The Shaman and the Droll Read online

  I remember stopping for food. And we slept several times. Then the Shaman would shake me awake and stride on. No word. Down more tunnels. Through curtains of slime that dragged and slid. I pushed through the filth, eyes, mouth closed, wishing I could close my nostrils, too. Down passages where the roof lowered, forced us to crouch, crawl, slither through something noisome. I had to put my head under and half swim, turning, reaching to feel for Jak and Nip, losing my breath, thinking I was drowning in that darkness. And suddenly able to lift my head, take a breath, put it under to get beneath the hanging roof, and swim and scramble on.

  Spitting filth from my mouth I squelched to my feet and followed the Shaman. Cold one moment, burning the next. Deafened by screams and thunder claps. Blinded by lights that flashed and gave way to darkness even blacker than before. Pushing through what felt like stiff reeds, tall grass. Floundering airless, burrowing through what seemed like heated sand. Dancing over hot rocks. And still Jak and Nip kept close behind.

  Then silence. Nothing to touch. No smell. No sound. I reached for the Shaman. Nothing. Felt behind for Jak and Nip. Nothing. Knew I must keep going. Must not stop. But was walking on nothing. Through nothing. Not in blackness, but through nothing and with no sense of either beginning or end. And was suddenly afraid of the Droll.

  “There is no Droll!” I told myself aloud. “The Droll only exists if you let her. There is no Droll but in your mind. No superstitions but those you invent.” I heard my own hopelessness. Did not know who or what I was. Could not even believe I existed. And in the meanness of despair heard a whine from Jak, and followed it, bumped into something, felt forward, touched the hairy tip of his tail, and followed.

  “Don’t give up now,” croaked the Shaman. I had almost failed. He strode ahead and I followed, the dogs behind me again.

  When the air thinned, I knew it was another form of my misery, that was all. I breathed in, but nothing came to my lungs. Opened my mouth and tried to suck in air, but there was none. The roof pressed down. The floor pressed up. There was no space. Again I had the sense of being alone, sinking through nothing into nothing.

  From somewhere long ago, I heard the Shaman’s voice saying, “The Droll only exists in people’s minds. We invent our superstitions. Something deep in us wants to believe in the Droll, therefore she is. When you have beaten the fear, the superstition inside yourself, then you can enter the tunnel without being destroyed.”

  “Don’t give up!” another voice was saying, my own. And I gulped and felt the sense of something to breathe, as if a loathsome blanket lifted off my nostrils, from over my mouth. I heard the Shaman ahead and followed again.

  There were other trials to come, but now I knew – no matter what shape the Droll took – I would win! Then I thought I was thinking of the Droll as real again. My head was confused, I must clear it.

  How long we travelled, I have never been able to understand. It was probably some days and nights but seemed to go on for years, as if the torture would never end, when my lame leg seemed to be giving up. Then I found myself picturing the Droll, her ancient evil face. Gross, distorted body neither animal nor human. A loathsome plant. And the Shaman’s voice said from somewhere, “Think of the Droll, and she will appear as you think she is. Bring some other picture into your mind.” I thought of the lake, level and long. Water unending under a mild sun. And I thought of Lutha.

  The tunnel branched, divided, joined, and separated. We wandered lost, hearing all the time a booming like despair. At least I thought the Shaman was lost and I was leading him through the many tunnels like a needle drawing a string of brightness behind. And somewhere at the heart of all those tunnels, a picture of Taur, the horned Bull Man, bellowing in loneliness at the mountain’s heart. I looked on him and wept, because I could not make him hear. Could not make him see. Then I realised he was blind. I was following the Shaman again along the straight tunnel, Jak and Nip behind. And I knew that terrible vision of Taur was a story I had read once in a book.

  “Bring some other picture into your mind,” the Shaman had said. I thought of the lake again, the Floating Village. Of how we escaped the mountains, Jak and I. How we stole Nip and sailed down the long water. And I thought of Lutha, brown knees raised in the canoe. Of the touch of her hands in the dark. The softness of her breasts. I heard her voice, and something seemed to relent, as if the mountain let us go. The tunnel ended. We were standing in a strange half-light, drinking fresh air. Tasting fresh water. Looking down from a high place on to a fair land far below. But the image was streaked, changing in sunlight that came and went.

