Jareef was nine before his father took him out to the god’s-shrine to help with the rituals – unusually old for a shaman’s child. It wasn’t that Qpiq thought that he wasn’t ready. He just tended to forget.
“Shouldn’t you bring the boy out there soon?” his mother had asked, first when he turned seven and many, many, many times thereafter. And Qpiq had nodded and grimaced and said: “Ah, ah, you’re right, you’re right. Next time, I will take him.”
And then next time would come and he would forget again and come back complaining of how heavy the sacrificial bundles had been, especially in the deep snow – oh, how deep the snow was lately, don’t even get him started – and how he wished someone could help him carry them.
“You have a son, Qpiq,” Jareef’s mother would say.
“Oh. Yes, that’s right,” he would reply. “Next time, next time I will take him,” he said, and then Jareef’s mother would sigh and give up on him. It was the central part of her pretty-happy life, she told Jareef and his younger sister, Gappa. “Children, when your father is frustrating and he doesn’t know it, and it’s not his fault, just give up and wait for him to do something else. He’ll get distracted.” It was good advice, like all her advice.
But when Jareef was nine, Qpiq remembered.
“Now, take this bundle. Here, take it. Don’t let the laces come loose, or it’ll fly everywhere, and you’ll have to gather it all up again.”
Jareef complied obediently, mittened hands fumbling at tanned and intricately decorated leather, crawling over patterns with meanings that Qpiq was under high oath never to explain to anyone not sworn to the spirits.
“What’s in it?” asked Jareef.
“Ahhh, lots of stuff. God-stuff, spirit-stuff. Things they like, you know? Bits of good-smelling bark, some nice teas, things like that. Stuff that moves through the air. We need that, you’ll see. Come on.”
And so he came on. The walk was not a long one, but it took them far. Up from the shaman’s camp at the edge of the clearing’s treeline, up the winding, narrow path that eeled its slim self against the furrowed slope of the hill, to its almost-bald peak where the three frowning pine trees sprouted from the same spot, twisting apart and away to hold one another at arms length, embraced in needles.
Jareef thought they disapproved of him, and shrank a little inside his coat. Qpiq laughed.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry. They’re just pines. Hoary a little, twisted and bitter from the wind, but pines. Takes a god’s-shrine a long, long time to soak up enough sacrifices and spirit-stuff to get really awake, you know? They’re just pines.” He took out his flints, long and specially shaped and kept blessed by his special pouch he kept them in. “Right. Now you lay that bundle down there on the snow, and you start piling up that god-stuff in that little hollow right between those trees. Then stand back and keep quiet, okay? Don’t speak unless you’re asked to, or you could mess something up, and I want to bring Hleena back her oldest boy in one big piece.”
Jareef did as he was told while Qpiq started up his singing, a deep-chested drone that sounded as though it was coming from a much bigger man than him. The contents of the spirit-bundle were as his father said: teas, dried herbs, a couple carvings from fragrant woods, things that “moved through the air” as they burned. He recognized one of the carvings as his aunt Rmea’s handiwork, and wondered how much time had been put into something that was about to go up in smoke.
His father was reaching the apex of the song, a high, ever-rising note that could make dogs go cross-eyed and cause birds to drop out of trees. Then it stopped, hanging there in the air without a voice to sing it, and it was in that one magical moment that his father struck a spark with his flint and set the driest and most brittle of the offerings aflame.
The fire spread so fast that Jareef flinched, roaring up and high over the little wooden carvings and consuming the leaves and packages with avid thirst, turning and flicking through strange colours and shapes. And up into that whirling vortex, that little pyre too big for its fuel, rose the carvings, the fuel suspended in the flame.
Ask us, they said. Jareef’s ears hurt at the voice; it was shaped out of sounds not meant to be heard by human ears, a tool haphazardly made.
“Well, sure,” said Qpiq. “I’ll ask, sure. Now, what we were wondering about… those mammoths, right, the ones we saw last week. They’re still near here, yes? Pretty good time to go after them, none of their spirits around them, moon’s dark so they can’t see, we haven’t upset them too badly. Safe time for a hunt, right?” Jareef was amazed to see his father as at-ease as ever, talking to this spirit the way he would to his neighbours.
Yes, said the fire in the pines. The trees were awake now, awake and whispering in the wind, adding sibilants to the voice. You know this. What do you really want to ask us?
“Right, right, just making conversation, don’t worry. Now then, are there any other gods there?”
The wind rushed low and quick for a moment, then dropped away. No, said the fire in the pines. But it said it slowly, and it said it softly.
“Hmmm,” said Qpiq, and he pulled out his pipe and lit it. “You don’t sound sure. You sure?”
