The Storyteller Trilogy

by Sue Harrison

  “No need to be sorry. I will go back to sleep and eat all the chestnut cakes I can hold.” Laughter crackled in his throat.

  Daughter lifted the tea so he could see it. “Mother left medicine for you. She says it will make you strong.”

  “She had you wake me from a good sleep to give me this?” he grumbled. “What does she know? Sleep and good dreams, those things make an old man strong.” But he propped himself up on his elbow and leaned forward to drink. When he had finished the tea, Daughter set down the cup and tucked her hands behind his head, laid him gently back on his sleeping mats. The grandfather closed his eyes, but then he opened them and looked at her. He blinked and whispered, “Where is K’os?”

  “She went to Seal’s ulax.”

  The grandfather smiled. “Then perhaps I have time to tell you a story.” He spoke in the language of the Boat People, and his voice seemed stronger. “Have I ever told you about the time when I was fishing far from shore and a storm arose?”

  He had told Daughter the story many times, but she held her eyes open wide to show her interest. “If you have, Grandfather,” she said, “I have forgotten most of it. Please tell me again.”

  He reached out to clasp her hand, and she settled down beside him and listened as he told the story.

  K’os curled herself around Chiton’s body and leaned forward to touch the tip of her tongue to each of his nipples. His wife had just given him a new daughter and was still living in the birthing lodge.

  When K’os went to Eye-Taker’s ulax, Chiton’s sister and aunt were visiting there, and they told K’os about the birth. K’os had stayed only long enough to get the sax, then pretended that she needed to return to Water Gourd. Instead, she went to Chiton’s ulax.

  As she had hoped, he was alone. She had congratulated him on his daughter, but he scowled and said, “Every man wants a son.”

  “Once long ago when I lived with the River People, I had a son,” K’os told him. “I was a good mother, gave him everything, sewed all his clothing and got him a beautiful wife. But when another village attacked our own, he betrayed us and went to live with our attackers because they were stronger, and he knew they would win. When nearly all our men were killed and our village was burned, I was sold as slave to the Walrus Hunters, and my son did not lift a hand to help me. Only by good luck did I come to this village, where once again I am wife and mother. If I had to choose between my son and my daughter, I would choose my daughter. Be thankful you have a healthy child. Daughters are good luck, and sometimes sons are not.”

  He did not reply, merely turned his back on her and grunted. She went to him, stood close. He was wearing only an otter skin breech-cloth, and she slipped her hands around his waist, tucked her fingers under the edges of the otter skin.

  “I have a wife,” he told her, but he turned to face her and knelt to slip his hands under her sax. She pulled the sax off up over her head, then moved his hands to her breasts.

  “Why should I give you my seed?” he asked. “You are too old to make children.” His fingers strayed to the band of the woven grass apron that hung from her waist.

  “I make no claim to be young,” K’os said. “But I am not ugly.” She cupped her hands around her breasts. “Are these the breasts of an old woman?”

  “You must have some medicine that keeps you young,” he told her. “Though it does not work for your hands, and perhaps not for your hair.” He pulled several gray strands from the bun at the back of her head.

  She smiled at him. “It is good medicine,” she said. “How else do you think I have kept that old man Taadzi alive so many years? Whatever hunter I choose will keep his youth for a long time. I cannot give you children—you have a wife to do that—but my medicine will make you strong.”

  “I am strong,” he said, and scowled at her.

  “I only meant that I would help you stay strong,” she told him. Then she said, “Enough talking.” She pushed him back toward the curtained niche that was his sleeping place.

  He clasped her arms, laid her on the furs, and fell over her. “It has been too long since I had a woman,” he groaned, “and all that waiting just for a daughter.”

  The grandfather’s words suddenly stopped, and Daughter, crouched with her eyes closed so she could see the story, waited. It was the most exciting part, where the storm waves had torn the outrigger from the boat, but she supposed that he had fallen asleep.

