Chapter 10: Battle of Will
After a full day’s climb, the medicine man finally reached the great serpent’s high cliff. Night was creeping up the slope behind him and would soon devour the peak. Eagle Flying By decided to rest until morning.
The clean air of the mountain turned sour and became tainted with irritation as brimstone and sulfur assaulted his nostrils. He knew that, if the legend was true, the great serpent, Uktena, awaited him over the next rise of jagged and rugged cliffs.
The elder medicine man sought shelter in the lee of a leafy tree for the night but could not sleep. He built a fire, toasted some wah^pe khalyapi, and made himself a pot of herbal tea.
All through the night, the earth shook. Firelight flickered and cast shadows on the mountainside. Electricity in the air made his hair stand on end. His mind mulled over the old legend; he considered going back home, but the reward was too great—so great that it was worth the risk of life to carry on with his destiny.
For in the Badlands—specifically, the great fissure of the wily serpent, it is said—lived a beautiful maiden: a maiden who never aged, a maiden who would bring immortality to the man who came to her rescue, a maiden in whom all the beauty of creation resided. She wore the white linens of a virginal princess over her long, creamy legs and pert, rounded breasts. Her long, flowing black hair framed a face as beautiful as her form and disposition. This was the doe that he had sent to the slaughter. But first, there was the matter of the serpent to deal with.
Sun now drizzled around the edges of the Badlands, outlining the peak with a halo of light. His fear had vanished overnight; he was ready to face what came next. After a sip of courage from his goatskin and a few berries and nuts, he set out for the fissure. He knew the serpent monster would be waiting for him; he could hear him stirring deep in the abyss of the fissure; his bold footsteps became shaky. Indeed, by the time he had climbed to the crest, he was weak-kneed. Longingly, he looked back toward Dakota—toward home.
Stepping out onto the rise of land overlooking the deep abyss, he waited to hear the hiss of the slithering serpent. He was confronted with a vision—a giant, even for a legendary horned rattlesnake: a mound of scaly, undulating flesh all of fifty feet long; a horned head at least three feet across; a tail that could wrap around a sweat lodge; enormous fangs. The great medicine man stumbled backward.
The Lakota healer chanted incantations to a full, blue moon in a tongue that had been already ancient when the moon itself was born. As he chanted, he climbed, clinging perilously to a stone cliff face eight hundred feet above a bed of jagged rock. Dark slate night clouds occasionally eclipsed the cold, reflecting orb, forcing the shaman to pause until light returned. The dimly illuminated stone, with its hellishly smooth surface, was testing even Eagle Flying Bye, the most powerful of the Lakota warriors. His lithe, lean, well-muscled form quivered with exertion as he steadily, carefully rose, and he knew that without the enchanted potion he had consumed earlier, the climb would have surpassed his physical limitations. No mere mortal could survive here, he thought. From the ground, the medicine man scarcely looked human.
Now, the jutting tip of the final crag marked the last—and seemingly insurmountable—obstacle of the arduous, thousand-foot ascent. He hung precariously below it by his fingertips, weighing the task at hand. He quickly concluded it was physically impossible to traverse the three feet of angled rock barring his path. 'Fortunately, there is a more ethereal approach, beyond the physical.’. No sooner had the thought become memory than he began systematically closing his senses to standard reality: first, hearing; then smell; then taste; then sight; and finally, all forms of touch.
He retreated deep into the labyrinth of the mind, opening doors that led to other planes … and to communion with a dark, demonic presence.
“Great Wakan Tanka, protect me in this hour of total darkness,” he hoarsely began. “Great Wakan Tanka, I seek strength—not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy: myself” His voice had grown louder now, and higher-pitched. Again and again he repeated the chant, voice growing progressively shriller until a tortured, high-pitched shriek ended the ecstatic spell.
The shaman sensed an astral vortex gleaming with dazzling, self-generated light in the liquid black infinity inside his head. As he moved toward the portal, it opened, and he became an ebony wave flowing through into … what must be Tohu and Bohu! Eagle Flying Bye, entered into the realm—of perversion, corruption, and putrefaction—encompassing the totality of it in his own soul, and shuddered not.
After an interminable time, during which he conversed with the living embodiment of disease, the astral vortex suddenly reappeared, and again the medicine man was liquid jet, splashing forth as a wave of night.
