by Sue Harrison
She could still eat, she told herself. She could still pick up things. It would be hard for the grandfather to carry something heavy, but she still had two good arms. She would carry what he could not.
Water Gourd slept for five days, and when he opened his eyes to the darkness of the ulax, his first thoughts were of death. He had died, of course, and they had laid him in the earth. They had given him more honor than he deserved, for his grave was large. He tried to remember what he might have done to earn such a grave, but no remembrance of bravery or wisdom came to him. Maybe it was only that he had been killed when the Bear-god men attacked their village, and all those who had died were given honor burials. But the memory of many days in the outrigger boat came to him, and he thought of Daughter.
Suddenly he realized that in the darkness above him he could see ribs. Bones, they were, he was sure. He remembered his fight with the sea otter; he remembered his arm swollen and so painful that finally he could bear it no longer, and he had escaped into a sleep of spirit-wandering.
A sea dragon, no doubt, had found them and swallowed them whole while Water Gourd slept. He was now within that monster’s belly, for no grave he had ever seen was made with bone rafters. Where was Daughter? He thought of the little girl, and his heart crept into his throat. Why, in his cowardice, had he slept? Surely he was man enough to endure pain, and if he had stayed awake, he might have been able to save them both from the dragon.
His arm still hurt, shooting pains that began in his shoulder and ended at his wrist, but some of the spirits that had entered with the otter’s teeth had left, for the pain was merely a nuisance, nothing compared to what it had been. He tried to sit up, but his head spun, and he sank again to the floor of the dragon’s belly. He lay there for a time, drifted into thoughts that were nearly dreams, but finally tried again. This time he managed to do so, though an ache began at the top of his skull and ground into his teeth, so that he clenched his jaw and bit his tongue. He tasted blood, swallowed, and gagged. He felt unsteady, like a child just learning to keep his balance. He tipped to one side and reached to catch himself before he fell, but his arm did not respond. He looked down, and, in horror at what he saw, screamed.
He fell, his weight mashing what was left of the arm, so that his second scream was one of pain.
Then Daughter was beside him, her small cool hands patting his face, and there was a woman with her.
His first thought was of his favorite wife, that good woman, long dead. But how could it be? No sea dragon had swallowed her. She had died in a choking fit.
Then, as the woman eased him off his shoulder, laid him on his back, he saw her face, and knew that she was not even from his village. Her eyes were too round, her face too long, her nose too large.
Daughter was whimpering, and before he thought, Water Gourd reached out his right hand toward her, caught his breath in gratitude when he saw that the hand and arm were whole. But how would he carry water without his left arm?
Carry water, he thought, and mocked himself for his foolishness. He was dead! Did the dead need water?
“She cut it, grandfather,” Daughter said to him. “She cut it. I not find it.” There was fear in the girl’s voice, but Water Gourd saw something more. She looked stronger, her eyes brighter, her face fuller.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Little village,” she said, and raised a finger to point at the huge ribs that stretched like rafters over their heads. “Inside the ground,” she said. She poked a finger into her mouth, sucked for a moment, then popped it out and told him, “You sick.” She lifted her head to look at the woman and said, “She feed you and me. Good fish.”
The woman said something to him, her voice low and thick in her throat, the words scraping against her teeth with sounds that were more grumbling than talking. Was she Bear-god?
No, he didn’t think so. Her skin was too dark, and her hair was black and straight. He realized that he smelled smoke, tasted fish oil each time he took a breath. The woman must be burning it, he decided. That fire, set somewhere behind his head, gave light so that he saw the glint of gray in her hair. She must be older than she looked, and though she was not what the Boat People would consider beautiful—her features were too strong for a woman—there was something about her face that caught the eye.
“We are inside the earth?” he asked Daughter.
She was sucking her fingers, and the woman had turned away from them, was doing something that blocked part of the light.
Daughter nodded.
“Can you go outside? Can you leave this place?”
