They Called Us Shaman

by Corinne Beenfield

  I fold into Ramose, cling to him as though he has just carried me from an inferno. Pain torches through me, leaving nothing untouched. I think of those shaman whose only crime was to sit and listen to a simple story. We have not been able to find out what happened to them—try as he could, Ramose couldn’t get his mind to be still enough to connect with the earth. The unknown sucks oxygen from the room, and I feel a sob catch in my throat.

  “It’s over—don’t worry. It was just a dream.” Ramose’s steady hands stroke my hair as though I am a child. Tears stream down my cheeks while heavy-laden breaths shake my whole frame.

  “Cry it out.” He runs his fingers across my back, suddenly understanding, I think, that this is no longer about the nightmare. “I’m here—cry as much as you need. You’ve been strong for so long.”

  To cry seems the only way to release all the hurt inside me. The world used to be beautiful, lush, but now everything has become charred. Whatever remains is a blackened, scorched version of itself, forever changed.

  The nightmare’s tarnished fingerprints remain in my mind, and I find myself thinking of how Alessio had stayed safely behind the curtain, had ignored my cries for rescue. Part of me feels ashamed to be grieving him even as we don’t know if our fellow shaman are still alive, but I can’t help myself. I feel his loss as though it were a death in itself. This blaze that has consumed my life has left even something as pure as first love destroyed beyond repair.

  With careful fingers, Ramose combs the strands of hair back from my face as I weep softly for all we have lost. How can Gadian take all this from us without the slightest remorse in his eyes?

  For a long time, we stay like that, Ramose and I, his warmth seeping into my being until my tears and hummingbird-breaths slow to a calm. Somehow with hardly a word spoken, he comforts me. He stays for so long, the motions sensors kick off, and we are left in the dark.

  “I should let you get back to sleep,” he says, yet doesn’t move. He wants to be with me—I can feel it in how his arm muscles ever so slightly tense around me.

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep if you go.” I pause, weighing my question before it slips out. “Will you stay?” I hate myself for saying it. It is so unfair to him, as I’m still in love with Alessio. But when Ramose is here, I feel safe. I feel like the hours of the night could go on and maybe by morning, I could believe again that somewhere there is still sunshine. Still good people. That the earth is waiting for me with open arms. If Ramose were to leave, I don’t know how I could make it through the hopelessness of the night alone. “Please don’t go,” I whisper.

  “I’ll stay as long as you want me,” he answers into the dark.

  Without a word, we lie down, settling in for the night. I feel his arm extend for me, and I tuck myself against his strong chest. The rise and fall of his breaths soothe my soul, like lying in a meadow.

  The motion sensor remains off and after a minute I dare speak, but keep my voice hushed anyway.

  “Have you been able to find out what happened to Wild Dove? And the others?”

  “No.” Ramose’s voice is discouraged. “I’ve been trying for hours to quiet my mind enough. But something did occur to me.”

  “What?”

  “I think Wild Dove must still be alive. She is the most powerful Master of Tongue at the Academy—which is why they’ve put up with her this long. They know she doesn’t like it here, and that she can be a bit of a ‘troublemaker,’ if you will. But they need her. If they kill her, we won’t be able to communicate anymore. So long as we can understand each other, I think she must be okay.”

  “Good, good.” I sigh. His words are a release valve I’ve needed, surrendering some of the pressure mounting inside me. But not enough. “But how ‘patient’ will they be, though? Is it just a matter of time before they find a more powerful Master of Tongue to bring here and replace Wild Dove? If they find someone like that, what hope does she have?”

  “We can’t do anything more tonight.” Ramose strokes my arm to calm me. “We need to lay low for a little while, get some more answers before we plow in. Things are always scariest at the beginning when you don’t have all the cards in your hand, when you don’t know what to expect. It would be unwise to rush.”

  “No!” I jerk back enough to see his face. “We have to save her! Every day she is at risk!”

