by Yuri Rytkheu
“You must leave!” Kalyantagrau’s reply was strident and unequivocal. “Go into the tundra, into the mountains, until your soul is cleansed, until you feel yourself changed. And if that does not come to pass, you must leave life itself!”
“What, now?” Mletkin reeled, horror-struck.
“Now!” thundered Kalyantagrau. “Go now!”
In the impenetrable darkness Mletkin trudged slowly along the lagoon, heading toward the mouth of the stream, which in the autumn season of heavy rains swelled and flooded down into the lagoon in full flow. Barely noticing the water, Mletkin crossed the stream and walked upon the boggy tundra floor that slurped and sucked underfoot, up the slope of Linlinney – the Hill of Hearts’ Peace.
Something suddenly glimmered up ahead, like a winking flame at the door of a yaranga, lit to guide a late-returning hunter home. His heart skipped a beat and a wave of icy horror washed over him. Mletkin halted: was it possible he’d lost his way, and his feet had brought him back to the village? Another step and the possibility vanished as he almost tripped on a human skull, which glowed palely against the dark earth. Mletkin imagined that the glow came from within the bony sphere that once held a living person’s brain. Whose skull was this? A burial place was normally marked with a ring of small stones, none bigger than a nerpa’s head, but the tundra birds and animals were quick to raid the grave site, mingling the skulls and bones they dug up with those of the long-departed. No one visited Uelen’s burial site without a reason. Only in his earliest childhood, walking alongside his grandmother to the berry bushes in the tundra, had Mletkin had to quicken his step and avert his eyes from the blanched skulls, broken sleds, spears, bows, arrows, and the shards of household vessels that accompanied those who had gone beyond the clouds, as they passed along the side of the village graveyard.
Haltingly, barely able to lift his leaden feet from the earth, Mletkin pressed on, stumbling on skeleton parts and the stones that ringed the graves. The camp of the dead seemed better lit than its environs and, to Mletkin, bluish flames seemed to flicker from within the white, luminescent skulls. His heartbeat echoed in his ears with a thundering, resounding toll; a gripping terror froze his guts. A few more steps, and someone powerful, invisible, would grab him by the feet and drag him underground into the depths, where the bad people, unworthy of a place in the sky, eked out their afterlife in tattered, beggarly yarangas. Their hunting grounds were scarce of game, so they were always hungry, and always thirsty, too. Kalyantagrau, aided on his shamanic travels by a distillation of the fly agaric mushroom, had sometimes visited this underworld; each time, upon his return, he drank and drank, barely able to assuage a deadly thirst.
An eternity seemed to pass before Mletkin had finally crossed the camp of the dead and embarked on a steep path that led farther into the tundra.
As he left the place of blanched skulls and bones, thoughts of death beat insistently against his brain. According to lore, the dead person left his material body sometime after the funeral. The souls of those who had perished fighting an enemy, those who had dedicated their lives to the good of those they left behind, those who had lived a good life, helping the poor and the orphaned, those souls ascended to the environs around the North Star. There you could see the souls of Mletkin’s ancestors – Mlemekym, Mlakoran, Kunleliu – bright among the glittering spray of stars . . . Why had Kalyantagrau given him the name Mletkin? What did he mean by it? Was he foreseeing his destiny, sensing from afar that his, Mletkin’s, lifetime would see the breaking of time? But how would this happen ? And why would it happen to him, to Mletkin? If he had felt no divine inspiration then, on the crags above the walrus breeding grounds, surely it meant that he was not destined to ever feel it. And Kalyantagrau’s hopes that his grandson would be his successor had been in vain; the shaman had been mistaken.
It must be nice to be one of those who had found their destiny beyond this life. The life of the underworld kingdom may have been full of hardship and pain, but it would flow forever unchangingly. There would be no uncertainty, no false hopes and expectations. It would be the best of all, of course, to be one of those who had flown up to the stars. But there was no place up there for Mletkin, who had consigned his tribesmen to a winter of famine, had failed to placate the Higher Powers.
