Blade Kin (6 page)

Chapter 8: Wake to Sleeping

All day, Tull felt the urge to move, to walk. The young men of the village got together in the afternoon, and Chaa taught them how to use swords, to prepare earnestly for war.

Tull and Fava attended the practice, and Tull spoke with Chaa briefly, made an appointment to see him that night. Tull did not tell Fava of his plans.

That night while Fava slept with little Wayan, Tull slipped out into the cool night air, listened to the sigh of breakers pounding the rocks, the howls of a cat in heat. He walked down the path to Chaa’s cabin, called softly at the door, “I am here,” in the manner of the Pwi. Chaa opened the door. Tull could smell curry and beer on his breath.

“I’m ready,” Tull answered.

“Then come with me.” Chaa escorted him through the front door, holding Tull’s elbow, guiding him down the corridors in the darkness to his Spirit Room, a circular chamber with a dome-shaped, mud wattle roof.

A circle of stones at the center of the room was used as a fireplace, and a large water jug sat by the ashes of a fire. The fire had burned out hours ago, and the only light to enter the room shone from a smoke hole in the dome, a small hole that let in moonlight. The room smelled thickly of smoke. A mat of woven reeds lay on the floor next to the fire.

Around the room, the walls were decorated with hunting trophies—the serrated teeth of a tyrannosaurus gleamed whitely even in the muted light. The shadowed shape of a bear hide hung on the wall. Tull could not see much beyond that.

“Would you like me to light a candle?” Tull asked, but Chaa shook his head.

“We have more than enough light to see by,” Chaa said, and he motioned for Tull to sit on the mat. The thin moonlight coming in from the smoke hole illuminated Chaa’s features, his wispy hair and prominent nose and brows. He spoke softly, “Before you were born, your spirit danced in the Land of Shapes, and your spirit did not comprehend some of the things you understand now—lust, greed, fear. But it understood something. Mostly, it understood intense curiosity. So your spirit entered your body in order to sate its appetite for curiosity—to learn to see with physical eyes, to move and taste joy. The Land of Shapes is behind you, and it is ahead of you.

“For now, your life is like a bridge, a narrow trail connecting two vast worlds. But the new sensations that you feel, they overwhelm you, so that you have been blinded to your previous life in the Land of Shapes. Your physical eyes cannot see it. Your tongue cannot taste it. In a sense, you have fallen asleep, but your heart knows the terrain, the geography of the Land of Shapes.”

“You mean I am asleep now?”

“Yes, a fitful sleep. You are asleep to your own beauty, your own potential, like all the other people in the world. Most of them can never be wakened. Their spirit eyes are firmly closed,” Chaa said, and he paused.

“But I have seen that you are different. You seek places of power for your spirit. You can feel your enemies even in the dark or behind stone walls. It is only because your sleep is uneasy that I can wake you.”

Chaa motioned to the water jug, “Tonight I will begin to teach you to see in the Land of Shapes. It will be a great task for you just to open your spirit eyes, and that alone may take many weeks. Do not worry if it seems difficult at first.” He picked up the water jug. “I have made seer’s tea. It has mushrooms to open the eyes, roots to open the ears, seeds to open the mind.”

“Like the drugs the Okanjara take?” Tull asked. The wild Neanderthals of the plains took many drugs, often to excess, and Tull did not want to be like them.

“Yes,” Chaa said.

“But won’t such tea make me crazy?”

“With the Okanjara, fear makes them crazy. They gaze into the Land of Shapes but do not comprehend what they see, and so it frightens them. With the tea you will see a land where time can stop, or exist all at once. You can see the holiness of stones and men. Once you drink the tea, I will speak with you, guide your journey. You will not become lost.”

Chaa opened the small clay jar. It was rounded on the bottom like a gourd, with a long neck, and it had been painted with dancing birds in bright whites and yellows, yet when Chaa handed the jar to Tull, he was surprised to find it nearly empty.

Tull swirled the jug, drank a sip. The water felt greasy in his mouth, gritty with seeds and bitter roots. Chaa took the jug, poured it all down Tull’s throat.

“Here, lie upon my pallet,” Chaa said, and Tull lay on the mattress of woven reeds. He suddenly felt dizzy and wanted to vomit, but realized he was dizzy with fear and that he wanted to vomit only because his stomach was knotting.