  “We will, we will,” he quickly reassures me before I can kick on the sensors. “The moment we are ready, we won’t waste a day. But if we are rash, we increase the risk.”

  “Risk? How can we think of ourselves right now when they could be doing anything to her?”

  “Joanna.” Simply in how he says my name, I know the argument is over. Not because he’s putting his foot down or being pushy—not at all. No, he speaks my name as though it were a prayer. Lovely. Special. Treasured. “I will not put you in harm's way. Not more than necessary. We must wait. But we will get to Wild Dove.”

  My voice, when I speak, sounds like a frightened child’s. “I’ve seen what Gadian will do,” I whisper. “When someone threatens his perfect utopia. I saw what he did to the fallen man, Ramose.” I tuck back into him, and he wraps his arm around me. “We can’t let him do that to her.”

  “We won’t. We’ll figure out something. I promise.”

  I don’t answer, the image of Gadian switching the injured man’s medicine bag banging upon the walls of my mind. He would do that to all of us. Poison, a gun, a gallows—it’s all a means to his end. Even now, I can almost feel the rope burn from the nightmare that seemed so real. It replays in the darkness around me, and when I close my eyes, it’s waiting inside my lids. But the end of the dream snags and pulls at my thoughts like a hangnail, and I find myself asking the question that in the nightmare, Gadian didn’t get the chance to answer.

  “Why is he doing this to us? How can Gadian treat us like this? He doesn’t even know us.”

  I feel Ramose’s heartbeat once, twice, three times before he answers quietly enough that even if the sensors were on, they couldn’t pick up.

  “He knows us better than you may think.” Ramose pauses, and I feel his muscles tense. “He was one of us.”

  ___

  One memory haunts me more than all the others. I see it every time I close my eyes, and have to push past the carnage to find the answers to my questions. But it always returns.

  The dead shaman draped in these same halls, their limbs at strange angles as if they were just dolls dumped in the grass. Except they each had holes in their heads, red and brown seepage left to dry on their lifeless faces.

  Their families never knew what happened to them. Somewhere in time, they are still waiting. No one was there to weep salty tears on their graves, no one sang them into the next life with a song, no mothers and daughters sent kisses on the wind.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Californian Remains, September 2048 A.D

  I feel myself lose control of my limbs, like a dropped marionette. My mind replays Ramose’s words as if I couldn’t possibly have comprehended them correctly. He must have meant something I didn’t catch.

  “What?” I mumble stupidly.

  “Gadian was a shaman. Once, a long time ago.” Ramose keeps his voice so low, I can’t rustle the blankets even the tiniest bit or I’ll miss what he says entirely.

  “What happened to him?” This flies in the face of everything I’d believed about what it took to be shaman, about the character and connection with the earth that is required.

  “When I first came here, something about Gadian didn’t sit right with me, so as soon as I learned to reconnect with the earth, I had to find out what he was holding back.” He pauses and pulls the covers over us, slowly so as not to activate the sensors. “I could hardly believe all he had been hiding. What scared me most,” he continues as he settles back into the pillows, his arm still around me. “. . .was that at first he was like any one of us. It rocks you to realize that someone you think so little of was once no different t
han you. You have to face that monsters aren’t real, there’s no boogie man under the bed. He was just a person, like you and me.”

  “What was his ability?” I ask, trying to complete the picture in my mind that makes no sense. Gadian the Shaman. No, no...

  “He could enhance his senses. If he so chose, he could see farther away than everyone else, or in greater detail. In one memory, I saw how he could hear an owl lift off a branch over a mile away. As a young man, this made him an exceptional hunter, though hunting wasn’t necessary for his survival like it was for our peoples. At first he just enjoyed the sport of it—the chance to be outside with the earth, to turn his abilities on full force, to be successful by using them.

  “But I saw it, in his mind, when the shift began. When he started to feel satisfied at seeing fresh blood spilled against soil, when he enjoyed the feeling he got from watching the light fade from an animal’s eyes. Respect was gone—it became about power.”

