Call Down the Stars

by Sue Harrison

  “What do you mean by that? If I would have been here, that I would have been the fortunate woman to share your bed?” Qumalix turned her back on him and the sisters and walked toward the storytellers’ ulax.

  The sisters called down to him, but he ignored them. “Qumalix!” he shouted. “Qumalix, wait!”

  She did not slow her pace, only lifted her hands over her head as though her fingers could shield her from the rain.

  Yikaas heard someone behind him and turned, ready to rebuff the sisters, but found himself looking into Sky Catcher’s face.

  “She is not worth your worry,” he said, his words in the River language, stilted and broken. “That one thinks about nothing but stories.”

  Yikaas nodded grimly, but as soon as the man walked away, he could not help but let the smile that was lurking behind his teeth out of his mouth.

  The heavy, cold rain brought the traders from the beach, and the place smelled of wet parkas and mud, for the men’s feet had stirred the hard-packed floor into a thick dirt soup.

  “Sit down!” Qumalix shouted, raising her voice into a screech. She was disappointed with Yikaas, and angry at herself for being so. What better way to shed some of that anger than in trying to make order out of the chaos in the storytellers’ ulax? “Sit down,” she shouted again. “Does anyone need water?”

  As quickly as she started passing water bladders, others dug into packs and bags for smoked fish and sweet dried berries. Before long, the damp and the dirt were lost in the laughter of people who have decided to make a celebration out of misery. Qumalix raised an arm to gesture toward Yikaas, who had just entered the ulax.

  “You need to tell a story,” she said, then stood on her toes to look over the crowd. “If you don’t want to, Kuy’aa is here also.”

  “I’ll tell a story,” said Yikaas.

  “About bedding First Men women, no doubt,” Qumalix snapped.

  “We have mostly traders here,” Yikaas said, ignoring the barb. “Perhaps they would like a story about one of their own. I know a good one.”

  Qumalix lifted her fingers and flicked them toward Yikaas, almost an insult. “Tell your story. I will be glad to hear it.”

  But the clamor in the ulax had again grown loud, so Yikaas pressed the biting edges of his front teeth together and blew out a short, sharp whistle.

  The whistle brought silence, and Yikaas said, “The young woman beside me asks to hear a story about traders.”

  As if speaking in one voice, the men in the ulax shouted their agreement.

  At that moment, Sky Catcher started down the climbing log. His sax was soaked, and his legs were spattered with mud. The men sitting near the log raised protests as he sluiced the water from the sax.

  Sky Catcher acted as if he did not hear them. “Yikaas’s story will be about River traders,” he said. “How many of you are River?” He stood with his chin outthrust, labrets bristling like tusks. “You want a story. I will tell you a story, and it will be about First Men traders.”

  A low grumble swept through the ulax, First Men and River traders arguing. Qumalix’s heart lurched in her chest. How could a woman handle a fight between men?

  “Yikaas first,” she called out. “Because he was asked first.” But her voice was drowned in the arguing. Suddenly she was very angry. She made her way through the traders to the climbing log, grabbed one of Sky Catcher’s dirty ankles, and yanked him down. It was not a far drop, and he landed easily on his feet. Before he could react, Qumalix scrambled up the log until she was a head taller than any man in the ulax. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, but still no one seemed to hear.

  Suddenly Yikaas’s piercing whistle again cut its way through the noise, and in the moment of silence that followed, Qumalix said, “You traders have come to hear a story, but what you forget is that we are in this ulax because of other people’s hospitality. We drink their water and muddy their floors and leave the stink of our parkas in these walls.”

  Though there had been a gruff laugh when she began, now the men were quiet, and one of the few traders’ wives in the group batted her husband with the back of her hand and said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “How would you like it if all this mess was in your lodge?”

  They began to give apologies, but Qumalix said, “No one asked you to be sorry, only to be polite. Yikaas was invited to tell the first story. After he is done, Sky Catcher will have his turn. The clouds are too thick for this rain to leave us quickly. We will have a long time for stories.”

  She nodded at Yikaas and said, “We are ready.”

