The shaman put a comforting hand on the chief’s shoulder. ‘It was not for wisdom but for your courage that Kehloke chose you. Now your people have need of that strength. Heed my counsel. Keep the traitor alive while ever he is useful to us. He might still prove a source of further information in the difficult hours to come. In the meantime, lead us away from this place of hunger. Make haste, proud Siam. Though our path may be one of danger, yet it is not our lives that matter. There are those amongst us whose safety overrides our own. We will assist their escape to Carfon, these chosen ones from another world.’
A Sense of Grief
Mo woke from sleep, listening to the noises all around her. The river nearby never stopped crackling and sighing. Yesterday, she, Mark and Kate had stood on its snow-covered bank and marvelled at the central melt, where the water was too fast and too deep to freeze even this close to the huge glacier-wrapped mountains. But there were other noises too, the sounds of objects being hauled and dragged over the ice-bound lake, the whispers of voices, the cries and whimpers of children that told her that the whole village was in a fever of movement. And now, with daybreak, she saw that all the other bunks were empty. She guessed that Alan was out there, helping the shaman with getting ready to flee. But where were Kate and Mark?
Mo dressed hurriedly, using the last change of underwear from her backpack, and covering her normal clothes with the coat and boots provided by Turkeya. When she emerged onto the deck, Kate was standing at the highpoint of the prow, looking up into the sky with an expression of amazement.
‘Huh-huh-hi, Kuh-Kate!’ she murmured, padding forward to stand beside her. Kate smiled, still staring up into the sky.
‘Will you take a good look around you. Can’t you just feel it, Mo? There’s magic in the air!’
Mo wasn’t sure she felt anything other than the freezing cold.
‘We’re all changing, aren’t we?’
Mo stared up at Kate’s face, her green eyes. Changing? Yes – she believed that the others were changing. They were all changing and she wasn’t. But Kate just laughed, spinning her body around, her auburn hair blowing in the wind. ‘You can almost taste it.’ She put her arm around Mo’s shoulders and threw the other hand into the air. ‘Will you look up there – can you credit that sky?’
Mo threw her head right back to gaze up with Kate at the thunderheads that were invading from the north, squeezing the air like gigantic pincers. The air whistled and tossed, making her eyes hurt. It was as if the elements were one with the hustle and bustle of the fishing village. She sniffed: she could smell burning. Suddenly she heard Alan call out hoarsely:
‘Kemtuk!’
A prickle of gooseflesh crept over Mo’s skin as she realised that she must have heard Alan call the shaman through the triangle. Leaving the boat, Mo ran in the direction of the call until she came across Alan standing out on the ice. He was looking up at the shaman, who was standing high on the middle deck of the Temple Ship. A low morning light bathed the tall figure in a silvery glow. His blind eye glittered like a pearl in a face that was a mask of concentration. Mo desperately wanted to talk to Alan but he looked as preoccupied as ever. Just now, watching that strange communication between him and the old man, Mo felt a new flicker of worry clutch at her stomach.
Mo’s hand moved to the talisman hanging on the lace around her throat. Was Alan changing so much they could lose him entirely?
Instinctively she squeezed the bog-oak figurine.
She wandered away from Alan to watch the bands of men hurrying back from the pinewoods, dragging piles of brushwood on makeshift sleds fashioned out of sail leather. Others were heaping the brushwood along the ice around the Temple Ship. She watched them drenching the piles with lamp oil. Suddenly she flinched, her feelings flooded by a sense of longing. It was so overwhelming she reeled in confusion for several moments before she could lift her head again and focus on what the Olhyiu were doing. The oil-soaked brushwood was being laid out in a broad path linking the boats to the river and beyond its banks out along the frozen stream as far as the central melt. It looked desperate – the attempts of frightened people trying to soften the ice enough to create a passage.
Picking out the lonely figure of Mark, Mo contemplated her brother, who was standing in silence in front of the Temple Ship, gazing up at it with that same look of amazement Kate had bestowed on the gathering storm clouds. Hurrying towards him, she put her hand on his arm.
He blinked with her sudden arrival, as if she had startled him out of a daydream. ‘Hi, tiddler!’ He raddled her hair. He hadn’t called her that for years. ‘Did you just feel something really weird?’
