The Shaman's Secret

by Natasha Narayan

  “Did you hear me, Kit? Cecil has left my head. Is it the same for you?”

  “Ye-es. Maybe. Yes …” Now that he mentioned it, I hadn’t felt that uneasy sense of something crawling in my head recently. Wriggling, squirming. It was too hot to feel anything, however.

  “We’ve been set free,” Cyril went on. “I don’t know why, but think what this means. Perhaps we’ve given him the slip. We’re winning somehow.”

  “Maybe he’s just resting,” I replied. But I wasn’t really listening. I hadn’t ever really been convinced that Cecil Baker was inside my mind. How was that possible? Besides, over there in front of us, the blue thing. Yes, that was water. It had to be water.

  “Water!” I rasped.

  “What?” Cyril’s head snapped forward, his brother temporarily forgotten. He scanned the desert. But by now others had seen the lake.

  “Water!” Waldo shouted. “Water!”

  “It may be a mirage,” Aunt Hilda warned. But hope stirred in our hearts. We ran as fast as our weak legs could carry us toward the great flat basin where water shimmered. A haze of blue, dancing with light. What an exquisite sight. A thing to gladden the heart. A shallow lake, surrounded by jagged white cracks in the desert floor.

  I had never seen anything more beautiful.

  My heart turned over as I saw Rachel running after Waldo, a mad gleam in her eye. Her usually glossy chestnut hair was dried out by the sun and hung in dirty, brittle ropes. Her skin was burned and cracked. Yet still she had the energy to run.

  I must have stopped for a moment, because Isaac was by my side. His glasses were misted, his eyes grave as he looked into mine.

  “Don’t give up now, Kit. Just a few more minutes.”

  “I’m fine,” I replied. “Don’t worry. I’ll make it.”

  “Here,” he said, offering an arm.

  I almost wanted to laugh. Isaac, with his glasses and his lanky uncoordinated limbs, was weaker than I am in most normal circumstances. But now, for me, the world was shimmering, the lake moving up and down. For a second the sky went black, and when I looked at Isaac I saw nothing. I looked again and saw him standing there, holding out his hand. He looked as weary as Rachel, his eyes hectic and red patches on his cheeks. He was at the end of his tether, yet still he was trying to help me.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, as I took his arm.

  Waldo had turned round, on the edge of the lake, to see what the problem was. When he saw me leaning against Isaac and hobbling toward the lake, he smiled, sort of, and turned away again. I really didn’t think I could make those last few steps to the lake—but somehow I did.

  “Not a mirage,” Aunt Hilda shouted joyfully, kneeling down at the water’s edge, dipping her fingers in. “A real lake. Praise heaven. Praise everything! We are saved!”

  I had a moment to think it wasn’t much of a lake. The water was muddy and brown-looking. But still so cool, so real, so heaven sent.

  Aunt Hilda, Waldo, Rachel, Isaac and Mr. Baker were all cupping their hands, using them to scoop up handfuls of the water. One by one they brought them to their lips. For some reason, though all I had thought of was water, I hung back, watching.

  “Phhoooo!” Aunt Hilda spat out a mouthful of the water, which arced over Mr. Baker and hit Waldo in the chest. “Disgusting!”

  One by one my friends were spitting out the water. I looked at them in wonder. It certainly looked a bit brackish and brown, but water is water. When it is going to save your life, it doesn’t matter how clean it is.

  “Salt!” explained Aunt Hilda. “It’s a salt lake.”

  Waldo was swearing, while Mr. Baker had simply collapsed.

  “Shouldn’t we drink it anyway?” I took a drop of water in my hand and licked. It had the briny tang of seawater.

  “No!” yelped Aunt Hilda. “It will only make things worse. The salt in the water dries out your body quicker—which means you die quicker, you dolt!”

  “You don’t have to abuse me,” I said, sinking on to the dry sand. I understood what had made the layers of white cracks, radiating away from us. They were caused by the salt in the drying earth. Beautiful, like a layer of paper snowflakes laid over the desert. But for us they spelled defeat.

