The Shaman and the Droll Read online

  “I – ”

  “Let me finish. You have taught me to read and write, taught me healing. You saved me from the trap, Ish,” he said. “You saved me that time I slipped and fell in front of the white bear. You pulled me out that time I fell through the crack in the ice and would have drowned. You have saved me three times. I owe you the truth.”

  I knew what he was going to say, but didn’t want to hear him. I tried to smile. Felt a sickly grin distort my face.

  “What is it?”

  Arku was kneeling, fiddling with Chaka’s harness. He tried to speak. Closed his mouth. Opened it again, and a voice unlike his said, “They are going to blind you.”

  Chapter 31

  “There Must Be a Sacrifice.”

  Arku knelt, twisting, untwisting a strap over Chaka’s back. I stared at a crack in the leather, but was too dizzy to speak. I remember thinking it looked as if Arku was talking to his busy hands.

  “There will be a ceremony here at the cave.” He raised his head. I stared at the deep-cut fan of lines at the corners of his eyes. They came from peering into the snow-glare – and from laughter. Each single hair of Arku’s eyebrows was thick and black. Behind his head, the snow dazzled white, rocks black. Everything looked clearer, sharper.

  “Everyone will meet here,” said Arku. The thickness of his tongue made it hard for him to pronounce his words. “The Carny will blind you with the hot wires.”

  I gasped so cold air thrilled in the back of my throat until I tasted blood. Its musky smell rose in my nostrils. The hairs on the back of my neck stood. I ran my hand up my neck, felt their stiff rasp.

  “That strap,” I whispered. “It’s got a crack in it.”

  Arku nodded, and I heard my voice ask, “Why will he blind me?”

  “To give you wisdom.”

  “What about the Shaman?”

  “You will be the Shaman. Our Judge.”

  “But, the Shaman?”

  “The old Shaman will die. The Carny will cry out, ‘The Shaman is dead.’ Everyone will lament. Then he will cry, ‘Long live the Shaman!’ Everyone will cheer. And we will have a feast.”

  “But, why?”

  “Because that is how it is done.” Arku stood. “Ish, you have been a good friend. You taught me everything you know.”

  “But I don’t want to be blind.”

  “That is why I am telling you.”

  “I’ll climb the mountains. Look for the central land. Lake Ka.”

  “You can try,” said Arku. “But you’ll never climb the mountains.”

  “Who can stop me?”

  “The white bears,” said Arku. “They obey the Carny.”

  I was bewildered, could not get my breath. The Shaman could no longer travel and heal and judge, as he used to do. But why couldn’t I do his work for him? Arku could only repeat what he knew. What had always been done.

  His father had seen the old Shaman die, the new Shaman blinded. He had described it, but Arku could not remember his father’s words clearly. It was so long ago, and they were mixed with other stories he had heard. And the old people were telling the stories again.

  “I cannot help you any more,” he said. “When the time comes for the ceremony, I will be there with the rest. There is an old saying: ‘Everyone sees a Shaman die and a Shaman given wisdom.’ It is what we have always done.”

  The Shaman came out and listened to the sledge drawing away, the yelps of the dogs as they followed Chaka. “What was Arku saying?”

  “Just talking about the time we hunted the bears.”

  “I thought I heard him saying something else.” I had forgotten how sharp was the Shaman’s hearing. “Something about the Carny.”

  The Shaman stood gazing blindly in the direction of the dwindling sledge. “Remember: trust everyone and no one.” Suddenly I remembered where I had heard that said before. I heard her voice again now. “My father said we must trust everyone and no one.” It was Lutha, and she had said those words in the cell on the Floating Village.

  “After you came down the river under the mountain – ” I said to the Shaman. “When you were chasing the Salt Men who had attacked your village on the edge of Lake Ka – ”

  The Shaman lifted his head as if to a voice from above the cave, but I knew he was listening to me. And I was listening to Lutha telling me how her mother had described the disappearance of her father.

