Shadows in the Cave

by Caleb Fox

  “Excellent, because it’s the truth. Now why don’t you tell me what you’ve come all this way for?”

  Aku suspected that his grandmother already knew, but he told her the story of how Salya was kidnapped, how he and Shonan went to the village of her abductors and were captured. “I …” He didn’t know how to say it. “I changed myself into an owl and flew away.”

  They looked at each other.

  “They tortured and killed my father.”

  “So you used one of your abilities. You’re not avoiding them anymore.”

  “I didn’t have any choice. I was way out on the ocean, carried by a riptide. I couldn’t swim back. My only chance was to fly. So I took it.”

  “Very good. I was worried that your father would force you to follow his path. Which isn’t yours.” She looked at him. He saw the fire reflected in her eyes and thought, She’s much more than my great-grandmother. She has a power I don’t understand. It gave him the Feeling.

  “And what do you want to do now?”

  “I don’t know who to speak of first, Salya or my father.”

  “Tell me about your twin.”

  “Maloch said he’d eaten Salya’s spirit but not her body. I don’t know where her body is. I want to … I have to try to save her.”

  “He ate her spirit.” Tsola’s voice was contemptuous. “He consumes other people’s life-fire and adds them to his own.” She thought. “Do you know what that means?”

  “No.”

  “Every living creature has a yuwi, a unique spiritual energy. Yours makes you what you are, mine makes me what I am. The same goes for crawfish, a sparrow, or a dandelion. It is your life. It never dies—but this is not the time to talk about that. If Maloch the Uktena steals your life …”

  She held up a hand for a long time, thinking. When she spoke, she changed the subject. “Now speak of your father.”

  “His last words to me were a cry, ‘Meet me in the Darkening Land.’ I don’t know what he meant. Die along with me? I don’t think so. I think he meant, ‘Meet me there and we’ll get Salya’s body out.’ It’s scary.”

  “Worse than scary. Your father will reappear in this world soon. But living people don’t go into the Darkening Land and come out.”

  “She’s down there. My father’s down there. I have to go.”

  Tsola thought for a while. “Two reasons. You have to save your sister. And you have to be loyal to your father.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re scared to go, so scared your pee comes out cold.”

  “Yes.”

  “If she’s a body without a spirit, how will you save her?”

  He showed her the flutes, the one that healed wounds of the spirit and the one that resurrected the dead.

  “I don’t know whether the powers of the Little People can accomplish something so enormous against the greatest of enemies, death itself.” She pondered. “Are you sure you want to risk your life for this?”

  “She’s my sister. My twin.”

  Tsola gave an odd smile. Maybe she thought she was looking at a simpleton or at sublime simplicity. “You alone. I don’t believe I will see you again.”

  “I know.”

  Unreadable changes ran across the old woman’s face. Or perhaps that was a trick of the firelight. She took a huge breath in and let it out. “You have earned the chance to try.” She looked at him for too long a moment. “You may become someone great. Or you’ll become nothing at all.”

  He felt too small to speak.

  She held his gaze, taking his measure. “This is what you’re going against. The physical danger is trivial. To die physically is a small thing, compared to dying spiritually. It is an ember trying to glow next to the sun.

  “Children imagine monsters in the dark.” She shook her head. “The monster here is fear. I gave you the feeling of a cold cloud in your heart because I wanted to intensify your dread of being lost and blind in the cavern. Imagine a fear like being lost and blind among the stars. If you let yourself feel that fear, your spirit shrivels.”

  He didn’t dare ask a question.

  “Only those who become seers are able to look beyond the monstrosity to the truth.” She got a faraway look and then returned her eyes to Aku. “Did Shonan ever tell you that on the battlefield the true killer is fear?”

  “He said it over and over.”