  Yikaas saw the weariness in her face and wondered how long it had been since she had slept. Don’t pity her, he told himself, fool that she was to go with Sky Catcher. Yikaas pulled his thoughts away from her and brought into his mind the remembrance of hard seas, lashing winds. He closed his eyes, waited until he could see the storm, hear it, feel it; and when he began the story, Yikaas had become Cen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Bering Sea

  6435 B.C.

  CEN’S STORY

  THEY HAD LASHED THEIR iqyan into a raft of three, Dog Feet with his larger iqyax in the center, Cen and He-points-the-way with theirs tied to each side. When the only beaches were more treacherous than the sea, how else did traders ensure their safety for a night?

  Theirs was the gift of clear skies, and they saw no sign that would lead them to fear a storm, no haze of approaching rain, no thin white lines at the edges of the sea to suggest a far-off wind kicking up white-caps. Even the smell of the air was that of fish and sea animals rather than any taste of forests or strange lands brought by foreign winds.

  They had chosen He-points-the-way to watch as Cen and Dog Feet slept. Well into the night, Cen heard him wake Dog Feet for the second watch. Cen roused himself enough to look out over the blackness of the sea. He rubbed his eyes and squinted up at the sky. There were no stars, but that was no surprise. What clouds did not hide, fog often did. A thin wind had begun to blow from what he assumed was the west—without stars or a clear vision of water currents, it was difficult to tell—but the sea was nearly calm, lifting and dropping in a gentle rhythm that lulled him back into sleep.

  Later, when he heard Dog Feet’s voice, he thought it was his turn to watch, and so he was surprised to see that the skies were still black, not even the hint of dawn to the east. Dog Feet must not have taken his full turn. Cen did not know the man well, but he must not be much if he cheated on the length of his watch. Still, Cen told himself, it was better to have slept a little than not at all. He had made the same journey alone, catching only a few blinks of sleep now and again during the long beachless night between the Traders’ village and the cluster of First Men villages two days west.

  “My turn?” he asked, and tried to keep the disgust out of his voice.

  “No,” Dog Feet answered, and in the darkness Cen heard the dripping of the man’s paddle as he lifted the blade from the water. “What do you think of that?”

  Cen pushed himself upright in his iqyax. He could see nothing but darkness.

  “What?” he asked, and this time he did not try to hide his exasperation. Dog Feet was a young man, probably given to all kinds of fears. He had listened to too many stories about blue ice people and sea monsters.

  “Listen.”

  At first Cen heard nothing but the waves against their iqyan, but then, rising over those gentle voices, came a howling, sprung from many throats.

  “Wolves,” he said. “We must be close to land.”

  “No, listen!” The young man’s voice was tight with worry.

  He-points-the-way called from the far iqyax, “What is the matter? Be quiet, both of you. I need to sleep.”

  “Listen, those are not wolves,” Dog Feet said. He pointed toward a white blur coming at them across the water. “See?”

  Cen’s throat constricted, cut off his breath. If they had been in that sea that lies south of the First Men’s islands, he would ha
ve thought it was a tidal wave, but there were no such waves here in the North Sea, though quakes could raise the water to a height that would swamp most boats.

  He-points-the-way shouted, “The wind! Look! It drives the sea toward us.”

  Cen began to unlash the paddles that held his iqyax to the others, but Dog Feet protested.

  “We will have a better chance against it if we stay together.”

  The wind had grown so loud that Cen could barely hear what Dog Feet said. “In a storm, yes,” Cen shouted, “but with a wave like this, we are better to drive our iqyan through it rather than try to ride it.”

  “You are a fool!” He-points-the-way said, and in the noise of water and wave, his voice seemed to come from a long way off.

  “Do what you want,” Cen told them, “but I will face this alone.”

  In the darkness, it was difficult to judge how close the wave was—closer than Cen had first thought; that, or it was traveling much faster than any wave should. He cut the remaining lash, reclaimed his paddle, and thrust it into the water. He pushed back from Dog Feet and He-points-the-way. Cen knew he could never outrun the wave, but he paddled hard.

