Call Down the Stars by Sue Harrison

stories, but here she was, the lesser wife, searching for firewood in a strange land where the soil could not even grow trees, where the largest animals were the otters and seals that came to the beaches from the sea. No, she did not need the problems of some whining child to interrupt her work.
    She glanced up for landmarks so she could find the plant again, then continued down the gray sand beach, picking up driftwood as she walked. When her arms were full, she would swing the sealskin sling from her shoulders, add the wood she had been carrying, then bend once more to her task. One slingful would not be enough. Eye-taker would send her out for more, but Old Woman was good at stacking her wood slowly so she could get warm inside the ulax before having to go back out into the wet fog of the day.
    She rounded a narrow point of beach, a small finger of gravel that protected a cove where the waves were generous. She was bent over a heap of branches when she again heard the child’s voice, more clearly this time.
    Strange, she thought as she straightened, arched her shoulders against the weight of the wood on her back. The voice did not come from the direction of the village or the hills. Had some child, playing in his mother’s fishing boat, been swept out to sea?
    She might not like children, but to rescue one—or at least go for help—would win her favor in the village. She untied the wood from her back and set the sling on the beach. She shielded her eyes with one hand, squinting into the haze. At first she saw nothing unusual, but then a darkness she had thought to be only a thin spot in the fog grew larger.
    Old Woman was wearing a puffin skin sax. The long hoodless parka hung past her knees, and she wore no leggings, no boots. She pulled up the sax, balled it in one hand, and waded into the water. The cold numbed her skin and made the bones of her feet ache. She called to the boat, but received no answer, then saw a small white face peek up from the bow.
    The child held a hand toward Old Woman, and Old Woman forgot about her sax, allowed it to drop into the water. She turned sideways to more easily take the force of the waves, and waited until the sea brought the boat to her. She clasped an arm over the edge, began to tow it toward shore.
    The child, a girl, patted Old Woman’s shoulder, and Old Woman shook her head at the sores that covered the girl’s body. The child wore only the remnants of a parka, hoodless and made of something that looked like woven grass. From the waist down she was bare, more bone than meat, and her legs and feet were mottled blue around raw sores.
    She looked like a First Men child, with a round face and small nose, her hair dark and straight, but when she spoke, holding out both hands as though asking to be taken from the boat, Old Woman did not understand her words. They were not First Men, not Walrus, not even the language of the River People.
    Old Woman shook her head, held one hand palm up, and again grasped the boat, tried to guide it to shore. There was an undertow along the cove, and several times she lost her footing, but managed to right herself.
    The boat was a strange craft, neither raft nor iqyax, but made of two logs, the larger hollowed out like the dugout canoes some River People used, and the other, much smaller, left whole, but shaped to a point at both ends. The logs were held several arm’s lengths apart by four heavy poles that were lashed to the logs with bindings made of heavy rope.
    Old Woman remembered how First Men hunters, when caught in storms on the sea, bound their iqyan together with their paddles to make a more stable craft, one that was less likely to be capsized. The man who had made this boat was no fool, but the craft had seen hard use.
    It stank of old fish and worse. Slices of meat lay against the sides of the boat, and many of them had rotted into the wood, making their own stink. Long stipes of bull kelp extended from bow to stern. They were fresh,