The Archivist (17 page)

By the end of the day, I appreciate the strategic value of the settlement’s location, because three high lookouts maintain vigil over valleys and passes, with views extending nearly to Entiak. It would be virtually impossible for someone to approach unseen, at least from the coast side.

Little Crow also shows me the latest additions to the tribe: three cubs recently born to a couple of the lions. The oldest one is a male as big as a pony, and my friend explains that soon the cub will be matched up with a human companion in a selection ceremony. The lion has as much choice in the selection as the human; it was in just such a ceremony that Little Crow ended up with Malsum. I hope we are here to witness that upcoming ritual.

We return as dusk falls. Henry still has not returned from his hunting expedition. Alice and Little Crow seem neither surprised nor concerned, so we have a quiet evening repast. Late the next afternoon, Henry returns, bearing a deer carcass slung over his shoulders, and he ignores our presence, so I do likewise.

Every morning, Danae works with her students, first turning lengths of softened hide into supple slings, and then weaving small pockets for the projectiles. I notice that a few adults also join in, after she demonstrates the effectiveness of her weapon by bringing down a rabbit during an early dawn walk just outside the village. They are, after all, pragmatic.

On the fifth evening, we are sitting around the fire pit while Alice tells us some of the ancient stories of her people. Footsteps approach from behind me, and the woman pauses her tale about how Coyote tricked Bear into giving the sun away in winter, causing Bear to hide in shame so that now all bears hibernate.

I feel a light tap on my shoulder and turn to look. A young man stands behind me, his head covered with a headpiece made of black fur, with a long snout and enormous ears. My first thought is that he could be a team mascot. The wolf-headed man points silently, first at me and then at Danae, with a spear adorned with feathers, and gestures into the darkness.

“Raven Eye sent him. The Great Spirit calls you to a dream talk,” Alice says. When I hesitate, she adds, “It’s okay, my brother wishes to give both of you a reading.”

Danae gives me a ‘What the hell, why not?’ glance as we stand up and follow our guide into the night. But she does maintain a firm grip on my hand. Just short of being full, the waxing moon provides more than enough light for us to keep up with the man.

He somehow navigates along a narrow trail which circles through trees and up a hill. Breezy gusts blow through the branches. From the way Danae tightens her grip on my hand, I suspect she finds it as eerie as I do.

I cannot imagine how our guide can traverse the path wearing that headpiece, but he is obviously familiar enough with the trail that he could walk it literally blindfolded.

Fifteen minutes later, we emerge onto a small promontory on a ridge that looks west, so we face away from the village. The guide leads us to a small, weather-beaten hut and gestures for us to wait. I am far more curious than nervous about this surprise visit to the medicine man.

The guide enters the hut and returns with a smoking smudge stick that he passes over both of us ceremoniously, back, front and sides. The sickly-sweet rich smell contains the scents of herbs I cannot identify. When he is done, he pulls aside a fur skin hanging across the doorway and gestures for us to duck through a low opening. Our masked escort remains outside.

The hut is about ten feet across. A small, hot fire burns in a pit in the center. On the other side of the flames sits an elderly man in buckskin, facing the entrance. This must be Alice’s brother, Raven Eye.

When I was recovering in the village last winter I did not meet him, but I did hear of the shaman. He gestures downward wordlessly and we sit cross-legged. The walls are adorned with numerous small masks, several elaborate dream-catchers, and a few feathered artifacts which serve some purpose I could not begin to guess at.

“Thank you for coming,” the elder greets us solemnly, in a voice that is deep and raspy, weathered, and yet not weary. “Children of Mother Earth who are of the White race do not easily hear the Great Spirit, so my spirit guide asked me to bring you here. The Great Spirit may show the path that lies ahead. If you are willing to walk the spirit path with me, I will lead you there and back.”

We both nod, and the shaman closes his eyes as he begins to chant. The words are in his native tongue; I do not understand any of it, but it is strangely soothing. Then the old man holds out a long wooden pipe, decorated with small feathers and ending in a stone bowl that contains some herbal substance.