  The water roiled under him, grew choppy, as if the sea itself were afraid. Cen looked back and saw that the sky had opened, the dark clouds split. He could see stars in the break, the last faint light that shines just as dawn brightens. They gave him his bearing, and he knew he was paddling toward land. Not good. The wave would smash him into the shallows or against a cliff. He turned and started out to sea. The wave was coming from the north, and he headed his iqyax west.

  The chop became swells. Cen paddled over them, careful to keep his bow straight so he did not roll. He needed to stay upright until the moment the wave caught him. He looked back over his shoulder, hoping to see that Dog Feet and He-points-the-way had decided to cut their iqyan apart. A wave lifted them into view, and Cen realized that he had come farther than he thought. They were so small to his eyes that by raising a hand he could cover them with his palm.

  “Cut loose! Cut loose!” Cen yelled at them, but he knew that his warning would not be heard above the wind.

  He turned away. The wave was close enough that it looked like a mountain rising in the sea. Once on one of his trading trips, a whale had breached near his iqyax. Cen had been young and numbed with fear, but watched as the whale approached, pushing a mound of water ahead of it. Finally the animal had rolled and turned, one long flipper flailing at the sky. Its wake had caught Cen, skipped and skidded his iqyax across the water like a flat stone.

  This wave was larger than the whale’s swell, but it looked as if some power lived beneath it, forcing it forward.

  “I’m too shallow,” Cen hissed under his breath, and continued to paddle toward deeper seas. If the wave remained merely a mountain of water, there was some chance he could go up and over it, but if in gaining mass and speed, it grew so tall that its roots touched the bottom of the sea it would curl and break. Then Cen’s only chance would be to turn his iqyax upside down, allow the bottom of the boat to take the brunt of the breaker.

  Bound together as they were, Dog Feet and He-points-the-way would have no chance to do that, and even if the iqyan in their own wisdom turned, the men would never be able to right themselves before they drowned.

  The swells grew, and Cen glanced one last time toward Dog Feet and He-points-the-way. What he saw made him scream in frustration, for they were paddling their bound iqyan hard toward the shore.

  “Fools! Stay in deep water. It’s your only chance! Cut loose, cut loose, cut loose!”

  Suddenly the motion of the swells stopped, and Cen pulled his eyes from the men and stared in horror at the sea. It was smooth, as though a giant hand had stretched it taut, and he realized that the water was being sucked toward the wave as though it were a maw, eating, filling its belly. He felt his iqyax drawn with the water, and he knew he would be swallowed.

  He checked the bindings that lashed his spare paddle to the deck. If he survived the swallowing, he would not be able to turn himself upright without a paddle, and surely the one that he held in his hands would be torn from his grasp.

  He realized that in his fear he was holding his breath, and he forced himself to look up at the sky, to drawn in power from the air until his lungs were full to bursting.

  Then for a moment it seemed that all the world stopped. He saw his wife, Gheli, and his daughters. He saw his parents, and worried that they called to him from the dead. He saw K’os as she had been when they were both young, and Daes, the woman he had loved above all others, she, too, dead. But Cen set his mind on Ghaden, as if his son, with all the strength of youth and the power he had gained from killing the brown bear, could lend him luck.

  He tested the knot that bound his chigdax hood tight around his face, then braced his legs wide inside the iqyax. Once more he filled his chest with air, once more he filled his eyes with the sight of the sky, and as the wave loomed over him, as whitewater curled down the sheer green of its sides, he flipped his iqyax and drove the bow into its mouth.

  Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

  602 B.C.

  Yikaas stopped. Sky Catcher had chosen to sit directly in front of him, and the longer Yikaas spoke, the more noise Sky Catcher made. First he merely sucked at his teeth; then he began clicking the blade of his sleeve knife against the flats of his fingernails. Now he was snorting and coughing and clearing his throat.

  Yikaas had tried to keep his thoughts on the story, but Sky Catcher’s small irritations began to thrust themselves between each of his words.

