Ivory and Bone (11 page)

I catch myself. I was about to say that I do like you. I was about to say that if circumstances were different, I might actually like you very much.

Water sloshes in my boots as we reach the clearing—I wasn’t dressed for wading. My pant
legs are soaked through with ice water from the knees down.

We catch up with you in time to see you drag Lees into a hut, without a word of thanks or even a glance back.

I turn toward the hut where I’ve been sleeping—your hut—and I remember waking to find you there. I’d been naive enough to assume that you were worried about me—that you were there out of concern instead of duty.

But in so many
ways, you’ve shown me your true feelings. The return of the pelt I’d sent you as a gift. Your ungracious behavior now that Roon and Lees are safe.

It couldn’t be more obvious that you have no concern for me at all.

Which is fitting, since after today, I have none for you.

A
terrible evening fades into a terrible night. Despite the softness of the pelts I lie on, enough salt water splashed on the cuts on my back to cause them to ache and throb. For a long time I toss restlessly, and just when I resign myself to lie awake all night I fall asleep and become lost in a nightmare.

In the dream I’m running up and down the bank of a river, pursued by a cat I
never see, one that casts a shadow three times the size of the one I killed. I run and run, but I can’t escape it—it’s always right over my shoulder. Finally, I feel its hot breath on my neck and I turn and throw my spear with all my strength.

But as I turn, I find that the cat is not there. Instead, I’ve struck you with the spear; it juts out at me from a gaping wound just below your collarbone.
Your eyes dim, and you crumple at my feet. I turn in place, calling for anyone to
come help me try to save you. But when I bend to pull out the spear, it isn’t you lying in a pool of blood. It’s the mammoth, the one that haunts me, still staring at me with that look of defeat, still silently beckoning me to throw myself into the dark hole that opens up in its eye.

When I wake in the daylight,
the back of my neck drenched in sweat, I thank the Divine that the final night in your camp is behind me.

My family emerges from our borrowed huts before the morning meal, but Chev meets us with a basket loaded with dried berries—many I’ve never seen before—as well as several parcels of salmon, cooked and wrapped to be eaten on the journey.

No one else greets us from your family. Only your brother
and the oarsmen who will row us back to our own camp are outside, as the covered meeting space buzzes with quiet preparation. The rest of your camp is silent and still.

Pek carries my bag to spare my back as we head down the trail to the beach, and following this path this morning fills me with an echo of the fear I felt last night. Roon runs ahead of me. Even this morning he overflows with a
sense of adventure. It’s odd, I think, how the thing you love most in a person can also be the thing you sometimes wish you could change.

The path seems to have doubled in length while we slept. I don’t remember passing under so many trees before
reaching the water. The soil underfoot becomes sandy and the trees more scraggly. Just as we come to the spot where the trees give way to shrubs and
grass, I hear a voice calling my name. I turn, but I see no one.

I hesitate. Last night’s nightmare is still too clear in my mind, I think. My senses are tricking me. Scanning the trail just once, I turn again to follow my family, who have all gone ahead of me and are probably loading the boats, wondering where I am.

I emerge from the trees and suck in a breath; the strip of rocky beach looks
so different in the daylight. Even low in the sky at our backs, the rising sun has burned away the horrors of mist and shadow that were so perfectly illuminated by the setting sun last night. The briny scent in the air is a welcome sign that we are heading home and I can leave the bad memories I’ve made in your camp behind.

I’m within just a few steps of the rocks when I hear it again—a voice
calling my name.

I turn, and this time the source is clear. This is not a voice from my nightmare, but the voice of your youngest sister, Lees. She runs hard down the trail from camp, waving her arms to catch my attention.

When she reaches me, she stops and looks into my face with the expression I’d seen at last night’s meal—the expression I’d mistaken for innocence. I know better now. It’s
far from innocence. It’s more an expression of cunning.

“Did you run all the way here to say good-bye?” I ask.

“To say good-bye, yes, but also to say I’m sorry. I caused a lot of trouble last night—”

“You did—”

“But I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry for everything.”

Just then, Roon calls her name from the water, but when we both turn, we see Kesh grab him by the arm. They are already seated in
a boat and I can see Kesh isn’t risking any wild behavior from Roon. Maybe Lees and Roon had hoped for a more personal farewell—perhaps even an embrace—but they’ll have to make do with a vigorous wave.

“Kol!” my mother calls. “Everyone’s set to go.”

“Good-bye, Lees. Try to stay out of trouble,” I say. She smiles that cunning smile and I begin to turn away.

But before I can turn, she grabs me
by the shoulder. I’m caught off guard, and I spin my head around to face her. As I do, she pushes up on her toes and presses a soft kiss against my cheek.

