Queen of the Dark Things (16 page)

A
N
EXCERPT
BY
D
R
. T
HADDEUS
R
AY
, P
H
.D.,
FROM
HIS
BOOK
D
REAMSPEAKING
, D
REAMWALKING
,
AND
D
REAMTIME
: T
HE
W
ORLD
ON
THE
O
THER
S
IDE
OF
D
OWN
U
NDER

T
he true power of the songlines is a closely guarded secret, but far from the only one the medicine men of the Aborigine tribes keep from the outside world. These medicine men, known as Clever Men or Men of High Degree, spend a vast majority of their life training in the many secrets of their ancestors. The most important of these secrets is the ability to dreamspeak.

Dreamspeaking is what many in the West refer to as
the sight
, the ability to peer behind the veil and commune with the spirits who live there. Clever Men accomplish this through meditation and ritual. It is a rare Clever Man who natively possesses the ability to see and hear spirits. Those who have such skills are revered as possible dreamheroes, people who have lives that intertwine with powerful spirits and accomplish some great deed as a result. Those with gifts find their way into apprenticeship regardless of birth or tribal standing, whereas most Clever Men are chosen as children for such training as a result of relation to a current or past Clever Man.

A second and much more heavily guarded secret is the capacity to dreamwalk. Dreamwalking is the ability to astrally project, to unmoor yourself from your body, leaving it behind while your spirit traverses beyond the veil. Traveling this way leaves behind a single, thin, often silvery thread that maintains the link between your body and soul. This allows the traveler to freely explore the world in spirit form, perceivable only by other spirits and beings of dreamstuff, unhindered by terrain, distance, or time. If that thread is severed, the spirit may not be able to return to its body and may end up wandering the earth, lost, until its body expires, extinguishing its spirit with it.

Clever Men use the ability to dreamwalk to commune with spirits, with whom they strike bargains or make deals that benefit and protect their tribe. A Clever Man's primary obligation, the whole reason for their being in certain tribes, is to keep the supernatural world at bay and to treat the maladies vexing his people who come into unfortunate contact with creatures beyond the veil.

And this is where the values of the West differ from those of native Australia. A Clever Man's power, his standing as a man of high degree, is reflected not in the power of his spells or in his strength against the supernatural, but rather in his ability to outwit those he comes into contact with. A good Clever Man doesn't have to fight supernatural creatures; he merely needs to convince them to go elsewhere. Thus the very best of the Clever Men prove to be cunning tricksters who employ deceit and guile to turn a spirit's own powers and weaknesses upon itself.

Clever Men are also employed as doctors, but mostly as spiritual healers, exorcising the possessed, cleansing those taken ill by the powers of spirits, or simply granting some sort of spiritual resistance against such incursions. The outback of Australia, which is among the most dreamstuff-rich areas left in the world, provides quite a bit of fuel for aspiring medicine men intent on restructuring the reality around them. However, this is a double-edged sword for a superstitious people. Someone who believes strongly enough that breaking a taboo or invoking the wrath of the land can lead to illness or harm opens himself up to his reality being restructured to just that. These Clever Men are needed to provide healing from the things physical medicine cannot.

This, however, is where the Clever Men of many tribes part ways. For not all Clever Men have the same skills or possess the same talents. Different tribes across the continent ascribe very different powers to their Clever Men, who carefully guard them from others. These gifts range from being able to speak with animals, to manipulating the weather, on to telepathy, cursing others with maladies, or unleashing the fury of spirits upon them.

But none are so powerful or feared as the sorcerers of Arnhem Land, the one territory in all of Australia where sorcery is not only openly practiced but also acknowledged as such. There, in the deepest regions of the Northern Territory, medicine men practice dark arts and outright sorcery to protect their people, collect debts, or avenge vendettas. Theirs are the secrets of soul stealing, an ancient, terrible practice that involves subtle, devious murder by way of capturing and torturing the soul while leaving the still conscious husk of a body behind to slowly die. Here tribes do battle through silent warfare, sneaking into enemy camps at night, stealing the souls of their victims, and leaving them to grow sick and die long after they've returned home. This is when the healer must become the detective and hope to discern such assaults while there is still time to retrieve the soul, if not simply track down the assailant.

