Obsidian and Stars

by Julie Eshbaugh

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s stopped for now. Whatever brought it on, let’s hope it’s over.”

  We pull the boat far enough up away from the water that we are sure high tide won’t reach it, but I tell Lees to leave it right there—right in the wide-open space, away from trees and cliffs. The sky is finally black, the stars finally shining. I don’t dare trek back under cover. Not after that quake. Instead I ask Lees to dig out something for us to eat while I spread the mammoth hide across the cold ground.

  “We’ll sleep right here,” I say. Even though I know it’s the only choice, the chilled air that swept in with the dark sky sends a shiver through me. “It won’t be cozy, but at least nothing will fall on us.”

  Lees spreads out a piece of caribou hide and places on it a full skin of water and two piles of dried mammoth meat and berries. It’s nothing grand, but it fills our stomachs. Fear had soaked into every bone of my body during the quake, but it finally drains away, replaced by a deep ache. Dragging ourselves despite our fatigue, Lees and I stash the packs of food and other supplies beneath the overturned kayak. When we’re done, we wrap ourselves between the folded halves of the mammoth hide. Before I can say a single word to Lees, she drops her head against my shoulder. “In the morning, we’ll scout around to find a better site,” I say, but her body has already gone heavy and still with sleep.

  I lie awake a long time, listening as the waves lap the shore to my right and the wind stirs the dune grass to my left. I feel like I will never relax enough to drop off, but I must. I wake with a start as something thuds against the ground.

  Lees is curled away from me. Her long hair, all loose from her braid, covers her face. She is definitely asleep. I sit up and run my hands through the sand—cold and damp with morning mist.

  I swivel in place, sweeping my eyes across the tops of the dunes. Nothing stirs. My gaze scans the horizon, but nothing breaks the line of the sea except for an occasional gull diving for its morning meal. But then I notice faint footprints that mark the surface of the sand. Human footprints. Two lines overlapping—one leading to the overturned kayak, one leading back toward the dunes. My eyes trace the tracks back toward the tall grass and this time I notice movement. A figure—a person hunched over and moving fast—disappears up the trail toward the cliffs.

  I jostle Lees’s shoulder until she opens her eyes. “Someone’s here. Someone was near the boat.”

  Lees sheds her sleepiness as soon as she understands the threat. “Did they get anything?” she asks.

  If we lose our food, we won’t have a thing to eat until we’ve successfully hunted. And if we lose our food and our weapons, what will we do then? Without a means of bringing in game, we’d almost certainly have to go home. Even the best toolmaker—even Kol’s father—would struggle to make proper hunting tools from the limited resources on this island. Though I hope it will be only days until Chev relents and sends for us, I can’t be certain we won’t be here long enough for the food we’ve brought to run out.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see if she carried anything—”

  “She?”

  “It might’ve been a girl. The person was moving fast and I only saw her back, but something made me think of a girl.”

  While Lees checks on the supplies, I run through the possibilities of who might be on this island. Could a clan have landed here after having become lost? We’re so far from shore, I can’t imagine anyone landing here without being lost.

  “They got just one thing,” Lees says. I turn to her, hopeful, ready to calm down and understand that this is not a tragedy. We are not in danger. But then I see her teeth pressing into her bottom lip. “They got the pack of food.”

  We have no choice but to go after it. We can hunt, but we don’t know what game we’ll find. Even fishing—usually the shortest path to food—is harder when you don’t know the waters.

  Lees and I drag the kayak and the rest of the supplies to the tallest grasses and try to stash it all out of sight. Before we hike away, I grab the most valuable items—the waterskin, a net, the atlatls, the darts. I toss it all into a pack that I sling over my shoulder, grab my spear, and lead Lees up the path to the cliffs.

  We stay low, hiding behind the tall grass. The dunes rise to the base of a towering wall of rock—the cliffs we saw from the sea. From a gap in the dunes, I notice the mouth of a cave, partially blocked by large boulders that must have fallen during last night’s quake. A woman lies beside the rocks, so close I worry she might be pinned. My eyes scan the area around her. She’s alone. Whatever I hoped to gain by staying out of sight, I throw it away when I rush to the woman’s side. Lees calls my name as I dart into the open.

