The Storyteller Trilogy

by Sue Harrison

  “I understand your worry, sister,” said Ghaden, and set Chakliux’s daughter from his lap so he could stand up. “But as a hunter I can tell you that though a man is flattered by a little worry, he is insulted by too much. If a wife doesn’t believe he can take care of himself when he hunts, then she must also think that he’s not a very good hunter.”

  Yaa whirled, a stirring stick in one hand, gravy from the meat dripping to the floor mats. “You know I sing the praise songs as loudly as any woman when my husband brings meat back to our village.”

  “So does a mother praise a son,” said Ghaden.

  She gritted her teeth, and Ghaden caught her wrist, lowered the stirring stick back into the boiling bag. “Be a wife, Yaa,” he said. “Just be a wife.”

  Cries-loud walked until dusk, walked without stealth, paid little heed to the path he followed. He brought the faces of every unmarried woman he knew into his mind, considered who would make a suitable second wife. He could not throw Yaa away without bringing the anger of Chakliux and Aqamdax down on himself, but if he took a second wife and provided another lodge for her, he could live at that lodge, with that woman. How could anyone protest?

  This time he would choose carefully, and not allow himself to be lured by a woman’s face or body. He wanted someone who saw his strength and wisdom as greater than her own.

  Since the Cousin and Near River Peoples now lived as one, Cries-loud seldom thought about enemies, and so continued to walk without caution, breaking branches that were in his path, making no effort to step on soft ground to muffle his passing. He did not even smell the smoke of a hearth fire until he stopped to build his lean-to shelter for the night. Then he suddenly realized his foolishness. He licked his fingers, wet the insides of his nostrils, and sniffed until he was sure that the fire was small and burned just to the west of his campsite.

  He walked carefully then, crouched as though he were stalking an animal, his hunting knife in one hand. He heard one of the voices before he saw the glimmer of the flames, bright in the darkening forest. Women’s voices. That was always a good sign. Men intent on raiding villages did not usually bring wives with them.

  Cries-loud lay flat on his belly, slid closer until he could see that the camp had only one small lean-to, and that there were two women, no men. Suddenly he realized that they were Ghaden’s women, his wife and her mother. They spoke the First Men language, words he did not understand, but there was a familiarity about one of the voices.

  They sound like Aqamdax, he told himself. The accent she still gives to the River language, the depth of her voice, the music in the rhythm of her words.

  No, it was more than that. One of the women, the older, not only sounded familiar, but looked familiar, the way she held her shoulders, the way she used her hands. Then he knew. K’os! The mother was K’os!

  In his surprise, he stood, and both women started. Each grabbed a knife, and Ghaden’s wife also leaned forward to clasp a fist-sized rock from the edge of the hearth circle.

  “I am Cries-loud,” he called, “brother-by-marriage to Ghaden of the River People.”

  K’os sighed her relief and slipped her knife into a sleeve sheath. She leaned close to the younger woman, said something Cries-loud could not hear. The woman dropped the rock, but kept the knife in her hand.

  “Tigangiyaanen!” K’os said. “Welcome. Are you alone? Did Ghaden send you?”

  “I am alone, hunting. Ghaden is well. He plans to come for his wife tomorrow.”

  He waited, thinking K’os would translate the words to the young woman. After all, Ghaden had said she was First Men, and it had seemed that the father, Seal, had not understood the River language, despite his claim to be a trader. But the young woman also called to him, and her words were in River.

  He stepped out from the brush, and she asked K’os something in the First Men language. He did not remember K’os speaking First Men, and wondered how she had gotten this daughter. She had left their village years ago, long enough, he supposed, to have a daughter. But Cries-loud knew she had been barren, had no children, save Chakliux, whom she had found, not birthed.

  During his trading visits to the Walrus Hunter village, he had noticed that she no longer lived with them, but he had supposed they had traded her to someone or that she had died. A slave’s life was not easy, and in a hard winter, slaves were the first to go without food. Somehow, by trade or by escape, she had gotten to the First Men.

