They Called Us Shaman

by Corinne Beenfield

  Knowing? Knowing what—everything? And how does he access his abilities when no one else here can? Yet these questions that would normally dominate my mind don’t take precedence over what I’ve just experienced.

  “He won’t let us leave. I’m certain! I have to get back to Mama—”

  “Shhhh. It will be okay.” His eyes dart around once more, and suddenly I realize he is doing more than just trying to keep me from the brink of a mental breakdown. I remember how Azure never needs to take notes of my stories. They are being recorded. Others are listening in, she had once said. Even here? In my private quarters? Yes, I see, of course. It’s just one more way for them to keep us under their thumbs. Now I lower my voice as well, to barely a decibel above a whisper.

  “I have to get home. How? How can I ever get home?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Ramose admits. So, apparently his “knowing” is limited, or at least his access to it. “Not yet. But I promise you—we can find a way to escape from here. We will be free again. All of us.”

  All of us. Those three little words somehow seem to give me oxygen. All of us. Yes. The shivering stops.

  “Do you think—can it be done?”

  “Yes.” His voice is as sure as if I had asked him his name. “It isn’t enough to find a way for just ourselves to break out, leaving all the others to his whims. We can stop him. We have to.”

  “All of us,” I whisper to myself now. Here is my purpose, and though my mind feels like it’s been running several miles an hour just to come to an abrupt stop, I suddenly feel as if this mess is something my body and brain can cope with. I won’t live in silence waiting for my people to be extinguished, a candle flame met by wet fingers. “We will find a way.”

  “Yes. We will leave no stone unturned, we will try every door, every possibility. It will be okay,” he says, and I know it’s more than just empty words to calm a panicked mind. He means it.

  All of us. This is bigger than I had first realized, bigger than Mama and me, bigger than the murdered man and his Elleny. All of us. All.

  This is bigger even than the Shaman in the Academy.

  This could be what all magic needs.

  We may be captive, yet perhaps these scientists made a mistake by bringing us here, out of extinction. But their folly is our best hope. Yes. Sometimes all a flame needs is a gentle gust and some kindling for it to roar back to life, stronger than it ever was before.

  I sit back on my heels, the blizzard inside me settling to a white stillness.

  “Ramose,” I whisper, looking him in the eye. “We have to figure out how to give magic a second chance.”

  ___

  One after another, the memories come, sometimes male, sometimes female. Each presses upon me, erasing Ramose, taking my place. Tonight when I close my eyes, I see a restaurant, and flowing blonde hair with a single blue streak over my shoulder. As I always, I am only an exhale away from being gone. Then her piece of the story comes.

  The waitress hands my boyfriend the checks, and when she wishes us a good night, we can only nod a response. We are each laughing too hard to muster up a social expectation.

  At last, with stomachs pleasantly hurting, we lean back and subside into chuckles. “We’d better get going,” I finally remind the group, tucking my long hair behind my ear, hating to be the one to seem like a nag. So far I think I’ve pulled off a good impression with my boyfriend’s old high school buddy and his fiancée, and I don’t want to blow that now. I explain, “If we’re late, they may close the doors. Then we couldn’t get in till intermission.”

  Standing, Gadian reaches for Madison’s coat and purse. For the briefest moment, he turns his back to all of us, his spine arched over the purse.

  The hairs on the back of my neck raise, like a wolf sensing danger.

  But then the moment is over as he hands the coat and purse to Madison with a smile, and no one else has noticed a thing. My glance darts to his palms—empty, clearly. If he stole something, he wouldn’t have anywhere to hide it that fast.

  He plants a kiss on her cheek and looks at her as if she is a Greek goddess. She closes her eyes to relish the kiss, and I see that she trusts him completely.

  Chuckling, I shake my head, and smooth my hands over my arms.

  I need to watch less Criminal Minds, I chide myself, and grab my to-go box.

  SIXTEEN

  The Californian Remains, August 2048 A.D.

