by Tom Deitz
Calvin swallowed hard, took a deep breath—and regretted it, for the heat seared his lungs. Sweat lodge for certain, then—as the beads on his skin were already proving. Could be worse, he added, one this big couldn’t get too hot—whereupon he squared his shoulders and stepped in. As was proper upon entering such structures, he moved left, described a clockwise path, and took a place to the right of the entrance. David followed by example, and Alec, after a flurry of hand signs involving securing the door flap, as well.
As so they sat in the northeast quadrant, bathed in a steamy, golden half-light, and waited.
Very quickly the chamber grew dark, filled only with the dim glow of the persistent embers and the sounds of increasingly vocal stomachs and nervous breathing. Occasionally an ember popped or hissed, or a red-hot rock split with an explosive crack.
And still they waited.
Unfortunately, the heat was increasing by the second, the air becoming thick and close; presumably because the smoke hole in the ceiling had been sealed. Already reality was shifting away as Calvin’s awareness focused on his senses, on his body and what it was experiencing. The sweat that had beaded him from the start turned to torrents. Streams of it gathered on his forehead and dripped into his lap, or slid like lazy waterfalls down his back, shoulders, and arms. Beside him, he could hear Dave and Alec stirring restlessly, and thanked whatever gods looked after him that they had sense enough not to act up. They’d been in similar situations before, after all, and had read at least some of the right books—or Dave had.
If this was what he hoped.
Liquid splashed onto his head—probably their own sweat condensing on the ceiling to drip back down. The air was beyond muggy: hot and dense, with more than a hint of tobacco smoke or resin incense wafting through it that made it doubly hard to inhale. He tried to calm himself, to take shallow breaths, to use as little energy as possible. He sought also to turn his awareness inward, away from the torments of the body to that place were his self dwelt, inviolate and secure.
Longer and longer, hotter and hotter; and Calvin found reality shifting ever further away. More than once he started awake, having drifted to sleep—or passed out. Several times he thought he heard voices or drums, or saw lights. But the reflexive twitches those instances prompted brought him sufficiently aware to conclude they were mere tricks of his mind.
Finally, however, he was roused by what he truly could not distinguish between heat on his skin, the twisting in his gut, the tightness in his lungs, or the throbbing in his head—and saw true light: a man-high rectangle to his right, whose glimmering surely marked an exit from this place of torment. And even as he saw it, he felt a breeze—a cool breeze—and with it came fresh, clean air. As he rotated his head to clear the stiffness, and breathed deep to fill his tortured lungs, he heard a voice.
One word it said—Uki maybe, or maybe not. And that one word was, “Come!”
Chapter III: The Warriors
(Galunlati—morning—high summer)
Calvin rose stiffly, saw Alec and David doing likewise, their faces grim and apprehensive beneath their sodden hair and sheen of sweat. He blinked—they all did—as he pushed aside the bear skin and half-staggered up the now-sunlit tunnel and thence back into—not the real world, he told himself firmly, but at least one more tangible than that inside his skull.
Asgaya Gigagei, the Red Man of the Lightning, awaited them alone outside the earth lodge, his face as passionless as it had been since they had entered Galunlati. It was morning, presumably the one following their arrival—which meant that Calvin was now officially late for his final go-round with the Willacoochee County authorities regarding the Spearfinger affair.
Not that he could do anything about it. Not that he even wanted to on a morning such as this.
The sun had barely risen, its lower rim still masked by the treetops to the east, and the air—blessed respite—was cool and smelled of honeysuckle. Wisps of fog wove in and out among the more distant trunks like misty dancers tying the night to dawn with cobweb scarves. Their clothes, however, were nowhere in sight, which neither surprised nor concerned him. “Follow,” the Red Man grunted, striding eastward, where an opening between two hickories marked the beginning of a trail. Having no reasonable choice, they obeyed, first at a walk, then a jog, finally at a steady ground-eating trot. At some point the Red Man began to chant: “Yo, yo, yo, yo…” Calvin hesitated at first, then joined in, Uki’s ban having been on speech, not obscure monosyllables. Apparently the Red Man approved, for he began to blend his tones with Calvin’s, and eventually David and Alec chimed in.
