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The Ivory Eagle

by Jonathan Olfert

Autumn winds chilled the late-harvest gathering, kept everyone huddling by fires or the warmest tidepools. Kerredi’s latest trade brought him down to crouch by the shore where the breeze bit through the seams in his ragged furs. Two traders sloshed in the shallows, waiting on his decision. He clutched a leaf-wrapped packet of elk jerky and eyed the bargain: a shell-bead bracelet dangling from a tentacle. The Curling Hand People did make nice beads, but was this a trade up? Enough of a trade up?

He surrendered the jerky and snatched the bracelet. As the prize vanished into his shoulder-bag, he darted into the milling trade meet and was gone.

<The little human seemed nervous,> said one Curling Hand trader — quietly, because this was the Gathering Cove where all peoples understood each other. <I didn’t see its parents, did you?>

The other trader pulled the jerky into the warm water and disassembled it with eight tentacles and a flint knife. Babies swarmed from a subsurface grotto, chirping irritably for their snack. This was the last day of the swap meet, and everyone missed home.  <It looked big enough to be by itself.>

The first trader squinted into the mess of stalls and cookfires and wagons and humans and great shaggy Blue Ochre People and so much more. <Well, I suppose…>

---

Kerredi’s belly growled like a spikelion. He’d allowed himself one strip of jerky this morning, and chewed it to a stringy tasteless lump even though it hurt his wiggly back tooth. Hunger was the reason he’d looked for an inedible trade: he wasn’t tempted to take a bite of the shell-bead bracelet.

Huddled by one of the big waterside fires, where travelers ate acorn-bread and bowls of seafood chowder, he took the bracelet out of his raggedy shoulder-bag. Sixteen polished beads on a tight four-strand braid: beautiful work. What came next? Not food — he wasn’t lightheaded yet. The past three days’ trades had come to nothing or gone to feeding Grandfather. Today. He had to get the boat today.

It wasn’t like the Grey People even needed boats. They could swim faster than the fastest three-sail outrigger, never mind the one Kerredi had his eye on, bobbing there between trade boats and floating docks. The Blue Ochre People pulled those huge docks out of the caves every year, down into the water, trumpeting with exertion, blue paint sluicing from their fur to paint the cove. Now humans — the Longwalker People — crouched on the docks’ edges to barter with the Greys. The boat, the one Grandfather needed, floated like a leaf between them.

The Grey People were notoriously friendly. Those smiles, those sly jokes, were genuine to the core. But, like everyone else, they’d come here to make the deals that could set them up best for winter, and they drove a canny bargain. Kerredi needed to barter his way up very carefully indeed if he was to present them with a fair trade for that beautiful boat.

And it was a beauty. All one huge log, chopped sleek and burned out and braced wide to become a cavernous hull, sleek as a Grey; a sturdy framework anchoring the mast; a square sail, rolled up but clearly in great condition; a steering oar with a comfortable bench and good command of the ropes; all simple enough that a boy and a broken elder could call it home. Grandfather’s eyes had lit up the moment he saw it. For years and years before last summer’s wreck, he’d often taken Kerredi out on a boat much like this one.

Right now Grandfather, wrapped in a blanket, was nodding along as old friends — tired lean men much like him — shared sour honeywater and stories. Firelight gleamed on the scars that traced his hands, lined his cheeks, skittered down his neck and up into his wispy hair. Those were new scars, just one year old, and all the poultices and spells to save him had cost every treasure he’d collected in a lifetime on the sea.

He kept his distant, maybe-empty eyes on that beautiful boat. And Kerredi scanned the gathering for his next barter.

Distance, Kerredi was starting to understand, could help an awful lot: people valued someone who would go somewhere they wouldn’t or couldn’t. That was the whole foundation of coming so far to trade, wasn’t it? So who here might want the bracelet — but have the most trouble coming down along the cove’s edge to deal with the Curling Hand People in the warm tidepools?

The obvious answer loomed in the bluffs around the cove, giant four-legged silhouettes backlit by the largest fires around.

