Penric and the Shaman

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “There, there…” Penric clutched his shaking body and patted his back as if calming a hysterical child, prudently dragging him over to the wall again. “You’ve seen a god, I know, I know,” he soothed. “You’ll be drunk on it for days. No doubt Oswyl will be highly offended, which will be entertaining in its own way…”

  Gasping, Inglis rolled over in his lap and grabbed up at his collar. “What, what did you see? Just now?”

  Penric gently undid his clenching fingers before he tore the fabric. “I saw you go into your trance. It was a bit alarming. Might have been taken for a stroke—you should warn your companions about that. Your nose bled. I saw when Tollin came unbound, and when he went off. Scuolla, too. It was hard to get much more, because Des went into retreat. Since she has nowhere to go but inward, this results in her curling up into this sort of impenetrable, useless ball—” his voice rose on this last, not, apparently, to Inglis’s address, for he added aside to Inglis, “Gods terrify demons. They are the one power that can destroy them. Understandable.” Inglis wasn’t sure who was supposed to understand what, but Penric hesitated for a long moment. He held up his hand, fingers spreading as if miming a man pressing on a glass, except that it also recalled his five kinds of prayers. Supplication, Inglis thought. “Otherwise… otherwise, it was like standing outside a window in the rain, looking in on some harvest party, to which I knew I was not invited.”

  “Oh,” said Inglis, stupidly. And at an echo in his mind of Stop that, grinned uncontrollably despite it all. He rubbed at his upper lip, and his hand came away sticky and red, but the bleed seemed to have stopped on its own.

  Penric held his hair and peered down into his face with a curiosity…medical? theological? magical? or just the inquisitive scholar? Voices and barking echoed from below, and Penric craned his neck. “…Right. So, here comes Gallin, and a lot of excited men with ropes. I hope they brought enough. Arrow and Blood are running over to greet them, or maybe hurry them along. Or trip them and break their legs, hard to tell with dogs. Are you going to give us any more trouble?”

  “I am in your hands,” Inglis said, limply. And truthfully. And thankfully.

  Rescue. I am rescued. Of all men to be lost in these mountains, he had to have been the most lost, and the most rescued. Such rescues had been Scuolla’s calling, had they not? him and his brave band of dogs. The shaman’s last rescue, and the shaman rescued, hand to hand to hand to hand in a long, long chain of help beyond hope. Reaching how far back?

  …And how far forward?

  XIII

  Getting the two men off the ledge took over an hour. Like the injured shaman, the sorcerer waited to ride the rope net down; unlike the shaman, he stepped out of it with the panache of a prince descending a palace stair. When taxed by Oswyl, Penric claimed that it was much harder to climb down than up, because he couldn’t well see where he was putting his hands and feet. No mountaineer, Oswyl had to take him at his word. It was hardly a thing to balk at, considering what all else of the uncanny events he was forced to take the sorcerer-divine’s testimony for. The eager Acolyte Gallin ate up their wild tale like a starving man, and asked for seconds. The guards and the valemen grew wide-eyed. In all, it was rising dark before they made it back to Linkbeck once more.

  Inglis, certainly, seemed a man profoundly changed, unless the fall had struck him mad. Madder. When they’d cleaned up, and Penric in his third guise as physician had seen to their prisoner’s new bruises, they all went down to dinner, where Gallin and Gossa were slavishly grateful—to Inglis. For Gossa, this took the form of trying to stuff him like a feast-day goose, and feeding his dogs like people. Penric beguiled his own neglect by telling the servant girl, who turned out to be the daughter of the village wet-nurse, all about the fine opportunities for an energetic young woman in the silk industry at Martensbridge, under the princess-archdivine’s careful eye.

  Oswyl finally broke it up by announcing an early start in the morning. As they mounted the staircase, he said to Inglis, “You are still my prisoner. Still under arrest. And we are still going back to Easthome.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Inglis, pensively. “It’s all very good now. And if it is not, there will be something better.”

  For his part, Oswyl predicted a blizzard with the dawn.

