Broken Rock Bay (Clan of the Ice Mountains Book 3) Read online

  Farnook asked the rest of the Nukeena men a question. More exchanges took place among them before two other hunters took a step forward, standing in the light of the torches, their faces solemn.

  “This one lost his cousin,” Farnook said, pointing to a young man who was doing his best to stand on very wobbly legs. Attu knew he had only awoken at mid sun that day. It had taken all his strength to walk to the beach to see his cousin’s body taken care of in the proper manner. “He will ride in the canoe, but Cray will paddle for him,” Farnook added.

  “This one lost his sutowna, his ‘heart brother.’” Farnook pointed to an older man standing rigid in the torchlight, his face a mask of light and shadow, flickering with the flames in the wind. Two tracks of tears flowed freely down his stony face.

  One by one the Nuvik hunters walked to each of the Nukeena hunters on the beach, embracing them all, but also striking the backs of those who had suffered the most personal loss. Attu could see the other Nukeena hunters struggling to keep their faces still, their eyes free of tears. When they’d finished, the four Nukeena men moved down the beach to ready their least-damaged canoe. Attu, Ubantu, and several other Nuvik hunters went with them to help.

  Slowly, the men of the Nukeena Clan paddled their great canoe toward the log boat. But instead of securing their canoe to the log boat, the Nukeena stepped from the canoe, pulling it up to shore once again.

  Attu turned as several women popped their lips. The other Nukeena were coming down the beach. They were naked, each carrying his clothing in front of him, rolled and fastened with some sort of colored rope. One by one, those who could walk and carry their own clothing stepped up and placed it on the already overflowing log boat. Two Nukeena were carrying the healer, Dran, still unconscious but now also naked. They laid him on the sand.

  As Attu and the others watched, fascinated, Soantek, Cray, and the two other men from the canoe took off their meager clothes, rolled them, and added them to the pile.

  I forgot to ask Yural to have the women begin making the Nukeena new clothing. Attu watched the men, wondering just what this ritual meant.

  We will start first thing tomorrow, Rika mind spoke to him. Perhaps even later tonight.

  Attu looked to where Rika and the other women were standing, trying to keep their eyes averted from the Nukeena men. Some appeared to be trying harder than others...

  Attu felt the beginning of a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, but stopped himself and forced his face into its most serious expression. What I’m seeing here is no joking matter to these men, and as Clan leader, I must be careful to honor them, even when what they do makes me feel uncomfortable. Others are watching me.

  Attu glanced at his mother. Yural gave him a look of approval.

  Soantek pulled a long rope from the canoe. It was also brightly colored, matching the rope the men had tied around their clothing, but much thicker. He tied the rope first to the log boat, then to the Nukeenas’ canoe. The other Nukeena stood back as the three paddlers climbed into their boat. The fourth young hunter, the one who’d had difficulty standing, held a lighted torch. The men moved out into the bay. Attu could not tell if their weakness made them slow, or the large log boat the Nukeena were pulling slowed them, or if this was all part of the ritual. They stood for a long time, watching the men paddle to the center of the bay. True night had fallen by the time the paddlers reached it.

  Nuvik women held the few young children in their arms, standing by their hunters. Attu stood with his family, clustered and watching, his hand firmly in Rika’s. The quiet waves of the calm bay lapped the shoreline, and the trees whispered as if they, too, knew this was a solemn event.

  Meavu glanced at him, nodding and motioning around her as if to say, “See, Brother? All of Nuvikuan-na is watching, waiting, a part of this ritual, a part of it all.” She turned away and nestled into Rovek’s chest, gathering warmth from her man in the chill of the evening.

  In the center of the dark water, Attu watched as the young hunter handed the torch to someone standing at the back of the boat; Attu assumed it was Soantek. They’d maneuvered alongside the log boat, and Soantek touched it with the burning torch he was carrying. A flare of yellow light rose in the air, and Soantek and the other paddlers pulled away from the now burning bodies as quickly as their paddles would move them. Towering flames and sparks rose from the boat as both Attu’s Clan and the Nukeena hunters watched in silence.