  The longer he lived, the more easily sleep came to him. What had K’os told her? Life was a circle, and old people move toward that time when they were infants. They sleep as often as babies, and sometimes, like babies, their thoughts and words are garbled. Of course, the grandfather’s mind was clear. No one in the village doubted that he was still the wisest of all the elders.

  Daughter opened her eyes. To her surprise, she saw that the grandfather was staring at the top of his sleeping place. In curiosity, she bent close and looked up. There was nothing but darkness.

  “Look, what do I see?” she asked, and waited for him to supply the rest of the riddle. Riddles were a River People game, but K’os had taught them both the joy of those word puzzles.

  When he did not answer, Daughter clasped his hand. “Grandfather?”

  A groan came from his throat, and suddenly Daughter was afraid. She slipped an arm under his shoulders and slid into the sleeping place so that his head was on her lap. She placed the palm of her hand on the center of his chest. His heart had always been strong, but now she felt only a faint fluttering.

  “Grandfather!” she shouted at him. “Grandfather, don’t leave me! I need you.”

  Daughter grabbed pelts from his sleeping place—any she could reach that were not tucked under him—and rolled them into a ball that she placed under his head and shoulders. She slipped away and grabbed a water bladder from the rafters, filled a cup and tried to make him drink. He choked, and she wiped the dribbled water from his chin, told him she would get K’os. Surely K’os would have medicine to help him.

  She did not realize she had forgotten her sax until she was outside and felt the bite of the wind against her bare skin, but she did not go back. She ran to Eye-Taker’s ulax, and without pause for politeness, started down the climbing log.

  “My grandfather …” she gasped, trying to catch her breath.

  “Where is your sax?” Eye-Taker asked her. Seal looked up from the spear shaft he was smoothing and frowned.

  “You should protect yourself better,” he said. “Wind spirits will get into your belly.”

  One of their sons farted, and the other children began to laugh. Daughter shook her head at them, and her eyes flooded with tears.

  “My mother,” said Daughter, “she was supposed to be here. My grandfather is very sick.”

  She saw the sudden concern in their faces, and the children closed around her, so that it was all she could do not to push them away. “My mother?” she asked again.

  “She was here,” Seal said, “but she left a long time ago. She must be visiting.”

  He told his two sons, boys of eight and ten summers, to go to all the ulas, to find K’os and send her home. Then Eye-Taker ordered one of the girls to bring a sax. They slid it over Daughter’s head, and not until she felt the weight of the garment on her shoulders did she realize how cold she was. She began to shiver, her teeth clattering so hard that she could not say anything without chopping up the words.

  “I will go with you back to your ulax,” Eye-Taker said, and pushed Daughter toward the climbing log, hurried her outside. “My father was a shaman. I know chants that might help.”

  Daughter nodded. She remembered the woman’s father. He had died shortly after she and the grandfather had come to the village. The shaman had worn three labrets, one at each corner of his mouth and a third below his bottom lip. The weight of that labret had made his whole lip hang forward so his teeth were always bared in a grimace that sometimes still came to Daughter in nightmares. He had been a man of loud voice and many words,
and at his death it seemed that those words had moved from his tongue into Eye-Taker’s mouth. Always the woman was boasting about him, and when she spoke, she spoke as boldly as a man.

  When they got back to the ulax, Water Gourd was moaning. His eyes were closed, and his breath bubbled from his mouth as though a river had suddenly decided to live in his lungs. The roll of pelts Daughter had left under his head had slipped to one side, and he was lying crooked in his bed. She knelt and again slid herself under the grandfather’s shoulders, raising him until he seemed to breathe more easily.

  Eye-Taker began to chant, and her words hammered in Daughter’s ears. Daughter leaned forward and, in hopes that her need was strong enough to tie him to the earth, she whispered to the grandfather, told him how much she would miss him if he died.

  Finally Eye-Taker’s sons clambered into the ulax, each shouting and yelling, telling the story of where they had found K’os.