Mo gazed up at him, nodding.
How deep in thought he appeared to be! He shook his head, as if struggling to put his feelings into words. ‘Something like … I don’t really know how to describe it.’
‘Like a guh-guh-great suh-suh-sadness?’
Mark frowned at her. ‘Yes, Mo, you’re right. It does feel sort of like sadness. But what does it mean? Where can it be coming from?’
Mo shook her head.
‘Weird things are happening, Mo. Don’t you feel like you’re changing?’
It was exactly what Kate had said to her just minutes earlier. Mo blinked rapidly, not knowing what to answer.
Mark laughed, but it was a laugh of bewilderment. ‘What on earth is really going on? What’s happening to us?’
Mo shook her head. ‘I duh-duh-don’t know.’
‘Let me show you something!’ He dropped down onto his haunches and held out his left fist. ‘Look at that!’ He threw his fist wide open.
Mo stared at Mark’s egg-shaped crystal, the light-devouring black in which tiny petals of silver flickered and metamorphosed. With a start, she realised that the flickering patterns inside the crystal were pulsating.
‘It’s buh-buh-beating!’
‘Yes it is, Mo. Beating in time with my heartbeat. But let me show you something even stranger.’ He slipped the crystal egg into his pocket and opened his hand for her to inspect it.
Mo saw the dark colour and movement in the skin of Mark’s palm. It just wasn’t possible, but the longer she looked, the more certain she was that she saw the same pulsating matrix in his palm, as if the crystal had transferred something of itself into Mark’s flesh.
‘Whuh-whuh-what does it muh-mean?’
‘All I know is I slept with the crystal in my fist. So did Kate. When I woke up, I could feel it happening. Bloody hell, Mo! I could actually feel it – as if it was somehow melting into me. Insane, or what?’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘Then, a few minutes ago, I felt that …’
‘Suh-suh-sadness!’
‘Sadness – yes! I felt it and at the same time my mind was filled with the image of the ship.’ Mark stretched his back to stand erect again and both their eyes swivelled up to stare at the ship. ‘God, I can’t help thinking about it, Mo. I know it sounds insane, but I’d say the feeling was coming from up there, from the ship itself.’
‘Buh-buh-buh-but how?’
‘They’re planning on leaving her behind, Mo. The poor old thing, she’s too damaged to sail. There’s no time to repair her. I’m not sure they even know how to repair her. That’s why they’re putting the brushwood around her. They’re going to burn her timbers to melt the ice.’
Mo felt it again – that overwhelming clutch of anxiety.
Mark ran a hand, red with cold, through his fair hair. ‘I only wish there was something we could do to stop it happening. But the superstructure is damaged. The timbers are completely rotted away in places. I had a good look over her at first light. There are these huge rolled up sails made out of sealskin leather, but they’re in tatters, like centuries of mice have been nibbling away at them. Half the lines and the rigging are gone. There just isn’t a hope in hell of making her sail-worthy.’
Mo tugged at Mark’s arm. ‘Lets go tuh-tuh-talk to thuh-the others.’
‘If it’ll make you happy. But I doubt it’ll
do any good.’
Half running to keep up with Mark’s hurried strides, Mo had to dodge around the scurrying men with the brushwood. They found Alan still gazing up at the shaman on the quarterdeck, the old man’s face pallid with concentration as he held himself erect before the rail. He was dressed in formal shaman regalia. On his brow he wore the skull of an eagle and over his shoulders a heavy necklace of whale’s teeth. In his right hand he held the pointed horn of a narwhal and in his left he was cradling a bear’s skull. His eyes were glazed, his attention focused inward, oblivious of worldly attentions. He intoned a prayer, deep and resonant.
As she heard a sudden loud crackling of burning brush and oil, Mo stood between Mark and Alan, and linked their arms. All three of them lifted their eyes above the shaman into the gathering thunderheads. Suddenly the longing returned, such a sense of despair it struck Mo like a physical blow.
Mark shouted above the growing wind, ‘It’s definitely coming from the ship.’
Alan shook his head, unable to explain it. He shouted to gain the shaman’s attention again, ‘Kemtuk!’
