Call Down the Stars

by Sue Harrison

  Bird Hand motioned toward the left branch, then turned and started back toward the Four Rivers village. Ghaden watched in disbelief, his mouth open in surprise.

  “Your sister Daes hates me,” Bird Hand called over his shoulder, simply those words, nothing more, as if that would explain everything. “You’re almost there. Maybe a half-day. Maybe a day.” Then he was gone, swallowed by the willow that grew dense near the river.

  Ghaden considered running after him, then in his mind he saw Yaa’s face. What would he tell his sister? That he had grown weary of walking and decided to quit searching for her husband?

  He trudged on, picking his way through the brush along the overgrown animal trail, cursing Bird Hand and Cries-loud and all the small branches that caught at his pack and his parka. His feet ached, and his back, and finally he promised himself that when he came to the next clearing, any bit of high ground, he would camp for the night.

  The willow thinned into tattered birch, and the tussocks of grass crowded into a mat that made his walking a little easier. The river split around a small swampy island, and just past that, he could make out a wide, flat clearing. He unbuckled the chest strap on his pack, swung it off his back and up over one shoulder. A man never knew. Animals might come to such a clearing, to drink from the river. Ghaden needed to be ready to drop his pack and pull out a knife or lance.

  He smelled smoke, stopped to be sure. Listened for a moment and heard voices. Cries-loud!

  Ghaden called out a greeting, laughing as strode into the clearing. Cries-loud was there, just hefting a pack to his back, as though he were about to leave.

  “Brother!” Ghaden called.

  But Cries-loud gave no welcome, merely set his pack on the ground and stood where he was. Then Ghaden saw the women with him. One was young, no doubt his sister Daes.

  He had pictured her differently, as someone small and lovely, but she was a big woman, wide of shoulder and hip, with a hard face. She scowled at him, and for a moment he was puzzled. She looked familiar, as if he had seen her before. He glanced at Cries-loud. They were so much alike that they could be brother and sister, with eyes and mouths and noses nearly the same.

  An older woman, without doubt his father’s wife, crowded behind Cries-loud, as if she were trying to hide.

  Standing awkwardly, waiting for Cries-loud to speak, Ghaden finally said, “You’re leaving?”

  Cries-loud looked down at his pack as though he were surprised to see it sitting beside him, then he forced a smile and gestured toward the girl with an open palm.

  “Your sister Daes,” he said to Ghaden. “I’m sure your father told you about her.”

  “Yes,” Ghaden answered. Her eyes were red, and he knew that she had been crying. “You share my mourning,” he said to her.

  She raised a hand to cover her face as if she did not want to see him.

  “I brought gifts for you and for your mother,” he said.

  The woman behind Cries-loud lifted her head, and for the first time Ghaden saw her face. The air slammed out of his lungs as though someone had set a fist into his gut. He gasped and reached for his knife.

  “My father took this woman as his wife?” he shouted. The words felt as though they ripped through the flesh of his throat, and bled the strength from his body. “And this daughter, is that the baby Red Leaf took with her? Sok’s daughter?”

  “She is,” Cries-loud said softly. “And so, my sister.”

  “But how could my father …” Ghaden’s voice cracked. “How could he name her for my mother?”

  “He didn’t know,” Cries-loud said. He spoke slowly, as if he were talking to someone very young or very old. “My mother changed her name when she came to the Four Rivers village. How would a trader remember one woman from all the villages he had visited? He didn’t know she was Red Leaf, the one who had killed Daes. Only K’os knew, and she didn’t tell me until after your father died.”

  “K’os knew.” Ghaden’s words were bitter.

  “For a short time, K’os lived in the Four Rivers village. That was after Chakliux threw her out of our caribou camp. You remember.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “That was when she tried to kill me,” Red Leaf said.

  Her voice surprised Ghaden. It was soft, and she spoke in fear, trembling. Then her words rushed out as though she had been saving them for Ghaden during all the years she had lived with Cen. “K’os tried to poison me. She wanted Cen for herself, and he would not take her as wife, even as second wife. She said that if I didn’t agree to swallow her poison, she would tell Cen the truth. Then he would kill me and my little daughter as well.”