  “He was young when he disappeared and left my mother pregnant with me. The Salt Men attacked our old village. They killed many of us. My father and some men were returning from up the lake. They chased the Salt Men to the river, cutting them down. But he disappeared, my father and all our other men. They never returned. Some say the Salt Men killed them as they crossed the river where I rescued you.”

  “When you were a young man,” I said, “you chased the Salt men across the river out of the lake. Your canoe was swept down the tunnel under the mountain. The other men were all drowned, but you survived. You lived and became the Shaman.

  “After you disappeared your wife had a baby, a daughter. She called her Lutha.”

  There was a gasp from the Shaman. “My wife’s name was Lutha! Yes, she had just found out she was pregnant. Her bleeding had stopped. Then we chased the Salt Men, and I was swept down the river under the mountain. How do you know all this?”

  I told him how I had come to the lake, across the mountains from the Western Coast. How Lutha saved us from drowning in the river. How she told me about her father. How she saved us a second time. And the Shaman sat and listened.

  “You were rescued by the old Shaman. He taught you everything he knew, how to read and write, how to use the Library. He taught you healing and judging, then he grew old and was killed. And you were blinded by the Carny and became the Shaman yourself.

  “Now they want to do it all over again. To kill you and blind me so I can become the Shaman in your place.”

  “No one lives forever,” said the Shaman. “I have had a good life. Now it can be yours.”

  “Not at the cost of my eyes. Before you became the Shaman, did you know they were going to blind you?”

  “No.” He admitted it. Instead of lifting his blind eyes to the roof of the cave, the Shaman lowered his face. “But they believe it gives wisdom, and so it does, in a sense.” He was silent, and I could not wake him out of his trance. I felt tight with rage and anger.

  How could I convince him I did not want to be the Shaman? Nor the Judge.

  I could take the sledge and head north or south, but the Carny would soon catch me with the help of the villagers. I knew that from what Arku had said. And he had said the white bears would not let me escape across the mountains. But there must be a way back to Lake Ka, to Lutha.

  That same day, before the light vanished, I tramped through the snow to where we had first arrived, Jak, Nip, and I. The river spouted out of the cliff into the pool. I looked up at the hole and saw its mouth was the same shape as the tunnel behind the cave.

  I already knew the mountains to the north were a continous series of cliffs and bluffs. Impassable. Over the next few days, we explored south, looking for a good spur to climb. But we had only gone a short way when Jak and Nip snarled. Fresh bear sign. Tracks and dung. Claw marks high on an ice cliff, like a warning. White bears closer to the cave than I had seen them before.

  What did Arku mean, that the Carny controlled the white bears? Packs of them. I thought of the Droll and its single-footed tracks. There was so much I had wanted to understand. But not at the cost of my eyes.

  I would take the Shaman with me. Back to the daughter he had never seen. To the Floating Village the women had built after their men disappeared. Back in the cave I found him awake.

  “There is no way over the mountains,” he said and repeated it. There was sympathy in his voice, but he did not understand my terror. It was only what he had suffered himself. And he had become the Shaman: Healer and Judge. Now it was time for him to end his life, and he was satisfied. He ha
d prepared somebody to replace him. His part was done.

  I argued with him. He had taught me to question and oppose superstition. Yet here he was giving into it.

  “I will find a way,” I said. When he shook his head, I was all the more determined. With Jak and Nip, I set off again to explore the faces, to find a crack or a gully we could climb.

  There must be some way we could force. The same problem drove us back each time. As we turned from a bluff like a wall of glass, a boulder bounded down, smashed into sharp plates of rock. Like blades they spun and whirred, slicing the snow.

  The next crack I found in the side of an icy spur led us further. Then a slide of snow fell ahead of us, piled in the bottom of the gully, gushed up the other side. More masses of snow creaked above. We retraced our steps.

  It was the same every time. We were being watched. I would climb a short way, fling up my head and be aware of something darting out of sight.

  I dreamt I saw white bears on the ridges above us. Hidden in their white coats against white snow. Tumbling boulders, setting the snow sliding. Stopping us whichever way we climbed.

