“Mama! Mama!” Malsie bounced in the door, full of six year old energy. “The earth shook today!”
Her mother took this news calmly. “Were you frightened?”
“No.” Her long black braids slid over her quilted jacket as Malsie shook her head. “We went under the tables, just like we practiced. Teacher said we were good. But Sayara was crying because Kurkil said it meant that the mamonts were coming to eat us up!”
“Mammoths, sweetling,” Nimnya said. She knelt to help Malsie take off her reindeer skin boots. “Mamonts is not a civilized word.”
Malsie stuck out her lower lip, wriggling backwards against the pull on her foot. “Mamonths,” she amended, as her older brother came into the entry way.
“Mamonts!” he said. “Have you seen one? They have big teeth, just for scooping up children and carrying them off into the night.” He swooped Malsie up, swinging her around until she screamed with laughter.
Nimnya followed her rambunctious offspring from the mud room into the house. Sal was so tall now, her first baby big enough to carry her second on his shoulders, and little Maliskina already learning to read. Their giggles drifted into the kitchen while Nimnya spoke with the housekeeper about dinner; she hoped she could hold onto them both for a little longer.
In the evening, when the dark was creeping in from the edges of the house, and Nimnya thought Malsie might slip away easily into sleep for once, the little eyelids popped open. “Mama,” she whispered. “Will you watch for the mamonts? I don’t want them to get me.”
“Don’t worry about the mammoths, Maliskina.” Nimnya sat down on the bed beside her, pulling the comforter up around Malsie’s chin. “They’re asleep in the mountains. They’re much too sleepy to come to town for little girls, even ones as sweet as you.”
“Why are they sleeping?” Malsie asked. She sat up and pushed back the comforter. The lamplight caught the silken threads of the bright peonies woven into the cloth and Nimnya sighed. On the other side of the room she could see that Sal was already asleep, worn out from the exercises at Master Erkhan’s training hall. But Malsie—Malsie was wide-eyed, and wide awake.
“Because Isobel sang them to sleep.”
“How did she sing them to sleep? Will you tell me?”
“If you promise to go straight to sleep after,” Nimnya said, gently pressing the little girl back down into bed.
Malsie nodded solemnly. “I promise.”
***
It was a long time ago, when Isobel was very young. It was before she helped Esker to close the mountain gates, and it was even before she had met him, when she was just Sobel, and no one knew she’d be anything more.
She was born among the Salmon People, in a village on the coast just a little north of here. Or perhaps it was a lot north, no one knows anymore. But it was near a good salmon stream, and they had plenty of fish each year, enough to feed themselves, and extra to trade to the Reindeer People, who came every year on their way to the far north.
Sobel lived with her family, and helped her mother take care of her little brothers and sisters. She told them stories at bedtime, and sang them songs while they played during the day.
In the fall, when the Reindeer People came, the village had a big party. Everyone danced and sang, and Sobel danced and sang, too. They ate salmon and fresh roe. There were blueberries, and lingon berries, and fiddlehead ferns preserved from the spring. There was reindeer meat, and seal and whale. Everyone was joyful, and the Salmon People laughed and talked with their Reindeer friends, whom they hadn’t seen since the last year.
But one afternoon they looked out to the mountains. There was smoke, and fire. The ground shook and everyone was so frightened that they stopped dancing. They were too scared by the mountain to dance. They were too scared to sing, and too scared to tell stories. It was a volcano, but they didn’t know why it was erupting. They didn’t know if the village was in danger.
So the Salmon shaman and the Reindeer shaman went together to ask the spirits what was happening.
For three days the shamans danced and sweated. For three days they wandered through the spirit world, crying to the spirits, ‘What has woken in the mountain? What is the fire in the mountain?’ For three days, the spirits were asleep, because they had been drinking and eating during the party, and they were full of salmon, ready to sleep for the winter. But on the evening of the third day, the Reindeer shaman found a spirit who said that the mammoths were awake in the mountain. At the same time, another spirit came to the Salmon shaman, and said that what the people saw was the fires of the mammoths in the mountain.
