by Meredith
“How dare you—” Shonan began.
“Who dares what?” That blast of sound was Kumu’s father Zinna, walking up. More accurately, staggering toward them and keeping himself upright with his war club. Shonan stiffened. Zinna reeked of fermented corn liquor. The Galayi people drank it at ceremonies. Maybe Zinna had saved some back. Or maybe Kumu had, to make sure his father was out of the way. Shonan seethed.
“Now calm down, Red Chief,” blared Zinna. This burly, middle-aged man had been through a score of battles with the war leader. He was a whirlwind with that club, and Shonan counted on him. He’d earned the right to talk familiarly, but not to have trouble staying on his feet, and not to go into a giggling fit.
When the fit subsided, Zinna roared on, “You wouldn’t want us to think you’re better’n us.”
Shonan relaxed his face. Airs of superiority weren’t accepted among the Galayi.
“It’s true, now, my boy has filled your daughter with his juice. He’s been wanting to for a long time. Just think how great that is—the first child born in your new village may be a full-blooded Galayi. And I think he’s got something to say.”
Kumu repeated, “Shonan, Red Chief of the Tuscas”—no tease this time, but the formality of a serious man—“I ask permission to marry your daughter.”
Shonan glared at them all. It ran straight against his plans. Zinna’s family wasn’t supposed to go to the Amaso village. Salya wasn’t supposed to go with a husband, a new member of Shonan’s family. Shonan wanted to present her to the village as marriageable. He had planned to give her to the son of the Amaso chief, a symbol of the joining of the two peoples. What better gesture?
Besides, though he liked Kumu, who wanted a clown for a son-in-law?
He looked his daughter in the eye. “No.”
“I say yes.”
“And I say no.”
“How do you think you’ll find me? When you’re ready to go, where will Kumu and I be?”
“You’ll be tied to a drag.” The Galayi moved their belongings tied to poles pulled along behind their dogs.
“And Kumu will be walking alongside. My husband stays with me.”
Shonan considered. Salya had chosen the one time she could get away with saying something like that. He couldn’t delay the great journey.
Still, the word “husband” was foolish. Marriage was an important ceremony. The man’s family made substantial gifts to the woman’s. The village joined in singing songs of blessing for the new couple. A pair who got married without the families’ permission would be ostracized, would probably have to leave the village and beg another to take them in.
“Get out of my sight,” said Shonan.
The war chief had bigger things on his mind than his daughter’s boyfriend. He also didn’t care what his son thought. They’d lost half a day. Since he still intended to get started today, there was work to do. He walked around Tusca organizing everything. He encouraged people. He reassured them. He painted pictures of Amaso as an adventure, a new life. The families who were going stopped moping and set to lashing their clothing, their kitchen utensils, their clothes onto the drags. Their spirits rose.
Shonan was achieving the great task the top chiefs had set for him. He gathered young men—families were picked which had lots of young men—and organized them into groups that would scout ahead and behind for enemies, and walk the ridges to the sides. He helped women lash the poles to their dogs. He helped young men gather river cane for blow guns, for such cane didn’t grow near the sea. He was helpful, encouraging, firm—a good leader.
He looked at the sky. Not enough time before dusk, but he thought it was important to get moving.
When the great congregation was organized, his daughter was standing at the front, between his son and the man she intended to marry.
5
In her family hut at the Amaso village, beside the river that curved into the sea, Iona woke when the first hint of light lit the smoke hole. She sat up wildly, feeling like all the hairs would fly off her head and then her head would sail away from her neck. She groped inside for … what? The feeling of being herself? What she found was craziness. In a quarter moon, or perhaps a half, her lover would come to her. Until then, craziness.
She pulled on a doeskin dress, slipped out the door flap, walked up and down the ocean sands, searching for something, but she didn’t know what. The village where she’d lived all her life, the sands stretching to the north, the cliffs rising to the south, the great water blasted with the light of the rising sun—she cared nothing for this familiar world. She felt like she couldn’t breathe, like the air had been sucked off the planet.
