And She Was (6 page)

The next afternoon Tugakax and Slukax returned to Aya.

“Get up,” Slukax said, trying to sound stern. She pushed Aya with her foot, then took hold of her shoulders and sat her upright. “Tugakax and I have a proposal.”

Tugakax knelt beside Aya and touched her cheek. “Aya, my daughter is shrinking as I watch. I feed her everything I find, but still her face becomes more hollow and her legs and arms like reeds. Everything I have done, I’ve done for her. I fled the Russian because I would not have her growing up seeing me as his
kalga.
Even though she is half Russian, she is mine. She is the future for me. I will do anything so that she can live. Even go to the caves.”

Aya listened without hearing. The weight of her sorrow pinned her to a void into which she kept falling inch by inch. She didn’t understand what Slukax and Tugakax were saying until the words thudded into her consciousness—dead-man’s fat. She opened her eyes.

“I know these caves,” Slukax was saying. “It would be a simple thing.”

Aya felt the weight shift, felt hope slither between it and her body. She reached for it.

“Aya,” Slukax said, “we will die one way or another. We may as well die as crazy women than as starving women.”

The meaning of Slukax’s words dropped like mist around them. They seeped into Aya with a permanence that would last all her long years. An age-old bargain with nature, with God. Take my will, my clear thoughts, and give me life. Aya knew that afternoon, sitting over her baby’s cold body, that the trade-off always lurked nearby, and that it always demanded someone to bow to it. She had gone this far, already contaminated herself. She had no more children to sacrifice. Aya knew then that this was the moment for which her mother had prepared her with those strange words and urgent voice. Perhaps it was the knowledge of a mother with a dead baby, perhaps the knowledge of lasting hunger, but Aya sensed the weight and curve toward darkness that her own next word would bring. Yet she would not let her destiny be controlled by something other than her own hand.

“Yes.”

That next morning the three women dressed in warm kamleikas and set out for the hills. They trekked down a long valley that gradually rose into the saddle of two mountains, a shortcut to a deep bay to the west. The first snow came gentle as the hands of a child. Aya felt it flutter over her eyelashes and caress the back of her neck, where it melted and trickled under her kamleika to form parallel rivulets flanking her spine. She arched her back away from her clothing to let them run.

When the women reached the ridge, they stopped to drink from their seal bladders. They topped the saddle and traversed across the western hill on a narrow path beaten into the ryegrass until the trail reached the sea then turned south to parallel the ocean. Slukax led them past several rough caves that darted into black lichen-covered rocks thrusting through the grass and tundra. At midafternoon she stopped before the broken face of a rock outcropping that leaned out over the sea. The gap, just wide enough to allow a body, faced away from the sun, and the women could see nothing but black inside.

When Slukax tried to move inside, Aya stopped her. “I will be the one,” she said. It was what she wanted. To touch the dead now, linger with them.

She closed her eyes and saw Anshigis’s smooth cheeks and sleep-damp hair as she withdrew her tinder of birds’ down, sprinkled it with
powdered sulfur, and struck her spark rocks together. She heard Anshigis’s nursing murmur as she poured a shallow pool of precious seal oil in the hallow of her stone lamp and floated the burning tinder on it.

Aya moved past the other two women. She slid one leg and the arm holding the lamp inside, poking her head in to see what lay before her. The cave opened wide just inside, and the lamp’s light didn’t reach the walls. Turning her head back outside, she breathed deep from the fresh air. She refused to let her eyes find Slukax and Tugakax, standing a few feet away. Pulling her body inside the cave, she gave herself several minutes to stop trembling; she could not drop the lamp. She stepped farther in and held the lamp first to the right then to the left. The light illuminated the dim face of rock to the left, and she moved toward it. She held the lamp as far away from her body as possible.

The bodies didn’t frighten her. And she understood all at once the change that had replaced the girl she’d been with the woman she’d become. Some part of her mourned for that girl, with a life of children, sewing, cooking, loving before her. But the larger part looked into the future, saw a woman who would never forget the cold, small body against her chest or the feel of a spear in her hand, or the taste of a dead man on her tongue.