Fortunately, they did not have far to go—no more than half a mile. And their destination was precisely what the pattern of the ritual so far had led Calvin to expect. David knew it, too, to judge by the increasing confidence with which he moved. And even Alec, though still tense and edgy, looked marginally more serene.
It was a river. Not the wide one that thundered over Uki’s cliffside home, however; this one was no more than thirty feet across and, by the darkness of it, deep. Its banks were mostly overgrown with laurel, save where a strip of coarse-sanded beach marked the terminus of the trail. Calvin didn’t need to be told what to do next. With a final “Yo, yo, yo!” he darted forward to launch himself into a flat dive straight into midstream.
The water was far colder than he’d expected, and made him gasp and shiver. But even as the cold stabbed into his heat-slackened muscles, it likewise reawakened his senses and brought tingling new life to his skin. For an instant he foundered, then found his depth and trod water while he waited for the others to join him. David did, whooping loudly. Alec followed more calmly, but likewise showed a relieved grin. The Red Man merely watched from a round-topped boulder on the shore—and lit a long soapstone pipe with a cedar stem. The smoke was pink and did not smell of tobacco.
For maybe five minutes they sported there, silent as river rocks but, as they grew accustomed to the frigid water, enjoying themselves nonetheless. Eventually Calvin waded to the shallows, where he made a stab at scraping a day’s worth of dirt off his body and at untangling his badly snarled hair. When the Red Man motioned them back onto the beach, the sun had cleared the trees and was warm on their skin. And by the time they had jogged another quarter mile—still chanting “Yo, yo, yo, yo…”—Calvin, at least, was quite dry. Eventually he realized that their cadences had merged with a pounding of drums that grew louder as they approached the lodge.
But the place they returned to was not that from which they had departed—not hardly! Instead of a small clearing centered by a single mound, he stared down from a low ridge at an open area of perhaps ten acres, enclosed by a palisade of sharpened, head-high stakes. A little way inside rose the east slope of the nearest of the four-sided earthwork mounds that marked the cardinal directions around a flat courtyard of roughly one acre, in the center of which stood a single wooden pole, easily twelve feet high and capped by what was likely a bear skull. Each mound was maybe fifty yards on a side, and all bore on their summits thatch-roofed, wattle-and-daub structures that Calvin assumed were temples—assuming this was some sort of ceremonial complex, which it almost had to be. The presence of staircases leading up the mounds’ inner sides reinforced that suspicion.
He had never seen this particular place before, but it smacked of several historical sites in his own world: Etowah over near Rome, Georgia, for one; Kolomoki down by Albany, for another; Town Creek out past Charlotte, for a third.
But those were reconstructions; at least in part, this looked…not lived in, but perhaps maintained.
“This is Otalwatadjo,” the Red Man said. “The Place at the Navel of the Earth. It is the center of Galunlati. Enter Otalwatadjo from the East.” And with that he stepped into the woods and was gone.
Uki met them at the designated point—which was simply an overlapping of the walls like the entrance to a spiral. But where before the shaman had been simply clad, now he wore an elaborate headdress of white feathers
that looked like egret, with more frothy plumes depending from quilled and painted bands around his arms and legs, while a complexity of lesser ornaments made mostly of incised conch shell clicked and winked from his ears and nose, at his throat, wrist, and ankles, and among the waving feathers. He also sported a gray-and-white finger-woven sash. Wordlessly, though with a ghost of a smile, he gestured to them to follow. Sighing, they fell in behind him and marched (still keeping time to the beat of the unseen drums) up the southern mound.
It was not all that high, but the pitch was steep, and Calvin’s calves tightened painfully as he trudged up the split-log stair. The summit was level and grassy, maybe sixty feet on a side, and centered by one of the thatch-roofed buildings. A single opening faced the head of the stair. They dared it, entering a garage-sized room lit by four torches fixed to the four wooden pillars that stabilized the pitch-poles that supported the roof. A fire blazed in the center of the floor, fed by logs set along the primary axes, burning where they met.