  Through a glassy, shifting curtain I made out a silver stripe, a river disappearing under a mountain’s shoulder. An island of rocks as white as bone. And, disappearing between distant mountains, the lengths and levels of shining Lake Ka under a mild sun. I looked for the Floating Village, to describe it to the Shaman, but he spoke.

  “We are not safe yet. The Carny follows.”

  We might still be caught, dragged back through the Droll’s tunnel. I wanted to feel the warm air on my face, escape that never-ending darkness. Somewhere behind I heard a chuckle, and the wet slither – like leather sheets dragged across damp stone.

  Then I realised why we were seeing the land of the lake beneath us as if through a changing mist. We were standing behind a curtain, a thin sheet of falling water. The shifting light distorted the view; the booming voice was the waterfall. I took the Shaman’s hand, stepped forward, felt its cold shock as water broke like glass about us, and I kept walking, drawing the Shaman with me, stepping out of darkness into light, through water into air.

  Behind us the waterfall vanished down a black slot. Water had carried us into the Land of the White Bear. Now we stepped back through water into sunlight. And I knew it was the waterfall I had seen from the valley below, before the river swept us away on our raft.

  To our left, bluffs sheer to the valley floor. A bark from Nip! She had found a ledge. I followed her. Crawling under the overhang of a stone brow. To another ledge. Along a broken crack, hanging by my fingers, I followed her. At least we had a chance that way. I returned and led the Shaman. Jak followed, picking his way, uncertain.

  Nip jumped to a flat spot and barked. I got the Shaman across, but had to return and jump with Jak in my arms. He seemed to have lost his energy, his confidence, Jak who leapt across the gorge in the mountains, where Jess died. I moved the Shaman down the track Nip found for us, guiding his feet and hands one at a time, and returning for Jak.

  Halfway down, the thunder came, rolled out of the sky above, then from inside the mountain itself. I pinned both the Shaman and Jak to its wall as the mountain shook. Far above where the waterfall had been, a tongue of dust or smoke licked out of the tunnel mouth. A last cry of hate. Then thunder again. The rumble and din of rock, roofs, cliffs, galleries of stone collapsing. The Droll’s Tunnel was closed for ever.

  “Leave me with Jak,” said the Shaman.

  “I am nothing without you. You are my family,” I told him. Below us Nip barked, ran back and forth. “Come on, it’s easier from here down.”

  Chapter 33

  The Sacrifice

  Shafts of sunlight angled through dust columns from the tunnel’s collapse. The tiny spots sparked white, sifted, settled dull. I spat grey phlegm, blew it from my nose. A last shower of drops from the vanished waterfall rinsed the air, and I saw the lake country below like a painting: umbers, blues, greens, then tawny bleached ridges rising through dark belts to the snow-scarved western peaks where Taur lay dead.

  The Shaman’s hands felt hard as if carved from wood. I placed them in cracks in the rock, guided his feet. “Nip’s found a goat track. Just a bit further.”

  We came down through trees to a green clearing and a gossiping blue and white stream. The colours in sunshine, scents of grass and earth, the taste of fresh running water! I described it all to the Shaman as I went to make a fire. But instead of smouldering moss my firepot held only a few cold ashes.


  Despite his bearskin clothes, the Shaman shivered. I made a bow-drill, lit a fire, sat him in its warmth. I stewed the rabbits Nip caught, and the Shaman drank the rich broth. Jak mumbled a little meat, content to lie beside the fire.

  I was still talking of Lutha and the Floating Village that night, when I realised the Shaman had gone to sleep. Comfortable in a light tunic of leather, I spread my own bearskins over him. The air here was moister, lacked the sharp cut of that other country.

  I put grease on Jak’s and Nip’s burnt and cracked paws. Nip opened an eye, but Jak did not stir.

  First thing next morning, I made a bow. Hammered flakes from dense rock. Ground them down for arrowheads. Having no beeswax, I wiped their lashings with grease and clay, and they held well enough on the shafts. I felt safer now, even though there were recent signs of Salt Men.