  I looked at Aunt Hilda, who was towering over me. A single tear welled up in her right eye and dropped down her cheek. She was crying. I couldn’t remember her ever crying before.

  “We will make it,” I said softly.

  “How?” She sank down on her legs beside me. “We should never have come through this place. Never. It’s called Death Valley, for heaven’s sake. But, no, I was stupid. I thought it was a short cut. It would save us time.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Cyril said. “I was the one—I couldn’t wait. I didn’t have much time left anyway and this route seemed the quickest—”

  “We all know that you’re dying, Mr. Baker,” Isaac cut in. “Doesn’t seem fair that the rest of us have to join you.”

  Waldo coughed. Like the rest of us he was squatting on the sand, the precious water canisters hanging from strings around his neck. All our eyes turned to look at him. All the water we had in the world. A dribble in one bottle and the other totally empty.

  “No sense in going over the past. No sense in squabbling,” he said quietly. “It wastes precious energy. Only way we’re going to get out of this is if we save all our energy—”

  “Stop!” Aunt Hilda’s tears were all gone. A new determination blazed forth from her. “I have the answer! A desperate measure, but it will save us.”

  “I’ll do anything!” Rachel said.

  “We must drink our own urine,” Aunt Hilda announced.

  “Urgh!” Rachel said. “Anything but that.”

  “Revolting idea,” Mr. Baker muttered, shuddering.

  “It is the only way,” Aunt Hilda said. “I believe Mr. Livingstone tried it in Africa when he was stuck somewhere. Or was it Lady Hester Stanhope? Urine is said to be quite nutritious.”

  Radiating determination, she strode up to Waldo and held out her hand. “The bottle, please, young Waldo. I feel the call of nature.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said. Waldo was hanging on to the empty bottle, showing no sign of giving it to Hilda.

  “This is it,” she said, her outstretched hand trembling slightly. “If drinking my own … er … water … is the difference between living and dying, I’ll do it … I’d go even further, I would—” Thankfully she stopped before we learned what she would do, because Waldo interrupted.

  “Hilda is right,” he announced, finally giving her the bottle. “If we don’t take in some liquid, we’ll die. The life is being slowly sucked out of our bodies by the sun and the heat coming from the sand. I saw you, Kit.” His eyes flashed at me, blue and angry. “You were close to blacking out. I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Mr. Baker and Rachel were holding back, their faces rigid with horror. It sounded awful, drinking your own urine, but I think I was ready to do it. To close my eyes and—well, I was so light-headed already I think I could stomach any taste. This journey was my fault; I couldn’t let everybody die.

  “I agree with Hilda,” I said softly. “We have to do this.”

  Isaac began to laugh. He ran his hands through his hair and his face crumpled with something between laughter and tears.

  “It’s not funny,” Waldo said.

  “I know, I know. I don’t know why I’ve been so darn stupid. It must be the heat or something.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t need to drink our urine,” Isaac explained. “We’ve got all the water we need here.” His hands gestured toward the lake.

  “It’s salt, you fool—” Waldo began, then stopped, and a smile spread over his face. “Can we, do you think?”

  “All we need is to turn this salt water into drinking water. We need to desalinate it.”

  “Bravo! Israel, you’re a genius,” Aunt Hilda said. “You can boil the salt away, can’t you?” Then s
he paused, her face falling. “You foolish, foolish boy, raising our hopes for nothing. We don’t have a cooking pot. How can we de-sal-i-what’s-it the water without a cooking pot? You should think before you raise all our hopes, you—”

  “Whoa. Calm down.” Isaac raised his hand, as if soothing a snapping dog. “I’ve thought of a way.”

  We drank our last water, each person receiving just enough to wet the tongue and the back of the throat. We followed Isaac’s instructions carefully, digging two small pits in the sand. Using our bottles we filled the pits up with salt water from the Badwater Basin. Then we put our bottles in the water, with the tops up. We covered the pits with strips from Waldo’s waterproof coat. Finally we weighted down the covering with a pebble, placed exactly above each bottle’s spout.

  Then we prayed.