I step back. “Was that a thank-you for helping you last night?”

“No,” she says. She lowers her voice, as if she is about to bestow upon me some rare secret. “That wasn’t from me; it was from her.” She turns and looks up the trail and right
there—right at the place where the last trees cast a blanket of morning shade—you stand.

You raise your arm and wave. Such a small gesture, but
the simple movement of your hand fans a flame inside me that I’ve tried again and again to smother out.

Without thinking, I raise my hand and wave back. I want to jog up the trail and speak to you, but I’m not sure what I want to say.

“Kol!” Now it’s
the voice of my father. “What’s wrong?”

“Be safe,” your little sister says, “and come back soon.”

I want to ask Lees if this message, like the kiss, was sent by you, but my father calls my name one more time, so I turn and hurry to the water’s edge. Wading out to where the water reaches my knees and my feet ooze into the silt of low tide, I climb into the long canoe and we are off.

When I look
back over the beach, Lees still stands waving, but you are gone.

As soon as we push into your bay, we head out beyond the pull of the tide to deeper, calmer water. From here, the coast is a long swath of green—an unbroken line of trees soaring above rocky gray cliffs. At places, the cliffs tower high over the sea and at others, they bend so close to meet it that they are no longer cliffs at all,
but low bluffs that wrap around cozy inlets.

We move farther north, and the wind grows cooler as the trees grow thinner. Here, the rocky shore is interrupted by frozen waterfalls that plunge to the edge of the sea. These rivers of ice run down from the ice-covered peaks of the
coastal mountains. They are as cold as they are beautiful, but still my heart warms as they come into sight. We’ve reached
a boundary, a sort of gateway to the north. I’m reminded of the moment on my hike south on the inland trail when I realized the mountains were all at once behind me, holding back the north wind, protecting the south from the chill that blows constantly down over the Great Ice.

Out here on the water, I know those mountains aren’t far. Soon, the north wind will blow hard against my face again.
Soon, the trees on the shoreline will disappear. Already they’ve diminished to a broken line of scrubby, tangled patches where there is still sufficient shelter to the north. Just ahead the line of land bends west. When we reach that bend, the mountains, still white bumps against the sky that could pass as low clouds, will rise up to welcome us.

My mother sits in front of me. She turns and smiles.
“You look hungry,” she says, misreading only slightly the look of longing she sees on my face. She unwraps slabs of fish and passes them to me, my father, and the two oarsmen who wordlessly paddle this boat—one at the head and one at the rear.

Out on the water ahead of us, my brother Pek leads our group in the kayak he used to come to your camp, while another oarsman from your clan paddles from
the rear seat. Pek had argued that he could handle the boat by himself, but considering the distance, it was decided the presence of
an extra paddler made more sense than my prideful brother paddling alone with the second seat empty. Behind us, a second canoe similar to this one but a bit smaller in size—a boat I suspect may be the exact canoe Roon and Lees took out last night—carries Roon and
Kesh as well as two more oarsmen from your clan. Roon is almost finished with his piece of fish—that boy is always hungry.

I pivot in my seat again, turning my back to the shore and facing west, allowing myself a long moment to look out at the horizon—ever constant despite the changing coastline. I linger over a few deep breaths, reveling in the familiar scent of the sea and the whisper of the
paddles as they cut the surface. So familiar . . . I let my eyes close and I almost feel that I’m home. I open them again and imagine that the sea beside me is the sea that stretches from our bay.

It’s then that I notice them—distant shadows moving across the gray sea.

Boats.

Far away toward the line that separates surface from sky they glide along, hardly more distinct than the shadows of
seabirds or the breaks in waves, but yet distinct enough. Three in all: I can make out the point at the front of each boat, cutting through the spray, and the rhythm of the strokes that propel them forward almost in time with us. Almost, but not quite in time. A beat or so slower, they gradually fall behind. I turn in my seat to watch them recede, wondering
what clan might have boats out on these
waters—halfway between your camp and mine. Could it be that Chev sent rowers to follow us to ensure our safety? It seems unlikely, considering five of his clansmen are escorting us home.

Could these be the spies Chev wondered about, on the morning Roon discovered the clan on our western shore? I remember your brother’s speculation as you hurried to leave our camp.

By the time they disappear,
I suspect, as Chev did, that these were not spies but something else—Spirits sent by the Divine—perhaps to aid or even impede us. Not knowing which, and not wanting to cause a stir, I keep my thoughts to myself and say nothing. Before long, my eyes tiring from the sight of water rolling out in every direction, I decide they were never there at all, but rode the waves only in my mind.

The sun
slides west and the wind picks up. Other than these small signs, everything suggests that time has stopped. Surrounded by circles—the circle of the paddles, the circle of the waves—I wonder if the day itself has closed into a circle, an endless loop rather than a line leading to an end.