“Should we bring the mammoths a gift of food?” asked the shamans. “Should we bring them salmon? Should we bring them reindeer meat?”
“The mammoths live under the earth,” the spirits replied. “All rivers flow through their land, and they do not need salmon. The reindeer walk on their roofs, and fall in their smoke holes whenever the mammoths want them. They do not need these things from you.”
“What should we do, then?” the shamans asked.
“Send them a story,” said the spirits. “Send them a dance, send them a song.”
The shamans thanked the spirits for their advice and returned to the village, where the people were waiting.
“The mammoths have woken in the mountains,” they explained. “We see their fires, and we must send them some of our joy of the harvest.”
They looked around, and the Reindeer shaman pointed to Sobel. “This girl knows how to dance and sing,” he said.
The Salmon shaman nodded. “Sobel will go to the mammoths and share our stories and songs and dances with them.”
Everyone turned to look at Sobel. All the boys knew she was a fancy dancer, and all the little children knew she could tell a story about anything. All the hunters knew she could sing any animal into a snare. But Sobel’s little brother ran up to take her hand. “Don’t go, Sobel,” he said. “Who will tell us stories?”
“Sobel will stay and tell you stories,” said her mother. She hugged her children tight and said to the shamans, “My daughter is only a child. Send someone else.”
But the Salmon shaman shook his head. “She is almost old enough to be married, and she is the one who must go.”
Sobel slipped out of her mother’s arms and stepped forward from the crowd. “I will go,” she said. “I will go to the mountain and share our stories with the mammoths.”
She put on her best clothes and prepared to leave. Her mother gave her a circlet of fine beads to wear on her head, and her father gave her tall boots of rich leather. The Salmon shaman gave her an amulet to tuck into her pocket and the Reindeer shaman chose two Reindeer riders to take her to the mountain.
They traveled for five days, and every day they drew closer to the mountain, which was still spitting smoke and fire. Every day, the fire took a new path from the mouth of the mountain down its blackened slopes. The air was filled with terrible smoke, and powdery ash fell from the sky. When they came to a place where the very trees had been burned away, the reindeer would go no further. The riders helped Sobel dismount. Then they wished her luck and rode away.
The side of the mountain was nothing but ash and hot stones, for the heat and fire had destroyed everything. Sobel looked back, but the smoke had hidden everything from view. She imagined the ash falling onto her village, and fire pouring into the salmon stream to boil the fish her people depended upon. The Reindeer Herders could leave with their herds and travel across the world, but Sobel’s people had lived near the salmon stream for generations. She turned back to the mountain, standing ankle deep in warm ash, and began to sing. There was no song that she knew for mammoths, so she sang the greeting to the Reindeer, and substituted “mammoth” for “reindeer” in the words.
It was late in the day and when she had finished her song, she noticed an opening in the rocks from which came a glow of firelight. She went to it and saw a tunnel leading down towards the heart of the mountain. As she entered, there was a strong smell of wet fur and smoke, and she heard a loud rumbling, a groaning and thumping. It was a frightening sound, but she kept walking until she came to a large cave. It was so large that her whole village could have fit inside it: every house, every person, every dog.
The cavern was brightly lit by a huge fire in the center, and she saw that the smoke went up to the sky through an opening high above in the ceiling. The flames licked at the roof, and spat sparks into the night. Tall shadows danced around the walls, cast by the mammoths who surrounded the fire.
They were huge and hairy, four legged like a reindeer, but each leg was as big as Sobel. Instead of antlers on the tops of their heads, they had great curving tusks on both sides of their mouths, and their noses stretched down to the floor. They walked around the fire in a great circle, swaying back and forth and singing a mammoth song. Their voices were so deep that Sobel didn’t hear it as a sound in her ears, but a vibration in her bones. They didn’t notice her, a tiny creature on the edge of their circle, so she sat down to watch. The mammoths tramped around the fire three times, then turned around and circled in the other direction three times.
