Chapter One

Fish In A Net

 

Sobel’s hands grew sticky as she and the other girls pulled dried strips of salmon down from the racks. The smell of smoke and fish sweetened the air, but there was a musky undercurrent in the village. It was five days since the Reindeer herders had come to the village, bringing the excitement of news from the western lands along with trade goods.

“How many is that?” Telpina asked.

Sobel turned to count the baskets onthe floor. “Seven.”

“That’s good, then.” The older girl hoisted one of the baskets against her hip, the woven grass shifting to conform to the curve of her body. Sobel lifted a second basket and Telpina’s two younger sisters held one between them. Only Sobel’s baby sister, Lili, was too small to carry anything. She toddled behind, begging a strip of fish to suck on. Sobel watched Telpina’s youngest sister give Lili her treat and felt the too familiar thought in her mind: Ksala should be here. But Ksala was gone with the spring ice on the river. The river would freeze again, but her sister would not return to help Sobel with the baskets or with Lili. The others began to chant a counting song, and Sobel hitched her basket up a little higher. With or without Ksala, she was still the oldest. She had responsibilities.

The girls carried the baskets along the wide path through the center of the summer village, passing between the elevated summer houses. Above the roofs a few wisps of smoke rose into a clear sky, echoing the light clouds which hung around the peak of the high mountain behind the village. Its upper slopes were dusted white; the end of summer and the return to the winter village were imminent. A raven watched them from a nearby tree, dark amongst foliage newly tinged with yellow-orange, but Sobel was used to ignoring the black birds. She kept her eye on Lili instead.

As they approached the northern end of the village, Telpina’s sisters set their basket down for a rest and the little caravan came to a temporary halt. “No dawdling,” Telpina said with a meaningful look at her middle sister. Seizin was prone to wandering off with her own thoughts. “Come on.” The path led down to the river ford, where the visiting Reindeer herders had made their camp, dragging saplings over the field to make a small corral. With fourteen summers’ experience, the novelty of the visiting animals no longer excited Sobel, but several of the younger children had gathered at the edge of the fence to watch the restless herd. She recognized her brother among them.

As Sobel shifted her basket again, she heard stifled laughter from between the pilings of the nearest house. Then there was a net, floating down over their heads. A group of boys surrounded the girls as the salmon-scented strands settled on their heads.

Their leader, one of Sobel’s cousins, set his foot on the edge of the net so they couldn’t lift it to escape.

“Oh no,” Telpina said. “We’re trapped!” The net caught the beaded circlet in her hair as she turned her head towards Sobel. “Whatever shall we do?” Telpina’s sisters began to giggle, ducking their heads to avoid the looks from the boys while Lili looked at them in confusion. Three were from the village, but the fourth was a stranger: a Reindeer boy.

“Let us go, Amskalin,” Sobel said. “We’re supposed to take the fish down to the Reindeer.”

“Let them catch their own fish,” her cousin said with a grin. “We caught you, fair and square.”

“Why would you want us?” Sobel asked. “We’re just little fish.”

Telpina held up her arm. “Very skinny, see? Hardly worth eating.” Amskalin reached through the net to pinch her, and Telpina squealed. The boys laughed and Sobel smiled too, warming to the game. She let her basket slide down her hip to the ground and crossed her arms.

“Big brave fishermen like you, you would be ashamed to bring home small fish.”
Amskalin shrugged. “We’ll use you for bait to catch a bigger fish. Or just for a snack. We’re hungry, that’s why we’re fishing.”

The other boys nodded. “Hungry!” the Reindeer boy echoed. The word did not come properly formed from his tongue; his accent sent a snicker around the little group and Sobel looked at him. The Salmon boys wore long tunics, but the Reindeer had an open jacket. It was decorated at the hems with a pattern of horizontal stripes rather than the concentric circles that her people used. When he laughed his cheeks were so round that it seemed clamshells had replaced the bones beneath his smooth brown skin. He did not yet have the shadow of a mustache that had recently appeared on Amskalin’s upper lip.

