Ivory and Bone (17 page)

T
he room itself seems to suck in a breath.

“And who is plotting to murder me?” Chev rocks forward, moving so close to Shava that only a small sliver of light separates the silhouettes of their shadowed faces.

“Lo—the High Elder of the Bosha clan.”

You are the first to react. “Lo?” you ask. “How could it be Lo? Her father is High Elder—”

“Lo’s father is dead.”

A note fills the
air, a chorus of gasps.

“That’s not possible,” I say. “Just yesterday, she was on her way to see her father. She said she had to help him—”

“Lies,” Shava whispers, as if Lo might somehow hear her, or have spies listening in.

Spies . . .

“But why? Why pretend her father is alive if he’s dead? What does any of this have to do with murder?” My tone is
beyond skeptical—it’s accusatory. I lean
over the spot where Shava sits. Am I hoping to intimidate her? Behind me, my mother opens a vent in the roof, letting in a shaft of light, but my shadow paints the floor like a stripe of night, keeping Shava cloaked in violet darkness.

“Everything is by design,” she answers. “We didn’t land on your shore and then discover Chev here. We knew Chev was here, so we came to your shore. Lo wants to
manipulate perceptions. She creates elaborate secrets—secrets she claims are to protect the clan. It’s a clan secret that her father has died—that
anyone
has died. The truth, she says, would expose our weaknesses.”

Shava looks up at Kesh and he smiles and nods. Her eyes move to mine and then quickly dart away. I can feel the suspicion fixed on my face. I do not believe her, and I’m certain it
shows.

She looks down and curls inward, but her mother takes her hand.

Clearing her throat, Shava’s mother glances from face to face with a sharp light in her eye. When it sweeps over me, from my furrowed brow to my tightly drawn lips, I feel indicted by that light. “My daughter’s story is true,” she says. “Lo wants to give the impression that those who remained have thrived since Chev left,
but that’s a lie. They have struggled. Lo blames Chev for taking the best hunters, for taking the Spirits of the game when he left. My family—my
grandmother, my mother, me and my daughter—we are all storytellers. We keep the stories of the clan. When we first returned, my mother taught Shava and me all the old stories—stories of abandonment by Chev and his family, about the Spirits following Chev
south, Spirits of the herd animals—mammoth and bison. We learned all the stories of struggle, suffering, and death—”

“Lo shares the old stories whenever she can,” Shava interrupts. “But her plans for the future . . . Lo won’t share those with the elders. Instead, she plots in secret. She quietly converts her followers—her believers—many of whom were so young when Chev left, they hardly remember
him. Lo’s lies have become their truth. Those who listen to her have been suffering a long time, and hunger has made them vulnerable.

“She works with Orn, who is full of cunning and charisma. He is training to become a healer, and he reads signs from the Divine that support what Lo says. Those who are desperate for something to believe in have put their faith in them.

“She intends to take back
the bounty of the clan. She is making a plan to repay death with death.”

“But the elders of your own clan,” my father starts. “Why haven’t you gone to them?”

“I have!” Shava says. “They nod and agree. They say they have counseled her against violence. They underestimate
her, and she lulls them into a false sense of control.

“The elders advocate for a change—for a return to the use of kayaks
and a camp by the sea. Generations have fulfilled the promise of Bosha’s husband to live off the herds, and the elders have come to believe that the Divine has a new plan for us now. They have asked Lo to settle by the water, to construct more kayaks to use for hunting and fishing.

“Lo has happily constructed new kayaks. Kayaks can be used to fish, but they can also be used to spy. Even to attack.
But the elders are satisfied that they are getting their way.

“And so Lo has announced a scouting trip, to search for a suitable bay. The elders are to leave today. They will go feeling victorious, believing they have influenced her, and Lo will have them out of her way.

“Eight of the ten will go. Two of them—a cousin of Vosk and her husband—are loyal to Lo. They will stay behind, ‘in case they
are needed in camp.’ With the help of these two elders, Lo has all the support she needs. Ten clan members have vowed to help her, in whatever action she takes.