  And that was how I spotted them. High on the cliff above us, one day, I saw the black spot of a white bear’s nose. I glanced away and back, and the black spot had disappeared. But I remembered seeing white bears cover their noses with their paws as they crept up on seals. This bear now looked just part of the white cliff, but it must be there!

  An old hunting trick: I turned sideways, looked through the slits of my snow mask, out of the corners of my eyes, and picked out the shape of the bear against the snow. Now I could see it clearly, the touch of yellow in its fur. I swung and stared too hard, too straight. The beast vanished into the snowy side of the spur. I looked out of the corners of my eyes again, saw the first bear – and several others. Up every gully, every spur, white bears waiting to turn us back. We were never going to climb the mountains.

  Was it true what Arku had said, that the Carny controlled the white bears? Earlier I had laughed at myself for even asking the question. We returned to the cave.

  When would the blinding ceremony happen? The Shaman shook his head. He was so used to the idea, had resigned himself to its happening.

  We found an ice bridge across the river and explored the mountains to the north again, but were turned back by impassable bluffs, snow slides, smashing boulders, and tracks of white bears. Jak and Nip whined and lowered their tails between their legs.

  Bear tracks began appearing near the cave itself. We would soon be unable to leave it. The ceremony must be close. Fear suffocated me. There were terrifying nights when I woke unable to breathe, thinking I was already blind. What if the Carny came with the hot wires in the night? Caught me in the dark? One morning I heard Jak snarling at fresh bear tracks and steaming dung just outside the cave.

  The Library! I spent the next few days searching it, finding rooms I had never seen before, flights of steps up into more and more levels, more and more rows and shelves of books. But no sign of any way of escaping. And if the Carny came hunting me in the Library, his dogs would follow our scent with ease.

  I spoke again of Lutha to the Shaman. “I am too old,” he replied. “My life is near its end.”

  His words opened something in my mind like a crack in the mountainside. They convinced me he could still think of the possibility of escaping. He was too old. That did not mean he was ready to die. The beginning of the idea was there in his mind, I was sure: the idea that he might still escape and live.

  I worked on that suspicion of an idea in the Shaman’s head. I also worked on the door of the cave. Into the holes in the rock walls either side, I thrust heavy beams of wood and built up slabs of ice and boulders I had rolled inside. They froze together in a solid wall.

  The fire still kept burning. The air in the cave was still fresh. There must be air coming from somewhere!

  I argued with the Shaman. Sometimes he seemed to go into a trance, just to escape me. But he had to wake from it. I was waiting, and I reasoned with him. And slowly he began to admit that he did not want to die. That he did not want to give in to the rule of superstition.

  “What of the people?” he asked. “Who will heal them? Who will be their judge?”

  “Arku! He knows as much I do about healing and judging. There is always somebody who can lead them. Better they should find their own leaders than be led by the Carny.”

  The Shaman repeated that he was getting old. Losing the power of his mind. His grip. The people needed somebody who came from outside, whom they would respect.

  “Everyone respects Arku,” I said. “He has helped me with healing in all the villages. He will make a good judge.”

  Later that day the Shaman came out of a trance and called me. “There is a way out of the Land of the White Bear,” he said. “But there must be a sacrifice.”

  “Come,” he said. “We must go at once.”

  Chapter 32

  The Droll’s Tunnel

  I had my pack ready – fire-pot, a book of stories, boiled meat, a cooking pot, an axe lashed down the back. Spear in my hand for a staff, knife belted around my waist. The Shaman strode into the gloom at the back of the cave. A flash of silver on one hand – the ring he sometimes wore. Then he was in darkness. Jak and Nip trotting behind.

  Somewhere a steady thump! thump! My heart. It stopped and began again as I snatched up the burning lamp and a bag of blubber for oil. The thumping redoubled. Smashing at the barricaded door! I thought of the massive paws that could crush a seal’s head with a tap and hurried after the Shaman – into the Droll’s tunnel!