As he drew farther and farther away from the camp of the dead, his animal terror began to subside, only to be replaced by an equally overwhelming longing for rest. He wanted to sprawl facedown on the earth, arms and legs outflung, to close his eyes and to sink into sleep. Just not here on the cold, waterlogged ground. Up by the little river called Tehyuve’em the incline rose again; there the earth was less damp, and swathes of dried grass and blue-green vatap, or deer moss, blanketed the earth.
His thoughts knocked about inside his head, scattering in different directions. If he did not go beyond the clouds, or down to the underworld, would he have the strength to return to his native Uelen, to show his face to his people? Which was the better, death or exile? In his case, it would seem that death was preferable.
He often fell as he stumbled through the darkness. Once, he hit his knee on a jagged stone and a moan of pain escaped him. To his surprise, someone far away responded with a sad, plaintive sound, but it was difficult to tell whether this answering note had come from a human or an animal.
Now it was almost morning. Mletkin could tell by the way the air became more arid, and the way his fevered face felt the occasional gentle breeze, the kind that can rise up even in deep autumn, on the cusp of the first real blizzard of the season, after which the snow does not melt again until spring. It was as though the departed summer were sending back a last whisper of farewell: don’t grieve, I will come back again, the warmth of earth and air will return, will hurry back upon the wings of the wind. At last, Mletkin thought he’d found a dry hillock. He ran his hand over the ground and felt the dense carpet of deer moss, which stays dry even in a storm.
Mletkin sprawled on his back, flung his arms and legs akimbo and closed his eyes. It would have been a blessing to forget, to escape the thoughts that were rending his brain, to find a moment of peace. But peace in earnest would come only with death.
Mletkin had always had a particular, not to say unnatural, curiosity about death. Whenever it fell to him to assist Kalyantagrau in helping someone to die, he would peer intently into the dying one’s face, and each time he was just as astonished at how little the dead person resembled the living one. Oh, on the outside, the two were similar enough. But only on the outside. It was strikingly apparent that something internal and imperceptible was disappearing, something invisible but so essential that the body of the deceased suddenly seemed no more than a covering, the outer clothing of the person who had now passed into the unfathomable beyond.
Kalyantagrau had confirmed Mletkin’s idea that a person’s essence, his soul – kelelvyn – did not vanish but flew up through the clouds or else fell far down into the underworld, to live a new life, this time for all of eternity.
If Mletkin died, would his soul, too, fly from his earthly body?
A gray autumn day was beginning to dawn, the kind that does not have a sunrise but rather a sudden illumination of everything – the sky, the earth, and the air. Mletkin could now make out his surroundings: the east-facing slope that came gently down the nipple-top of the Pe’eney mountain.
There was no way back. And with the coming of the dawn, he found that he did not want to die. So what if his soul could live on in another world, if there was nothing of this world in that one? Not even this gloomy, unwilling dawn, when nature begins to glow with daylight from within. Nor these unexpected warm breezes, as tender as a mother’s hand on your face. There would only be a cold, indifferent world of eternity, but not of life.
Mletkin drifted in and out of a fevered sleep. At times he imagined, in a fever of fright, that his soul had torn away from his body and was soaring over the earth, climbing higher, ever higher.
Night came, and Mletkin stil
l lay in the same spot. He had risen only once, to go down to the stream for a drink of water. So far he had not felt hunger, only an expanding sense of lightness. His soaked clothing had dried during the day, and with the coming of darkness Mletkin once again fell into a dreaming stupor.
The voice came in the middle of the night. It was distinct and clear, though the words seemed to run together in the manner of Tangitan speech. His whole body rigid with attention, Mletkin focused on hearing. Suddenly, in place of Mount Pe’eney’s nipple-like peak there was an explosion of pink light. Then the glow changed to blue, and finally, a gigantic visage coalesced, covering fully half the sky.
“We see you!” the words came loud and clear.
