Burying the Shadow (25 page)

‘You are a
soulscaper,’ she said.

I wriggled my
shoulders, non-commitally, but a gesture that perhaps would be
taken as an answer. So much for being a tinker!

‘Q’orveh
speaks of the stealing of souls, not just the scaping,’ the girl
continued, oblivious.

Q’orveh,
presumably, was the shaman. I was watching him covertly as the girl
spoke. Having direct access to my feelings and yearnings, I
realised this man, whether through his scent or soulscape
emanations, had already kindled a spark of interest within me. It
is always this way with soulscapers; we know immediately when we
have met someone with whom we can resonate on a physical level. I
had an itch in me to touch him; it had been a long time since I had
given in love, and the shaman was a beautiful creature, all hair
and quivering mania. I inclined my head in the noblest manner I
could muster. ‘Please relate to your master, he has no reason to
fear or doubt my presence. I am not seeking work, but merely
travelling across the plains of Khalt to the western lands. I would
linger with your people, true, but only to share a bone or two.’ I
smiled.

The shaman was
peering at me suspiciously, flicking back his hair with his hands,
shifting restlessly. I hoped he had not mutilated himself too
badly.

He leaned down
to listen to his acolyte’s whispered message and then grunted a few
words back. The girl addressed me once more. ‘Q’orveh says you may
walk with us,’ she said, and then turned away, skipping back to her
position in the troupe.

With a
resigned shrug, I shifted my carryback into a more comfortable
position and joined a group of women, who all looked at me with
great suspicion. Rattles hailed into life, feet stamped, voices
found their pitch, and the tribe moved off again, towards the west,
me in their midst, barely tolerated.

All day they
walked, eating and drinking on the march, never pausing, except to
relieve themselves and, even then, the men barely bothered to slow
their pace, pissing confidently into the grass beside the road. The
nomads are bizarre people. Had I not known better, I would have
thought they’d somehow crossed from the soulscape into reality;
they were so faery-like, so unpredictable and swift. There are folk
tales to be found among most cultures of the known world, about
people who, while travelling on the plains of Khalt, have been
tempted away from the road by nomad lovers - quick, lovely beings
who tantalise and lure, who offer unimaginable pleasures and
strange elixirs. These stories always end with the seduced
individual, by this time a lovelorn wretch, being left alone in an
unknown wilderness, generally with a destroyed mind, and with no
way of finding their path home. I had always regarded these tales
as being the result of severe culture clash, but marching along
with these ragged, black-eyed tatter-sprites, I wondered, with a
smile, if there was not more truth in them than I had credited. The
nomads wore clothes the colour of Earth itself, but far from dull;
leaf green, rich dark red-browns, sandy yellows and duns. They were
festooned with protective talismans, some of which gave off strong
and disagreeable odours. Their goats, sheep and mules roamed
uncontrolled among them, as if they were human themselves. The
whole tribe just poured forward, a randomly moving mass, somehow
managing to find order in its chaos and progress further up the
road.

Most of the
men walked behind the holy people and their dancers, clad in
trousers of deer-hide pelts that were roughly sewn together, their
long, tangled hair hanging over bare bronzed backs to show off
their tribal marks; tattoos from rites of passage, or even metal
rings that pierced the skin in the most unlikely places. None of
the men, not even the older ones, wore beards. Perhaps it was in
their bodyscape, bequeathed through the generations, for them to be
clean-skinned. The children were often naked.

By late
afternoon, I had fallen into the rhythm of the chanting up ahead,
and was walking in a dream, happily investigating old memories and
thinking up new ones. The sun sank into the hissing grasses around
us, and we came to a place where a finger of forest reached out
from some distant higher ground, invisible from the road. Here, the
tribe turned off the track and snouted around for somewhere to make
camp. It was clearly a site used regularly by nomads, because the
grass had all been nibbled short, and the trees bore signs of
having been cut for their wood. No one had paused here for a while,
however, because the black ashes of cooking fires were obviously
months old.

