Shamanka

by Jeanne Willis

  “I really w-wouldn’t go in, if I were you.”

  Sam takes no notice. “Why not? Are the mattresses hard or something?”

  “M-m-mattresses? It’s not that, miss. The mattress was replaced after the m-m-murder.” He claps his hands over his mouth. “Did I say murder? I meant Monday. The mattress was replaced after the Monday.”

  He is lying.

  HOW TO MAKE A GHOST APPEAR

  You need: an actor, a bright spotlight, a dim light, a sheet of glass larger than the actor.

  1. Position the actor below stage or in the orchestra pit.

  2. By adjusting the lights and/or angle of the glass, the actor’s “ghostly” reflection appears on stage.

  3. The “ghost” is produced due to light bouncing off the actor and hitting the glass at 45 degrees. At this angle the light doesn’t pass through the glass but bounces off into the eyes of the audience. The image appears to be on the other side of the glass at the same distance away as the actor – just like a mirror.

  4. The dim light coming through the glass helps the illusion that the ghost is on the stage.

  ABU YARFHET

  The mattresses in cabin 333 are perfectly clean and bouncy. So why was the cabin boy so jittery? What happened that made the captain quail?

  The answer lies with the pastry chef. Kitty is in the cabin drying Lola’s fur, but Sam is in the ship’s galley helping to prepare apple pies. The chef stands beside her, laying pastry over the chopped apples, tucking them in as gently as if he were putting his children to bed.

  “I never had any children,” he says, unprompted “Not that I know of, anyway.”

  “My father doesn’t know I exist either,” adds Sam.

  The pastry chef blows his nose loudly on the tea towel. “Was he a sailor, by any chance?”

  “A magician.”

  What is it about the word “magician”? As soon as Sam says it, the pastry chef drops the fork he’s using to perforate the pastry lids and whispers behind his hand, “The captain has banned the M word on this ship.” He looks over his shoulder to make sure the vegetable chef isn’t listening, but he’s busy chopping carrots.

  “I hear you’ve got a big monkey,” he mouths. “I’ve worked here as man and boy and when the gravy chef told me the sailors had rescued a monkey along with yourself, I thought, Aye, aye, that’s history repeating itself.”

  Sam is tempted to say, “She’s an orang-utan!” But now is not the time to be pedantic. Now is the time to listen to the pastry chef’s tale. It could just be a sailor’s yarn, but stranger things have happened at sea.

  “We were in the Pacific Ocean,” begins the chef, “coming back from Australia. It was a Tuesday, because that’s the day the captain likes a hearty pudding and I was stirring sultanas into the spotted dick when I heard that the lifeboat had gone out—”

  Sam begins to feel a little light-headed. She can smell the familiar green smell that she smelt when she first opened the witch doctor’s pouch and she can hear the plop, plop, plop of the mwa sawah paddles plunging into the Sepik. Perhaps it’s just the scent of the steam rising from the huge vat of peas and the sound of potatoes being dropped into a pan. The call of the Torresian crow? The whistle on the kettle, surely?

  The pastry chef is telling Sam that he can still remember the day The Trinity came to the rescue of a youth and his monkey who’d capsized in a dugout canoe. As the youth was penniless, the captain said he could work his passage by assisting the ship’s magician – the original assistant having been left at the last port suffering from scurvy.

  The magician’s name was Abu Yarfhet. He was a good illusionist but a bad person. He was seedy, greedy, vile and vicious. It’s never easy working for a boss like that, but John Tabuh did his best – in fact, he did better than that. He learnt the tricks with ease; within months, he was his master’s equal. Abu Yarfhet wasn’t bothered about that – nobody wants a butterfingers assisting them – but what he couldn’t tolerate was John’s popularity with the ladies.

  John didn’t deliberately encourage the adoration of his fans, but he only had to push his elegant fingers through his glossy hair and they would swoon. Women would shamelessly move their chairs to get a closer look at him. They’d crane their necks and wave the old magician out of the way in order to get a better view of this ravishing boy.

