Corridor of Storms

by neetha Napew

  Navahk had told them how it would be. He had said that in his dream times, when he walked with spirits, they revealed their world to him. It was a desolate, lonely world that no man would wish to enter, except for a magic man who must commune with the spirits on behalf of his band.

  Frustration pricked Grek. Navahk was responsible for Supnah’s death. It was his spear that had flown wide, causing his brother to fall prey to the wanawut. And it was Navahk who had wounded the wind spirit, causing it to flee into the mountains with Supnah’s head and arm. By right, the responsibility and the risk for reclaiming his brother’s parts should be his.

  Yet what was a band without a magic man? Weak. Vulnerable to the whims of the weather spirits, unable to anticipate the coming and going of the game or to protect itself against the vengeance of the crooked spirits of its members when they came from the spirit world to take the lives of those who had prevented them from being reborn into the world of men.

  This spring the great herds of grazing animals had not returned to the tundra. The newborns were crying with hunger, and mothers had little milk for them. The People had been reduced to living off birds and vermin, camping closer to the mountain realm of the wind spirits than they would normally have dared, so that they might set snares for marmots and dig pit traps for sheep and wolves and bears. It was dangerous hunting, and their rewards had been small. It was not a time to offend the spirits of the mountains or to leave the mutilated corpse of their slain headman to become a crooked spirit.

  Grek sucked in a deep yet reluctant breath. His course was clear now: For the good of the band, for Wallah and Mahnie, and with the hope of a future relationship with Pet, Navahk must be followed and protected as he challenged the wind spirits. The band must have its magic man. And if Grek were going to be headman, this was the time to take the lead.

  Having accepted it, the weight of responsibility seemed lighter; although, for the first time, he knew that authority was not without disadvantages. As he spoke with the unfamiliar tone of command, he saw the expressions on the faces of his fellow hunters harden toward him. “We will walk with Navahk into the shadow lake of spirits. Together we will bring back the head and arm of Supnah.”

  Grek was as startled as the others when Navahk turned abruptly and, with a single word, robbed him of command. “No, he hissed. His face was raptorial, black eyes fixed upon them, broad mouth set. “I am Navahk, magic man. I alone walk the spirit world. No man may follow.”

  The child held its breath. Through the green, fragrant spruce boughs, it could see that one of the beasts was descending into the ravine. The others, remaining where they were, still blocked the light of day; and yet somehow the beast that was coming closer walked in the light, as though the radiance of a winter moon emanated through his body and shimmered in the white skins. That which had seemed ugly and repulsive from a distance was transposed into beauty within the eyes of the watching child. There was a lithe, fluid grace to the beast’s movements, a raw, savage tension in the way he held his head. He was like a white lion walking upright, picking his way downward along the dangerous, precipitous face of the gorge. The child sensed his intent. Danger walked in the skin of the beast.

  Navahk paused in his descent of the wall of stone. This was the abode of wind spirits, yet the wind was absent. Within the gorge the air was heavy, cold, unnaturally still. He could smell blood and death in the shadowed depths, and he smiled, pleased. High above, Grek and his fear-wracked companions stood watching. What gullible, easily manipulated fools they were to believe that the creatures they pursued were somehow more than mere flesh and blood and bone. Whatever they were—and Navahk had never seen their kind before-they were not spirits. Spirits were things of wind and air, clouds that formed in the substance of men’s minds and drifted through their dreams to gnaw upon their reason. Spirits did not bleed. They did not cry out against pain or flee in blind panic, leading their pursuers to their lair.

  Navahk’s smile widened. Whatever the beast was that had attacked his brother, it was so devastated by its injury that its poor judgment had betrayed it. Navahk would seek it out and, if it was not already dead, he would kill it. And its child. As he had killed his brother.