  “In the spiritual world the true killer is also fear. If you quail, you die.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re a beginner as a shape-shifter, you haven’t apprenticed yourself to a seer, you haven’t learned a thousand lessons you needed before you came to me. You have no idea how ignorant you are, or how hard it will be. But for whatever reason life has put this task in your hands. For the coming days you are not a relative, and I am not your great-grandmother. I am Tsola, the Seer and Wounded Healer. You seek to discover your powers. I am your daunting taskmaster.”

  She mused. “Do you know how to begin?”

  “No.”

  “Good. You tell the truth. Which you didn’t do with the mother of your child, which you didn’t do with me. Because you were afraid of her reaction, you didn’t tell her you are a shape-shifter. Because you were afraid of losing my respect, you denied your fear of the adventure in front of you.

  “So now we must make a bargain. At every moment, in every word, with every gesture, you will tell the truth. Not only to me, but to yourself. That is your pledge. That is the cost of crossing the threshold of the world you want to go to. You will tell the truth to me, and you will tell it to yourself.”

  She raised her hand for the traditional gesture of sealing a pact, and he followed her lead. At the same moment they slapped the ground.

  “And right now, Aku, son of Meli,” the old woman said, “what is your truth? The spirit inside you, how does it feel?”

  He nodded once before he spoke. “Scared and excited.”

  “That’s a good beginning,” she said. “Now get some sleep. We have hard work to do.”

  18

  Tsola waited for Aku to wake up, sit up, and focus his eyes across the fire and on her. “Truth,” she said.

  Aku shook his head, held it still, and shook it again hard. His mind was still cobwebbed from sleep. He was trying to grow, half consciously, into his powers. While he was awake, he grew by thinking about being as much owl as man. While he was asleep, he grew by dreaming himself as an owl. He was exhausted from working in both states.

  She handed him a tea she’d brewed to snap his mind awake. The young man—she refused to think of him as the boy he was—took a long swallow. She looked over at her son Bola, curled up in sable elegance. They both felt for Aku. Bola had guided many seekers through the cavern to her, and she’d initiated most of them—nothing she did was more important than creating shamans to guide the people. Generally, the seekers brought nothing but the awareness that they were different, that they bore the talent and responsibility of some kind of special powers. They came, learned something, and came back year after year before coming to the trial. Even after the most patient training, some failed the trial.

  So why the dilemma of this young man, her own great-grandson? He had a genuine gift, and in time he might become a true shaman. Why, then, why, did he have to risk the trial now, when he was a spiritual infant? She was probably guiding him to his death. She shrugged inside herself. Her skills let her see and hear the Powers, not question them.

  “Truth?” she repeated.

  “All right,” he said.

  “You came a long way to see me. What do you want?”

  “You are a seer. Tell me where my sister is.”

  “If Maloch ate her spirit,” she said, “she’s in the Underworld. But that’s not what you came for.”

  “It isn’t?”

  Bola growled.

  “You can do better,” Tsola told him.

  “My father is waiting.” He felt a searing hurt. He owned a flute that would
save the dying, but he had not been able to help his own father. “Is it possible to bring him back? Or her?”

  Bola screwed himself into a different curl-up and gave Aku an impatient look.

  “Yes.” Tsola deliberately didn’t tell him the rest. “That’s still not what you want.”

  “I’m tired of this playing around.”

  Bola growled loudly, but Tsola liked the young man’s spunk.

  “I’ll get you started. Look inside yourself. Did you come to get me to save your sister? Your father? Or to help you find the power you need within, so you can do it yourself?”

  “That’s a big bite,” said Aku.

  “Find the courage to tell the truth,” said Tsola. She cocked her head and waited.

  He waited several heartbeats. “Tsola, Seer, Wounded Healer, Grandmother, I want to find my sister and father and save them. Show me the way.”

  “Better, but not enough.”

  “Give me the strength to do it.”

  “No one can give you that strength. But you can discover it in yourself, if it’s there.”

  “Help me.”