Yes, she knew Aku was on the way. She knew he felt the same passion, bigger than anything she had ever thought people could feel, a force rough and crazy, like the white-frothed waves that racked the sea. She knew that when he came to Amaso, she would give him all they both wanted, they would fulfill the promise. But she felt empty now. She wanted something now.
She got an idea. She saw her father, Oghi, walking away from the hut they shared—only the two of them lived there. He was headed for the tide pools and soon would come back with his hands full of shells. He was the village seer, and he used shells as tools of divination to get glimpses of the future. She didn’t understand how it worked. Now she ran after him.
Though she called him “father,” he was no more than a dozen winters older than she, and he was the brother of her first father. Two winters ago her mother died giving birth, and last winter her father died of the coughing sickness. Oghi had never married and lived alone in a small hut about a hundred paces from the village. Though he declined to move into the village—the closeness made him uncomfortable—she moved in with him. Neither of them had any other family left.
“Father,” she called, “what are the tides today?”
Oghi meant “sea turtle” in the Amaso language, and her father knew more about the ocean than anyone else in the tribe. In a vision he’d seen himself as an ocean-going turtle. Then he learned to shape-shift into the common turtle with the smooth red-brown back and the fine-tasting green fat. Though he was a monster as a turtle, the weight of two men, as a man Oghi was slight and looked boyish, except for his ancient eyes. His hair, oddly, had been red-brown from birth. He kept track of the weather and everything about the sea for the village.
“The tides will be big,” he said. Sometimes the incoming tide pushed halfway to the village and deepened the separate fingers of the river until no one could walk across them, or the outgoing tide exposed long stretches of sand and rock, and sucked the river almost dry.
“Really big. Flood tide way upriver tonight. Go get some water. We’ll cook these mussels.”
“What about the ebb tide?”
“Biggest one in a moon tomorrow at midday. Bring back plenty of water. You’ll want to stay away from the river in the morning.”
Will I, now?
At dawn she was ready. She shoved the log off the sand into the river, stood in the water naked, and held it back against the current. The outgoing tide shooshed around her thighs. If she didn’t launch on the log, the force would take both dead tree and passenger, ready or not.
She looked at the sun, gathering itself on the eastern horizon far, far out to sea. She felt the river running out to … no one knew where, not even her father. It was against all wisdom, yes, it was. Of all Amaso people she, daughter of Oghi the sea turtle, knew that best. It was what she wanted—to be swept away by an immense force, to be taken.
She pushed the log and flopped onto it. The current seized both of them and for a moment snatched her breath away. Once, several years ago, she’d felt loss of control like this. She’d dared some other girls to climb an oak tree that stood on the edge of the high river bank, roots peeping out below. Taunting them, Iona crept further and further out on a thick limb. She was agile as a squirrel and as sure-footed. Her best friend scooted out onto the branch and—
It snapped off.
The friend fell the height of two men to the flat ground and hollered like she’d been wounded mortally. Iona fell onto the sloping bank and tumbled head over heels all the way to the river sand. Her friends shrieked in fear. Iona stood up and roared like a bear, beating her chest. Not because she’d survived unhurt, but because of a feeling. During the moment of the fall—the moment that lasted half a lifetime—she had felt absolutely out of control. She exulted in it.
Now—Let it come!—she lost control again. She rushed between the banks and swept out along the tidal flats. Where sweet river met salt ocean, the log spun in the churning sea. She whirled past the last point of land and into infinity. She felt triumphant. Let fate come—she wanted whatever it brought, she wanted an enormous blast of something, she wanted to throw away her daily wisp of a life, she wanted experience, real and strong. She wanted to feel alive today.
She saw it now—the ocean was as big as the sky. She wasn’t a bird, she wasn’t a fish. She couldn’t swim in the one, couldn’t breathe in the other. She was going wherever the tide took her, and it was running toward the end of the world, wherever that might be. She was possessed wholly—she lived in immensity. She wanted to feel owned, lips, arms, breasts, legs, crotch, the heart that drove the blood, the blood itself, the place her feelings lived—she wanted to be usurped and melded into this sea, this world, this power.