  Now Navahk’s smile flexed against memories. Supnah had always been the superlative hunter, so powerful and fast that he could run down a fleeing horse or antelope. Navahk knew that Supnah’s wound would have healed in time. Afterward, although maimed, Supnah would have been held in awe for having survived an attack by a wind spirit. Men would have hunted for him; women would have vied for the honor of sharing his bed skins. Word of his miraculous encounter with the beast would have spread from band to band until his reputation outshone that of his younger brother.

  Navahk frowned. He could not have allowed that to happen. As magic man he had worked too hard and too long to maintain the subtle balance that allowed him to be the driving force behind the band. As headman Supnah controlled the band. As magic man Navahk controlled Supnah. It had been a comfortable arrangement until Torka had come to the band and caused Supnah to challenge his brother.

  Even though Navahk had succeeded in driving Torka away, increasingly there had been bad blood between the brothers. Now that starving times had returned to the band once again—despite the best of Navahk’s chanting and dancing—it would have been only a matter of time before Supnah saw into Navahk’s heart and, recoiling, stripped him of his status. He had nearly done it once before. Three long years had passed since that night, but Navahk had not forgotten the heat of the feast fire before which his brother had shamed him by suggesting that Torka become magic man. Had Torka not refused, Navahk might well have been driven from the band. He trembled with rage at the memory, which had fed upon his pride for too many years.

  So when the wind spirit had leaped at Supnah out of the mists, Navahk had deliberately aimed wide. He had feigned remorse when his spear had struck his brother squarely in the back, and he had loosed a cry when Supnah had fallen and the beast had hurled itself upon him. As his fellow hunters had howled and stamped their feet and ineffectively threatened with their spears, Navahk had known that they would make no move to help his brother; they were terrified of what might happen to their own hides.

  Wind slurred briefly in the gorge, stirring the treetops that created the surface of the shadow lake below. Was it the wind? No—something moved within the shadows. Navahk’s mouth pressed against his serrated teeth. Again he caught the smell of blood and death, and he felt the eyes of something watching him. Something ... or someone?

  His mind was filled with the image of the beast that had straddled the fallen body of his brother. Never, even at the heights of image-making that he reached during the telling of his tales, or in the worst of the childhood nightmares that had often sent him bolting upward out of his dreams, had he seen anything to equal it. It had stared at him out of eyes that were the color of gray mist, out of a face that was neither beast nor human but something in between. And, unable to look away, unable to move, he had stared back, appalled by its ugliness, enthralled by its physical power.

  Incredibly, he had been aroused by it. It was female. The awe she inspired reminded him of Sondahr, the magic woman who had stayed with his band long ago. Old Beksem, the band’s master of magic and deception, had died just before her mystical arrival in the aura of assurance that surrounded her as visibly and impressively as her cloak, which was sewn entirely of the black and white flight feathers of the giant tera torn She had singled Navahk out so that he might learn from her and share the secrets of shamanism. Her teachings had been planned to summon up both man and mystic from within the body of the youth, challenging, nurturing, and inspiring.

  But he had always been frustrated by her because he could never fully satisfy himself upon her body and could only grasp inferences of the complexity of her spirit as she spoke to him of good and evil, light and dark, blood and water, fire and ice, earth and sky, and meat and grass. And she would speak of men—men of flesh, and
men of spirit. She said that the latter were rare, able to transcend their bodies and walk the world of dreams, where they communed with the spirits of all things, animate and inanimate, living and dead. He asked her if she was a spirit woman, and when she said yes, he said that he would be a spirit man.

  Sondahr was mother, sister, lover, and prodder to him. She posed endless riddles but never told him if his answers were correct. She taught him the chants and magic that called upon the spirits of the game to come to die upon the spears of the hunters of his band. It was so for her but not for him, and when he grew restless and frustrated, she gave neither rebuke nor encouragement. He watched her bring forth babies from women whose time was at hand. He witnessed the way she expelled evil spirits from the sick and sang sad, gentle songs of mourning with the old who knew that death was near. He had little concern for learning these things. Seeing this, she told him that a shaman must be a living fire for his people, to brighten and clarify the clouded world of the men of flesh. A band without a shaman was a band that must live in darkness.