  “I can help you begin. You need more than you realize. You need courage. You need wisdom. You need to understand your powers. What it means to take the form of a human being, to take the form of an owl.”

  “Or a panther,” said Bola.

  “Yes,” said Tsola, “some shape-shifters can become several animals. Bola and Bota are human beings, panthers, and ravens. They spend most of their time as panthers because that’s the best way to protect me.”

  “And because I like it that way,” said Bola.

  “I can’t wait to learn all this.”

  “Then learn fast. You also have to get some idea of what it means to be a seer.”

  “My father is in the Underworld. My sister is in the Underworld. Her spirit, her life-fire, is inside another being, a monster.”

  “I will show you how to begin if you will show me the respect of learning what you can. If not, I will only be giving you to Maloch the Uktena.”

  “I have to find my father and sister.”

  “First you have to find yourself.”

  19

  As the three of them walked, Aku holding a torch high, Tsola issued her warnings.

  “I’ve never sent anyone across who was so unprepared.”

  “I want to go.” It was a flat, firm statement.

  Bola led the way into a passage where the human beings had to crawl. Aku was tempted to flutter through as an owl, but crawled with his great-grandmother.

  “The entrance to the Underworld is guarded by the Great Dusky Owl. You have to ask his permission.”

  “He’ll see you’re not ready,” said Bola.

  “What do I do?”

  They stood up and walked through a graceful passage. She thought about her answer and couldn’t find one. They squirmed through worm holes and waded down streams. They skirted a pond that appeared to have lily pads, except that the pads were pale stone. They strode into a room so bright with light from above—the outside world!—that Tsola had to shield her eyes. They scared a thousand bats into wild flight.

  For Aku the cave was drenched in dread. He wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else.

  Bola and then Tsola stopped in a round room that was a dead end and lit two lamps of animal fat from the dying sparks of the torch. She handed Aku one lamp and kept the other. Aku saw a small stack of torches, hides, and gourds with food and water, all the signs of a long-term camp. Since he’d never seen a stone lamp, he inspected it. It had a handle and then a surface the size of a hand, with a place scooped out to hold rendered animal fat, all carved elegantly. A wick of cloth burned slowly.

  “Hold it up and look at the bottom.” Tsola held her lamp beneath his so he could see. Inscribed into the underside was a large eye, not a human eye, but a round one, like a bird’s.

  “An owl’s eyes,” she said, “because the owl is the master of the knowledge of life and death.”

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. And very different from the workaday lamps the people used, made of buffalo horn.

  “Aku, lift your gaze.”

  The walls were covered with drawings of animals. Some were pecked into the rock, some stroked onto them in black and shaded with grays and blues, some painted in bright reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and purples.

  Among the Galayi, drawings were common enough. If a man had a vision, or acquired an animal helper, or if he brought down a buffalo or slew an enemy, he might draw the event on a hide. But those drawings were childish compared to these.

  These were … they had power. The power of beauty and the power of magic at once. They hummed with it.

  “Unbelievable.”

  He studied a big painting of two buffalo that were, comically, facing each other not head to head but bottom to bottom. They were big, magnificent creatures, their heads turned toward the viewer with expressions that seemed to say, “I am Buffalo.” The bull was solid black, the cow black with a large area on the flank colored red-brown, the color of a new calf. Aku wondered if the color was meant to suggest the next generation within the buffalo belly.

  He stepped sideways and looked long at one that felt different. The artist had started with a bulge in the rock for a basic shape. By incising he had made the bulge into a large great dusky owl looking straight at the viewer. The rock was cut away to let the head, tufted horns, beak, and body stand out in relief. For the moment Aku had to avoid looking at the eyes, which drew him powerfully. He forced his eyes along the head and body of the bird, which were spotted black on the gray rock, and the legs striped with black. There were no talons.

  From the spot where the claws might have grown issued a different feature of the rock itself—it seemed to be weeping huge tears, thicker than thumbs and long as arms. The tears ran down the rock until they were longer than the owl, and where the wall cut back, they dripped off it into mid air. King-sized stone tears, frozen in their grief.

