Beneath Ceaseless Skies #156 Read online

  That’s how my daughter’s marriage begins.

  Sodortur instructs me to sit beside him on the hide of a bear and he blindfolds me with a strip of unknown hide, stuffs berries in my mouth and starts humming something. I try not to gag on the berries. As surreptitiously as possible, I eat a few.

  The smoke in the tent thickens and I start to choke. I hear Tamke moving about as the shaman orders her to, doing her best not to fumble and trip. I hear my sons coughing. The shaman keeps up his hum and starts a beat on a drum. I clench my jaw and swallow down more of the berries to help me breathe better. The ones still in my mouth start leaking bitter juices.

  The smoke thickens and thickens and I start breathing smoke instead of air. Sodortur’s drum is beating in time to my heart, or is it the other way round? I can’t feel my body anymore. Very distantly, I wonder what type of berries he’s put in my mouth.

  I’m a heartbeat, blind and mute, pounding, pounding, hot, cold, so hot I burn, so cold I burn.

  I’m sitting on a hide, my whole body aching, my mouth swollen. Sodortur removes the blindfold and I see him with the drum in his lap. I see Tamke making a meal. I see Oruguaq and my sons sitting by the fire. My sons are talking to each other, but they stop when they realize I’m awake.

  I don’t know what boundaries Sodortur sent me across, but I feel exhausted like I’ve been traveling for at least a day and a night.

  “Sleep,” Sodortur tells me. “In the morning you will be ready to leave.”

  Not cursed. Not eating dolls through another winter.

  I fall back onto the bear hide and straight into sleep.

  * * *

  Saying goodbye to them is difficult. My sons are starting to look keen, although they go still whenever Sodortur looks at them. I think they’ll be fine. Tamke looks sad. I hold her for a long time.

  “He just orders me around,” she whispers. “I keep tripping. What will he do with me if my eyesight goes completely before he can heal me?”

  I feel all cold inside, not like during the boundary-crossing but like I’ve been left outside to die. “I don’t know.” I want to be more helpful. “Remember that you can upset his relationship with the village by going near it and scaring off the people’s animals.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” she says.

  “Let him think otherwise.”

  “I will.”

  “And spend time with the women in summer. That’s how women survive in this kind of life.”

  “I will.”

  I breathe in the smell of her, smoky and sweaty from her cooking, and I tell her I will visit her. I mean it. I also want to see how my sons grow as the shaman’s assistants. They won’t become shamans unless he sees the talent in them, but maybe they’ll finally fit into themselves in some other way. I smell both of them, both smoky—but each a bit different—and words suddenly swell up in my throat, stuck there.

  It’s time to go. Oruguaq is standing by her sled looking impatient, with the harness in her hands. I walk away from my children without looking back. I take the sled’s harness and put it on and follow Oruguaq through the falling snow into the taiga.

  * * *

  My work begins when I see the sea for the first time. It’s spring. The ice is slowly cracking open like skulls, creaking and groaning and fighting against the rising temperature. The sun has brought its reindeer back into the sky, and the air sometimes goes a little bit above freezing; warm enough that I bare my arms as I pull the sled. I have an affinity with reindeer now. I look up at the sky and acknowledge them as friends.

  Oruguaq hasn’t pulled the sled since I joined her, and I’ve decided that she just wants a reindeer who talks back sometimes rather than a proper assistant—and then she says, “Do you see those tents by the shore? They belong to the seal-people. I haven’t sat with them in over three hundred years. So we will sit with them, and afterwards I will teach you how to add to the book.”

  “Huh,” is all I say as I follow her down the slope to the sea.

  In-between the ice-cracks, I can see water. It goes all the way out to the horizon. I can’t tear my eyes off it. Where are the trees?

  I’m glad when we’re among the tents, all tall and thin and ragged in the wind. I pretend they’re trees.

  Then I start to see the seal-people, or some of them; dark lumps of flesh on chunks of ice. There are small faces at their sides. “The mothers,” Oruguaq says, noticing my attention. “We won’t be talking to them. Look.” She points ahead, at a cluster of the lumpen animals.