  Jak and Nip brought a deer down past me that evening, an easy shot. Jak staggered after his run, but gave one short “Gruff!” as I made much of him. We ate steaks grilled on sticks, and a soup thick with blood.

  I told the Shaman how Jak had remembered his old cunning. How Nip had learned hunting from him. “We’ll soon need a pup to start learning from her,” I crumpled Jak’s ears between my fingers, the way he liked. As I went to sleep, he rested his grey chin on my feet.

  His head still lay on my feet when I woke next morning. But he did not move when I sat up. Jak who had been born by the first Nip at the Hawk Cliffs. Who had helped me hunt Tara’s killers, who remembered Old Hagar. Who had loved Taur and travelled with us all the way down the North Land, across the strait, and down the South Land. Whose sister, Jess, lay under the fallen mountain with Taur. Jak who had gone under Grave Mountain and returned through the Droll’s Tunnel. The years, the long journey…

  I buried him on a clearing where the wild deer would stamp overhead, the wind and the rain would blow. Now it was Nip who looked puzzled as I built a cairn of stones. Who ran after me, stopping, looking back, whining.

  It was the day after Jak died that the Shaman said, “Inside the statue of Hekkat there is a staircase cut into the stone. When snow melts in the mountains, the lake rises up markers on the bottom steps. The priestesses saw that and knew you’d be drowned, the night when they ordered Lutha to leave you on the Island of Bones. People believe they have magical powers. Nonsense, of course, like all superstition.”

  “Of course!” I shuddered. For a moment, I was seeing the Salt Men drown as the Island of Bones sank. “But how do you know all this? The Floating Village wasn’t built until after you were swept down the river.”

  “The stone statue was served by priestesses when I was a boy. I put a stick in the lake and found I could predict a flood in the river myself.”

  “I should have been able to work it out, too.”

  “It is easy to use superstition to explain mystery,” said the Shaman. “The wise – and the brave – say they don’t know the answer, not yet. It is like death: we know it happens, but we cannot explain it, so people surround it with superstition.”

  Next day we climbed along the back of the cliffs above the northern side of Lake Ka. I could not see the Floating Village for the shoulder of a hill. Once I had explained where we were, the Shaman described a bay where we could climb down and build a raft.

  His memory was exact. We turned left below a notch he described in the hill. There was a gap in the cliff edge, an animal track down through the trees. I began chopping logs for a raft next morning, but Nip barked from somewhere up the hill. I found her sniffing a heap of droppings.

  The bear’s tracks were clear. The front feet with their five toe pads and the claw marks. The back feet longer, broad across the foot, tapering to the heel. Clear in soft soil where the bear had scented us, turned, and trotted up the hill. We needed meat, and the skin would be useful.

  The Shaman told me of a trap he used to kill bears when he was young. With his hands he showed how to lash heavy spearheads to a strong sapling. Take a rope around the head of the sapling. Draw it down. That would take some doing, but it would work if the rope was led around a low branch or a root to give a purchase. Then lead the rope across the track and around another tree. Fix it with a toggle, a small shaft of wood thrust through a ring. The ring could be made of a green branch lashed in a circle. Anything walking along the track would stumble on the rope, tug the toggle from the ring. The bent sapling – the spring – would straighten, driving the spearheads through whatever had tripped the rope.

  It was a monstrous device, dangerous as the iron-jawed traps Arku and I set at the Coal People’s village. I tried the idea on several small trees, working out the toggle arrangement. I chopped spearheads out of dense wood, hard as iron. The Shaman felt them.

  “Never stand in front of them. They will kill a bear – or a man.”

  On the first trap, the spearheads were set too low and might have killed Nip. I lashed them higher so they would strike a bear about its chest and belly. I set three traps, and they stood bent by the track, silent, terrifying. I backed away. Down by the lake, I went on with the raft. The Shaman sat plaiting flax into ropes for lashing the logs together.

  Early next morning, there was a great roar up the hill. Nip’s hackles rose, ears pricked. That day we ate rich bear meat and began drying the skin. Last thing in the evening, I climbed the track, circling wide around the two remaining traps, set the first one again, and stood on the cliff.

