The Spirit Keeper (18 page)

But no. He ignored me as he grabbed his long black hair and began hacking it off close to his head. I stopt screaming, shocked. Hector was proud, e’en vain, about the length and beauty of his sleek locks. Now they lay lifeless, abandoned in the dirt.

But he was not done. After cutting off all his hair, he made incisions all o’er his arms. He chanted and lifted his face to the sky, weeping as blood oozed from the cuts and trickled down to his palms. He lifted the knife and made similar slices on his chest. In a very short time his entire upper torso was bright red with blood.

Panic-stricken, I looked at Syawa’s body, wishing so much he could turn and tell me what Hector was doing and what he was going to do next. But my dearest friend lay lifeless, his lips forever still. I laid my head upon his chest and held him tight, abandoning myself to my own tears. I cried ’til there was not a drop of liquid left inside me.

I may have swooned. I know not. But I do know that time kept moving, carrying me farther and farther from Syawa, and, at some point, I realized Hector was gone. I slowly sat up and blearily looked ’round, surprised to find I was still alive. I was actually rather disappointed.

The fire was as dead as I felt inside. I set about rekindling it. My hands moved, but my mind was not connected. I felt as if the me that was me was lying dead on the ground from snakebites. I started a fire. I watched it burn. At some point I heard a noise in the woods and wondered dully if some predator was coming to finish me off. But it was only Hector, returning with an armload of vines and the refilled waterskin.

With his hacked-off hair, blood-encrusted body, and the glazed, violent glow in his eyes, he looked like something that should be kept in a cage. He handed me the skin and gestured for me to drink, which I did without thinking. Then he pointed at Syawa’s body, gesturing I must prepare him for his final Journey.

I swallowed hard, nodded, and found a soft rabbit skin, which I dampened with water before gently wiping Syawa’s forehead, his cheeks, his chin. I closed his half-opened eyelids for the final time and leaned o’er to kiss each one. Then, for the last time, I kissed his mouth, so unnatural now it was no longer smiling. I stared at his mouth and remembered.

It had been my job to wash my grandmother’s body when she died. I was fourteen at the time, beside myself with grief. Gran had been failing for about a year, and in that time she gradually lost her wits and began hearing voices. Then she began responding to those voices. By the time she died, she was engaged in almost constant conversation with people only she could see—her husband, her sister, her mother. Oft she was visited by her own grandmother, and I marveled at the way time and space melted away. I wondered if one day I would be talking to Gran whilst I myself lay dying, sometime far in the future. What are time and space, I wondered, compared to love?

’Twas strange to handle Gran’s dead body. The soft skin I’d loved so much was cold and stiff; the rosy cheeks were white. She’d been my only source of solace and security throughout my childhood, and without her, I knew life was going to be much harder than it had been before.

And it had already been pretty hard.

I remember washing her fingers, her hands, her arms, puzzling o’er the way a person could be alive one minute, and then gone—just absolutely gone. The body was naught but dead meat, like any butchered animal, a carcass waiting to be consumed by the rotting forces of the earth, but Gran had somehow slipt away. Was she in Heaven, I wondered, benevolently watching o’er me? Had she joined the throng of dead relatives she claimed were always watching from above, those hovering specters visible only to those slated soon to join their ranks?

As I washed Syawa’s body, I wondered if Gran was watching o’er me now—lost in the middle of a strange continent, heartbroken as I prepared the only man I’d e’er loved for burial. It was cold comfort, but all I could find in an otherwise unendurable situation. I had to believe Gran was watching o’er me. The only time I’d e’er felt anywhere near as safe as when I was in Gran’s arms was when I was in—

Syawa’s. Oh, God, I wondered, where are you? How could you leave me like this, just as we were learning about each other, just when everything seemed so promising? Here I was, thinking I knew at last what my life was going to be, thinking I finally understood some things, and then in the space of one awful moment I discovered I knew nothing, I understood nothing. How was it possible for me to be so very sure and yet so very, very wrong?