  “My father was not that kind of man,” Ghaden said. “K’os knew that. I do not say that he would have spared you, but he would never kill a child.”

  His words seemed to give Red Leaf courage, and she stepped out from behind Cries-loud. “And are you like your father?” she asked. “You owe revenge for your mother’s death, but will your revenge include my daughters?”

  Cries-loud took his own knife from the sheath at his neck. Daes sank to her knees and began a loud mourning cry.

  “Your daughters are safe,” Ghaden said, shouting to be heard above Daes’s song. He pointed at Daes with the tip of his blade.

  “This one carries my mother’s name, and thus some part of her spirit. How could I kill her? The baby is my sister by blood. I would not insult my father by harming her.”

  “If you kill my mother,” Cries-loud said, “what stops me from seeking revenge for her death? Then what about Yaa? If you die, will she seek revenge on me, her own husband? If I die, will she seek revenge on you?

  “Remember this, for what she did to my mother, I owe K’os revenge.” He met Ghaden’s eyes. “Perhaps for the sake of your wife, you will decide to leave things as they are. No killing.

  “Put away the knife and we will leave now—my mother, Daes, and I. I’ll take them to another village, and you can tell K’os that they’re dead, killed by wolves.

  “When I return from taking them to that new village, I will say the same thing. Agreed?”

  “Not for the sake of Red Leaf,” Ghaden said. He paused, then added in a soft voice, “but I would for Uutuk. And for my sisters Daes and Duckling and Yaa.”

  He set down his pack, then, matching Cries-loud move for move, he slipped his knife into its sheath.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

  602 B.C.

  YIKAAS OFTEN SPOKE WITH his eyes closed, but this time he watched the people, and he noticed they were shifting and sighing, moving to stretch arms or legs.

  The storytelling had lasted long enough. It was time to do other things. He ended his story and waited for Qumalix to make the final translation.

  There was a murmur from the people, a polite thanking in soft, tired words. Yikaas lingered as everyone left, men first, then the women with their children. He helped Kuy’aa to her feet. She looped an arm through his, and he walked her to the sleeping place she had claimed as her own.

  “An old woman cannot tell as many stories as she used to without wearing out her tongue,” she said, and wrinkled her nose as though she were a child who did not like what she was tasting.

  “And some storytellers are lucky,” he told her. “They never, ever get old, no matter how many years they live.”

  She laughed at that and batted his arm as though he had told a joke, then he pulled aside the grass curtain and helped her into her bed, unrolled a furred sealskin over her. She closed her eyes and within only a short time was breathing like one asleep. He allowed the curtain to fall, then heard her say, “Be ready for tomorrow night. I want you to tell the story of Cen.”

  “I’ll be ready, Aunt,” he said, and turned to find Qumalix waiting for him.

  “She’s asleep?” Qumalix asked.

  “Almost.”

  “Are you very tired?”

  “I could sleep.”

  “Do you hav
e time to talk for a little while? There’s something I want to ask you.”

  “Ask,” he said.

  She shook her head and gestured toward the climbing log. “Outside, where we can see the sky.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “No.”

  He followed her outside and was surprised to see that she was right. The rain had stopped, and stars had begun to find their way through the clouds. She squatted at the top of the ulax, and he did the same, trying to sit in the manner of the First Men so he did not get his rump wet, but even though he rested his haunches on the backs of his heels, he felt the damp cold of the sod roof seep through his caribou hide leggings.

  “Ask,” he said again.

  His tiredness made him feel irritated. The First Men did not know a lot about comfort, he thought, and he wondered how they could crouch on their heels for so long. His ankles already ached.

  Qumalix did not look at him as she spoke, but sent her words out over the village, speaking so softly that he had to lean toward her to hear.

