by Jack Lasenby
Jak looked at us, one ear pricked, the other folded. He cocked his white-splashed head to one side and whimpered. Nip yapped.
“Nip! N–I–P.” The Shaman wrote the letters.
“Nip!” I copied his letters, trying to make mine more like his, wrote her name. “N–I–P!” I said. Now she looked confused.
“I’ve just written your names! And I can read them, too. Look, there’s your name written down.”
“How beautiful it is! With these letters, the alphabet, we can write everything. Snow!” the Shaman said and wrote four letters. He said them separately. “S–N–O–W.” Then he said them together as one sound: “Snow!”
“Snow!” I repeated. I wrote it myself.
“It’s like drawing a picture – only quicker. You can draw a picture of Jak. Or you can write his name. Draw a picture of snow – or write its name: S–N–O–W.” I said the letters aloud with him as we both wrote.
“To be able to draw is a great gift. But to be able to write our speech down, to write ideas down. That is even greater.”
“What are the names of all the letters again?”
The Shaman shifted his hand down, and began on a clean piece of the skin. “A, B, C,” he wrote them out again as he said them. “D, E, F, G…” and I said them with him.
And so I, who did not know how to read, began learning the alphabet from a man who could not see.
“Make your letters like mine. Only you can make sure.” It was the first time the Shaman had almost admitted to being blind. I nodded, but he must have heard me. I was used now to his hearing my slightest move. “We can only read if we all make our letters the same.”
I nodded again. “Some day,” said the Shaman, “you will teach somebody else how to read and write. They must be able to read the letters whether they are written by you, me, or somebody dead a hundred years ago. That way, ideas never die.”
“How did you learn the alphabet?”
“The old Shaman taught me. As I am teaching you now.”
I did not dare ask him if the old Shaman was blind, too. Besides, I was busy copying the letters, repeating their names. I asked him the letters for cave, and sledge, seal, people, ice, fire, spear, white, and bear. I looked at the words as I wrote their letters together, drew pictures of them, and said their names aloud. I was recognising the shapes of the words, like pictures of the things themselves. I was learning to write!
As if he could see inside my head, the Shaman said, “You are not just learning to write; you are learning to read. Go and look at the wall, at your drawings.”
I came back.
“What did you see there?”
“Jak and me on our raft.”
“Draw that picture on the sealskin… Now write beneath it, ‘Jak and me on our raft.’”
I wrote “Jak”. “And”, I worked out myself. The Shaman heard my letters and said, “Good!”
“Me” and “on” were easy. But I had trouble with “our”. The Shaman spelled it out. “O–U–R. Our!”
“O–U–R.” Helped by the Shaman, I wrote the words under the picture.
“There are now two records that you rafted down the lake: your picture, and your writing. What you’ve written there is several words joined in a sentence. An idea. Letters make a word. Words make a sentence. Sentences carry our ideas. We talk in sentences.
“It will be easier once you know all the letters, their sounds, and how to write them down.”
I thought I knew most of them already, but he made me write them all out, saying their names aloud, again and again. The shapes and sounds of the letters filled my head. I began to see the words in my mind. I could already write several without looking at the alphabet. And I tried writing others: river, duck, paddle, pole, and the Shaman got me to say – to spell, he called it – their sounds aloud.
Then, suddenly, his old voice was tired. The Shaman slept, and I copied the alphabet across the top of a clean, bleached sealskin. I tried to make up words for everything I could think of. And wrote my name, Ish – for the Shaman had taught me how to write that – again and again. Ish, and another name I had worked out for myself. “Lootha,” I wrote. “Lootha,” again and again and again. It was a long time before I realised her name was probably spelt, “Lutha”, and before that I had learned how the letters don’t always say their usual sounds.
A, E, I, O, and U, now, they were cunning letters, often changing their sounds. It was not as easy as I had thought, that first day, learning to read and write. I wanted to do it. I worked at it. So I learned it.
One night in a vivid dream I saw something that happened years ago in the North Land. Tara giving me a metal disc on a chain, Dragon’s picture on one side, her own on the other. And under the pictures there were letters! Dragon’s name, and Tara’s? I woke, trying to see the letters, but the dream faded.
Had Tara known how to write? She had given me another disc with a picture of Bar, my first dog, on one side. Myself on the other. And the marks that must have been our names below them.
As I lay thinking of that, I remembered the rock shelter on the Western Coast where Taur and I had slept. The curious marks somebody had chipped out of the rock. That had been writing, too. Whoever wrote the message had died, but it had lasted because it was written down. And I would have known what it meant – if only I had been able to read.
Why couldn’t I see Tara’s face? Taur, I could remember his. And Hagar’s. How would I spell their names? I wanted to wake the Shaman and ask him. Just the idea made me giggle. And beside the fire, I heard something stir. “Jak,” I murmured. Claws pattered across the rock floor. A wet nose rubbed mine. “J–A–K!” I whispered. “Jak!”
I soon knew the alphabet. I could write words. And I could write sentences. We had a game where the Shaman would say a sentence aloud, and I would write it down. Then I’d spell it out to him, and he’d count how many letters I got right. One day I asked, “What am I going to read?”