  * * *

  In the blackest hour of the night, Oswyl dreamed.

  A deep, slow voice, which seemed to reverberate to the ends of the world, said judiciously: “You were not too late. Well done, child.” After a thoughtful pause it added, in a far less grave tone, “No snow tomorrow. But do not linger three days.”

  Oswyl, scrambling to sit up, came awake with a cry. He didn’t know if the sound was night-terror or joy, but it was loud.

  Dogs yipped, covers were thrown back, and Penric’s voice out of the shadows called, “Des, lights, lights!” He then cried in fear, “He’ll burn my eyes!” and replied to himself, “You haven’t got eyes. I do and they’re just fine. Or they would be if there were any light in here. Thank you,” he added, as upon the washstand the two tallow candles sprang into flame all by themselves.

  Oswyl, clutching his blankets, gasped, “He… He…”

  “Are you all right?” asked Penric, concerned. “You sound like a horse with the heaves.”

  “Nothing. Nothing,” Oswyl managed, trying to catch his stolen breath. “Pardon.”

  “Judging from Des’s reaction, it was not nothing.” He added, “You can come out now. I think it’s over.” He twisted around to Inglis, who was sinking sleepily back into his bedroll, and coaxing the dog Blood to lie down to be clutched like another pillow. “Did you sense anything, just now?”

  “No… I don’t think it was meant for me.” He cuddled the dog, which slowly gave up its alert mien and put its head on its paws once more. Arrow stepped over, and on, Penric in his trundle— provoking an, “Oof, you enormous beast! Paws off!”—and stretched his damp black nose to sniff curiously at Oswyl.

  “It was just a dream,” said Oswyl. “Maybe, maybe a little hallucination. It’s been a long day.” And a long, strange chase.

  “A bad dream?”

  Oswyl hardly knew, except the corners of his mouth kept crooking up, unaccustomed and unwilled. “No… It was… a different kind of frightening.” He added, “How can you tell? Discern a true voice from, from a mere dream?”

  “If you need to ask, it was a mere dream. The other is rare but, hm, not as rare as you’d think. Our daytime minds, I’m told, are too full of ourselves to let Them in. Well, and mine’s too full all the time. At night our gates come sometimes ajar, just enough.”

  Oswyl’s brows drew down. “That’s… unhelpful.”

  “What was your message?”

  He wasn’t embarrassed, exactly. But… “I’d rather not say. It would sound too absurd.”

  Penric, propped up on one elbow, studied him thoughtfully. He finally said, “A bit of free theological advice. Do not deny the gods. And they will not deny you.”

  As Oswyl stared at him, he went on, “Dangerous habit, mind you. Once you start to let Them in through that first crack, They’re worse than mice.”

  Oswyl, thoroughly bemused by now, protested, “How can you speak of the gods so irreverently? And you a full-braid divine?”

  Penric shrugged a half-apology. “Sorry. Seminary joke, there. We had a hundred of them. Needful at times of stress. One of my masters said, For all that we trust the gods, I think we can trust them to know the difference between humor and blasphemy.”

  “Not so sure about your god,” Inglis’s voice came from his bedroll.

  “Hey. Yours is no better. A god whose harvest of souls includes all whose last words were, ‘Ho, lads! Hold my ale and watch this!’ …Seminary joke,” he added aside to Oswyl, who hardly needed the gloss.

  Inglis snickered into his dog, and then mused, “That would be funnier if it weren’t so true.”

  “If it were not true, it wouldn’t be funny at all.”

  The two youn
g scholars seemed willing to debate the theology of humor, or the humor of theology, till dawn. Oswyl said loudly, “You can snuff the candles back out, now. I’m all right.”

  Penric smiled at him, eyes narrowing. “Ye-es. I expect you are.”

  “Want to borrow a dog?” Inglis offered. “They’re very soothing.”

  “In my bed? No, thank you.”

  Arrow, snuffling over the edge of Oswyl’s blankets, heaved a disappointed sigh, as if finding that the source of some delicious scent had gone.

