Shadow of the Seer

by Michael Scott Rohan

  The many-headed dragons seem to have been a race apart, formed again by manipulating the germ within the egg, as many-headed beasts may be today. No doubt some were useless and helpless, pathetic wastes of life; but in Zamai of the Two Heads and his still more monstrous offspring Tugarin they created bodies ruled by a single will, weapons of appalling accomplishment. But the manipulation may have been too great; Tugarin’s line failed, he had no direct offspring, and as he was needed less to subdue great cities, he was left to grow old and vast for many hundreds of years in his noisome den beneath the stone, till even the Ice’s servants hardly believed in him. In youth, though smaller, he would surely have been harder to bring down and slay. In later years Louhi was to breed other great firedrakes, but Tugarin’s monstrosity and majesty none approached.

  OF THE CRAFT OF THE SEER, AND THE LORE OF MASKS

  Throughout this book Seers are often called ‘shamans’, because that is roughly the meaning of the term the Chronicle most commonly applies, often with patronising undertones or even open contempt. Yet only of the Ekwesh is it really true. Elsewhere, among free people, the craft of the Seer reflected something much more complex, some survival of ancient arts half forgotten. Even though the methods used were now chiefly those of the traditional shaman, the aims and goals of the Seers appear to have been somewhat different – and even more so, the power they tapped.

  Like traditional shamans in almost all cultures, they sought inner visions through a state of heightened mental awareness, by ritual and ordeal; in these visions was mingled an element of divination with one of personal development, the conquest of self that was necessary to overcome the Wall. With this went a strong tradition of healing, although this art was by no means confined to Seers, a largely (though not exclusively) male discipline.

  The Chroniclers, many of whom are known to have been Mastersmiths of Nordeney, were inclined to scorn the idea that any of this had any worth. And indeed it must have seemed painfully crude, compared to their own intricate and demanding art and craft. After all, didn’t the Seer rely not on ordered skill, scholarship and discipline, but on ecstatic dancing and extreme self-deprivation, almost masochistic, to induce a state of near hysteria?

  These were available to anyone, requiring none of the formal study and long apprenticeship, the development of great lore and skill both mental and manual, that smithcraft demanded. Anyone could call themselves a Seer; and it is certain that many did who were mere charlatans, self-aggrandisers and self-deluders, hysterical visionaries, or simply insane. What was supposed to be trance, or at least heightened awareness, could equally be deception, its visions delusions or lies.

  And how could one compare the end result? The mastersmiths imbued the metal they shaped and sang over with subtle virtues to affect the world, sometimes in extraordinarily powerful ways. The shamans sought only subjective visions, often hard to tell from the phantoms of dreams or madness, let alone to interpret with any authority.

  Put like that, the Seer’s art does seem primitive and shapeless by comparison. Yet there is no doubt that in the right hands it could work great wonders – and sometimes, unfortunately, in the wrong ones; but the same could be said of smithcraft. And when the evidence is examined more closely, the contrast no longer seems as strong, and the Mastersmiths’ contempt no longer justified.

  Beliefs and concepts

  The resemblance of the Seer’s art to shamanism was, for the most part, skin deep. There was, for example, no tradition whatsoever of cursing or blessing, as there is in almost all shamanistic cults from the old Norse to the Navaho; nor was there any element of witch-finding, that embodiment of individual and mass paranoia, which has been so bloody and destructive in cults, and won shamans in West Africa and the Congo especially the popular name of ‘witch-doctor’. And the visions Seers sought seem to have been clear and unambiguous, limited only by the scope and comprehension of their vision, and not wrapped in oracular mystery. Furthermore, there is strong evidence of something present in no other shamanistic belief, namely a common and systematic body of belief, knowledge and techniques.

  Every shaman, even, in their limited way, the Ekwesh, seems to have shared this, although the depth of understanding varied widely. Common to them all, though, was a belief in the use of symbols to direct an ability or resource which sprang from within the shaman himself, but was ultimately the gift of others – usually understood to be those Powers who favoured mankind, and almost always clan totems. The most powerful symbols were those that emphasised one’s identity with one of those Powers, major or minor, in a kind of communion that both honoured the Power and sought its attention, and even aid. Of these, the greatest were masks, considered to hide the wearer’s identity in that of the image or totemic power; the Raven was one of the most popular, though best approached with caution and by Seers of some strength. The Hawk, whose mask seemed to reject Alya, appears to have been a minor Power largely associated with hunting and the open air, a favourite of independent outlivers such as Alya’s father, and also of adolescents. Some, such as the feathered serpent mask the women wore, were only used by the Ekwesh, and even half-forgotten by them. As the tale shows, these masks were often of ancient lineage and extraordinary craft, carefully preserved when all other treasures were cast away, and able to acquire a mana of their own from the forces unleashed with their aid; of which more later.

  But they were not the only form of symbol. Shapes and forms, abstract or geometrical, were often used to direct the shaman’s mind in his attempt to awaken that inner force; the Trail was one of the commonest, learned until it almost became an instinctive reflex. It was compared to an incense-burner, a maze of lines along which a trail of slow fire burned; and indeed there is evidence that it may originally have been such a thing, a ritual element in some forgotten temple or place of art. When they could no longer make the actual burner, the Seers recreated it in their minds, in shamanic fashion, and found it worked as well.

  It was well known that even written characters could act as powerful symbols; the effect of the inscription above Oshur’s door was not uncommon, and Alya’s use of it on bodies to pass unseen, though ingenious, was not without heroic precedent. It has been suggested that this was a survival of the smithcraft’s practice of inscribing or incising characters on metal, or more rarely stone, to enhance or define virtues already imbued within them; and this would be in keeping with the concept of the craft’s origins, described below.

