The Shaman and the Droll

by Jack Lasenby

  “Men strong enough for such courage are few,” repeated the Shaman. “So few, I remember only two. Men who had the courage to go against custom. Who were brave enough to say, ‘I am too great a man to take this life. Let him live. For the good of the people.’”

  Chatu scrambled to his feet. Standing taller than anyone there. Leaning over us all. He strode – if he had been shorter I would have said he strutted – he strode out in front of the Cliff People. Stood beside the Shaman. Chest thrust out.

  He cleared his throat. “I had already thought of what the Shaman just said.” Chatu’s voice was full of importance. He cleared his throat again and shook his head, an abrupt jerk. He worked his shoulders, tugged at the neck of his tunic.“Others would follow the old custom, but I am Chatu, the great hunter. The old custom is for the weak. I could kill Filar, but have decided to be merciful. We need all our hunters. Let Filar live! I have spoken.”

  Chatu seemed to swell even bigger. He sat near the Shaman. And there was a sigh from the Cliff People.

  The Shaman moved back ever so slightly, as if making way for so great a man. The young men came out and sat behind Chatu again. Stroking his arms, his back. Murmuring admiration.

  The atmosphere in Arku’s house had changed. The tension gone. A girl whistled and put her hand over her mouth with a grin. There was a gasp of relief. Somebody farted. People laughed. Children ran screaming.

  Food was carried in. We feasted. Everyone was pleased. Presents were heaped on the Shaman. Chatu made the most valuable gift, a beautiful white bearskin.

  As the feasting ended, the Shaman stood. “Once upon a time there was no world,” he said, “just darkness. And the Great Shaman made the first light. He shone it upon the first ice and snow. There was no sign of life. So the Great Shaman took handfuls of snow and made the first white bear. He made the first seal, the first fish, the first bird.

  “The Great Shaman laboured long and hard. He judged the night and the day, divided them into hours, each hour into minutes.” I listened and thought of the Carny’s Clock.

  The Cliff People joined in, chanting the story they knew by heart, echoing the Shaman’s words. “From ice the Great Shaman made the first sledge, the first knife, and the first lamp. He made the first man and the first woman out of snow, breathed in their mouths, gave them warmth and life.”

  That night, Chatu and Filar slept side by side like close friends. Starting back to the cave next day, I thought of how the Shaman had used one man’s vanity to save another’s life, and knew I had seen something of what it takes to be a judge.

  Chapter 28

  “We Must Trust Everyone and No One.”

  What happened with Taku and Filar made me want to know more about people, how our minds work. There were rooms and rooms in the Library of books on human behaviour. Most badly-written; almost all dull. And what amused me: many of their writers certainly did not understand people.

  And then I found the story books. Novels. One that told about a problem like that of Chatu and Filar, and how somebody solved it with a wise judgment. I wondered if the Shaman had read it. The novels held me whole days in the Library.

  I read so long Jak would get restive. He was hungry – and so was I. Once I heard a whine, felt a nudge, and glanced down. There was Nip. And, standing on the edge of the light thrown by my lamp, the Shaman. I was pleased he had come looking for me.

  “This is a distant part of the Library. What are you reading?”

  “Stories.”

  “Why?”

  “To understand people.”

  “Stories!” The Shaman felt his way, took down a book. Stroked the pages softly.

  “To know people, the Judge must know many stories. Must have a sense of the past in order to understand the present.” He put the book back. Hesitated. I thought he would take it down again. He muttered something and pushed it back.

  “People used to try to see into the future, but few foresaw what was going to happen to the world. Only the wise understood our future is in our past.

  “It is still the same. We understand ourselves by understanding our fathers and mothers. Only then can we understand others. Many of the best stories take us forward by taking us back.”

  He took the same book off the shelf and we returned to the cave together. Sitting before the great fire that night, he asked me to read the book to him. Halfway down the first page I heard another voice saying the words. The Shaman’s lips were moving. Little by little I dropped my voice, his became clearer, and he spoke the next sentence alone.

  “‘Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea…’” I listened while my eyes followed the printed words: “‘…and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea…’”

  He had the whole of the book by heart. I would read a chapter. And he would recite the next. When I asked him how he remembered it all, he said, “You will remember when you have to.”

  That book finished, he began on another, reciting the first lines aloud before sending me to find the book itself in the Library: “‘He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon,” hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.’”

  We talked about the two main characters, a boy and an old man, their travels in the country called India. When I tried to learn it by heart, the Shaman said, “You will remember. It will come to you like the getting of wisdom.”

  “‘The getting of wisdom?’” I asked, but he had gone away in his mind.

  We read many books together, the Shaman reciting long passages, or listening to me reading. When I didn’t understand why somebody acted as they did, we would discuss it.

  There were books about a time when people travelled on huge ships and flew through the air. I had begun to grasp more clearly the idea of a past world filled with people. Not just the North Land and the South Land, but other lands across wide seas. Huge lands with huge numbers of people. Too many. The overpopulated world with its pestilence of people that my father used to tell me about.