She reached for the exposed hand of a man, lain along the wall. She could see this hand had been tasted before. Only two fingers remained. She was grateful the cave wall had sloughed, hiding his face in earth. She would never know who he was, although from the feel of his flesh, not yet dried hard and black from the warm vented cave, he had been dead no more than a few years.

Aya set her lamp on the uneven floor. The light sprang up and made the low ceiling dance with the shadows of dead limbs. She could see at least six bodies, laid on driftwood platforms along the wall. She held her breath, reached for her slate knife, and placed it at a slight angle to the dead man’s second finger joint. She steadied the blade and carved through the joining bones, placing each piece of finger into a skin pouch.

The bodies held the power these men had gained in life. And if the living were willing, that power would flow to them. Although the only sanctioned use of these corpses was for power to hunt whales, Aya and her people knew the power itself was not so narrow.

As she turned back toward the cave opening, Aya heard the first moan of the returning wind. She wrapped her hand around her bead necklace and let go of the breath she had held too long.

When she squeezed from the cave into the open again, Slukax and Tugakax stood with their faces into the new wind. They would hardly meet her gaze. She could tell that they tried, as if by a connection of the eyes they could share her doom. But they were unable. Tugakax at last broke through the barrier and slung the pouch of dead-man’s fat from Aya’s shoulder.

“I will carry it,” she said, offering herself as well to the forces that now marked Aya.

The three women started the long walk back to their village. Slukax hung back, and Aya could feel the press of her indecision rolling like waves against her back. She wondered if the flesh she had touched brought such easy awareness. At the saddle the women again rested as the moon glowed after the setting sun. Tugakax had set the pouch near her on the ground, and when they rose again, Slukax lifted it onto her own shoulder and wordlessly began walking down the mountain.

A wind whipped across the beach and toward the sea the next morning as Aya, Slukax, and Tugakax stood ankle deep in the water and washed. They scrubbed sand across their faces and hands, giving their woman-scent to the ocean in return for the smell of sea. Aya opened the pouch and pulled out three joints. Although the rituals, performed by men since ancient times, were the secret ways of hunters, a man could not lie beside a woman, share her life without passing something. Knowledge came in pieces, a whisper, a stolen glance, but the women knew enough to begin. They smeared the fat-layered skin, now warm and viscous, across their cheeks and palms as they had seen men do. The smell reminded Aya of whale and seal and her hunger. She bit off part of the meat, as did Slukax and Tugakax. The fat melted on Aya’s tongue and pooled beside her back teeth. She closed her eyes and swallowed, letting the skin glide down her fat-slick throat, unchewed.

The three women pushed their kayak into the waves, laced the skin covering tight under their arms, and paddled straight into the sea.

Aya had felt her new power all night. She heard the breaths of Slukax and her boys even through her sleep. She knew when a child awoke in another house. She felt the wind shift and begin rolling off the island. And her dreams had come in waves of color that mocked the gray sky. So she was not surprised when she felt the presence behind her.

They had paddled far along the coast, searching kelp beds for a lingering sea lion. Now in more open water, they skirted reefs uncovered by the outgoing tide. Aya laid her paddle across the boat. Slukax and Tugakax stopped paddling as well and waited for her gesture. Aya nodded behind her, and Tugakax and Slukax dipped their paddles into the water to let the waves turn the kayaks.

The whale breached as their bows pointed straight at it. None of the women had envisioned a whale. This one was small, a gray whale, and young.

Aya reached into the kayak for the small pouch of monkshood oil. She held it upright as she slid the tip of her spear inside, coating it with poison. She unfastened her throwing stick and slotted the spear. The whale remained at the surface, within range. She circled her tongue against the entirety of her mouth, tasting for remnants of the dead-man’s fat.

And threw.

Slukax shouldered her own weapon, waiting to see which way the whale would break. The spear shot forward in a low arch; it landed with a popping noise to the rear of the fluke. Aya had not known to aim for this vulnerable spot, where the poison could readily enter the beast’s bloodstream and work its slow death, but her arm had been directed there nonetheless. The whale immediately dove straight down. Slukax had no time to throw.

