The Chukchi Bible Page 6

  We will draw new strength

  We will draw a new name

  We’ll bring back a glorious name!

  Kalyach laid the yarar down on the earthen floor and, drawing himself up slightly, peered at Outstretched Wings. Many of those present thought they saw sparks fly from the talisman’s empty eye sockets and bounce off its surfaces of ornamented bone.

  “Is the child’s name Mlemekym?” Kalyach thundered, pointing to the infant, who had begun mewling. His finger seemed to elongate, almost touching the child.

  Breaths held, everyone watched Outstretched Wings, but the talisman continued revolving dispassionately in the daylight-riven smoke.

  Once again Kalyach lifted up the yarar. This time, his words were indistinguishable, and only from time to time the word Mlemekym could be made out.

  The child began to cry. His mother went to quieten him, but Kalyach, making a sign with his hand, said loudly:

  “Let him scream. Let him scream! It means that his true name is drawing near him!”

  And again he asked in a voice like thunder:

  “Is this newly arrived person named Mlemekym? We ask and we listen! Has he come to us, the one for whom we have waited so long?”

  The rotation of Outstretched Wings slowed. It was as though they were pondering. And then, with absolute certainty, they rocked in the direction of the crying boy. And in that very instant the baby boy fell silent.

  A silence descended inside the yaranga.

  “He has come to us! He has returned to us – Mlemekym!” Kalyach shouted joyfully, as he picked up the child. “Look! Here he is, come on a long journey through the ages, through the years that have passed away! We welcome you, Mlemekym!”

  It was the young men and women who now stepped forward to the center of the yaranga, underneath the rocking Outstretched Wings, and began the Universal Dance of Joy.

  Kalyach wandered down the beach. Although the wind had died down, huge waves still battered the shingled spit. Low clouds seemed to brush his face, leaving behind a salty residue. Kalyach tested the moisture with his tongue. He should have been feeling happy. He had awed the people with his powers, flying up and out of the chottagin for all to see; he’d brought back the almost forgotten name of the legendary Mlemekym, a man who had imbibed the experience of the ages of legend, and yet . . . An inchoate feeling of unease lay upon his soul like a dark cloud, his joy flattened by a presentiment of disaster. Uelen had lived well and ithout worry, these last years – too well. It could not continue forever. Something was bound to happen. Just as in nature good weather can’t last indefinitely, so too must there always be times of trial in human lives. A pity that with all his wisdom Kalyach could not foretell the future that lay in wait for his tribesmen.

  His sharpened mind could sense big changes drawing near, but he could not guess what was coming. And the return of the name Mlemekym was one of many small attempts to make the people of Uelen remember their heroic, shining past, to make them feel sure and steady upon this narrow shingled spit, battered though it was by the ocean’s gigantic waves.

  The First Hairmouths

  This event can be dated with a certain precision, as it is part of recorded history, set down in writing by witnesses and participants; it is a subject of study, lauded in poetry and novels, reconstructed on film. There are memorials to mark the event, one of which stands about thirty kilometers east of Uelen, in abandoned Nuvuken, the ancient Aivanalin settlement destroyed at the end of the 1950s on the whim of a Soviet bureaucrat.

  Semyon Dezhnev – Cossack, sailor, and native of the northern Russian settlement of Great Ustiug – is commonly acknowledged as the leader of the first Russian expedition to Uelen. An old lighthouse stands over a cape bearing his name. It was Dezhnev and his comrades who, taking advantage of unusually favorable ice conditions, first sailed a small fleet of kotchas, or large sailboats, from the mouth of the Kolyma River to Uelen.

  On a wet and windless evening in early spring, 1648, old granny Cheivuneh was gathering seaweed to spice a thick walrus-meat stew. A dense, moist, almost tangible fog smothered the fastness of the ocean, and from behind this curtain of mist, over the hissing of the quiet tide, she heard strange noises and even the sound of people speaking an unknown tongue. In the last few years this had happened to her often, and Cheivuneh attributed it to her advanced age, a time when a keen ear begins to pick up the sounds of the other world.