Sobel counted sixteen of them, each one tall enough that she could have walked beneath its belly and the long fur hanging down would not have brushed her head. Their curved tusks might scoop up a reindeer without any trouble. Even one of their eyes was as big as her head.
When the mammoths had completed their sixth revolution, they all turned to face the central fire, still grumbling and murmuring and shifting their weight from foot to foot. Then they turned again, putting their backsides to the fire and Sobel found herself face to long nose with one of them.
The vibrating rumble of the mammoths stopped abruptly, and there was no sound except the fire drinking up the air. The mammoth closest to Sobel turned its head from side to side, looking at her with first one eye, then the other. She didn’t dare move, even when its long nose moved forward to sniff and snuff at her, like a dog searching for the trail of an animal’s scent. The nose brushed over the beads hanging in her hair, and down the tassels decorating her overdress. When it had inspected her closely, the mammoth stamped its foot. A raven flew down through the hole in the ceiling of the cavern. He landed next to Sobel, and swung his feathered cloak from his shoulders to take human shape.
“Salmon girl,” the raven-man said. “You belong on the coast. Why have you come to the mountain?”
“We saw the fire from far away,” Sobel said. “We wondered what it was.”
There was a deep rumble from the mammoths, and the raven-man said, “The mammoths have grown tired of their life underground. They are warming their bones, and preparing to go out from the lower world to the middle world.”
“I am sent to bring greetings, stories and songs from the middle world to the mammoths,” Sobel said.
At this the mammoths all began to rumble at once, until the vibrating roar of their speech shook small rocks free from the ceiling, and the raven-man spread his cloak over his head to protect himself and Sobel from the debris. Finally the tremors subsided.
“If you can satisfy their curiosity,” the raven-man said, “then there is no need for them to keep their fire going in the mountain and they will go back down into the earth.”
So Sobel sat down next to the fire, and began to weave a story for the mammoths. She told them how the sun was an ermine, eating away at the fish-moon every month, until the star brothers noticed it was gone and caught a new one from the wide river in the sky. When that story was done, she sang them the song of the salmon, going out to learn the secrets of the sea and bringing them back each year. She danced the ptarmigan in the forest, seeking to impress his wife, and she danced the raven on the beach, eating snails. She sang the song the first woman sang to her children when they were born on the beach, and she told the story of the salmon girl who stayed on the coast while her younger brother went to explore the sea, and her elder brother went inland to follow the reindeer.
The mammoths gathered close around her and stood shoulder to tall shoulder, listening and watching. For three days and three nights Sobel sang and danced and told the mammoths every story she could think of, from the longest story of a shaman’s journey into the spirit world, to the shortest song of the frog who fell in love with a dragonfly. As she spoke, the fire began to die down, and the mammoths grew quieter and quieter, and rumbled less and less. The raven hopped around the circle, now listening as a man, now taking his own bird form and swooping across the cavern.
On the fourth day, Sobel could think of no more stories of history and no more songs from the animals, but the mammoths were still listening. If she stopped, she knew that they would build up their fire again, and go out into the middle world. So she continued and told them all the stories that the Reindeer People brought with them from far places, about the Horse Khan and the grassy steppes, about the Black Powder People who lived to the south and the Metal People far, far off in the west.
By the fourth night, the fire had sunk so low that she could see the moon outside. The mammoths were only shaggy shadows around her and Sobel had nothing left but her own story. She told them how the shamans had sent her to the mountain to speak and sing and dance for them, and how she had told them every story that she knew.
“And now you must go back down to your world, and go to sleep,” she said. “I will go out into my world to learn how my own story continues, and when I know its ending I will come back and tell it to you.”
It was the fifth morning and the sky was bright outside the smoke hole of the cavern, but the fire was cold and gray. The raven-man bobbed his head and turned his bright eyes to her. “You sing like a river, salmon girl,” he said. “And you dance like the bright spirits in the sky. Your stories could outlive a winter storm and kill the wind ten times over.”
There was a tremor of agreement from the mammoths as they shifted their feet for the first time in days.
“You have told stories that even I don’t know,” the raven-man said. “Now the mammoths will go back to the lower world, for you have told them everything that they wished to know about the middle world.”