I glance at Danae in the dim firelight and she nods her assent. Placing the stem to my lips, I lean toward the shaman and he pulls a stick from the fire with a red-hot ember on the tip, to light the contents of the bowl.

I cough with my first draw on the pipe, and then take a second draw. The smoke is complex; along with tobacco I detect the sweet, cloying taste of marijuana, mixed with some other herb. I do not think it is peyote, but suspect it could be a close relative.

I hand the pipe to Danae, who first takes a tentative draw, and then another, deeper one. As I watch her puff on the pipe, I recall the night we smoked outside her house in Port Sadelow, then I have to immediately cut off thoughts about what we did afterward.

The shaman takes a turn, and then the pipe makes another round. By the time it completes a third circuit, I start feeling disembodied.

Raven Eye sets the pipe aside and takes up a three-foot wide, flat drum made of hide stretched over a wooden frame, and a drumstick with leather tightly wrapped around one end. The drum is only a couple of inches thick, but it produces a surprisingly deep tone when the shaman strikes it with the drumstick.

Maintaining a slow, steady beat, the old man starts another low, almost mournful chant.

I do not understand Raven Eye’s words, but they sweep me up in the swirling smoke of the fire, and I drift into a hazy cloud. Within the cloud, Raven Eye speaks. “The Great Spirit weaves the web of life which binds us all together, both what we see and what we don’t see. This web connects what was, what is and what will be. May the Great Spirit help us see clearly, and with open hearts.”

The hut fades and we all stand in a circle around the fire, but we are still in the thickening fog. A soft white illumination that might be dim sunlight or bright moonlight filters through the fog from all directions. There is no shadow, almost as though we are swimming in light that is cool and somewhat refreshing, but not damp or wet.

“Little Crow says you seek something from the False Brothers. Is that true?” the elderly man asks me.

“They took a very important item from me, which I must recover and take back to the Archives.”

The shaman pauses as if listening, then responds, “That is a good question, I will ask.” Then he turns to me and says, “Will taking this thing weaken them?”

“I’m not sure, to be honest. I know they seem to want this thing very badly, but not why. So I can’t say what harm they would suffer.”

“They may want it for the same reason you do.”

I cannot help laughing; the image of free-falling Disciples is just too much. Then I respond, “I don’t think so. They seek to destroy that which I seek to save.”

“In that respect, we view the False Brothers the same way. If our enemy desires a thing, then we don’t want him to have it. They are without honor, and grow powerful and strong. Unchecked, they would bring back the way of the White man to the land. It is much easier to remove a bear’s claws when it is a cub than when it is an adult.”

The old man faces me with a gaze that penetrates right through me. “Snow Raven, I see a city on a plain, and beyond it a blinding flash as bright as the sun. A terrible cloud like a mushroom rises, and the city burns like leaves in a raging forest fire. In the far distance are two more clouds. Now the dream changes to a metal house, floating in the air like smoke. Men inside this house fight demons, and again a terrible flash destroys everything.”

I know what the house is, or rather was. Somehow he sees the beanstalk terminal, thousands of miles above the surface of the Earth.

Those half-dozen men were soldiers who I piloted from Mars. They swept the station clean of techbots. Intellinet left them there for some inscrutable reason, but the bots only had tools such as wrenches and drills, which was good, because the last thing you want on a space station is gunfire.

Still, we found out the hard way that even common tools can be dangerous, when we discovered one techbot madly drilling holes through the station skin. Lack of air would inconvenience us far more than it would them. After we cleared the station, we sent the one surviving human inhabitant down to the surface, before Intellinet responded with a counter-attack.

That was over thirty years ago, and I was the only one who made it to a lifeboat before the station exploded.

Raven Eye continues speaking. “Snow Raven, my guide says you will once again fight the battle you lost. This time you must prevail, or the terrible fire will return to destroy the future of mankind.” I have no response for Raven Eye or his Great Spirit, because there was only one beanstalk, and it is gone. There can be no second chance.

Then he turns to Danae, and again he slowly beats the drum for several minutes. Just as I think the dream walk might be over, Raven Eye speaks again.