Aya watched the spear disappear with the whale. The waves from its plunging descent splashed at the kayak’s bow. She dropped her weight low and waited. When she looked up nothing remained to show she had speared a whale. The water calmed like a pond, and fog sunk across it.

Aya felt her legs cramping under the skin skirt. Her mouth grew dry. She could no longer see Slukax. They found each other with their voices and began the journey back to shore. Aya began a song, and Tu
gakax and Slukax joined. They sang a wedding song and a birthing song and a song to the birds and, at last, a song to the whale.

For three days, Aya sequestered herself in the isolated whale-hunters
ulax
. Slukax and Tugakax, she knew, would find a story to tell the others. Although women did not enter this
ulax,
they knew what the men did there. They grieved so that the whale’s suffering spirit would be drawn toward theirs. Aya neither ate nor drank. When she found herself thinking of things other than the whale, she let a mournful sigh into the silent walls. With her mind, she told the whale how it should die. She promised it she felt its pain as her own. She wondered if her husband had felt the whale the way she did. Twice since their marriage, he had hidden himself away in this same
ulax,
willing his own whales to die. Did all hunters feel this connection? Or had the Dry One given her something more?

Aya tore at her kamleika; she pulled her hair from her scalp. She ripped the beads from her neck and let them fall to the ground, an offering to the land itself for what she had taken. As her mouth dried and her stomach ached, she told the whale how she suffered with it. She felt it slow in the gray water. An ache stretches along its body. It can no longer sound as deep and must keep returning to the surface for breath. And each time, its eye takes in the rough shores of the island. Aya told it to let her pain draw it further toward death, toward land.

On the morning of the fourth day, Aya climbed outside to find Slukax and Tugakax waiting for her. Aya led them along the beach. An image of the whale, belly bumping against the rocky shore, had formed. She led them toward the place she saw in her mind. When they drew close, Aya saw it was true. Her whale had followed her through hunger, thirst, and pain, and died for her.

As she came close, a thrill she’d never felt coursed through her. They would live. She felt the power of life and hope.

“Cut here,” Slukax said, directing Aya’s knife around the spearhead, still embedded in the whale’s flesh. “Now here, and here.” Slukax traced a jagged line around the wound in what they hoped would be mistaken for the bite of a killer whale. Tugakax returned to the village to tell the people that the sea had given them a gift at last.

Aya heard the excited shouts and saw three boys round the bend first. The entire village came running, knives held high, pulling skids
behind their skipping feet. She was wet from feet to waist, having waded in beside the whale to slash away at the skin and blubber around the spear puncture.

The boys yelled as they spotted the gray beached form. Slukax’s boy Alidax ran hard into the water to jump up on a flipper, trying to spring to the whale’s back. He slipped and crashed into the waves. His two friends laughed at him and jumped to the flipper, then boosted each other up. They were shouting and jumping, slipping and laughing when the village women reached the whale.

Tugakax’s little girl placed her hands on the whale’s cheek and raised to her tiptoes to gaze into its open eye. “Look, Mama,” she said, pulling Tugakax over, “I am in the whale’s eye.”

Tugakax clutched the girl to her chest, closed her eyes, and hid her tears in her daughter’s hair.

Aya didn’t need to worry about the mark of her spear on the whale. With skill and relish, the women fell on the carcass, marking squares of blubber with their short knifes. This was women’s work, and they did it well. Slukax shouted needless instructions. Two women took the whale’s back, ripping regular squares of rubbery skin and yellow fat, which they handed down to two other women, who placed it on skids and harnessed themselves to drag it back to the village food pits. Others carved the sides and finally rolled the carcass to expose the belly. Children smeared fat in one another’s hair and licked their fingers clean. Women smiled and talked in hushed, brief sentences.

“Such a gift. Such a gift.” Slukax repeated the phrase often through the afternoon, giving the village women a safe word to remember.

They worked until nightfall, leaving the bones and innards for the next day. The village women and children walked together back to their homes, full with meat and the knowledge that they would live for another winter.