  But then the curtain of mist was rent and the old woman saw creatures even the worst of nightmares could not conjure.

  They were gigantic, these monsters with their black wings flapping in the weak breeze, and they were inexorably gaining on the land. Their low-slung bellies were full of human-looking but oddly hair-mouthed beings who disgorged strange guttural sounds as they peered at the shore. With a heartrending scream, the old lady bolted, dropping the seaweed she’d gathered for her repast. Her scream was so loud and so piercing that it was heard in almost every yaranga. Villagers peering out of their dwellings beheld the approaching black monstrosities with terror. From a distance they resembled boats, grown to a gigantic size, and their flapping wings, sails.

  Mlemekym, whom all Uelen called Mekym for short, rushed outside with all his family, and he too was seized by a chill horror. Neither the ancient legends nor fairy tales ever made mention of anything like this.

  Snatching up their children and their few belongings, the people ran for the tundra on the opposite bank of the lagoon. In the gathering gloom, the women’s frightened cries mingled with those of the children.

  They could hear voices coming from the shore, where the monsters were landing, and the voices resembled human speech. They seemed to be calling or hailing someone, but their language was incomprehensible, utterly unlike that of any of the Chukchi’s neighboring tribes.

  Mekym was one of the last to leave Uelen. The men had grabbed their weapons as they left, their spears, their bows and quivers full of arrows. Some even managed to carry off their battle shields and walrus-hide armor. Kalyanto, the young shaman, also seemed frightened and spoke in a quiet voice.

  From the top of Great Crag, the villagers watched the strange-looking humans scatter from the enormous black monsters like maggots from a cured chunk of walrus meat. Neither their looks nor their clothing brought to mind anything seen or heard of before. They had faces like animals, covered in bristles up to the eyes, and their speech too was more akin to wolfish growling, walrus snorting, or the cawing of crows. They spoke to one another so loudly that their voices muffled the sound of the incoming tide.

  “We’ve never had anything like that in Uelen before,” Kalyanto said thoughtfully.

  “And what if they’ve come to live here forever?” asked Unu.

  “If they don’t scram,” said Mekym, “we’ll have to kill them.”

  Kalyanto was uncertain. “But are they even mortal?”

  “We’ll soon find out,” Mekym said with an air of mystery.

  The men of Uelen stayed atop Great Crag and kept watch over the abandoned settlement.

  As darkness fell, the strangers lit a chain of bonfires. In the flickering light, they dashed between yarangas, grabbing things, carrying them back to shore.

  And yet the night passed in relative calm, if you didn’t count the newcomers’ snoring – which was so loud and ringing that it caused Uelen’s anxious dogs to erupt in choruses of barks and howls.

  When dawn came, the newcomers followed the footsteps of those who had run to the opposite side of the lagoon. The watchers up on the Crag had already warned their tribesmen, and the men of Uelen met the foreigners as an armed column.

  Now Mekym could study the uninvited guests more closely. They really did have a remarkable amount of facial hair, but it was the skylike blue color of their deep-set eyes that astonished. Dressed in ragged clothes, the foreigners were clearly trying to indicate their friendly intentions with gestures, proffering their wide and calloused empty hands to show that they did not bear weapons. Smiles
glinted through their dense facial vegetation.

  A tall man with a leather thong that ran across his forehead and into his thick hair, threw something forward, as though spilling forth a handful of multihued droplets. The droplets were left to lie in the yellowed grass, and not a single one of Uelen’s warriors bent down for a closer look.

  The man with the leather thong ran his palms, wide as the shoulder blades of a whale, across his entire body.

  “He wants to show he is peaceful,” Mekym realized. Lowering his spear, bow, and arrows onto the ground, he took a step toward the stranger.

  The other gave a wide grin, making a joyful noise, also stepped forward toward Mekym and then clasped him with a pair of strong arms. Mekym’s heart stilled in fright, his breath stuck in his throat.

  But the stranger quickly let him go, accompanying his movement with ringing laughter. The other strangers followed his example.

  “Drop your weapons!” Mekym told his tribesmen. “We’ll answer peace with peace.”

