“His heart jumped when he saw a first ray of light in the east; when he looked back a change had come over the cottage. The pot was now full of good porridge, and wild herbs and fat shining fish hung drying from the hooks. He looked over at Mokos and saw that she was now a beautiful maiden. Her skin was gold as the sun, her hair green as spring grass, dotted with wildflowers.
“‘Will you promise not to eat me till tomorrow?’ Dasat said, the words pouring out of his mouth in a rush.
“Mokos laughed, and her laughter was like summer rain. ‘That was not very polite of you,’ she said. ‘I will grant your wish, though I hope it will be asked a bit less hastily tomorrow night.’
“Soon enough the dawn came, and both the cottage and Mokos became fearsome once more. Though Mokos was angry at not being able to eat her breakfast she nevertheless kept her word, and went out of the house till sunset.”
It was easier, Dasatan had found, if you used your imagination. You could imagine that the rock-hard clod of earth that had to be broken was Yavan’s head, for instance, or that the stinging weeds that had to be pulled were Svatyslan’s lungs.
The plants he had sown—some of them—were starting to come up, accompanied by a much larger number of weeds seeking to take advantage of the earth he had cleared. He had abandoned the idea of planting berries when Ayusha told him how long their bushes took to grow, sown instead wild buckwheat, leeks and onions. Before long—not too long, he hoped—they’d be able to eat some of them.
He stood, rested his weight on his blunted sword. It had become an all-purpose tool now—weed-digger, plow, brush-cutter—but he imagined it would still cut Kamanai flesh if Svatyslan or one of his family were to come and challenge his right to farm this plot. He hoped they would.
“Dasatan!” Ayusha’s voice called from the other side of the bramble. “Are you finished with your garden yet?” Kamanai didn’t have a word for farm; garden was the word they used for the few herbs they grew outside their tents. “I found a patch of reedmace downstream. Come and help me pick it.”
“Just a moment,” he said. He drove the point of his sword into the dirt so it stood upright, and removed the amber from the pommel: the thought of a Kamanai trying to steal it without the stone drawing the lightning out made him smile. “How far downstream?” he asked.
Ayusha emerged from the brambles, holding the broad gathering-cloth they used for larger plants. She was thinner than when he had first met her, even her round face looking drawn and sharp. He knew that if he were to look in the water he would see the same in his face.
“Just past where we went last week.” He sighed. That walk down the river had taken them most of the day. “Well, we’ve got to go out further—Svatyslan has left little enough food, and we’ve picked just about all of it. If we moved the shelter . . .”
“Let’s go,” he said. “Reedmaces have lots of seeds. Maybe we can grow some here.”
“It’s not damp enough for them.”
“We can try.”
They walked in silence to the river’s edge. He wondered if another Kavatai would even recognize him now: legs covered with scars—his tunic was long gone, and there were no Kamanai trousers for him to wear—hands and nails so dirty no amount of washing would get them clean.
“Hold on,” he said as they reached a spot on the stream where rocks made a natural weir. He had built a fish trap out of branches the day before.
“Well?”
“It’s broken. I’ll have to find a way to make it stronger.”
“It wasn’t the fish that broke it,” Ayusha said darkly. “It was Svatyslan, or one of his sons. Fish are sacred to Birun; they don’t want you bringing them bad luck. Keep this up and they won’t let us stay in their grounds anymore.”
“It’s bad enough they keep trampling my plants. I should be watching them now, not spending all day picking reedmace.”
“You’re spending enough time on that as it is—working too hard, and I can’t gather enough food for the both of us.”
“Then go,” he said, tossing the sticks away and watching them run downstream. “Anyway, I’d like to see them try to make us leave now.”
“Then maybe you could beat someone else with your sword, make him let us use his foraging grounds.”
“You don’t beat someone with a sword,” he said. “You cut them.” He shook his head, dissolving the visions of Svatyslan’s throat blooming red as his blade cut across it. He was no warrior, but it wouldn’t be hard; for all their strength, without iron or steel the Kamanai were just brawlers, homeless savages with no more ambition than to take over another family’s foraging grounds. No wonder they sat on treasure and traded it away for trinkets.