---

The Blue Ochre People stood tall as the trees they smashed for firewood. Back home in the hills and plains, they rolled in pits of the rarest ochres, or painted patterns on each other with their trunks. They bound rock blades to their tusks for fire-striking or harvesting or violence. Some wore beads or feathers knotted by their ears or high on their humped backs. All that to say: they liked ornamentation. If anyone might buy the bracelet, the Blue Ochre People would.

They knew how to be careful around smaller peoples — and plenty of Longwalker People moved among them, sat by their fires, shared food and bargains. As a small Longwalker and a child of the coast, unfamiliar with the Blue Ochre People in person, Kerredi approached warily. He’d come to the swap meet three times, but he’d been young and kept close to his parents. This was years ago, before he started losing teeth, before it was just him and Grandfather back home in their little cave by the sea.

You always wanted to make your bargains with the matriarchs, Grandfather had told him once. The big young males would be anxious for deals, aggressive with them and maybe with you. The matriarchs weren’t always gentler, but they took a longer view and had the final word on most things of real value. Their magic had been the heart of the Gathering Cove’s creation, not just the translation but the shifting patterns of wind and current that made it such a perfect place to gather by land or by sea. You crossed a matriarch at your own risk, but they had great things kept in store, great mysteries, and many beautiful objects to trade. Or that’s how the stories went, at least.

The bottom dropped out of Kerredi’s grumbling stomach as he realized there were actually no matriarchs in sight.

No, of course not — this was the last day of the swap meet, so they’d be off with the elders of the Longwalkers, the Greys, and the Curling Hands. Off a smaller private cove, renewing the Gathering Cove’s translation magic. They’d be there all day and well into the night.

Furious with himself for his oversight, Kerredi swiped prickling tears from his face and looked for the next best thing to a matriarch.

Half a dozen extended families had come to this late-summer gathering. That included children, massive furry babies who could crush an unwary human child. Keeping them amused and away from danger — or being dangerous — had to be as all-consuming a job as taking care of Grandfather on his worst days.

Frustrated people, Kerredi understood, had needs. A good trader could meet those needs.

One little valley, a hollow between bluffs, held a chilly stream and huge toys of carved, painted wood. A double handful of Blue Ochre children stampeded around, corralled by a Blue Ochre woman — not a matriarch, but one who might be in years to come.

“Greetings, honored grandmother,” said Kerredi, approaching her from the front with his head bowed. A curious baby lurched close, drew back, started snuffling at Kerredi’s near-empty bag with a trunk as thick as Kerredi’s leg. He held his ground and did his best to stay casual, harmless, not show fear. Instead he held up the gleaming bracelet.

The woman stamped, blue-painted trunk twisting high, all part of her speech. <A thing to trade, boy of the Longwalkers?> The translated voice was in his head, not his ears.

He nodded. “I went down to the tidepools on the far side of the cove. These beads come from the Curling Hands, from their deepest pools.” He took a careful step forward, holding the bracelet higher. “They’re fine striped shell, sixteen of them, polished smooth as pearls.” Grandfather had been a great trader in his time, and Kerredi found himself mimicking the way Grandfather’s voice used to flow from shiny thing to shiny thing.

The Blue Ochre woman snorted in what might be amusement; the Gathering Cove’s magic didn’t translate it. A pair of youngsters began thumping each other with their furry trunks. Her attention drifted their way, then snapped back to Kerredi. A little something for myself, he could almost hear her say. Why not?

She took the bracelet daintily with the flexible tip of her trunk and held it up before her face. The Blue Ochre People had poor eyesight, Grandfather said.

<This is beautiful,> she said at last, wistfully, and Kerredi realized that she might not actually have anything to trade. Desperation reared up for at least the twentieth time today. He clamped down on it, kept his head bowed — gods, but the sun was getting low — and waited for her to make an offer.

