Beneath Ceaseless Skies #156 Read online

  I am so intent on my work, on chasing away hunger with every flake of wood, every exquisite facial detail or jewelry-incision, that I don’t notice how she stares at me with her sightless eyes—listening, not seeing. Listening for the fumble of my tools, listening for the stub of my toe. I’m still not going blind. I start thinking, as I lie in the furs with everyone else, that when I get up the next morning I’ll trip over something. Or I’ll slip and cut my finger, not deeply, but enough to prove with red drops and a hiss of pain that I’m struggling to see.

  Every day I forget, too intent on my work.

  I’m still not even squinting.

  And they’ve noticed, all of them: my mother and aunt and uncle with their flawless ears, my cousins who are my age, my brother. At least the children mind their own business.

  I don’t know what to do. It’s winter. I can’t leave. I can’t get myself to talk about it with them, to reason them out of killing me.

  I’m hungry. I carve.

  * * *

  “We’re sick of dolls,” my aunt says, harsh as an eagle. “We want meat. Bring us meat.”

  “There’s no meat,” one of my cousins says, but I see how he glances sideways at me. I see everything, still.

  “Yes there is.” My aunt points right at me.

  I’m fixed with fear on the fur we’re sitting on.

  “No!” my daughter cries. “You can’t! Leave her alone!” She stands up with her small carving knife in her hand and such fierceness on her face. My bold, beautiful daughter! But she trips as soon as she takes a step and clatters down to the floor with a cry.

  My cousin laughs. “Be careful, Tamke. Take a seat. We’ll bring you the meat you deserve.”

  She looks up like a spitting wolverine. “I’ll tear your tongue out, I’ll tear your fingers off, I’ll eat those for my first meal by the fire.”

  I need to get out.

  Two of my cousins stand, looking at me like I’m a deer, and I get up too, thinking that if I can just get to the door—

  They grab me firmly and yank my head back by my long braids, baring my throat, and I close my eyes. I don’t want to see it.

  But the knife doesn’t fall. I look—and there are my sons, clinging one to each of my cousin’s legs: Bomak on the left and Turkam on the right, like identical dolls. And Tamke is on her feet again, squinting, and this time she doesn’t trip. This time the knife is in my cousin’s eye before any of the others can react.

  Then there is chaos, like on a hunt.

  I slip free and pull a longer knife from my boot, making my other cousin back off. I grab furs to add to the ones already on my back. I grab a small traveling pot. I grab Tamke—her cheek is reddened from someone’s fist but she has avoided knives—and I shove her outside. I turn back—my sons are up against the wall, wide-eyed, as another of my cousins swipes cruelly in the air before them. “You’ll make a doll every day!” she’s yelling. “You’ll work for four people! Or it’s you we’ll be cooking, you stupid brats!”

  Anger swells in me like a snowstorm. I’ve never been fond of my children the way I’ve seen other parents be, but to see them threatened like that; I’ll kill anyone who tries to kill them. I shove my cousin aside, tripping her to the floor, and my sons only need one yell from me to run outside.

  My brother and my cousin are going after them. “Run!” I yell. “Keep running!”

  The boys run off like wolves. Tamke doesn’t make it far before she trips.

  I’m outside—I slam the door behind me, and suddenly the world is muted, just me by the house and my daughter lying on the ground, and my brother and my cousin between us. It is dark, but not black. All that’s left of my sons is the sound of branches breaking and snow falling. “Get back inside,” I snap at my brother and my cousin, who are faint in the starlight. “Or I’ll cut you open as well.” They turn towards me, forgetting that Tamke is capable of getting back up.

  I see her standing, I see the weapons we’re all holding. There’s only one path. Tamke sees it too.

  Between the two of us, we kill them quickly.

  My daughter is gasping, crying.

  “Run,” I manage to say.

  I take her arm, and we flee into the forest after my sons.