  Their words were difficult to hear over the chants, and Eye-Taker did not stop, but began to dance and hop until Daughter felt that the whole ulax was filled with foolishness, and that she alone was there to protect her grandfather. But finally, in spite of Eye-Taker’s loud voice, she understood what the boys were saying.

  Her mother had been in bed with Chiton, a man whose wife had just given birth. Surely there was a curse in doing something like that. Daughter’s cheeks burned in shame, and she tried not to think of what the other girls in the village would say to her.

  Anger clasped her throat like a hand and squeezed until she could not breathe, could not speak no matter how hard she tried. She leaned forward and lay her cheek against the grandfather’s forehead, allowed tears to drop from her eyes to his face.

  Then K’os was in the ulax, and the boys were quiet. Even Eye-Taker stopped her chanting. K’os threw off her sax. Her medicine bag hung from her waist, and she pulled out a packet bound with blue string knotted twice. She used her teeth to untie it, and spilled its contents into the palm of her hand. She licked her fingertips, dipped them into the gray powder, and stuck her fingers into the grandfather’s mouth, into his nostrils and the corners of his eyes. She did this twice, and it seemed to Daughter that the grandfather’s breathing eased.

  Daughter sucked large gulps of air into her mouth as though her lungs worked for both of them. The grandfather’s eyes opened, and Daughter again found her voice.

  “Grandfather,” she said, “Mother has made medicine for you. Soon you will be well.”

  Daughter smiled and glanced up at K’os. The woman had a strange look on her face, almost regret, nearly sorrow, and the fist returned to Daughter’s throat, again squeezed off her words. Eye-Taker pushed in to stand beside the grandfather. The woman nodded her head in a hard rhythm, as though her skull were a drum. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. A chant without words? What good was that? Then Eye-Taker gave voice to the words, and Daughter realized she was not making a chant for healing but sang in mourning, a death song.

  “No!” Daughter said.

  The word was like a knife, and it opened her throat, escaped as a scream that made Eye-Taker’s sons raise the flats of their hands to their ears.

  “No-o-o-o! No, Grandfather! No! No! No!”

  She leaned forward over his body, and when Eye-Taker and K’os tried to pull her away, she kicked and scratched until finally they allowed her to stay where she was.

  “Leave her there for the night,” Eye-Taker told K’os. “Maybe tomorrow she will regain her reason and grieve as a granddaughter should.”

  So all night Daughter stayed with the grandfather, guarded his body with prayers and chants.

  In the morning, when she finally allowed the village women to come near, they saw with horror that she had cut off another toe, the smallest on her other foot, and that she had placed it in the old man’s hand. When they tried to pry it from his fingers, Daughter growled at them like an otter, stood with teeth bared until K’os asked them to leave the toe where it was.

  “I knew a man who cut off a finger and offered it to the spirits in exchange for his son’s life,” K’os told the First Men women.

  “The son was dying?” one of the women asked.

  “Nearly dead.”

  “And did he live?”

  “He lived,” K’os said.

  Then the women made no further protests, only whispered among themselves about the strange customs and foolishness of other people. K’os herself sewed up Daughter’s wound, and from that day said nothing about it, offered no comfort or admonition.

  “After all, what do we know about these Boat People?” K’os asked Eye-Taker. “I shared an ulax with Taadzi, and still could not understand everything he did, but he was a wise man. A good grandfather to Uutuk.”

  And though for several days after the death, people spoke of K’os’s visit to Chiton’s ulax, she was so faithful in mourning Water Gourd that the whispers soon died. And when Seal took K’os back to his own bed, all the village honored him for his selflessness. What other man would keep a woman who had dishonored him, was nearly old, and could give him no children?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

  602 B.C.

  “THANK YOU,” YIKAAS SAID softly.

  Qumalix smiled at him, and the wind took a strand of her hair, pulled it from the collar of her sax, and carried it to Yikaas’s cheek. Qumalix caught it with long fingers, tucked it back into her sax.

  “It’s a good story,” she told him, “but I do not tell it as well as the one who taught me.”