But then the coast turns westward and the trees that have lined the land for most of the day abruptly stop.
The snowcapped peaks of the eastern mountains seem to spring from out of nowhere, and my father calls out and stretches his
arms in front of him as if to embrace them.

We’ve made it home.

On the other side of those peaks are the meltwater streams, the wildflower fields, and the windswept grasses. The paddles quicken and we pick up speed, pulling closer and closer to shore. We round the point
that juts out over the sea at the foot of the tallest peaks, and we are officially in our bay. Nothing—not fatigue, not my throbbing wounds, not the prickly memory of the Spirit paddlers I’d seen along the way—can diminish the joy I feel at the sight of our land.

Yet once the boats have landed—once I’m climbing out of the canoe, stretching the cramps out of my legs—I notice something feels off.
At this time of day I would expect to find Aunt Ama’s family fishing or gathering shellfish, but no one is out on the water or on the shore. It’s still, far more still than it should be. Gulls circle overhead, their squawks calling attention to the otherwise complete quiet. I drag my heavy feet up the steep bank to dry land, following close behind Pek. I think he and I both spot it at the same
time—something out of place on our familiar strip of rocks and sand—a kayak.

Of course, there’s nothing strange about a kayak, but this boat is not one that I recognize. It lies on its side, displaying a hull that is longer and more narrow than the hulls of the
boats my aunt’s family constructs. The sides are deeper, the bottom flatter.

This boat was not built by anyone I know.

This boat brought
strangers to our shore.

M
y mother does not appear to notice anything out of place—she’s too distracted by her social obligations to the oarsmen.

“The midday meal has already been eaten, I’m sure,” she says, stumbling out of the canoe, not willing to wait for someone to help her. She must be as anxious as I am to feel our own land under her feet again. “But come with me. I’ll make sure that you are well fed
and rested before you return home.” My brothers and I drag the boats up and ground them on the rocks not far from the strange kayak. As we do, Roon lets out a yelp.

“This boat! I’ve seen this boat before!” Standing on our beach now, with the sun high in its arc overhead, Roon points to a thin wisp of smoke rising from the far western edge of our bay. Before I can ask him what he’s thinking, he
dashes up the trail and disappears from my view.

Pek throws me a glance full of caution and questions before hurrying after Roon.

Kesh shrugs. “And I thought the adventure was over.”

As we climb the trail behind Roon and Pek, music reaches my ears. A drumbeat and a voice. “The song of friendship,” says Kesh. I recognize the voice of the singer—my father’s brother, Reeth, one of the elders of
the clan.

We reach the circle of huts and there she is—the person who brought the boat. Sitting on the ground in the center of the gathering place, directly beside my uncle and his wife, is a girl with a long braid on either side of her face, her dark, deep-set eyes presiding over round cheeks and a wide smile. Hers is a face I know well—a face I grew up with.

This is Shava, the very same girl
who once cooked every kill my brother Pek brought in.

She had wanted to be betrothed to my brother, but he had convinced our parents to decline. “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Pek had said when my parents had pressed him. “Can’t I like her for a friend, but not for a wife?”

Two years ago, my parents agreed not to force the matter. I think they would have changed their minds by now, if she
and her mother hadn’t left the Manu. But when her mother’s native clan—the Bosha—passed through our land two years ago, they rejoined them.

So the Bosha must be the clan camping on our western shore.

My eyes scan the group. Kesh and Roon stand at the edge of the meeting place with my parents and the oarsmen, listening to the song, but Pek is nowhere to be seen.

Though it was just a little over
two years ago that I last saw Shava, it feels like a different lifetime. Back before fear about the lack of females in our clan really took root, when we still had intermittent contact with other clans. Back before the sight of smoke rising from camps to the west or north disappeared completely.

But even then, panic over the lack of prospective wives for me and my three younger brothers didn’t
develop overnight. Two years ago I was fifteen—old enough to marry but certainly not old enough to worry. The clans that crossed our path were more transient than we were, and my father and mother frequently mentioned that they suspected they had followed herds to the west or even inland, far to the east, along the southern edge of the Great Ice. Still, everyone spoke with confidence about the coming
day when another clan—one with many young women—would camp nearby.

A clan would arrive in the summer, when the days got longer. That was my mother’s constant refrain. When summer was half over without a sign of anyone, my father said that the fall would bring a wandering clan to our bay, where the fishing was easy. Fish helped feed a clan into the winter when hunting got more difficult and the
game harder to
find. Even once the harbor froze over, fishing was still possible, especially from a bay like ours, bordered by points that extended beyond the ice to the open sea. Of course a clan would come—maybe more than one.