Sorcerers of Arnhem Land also possess the ability to step into trees, disappearing as if into mud, and exiting from other trees sometimes miles away. They create illusions that distract or confuse opponents. Some can implant ideas or thoughts as a form of subtle mind control. Others can run at least a meter off the ground, their feet never touching the soil, or summon cords from their own bodies that they can use to climb without the need of a vertical surface.

The most powerful among them even understands the fundamental nature of true sorcery, that being the direct alteration of dreamstuff to be shaped to their will. These men are unbound by convention and lack the restrictions of most Clever Men. Fortunately these men are few and far between and in my travels I have encountered only two men capable of doing such things.

C
HAPTER
22

R
OCKS
AND
T
HROWING
S
TARS

E
LEVEN
YEARS
AND
NINE
THOUSAND
MILES
AWAY

T
he hot sun blazed down from the heavens, the land seared by its glare. Mandu stood comfortably, naked save for the pouch he carried his valuables in, regaling Colby with half a dozen different tales all tied to the three-foot-high boulder that rested precariously before them. Colby, on the other hand, slouched, his shoulders drooping, interest waning.

“I don't understand, Mandu,” he said. “What does this have to do with my walkabout?”

“It's the story of the land. You have to know it to understand the song.”

“What do a bunch of old stories about dead people have to do with the song?”

Mandu frowned. “I was told you were curious. That you were clever. That you wanted to learn. But all I see is another silly boy. You want to learn magic but don't want to study it.”

“I already know magic,” said Colby, his tone pinched and whiny. “It doesn't have anything to do with old stories.”

“It has everything to do with old stories.”

“No it doesn't.”

Mandu smiled, his face vanishing into sunbaked creases and crow's-feet. “Fine then. You know magic so well, perhaps you should teach me. Show me something. Show me some magic.”

Colby perked up, the lesson suddenly becoming interesting. “Okay! Watch this!” He reared back, intertwined his fingers, popping his knuckles, concentrating on the air around him. Dreamstuff flowed thick and slow through the land like molasses, unmolested and rich.

Colby focused the energy around him, then let loose.

The air ignited, first fire arcing like lightning, balling up into a small sun five feet in front of him, then darkening, siphoning all the light around it until the tiny sun became a ball of blackness, drinking in the warmth from the earth, no light, nor heat, escaping from its surface. The world began to grow cold around them, dimming the daylight into a twilight-tinged dusk.

Then Colby swayed into a kata, a martial-arts-like dance, with the black sphere swaying before him as if at the end of a string. He clenched his fists and the sphere burst, reshaping into the form of a long, thin, Chinese dragon, blackest of black, seven feet long, soaring across the sand, its tail whipping, drinking the heat from the air.

Finally, it burst one more time, Colby shredding its essence with a gesture, his arms held wide like a gymnast at the end of a routine, small scraps of black evaporating into the returning dry, blistering afternoon swelter.

For a moment he felt overwhelmed, dizzy, his head tingling. He was unaccustomed to weaving dreamstuff this raw, heavy, and abundant. It was as if he'd plugged in a portable radio to the direct current flowing out of an electric plant. Colby had no idea what to do with so much power.

It was all he could do to stem the flow away from what he was reweaving.

Mandu's smile had faded, his eyes wide with shock. As Colby presented himself, sweating, looking as if he was about to pass out, Mandu's eyes swelled with anger. “When the spirit told me of your power, I had no idea you knew so much! And understood so little.” Mandu walked toward Colby, putting a fatherly hand on his shoulder, guiding him to sit with his back against the rock.

“Wasn't that cool?”