  “I’m glad for the distance from the sight of burning bodies,” Rovek whispered to Attu.

  “How long do we stand here?” one of the other hunters asked.

  “Until the flames and boat are no more,” Yural said as if the answer to that question was as clear as the night sky and the stars lighting its edges where the flames of the dead could not drown them out.

  The Nukeena men held up their sacred objects toward the burning boat, and each of them was whispering intently, the same words, but not together. “Ohwoot, ohwoot, nadowna, Shyrise, Shyrise, ai.”

  What are they saying? Attu mind spoke his question to Farnook. Not something, but yes something? Ohwoot is what Shool kept repeating when we found him hiding among the rocks.

  “Ohwoot means spirit, bad spirit, I think,” Farnook said aloud. “It might be like our people who have died. If they don’t have the correct rituals performed for them, they can’t become proper spirits of the Between.”

  Attu studied Farnook for a moment, considering. She still seemed to dislike mind speaking, even though her Gifts were very strong. He deferred to her choice, however, and spoke aloud. “That would make sense. Shool was calling us ohwoots when he saw us. He must have thought he was dead and trapped in the Here and Now, or was someplace strange in the Between where he wasn’t supposed to be and we were bad spirits. No wonder he was terrified and tried to bite me.”

  “But what is Shyrise?” Meavu asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  I will have many questions for Farnook to ask these men. Tomorrow.

  Yes. We all have much to understand from this night, Farnook replied into his thoughts. She added, Give me time, Attu. Remember, I worked to hide my Gifts from the Ravens for many, many moons. I thought mind speaking would get me killed like the rest of my Clan.

  Attu felt his own mind slipping into the dangerous territory of Farnook’s Gifts, her disappearance, Meavu’s disappearance, and the Ravens’ reasons for taking each of the two Nuviks, but he yanked his mind back before he reached the word ‘sacrifice.’ Farnook needs to know the truth. But not now. She is facing enough right now.

  Attu focused himself firmly on the burning boat, concentrating on the plume of smoke rising up into the night sky. He could feel Farnook looking at him, but he didn’t even glance in her direction again.

  The scent of burning pine and another smell, like burning nuknuk, that Attu tried to ignore floated across the bay and into their camp. The Nukeena men seemed pleased with this, and several sat, stopping their chanting and sitting silently on the shore, eyes riveted on the burning boat as Soantek and the other Nukeena hunters in the large canoe guarded the pyre from a safe distance.

  Attu was surprised when just a short while later, the flames suddenly went out as a great curl of hissing steam rose from the place where the boat had just been. Darkness rushed into the space the flames had left. Only a few burning embers on the separated logs lingered in the otherwise black water, and overhead the stars glowed brightly once again.

  Attu remembered that night on the Expanse when Yupik had clung to the back of the ice bear, screaming and stabbing at it one moment, then disappearing into a hole in the ice the next. The ice had moved back moments later, closing them in a watery grave, and leaving this same stillness and darkness behind.

  Attu shivered as his spirit rose within him. “Attuanin, these were brave hunters of the Nukeena Clan.” Attu found his voice rising, mingling with the steam still floating up into the sky from the bay and the light of the few logs on the water, their tops aglow.
His hands lifted of their own accord and now he was calling out. “I speak for them. Please take them into your Clan if they desire it, and make them mighty hunters of the deep. Or, if Shyrise means another good fate for them in the Between of death, and it is in your power to grant it, I ask on their behalf that you lead them to that place.”

  Attu thumped his chest and dropped his gaze to the sand at his feet. Around him, he heard the chest thumping of his hunters. The women raised the ululation cry, and after watching them for a moment, the Nukeena hunters joined in, thumping their chests and crying out as well.

  Attu saw relief on everyone’s faces, Nuvik and especially Nukeena, as if they’d finally found a way to express their grief strongly enough. The Nukeena men stood, thumping and crying out with Attu’s own people, and Attu felt as if his very spirit soared in those cries. They continued shouting out for what seemed a long time. Then, as if some supernatural signal had been given by the spirits, everyone stopped shouting and listened as their cries echoed back to them across the bay, touching the wall of trees behind them, bouncing back from the rocks to the north. One call, one last echoed cry, moved across the bay before fading away into the darkness of the Nuvikuan night. Then all was silence.