Mletkin leaped to his feet. He felt no fear. Rather, he was astonished at the vision and the voice, though not so surprised as to disbelieve them.
“What can I say?” the young man exclaimed.
“You need say nothing!” the voice thundered. “You must act.”
Morning came, and despite the gray dawn and low-hanging clouds, to Mletkin everything around was suffused with an unearthly light, while he himself seemed to see with a different pair of eyes, unclouded, sharp, and farsighted. A glance under his feet revealed each unique blade of grass, each dry, dead flower stem, each pebble as a concrete, particular thing, the way he had seen the world as a child, when he was just beginning to perceive and comprehend it. The vision flickered in and out of his consciousness, but the voice was softer now, less forceful. Mletkin knew that from now on he would be able to call up these visions and voices himself, through an internal effort of will and concentration, and the realization filled him with a sense of freedom, as though some inner set of chains had been loosed. Whenever the visions and voices abated there came in their place a swelling of magical, soul-soothing music – a celestial balm that poured out from invisible, unearthly strings.
Mletkin did not know how long he had spent on the mountainside, by the bank of the Tehyuve’em stream. When he was hungry, he went down to the water’s edge and raided the winter supplies of tundra mice; digging up their store-mounds with his bare hands, he extracted the sweet roots they had carefully stockpiled for the coming winter, mentally apologizing to the mice and promising generous recompense, as both his grandmothers and his mother had taught him on their autumn forays into the tundra.
With the first snow, the frost easily penetrated Mletkin’s light summer clothes.
He set a course for the deep tundra, leaving behind Mount Pe’eney and the tiny Keniskun camp that straddled the Pacific Ocean shore of the Chukchi Peninsula.
Subsisting on the contents of the mouse store-mounds, the last of the cloud berries, and dug-up yuneu root, Mletkin walked on, charting his way by the stars.
He was very weak when, almost crawling, he managed to cross a half-frozen river and climb onto a high tundra bank, and see before him the white yarangas of Rentyrgin, Mletkin’s distant blood kinsman, the chief of the deer-people clan Mlakoran had founded so long ago.
Tundra Exile
Rentyrgin’s camp was the closest to Uelen. It was relatively small, only three yarangas strong, and all the inhabitants were blood relations. They were the descendants of Mlakoran, who according to legend had wrested a herd of deer from the neighboring Kaaramkyn tribe and settled it here, to the south of his own native Uelen.
Mletkin spent the first two days half delirious inside the tundra yaranga. Every now and again muffled conversations and someone’s ceaseless moaning, coming from a far corner of the fur-lined polog, intruded on his sleep.
One early morning, after he had thoroughly come to, Mletkin left the yaranga to relieve himself outside. Stepping out, he saw a world covered in snow. The snow cover was still soft, and his footprints left deep, dark stains through which the damp ground could be seen. The tundra hills were blanketed, too; all the hillocks looked the same now and there was nothing to snag the eye. The air was different, too. It was fresher, sharply so, and penetrated deep into the lungs. It energized, lifted the spirits, and made the world seem aglow with a new attitude, with inchoate hopes for the coming of joy.
The deer herders had accompanied their master on his rounds of the herd; only the yaranga’s women and children remained. When he returned to the chottagin Mletkin found a wooden dish of cold deer meat and a large tin mug of steaming tea awaiting him on a little low table. Even here, tea had become a usual thing, Mletkin reflected.
Cheivuneh, Rentyrgin’s wife, smiled warmly at her guests:
“Are you well now?”
“I’m well,” said Mletkin. “Thank you all.”
His clothing had been dried and mended; for his torbasses there was a new set of inner padding made of a special grass that not only absorbed moisture but also functioned as a soft and springy insole.
No sooner had Mletkin picked up his mug than a moan came from the depths of the polog.
“Who’s there?” he inquired.
“That’s my daughter, Givivneu. She’s been ailing . . .”
“Has anyone come to heal her?”
