Wiglaff contemplated the feathers and grain on the ground before him. He gently laid the adze on top of his pattern. Then he removed the necklace with the dun red stone, and he gently placed it over the adze. He began to chant very low in a deep voice. The villagers echoed his chant. After a while, Wiglaff increased his volume, and the people, again, followed him chanting as he did.
Wiglaff fell silent. He gazed at what lay before him as in a trance. The villagers sat absolutely silent, watching him.
In the distance, the booming sound of thunder came from the heavens, and a breath of wind followed from the direction of the thunder. Wiglaff sat as if petrified in his trance. No head among the villagers moved. The thunder continued and grew louder. The wind became a breeze. Great clouds appeared, and forks of lightning flickered and more thunder sounded as the clouds rolled over the village. When they first fell, the drops of rain were fat, and they came as if deliberately. Then the rain became a gentle patter.
The shaman and the villagers remained frozen in their places. The sun disappeared from view as the clouds now covered the heavens, and the lightning crisscrossed the clouds and jagged to the earth repeatedly. The darkness caused by the clouds was punctuated by the flashing of the lightning.
The shaman was revealed as if he were a flashing statue in the silver light of the lightning, and the rain now came in a torrent that turned the tableau in front of Wiglaff into a nest of floating feathers and grain against a muddy background with a dripping adze and dun red stone. The crash of lightning was deafening, and the village square and all the people assembled there were drenched, the excess waters running in channels towards the grid of irrigation channels in the freshly planted fields. Frightening as the booming thunder and electric ribbons of flashing fire were, the shaman and the people knew they were natural and necessary parts of the ritual.
As the storm clouds passed over, taking the lightning with them, Wiglaff continued to gaze at the adze and stone as the rain subsided and returned to a gentle patter. Water ran from every hut in the village, and the sounds of water dripping and running continued even after the rain from above had ceased entirely.
In the silence Wiglaff now rose, restoring the necklace to his neck and the adze to his right hand. With the dun red stone in his left hand, he strode back to his hut. Behind him he heard the villagers rise and scuffle through the mud to their huts. Everyone would now have to plug the leaks from his roof. The women would have to prepare the noon meal. From this point the shaman would be invisible because his job had been accomplished.
Wiglaff wrapped his adze in deerskin and stowed it in the special corner of his hut. Holding his dun red stone, with its wolf skin thong still hung around his neck, Wiglaff walked out of the village in the direction of the mountain to find his mentor.
Winna saw her brother Wiglaff leave the village and shook her head. Though Wiglaff was her kin and closest male friend, for her the ways of her shaman brother were difficult for her to understand. Their mother Onna had been set against Wiglaff’s becoming Ugard’s pupil, but Wiglaff’s father had died in the village wars, and Wiglaff was determined not to follow in his father’s footsteps and end up dead for no good reason as his father had done.
The shaman has been a better father to him than Wiglaff’s father ever was. For that matter, Winna reflected, Ugard has been better for the whole family, and not only because he’s part of the clan, but also because once Ugard was in love with Onna before she spurned his advances and instead of him chose a warrior as her mate.
A good watcher and, in any event, her mother’s oldest daughter, Winna noticed that her mother longed for something that she didn’t have and wouldn’t ever speak of. She guessed that Onna regretted her choice of a mate and wished she could make amends with Ugard somehow and bring him into her hut.
Wiglaff found Ugard at the resting point in a cavern halfway to the summit of the mountain. The shaman had collected stones and feathers during his climb, and he had taken shelter in the cavern just before the rains began. Now Ugard was meditating before a geometrical inscription he had made on the ground within the cavern.
“You’ve done well, my son. You brought the village rain. The crops won’t fail because of you.”
“You mean because of the dun red stone, Master. It was the stone, not I, that did the magic. Why did you leave us? I was terrified to have to proceed to do the ritual alone. I was afraid the magic wouldn’t work.” Even though the ritual ended well, Wiglaff was visibly upset with Ugard for abandoning him.
“That’s precisely why I had to leave. Now you know you are a shaman. You could have learned that in no other way. Charlatans might pretend to do the magic in the proper order, but the only way to avoid the curse of the adze is to have the proof in your heart that you are the shaman. The villagers would have killed you with your own adze if the rains had failed to come. It’s happened more often than I like to recall.”
Wiglaff had a queasy feeling in his stomach, thinking about what would have happened if he had failed. “So what about the dun red stone that I hold in my hand?”
“The stone is important, yes, but you are more important by far.”
“Now I’m confused. A village needs only one shaman. You are that person. I suppose I’ll have to leave and find another village.” This was the first time Wiglaff had truly seen himself as a shaman in his own right. Before, he had been only an apprentice. That being so, why would a village need more than one such man?
“Now that you know what you are and what you can do, what do you want to do with your powers?”