  “The old man who is with you?” he asked.

  “No, he’s my grandfather. He was never a storyteller. Words do not come easily to him. Though he holds many stories in his mind, he has trouble telling them.” She laughed and tipped her head as though remembering.

  “Who taught you then?”

  “His father.”

  Yikaas drew in his breath. “A man so old?” he asked.

  “He’s dead now. Dead many years. So you see, I had to learn quickly and when I was very young. When he no longer had strength to do anything but lie still, I used to sit beside his bed, and he would tell me stories. Each word came from his mouth as slowly as a woman punches awl holes to make a seam.”

  “A good way to learn patience,” he said.

  She nodded, her eyes turned toward the sky, and he knew that she had left him for a moment to revisit those days of learning.

  “I gathered his words like an old woman who picks up spilled beads, and his slowness gave me opportunity to consider the light and color and life in each.”

  She plucked two blades of grass, let the wind take them from her fingers. Yikaas felt the warmth of her body like comfort, and he knew she must be tired, but he did not want her to leave. He opened his mouth to say something, hoping words might bind her, but she spoke also, their voices tumbling together so that he did not know what she had said.

  She laughed, and he could hear the embarrassment in her laughter. What had the grandmother told him? The Sea Hunters—the First Men—were a people who did not need to fill the air with words. When they spoke it was because something needed to be said.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?” he asked.

  “Only that I have talked enough today. Now it’s your turn. I told you a story, so you must tell me one. Storytellers are traders, nae’? Journey for journey.”

  Aaa, she would stay, but Yikaas warned himself to see nothing more in her request than a storyteller’s need to learn. Perhaps she felt as he did when he had told too many stories, and the sound of his own voice grew so wearisome that he could not tell whether his words were strong or weak. Those were the times to listen to others, to allow their tales to stir his own spirit and again give him delight in storytelling.

  “Do you have something you’d like to hear?” he asked.

  “I do not know many River stories. Tell me one that you like.”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “Do you remember whe
n you were talking about Daughter, how K’os mentioned a father who cut off a finger to save his son’s life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to hear a story about that boy?”

  “The son?”

  “Yes. His name was Ghaden, and he grew to be a man who was known for his strength and wisdom.”

  “I would like to hear about Ghaden,” she said.

  She tucked her legs up into her sax and leaned against a hillock of grass. She pulled a strip of dried fish from her sleeve and handed it to him, then took one out for herself and said, “I’m ready. Tell me a story.”

  Yikaas took a bite from the fish and, looking out at the star-filled sky, pictured his own village: the domed caribou hide winter lodges, the meat caches, the wide river that flowed nearby. Ghaden had lived in a village much like that. A little closer to the sea, the elders said, but Ghaden had lived so long ago that no one knew for sure.

  In those days, animals could turn themselves into people, and the stories that Yikaas now told as Dzuuggi were being lived.

  He closed his eyes and saw Ghaden, son of a Sea Hunter mother and wide of shoulder like her people. Tall like his father, who was part River and claimed some Walrus blood, a people known for their bravery, those Walrus Hunters. Walrus Hunters still lived not far from the Traders’ Beach, but they were a different people, had come from the north, were fierce and strong, sometimes friends, sometimes enemies. Those first Walrus Hunters were gone now, and no one knew where, though some of the storytellers said they had taken their iqyan far to the south and lived there on distant shores and islands, hunting not walrus but whale. It seemed a foolish story. Why would anyone leave the rich waters of the North Sea for that land where monsters lived, cet’aeni, nuhu’anh, and more? But enough of wondering. Qumalix had asked for a story.

  Yikaas opened his eyes and began. “As a boy, Ghaden had learned to live with sorrow,” he said. “His mother had been killed by a woman named Red Leaf when Ghaden was hardly to the age of remembering. Red Leaf had also tried to kill Ghaden, but he survived, though no one had expected him to live. Red Leaf had used a knife, and Ghaden’s wounds were deep.”