Ivory and Bone(13)

Still, I can’t quite drag myself away, and I duck into the shadows between two huts as your brother and Pek wish each other a restful night. I hear your sister offer a brief but sweet word of thanks to Pek for a lovely day. Then Pek walks right past me, under such a spell he doesn’t even notice I am here.

Once Pek is gone, I can’t help but notice the voice of your brother, Chev. His words are muffled, but if I didn’t know better I would think he was scolding Seeri, but that can’t be right. I assume he must be chastising you for staying away from the meal. After a murmured response, I hear a question quite clearly. It’s your sister’s voice, and she asks what you and I were talking about just now.

I know better than to listen in on other people’s conversations, and the answer you give your sister is the punishment I deserve for doing something I know is wrong.

“He came to offer me a gift—a pouch of honey he’d collected.”

“That’s so generous—” Seeri starts, her voice lilting and light. I can tell she’s happy for you. But you cut her off.

“I refused it. At home I can gather my own honey. I won’t let some stranger think he can buy me with his.”

I stalk back to our hut, each breath laboring against a heavy knot of anger that presses down on my chest, your mocking words thrumming in my head. To push the sound of your voice from my mind, I hum the tune to the love song I just heard my brother Pek sing.

I know my parents are hoping this visit leads to a new friendship between our two clans. Silently, I thank the Divine for Pek and Seeri.





SIX


I wake in the dark to Pek shaking my shoulders. I had been dreaming, and though the dream fades quickly, a haze of dread colors my thoughts—it must have been a nightmare.

“Come on,” Pek says, clearly irritated. With Pek, a bad mood is unusual, but after yesterday, it’s all but impossible. What could have happened? Behind Pek I notice Kesh is already dressed and pulling on his boots. A gust of wind rattles in the vent overhead, and the shrill sound, like the laugh of an angry Spirit, chills me. “This is the second time I’ve tried to wake you. Mother wants us all down in the kitchen to help this morning.”

“She needs all of us to help with the morning meal?” I sit up and notice the pouch of honey where I’d dropped it on the floor last night. I push it out of sight, not wanting to be reminded of what I’d heard you say.

The last thing I feel like doing right now is getting up and preparing food for you.

“They’re leaving. Chev got up early and went down to put their things into their boat. Aunt Ama was at the shore checking her nets and spoke with him. Mother was already in the kitchen and she came straight to the hut and woke Father and me.”

I let this story sink in. No one had ever told me how long you and your siblings were staying, but there was a definite sense you would be with us for a while, certainly more than a night. We’d put up a hut. We’d butchered a mammoth. This couldn’t have been part of your plans yesterday. Something changed.

Could this all be your doing? Could it be that you’ve convinced your brother that there is nothing here worth staying for?

“Mother wants us all in the kitchen. She’s determined to send them home with at least half of the mammoth meat, so it needs to be divided and wrapped.”

“Fine.”

Good riddance to you and your haughty disdain, I think, but any satisfaction I get from your early departure dissolves once I see my mother’s face. The light that glowed in her eyes as she handed out mats piled high with her cooking last night is all but gone today. She sits on the floor in the center of the kitchen, a circle of tools and ingredients spread around her. She reaches for a sharp stone blade made from obsidian brought back from an expedition to the far north—her favorite cutting tool by far—but then sets it down again distractedly. Her hand moves to a bowl made of woven stalks of slough sedge, filled to the brim with bits of crab meat mixed with lupine roots gathered from the meadow. On a flat stone she’s been cutting wild carrots dug from a tidal marsh a half day’s walk from here. This was meant to be a meal that would rival the one she’d served last night.

Instead, she slides all these things aside and calls on Roon to help her move a large flat stone—a slab of rock split from an outcropping that broke into smooth, even layers when it was dug out from the hill. I remember my father presenting this stone to her—he had carried it on his own shoulders from the hill where it was quarried, knowing that she would find it perfect for cooking and cutting. An arm’s length wide and two arm’s lengths long, it holds most of the mammoth meat that was butchered last night. It’s not all of it, of course—only about a third of the mammoth has been cut from the bone—but my mother is determined to send half of what we have with you.

She gets to her feet and hands out large, supple sheets of tightly stitched walrus gut. “I’ll divide the meat into evenly sized portions. Each of you take a piece, wrap it tight, and tie it with a length of cord. I don’t want it to dry out before they get it home.”

Father’s voice comes from outside the door, followed by Chev’s. If my father feels insulted by your sudden departure, he’s much better at disguising it than my mother is. “Of course; we insist,” he says.

Chev ducks his head to step through the doorway into the dim tent. His eyes sweep over the scene, stopping on the piles of mammoth meat on the cutting stone. “You are being far too generous. There’s no need to send us with any provisions. By boat, it won’t take much more than half the day to reach our own shores.”