by Bjorn Kurten
The four-footed beasts bolted in terror before them as they crashed through the forest.
So the story ends with Tiger’s trial and judgment. For the third time he was summoned to Shelk. The first time, he came to take his oath; the second, to receive a sacred commission. Now he came as an unmasked traitor and perjurer. When he saw all the people who had gathered at the Sun Pillar, he knew what awaited him.
There were Shelk and Fox, Viper, and all of Diver’s Company. There, too, were all those who knew his secret: Hind, Tern, his sister Godwit; Wolf, Beaver, and Glutton, with ropes around their necks; even Goshawk, gibbering with terror. Baywillow had been ordered to bring two witnesses from Veyde’s Island: Veyde and Silverbirch. Tiger met their eyes and nodded. He took off the golden wasp, stepped up to Wolf, and hung it around his neck.
“You know its meaning, Wolf,” he said, “and I have not failed you, however bad things may look now.”
Wolf frowned, obviously distrustful, and Tiger cast a questioning glance at Baywillow.
“The sign has been given,” said Baywillow cryptically, looking at nobody in particular. Tiger smiled. He pulled out the tiger tooth, which he had kept hidden under his shirt for so long, and let it dangle on his breast. There was a general movement, and something like a sigh. Everybody’s eyes were fixed on the white crescent.
Tiger crossed his arms and looked directly into Shelk’s face. Shelk raised his hand, pointing to the Sun Pillar.
“Finish it,” he ordered.
Obediently Tiger went to the pillar, raised his scaffold, and started to work. Under his knife the false wildcat vanished. In its place the shape that really lived in the wood began to emerge. Everybody seemed to hold his breath, hour after hour, while the sun rose higher, and Tiger worked.
Once more there was a collective sigh, as Tiger stepped down. The pillar was finished. Now it was clear that everything else formed only a background, a garland around the two animals at the top: the shelk, in the shadow of death; the tiger, rising to it in ultimate fury. The whole pillar was transfigured by the revelation of this center of power, so that even the Sun Globe seemed eclipsed by the suspense between the two figures.
“You can kill me, Shelk,” said Tiger, “but there I have won.”
Shelk passed both hands over his face in the gesture of the Whites, yet he still spoke in the Black language.
“The magic still lives in your hand,” he said, “but now I know what it’s worth. Your father was a notorious unbeliever whom we had to strike down, yet he at least was honest. You have fallen lower. With perfidious cunning you insinuated yourself among us. With a false heart you took your vow. You came to kill me, did you not?”
Tiger nodded. “Cunning and perfidy are the weapons of the black tiger,” he replied.
“So you have a compact with the Powers of evil. They’ve given you the art of confusing the minds of men with beautiful pictures and pretty speech. All the while you plot to destroy us all, as you destroyed our emissaries, with your unspeakable witchcraft. But it won’t happen. You have judged yourself with your pictures and your words, and now you shall die. Seize him, Viper!”
Shelk was close to Tiger, and his eyes flashed in anger. Veyde, who had not understood much of the foreign tongue, was waiting calmly, but Silverbirch trotted up timidly and pulled at Shelk’s sleeve. He began to speak, faltering, in his curious rendering of the Black tongue.
“It isn’t like that, O Shelk and Master,” he said. “No, what really happened…”
Angrily, Shelk threw him aside, and Silverbirch fell. His back hit a rock, and there was a dreadful rattle in his throat as his face went blue and he fought for breath.
“The Troll ox has broken his back,” said Beaver with interest. “Too bad. By the Mammoth, he was a brave ox.”
Veyde threw herself down next to Silverbirch and put her arms around him. “Dear Mister Silverbirch, are you all right?”
In the White tongue Baywillow said, “What he was trying to tell you, Mister Shelk, was that Tiger did not kill your brother. I did. I had revenge for my father, Mister Ferret.”
“You, Buzzard?” cried Shelk, almost choking with rage. “Are you one of them, too?”
“My name is Baywillow. I am Tiger’s brother.”
Veyde, meanwhile, was looking fearfully at Silverbirch, who was struggling for air. “Oh Mister Skylark,” she cried, “come back! Come back!”