“Make my village safe, make the crops come every year, make my people fruitful and healthy. You know.”
“You now see why I must change my role and you must take the role of shaman. I mentored you so that this day might come. Your father was my friend and so was your mother. When you were an infant, your parents saw that you weren’t going to be happy as a warrior and that you’d be vulnerable because you couldn’t give the warrior life your full attention. So when I asked them whether I could take you as my successor, they acquiesced in your coming to me. I felt honored to be the teacher of a natural shaman, the like of which I never was.” He looked upon his pupil with pride while he said this, his glowing praise suggesting Wiglaff would become greater than himself.
“So now what will you do?”
“Sit down and give me time to talk this through. Much depends on your permission.”
“My permission? You can do whatever you want to do. What could I possibly give you permission to do that you can’t just do without it?”
He hesitated and took a deep breath. Then he said, “I wish to marry Onna, your mother. You’re the oldest male child in your family, and only you can give permission for your mother to marry.”
With wide eyes and his mouth hanging open, Wiglaff said, “I’m stunned. You’ve surprised me many times before. Why would you possibly want to marry Onna, I mean my mother?”
“It’s because I’ve always loved Onna from the moment I first laid eyes on her. Before your father won her as his bride, I thought she and I were destined to be married. When she spurned me and married your father, I was thunderstruck. I thought I had power, but in love I had none.” The shaman sounded heartbroken. “Love, however, has its own form of power, so I never stopped loving Onna. Whatever came from her, I was destined to love also. You, for example, I have loved as if you were my own son from the time of your birth.”
“Ugard, are you really my father?”
“I wish I were, but I’m only your mentor, and I love you as if you were my own son.” He sounded both wistful and regretful.
Wiglaff stopped to reflect on what had happened. Dwelling on the matter, he decided he fully accepted Ugard’s proposition without any misgivings. “So how do we proceed now that I know what you want?”
“Go to your mother and ask her whether she will accept my offer of marriage. If she won’t, then I’ll find another village or become a hermit on this mounta
in. I’ll live alone in this cavern.”
“As you can probably guess, I’ll have to ask Winna and my other siblings about this matter, since we all keep the memory of our father foremost in our minds.”
“Yes, that would be good, and the village elders will have to approve as well. I can help with them. My contention is that a village can prosper twice as well with two shamans. I could serve as your backup.” Ugard said this with an ironical smile.
“Master, I have the feeling that you aren’t telling me everything. What are you hiding from me?” He was hurt Ugard had been keeping secrets from him, but he could not speak in a sharp or assertive tone to his master.
“Wiglaff, I fear things that have not been revealed to me. The village wars were only revealed to me just before they began. I sincerely wish I’d known about them before they were upon us. I might have done something to prevent the bloodshed. Now I have an intuition that something far worse than those wars will come to plague us. What’s coming, I don’t know. Perhaps together we can puzzle out whatever is to come. I believe that we’ll be facing something far more complex than making rain and keeping disease and pestilence from destroying our crops. Have you had any such inklings?”
Wiglaff ruminated on Ugard’s words and nodded thoughtfully before responding.
“I’ve heard that a giant army is marching through the villages far to the south. The army has slaughtered and razed each village without mercy. None of our defenses can avail against the arms and numbers of this enemy. No magic seems to work, and no natural features between them and our village will impede them. I don’t believe there’s a greater threat than this.” He was struck with fear about what this army could do to their village.
“You may be right, but I’ve not completed your training. Together we may find a way to deal with this threat and many others. First, discover whether Onna would be willing to marry me. Then we’ll see about defeating this almighty army far to the south. Meanwhile, I’ll wait for you right here in this cavern.”
Wiglaff returned to the village and told his mother and sister what Ugard proposed. Onna burst into tears and wrung her hands with joy. Winna was overjoyed for her mother and supported Ugard’s proposal without reservation. Wiglaff’s other siblings were happy that their mother might have friendship while she aged, but they found the idea of their mother marrying a shaman difficult to comprehend.
“Brother,” Winna said, “how do you feel about this development?”
“I’m as surprised as you, but I’m glad for our mother, and I’m also glad that Ugard won’t have to find another village. If our village elders permit this match, we’ll be the only village with two shamans. Ugard is right that we’ll need more than one shaman to face what’s coming. I’m sorry that I can’t find anyone who is worthy of marrying you, for you’re the one who most deserves to have a proper mate.”
Winna bristled at her brother’s suggestion. She was not eager to marry quickly, though from time to time she had secretly wondered whether a hero might appear and capture her heart. She was not going to marry just anyone after all. Nothing her brother or mother said would change her mind about that. Her mother Onna’s happiness was another matter entirely.