  I stumbled on something, lowered the lamp, and saw the piece of coal I once flung in here. At the same time I remembered the Shaman’s curious words: “There must be a sacrifice.”

  “What are we going to give up?” I asked.

  The Shaman ignored my question. “Have you a firepot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then blow out the lamp.”

  Listening, following, it was as if I could see him: his steps, that coarse rasp of hair rubbing upon hair, his bearskin. “This is what it must be like,” I thought, “being blind.”

  Many hours later, it must have been night-time outside, the Shaman stopped. “Stand still,” his voice said. “There is a hole.” I heard the rub of his boot across the floor.

  “Do you want my spear? You could feel with it.”

  His voice seemed to come from another direction. “Turn to your left, put your hand out and feel for the wall.”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep Jak and Nip behind you and come forward slowly. There is a narrow ledge against the left hand wall. The hole stretches across the rest of the tunnel floor.”

  Suddenly his voice was close to me. “Hold the back of my tunic.”

  I felt for, clutched the Shaman’s hairy tunic. My left shoulder and the side of the pack scraped the wall as we shuffled on to the ledge. I could hear Jak following. A jobble of shrieks and moans rose out of the invisible chasm. A stench of decay and filth. It was as if I saw through darkness into the belly of misery itself. Descending circles of agony and despair of the fallen. The groans of forgotten sufferers who heard our free steps with envy. Tried to will us off the precarious edge, tumbling, arms windmilling, feet stamping air to fall and join their furious pain.

  The picture in my mind flashed off. I could smell the Shaman’s bearskin. Jak and Nip nosed my hand, crowded against my trembling legs. “We are across,” said a voice, and I found I had been holding my breath against the putrid reek.

  “Come on.” I followed.

  “How did you know the hole was there?”

  “Quiet. There are more.”

  We crossed a second hole on another ledge, this time on the right of the tunnel. A third we got over by edging sideways across a narrow bridge. The howls and whoops of misery, the same stench of decay. I dared not look down, kept my head up, tried to forbid the pictures in my mind.

  On my own, even with a l
amp, I would probably have pitched down the first hole. But the Shaman had said, “There are more.” That meant he knew they were there before he heard or smelt them. He said he had taught me everything he knew, but there were things he still kept hidden. Was he going to tell me about them before I was blinded? It wasn’t the time to ask him now.

  The left wall of the tunnel swam out of mist. I cried. “There’s light ahead!” The right wall retreated further into darkness. Something was slapping. Red reflections lunging across a black surface. The clap and suck of waves on stone. In the distance, a streak of sound which resolved itself into a hiss. And heat.

  In my mind I was back travelling down the underground river with Jak and Nip on our raft of blown-up goatskins. Surging past a burning wall.

  I wanted to run but could only follow at the Shaman’s speed. Across bloodied water the far wall of the tunnel trembled red, a molten slide of burning rock. The quench and hiss seethed and dinned. An acrid smell: Jak and Nip’s hair smoking. Smoke rose pungent from the Shaman’s bearskin. My own about to burst into flames. I pulled the snow mask over my eyes, but its bone burned into my skin. Then we were past and around a bend, coughing, gulping cool air, smacking our clothes to put out the sparks, running our hands over Jak and Nip.

  “It’s only fire, burning rock,” I kept telling them over and over. The Shaman strode on, and we followed deeper into that underground of stone dryness. Throats aching for moisture.

  Long before we heard the water, I smelled it. Grateful for its sound, for the promise of wetness, at last I felt it on my face. Snuffed it up my dry nostrils. Gaped my mouth so dampness softened the cracking flesh inside my cheeks. We moved through a mist of water. I kept hard behind the Shaman, bending forward over the firepot, shoving it inside the front of my tunic, warm against my belly.

  A river collapsed upon us. A waterfall out of the dark. I hung on to the Shaman’s back and followed. Felt Jak and Nip hard against my heels. When I had to let out my breath, when I had sucked in a mouthful of water and was coughing and spitting, almost ready to give up, to lie and drown, we swam into air again.