Song of the River (36 page)

Yes, it was best. And it would be good to have the ulax to herself again, to know that what she put in the food cache would still be there the next time she looked for it. How good not to dread the clicking tongues of the women. Who could criticize Aqamdax for becoming wife, and who could criticize the fine bride price Sok had given for her? It was more even than Day Breaker gave for Smiles Much. Yes, it was good, very good.

Now if Tut would only leave and allow her time alone for foolish tears.

The next morning, Chakliux walked into the bay until the water reached his thighs. He had been in cold water before. The Cousin River was never warm, and he often swam into the depths. He reminded himself that the difference he felt was that of a river otter first swimming the sea, and then he plunged quickly, crouched then ducked his head under, pulling himself into the cold with strong strokes of his arms, until he skimmed the bottom, feeling the lift of waves as they passed over him, the pull of a current that ran parallel to the shore. He swam until his lungs ached for air, then cut up toward the light.

His head broke the water some distance from where he had started, closer to the shore, where two First Men hunters waded in knee-deep water. One spoke to Chakliux, but Chakliux could not understand him. He set his feet on the bottom and stood.

“No understand,” he said in Walrus.

“You speak Walrus,” the other hunter said. They looked to be brothers, but Chakliux was not sure. Many of the First Men seemed to look alike.

“A little,” Chakliux said.

“You are the one they call otter,” the hunter told him.

Chakliux was surprised. He did not know what the Walrus or the First Men called him.

“People do not swim. You must be otter.”

“Anyone can swim.”

The men laughed and began to wade toward shore. Chakliux followed. When he reached his clothing, he rubbed feeling back into his arms and legs with one of his hare fur boot liners, then saw that the First Men only sluiced the water from their bodies with the sides of their hands, so Chakliux did the same.

He pulled on his leggings. The leather stuck to his wet skin. He put on his liners, boots and parka. Someone called him. It was Sok. Tut was with him; no, not Tut. Tut did not wear First Men clothing. It was Aqamdax, the storyteller.

When Chakliux drew close, Sok placed an arm around the woman’s shoulders. Chakliux looked hard into his brother’s face. Sok had been away all night, and now he was acting as though the storyteller was his woman. In many villages, the people would be offended to have a man so careless in his touching.

“She is mine,” Sok said, and smiled.

“She has agreed to come with us to the Walrus Hunters?”

Sok laughed. “She is my wife.”

When Cormorant and Red Feather, the Walrus traders, saw the woman, they crowed out their delight.

“So now,” Chakliux said to Sok as the traders celebrated and Aqamdax looked on, smiling, laughing, “when do Cormorant and Red Feather find out that she is your wife? Now or tonight when you take her into your sleeping robes? Have you prepared yourself for their knives?”

“I have done my part,” Sok said. “I have taken the woman in trade, and she has promised to come with us to the Walrus Hunter Village. Do you think that was easy? You are the one who must tell the Walrus traders. After all, how can I speak to them? I do not know their language.”

Anger tightened Chakliux’s chest. Sok’s foolishness could cost them their lives.

“Then, brother,” Chakliux said, “perhaps I will tell them what they want to hear. That you secured the woman for their shaman. Then it will be your choice whether or not to bed her, your throat that is slit if you do.”

“You cannot tell them that. Tut will hear the truth and let them know.”

Chakliux shrugged. “Still, better your life than mine.”

Sok clamped his hands on Chakliux’s shoulders. “I asked her to be the shaman’s wife, and she refused. She would only agree to come as my wife.”

“At least that gives us a starting point,” Chakliux told him. “I will find Tut. It is best if we ask her advice, and better to rely on her words than mine in explaining all this. Try to keep your hands away from Aqamdax until I return.”

As he left, he thought he felt the eyes of the storyteller on his back, but perhaps it was only Gguzaakk waiting to see what would happen.

He found Tut in the chief hunter’s ulax, her voice rising above the chatter of the wives. He called down from the roof hole, asking for her. Tut invited him to come inside, and so he entered, surprised at the size of the ulax as he climbed down the notched log. It was clean, well-kept, the floor covered with long sheaths of dried grass, the lamp wicks burning with little smoke. Braided leaves and roots, sometimes whole plants, hung from the high ceiling rafters.