Daughter twisted to point at an immense driftwood log propped up at an angle from floor to roof, and Water Gourd could see that it extended into the darkness beyond, through a square hole. His eyes were dim, but he thought he could see the sparkle of stars within that hole.
“Is it night?” he asked.
“Night,” she said, the word slurring around her fingers. “We go outside in morning. Catch fish.”
“There are other people?”
Daughter’s eyes were suddenly wet with tears. “Not my mama,” she said in a small voice.
“Other mamas?”
“Other mamas,” she said. “And babies.”
“Men? Hunters? Fishermen?”
“Mens,” she said. “Lots of mens.”
At first her answers brought him relief. They were not dead. Somehow their boat had found a village. But they were far from their own island, and these people, if they all spoke like the woman who was caring for him, did not know the Boat People’s language.
He and Daughter would be worthless in this village. Two more mouths to feed: a girl many years away from motherhood and an old man, weak and sick, and with only one arm.
At the thought, his elbow began to ache, not the elbow of his good arm, but the elbow he no longer had. Would it haunt him, that arm, blame him for the foolishness of trying to catch an otter? Would it give him pain that nothing could soothe? As a young man, when his hunting or fishing had made his arms ache, his wife would rub his muscles, bring life back into the flesh with her hands, but how could anyone rub what was not there? Could a man who knew medicine cut into the dead skin to bleed out the spirits of pain? Could a priest who knew prayer songs sing to an arm that was buried or burned?
The woman came to him then, slid a hand under his head and lifted him gently so he could sip from a wooden cup. He had expected water, but it was a warm tea that tasted of earth and plants, and it soothed his throat. He clasped Daughter’s hand, pulled her down to her knees. She snuggled against him, and the woman brought a robe to cover the girl.
There are worse things than being warm and dry with a woman to watch over me, Water Gourd told himself. There are worse things than having Daughter safe. Then, with Daughter warm at his side and the tea filling his belly, Water Gourd slid into a gentle sleep.
When he woke again, light streamed through the square hole in the roof of the earth iori. The woman and Daughter were sewing, and to Water Gourd’s surprise, when the woman spoke, Daughter answered. Sometimes the girl’s words were in the Boat People language, but other times she seemed to mimic the woman’s speech.
How long had he slept? Through the turning of the moon? Through the seasons of a year? Or was Daughter still baby enough that words came easily, and she understood all languages?
This time when he struggled to sit up, the world stayed still, and what little dizziness he felt soon passed. He leaned against his good right arm and thought about how to tell the woman that he needed to release his water, that his bladder was full to bursting.
When he was sure he had his balance, he lifted the blanket that covered him and saw that he was naked. He leaned forward to gather the blanket around his waist and tried to ease himself to his knees. The woman looked up from her sewing and hissed, then rushed to help him. She lifted his arm over her shoulders, and slowly pulled him up. The world darkened until Water Gourd could see only a pinpoint of light,
but he clenched his teeth and made himself stand until the darkness receded.
He motioned toward his penis, covered as it was by the sleeping robe, said the word for urine, but the woman did not understand. Then he saw Daughter point to a gully that was dug where the floor met the earthen wall. Sunk into that gully was a large wooden trough. The woman helped him walk, moved with him step by step until he stood beside the trough. By the smell Water Gourd knew it held old urine.
The women in his village also stored urine. When it ripened to a sharpness that burned the nostrils, it was good for many things—cleaning away fat or oil, preserving hides, killing the molds that rot grass mats during the rainy times of the year. But Boat women did not store the urine in their houses.
He was used to privacy when he relieved himself, and though the woman turned her head, it took him some time to release his stream. Finally he was done, and she led him back to his bed, helped him sit.
She offered him a bowl of broth, and he drank it greedily, surprised at his own hunger. When he had drained a second bowl, she knelt behind him, bracing his back with her knees, and began to knead his neck, so that under the pressure of her hands even the pain from his ghost arm lessened.