“Books! Books that will teach you about our bodies, how to make them well. Books about the world as it used to be before the sun went mad. Before the deserts spread down the other side of the South Land, and before the white bear ate the sun this side. Books about other countries, other people. You are going to read books.”
“Why don’t you have any here?” I went to ask, but stopped just in time.
“I read many books when I was young,” said the Shaman, as if he knew what I was going to ask. “And I remember them.
“The Old Shaman and I, we spent whole days writing and reading. He would cover a bleached sealskin with writing, and I would read it back to him. The names of herbs, where they were to be found in spring, summer, and autumn. How to dry, crush, and powder them. How to use them for illnesses. How to treat the lung disease. To set a broken arm. To cure sores, breaks, cuts, bruises, rashes, fevers. To help a woman bring a baby into the world. How to save life and, if all else fails, how to help people die.”
I tried to imagine the Shaman as a boy, but he was too fearsome a figure. Just when I thought he was friendly, just when I thought I could joke with him, his face would shut tight. He would turn the bone mask towards the fire. His great beak of a nose cut the air. And I knew I had got too close.
“What you have learned is just the beginning,” he once said. “It is good to read about them, but you will learn best by doing things. That’s the way to remembering.
“There are many things which you can learn only by reading. In our one short lifetime, the cleverest of us can think up only a few ideas. But just one book can hold the discoveries of many people. When people write down their ideas they are not lost.”
Early one morning, he led me to the branching of the tunnels. “You have explored the coal tunnel. Now we are going down another. I warned you to keep away from this one.” He stood at the mouth of the third tunnel, the one on the right.
“Ohei!” His call echoed and trickled away. Somewhere far off down that tunnel, something slithered across r
ocks, something leathery, wet. A damp stench of something rotting made me reel. “Ahhhh!” came a long sound, the echo of the Shaman, or something calling back. A threat, a promise. Hideous. A sound I never wanted to hear again. Nip and Jak pressed against me.
“Keep away from that tunnel.”
“The Droll?”
“I told you before, the Droll exists only in people’s minds. She lives because of people’s weakness. They want to believe in her: therefore she is! To anyone who refuses to believe in her, she cannot exist. It is so simple it cannot be explained to people who choose to live by superstition.”
I could not hear the terrible sound any longer. I looked at the dark tunnel unafraid. Then I thought I heard the echo of something far off in its depths, the drag of a huge belly, a faint cry, “Ohei! Ohei!”
“We invent the Droll,” said the Shaman. “Something deep in us likes to believe in it. That is why I have taught you to read. So you can know the thoughts of people who fought against superstition. And who left their ideas for us, written in books, so we can choose whether we will be ruled by our fear, or live free.”
“But you told me to keep away from that tunnel?”
“When you have beaten the fear inside yourself, then you can enter the tunnel without being destroyed. It takes courage to live without fear, without superstition.”
“Why?”
“Most people give in to their fear of loneliness, which means they give in to superstition.”
“But I heard something!”
“Your own fear, that is all.” The Shaman turned to the middle tunnel. Ran his fingers over something high on the wall, and strode into the dark.
“I’m sure I heard something.” I flung a piece of coal down the Droll’s tunnel and ran after the Shaman.
Nip a small shadow at his heels, he strode along the exact middle of the tunnel. Shielding the tiny bud of flame, I followed. The air pressed still and cold against my face. At last I saw the Shaman’s back rising. The tunnel floor was lifting. The air became warmer. The Shaman strode across a wide space, flat-floored, then into another rising tunnel.
We followed it up into air which was warmer still, more like the air of our cave with its great fire. Comfortable. It wasn’t just that. The air was strangely dry. I held up the lamp.
Around the walls were rows and rows of shelves rising higher than the Shaman’s head. Other shelves stood back to back in stacks, rows and rows of them down the middle of the huge room, because it was more of a room than a cave. And on the shelves were things like boxes on end, standing sideways on the shelves, leaning against each other, thousands upon thousands of them disappearing into the gloom above and beyond the light of my lamp.
“The Library.” The Shaman’s voice sounded dead.
“The Library?”
“The great tool of civilisation. It is what holds back the dark, pushes back the Droll. When men began to write books, they began to fight superstition.”
I took a book off its shelf, expecting it to be light. It was heavy. I lifted its lid, thinking it would be hollow like a box. The lid was fastened along one side. Inside was a thin sheet of something white. I lifted it by one edge and found it was fastened along the same side. Another sheet beneath it. But this one had some letters – words – printed on it. I knew the letters, could even make out some of the words: “The”, “to”, “and”. Printed much smaller but clearer than the Shaman’s printing on the bleached sealskin, much clearer than mine.
“Words!”
“Words,” said the Shaman. “Printed on sheets of paper. Each sheet we call a page. And on the pages, people’s ideas written down in words. Words in sentences. Sentences in paragraphs. Paragraphs in chapters. Chapters making a book.
“People tried to destroy the books. They destroyed whole libraries. Somehow, this one survived.”
“So many!”
“Books?”