Calvin bowed toward it, in obeisance to Sacred Flame, but as he raised his head, Uki stepped past him to pause before a low carved box of cedar wood set against the far wall. His body blocked Calvin’s view, but when he turned back around, he held a pottery jar the size of a man’s empty skull. “This is the fat of Yanu, the Bear,” he said. “Annoint yourselves until Yanu’s strength conceals every trace of your paleness.” Whereupon, he set the jar between the bewildered young men. It contained some sort of foul-smelling, red-tinged ointment.
Calvin squatted beside it, sniffed it, and winced at the strong animal musk. But this was no time for shirking. Rolling his eyes at his companions, he scooped up a handful and smeared it across his chest. It was disturbingly warm.
The next few moments were a comedy of nervous embarrassment as they slathered themselves from head to foot until they were gleaming in the flickering light, their skins now faintly scarlet.
Uki inspected them for a long ambiguous moment, then returned to the chest. This time when he faced them, he clutched three white leather bags, fringed with engraved shell discs and egret feathers. “Take now the first rewards of silence, of suffering, and of patience,” he intoned as he passed them one each. Calvin opened the drawstring that bound his and fumbled inside. His fingers brushed soft leather. But there was more. He sat down and rummaged about in earnest.
The first thing he drew out was his medicine bag; the second, his uktena scale necklace. Next came a long strip of white leather with thongs along either side that proved to be a loincloth similar to Uki’s, though shorter and less ornamented. There was also a pair of low, pucker-toed moccasins. He studied them briefly, then eased them on, stood, and secured the loincloth about his waist, noting that his friends had been similarly gifted. When they had finished, Uki nodded an impassive, mute approval and motioned them back outside.
The glare made Calvin squint, as they descended to the court at the bottom. The drums were still pounding, too: still invisible, but louder and with an indefinable note of celebration infecting their rhythm. Calvin couldn’t stop his gaze from darting from one mound-top temple to another. But nowhere could he see anyone save Uki, who stood like a strange white bird at the crest of the southern stair.
Abruptly, the drumming shifted tempo, and this time along with it Calvin caught a shimmer of voices: the high, clear tones of women. “Yo He Wah!” they sang. “Yo He Wah!” over and over, hypnotically. He didn’t recognize the language.
But he certainly recognized the singers! For just as the sun cleared the roof of the eastern temple, four young women danced into view from behind it, their slow, shuffling steps those of what Calvin knew from attending pow-wows was called a stomp dance. The first and last held turtle-shell rattles, with more clumped like barnacles around their ankles. These he identified with an impossible to suppress shudder as Uki’s sisters, the Serpent-Women (he’d heard no other name for them). Both were almost as tall as their brother and as white-skinned. They had black hair, too, but Calvin knew that it was false, that beneath their waist-long tresses their heads were as bald as pumpkins. They wore kilts of snow white leather, but went bare-breasted—and would have been impossibly enticing, had their mouths not been bracketed by the gaping maws of tattooed serpents, the bodies of which curved around those breasts to sting the nipples with their tails.
And the middle two…could only be Liz and Sandy, clad much like their companions, if somewhat more modestly, with knee-length feather capes fastened around their chests. And they really were singing, right along with the Serpent-Women. More to the point, neither looked at all uneasy. Indeed, Sandy, in particular, looked like she was having a hard time not grinning, as if she knew something Calvin didn’t—which she undoubtedly did. Liz’s eyes sparkled as well, and Calvin thought she looked fine indeed, with her red hair set off by the white feather cape. Dave was a damned lucky guy.
The worst was over, then—he hoped. Why else would Liz and Sandy be carrying on so, perfectly relaxed as they were?
“…Yo He Wah! Yo He Wah! YO HE WAH!”
Three final beats of a drum, as the women ranged themselves at the foot of Uki’s mound…then silence.
—Broken, from the North, by a jingling of bells.