  * * *

  No one follows to exact vengeance. The old ones must be terrified: so many able hands lost, it’ll be death if they lose another.

  The knowledge of what we did, Tamke and I, sits in me like I’ve swallowed a massive stone. I can’t ignore it. For all three of my children, it sits on their tongues, silencing them—but we’ll die if I let it stop my feet.

  I put my thoughts on one thing: our survival.

  I long to take us directly south, to the parts of the taiga where winter’s teeth are blunted by having already gnawed on so many people, but that route would take us close to other people. In winter we’re feared. We bring our illness to the lands we pass through; our illness drives the animals away. People would kill us for that, angry and hungry. So it’s west we go, following the map of the stars, into the uninhabited lands I know from my summer wanderings.

  Towards where I met Oruguaq, although I don’t know if I want to find her. I don’t think about it much. It isn’t important enough. What is: the daily work on the dolls, trying to get one in the pot almost every day, staying warm, keeping everyone on their feet even if there is ice at their eyes, getting far enough from our house that we can set up a shelter for the rest of the winter.

  The light is poor but it’s returning. The sun skims the underside of the horizon like a knife across wood, giving us hours of pale light. We use it to walk and work. The boys and I are nimble enough, even in our mittens, to carve as we walk. When the sun has sunk too far to give us light, we use the moon’s silvery glow. When we tire, we stop. Working together, we chop wood and gather kindling and build up a fire, and the boys and I build up a shelter around the fire and around Tamke, already seated, honored like an old woman.

  “We’ll survive,” I tell them as we sip the thin broth of a hurried doll, all four of us huddled together under the furs. Everyone is tired, cold, hungry. Alive. “We have enough furs. Soon we’ll set up a shelter with pine branches, using the needles like poor fur to block out the wind.”

  A herd of lies. The truth is, we’re dying. It’s just a lot slower than if my cousin had cut my throat. I don’t tell them that. I don’t know if they already know.

  When I do think about Oruguaq, I doubt my ability to find her in just one small tent in the vastness of the taiga.

  It’s Oruguaq who finds us.

  I hear the swish of snow falling off branches outside our thick-needled shelter and think, for a strange moment, that the illness is over, that animals will come near us when we’re far from the house—but no, it’s Oruguaq standing at the narrow opening of our shelter, with a dead fox slung over her shoulder almost blending into her furs, winter-hidden.

  Just her dark face stands out in the light cast by the fire. She looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “All the animals run from you,” she says. “It’s like you’re a fire, crackling at their backs. This one ran straight into my trap, even as I stood there, which is good for you. You’ll get some meat instead of those ridiculous dolls.”

  Just a few sentences and she makes me feel vole-small again. Why is this woman our only chance for life?

  “So give us that meat,” I say, even though she’s a guest to our fire—but what can I offer her? Ridiculous dolls? “And go catch more whenever we start walking again.”

  I don’t mean that last bit. Scaring off the animals like that isn’t the right way to treat the forest. It might not even work, if we send someone out. The illness is thorough.

  I eye the fox over her shoulder. It won’t be much hide, but anything to keep out the cold. And I want that meat, for all of us. Meat, in winter!

  “I’ll have some of this meat first,” Oruguaq says, “and then we’ll get moving.”

  “Yeah?”

  S
he doesn’t say anything more. She drops the fox in front of me and goes back outside, where I see the faint dark outline of her sled, and gets more furs and hides. Some she drapes over our shelter, shoving back at the wind that’s been cutting us for so long. Some she drapes over us. Pressed against my side, she works with me, skinning the fox and putting it in pieces into the pot, where there’s still a small doll bobbing.

  “Let me tell you something,” she finally says. “I once had an assistant called Arnatsiq. Found her on an ice-floe, more ice than woman by that point, crying out yet more ice because her people abandoned her there for having her vagina in her palms instead, two vaginas in fact, one in each palm, that she pissed out of same as we piss from between our legs.”