  They don’t flee me. I’m still not quite used to that.

  One of them regards us with curiosity on its long-whiskered face. It’s handsome, for an animal—much more handsome when, a moment later, it turns into a man.

  His seal-skin falls to the ground and he steps off it, ignoring it, already clad in sturdy hide leggings and a thick coat and boots. A shame. I like the look of him: taller and a bit darker than the men I’m used to, fat with health. He’s a welcome break from looking at Oruguaq’s old face.

  He speaks to Oruguaq in a language I have never heard.

  “Unfortunately we will not be able to speak in your language,” she says in the one I know. “My assistant has not yet learned it.”

  “Welcome to my village,” he says to me, and I don’t think I’ll have trouble understanding him. I’m starting to get used to dialects after so many weeks of traveling. “My name is Shore.”

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” I reply.

  “Do you both need a place to sleep?”

  “We only need to stay with you for a day or two,” Oruguaq says.

  “Nonsense. You must stay longer. We never have visitors, and we want to make sure you have eaten well before we send you on. Our clam stews are the best you’ll ever eat—you’ll be as fat as us in a week.”

  Behind him, the seal-people bellow and snort. I can’t tell if it’s agreement or just normal seal-noises.

  Laughing, Oruguaq says, “I’ve never been able to refuse a good stew.”

  My stomach agrees with her.

  All at once the seal-people discard their skins and become men—who take orders from Shore to tidy up the main tent and get the fire started and stew the clams. Their skins remain in a heap on the shore. Oruguaq and I are led directly to the tent, where furs are laid out for us to sit on and the pot is quickly set to bubbling. Shore sits with us while the other men finish bringing in furs and clams and bowls. Then they join us, and the storytelling starts.

  I find out that the seal-men love to tell stories about themselves. Most of these stories involve fighting bears and whales—whatever those are—and fighting over their women and having sex with their women. I’ve never heard men brag about that before. I sit with my bowl of hot clam stew in my hands, thinking that I could be one of the women they’re discussing. How he mounted her! How she moaned!

  I wonder, as I often do, how Tamke is being treated and how my sons are faring. If this is how the shaman thinks of her.... I feel sick.

  The seal-men are telling their stories so loudly that they don’t notice when I get up, as if to use the piss-pot, and keep on walking, right out the tent, right down to the shore where the ice butts against the pebbles.

  The very edge of the sea is churning ice and liquid, but I walk along the shore like I’m prospecting a river for a safe place to cross, until I find a still calm place where I can step out onto the ice. To get from chunk to chunk I have to jump carefully, but I’ve been crossing rivers since I was hip-high; I make it out to the first of the seal-women, nursing her pup.

  She sheds her seal-skin. Unlike the men, she picks it up again and wraps it around the fur-clad infant for another layer of protection. The infant needs it, out here on the ice where the wind’s teeth are wicked-sharp. I huddle in my hides and hood beside them.

  “Hello,” the mother says shyly, in my language. “Have the men fed you well?”

  “Yes. They’re very kind.”

  Her dark eyes
are lowered.

  Silence grows between us.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” I say, suddenly awkward. “It’s just that the men are....” I’m not sure how she’ll take my honesty, but I’m tired after all those stories. “They keep telling stories about mating and fighting, and it stopped being interesting.”

  I see the twitch of her lips.

  “Usually I talk to the women when I come to a new village,” I say. “Is it all right for me to sit with you?”

  “Oh, well, they might not like it, but....” Her gaze drifts upwards, to my eyes. “I would like to talk to you.”

  I have a feeling I’ve violated a taboo, but if the woman—the one under the taboo—doesn’t mind, then does it matter? I’m not sure. Or maybe it’s the infant that’s under the taboo, but surely the mother’s a better arbiter of that than the men far off in the tents.

  Well, I’ll find out how bad it is when I get back to the shore.

  “What is your name?” the woman asks.

  “Kegulan. Yours?”