I washed Syawa’s wounds, the angry purple-black no longer spreading. Suddenly I remembered the dream I’d had—was it yesterday or years ago?—about a snake, something about a snake. Syawa had said dreams like mine could help prepare us for what was to come, but if that was the case, the system failed miserably. I was in no way prepared to face this horrific situation nor to consider the possibility of life in the wilderness without my love.

I simply could not consider it.

When I was done with the washing, Hector laid Syawa’s personal items beside the body and gave me a sharp bone awl and some sinew, gesturing for me to wrap the sleeping fur like a shroud and sew it up securely. I numbly did as he instructed as he went back to constructing something on the other side of the clearing.

 • • •

The day wore on. About the time I finisht sewing, Hector hauled o’er the contraption he’d made. It was something like a giant cradle, loosely woven from vines. He bade me help lift Syawa’s wrapt body into it, then set about twisting the vines further to create an open-weave cocoon. When he was finisht, Hector told me in gestures I must help pull this cocoon-contraption through the woods.

I stared at the awful apparition that was Hector—blood-covered, hack-haired, wild-eyed—and it occurred to me my situation might be e’en more dire than I feared. Not only was the love of my life inexplicably taken from me, but the only other person in my world, the only thing standing between me and certain death, was the creature before me who had clearly gone completely mad.

What could I do? I had no intention of getting between Hector and his grief, so I wordlessly followed his commands.

We dragged Syawa’s body back toward the river, covering a mile or more. It was a difficult trek, with bushes snagging the vine-cocoon and swamps forcing detours, ’til at last we arrived at a small promontory on which stood a huge tree. Hector pointed up, gesturing that he was going to pull Syawa’s body to the top.

I stared at Hector, more than a little afraid. I said nothing, but when he gestured, increasingly impatient, asking if I understood, I nodded, still staring with wide eyes.

He climbed a smaller tree near the large one, dragging along the vine rope attached to the cocoon. I fed the vine up as he climbed, gaping as he worked his way out on a rather precarious limb to cross, like a squirrel, from the smaller tree to the large one. Dizzied by the dangerous display, I lowered my eyes and hunched my shoulders, fully expecting to hear Hector come crashing through the branches to land with a hideous thud right beside me.

But he did not fall, and when the cocoon began rising slowly off the ground, I grimly helpt get it started. By this time the light of day was dimming and I could no longer see Hector when the cocoon caught on a branch of the lower tree and would not budge. I heard him yelling, his tone tight and rising in despair. I yelled back that I would help.

Tho’ I always feared water, I have no fear at all of heights, so up I climbed, limb by limb, ’til I got to the spot where the cocoon was caught. Inside the woven vines, the hide containing Syawa’s body was slumped and sagging. I loosed the entangling branches and shouted up to Hector to pull again. I watched as the cocoon containing my beloved slowly rose and disappeared.

I was alone and it was nigh dark. I sat on the limb to lean against the trunk and watch the stars pop out, one by one.

For the first time since Syawa died, I thought about what he’d said before he passed. He said he had seen me—how was that possible? It wasn’t possible, was it? Surely not. Surely he’d just imagined me, or imagined someone, and when he found me I happened to fit the bill. There was no way he could have seen me on that day in May. Yet he described the scene so perfectly, right down to the color of the flowers in my hair. How was that possible?

And he said he’d taken pity on me, that he came to save me from a miserable life and a meaningless death. He said that if he hadn’t come to get me, I’d be dead already. With the dark of night deepening ’round me as I hovered in the middle of the forest canopy in the middle of a vast wilderness, I wondered—is this what it’s like to be dead? Lost in darkness, floating, aimless, alone.

I heard Hector coming down long before he reached me. When he lowered himself onto my branch, I startled him so that he very nigh fell, which infuriated him. He said I should not be there and we must leave now. I did as he told me, and when we reached the ground, I silently followed him through the black forest to our camp.

We must’ve eaten something, but I really can’t remember. What I do remember is sitting bleary-eyed before the fire with Hector on the other side, doing the same. I was so far beyond exhaustion I could not think straight, especially since my thoughts kept circling ’round and ’round this wild refrain: “I am supposed to be dead. I am supposed to be dead.”

I heard Syawa chuckle as he leant o’er my shoulder to whisper in my ear, “Sleep now, Kay-oot-li.”