  “Sky Catcher says you have a wife back at your own village. A River woman. He also says that you’ve asked for those two sisters …”

  “No!” he said, so loudly that he felt her jump. He placed a hand on her arm and repeated, “No, I have no wife, and I don’t want those sisters.” He thought she might say something else, but she did not. Finally he added, “Sometimes men are foolish. We take what we don’t want because we think we can’t have what we do want.”

  She was very still then, and when she spoke it was in a whisper. “A man like that might be difficult to have as husband.”

  Her words made him ashamed, and then angry. “A man like that would be a good husband. He’s already made his mistakes.”

  She stood up and he stood also, staggering a little as his calves cramped.

  “How do you sit like that?” he asked.

  She laughed but had no answer. Instead she said, “So what has happened to Cen while Ghaden and Cries-loud have been solving their problems?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Everyone tells the story a little differently. I’d like to hear your way. Will you tell more stories tomorrow?”

  “So Kuy’aa says.”

  “About Cen?”

  “If you want.”

  “I want,” she said.

  Then she went down into the ulax, but Yikaas stayed for a time on the roof. He knelt on the wet sod and looked up at the clearing sky. He wondered what exactly she had meant in speaking about husbands and the taking of wives. Aaa! Some man would have his hands full when he married that woman. Yikaas laughed and tried to picture Sky Catcher and Qumalix as mates, Qumalix’s voice raised high and shrill as she yelled at him for one thing or another. But for some reason as he thought of that, he became angry, and so instead he began to whisper his story of Cen to the stars, a good way to practice what he would say when all the village had gathered to listen.

  As he spoke it seemed that the stars grew larger, came closer, as though they, too, wanted to hear the story. The familiar words made him bold. He tipped his face toward the sky and raised his voice. He did not see Qumalix as she squatted at the top of the climbing log, her chin cupped in one hand, her eyes also lifted to the stars as she listened to Cen’s story.

  The Bering Sea

  6435 B.C.

  CEN’S STORY

  Each day the swelling around Cen’s eyes lessened, and he was able to see a little more. Finally, even the roaring in his ears began to dim, so he could hear himself shout, and once thought he heard gulls crying.

  At first he had been afraid. Each wave that rocked his boat, each swell that lifted it, brought his breath in gasps from his throat, and lifted his belly in nausea. What else did he have that the sea could want? His iqyax, his sax, his water bladders? His rotting fish? Perhaps it coveted those lashings that had once held paddles and harpoons. There was still a small bundle of trade goods in the bow, sodden and battling for space with his legs. If the sea wanted those things, he would gladly give all. If it chose to pluck him from the iqyax, he only asked that it be quick about it, play no games. He had heard too many storytellers speak of hunters who lived for days in the cold depths without wind to breathe or sax to warm.

  His prayer had become the prayer of an old man:

  “Let it come quickly. Let it come quickly.”

  But as his vision returned, so did his courage. His right eye saw light, then shapes. He had heard elders speak of seeing in such a way, as though somehow fog had dimmed their sight. And to Cen, it seemed that even the sun had aged, cauled white like an old man’s eye. But each day his vision became clearer, and finally even his left eye began to see, though through a thin haze of brown-red light, something that gathered and flowed like a strange sea within the eye itself.

  His eyeballs ached; pain pierced from brow to neck. But what was pain when each day brought him closer to seeing? He tried not to think that each day also meant he had less water, less food.

  He could paddle for only a short time before he had to stop in his desperate need to breathe. His strokes were weak, his cedar branch paddle cumbersome. His helplessness made him angry.

  Sometimes he sang death songs to honor his life, but he sang them defiantly like a warrior who prepares himself for battle. Most days, the sea remained calm, so Cen had no one to fight except himself. And how does a man battle such an enemy? Does he raise his knife against his own flesh?

  He often brought Gheli into his thoughts, their daughters, and his son Ghaden. Then he would remind himself that he was a trader, and who more than a trader better knew the sea? It was not some bowl of water that sloshed side to side within its basin, but rather rivers and lakes all thrown together, currents acting and reacting. Surely, in his paddling he would find a sea-river that led him to land, a current that pulled him to a shore where he could find fresh water.