She stood up on the log, wobbly.
It rolled.
She plunged deep, took two strokes deeper, held herself underwater for a delicious moment, turned, and surged upward to the light. Her head popped into the air. At that moment the log banged her shoulder. She cried out in pain. With her other arm she grabbed a stud sticking out from the log and held on hard. She rotated her sore shoulder in several directions. It sort of worked. She clambered back onto the log and straddled it.
She looked around. Grandmother Sun was well up from her watery bed, bright and strong—a strong woman like Iona.
The girl looked straight up and saw an osprey cruising overhead, hunting. It wanted fish for its belly. It had the swiftness, strength, and skill to get what it wanted.
Iona wanted a belly full of life, and she would take what she wanted.
And she wanted to stay out here all day and play and ride the tide back.
“It doesn’t look like much to me,” said Salya.
She and Aku looked from the top of a low hill across sand flats toward Amaso. The huts were few and shabby and the sands barren. The wide river split into a lot of stringy braids. She wasn’t enticed by the horizon-to-horizon immensity of water to the east. It was just somewhere she would never be able to go. The sun, straight overhead, didn’t make the place look better. She was dispirited, missing Kumu. The six men came back with the food, but, true to his agreement with her father, Kumu would wait in Tusca until he and Salya were married.
Aku said, “It’ll be fine.”
Salya humphed. She was back to wondering why her twin let their father push them to this odd place without protest. Didn’t he love the mountains where they grew up? She liked the foothills full of canopied hardwood trees, too. She was bored by what her father called the coastal plains stretching eastward from the foothills, much too flat, and boasting none of the rich herds of game of the foothills. At least the traveling party had taken a lot of meat in the foothills.
“What do you think fish and crabs taste like?” she said. “I hear they’re too salty.”
“You’ll like them as soon as you’re here living with Kumu,” Shonan said. They hadn’t heard him walking up. He gave Salya a hug. “And until then you can slow down on the grumping.”
She sort of smiled.
The three walked close to the village, the traveling party trailing. The Amaso gathered. Aku’s eyes searched for Iona.
“We better teach them to build stouter huts,” Shonan said. The homes were just brush huts, spread fingers of flexible limbs bent into the shape of cupped hands, turned upside down and covered with hides.
“They say it’s warmer here,” Shonan said, “never snows. Maybe that’s why the houses are flimsy.”
Aku said, “Or maybe it’s because the good hardwoods are eight or nine days walk back toward the mountains.”
Salya nudged her brother and grinned. She liked talk like that.
They approached the council lodge at the west edge of the village. “I didn’t want to tell you about this,” said Shonan. It was a shabby thing, as though nothing important could happen there.
“I’m glad our weddings will be at the Cheowa village,” said Salya.
Aku still couldn’t spot Iona.
“There aren’t enough people here,” said Salya, “to make a real blessing.”
“I told you I picked these people because they’re weak and will be glad of the safety of becoming Galayis.”
They’d heard it before.
An old man came walking toward them, bearing a pipe. A short, slight, boyish man walked next to him, Oghi the seer.
“Chalu,” said Shonan, “the chief. They don’t even have a war chief.”
When the chief came close, he made the signs for wanting a ceremony.
Aku was proficient in the sign language. “Signal him yes,” Shonan told his son.
Aku did, but his mind was on something else.
“As soon as we get our camp set up,” said Shonan.
Aku signed it.
Chalu turned and made his doddering way to the council lodge.
Oghi signed to Aku, “She’s waiting for you. You see the flat-topped rise over there?” He nodded toward it. “In the dunes right beyond it.”
Aku started running.
“Where are you going?” called Salya.
Aku turned, ran backward, grinned big, waved, turned again, and sprinted toward Iona.
Salya and her father set up their own camp and looked around. They had the same thought, but didn’t share it. We’re at our new village, but we still don’t have a home. Salya shrugged. “Hey, we’re used to it.”
Oghi walked up. He and Shonan had a short, quiet conversation off to one side. Salya saw that several digital repetitions were necessary. Then each man nodded and smiled a lot.