Then fall came, then winter, then spring, then summer again. When a year had passed since we’d seen signs of another clan, worry began to grow. Like a vine, it sprang
up and sent out shoots into every part of my clan. It sprouted in the thoughts of my mother and father, its tendrils binding all of us so that the more the worry grew the more it restricted us. We stopped talking about the other clans. We stopped planning for one to arrive. Only Roon, when he was just eleven years old, was bold enough to face down the fear. He would take off and search, wandering
the shoreline, looking for any sign. After two years of no contact from outside, my clan hadn’t given up all hope, but it was close.

As hope faded and fear grew, the prospect of a move south became the focus of our elders’ plans. And then you arrived, and everyone believed we were saved. All our fears were banished when Chev came to shore with a beautiful boat and two beautiful sisters.

Your
arrival was so captivating to all of us—so amazing and wonderful—that when another clan finally camped nearby, no one except Roon even cared.

But this afternoon, finding the strange kayak on the beach and Shava sitting in the center of my camp, knowing
everything I’ve come to know about you and your clan and the impossibility that betrothals could ever take place—the arrival of another clan is
very welcome indeed.

The friendship song comes to a halt as our clanspeople rush over to welcome us home. Shava springs to her feet as my extended family peppers me with questions about what I’ve been through. It seems the oarsmen who came to camp two days ago to bring my family south told the tale of the cat I had killed and—outside my family’s hearing—shared a gruesome description of my injuries.
Everyone wants me to take off my parka and show my wounds.

My mother asks for volunteers to help her prepare a midday meal for my family and the oarsmen, and Shava is quick to offer help. My mother thanks her and gives her a warm embrace.

Of course she does. Now that she knows of Seeri’s betrothal, she could only believe the Divine herself sent Shava back to our shores.

As soon as Shava disappears
through the door to the kitchen, Pek emerges from my family’s hut. He must have been staying out of sight.

I turn to him and smirk. “Shava’s helping in the kitchen. It’s like she never left.”

“That’s not funny,” he says.

“Maybe you should give her another chance. She likes you and she’s available. Don’t take that for granted. At least
she isn’t betrothed to her brother’s best friend—”

I barely
get the words out when Pek shoves me with both hands, sending me staggering backward.

“Calm down. I only meant that you shouldn’t rule her out—”

“Shut up.” Pek doesn’t even bother to pick up the two packs he carried up from the boats. He leaves them at my feet, right where he must have dropped them the moment he saw Shava. He strides away, retreating back into our family’s hut.

I consider following
him, but decide against it. Instead, I head into the kitchen to help with the meal, hoping that keeping busy will make it easier to clear my head.

The atmosphere of the kitchen is calming, and I slowly get my thoughts ordered again. I feel less of the sting of Chev’s rude behavior in your camp yesterday, and I begin to let go of the fury I’ve felt ever since you marched your little sister into
your camp without a good night or even a glance in my direction. Focusing helps me let go, and as I chop fireweed stems and combine them with nettle leaves, even the chatter of Shava as she asks my mother an endless stream of questions about Pek doesn’t bother me.

The only threat to my sense of peace is the constant interruption by my younger brothers. First they come in to tell me that Shava
came to our camp in the strange kayak with another girl—apparently the same girl who Roon met
while she gathered kelp in the bay with her brother. Then they come back to tell me a second kayak has landed on our beach, carrying the brother and another girl. They come back a third time to tell me this new girl, who introduced herself as the daughter of the Bosha’s High Elder, is the prettiest girl
they have ever seen.

“Next to Mya,” Kesh says.

I glance up, to see if this comment was made only to provoke me. After all, Kesh expressed his dislike for you just last night. But I can see he’s being sincere. Apparently, a bad temper and ungracious behavior have no impact on Kesh’s assessment of a girl’s beauty.

“Well, I’ve never seen a girl prettier than Mya’s sister. Lees is the prettiest
girl out of all of them.”

I smile at the affection in Roon’s words, remembering the kiss Lees gave me this morning . . . the last time I saw you, standing in the shadows farther up the trail . . .

“Kol, run and fetch me your honey,” my mother says from the place where she sits behind me, spreading the steamed and chopped roots of clover on a mat. “I’m going to mix a bit in with this to add a
little sweetness to the meal.”

“Is Pek in your hut? Can I come with you?” Clearly, Shava hasn’t gained any subtlety since she left our clan.

“No, thanks,” I say, but she gets up anyway. “I can get it myself. My mother could surely use you more in here. . . .” These last words I let trail over my shoulder in Shava’s
direction as I push my way through the partly opened door out into the daylight.

As I do, my eyes fall on the face of a beautiful girl. The second most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life.

It turns out Kesh was right.