Dance of the Tiger

by Bjorn Kurten

  “They did well,” said Left Hand. “Stoat’s a good man. He was a friend of Falcon’s.”

  “Then they decided to call in Stag and Skua. Stag was hauled from his house and charged with killing both of the hunters who were found with his javelins in their bodies. He swore by the Sun he had nothing to do with it. He said the javelins had been stolen. I’m sure he’d been coached by Skua. Then they asked him about Greylag and Falcon, and he swore he had nothing to do with that either. He kept asking that Skua be brought in to testify. So they started a search for him, but he’s disappeared.”

  “He probably ran away as soon as they found Badger’s body,” said Right Hand. “Most likely he’ll go back south where he came from. No matter, I’ll find him.”

  “When he knew Skua was gone, Stag broke down and blamed him for everything. He said Skua wanted to be Shaman and had enticed the others to help him. Stag himself had nothing to do with it. He swore again by the Sun and everything sacred that he was innocent. They took him back to his house and put two men on guard. Then they decided what to do with him.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Send him away,” said Fox. “They’re just kicking him out. They don’t want him in Sun Village any more. Everybody is against him, even his own woman. She says she hates him. The whole tribe is talking of leaving and starting afresh somewhere else. They say there’s a curse on the place.”

  It was Left Hand who found Stag the next day. He was unarmed, and seemed to have been wandering aimlessly all night. He looked shrunken, with red-rimmed, unseeing eyes. When Left Hand appeared before him, he stopped. Left Hand’s eyes bored into him, and although the Troll’s lips did not move, Stag heard voices. They seemed to come from a bush here, a rock there. They accused him of murdering Greylag, murdering Falcon.

  “I didn’t do it!” screamed Stag, suddenly defiant. “I didn’t! I didn’t! I swear by the Sun…”

  At that, there was a tremendous flash of light.

  Left Hand watched as Stag raised a hand to his lips, then fell to the ground. He could hardly believe what he had seen. A murderer and blasphemer had been struck down by the Sun, and lay dead without a wound on his body. He felt his own body shake like a tree in a storm. “I’m glad, I’m glad,” he whispered to himself, trying to overcome the terrible emptiness and fatigue that suddenly overwhelmed him.

  The words died on his lips, and the great crystal fell from his hand. His heart was telling him a truth as blinding as the flash of light he had wielded.

  He was at the point of confession and repentance. If you had given him the time, he would not have died. You had no right.

  Left Hand closed his eyes. His lips formed new words: “Father, great White father…”

  The piece of mica lay in the moss at his feet. There was a rustle in the wood, and Right Hand appeared.

  “Thought I heard someone call out,” he said. Then his eye fell on the dead man. “So you got him?” he said, with cold satisfaction. “Serves him right. Now we’ll settle with Skua.”

  BLACK CLOUD

  —à l’horreur, qui m’obsède

  quelle tranquillité succède—

  Oui, le calme rentre dans mon coeur—

  Nicolas-François Guillard, Iphigénie en Tauride

  After Stag’s death the brothers separated. Right Hand was grimly determined to take vengeance on Skua. Until that had been done, he would know no rest, and he swore to hunt the murderer down before next summer. But Left Hand was still overwhelmed by the emotions that filled him when he witnessed Stag’s death, and he wanted, above all, to find his White father. So they agreed to meet next midsummer at Watersmeet. Yet more than ten summers were to pass before the brothers saw each other again.

  The first stop on Left Hand’s northward journey was the last outpost of the advancing Blacks on the Salt Sea coast. The place was called Moon Village. To him it came as a great surprise, for that name had always figured in his people’s traditions in a most unflattering way. Perhaps that was a different Moon Village, somewhere else and in some other time.