She laid him gently against his bedding and stroked her fingers through his hair until finally he slept again, and this time his dreams were good.
When Seal returned from his hunting trip, the First Men gathered in the chief hunter’s ulax. Though K’os usually sat in the least honored place—with the children, furthest from the seal oil lamp—this time she sat beside her husband, near the chief, beside his fat wife and her ugly daughter. K’os held herself straight and strong. She was old, but most men would rather come to her bed than to that of the chief’s daughter. She smiled as she thought of the day she and her husband Seal arrived at his village.
The men, seeing her from a distance, had thought Seal had brought a young and beautiful woman to their village. Only when they came close did they realize that she was as old as a grandmother.
Though she had not understood their language, she heard the tone of their words and knew they were ridiculing Seal. In her mind, she had given words to their jests. Why had Seal taken an old woman as wife? Even a young hunter could not hope to breed children from an old woman.
Seal had responded with angry shouts and showed them the scars left from his wound. As he spoke, he gestured toward his rebuilt iqyax and often pointed at his leg, so K’os had known what he was telling them. Then he pulled her close, reached a hand down the neck of her parka, ignored the sudden laughter of the young men, and finally pulled out her river otter medicine bag. They were quiet then, those young men, stilled by the knowledge of the power she held in that bag, and their ridicule had stopped.
Now, in the chief hunter’s lodge, she raised a hand and laid it against her chest where the bag hung, soft and dark, over her breasts. In the custom of the First Men, she had removed her sax when she entered the chief hunter’s ulax. To do otherwise would be an insult, a sign that the lodge was not warm enough for her.
Yes, there was power in that otter bag, but she did not allow herself to think of how few packets of each medicine she still had, and how few of the plants she needed grew on this Sea Hunter island. She was learning the island foliage, but the women were reluctant to teach her, and none of them were well versed in plant medicines. She had learned about a poison from one of the young hunters, a gift of knowledge in exchange for an afternoon in her bed. The plant was deadly, and she had gathered some, dried it and kept it in packets marked with red string, knotted four times. There was a tall, heavy-stemmed green plant whose roots made a good poultice for sore muscles, and there were others that she had known before—yarrow and fireweed and ground-hugging willow—but she worried that her healing powers would diminish as her supplies were used. Then what would she do, an old woman, River as she was, and second wife?
Better second wife than slave, she told herself. Seal had come at a good time, when her days with the Walrus Hunters were numbered. How terrible to find that the Walrus’s shaman Yehl did not want her. Even when she sneaked away from the slave’s lodge, crept to the warmth of his bed, stroked him out of his sleep—no matter what she did with hands or tongue or lips—he showed no desire for her.
As her understanding of the Walrus language grew, she heard the whispers from his wives, how he shunned all of them, had welcomed no woman to his bed since K’os had come to live in the village. She heard the stories about Aqamdax and Chakliux and Sok, and what had happened to Yehl’s father because of them, and finally she understood that Yehl’s response to her had nothing to do with his desires, but rather with his fear of River People.
Once a man could not hold his power over a woman, how would the spirits keep their respect? How long until the people did not want Yehl as their shaman? Then how long until Yehl decided that K’os had cursed him? Without doubt he would kill her. What hope did she have? Who would stand up for a slave?
K’os chose a night of full moon to leave the Walrus Hunters’ village, and she had walked many days in the direction of the Traders’ Beach. Where else could she have gone? Not back to the River village. Not to the Four Rivers People. Only death awaited her at those places. What else was left but to go to the Sea Hunters? There she had the chance to earn herself some power. Perhaps she could find a shaman who might agree to use his own magic to destroy those who had tried to destroy her.
She had been scouring a beach for driftwood when she heard Seal’s death song rising above the noise of the waves. She had followed that song up a slope of shale to a cave tucked into a cliff not far from the beach.