  “Stay there,” I say. “Stay out of sight. I just want to see if I can help.”

  From up close, I can see that the woman’s arm isn’t pinned under the rock she lies beside, as I’d feared. Instead, it’s propped against it to elevate a bloody wound on her wrist that’s bound and wrapped with leaves of a plant I don’t recognize. These unfamiliar leaves lie across the woman’s face and neck, blood caking where it seeped around the edges. I lean over her chest, watching for any indication of the rise and fall of breath.

  As my hand hovers over her, a stone cracks against my wrist. It bounces away, but before I can look up to see where it came from, another lands hard against my head, just above my left ear. White light sears across my vision and I drop to one knee, slumped over the woman on the ground.

  “Don’t touch her!” The voice is young and female, and comes from a ledge partway up the cliff. I look up and see the girl—small and skinny—and I think it must be the same person I saw running away with our food. Her eyes wide like a startled deer, she picks up another sharp rock and cocks her arm back. I jump to my feet. I don’t know what she thinks I will do—what she hopes I will do. Whatever it is, she doesn’t expect me to pull the sling from around my waist and load it with the rock she just threw at me.

  She doesn’t wait for me to take the shot. Before I can rotate the sling even once around my head, the girl is racing toward me, tackling me to the ground.

  “Stay away from my mother!” She scratches and snarls at me, pulling my hair and slamming my head against the ground, but she’s small and I easily throw her from my chest. Before I can get to my feet, though, Lees has emerged. She grabs my spear from the spot where I dropped it and points it at the girl on the ground.

  “It’s all right,” I say, thinking the spear might terrorize this child—she can’t be older than Lees and Roon—but she ignores it. Instead she scrambles over the ground to the woman’s side.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “I have more for you.” Her hands clutch at something on the ground around her—more leaves, apparently dropped when she fell. She scoops them up and presses them to the woman’s face. Folding the woman’s limp arms across her chest, she drapes the leaves on the woman’s hands and adds more to her wrist. The leaves are dry and wilted, and when an arm slides to the woman’s side, they float up on a current of air before wafting back down to the ground. “Mother,” the girl mutters, clutching at the leaves. “Hold still. You have to let me help you.”

  I’m not sure what’s worse. That the girl’s mother has died, or that the girl stubbornly refuses to let it be so. I watch her working, peeling back a blood-soaked leaf from the woman’s face and smoothing another in its place.

  I come up behind her and set a hand on the girl’s shoulder. I notice her knee protruding through a tear in her pants. An angry abrasion covers the bottom of her exposed thigh. She must have been with her mother when the cave collapsed. I wonder how bad her own injuries are.

  “It’s too late,” I say. But she tugs her shoulder from my grasp.

  “It’s not. I can save her. I can save her. . . .” Slumped over the body of her mother, her voice becomes a jumble of murmured words of comfort for the dead woman on the ground.

  “It is,” I say again. “There’s nothing more that can be done.”
>
  The child never looks up, so dedicated is she to her work. I watch her, and an unbidden memory comes to me like something long forgotten rising from the bottom of a dark lake.

  I see a girl, climbing from a kayak steered by her brother as it docks on a strange beach. The boy calls to the girl, but she won’t listen. Instead, she runs headlong into the water toward a kayak that is coming in behind them from the sea. Other boats are there—her clan climbs to the shore, shaking with exhaustion, but she notices no one. Her eyes are on one boat—one double kayak—where her mother lies in the rear seat as if she’s sleeping.

  The girl reaches her mother’s side. She runs a cold wet hand across the woman’s cold wet face. A sudden flash of fear burns through her as someone lifts her from behind.

  Her brother carries her, kicking and flailing, to land. He drops her on the sand and orders her not to move. “Watch your sisters,” he says. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

  The rest . . . That’s what Chev had called her. But I knew what he meant. He meant our mother. He meant he would take care of our mother, because she was dead.