  Abu Yarfhet grew to hate John to the point of psychosis. He made him feel ugly. After the show, Yarfhet would stare in the mirror and blame his lack of popularity on his nose, which was bulbous and pitted like a strawberry. He told himself that if he’d been born with a handsome nose, like John Tabuh, women would love him too.

  He was deluding himself; women would still have recoiled. Woman are blind to ugly noses but they can always spot an ugly heart. Abu Yarfhet’s heart was as ugly as they come.

  “He was a cruel man. Nobody mourned his passing,” whispered the pastry chef.

  Abu Yarfhet is dead? Yes, indeed! Did John Tabuh have anything to do with it? The pastry chef shakes sugar over the pies and sucks his teeth noisily.

  “An illusion went horribly wrong.”

  Yarfhet and young Tabuh had been performing a trick involving matches and a banana at the captain’s table when, suddenly, Yarfhet lurched and knocked John’s hand, causing the match to set fire to the captain’s beard. Happily, John Tabuh had the good sense to dowse the flames by dunking the captain chin-first into his trifle – much to the amusement of the audience.

  The captain’s beard never grew back and his chin was charred, but that wasn’t the full extent of the damage. Yarfhet was banished to his cabin, but the ladies begged the captain to let John stay, insisting he was blameless and that they wanted to have him for pudding.

  Having spent a delightful evening being petted by the richest women in the world, John returned to cabin 333, which he shared with his master. By now Yarfhet was extremely drunk and when he was drunk, he got punchy. He hid behind the door and as John Tabuh entered, he cracked him on the back of the head with a whisky bottle.

  The blow wasn’t enough to knock the lad out, so as he fell, he pulled the witch doctor’s pouch off the table and it spilled its contents, including the shard of human thigh bone. As Yarfhet blundered towards him, John grabbed the bone automatically and cursed him in Motu.

  The effect was immediate; Abu Yarfhet was dead before he hit the floor, his face fixed in a pop-eyed grimace. Did the curse kill him? John thought so, but a heart attack can be caused by many other things; bad luck and bad living to name but two.

  John tried the resurrection chant, terrified that he’d be under suspicion of murder if he failed to revive Yarfhet. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Perhaps he’d chanted it too quickly. Or too slowly. Or maybe the chant was useless – he couldn’t know. All he knew was that he had to get off the ship before the body was found.

  The following morning, the ship docked and by the time the corpse was discovered, John Tabuh was miles away. Disguised in Yarfhet’s ill-fitting stage outfit, he fled to London using the dead magician’s passport and money. Lola went with him, hidden in a magic box.

  Some of this Sam learns from the pastry chef; some of it she discovers later in life. “But why,” she asks, “is the captain afraid of magic after all this time?”

  The vegetable chef has finished chopping carrots and is earwigging into their conversation, so the pastry chef builds a tower of pies to hide behind and mutters, “There are hauntings. They say that the ghost of Abu Yarfhet resides in cabin 333; at night he haunts the ship, performing the most mischievous tricks.”

  “Such as turning the Duchess’s wine into vinegar,” interjects the vegetable chef.

  “This is a private conversation!” scowls the pastry chef.

  But the vegetable chef won’t go away.

  “Such as putting a live eel in the stew. Putting the ship’s wheel in reverse. Creating illusions of icebergs. Scaring the ladies with a foghorn. Tugging the captain’s chin.”

  “Ah, the poor capt
ain; he’s afraid the ghost of Abu Yarfhet haunts him because he sided against him when the trick went wrong and favoured the handsome assistant. He fears he’s going mad.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Sam asks the pastry chef.

  “Yes, he does,” interrupts the vegetable chef. “Sailors believe in all sorts. We sees things at sea that landlubbers never sees.”

  “I can see that your carrots are chopped too thickly!” snaps the pastry chef, hustling Sam towards the door so that they can finish their conversation in peace.

  “Personally, I have never seen a ghost,” he says. “They are the invention of sailors who wish to keep smugglers at bay.”

  Whereupon he is spirited away by the wine waiter.

  HOW TO NAVIGATE BY THE STARS

  1. The positions of the stars change throughout the night and throughout the year moving from east to west, like the sun.