  We lie in the dark, Ramose on his bed and me on mine, yet they don’t seem to be separate islands. For once since arriving here, I feel a connection, a safety line thrown out to me at sea.

  Around us, there is only blackness. Since that first day, I have found nowhere else with a single window. Azure told me that only the Transitional Room has one to “help new arrivals understand their change in surroundings.” In other words, to understand how desolate the outside world is, should we try to escape.

  It’s also dark because we aren’t permitted the technology the mentors have, so there is no screen glow to see by. It occurs to me that we sleep and wake when the mentors tell us to, with no sun to guide our actions. I wonder if outside these walls at this very moment, there is the orange haze of twilight against the mountains I had seen from the Transition Room, or perhaps the sky is dove gray with the first kiss of a new day.

  The only light in the entire room comes from a single Exit sign, which seems ironic to me. If only it were that simple.

  So I lie in the dark and end the day how I always do—remembering. Some days it’s Mama’s radiant glow as she bartered in the markets with those merchants who adored her. Other nights, I have forced my mind to recall Leo’s voice when he insisted he could do something, or the heartbeat of the earth when I lay down upon it, no other living being around.

  Tonight, I decide to remember a new day in my home. Sunlight would pour onto the peeling frescos of our walls. Those walls and doors of our house were simple in their design, but so much more than the sum of their parts. For that, I thank Mama with her soft hands and gentle words, her rising before I do to start the fire so I don’t have to wake to cold. Evenings, as fun as they could be, often carried the weight of the full day and sometimes reservoirs of patience are tapped to a trickle, but mornings . . . Is not the best part of the day the good-morning hug? How I miss waking up within those sunlit walls, the radiance of Mama’s first smile of the day even brighter.

  “Ramose?” I ask into the darkness.

  “Hmm?”

  “What was your home like?”

  “Hot.” He laughs. “I don’t know. What do you want to know?”

  “Details. Come now! I want to see it. Paint it for me.”

  There is a rustling from his bed, and I imagine him turning onto his back, hands under his head as though watching scenes from his homeland begin to play across the ceiling. The motion sensors stay off, thank heavens. They don’t turn on for small movements, as one might do in their sleep, but anything quick or large, and they immediately flicker awake. Even when we are speaking of nothing important, I feel better knowing we aren’t being listened to. I never know what we say that our captors could take and use against magic.

  Ramose remains lost in thought, so I urge him on.

  “Think of sights, sounds, smells,” I instruct.

  “Okay.” He sounds tentative at his ability to play this game well. “My favorite place in the world is the market. I’d go there as a boy, and even after I began employment under the pharaoh, I still wouldn’t let servants go in my place. Children run amongst the white buildings, and often in the streets there would be a dancer twirling in a gauzy white tunic.”

  “We had performers too. If Mama had a spare coin, she’d let me give it to them.”

  “These didn’t dance for money. We didn’t have a monetary system.”

  “What? How did you function?” It takes all my strength to remain lying down.

  He laughs at my reaction. “We traded goods or services. She would be there to attract custom
ers to the stalls. There was baked fish, the smoothest linens you can imagine, hard bread. Several of the merchants had watched me grow up, I knew them by name. They’d smile at me and always accept the simplest of trades when I was a boy, handing me a pure white honey roll or pomegranates. When I was older, I always tried to make up for the kindness they had shown me. But how could I?” He clears his throat. “It wasn’t just honey rolls they gave me, was it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shuffles under the covers. “They taught me. Lots of things. They gave me the desire to learn about people, to hear their stories. They showed me that when you know someone’s story, caring for them usually comes easily. That’s why, I’m certain, the earth gave me my specific ability. I wouldn’t have it if it wasn’t for them.”

  “That’s good of you not to forget them when you moved on to the pharaoh's court.” I brush my fingers back and forth across on a wrinkle in my covers. I think of all the times at home I tried to reach across the differences between myself and others, how many times I had hoped a joke or act of kindness would bind us. But except for Leo, friendship never took root. We’d share a moment, but then they would move on, leaving me to my loneliness again. How quickly people forget.