“Mokos will get us all soon enough,” Ayusha said, though Dasatan wasn’t sure whether she was talking about his sword or their own empty bellies.
“The next night came, and again Mokos wanted to boil or hang Dasat, and again he convinced her to wait till breakfast, and again she changed for those two bells; this time she was more reluctant to grant his wish right away, still upset over his hastiness of the night before, and so he had to tease and flatter her a bit before she would promise not to eat him. So it went, he courting her to gain her promise, which came nearer and nearer to dawn each night; but always his wise heart convinced her to spare his life.
“Finally the sun outside returned and the snow melted, and when the door opened that night the smell of spring came in. When it was two bells before dawn and Mokos had changed once more, she had a sad look on her face, like the sun behind a cloud. ‘What is the matter?’ Dasat asked her.
“‘Winter is over today,’ she said. ‘Today you may ask to leave my house, and if you are wise you will never come back.’
“Dasat began to ask for just that, but found that he could not. Something was in his way; some part of him was keeping the voice in his mouth. It was his heart, his wise heart.
“In all those weeks, courting Mokos for two bells before dawn each night, Dasat had fallen in love with her.
“‘If I can ask you one boon,’ he said, ‘then I will ask this: let me stay here with you, as your husband. Then I will make this house our home and let all the men of Kaman see your beautiful face. Then they may see that there is love in this land, that it is fit to be a home.’”
“Come on. Try it.” Ayusha had to admit the buckwheat pottage wasn’t the most appetizing thing in the world, but it was certainly no worse than many of the things they ate. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty. And about time, too.”
There was plenty, plenty of almost everything Dasatan had sown; it was as if the soil, never broken, had thrown out all the life it had in it in one burst. But it had almost come too late: he had had to work it all day for the last moon, and she had had to range further and further for what little there was to forage.
Dasatan took a mouthful of the pottage, swallowed. He was so thin, now, she imagined she’d be able to see it sinking to his belly. “Too hot.”
“Sorry,” she said, and blew on the scoop.
“No—not the food. Too hot.” He reached up to wipe sweat from his forehead.
Ayusha frowned. “It’s the food,” she said. “Your body’s probably not used to it by now.”
He nodded his head weakly. “That must be it.” she said.
She carefully fed him the rest of the pottage. “You need water to go with that. I’ll fetch you some, all right?” He didn’t answer but gave a small smile. She rose, looked back at him—his eyes were closed, now, his face flushed and sweaty—grabbed his waterskin and headed for the stream. She had seen this fever before: it would pass so long as he had rest, water and food. Thank the Lady, they finally had that last.
She reached the bank of the stream and knelt to fill the waterskin, ignoring the remains of Dasatan’s broken fish-trap. They could forget about her almost in-laws, now: they didn’t need them anymore. Rising carefully—she was as weak as
he was, and found she often lost her balance—she headed back to the shelter.
“Dasatan?” she called. He was sleeping, now, and looked more peaceful. Wondering if the fever had broken she put his hand to his forehead. Yes, it was definitely cooler.
She held her palm two fingers over his mouth.
“No,” she said. “No—have some water, you’ll feel better—” She tipped the waterskin; water poured out the sides of his mouth, and his throat did not move.
The reedmace had not come up, just as she had told him. It was just as well: that meant there was still a bare patch in the field. Her people burned their dead, and he had told her that his laid theirs to rest in the sea: neither one, somehow, seemed right for him.
As poor a plow as a sword makes, it makes a worse shovel; she had been working all day to cut a deep enough hole. Summer, long promised, was now fully come, and she had stripped off her jacket for the first time since the snow had come. Bees were humming among the berries, and the recently turned earth smelled of life.
He should have seen this, she thought. How high everything grew. The smell . . . he had told her, when he had first come to this place, that he could not imagine it in summer, and she had said that when it came he would not be able to remember the winter. Summer pays for all.
