Spirit and the Skull

by J. M. Hayes

  “Don’t forget what I said,” Takes Risks reminded me as Bear Man’s long strides separated us. Unlike his name, Takes Risks didn’t take the risk of following us to the Women’s tent.

  I nodded, lacking the strength to answer.

  “Down?” I asked Bear Man.

  “Much better,” he rumbled. “The Mother sent healing powder and wine. Gentle Breeze said washing the wound with wine might make things worse. So she and Down drank it. But Gentle Breeze made a new poultice with The Mother’s powder. Come and see for yourself.”

  He lowered me to the ground in front of the tent and Down opened the flap for me. Her eyes were clearer, though they flooded with worry when she saw me. I must have looked even more than my accumulated years. As old as death, perhaps.

  Down took me in her arms. Her skin felt warm, but it was no longer flushed with the fever she’d had. Ice Eyes had been right about the mold at least. It had begun to work its miracle.

  “Let me see your wound?” I said. Or maybe I only tried to say it. Down started untying the strings that fastened my clothing instead of hers. I tried to protest, but I can’t remember speaking. Down told me later I was asleep before she managed to remove my skins and tuck me between our robes.

  ***

  Bone

  I was in Ice Eyes’ hut again. He wasn’t there. The strips of cold flame were dark, the way they’d been last time. The cone-shaped light still glowed. The wine container stood on the floor where it had before I woke from my last dream of being in this strange and terrible place—just before Scowl alerted the band and I spoke to our council. That seemed so long ago in my world. So much had happened to me while only moments passed in Ice Eyes’ world.

  I sat on that slab of wood and waited for what seemed a very long time. Finally, Ice Eyes returned. “The little bitch got back to her people before I could catch her. Then my woman chewed me up and spat me out. She yelled at me all the way back up here. In front of everyone. What a piece of crap this day turned into.” He cursed after that, using words I thought must be exaggerations.

  What did he mean by everyone? I’d only seen Ice Eyes, Perfect Woman, and Second Woman. I tried to use my new vision that let me see beyond the range of normal eyes. Apparently it had limits. I could see nothing past the interior of this hut. I had a sense of other places and more people, but it was vague and uncertain. It didn’t matter, I decided. Other things did. I needed to know more.

  “How far are we from where you found me?” I asked. “From where you uncovered me with your digging?”

  Ice Eyes mumbled to himself and took another drink from his container. A long one, tipping it back until it was empty. He wobbled a little as he bent and opened a small but all too perfectly angled door. He removed another container exactly like the one he’d emptied, twisted the top off, and sipped from its mouth.

  “How far?” I said again.

  “What? Oh, sorry. Deep in my own troubles. They must seem like nothing to you, considering. But, where I found you? It’s not far. We’re just outside the cave. You were at the back of the main chamber at the beginning of a passage that had been filled with rock and earth.”

  “Show me.”

  “What?”

  “Take me out of here and show me the exact spot where you found me. Let me see this cave. I think I know it in my own time. But I have to be certain.”

  “All right,” he said, “why not?”

  I held my breath. Well, not really, of course, having no way to do that. I was bursting with terror and excitement. What if I hadn’t been found in Willow’s cave? What if this was some other mountain and my future still reached toward an unknown destination? On the other hand, what he was about to show me might confirm my worst fears. If he took me where I expected, death and I would soon meet and my soul’s final resting place stood all too near where I hoped my living body still lay beside Down’s.

  Ice Eyes carried me out of what I’d thought was a hut. I suppose it was, but I’d thought the space I’d been in was all of it. That wasn’t true. Ice Eyes took me into a tunnel inside a bigger structure. A perfect tunnel. What else? We passed openings that led off of it, the kind of exact rectangles I’d become accustomed to seeing Ice Eyes and the others pass through to reach the place where I’d first dreamed myself a skull. Ice Eyes stumbled past these, then put a hand on a rectangle at the tunnel’s end. He grabbed a round projection and twisted. The thing opened on bright daylight glowing off the face of a cliff only paces away.

  “Over here.” Ice Eyes pointed at a narrow opening in the cliff wall. The sun seemed hazy, our shadows not sharply defined. I looked up and discovered an eerie yellow sky across which a silver bird few high and fast. It was no bird I knew. It didn’t move its wings and they trailed smoke, as if its feathers burned.

  A strange fog hung over everything. Still, the mountain’s rock had a duskier hue. There were no lichens to cover it with color. The cave’s opening seemed different, too. Its outline wasn’t like The Mother’s cave I remembered. I felt a brief surge of hope as Ice Eyes bent and carried me inside.

  Mysterious lights dotted the walls. They shone down on the floor as if aimed. Trenches crisscrossed the space, making it unrecognizable. A flat stone lay at the bottom of one by the far wall. Its shape was identical to the stone on which I’d seen the wolf skull as Willow led me to the hidden chamber. That rock hadn’t been artificially shaped like everything Ice Eyes and his people made. It was natural, and thus, unusually flat and oddly circular…unlikely to be duplicated in nature.