  “Not really.” He brushes off my compliment. “It’s what any decent person would do.”

  No, I think. It’s rarer than you realize. I smile, picturing him leaving a palace to go to the market on his own, to see merchants who knew him before he became a somebody.

  “How did you get to be employed by the pharaoh?” It’s interesting, imagining Ramose working for a king. He has never taken me as one to care for extravagance.

  “Necessity,” he answers simply.

  “Oh?” I don’t let him off the hook easily.

  He exhales slowly, and I get the impression this isn’t a story he has recounted much.

  “My father was a hard man. I think he loved my mother once. I recall a time when we were all happy. But then the twins happened—my brothers.” He pauses, as though just remembering is painful. “The first died at birth, and my mother put all her hope, all her effort into keeping the second alive, but on the fourth day, we lost him as well. I lost Mother that same night.” His voice lowers till I can barely hear it. “I remember her holding his cold body, the gaping wound of losing the first babe still so fresh, and it seemed to me that a light just . . . ” He made a puff sound, as though blowing out a candle. “. . . went off in her mind. It was like watching a star go out. She never fully came back since then.” He exhales, long and slow. “She became . . . simple.”

  “Oh, Ramose,” I whisper.

  “Father’s love for Mother dissolved, and impatience took its place.” His voice is firmer now, as though the story demands to be told. “She used to sit by the window, watching the children play and comment on how big the twins were getting, remark on milestones like losing teeth. I remember Father grabbing her by the shoulders, shaking her and roaring right in her face, his spittle flecking her cheeks—that they were dead. But there was no talking her out of where her mind was. After years, Father’s impatience turned to bitterness and eventually a rage that this was his life, his wife.” Ramose pauses. The rawness in his voice gives away that for all his love of other people’s stories, he doesn’t tell his own. Perhaps it is the soothing darkness that hands him the courage, his knowing that I can’t see his face and he can’t read mine.

  “I don’t think anyone wakes up and says to themselves, ‘I’m going to hit my wife today.’ But all that anger was boiling inside him, and it was all targeted at her. Often he would tell her as he hit her, ‘You’re not my wife. You’re not my Ahhotep,’ as if by convincing himself that wasn’t her, it would somehow justify what he did.” The words come heavy now, falling hard to the floor. “When I was a child, I could only watch in horror, screaming for him to stop. Sometimes he only seemed satisfied when her life hung by a thread. When I got older, I would stand in his way, and most times he was content just to hit someone. Yet how could we waste our lives that way, Mother and I? I wasn’t ready to play dead yet. To spend the rest of our days hoping that if we were just quiet enough, polite enough, if she acted just normal enough, he wouldn’t notice us.” He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice softens. “But no. It wasn’t fair to expect that of her.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I made up my mind to run away and take her with me. Though I hadn’t wanted to tell others about my ability to connect with the earth, I knew it was my best chance of providing for us. Pharaohs were known to have magicians on hand. It took some time, using my abilities, to get the royal counselors to pay me mind. When they did, though, I was ready.

  “I was fifteen the morning I was first brought before the pharaoh. I remember walking down the throne room toward him, elaborate rows of white pillars on either side painted with scenes of grandeur of the ancient rulers. It was so far removed from the dust of our hut. It was the sort of place where Father could never touch Mother again. When it came my time to perform for the pharaoh, I held back nothing, thinking of her all the time. Knowing at that very moment while I was away what Father could have been doing to her, but vowing to myself, ‘Never again.’ I was given the position as a court magician, the other five my superiors by decades.”

  “And then you escaped from your father?”

