“I don’t want to bother Urar,” Kol says. My hand burns where he touches me, though his fingers are cold. He hasn’t pulled on a parka yet, and I notice the hairs on his neck standing up in the cold light from the fire. His breath mists the air. Through the din of voices, the healer’s voice stands out. He’s offering a chanted prayer over the body. Kol’s icy fingers wrap around my hand and tug me toward him. “There’s not much light, but could you come look at my knee? If you could clean the wound—”
“Yes,” I say.
He drops his eyes, and I feel like there’s something else he wants to say, but he doesn’t. He pushes through the bear hide that drapes across the doorway to his hut, pulling me in behind him.
FOUR
He’s right. There’s not much light. An open vent in the wall that faces the fire lets in a shimmer of gold that dances across the hides that form the ceiling. In the center of the room, a wick of moss burns in a shallow stone lamp filled with seal oil.
The light from the flame explores Kol’s skin, illuminating first the lines of his stomach, then the curve of his upper arms. “Are you warm enough?” I ask, all at once aware of my eyes tracing the light’s path across his body.
“I will be,” he says, reaching for a parka that hangs from a notch in the central post. Immediately I recognize it.
“That’s the one I made for you.”
“From the cat you killed when you saved me.”
“Kol . . .” Shame burns in my cheeks. How many times have I let myself feel superior because I killed the cat that threatened Kol? As if I’d shown him some great courtesy. “Anyone would have done that,” I say. “You would have done it for me.”
“I would have,” he answers. “I wish I had.”
Outside, a drumbeat starts. A chorus of voices takes up a low, dark melody. The whole Manu clan is singing a song of mourning. “You should be out there—”
“I know. I will be,” Kol says, sliding his arms into the sleeves and wrapping the cat’s warm fur around him. He drops onto a pile of pelts that make up one of the beds. “But I need your help first. I need to get the pieces out—”
His voice cuts off, replaced by a sharp inhale of breath as he tugs his ruined left pant leg up over his knee, revealing wide gashes pocked and wedged with fragments of broken rock. Clotted blood—not dry but thick and moist—covers everything like a layer of red algae.
“This . . . this . . . You need your healer. This is too much for me.”
“It’s all right. I’ll ask Urar to look at it in the morning. But right now, I just need someone to clean it.”
He exhales a long sigh, rolling back onto the bed. His eyes squeeze shut as he sucks in breath through his teeth, then lets it roll out as a groan. “I can’t interrupt Urar right now,” he says, his voice tight with pain. “And I can’t let my mother see this. She’s been through too much. My father . . .”
That’s all he gets out before his voice breaks.
“Kol,” I say. “I’ll clean this. Of course I will.”
I get up, searching in the dark for the tools I’ll need. I find a waterskin on a hook by the door. Kol tells me to look in his pack for a soft, thin piece of well-worked hide to use to wipe away the blood. I work slowly, and as I do, Kol’s body relaxes. His limbs stretch, uncoiling, tension dissolving. His eyes close.
“It’s not over yet,” I say, easing my knife from my belt. “I need to pick the small pieces out with this.”
“I’ve been through worse before. When Urar and Ela cleaned the wounds from that saber-toothed cat. Remember?”
“I could never forget that,” I say. I leave out that I thought he would die that day.
“Besides, I know you won’t hurt me.”
But I will hurt him. Though I begin to suspect that Kol won’t mind, because he’d rather lie here and have me dig gravel from his knee with a sharp knife than join the mourners outside. Not because he didn’t love his father, but because he did.
I know how he feels. I understand the desire to draw away from people when you’ve lost someone, to refuse to let anyone help.
Even with the lamp set right next to his leg, it’s difficult to see the gashes. They split the skin across his knee, gaping open with the slightest movement. In places, the skin stretches and swells around bits of rock wedged into the wounds. These must come out.
I slide the tip of my knife into the first cut, and Kol stiffens. Blood pours around the blade. Twisting it no more than I must, I work a chunk of rock about the size of a child’s tooth out from under his skin. His fingers dig into my shoulder, but he doesn’t make a sound.