“Can we buy our freedom?” Telpina asked. “We can give you a little something if you let us go. A piece of fish.”

The boys shook their heads, the Reindeer joining in a beat late.

“What else have you got?”

The girls exchanged a look. The net shifted and snagged on the beads in their hair as they moved. “What else does a fish have to offer?” Telpina said.

“Unless you want fish kisses from fish lips.” Sobel said. She sucked her cheeks between her teeth to contort her lips. Behind her, Telpina’s sisters giggled.

The boys consulted momentarily, then Amskalin said, “We’ll each choose our price. Reindeer first.” They pushed the foreigner towards the girls.

Sobel pulled out a strip of salmon and held it out, extending her hand through one of the openings in the net. “Which do you want? Fish or kiss? Kiss or fish?”

The Reindeer boy looked at her. His eyes narrowed as he concentrated on the movements of her mouth, trying to follow her words. “Kiss,” one of the Salmon boys said in an overloud whisper. “Say ‘kiss.’”

“Kiss,” Amskalin said encouragingly. Sobel glanced at him, but her cousin was looking at Telpina.

“Kiss,” Reindeer said. He stepped forward and Sobel pulled the salmon strip away instinctively. He came closer and she surprised them both by leaning in to kiss him. The boy was too startled to respond, but neither did he pull away. His lips were dry; the strands of the net pressed between their faces smelled of salt and the sea.

The other boys began to snicker, and the Reindeer boy recovered enough to grab the salmon from her hand while Amskalin darted in to kiss Telpina. Then the boys ran away.
Telpina stooped to lift the net and Sobel bent down, too, glad for the distraction from her hot face and wildly beating heart. The strands of the net caught on the tassels of their dresses and pulled the beaded circlets from their heads. Lili’s beads fell into the grass and she began to cry. It was the first year that she was old enough to wear them for the fall festival, and she was proud of the new decoration. Sobel helped her put them back on and untangled the long strands that hung down beside her face. Telpina and her sisters piled the net on the side of the path.

On the steps of the next house sat an old woman. She’d been watching their game as she worried an old jacket apart into its component pieces. “You were good fishes,” she called.

Sobel straightened the beads in her own hair. “Amskalin’s fishing for you,” she said to Telpina. Her friend gasped and swatted indignantly at Sobel while her sisters snickered. Sobel sidestepped her hand and picked up the fish basket again. “As if you hadn’t kissed him already,” she said over her shoulder.

At the corral a Reindeer rider took the fish baskets from the girls and stowed them away in a sledge. Another Reindeer man tallied the baskets with an abacus of stained wooden beads while men from the village looked through the traders’ wares. In return for the fish, the people of the Salmon village bartered for reindeer meat and a plethora of goods from far places.

Sobel’s father waved his daughters over to one of the sledges and held up a blanket, striped blue and brown. “How would you like this for your bed?” he asked Sobel. “It’s made of yak fur.”

“What’s a yak?”

“An animal,” said one of the Reindeer men. “Like a cow.”

The Salmon girls looked at him without understanding.

“Like a reindeer,” he said, “but with long hair and a wide body like a bear. They have horns instead of antlers.” He held up two fingers by his head to demonstrate. “The Horse tribes keep them the way we keep reindeer.”

Sobel reached out to touch the blanket, feeling the texture of the nubby strands. It was softer than the cotton cloth the Reindeer brought from the west, warmer on her fingers than the smoothness of worked leather, or slithery silk from the Black Powder People to the south. Lili laid her round cheek against the blanket and began to pet it as if it were a puppy.

“Do you like it?” the Reindeer man asked. He pulled a red blanket from the sledge, and a length of blue cotton fabric. Sobel wanted to see the cloth, but Lili had caught sight of the trays of bright glass beads. The ornaments the girls wore in their hair were mostly made of shell and bone; a few glass beads were a prize for any girl in the village. Sobel’s father let them each pick out two beads, and two more for their mother. Telpina and her sisters crowded around the trays, exclaiming over the bright colors, but their parents were both working by the river. They would have to wait.