  “There,” Ice Eyes said. “On that rock. Your skull was surrounded by a handful of stream-rounded cobbles, all of similar sizes and bright colors. I found the figurine, face up, propped so that its head lay in your right eye socket. The rocks formed a pattern. I can show you what they looked like if you want. Maybe you can tell me what that means. Oh, and you faced the opening to the cave, looking out.”

  I wasn’t interested in the rocks. “I see. Take me back outside. Let me look at the mountain. Let me see the tundra and the horizons.”

  “Whatever.”

  We went outside, exiting in front of the hut. Behind it should be the mountains and the ice. I couldn’t see them because the hut stood too close. The ground under us was perfectly flat and gray. Absolutely even. At the cave’s entrance there was stone and dirt—rocky, irregular, without grass. No mosses or bushes or lichens—just stones and earth.

  “If this is the place I remember,” I said, “there should be a path that circles up and around the mountain to our left.”

  “Yeah. Nice view up there.”

  The path was more or less where I remembered. It curved gently around and up, ever steeper. Like the ground between the huts, its rugged stone surface had been replaced by one that was smooth and gray. Every few feet a perfectly squared step took us higher. Someone had bordered the path with a wall that curved along what I assumed must be the edge. The wall rose, absolutely smooth, and high enough to block my view of the tundra. But far, far away, I saw mountains. Were they those I’d known? I wasn’t sure. In my time they’d been snow- or ice-capped. And brilliantly verdant in summer, which it must be since the sun shone and Ice Eyes hadn’t put on heavier clothing and still seemed warm enough. Where, I wondered, were the mosquitoes?

  At last, we came to the place where the trail ended. Where Willow had told me Mammoth Rider’s people once built a great fire in the mouth of the wrong cave. Over all the years I must have lain within, the shape of the mountain’s face had changed little. And yet it felt completely different. Rocks must have tumbled. Vegetation had died. Where I remembered flowers and berry thickets and lush greenery, now only occasional clumps of wispy, dry grass reached, without enthusiasm, toward the ugly sky. I glanced over the edge toward the tundra and my jaw dropped. Or would have, if hadn’t lost that, too.

  I had no idea what I was seeing. Beginning directly below an
d extending nearly as high as where we stood were…huts? Artificial constructions, but monstrous ones.

  When tundra lay down there, I’d have seen angular shapes in the ice wedges. Since we came to this country, I’d known the ice sometimes mocked rare items found in the earth. Like the crystal in my medicine pouch, ice could also be multi-sided. The ice wedges and my crystal were natural, but no two were exactly alike. What had been built at this place mocked nature. It consisted of squares and rectangles, many identical and all connected to one side or the other of a staggered rectangle, like limbs upon a tree, except this thing clearly wasn’t alive and never had been.

  “What is that monstrosity?”

  “It’s the central facility.” Ice Eyes sounded proud. “It connects production to separation facilities and the pumping station.”

  None of that made any sense to me. I told him so.

  “Look.” He gestured beyond the structure.

  I did, and was more horrified still. Out where I’d expected tundra lay a dry and dusty landscape. Completely alien. The sedges were gone. There were no animals. Nothing but long, snake-like things, many of them standing on legs that lifted them to connect to Ice Eyes’ central facility at a variety of levels. The snakes crawled everywhere across the landscape. And then I realized what Ice Eyes wanted me to see. There were more strange and terrible constructions out there. Some were much like the thing below me. Others stood like solitary towering pine trees, narrower at the top but many times taller than any pine tree I’d ever seen. All these unnatural things were connected to each other by snakes—a few big enough around to hold a man.

  “Holy Mother!” I gasped. “What is all this? What are those snake-like things?”

  “It’s funny you should use that particular expression. Some of our people still pray to a mother, though I think they’re addressing a different woman. What mother are you speaking of?”

  Ice Eyes might be drunk, but he hadn’t forgotten his profession.

  “Soon,” I said. “First, tell me…well, start with the snakes.” Snakes was the wrong word, of course. Like everything in this awful world they were artificial—too perfect to be alive.

  He tried, using words without meaning.

  “Simpler. Start again”

  “Under all this land there are great pools of…” He paused, trying to think of a way to describe the stuff to me. I saw it in his mind. And recognized it.

  “The shining liquid that floats on water and makes it undrinkable?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Sometimes it’s liquid. Sometimes it’s…” He stopped again, deciding how to explain. “People eat things that make them break wind.”

  “Of course,” I replied, frustrated that he’d changed the subject. Before I could try to get him back on the topic, he went on and I began to understand.

  “Have you ever seen that wind burn?”

  When the people were very hungry, an animal’s carcass might be thrown directly on the fire to cook before it was butchered. I’d seen such carcasses bloat, heard the eruption of their wind. It did burn, quite dramatically.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well,” he continued, “our lives are based on that liquid, or a liquefied version of its wind-like form. We burn it, to light and keep our homes comfortable. We make things with it. What you call snakes are hollow tubes, empty on the inside like water reeds. We force that liquid through them. Use it, or send it to others in trade for things they make that we find useful.”