  “Gytyn.” That’s different to Shore. Or maybe he translated his. “It was a gift from my mother, who received it from her mother before her, who met a shore-dwelling woman with that name. They developed a very close relationship—they were lovers. When they parted, Gytyn told my grandmother that she could take her name to remember her by. The men call me Swell.”

  I feel hot under my furs, like someone’s lit a fire under my belly. They were lovers.

  “Gytyn,” I say, because it’s clear as the cloudless sky which name she prefers, “they....” I stumble. Oh, I like to fuck men—I like the look of them—but women.... I never knew other women did that, besides me and Pasan one long summer when we’d both got our wombs full from the men and wanted not just talking, wanted a different touch. That winter, rumors told her about my family’s illness and she never talked to me again. Sometimes I wondered if my stillbirth the next spring was because of what Pasan and I did. “Tell me more about your grandmother and the shore-dwelling woman. Will you? I’d like to hear it.”

  “I know that Gytyn the shore-woman had a beautiful voice, like the wind coming down off the cliffs—hard and strong. It almost blew my grandmother back out to sea. She fought against it and found Gytyn teaching her daughter how to catch fish. Something had happened and Gytyn had lost her village—or they lost her—so it was just Gytyn and the girl. My grandmother spent the summer with them, nursing her own child and sending it out to sea to learn how to swim. The two mothers became lovers. Then winter came and they parted, and that was that: winter separated them like it does the water from the sky.”

  I sigh.

  Gytyn, sitting up, with her skin-wrapped infant in her lap, smiles at me and places a mittened hand on mine. “Will you tell me about yourself and the journey you are on?”

  I tell her everything—and she tells me more about her grandmother and the shore-woman, how they sang shore-songs and seal-songs together, how her grandmother brought clams to the rocks and tasted a stew different to the one the seal-people make.

  It’s only because someone starts shouting from the shore that we stop our stories.

  Oruguaq is standing by the sled, looking ready to go.

  “It was a fairly bad taboo, then,” I say. There’s no sign of the seal-men.

  “They think so.” Gytyn shrugs. “My pup will not be harmed by your presence, any more than my grandmother’s was by spending the spring and summer with Gytyn. That pup is now one of the adult males, and he should know better.”

  “You’ll be all right? They won’t be angry?”

  “They will forget when mating comes around.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I will be fine,” Gytyn says, smiling. “They are a small part of my life. Go. Come back, one day, later in the summer, and I will introduce you to my daughters, who are all called Gytyn, although maybe this one will be Kegulan, if you would like that?”

  “Yes. That would be....” I stumble again. “I’ll come back.”

  At this rate, I’ll have to retrace all my steps. Oh well. Oruguaq will have to cope. I press my face to Gytyn’s and breathe in her scent: salt and warmth and milk. Then I return to shore.

  Oruguaq and I leave the seal-people’s village in silence, until after about an hour of walking she smacks me on my head and tells me that the men never want to see us again.

  “The women do,” I retort.

  “Hmm!”

  Two days later, still following the jagged line of the groaning coast, we set up the tent and Oruguaq gets out the book and says that now I’ll learn how to really help her.

  There’s a strong wind gusting all around our tent, roaring like a giant bear. There’s the sea, cracking and creaking and groaning, like it’s alive. Maybe it is. More importantly, I wonder how I’m going to hear a word Oruguaq says.

  “First, you need to learn how to bind new pages into the book.” Somehow I don’t have any trouble at all hearing her. It’s like her mouth is against my ear. “I’ve already tanned the pages and dried out sinew to sew them with, so you can get started straight away on sewing. You need to be careful. I’d tell you to do it like you’re making clothes for a ceremony, but I know your family hasn’t had ceremonies in a long time.”

  Even after my family tried to kill me, I hate how she talks about them like they’re ridiculous. She should try having that illness on her. If she’s given herself the duty of recording the stories of all the peoples in the taiga and the other endless places, shouldn’t she respect them all a bit more?

  “I can sew carefully,” I say. “Just show me where to do it.”