  Not without a certain trepidation, Mekym picked up a few of the multihued droplets and laid them out in his palm. They shimmered with rainbow colors, but felt cold, as though made from some kind of special, unmelting ice. Seeing this, the stranger with the leather thong extracted another handful from within the folds of his clothing and gingerly poured it into Mekym’s open palm. The he knocked his own chest and said:

  “Semyon!”

  He poked his finger in Mekym’s chest and asked something. Having had no response, the stranger once again clapped his own chest and repeated:

  “Semyon!”

  Then he poked his finger at Mekym’s chest.

  “He is telling you his name and wants to know yours,” Kalyanto said, on a hunch.

  Then Mekym, copying the stranger, clapped his chest and said, just as loudly as the other had:

  “Mekym!”

  “Semyon!” The stranger repeated his own gesture and, pointing to Mekym, slowly enunciated:

  “Meh – keem!”

  Now it was not just the newcomers who were smiling; the men of Uelen, standing watchfully by, smiled too. The newcomers came up close to the Luoravetlan. They stretched out their arms, hugged the Luoravetlan and clapped their backs, laughing loudly all the while.

  At first glance, these people did not seem to have mouths, but these would suddenly appear among the dense facial hair as a row of yellow teeth. Even Kalyanto, the shaman, did not recognize a single familiar word in the visitors’ speech, though he could speak with the Aivanalin and knew the language of the Kaaramkyn.

  The fraternization continued on the shingled beach, to which the people of Uelen were now returning. It turned out that the visitors had not touched anything within the yarangas, save for scraping the stone vats clean of boiled meat.

  The one who had called himself Semyon had clearly marked out Mekym for his special friend. With his arm around the other man in a comradely manner, he led Mekym to one of the enormous boats, which sat half-beached on the shingle. But Mekym preferred not to go aboard, though he looked at the bearded visitors’ seafaring technology with great interest. These were huge boats with exceedingly tall sides, smeared with something black, which looked like tree blubber – a thing of extreme rarity in these parts. The sails were made from an unfamiliar stuff, durable and light.

  The natives dragged some fresh nerpa meat out onto the shore, and the visitors lit fires, over which they hung vast cauldrons made of a dark, flameproof substance.

  They set to work with astonishingly sharp, wood-handled knives. Evidently, this was the “metal” of which tales had reached Uelen. The Luoravetlan’s southern neighbors, the Koryaks – who spoke a language somewhat similar to that of the Luoravetlan – were known to possess this durable material. Iron was a vain dream, a secret desire. The foreigners seemed to have it in plenty, from their cauldrons to their knives and axes, even the buttons on their torn, ragged clothes.

  Noting the interest in all things metallic, Semyon gave an order, and in an instant measureless riches lay spread out before Mekym: knives of all sizes, axes, hammers, and cauldrons, as well as a jagged-edged strip of metal, which, Mekym soon guessed, the visitors used to cut pliant wood. To top it all off, Semyon poured a heap of metal needles into Mekym’s open hand. It seemed like a magical dream. Surely when they awakened it would all vanish: these monstrous boats, these people with their hairy mouths, and the wealth of metal they had brought.

  But nothing vanished. Mekym’s tribesmen sifted over the treasure, passing knives to one another and cautiously testing their edges, flicking the iron cauldrons with their fingernails to produce a metallic peal.

  “If I had even one of those knives!” Mekym thought to himself.

  Semyon pointed to Mekym’s clothing, then to the clothing of the other Luoravetlan. Then he plucked at his own . . . He swept his arm over the metal pile, as though to embrace it, and then made a sign that left no doubt that he was after Luoravetlan clothes in return.

  “He wants to trade!” Unu cried.

  Trading was something in which the Luoravetlan were well versed. They traded with the nomadic deer herders, exchanging walrus, lakhtak, and nerpa hides and clarified blubber for deerskins, kamusses, deer meat, and tendons from which the women made thread. They also traded with the islanders and the natives of Kymgyn, on the other bank of the Irvytgyr. From time to time bits of metal made their way to Uelen via a circuitous route around the shores of the Ice Sea. They tended to be so small and were such a rarity, however, that they were seen as precious, but essentially useless, novelties.

