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When Hilla-Tupa finished telling the story of Big-Eye, it was already blue morning hour outside. The northern wind had weakened, giving way to all-encompassing silence. From inside the reed house, it felt like there was nothing beyond it, as if the house and the little dimly lit space at its entrance were all there was in the world.

“Well, that was a long journey,” Hilla-Tupa whispered, pouring the remainder of his rozhopataki* outside the hut. He put the cup near the fireplace and began settling down on the mat near his wife. “Time now to get some sleep.”

I did not feel like sleeping, though.

“So does it mean,” I asked, “that this man may still be rowing towards the River’s source?”

“Nobody knows. He may be rowing, he may be swimming on his own, he may have already reached it. He may as well have already died, and the halves of his spirit may already walk among us. As I’ve said, there’s a lot of speculation.”

“What exactly did he try to fix?”

“Everything.”

Hilla-Tupa was already lying on his side with his eyes closed, but I still ventured to ask him one last question:

“Even death?”

“I think death was the first thing he was trying to fix,” Hilla-Tupa whispered and did not respond to me anymore. I spent the rest of the morning ruminating, watching the world behind the entrance hole go from dark blue to light yellow. At some moment, a bird croaked close, ripping me out of my dreaminess. Then I set aside my thoughts and lay down, curling up in my blanket.

Pamala-Rashe and I spent the winter with the River People. During that time, Pamala-Rashe became close to a girl named Tshoowa-wa-Yi**, the youngest daughter of Hilla-Tupa’s cousin. They spent a lot of time together, and though nobody talked about it loud, out of the River courtesy, but everyone knew where this was going. I, on the other hand, selfishly considered this an opportunity to find out more about this strange man. For that, I spent many windy nights in the house of Hilla-Tupa’s cousin when Tshoowa-wa-Yi was there, asking her many questions. Once again, I was disappointed.

“I don’t know,” was the answer to each of my inquiries.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I exclaimed. “Don’t you talk to each other?”

“We do! But not about him.”

“But why? Don’t you want to know who he is, where he is from, who his parents are?”

“I do, just... maybe not now. For now, I know that he’s a good man, very strong and handsome. Well, I also know that he is from the plains. Or rather, I think so, judging by his accent.”

Her father sat in the far corner, wrapped in a cloak, drinking hot rozhopataki.

“Some people don’t have answers to questions asked,” he said, keeping the wooden cup close to his mouth. “Forcing them to hand over what they don’t have is rude.”

Thus, realizing that my useless attempts were now also becoming inappropriate, I stopped my questioning and resigned myself to the fact that this man would remain a mystery to me. He appeared in my life from nowhere and as such would likely disappear one day just as inexplicably—maybe even with a thing of mine.

This is the mindset we have in the valleys. Reliability is achieved by stating your name, your relatives, and your position in your tribe. That way, you’re bound by the responsibility that you have towards your kin. This was how we reinforce social harmony back in the valleys, but here at the River, they had a different view on these things.

Fiancée was not the only thing, however, that Pamala-Rashe acquired during our stay in the camp. Just fifteen days before the spring equinox, he became severely ill. At first, people speculated that it could’ve been black fever. This made us all worried, but on the fourth day Pamala-Rashe’s fever broke and on the sixth, he was already taking part in the power contests with the youth. His disease loosened its grip but did not free him completely, however, for his nose remained stuffed for many moons ahead.

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***

Ten days after the spring equinox, Hilla-Tupa, along with some of his clanmates, took us on a journey up the River.

“What are we hunting?” I asked him while we were rowing upstream in our reed boats.

“Oh, it’s not a hunt,” he said. “You will see.”

Intrigued, I sat in front of him, helping to paddle the boat against the current. By that time, the River had begun to rise. We passed many places which I had walked at just half a moon prior, and which were now submerged.

We paddled quite far away from our island and entered a channel on the northern side of the River. The southern shore of the channel was flooded. At some point, I saw a line of flowery trees in the distance above the grass tips. It looked like a line of blooming apricot trees, though they were a little taller and with much wider canopies.

“These are River’s cherries,” Hilla-Tupa explained. We reached the grassy bank and went into the grove. Sturdy trees with branches fully covered in pinkish-white flowers grew all across the narrow strip of land locked between two channels. Their petals covered the hilly ground, clear of any bushes. The air was filled with a faint sweet scent, somewhat reminiscent of almonds.

Groups of River People, mostly women and kids, were already walking in the grove. They chanted and sprinkled tree trunks with water from waxed pots. It was a ritual of greeting the spirits of cherries who returned from the south. The spirits only returned in the short period of two moons during the spring equinox, Hilla-Tupa explained to me, when Dot—patron of the northern winds—is least active. At other times, they hid in the south.

Men weren’t supposed to be present for this ritual, but since Hilla-Tupa was the devoted one and I was his dear guest, we could be there. We went further into the grove and sat down under a tree.

“You know,” I said to him. “You mentioned the desert before. There is something I’ve been meaning to ask for a long time now.”

“What is it?”

“Why do you tell so little about the desert in the north?”

“Why, we have a story,” Hilla-Tupa said. “A Payaha of the north married a spirit of a deceased man and gave birth to Dot—patron of deadly northern winds who devastated the land. Since then, Payahas are not allowed to marry spirits, and Dot is not allowed to go south. Aside from that, there is nothing much there, so there is nothing much to tell.”

“Well, it sounds like a dead place,” I noted.

“Yes, dead it is indeed.”

“So it is the land of death.”

“Yes, it is,” Hilla-Tupa now glanced at me, unsure as to where I was heading.

“And if so—wouldn’t it be logical to assume that this is where the dead go?”

Hilla-Tupa thoughtfully plucked several blades of grass and began chewing on them.

“The dead go to the Last Rock where Raven and Lark divide their spirit and carry them over to Payahas,” he said.

“And if they don’t go there?”

“Then their spirit walks the earth undivided.”

“Right. So if somebody goes to the north and dies there, his spirit will roam the blazing sands.”

“That is correct.”

“So it’s the land of the dead.”

Hilla-Tupa chewed on the grass stems, watching the group of women return from the farther side of the grove.

“I think so,” he said. “But what of it?”

“Nothing much,” I said. Now I had to think over what I had been saying. “It’s just that the story of Big-Eye triggered some memories of mine. About my father and mother. I’ve had this same feeling for a long time, that I was not their son. But now that they’re gone... If only I could ask my father.”

“You said they died in a flood?”

“They were washed away by the current, yes.”

“But then it is logical to assume that their spirits are somewhere in the Sea?”

“But if Surians are right and everybody goes to the land of the dead in the north, then they must’ve gone there. Don’t you think?”

Hilla-Tupa got to his feet smiling.

“But if they are wrong and we are right, then their spirits have been divided and sent back to the world. And they are neither in the Sea nor in the north, but may very well be among us.”

“And if everybody is wrong and death is not what we think it is at all?” I said, and my tone probably sounded too agitated, for Hilla-Tupa reached for the closest branch of a cherry tree, snapped it off, and gave me the flowery twig.

“I think, my friend, you think about death too much. You should take a break occasionally.”

He went to the group of women who were walking between the trees back to the shore, their kids roistering behind them.

“If only I could ask him,” I mumble while getting up and following my friend.

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Footnotes:

* - /ˌroʒopaˈtaki/ - a local beverage brewed from cherry berries (see Ch. 20)

** - /tʃoːˌwa-wa-ˈi/ - Brought-in-a-Leopard-Skin