Call Down the Stars

by Sue Harrison

  Daughter leapt to her feet and ran to his side, her small hands balled into fists, her teeth bared. The old woman looked at her, surprise rounding her eyes, but she tipped back her head and laughed. She spoke in words that Daughter did not understand, and as she spoke she used her hands to give the words meaning. She directed Daughter’s eyes toward the grandfather’s arm, swollen and purple and oozing pus. Then she raised a knife. The blade was so black and glossy that it looked like water frozen into stone. It caught the light from the fire and seemed to glow in the old woman’s hand.

  She motioned to show Daughter that she would use the knife on the festering arm. The old woman had fed Daughter a piece of fish, and now it rose into Daughter’s throat. She leaned over and vomited on the floor. The woman hissed at her, shouted angrily, then pushed Daughter back toward her place against the earthen wall. Daughter hunkered on her haunches, and the old woman crouched beside the grandfather. Her knife flashed light. Daughter covered her eyes with her hands, tried to stop up her ears by hunching her shoulders as the grandfather cried out again and again.

  When he finally stopped screaming, Daughter slowly took her hands from her eyes. The old woman had removed her feathered coat and was bare from the waist up. Her face was wet, as shiny as her knife, and little rivers of sweat made paths between her breasts.

  Daughter gathered her courage and said, “Do not hurt him anymore.” But her voice was tiny, and it seemed as though the earth sucked up the sound of her words. The old woman did not even look up from what she was doing. There was a sharp crack, stone against bone, another garbled cry from the grandfather, and then the old woman lifted the severed arm.

  Blood dripped to the grass on the floor, and Daughter turned her back, leaned her head against the cold earthen wall, and wept. What would the grandfather do without his arm? How could he carry water? How could he fish?

  She stayed huddled beside the wall until the old woman came and pulled her away. Daughter kept her eyes squeezed shut to close out the remembrance of the blood and the knife. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself in fear that the old woman would decide to cut her as well, but the woman only picked her up and crooned a song in a voice that was rich and comforting.

  At first Daughter held herself stiff and still, but finally she ventured to turn her head, look at the grandfather. He seemed to be asleep, his face peaceful, as if he dreamed good dreams. Daughter’s eyes filled with tears as she thought of his sadness when he awoke and saw that his arm was gone. If she could find it and somehow save it, then maybe the grandfather could sew it back on, like her mother sewed sleeves on a coat.

  She scanned the floor for the arm. The bloodstained bundle was lying near a notched log that rose from the floor to a square hole in the earth. Above the hole it was dark. Did the log lead out into the night, or was the darkness only more dirt above them? When the old woman had taken them from the boat, there were other people who helped her, but one of them had wrapped Daughter in a fur blanket, had covered her so completely that she had not seen how they got down into the earth.

  When the old woman finished her song, she gave Daughter water and more fish. The fish smelled good, like the smoke of a cooking fire, and Daughter tried to eat, but her throat seemed too small, and it was difficult for her to swallow. Finally the old woman gave her a cup of broth, but after one sip, Daughter drank no more. The woman made her a bed, padded with furs and layered with otter skins, sweet smelling, like the skins her own mother used for their beds.

  She took the wooden cup from Daughter’s hands, said something that Daughter did not understand, then lifted her chin toward the bed. Daughter crept into the furs, made herself a nest, closed her eyes, and pretended to sleep. But as she lay there, she thought of how she and the grandfather could sew his arm back on. If the old woman had knives, she must have needles and sinew thread. Daughter had not yet learned to sew. Her mother had said she was too little for needles. But she had watched her mother and her grandmother, and she was sure she knew how. Perhaps even the grandfather knew a little. After all, when a man was away hunting or fishing, who else would repair his clothes but he himself?

  She considered needles and thread, finger protectors made of hide, awls, and sewing knives, until finally they all danced together like windbent flowers. She watched them until it seemed as if she were again back in the boat, the sea rocking her, and she fell asleep.

  Through the night, K’os kept vigil beside the old man. He was strong, that one. The arm had been so badly festered that he should have died days before. She placed a hand on his forehead. There were spirits of sickness in him, no doubt of that, but his pulse was steady.

  She was glad that her husband Seal was away hunting. He probably would not have let her bring the man or his little girl into the ulax.

  At least the chief hunter had not been so foolish. There were tales of others who had come to the First Men’s islands from distant shores, brought by storm winds. The chief’s own family was said to have ancestors who had arrived in such a way, so the storytellers said.

  The old man’s boat was strange, unlike anything River People would build. None of the First Men had seen one like it, but if you could get beyond the stink, you could see that there was some merit in the way it was made. Even several hunters had commented on its stability in sea waves. But who would waste two good logs on building one boat when there was enough wood in them to make four or five iqyan? A greedy man, this one must be, those hunters had decided.

