The Skrayling Tree (25 page)

Pass the red bowled, smoking spirit

Declaim our noble deeds and dreams.

Let speakers see themselves in others,

Let listeners listen to their brothers,

Listen to sisters and their mothers,

To the dwellers in the forest

And the spirits of the sky.

Our tales are strong and live forever

Tales of luck and skill and cunning

When the White Hare she came running,

When the cackling Crow was flying,

When the Great Black Bear was charging,

When in War we faced our foes.

Speak to all, for all are brothers,

Speak of deeds and dreams of valor,

Breathe the smoke that soothes the soul.

W. S. H
ARTE
,

“The Hobowakan”

I
t was already very hot inside the large lodge, and it took a while for my somewhat weak eyes to clear. Slowly I made out a
central charcoal fire around which were arranged rich piles of animal hides. On the far side of the fire was a larger heap
of furs. Those had a white skin thrown over them. I guessed this to be Ipkaptam’s seat. Willow branches had been woven around
it to make a kind of throne. I did not recognize several of the pelts used. Some must come from indigenous beasts. The air
was thick with various herbal scents. A smoldering fire in which several round
rocks were heated gave off heavy smoke, sluggishly rising to the top of the tepee. A strong smell of curing hides, of animal
fat and what might have been wet fur permeated the room. I was also reminded of the smell of worked iron.

I asked Klosterheim the purpose of this discomfort. He assured me that I would find the experience engrossing and illuminating.
Gunnar complained that if he had known it was going to be this sort of thing he would have hacked cooperation out of the bastards.
Recognizing his tone, Ipkaptam smiled secretly. For a moment his knowing eyes met mine.

Once inside, the flaps of the lodge were tied tight, and the heat began to rise considerably. Knowing my tendency to lose
my senses in such temperatures, I did my best to keep control, but I was already feeling a little dizzy.

Klosterheim was on my left, Gunnar on my right and the Pukawatchi shaman directly ahead of me. We made a very strange gathering
in that buffalo-hide wigwam. The lodgepoles were strung with all kinds of dried vermin and evil-smelling herbs. While I had
known far worse ways of seeking wisdom in the dream-worlds, I have known better-scented ones. Yet I was struck by a strong
sense of familiarity. My brain would not or could not recall where I had experienced a similar conference. Decorated as he
now was with a white feather crown, turquoise and malachite necklaces and copper armbands, together with his medicine bag
and its contents, Ipkaptam looked even more striking. He reminded me vaguely of the old Grandparents, the gods who had
talked to me in Satan’s Garden. I tried desperately to remember what they had told me. Would it be of use here?

The shaman produced a big, shallow drum. He beat on it with long, slow, regular strokes. From deep within his chest, a song
grew. The song was not for us to hear but for the spirits who would help him in performing this séance. Half its words and
cadences were outside the range of even my own rather sensitive ears.

Klosterheim leaned forward over the fire to splash water on the heated stones. They hissed and steamed, and Ipkaptam’s chanting
grew louder. I struggled to keep my breathing deep and regular. The scar on his face, which I had seen as an irregular wound,
now took on shape. Another face lurked beneath the first, something baleful and insectlike. I tried to remember what I knew.
I felt nauseated and dizzy. Were the Pukawatchi human? Or did their race merely take on human characteristics? According to
Klosterheim such ambiguous creatures were quite common here.

As I came close to losing consciousness, I was alerted by Klosterheim’s changing voice. He sounded like a monk. He was chanting
in Greek, telling the tale of the Pukawatchi and their treasures. He threw fuel on the fire, blowing until the stones were
red-hot and then splashing on more water. The fire danced up again, casting shadows, increasing the heat until it was impossible
to think clearly. All my energies were largely devoted to remaining conscious.

The beating drum, the rhythmic chanting, the strange words, all began to take me over. I was losing control of my own will.
It was not pleasant to feel that somewhere
I had experienced all this before, yet I was also somewhat heartened by the thought. I hoped a higher purpose was being served
by my discomfort.