The shadow of a smile passed over the old man’s face.
“He’ll come round,” said Glutton. “You see, he’s not dead yet.”
“Skylark?” repeated Tiger, surprised.
“Yes, that is his soul-bird,” said Veyde. “Did you not know, Tiger?”
“Skylark?” Shelk’s voice was filled with incredulity and horror. “Skylark was the name my mother took.”
“Yes,” said Veyde. “I have known it for a long time. But I did not want him to know. The grief would have been too much for him.”
“I’d say he’s as dead as a last year’s grasshopper,” said Beaver critically.
“That’s what you say, but you don’t know how tough these Troll oxen are,” Glutton argued. “I’ve seen—”
“No!” cried Shelk in despair. “He cannot be my White father.”
“He is,” said Veyde, now on her feet and facing him sternly. “You have bungled everything, Mister Shelk. You may even have killed your own father. What do you think you are? The Guardian of birds? Ha! A poor raven is the only guardianship you have. The Guardian of the caribou? Just come to Sunwood and watch them die. They are starving. The wood is ravaged and the caribou have nothing to eat. They die from heat. Why have you locked them in Sunwood? Why have you not left them free to migrate to the north and south? If they are the Sun’s cattle, as you say they are, then you are the Sun’s enemy, Mister Shelk. And why have you shut us up there, when all we ask is to live in freedom on our island? You have given us nothing but sorrow and misery. What are your warriors but murderers and bandits? They kill ordinary decent villagers, take our property, and make us slaves. We have to toil and sweat and starve so that they can fool about with their ridiculous feathers, thinking they are our betters. You are the one who allows all this to happen, Mister Shelk. You who call yourself the Son of the Sun! But your power is coming to an end. You do not know it yet, but so it is. With these hands we have destroyed it!”
And Veyde thrust her horny hands in Shelk’s face.
“By the Mammoth, that’s a Troll bitch for me,” said Beaver admiringly. “I don’t understand a word, but she’s talked herself into the heaven of the Trolls for sure.”
“Shut up,” said Glutton. “Don’t you see?”
Shelk dropped to his knees at Silverbirch’s side, took both his hands, and studied the old man’s face intently. Silverbirch lay with his eyes closed, breathing stertorously.
Viper, who had been looking from one to the other, now strode forth and lifted his spear.
“Shelk, as you call yourself,” he said angrily, “you are a liar and a traitor. You’re not the real Shelk, you’re his shade, risen from a stinking puddle. You’ve fooled us all long enough. You’re not the man who was like a father to me, who was my Master and shared everything with me. You sent that man to his death so that you could grasp the power yourself, so that you could fool about with the caribou—the caribou you can’t even keep alive!”
Shelk looked up and said in a low voice, “Black Cloud was right, She moved with the caribou. I’ve shut them up. A fool I’ve been.”
“And now you’re a dead man,” said Viper. “The power is mine. Tiger shall be my shaman. He’s greater than you are, but I’m the greatest of all!”
Fox attacked him, but for a man of Viper’s strength it took only a moment to strike Fox down.
“Why did I not find you in time?” asked Shelk, reverting to the White language, and still staring at the unconscious Silverbirch. “Perhaps you could have taught me…”
“He was the gentlest, most considerate man i
n the world,” said Veyde. “Perhaps he could have taught you that. Do you think so?”
“Perhaps,” said Shelk.
“Enough talk,” said Viper, also in the language of the Whites. “You are finished. Viper is the Chief of Caribou Lake, and Tiger is Shaman. From now on I give the orders here.”
Veyde looked at him with a grin. “No, Mister Viper, you are mistaken. It is the spirit of Caribou Lake who gives the orders, and now she is free at last. Listen!”
Viper started. There was a change in the din from the rapids; suddenly it seemed closer, and in the earth before them, there was a tremendous rumbling. The sparse birch wood shuddered as if from sudden terror. Then it started to move. The roaring of the water increased to a deafening thunder. Before their eyes the entire birch grove was snatched away, and an immense sheet of falling water came into sight. Shelk sprang up.