People were gathering in the arbor used as a council lodge.
“Go find your brother and this Iona,” said Shonan.
Near the center fire stood Chalu, holding the sacred pipe, on one side of him Oghi and on the other Shonan.
Chalu picked up an ember from the fire with two twigs and dropped it onto the sacred tobacco. Then he drew the smoke in deeply and offered it to the four directions. Shonan couldn’t understand what he was saying. He watched carefully how Oghi handled the pipe and again couldn’t understand. When his turn came, he performed the ceremony in the Galayi style. He thought, We’re not going to learn to be them. They’re going to learn to be us.
Chalu addressed the assembly, and Aku fingered his words to all the people of both groups. Shonan paid enough attention to see that it was a welcome to the visitors. “Except they’re not visitors,” said Chalu. “They will become our relatives, our children, even our fathers and mothers.” Other words followed. Shonan gathered that it was a diplomatic speech.
When Chalu handed him the pipe, Shonan smoked ceremonially and repeated some of what the Amaso chief had said. “This is a great moment,” he said. “Let us no longer call each other Galayi and Amaso. We are one people, and we will be known as the Amaso village of the Galayi tribe.”
It was well done, a good acknowledgement for both groups.
Now Shonan raised his voice. “And I have something special to add.”
Iona stood up beside Aku, who was still translating with his fingers.
“Proudly Oghi the seer and I announce to all the first blood joining between our two peoples. At the Harvest Ceremony in three moons my son Aku”—here Aku pointed to himself with both index fingers—“will be married to Oghi’s daughter, Iona.”
Aku held Iona’s hand high in triumph.
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nbsp; 4
Shonan walked observant. The mountains of his native country were a wild country, steep, rugged, heavily wooded. His migrants followed a twisting creek eastward, toward the sea. At will, though, it snaked around to point northwest or southwest, turned by the shapes of the great ridges. The rhododendrons and mountain laurel were thick as fur on the hillsides, blocking vision. Scouts walked ahead and behind. Others flanked themselves to each side and followed trails that led to observation points. Spotting enemies in this country was almost impossible, but Shonan and his soldiers had driven all enemies back to distant borders. He might have felt safe if he did not remember, every day of his life, that his wife was taken from him in an enemy attack in country just like this.
His duty now was to pay attention, but his daughter was making it hard.
“What?!” she said. “What do you expect? You’re making us leave everything we love. Our friends? Most of them we leave at home. Our uncles, aunts, and cousins?” She spread her arms toward the forested mountainsides. “Why don’t I see them? Every place I played as a kid, every place I stooped to get water, every place we gathered onions or seeds—where is it all?”
Shonan walked silently. Aku said, “Lots of our relatives and friends are here with us.” A third of the village, in fact.
“Yes, being tortured. Walk three quarter moons to a place we’ve never seen and don’t give a damn about, and then stay there forever.”
Only Shonan and a score of soldiers had visited Amaso.
“Salya,” said her twin, “you have your lover.” Unlike me. “You will have a husband, children, your family.”
Shonan and Kumu glanced at each other, but neither even whispered.
Salya plunged on. Sometimes she was like the drummers at a ceremony—carried away with their own rhythms and then wilder and crazier until dancers fell on the ground laughing, unable to move to such a beat. And the drummers loved it. They banged on until … who knew what made them stop? Who knew what would make Salya stop?
Shonan strode along on one side of her, her clown lover and twin brother on the other side. None of them cared if she banged out her mood. It was half anger and half play, and would wear down. Shonan’s mind was on the country. He couldn’t see far to the rear, high ridges shutting out half the sky. He couldn’t see past the forest to the next region they would reach, the piedmont, the foothills of the mountains. He knew it, though. It was a good country, full of oaks, chestnuts, silver maples, sweet gum and black gum, and lots of game. They would spend a night in a Galayi village in the piedmont, Equani, where three narrow streams joined into one broad river. Everyone had relatives there. It was the last time they would sleep inside for the three quarter moons of their walk.