  2. By learning to recognize patterns of stars at different times, you can use them to guide you.

  3. A particular star – such as Polaris, the North Star – should be followed to make sure you’re travelling in the right direction.

  4. To find Polaris, first find the Big Dipper. Polaris is an extension of the line formed by the vertical side of the Big Dipper opposite the handle.

  5. In the desert, the best time to navigate by stars is during the dry season when there are no clouds.

  YERBA HUFAT

  Put your sunhat on. Apply Factor 50 sun cream and do not paddle in the Nile – there are crocodiles. We have arrived in Egypt. Kitty wants to head straight to Bubastis to visit the ruined temple of Tel Basta, home of her spirit guides, but first they need to find Yerba Hufat, the man who sits cross-legged under the yellow stripy umbrella in an oasis.

  But which oasis? A camel seller shows them a map and stabs at an isolated patch of green with his finger.

  “You are wanting to go to Bahariya.”

  Sam assumes he must know his oasis from his elbow, so, having loaded their provisions onto the camels, Sam, Lola and Kitty set off in the direction of the Black Desert with Khensu riding in the saddlebag.

  One small problem. When the camel seller said, “You are wanting to go to Bahariya,” he wasn’t making a suggestion; he was asking a question, only he forgot to add a question mark. He’d never heard of Yerba Hufat (not many people have) and he just thought Sam wanted to do the touristy thing and visit the most popular, easy to get to oasis on the map.

  Easy to get to? It would have been if Kitty’s camel knew its left from its right. It would have been if Sam’s camel hadn’t just eaten the map. But what’s really going to put the kibosh on this expedition is the approaching sandstorm.

  This isn’t your average sandstorm; this is a wall of sand travelling at fifty miles an hour, sweeping up half-baked lizards and dumping them on top of cacti taller than trees. Sam, Kitty and Lola are sitting under the camels with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears to keep the sand out. Khensu curls up, ignores the whole episode and goes to sleep.

  They sit huddled like this for hours. When the storm finally passes, the shifting sand has altered the landscape beyond recognition. Nobody wants to admit it, but they are completely disorientated. Darkness falls within seconds, as if a mother somewhere has announced that it’s time for lights out.

  “Can you navigate by the stars, Kitty?” asks Sam.

  Of course she can. Mr Jones taught her about the constellations and how to use them as a heavenly map. Kitty climbs back onto her camel.

  “Follow that stare!”

  “Which star?”

  There are no stars. A few grains of white sand have blasted through the holes in Kitty’s mask and settled behind her eyelids, making her see stars that don’t exist. Sam, being none the wiser, follows behind, with Lola sharing her camel. There’s not much room, the camel is badly upholstered, and by morning, tempers are frayed.

  “We’ve been past this same cactus three times, Kitty.”

  “Nonsense, I know my stares. Keep following, Sam.”

  “But it’s daylight. How can you see the stars in the morning?”

  Kitty instructs her camel to stop. Turning her back on Sam, she inserts two fingers under her mask and rubs her eyes. As soon as the sand grains have gone, so have the constellations. “Oh,” she says, dully.

  “What do you mean, ‘oh’?”

  They’re completely lost. A vulture wheels above them, wondering how long it will have to wait for breakfast. He knows that people – especially young girls – can only live for so long without water. He’s never seen an orang-utan before, but it looks juicy. And cats make a good snack.

  They’re out of water too. The vulture’s friends and relatives arrive. This could be the end – but luckily, Sam has her wits about her. While Kitty and Khensu crawl along in the dust and Lola drags her knuckles, Sam holds the divining rod out in front of her and marches forward purposefully.

  She marches, head held high, in the name of Mr Fraye. She marches, believing she can do this, in the name of Athea Furby. She marches, hoping for a miracle, in the name of Hubert Faya, and as she marches, the end of the rod starts to twitch. She breaks into a run; she can’t stop running – the rod is pulling her along. Now Lola has her arms around Sam’s waist, Kitty has her arms around Lola and Khensu and the four of them sweep over the dunes in a desert conga, feet flying across the sand – only now it isn’t sand. It’s grass!