“We haven’t got anyone like that here . . . There’s no shaman nearby, and what Rentyrgin could do for her hasn’t eased her suffering.”
“May I see her?” asked Mletkin.
Strange, but he was nervous; nervous and growing inexplicably excited.
A weak ray of light seeped through the smokehole high above. Mletkin all but felt his way toward the girl who lay against the back wall beside a cold brazier, under a pile of deerskins. He touched her and she answered with a weak moan.
“Who are you?” the sick girl asked him softly.
“I’m the one,” the words came unbidden, “who has come to heal you.”
“Are you a shaman?”
“I am.”
“I’m so glad you’ve come!”
His eyes adjusting to the gloom, Mletkin could now make out a sweet, girlish face, smiling weakly, suffused with a fevered glow.
“You will get well,” Mletkin told her, “you will surely get well. But you must listen to me carefully and think about my words.”
Mletkin began to sing. At first his voice was small, barely audible, but gradually it filled with power and intensity.
If a wolf attacks the herd
Don’t fear, turn and face him
If a wolverine growls
Don’t fear her bared teeth
You are strongest of all things here
That may seem to threaten.
Concentrate your will,
Gather up your strength, throw aside your fear
And then you will keep your life
And the day will smile on you again
Life itself is the bright day of man!
Mletkin felt the words pouring in from somewhere outside himself, and his body rang with the melody like a taut string. Joy and energy flowed into him like a rushing stream. An astonished thought beat inside his head: “This is it, this is inspiration from above!”
His song at an end, Mletkin pressed his palm against the girl’s hot forehead and said, quietly but fimly:
“You will get well!”
He told Cheivyneh to lift the polog’s fur-lined front curtain.
The necesssary herbs had to be hacked out of the all-but-frozen ground. He dug the most important item – yunev, the golden root, possessed of great healing powers – out from beneath the snow.
Mletkin brewed the remedy and, when the girl had drunk it all, told her:
“Now sleep.”
“I feel so good,” Givivneu smiled. “Just don’t go far away from me.”
“I’ll be right here,” Mletkin promised her.
In the evening Rentyrgin and his elder son, Rento, returned from the herds. Glancing sideways at the raised polog as he ate his evening meal, he asked his wife:
“How is she?”
“She’s sleeping . . . It seems we have a shaman for our guest.”
Rentyrgin looked at Mletkin. He knew that the famed shaman of Uele
n, Kalyantagrau, was the young man’s grandfather.
“I’ve got a tambourine,” Rentyrgin told him.
“I managed without.” Mletkin smiled.
Having slept through the night, Givivneu awoke late in the morning of the day that followed and said she was hungry. But Mletkin allowed her only a bowl of thick deer-meat broth and a cup of tundra-root tea.
Wandering around the camp’s environs, he came across a column of wooden poles staked into the ground and marching off over the hills to the southwest, deeper into the mainland.
He walked up to one, removed his mitten, and ran a hand down the stripped, smooth surface of the wood. The poles had clearly come from abroad and had been worked with a quality instrument, likely one made of metal. Mletkin couldn’t begin to guess their purpose.
In the evening, Rentyrgin explained:
“It was the Tangitans who erected the poles. They were also supposed to string them together with metal ropes, but the work seems to have stopped for some reason. They were going to use the metal ropes to send talk between the main Russian camp where Tirkerym lives and the American big chief. And they also said, those Tangitans, that the earth is round like a ball . . .”
This was one of the major undertakings of the end of the nineteenth century, that pivotal century of technological progress. The telegraph line was to reach from Asia to Europe, crossing the enormous expanse of the Russian empire, the northeastern Arctic desert, and the Bering Strait, reaching the North American continent at Cape Prince of Wales. This plan was the brainchild of Perry Collins, an American commercial agent who traded in the Amur River basin in the far East. He had gathered massive financial investment from both sides of the globe and equipped a series of major expeditions. The Russian side of the project included George Kennan, a young American topographer and the uncle of a future U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, as well as the founder of the renowned Kennan Institute.