They knew how to build lodges, those First Men.

He waited beside the ladder, trying to catch Tut’s eye, but she would not look at him. She knows I want her to come with me, Chakliux thought, but she does not want to leave the women. Why should she?

He thought of how often he remembered his own village, his own people. He missed the wisdom of the elders, their stories of hunts and hard winters. Tut must have missed the people of this village in the same way.

Finally, the oldest woman said something to Tut, lifted her chin toward a curtained area of the ulax wall. Tut shook her head, then stood and walked over to the climbing log.

“Grass Eyes wants to know if you are hungry.”

“I need you to come with me,” he said.

“Now?”

“Yes. I am sorry, but my brother has done something that could bring us trouble.”

“He has taken the storyteller as wife.”

“You have heard?”

“I was there when he asked her.”

“Do others in the village know?”

“Do you think something like that could remain a secret through a whole night?”

“These women, what do they think?”

“They are glad,” Tut said. “They say she will be a good wife. They want to know if you will take her back with you to the River People or if your brother will live here with us.”

“He plans to take her back.”

Tut shrugged. “Then what is the problem?”

Chakliux lowered his voice. “Tut, you know the Walrus traders came to get her as wife for their shaman.”

“And Sok has not yet told them he himself is the husband?”

“No.”

Tut threw back her head and laughed. “And I am supposed to worry about this?”

“Tut, please come.”

“You speak the language. You tell them.”

“You would risk something like this to my poor knowledge of their language?”

Tut gave him a sour look, then sighed and turned, spoke in quick words to the First Men women, then gestured for him to climb the log. He waited at the top of the ulax, and finally she came. He helped her down the side, then she pulled away from him, walked in hard steps, stomping her feet against the earth like an angry child. Finally she said, “And what do you want me to tell them?”

“Tell them the truth,” Chakliux answered. “Say that she would not come with us except as Sok’s wife and that it will be up to the Walrus shaman to win her with gifts and promises when we get to their village.”

She nodded and said nothing more until they arrived at the traders’ tent.

Chakliux heard Aqamdax’s voice even as they neared the tent, and, though she spoke in the First Men’s language, he could tell by the cadence of her words that she was telling a story. Her voice rose to meet them as they entered the tent, though the storyteller herself did not move from the center of the shelter. The Walrus traders were sitting, listening, as was Sok, his face creased with a smile. When he saw Chakliux, he said, “She tells us a story. You see the powers she has. Listen.”

She spoke in many voices, and her face glowed with her words; her body moved with the rhythm of her speech. To his surprise, Chakliux felt his loins tighten with desire, and finally he closed his eyes so he could not see her. It was a foolish thing to want a brother’s wife.

Then in the darkness, he heard Tut tell the Walrus traders of Sok’s marriage. To Chakliux’s surprise, they seemed to think Sok had acted wisely. Whether they expected Sok to give her to Yehl once they returned to the Walrus Hunter village, Chakliux was not sure. And what of Sok? Would he be willing to give her to another once she had been his?

For two nights, Sok and Aqamdax stayed in Qung’s ulax, slept in Aqamdax’s sleeping place. During those nights, Aqamdax woke often, sometimes to respond to her River husband’s lovemaking, but most often because something in her dreams reminded her that she was wife. She would wake and listen to Sok’s breathing, to the sound of him as he slept. The word
ayagax
—“wife”—would come to her, and it seemed that Sok’s breath became the rhythm of that word:
ayagax
,
ayagax
.

Then her heart would fill as though it were a nayux, buoying up her spirit, lifting her from the darkness of the years since her father’s death.

On the third day, Tut drew her aside, sat with her in the lee of Qung’s ulax and together they scraped sea lion hides. They worked in silence, enjoying the heat of summer sun, the sound of wind in the grass of the ulax roof, the noise of children playing. Aqamdax’s scraper spoke in the silence between them, loud enough so that she was sure Tut also heard and understood her joy:
ayagax
,
ayagax
.

Finally Tut said, “You know that they plan to leave tomorrow?”