  “What,” said Penric, “they don’t have fleas—don’t everyone rush to praise me. And Gossa made her children wash their paws.”

  “You are welcome to him,” said Oswyl, shoving the beast back into the trundle. “You, go sit on your master.” Giving up on his riotous company, Oswyl struggled from his bedclothes and went to blow out the candles himself.

  * * *

  The heavy snow did not close in till after they’d reached the safety and warmth of Martensbridge, three days later.

  XIV

  At the knock on his workroom door, Pen looked up from his calligraphy and said, “Come.”

  The door swung open cautiously, and a palace page entered. “The Temple courier has brought you some letters, Learned.”

  Pen set his quill in its jar and turned to accept them. “Thank you.”

  The girl ducked her head and, after a last curious look around, went out again.

  Penric examined his take. The thinner missive was marked with a Temple stamp from the Father’s Order in Easthome; the larger, wrapped in a piece of old cloth and waxed against wet, had been franked by the Wealdean royal court chancellery. He opened it first, to find a letter and an unbound book, freshly copied and pristine. Both from Inglis, ah.

  It had been over a month since Oswyl and his prisoner, and his prisoner’s vigorous pets, had departed for Easthome. Penric had managed to evade being taken along by virtue of the week they’d all spent snowbound in Martensbridge, which had allowed him to scribble out a full deposition of the late events in Chillbeck Vale, heavily slanted in Inglis’s favor. Normally a trip to the Wealdean royal capital at the Temple’s expense would have been a high treat, but—not in midwinter, despite Oswyl’s descriptions of the fine Father’s Day festival put on there at the solstice. Not my season.

  Nor mine, sighed Des. Did I ever tell you about the sun on the sea around Cedonia?

  Several times. He’d never seen a sea, warm or cold. Could a demon be homesick? Pen wondered, and broke the seal on Inglis’s letter.

  Inglis thanked him for his deposition, which had done the trick—the shaman did not appear to be writing from a condemned prisoner’s cell, certainly. You were right that the god-drunk wears off, Inglis wrote, for I was very sober when we reached Easthome. I have been strongly reprimanded by the Royal Fellowship, and put on probation, whatever that means, but not dis-invested. I am not sure anyone can actually do that, or at least, no records of such a skill have surfaced in the ancient annals. It seems the old method of execution for bad shamans was to hang them upside down and drain them of blood, which no one in the Fellowship has suggested even for the experiment.

  The Father’s judges after much debate finally ordered me to pay a fine to Tollin’s family, in the old style, by way of weregild. My parents had to borrow some of it from our kin lord, which did not please anyone very much, but I trust they’d have been less pleased to see me feet-up with my throat cut. Oswyl says I should just give up on Tolla, but I am not so sure. She did listen to my tale and mark my scars. Tollin’s second funeral was a comfort to his family, I think, though redundant, as I saw very well which god took him up, and told them so. I’m not sure some believed me until their local temple’s holy animal signed Autumn at his graveside.

  I had a copy made for you of the Fellowship’s writings on shamanic practices that you wanted to read, at least as they are understood so far. I hope we’ll need a second volume in a few more years. It seems small thanks, but it was what I could do. You should find it under seal with this letter.

  He signed it with a flourishing Inglis kin Wolfcliff, Fellow of the Royal Society of Shamans (on probation). And added, as a cramped postscript at the bottom of the sheet, The dogs are well, and settling into their new home. We maintain a bit of a menagerie here, so they fit right in. They like Tolla.

  Penric’s fingers itched to dive for the new volume, but he opened the thinner letter instead. As he’d hoped, it was from Oswyl.

  You may be pleased to learn that your affidavit was accepted by the court, though immediately afterward seized upon by some theologians and carried off. From the legal side of things, there is no sign that anyone wants you brought here in person after all. The other I cannot speak to. Inglis got off lightly, but I do not feel there was injustice done.

  My former sorcerer and his party arrived back at Easthome about two weeks after we did, frostbitten, footsore, and empty-handed. Happily, their official complaints of me were stopped by word of my success. Their private ones, I feel no need to attend to.

