Again, he held up his open hands.
“I no hurt.”
It was the voice!
“I wasn't dreaming!” she spluttered. “It was you who saved me!” She then realized she was speaking the language of the Vikings. She switched over to a language she hadn't used in nine years.
“You rescued me!” she said in her Celtic mother tongue.
“Yes,” he replied.
“How is it possible that you know the language of my ancestors?”
He shook his head. “Story long. You sleep two days. Tired. Hungry. Must eat.”
The spoken words were choppy, and the skraeling seemed to struggle to find the right words, but his voice was one of the sweetest things she had ever heard. She stared at him in amazement. Was she dreaming all of this? This was impossible! How could she be speaking Celtic to a skraeling who was living an ocean away from her home?
He cautiously moved to the fire and lifted a stick of fish. Then he turned and called into the woods using a strange language. The woman whom Kiera had seen when she had first wakened reappeared with another wooden bowl. She approached, her eyes fixed suspiciously on Kiera. Kiera noticed that above her left eye was a pattern of three black triangles that together looked something like half a flower.
“Please,” Kiera said, soothingly. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you.”
The man spoke to Kiera. “She not know.”
He turned and spoke to the woman. She seemed to relax slightly. She then examined Kiera as if she was the strangest creature she had ever seen. Carefully, she set the bowl of water by Kiera's side, then backed away.
The man pointed at the water, then passed her a cooked fish. He also passed a small birch dish filled with a selection of wild berries.
“Eat. Drink.”
Kiera held the fish. Her stomach rumbled at the thought of sinking her teeth into some food, but she hesitated and watched her visitors. She observed the two strangers as they removed the fish from the stick, then pulled the meat from the bones with their fingers. His mouth full, the man gestured again for Kiera to join them. Kiera could no longer resist. She attacked the food ravenously. The fish was delicious. She then realized how long it must have been since she had had her last meal. The food also seemed to help clear her thoughts. She looked again at her wrapped leg. She tried to move it, but a sharp pain fired up through her body and took her breath away.
The man seemed startled by her action. “No move!” he commanded.
He said things that she did not understand. Kiera, confused and in pain, shook her head. The man looked around and found a twig. He pointed to his shin, then took the twig and bent it until it cracked, then pointed at her, trying to tell her that her leg was fractured. Kiera eased herself backwards and stared up into the speckled sky. This was what she had suspected.
She was helpless. She could not move, let alone get home. What was she going to do? She was now at the mercy of these strange skraelings. It took a minute for her to recover from the shock. Her thoughts quickly returned to the fact that the man knew Celtic. Perhaps this was a key to another way home! The skraelings were still sitting across from her, staring, eating their fish in silence.
“Tell me,” she asked, “how is it that you know Celtic?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. An answer to such a complex question was too much to expect. Better to step back a bit. After all, she wasn't going anywhere. She pointed to herself and smiled. “Kiera. My name is Kiera.”
He smiled and pointed to himself. “Chocan. She Sooleawaa. We Beothuck.”
“Chocan. Sooleawaa. Thank you for saving my life.”
Kiera bowed her head in respect. Chocan stood up, approached her and knelt down in the ditch beside her. He reached out and reverently lifted up the Celtic cross that hung around her neck. He rubbed the intricately carved grooves with his thumb and smiled.
“No. Thank you, Teacher.”
SEVEN
Kiera lowered the needle, held up the fine leather garment and examined it in the glowing radiance of the fire. Sooleawaa circled around the fire and knelt next to Kiera, her eyes widening in admiration.
“It is beautiful,” said Sooleawaa, feeling the delicate stitching. “I have never seen anything like it.”
Kiera, Sooleawaa and Chocan had passed the last several weeks trying to learn each other's languages. It was Kiera's job to improve Chocan's mysterious knowledge of the Celtic tongue, while Sooleawaa had taken on the task of teaching Kiera the Beothuck language. Although Kiera could now understand most of Sooleawaa's phrases, she was having far more difficulty getting her voice to imitate the strange rhythms and sounds of the different tongue.
“Your skirt,” corrected Kiera, in embarrassingly rough Beothuck. “It for you.”
“For me?” stammered Sooleawaa, shocked.
Kiera passed it to her. “Yes. My thank you gift to you.”
Sooleawaa looked to her, then turned in disbelief to Chocan, who sat to the right of the fire. He was using the fire to help illuminate the fishing spear he was carving from what was once a maple sapling. He put the stone and stick down and admired Kiera's handiwork. The flames danced across his glowing gaze.
“Are you going to try it on?”
Sooleawaa needed no further prodding. She stepped into the skirt and pulled it up over the thin, worn skirt she had worn every day since Kiera had arrived. The soft, brown material fit perfectly around her waist, curving down her hips to just above her knees. Kiera was relieved that she had sewn it perfectly. Sooleawaa turned back to Kiera, her eyes as round as the full moon peering through the trees above them. She tried to stammer a thank-you, but she was so excited, she simply hopped up and down three times, turned and sprinted into the darkness.
Chocan laughed. “I have never seen my sister so happy. Thank you, Kiera.”
Kiera put the needle back into the hem of her own skirt. She grinned with a mix of satisfaction and relief. The giving of a gift brought back all of the memories of the last few weeks. Seeing her friends covered in red ochre seemed now just a natural extension of their warm personalities. She was overwhelmed with gratitude.
“It was the least that I could do. You saved my life, fed me and kept me company. I owe both of you much more than a simple leather skirt.”
He nodded towards the trees. “She has gone to show the villagers.”
Kiera turned her gaze towards the woods as well. “When will I meet the people of your village?”
“Soon,” laughed Chocan as he threw another log on the evening campfire. “They know you. They've seen you through the trees. My people, however, still fear you. You are a pale-skinned stranger. I tried to tell them that you are not a spirit to be feared. They're still not sure.”
Kiera straightened. “I would love to meet them. Is there anything I could do to help them not be so afraid of me?” she asked.
Chocan thought for a moment. He then reached behind the stump on which he was perched and brought forward a stained leather bag. Kiera recognized it.
“Your staining powder,” she whispered.
Chocan opened the sack, reached in and took out a handful of the clumpy mixture. He held it up to the fire. “This is ochre. Ochre is part of us, just as skin is part of us. It comes from Earth, our mother.