  The girl still crouches in front of me, but her edges smear as my vision blurs. Hot tears run down my face.

  An arm drapes around my shoulder. Lees tugs me to her side. “She’s dead,” I say. The words come out in a shudder of pain that’s been held like a clenched fist for too long.

  “I know.” I’m not sure, but I think Lees knows I’m not talking about the woman on the ground.

  I don’t notice at first, but at some point the little girl stops leaning over her mother and turns her attention to me. She begins to say something, but her voice cuts off. A sound comes from the cave—rock falling, and after, a faint sound like an animal in pain.

  Lees looks up—she’s heard it too—and she hurries to the mouth of the cave. The girl is right behind her.

  “What are you doing?” I call. “You can’t go in there!” I jump to my feet, hurrying to grab them and hold them both back. Lees turns her ear to the cave and closes her eyes, listening.

  “Did you hear that? Someone’s alive in there. We need to—”

  But before Lees can say what we need to do, the quiet of the clearing is split in two by the long, high howl of a wolf. The howl of a wolf coming from inside the cave.

  “It’s Black Dog!”

  The girl turns her dirt-smeared face toward me, her tired, red-rimmed eyes wide and bright again. “Black Dog is alive!”

  Before I can reach out to stop her, the girl scrambles over the rocks that fill the opening of the cave and disappears from view.

  ELEVEN

  She’s gone before I can catch her by the arm. Right behind her, Lees runs to the mouth of the cave and climbs up on a boulder that partially blocks the way.

  “Lees, stop! You can’t go in there—”

  “She could need help—”

  “She’s not your responsibility.” My eyes brush over the body of the dead woman. I don’t mean to abandon her daughter, but I can’t let my own sister run headlong into danger to help someone who isn’t even of our clan.

  “But the dog—”

  “What could you possibly know about dogs?” I ask. Lees has never seen a dog in her life. Neither have I.

  “Father used to tell me stories about them,” she says. “Before he died.”

  This stops me short. I wouldn’t have guessed Lees remembered any stories from our father at all. She was only six when he died. “He told you about dogs?”

  “About how long ago our clan kept dogs. How they were like wolves, but tame, and helped the people with their work.”

  I know these stories too. Stories of the days many generations ago, before a storm took the lives of half the clan. All the dogs were lost in that storm, and our clan has never kept dogs since.

  Maybe dogs remind Lees of our father. Maybe the thought of seeing one feels like reaching back to him, to the stories he told in the past. Before I can ask, Lees is beyond my grasp, climbing through the mouth of the cave. I call her name but she never turns back.

  Lees’s willingness to help a person who is not clan is beyond my understanding. She hasn’t been groomed for clan leadership. She hasn’t been taught to never let anyone or anything come before the clan. She’s fortunate—in so many ways, she’s the most free of the three of us—because the least is expected of her.

  At least until now.

  I call her name twice after she drops down into the cave, but I get no response. I have no choice but to follow.

  Inside the cave I find two boulders as high as my shoulders. Above my head, light pours in—these rocks must have formed part of the ceiling before the quake loosened them and let them fall. A sound—part howl, part cry—comes from beyond the place where Lees and the other girl stand. They have gone far back into the cave. Sweeping my eyes over the space beyond the girls, I see nothing.

  The sound comes again and Lees drops to a crouch. “There!”

  The other girl straightens and slides farther into the dark, skirting the edge of a huge trench that splits the floor in two. “Be careful!” I imagine this girl falling into the trench, and my stomach drops. As I get closer, I see how deep it is—at least as deep as the height of three men—with sides too steep to climb. She would be lost to us if she fell in.

  I think of this as I move closer to Lees, reaching for her hand. I edge forward, peering into the hole. It’s narrower at the bottom than at the top, with straight, smooth walls. And at the very bottom, tucked so far into the rock that his voice is muffled, stands an animal that looks like a wolf with a black coat. If I saw him in the wild, I would think wolf. I would think run.

