Song of the River by Sue Harrison

Author:Sue Harrison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical Fiction, Native American
ISBN: 9781480411944
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2013-04-22T21:43:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-seven

THE BERING SEA

DURING THE FIRST DAYS of their journey, Aqamdax wondered whether she would have agreed to come had she known the cold and fear and hunger she would face. Her chigdax kept her dry, but even with a warm sax underneath, the cold that rose from the sea found its way into her bones until even her teeth ached.

Before they left the First Men Village, He Sings showed Sok how to enlarge his iqyax hatch so both he and Aqamdax could sit inside, back to back. At least Sok’s body blocked some of the wind, and his back, pressed against her own, gave warmth.

The waves were worse than the cold. They thrust from the sea, huge under the iqyax, sometimes so large that Aqamdax could not see the other men, and it seemed that she and Sok lived alone in a world of water, without the hope of land. She did not allow herself to consider the thinness of the iqyax walls, and she blocked out stories she knew of sea animals rising from the depths to bite holes in iqyan.

On the second day, she found that the men did not eat before they left the beaches in the morning. Perhaps they would take a mouthful of dried fish, and always they drank water, but that was all until they beached their iqyan each night. Aqamdax did the same, though by the end of each day her belly ached with hunger.

The Walrus traders chanted as they paddled, and sometimes Sok’s brother sang River People songs, yet the words, sounding strange and without sense, brought her only despair. How would she live with a people she could not understand?

Her skin peeled and cracked, leaving her face and hands sore and red. Sok gave her goose grease to use as salve, but the salt water ate through grease and skin until she had bleeding sores on her lips, in the corners of her eyes and at the edges of her nostrils.

As the days passed and her terror lessened, she found herself mourning for her village, her own people, and for the sound of words she could understand. Then one morning as she woke to the shaking dread that preceded each day, a voice came to her as though Qung were speaking.

It was a scolding voice, grandmother to child. “You are storyteller, yet you waste your days in regret. The songs of your husband’s brother come to you as he paddles his iqyax, yet you do not hear them. Now is the time to learn words. How will you be storyteller among the River People if you do not speak their language? Do you expect them to learn yours?”

Then, after Aqamdax packed away their caribouskin tent, and bundled her feet into the warm hare fur socks that her husband had given her the second day of their trip, as she pulled on her chigdax, she grabbed a piece of dried fish and held it up. She told Sok the First Men

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