  It is a good place to stop, Yikaas told himself. He had heard other storytellers do so. He nodded his head and repeated the traditional story ending: “That is the way it happened, so they say.” Then he thanked Qumalix for her translation.

  “You’re done? The story is over?” she asked.

  “You can’t stop there,” shouted a River man.

  Several others protested, some in the River language, others shouting out First Men words.

  Sky Catcher stood and swaggered into the storytellers’ circle. “I will tell you a better story than that,” he said, and Qumalix translated his words into River, flashed her eyes at Yikaas, as though he should do something to stop the man.

  She leaned close to Yikaas and said, “Finish your story.” But her words were more demand than request, so he told her, “It is finished.”

  The nearest trader stood up and shoved the flats of his hands against Sky Catcher’s chest. “Sit down, go back and sit down,” the trader said, then lifted his chin toward Yikaas and asked politely, “Will you tell us the rest of the story?”

  “The story is told,” Yikaas said, and glanced at Qumalix, saw that her face was pinched, her lips tight.

  Then she smiled at him, a forced smile that showed her teeth, white as gull feathers. “Perhaps there is a story that follows this one,” she said, “but if you have no more stories about Cen, then I guess we will listen to Sky Catcher.”

  Several First Men spoke, and Qumalix told Yikaas, “They say they would rather hear your story.”

  “Ask how many want to hear my story and how many want Sky Catcher’s.”

  She asked, and every man in the ulax chose Yikaas. Sky Catcher puffed out his cheeks and spat a word of insult, then made his way to the climbing log and left the ulax.

  “He’s a child in a man’s body,” Qumalix said to Yikaas. “I’m glad that you are wiser than he.”

  “Sometimes I’m wise,” Yikaas said. “Other times I’m as foolish as any child could be.”

  “Women have their own ways of foolishness,” Qumalix said, and though neither had spoken words of apology, Yikaas felt his heart lighten.

  “So, then, my friend,” Qumalix said, “will you finish the story?”

  “Tell them that in the River tradition this story is sometimes stopped at this place so the listeners can give ideas to the storyteller.”

  As she translated his words, there
was a murmur of surprise among the traders, then one of the First Men, a hunter called Fish shouted out words in broken River, “Cen dead. No chance.”

  Several First Men began to quarrel. Qumalix laughed and told Yikaas, “They claim that Fish will curse Cen’s chance to survive.”

  A River trader heard her translation and also began to argue, drawing in other River men. Two hunters discussed the best way to roll an iqyax, and several men told of their own experiences in heavy surf. The arguing began again, and Qumalix finally held both hands up, laughing. She pinched the bridge of her nose as though to say that her head was aching.

  “Enough!” she said in the River language. “Arguments are too difficult to translate. Tell your story, Yikaas. Please.”

  Yikaas took his place again in the storyteller circle and held his arms out, hands palm up. “Perhaps the prayers of all those who have lived these many years since Cen fought that wave, perhaps those prayers have traveled back to make a difference for him.”

  There was a roar of approval from the men who thought Cen would survive, but then Yikaas said, “Of course, there is that chance that those prayers did not help at all.”

  Then the other traders began to laugh, and Yikaas lifted his voice to finish Cen’s story.

  The Bering Sea

  6435 B.C.

  CEN’S STORY

  He had been inside waves before, had turned his iqyax so the bottom of the craft, rather than his own head, took the brunt of a breaker. He expected the cold that suddenly enveloped his body. He did not worry when the noise of the wind was replaced by the sound of the water and by the hollow voice of his own heart pushing his blood.

  But in this wave, he had expected darkness. What light could survive in the belly of the sea? To his surprise, although the sky scarcely held the first rays of dawn, somehow the wave had captured that brightness, and the water glowed.

  Cen tried to right himself, arched his spine back over the hard wooden ridge of the iqyax coaming, thrust his upper body and his paddle forward with enough force to move quickly through the water. The sea grabbed Cen and his blade, slowed their thrust. Once, twice, he arched and pulled. The third time the iqyax rolled upright, but in numbing despair Cen realized that he was still trapped within the mountain of water.