  “Yes, that very afternoon, I went home and packed Mother up. I know now I should have waited until dark, snuck out while Father was sleeping, but I honestly thought he’d be glad to see us go. I had pictured him barely looking up from his drink, not so much as saying goodbye when we walked out the door, but I was wrong. When he understood my intention, for the first time his rage passed Mother by completely and came to me first. Grabbing our things, I told Mother to run outside. I followed, but just outside the doorway, Father caught me and began to beat me like never before. Everything I had packed—the clothing and Mother’s small heirloom gifts from her parents—flew everywhere.

  “Suddenly, the beating stopped.” Ramose pauses and swallows. “Looking up, I saw Mother ramming into him, thrusting him against the wall of our home. I never understood where her strength came from. She must have barreled into him when his balance was off. There in the sunlight, she stood over him with his own wooden mallet in hand. It’s strange, but I thought about how I had forgotten how tall she was.

  “I remember him slumped against the wall, staring up at her in shock. He called her by name. ‘Ahhotep?’ as though he hadn’t seen her there. As if he finally saw that it was still her inside that shell.

  “‘You will not touch my son!’ she told him as I picked myself up.” As he repeats her words, I can hear the pride in Ramose’s voice. “Our belongings were strewn about in front of the house, but she didn’t gather any of them except our market basket, as if we were just going to get the day’s food. She set the mallet in it then put her hand in the crook of my arm, and we left. He just watched us go.

  “I looked at her as we walked, the happiness in her eyes, and wondered, ‘Are you back?’ But then a cluster of children ran by. She laughed and called out to the twins to wait for us, that they would get lost in the crowd. But she had laughed! It seemed to me that as lost as her mind was, somewhere in there she understood—we were free.”

  He falls silent, the images of his story wandering about my thoughts. “You did all that for her? You took her beatings for her?” My voice comes out quiet, but I think he can hear me. I imagine what that must have been like, day after day, to know you didn’t have to be hit, that you weren’t the target, but choosing to let solid fists pummel your soft flesh if it meant that your loved one would be spared. “You’re a good son.”

  “No, just a son. There’s no one I owe a greater debt to than my mother.”

  I think of my mother, all she did for me. “You must miss her very much.” Light dawns in my mind. “That’s why you want to get back, isn’t it?”

  He shuffles in the dark before answering. “Sh
e died just a couple of weeks before I was kidnapped and brought here. It was an accident. She never paid enough attention to the busy streets, and there was a racing carriage.” He sighs, and I hear an exhaustion that goes beyond the late hour.

  “At first, when I believed they would keep their word and return me home, I had hoped to stop the accident from ever happening. But the machine doesn’t work within a hundred years before the time it visited so there can’t be two of the same person at one moment in time.”

  “What?” I pause, trying to wrap my mind around it.

  “Since you were kidnapped around the year 1470, you and your boyfriend are the only people in history that they took between the years 1370 and 1470.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, no.” His words come out tight and hard, like balled fists. “I will never see her again. Not in this life.”

  I don’t say anything for a while, but place a hand over my heart as it physically aches for him. For his mother. For my own mother. These are holes no long else can fill.

  After a moment a thought occurs to me. I tilt my head. “Why be so anxious to get back then?” I know that for me, it’s the smiling memories of Leo and Mama that give me my motivation.

  “I know what it’s like to spend every day feeling trapped, to wonder if I will ever be able to escape. It’s a feeling that I never wanted to feel again, yet here I am. No, it’s not so much Egypt I miss. It doesn’t hold much for me anymore but a painful past.” He breathes, his voice becoming steady. “What I miss more than life itself—what I will fight for—is the power to live as I wish. That is oxygen to my soul, to know I am rid of chains.” He stops, his words strong and bright in the otherwise black room. “I will be free.”

  I smile and close my eyes, hoping that the golden glow of what he says will settle over me, give me strength too.

  Yet one thought picks at my mind like a snagged hangnail. Opening my eyes, I have to ask.

  “Ramose . . .” I inhale. “Could we be wrong? Maybe what Gadian did . . . maybe it was just that once. Maybe if we cooperate, they still will time travel us back home. Perhaps—could I have misunderstood what I saw?”