But the shaman didn’t respond.
Mo had to raise her voice to be heard above the human commotion and the rising wind. ‘Shuh-shuh-shuh-show him!’ She touched Mark’s hand.
Mark held open his left hand so Alan could see for himself.
Alan’s eyes widened. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘Neither do we,’ Mark retorted. ‘Maybe the crystal egg is doing something to me in the same way the ruby’s changing you, only more slowly. It’s interacting with me in some way.’
‘Wow!’
‘I wuh-wuh-wuh-woke up with an idea.’ Mo concentrated as hard as she could to try to control her stammer. ‘Luh-luh-like …’ She gave up and held her hand against her ear.
‘What – something to do with a mobile?’
She nodded.
Mark shook his head. ‘I think Mo is wondering if the crystals have taken on some kind of property from the mobiles.’
‘Maybe you’re right, Mo. I guess it would make some loopy kind of sense.’
Mark shrugged. ‘But how do we check it?’
‘What do you mean? Like some way of testing mind-to-mind?’
‘Shouldn’t be that difficult.’
Alan gestured so the three friends gathered together in a close huddle. ‘Okay, let’s see if we can call Kate. Just think it while you’re clenching your fist around your egg. I’ll do something similar through the crystal in my head. On my count to three. One, two, three!’
They stood together and waited. Within seconds they heard Kate’s shriek and she came careering through the Olhyiu, with an excited look on her face.
‘You got the message?’
‘I heard you calling me.’
Alan, Mo and Mark laughed as one. Mark unclasped his fist to show Kate the flickering matrix in his palm. ‘Open your hand and show us yours.’
Kate seemed unaware that her right hand was tight-clenched about her crystal. Now, exposing the palm, they all saw the same soft green matrix embedded in her flesh, speckled with motes of yellow and gold.
Mo gasped.
Alan explained, ‘Mo’s excited because we didn’t actually call out your name. We called you through Mark’s crystal and my ruby triangle.’
‘Ah, go on!’ She shook her head and laughed. ‘For goodness sake – you people must think I’m an idiot!’
Alan hugged her. ‘It’s true, Kate.’
Kate looked at him questioningly, then stepped back, her hands clapped to her mouth and her eyes wide.
‘Makes you wonder what else we can do.’ Alan looked thoughtfully around at the milling people. ‘I have an idea.’ He picked one of the women who appeared to be scolding her children. She was shouting, distractedly, in Olhyiu. ‘Mark, Kate – get a grip of your crystals. I want us to form a circle. You too, Mo – I want you to be our neutral observer here. Now, guys, let’s all of us focus on that woman over there, listen to what she is shouting, and try to project ourselves through the crystals.’
The woman was married. They could tell this now because they knew married women among the Olhyiu displayed jewels on a chain around their necks, rather than rings on their fingers, and she was shouting from the deck of her boat to some children frolicking on the ice.
‘Monkeys!’ Mark and Kate exclaimed it together. The woman was calling her children monkeys.
‘Yee-hah!’ They all roared with triumph, clapping arms around each other’s shoulders and jumping with glee on the trampled ice.
‘Mo?’ Alan was gazing down at her, a question in his eyes.
‘I – I … I thuh-thuh-thuh-thought …’ Mo stared from one to another of her friends, her lips trembling.
‘You thought the experiment was a scam?’
Mo shook her head, far too excited to even try to explain through her stupid stammering lips what she wanted to tell them. She too had heard the word, ‘monkeys’. How was that possible when she had no crystal? Even as she turned her head away from Alan, startled by the idea, a thunderclap erupted directly over their heads, causing all four friends to stare up into the sky.
Alan waited for the thunder to stop booming, so he could think more clearly. Something very strange, something as frightening as it was wonderful, was happening to him and his friends, and he couldn’t even begin to understand it. Ordinarily he’d have asked the shaman for an explanation. But the shaman was preoccupied with spiritual forces, so that when Alan opened his mind to the shaman’s words, he in his turn became the receptor for communications of meaning and vision somehow deeper than words. He knew that Kemtuk, in asking for his people to be freed from tyranny, was extolling the sacred visions that had been forbidden to him for all the long years his people had been held in captivity. Suddenly the hairs on Alan’s neck stood up in awe.