I was just
wondering where I should erect my bivouac, which, I must confess, I
did not intend to sleep in, if at all possible, when one of the
nomad women finally deigned to speak with me. She was young and
imp-faced, with tangled red hair, dressed in a motley of russet
rags - layers of skirts, leggings and shirts - and had marched by
my side all day; in nomad terms, our proximity on the march
probably meant she could now consider herself an old friend of
mine, although her first words, in Middle Khalt, did little to
inspire closeness.

‘I’m Sah’ray.
Soulscaper killed a kidling of ours once.’

‘Oh.’ I didn’t
know quite how to respond. Her tone was not accusatory. ‘I’m
Rayojini. Where are your people travelling to?’

She accepted
this change of subject smoothly. ‘Bochanegra garter lands, the
Strangeling. Have business there, does Q’orveh. Has a price to pay,
they say.’ She fixed me with a steely eye. ‘So do you, I’m
thinking. Told it to him loud on the road, you did.’

I was again
unsure how to react, rather flustered that my carnal interest in
the shaman had been so obvious.

Then, Sah’ray
grinned and pawed my arm. ‘You can share my space, if you like.
Help me make it stand?’

I nodded.
‘Thank you.’ I considered it would be useful to become closer to
this woman, although I did have plans of my own about where I would
be spending the night.

Sah’ray chose
a spot between two trees, where the branches hung low, thick with
ripening berries. She told me they were not good to eat, which was
slightly erroneous, as I recognised them as being an ingredient for
a particularly efficacious remedy against lung-thickness. Perhaps I
should impart this knowledge to one of the healers, at a later
time. I helped Sah’ray erect her tepee, which seemed barely large
enough for one person to occupy, never mind the pair of us. I
dearly hoped I would not have to share it with her. Nearby, the
cooking pit had been lit, and the resinous fragrance of burning
wood filled the air. Some of the tents being pitched around us were
large enough to contain several families; others were tiny, like
Sah’ray’s. It seemed there were no social guidelines concerning
whether people should sleep communally, or alone. I would have to
question the girl about this.

Once Sah’ray’s
tepee was firm and solid among the trees, I asked her, ‘Where do I
find him?’

As I had
anticipated, she needed no more detail than that to understand my
question. She pointed through the smoke at a large, skin-coloured
tepee of bleached hide, whose flanks were painted with the tribe’s
personal glyphs and seals.

‘Thank you,’ I
said. ‘Do you think that now would be a good time for me to request
an audience?’

Sah’ray smiled
at my choice of words; she was obviously not as ill informed and
ignorant as she appeared. ‘Oh, he’ll speak with you. Always looking
for soulscapers now.’

‘Really? Why
is that?’

She screwed up
her nose, clearly reluctant to tell me. ‘The dead have come down
from the trees,’ she said, her expression betraying she did not
think I’d believe it.

I briefly
touched one of her hands. ‘Then, of course, I must speak to
him.’

Her words
intrigued me. Like many nomad tribes throughout the world, the
Khalts left their dead on wooden platforms high in sacred trees, so
that the birds of the air could pick at the flesh, thus releasing
the spirit into whatever heaven the tribe believed in. (There were
many heavens available to the people at that time). Bearing in mind
that the nomad shamans had never, to my knowledge, actively sought
consultation with a soulscaper, I wondered whether I had already
uncovered one of the clues I sought. I did not believe, for one
instant, that the dead were actually climbing down from their
perches, but perhaps one or two cases of the non-death had
occurred, blurring the lines between what was death and what was
not. It seemed the obvious explanation, and fortuitous I should
come across it so soon.

The night had
moved in quickly around us. I tongued the wind and it tasted of
Mouraf’s orchard, a cold vein coming down from the mountains,
hiding fatal secrets.

‘Go now,’
Sah’ray said, pushing me away. ‘Before we eat. You may share your
food with me.’

‘Take what you
need from that pack,’ I said, gesturing at my belongings. She would
investigate whatever else I was carrying, of course, but I did not
think the nomads were thieves, so I was happy to let her satisfy
her curiosity if she wished. Waving to her cheerfully, I moved off
through the trees towards the shaman’s tent.