“The Sun Pillar!” he cried, and ran toward it.
“You won’t escape me!” roared Viper, running after Shelk with his spear raised.
The moment Shelk reached the pillar, it tottered, as the rushing waters dug in beneath it. It fell and was swept away, along with Shelk and Viper.
“Go back!” cried Tiger, stooping to lift up Silverbirch, who was still unconscious. He started to run, and the others followed, in a panic. Wolf, with the rope still around his neck, with only one serviceable arm, carried Fox. Hind tripped and fell, but Baywillow saved her, and they all managed to work their way up to Shelk’s solitary eyrie on the top of the hill. Behind them the Master’s house was swept away by the flood. The entire lake seemed to tumble in a tumultuous white chaos down the little valley. Not a trace of the War Camp was to be seen. The spirit of Caribou Lake was free at last, and its wrath dwarfed everything around it.
THE GUARDIAN OF THE TIGER
And all those who sleep, sleep, sleep under the hills are annihilated; Death itself is annihilated.
—Gert Bonnier, Del Oförklarliga
It was Tiger who had conceived the idea of digging a new outlet for Caribou Lake, allowing it to flow down into the valley, but Baywillow and Veyde had decided on the place. Veyde, with her Whites and with Miss Rosebay as second in command, did the work. It was a huge undertaking. They had nothing but sticks, caribou antlers, and their bare hands for digging. The work had to be done in absolute secrecy, so the ditch was covered with branches and moss to escape detection. Fortunately, all traffic to and from Sunwood followed a single path, which was untouched until Baywillow brought news of Shelk’s return. At that moment Veyde gave Miss Rosebay the order to break through. Then she and Mister Silverbirch went to the gathering at the Sun Pillar.
The results exceeded their wildest expectations. There was only a small trickle of water at first, but as they dug deeper the water began to detach clay and earth. At whirling speed, the trickle grew into a great waterfall, and Miss Rosebay and her people were barely able to escape it.
In the Gorge the flow of water subsided, and the following day it was as dry as it had been when Mister Cornel lived there, bare and rocky. Thus the caribou were able to use their old migration route again.
Of Shelk, Viper, and the Sun Pillar, no trace was ever found, though it was rumored that some of Shelk’s warriors found his body and divided it into four parts. When they set out in different directions to reach their old homes, each warrior took one part with him.
Wolf returned to Big Lake with Beaver, Glutton, and the men of Diver’s Company, who swore allegiance to him. He also took Tern, who was perhaps more enamored of the golden wasp than of Wolf himself. Thus she became a chief’s woman. For a short time Fox, too, lived at Big Lake with his family; later, they set out for the Salt Sea.
Wolf gave his daughter Hind to Baywillow, who had saved her life. Everybody thought it fitting that Hind should marry Ferret’s eldest son after all, though he happened to be Baywillow, not Tiger. She too became a chief’s woman, for Baywillow went back to reign with Veyde on Veyde’s Island. Through Tiger’s brotherly assistance, Hind and Baywillow were blessed with many sons and daughters, all of them Black.
Silverbirch recovered, and for years afterward he continued to set the standards of behavior on Veyde’s Island. He died in peace, without ever learning the secret of Shelk’s parentage. Veyde was grateful that Mister Silverbirch had been unconscious during her talk with Shelk. Not only because of the secret, but because she had been intolerably rude to Shelk. “Silverbirch would never have let me forget that day,” she said.
Tiger and Veyde had many children, who grew up tall and beautiful, star-eyed, indestructible, and strangely gifted. All survived to old age, but none had a child.
Late each winter, when the sun rose high and spring was in the air, Tiger went away for a moon or more, nobody knew where. Veyde may have guessed. With a knowing smile she would look up at the Sun Pillar that Tiger had erected on the very platform where the first Shelk had once besieged them. The pillar was covered with every animal imaginable. Above them all were a shelk and a black tiger, in happy, tranquil amity.