He was gazing out on a vision of creation, at a time when there was but one existence, and his name was Akoli, the Creator.
‘In that time,’ the shaman spoke, ‘he was in the form of the Great Spirit. In one day he created the world, lifting up the lofty peaks of the mountains and cloaking their shoulders with snow. Then he forced apart the mountains and into the deeps between he blew the moisture of his breath and created the oceans. Henceforth, these would become his spirit home.’
Alan saw the cataclysms as the mountains reared up out of the land. His body shook with the earthquake as their vastness was cleaved apart and, through the turbulent upheaval, a titanic gust of wind and rain surged and swelled through the birth of continents to become the storm-tossed oceans. Through the shaman’s vision he tasted the bitter-damp mulch of the newborn world upon his tongue, he breathed the sulphurous first atmosphere, he stood on the brink of spuming calderas of gigantic volcanoes, and he watched the eruptions of boiling lava that would fashion and refashion the primal landscape in the dawn of time.
‘Then the leviathan, Akoli, he that would henceforth be known as the Creator, took form in the eternal chaos of the deeps. From there he rose against the howling of beginnings, for then he came as the moon and as the fury of the storm. With wind and cloud he filled the skies and the world below, and then he wept so that the rain of his passion might make fertile the land and his joy would become the rainbow. Finally Akoli sang, and it was with the music that makes the tides rise and fall and the wind that rolls the clouds upon the air. He called together the mountains and the sky above, the stars and the planets that live within the sky, and he told the heavens: “Let there be night and day.” He made the golden sun and bid it wander over the sky. He made the silver moon and had it swell as a woman with child each month. So sun and moon would rule the mysteries of creation as they made their journeys from the sea to the sky and back again.’
Alan focused on the figure of the shaman. A storm of energy was whirling about Kemtuk, flapping his ceremonial clothes and lifting his white hair in a startling nimbus. There was something profound beyond the words, something Alan desperately needed to under
stand.
Suddenly he moaned aloud, clenching his fists against his brow. The sudden swell of longing was so overwhelming, he fell to his knees. Kate helped him back up onto his feet. She was pointing – and Alan’s eyes followed her finger, to the men with the brushwood.
‘What’s going on?’ He had to shout to be heard.
‘They’re burning the Temple Ship.’
Alan whirled around, his eyes back on Kemtuk. He understood now. The shaman’s homage was guilt, asking forgiveness for the great wrong the Olhyiu were about to commit.
Alan heard the closing words of the lament, ‘At last Akoli, the leviathan, leaped over the oceans he had made with the flash of the rainbow. Then, tired from his labours, he pulled about him the blanket of the icy peaks, and closing his eyes, he rested there.’ Kemtuk’s silver eye had fallen onto the men, who waited for his word to fire the brushwood. But still the shaman hesitated, as if weighed down with the enormity of what he was about to command.
People were having difficulty keeping on their feet in the wind. Still they continued to lay the path of fire directly to the ship, piling the oil-soaked brushwood against the massive out-curved hull.
Mark shouted into Alan’s ear, ‘We all sense that it’s wrong. But you’re the only one who can stop it.’
But then what if he did? He’d be condemning them all to be killed by the Storm Wolves.
Alan thought back to the experience in the cave. To Granny Dew and her words. ‘Duvaaaalll aaassskkksss – yeeesss! Duvaaaalll seeesss – nooo!’ What did he ask but not see? A meaning deeper than words? He shook his head, bewildered by riddles. He would have to trust his own feelings.
‘Kemtuk – stop!’ Alan shouted out his opposition through the triangle on his brow. ‘Kemtuk, you must stop the burning!’
But Kemtuk was lost in his own grief, standing as stiff as a statue, his face like ravaged stone. His right hand fell, holding a thick bundle of oiled twigs.
Only now did Alan notice the standing crucible behind the old man, a small stone altar of whorled carvings, and an altar on which he had prepared the signal – the fall of the lighted firebrand onto the brushwood directly below the centre deck.
The Snowmelt River Page 19