We know or do not know, said the fire in the pines. We are sure. Its voice was harsher now, and Jareef could see the wood beginning to blister and char on the offerings cradled inside its grip.
“That’s good,” said Qpiq, and he blew smoke into the flame, changing the colours five times over before Jareef could finish blinking. “That’s very good. Now, about the weather… I saw five flights of the little yellow birds yesterday down by the stream, with three birds each.”
A warm spell, said the voice in the pines. You know this,
“Right, right. But after the fifth, a hawk came down and ate the last, slowest bird. Now, what do you suppose that means?”
A cold snap, said the voice in the pines. You know this.
“Yes, but then,” and here Qpiq’s voice grew if not sharp, then edged, “I saw that last bird let itself be caught to let the others get away. Now, what do you suppose that means?”
The voice in the pines did not speak. Qpiq blew more smoke, this time up into the branches.
A choice that brings change, one way or the other, the voice said at last.
“Yes, yes, I suppose that sounds right,” said Qpiq, relaxed and smooth again. Jareef realized he’d been holding his breath, and stopped. “Well, that’s all changes one way or another. I guess it’ll work itself out then, I guess. Changes do that.” He stretched himself out and emptied his pipe’s ashes on the fire, three clear, calm taps. “Thank you and thank your kin, and stay warm.”
Yes, said the voice in the pines. And then it wasn’t there any more, and the fire was dwindling pieces of charcoal no bigger than Jareef’s knuckles.
“They like the smoke, but the ashes put them off,” said Qpiq. He picked up the charcoal lumps and put them in a little drawstring bag. “Best not to leave them lying around, you know?” he told Jareef. “Can’t have leftover god-stuff. It makes a mess in a few different ways, big, important ways if let it get out of hand. Can’t have that. But we can take this and use it to mark up some important things, use it for paint. Nothing better.”
He turned to leave, then stopped. “Oh yes. You have a question? You can talk now, forgot to say.”
“Why the weather?” blurted out Jareef, then felt foolish. But his father didn’t look at him like a fool.
“Why ask the weather?” he echoed. “Well, I can tell the weather, you know. Doesn’t take many symbols or signs to do that, or much of a shaman. Anyone can do that. But there’s weather, and then there’s weather. All kinds of it. Spirits can help with the other kinds, or at least getting a good warning of it. And the more you know the spirit, the more reliable it is. Why we keep the same one, instead of just asking new ones wherever we go.”
Jareef didn’t look at his father with new eyes, but he certainly felt that he saw something different when he turned them to him. Something firm and immovable hiding underneath that rolling jolliness, that might not shove, but would refuse to ever be pushed. Except by his mother, as he was reminded when they got back to the tent and she decided that they’d been up there too long for her to be comfortable. The lecture only ended when he complained of his headache – a relic of the smoke of Qpiq’s pipe – and he went to sleep early.
The hunt set out the next day, all the men together, Chief Yhal and Uncle Huunj and Strange Breese, the woman who hunted like the men because she could do it better than any of them, and all the rest of them. And Jareef’s father, Qpiq, because a hunt with no shaman was like a human with no chest. All the important bits would be there, but there wouldn’t be anything holding them together.
They were gone three days, and then they came back. But four of them didn’t, and one of them was Qpiq. And all of them were quiet.
Chief Yhal explained it the next morning, when all of the hunters had a full night’s sleep between themselves and what had happened. A terrible accident, a chance blundering. A mammoth had barged the wrong way in the night as they herded them this way and that towards the killing ground, and the rest of the herd had pounded after it like the world’s biggest and heaviest lemmings. They had been too frightened to fight back, but they hadn’t needed to, not in the dark and confused night as bushes being used as cover turned into traps and roots leapt eagerly to snare and tangle feet. Qpiq had been immovable, all right, said Uncle Huunj. He had pushed him out of the way, but hadn’t stepped of his own accord, not fast enough. Jareef’s mother had gotten a funny look on her face then, one that frightened him, but it passed and they hugged and cried a little. Most of them hugged and cried a little.
And that was why Jareef was walking up the hill by himself the next dark moon, ritual bundle lugged clumsily in both arms, wearing his old coat with new markings painted onto it hurriedly, a headfull of half-remembered scraps of rhyme, ritual, and stories he thought, he hoped his father had said were important at sometime or another. It wasn’t too good to have a shaman that young, everyone had agreed, but he was the shaman’s oldest child, and that was just too bad. Everyone had wished him good luck, some of them so strongly that he was quite un-reassured.
