Ivory and Bone(83)

THIRTY-THREE


I am alone in my family’s hut, dressing to do something I do not want to do.

My mother stands at the door. She tells me everyone else is leaving. It’s time to go. I tell her not to wait. I’ll come on my own. Soon, I promise.

“I won’t leave without you,” she calls through the door.

I step outside, barefoot, still tying my pants at the waist. “Just go,” I say. “I promise I won’t be long.”

My mother raises her hand to shield her eyes from the sun as she looks at me, and the lines at the corners of her lips deepen. She will wait. My mother has had to wait for so many things. For the bay to thaw. For the herds to return. For the first kill of the spring.

For the Divine to provide wives for her sons.

I should not test her patience now. I drop my head and step back into the hut. I have no choice. This task will not go away. I lace up my boots, pull the elk-hide tunic over my head, and join my mother outside, where the sun is reluctantly climbing out of the eastern sky.

A two-man kayak waits for us on the beach. The rest of our party is far out on the bay. The wind is in our faces, slowing us, and by the time we land on the western shore, the sun is directly overhead.

It’s time.

A girl approaches, helping my mother alight from the boat. She is familiar to me; I’ve seen her in this very spot. The day I hiked the overland trail with Lo, she met us right here on the beach.

This is Anki, the sister of Orn.

She glances over at me, and I can’t quite read the emotion on her face. Does she know that I am her brother’s killer? She can’t possibly. If she did, I doubt she would look at me at all.

“Mya was asking for you,” she says. “She was on the beach earlier, looking for you.”

I hear voices. Up ahead, on a ridge above the Bosha’s camp, a crowd is gathered around two open graves.

Chev stands at the head of the circle of mourners. I try to imagine the conflict he must feel today—reunited with his old clan, but at such a great cost. Beside him stands a man dressed in black bearskin—the Bosha’s healer. He begins a chant, asking the Divine to pull back the hides that drape the doors of her land, to open wide the entrance to receive Lo and Orn.

Something inside me flinches. I swallow, and hot anger burns down my throat.

As the chanting continues, two drummers beat a rhythm that rolls out from this ledge, vibrating out over the sea. From behind me, a dancer emerges. He wears a broad mask made of twigs and vines, bent and twisted into the face of a mammoth.

A wide mammoth hide is spread at the bottom of each grave, and in the center of each one rests one of the dead. Orn is dressed in a hunting parka, a spear clutched in his hand. I can’t help but notice the details of this spear—a thick bone staff hafted with sinew to a black flint point. It is identical to the one that broke off in Chev’s chest.

Lo is also dressed in hunting clothes, but her hands are empty. Around her neck, she wears the bone pendant, the symbol of her status in the clan.

Up close, I can see how thoroughly both bodies have been rubbed with red ocher—face, hair, clothing—it coats them like the blood that coats a baby as it emerges from the womb.

The dancer completes circle upon circle upon circle around the graves, as the sun slides slowly into the west. All the while I feel Mya’s presence. I want to look up, but I can’t. Sweat trickles down my back, yet I shiver with cold. Beneath my feet, I notice the shifting of my shadow, bending toward the east, toward home. Still, the drums play on and on, the music rising, carrying the Spirits up, bearing them to the Land Above the Sky.

Finally, the last note is struck. I turn quickly, striding off into the meadow to the east, not wanting to speak to anyone.

Voices die away, until only the sounds of the meadow remain—the thrumming of insects, the whisper of the wind. I lie down, surrounded by tall grass and clusters of tiny blue flowers.

I try to listen for bees. Eventually, I hear footsteps. Someone lies down beside me. I don’t have to look. I’ve been in the dark with her enough to know her by the cadence of her walk, the sound of her exhaled breath. . . .

She slides her hand over and wraps my fingers in hers. I don’t pull away. Warmth floods through me, like it did that first time in the cave, the night she saved my life.

We lie still for a long time. “You were right,” Mya says after a protracted silence. “Summer has returned. This parka is too heavy for this day.”

“It’s also too big for you,” I say. “Why do you wear it?”

“It belonged to my mother.”

And just like that, one of the many mysteries of Mya is solved.

We fall silent again, content to listen. Eventually, I hear it—the whir of wings. She does too. We both sit up. Without a word or even a glance, we focus on the bee. We both climb to our feet and follow him.

He joins another, then another. They move with purpose, following their secret pathways over a sea of blue and violet blooms. After following them for so long I’m convinced we’ve gotten confused and will never find the hive, we discover it in a grove of withered spruce, tucked beneath a ledge beside the sea.

I slide down onto the ground in the scant shade of the trees, staring out over the water. Mya sits facing me, her back to the sea. Before I can shift my gaze, she lifts her hand to my face.

I turn to her, and I’m startled to see her cheeks damp with tears. I wipe them away, and she kisses me.