  He sees the girl, and he howls again. His front paws claw at the steep ledge of rock that separates the two of them as if he intends to climb straight up to her, but his feet skid back down. He tries again, manages by force of will to climb a bit, but then tumbles to the bottom once more. He lets out a yelp as he twists from his back onto his feet. The sound bounces from the walls, mingling with the skittering of pebbles.

  This dog confounds me. Everything about him tells me he’s a predator—everything except his behavior. He whimpers, and I suspect he’s no danger at all.

  I suspect, but I can’t be sure.

  “Don’t cry, Black Dog,” the girl says. “We’ll get you out. We’ll find a way.”

  “Don’t tell him that,” I say. The dog whimpers again, and the sound claws at my heart the way his feet clawed at the rock. “We can’t help him. We can’t reach him, and there’s no way to lift him out.”

  “Yes, there is,” says Lees. I turn toward her, to ask her what she has in mind. But before I can get out a single word, she is far below me, clambering down into the trench.

  “Lees!” I don’t think; I don’t wait for her to turn. Instead I scramble out to the rim of the pit and start to climb right after her. There is only a small incline at the top edge where the rock slopes. Then it drops off sharply—too sharp to climb up or down. All I can think of is getting my hands on her and pulling her back out while I still can.

  “Don’t follow me,” Lees says, as she crawls to the lip of the rock that plunges straight down to the floor of the pit. Without a look back at me, or even a glance at the girl, she swings her legs out and drops to the small circle of ground beside the dog.

  My legs convulse so hard, I drop onto the slanted rock where I stand. I almost can’t look down. When I force myself, the world around me spins. A loud sound echoes though the cave—the sound of my voice as I scream my sister’s name. My ears ring with her name, mixed with a buzz like a thousand honeybee wings. I tremble so hard, I almost lose my balance and join her at the bottom of the pit.

  But I can’t fall to pieces. I need to stay calm. I look around, searching for tools that could help us. The two girls are calling to each other, Lees shrieking with delight that the dog is being friendly to her. The other girl sobbing that Lees is with the dog and she is not. My eyes move from rock to rock—ther
e’s nothing here. The net outside isn’t strong enough for Lees to climb. It would never hold her weight. Would my spear be long enough to reach her, if I lay across the ground and dangled it over the wall of the pit? Could she use it to pull herself up, or would she just slide back down again?

  Far below, I hear her, struggling to find footholds. “I didn’t expect this to be so hard,” she says, breathless with effort. The other girl shouts instructions to her, but I know it’s no use. Even before Lees climbed down, I knew there was no climbing up those straight walls. If I’d thought it were possible, I’d have climbed down myself.

  My eyes search the cave, but I find nothing long enough to reach her, nothing strong enough to pull her up. All I see are rocks—small rocks, big rocks, boulders.

  “Wait,” I say. It comes out as a whisper, a word spoken more to myself than to the girls. But they both hear and they both listen.

  I look across the wide mouth of the trench at the girl. This girl who is not even clan. This stranger for whom my sister is risking her life. “What’s your name?” I call.

  “What’s yours?” There’s a clear note of distrust in her voice.

  “I’m called Mya,” I say. “And that’s my sister Lees, putting herself in danger to rescue your dog.”

  “My name is Noni,” the girl says.

  “Well, Noni, you and I have a big job to do.”

  Together, Noni and I gather the largest boulders that we can lift and bring them to the rim of the trench. There are others bigger and heavier—those we would have to roll—but I don’t dare use those.

  After the boulders, we collect the bigger rocks. These we stack separately, off to the side.

  I stand back and study the shape of the trench—the way the walls slope down from the front edge, but drop almost straight down from the edge that faces the back of the cave. Even the sloping side drops over a ledge a few paces down, right where Lees climbed over. Though the trench is wide at the top, it narrows as it deepens, so that the space where Lees and the dog stand is a circular spot of ground only about twelve paces wide.