“That was the first one—”
“I’m fine—”
“There are several more—”
“I’ll be all right. I appreciate your concern, but I’ll be fine.” He quiets, and I think he may be listening to the voices of the singers coming from the other side of the wall. The drum continues, joined by a rattle made of beads attached to a wooden rod, but I don’t hear the flute that Kol’s brother plays.
“Is Kesh not here?”
“He’s at the Bosha camp, with Shava and her mother.”
“So he doesn’t know yet.”
“I’ll go in the morning and tell him,” he says.
I work another piece of stone loose, and Kol winces. The song ends and another one begins. This one is sung by a single female voice.
“That’s my mother,” Kol says. He lets his eyes fall closed and turns his head toward the wall, though I’m not sure if he is turning toward the sound or turning away from me. I set to work on the next piece of stone. It comes out quickly—a tiny bead—almost like the beads of ivory in my hair. I start on the next one, but it’s wedged more deeply in Kol’s flesh. So much blood flows from the wound, it’s impossible to see. I blot his skin. I can feel the fragment of rock move beneath my fingertips. Gently, I work it free.
“When my own father died,” I say, speaking in a quiet voice that I hope will soothe him, “I was almost twelve years old. Old enough to know what death was. To understand the permanence of it,” I say. I pause, looking for clues from Kol as to how he feels about me talking like this. He doesn’t answer, so I go on. “I loved my father, but I was fortunate. I have an older brother. Chev slid easily into the father role in my life. He looked after me in the same way my father always had. He still does.”
Kol’s mother’s voice rises as the words of the song plead with the Divine to show favor to the one who died, to give him a comfortable hut beside a hunting ground rich with game. The melody is so sad, I feel the weight of Mala’s grief pressing down on my chest. My hands still.
The song ends, and Kol turns toward me. The light of the lamp catches in his eyes, but they stay dim and cold.
“But when my mother died,” I say, swallowing hard, forcing myself to continue, “that was different. I felt like I’d died, too. I didn’t feel sad. I felt empty. And I didn’t want anyone to try to change that. I wanted the emptiness. I cherished it like it was something solid. It was proof that she had been there. I wanted the pain so I wouldn’t forget.”
Another song begins, this one in unison like the first. “To your land, to your land,” the chorus repeats. “Bring him safely to your land.” I think I hear the voices of Chev and Seeri joining in.
Kol sits up and raises my hand to his lips. His fingers are still cold, but his mouth against my skin is warm. “I’m sorry for what happened to your mother—”
“That’s not why I’m telling you this. I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to do what I did. I shut everyone out after my mother died. Partly because I needed to be strong for my sisters. Partly because I didn’t want to share even the smallest piece of my grief with anyone else—I wanted to keep it all to myself. But shutting all that pain inside let it eat away at me. It chewed at my heart until I felt like my heart was gone.”
Kol raises his eyes to meet mine. “But your heart isn’t gone.”
My breath catches in my
throat. “No, it’s not. But it almost was. Don’t let that happen to you. Don’t hold yourself apart from the people who love you. The people you love.”
There’s an emptiness in Kol’s eyes, and I know I’m right. I know he’s trying to protect that emptiness. But then he lets his lids fall shut. When he opens them, the corners of his mouth curl up just a tiny bit. Not a smile, but acceptance. “You’re right.” He lies back down. “They need me, and I need them, too. Just for a little while tonight, I think I needed you more.”
“I need you, too,” I say. I bite back the words I want to say. Tonight is not the right night.
Later, with his wound dressed with moss and wrapped in another supple hide, hidden from his mother’s view behind clean pants, Kol emerges from the hut and joins his clan. I hang back, aware that people might think the wrong thing if they were to see me come out with him. Everyone calls his name when he appears—offering him a place to sit near the fire, bringing him a mat of food—but no one asks why he stayed away. They are just happy to have him with them now.
“The High Elder’s son,” I hear a voice say.
“The future High Elder,” another answers.