  If Isaac was right, the natural heat in the sand, which was boiling hot, would cause the water to evaporate and collect in droplets on the waterproof-coat covering above, leaving the salt behind on the sand. The droplets of clean water would run down the covering toward the pebble placed above the spout and drip into the bottle.

  Isaac is very often clever about things I have no understanding of at all. We all hoped that this was one of those times he would be right. While we waited, time ticked on, the sun sinking under the horizon and shadows lengthening around us. I heard the howl of prowling wolves, or perhaps coyotes. At one stage Isaac lifted the cloth. A puff of vapor rose in the darkness.

  Waldo had disappeared to see if he could find anything edible around the lake. We still had a few strips of the dried meat pounded with berries called pemmican, which is a staple food of American pioneers. The bandit, who had so callously left us to expire in the heat of the desert, had at least left us a few strips of this. Probably because he couldn’t stomach it himself. Horrible tasting, like eating pieces of old shoe leather, but it had saved our lives.

  Time passed, and then with an excited cry Isaac held up one of the metal water canteens.

  “Ladies first,” he said, and handed the bottle to me. I smiled at Isaac and then passed it to my aunt.

  She didn’t stand on ceremony. She tipped her head back and drank from the bottle. Then, soon, it was my turn. I drank. There was not too much, just a dribble, enough to wet my mouth and keep away the worst of the thirst. It was warm and brackish, with a taste of roots and sand. Never mind. It was delicious. Life-giving.

  Waldo had returned with a few roots and berries, which he pronounced edible. I believe one of them was called mesquite. We sat, huddled in a circle, and ate and drank. The leathery pemmican. The odd, tangy berries and roots. Our voices rang low in the desert, set against the call of wild things in the dark. There was life here, slithering things that hunted at night. The rattlesnake, the coyote, the road-runner. The magnificent golden eagle that soared far above. We were each other’s protection, so we sat tight together, lighting a fire not for heat but for safety.

  I thought of other feasts I’d had. Magnificent seven-course dinners. Trifle. Chocolate cake. Those sweet-sour Chinese dumplings. Apple pie and normal things like hot toast. The butter dripping into the crunchy bread. Nothing could compete with the joy of that simple meal in the desert, that tough old meat eaten with a few mashed berries and washed down with gritty water.

  I was happy that night with my friends so near. Confident we would survive. We would distil more water and fill our canisters with at least enough to keep going. We would eat roots and berries. We would make it out of the desert and reach our goal of the Grand Canyon. That was when darkness descended in my mind, for who knew what we would find there?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Something was digging into me as my dream slipped away. Hoarse voices, gunfire and screams. Rachel was screaming, Isaac was screaming, Cyril was screaming. Blearily I opened my eyes and saw a face looming over me.

  A stranger’s face, his gun digging into my shoulder.

  It belonged to a boy, maybe sixteen years old, with a piece of scarlet calico wound round his head. Long black hair framed a strong, tanned face, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. In the light of the stars they appeared very dark.

  He was looking at me as if he was frightened. But he was the one standing over me with a gun pointed at my chest.

  “Apaches,” Waldo whispered in my ear. “God help us.”

  The boy was still looking at me. Not at me, exactly. At my body. I jerked up, crossing my bare arms.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  He couldn’t understand me, for not a flicker crossed his face. He continued to gape at me, as if he had never seen a white girl before. Then he turned round and called out. Our fire had died to a few embers, but there was enough starlight to see that we were totally surrounded.

  The circle we had made last night as we curled up to sleep had been ringed by a group of Indians on horseback. There were four or five men and a few young boys dressed in flowing robes and ponchos made of woven cloth and dyed deerskins. Some wore porcupine quills or feathers as decoration. Others wore cowboy hats or strips of dyed cloth round their long hair. One man had a buckskin hat decorated with eagle feathers. They trotted around us on their fine horses and grunted to each other in a hoarse tongue.

  “They’ll scalp us,” Mr. Baker said.