  Like Greylag, many of the Sun Villagers believed that the Moon was an inferior deity. Its connection with woman was evident from its phases, which governed her bleeding time. The Moon Village of their fancy was populated by blunderheads and simpletons who had a woman for chief and a new-born babe for shaman. Everything foolish and crooked could be found in that imaginary Moon Village. In the first place, everybody knew that the Moon Villagers were inveterate thieves. In Sun Village you could leave your gear anywhere and find it undisturbed when you returned the next day, even the next summer. In Moon Village you hardly had time to belch before somebody had sneaked it away. A Moon Villager could do nothing right. If he went to hunt the mammoth, the mammoth invariably ended up hunting him. Nor did he know how to impregnate a woman. He chose the wrong orifice, so the children were born with feet in place of hands, or with heads between their legs, and had to be left out for the hyenas. Here, a sensible and helpful man could come to their aid and have his own pleasure out of it, as long as he took care to hide his things out of reach of the villagers’ sticky fingers. When a Moon Villager came to a stream, he would stop and wait for the water to flow by so he could cross. He would die of starvation unless somebody happened to come by and help him. He hunted the caribou in the summer, and went fishing for trout in the frozen rapids of midwinter. Building a house, he started with the roof and ended up with the cellar. He used the throwing-stick as a javelin, and the javelin as a throwing-stick. In early summer every Moon Villager went out to pick cranberries.

  The foolishness and incompetence of the Moon Villagers was due to their descent from the Moon rather than the Sun. To them, day was night and night was day. One had to pity them, and when an ordinary person did something silly, he had to swallow his vexation at being called a Moon Villager.

  Probably no one really took all this very seriously, and Left Hand in fact found that the people of this Moon Village were no different from his own. The children were perfectly normal, the Chief a skillful hunter, the houses well built. As for thieving, he had to admit that the only time anything had been stolen from him was in Sun Village when Skua and Stag took his javelin.

  Left Hand told people he was an itinerant shaman, and he was welcomed warmly. Moon Village had lost its Shaman a winter ago, and they wanted him to stay. He found himself in possession of a house, a woman, and also a name. The name came to him unexpectedly when he was asked about it. He was reluctant to let them know his true identity. There might be stories abroad, false stories about the Troll twins, arising from Stag and Skua’s brief reign in Sun Village. At the time he was standing at the center of the village. In front of him was its noblest ornament, two great shelk antlers painted with ochre. They reminded him of the triumphal arch at Sun Village, and without hesitation, he told them his name was Shelk. The name stuck.

  So it happened that young Left Hand, now Shelk, became the Shaman of Moon Village for two winters and a summer. He got on well at first. He had been old Greylag’s most brilliant pupil, and was really good at his work. The people of Moon Village congratulated themselves on having found such an excellent shaman. He had a profound knowledge of medicinal herbs and was a great healer. Sometimes the masterful gaze of his eyes, beneath their brooding brows, was enough to scare away the evil spirits. To see him speak to the spirits of the rocks and trees and receive their answers was a new and unforgettable experience for the villagers.

  The woman they gave him was the widow of the former Shaman, a few years older than he, yet healthy and able. There was one thing wrong with her, though: she did not give him a son, and this began to prey on his mind. As time passed, he got the feeling that people looked at him with pity and tactfully avoided the subject. He told himself that he was imagining things, but the woman, too, was unhappy at being barren. In the end Shelk decided to leave Moon Village.

  The Chief accepted his decision with sorrow. They could not wish for a better shaman, he said.
If Shelk wished, they would give him another woman. Yet Shelk had made his resolve. Perhaps, secretly, he feared that another Moon Village woman would be no better. When his plans became known, many Moon Villagers whom he had nursed to health came to him, weeping and bringing small farewell gifts. Shelk was moved and grateful, but nothing could shake his resolve. In the time of the melting snow he started out, going north.

  Again he felt that he was hunting for his White father. Once he found him, perhaps everything would be all right. He was no man unless he had a son. Satisfying a woman was not enough. Any blackcock in the woods was more of a man than he, but the White One far away would surely know what to do.