  Tamke makes a face. The boys giggle.

  “If you laughed at her, she’d slap you in the face, and she wouldn’t hold back her piss.”

  The smell of meat’s making me heady.

  “She sounds interesting,” I say, meaning it.

  “I take in assistants who have survived,” Oruguaq says, cutting into my light-headedness. “Usually it’s cruel winters or cruel husbands they’ve survived, but sometimes it’s cruel families. You can be the next one.”

  “What about my children?”

  “There’s a shaman about six days from here. Maybe he will want a wife,” she says, leering at Tamke, “and maybe he will want some assistants.”

  “I’m not giving my daughter to someone.” I look at Tamke. “Not unless she wants it.”

  Tamke’s looking down, at her hands. I wonder how much she sees. I don’t really have to wonder what her thoughts are. “What else will I do?” she asks.

  “You said that a blind woman can do a lot more than sit,” I say to Oruguaq. “Well, what would you have Tamke do?”

  “I don’t need two assistants,” Oruguaq says, caring about us as much as about a block of ice falling out of a tree. “Or four. I don’t mind looking around for a place to put them, seeing as you don’t want to let them die, but we’re getting rid of them one way or another. Children are easier to get rid of than adults like you, or maybe I’d take one of them. And who else but a shaman’s going to want people who scare off animals in winter?”

  “Maybe the shaman will end the illness on us.”

  “I’m hoping he’ll do it on you, but four people is four times the magic. I don’t know if he’s strong enough for that, not all at once.”

  “I will marry the shaman,” Tamke says quietly.

  I don’t like it and I say so, but it’s like shitting to put out a snowstorm; what does it change? Only our family’s illness has stopped our women being sent off to the nearest families. We have left our family and we have left that life.

  It gets into me, like a bone splinter.

  What use is being upset by it? This is the life of countless women. But the discomfort stays.

  My sons are quiet, too tired and hungry to have an opinion on becoming a shaman’s assistants. Probably worried about having a new person yelling at them. Well, it’s better than going into the pot like a doll or a fox or an unwanted niece.

  “Let’s go see this shaman, then,” I say, because just sitting isn’t going to get us anywhere.

  * * *

  It’s a tiring walk. Though Oruguaq’s the one pulling the sled, she’s strong and fast; she’s spent the winter eating meat. We struggle to keep up, still carving our dolls because there isn’t enough in Oruguaq’s sled for all five of us to eat.

  “The shaman’s name is Sodortur,” Oruguaq tells us as we walk. “He lives outside a village. They look after him; bring him meat and fuel sometimes.”

  “Won’t we drive away their animals?” I ask.

  “He lives far enough away that you won’t. A bit over a half-day’s walk.”

  Tamke stays silent all throughout what Oruguaq says, concentrating on not losing her footing. And I suppose it takes a lot of time for a woman to resign herself to a marriage.

  I don’t know what to say to her. I made her but I never got to be—never really wanted to be, never knew how to be—the one who comforted her or explained the world to her, except for telling her that nothing’s ever easy and not many people are kind. All that’s still true. I know it’s not what she wants to hear.

  “Will you visit me?” she asks one night when Oruguaq has fallen asleep, snoring loud as thunder. “I’m....” She swallows down her fear. “I think I’m going to be lonely.”

  “In the summer, there’ll be the village women.”

  “What if they fear me, as the shaman’s wife?”

  There isn’t an answer for that, but I can’t stand the sight of tears in her eyes. She deserves better than loneliness, my skilled, brave Tamke. “A shaman’s better than a normal man, probably. More interesting.” I go crude, because it’s all I’ve got to offer her. “Maybe he’ll shape-change during sex.”

  Tamke, who was about to say something sad and unhopeful like “I hope so,” starts laughing, properly cackling like an old woman. So I tell her what animals her husband will change into, even though I’m not sure if eagles have penises, and Tamke’s whole body shakes like the eagle’s already down there. “Now you have to visit,” she says when she can finally speak again, “and find out if it’s really like that.”