Finished, she planted Dasatan’s sword in the dirt and used it to lever herself to her feet. The onion patch had been trampled again, but only a bit; most of the Kamanai had learned to fear him, now. Good. They didn’t understand what she and Dasatan had made here. How could they? All the others had was a camp, one they moved from year to year. Here they had made a home.
Wiping the sword on her jacket, Ayusha set off for Svatyslan’s camp.
Kaman was not at all the way Yavan remembered it. He had noticed felled trees when they first entered the wooded lands; then, instead of their having to seek out young ai Kamanai to guide them to where the amber lay, they were met by a group of them, who told them to follow to the camp.
“Thanks be to the Lady,” Kuyuban said. “The sooner we find some guides, the sooner we can be home and rich. Eh, Yavan?”
Yavan nodded. This was Kuyuban’s first time leading one of these journeys; he did not know how brief an amber fortune was. For Yavan it had been only five years since he had last taken up his staff to find the god’s blood.
“This way,” one of the ai Kamanai said. Following, Yavan was surprised to see a wooden stockade wall and gate blocking the path. This, too, was unusual: he had never known the ai Kamanai to make anything they couldn’t take with them when they moved to new forage grounds. A bit nervously, he followed through the gate, which a man on the other side opened and closed. Inside was more familiar—a gathering of tents—but there was one large wooden building, with smoke coming out the roof. Yavan drew in a breath, disturbed by the change.
“Yavan, this isn’t what you described,” Kuyuban said to him under his breath.
“No, it isn’t,” Yavan said.
Their guide opened the wooden building’s door and stood aside. “The Kisar will see you now.”
That was something else new, Yavan thought as he and Kuyuban were led inside the wooden building. Ai Kamanai had never had any leaders more formal than the heads of families. The inside of the wooden building was dark, lit only by a smouldering fire pit in the middle, and the place smelled of pine sap. A man was waiting for them, facing away, and as he turned Yavan saw he was wearing a sword. Yavan looked over at his companion: unused to life here, Kuyuban had not noticed the steel, did not know what it meant.
“Friend of the ai Kavatai,” Kuyuban said in Kamanai, beginning the standard formula, “I am Kuyuban, son of Kadanim, of the ai Daneyanim. We have brought gifts to show our friendship.”
This was normally the time to awe the natives with the trade goods, but the Kisar stopped him short. “Things have changed,” he said in thickly accented Kavatai. He took a step closer and Yavan got a good look at him: clean-shaven, shorter than most ai Kamanai but wearing a bearskin jacket that made him look enormous, and wearing that sword buckled at his belt. A piece of red amber larger than any Yavan had ever seen was fixed to the pommel. “You will not go into our woods to take our treasures from the ground. We have what you want, but you do not have what we want.”
He reached into his pouch, drew out a handful of amber, some pieces even larger than the one on his sword. The stone on Yavan’s staff glowed in sympathy; so, too, did the one on the pommel of the Kisar’s sword.
“We have jewellery that would please any woman,” Kuyuban said—still using the formula, but shaken. “Ribbons, and thread—”
“Take that back with you,” the Kisar said.
Kuyuban’s composure finally broke, and he said, in Kavatai, “What do you want, then?”
The Kisar smiled. “Steel,” he said.
Seeing Kuyuban frozen, Yavan nodded quickly and began to back away. Kuyuban nodded too.
“Before you go—a message,” the Kisar said, just as they began to turn away.
“For who?”
“You. All of you.” The Kisar rested his hand on the pommel of his sword, a message in itself to Yavan. “Those other things you offer—we will want them, too, in time. But when we want them, we will not barter for them. We will take them.”
“‘You speak very politely now,’ Mokos said, ‘and I accept your offer. For years uncounted I have been the Lady of this land, its soil and its snow; but until now I never had a Lord to join together the men that dwell here, to make them all one family within a single tent. You shall be Kisar, the first; and to you and those that follow you I give my dark soil, to work and to bring forth its fruits. The whole of this land, from the frozen sea in the north to the shining river in the south, shall be home to you.’