  Shelk now came to the land of the Trolls, the world of the Whites. He already knew their language, so ponderous and circumstantial, so slow-spoken and ritualistic compared with that of the Blacks. His first encounter was disappointing. Could these short, clumsy people with their pink skins and strange, large faces have anything to do with the white shape in his dream? He towered over them, and they regarded him with awe as one of the children of the Gods. Did they know anything about his father? They told him long stories of their ancestors, but he could get no clues from them. Could one of the White women give him a son? He stayed with the Trolls in their winter village and found that the women desired nothing more than to be embraced by a child of the Gods. He learned the art of love White fashion, the woman astride her man. Hope revived, but once more it was killed by time.

  When the sun rose high in the sky, the Whites broke camp. They migrated with the seasons, pitching their summer tents in distant lands to the north. He traveled with them, and when they stopped, he pressed on alone. Everything White came from the north: ice, snow, and in his mind now his father became a luminous, icy figure beneath the polestar.

  After years of travel, Left Hand found himself in the Land of Birches. Here, for the first time, he heard of the woman who was to change his life. Many stories were told about her among the Whites. She came and went like a cloud, so she was named for neither plant nor bird, but was called Black Cloud. The Whites looked at Shelk and nodded at each other.

  “Is she your sister?” they asked.

  Sister? Yes, they explained, she, too, was a child of the Gods, and she had wondrous power over all living things. She had been seen traveling with the caribou, her hands on their antlers. She had been seen playing with wolf cubs like children in the snow. When she raised her hand, the birds of the sky alighted on it, and she spoke to them in their own language. She was a Guardian of birds and beasts.

  Where to find her? No, they could not say.

  Thus Black Cloud became the object of Left Hand’s search, the destination of his journey. He moved from village to village, always asking for her. She was known everywhere. Yes, she had walked by, it might have been last winter; she was moving north—no, east, or perhaps south. No one could be sure. She came and went, like a cloud.

  Winters and summers alternated in the Land of Birches just as they did in the Land of Pines and on the coast of the Salt Sea. Here, though, the winter was longer and the snow was heavier. Living among the Whites in this country, Shelk learned more words for snow than he thought possible. There was a word for the kind of snow that formed a hard crust; another for the soft kind that took faithful foot impressions; yet another for the light powdery snow of the cold weather and for the big sticky flakes of the warm. There was one for snow with alternating layers of soft and hard. For the large-grained snow at the bottom of such a deposit, which was melted for drinking-water. The snow that blew into fine-grained and tightly packed drifts. The treacherous snow that fell on your neck from the branch of a tree or hid a pothole under your feet. The snow that filled the air, like a white darkness, in a snowstorm. The snow that swept thin veils across the open country under a clear light-blue sky. The snow that rolled down a slope in a growing ball, and the snow that slid down in a single massive sheet. All had their own names and their own spirits, as did the black and grey clouds, heavy with unshed snow. The Guardian of the snow was powerful, and you had better keep on good terms with him, just as you did with the Guardians of beasts and birds.

  Mammoths paraded across the snowbound plains on their migrations between the northlands and the forest in the south. There were solitary rhinos, short-sighted and surly in their woolly brown coats. The musk oxen formed a living wall at the sight of men; they would snort and stamp and refuse to break; no spear could penetrate their bony foreheads, but a skillful throw at the body might bring one of them to its knees.

  Roving lion prides came from the plains to the north. One grey autumn morning Shelk, almost dumbstruck, heard for the first time in his life the roar of a male lion. He watched the great predators hunt down a young rhino; they moved in tactical concert, and the confused woolly pachyderm was finally brought down by the onslaught of two lissom lionesses. The first to fall, though, was the great grey, black-maned lion whose deep voice he had heard that morning.

  There were creatures even stranger and more foreboding than lion or wolf, bear or hyena. Two black tigers crossed Left Hand’s path. They pattered on, tall and silent, without a look at him. Carrying their heads proudly, they spied as from a tower for bigger, worthier prey; and they vanished in the snow and the twilight like incarnations of the powers of the night.