I said, “No! I am afraid!”

Hector said, “What?” in a tone tight with alarm.

I tried to look at him but could not focus my eyes beyond the fire. I glanced behind me for Syawa but found only darkness. I would’ve cried had I any tears left. Instead I mumbled, “He tells me sleep, but I am afraid of dreams.”

Hector inhaled sharply. “If he tells you sleep, then you must sleep. In the morning I will take you back across the Great River and return you to your people.”

I tried again to look at Hector. The shadow I could see of him did not look at me. I nodded as I crawled to my bearskin and unrolled it on the very spot Syawa died. My last thought as I lay down was, “Well, yes, maybe that would be best.”

’Twas the only thing that made sense. I would go back to my family and this entire excursion into the forest would be as if it had ne’er been. These months I’d spent with Syawa would be naught but a memory, a weird and wonderful dream.

~17~

A
GAIN AND AGAIN THAT NIGHT
I was jerked from sleep just as my throat was being sliced open with a sharp knife. I was back home in the sleeping loft with the children, and, as before, when we heard the mayhem outside I got the musket and the children cowered behind me. But in these repeating dreams, it wasn’t Hector and Syawa who crept up the stairs—it was the savage I’d seen lying dead on the farmhouse floor.

In my dreams he was very much alive, his scalp plucked bald save for the stiff brush atop his head. His war paint was hideous; his black eyes gleamed in murderous rage. He sneered at the musket I pointed at him, knocking it from my hand before I could lift it to swing. In one smooth motion he grabbed my arm, spun me ’round, and pinned my back against his chest as, with his other hand, he drew his razor-sharp blade from left to right across my throat. He released me and I crumpled, the light of life fading from my eyes as he threw the children down the stairs, one by one.

Every time I felt that knife slice into my flesh, I jerked myself awake, so that the last glimmer of life in my dream was also the last glimmer of the dream as I awoke. But I was so exhausted that I kept falling right back to sleep e’en tho’ I didn’t want to, e’en tho’ I knew the dream would happen again and again and again.

Finally it didn’t. Finally I slept deeply and well and as I awoke, I could feel Syawa beside me, his hand resting lightly on my arm. I heard him breathing and I smiled, knowing that when I opened my eyes, he would be lying there, smiling that smile of his, about to ask if I was ready.

But he wasn’t.

I opened my eyes to naught but woodland, and I sat up with a start. Like it or not, I was still alive and Syawa wasn’t. He was gone, gone, and I would ne’er see his smile again. As I looked ’round the camp, all my dreams dissolved and the enormity of reality piled on top of me like a million invisible blankets. I was sure I would suffocate under the weight.

Hector had packed and was waiting impatiently for me to arise. I slowly rolled my bearskin and tied it to my pack. I accepted the cold food he gave me and ate slowly as we hiked through the woods. I felt numb. I could not taste the meat, nor could I feel the earth beneath my shoes. Everything about me was numb.

We neared the spot where Hector had pulled the canoe into the bushes. I stood on the muddy creek bank, staring at the mucky remnants of a large snake that had been chopt to pieces, apparently by Hector’s paddle. I began to tremble. Then I began to scream.

Startled, Hector spun ’round, his hand on his knife, bracing himself against the canoe as he looked for trouble, but I was just standing there screaming, staring at the pieces of snake. Hector must’ve assumed the sight of the snake terrified me, but it wasn’t that—it wasn’t that at all. It was what the snake represented, what it meant, what it was saying to me. This precious interlude in my life was finished, irrevocably gone, lost forever. As sweet as it had been to have a few brief weeks in which I wasn’t miserable and suffering, the respite was done and the misery could begin again, a million times worse than before.

How could I not scream?

Hector sighed before coming to take my pack from me. He strapt it in the canoe, then said something, clearly urging me to get in. But I couldn’t. This was the spot where it happened, where everything changed, where my life was ruined. I fell to my knees crying, my heart broken, bleeding. Without another word, Hector leant over and picked me up the way Syawa once did. I felt his arms shake as he carried me to the canoe and knew his heart, too, was broken. I wanted to reach out to him somehow, to comfort him, but I could not stop crying.