As these words repeat in my mind, the room grows suddenly smaller and darker. The future High Elder. I knew that, of course. I’ve always known that Kol would become the High Elder when his father died. But despite that knowledge, it hadn’t entered my thoughts today.
Not until this moment.
I step out of Kol’s family’s hut. The fire has grown. Its light spreads to the edge of the meeting place, throwing tall shadows on the walls of the circled huts. Kol turns toward me, and his face is illuminated. He doesn’t see me, though. He’s accepting condolences from the members of his clan.
I watch him—Kol, my future betrothed. And I remind myself that I’m ready. I’m ready to be betrothed. Even to the new High Elder of the Manu.
I linger at the edge of the crowd, listening to song after song until the sun begins to rise, but then I say good night to Kol and his whole family and go to bed. The music continues, though, and I don’t sleep well. When finally the light coming through the roof vent glows along the walls and I know the sun is well into the sky, I let myself get up.
I leave my brother and sisters asleep in the hut—they all came to bed after me—and step out into the cool morning quiet of Kol’s camp. People will sleep late today. So many songs were sung, so many stories were told. Stories of Arem, and all he had done on behalf of the clan. Stories of his hunting skills. Stories of his talent for working stone into tools.
Stories of how he’d trained a fine son to take his place as High Elder.
This morning the camp is silent, except for the waves in the bay. Called by the sound of the sea rushing to the sand, I follow the trail from the ring of huts to the beach.
As I draw closer—the cold gray surface reflecting clouds of soft gold—I catch the sound of voices. At the water’s edge, Mala’s sister, Ama, and her sons are prepping the boats to fish. They see me. Their heads lift in turn. Someone has pointed me out.
“Mya!” Ama waves to me, and I find myself hurrying forward to greet her. She stands in ankle-deep water loading a boat, but she wades onto shore as I reach the sand. “You’re up early,” she says.
Kol’s cousins wind rope and fold nets, stacking them onto the deck of a double kayak that floats in the shallow waves of low tide. Ama stands with a spear in her left hand and a pack propped against her knee. The hide of the pack is almost black from the many layers of oil rubbed in to protect it from water. Her tunic has the same dark sheen. “I came to help,” I say, and the words surprise me more than they seem to surprise her.
Ama’s eyes sweep over my clothing—I’m still dressed in my betrothal clothes, not really best for fishing—but still she smiles. “Have you ever hunted with these?” She unties something like a sash from around her waist—a strip of hide worked thin and supple, about as wide as her palm and about as long as her arm. She hands it to me, then stoops to pull large chunks of walrus ivory out of her pack.
“A sling?” I ask.
“Yes.” She smiles like my mother used to when I correctly identified an edible plant. “So you’ve used one before?”
“I’ve used one, yes. But not exactly like this.” I take the strip of hide from her hand. It’s soft and lightweight, like the hides used to wrap infants in summer. The ivory pieces are scuffed and marked—these have brought in their share of game. “I’ve used something similar,” I say. “But the ones we use are woven from strips of sinew to make a sort of flexible basket with a long tail. We use them to hurl rocks, not chunks of ivory—”
“You use them on land?”
I nod. “To hunt grouse,” I say.
“Ah, yes. We hunt grouse here, too. But these are for seabirds, so for these we use walrus ivory.”
Of course, I think. A weapon for the sea should come from the sea. The Spirits know their own.
Ama nods at the sling in my hand. “But you’ve used this type of weapon to hunt birds?”
“I have—”
“Good. Then I have a hunting partner.”
With a quick flash of a smile, she picks up the pack and moves to prep a second double kayak with the efficiency of someone who lives more on the sea than on the land. “Tie that sling around your own waist. I have another one for me.” She turns away briefly to instruct her boys, but they move even before she speaks; they are so skilled at the task of launching out to fish.
