Call Down the Stars by Sue Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

who deserved a longer life. He looked down at her small face—at the eyes, once so bright, now sunken and dull with hunger—and sorrow burned at the center of his chest.
    She is only a girl, he reminded himself. A girl’s life was not easy, nor even necessarily good. As wife, she would spend her days working hard, her nights serving a husband who might not be easy to please.
    He had been good to his own wives, Water Gourd assured himself. Most of the time, anyway. Perhaps in his youth he had been more impatient with his first wife than he should have been. Demanding. But surely he had made up for that over the years, and paid for it with his fourth wife, wicked and self-centered as she had been.
    Perhaps, then, for both he and Daughter, it was good that the sea urchins were gone. Perhaps neither of them had much to live for. Now, he could give serious thought to dying. How can a man consider the necessity of death when he still has food?
    He set his thoughts onto ways of dying. Starvation was certainly one, drowning another, but neither seemed appealing. Water Gourd still had his knife. He could cut into his veins, knotted like blue worms under his skin. But thinking of blood turned his thoughts to butchering, and for most of that first day after their food was gone, Water Gourd was lost in remembering the feasts of the past, times of celebration.
    He filled his mind with the remembrance of sea urchins, split and ready to eat, rich as the boar fat that dripped from spits into the roasting fires. Delicate chestnut cakes, roasted nuts and tubers, grass seeds pounded fine and mixed with water, cooked on flat stones and rolled around a paste of fish. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to eat his way through such a meal, finishing with flower blossoms, bitten and sucked to get at the nectar.
    And it wasn’t until Daughter’s whimpering brought him from his feast back to the cold, wet hulk of the boat that he realized that instead of thinking about death, he had spent most of the day considering life.
    He was disgusted with himself. If he wasted his time thinking about eating, how could he hope for an honorable death?
    “There is nothing to eat,” he told Daughter sadly, and she pulled her fingers out of her mouth and puckered her lips into a pout.
    “Fish,” she said.
    “No fish,” he told her.
    She pointed at several empty sea urchin shells that littered the bottom of the boat. “Fish,” she said again, in a more demanding way. He leaned down and picked up a shell, handed it to her. She licked at the inside, then played with it for a while, and for the first time he realized that she needed a toy. Didn’t all children have toys? He considered cutting away the edge of one of the blankets, tying it into something that would look like a doll—legs and arms and head—but then he realized his foolishness. They needed the blankets much more than Daughter needed a doll. She was happy enough with the sea urchin shell, prickly though it was.
    But the thought of cutting the blanket set another idea into his mind. Perhaps he could make some kind of line from the blanket, or better yet from the fiber of his shirt. He began to examine the edges of the jacket where stitches caught up a hem of sorts to keep the fabric from unraveling. He picked at the thread, wondered what it was made of. He had seen the women of the village pounding bark, perhaps to separate it into threads for sewing. Sometimes they twisted sinew, but what man paid attention to that? Curses were too easy to come by as it was. Why bring them on yourself with an inordinate interest in women’s work?
    By the time he had picked out the stitches, he had a section of thread as long as his arms stretched wide. Perhaps enough to catch a fish, he thought. He tugged at it, and decided it was strong enough to hold. He used his knife to cut away a section of wood from the edge of the boat, managed to take off a piece as long as his fist and as big around as two