The singing was the hard part. He piled up all the offerings in a little heap, but the singing escaped him long and hard, his efforts fading in and out of nasal shrillness and into cracked mumblings and humming. Finally he gave up and tried to start a spark. That took six tries, as numbed fingers tried to flex around tools much too big for them. The final result took him by surprise all over again, hopping back in surprise as the fires rushed upwards.
You are not the shaman, they said.
The words were inflectionless, as flat and strange as before, but Jareef still flinched under their meaning. “No,” he said. “But I have to be now.”
The shaman is dead, said the fire in the pines.
Jareef didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t. It was when he was about to start fidgeting that he realized that he had to speak next. “I have to do this now.”
You know nothing, said the fire in the pines. Ask us.
“Can you teach me?”
The sound that happened next was the worst yet. It sounded like a forest fire burning small creatures alive, drawn long and slow. It wasn’t until after, when Jareef had time to run the entire thing through in his head, that he knew the voice in the pines was laughing.
You will learn, it said. And then it went out.
His mother gave him a sympathetic look when he went home, and hugged him when he cried a little. Then she had to go back to looking after his sister and arguing with Uncle Huunj, who kept leaving his knives lying around where she could get at them.
By the time the next meeting-time came about, Jareef had learned a few things from his father’s old friends. One was that you only got so many questions. The other was that you could squeeze more out with better gifts and the proper manners, but they got vaguer and vaguer if you pushed too hard. Yet another was the sort of questions he should be asking, because the answers were important for everyone. The last thing he learned was a mix of herbs that his mother gave him that his father had smoked, and it made him sick for a few weeks before he got a little used to it. He still coughed like a bone was stuck in his lungs, but he could put it off for a few minutes after his first puffs.
“It’ll help,” she told him. And he remembered what Qpiq had done, and it made sense.
Gappa asked if she could come, and he told her to stop bugging him. Uncle Huunj asked if he wanted him to come, and his mother told him to stop bugging him.
Ask me, said the voice in the pines, and so he did. He asked it about the weather, and about where the herds would be going, and if their spirits would be strong and alert or sleepy and restless in the coming weeks.
The voice in the pines answered, tersely but acceptingly, and it was only after the fire had gone out and Jareef was halfway down the hill that he realized that he couldn’t remember a single thing it had told him. He was in a terrible state for the next few days until he broke down and told his mother, who told him he must not have sung the song correctly.
“It’s protection,” she told him. “Powerful protection. It keeps their fingers out of your head out of your pockets. You need to get that song right.”
She asked Uncle Huunj, who asked Chief Yhal, who sent him to Strange Beese, who, surprisingly, was not only the strongest hunter, but also the sweetest singer. She frightened Jareef a little – well, a lot – but she was a good teacher. He didn’t dare make a mistake, especially not with her habit of sharpening her knives and spear-tips as she sang. “It helps concentration,” she told him, and chuckled at his big eyes. “They can’t hurt you,” she said. “And besides, they do no harm. They need a person to do harm.” He certainly concentrated awfully hard on the blades, but his mind would wander a little from the singing.
They moved before he could try out the singing at that god’s-shrine. That was the last time he saw those three pines on that hill, peeking down at them as they walked the trail away and into the forest. They were glowering again, he thought.
Heading south was nice one way: the snow fell away and the trees thickened and he didn’t have to wade through snowdrifts to reach the god’s-shrine, which was a little hollow under a big rock. It wasn’t as far away – he could overhear the noise and talk of camp as he asked his questions – but there were thorny bushes ringing it that gave privacy and snagged at his clothing.
The shrine was different, so naturally, the god was different. “The stuff is the spirit,” Chief Yhal had told him. “Different stuff, the spirit’ll be different. Same one, though. One spirit, many forms, many minds.”
The little hollow was filled with water, and for some time Jareef had no idea how he was supposed to light it. He spent half an hour futilely skimming sparks across it and humming to himself before he hit upon the right of what he was meant to do. So he gathered up the offering bundle – singing the sacred song as he did so, a proper way, using the tricks of Strange Beese – and unrolled it over the pool, and all the offerings spun out and sunk down, down, down, down. They were different this time, small, heavy things that glimmered and shone as they spun down, shells and stones and such.
His reflection stared back at him, and then it went all wrong. Its eyes were either too small or almost all of its face, its skin and its clothing were too alike to tell the difference or completely unalike, and its mouth was too big, with too many teeth that were all too little.
asK me, it said, and its voice was like the drip and tremble of water on moss, bulging, rippling, flat, unsettling.
This time Jareef was ready – pipe lit and mind calm – and he asked all the questions properly. It answered them, and he felt the answers settle in cautiously in his mind, letting the fingers of his memory clasp them tight. No spirit-tricks this time.
therE is much prey here, said the voice in the water. feW other tribes have come this year.