“I know not to hunt out at sea alone,” she says. “It’s too dangerous without a partner, even for me, and I can’t take the boys away from their fishing. I would’ve asked someone, but . . . not today. Not on a day like today.” Her voice falters, and she presses her lips between her teeth. She turns her shoulders away from me, letting her eyes trace the horizon, and when she turns back again, her composure has returned. “You were sent by the Divine this morning, I think,” she says, forcing her mouth into a thin smile. “You and I will bring in good food and good blessings to this clan on this day. The Divine brought you here to help me.”
Could this be true? I wonder. Could it be the Divine’s will that I am here with Ama this morning, to bring some good to Kol’s clan?
To the clan that will soon be my own clan?
I say nothing, but I follow Ama to the boat. She offers me the rear seat. “We’re heading out to a rocky island outside the mouth of the bay. A colony of black shags nests there every summer—hundreds of them. Just to the south beyond the point.”
Once we are out on the water, my head clears of every thought that doesn’t concern action. I focus on the movement of my paddle. I look ahead to the hunt, rehearsing in my mind the motion of my arm as I swing the sling, the feel of my fingers as I release it at just the right moment.
Two long rocky ridges enclose the bay like two cupped hands. As we paddle out we hug the ridge to our left—the one that forms the southeast boundary. Beyond it lies the open sea. I look up at the rocky cliff—gray stone worked smooth by the wind, crisscrossed by floes of ice—and I notice people walking high up along the crest. They carry tools—long poles and axes—tools for digging a grave. My eyes drift over the figures, and among them I recognize Kol’s brothers Roon and Pek. At the front I see Kol, walking alongside Urar.
I think of the gashes across Kol’s knee. I hope he showed them to Urar as he planned, and that the healer has treated them and offered chanted prayers.
The tide is coming back in, and the crash of the waves against this cliff creates a steady rhythm that ripples through me. My hair stirs on my shoulders. The wind swirls across the fur of my tunic.
Ama digs harder and faster at the water, and I match her strokes, pushing the kayak farther out to sea and leaving Kol behind.
For the first time since Arem died, I don’t see his bleeding body when I let my eyes fall closed. Instead, I see a cloud of birds with broad black wings—the game I will help bring in for Kol’s extended family. When I open my
eyes again, Ama is slowing. We pull within sight of a flat, bare rock that wriggles with black shapes like a giant hill of ants. These are the birds we’ve come to hunt. Before we draw close enough for them to sense our presence, Ama twists in her seat, signaling me to stop.
“You’ve never hunted shags?” she asks.
I shake my head, squinting against the icy spray that pricks at my cheeks and eyes.
“They’re nice big birds—lots of meat on each one—and this island is covered with them. Since they’re nesting, we can bring the boat right up on the beach. They won’t fly away. But many will take off and hover over our heads. Those will be our targets.” She swivels in her seat and points with the paddle to the island’s western shore, where the rocky surface crumbles into a pebbly beach. I follow her lead, paddling until the water beneath us is shallow enough to allow us to jump out. My sealskin boots keep my skin dry, but still, the cold cuts through to my feet and ankles. The bright knife it sends to my mind clears out all my lingering, murky thoughts, and I’m grateful for it. Dragging the kayak ashore, we gather up our supplies. Ama and I each untie the slings wrapped at our waists. She pulls six heavy chunks of ivory from her pack and hands me three.
Before us, dotting the ground from one edge of the island to the other, are rows and rows of birds squatting on mound-like nests. As we approach, they honk and squawk, and those closest to us take off. Just as Ama promised, though, they don’t fly away; they won’t desert their chicks.
They care for their offspring, and it will be their undoing.
I block these thoughts from my mind. To a hunter, these birds are not individuals. They are game. Game that live in relationship with the clans, just as the Divine ordained it.
The game give their lives so that we can live. And in return for feeding our children, the Divine gives them food for their own children to eat. This is the relationship between the clans, the game, and the Divine. It has always been this way, since the Divine made the first woman, and told her to reach her hand into the sea for the first fish. And from the bones of the first fish, she made the first spear point to shoot the first deer as it grazed on the grass the Divine had given it. This was the plan of life the Divine gave to the first woman, and it has held the world in balance ever since.
Obsidian and Stars Page 3