“This will not take as long as you think,” Chaa said, and he waited, holding Tull’s hand. After only a minutes, he said, “In our world, we imagine that everything is separate, that I am separate from you, and you are separate from your friends, but in the Land of Shapes, there are fewer boundaries.

“When I play a song on my pipe, and you sing, and another taps his foot, and another man dances, we all see ourselves as separate entities. But in the Land of Shapes, we see that the music and the dancer, the singer and the drum, all are one thing connected, blurring into each other. The music is shared, and we all become part of it.

“In the same way, you are not a single person, but part of your mother and father, all blurred into one, and they are each parts of other mothers and fathers, all blurred outward over time, so that all people are really just different manifestations of a single person, manifestations that expand outward with time.

“But in the Land of Shapes, there is no time, and all the connections are more easily found. Once you learn to see and maneuver in the Land of Shapes, you can touch another person on the far side of the world, or share the life of someone long dead, or glimpse the future of people who may yet live. You will learn to see the beauty in every man, and understand that your enemies are no less glorious than the sunrise. Doors will open to you. Yet it will not all come tonight. It will not happen in a moment.

“Tell me, how do you feel?”

Tull considered. He felt … dazed, but not frightened. The colors in the room had shifted. There was a green mist in the air, almost a haze.

Chaa’s voice was loud, yet Tull suddenly realized that Chaa had been whispering, and that Tull’s hearing seemed keener somehow. He listened: below the floor, Tull could hear the crunching of termites’ teeth, the soggy noise of earthworms gushing through their holes. He had not been aware of the change coming over him. He’d felt only a peculiar lightness, as if he were floating.

“I don’t know. I feel strange. Everything is so loud.”

“But it is not an unpleasant loudness, is it?” Chaa asked. “I have felt it many times. It’s almost as if you have new ears, better ears—the ears of a fox.”

Tull considered. He could hear Chaa’s intestines squeaking and rumbling as they digested. “No, it is … pleasing.”

“You are just more open to sound,” Chaa said. “Tell me if I speak too loudly. Now, I want you to relax. Stare at the hole in the ceiling,” Chaa said, nodding at the hole where moonlight streamed in. “It is like the hole above your navel, which we Spirit Walkers call ‘the hollow of your soul,’ where your dark desires and fears are kept, only there is no light streaming from the hollow of your soul. Darkness streams from it sometimes, when it can. That is the nature of souls.”

Tull tried to relax and watched the hole. He was very aware of the stars shining through the hole in the ceiling, so distant, so distant, yet he could almost make out the planets that circled them, he thought, if only he could lean a little closer.

Tull realized that Chaa was touching him above the navel, but below the sternum, stroking him gently in an arc only two inches wide. He found the sensation very soothing, the way a cat must feel lulled when you rub between its ears, and Tull closed his eyes, relished the sensation of touch.

“I will tell you a story,” Chaa said, stroking Tull above the stomach, “about a man who lived long ago, and even though you close your eyes, I want you to watch the ceiling, the hole in the ceiling, where only darkness streams through.”

Chaa’s voice seemed to have become muted, as if he were in a forest. Tull’s tongue was thick in his mouth, and he idly wished that he could pull it out, lay it beside him in the dirt until they were done, and then put it back.

“Long ago,” Chaa said, “before the wind learned how to breathe or before the sun learned how to laugh, or before the first human was trained at the hands of a Neanderthal how to throw a spear, there was a vast plain where bison roamed beneath blue skies, and a man lived upon this plain.”

Tull had to force himself to concentrate as Chaa spoke, and he found that his eyelids had grown heavy. He tried to open them, but they were so heavy, and he wondered if Chaa had set stones upon his eyes to keep them closed.

Tull could not rouse the strength to open his eyes, but he looked to the darkness streaming in from the ceiling. He saw it now, a hole with darkness streaming through, only it had moved to the side. He let his head flop to his right, and he stared at the hole.

“The man who lived on this plain found a bear’s den one day, a den so large that he could not walk around it to guard it, and he feared any bear that could dig such a hole—he feared that the bear would come running out at any moment, and he decided to guard that hole, the hollow of his soul, and slay any bear that tried to leave. The man’s name was Man of Peace, and he had twenty-one children, and all of them were like him, made of lightning, and they danced around the great hole, keeping the bear inside.”