“No,” said Mandu. “You understand the ideas of magic, but have no discipline. You know that lighting oil makes fire, but instead of dipping in a wick for hours of light, you dump the oil out on the ground and light it for a few seconds of fire. That is not how we use the energy around us. It is not how it was meant to be used.”

“But that's how you do it. You take it and make something else out of it.”

At that moment, Mandu finally understood why Yashar had brought the boy to him. He shook his head, pointing at the boulder against which Colby propped himself up. “Let me tell you about this rock.”

“Oh man, the rock again?”

“The rock.” Mandu sat across from Colby, his eyes locked with his pupil's, Mandu's demeanor reverent. “Once there was a great but cruel hunter. A man capable of bringing down any beast in the land with a single throw of a rock. He could wing a rock sideways, skipping a stone off the water seven times, and kill a thing across the river.

“One day this man was out chasing some wild thing across the land, all the way to a distant river, and he found himself farther away from his camp than he ever had been. And as he reached into his dilly bag for a stone to kill the thing dead while it drank, he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, bathing in the river. He whooped loud, getting her attention—and also the attention of the beast—then flung his rock, hitting the thing right between the eyes. It dropped dead right there.

“Well, the hunter then slung the kill up over his back, crossed the river, took the girl by the hand, and asked her to lead him to her camp. There he approached the elders—all well past their prime—and asked to wed the girl from the river. Now, this camp had a problem. The past two generations had produced very few boys, and of those boys, few were worthwhile hunters. But here was a man who could kill such large beasts with a single stone. Though he was arrogant and brash and the girl did not love him, they consented to let him stay to court her in hopes that she would.

“But what none of them knew was that she loved another, a weaker hunter but a more gentle and noble man. When the hunter learned of this other suitor, he saw to it that he spent every waking moment around the girl, keeping the suitor at bay except for when he was away hunting. Even then, the hunter saw to it to kill quickly only game close to camp in order to limit her exposure to his competition.

“Finally, after he could bear it no longer, the hunter proposed to the girl, finally asking for her hand in marriage. She denied him, telling him for once and for all that she did not love him and never could. Well, the hunter, angered by this, picked her up and slung her over his shoulder to bring her back to his own people. He ran and the girl's tribe ran after them, the young suitor running fastest of all. But as she was slight and he was strong, and there was little but open ground between the two camps, the suitor and his tribesmen were unable to catch up to them.

“At last, the hunter reached sight of his old camp, just over there in the hills behind you.” Mandu pointed at a rocky outcropping in the distance, at the edge of a dry billabong—a small, rain-created lake. “But he saw no fires, and the shelters had been taken down. It was then that he realized how much time had passed since he had last seen his people—the months he had spent pining for this girl—and he now knew that they had long ago moved on to some other watering hole. He was angry as ever, and threw the girl down on the ground, intent on whipping her with his spear for what she had made him do. He threw her there, right where you're sitting.”

Colby looked down at the ground around him. “Here?”

Mandu nodded, walking toward Colby, casting a long shadow over him. “Right there. And the hunter stood here, unslinging his spear.”

“What happened next?”

“The other suitor showed up.”

Colby's eyes went wide, and he leaned forward, desperate to hear what happened next. “And?”

“He called out to the hunter, demanding he let her go. But the hunter sneered and cast his spear at the young man, killing him instantly. The girl leaped to her feet and climbed atop that rock, crying over her dead love. And as the hunter went to retrieve his spear, she realized she had nothing left keeping her here on this world and jumped—right there from atop that rock—into the sky!”

“What?”

“She leaped so hard and so far that she crossed over from this world into the sky world where she became a constellation. And the hunter, madly in love and ever the angrier, climbed atop that rock and jumped into the sky after her. There, he grabbed stars from the night sky to throw at her, trying to stop her so he could catch her for once and for all, but the stars burned his hands and he missed. And he missed again. And again. And again. And now, on dark nights, once a year, you can look above you in the night sky and see the rocks he throws fall from the heavens, burning through the night, missing the woman he wants and loves so much.”