  Once more spring came, and the birches, which had been standing bare and dead for so long, lit up with the tenderest of green. Still Left Hand asked for Black Cloud.

  By then word had reached her, too, of the stranger who had been looking for her so intently. The winds are generated by the clouds, the Whites used to say; now Black Cloud asked her wind to carry her to him. The leaves of the birches had just come out when they met.

  Left Hand saw a woman tall and brown like himself. Her hair was plaited and artfully coiled around her head, with a raven feather in it. She was younger than he had expected. Under her heavy brows so like his own, her eyes were merry and brown. Her broad nose bore witness to her ancestry, as did her full face, but her mouth had the sensitive lines of a Black woman’s, and her body, scarcely concealed by the short caribou-skin frock, was longer and more slender-waisted than the bodies of White women. Her feet were bare; her long legs, like those of the Blacks, were straight. Yet her skin was a light brown. He raised his own arm and saw the same color. Captivated, he looked at her.

  Black Cloud saw a man unlike all the Whites: taller, darker, broader-shouldered and narrower-hipped, with more masterful eyes than any White man. He too was dressed in caribou skin. He stood with his arms stretched out to her. His bundle and weapons had fallen to the ground. Every lineament of his face was familiar to her, incredibly and incomprehensibly. In all her life she had been the only one of her kind. Her eyes filled with tears.

  She went up to him, laid her arm around his shoulders, and said, “Come!” She pulled him to the nearby tarn. Together they leaned over its surface. There, side by side, were both their faces, each with the same incredulous smile.

  “You are me,” she said. She spoke in the tongue of the Whites.

  “I am you,” he agreed.

  Their eyes were reflected radiantly in the water.

  “Are you my sister? Am I your brother?” asked Shelk.

  “No, it is more than that,” said Black Cloud. “We were destined for each other when time began. There are none of us except you and me.”

  They looked at their reflections in silence. Then she said, dreamily, “Only now I know that she down there is I.”

  “She is you. Why should she not be?”

  “To me, she was always the water spirit. How could she be I? There are no humans like that. People are White or Black, but she who looked at me out of the tarn was neither. Yes, she did all the things that I did: plaited her hair, put the feather in it, laughed and wept; never did she make a mistake. Yet if she really was I, then I could not be one of our people. So I went away, leaving my human name behind. Now you are here, and you are just like me. Now I know that
I exist.”

  She pushed her nose flat with one finger, and the girl in the tarn did the same. Black Cloud laughed.

  “There you are: she is I. Up to now I have not even dared believe that it is my real face. Perhaps I had no face at all. Perhaps my hand deceived me when it felt it, perhaps I saw without eyes, ate without a mouth, heard without ears. Perhaps I and all the world existed only in my dream, or in the dream of the water spirit. But you,” and her fingers moved over his face, “you have eyebrows like mine, cheeks like mine.”

  “A beard, too,” said Shelk, smiling.

  She hardly heard him. Her hand caressed his forehead, nose, and mouth; then her own.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “They say you are Guardian of birds and beasts.”

  “What does it matter what they say? To us they do not exist any more. We are the Different Ones. And now there is no one else but you and me.”

  So it was, and so they wanted it to be, this summer and every summer to come.

  “My mother was White and my father Black,” said Black Cloud, “but I only saw him as a child, or in my dream, I do not know which. I have always been Different, and always wanted to be Similar. They called me a child of the Gods, but I did not want to be a child of the Gods. I wanted to be an ordinary human child, and I wanted to grow up into an ordinary human woman. That could not be, so I left it all: my tribe, my mother, my name. I told the water spirit, ‘Go!’ and I could see that she told me the same.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “I went to the animals. If I was not human, then perhaps I was one of them. I hunted with the wolves and traveled with the caribou. Wait!”

  She brought a skin and gave it to him. “Drink!” she said. He put it to his mouth and drank while she watched him, smiling. A strange, sweet liquid flowed into his mouth, and he looked with wonder at the white drops that fell on his hand.