Shaman's Blood

Shaman’s Blood

By

Anne Petty

JournalStone

San Francisco

Copyright ©2011 by Anne Petty

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN:978-1-936564-20-0(sc)

ISBN:978-1-936564-21-7(dj)

ISBN:978-1-936564-22-4(ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number:  2011932591

Printed in the United States of America

JournalStone rev. date:  August, 2011

Cover Design:Denise Daniel

Cover Art:PhilipRenne

Edited by:Elizabeth Reuter

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Acknowledgements

First off, many thanks to the staff of JournalStone for bringing this book to life. Ned’s story has been waiting to be told, and I’m grateful that it’s finally going to happen. Thanks as well to the fans of Thin Line Between, who kept asking me what happened to Alice and Margaret.

Thanks also to supportive readers who have helped me hone this manuscript over the years – Bill, Lynn, April, Lissa, Kate, and probably others I don’t remember.

A few words about my source material: To find out what the Australian Aboriginal Dreaming is all about, you can dip into any number of books on Aboriginal mythology and culture, but I recommend beginning with the works of James G. Cowan, Percy Trezise, Bruce Chatwin, and K. Langloh Parker, among many others. Online, you can sample the resources of the Australian Government Department of the Environment & Heritage at www.deh.gov.au, as well as the numerous Australian Aboriginal cultural heritage centers represented on the Internet, or Aboriginal publishers such as Magabala Books.

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Prelude

July 1953

Flames roared through the pines, crisping their tops and scorching the night sky. Orange sparks swirled in a mad dance, carried high and far on the breeze.

Running flat out, Ned crashed through brambles and underbrush. Saw palmettos tore at his bare feet and ankles. He splashed headlong through a bog of red-leaved snotbonnets, their mucous undersides sliming his shins. Reaching higher ground, Ned searched in the dark for the narrow surveyor’s trail he knew to be somewhere ahead. Tall for his sixteen years and starvation thin in threadbare overalls a size too large, the boy looked like a demented scarecrow.

The fire behind him filled the swamp with smoke, its ravenous red mouth popping and hissing as it ate the roof of his mother’s house and low-hanging branches from patriarch oaks. The homesteader’s cabin had been roughly built of heart pine nearly a century ago, and its resin-soaked timbers fed the furious blaze.

Ned bit his lip. He couldn’t let himself grieve over what he’d done—that would come later. Flight was all that consumed his mind now as he tore through the underbrush. . Stumbling onto the trail, lungs sucking air, he felt rather than saw the cool reptile body that whipped over his foot and off into the underbrush. Cold fear stopped his breath for a beat as he felt the fleeting sting above his instep. The snake had tagged him.

Panic drove him now, and soon he was staggering and gasping for air, his tongue thickening against his palate. A metallic tang invaded the back of his mouth. Shit! Ned knew the signs—he was a dead man. Venom boiled along the network of arteries, pushed by his pounding heart from his swelling foot up his leg and into his trunk. The trail tilted and Ned fell heavily into a titi thicket, its elongated spires of tiny white flowers bobbing back and forth over his head.

The boy lay on his side, gasping in ragged heaves, his leg a lava tube of red pain. The surrounding slash pines and hardwoods dimmed to a blur, but the scurryings and scratchings of tiny creatures in the sand near his face seemed louder than his labored breathing. A distant crash and whump told him the house had collapsed, but he could barely lift his head to look. “Shit,” he breathed, “shit.” He understood … she’d sent the snake as punishment. Which he deserved and more.

Somewhere back beyond the oak grove his old life was burning away, but the fact of the snakebite reversed all his future plans. Struggling to his feet, Ned tried to limp forward, but his bitten foot refused to respond. Would his mother be amused now at his predicament? She had been a snake handler, a hex woman who made potions for a price or an exchange of goods when the customer had no cash. They often ate the offerings left on their doorstep—tomatoes, squash, pole beans, eggs, even an occasional live chicken. Sometimes clothing would be left as well, mostly for Ned. He was especially fond of the striped overalls someone from the county’s volunteer fire department had donated. His mother didn’t mind; she had no money to spend on clothes for him anyway.

From an early age he’d helped her in obedience and shivering terror as she trapped and milked copperheads, cottonmouth moccasins, and their most venomous cousin, the Eastern Diamondback rattler. He’d seen what that witch’s brew of poison blended with nightshade and other vile filth could do. And now, he understood for the first time how it felt inside the body, working its way through the tributaries of veins and capillaries, wreaking its destruction.

Steadying himself against the rough bark of a loblolly pine, Ned tried to examine his foot. The bite site was turning mottled purple, and the swelling of hot, stretched skin that engulfed his ankle was headed up his shin. Ned dropped to his knees and retched heavily, his stomach turning inside out as the toxins invaded his gut. How long, he wondered, did it take to die from a rattler bite? If it had been a moccasin, he might have some small cause for hope; he knew their bite, bad though it was, rarely proved fatal and could be survived without treatment. He spat out bitter saliva, pretty sure which of the Florida pit vipers had scored the hit. Ned would’ve cursed his luck, but a gagging cough was all he could manage. The ground rose up and punched him in the face as his cheek hit the sand.

