1.
THE
RIVER
“Ooh,
how about this, Kako?” Nili thrust a scrap of amber cloth at me. “If I
embroider that in white, you’ll look all shimmery.”
“You’d lose me on the lake.” I waved at the sun-struck
cove where we lounged with our friends, cooking breakfast and preparing for the
day’s work. Shafts of golden light cut through puffy clouds and glittered in
the morning mist. Cottonwoods with yellowing leaves shaded the beach, dripping
dew into puddles with tiny plinks.
I went on sharpening my fish knife. Every autumn Nili
sewed me new shirts and leggings, and every autumn we argued about it. She
insisted that bright berry dyes would complement my colouring — brown hair,
brown eyes, tanned skin. I wanted something dark for tromping around the muddy
rainforest.
After I refused her fifth choice, Nili shoved swatches
back into her fabric bag. “I don’t know why I care,” she huffed. “You’ll
out-grow them anyway.”
“Sorry. Should I stop wearing clothes?”
“That’ll get Canoe Boy’s attention.” She snickered.
“Are the duck potatoes done? I’m starving.”
I knocked a bundle of singed leaves from our campfire.
While Nili grew up learning textiles from her mother, my mother had spent years
teaching me to sense and control water. Closing my eyes in meditation, I
slipped my mind through the leaves to the small roots inside the bundle,
measuring the water temperature and the amount of steam. I peeled the charred
leaves back with my knife to reveal small steaming roots. “Perfect—”
Cheering interrupted me. Several boys were spitting
squash seeds onto a tarp, competing to get one furthest. Onarem, an axe-jawed
leatherworker, raised his fists over his head and called for anyone brave
enough to challenge him.
Nili stood up. “Ai, bludgehead!”
She popped a seed in her mouth and spat. It soared
over the tarp and plunked into the lake. Onarem gaped. Nili kissed another seed
and spat it at his bare chest. Laughter rippled through the onlookers.
As we ate, an ochre-red canoe slid into the cove. Its
high prow was carved into a kinaru, the long-necked water bird that was our
tribe’s sacred crest. I peered at the paddler and swore. If I’d known Rokiud
was home from summer travels, I’d at least have brushed my hair.
“Yan taku,” Nili breathed as he landed. “I forgot how
lush Canoe Boy is.”
I
pushed her jaw shut. Like every boy in our tribe, the Rin-jouyen, Rokiud went
shirtless to show his tattoos, which included crossed paddles on his chest for
being a canoe carver. He’d razored off his hair, leaving a thin black layer
like leaf fuzz. It highlighted the sharp angles of his face.
Onarem
punched his arm in greeting. Rokiud swiped at his head. Onarem tackled Rokiud
and they rolled head over boot, shouting joyfully and trying to pin each other
in the shallows.
Nili elbowed me. “Go say hi.”
“I’m done wasting time on Rokiud,” I said, picking
soot from my fingernails. “I have things to do. Training for my water-calling
test, working my trapline—”
She looked at me like I was made of stupid. “You
passed every practice test, and it’s not trapping season yet. C’mon.” She
pulled me to the shore and beamed at Onarem. “Kateiko and I wanna go fishing by
the old smokehouses. Can you take us?”
Onarem scrambled up, dripping. “Uh, my canoe’s only
got two seats—”
“Riiight,” Nili sighed. “Guess we gotta ask someone
with a bigger boat.”
“Nei, hang on,” he stammered. “Rokiud, why don’t you
bring Kateiko? We’ll all go.”
Rokiud grinned at me, shaking droplets off his head.
“Do your water-caller thing and we’ve got a deal.”
My stomach flip-flopped. I seeped my mind into the
fibres of his breeches to dry them, acutely aware of his muscular legs. I
tossed my fishing gear into his canoe’s bow, then stopped when I noticed gouges
in the hull. The carved kinaru’s bill had broken off. “What happened?”
“I
went over a waterfall and hit some rocks,” Rokiud said. “No big deal. I resined
over the damage, so it hasn’t rotted.”
He’s the rotten one, my mother would say. For years
the elders had refused to initiate him as a carver — first for skipping
lessons, then sneaking off to river-race, then stealing his father’s war canoe
to race again. The day they were finally going to evaluate his work, he’d found
crude symbols painted on his hull, probably a prank by another kid. I’d made
new paint from ground ochre, helped Rokiud cover the symbols, and dried the
paint just before the elders arrived. His proud look while getting his carver
tattoo had been the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Then, before I worked
up the nerve to say anything, we’d separated for summer. My family had canoed
to an alpine village of itherans, the foreigners who’d settled around our land.
In the high pastures, busy trading my furs for goat wool, I’d tried to forget
about Rokiud. Here, eye level with his radiant smile, my resolve melted like
honey in sunlight.
I dropped onto the bow seat and grabbed a paddle.
Rokiud leapt into the stern and pushed off. We glided from the cove onto the
lake proper, framed by steep valley walls dense with forest. Tendrils of mist
parted around us. Nili and Onarem followed in his boat, her laughter carrying
across the turquoise water.
All along the beach, canvas tents hung from huge
conifer trees. The canoes at my family’s campsite were gone. Everyone must’ve
left for the day. My father had jokingly moaned that I’d grown up enough to
avoid my parents, but they didn’t mind as long as I gathered my share of food.
I wondered if I could keep it secret that I was going fishing with Rokiud —
then a voice hollered my name.
Fendul, a lanky older boy wearing a sheathed sword,
walked out from the woods. “Where are you headed?” he called.
I raised my fishing net. “To catch bears.”
He looked unamused. “Remember to stay off the
downriver branch of Kotula Iren. It’s not safe these days.”
“The river I canoed every summer to get to the ocean
until your father banned anyone from going?” Rokiud said. “You think I’d
forget?”
Fendul rubbed the lines tattooed around his arm, a
marker that he was our okoreni, the second-in-command of the Rin-jouyen. “If
you knew what’s going on out there—”
“Let’s go,” I interrupted. Fendul and I lived in the
same plank house at our permanent settlement. I got enough lectures from him.
We pushed off again. Rokiud’s bitterness radiated like smoke.
Earlier this year Fendul’s father, our current leader,
had declared the war-torn coast too dangerous to visit — for everyone except
Fendul’s family, who’d travelled there on some diplomatic whatever. All I knew
was itherans kept fighting over land that wasn’t theirs to begin with.
“Where’d you go instead this summer?” I asked Rokiud.
