Ivory and Bone(78)

The huts stand like half-dressed skeletons against the bright blue sky. Some are stripped of hides completely, leaving only the frame of bare mammoth bones hunched over like bending backs. Others have holes ripped open, gaping like fresh wounds—a gap in a wall or a roof torn away. I find my mother and father with several other elders in the gathering place, studying hides scattered on the ground, deciding which should be used and which should be rejected. I notice a pile of sealskin pelts beneath my mother’s hands. These are her own, tanned for her as a gift from Pek. Her plan was to stitch them together, to make a luxurious blanket for her bed.

She looks up, her eyes hazy with thought, but when she sees me the haze clears and she jumps to her feet. Then she’s hugging me, kissing my cheek, while at the same time repeating my name over and over, scolding me for leaving without letting anyone know.

“Pek knew,” I say.

“Pek doesn’t count. You need to tell someone with sense.”

My father comes up and lays a hand on my shoulder. Turning toward him, I catch a glimpse of something in his eyes, something I’ve rarely seen there—the fading shadow of fear. His hand clamps down tight and the shadow fades, so swiftly it’s almost easy to believe it was never there at all, but his other hand clasps me on the opposite shoulder and I am sure.

What had they thought when Pek told them I had headed south, alone in a small boat in that storm? All at once it rushes back to me—my confusion on the water, my soaked and freezing clothes, how close I was to death when Mya found me.

Tears spring to my eyes. I draw my father into an awkward embrace to hide my face from him.

“I want to help,” I say when I feel collected enough to speak. “With the huts. I want to help—”

“You need to rest,” my mother says, not letting me get the words out. “Look at your ankle. This wound on your arm. What happened to you? What happened . . .” She trails off. Is she afraid to know the answer?

“Chev was injured,” I say. I know I need to tell them everything, but I also know I don’t have the strength or the will to tell them everything now. “He survived. He’s healing. But Lo . . .” I look down, draw in a deep breath, then look back at their expectant faces. The words stick in the back of my throat. I have to spit them through my lips. “Lo died. It was an accident. She drowned.”

The light in my mother’s eyes dims. She shoots a fleeting glance at my father. “And the others? From the Olen?” She doesn’t have to ask—I know what’s on her mind. Lo’s goal was to kill Chev’s whole family. She wants to know if she had any success before she died.

“There were many injuries,” I say, remembering the horror of the scene under the canopy, “but everyone from the Olen clan survived.”

My mother’s eyes brighten, and the tension at the corners of her mouth softens. “Pek will be so relieved to know Seeri is all right.”

I learn that both Pek and Kesh are in our family’s hut. Urar has dressed their wounds with cool wraps and offered up countless prayers and chants, but their burns are extensive and healing will be slow. “Seeing you safe will help their pain,” my mother says. Her words send a shiver of dread through me, and I hurry to find them.

When I duck under the charred pelt that forms the door I find Urar sitting on the floor, chanting softly, his voice barely above a whisper. My brothers Pek and Kesh are both in bed, both apparently sleeping. A tangle of scents hangs in the room—the sweetness of mead mixing with a heavy, darker odor, like mud from the bottom of a pond. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I couldn’t hear you from outside.”

Urar flinches at the intrusion, but then a small sound, not more than a gasp, escapes his lips and he gets to his feet. He holds me at arm’s length; his brow, wet with sweat, furrows as he squints through the dim light at the long cut that runs along my forearm. “Rest,” he says. “That is first. Later, when you wake, I will treat that with oil and herbs.”

“Yes,” I say. He hesitates, perhaps waiting for me to follow his direction and lie on my bed, but I stand still, nodding in agreement, not wanting to hobble and let him see that my ankle is splinted. Finally, he nods in reply and squeezes my hands. With a hint of a smile—something quite rare from Urar—he ducks out through the door.

I collapse onto my bed, but it’s not the bed I had before the fire. The thick stack of pelts and hides I’ve always slept between has been thinned considerably, as have the other stacks of pelts that form the beds around the room. Patches of dirt, once hidden completely by soft rugs, peek through the hides that remain on the floor, scattered about in an artful effort to cover as much of the ground as possible.

How many pelts were destroyed in the fire? The hides and furs that filled this hut were the reward of many lives spent hunting—my life, my parents’ lives, my grandparents’ lives. How long will it take to rebuild what was destroyed?

Stretching out, I unwrap my ankle and discard the unnecessary splint. Restlessness grips me. I’m up on my feet, pacing, trying to get used to the changes in the hut, to the overwhelming strangeness I feel in this place where I once felt at home.

Home . . . it’s a word I don’t understand anymore. I don’t feel right in this hut. It floods me with longing for a time that will never come back. A time when I still felt trust—trust in neighboring clans, trust even in strangers.