  He stepped nearer the edge and again waved the hand that wasn’t holding me. “As far as we know, this is the last place on Earth where that liquid can still be extracted. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  He sensed how greatly I despised what he showed me. “I suppose the world has changed a great deal since you lived.”

  “It has.” I felt like gesturing, too, like pointing at the tundra. Instead, I directed his view inside my mind. “What happened to the tundra? Where did it go? Where are the ice wedges? Where are the animals? The great herds? The mosquitoes?” I made him see it all, including how this same place had looked when Willow showed it to me filled with living creatures. Then I let him see how The People lived in harmony with the Earth. I recalled all his questions about our life and gave him answers.

  “Oh my!” Ice Eyes said, obviously as shaken by the abundance of life in my world as I was by its absence in his. “There’s been an awful cost for all of this, hasn’t there?”

  “Where did it all go?” I demanded.

  “Our people sprayed a plant killer on this land before we developed it. Of course, it stopped being a tundra long before that. It’s a lot warmer here now. Has been for ages. Can you feel the heat? Maybe you can’t, but see how I’m sweating. It’s not because this slope is all that steep.”

  Suddenly, I felt the awful heat. Smelled the acrid stench of dead air. “I don’t understand. You killed all the sedge grasses? The willows? The animals? Why?”

  “Not me. I didn’t do it. It was…what would you call them? A clan that specializes in that liquid, I suppose. The woman you call perfect, it’s her clan. Of course the tundra changed long before they sprayed. Even in your time, this land never got much precipitation. What it got it kept, stored as ice and frozen earth. Lakes and streams and mud in summer, just above ice that never melted. Eventually, all the ice did melt and this turned into a grassland. Still some wildlife, but none of the great herds you remember.”

  I made myself look at the land instead of the huts and snakes. The streams were gone. Where there had been lakes in which I might once have bathed or fished, there were only low spots where the sparse clumps of grass grew a little thicker.

  “A long time ago,” he said, “we fought a war a very long way from here. Some people thought we’d win more easily if they destroyed the plants so The Enemy wouldn’t have a place to hide. It didn’t quite work out, but since then we’ve improved our abilities. When they built this place, dug down to those pools in the earth and connected our snakes, they sprayed so nothing whatsoever grew here. Now, some scruffy grass does. And a little cactus. They’ll probably spray again soon. We can’t have dry brush around or we might have wildfires. That’s way too dangerous.”

  “What happened to the animals?”

  “Change. People. There are a more of us on the Earth now than in your time. Maybe a thousand of us for every one of you. There are still lots of animals, but no wild herds, really. I know you had domesticated animals. Did you plant seeds?”

  “Some people carry seeds from one place to another so a favorite fruit or berry might grow where they move.”

  “Well,” Ice Eyes said. “We deal with our herds a little like your people handled those seeds. We grow them where we want them, in controlled spaces. We harvest them to feed ourselves. There aren’t many wild animals left.”

  “How did you persuade The Mother to allow this? Why hasn’t she swept your kind from the face of the Earth?”

  “The Mother? Oh, you mean the woman represented by your figurine. Mother Nature, we call her. We beat her, or tamed her a little. We have more control over nature than you did.”

  “What? You tell the wind when to blow, the rain where to fall? You have no floods or storms? The Earth no longer shakes beneath your feet?”

  Ice Eyes shook his head. “Not that much control. I’m sorry. Ours isn’t a world you’d want to live in, for all the fine artifacts and comforts we provide. You know, now I’m not sure it’s a world I want to live in either. Especially since you showed me…”

  He paused, rubbed his chin, thinking. “Actually, that’s why I do what I do. To know what it was like and teach my people to appreciate your kind and your world. How you lived. How you suffered. How you died. Because knowing that might encourage my people to question how we live, I may have trouble telling your story. The perfect woman and her clan own all this. She’s been trying to persuade me
to be quiet about you. If she has her way, your skull and tools and that beautiful figurine will end up in a private collection where hardly anyone sees them.”

  “So I’ll exist in a world without herds or hunters or prey? Where The Mother, who keeps us all in harmony, no longer exists? You’re saying I’ll spend eternity as a skull on display to perfect people who won’t understand I was once a living, breathing man with wants and needs? Separated from the woman I love? I’d rather die!”

  I laughed. I’d rather die? That seemed to be exactly when my troubles would begin.

  Journey to a Confession

  I slept for a very long time. They tried to wake me over and over, or so I discovered later. They couldn’t. I didn’t respond. Down finally persuaded them to leave me alone. To let me rest, but she worried about me.

  I wonder if my spirit was away from my body then, temporarily lost in that terrible, distant future. Or had exhaustion simply overwhelmed me? Were my dreams the creations of a damaged mind, or messages from the spirits that I couldn’t properly understand?

  I finally woke when Stone came and shook me by the shoulders. “Raven, come quick,” he said. “I need to show you something.”

  I struggled to untangle my mind and sort my dreams from reality. “Down?” I asked, confused. Shouldn’t she be in the tent with me?

  “She’s up and around already. And much better. The last I saw her, she was asking Gentle Breeze how to wake you. You slept through the night and three-quarters of a day. But you’ve got to come with me now. It’s important.”