Tull could hear something in his head, trudging about. He opened his mouth, and lights came streaming out in ribbons of canary and vermilion.

Chaa kept stroking Tull’s stomach, and he said roughly, “These twenty-one children are called the Lightnings of the Soul, and they dance over the surface of the hollow of your soul, and keep the darkness from streaming out.”

Tull looked at the dark hole. Lightning danced across the surface on tiny feet. The threads of lightning were blue and thin as a willow switch, but incredibly long. They did a slow melodic dance, waving, weaving patterns over the darkness.

“One day, Man of Peace had a dream,” Chaa said. “He dreamed that he needed help, he dreamed that he wanted something desperately, and do you know what it was?”

“Help,” Tull said. He could feel his body sinking, sinking into the floor.
I am only made of mud,
he thought,
and that is why I must sink down into the mud of the earth.

Chaa kept stroking above Tull’s navel, digging his fingernails into the hollow just beneath his ribs, and Tull suddenly understood that he had not been stroking at all, but that Chaa had really wanted to dig something out of there. Something stuck under the flesh, and Chaa was digging a hole with his fingernail.

“Yes, Man of Peace wanted help,” Chaa whispered. “For Man of Peace feared the Slave Lords of Craal. He had gone into their country to hunt for sea serpents, and while he was there he had killed some soldiers and a sorcerer. So, what do you think he did?”

Tull wondered for a moment before he answered, “Gah.”

“Man of Peace planted the seed of a tree on a black hill, and in only moments the tree began to grow.”

Tull felt something enter him, a sharp pain in his abdomen. He looked down, and just above his abdomen on the black hill, blood flowed like a stream. Tull realized that Chaa had been scratching and picking at that dark place, and now he had pushed a seed into it, and he could feel the seed swell and grow, rumbling in its power.

“The tree grew fast, faster than Man of Peace could imagine, and it filled the sky so that the stars hung in its midnight-blue limbs like ornaments, and it became the World Tree, where the future hung heavy on the branches like globes of fruit. It is above you even now, and Man of Peace knew that if he climbed that tree, it would take him into the future, where he could explore its many branches, but Man of Peace did not want to climb among the tall branches; he only wanted to climb the trunk, then look up at the leaves to find where the slavers hid.”

Tull studied the World Tree bursting from his belly. Its bark was rough and black like the bark of an oak, and it was tall with many branches. He could no longer see his feet. The trunk of the tree was enormous—filling the room, and the tree itself filled the sky. Stars blazed among its branches, moons hid in its leaves, and the tree was dark blue, the hue of the dark between the stars.

A flame leapt at the tree’s trunk right before Tull’s eyes—a single streak of pink lightning, and it tentatively wavered at the bole of the tree.

“That is right, let Man of Peace climb,” Chaa urged. “There is so much to see in that tree. Its roots stretch deep into the past, and its branches flare wide into the future, twisting endlessly. Only here do the two halves join in a single moment. Let Man of Peace climb. Do not try to stop him. Don’t even try to help him. Man of Peace has climbed many trees, and needs no help.”

Tull watched the lightning waver at his belly, pinker than the sunrise, then begin to climb. Tull asked, “Why is Man of Peace pink?”

“He only looks pink today,” Chaa answered. “Turn your eyes toward me. Look at the lightning of my soul.”

Tull turned, saw blue lightning dancing over the black hollow of Chaa’s soul. The Spirit Walker’s body was but a pale shadow, like the flesh of a jellyfish. Within the gelatin lightning played, and the black sphere seemed small, a tiny black hole like the iris of an eye. The gelatin, the sack of flesh, was tinted slightly blue, coloring the lightning.

Tull gazed at his own navel, saw the hollow of his soul—large, like a huge ball, and the pink lightnings flashed over it, and the gelatin of his body colored the lightning pink.

Man of Peace had nearly climbed the tree, and Tull wondered what would happen if he fell. He became very concerned. The lightning snapped back into him.

Chaa swore mildly. “You were almost there! Here, Tull, close your eyes. If you must look anywhere, look at me. Let the Man of Peace go where he will. Think only of one thing, think of the slaver he wants to see. Imagine the slaver—the color of his hair, the shape of his nose, the strong arms.”