  “You wonder how I managed to return,” K’os said. “Don’t look so surprised. Your face has always reflected your thoughts.” She lifted her chin toward the young woman. “My daughter Uutuk, Ghaden’s wife. I see he didn’t tell you that I’m her mother.”

  “No, he did not,” Cries-loud said, “and I see that you made no haste to come to our village.”

  “Uutuk will go, but I’ll stay here. I’ve had my share of nights in the forest alone. I’m not afraid. Since you are surprised to see me, I will guess that Ghaden didn’t give you my message.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “I told him that I wanted to speak to you.”

  “Me? Why?” He crossed his arms over his chest, lay his right hand casually on the sheath of his sleeve knife. Who could say what a woman like K’os would have in her mind? After all, he had been one of the men who sold her to the Walrus Hunters.

  She pursed her lips to point at his knife. “You have no need of that. I’ve changed much since I left this village, and in truth have more reason to thank you than to resent you, but I’m not fool enough to think that Chakliux will believe that. I hope that when he gets to know my daughter, he will see how good she is and know that I’ve changed.”

  “So what will you do?” Cries-loud asked. “Stay here until Chakliux decides you are welcome? A woman alone or even with her husband will have a difficult time living outside a village in winter. Besides, your husband is a First Men hunter. How will he get enough meat to feed you? There are no seals in this land, except the few that come upriver in the summer, but beyond that nothing.”

  Uutuk was crouching by the fire, patiently feeding sticks into the flames. She raised her head and said to Cries-loud, “Ghaden plans to winter in a village named Four Rivers.”

  Unlike most new wives, she spoke boldly and did not keep her eyes lowered, but studied his face, as though to set it in her memory. She stood and wiped her hands on her sleeves. Though K’os wore River clothing—a lightweight ground squirrel parka and caribou hide leggings—Uutuk wore a feathered sax. Cries-loud could see her calves when she stood, and so knew she wore no leggings, though she had wrapped strips of hide around her feet, secured at her ankles and over her instep with lengths of babiche.

  “A good place to go,” Cries-loud said.

  K’os turned her head, smiled at her daughter. “I taught Uutuk our River language, and also our customs. She will have no trouble living in a River village, and I have no doubt that Ghaden is hunter enough to provide for all of us.”

  She lifted a hand toward the fire, invited Cries-loud to join them. “We’ve eaten,” she said, “but there’s food left for you, if you do not mind dried fish dipped in seal oil.”

  Aqamdax always had a belly of seal oil in her lodge, and Cries-loud had learned to like the taste of it. He crouched by the fire on his haunches, imitating K’os rather than sitting cross-legged like most River men. He lifted his chin toward her and said, “I see you are First Men now.”

  “In many ways,” she told him.

  “How did you get yourself this daughter?”

  Her jaw jutted as though she had been insulted, and she said, “How does anyone get a daughter?”

  He kept his other questions hidden under his tongue. Why risk the anger of a woman like K’os when Ghaden could tell him what he wanted to know? He watched Uutuk as she brought him a wooden bowl of seal oil, a handful of fish, and a water bladder. She was a beautiful woman, round-faced and small-boned, with eyes even more narrow than Aqamdax’s. Except for her thick dark hair
, there was no resemblance between her and K’os.

  He turned his mind toward the man Seal, decided that the girl was his and somehow K’os had earned herself a place as his wife. Most likely the girl’s true mother was dead. Cries-loud wondered if K’os had killed her.

  “So why did you want to see me?” he asked after he had begun eating. The fish was good, dried and smoked, rich with the seal oil.

  “I thought perhaps you would like to travel with us to the Four Rivers village. Ghaden wants to tell his father’s wife that she is a widow.”

  Cries-loud was suddenly very still. He was wise enough to know that K’os was wolf as well as woman, rejoiced in the stalk nearly as much as the kill. He gave his attention to the food, drank long from the water bladder, then asked Uutuk several questions about their journey.