  K’os had stood up for him, had told of lands where there were enough trees to make two handfuls of log boats for every hunter. They had considered what she said, but none of them had traveled much beyond their island, and her husband, the only trader among them, was not there to take her side. Surprisingly, K’os’s sister-wife Eye-Taker had. Boasting, she told of the many strange lands where their husband had traveled, of places where trees grew as thick as grass. And finally, with Eye-Taker’s words to back her, K’os had won permission to try to save the old man.

  She could also keep the girl, the chief hunter said. At least until Seal returned from his hunting trip. Then the whole village would gather and decided what to do with both man and child.

  After all, even thin and scabbed as she was, and also missing a toe, the girl was not ugly, and perhaps someday she could be a wife for one of their sons. Of course by the time she had learned to speak their language, she would have forgotten what she knew of her own people, where they lived and why they built their boats in such way, for she was not yet to the age of remembering. But the old man, he would know much, and the chief hunter was anxious to learn what he had to tell them. For the man was not River, nor even Caribou, and not North Tundra. All those people the First Men knew or at least had heard about. So yes, the chief hunter and the elders agreed, K’os should try to save him, and they would find places for Eye-Taker and her children in their ulas, since Eye-Taker had decided that the old man probably carried some curse. As long as he was sick, she and her children would leave Seal’s ulax and stay in a safer place.

  But who would care if K’os were cursed? She was, after all, a River woman, old, and only a second wife.

  When the gray of sunrise finally pushed back the night, K’os ate a chunk of dried fish and roused the old man enough to give him something to drink. He fought against her, but finally she managed to get some willow bark tea down his throat. The girl was still asleep, and for a moment K’os considered waking her, but then she decided to wait. She climbed out of the ulax into the dawn wind, and she walked to the beach, where the grandfather’s boat still lay, its tail in the waves.

  She used a strip of driftwood to scrape the rotted meat and fish from the inside of the boat, then went back to the village and found several boys to help her. They approached the boat with fingers pinched over their noses, and even K’os could not keep from puckering her lips in distaste as the wind carried the smell to them.

  “I need you to help me lift it past the reach of storm wa
ves and into the shelter of those rocks,” K’os told them, raising her chin toward a hedge of rocks that sat above the rise of the beach.

  “Why keep it?” one of the boys asked. “It will never lose its stink.”

  “Perhaps the old man will want it someday,” K’os told him.

  “My uncle says he will die, that his arm is too rotten.”

  K’os shrugged her shoulders. “If he dies, he dies,” she said, “but for now we will move the boat.”

  They complained, but they helped her, groaning and whining until K’os began complimenting them on their strength. Then they worked all the harder, each vying for her praise, and finally the boat was behind the rocks. The boys left her and ran back to the village, but K’os sat beside the boat, laid a hand on the wet, sated wood, and considered the gifts the sea had brought her—a good boat, and a daughter to raise more wisely than she had raised Chakliux.

  She thought of a riddle, and it made her smile. She spoke it to the sky and told the wind to carry it above the clouds to those few stars that lived over the Sea Hunters’ islands. They seldom shone, those stars, and when they did, their light was faint, as if in finding their way through the clouds, they used up nearly all their brightness. But each dim star reminded her of the great dome of night sky that rose over the River People’s villages. And now she had more hope that she would live under those bright stars again.

  “Look! What do I see?” she called to those First Men stars. “A daughter of light to guide my iqyax.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  IN DAUGHTER’S DREAM, THE otter jumped from the sea into their boat. It chewed off the grandfather’s arm, then came toward her, its teeth bared. She screamed and woke herself up. She opened her eyes and saw that she was no longer in the boat, and the memories of what had happened returned. She was inside the earth, she and the grandfather and an old woman.

  She unwrapped herself from the bedding furs and stood up, but the motion of the grandfather’s boat seemed to be a part of her arms and legs, and she walked with a lurch that made her reach out toward the earthen walls to keep her balance.

  Then she saw the grandfather. He was lying where the old woman had left him, on mats of woven grass that looked a little like the mats her own people used. Only a short stump, little more than the length of Daughter’s hand, remained where his left arm had been. Daughter remembered the bundle beside the notched log and her hopes of sewing the arm back on, but when she went to the log, the bundle was gone, nothing left of it but a scattering of dried blood in the floor-grass where it had lain. The old woman was gone, too, and Daughter decided she must have taken the grandfather’s arm with her.

  The loss of that arm made an ache in Daughter’s chest, and as she crouched beside the grandfather she crooned a song her mother had taught her. It was a song for grass cuts and scraped knees, probably not much good for the grandfather, but it was all Daughter knew. She laid a hand on his forehead and was surprised to discover that his skin was cool.

  Had the arm itself made him sick? If so, maybe the old woman had been right in cutting it off. At least the grandfather was alive. Daughter looked at her own small arms, so thin that they seemed little more than bone. She tucked her left hand behind her back and thought about living with only one arm.

  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.