  I set an offering on your god’s altar the other day, in Temple.

  His signature was neat and square, Oswyl, Senior Locator, the Father’s Order at Easthome.

  He, too, added a cramped last word: I am not sure how demons feel about blessings, so please just give my best wishes to Desdemona.

  Des was so astonished, she was momentarily silent.

  Penric smiled and reached for his new book.

  Author’s Note:

  A Bujold Reading-Order Guide

  The Fantasy Novels

  My fantasy novels are not hard to order. Easiest of all is The Spirit Ring, which is a stand-alone, or aquel, as some wag once dubbed books that for some obscure reason failed to spawn a subsequent series. Next easiest are the four volumes of The Sharing Knife—in order, Beguilement, Legacy, Passage, and Horizon—which I broke down and actually numbered, as this was one continuous tale divided into non-wrist-breaking chunks.

  What were called the Chalion books after the setting of its first two volumes, but which now that the geographic scope has widened I’m dubbing the World of the Five Gods, were written to be stand-alones as part of a larger whole, and can in theory be read in any order. Some readers think the world-building is easier to assimilate when the books are read in publication order, and the second volume certainly contains spoilers for the first (but not the third.) In any case, the publication order is:

  The Curse of Chalion

  Paladin of Souls

  The Hallowed Hunt

  “Penric’s Demon”

  In terms of internal world chronology, The Hallowed Hunt would fall first, the Penric novella perhaps a hundred and fifty years later, and The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls would follow a century or so after that.

  Other Original E-books

  The short story collection Proto Zoa contains five very early tales—three (1980s) contemporary fantasy, two science fiction—all previously published but not in this handy format. The novelette “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma” may be of interest to Vorkosigan completists, as it is the first story in which that proto-universe began, mentioning Beta Colony but before Barrayar was even thought of.

  Sidelines: Talks and Essays is just what it says on the tin—a collection of three decades of my nonfiction writings, including convention speeches, essays, travelogues, introductions, and some less formal pieces. I hope it will prove an interesting companion piece to my fiction.

  The Vorkosigan Stories

  Many pixels have been expended debating the ‘best’ order in which to read what have come to be known as the Vorkosigan Books (or Saga), the Vorkosiverse, the Miles books, and other names. The debate mainly revolves around publication order versus internal-chronological order. I favor internal chronological, with a few adjustments.

  It was always my intention to write each book as a stand-alone, so that the reader could theoretically jump in anywhere. While still somewhat true, as the series developed
it acquired a number of sub-arcs, closely related tales that were richer for each other. I will list the sub-arcs, and then the books, and then the duplication warnings. (My publishing history has been complex.) And then the publication order, for those who want it.

  Shards of Honor and Barrayar. The first two books in the series proper, they detail the adventures of Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony and Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar. Shards was my very first novel ever; Barrayar was actually my eighth, but continues the tale the next day after the end of Shards. For readers who want to be sure of beginning at the beginning, or who are very spoiler-sensitive, start with these two.

  The Warrior’s Apprentice and The Vor Game (with, perhaps, the novella “The Mountains of Mourning” tucked in between.) The Warrior’s Apprentice introduces the character who became the series’ linchpin, Miles Vorkosigan; the first book tells how he created a space mercenary fleet by accident; the second how he fixed his mistakes from the first round. Space opera and military-esque adventure (and a number of other things one can best discover for oneself), The Warrior’s Apprentice makes another good place to jump into the series for readers who prefer a young male protagonist.

  After that: Brothers in Arms should be read before Mirror Dance, and both, ideally, before Memory.

  Komarr makes another alternate entry point for the series, picking up Miles’s second career at its start. It should be read before A Civil Campaign.

  Borders of Infinity, a collection of three of the five currently extant novellas, makes a good Miles Vorkosigan early-adventure sampler platter, I always thought, for readers who don’t want to commit themselves to length. (But it may make more sense if read after The Warrior’s Apprentice.) Take care not to confuse the collection-as-a-whole with its title story, “The Borders of Infinity”.