  I nod slowly. Yes, that is the Gadian I know.

  “Then he met Madison.”

  Ah. A woman. What kind of woman would have caught young Gadian’s eye? “What was she like? Describe her to me.”

  “‘Paint a picture’ for you?” Ramose steals my words from the past.

  “You’re learning,” I answer with a soft smile. The seas of Gadian’s story are so murky and dense, I’m grateful for a moment to breathe with Ramose, to gasp for air. But he speaks on, as again the waves of yesterdays wash over us.

  “Well, she had cream skin and red hair that wisped back from her face before drifting to her shoulders. But it was her brown eyes that stopped people in their tracks. They burned with a fire, radiating something from within that made her irresistible. The first time Gadian saw her, he literally tripped over himself. He said to his friend, ‘What was that?’ Not who. What. From that moment on, she became his prize to be won. I wish that when I’m drenched in those memories, I have some impact, some chance to scream at her to run in the other direction. But that’s not how the memories work.”

  I inch closer into Ramose, letting his skin warm me. The room suddenly seems colder.

  “Gadian was the sort of man friends wouldn’t introduce their girlfriends to. Besides having a faulty moral compass, he was handsome and always knew how to play the part, to say the right things—that much hasn’t changed. He would use his enhanced senses to watch and learn how best to woo Madison, and he wooed her hard. At first, he treated her like royalty. I think sometimes that she didn’t stand a chance. Of course she fell for him.

  “When they were engaged, he started to treat her as a possession, to use his abilities to watch her, control her. He was a master manipulator and would talk so calmly, so rationally, about how she was losing her mind, how she needed him to protect her. Similar to the animals he had hunted, his goal was the power that came from watching the light go out in her eyes. However, he was surprised to find that it was like trying to put a leash on a wild animal—she didn’t just lay down at his feet. But Gadian wouldn’t stop until she was tamed. Eventually he warped her mind into staying home, for friends would take her time away from him, and perhaps help her see who he was. He convinced her she wasn’t stable enough to have children, for then her heart would be divided. Her only option was to be thoroughly his.”

  “What happened to her?” I ask, running my teeth over my bottom lip.

  Ramose pauses before answering, and when he does, I hear the pain in his voice. Through the memories he felt, he had come to know her. I recognize it from the unique bond I feel to Brigetta. “She started to plan her escape, but she was no match for him and his senses. He’d always track her down, publicly declare her as losing her mind, and drag her back home for a mental beating. He told her that if she left, she wouldn’t live. Whether from her own supposed incapacity or his hands, it didn’t matter to him so long as she wasn’t someone else’s.

  “But Madison fought for her mind. She refused to believe she was the problem. She learned that Gadian noticed things no one else did and played his own game on him. She left the tiniest of ‘clues’ meant to lead him on a wild goose chase. In his fervor, he followed them, and she took her chance.

  “She disappeared. Her escape was her masterpiece, flawless no matter how hard Gadian looked at the pieces left behind.”

  I smile, thinking of Madison’s warrior heart, fighting with all she had to be free. I feel a swell of love for her, a sisterhood. We are unified in our captivity, in our captor—and I hope, someday, the chance to outsmart him.

  “There was only one way to get her back.” Ramose’s voice is heavy with trepidation, like a weight about the neck, and I know what comes next.

  “So he time traveled.”

  “Yes.” Ramose confirms with a single nod. “With no respect for the earth that gave him everything, he completely desecrated it—desecrated the entire passage of time and life—to maintain his hold on Madison.”

  “I could never understand why,” I interject as I fidget with my necklace. “As shaman, we cannot learn each other’s abilities, but we can all learn time travel if we choose. To do the evilest act. If it is so awful, why would the earth even give us that option?”