  And in the way of all pestilences, that one died out and left just a few survivors here and there, like the Travellers. There were writers who had foreseen what was going to happen, others who ignored what must have been before their eyes.

  The Shaman seemed to know every story I had read. I thought of the Library, its endless floors and rooms, its lengths of shelves, halls, and corridors that riddled the mountain. How was it that out of all those countless books we had read the same ones?

  “Two men climbing a mountain will put their fingers in the same cracks in the rock. Two men walking through a valley will step in exactly the same places,” said the Shaman. “Our tracks may branch awhile, but they always come together again. There is something common to us all, our being human.

  “But because we find and read the same book does not mean we always read the same story. Each time we come to a book we give it a different reading, because we bring a different person to it.” And he said a curious thing. “It is not you who reads the book; the book reads you.”

  Jak and I fell into a ritual, visiting the Library. We would start off by taking a few steps down the Droll’s tunnel. More each time. I thought I was learning to control my unreasonable terrors. Ridding myself of superstition.

  With my lamp, I searched the dusty floor of the tunnel, but found only my own footprints and Jak’s. “That means it’s safe,” I told him. A few more paces. “Twenty,” I said one day. Then thirty. Forty. Fifty. A hundred.

  When I asked the Shaman about being the Judge, he suggested certain books that
had helped him. “Read them, but make up your own mind. Learn to trust your own judgement. We must trust everyone and no one.”

  When he said that, I was drawing the village of the Seal People on the wall of the cave. I was making a record of them, each village with its own people. Each person different.

  I was trying to show Kala’s face when he returned from leaving his wife, Heta, to die. I wanted to show Heta’s misery. I wanted to show Taka, to draw a record of his wounds, and how we treated them, what they looked like now they had healed, the scars, the changes to the muscles where the bear’s claws had torn. I wanted to show Chekaiti bouncing in her dance, the blue beads jiggling in her hair. But the Shaman’s words drove all the pictures out of my mind.

  “What did you say?”

  “We must trust everyone and no one.”

  “I’ve heard somebody else say that.”

  “Perhaps you read it.”

  “I’m sure I heard somebody else say it.”

  “To trust people is a gift. To trust yourself is another; but to not trust anyone, including yourself, that is another kind of gift. One the Shaman must learn.”

  But I only half-heard him: I was trying to remember who had said those words before: “We must trust everyone and no one.” Where had I heard them? And why did it matter so much?

  Then the Shaman asked what I was working on. He always wanted to know what I was drawing. When I gathered materials for painting, he wanted to know all about that as well.

  During the short summer I collected coloured clays, and leaves, grass, and bark from stubby trees that grew in the warmer valleys. From them I made dyes, colours mixed with bear fat, seal oil. It was difficult describing the strengths, the shadings, the brightness and tones of the different paints.

  For several days the Shaman carried a smear of green across his nose, where he had touched it after sticking his finger into some paint. I grinned and did not tell him he looked lopsided like Jak’s face with his white splash of hair.

  There were grey hairs beneath Jak’s muzzle now, on his head, his legs, along his back. So I drew him as a young dog at the Hawk Cliffs, when Old Hagar was alive. I drew him all along our journey with Taur. And I showed him getting older. When I told the Shaman, he nodded and said, “You are painting time. Poor Jak!”

  It always seemed easier for him to show affection to the dogs. To feel sorry for them. As if being the Shaman, the Judge, put him at a distance from his own kind. He felt for people – like the time he came looking for me in the Library – but was unable to express his tenderness in words. It made me love him all the more.

  I kept thinking of his words. “We must trust everyone and no one.” Where had I heard them spoken before?

  I kept going to the Library. The best books, the most useful ones were still those which told stories. Short stories, some of them, and the great long ones called novels. I read about people who lived in cities, like Orklun and Hammertun and Welltun. And older cities long before them where the same need existed for people like the Shaman. Controlling those like Tuka and Chatu. Protecting others like Lekka and Filar.

  Every now and again, a messenger would come. Sometimes it was for us to heal someone. Sometimes to judge. The villages were so far apart, there was little trouble between them. When the Coal People complained about the price they were paid in furs and meat for their tools and weapons, the Shaman said they could work out the problem themselves.

  “The Shaman should interfere only when the decision needs to come from outside,” he said and directed me to some stories in the Library which made that point.

  On one trip I saw the Shaman order a man killed, a Seal Man who had murdered several times.

  “He is mad, of course,” said the Shaman. “But he must be stopped.” And he ordered the man’s own brother to execute him. The younger brother struck down the madman as they built a snow-house, left his body inside. And I saw why the Shaman had kept the execution within the murderer’s family.

  When Tuka, Lekka’s murderer, returned to the Cliff People, he was punished by Filar. Again, because Filar was his brother, it made the execution easier. And Lella, who had been Lekka’s wife, now married his younger brother. It was justice that worked.