  * * *

  The shaman’s tent is small and conical, with smoke escaping from the flap at the top. It’s in a small clearing with chopped wood stacked outside it, mostly covered in the snow that makes all the ground and trees white. While we stop—Tamke and the boys and me, all of us looking at the place where they will live if they’re lucky—Oruguaq walks right up to the entrance flap and pulls it open and goes inside.

  “Should we follow her?” There’s fear in Tamke’s quiet voice.

  “No point waiting till our noses freeze off to get an invitation.”

  So I lead them inside, my frightened daughter and my silent sons, to where Sodortur the shaman and Oruguaq are sitting on the fur-covered floor of the shaman’s smoke-filled tent. Something’s cooking. My stomach cramps. The shaman watches as we all sit around the fire, crowding the tiny tent, coughing. The air inside the tent is hot. I’d forgotten what hot feels like. I start removing furs.

  The shaman is wearing all white furs, fox-thick, and over them an apron covered in detailed embroidery. I can’t help staring at it. It’s just like the patterns my sons carve on the dolls, but all in color: red and white and blue and yellow. There’s more of the embroidery on his fur jacket, down the front where it fastens shut, and I see some on his boots too. Then there are the metal pendants hanging off his outfit everywhere, carved with various symbols. I wonder when he has the time to do all that embroidery and carving—but then I remember that he has the villagers to bring him at least some of his food. If he’s lucky, there are days in a row he only goes outside to empty the piss-pot and take more wood off the pile.

  “So which one of these two is to be my wife?” he asks, gesturing to me and Tamke. “The younger one, I hope.”

  His voice is high.

  “Yes,” Oruguaq says. “Her name is Tamke. And those are the boys who’ll assist you with trapping and wood-chopping in summer, if you take them. Bomak and Turkam. Kegulan is mine.”

  I don’t like the way she says that. It’s my choice to go along with her. Except it’s not, really.

  “Hmm!”

  And that’s all Sodortur says to us. He starts conferring with Oruguaq in a quieter voice, and because he speaks our language a bit differently I can’t figure out what he’s saying to her.

  Meanwhile my sons are staring around the tent with wide eyes, at the bright-clothed shaman and his myriad tools and objects hanging around the tent and the stewpot, which they want to get a bowl into as much as I do. I’m glad they’re taking an interest in what’s happening. Tamke just stares through the smoke at her husband. After a little while she whispers, “The shaman sounds like a woman.”

  I smack her on the arm. “He is a shaman.” They cr
oss the boundaries between this world and the upper and lower worlds. What’s the boundary between woman and man after that? Doesn’t Tamke know any of the stories?

  “So....”

  “So he’s a man, even if he...” and I drop my voice as quiet as I can “...has bits like ours.”

  “Oh.” I can see her mind getting quite quickly to how sex between them will work. A mixture of surprise and mirth crosses her face. “Well, you warned me there’d be shape-changing,” she whispers, with a tiny giggle.

  I smack her again. “Show the shaman some respect.”

  If he takes offence at Tamke, if he refuses her, if he mistreats her....

  My slap puts tears in her eyes. “I’m just....” Frightened. I know. The shaman’s bits aren’t her worries.

  “From what I hear, marriage is often not what the woman expects,” I say. Sometimes it’s even more brutal. I don’t say that. “Work hard for him and it might surprise you by being a good marriage.” I never thought I’d have to say such things to her. I thought it’d be a life of going blind and telling her to work harder to keep me full of dolls.

  I hold onto her as she cries onto my shoulder.

  “I’ll take her,” Sodortur says, “and I’ll take the boys. Kegulan’s illness will take a day and a night to end. My wife and assistants will have to live with their illness for a bit. Tamke, go outside and get more wood for the fire.”