  Chapter 9

  Attu saw Keanu standing on a large flat rock in the middle of a river, the water tumbling around her, sprays occasionally hitting her bare feet and wetting her lower legs just below the fringe of her tunic. Her arms were lifted and her eyes closed. Sunlight streamed through green trees to her right and caught strands of loose hair around her temples, making the edges of her face seem to sparkle.

  “We are close,” she said, and as she spoke, she opened her eyes and stared straight at him, her eyes like two burning fires. “Two days upriver. We are coming.”

  Keanu turned away.

  “Wait!” Attu cried. “Don’t go. Suka and the others, have they reached you yet?”

  Keanu didn’t respond. She stood, her back to Attu, now standing near the edge of the rock, facing upstream. She took a step. And another.

  “Don’t!” Attu called out. It was too dangerous to step into the water on that side of the rock. Keanu would be bashed back against it with the strength of the current. She might even be dragged under and trapped. He tried to reach out for her, to grab her and pull her back, but his arms wouldn’t move.

  Keanu leaped forward, but as she jumped, she did not fall into the roaring river. Instead, Keanu changed. Her arms became wings, her tunic dark feathers, and she rose up into the air and flew.

  Attu gasped. He felt his spirit tearing at his body, like an animal pierced with a spear but not dead, trapped and desperate to escape. He would fly with Keanu. He had to fly with Keanu. He was on the rock. And he felt himself taking one step forward, then another.

  “No!” Keanu cried.

  Or was it the bird, calling out over the rock escarpment rising on the other side of the river?

  He heard her voice, desperate above the rush of the water around the rocks. “Remain in your body, Attu. You must remain! I shouldn’t have tried again, but I knew you’d be worried.”

  Attu felt himself resisting the pull of his own spirit, Keanu’s fear for him strengthening him. He fought to stay one with this spirit as it tore at his flesh, working to break away from him, to be free. It had to be free...

  “Attu! Attu!”

  Attu awoke, drenched in sweat. Rika was holding him, shaking him.

  “What happened?” Rika asked. “I dreamed your spirit was leaving your body, and when I awoke, I knew it was true. You were clawing at your stomach, and your eyes...” She covered her own eyes for a moment in the light of dawn filtering into their shelter. “Your eyes were rolled back in your head. You were dying, Attu. I could feel it. What was that all about? What is happening to you?” She threw herself on him, grasping him as tightly as she could, pulling him to herself. He could feel her violent trembling, as if she’d just been rescued from freezing water after falling into a hole in the Expanse.

  Attu held Rika and breathed, working to slow his pounding heart and spinning thoughts. What just happened? Where did dream end and the reality of the Here and Now begin? Would my spirit have fled my body to fly in the dream? Could I have gone Between forever? Keanu seemed to think so, and she is the only person who can See through animals. And become one with them – at least in the dream, that’s what she did.

  Attu sat up, Rika still clinging to him.

  It was sun high the next day, and Attu was working with a few of the Nukeena hunters and his own, repairing the Nukeena’s canoes. One of the three canoes was badly damaged, and the Nukeena were fitting new pieces of wood into it.

  More of the dark iron stone appeared, pulled from the wrecked canoe: long thin pieces of it, sharpened to points on one end and flat on the other. The way the Nukeena handled the iron stone, it was obvious to the Nuvik hunters they also considered it valuable.

  “Oh, nadowna,” Rovek said as one of the Nukeena bent a long piece as he removed it from the side of the canoe.

  “Tonutcha,” the man said, and laid it aside with the others.

  Attu watched and listened, trying to understand both the Nukeena’s language and how their boats were built. He helped when a heavy board was removed and placed on the sand. The Nukeena hunters had not been working long, but they were already tiring. One stumbled, trying to carry another heavy board by himself. Cray held out his arms, taking the board from the man, who sat, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and drank from his skin flask.