  I hear Ramose turn his head against his pillow as though to look at me, and even in the pitch black, I can feel his gaze resting on my face. “It’s not enough for us to enjoy the earth’s abilities. We must have the chance to choose it. Regret is perhaps the greatest pain a person can feel, making the pull of time travel enticing to all of us. We must choose to sacrifice what we want in order to hold on to what the Earth has to offer us. Which is a sacrifice Gadian wasn’t willing to make. He was consumed with Madison and decided to gamble everything to get her in his grasp.

  “He time traveled to the day she ran away. Perhaps if he had gone farther back, things would have ended differently, but he wanted the satisfaction of ruining her plans. I could see, in his mind’s eye, how he wanted to let the leash out just long enough that she would think she was free just to yank her back by the throat until she was again submissively at his side. And that’s exactly what he did.” He pauses before continuing, an ache seeping through his words. “It worked.”

  Something inside me turns jagged, and when I draw breath, it leaves my chest tight. “What? No…”

  “But Madison had one last card to play,” Ramose continues, but something in his voice tells me not to hope just yet. “She wasn’t going to be his. No matter what.” He inhales sharply, then exhales slowly. “She shot herself. Right in front of him.” I can see her as he speaks, a cornered warrior—enemy surrounding, all means of escape burned, the horrors of what would come racing through her mind—with a single weapon left. Who could blame her?

  “He tried to time travel again, but it was too late. The earth had taken all magic from him. And any hope of getting Madison back was also gone.

  “Gadian was ruined. But rather than swallowing an ounce of truth—that Madison was dead because of him—he cast himself as the victim. He blamed the earth for stopping him when he would go back yet again, for taking from him everything he had loved most. He felt it had betrayed him.”

  I imagine young Gadian, the woman, and the magic he once had loved ripped from his still-beating heart. The gash that remained was left untreated, open to infection that would change him. Gadian was still Gadian, but that infection—that hate—colored him inside out. It ingrained itself in him down to his very tissue. It left something black and deformed where his soul had once been.

  “He wanted the earth to pay. He became consumed with that idea—revenge, revenge, revenge. He knew that whatever he did, it would have to be huge to impact the earth. Then he came across an idea, sparked in the Renaissance times, of a silent war being waged against magic. It was a battle for the heart of mankind, and the more he learned, the more he realized that this war had continued for centuries, unbeknownst to most people. And magic was sorely losing. As far as he could tell, it was nearly extinct. The pull of power and control
that he always craved overtook him. He couldn’t hold on to Madison, but he could close his grip on the remaining shaman.”

  “So he began the Academy.”

  “Exactly. All remaining shaman were gathered and brought here for ‘research.’”

  “But . . .” A thought occurs to me, and I furrow my brow. “If he has a time machine here, why doesn’t he use that to go back and get Madison?”

  “He didn’t create the time machine—it was created by the American government, who built it in a way so as not to be able to go back to the hundred years prior. Plans for it were intentionally destroyed, and though he has spent years of his life trying to re-create it, it is not a simple machine. Entire countries have funded teams to build their own time machines, but no one else has accomplished it.

  “At first, the Academy just gathered up and controlled the few shaman who remained, less than a thousand. The circumstances then weren’t quite so plush as they are now, and the shaman weren’t so easily pacified. There was a rebellion.” He pauses, and I hear him swallow hard. “It was horrible. I saw it, Joanna.” Again he hesitates, and for a moment, I wonder if he will go on. “There was a massacre. Where now we stroll and dance and drink, they once fought and bled and closed their eyes for the last time.

  “But to Gadian, failure is unacceptable. His Academy had been recognized the world over for finding cures and solving humanity's problems. So it was decided that the Academy would be given a second chance. The American government had just completed a time machine and dedicated it to the Academy. Gadian’s slate was wiped clean, the corpses were dragged out, the carpet replaced and the walls painted. Our kidnapping received a stamp of approval, with the caution never to let us grow resentful. To let us want for nothing. Nothing, that is, except for who we really are.”