He now stood atop the cliff, facing the precipice and staring at the full moon in utter amazement. Exactly how he had arrived was anyone’s guess. . Absently, he noted that the night orb’s usually golden color now seemed a darker shade of pale, sickly yellow. Then his hypnotic gaze shifted, as he spied the entrance of an underground cave, which lay between his feet and the crag’s jutting tip. Around the portal, carved in natural rock, were carvings of perverse images; inhuman torture, human sacrifice, sexual perversion, wickedness as an art form... etched in the circumference, the serpent swallowing its own tail as the height of demonic lust.
Still, Eagle Flying Bye shuddered not, for he was cold, frozen to normal human compassion. He would not let the vision disturb his quest. Far on the dark road he had already traveled, visual torture, performed in dark gullies surrounded by warped, distorted demons... he was gaining powers while growing forever distant from his own plane by tasting the forbidden fruit of other dimensions.
Without hesitation, the medicine man slipped through the opening, his fear a wild beast that he learned to cage a long time ago. He descended on broken shards, lashing out at unseen incubi as they tried to weaken his very resolve. In a rough hewn tunnel, which was cut out of solid, stalagmites, the limestone reflected opaque, olive light which radiated from great, rounded columns descending from the stone ceiling. Almost immediately, the shaman felt a hot, incessant breeze blowing fetid in his face. Like the entranceway, the walls were worked with the most sordid of engravings. Eagerly past them went the Eagle, drawn inexorably deeper by his own insane obsessions. Closer, closer, closer … to attaining great power while destroying ultimate sin.
The stairway abruptly ended, giving way to a small, circular room, still hewn from the same underground dripstone, the inner sanctum. Between Shaman and opening, protruding seamlessly from the center floor, lay a small, circular altar hewn from a cave pearl... Its sides were etched with further hieroglyphics from the same demonic-possessed serpent as before, and a small, polished-sable stone marked its center, contrasting with the main-stone. The ebony circle was so perfectly joined with the rock it seemed it had always been there. A small, round bowl made of Ivory, about the size of an eagle’s egg, was centered therein. The thin tracing of some rough, verdant-hued, fluorescent material delineated the circumference of the depression, which itself was a part of the circular altar.
The shaman stepped to the beveled pedestal carved from a stalagmite, left hand slipping into a fold at the hip of his leather breechclout. From the pocket he pulled a small, turquoise urn and a clear vial in which blood-red powder was visible. Setting his jeweled hollow bone on the stone, he quickly but carefully emptied the contents of the vial into it.
Now, thought the shaman, comes the battle. Dropping to his knees, the medicine man began expertly drawing strange, arcane glyphs in the hellish air, one with each of the fingers of his left hand. The crimson powder, which consisted of the dried blood of a sacred white buffalo and certain extra dimensional herbs, Yerba Santa and sage, suddenly burst into phosphorous flame. Eagle Flying Bye raised his arms above him, his palms spread wide in supplication, and began chanting. He had spent years and risked much tracking and perfecting
this shamanic spell that now contorted his classic Lakota features in ecstasy as it opened the seal to the realm of Uktena. Simultaneously, the smell of putrefied flesh permeated the air. From his knees, the shaman fell unconscious to the floor, swooning in a violent, unrelenting stupor. Then the smoke was sucked like a vacuum into the small ivory bowl.
Eagle Flying Bye awoke with a start from a short, nightmare-haunted sleep. He was on his side, in fetal position and completely disoriented. Rising with some difficulty to his knees, he surveyed new and terrible surroundings.
Finally, the shaman blanched—for, unlike the other distorted places he had been, this was a horror that children of God were never supposed to witness! The very substance and geometry of the place was literally inconceivable.. The medicine man recoiled, shaken by the maddening effect. With superhuman effort and steely resolve, the shaman focused both inward and outward, fighting off the feelings of vertigo, seeking a clue to the entrance he knew must be there.
His trained mind sensed an opening—or what might be an entrance, so perplexing was its nature. Momentarily he purposely blurred his vision;, he scanned the spot where he thought the gateway should be. Slowly, his vision refocused, and in it was a familiar shape: the same white, polished ivory stone bowl that had been centered in the rock niche he had so recently departed. Instinctively, he knew the stone to be the door.
A sudden awareness of the hellish, unremitting breeze that had followed him (or had always been there) brought thought: “'There are realms within realms, within planes, within dimensions, without end, without limits…” His chant ended his brief reverie, calling upon his prowess to again transcend the finite world.
