The bell in the steeple began to ring. One for each fisherman dead in the past season. Kate counted forty-one.
Forty-one fishermen lost to the Cradle of the Winds since last year's Blessing of the Sea. It would have been forty, but for Harry Gault. She searched herself for guilt, and found none. He would have killed her without compunction, and Andy, too. The memory of the inside of that steel cage, of the rapid descent into a cold, green grave, was all too vivid. Deliberately she shook it off. Harry was dead but she was alive. Andy was alive. She raised her head to draw cool fog and salt air deep into her lungs, and expelled it on a long, slow, almost voluptuous sigh. Jack squeezed her hand and she smiled without looking at him.
The last peal died away and they stood in silence.
The fog drifted offshore, muting the coming and going of boats, the noise of the processing plants across Iliuliuk Bay, the inevitable stutter of the taxi vans passing back and forth. Andy, rapt and reverent throughout the service, gave a long, deep sigh. "Did you ever hear of Deva Lokka?" he asked her in a low, dreamy voice.
She shook her head.
"She's the Hindu goddess of death. She waits at the bottom of the sea for sailors who drown."
Kate looked blank. "Deva Lokka," he prompted. "Get it? Deva Lokka. Davy Jones's locker."
The patriarch raised his hand in the sign of the cross, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. As the mass ended Kate felt a touch on her arm and turned to see Olga, a scarf tied over her head and Sasha at her side. "Hello, auntie."
"Hello, Kate," Olga replied. They moved out of the crowd, and stood side by side looking out at the water.
"Didn't I tell you? When the killer whales come."
"When the killer whales come," Kate agreed, and surprised both of them by reaching out and enveloping the other woman in a fierce hug.
She would have hugged Sasha, too, but the girl pulled out the storyknife and walked down to the beach to squat in the sand. Kate followed and squatted next to her. "Another story, Sasha? What is it this time?"
Sasha drew a symbol and touched it delicately with the point of the knife. "Woman," she said sternly, looking at Kate.
"Woman," Kate said, nodding.
Sasha drew the figure with eight arms. "Bad."
"Monster," Kate said, nodding again.
"Bad," Sasha said firmly.
Kate gave an involuntary laugh. "Okay, you're telling this story. Bad."
Sasha enclosed both figures in two concentric circles.
"Home." In the quick, deft, graceful gestures that were such a painful contrast to the rest of her clumsy, shambling movements, Sasha sketched in a river and drew lines first from the woman to the river, and then the bad to the river.
"The bad is chasing the woman? To the river?"
Sasha nodded, still drawing.
Kate watched the little figures appear and disappear and reappear in the sand. "The bad chasing the woman. The woman crossing the river. The bad crossing the river, too."
Sasha nodded her head fiercely. She pointed to the woman and to the river, with the bad still in the river.
"The woman looks at the river? She looks at the bad?" Sasha looked annoyed and Kate was ashamed of her obtuseness.
Sasha tilted her head back and held her cupped hand up to her mouth, pantomiming drinking. "Glug, glug, glug."
Light broke. "She drinks the river."
Sasha shook her head. "She doesn't drink the river."
Sasha pantomimed drinking again and pointed from herself pantomiming to the woman. "Oh, she pretends to drink the river, like you're pretending. Why?"
Sasha pointed to the bad. "She tells the bad she drinks the river?" Sasha pointed from one side of the river to the other. "She tells the bad she drank the river and that was how she got across!"
A wide smile broke across Sasha's face, lighting the heavy, unformed features with humor and intelligence.
She pointed to the bad and pantomimed drinking.
"So the bad tries to drink the water so he can get across."
With one stroke of the knife Sasha made the sign for death below the bad. Above it, she made the sign for thunderbird.
"So the bad dies from drinking too much river, and the thunderbird comes and takes his body away to feed to its children."
Sasha showed the thunderbird flying off to its volcanic nest, the bad clutched in its claws, and the woman figure on her merry way. Smoothing the sand clear with a flourish, she sat back on her heels and looked expectantly at Kate.
Kate smiled at her. "It's a wonderful story, Sasha.
Thank you for telling it to me."
Sasha's eyebrows met in a straight line. "No. No no no."
"What?" Kate said. "What's the matter? Didn't I get it right?"
Sasha pointed from the woman figure to Kate. "Woman.
You. Woman. Woman dead bad. You. Woman. Dead.
Bad." Her hand came out and gripped Kate's shoulder.
"You. Woman. Good."
Kate could find nothing to say.
Sasha gave a satisfied nod. Sheathing her storyknife, she struggled to her feet, and vanished down the beach and into the mist.
"Kate?" Jack's voice said from somewhere behind her. "You coming?"
She found her eyes had filled with tears. Impatiently she blinked them back and stood up. "Yes. I'm coming."
Dana Stabenow