“She confided all of this to me yesterday, after we learned that Chev and his family were here with your clan. She didn’t say what she would do, but she said she would act soon.

“When I went to get my mother, I tried to warn the elders,
but Lo had already called a formal meeting of the
council, to prepare for their trip. I was terrified to see how quickly she was moving.

“Lo is taking steps. For so long, her plan was nothing but words, but now it is becoming action.”

None of this makes sense. I study Shava, huddled on the ground beside her mother. Is all this for attention? Is this a scheme to get Shava noticed? “These are
strong accusations—” I say, but my own father cuts me off.

“These are strong accusations indeed,” he echoes, but his hand catches hold of my upper arm and draws me back. My shadow slides away, and light cuts across the floor where Shava sits, propped against her mother’s shoulder. “Accusations shouldn’t be made lightly,” my father continues, “but if they’re true, Chev has a right to hear them.”

Chev gets to his feet, rubs his hands over his face, and sits back down. “You say you are a storyteller,” he starts, addressing Shava’s mother. “You are Gita’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“How many years ago did you leave our clan to marry?”

“Twenty-three years ago.”

“Before I was born,” says Chev. “That’s why I have no memory of you. But your mother, Gita. I grew up listening to her. She is a gifted
keeper of stories—”

“She was. She died before the spring came—”

“I am so sorry to hear that.” Chev gets to his feet again, looks around as if seeking a place to go, and runs both palms
across his head. I notice a frailty in him that I’ve never seen before. He sits again. “I’m sorry to hear that death came to my old clan, my old family. Can you tell me how many have died?”

“Since you left for
the south, ten have died—”

“Ten,” you repeat, your voice a hushed whisper. Your hand flies up to your mouth and you drop your eyes.

“We left thirty-seven behind,” Chev says.

“And they are twenty-seven now.”

Chev slumps forward, his face in his hands. I try to think how many of the Manu have died in five years. Tram’s father and mother, a cousin of my father’s . . . three.

Ten deaths in five
years. It’s hard to imagine so many burials.

“You say death also came for Lo’s father, Vosk. We may have been enemies at the end, but he was once my father’s close friend. Would you tell me the story of how he died?”

Shava’s mother nods. “Yes,” she says. “I will tell you. Shava will help me. Shava?”

Without further instruction, perhaps acting out a process she has followed with her mother many
times before, Shava stands and closes the vents my mother just opened. “You can’t depend on outer light to see,” Shava says, her hands trembling with nerves, but her voice smooth with an incongruent wisdom. “You must each see the scenes unfold with your inner eyes, illuminated by inner light. Sit. Rest your
hands in your lap. Close your eyes.”

I glance around. My father sits without hesitating.
My mother settles beside him, but it’s impossible to tell whether she is showing trust in Shava or her own husband.

Beneath my left foot, a round stone, no more than a pebble, pokes into the thin sole of my summer boots, and I roll it side to side distractedly as I consider Shava’s mother, Fi. A stout but solid woman, like the stump of a once-tall tree, her face is lined by a multitude of thin
creases that form stars around each eye—the eyes of a woman who has spent long stretches of time squinting in concentration. She was a storyteller for our clan before she and Shava left. I remember many evenings when her words carried me away.

And now she has promised to tell a tale of Lo’s clan. Curiosity overcomes hesitancy, and I sit.

I close my eyes. Everyone is seated; everyone is silent.
An impatient wind ripples the hide behind my back and rattles in the vent flap, scolding, taunting. The wind moves on, replaced by a deep stillness. Quiet wraps around me like the walls of a cave. Into this space a voice intrudes, the voice of Shava’s mother.

It was winter—the kind of cold dark winter that coats everything in the same pale gray—clouds, water, ice, sky. Haze hung like a drape
across the heavens, and behind this drape the Divine hid her face, unwilling to give her warmth to the world.

It was during this hard gray time, two years ago, that the Bosha
clan appeared at the far northern edge of the meadow. The last light of day was burning out when they appeared, and as the sun dropped hastily behind the ridges of the western hills, their elders descended the slope toward
this camp—dark shadows, purple and blue in the gathering dusk, like a line of ants marching with an unknown purpose. Kol and Pek, the first to see them, called to their father, who in turn called his elders.