  He had grown impatient with her words about spirits and shamanistic light and asked her to tell him instead about the powers of magic. She told him that magic was a false and distorted thing and that a magic man who was not also a shaman was a man of smoke; he blinded those who would be warmed by his fire so that they could not see where, or to what, he was leading them. She had made him know that all his skills would amount to nothing when compared to what they might be if he were a man of spirit instead of flesh.

  Those were her last words to him. Like a late-summer mist that lay upon the tundral lake at dawn and was gone by noon, she vanished. She had lain with his brother before she had left the band, to honor its headman, to give to him the gift of her presence, and to leave with him a feather from her cloak as a token of her favor. To Navahk she had left nothing but shame, for when Supnah had given him the sacred medicine bag of Beksem shortly after Sondahr’s departure, thus bestowing upon him the rank and responsibility of magic man, he had worn Sondahr’s feather in his hair. Navahk had known then that dull, uncomplicated Supnah had pleased and satisfied Sondahr when he, Navahk, had failed. He had hated her for that.. ..

  Memories pricked behind his eyelids like the beaks of carrion-eating birds. Everyone loved his brother. People followed Supnah as naturally as grazing animals followed the greening grass of summer. The steady warmth of his nature was like an inner sun that drew the loyalty of women and fellowship of men while, for all of Navahk’s cleverness and extraordinary handsomeness, women feared him as much as they desired him, and men tended to be wary of him, observing him from a distance.

  Navahk hated his brother for this. He had hated him since the death of their parents, when Navahk was sent to share the fire of old Beksem. Supnah, already a young man, had a woman and a fire of his own. The boy begged to live with him, but Beksem had chosen him to be the future magic man of the band. This was an honor, although Navahk had not wanted it then. Old Beksem had used him as other men used their women. Supnah was oblivious to his brother’s plight, and Navahk would not be further shamed by speaking of it. As the years passed, he found other ways to deal with his disgrace: by humiliating others and by learning to make them fear his magic. This was when he came to realize that his brother’s status was nothing when compared to the power that was held in the hands of a magic man.

  When old Beksem continued to use him into manhood, Navahk surreptitiously fed him contaminated portions of the spleens and livers of carnivorous animals. The old man died slowly of the poison. Navahk had smiled; he liked to kill. He had wanted to kill Sondahr and Supnah when he saw her bright feather shining in his brother’s hair, but he contrived a new and better game—finding perverse pleasure in insidiously undercutting his brother’s natural dignity and gradually overshadowing his status.

  Everything had gone according to plan until Supnah’s first woman had died and he had bartered several of the band’s superfluous females in exchange for a new woman, whom he adored. She was a virgin. Violating all taboos, Navahk had secretly entered the small, conical hut of purification that the women had raised for her. There the intended bride of Supnah sat naked for the entire cycle of a single moon, amid smokes of wormwood and fragrant grasses, cleansing her body and spirit, preparing herself to enter a new life and to put her girlhood behind.

  He had not desired her; he had desired to possess and impregnate that which was to have been solely Supnah’s. He whispered that his body was not his own but that of a spirit hunter who walked the wind, entering the bodies of living men in order to enjoy the bodies of living women. He told her that she must yield or be consumed in the fire of the spirit’s anger. He warned her that to speak of the mating, even in her dreams, would result in her becoming barren forever. Her eyes, brown and soft, had gone wild with terror as she had spread herself for him.

  The fear in her eyes had aroused him—that and the thought of Supnah, in his own pit hut, longing to lie with her, to bloody himself with her virginity even as Navahk was secretly taking it for himself. He had laughed to think of it and had pierced the girl with no concern for her pain as he whipped himself into a frenzied passion, riding her to heights of ecstasy that he had not thought possible.