  It seems the concept survived down into relatively recent times in this general region, as witness the Japanese tale of Hoichi, a minstrel ensnared to play for ghosts of long-dead nobles, to the detriment of his health and sanity. A well-meaning priest covered his whole body in just such an inscription of characters, to hide him from their sight; but forgot his ears. When the ghostly messengers came again, they saw nothing but the ears. Hoichi survived the encounter, and became a famous court musician and intriguer – under the name of Hoichi the Earless.

  Of the origins and destiny of sight

  Altogether, the Seer’s art appeared as if sophisticated thought lurked behind primitive methodology, as if civilised ends had been reduced to uncivilised means; and that may well be its origin. Indeed, however primitive the means and the ends, it is even possible that the inner forces the Seers and the Smiths tapped were essentially one and the same.

  The main authority for this is Alya’s tale, in which he is depicted as having been able to see fluxes of light within the metal parts of the ancient Raven mask, exactly as any smith of Nordeney could see the flow of the virtues within such craftwork. This suggests two things: that the mask had been shaped, some time in the remote past, by a smith of comparable craft; and that Alya himself, a powerful Seer, had the same talent as such a man. It would be a remarkable coincidence if the two facts were not connected. True, Alya’s father saw no such traces; but his power was probably less great, as he himself suspected. Or, being a man of somewhat closed and obstinate mind, he may have dismissed any su
ch glimpse as an illusion.

  There is another strong authority, however, to be found in the Chronicles’ most famous book, the Book of the Sword, and its account of the Mastersmith Elof’s early years and apprenticeship. His first and evil master and mentor, the Mastersmith Mylio, lived for many years among the Ekwesh. Through them, and no doubt also their cold masters, he unquestionably gained much ancient and half-forgotten lore. The account specifically states that some of this, at least, treated of masks and symbols, in a manner that sounds very familiar; and Mylio is known, himself, to have danced as an Ekwesh shaman on more than one occasion, in the mask of the Thunderbird, with devastating results. Yet, equally certainly, he was able to blend this arcane and primitive learning with pure smithcraft of a high order, and so envisage, if not actually create for himself, those works of frightening power the Tarn-helm, and above all the Mindsword. If smithcraft could absorb Seer’s lore so readily, and be so intensified by it, there is little doubt that they must once have been part of some greater wisdom, some more powerful lever by which mankind could affect the world.

  In Kerys and its offshoots this remained a practical science and a craft, albeit one a large part of the people did not take seriously. But in the fragmented East it seems to have weakened and declined, perhaps because it was turned inward rather than outward, degenerating into a half-superstitious quest for personal enlightenment, without any means of applying it to the outside world. Only through ancient and half-understood symbols such as the masks could that power be directed at all. No doubt this tendency, too, had been encouraged by the Ice and its agents, turning the minds of free men away from the practical and towards the introverted, egocentric and passive, a mock-primitive belief which, as it lured folk to despise true craft and wisdom, all too soon became the genuinely primitive.

  It has been suggested, in fact, that all the shamanistic cults, of Europe and Asia, or indeed worldwide, were inspired by the memory of the true Seer’s art – that they grew up in the dark millennia following the fall of the Ice, pretending to deliver what the older wisdom had delivered, by using what seemed like similar means. In just such a way the cargo cults of recent years imitate the trappings of civilisation without understanding them, as if they were magical rituals. If so, this was in keeping with the general decline, that the Ice forever sponsored, and heightened even with its fall.

  From shaping metal, men fell to whittling wood; from hewing stone, men were left stacking mud-brick and wattle; and from striving to better the world they degenerated into its hunted victims. In that lay the victory of all that hated humanity, and wished its end, summed up by the Ice and its masters; but they could not have wrought it without humanity’s own active aid. And the Ice, it is said, has not gone, but merely withdrawn to raise new lords, wiser and subtler than the old, with the wit to find newer and more beguiling masks of their own to hide behind, as they assist humanity in encompassing its own destruction, once again.

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  Also by Michael Scott Rohan

  The Winter of the World

  1. The Anvil of Ice (1986)

  2. The Forge in the Forest (1987)

  3. The Hammer of the Sun (1988)

  4. The Castle of the Winds (1998)

  5. The Singer and the Sea (1999)

  6. Shadow of the Seer (2001)

  Spiral

  1. Chase the Morning (1990)

  2. The Gates of Noon (1992)

  3. Cloud Castles (1993)

  4. Maxie’s Demon (1997)

  Other Novels

  Run to the Stars (1982)

  The Ice King (1986) (with Allan J. Scott)

  A Spell of Empire (1992) (with Allan J. Scott)

  The Lord of Middle Air (1994)

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to all those who have helped me create this book, including Tim Holman and Simon Kavanagh at Orbit; Ian Miller; Anne and Bill Macdonald, for unearthing source material I hadn’t seen since my childhood; and, as always, for belief and support, my wife Deb.

  Dedication

  This sixth Winter of the World tale is gratefully dedicated to the many thousands of people across the world who have contributed to its success over the last two decades; and, most of all, to you, the reader.

  Michael Scott Rohan (1951 – )

  Michael Scott Rohan, born in Edinburgh in 1951, writes both fantasy and science fiction. Whilst studying law at Oxford, Rohan joined the SF group and met the president, Allan J Scott, who started him writing for the group’s semi-professional magazine SFinx alongside names such as Robert Holdstock and Ian Watson. His first novel, Run to the Stars, was published in 1983 and he collaborated with Allan J Scott on The Hammer and the Cross, a non-fiction account of how Christianity arrived in Viking lands. Rohan is best known for his acclaimed The Winter of the World sequence, an epic fantasy set in an ice-bound world.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Michael Scott Rohan 2001

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Michael Scott Rohan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 09227 3

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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