She had scraped the hides River Ice Dancer gave her, added them to her own, and sewed them into a lodge cover. It was a small lodge, but K’os’s stitches were even and tight; the sinew she had borrowed from Sand Fly was well twisted and strong.

  She moved into the lodge the day the storm began. She stayed there alone, fighting to keep the snow from finding its way down the smoke hole and in through the entrance tunnel. Usually she did not like storms. What could anyone do to stop them? But this storm, she decided, might be a good one. She doubted that River Ice Dancer would survive it. On the third day of the storm, she heard a scratching at her lodge wall. First she thought it was only the wind, but then someone called her name. She crawled into the entrance tunnel, pulled aside the flap. The one who stood there was so caked with snow and ice that she did not recognize him until she had brushed the snow from his parka.

  River Ice Dancer. He smiled at her, and in spite of her disappointment, she returned that smile. Most likely he had not brought back the meat he had promised Tree Climber. How could he? He had been gone scarcely more than two handfuls of days.

  “My dogs are outside,” he said to her without any greeting of polite words, but in such a storm K’os did not expect politeness.

  “They can stay in the tunnel,” she told him. “But only until this storm has passed. I do not need their fleas in my lodge.”

  He went out, heaved several large packs in through the door, and she pulled them into the lodge. Finally, he brought the dogs into the tunnel. He cracked the balls of ice and snow from their feet, rubbed his hands over their eyes and noses, the tips of their ears.

  K’os went into the lodge, brought out water, dried fish. She had not yet convinced one of the village hunters to make her a cache, so she kept her meat and fish with her in the lodge. Why chance leaving them in Sand Fly’s cache? No doubt the old woman would use them up before she touched her own meat, and K’os did not have enough to get through the winter as it was.

  She gave fish and water to the dogs, then motioned for River Ice Dancer to join her in the lodge. He waited as she hung his parka on a lodge pole, then helped him out of his leggings and inner parka. The inner parka was wet with sweat, rimed with ice, and so she knew he had walked too hard, too far, had taken a terrible chance in trying to get back to her.

  She gave him a hare fur blanket, and he wrapped himself in it, groaned as he finally sat down beside the fire. “I thought I would not get here,” he told her. “Even when I came to the village, I thought I might not have the strength to make it to your lodge.”

  “How did you know which lodge was mine?” K’os asked.

  “I saw this lodge, new, sitting where there had been no lodge, and I hoped it was yours.”

  She gave him a bowl of food, watched as he curled his fingers around its warmth. His mouth was bloodied from splits in his lips, and his nose and cheeks were spotted with frostbite. She went to her medicine bag, took out powdered plantain leaves and mixed the powder into goose grease. She tilted back his head, and though he tried to turn away, she smoothed the grease on his face.

  “Be still,” she told him. “It will help pull the cold from your skin.”

  When she had finished, he held out his food bowl.

  She filled it again and watched him eat.

  “I have enough for a bride price,” he said, his mouth full.

  She raised her chin, looked at him through slitted eyes. Perhaps he was lying, but she did not think so. It was too easy for her to check his packs.

  He was a boy, yes, but tall and big, perhaps more handsome than she had thought. She had first seen him when she and her husband Ground Beater traveled to the Near River Village. River Ice Dancer had been a leader then among the children. She smiled as she remembered. He had refused to tell her his name. Wise even then. Why give a stranger the power of knowing your name?

  Perhaps he would be a good husband. “River Ice Dancer,” she said, holding out her hand to him, “you are cold, and my bed is very warm.”

  Chapter Forty-two

  DII WALKED FOR NEARLY two days before leaving Anaay’s body. She found a clearing inside a stand of alders, the snow in sharp-ridged drifts where the trees had stolen it from the wind. What was more fitting than alders, with their weak branches and poisonous leaves? Dii asked herself.

  She rolled his body from the travois, set his weapons beside him, then sang a mourning chant. She sang loudly, hoping to appease his spirit so he would not follow her and take revenge, but when the words came from her mouth, they seemed to fly into the grass mats that wrapped Anaay’s body, and were sucked away so quickly that she did not hear them as song.

  During her walking, she often spoke to his body on the
travois. She explained that she had made him the tea only so she could bear him a child. K’os had tricked them both, giving poison rather than medicine. But Dii doubted that her explanations would be enough to turn away her husband’s anger. When had Anaay ever given in to reason?

  Dii used her woman’s knife to cut the dried grass that stuck up through the snow, and she laid it on Anaay’s body to hide him from anyone who might pass near the alders. Over the grass, she piled spruce branches she had brought from the Near River camp. The grass and the spruce were too light to hold down Anaay’s spirit if he decided to follow her, but perhaps the bindings she had put at each of his joints would delay him until she was far enough away that he could not find her.

  She repacked the travois, fed the dogs, all the while remembering her life with Anaay. She saw him in the fine parkas his first wife, Gull Beak, had made him, saw him as he stood in front of the hunters in the village, explaining his visions.

  Then it seemed as if Dii’s eyes cleared, and she remembered her husband in another way—as a man who did all things for himself and nothing for others. Perhaps he is not strong enough to take revenge, she thought.

  She had not walked far after leaving Anaay when snow began to fall. She lifted her head to welcome it. What better way to bury her husband’s body? But soon the snow was so heavy she could not see beyond the step she was taking. She stopped and made a shelter, setting the travois so they would block the wind. Why continue to walk when she could not see? She would probably only wander in circles.

  She fed the dogs dried fish, hoped full bellies would help them sleep through the storm, then she curled under her tent covering, ate and tried to sleep. But the wind sang sharp, bitter songs, and scared away the comfort of dreams, so that Dii began to wonder if Anaay had sent the storm to kill her. How better to take her with him, still wife, still slave?

  Chakliux guided Sok as though the man were a child, held on to his parka for fear of losing him in the storm. They had made a death platform and put it high in a spruce tree. He had promised Sok they would return the next summer and take Snow’s bones to a sacred place, perhaps the Grandfather Lake, where Sok could visit them if he wished.