“Here, Neddy, hold onto this fella while I get the glass,” his mother had said, thrusting a prime rattler at him nearly as long as he was tall. “Just grab it behind the head and hold tight.” His ten-year-old mind had shut down at the thought, and he’d blindly reached out for the infuriated serpent with a hand marked by tiny white dots from dry bites where no poison had been injected. Snakes hoarded their venom, she’d said, saving it for prey catching, and half the time the bites were warnings not meant to kill. “Hold still now.” He could hear her voice clearly as he lay in the sand. He’d done as he was told and held the snake in a death grip, staring into its beady eyes—he was her good, obedient son.

Most of the snakes she freed into the woods once they were milked out, keeping only the fat ones to eat. He could still see her lopping off their heads and splitting them down the belly with a sharp filleting knife. The image brought a darker memory.

She’d held him smothered in her great fleshy arms and whispered, “Your father’s dead, Neddy. His own doing, just so you know. Do you want to see?” Her voice had crept around his ear, comforting and chilling. “Do you?” He didn’t, but couldn’t avoid looking. The blood was bright and dark at the same time, crimson red and muddy brown. It oozed from the spot where the filleting knife had torn open the man’s stomach. Five-year-old Ned had stared, barely comprehending.

Ned heaved and retched again. His leg was on fire. Sweat slicked his face, and a crust of sand formed where his mouth met the ground. Rolling onto his back, he lay helpless in a bed of wiregrass.

“My love,” his mother had said, stroking the soft dark hair that framed his father’s perfect face. “So pretty...” Her voice had trailed off, as she’d pushed the curtain of hair away from his unfocused eyes. It was true. His father was deemed beautiful by all who met him, and although Ned’s coloring, which mirrored his mother’s sandy hair and hazel eyes, didn’t resemble his father much, he had inherited the man’s prominent brow, sharply defined nose, and heart-shaped mouth. His father was much younger than his mother, or, as Ned’s childish mind had thought of it, his mother just seemed a lot older than everybody else. They didn’t fit as a pair, but at the time of his father’s death, he was only vaguely aware of the mismatch. The few children he knew had mothers roughly his father’s age, and women who looked like his mother were either called Auntie or Granny.

“Nnngh,” Ned grunted, sitting up. Sparks flashed behind his eyes and he was falling again, clawing on his belly with his dead leg stretched out behind him. Frogs chorused from unseen ponds, and a symphony of nighttime noises he’d listened to as long as he’d been alive sang around him. Then, unexpectedly, he was aware of the Other.

“Bassard ... f-finally comin’ to get me?” he wheezed, his chest constricting and his tongue going numb. He was breathing in shallow gasps now. “Hope I poison ya!” Ned spat into the dirt, trying to remove the horrible taste pooling in his mouth at the base of his swollen tongue.

The dark presence that had stalked him ever since he could remember came out of the tangle of blackberry brambles lining the path. His mother had wanted to harness it, to use its dark magic, but she didn’t have the mojo. It hovered over him now, a darker blotch in the center of his tunneling field of vision.

“What do you fear?” Its soft rasping voice whispered in his head, like wind in the reeds at the edge of the marsh.

The shadow began to coalesce, twisting itself into an enormous fat-bodied snake with a flat wedge-shaped head and rounded snout. The thick, heavy coils were reddish-brown with darker jagged crossbands and a sharp backbone ridge that tapered down to a thin, nervous tail tip. Its bright eyes fixed on him from beneath prominent brow scales. An Australian death adder. Ned recognized it instantly from the many images of serpents his mother had painted and taped to the cabin walls. His mind recoiled; it was the very snake-shape that repelled him the worst. Ned scrambled away from it in horror.

“You’re not an ordinary boy.” His mother had held his chin in her hand, her eyes probing, looking for whatever it was that made him different. “You can see, can’t you?” Yes, Mama, I’ll draw you the magic, so please, love me ... Six-year-old Neddy wept with pencil and paper in hand as the terrifying images of a place and a time that were not his own flowed and splashed through his mind like river rapids.

“You’re my gift, my precious Neddy,” his mother had crooned, smothering him against her chest, her sweat and the scent of her hair filling his nostrils. He saw it now, that cascading gray-streaked waterfall of hair that reached past her waist. She wore it straight and loose, parted in the center, even on the hottest, most humid of days, when her sweat strung it into long snakes down her back. It was her sigil, her woman’s power, and Ned would never be rid of its image and weight in his mind. “Draw me the visions, Neddy,” she would coax him.