As he spoke, the mammoths began to turn and move away from the cold ashes of their fire. They shambled down a tunnel on the far side of the cavern, their footsteps shaking the earth. When the last one had disappeared, the roof of the tunnel collapsed behind it, leaving only a dusty pile of rubble. The tremors continued and Sobel turned to see that the opening she had come through had disappeared. She looked around for another exit and saw none, only the smoke hole, which was too high above for her to reach. She was trapped in the mountain.
But the raven-man spoke up. “You won’t die here,” he said. “Your story will continue, and when you return to tell it again, it will be as long and exciting as any you have told in these last few days.” He gave her a necklace and two wristbands, made of tea colored mammoth ivory. “Put these on,” he said, “and you will swim through the earth as if it were the ocean.”
Sobel put on the necklace, and it clasped very close around her neck. She put on the wristbands, and it was as if they had been made for her, so well did they fit. “Now go,” the raven-man said, “and live your story.” He put his feathered cloak on again, and flew out the hole in the ceiling, and Sobel did not see him again for many years.
All around her the rocks were falling, and the boulders were crashing. But the necklace and the wristbands kept her safe, for the stone washed over her like warm water. Sobel pointed her fingers over her head and leapt into the wall as if it were a river. She swam through the earth like a salmon swims upstream until she came out onto the side of the mountain.
The morning sun was sweeping across the valleys, making a bright mirror of the river. The air was clean again, and the only smoke she saw was from the cooking fires of her own village. She began walking down the mountain towards home.
When she returned, the people were very surprised to see her. She had not been in the mountain with the mammoths for just five days; she had been gone for five months, or perhaps five years. Her parents had given away all of her belongings. Her suitors had all married other girls. No one had set aside any food for her to eat during the winter, and there wasn’t even a sleeping place for her in her parent’s home. That’s how dead they thought she was.
Sobel told the people of the village about the mammoths in the mountain, and how they had gone back down into the earth. The people listened to her story and they looked at the necklace and wristbands that the raven-man had given to her. They knew that she had been to the spirit world, and they began to call her Isobel, because they knew that she was a shaman.
Sobel did not want to become Isobel. She wanted to stay and help her mother with the fire, but anytime she reached out to help, those mammoth bone wristbands squeezed her tighter than tight, and she could not help. Anytime she wanted to speak up, that mammoth bone necklace squeezed her tighter than tight, and she could not say a word.
So Sobel knew that her story did not stay in her village. She said goodbye to her family, and goodbye to all the Salmon people with whom she had grown up, and in the fall she left with the Reindeer People. And among the Reindeer she found Esker, and with Esker she found the rest of her story, and it was indeed as exciting as the raven-man had said, and long, too. Far too long to tell tonight.
***
“Mama, was Sobel for real?” Malsie was still awake, her eyes bright in the darkness.
“Well, sweetling, Esker didn’t close up the mountains and keep out the western hordes by himself. I think Isobel was blood and bone, like you or I, and Esker was lucky to have her help.”
“And mamonths? Are they for real?”
“Maybe there was a volcano erupting when Isobel was young, but it’s so long ago that we don’t know what really happened. Sometimes a story is just a story, something that’s fun to listen to, but not a true history.”
“But Sobel and Esker are true histories.”
“Isobel and Esker were true people, but that doesn’t mean we know all their true history.”
“But Mama, I want to know Sobel’s true history.”
“Maybe you’ll be a historian, then,” Nimnya said. “Although yesterday you said you wanted to be the first girl at the training hall.”
“Can’t I be a historian and go to training with Sal?”
“Not tonight. It’s time to sleep now.” Nimnya pulled the comforter up, tucking it around the little girl and smoothing her hair.
She stood up to go about the night business of the home, but not before one last question leaked out.
“Mama, if I went away, would you give away my things?”
“Of course not, sweetling.” She bent to kiss her daughter’s forehead. “You’ll always have a place here. But sleep now, please. Tomorrow you can get up and live another day of your own true history.”