“And so they wed; and at their wedding feast they gave as a gift to all Kaman the dark soil, and became the mother and father of all the people of Kaman, and commanded them to give up their scattered homes and come together to be one people. I was there; I was the last to come and the last to go; I drank the last bowl of soup, and the last drop still sits in my beard.”
So the old man finishes his story, and he looks at us as though he expects that to explain all. Perhaps, for a savage like him, such stories do; to us he is useless.
Now that he has finished speaking we can hear that the screaming has stopped. The bridges are burning, and they have not crossed. Bayakul, our sister across the water, is gone, but we have been spared.
“Do not worry, men of the south,” the old man says from the darkness. “You are safe on this side of the river. This is your home, and we would not destroy it.
“It is a good thing, to have a home.”
LONG PIG
Four stars
Dinner for two $120–$160 with wine, tax and tip
Wheelchair accessible
Don’t be fooled by Long Pig’s name—it’s not another Szechuan hot pot place on the Spadina strip. Chef Nimith Keo is well-known from his stints as head chef at Chimayo Bistro and Aubergine, both fondly recalled restaurants, but it’s Long Pig he’ll be remembered for. It’s a fascinating, eclectic mix of haute and low, a fusion (how overused that word, how appropriate here!) of cuisines including his native Cambodian as well as Mexican, Caribbean and even Polynesian; it’s also quite possibly the best restaurant in town.
The decor at Long Pig is sparse but elegant, reflecting the chef’s Buddhist principles: a mural of the Angkor Wat temples covers the wall and a few bronze figurines are clustered around the entryway but otherwise the watchword is clean and clear, with white tablecloths, bamboo chairs and a simple place setting, a single wooden fork and spoon for each diner.
Unlike at Aubergine, where Keo was famous for the wonders he worked with bean curd and vegetables, the common theme running through Long Pig’s menu is meat. After the amuse-bouche—tiny, succulent bones like short ribs, braised in a chili-f
ired sauce, one per diner—we begin with a gently fragrant broth of ginger and scallions, into which has been shaved flecks of dried pink meat that taste surprisingly, but pleasantly, like Spam.
Our server informs us that after the ribs and soup we are to use the wooden fork only to eat the remaining dishes. We find this more than adequate to eat the plate of greens that comes next, a mound of bok choy and Chinese broccoli in which no meat could be seen but which have been soaked through with a deep umami taste (ground bones and marrow, the server informs us). Skepticism arises, however, at the sight of the dish that follows, which the menu refers to as “two-legged mutton”: a steamed lotus leaf stuffed with sticky rice and thick chunks of dense, deeply pink flesh. Our faith in Keo is rewarded, though, and the meat falls to pieces at the first prodding of our forks. As with the broth there is a hint of corned beef, intensely meaty and just a bit gamy, but this is a subtle and complex experience to which the canned product stands as a boardwalk portraitist does to Rembrandt. Unfortunately the most intriguing item on the menu—a Mexican dish with pre-Columbian roots called “Precious Eagle-Cactus Fruit”—is not available that night; in fact, we are told it will only be served on the restaurant’s last day of operation. We make a mental note to return on that unhappy day.
To our surprise Chef Keo himself comes out to discuss our choices with us. He explains the thinking behind Long Pig’s menu. “In my childhood, in Cambodia, we had nothing,” he says. “Under the Khmer Rouge everyone who had any kind of Western education was killed or had to run away. When I ran away I met a man who had been trained as a French chef. We were eating grass, worms—anything at all to survive. If we had any meat, any kind at all, we would be grateful for it, but for him it was always not just something to eat but ingredients, things you could make into something more. When he was finished cooking you would not know you had a worm or something worse in your mouth. We all gave what we could, and since I was too small to give I learned from him how to cook what we had. We lived many months like this, and in the end only I survived.
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