She hooked the bracelet deftly on a carved tusk and reached into her fur, up by her neck and shoulder. She unhooked one of her ornaments and held it up for Kerredi’s consideration. <Would you accept this in trade, friend?>

The offer was a human carving: an eagle in painted ivory, worn smooth and clean except for the ochre in the lines of its wings. Kerredi wet his lips nervously, trying to imagine what he could trade for it. Blue Ochre People didn’t part with their ornaments often, but it seemed such a little offer, such a paltry offer, nothing he could trade up toward that boat…

He found himself crying then, for no reason he could put to words. Just weeping there empty-handed by the muddy stream, as Blue Ochre babies squabbled over painted tree-trunks, as the sun passed below the bluffs and the real chill set in.

She hooked the ivory eagle in her fur and passed him back his bracelet, each motion delicate despite her size. <Are you hungry?> she said, and he just barely held back from bawling. Stopping to eat would mean he’d given up. Would mean no boat for Grandfather. Would mean Grandfather would never, never smile again, not like he had before last summer’s wreck.

Kerredi shuddered and forced himself to stop crying. To breathe. A fuzzy, curious trunk prodded at him: the babies were concerned. He was, he found, too tired to flinch.

The Blue Ochre woman stomped and rumbled, almost too low to hear: she called over another of her people, a young bull who’d been breaking firewood up the valley. In ways that the translation magic didn’t fully grasp, she made it clear to him that it was his turn to watch the children. Then she nudged Kerredi toward one of the fires where both their peoples bartered and ate.

---

She got the story out of him as she urged him to eat two, then three whole roasted bladefruits, a huge amount of food to him but barely a mouthful to her. The charred, soft fruit came out of its flat shell without much persuasion. It sat heavy in his gut, burned in his chest unpleasantly after a long winter of dried foods and a long summer digging shellfish in the mud. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever tasted.

<When I was a girl,> Gullwatcher said — that was her name, the Blue Ochre woman — <I helped drag the docks into the cove. My grandmother let me pull until the water was too deep for me. Then she told me I could let go of the rope and swim, and helped me back to the beach. I was so sad I made myself sick, Kerredi, for that whole swap meet. I was so tired of being small and useless and helpless. My father had just died, killed by spikelions. It was a bad summer. Grandmother understood that I needed to help, but she also understood that I would hurt myself if I pushed too far. What she didn’t understand was how to make me feel better. I can’t make you feel better, Kerredi. But I can at least tell you that you’ve gone as far as you can, and there’s no shame in that.>

He wiped juice and snot away with the back of his hand, and hunched over the ruin of the third bladefruit. “At least you got the docks in the water.”

<No, friend, someone else did. What needed to happen, happened, and nothing I did made much of a difference either way. I know that’s hard to hear– >

“Nobody else is going to fix this,” he said, knowing that interruption was ungrateful, but still. “Nobody else can.”

She watched him for a long time then, watched as he clawed the last of the bladefruit from its shell and licked his fingers.

THUD — Gullwatcher stomped and sparks shuddered up. Eyes turned their way, eyes from both their peoples. Kerredi felt himself weighed and measured as a pretty poor trade: a filthy boy slobbering over a meal he hadn’t earned.

<At least one thing from each of you, please,> Gullwatcher said firmly.

“No, Gullwatcher–”

<Ssh. You’ve done enough, Kerredi.> She plucked off his shoulder-bag and hooked it on her tusk, straps snug in the carvings. She took out the ivory eagle again and placed it in the bag, then began to walk, very slowly, around the giant fire. <One thing from each of you. For the boy.>

A Longwalker-human trader eyed him, then her, then him again, and put a coil of fine rope in the bag. A Blue Ochre bull, old and scarred, reached over Kerredi’s head: the bag shifted under the weight and shape of a beautiful human axe with one of those modern smooth-ground blades. A gasp got away from Kerredi. They were competing, he realized. This felt wrong, this felt–

Undeserved. That was the real wrongness, not the way they sought to outdo each other. He’d pushed so, so hard all winter to be enough for both himself and Grandfather, and harder still to get here, picking their way boatless along the shore, then begging and wheedling his way through the gathering. And now after all that, how useless was he, that people felt such a need to make up for this filthy Longwalker child who’d failed?