  At first he had counted the days, but as he used up his water, he stopped keeping track. There was too much discouragement in knowing that soon he would have nothing to drink. Where was the rain? He had never seen the sky go so long without weeping. Did it rejoice with dry eyes over his agony?

  The evening he used the last of his water, he fell into a light sleep. He dreamed of a feast, and of his wife holding a water bladder where he couldn’t quite reach it. He became angry. Why didn’t she come closer?

  Then the iqyax lurched, and he was awake. He saw that it was night, the stars hidden by a cover of clouds. At first he did not know what had taken him from his dreams, but then he felt it again, a sudden movement as if someone were pushing his iqyax from behind, shoving it through the water.

  He dipped a hand into the sea, even stopped his breathing, so he would feel nothing but the water. Yes, it was a current, running in a direction different than he had been traveling. Was the current running toward land, or should he paddle his way out of it? Had his iqyax turned while he was asleep? He needed the stars!

  Best to stay with the current, he decided. He would have more difficulty finding it again than getting away from it. He sat awake through the night, impatient for the darkness to pass.

  Dawn light came gray, with fog and clouds so heavy he could not see beyond the bow of his iqyax. He groaned in frustration, shouted curses with raw throat and angry words.

  In spite of his disrespect, by midday the clouds had begun to lift. Then he noticed that his left eye was much clearer than it had been, the brown-red now covering only half his vision, as though someone had drawn a curtain back from the inside corner of the eye.

  In all directions he saw nothing except the sea, but by the placement of the sun he could tell that the current flowed toward the northeast. Though his throat was parched for need of water, his tongue swollen so that he could not even sing, hope slaked his thirst.

  By night he thought he saw a darkness in the east, something more than the line of the horizon dividing the sea from the sky. He slept fitfully, waking often in his need for morning. A
t daybreak, clouds again lay over the sea, but the sun had pushed in close to the earth, and its warmth burned off the haze until Cen was able to see clear sky, as warm as midsummer, blue from horizon to horizon.

  He squinted, shielded his eyes, and watched until he knew that he was seeing land. When he shouted out his joy, he broke open the dry skin of his throat, tasted his own blood.

  The sea-river he had come upon was lazy, and all that day he paddled beyond his strength. By night, the only way he could tell the land was any closer was by the shallow cuts he had made on the side of his thumb as he held it up to measure the height of that bit of land against the far edge of the sky.

  He continued to paddle, even in the night, but the effort made him lightheaded. Finally, he decided that he would have to eat, even if just a little. He still had a few dried fish, but they were softened by the sea and beginning to stink. He choked one down, its soft flesh slimy and rank. It made his stomach ache, but his head felt better. He started to paddle again, and his belly began to churn.

  He fastened his paddle to the deck and lay back against the coaming, but his stomach only grew worse, until finally he vomited up all that he had eaten, gagging and choking until he was bringing up yellow bile. When the spasms finally stopped, he slid down as far as he could in his iqyax and lay very still. The water rocked him, and he was able to sleep.

  It was still night when he awoke, the sky darkest in the east, the water black. Once again, he had dreamed of being caught in the wave. It had slammed him against the iqyax coaming, shattered his ribs, ripped open his stomach. The dream was so real that Cen had to shake it out of his head, but the pain in his belly did not subside. Instead, the spasms moved into his bowels.

  He moaned. The fish had poisoned him. He unlashed his waterproof dripskirt and jerked his sax and chigdax up around his waist so that he was naked from hips to boots. He untied one of the empty water bladders, cut off the top, and raised himself up to crouch on his haunches. He opened the bladder and set it under his rump, then allowed the release from his bowels. The pain clenched him from waist to anus, twisted, pulled, as if dogs fought over the poor scraps of his gut. Well into morning his body continued to empty itself, until he felt hollow except for the air he breathed. But the pain had become a bearable ache.