Calvin nudged David with his elbow, and the three boys spun about—to see, standing at the top of the northern mound’s stairs, the disquieting figure of Asgaya Sakani, the Blue Man of the North. He was dressed much like Uki, save that his clothing and feather ornaments were the blue of lizard tails, jays, and herons, accented with discs of mica and incised slate. In his right hand he bore an arm-long length of azure wood Calvin identified as an atasi, or war club.
“Sikwa Unega!” Asgaya Sakani cried. “White ’Possum, whom men in the Lying World name David Sullivan! Is it you that stands before me, arrayed for war, yet weaponless?”
Calvin was relieved to hear David reply clearly, “Siyu, adewehiyu: it is I!”
“Sikwa Unega,” Asgaya Sakani continued, “was it you who came to Galunlati, where you had never been, and where your kind are no longer welcome, baring no weapon save a simple stick of wood?”
“It was.”
“And was it you who fought the great uktena that threatened the peace of Walhala? Was it you who, when your friend was wounded nigh unto death, ventured alone to the Lake Atagahi, where you fought Yanu Tsunega and won the water which healed that friend? And was it you who put an end to a war in the land of the Nunnehi that made Nunda Igeyi burn hot across Galunlati?”
“It…was,” David said meekly.
“These are the deeds of great warriors,” the Blue Man went on. “And by a warrior’s name should you therefore be known! Henceforth you will be known as Yanu-degahnehiha: He-Wrestles-Bears! May warriors in every Land hear that name and despair!”
And with that, he strode down from his high place until he was an arm’s length from David. “Wits are a mighty weapon,” he said. “But a warrior must rely on his strength of arm as well.” And with that, he passed David the war club. David took it awkwardly, but Calvin could see he was grinning like his namesake.
Asgaya Sakani studied him for a moment, then reached around and clamped his left hand briefly on David’s bare shoulder. David flinched, and his eyes widened, but he did not cry out. “Iaaai!” the Blue Man whooped, and withdrew, staring at David as if awaiting some reply.
“Iaaai!” Calvin yelled, to fill the nervous void, and because it seemed right. After a moment, Alec followed. Finally David responded as well. “Iaaai!” he cried. “Iaaai! Hear me, Asgaya Sakani, and all of Galunlati. I am…Yanu-Degaluiehiha!”
Calvin relaxed. They’d had no coaching on this, but as best he could tell, Dave had winged the right response. Or at least Asgaya Sakani looked pleased, before he turned and ascended the northern stair.
When he reached the summit, a second jingling sounded, this time to the West. As one they faced that way.
The Black Man stood atop the mound there: Asgaya Gunnagei, Chief of Usunhiyi, the Darkeni
ng Land. His loincloth still bore slick black fur, the feathers he wore were black, and his ornaments were of jet, obsidian, and raw iron. He too clutched an atasi.
“Tsulehisanunhi!” he shouted. “You, whom the Lying World names Alexander McLean! Is it you that stands before me arrayed for war but weaponless?”
“It is!” Alec said, far more forcefully than was his wont.
“And was it you who likewise came to Galunlati, though you fear to fare in such Lands? And yet you came, because your friends had need of you?”
“It…was.” Alec sounded uncertain, and Calvin had a good idea why, though this was not the time to think on such things.
“Tsulehisanunhi, was it your spear that slew the great uktena when no other weapon could? Was it you who felt the fire of its poison and well nigh died by that, so that I thought to have you as my guest in Tsusginai?”
Alec’s expression darkened. “It was.”
“And did you likewise master the ulunsuti, and thereby help restore Nunda Igeyi, and thus save Galun-lati?”
“I did.”
“It is good that you did!” Asgaya Gunnagi cried. “For by those acts you mark yourself a warrior indeed, and by a warrior’s name shall you hereafter be called: Uktena-dehi: He-Killed-An-Uktena! May warriors in every Land hear that name and tremble!”
The ritual that followed was the same as before. The Black Man descended, conferred the club, and clapped Alec on the back with his left hand—prompting a startled yip that provoked a frown from Asgaya Gunnagei before he whooped.