A spirit of sickness had come into his body, given entrance by a gash that had laid his leg open to the bone. She had given him medicines, sewn up the wound, tended his fire, brought food and water. Sometime during the long days of his illness, he had begun to call her wife, and when he was well enough, she showed him that she had found the skin covering for his iqyax, had saved many of the pieces of its frame. They rebuilt it together, Seal carving the frame and K’os repairing the cover, and when he left to return to his own people’s village—a long journey of many days—he had asked K’os to come with him.
Until then, she had been the strong one, the warrior, the shaman, but once they were in the First Men village, she needed him much more than he needed her. She still struggled with the First Men’s language, and it did not help that they were a people stingy with their words, spending long days saying nothing, the men watching the sea for seals and sea lions and fish, the women working in silence.
She despaired over the few plants on the island, and she had to wait through a long winter before even beginning to gather the plants she did know and to learn about those she did not. She used her supply of medicines sparingly and hoped for broken bones and dislocated joints, but some spirit had cursed her. The First Men she lived among were a healthy people. Even in giving birth, the women seldom had need of her advice. All the babies that had been born since she arrived at the village had come head first, face down, as babies should.
The First Men were short-legged, with thicker bones than the River People, with rounder heads and smaller noses. The women grew their hair long and bound it into tight buns at their necks or ears. They used a needle and charcoaled thread to draw broken lines across their cheeks and patterns of triangles on their thighs. The men marked their chins with long lines from lips to chins and wore thin ivory pins through the septums of their noses. They also pierced the skin at the corners of their mouths and set circles of ivory there, some nearly as large around as walrus tusks.
Their faces, marked as such, were at first strange to her, but now she was able to see the beauty in the women’s marks, the fierceness in the men’s. So that if by chance she saw the reflection of her own face in a still tide pool, it seemed to be the face of a child, not yet complete.
Though she was ranked as the lowest woman in the village, she was not a slave, and Seal treated h
er well. But with the arrival of the old man and the girl, her status had grown, and she sensed that both men and women watched her with no little fear, as though waiting to see whether she would fall under some curse or perhaps even a blessing. For after all, if their chief hunter carried the blood of people like these, could they truly be evil? And if K’os’s medicines had saved their lives, then she, too, must have more power than they had thought.
K’os listened carefully as the First Men discussed what to do. They seemed in agreement that the girl should be allowed to grow up among them, though most women were afraid to take her into their own ulas. Finally the chief hunter spoke to Seal, asked if he were willing to keep her. Seal shrugged, glanced at K’os, and when K’os nodded, he ignored Eye-Taker’s anger and agreed.
“As slave,” he said, “for my wife Old Woman.”
Then K’os did what no second wife should do, spoke without asking her husband.
“I will take her as daughter,” she said, and when Seal looked at her, his mouth and eyes opened wide in surprise, she bowed her head in deference, but quickly added, “I need someone to help me with my medicines. I am an old woman, and the healing powers I bring are River. These powers have been a good thing in your village.” She nodded toward her husband’s leg, and lifted her eyes at the chief hunter’s youngest son, who had cut his face in a fall against a rock. “But who can say what will happen to your children if I try to pass this knowledge on to one of them? River medicine might curse them. Better to take such a chance with this girl.”
A murmur of agreement passed among the people, and Seal smiled at K’os. Eye-Taker hid her anger with a quick nod, and K’os again bowed her head in respect.
“And the old man?” the chief hunter asked.
An argument began among the hunters. Some wanted to kill him, others claimed he was a gift from the sea. Finally Seal spoke, and though he was a young man, he was known for having some wisdom, so even the elders stopped their grumbling to listen.
“My wife tells me that he will most likely die. She has already had to cut off his arm, and he is old and weak. Why take the chance of cursing ourselves by making such a decision? Why not wait and see what happens? If he is a gift from the sea, then the sea will give him the strength to live. If he is not a gift, then he will die, for surely a man as old and sick as this one will not have the strength within himself to survive.”