  Again, I could not see the Floating Village, but somewhere along the base of Grave Mountain, two white columns rose. Nearer the lake, two pillars replied. Smoke!

  I ran down the hill, dashed water over our own fire. The Shaman nodded when I told him of the Salt Men’s signals. He plaited even faster, while I hurried work on the raft.

  After night fell, Nip became uneasy, growling, looking up the hill. Somewhere high on the clifftops we heard men’s voices. All that night the Shaman plaited ropes in the dark. In the half-light off the lake, I finished lashing the logs together.

  Before dawn, we poled out hoping the wind would fill the sail patched together from the bearskin and my old clothes and blow us out of range of the Salt Men’s arrows. We had only emerged from the cover of the trees when arrows hissed and tossed white plumes from the dark water. Shouts from the clifftop. I ran a couple of steps along the logs, shoving hard into deeper water. I dropped the pole, took up a paddle. Almost safe but, if the Salt Men found the bear track and ran down to the beach, their arrows could still reach us.

  As I thought that, there came a horrid scream. And another. Silence. The Salt Men must have run back to the clifftop, terrified by the monstrous traps. I paddled on, the Shaman helping. The arrows now falling well behind.

  “Keep paddling! We’re still in range from the beach…”

  Another scream up the hill. Sluggish, the heavy raft moved further out. An arrow splashed close behind.

  I did not turn to look. Ponderous, the raft surged. The front went under and came up shedding water as we thrust it forward. My eyes dimmed. I tasted blood in the back of my nostrils, my throat, and paddled harder. We must be safe now.

  With the force of my stroke, the paddle breaks. I grab the Shaman’s paddle, churn at the water again. Keep the raft moving till we are quite safe. A last shower of arrows falls behind.

  Perhaps he was a better bowman. A stronger bow. A longer arrow. Perhaps the wind coming up just then and beginning to fill our rough sail, perhaps the wind helped the arrow carry. I heard its whistle and thud. Face down Lutha’s father sprawled, the gay-feathered flights jerking between his shoulders. And I remembered his words as we left the cave. “There must be a sacrifice.” Jak and the Shaman.

  Chapter 34

  Under Grave Mountain

  Cut through the shaft. Pack a wad around its stump to stop the bleeding. Ease him over. Blood flowered across the front of his tunic where the arrowhead protruded. I thought of similar injuries I had treated, and did not dare pull it out yet. As I packed the chest wound around the arrow
shaft, bright lung blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Something inside his chest rasped with each breath.

  “Ish?”

  “An arrow. Through your back. Just hold on.” I half-lifted the Shaman against the mast, wrapped him in the bearskin. He breathed easier. “I’m going to get you to the Floating Village. Lutha will help me get out the arrow.”

  Water lapped. The cries of the Salt Men dwindled. Ears and tail down, Nip crawled and licked his fingers. “Nip!” A bubble of blood formed at his lips. It broke as he opened his mouth and asked, “Jak?”

  “Just hold on!” I slid the paddle between two logs at the back and shoved my weight against it so the raft swung, the sail filled. We had come all that way under the mountain. It was enough that Jak was dead. I was determined to bring Lutha’s father home.

  The wind strong now. Water gurgling under the raft. A filament of red divided ahead of the steering paddle, folded down the wave behind it, and disappeared.

  “Ish!”

  “Lutha will come and help when she sees us.” I leaned against the steering paddle, tightened the ropes so the sail strained. “We’ll soon be there. Get that arrow out. Make you comfortable.”

  “Ish!”

  “Not far now. The wind’s come up.” The Floating Village must lie ahead of us, but the sail hid it. I could see only his great nose below the mask, his mouth.

  “We’re going fast. Arku would like this. He’d build another raft and race us.” I was babbling, I knew, but I must keep the Shaman alive till we reached Lutha. “Hold on!”

  “It is you!”

  It took me some time to realise the Shaman’s lips had not moved. Nip barked. A canoe, somebody with a bow pulled, the arrow pointing at me.

  “Ish!” said the same voice. The bow dropped. A far cry made me glance behind. Distant, the Salt Men moved along the clifftop. Wind tore a smoke signal.