The question seemed to catch in the notched edge of Aqamdax’s scraper, so that her hands had to stop. “Tomorrow?”

“They return to the Walrus, then your husband and his brother will go on to the River People.”

Aqamdax thought of her mother, drew out the faded remembrance of her face, then Aqamdax’s hands were free to move again. She pressed her weight against the scraper, peeled a thin strand of membrane from the hide and watched it float away, caught on the wind.

“Then perhaps I will find my mother,” Aqamdax said, speaking with strength so Tut would not think she regretted her decision to marry.

For a long time Tut said nothing, and Aqamdax let her eyes wander from what her hands were doing to rest on the small familiar things she could see from this side of Qung’s ulax. The high growth of salmonberries near Fish Caller’s ulax; the black lava rocks He Sings kept as remembrance of grandfathers and great-grandfathers; the long fringe of Qung’s basket grass strung point down on the drying racks.

She spoke to her eyes, told them to see and remember, told her ears not to forget the sound of the sea at this beach. Then she told herself, You are wife! with words fierce enough to tear away the sadness. Someday, you will come back. You will bring your babies to listen to Qung’s stories.

Qung is old, came the thought, unbidden, but Aqamdax pushed it away. Qung was strong in spite of her age. She would live to see Aqamdax’s children. It would not be easy to tell the old woman goodbye, but Aqamdax must remember what had been given to her. A strong husband, a new home and the chance to see her mother again.

“If you have questions, you should ask now,” Tut said. “There will be no one you can ask once you leave here. No one in the Walrus Hunter Village speaks much of the First Men language. It has always been the First Men who spoke both tongues. Though any trader will know some. So ask, and I will do what I can to answer.”

Aqamdax set down her scraper and looked at the woman. Tut was old, but she held herself straight, and her hands showed no signs of the bone sickness that knots joints and twists the body. Aqamdax had thought the woman would return to the Walrus Hunter Village with them, and the knowledge that she would not filled Aqamdax’s stomach with sudden unease.

“You will not return to the Walrus?” she asked.

“My Walrus husband is dead. My daughter married a First Men hunter and lives in a village a day or two west of here. It is better for me to be here, with my brothers, with my First Men family.”

“I will be alone then,” Aqamdax said, her voice soft, as though she spoke to herself.

“You will like the Walrus Hunter Village,” Tut told her. “The people there are good people. They will be a new family to you.”

“I will probably not be there long,” Aqamdax said. “My husband will soon return to his River village.”

“You know the Walrus shaman has asked to have you as wife?” Tut said.

“Yes,” Aqamdax said, “but now Sok is my husband. I will not stay with the Walrus.”

“I will tell him that for you. I will be sure he understands.”

Aqamdax picked up her scraper, then set it down again. “I will not go with him if he plans to give me to the Walrus shaman.” Her words were strong, but she felt a sickness inside, as though something were eating her heart. Had Sok taken her only so she would go with him, then when she was away from her own people, no longer storyteller of her village, would he give her away? She remembered his hands on her body, the strength of his arms around her. No, he would not trade her. Already, they had formed the strong bond that comes to husband and wife. She did not need to worry.

“Is there anything else I can ask him?”

“Do you know if he has other wives?”

Tut thought for a moment. “He has two sons,” she finally said. “He speaks often of them. They are still boys, but old enough to hunt.”

“Then I am second wife.”

“Probably.”

“Will you ask him what the River People expect of a second wife? I do not want to offend.”

“I will ask for you. And I will ask what other things you should know about River customs.”

Aqamdax nodded but said nothing. They worked in silence, the two together. Aqamdax tried to think of other things to ask Tut, but her thoughts were like the bits of flesh she scraped from the sea lion hide, carried quickly away on the wind.

Chapter Twenty-six

THE NEAR RIVER VILLAGE

GHADEN HEARD THE CLATTER
of the killer’s boots, the clicking of caribou hoof rattlers like the ones dancers wore during celebrations. He opened his mouth to scream out a warning, but he had no words, nothing but a quiet moan that sounded more like wind than his own voice. Suddenly a dog barked, chased the one with the knife, and instead of the clicking noise, Ghaden heard Brown Water’s voice, loud and angry.