A circle of
men and women, whom I took to be the elders of the tribe, sat
around the entrance to the tent. As I approached, they looked at me
through tangled hair with fierce eyes, and stopped speaking amongst
themselves, but two old women shuffled aside to allow me to squat
down among them. I thanked them with a murmur and bowed my head,
lacing my fingers over my knees. Conversation was not resumed, but
a smoking mix rolled in dry leaves was passed around, of which I
inhaled too deeply. It seemed my harsh coughing awoke something
within the tent. Abruptly, the flap parted and a youth came out,
prompting my companions to look away. This told me quite a lot
about the boy; he was not a favourite with the elders. In fact, his
position within the tribe was immediately obvious to me; something
associated with the arrogant stance, and the down-sweeping gaze
with which he raked the gathering. If he was an acolyte, it was to
sciences other than the religion of the tribe, I was sure. Although
he was dressed in similar garments to those seated around me -
feather and bead decorated rags and tatters - his appearance was
somehow tidier, as if he usually dressed himself in a very
different manner. His long dark hair was sleeker too, his skin
finer than that of the nomads. He looked at me and I went cold.
Never had I had to drop my eyes from someone else’s stare before. I
felt absurdly young and awkward. I felt like a dog.

‘You,’ he
said, in strangely accented Middle Khalt. ’Q’orveh commands your
presence.’

I knew, even
though I was staring at the crushed grass at my feet and not at
him, that he was speaking to me.

The interior
of the tepee was thick with the smoke of burning perfume oil, and
some other, mind-stimulating substance. Q’orveh reclined on a mound
of cushions and brightly coloured rugs, being rubbed with aromatics
by a female acolyte. Treasures were heaped at random around the
floor; delicate metal jugs and censers, piles of fringed silk, and
many articles of carved dark wood. The youth who had summoned me
sank down behind me and I could feel his attention riveted onto my
back like needles; the skin between my shoulder blades prickled and
crawled.

‘A woman of
the tribe told me you might wish to speak with me,’ I said, because
it did not appear Q’orveh was going to initiate verbal
communication between us. I wondered whether he understood Middle
Khalt, but then, if his acolytes could speak Tappish, it was
unlikely any dialect of Khalt would be strange to them. I began
thinking of the legendary seducers, who stole people away with
desire, and wondered whether the girl who had first spoken to me on
the road, in Tappish, could have been a product of such a
liaison.

I spoke again,
in Tappish. ‘What tongue would you prefer me to speak in?’

The shaman
laughed. ‘Whatever you choose,’ he replied in faultless
Bochanegran.

‘You travel
widely,’ I said.

‘We are
nomads,’ He nodded at the girl, who was kneading one of his thighs.
She stood up, wiping her hands, and went outside.

‘So, how may I
help you?’ I asked.

‘You can’t,’
he replied. ‘But I speak to people whenever I can; to gather news,
to listen to their opinions. But I do not believe anyone can help,
as such. We are living a shaping time, soulscaper. Our lives are
moving, all of our lives. Gods march down the road from Bochanegra;
they pour like wine down the road, and strange things happen along
the way.’ He paused as his girl came back into the tepee carrying a
pitcher and cups. ‘You drink?’

I didn’t know
what he was offering, and I had heard that some of the stuff they
brewed could be positively evil, but nodded all the same to be
polite. ‘Strange things,’ I said, as the girl poured the dark
beverage into cups. ‘Such as?’

The shaman did
not look at me as he spoke. ‘The air is full of beings we cannot
see. More than usual. Others think this way too. The shamans of
many tribes have gathered to discuss the phenomenon. Also, we find
blood upon the grass in unusual places, and mourning things trail
us, lamenting, but there is never anything to see. A virgin became
pregnant and she gave birth to a creature that was half deer.’

‘In your
tribe?’ I was quite shocked. He spoke so seriously.

‘No, not this
tribe.’ He shook his head. ‘Now, you disbelieve my words.’

True enough,
although I did not think he was deliberately trying to deceive me.
However, now was not the time for debate or education. ‘Far from
it,’ I said. ‘I too believe there is movement in the world, strange
things
are
happening, and not just to your people. I am
anxious to discover the cause.’