During my youthful training I had been absorbed into many such rituals. I, therefore, made no particular effort to hold on
to individual identity but let myself be drawn into the dark security of the heat and the shadows, the chanting and the drumming.
I say security because it is like a kind of death. All worldly and material cares begin to disappear. One is confronted with
one’s own cruelties and appetites, experienced as a victim might experience them. There is remorse and self-forgiveness, an
incisive glance into the reality of one’s own soul, as if we stand in judgment on ourselves. This creates a peculiar psychic
spiral in which one is redeemed or reborn into a kind of purity of being, a state which enables one to be open to the visions
or revelations which are almost always the result of such formalities.

Apologizing to us that he no longer possessed the tribe’s traditional redstone pipe bowl, Ipkaptam produced a large ceremonial
pipe and lit it with a taper from the fire. He turned to the four points of the compass, beginning in the east, chanting something
I could not understand, puffing the smoke as he did so. He held the pipe aloft. Again he chanted and puffed. Then he passed
the pipe to Klosterheim, who knew what to do with it.

Now Ipkaptam began to speak of the tribe’s great past. In rolling tones he described the Great Spirit’s creation of his people
deep below the ground. The very first people had been made of stone, and they were slow
and sleepy. They had in turn made men to run their errands for them, and then made giants to protect them against rebellion.
The men ran away from the giants to another land, which was the land of the Pukawatchi.

The smaller Pukawatchi were too weak to fight so many; thus they fled underground. The giants had not pursued the men. The
tall men had not pursued the Pukawatchi, and soon they were at one with men and giants.

All had been equal, and all had gifts the others could use. Warmed in the womb of Mother Earth herself, they had no need of
fire. Food was plentiful. They were at peace. Every year the great Eternal Pipe, the redstone smoking bowl of the Pukawatchi,
which they had won in war against the green people, was produced and presented to the Spirit. The pipe was smoked by every
tribe and every people in creation. It was always full of the finest herbs and aromatic bark, and it never needed to be lit.
Even the bear people and the badger people and the eagle people and all the other peoples of the plains and forests and mountains
were invited to the great powwow, to confirm their bond. All lived in mutual harmony and respect. Only in the world of spirits
was there conflict, and their wars did not touch on the lands of the Pukawatchi, nor of the tall men, nor of the giants.

I realized I was no longer hearing Klosterheim’s Greek but Ipkaptam’s own language in his own voice. Ipkaptam easily made
the mental links necessary for me to understand their language. At last the words had found their way directly to my mind.

With the words came pictures and narratives, crowding
one upon the other. All were sufficiently familiar. I absorbed and understood them quickly. I was learning the whole history
of a people, its rise and fall and rise again. I was hearing its own legends. Would I learn about a lost sword with a habit
of escaping or killing those who possessed it?

More water was poured on the stones. The pipe was passed again and again. As I learned to inhale its strange smoke, my sense
of reality grew even dimmer.

Ipkaptam’s insectoid features seemed those of a great ant and his crown of feathers antennae. I refused to lose either my
life or my sanity. I pretended his disguise was all that was visible to me. I remembered the teachings of a people I had lived
among briefly, who spoke of a god they called the Original Insect. He was supposed to be the first created being. A locust.
The story was told how the locust could not eat, so the spirits made it a forest where it might graze. But the locust was
so hungry he ate the whole forest, and now he cannot do anything else. Unless stopped, he will attempt to eat the whole world
and then eat himself.

I found nothing sinister in the tale the shaman told of his people’s history. Perhaps there
was
nothing sinister in the tale itself, only in the teller. What Two Tongues had learned might not have been from his fathers.
Nonetheless, I listened.