“People. I did not know there were so many. That so many lived and died”. For a moment I saw the toppled walls of Hammertun and Welltun in the North Land. The walls that Taur said had been cities.
“People were once a plague upon the world.”
“My father said that.”
“We were an epidemic. A sickness. Too many, so the sun went mad and destroyed us. But it destroyed that world, too. Made so much of it into deserts of sand and ice.”
He led me to a stack of shelves, ran his hands along. “Here,” said the Shaman, tapping the back of a book. “Here is a book about the muscles of the body. It has pictures of them. And it tells you how they work. What their jobs are. What you can do if they get hurt. How to help them get better.
“This book.” He pulled out a small one and ran his hands over its worn cover. “This is the first book I read about health. Much healing, it says somewhere, is what you do to keep people entertained while their bodies heal themselves.” He gave his dry snort.
“Read this book. Because it is wearing out, we must make a copy, so the ideas will last. Take this book, and the one on muscles. Take this one, and this.
“Now, you know your way here. You know where to find the books about healing. You know how to read and write. All you have to do is come here and read and borrow books. When you have finished, always put them back in their places. Others will need them long after you. Others learning to become the Shaman.”
He led us back down into the cold air of the tunnel. When we reached its mouth, the Shaman said, “Feel up here. Do you know what they spell?”
They were large letters cut into the wall. I ran my fingers along their carved shapes, so it was like seeing them inside my head. “L–I–B. I know – Library!”
I heard his dry creak. “Make sure it’s the Library tunnel you go down. Not that other one.
I always remembered to feel for those letters. The first time, I had to add more seal blubber to the lamp. Later I learned to keep in the middle of the tunnel by listening to the echoes of my steps, by the feel on my feet of the slightly-rounded floor. I would reach the Library and blow upon the firepot of moss I carried, light a lamp, and explore amongst
Chapter 21
Sledging With Arku
I discussed all I read with the Shaman. Not just books about healing, but books about the world before the sun went mad. Books about people in other countries. About this country, about what we called the South Land and the North Land. About the Whykatto, Orklun, Hammertun, the country around Lake Top, the mountains, and the Hawk Cliffs. All these places the books called by other names, some of them like the names I knew, some quite different. I preferred the names I knew. All that other land with its North Island and South Island, was lost in what the Shaman called history, the story of the dead. It fascinated me, but I was here, now, in the land of the living.
I found sheets of blank paper in the Library, things the Shaman called pens, and glass bottles of a black dye – ink. Some had dried to a powder which turned back to ink when I filled them with water. I dipped a pen into the ink and began copying the worn old book about healing. “Some books have been copied again and again,” said the Shaman. “You can see them in the Library. It is part of each Shaman’s training, to copy some of the books.” Copying made me think about the ideas, and it made me remember the words. I could recite whole pages.
One day as I sat quoting a passage to the Shaman, Jak and Nip ran to the door. A sledge! The drivers plodding. The gaunt dogs – a huge team – collapsing, starved.
One of the men, Meeka, was a bone shadow of himself, flesh almost transparent. The other man, Arku, I had not seen before. He walked as if his bones cut into his skin. His voice sounded thick, as if his tongue was too large for his mouth.
I helped them inside. Took off their outer clothes. How had they driven all the way from the coast? Faces fallen, eyes sunken. Skulls shining through the skin of their heads, like dead men. They drank soup, ate a little meat, and fell asleep before the fire, the bowls slipping from their hands.
“When they wake,” th
e Shaman said, “give them a little more food. Too much, and they will die.” Meeka and Arku woke, ate a little more, and slept again.
Each time they woke, I fed them a little more. At last they were able to sit up, limp outside to look at their dogs. Three had died. The others were already recovering, feeding well.
“Our people are starving,” Arku said. “Some are dying of the skin disease. They say the Droll is angry because she has had no gift. So she has kept the seals away.”
“I will protect you against the Droll,” said the Shaman. “Eat and get strong; we will help you.”
Arku and Meeka ate a huge meal that time. Arku snored softly to himself, slept all that day, the night, and most of the next day. Meeka woke, ate again, and slept.
“Their bodies have learned how to recover fast from starvation. The seals are late this year. The Droll is a superstitious explanation,” said the Shaman.
I made soup, froze it in blocks, filled bag after bag. I got ready the medicines the Shaman said we would need. I crushed seeds and dried leaves, filling little bags and jars with the powders. I mixed salves. By now I had read about most of these things, discussed them with the Shaman, and knew their uses. I could tell them by their touch and smell, colour, weight. And I wrote their names on the pots and bags. The Shaman had impressed on me the importance of never confusing the medicines.
He said, “I told you how I taught them to look for the green plants, but they forget – or they want to believe in superstition. This powder will help the ones who are too weak to eat. Some will have sore gums and loose teeth. They will need to be careful not to lose them.
“Arku starved once before,” said the Shaman. “His voice has sounded thick ever since, as if his tongue doesn’t quite fit his mouth. It happens sometimes.”
When we left, he said he would go with Meeka to the village of the Seal People who had visited us. “We have enough dogs for two teams. You take my sledge and go with Arku to his village. You know what to do. Remember, we learn best by doing.”