  Finally, K’os interrupted to say, “So I thought you might like to come with us and see if your sister is still living in that village. Or perhaps you have visited her already in these years since I’ve been gone.”

  “Once I went in summer,” Cries-loud said, “but the people were all scattered into fish camps and I never did find her.”

  He had not told the Four Rivers People that he was her brother. Why give his sister problems that she did not need? There were sure to be questions about the mother they shared, dead though she was. He himself thought about Red Leaf too often, and Yaa never tired of reminding him that he did so. Because he preferred to hunt alone, she accused him of searching for her. Yaa was wrong, of course. What man would waste time foolishly looking for someone who no longer walked the earth? But still, there was something that called him into the forests. Perhaps her spirit.

  Red Leaf might have killed others, but he had never doubted her love for him. He was not afraid of her, not even her spirit. So why, then, did he avoid the Four Rivers village? Did he not want to know his sister, or take a brother’s responsibility for her children?

  Those children would be young—a good time to visit them, so they would learn to recognize his face, and in future years when he returned, they would know him as uncle. But what of Yaa? Each year that passed, each baby that died, made her cling more tightly to him. Would a sister with children hurt or help?

  He shook his head. Who could say? Yaa was not a woman easily understood. He looked up to see K’os watching him.

  “You don’t want to go, then?” she asked him.

  He looked at her, puzzled, then realized that she had misunderstood the reason he was shaking his head.

  “I haven’t decided,” he said, and was glad she did not know that he had already told Ghaden he wanted to accompany them. To escape K’os’s questions, he turned toward Uutuk and said, “I’m sorry I cannot speak to you in your own language.”

  “That is no problem, since I speak yours. My mother taught me well.”

  “A wise thing to do,” said Cries-loud, “especially now that you are a River wife. Of course, she could not have known that would happen.”

  He caught the sudden darkening of K’os’s eyes as she leaned forward to thrust a few sticks into the fire.

  Aaa, but she had known, Cries-loud thought, or at least had hoped for such a thing. He was suddenly cold and moved closer to the flames. Why believe K’os had changed just because she had a good daughter?

  “You should come with us to the Four Rivers village,” K’os said, and Uutuk added, “My husband has missed all of the people in his village very much. He’d be glad for you to come.”

  “I was thinking of my wife,” Cries-loud said. “She has recently mourned the death of another baby, and I think it would be good for her to leave the village for a while. The child’s ghost seems to linger.”

  “Yes, bring her,” Uutuk said. “She can tell me about the village, and how I can be a good wife to a River man.” A smile lighted her face, and she clapped her hands like a child, but K’os’s voice cut into the darkness, rose above the snapping of the fire.

  “Uutuk, I should have told you that this man is married to your husband’s sister, Yaa.”

  “I know,” Uutuk said. “Ghaden told me all the people in his family.”

  “You see how quickly my daughter learns, Tigangiyaanen,” K’os said, boasting as any mother might, but Cries-loud heard more than boasting in her words. Her pride was eclipsed by some darkness. Jealousy, and something else as well. Fear?

  Most likely she did not want Yaa to come with them. Yaa might be able to tell Uutuk more than K’os wanted her to know, for unlike Ghaden, Yaa, being older, was more likely to remember some of the evil that K’os had done when she lived in their village and owned Aqamdax as slave.

  “Perhaps you will want your wife to go with you, or perhaps you will not,” K’os said quietly.

  Uutuk began to protest, and Cries-loud was surprised that the girl should do so. Perhaps K’os had softened, raised this child differently than she had raised Chakliux.

  “Be still, Uutuk!” K’os said sharply, and lifted one hand, palm out, as though to stop her daughter’s words. “There are things here you do not understand and don’t need to know. Go get wood. The fire is eating more than its share, and the night gives warning that winter isn’t far away.”

  Uutuk’s face puckered into worry, but she left them. Cries-loud felt his heart walk with her, into the evening shadows of the trees. A First Men woman would fear the forests, yet K’os seemed to give no thought to her terror.