“What sort of prey?” asked Jareef.
deeR. mastodoN. elK. noW and again, bear.
“Good,” said Jareef, and then he was out of questions he’d been told to ask. So he went ahead and asked the question he’d kept for himself. “How did my father die?”
murdereD, said the voice in the water. nO more questions.
Jareef stood there for a moment, pipe half-held in readiness to empty, thoughts mixing. At the last minute he avoided the foolish thing and asked no more. Instead, he tapped the pipe out, once, twice, three times. “Thank you and thank your kin, and stay deep,” he said.
yeS, said the voice in the water, and his reflection was normal again. It looked very pale.
Jareef didn’t tell his mother. She had enough to keep herself busy with, he thought, and from how he felt, the amount of worry delivered with the news would be very large.
What he did do, though, was ask Aunt Rmea what could kill a shaman. She gave him a sad, pitying look and hugged him too tightly to be comfortable.
“Anything that kills a man, little boy. A spear. A knife. A stone. Water. Fire. Jealousy. Hate. The last two are the deadliest, especially when they’re secret.”
“Who would hate my father?” asked Jareef, somewhat muffled.
Aunt Rmea shrugged. “Not one of us. Qpiq didn’t get angry. And you couldn’t stay angry at him. And he didn’t die from that, little boy. Mammoth got him, not man.”
That made Jareef feel a little better, and stopped that cold feeling his stomach got whenever he looked around the camp in the evening, looking at people and wondering. But he still did wonder, and he still did watch.
True to the spirit’s promise, there was much game at the new camp. They stayed there long enough for two more meetings, which meant two more questions left over for Jareef to use.
“What man murdered my father?” he asked.
nO man, said the voice in the water. nO more questions. And that was that for that meeting, and Jareef cursed himself. Then he thought of Strange Beese, and felt very stupid.
“What person murdered my father?” he asked next time.
nO person, said the voice in the water. nO more questions.
Jareef sighed. “Thank you and thank your kin, and stay deep.” Tap-tap-tap went the ashes, and away went the voice in the water. And that was all for that meeting, and he cursed himself all the way back to the tent.
That was the last time he used that god’s-shrine, and the trip to the next big camp was a long, slow slog, through valleys and over hills, stopping only to sleep, living off preserved supplies. Jareef turned ten years old or so on the trip, and his mother gave him a small knife. He was careful with it until he cut himself. Then he was very careful.
The new campsite was a good one, next to a great roaring river that seethed into a lake no more than a minute’s-walk away. Jareef had never seen so much water since as early as he could remember, and he felt very small near it. He thought of the voice in the water, and shuddered at how big it would’ve been if it appeared in that lake.
The next dark moon, when the spirits of the prey would be sleepy and blind, was far away, and he had some weeks to adjust himself to his new god’s-shrine and prepare his question. He thought of it carefully.
The god’s-shrine was a little cave near the lake, an alcove in the rock not much deeper than a tent. Ivy grew down over it, like a curtain, and a little hearth spoke of burned gifts, things that moved through the air.
It took all his effort to make the song go as slow and steady as it was meant to, when everything in him was aching to hear it speak now. He had to think careful of spirit-plucked memories to keep himself focused.
The fire was small and dark and smoky, and the dense smoke’s voice was smokier still.
ask, it said.
Jareef made himself ask all the questions; of the weather, of the game, of anyone else around that might cause trouble, of every little useless detail he didn’t care about any more, and then he asked his final, big question.
“Who murdered my father?”
And then the strange thing happened. The voice in the smoke hesitated. There was a gap, a space where there should’ve been the prompt, steady answer.
a mammoth, said the voice in the smoke. And that didn’t sound right either.
“No,” said Jareef, speaking over the little voice in his head that was telling him what he was doing was very stupid.
“That was what killed my father. A mammoth can’t murder people, a mammoth isn’t a person. It’s like a knife-blade or a spear-tip – it has no purpose on its own. Who murdered my father?”
There was a long, slow, steaming silence. Jareef’s knuckles started to whiten on his pipe.
i did, said the voice in the smoke.
Just like that, Jareef felt two things at once: soaring exhilaration at knowing, and a fast-growing dread in his gut.
“Why?” he asked.
he kept us close. he kept us from wandering. he kept us from settling. we were chained and dragged through a hundred hundred bodies and minds, all different, all changing. our three-pine-mind-on-fire smothered his call, pushed the mammoth.
“How?” he asked.
there was a way out.