  I hushed him because they were watching us, and who knew what they could understand. The man in the buckskin hat was talking to the first boy, who was gesturing to me. The words flew fast in their strange, guttural language. As they were talking, I tried to remember what I had heard about Apaches, if indeed this was an Apache band. They were meant to be fierce, ruthless warriors. While many other tribes had been defeated by the white settlers and government soldiers, groups of Apaches held out under the leadership of a great brave called Geronimo. So far the government in Washington had not been able to capture him.

  I’d had an argument just a few days ago with Waldo about it. He had called Indians savages, and said they should all be rounded up and placed on reservations—if not killed outright. My mind was more confused. Indians had lived in America for centuries before the coming of the white man. They had roamed the plains, lived in their tent-like tepees, tended buffalo, worshipped their gods of the stars and the earth. Did not the land belong to them?

  Waldo had become heated and said I had no idea what I was talking about. He said something about “manifest destiny”—which apparently meant that the white man was fated to rule this land. “They fight with bows and arrows and we fight with cannon,” he said, which was true enough. It didn’t make it right, though, did it? Were the settlers not stealing their land? “You can’t stop progress,” he’d said. “The gun will always win against the spear.” Perhaps because he was so stubborn, I took the opposite view. In the end he’d called me a nincompoop and turned aside. This was before he had stopped talking to me altogether.

  Now as these wild men on their horses circled us round the dying campfire it was hard to believe in my own fine words. They looked wild and smelt of blood. They would kill us without mercy. It was clear that civilized notions of pity were unknown to them.

  We sat silent while they talked. What could we do? We had no guns or knives. The Apaches were arguing amongst themselves. After a while one of them, the man in the feathered buckskin hat, seemed to come to a decision. He called out to the others, and one by one they hauled us to our feet. I thought they would make us walk, but instead each of us was jerked behind a man on one of the horses.

  I sat behind the boy. I was weak. Hunger, thirst and sickness were causing me to separate from my body. My head was floating. It felt like a dream, sitting bareback on that strong horse, shivering in the night chill, the boy inches away from me, guiding his animal through the starlit night. We galloped through the desert, the horse sure-footed. As we raced, the Apaches sang, a cruel wind-blown song. A song, unmistakably, of war.

  When I did come back to my body, I took comfort from the horse, its warm limbs working under me. It was odd. I se
nsed that the boy rider in front of me was more scared of me than I was of him. But why? I was the captive here. The boy made sure to keep his flesh well away from me, had given me a rein to grip. He shuddered at the sight of me, as if I was some demon rather than a normal girl.

  Incredible as it sounds, riding through the night I fell asleep. Or maybe I blacked out. I know not which. All I knew was that one minute I was there in the desert. Nothing around except that great animal’s loping limbs, the murmuring song of the Apache band and the wind whistling past my ears. The next thing I knew I was waking up in some sort of dwelling. I had been stripped of my clothes and was dressed in an embroidered buckskin dress with fringes. A strip of red calico had been bound round my head. Wherever we were, it was no longer the desert as the air was fresh and cool. I was covered with stinking animal skins, around me other bundles of bedding. It was morning. I could see sunshine flooding through gaps in the roof and the walls, which were made of twigs and grass. I guessed I was in an Apache home, a shelter made of twigs and brush called a wickiup.

  I saw no sign of my friends and could hear nothing. No talking. No Aunt Hilda snoring or Rachel murmuring soothing nothings. I didn’t even know if they were still alive. I didn’t know anything except that I was alone.

  Alone with these merciless Apaches.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A few minutes later someone put their face through a hole in the wickiup. It was a girl of about my age. I had the fleeting impression of brown skin and glossy black hair. Eyes that flickered about, searching for something. Our gazes met for an instant. I saw her terror. Then she vanished.

  My captors were frightened of me. Frightened beyond reason. Why? I was a sick girl, without weapon. It made no sense.

  As I sat up, the bundle of cloth next to me began to move. Straw-colored hair emerged from below the bedding. Relief flooded me. Waldo was here. Waldo. Then I saw it was Cyril Baker and disappointment nearly choked me. The old man was blinking, his beetle eyes looking around dully.