  “You shouldn’t send her out there alone,” Cries-loud said. “She’ll be afraid.”

  “My daughter knows how to live above her fear,” K’os told him. “Besides, what I have to say will not take long; then you can go with her if you wish.” She looked into the fire and said, “A question first. You mentioned that Yaa lost a child. How many children do you have?”

  “Four in the spirit world, and now she spends most of her time treating me like a child.”

  The words were out before he could stop them, the complaint as nasty and whining as anything he could have said. He closed his eyes in regret. How stupid to give K’os such a weapon against him and against Yaa.

  “I fear I did the same to my husbands in my longing for a child. It’s difficult for men to understand, but every woman does. You have another wife?”

  He expected the question. Anyone who heard that Yaa had no living children was surprised that Cries-loud had not taken himself another woman. He gave K’os the answer he had given others.

  “When Yaa has ended her mourning, I plan to take a second wife.” He did not tell her that Yaa never ended her mourning, that with each birth and death, she wrapped herself more tightly into her sorrow.

  “Perhaps you’ll find someone at the Four Rivers village.”

  “There are still more than enough young women in our village for any hunter,” Cries-loud said.

  K’os lifted her brows in acknowledgment. “Wars are foolishness.” She shook her head as though she had had no part in the hatred that had pushed the Near and Cousin River villages into battle.

  “You need to go with us to the Four Rivers village,” she said. “Without Yaa. Not for your sister, but for yourself.”

  He began to offer reasons Yaa should go, excuses, but she cut him off. “Listen to what I have to tell you, then make your decision, about yourself and about your wife.

  “Cen died in a storm. I suppose Ghaden told you that.”

  “They’ll have a mourning for him tomorrow night,” Cries-loud said and was embarrassed at the sullenness in his voice. His wife had made him too bitter with her condescending ways, and now it seemed he had begun to act like a child.

  But K’os continued as though she gave no consideration to his words. “Before he left the Traders’ Beach, I had time to speak to him of his life in the Four Rivers village. Once, years ago, I nearly took Cen as my own husband. We did not forget that friendship.”

  “I didn’t know,” Cries-loud said.

  “You were too young to know,” K’os told him. “Besides, that was when I lived
in the Cousin village and you were with your mother and father in the Near River village. But that doesn’t matter. You remember when Chakliux forced me to leave his hunting camp?”

  “I remember.”

  “I went to live in the Four Rivers village.”

  “You told me that. Long ago, you told me that.”

  “Yes, when you sold me to the Walrus Hunters.”

  “You said that my mother had survived even after she left my father, but that she had died in childbirth.”

  “I thought she had.”

  Cries-loud narrowed his eyes. In the light of the fire, K’os’s face had shadowed so it seemed as though she wore a dancer’s mask. Her mouth moved with her words, but otherwise she was very still, as though someone else were speaking, someone who stood behind her, hidden by the mask of her face. She sounded as though she told him the truth, but who could trust her? Perhaps she had lied before just to give him pain.

  “You’re telling me that she’s alive?” he asked.

  “I’m telling you that somehow she lived through that terrible birth and the illness that followed and when Cen left the Four Rivers village in early summer to trade, she was still alive.”

  “No longer ill?”

  “Strong enough that she had just given him another healthy daughter.”

  Cries-loud had many questions, but he could not pull them from his throat. They crowded there choking him until he began to cough, finally gasping for breath.

  He heard K’os’s low chuckle, and his anger burned against her. She did not tell him this to bring joy, but to see what he would do, to watch as though he were a dancer, to listen as though he were a storyteller.

  “Decide then if you want to go with us, and if you want your wife to know about Red Leaf.” She paused for a moment, lifted her voice to call Uutuk back to the fire, then leaned close to say, “I suppose your father Sok is still alive. I suppose you don’t want him to know about your mother.”

  “What does it matter?” he asked. “Ghaden is going. He still bears the scars of my mother’s knife. You think he will let her live?”