  And now, look at all that metal before their eyes! And not just tidbits, but useful tools and instruments.

  “We could take all those riches anyway.” Mekym heard a hot whisper from behind and recognized the voice of Unu.

  But the newcomers numbered several dozen. And because they all looked alike – each dressed in torn clothes and with a hairy mouth and long locks of hair that fell to his shoulders – their number seemed even greater.

  Only two of Uelen’s men were allowed to decide whether to kill the strangers or let them go: Mekym and Kalyanto.

  Yet, who knew what stood behind these people? How many of them were there in all, and what manner of weapons did they have? When they learned that their kinsmen had been slaughtered, might not the hairmouths (as Mekym had mentally named them) come in countless multitudes?

  He uttered none of this aloud, only saying quietly:

  “It will be simpler to trade.”

  It seemed to the people of Uelen that the visitors did not know the true value of their metal tools. A walrus-intestine cloak and a pair of waterproof sealskin torbasses were enough to secure a large knife. In exchange for a pair of leather mittens, a woman could receive two sharp, shiny needles that pierced thick hide with incredible ease. The black iron cauldrons could be got for any kind of rubbish – like the polar fox pelts that were only good for decorating women’s outfits, since the thin fur was easily worn out and useless for proper winter clothing.

  The people of Uelen were afire with trading zeal. They brought anything and everything that might be traded. The visitors especially esteemed walrus tusk, of which there was plenty – a century’s worth of hunting, in fact. Almost every family in Uelen got themselves a metal item of some sort – a knife, an ax, a saw, a cauldron, at the very least a few metal needles.

  The hairmouths also showed an interest in Uelen’s maidens. From time to time a couple wandered off to the other side of the lagoon; the nights had gotten dark and there was not enough starlight to distinguish the squirming figures in the yellowed grass.

  The foreigners strengthened the sides of their boats with walrus hides, pinning them to the wood with enormous iron nails; they plugged the leaks and mended the sails.

  On the eve of their departure they lit large fires with heaps of driftwood to be had not far off Pil’Khyn Bay, and sang plaintive, hoarse-voiced, soul-rending songs, which belied a yearning for a homeland and kins
men inconceivably far away. What had brought them so far from home, Mekym wondered as he leaned in to catch the unusual, heart-plucking tunes. Was it someone’s wish or an unshakeable order? Or perhaps their own curiosity, a burning desire to go beyond the boundaries of the known? Mekym knew this feeling well. Even as a child, peering at the hills beyond the lagoon, at the far-off ridges, his imagination flew far ahead, transforming him into a bird. He would soar above the hills and the watery expanse, the plains and the rivers. In his adult life he had traveled long distances by dogsled, and had sailed to Kytryn in the south, where some of his tribesmen lived in pastures, and to the other side of Irvytgyr, which was the homeland of the Aivanalin, whale hunters who decorated their cheeks and chins with smoothly polished plates of walrus tusk.

  Those people were hostile and always on their guard, because they could still remember Uelen’s men raiding their villages for brides or just for plunder.

  The hairmouths were clearly from another land altogether.

  They might have come down from the moon, whose surface was shadowed with shapes resembling those of men. Or perhaps from another, more distant star . . . But the moon was closest, of course. Sometimes, especially when the moon was new, hovering just above the horizon, it seemed close enough to reach by dogsled and touch with your bare hand.

  The whole village turned out to see the hairmouths on their way. Even their neighbors, the Nuvuken Aivanalin, came in their large canoes.

  The mended ships rocked in the waves and the hairmouths called to one another in ringing, joyful voices, excited like a pack of sled dogs before a long journey.

  Uelen’s maidens stood slightly apart and watched their brief happiness sail away into a measureless beyond, their eyes clouded by sorrow.

  When the boats raised their sails and moved toward the Senlun crag, slowly at first then gathering speed, the hairmouths struck a familiar, plaintive tune.