“Woman, your spirit guide comes near. It is the Great Lion, like those that guard our village. He tells me you have much strength sleeping inside, so your spirit name is Sleeping Lion. Now your guide steps back, and you are inside a small hut. You struggle with a man, and then he goes outside into a great storm. The man vanishes into the storm, leaving you holding an empty pot.”

Danae begins weeping.

The shaman pauses for a minute. His head bobs as if listening, then he says, “Your spirit guide tells me you will again face a great storm, but this time you must go in place of your husband.”

After what seems like forever and yet an instant at the same time, Raven Eye chants again, and I feel myself sinking. Then I am drawn, almost sucked down into my body. When I open my eyes I am seated in front of the fire, which has burned down to embers. The dream—vision, or whatever this was—must have lasted well over an hour, for that wood to burn down to where it is now.

The hut does not feel hot inside, but I am sweating and shaking. The shaman hands me a cup that I am hesitant to put to my lips, because I am still coming down from the last thing he gave me, until I realize it is just cool water. Then, eagerly, I take several deep, refreshing swallows. Danae is shaking so much that I hold the cup up to her mouth for her.

When I hand it back, Raven Eye refills the cup and says, “Just rest for a little while. The first time you Dream Walk can be draining.” He watches us, silent and with unblinking eyes, which I find unnerving. I still feel weak, but also relieved a few minutes later, when he says we have recovered enough, and dismisses us with a gesture.

The wolf-headed man waits outside for us. He lets us take a few deep breaths, then leads us back down through the dark forest silently. He does not say a word to us—in fact, I realize he has not made a sound this whole time.

We stumble in the darkness a few times, before we reach the edge of the village. Alice stands waiting for us with a single torch, and she guides us wordlessly back to our lodge. As she turns to leave, I begin to thank her, but she shushes me.

“This time must be reserved for reflection,” she says, then Alice gestures at the doorway.

Danae takes my hand when we enter, and I look down at our clasped hands, fingers laced together, and then at her. We simultaneously burst out giggling, and I know we are both truly loaded.

“It’s cold, come sit with me,” Danae pleads, pulling me toward her pile of furs in one corner. She whines while she pulls me down. “Please? You’re my friend. Friends should share secrets, and I have a really big secret to tell you.”

Her grip slips and she falls to her knees into the furs, then flops over face first and starts laughing uncontrollably. “I promise, you will be surprised.”

I ease down next to her and lean against the back wall of the lodge as I pull a cover over both of us. Danae squirms up next to me and I put my arm around her shoulders so she can snuggle up against me. Her warmth seeps into my side as she settles into slow, steady breathing. Apparently she forgot about her secret, which is fine. She is so high she was probably going to tell me some kind of girly thing that we would both be embarrassed about in the morning. I think Danae is asleep, but she stirs and looks up at me.

“Can I ask you something personal?” she whispers. “When you killed that Disciple, was that the first time? That you killed someone?”

“I haven’t kept count,” I reply, “but over the years there have been more than a few. Whenever I did take a life, I was defending myself or others. I didn’t like it, but I never regretted it.”

I am being mostly honest—there was that woman in Paramus. It is not like I really had a choice, but it still haunts me, and I sure as hell am not going to tell Danae about that one.

Danae sighs, and responds in a small voice, “That man I strangled was my first. I don’t regret it either, but I still think about it.”

“You don’t think he really deserved it?”

“No, that’s not it,” Danae states vehemently. “Malsum killed the one I really wanted. The only reason the leader didn’t have a stump between his legs is because the other man held a knife at my throat. Otherwise I would’ve bitten the damn thing off when he forced it into my mouth. The guy I killed wanted a turn as well, but the leader said he was saving me for himself.”

“You had good reason to kill him, and no court I know of would fault you,” I tell Danae as I rub her arm. “My advice is don’t take pride in it, but don’t blame yourself either. Regret is a heavy pack to carry, and it does you no good.”

Danae is silent for a few moments, then she whispers, “It could have been much worse. I’m glad it was just my mouth, but I still felt defiled when he did that to me. Do you feel contempt or disgust toward me, because of what they did?”