One day a Black hunter came to Blue Lake, which was now a White village as of old. He was frightened and confused by a mysterious vision he had seen in the forest. The black God of the village received him kindly, listening to his story with interest. It was indeed an arresting tale. The man had seen a monstrous shaman—it must have been the Guardian of the tiger himself—hunting with a retinue of young black tigers. The eyes of the fat God lit up.
“That shaman is my oldest guest-friend,” he said. “You came at a happy moment, my friend. I still have a skin of black wine, and I can lend you a bitch for the night. Don’t thank me, the gratitude is all on my side. You’ve brought me news of a dear friend.”
A thousand years later the ice returned to engulf their world, and the crust of the earth sagged under its weight. Even today, Veyde’s Island lies at the bottom of the sea.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have promised a solution, but before I come to that, a few words about the setting of the story. In the time between 70,000 and 10,000 years ago, much of Europe was covered by a great inland ice-sheet, radiating from the Scandinavian mountains. But there was a warmer spell, between about 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, when the ice retreated to the north, leaving much of Scandinavia uncovered; and the story takes place in this interval. The Salt Sea is the North Sea; the Great Water, or the brackish sea, is the Baltic; and the Land of Flints is southernmost Sweden, with its flint-bearing chalk. We know that mammoth and reindeer lived in Scandinavia at the time, so I feel justified in populating the landscape of Nordic forests and skerries with an Ice Age fauna. (The reindeer is called “caribou” because the Ice Age reindeer in Europe resembled the living North American form.)
The animals are described as they may have appeared to contemporary humans. More scientific descriptions can be found in other books. But there are three animals that play a major part in the story, and I’d like to say a few words about them.
You may be surprised to see the mammoth described as black. It is usually brown in life reconstructions, for that is the color of the fur on mammoth skins preserved in the frozen ground of Siberia and Alaska. But Kenneth Oakley thinks the brown tint results from degradation of the pigment, and that the mammoth was black in life—which, I think, makes it even more impressive. (On the other hand, these mammoths of the late Ice Age were not particularly large, as elephants go.)
Then the strange “black tiger.” It was not related to the living tiger, but belonged to the extinct saber-toothed cats. The scientist knows it under the name Homotherium, meaning “similar beast,” and a more inept name would be hard to find, for apparently it looked like nothing else on earth. Its shape is described in the story. Of course, we know nothing about its color, so I was free to make it black like its favorite prey, the mammoth. (How do I know about its favorite prey? A very proper question. In a cave in Texas, many skeletons of Homotherium were found together with hundreds of mammoth milk teeth, so we deduce that mammoth calves
formed its staple diet. One of the skeletons, by the way, had polydactylous feet.)
The “shelk,” finally, is the “Irish elk,” yet the animal was neither an elk nor exclusively Irish. It was probably the most magnificent deer that ever lived, and deserves a better name. This one is taken from the Nibelungenlied, where Siegfried kills a mythical “schelch.” I hope the name will stick.
Wherever possible I have tried to base descriptive details on scientific fact or reasonable inference. As an example, Tiger, when first viewing the sea, observes gulls with white wings. I think the species in that particular setting would in fact have been the common gull, or Larus canus. The black-winged Larus marinus may have been present too, but would have been much rarer and generally farther out to sea. At the present time there are three additional species of gulls in the Baltic, but I have reasons, different in each case, for suspecting they were not present then.
The story of Cornel and the flooding of the Gorge is puzzling enough to demand an explanation, the more so as Veyde’s recounting of it is hearsay and contains elements of myth. These are included to show that the story was a tradition embellished in its passage from generation to generation. (One detail, which I am not going to divulge, is a direct giveaway to an ornithologist.) But the main events are credible enough. The earth’s crust, relieved from the weight of the inland ice, was rising. This rebound was in general a gradual process but occasionally occurred as a minor earth tremor. The rebound was also unequal, depending on differences in the thickness of the erstwhile ice-sheet. As a result, lake basins were gradually canted and tended to find new drainages, in this case farther south. Thus, the original eastern drainage of Caribou Lake was abandoned, and the water broke south into the Gorge and passed through it, then resumed its eastern direction. At the end of the story, Veyde digs a new channel that allows the water to bypass the long loop of the Gorge.