“What?” he asked.
another mind, unguarded, unprepared, opening outside to hide in and ride in and escape. found the mammoth. took the mammoth. murdered the shaman.
“Me?” Jareef felt a twinge of a long-ago headache.
your mind was open.
Two more feelings: anger and guilt.
“How do I kill you?” he asked.
you can’t kill a spirit, said the voice in the smoke. It wasn’t in the smoke anymore, Jareef realized with a start. The fire had died altogether, and the air was clear. And what was that shuffling, stumbling thud he heard from outside, on the path?
Jareef ran without thinking, which probably saved his life. The bear’s paws swooped in low and over his head as he scurried out of the cave, rank-smelling fur scraping his coat and foul breath gushing past his head. He saw its roar more than its body as he fled, not daring to look back, but what he had seen felt wrong, strange, broken as a reflection in ripples. How many eyes had it had?
i see you, whispered the voice, not in smoke or fire, but on its own now, and he almost turned around right then, even as a tree lunged up at his face and he twisted desperately around it. His flight took him off the path, staggering and stumbling into a berry-laden bush, arms and legs tangling in bounty that would’ve had him jumping for joy any other time.
i hear you, called the voice on its own, the lumbering bear-gallop and its frothing pant growing louder in Jareef’s ears. He tore loose one arm, tugged on the other. His pipe was still in his hand, why was he still carrying his pipe?
i have you, growled the voice, deeper and stonier, as huge arms wrapped around his body, lifted him up in the air, turning him about. He saw the bear’s face now, but it wasn’t. No bear had looked like that; it was worse than the ripples. Jareef still didn’t know how many eyes it had, or how many faces.
The bear-god held him up high, above its head, all the way up. Jareef was higher than the tallest men in camp, twice as high as Chief Yhal, high enough to see all the way back to the faintest hint of the tents in the campsite. He was tipped upside down, arms flying, and it was because of this that at some point his pipe was upside down and a few ash-specks tipped out. They lit on the bear-god’s snout and it sneezed mightily and violently, dropping Jareef to claw at its nose.
Jareef landed heavily, face-up, staring at the bear as it rubbed its face and sneezed. And it was just good luck that his wind came back before the bear’s did, because he knew what to do before it did. He swatted the bear’s foot with the pipe, and great swatches of it were sprayed grey with ash. It roared and staggered.
“Curse you,” said Jareef, somewhere in that roar. He swung the pipe again – surely there were not that many ashes in it, not enough to cover half the bear’s chest with one blow? It didn’t roar this time, it screamed, a wailing that didn’t exist outside his head. “And curse your kin,” he added, fumbling through his pocket as the bear dropped down to all fours, head-thing wobbling above him.
“And stay in there,” he said, yanking out his mother’s birthday knife. And with one little boy’s strength behind it that knife dove in clean as cutting through water, right up through the bear’s jaw and into its head as far as his arm could reach.
The bear-god lurched, swayed, and fell over. And that was when everyone came running up through the trees, wondering what all the noise was about.
Jareef told them everything, and they believed him, of course. Bad luck not to listen to your shaman, and besides, little boys didn’t kill cave bears.
“What do we do now?” asked Chief Yhal. “Ask whatever spirit comes by? They’ll be as truthful as a treacherous breeze. Have no spirit at all? The other tribes will laugh at us even as they’re hunting up all our game.”
“No,” said Jareef. “We can use this one.”
“It’s not dead?”
Jareef pointed at the bear’s head, and they saw that its eyes still glared. “You can’t kill a spirit,” he said. And it wasn’t dead, but it was stuck.
So they took that skull from the bear, steaming and bloody-red. And they took that bear’s bones, the strongest bones, and they gagged that skull’s mouth tight with them, and they blinded its great mad eyes with its own thigh-bones. The skull was kept carefully in Jareef’s mother’s tent, and whenever they had a question, they would get together and un-blind it, and loose its tongue, and ask it what they needed. And if it was good, they would maybe burn some offerings, like the old days. But if it cursed them, they would laugh at it and gag it again, and Jareef’s mother would pour the ash from Qpiq’s old pipe over its bones. It stung it like anything.
“They’re lazy, spirits,” Jareef was told by his uncle, when he asked why this sort of thing didn’t happen all the time. “This one must’ve been just a little too lazy, enough to choose to do something about it. Most don’t bother. Choices and changes. One brings the other, right? It chose, so it changed. Didn’t choose the change, but it chose.”
Jareef had left the topic at that. He was quite happy not having to do any of the shaman’s duties – the pipe had always made his throat ache, and the offerings bundle had been very heavy – and speaking of laziness and work brought the topic a little too near for comfort.
He did miss the singing a little, though.