  There is lush green grass and a pool, bright as a giant mirror. It’s not Bahariya; this oasis is not on the map. I’ve looked it up and there is no reference to this particular paradise, no bigger than the gardens in St Peter’s Square.

  Kitty is afraid it’s a mirage and they’ll die of thirst, but the water is real. They get down on their knees with the camels and drink. They have just refilled their water bottles when they hear a voice.

  “I wouldn’t go so close to the edge if I were you. There are crocodilians.”

  Observing them from behind a palm tree is a man flanked by two stone crocodiles. He’s sitting cross-legged under a red stripy umbrella.

  “Mr Hufat?” enquires Sam. “But in my dream, your umbrella was yellow.”

  “It is yellow!” he insists, shutting himself inside it. When he opens it again, sure enough, the umbrella is yellow.

  “Magic!” he says.

  Sam smiles. “Not magic – an illusion.”

  She reaches behind his ear, retrieves the pencil she placed there a second ago and makes it change colour.

  “Look, Mr Hufat. Now it’s red … now it’s yellow.”

  Offended that no one is impressed with his umbrella trick, Yerba Hufat takes a ball from his mouth and places it under one of three cups lined up in front of him. He switches the cups round and asks Sam to guess where the ball is.

  “Under the green one.”

  She’s right. Declaring that it’s beginner’s luck, Hufat switches the cups round angrily and asks her to guess again.

  “Where is the ball?”

  “Under the black cup.”

  Right again. Exasperated, Mr Hufat tries to outwit Sam six more times but fails miserably.

  “I am a fellow magician,” she admits. “I know how it’s done.” Cups and balls is the oldest trick in the book; it’s inscribed on papyrus along with tales of wizards turning wax crocodiles into live ones and bringing beheaded geese back to life.

  “There’s no need to rub it in,” snaps Hufat, picking the fluff from his navel.

  Sam stacks the cups neatly and, sucking on a blade of grass, considers the geese.

  “Mr Hufat, do you think it’s possible for a goose to be brought back to life after its head has been chopped off?”

  Flattered that his opinion is finally being sought, he cheers up a little.

  “That would be a good trick. But that is all it would be – a trick. If a goose lost its head, it would be dead in this world but it would have an afterlife in the next.”

  “Which next world?” asks Sam. “Is
there a poultry heaven where beheaded geese and Christmas turkeys go?”

  “The Ancient Egyptians call it the Field of Reeds,” explains Kitty. “It’s like heaven…”

  “Only damper,” adds Hufat, determined to have the last say. “The geese prefer it damp. Everybody does around these parts. This hot weather gets on one’s wick after a while. I’m sick of getting my fingers pinched trying to erect this sun umbrella. I shall be eternally grateful to spend my afterlife in the shade … assuming they let me in, of course.”

  In a voice that sounds like Fey Ra’s, Kitty adds (and I translate) that first, Ma’at, the Goddess of truth will have to weigh Hufat’s heart against an ostrich feather. The god Anubis will check the scales and the ibis-headed Thoth will write down the results in front of twelve great gods who sit in judgment.

  “If my heart is light, I will be reborn. Then I will be a spirit member of the starry sky,” says Hufat. “Won’t that be fun.”

  “But if your hat is heavy with sin, you’ll be gobbled up by Ammit, who is part panther, part hippoo, part crocodoll,” Kitty retorts.

  Hufat folds his arms defiantly. “That’s not going to happen. I’m a good person. I wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Not true. Sam has witnessed him swatting six daddy-long-legs which he smooshed into a paste with the red ball, and she’s beginning to wonder if Mr Hufat is as harmless as he makes out. There’s something about him she doesn’t trust. Even so, she’d like to hear his views on what is real, what is illusion and what is magic.

  “Mr Hufat, do you think it’s possible to bring a dead person back to life with magic?”

  He picks the sand from between his toes and sniffs his fingers. “Most ignorant of little girls, a dead person is as dead as a dead goose! Egyptian magic has a practical purpose – the thousands of healing prayers and chants are used to extend and ease life, not bring it back – that would be sinful!”

  Sam hasn’t finished with him yet. “But Mr Hufat, is there such a thing as real magic or is it all just a neat trick?”