The steam and the smoke continued to make me very faint. My heart sank when the great red sandstone peace pipe was passed
again. Once more it was offered to the spirits of the four winds. Klosterheim took a small, mean puff and passed it to me.
I inhaled the fragrant
barks and leaves and came suddenly alive. It was as if the smoke curled through every vein and bone in my body, inhabiting
all of me and filling me with a sense of well-being, leaving none of the effects of my usual desperate drug-supported state.
Those drugs fed off my spirit as I fed off their energy. These were natural plants, dried but not cured. I felt as if I inhaled
all nature’s benefits in one long pull on the pipe. I was hugely invigorated.

Ipkaptam took back the pipe with reverence. Again he offered it to the sky, then to the earth, then to the four winds, and
only then replaced it on the stone before him. His widening lizard eyes glowed huge in the firelight.

“Many times,” he said, “the spirits tried to involve us in their wars. We would fight neither for one side nor the other.
These were not our wars. We did not even have the means to fight them. We did not have the will to kill our fellows.” He seemed
to grow in stature as he spoke with reminiscent pride. “Once all peoples, giants and men, came peacefully to trade with the
Pukawatchi in their underground realm. We traded the metal we chipped from the rocks. With this metal the whole world tipped
its arrows and lances and made fine ornaments.” Iron was more highly prized than gold, said Ipkaptam, for with iron a man
might win himself gold, but with gold he was always vulnerable to the man with iron. Metal was even more highly prized than
agate and quartz for the edge it would take.

Men were cunning, had fire, but they did not know where to look for the metals and stones. Their tools and ornaments, their
weapons, were made of flint and bone,
so they traded furs and cooked meat for the Pukawatchi iron. Giants had sorcerous powers and ancient wisdom, for they were
the folk of the rock. They had the secret of fire, and they knew how to burn metal and twist it into shapes. All had to come
to the Pukawatchi for their metal, and the most prized of all the metals was the sentient iron mined at the heart of the world.

The Pukawatchi were small and clever. They could find the crevices where the metals and the precious stones lay and prize
them out. They had the patience to mine them and the patience to work them. They made hammers and other tools strong enough
to flatten the iron, the copper, the gold. Striking them over and over again, they made beautiful objects and impressive weapons.

They lived in their great, dark realm for untold eons until massive upheavals occurred below the ground and all around them
people went to war. The Pukawatchi were forced to the surface. Terrified of the sun, they became night dwellers, hiding from
all other peoples and keeping their own council. Sometimes they were forced to steal food from villages they found. At other
times the villages left food for them, and they in turn repaired pots and the like.

So the Pukawatchi wandered until they came to a place far from the lands of other men. Here they built their first great city.
Now they were no longer brothers with their fellows. Now all were at war. Yet the Pukawatchi brought their skills with them
when they fled, and they still had knowledge of the earth and what was to be found there. After a while they built a great
city deep into the rock face of the land they had reached. The city was fashioned like the dark tunnels and chambers they
had known below the ground. Now it was above the ground, but inside it was as it had always been. And the people were safe
and the people prospered, living in their cool, dark cities. At last, against all sane instinct, against the very will of
the spirits, they began to work with fire.

Soon the giants heard that the Pukawatchi had survived and could be traded with. The Pukawatchi learned the secret of fire
and began to deal again with everyone except the spirits, who remained mindlessly at war. The war spread to men. The Pukawatchi
made weapons for all peoples and grew rich as a result. The men were exhausted by war. The Pukawatchi cities had prospered
and proliferated until the whole of the south and west became their empire.

The Pukawatchi grew rich with all things men valued. They had extended their rule further and further across the surface—the
Realm of Light, as they called it. They conquered other tribes and made them subject to the Pukawatchi, and in the conquering
they won great treasures, among them the famous Four Treasures of the Pukawatchi.

Each treasure had been won by a different hero, then lost in a series of complicated epics, then won again. All these stories
were told to us in such a way that we absorbed them as we sat smoking and sweating in the lodge, our ordinary human senses
completely lost to us.

The Four Treasures of the Pukawatchi were the Shield of Flight, the Lance of Invulnerability, the Perpetual
Peace Pipe which never required filling, and the Flute of Reason, which, if the right three notes were played upon it, could
restore a mortally wounded creature to life.