Still on his knees, the shaman took a thin, razor-edged dagger from his sash and sliced deep into his left wrist, slitting flesh and causing blood to well and drip from the gaping wound. Standing, he squeezed his fist until blood flowed into the tiny, bowl of the familiar altar, filling the bowl before spending the rest on the maddening, serpentine rocks as he ejaculated his life’s seed.
The home stretch of a long, dark journey was now at hand. Again Eagle Flying Bye retreated, via transmutation, to the liquid, black infinity of his essence. There, he became a solid black ball, falling through an astral vortex that lay below him, descending deep, deeper, and deepest into the pressure-filled depths of an abyss. The enormous compression crushed him incessantly, rendering him a tighter, denser spherical mass, which dropped through a long stretch of actual intestines, he was shooting through the bowels of hell…., …
The shaman re-entered the physical world on a, glowing, ebony shoreline before an ocean of warm, thick claret. The tide’s alkaline smell was overpowering. The visible sky was the ivory bowl, with no apparent ending or light source. Out in the distance, luminous, silvery giants swam in hot hemoglobin. Now and then, one of the gorgeously glowing monsters would leap free of the viscous, red ocean, revealing its gleaming, rounded body and squirming tail, which were huge even at this distance.
The medicine man recognized his own sperm, romping in his own blood, and thought, ‘everything is relative.’ For a long moment, he stood frozen, transfixed by the disturbing symmetry of the scene. Gradually, he became aware that one of the rollicking multitudes was now swimming toward him, closing vast distances effortlessly. Closer and closer it glided, looming larger, and larger, and larger, striking real fear in the medicine man as it approached him. Blood lapped the shoreline, against his feet, then knees, then groin as the huge sperm swam close, displacing tons of liquid before it. The true immensity of the creature was finally apparent. It towered over the medicine man, taller than a tree, its head wide as a subway train. Up close, the gleam of translucent flesh was blinding, as he tried to make out the features visible on its luminous face…..
He stood frozen to the ground as he watched two eyes appear just above the gaping mouth (from which flickered a forked tongue).
“Human, what are you doing near my mountain? Have you come to satisfy my taste for red men’s flesh?”
“Y-you can speak?” the great medicine man stammered.
“Well, you don’t see anyone else around here, do you?” it replied.
“Do you get many visitors up here, Uktena?” He remembered to pronounce the snake’s name clearly, even though he was full of fear.
“I have no time for chitchat, human,” it replied. “I see you know the game—calling me by name. What brings you to this place?”
“Huh? Oh, yes, you’re the great serpent, Uktena, and you possess the great crystal, Ulun’suti.”
“Enough of this chitchat!” it hissed. “Why are you here? Tell me—before you become my breakfast snack!”
“Why, there is only one reason for me to be here,” whispered Eagle Flying Bye. “I’m here to rescue the fair maiden who lives in your cave—the doe that I personally sent to you.”
Flicking his forked tongue, the mighty snake hissed in what must have been its idea of laughter. Flame shot across the clearing to where Eagle Flying Bye stood. His clothing flashed and was gone, and every—every—hair on his body became thousands of crispy critters and vanished … without burning his skin. In fact, although his hair was missing, he had no burns on his flesh.
“I suppose now you’re going to eat me?” Eagle Flying Bye commented.
“Eat you? I don’t eat meat; I eat the dust of the earth. It ferments in my belly and fuels my fire. But now tell me,” the great serpent Uktena hissed. “Why do you think you are worthy to see the princess? Where is your army, your armor? I don’t even see a knife, let alone a sword or spear. How do you expect to fight me?”
“Sir Snake, I am but a poor red man without many possessions. I had hoped that my ability to speak reason would convince you that I am worthy to complete my quest. I am a man of peace,” the wise medicine man announced.
“Good grief, boy, I feel sorry for you. I am here to do battle for this fair maiden. What say you?”
“My father died when I was young, and I was raised by my mother and her sisters …” The shaman’s voice trailed off.
“Well, then, I truly do feel sorry for you, little human … because I’m going to let you pass. You may enter the fissure and take back your doe,” granted the great serpent.
“Just like that, I can enter? No song and dance about being worthy? No great feats of strength or courage?”
“Little human, even though you have brought no weapons, as you stand before me naked, it is easy for me to discern that you are amply endowed with all the … attributes you are going to need. In fact, you are exceptionally well armed for what you are about to face. Now pass me, and enter the cave before I change my mind.”
“But … but … I have no clothes …”
Birthing the Lucifer star Page 21