  Again and again Navahk secretly entered the hut of purification and lay with Supnah’s bride, thinking of his brother’s disappointment when he at last penetrated his new woman only to find that she was not tight around his shaft but as pliable as an old skin basket. But the moment of victory never came. Supnah’s bride had used female trickery so that her husband was given no cause to suspect that he was not the first to lie with her. As the woman swelled with life, Supnah spoke often of his love for her, and when she looked at him, he saw his love reflected. The woman had not looked at Navahk like that. She spurned him, and months later, when her child was born and Navahk prowled close to see what he had spawned, she warned him away. She called the magic man ugly and devious and misshapen. Then she held up her beautiful son, Karana, and said that in the infant’s face she learned the truth of Navahk’s treachery. Karana was his son, not put into her by any spirit, but by a brother who, for all his beauty, was not fit to walk in Supnah’s shadow.

  Karana had been a bone in Navahk’s throat ever since. Because Supnah and Navahk shared a physical resemblance, Karana’s true paternity was not suspected. But as time passed it became increasingly evident that the little boy possessed all the precognitive genius that Navahk pretended to own. Navahk had jealously watched the power maturing within the child until one day, like his mother, Karana had looked into Navahk’s eyes to see the core of deceit and treachery.

  The magic man had known that it was only a matter of time before Karana’s powers eclipsed his own. And so it was that, in the midst of one of the longest, coldest winters ever suffered, he began to contrive omens that would dispose of his unwanted child, his brother’s beloved only son. Although weakened by starvation and illness, the boy’s mother had sensed Navahk’s intentions but had been unable to convince the guileless Supnah of his beloved brother’s treachery. Soon after, she died.

  Child abandonment was the way of his people during starving times, and although Karana was no longer an infant or toddler, Navahk had seen to it that he was among those to be abandoned. When Supnah had balked, Navahk had only to suggest that a headman who must ask his people to sacrifice their children for the good of the band must not be unwilling to offer his own child to the spirit of the storms. He had almost laughed when Supnah had agreed. In an unprecedented vow, one made in memory of the boy’s mother, Supnah promised to seek out the children in the spring.

  Karana, standing tall, had strode off bravely with the other children, as if he would somehow protect them until the band came for them. Navahk smiled, knowing that the hated child was as good as dead.

  Weeks later game was sighted. The men of the band hunted. The people ate. Supnah took up his spears and prepared to go after his son. It had not been difficult for Navahk to co
nvince Supnah that any effort on behalf of Karana and the children would be in vain. The magic man swore that he had seen their deaths in a vision.

  Supnah was a man broken by his losses. Navahk virtually ruled the band until Karana had walked back into his life with a story of survival that had set the band to murmuring that Karana surely had been favored above all men by the spirits.

  Nothing had been the same since the boy’s return. For the first time Supnah had been unsettled by Karana’s resemblance to his brother, a likeness that had been strengthened by the passing of time. The headman had begun to brood over the accusation he had refused to believe when his woman had finally told him of it. His loyalty to Navahk rapidly deteriorated into open resentment.

  But Supnah was Supnah. The older man still held a hope that he had misjudged Navahk. Even after Torka had left and the boy disappeared, Navahk would be aware of Supnah watching him out of brooding eyes, and he would respond by secretly lying with Naiapi whenever he could, despising the woman except as a vessel into which he could pour his contempt for his brother, and with a brotherly smile for the headman, which overlay a sneer of disdain.

  After three long years of good hunting, starving times had returned, and Navahk’s chanting and dancing and magic smoke had failed to call the herds to come to die upon the spears of Supnah’s hunters. The old questions were back in Supnah’s eyes. His lack of faith in the powers of the magic man was growing. The people of the band had begun to sense it.

  And so Navahk had killed his brother. Supnah had left him no choice.

  The child huddled in the shadows. Hidden beneath the thick, tangled undergrowth, its body was a dark, shivering, shapeless blur within the gloom.