  “Fortunately,” said the Shaman, “Lekka and Lella had no children. There was a similar case amongst the Cliff People, in the time of another Shaman. One man killed another, took his wife. The woman went willingly with her husband’s murderer, but she took with her two sons, and a daughter. Her new husband killed both sons and raped and killed the daughter.”

  “Why?”

  The Shaman ignored my question. “Years later they returned to the village of the Cliff People. They brought a baby with them, six months old, and a two year-old boy. The brother of the murdered man killed the murderer, as was the custom. And the woman was executed, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she had gone willingly. And she confessed she had helped kill her other children.”

  “But why would she do that?”

  The Shaman shrugged. “Other animals sometimes do that, too. A new male moves in on a female with young, kills them, and takes over their mother, and breeds new young. And the female does nothing to defend her first young.

  “We sometimes see people do the same sort of thing. But we must never plead our animal nature. We are more than animals. We can reason, choose.

  “You have read books about wars, Ish. In war, our animal nature is allowed to take over, and whole societies perish. That is why we punish people who let their animal side take over, who practise war within their own village.”

  “What about the children of the two who were executed?”

  “They were adopted by the man who did the executions. That is the rule. He must bring them up as if they are his own. Everyone watches to make sure he does.” The Shaman was silent again, and I returned to the Library to think about that story.

  I read a medical book on blindness. I mentioned it to the Shaman, and it was as if he had been waiting to talk about it. He directed me to other books: poems, plays, legends about blindness. He talked as if it was a way of gaining wisdom. I supposed he was trying to make up for his own lack of sight.

  When he said justice must be blind I remembered a picture by that name, a statue of a blind woman, a pair of scales in her hand. When I described her, he said, “The scales measure the weight of guilt and innocence. What is in her other hand?”

  “A sword,” I told him, and he chuckled rustily.

  Once, he quoted a poem and told me where to find it in the Library. I read the lines:

  Because the pleasure bird whistles after the hot wires,

  Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?

  I put the book back on the shelf. The poem made no sense.

  I often travelled on my own now. Older people said I was on the way to becoming the Shaman myself. Once at the White Bear People’s village, I was asked to judge a case of dog-stealing. “It is too soon,” an old woman said. “Ish still has to get wisdom before he can be a judge.”

  “How do I get wisdom?” I asked, but it was not a question people wanted to hear. When I asked the Shaman the same question, he was silent several days.

  Although I still thought about Lutha and Lake Ka, I enjoyed life in the Land of the White Bear. The stories of the elders. The girls in the villages. Feasting. Dancing. Arku was my closest friend. We hunted and fished together. And I enjoyed the work of healing. Before judging, the Shaman now discussed every case. Asking my opinion. Once or twice even acting upon what I said. There were times I felt myself becoming necessary.

  The people of the villages were content with their life in this strange land. Why, I wondered, did I still feel that urge to see the sun? Not the mad sun of the north, but the soft sun of the lake.

  It was Lutha I really wanted to see again. In my mind she came to seem like the warm sun, the beautiful lake itself. I dreamed of Lutha. The long winter closed in. I spent more time in the Library, t
hinking about wisdom and justice. And of Lutha.

  When the weather allowed it, I explored several ways of climbing Grave Mountain but turned back because of white bears. Jak growled one day as we were climbing a steep face, looking for a way around an undercut shoulder of stone. I glanced at him. “What’s the matter.” He stood below me, looking up. I followed his gaze. Something moved, as if a head had been pulled back.

  I beckoned Jak and pressed hard into the undercut. A soft slither and a crash. Huge, a boulder smashed where we had both stood before. Snow cascaded behind it.

  There was only a narrow ledge left, after the boulder exploded. Jak and I stood a long time under the overhang. A few more spills of snow. More stones falling. And stillness. We waited until everything loose must have been carried away.

  “Come on!” It took us several leaps, but the newly-shattered rock of the ledge was not yet slick with ice. At the bottom we dived around the corner of the gully and a sound like a chuckle echoed among the rocks.

  I told Arku I had tried to find a way across the mountain.

  “There is no such way,” he said. “People have tried before. They all died in snow slides. Falling rocks. The white bears are fiercer up there.”

  I listened, but never gave up thinking of how to find a way back to Lutha. From far out on the white plain, I explored the mountain’s faces and heights. I looked on duller days and at night when shadows showed gullies that might lead to passes. Often I saw rockfalls, or the roll and plume of a snow-slide like a white river. Still I looked for an easy spur, for a pass between the peaks. A low saddle. But never found one. Nor could I remember who had first said to me, “We must trust everyone and no one.”

  Chapter 29

  “I Told You So!”

  Most men would have taken another wife, but Arku was not lonely just in that sense. He came to the cave more often, wanting to hear about the different people I had seen, the different places. He wanted to talk about ideas.