Brother Wind Read Free Page A

the sand, through blood from the first fight, to stand between Samiq and the Raven. Small Knife, Samiq’s adopted son, was there also, gripping Samiq’s arms.
    “You cannot win,” Small Knife said. “Look at your hand.”
    Samiq glanced down, but said, “I have to fight. I cannot let him take Kiin.”
    “Do not fight,” Kiin said. “You have Small Knife. He is your son now. You have Three Fish. She is a good wife. Someday you will have the power to fight the Raven and win. Until then I will stay with him. I am not strong enough to stand against him, but I am strong enough to wait for you. I have lived in the Walrus village this past year. They are good people. Come for me when you are ready.”
    Then Ice Hunter, a man from the Walrus village, was beside Kiin. He reached for Samiq’s arm, wrapped a strip of seal hide around the wound, pulled it tight to stop the blood. “You have no reason to fight,” Ice Hunter said. “The first fight was fair. The spirits decided.”
    Kiin looked into Samiq’s eyes, saw the emptiness of his defeat. She pulled off the shell bead necklace he had given her the night of her woman’s ceremony. Slowly she placed it over Samiq’s head. “Someday you will fight him,” she said. “You will fight him, and then you will give this necklace back to me.”
    She turned to the Raven. “If I am to go with you, I must go now,” she said, and she spoke in the First Men’s language, then repeated the words in the Walrus tongue.
    “Where are our sons?” the Raven asked.
    “Shuku is here,” Kiin answered, and raised her suk so he could see the child. “But I gave Takha to the wind spirits as the Grandmother and the Aunt said I must.” Kiin took Shuku from his carrying sling. “This is your son,” she said to the Raven, “but he is no longer Shuku. He is Amgigh.”
    Kiin saw the Raven’s anger, the clouding of the Raven’s eyes, but she did not look away, did not flinch, even when he raised his hand as though to strike her.
    “Hit me,” Kiin said to the Raven. “Show these people that a shaman has only the power of anger against his wife, the power of his hands, the power of his knife.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “A man does not need a strong spirit when he has a large knife, a knife stolen from someone else.”
    The Raven threw the obsidian knife to the ground. Kiin picked it up, walked back to Samiq, placed it in his left hand. Her eyes met Samiq’s eyes. “Always,” she said, “I am your wife.”
    The Raven gestured toward Ice Hunter, toward the other Walrus men who had come with him. One picked up Kiin’s carvings, another brought the Raven’s ik to the water.
    “We will not return to this beach,” the Raven said.
    But Kiin bent down and picked up a handful of pebbles from the sand. She waited as her mother brought Shuku’s cradle and a bundle of Kiin’s belongings from the ulaq.
    Once more Kiin looked at Samiq, tried to press the image of his face into her mind, then she turned and followed the Raven to his ik.

CHAPTER 2
The Walrus People
    The Bering Sea
    S HE HEARD NOTHING. NOT the full round voice of the wind nor the high, curling cries of oyster catcher and gull, not the dip and splash of paddles nor the soft throat purr of Shuku nursing. But the silence was as sharp as obsidian, as dark as old blood. Even Kiin’s spirit was still, so quiet that if she had not felt its ache in her chest, she would have believed it was gone—passed on to Three Fish along with the gift of Kiin’s son Takha, along with that carving of man, woman, and child made long ago by the great shaman Shuganan.
    She had not offered to paddle, nor had she looked back at the Raven, nor at the ikyan that skirted the Raven’s trading ik.
    Kiin pulled herself away from what her eyes were seeing, what her ears were hearing, until there was nothing but the throb of her spirit, pulsing like a wound. At first, its rhythm was the sound of her loss: Amgigh, Takha, Samiq; Amgigh, Takha,