All the elders gathered in the meeting place to greet the visitors—each with one hand open and one hand holding a spear.

I remember this visit by the Bosha, of course—Lo and I talked about
it just yesterday—but the voice of the storyteller, the quiet darkness, even the fragments of words that are carried by the wind into this space from outside bring the whole experience to life inside me, as if I am facing those elders again. Their gaunt faces lined by hunger, the sunken eyes of a woman who trembled relentlessly, no matter how close she sat to the fire in the hearth. Shava rushing,
carrying out mammoth meat that she’d prepared the day before. I remember the reluctance with which they had accepted it, and then, once accepted, the ferociousness with which they’d eaten.

Lo’s father, Vosk, told of his clan’s travels, of their hike to the edge of the Great Ice on a long and fruitless search for bison or mammoth. The elders of both clans sat in the meeting place under a sky black
as soot and talked about hunting and herds and hunger. Hunger, Vosk believed, was a challenge from the Divine, a test of
patience to pursue the game given to our ancestors for food when the earth was new. He had no faith in a settled life, a camp by the water that took food from both the land and the sea. It showed no faith in the old ways, the sacred ways ordained by the Divine through our ancient
ancestor, Bosha. Lo’s father, like Lo, watched constantly for signs, for messages from the Divine. Here in our camp, he believed he found one, in the form of my daughter, Shava.

Vosk was rejuvenated by the meat Shava had prepared. It was the first fresh meat any of them had eaten in a long time. He recognized me and realized Shava was a daughter of his own clan. When he learned my husband—our
tie to the Manu—had died, he was convinced that it was the Divine’s will that we should rejoin them. This meat, brought to him by Shava’s hands, was the omen he was looking for.

That night, our family camped with the Bosha clan, and in the morning, we departed. Vosk believed that Spirits of the game—of bison and mammoths—were calling the clan westward.

We ranged farther and farther west in search
of the herds. The game was scarce—a few thin caribou sparsely scattered across frozen, unyielding ground—and as we moved away from the sea, we had no fish and few birds to hold us over between kills.

Lo’s father was certain that the answer was to move faster across the open land toward the mountains in the far west. He believed that was where the mammoths would be found. Everyone worked to build
overland sleds that we could drag to move more quickly. To make the sleds, we sacrificed tent poles and hides, as nights on the
plains grew ever longer and ever colder. Every day we covered great stretches of ground, growing weak with exhaustion and hunger. Still, we followed our High Elder. We pushed farther and farther west. Beneath our feet, the rough gray soil became smooth gray ice.

After
days spent descending into a broad, unbroken valley that rolled unending to the horizon, the ice broke up. We traveled across islands of smoke-gray ice that floated in a shallow sea, indistinguishable from the bone-gray sky.

We waded with wet and frozen feet, taking turns pulling one another on sleds that floated like small boats. Lo’s father carried Lo on his shoulders, insisting we press on,
until we came to a place where the ground became nothing more than isolated points of ice—islands the size of footprints surrounded by wide pools and streams of water.

There was nowhere to camp. No dry land would support a tent. Seeing no choice, the elders of the clan announced that we would turn back.

This was a moment of both relief and horror. Who wouldn’t want to turn back rather than walk
steadfastly into the rising sea? But there was no food behind us, and we knew it. No fish swam in the sterile meltwaters. Unless we came upon some seabirds soon, people would begin to succumb.

Just then, Lo called out. From her perch atop her father’s shoulders, she said she could see a mammoth. He was out in the water farther west, and she was determined to make the kill. Before he could stop
her, she climbed down from her father’s shoulders and,
clutching her spear, she half ran, half swam into the deeper water.

Of course, her father pursued her. By the time he managed to get to her, she was dropping out of sight beneath the surface, her dark head rising and falling like a bird on the water, floating and diving, floating and diving.

But he saved her. He reached her, carried her
back, got her to the safety of a warm pelt in a sled that bobbed upon the sea like a makeshift kayak.