  Aku loved the way the artist had used the natural shapes of the rock, both the bulge and the drippings, and made them into what he saw in his head and felt in his heart. He stood transfixed.

  After a while he let his eyes sail up to the eyes. They were huge orbs, out of proportion to the body, and painted a yellow that radiated energy, like mini-suns challenging observers with light and heat.

  Grandmother interrupted his study. “Don’t look into his eyes,” she said, “not yet.”

  Aku felt her voice jerk him back into the ordinary world.

  “Keep in mind that Owl is your spiritual ancestor.”

  He wandered a few steps and looked back up at the magical animals.

  Aside from the power, what surprised him was that some of the animals were unrecognizable. Yes, there were deer, elk, buffalo, and rabbits. But the other animals didn’t exist, as far as Aku knew.

  “They do exist,” said Tsola, “or have walked the Earth at some time, or they are Immortals.”

  Aku snapped his head around at her. Again it gave him the willies for someone to look into his mind.

  “This is called a horse,” Tsola said.

  It was a beautiful, red-orange creature with four feet, a flowing mane, and a long black tail.

  “This is a woolly mammoth.”

  It had a nose as long as a man’s leg and horns too big to chase any animal that Aku knew about.

  “This is a rhinoceros. That’s an ibex. All of these creatures, well, the originals of them, live beyond the Sky Arch. You’ll see some of them there.”

  Aku shook his head hard. He wondered if he was really awake.

  “This is one you need to study,” said Tsola.

  Aku turned his attention to a vivid painting of the sun, flame-colored rays shooting out from a coal-hot center. Feelings welled in him that he could not speak aloud. He stepped back and took time to survey the room.

  “These are the dwellers of the world above.”

  “Yes, among many other
s. The beings of that world are immortal. We mortal creatures are shadows of them.”

  “The drawings are ancient.”

  “Old beyond imagination, but the artist is me, with Bola’s help. I saw them with the eye of the spirit, not the eyes of the body.”

  “Then why do you call them old?”

  “Because they exist outside of Time.”

  Aku pondered that and asked, “Why hidden away in this cave?”

  “Hidden away.” She hesitated, smiling. “I don’t think of them that way. These paintings are doorways to the world of the Immortals.”

  “You mean …”

  “Years ago, when I made a journey to the Land Beyond the Sky Arch, I would come back and paint an Immortal I had met there and learned something from. I made the paintings an act of homage and looked at them as a way of honoring the Immortal creatures. Then I began to use the paintings themselves as gates to the Immortal world. If I wanted to visit Buffalo, I would look at his image and pass through to the world where he lives.”

  She looked for a moment at the buffalo bull and cow.

  “Finally, I started using them as gates for the shamans in training who wanted to visit the Land Beyond the Sky Arch. Now they use the paintings as wings.”

  Aku looked at the paintings, stupefied. This was the Seer’s real work. In a way it was much more real than the ordinary tasks of fetching water, growing corn, cooking, and other daily jobs of women in the village.

  “It’s hard to find a place for you to begin. Maybe as good a way as any is to tell you some of the big stories. Why not start with Grandmother Sun?”

  Tsola built a little fire, took shredded tobacco from a pouch, dropped it onto the flames, and said quietly, “This smoke, my breath, breath of the Earth, carry my prayers to the spirits above. May I see truly and speak truly.”

  She sat cross-legged and motioned for Aku to sit across the fire from her. Bola padded to a wall and scratched his ribs on it.

  “In the beginning, the Land Beyond the Sky Arch got too crowded, so everyone began to look down at Earth and think, ‘Maybe we could live there.’ But Earth was nothing but water, water everywhere. Well, you know the story of how Water Spider dived down and got dirt and made Turtle Island, the land we live on now, even though there’s still a lot of water.