But next came a heavy pouch of rustling, fragrant seed, a fortune by itself. Then a woven shawl dyed brilliant green. Then a stone statuette, and a deadly redfin spine in a wooden case, and a carved shark-tooth bigger than his open hand. Then more and more until the bag distended, as points and corners pressed through its threadbare old weave.

Kerredi’s earliest memories held treasures like this: Grandfather’s trades, and Grandfather’s smile. The smile that said he couldn’t believe his luck and tomorrow would be even better.

With great care, Gullwatcher unhooked the bag from her tusk and let him take the weight. Kerredi couldn’t even put it on his back, just set it down and stared at the riches inside. At the promise that he could deliver on his promise. Overwhelming sights and sounds forced his eyes shut, but all that waited in the dark was the memory — as threadbare as the bag — of Grandfather’s smile. To come this far, and let someone else carry the weight at the end, felt like the deepest failure of Kerredi’s life. But wasn’t waking up that smile what mattered most?

When he opened his eyes, he had no answer that felt right. He did, however, have a bag full of trade goods and a place at a warm fire, and the end, earned or not, was in sight. Unexpected relief washed through his body, then sank into his heart a drop at a time as he started to let himself relax. He swiped at his eyes and hoped he wouldn’t cry again, now more than ever.

A song and a skin of sour honeywater were going around the circle. Gently but firmly, Gullwatcher snagged the skin with a curl of her trunk before Kerredi could take a sip. <Breath a little easier, friend,> she said, leaning her shaggy flank against him. <You’ll be on your boat tonight, I promise.>

---

The gathering’s final sunset lingered on the ocean like a drop of honey on your lip. Kerredi pushed the boat free of the floating docks and clambered inside. He tucked his bag, still half-full, down by the base of the mast.

Grandfather, wrapped in his blanket, had traded a seat by the fire for the rudder-bench. He gripped the rudder with both hands, eyes wide and fixed on the colours that rippled under the sun. The Grey People chittered a cheerful goodbye, tails thrashing in the water, and nudged their new trade goods into the appropriate piles on the edge of the dock. Some of the younger Greys snagged pretty things — the Curling Hand bracelet, the ivory eagle — and played with them underwater, using speed and sheer fun to keep the cold at bay.

High on the bluffs, Gullwatcher trumpeted loud enough to shake the clouds. Kerredi un-knotted the ties and let the square sail free.

The wind had pressed in from the sea all day, chilling the Gathering Cove. Now it turned, by luck or fate or maybe the magic of Blue Ochre women, and sparks from a dozen fires rushed up over the sea. As the wind caught the sail, the boat wallowed deep, then surged up until its sharp belly cut the waves. Slate-grey water whipped past underneath, somehow both splashing-soft and hard as rock skidding on rock. The boat held firm and picked up speed.

Other boats cut loose from the Gathering Cove and the little cove of the elders: more Longwalker people racing out to the sunset in outriggers and sleek dugouts. Maybe to start home on tonight’s perfect wind, maybe just for the joy of it. A whoop went up, the old here-I-am calls of ocean explorers and deep-fishers.

And Grandfather was whooping too. The wind ripped his blanket away and he stood as tall as he ever had, eyes blazing. He held the rudder with every bit of his old strength, and if he was a little clumsy on the turns, a little slow to signal Kerredi when to trim or turn the sail, ah well — these weren’t failures to bring the old man to tears. This was just a beautiful night, and the last sliver of the orange sun kept watching long after the stars came up to dance.

Grey People and Curling Hands danced too, and here were the Deep People coming up to meet them. One breached the water with a leap and a wordless shout of greeting, only half-translated by the distant Gathering Cove. The huge body smashed back into the waves; cold spray fountained high. It pooled in the base of the rushing boat, dampened Grandfather’s thin hair, gleamed on his scars, and something went clear and bright behind the old man’s eyes.