The girls ferried the rest of the baskets to the Reindeer area without incident, and Sobel found her brother in the little crowd by the corral. Chonin was muddy and contrite, and she quickly learned from the other children that he’d slipped and fallen during a dash to try and touch one of the skittish animals. Nothing was injured but his pride, but one of the Reindeer men came to shoo all the children away from the animals. The village dogs, tied up to keep them away from the deer, began to howl as Sobel dragged her brother down to the river to rinse away the muck.

“What if you got kicked in the head? You’d break Mama’s heart all over again,” Sobel said as she pulled his outer layers off.

But Chonin wasn’t listening. “Look,” he said, pointing over her shoulder. “The mountain’s smoking.”

“It’s the mountain spirit making clouds,” Sobel said without looking.

“Big cloud,” said Lili.

“Then maybe it will rain tonight,” Sobel said, feeling disappointed. Rain would mean the dancing and singing would be squished inside the bigger houses, close and hot. She’d rather be outdoors where there was room to breathe.

She handed Chonin’s overshirt back to him, fully intending to make him clean it up himself, when the men working at the weir downstream began to shout in alarm. On the riverbank, women cleaning fish straightened and hands pointed toward the mountain. Sobel turned around and saw the cloud hanging over the steep slopes of the mountain. It was not the white steam that sometimes leaked from the mountain’s sharp peak, nor was it a rain cloud. It was shaped like a massive jellyfish, with long tentacles of heavy gray dragging down to the mountain’s peak.

The ground quivered beneath their feet, and the world cracked apart. Sobel met Chonin’s eyes, wide with surprise, and knew she must have an identical look on her own face. She pulled Lili and Chonin close while the earth rippled. On the banks of the river, the tree tops swayed without wind, but the water below flowed as smoothly as always, the surface broken only by the thrashing of the salmon. A flock of ravens ascended from the trees, their form echoing the black cloud in the sky, and Sobel’s heart turned over in her breast.
“Mama,” Lili wailed.

Sobel sank to her knees on the heaving earth, pulling her siblings with her. “Mama will be here soon.” She clung to them for long seconds, not daring to look up and see if the ravens were still there, if the riverbank was breaking apart the way the ice had beneath Ksala. But the tremor subsided. The ground did not fall away and the trees did not drop their heavy limbs onto the cowering people beneath. Only a single golden leaf descended in gentle arcs, landing next to Sobel’s foot.

“Look at the ravens,” Chonin said. She followed his gaze and saw the birds settling down onto the river bank. Sobel let out the breath she’d been holding. If Chonin saw the ravens, then they were of the middle world, as ordinary as the dead salmon lying on the gravel beside them.

Sobel’s mother ran up the river bank to her children. As she inspected them for damage, silvered scales transferred from her skin to theirs, for she had been gutting salmon with the other women. On her back, her second son, still an infant, slept quietly. He was unaware of the drama around him and even Lili’s crying did not wake him. “Hush now. Mama’s here,” she said, stroking her youngest daughter’s hair. To Sobel she said, “Go home. Check on your grandmother, then look to see if anything fell or broke in our house.”

Sobel ran up the little rise to the village, expecting the ground to twitch and throw her down at any moment. But it seemed that the earth had settled, though her stomach had not. In the village, the people were either running in panic, or simply staring. Several of the older houses had fallen, shaken loose from the tall posts that held them above the damp ground. One of the ruined houses was that of the old woman who had sat on her steps and watched the game with the net a short time before. Now she stood with Sobel’s grandmother, looking at the cracked logs that had been her home. One of Sobel’s aunts comforted the two old women, so Sobel hurried on to her own home.

The wooden structure was still standing and appeared unharmed. Sobel put a foot on the first rung of the ladder and was starting to climb up when a hand pulled her back.
“It’s not safe,” said her father.

Sobel turned around. Amskalin’s father, her uncle, stood next to his brother. “Just because it hasn’t fallen doesn’t mean it won’t.”

“The earth may shake again,” her father said, and for the first time in her life, Sobel saw something like fear on their faces.