  So she holds open the book at the back and directs me to sew several thin hides against it. I pull the book closer to me, thread the stiff but pliable sinew on her needle, and start sewing.

  Once I’ve done it, Oruguaq goes, “Hmm!”

  “Good enough for you?”

  “I’m glad you’re going to be useful. But you can’t write, so give the book back to me.”

  She gets a fox-hide bag and opens it, revealing little transparent containers of black dye.

  “This is ink. I make it from all sorts of things. That’s one of the things you’ll learn how to do later. But for now, watch.”

  I do. The fox-hide bag also contains a long narrow piece of wood with a pointed tip, which Oruguaq dips into the container and draws across the page in her writing-signs like a water-skater across a stream. The ink has a strange smell and I breathe it in, entranced. I watch every mark as it’s formed: all sharp points and gentle swirls and dots above and below the signs.

  Then Oruguaq draws a seal-man discarding his skin, with his long dark human hair a-tangle.

  I won’t argue with Oruguaq if she tells me I’m not allowed to do the drawings—it’d take me at least forty years to get that good—but I’d like to write.

  “Tell me what you’ve written,” I say.

  “I’ve written about how we found them lying about in their seal-skins on the beach with their tents in disarray, how they fixed the tents for us, how they told me, while you were off breaking a taboo, that they’re getting bored of their human-skins and want to spend all their time as seals now. I’ve recorded some of their seal-skin stories: fighting over the females, mating, eating.”

  “The most boring stories I’ve ever had to sit through,” I mutter, and to my surprise Oruguaq laughs.

  “You broke a taboo talking to that woman.”

  I snort. “Even you care about that?”

  “I care about being made welcome.” She’s smiling at me, warm as a summer morning. It’s unsettling. “This is why I like to have an assistant. It is far easier for a person to break un-necessary taboos like that one if there is someone else to apologize for them and blame their youth. When you get old we’ll have to blame that, but for now you’re just young-looking enough that we can blame residual silliness. I think those dolls must be good for your skin.” She taps her own wrinkled face. “Too late for me, I think.”<
br />
  “Huh.” I’m twenty-five; closer to death than birth. At least, I should be. Oruguaq seems to keep her assistants going for far longer than the taiga normally permits.

  “Keep talking to the people who get ignored,” she says. “And now tell me, what stories did your woman tell?”

  “She’s called Gytyn.”

  I can already tell from the size of the book—it’s big, it’s still playing tricks on my eyes, but it’s definitely finite—that we can’t record every single story we hear, but I tell her everything Gytyn told me about her grandmother and the shore-woman. I’ve never been good at turning stories into the kind of art you want to hang on your ear and hear forever. I feel stupid when I tell stories—I can think them prettily, then when I open my mouth it’s just woodpecker tapping that comes out—but it’s good to tell this one.

  There’s nothing Oruguaq says to make me think she’s disgusted by the story. Maybe it is normal for a woman to love another woman. Maybe it’s much better that I’ve become Oruguaq’s assistant than I first thought.

  I think of Tamke, who might spend the rest of her life unhappy. Might not. Might.

  Life’s varied in ways I can’t count. Satisfaction, too.

  “I like that story,” Oruguaq says, and turns to the other side of the page to write it there. She draws the two women together, holding hands, bare-breasted like it’s the middle of summer. They’re smiling. Happy. Their children play on the seal-skin. Then Oruguaq writes.

  * * *

  “This is what it is to be my assistant,” Oruguaq says in the night, when we’re wrapped tight in furs around the fire, eating the stew I made with some caught fish. “Lots of walking. Pulling the sled. Cooking. I saved you from being eaten and I’m old and a long time ago I brought the sun into the world, so you owe me your whole life’s worth of work.”

  I can’t argue with most of that, but technically it’s Tamke who saved me from being eaten.

  “And you’ll get to add stories to this book that maybe no one else cares about, but we do. We remember them. If you get a bit better at storytelling, maybe you can help me tell these stories to some of the people we meet, the ones who do care; keep the stories alive in more and more places.”