  Attu noticed the flask had a colorful rope wrapped around it, just like the rope the Nukeena had wrapped around their clothing the night before.

  I wonder what the ropes mean. He moved to speak with Soantek, but Farnook was approaching.

  “You look more rested today,” Attu said as Farnook reached his side.

  “I thought you might need–”

  Cray had stepped up and now spoke to Farnook. “He is saying he thanks you for the help, but his men need to rest now,” she relayed to Attu.

  “They do,” Attu said. “They are still very weak and shouldn’t be doing heavy work yet.” He motioned to where the Nukeena hunter still sat in the sand, looking dazed. “I see the Nukeena are all dressed again, at least decently, if not completely. Soantek is wearing my old hide pants, I believe.”

  “The women decided to give away their hunter’s extra clothing so the Nukeena hunters didn’t have to walk around naked any longer than necessary,” Farnook said as she watched Attu eyeing the men. “They didn’t seem to mind wearing nothing; in fact, I think some of them thought it was funny we wanted to redress them so quickly, and a few seemed to be flaunting themselves around the campfire this morning.” Farnook reddened as she spoke, but continued. “I told them it’s not our way, and they accepted the clothing.”

  Cray was following Attu’s eyes as he looked around at the Nukeena men wearing Nuvik men’s hide pants, which were too short on them. Most were still bare-chested. Cray said something to Farnook, who blushed furiously and looked away. He chuckled, but his tone grew serious again as he added something else.

  “Cray says he needs to speak with you. He wants us to go to their fire,” Farnook said.

  “What does he want?” Attu asked.

  “Cray was made Clan leader after the Ravens attacked their settlement,” Farnook said. “He wants to talk about what his men should do once they have fully recovered.”

  “Good, I have a few questions I want you to ask him.”

  Farnook frowned at him. “I’m not asking him again about–”

  “Different questions this time, I promise.” He grinned at her, but she scowled and looked away.

  The three walked to the Nukeena’s fire. Cray sat near the embers. He gazed out over the water at the waves rolling into the bay. It was a bright, warm day, and Attu stood beside him admiring the view of the perfect blue sky, a few puffy clouds floating here and there, a mild wind from the northwest pushing them along. Long wav
es stretched across the bay, moving in the deeper blue of the glistening water, reflecting the sky. A good day for seal hunting.

  “Sit, Attu,” Cray said, and motioned to a place across from him.

  So you are working to learn our tongue as well. Good.

  Attu smiled at Cray. “Ai,” he said before asking Farnook, “How do you say ‘thank you’ in Nukeena?”

  “Fuva,” Farnook said. “It means thank you, but it also means, ‘I have eaten today, or I am full and don’t need any food.’ Caanti used to tease me when I tried to use the word, for she said I was never given enough food to be full.” Farnook looked away for a moment before forcing herself to smile at Attu again. “If she could see me eat now...” And her smile became genuine as she crinkled her eyes almost shut, grinning at both Cray and Attu and touching her rounding abdomen. “Oh, and it is also a greeting. Two people cross paths, and the first says, ‘Fuva nooshi?’ The words in our tongue would mean, ‘Have you eaten today?’ But to the Nukeena, it means, ‘How are you?’”

  “And fuva is the answer?” Attu took the seat Cray had offered. The man was listening to their conversation, nodding his head in encouragement to Attu. He rattled off a few words to Farnook. Attu thought he caught a few, like ‘nadowna,’ but couldn’t tell what the man was saying. Farnook put up her hand, and Cray understood this meant ‘talk slower.’ He repeated his words again, slowly and louder as if explaining something to a very young child.

  Farnook laughed and said, “Ai.”

  “What?” Attu asked.

  “Cray says if the day is a good one, the Nukeena say ‘Fuva.’ But if they are having a difficult day for whatever reason, they say, ‘Nadowna fuva owani nosha,’ which from what I can gather means something like, ‘I’m hungry because once again, no game has consented to jump into my family’s cooking skins.’”

  Attu slapped his thigh as he laughed. “Tell him this is a common problem among the Nuviks. The game often leaps right over our cooking skins as well.”