As soon as Wiglaff arranged for the elders’ approval, Ugard came down from his cavern and moved into Onna’s hut, and immediately after that Ugard and Wiglaff began working on a strategy to defeat the approaching enemy. So as not to disturb the villagers with their planning, they conferred daily in the cavern halfway up the mountain path. Perhaps because they worked on the mountain, their plan evolved to include the mountain with its cavern as their village’s best defense against the threat. They channeled the rainwater that fell on the mountain into natural and man-made pools to withstand a siege. When the crops were ready, they stored extra grain in the cavern. They fashioned spears in large numbers and stored them in the cavern also, and they studied ways that they could scatter and hide sharp stakes that would menace a climbing army.
Winna was concerned that the two men spent so much time in the cavern planning, so she brought them food and joined their discussions. She suggested stockpiling large stones to hurl down on the enemy and creating false paths that would lure soldiers but give way and send them into traps with pointed stakes, upon which they would become impaled. She also had ideas about concealment and horror. She volunteered to recruit young women to join their forces, and she took charge of their training because she had a warrior’s soul and the natural leadership to command respect among her peers. Wiglaff was impressed by her spirit and activity. Ugard began thinking about how they might engage young women like Winna in the other villages that were threatened, starting with those closest to the mountain. So it was that Winna became the liaison among the ten villages whose people were most threatened, and she recruited a dozen women like herself who were not afraid of combat or the rigors of warrior training.
Onna supported Winna’s efforts by reassuring the parents of her daughter’s recruits and enlisting their help in drying foods like cherries, plums, grapes and apples that could be used on the mountain during a siege. Onna suggested experimenting with poisons that could be used to apply to the tips of stakes so that if the stakes did not kill the enemy, the poisons on them would do so. Ugard developed sharp, short standing stakes that could be planted just under the surface of the earth so unsuspecting soldiers would step on them and die from the poisons on their tips.
The stockpile of throwing stones grew to such proportions that Wiglaff began to consider how they might be used for other purposes than throwing. He brooded on how he could build wooden rafts that could be mounted high on the mountain and filled with stones so that when their supports were removed, the stones would fall upon climbing enemy attackers. He also excavated within the cavern and hollowed out hiding places for eight warriors who could wreak havoc if the cavern should ever be overrun. With Winna’s help, he also fashioned hiding places all over the outside of the mountain and so deftly covered them with camouflage that they could not be discerned even at very close quarters.
The bumper crops for that year made stockpiling food for the siege easy. Winna’s women warriors fashioned two thousand sharpened staves that would serve as spears. Each was tipped with Onna’s poison, so they were lethal. Half of the staves were stored in the cavern, and half were stored at a new site near the summit of the mountain where, Winna said, a last desperate defense could be mounted.
Ugard and Wiglaff defined the broad strategy: make the village an easy conquest that was littered with small traps with poisoned stakes. Then take the fight to the bottom of the mountain, where defenders on the ground would retreat upwards and remain under the over watch of villagers stationed above them right up to the cavern. All the paths would be undermined with poisoned stakes, so the attackers would have to watch where they stepped while they dodged stones and spears coming from above. The siege would begin before the enemy could seize the cavern, and it would continue indefinitely, though the enemy would want to isolate the mountain and continue attacking farther north.
“All our planning depends on two major assumptions,” Ugard said one day. “The first is that the enemy would be continuing with momentum and bravado from its former exploits. It won’t have met any opposition strong enough or crafty enough to be troublesome. So the enemy will feel invincible. That’s good for us because hubris will lead to a fall. The second is that we have predicated our planning on uniformly fair, not foul, weather. So if the weather is exceedingly bad, we’ll have an advantage that the enemy hadn’t foreseen.”
“And that’s where our shamanistic powers can make a difference?”
“Good for you—precisely so. And if we work our magic early, the advancing enemy will have to suffer through the evil weather long before they reach our village, and they’ll have to slog through rain and mud and mudslides while they’re here trying to defeat us. If Winna and her warriors can fight an insurgency in the rain, we’ll be able to demoralize the enemy early an
d keep them guessing.”
“We’ll make our booby traps general in all our allied villages. All Winna’s warriors will engage the enemy as far away from us as possible. My estimation is that we’ll have another two weeks before the enemy reaches the outskirts of our alliance. So we should invoke the rain right now, and we’ll do so with the power of two shamans. When the rain begins, we’ll pull back all but warriors from the villages and send them farther north, where they can lodge with friendly tribes while we wage war. We’ll also begin our booby-trapping around the southern edge of all villages along the enemy’s line of advance.”
“I’ve been working on a little something that might help as well. What do you think of this?” Ugard unveiled a compartment in the cavern where he had stowed one hundred and eight talismans, each a wolf-skin thong necklace with a red dun stone just like Wiglaff’s on it. Ugard took one and put it on his neck, and he gave one to Onna and each of her other six children. He distributed the others to Winna’s warriors and the remaining villagers.
Ugard said, “Now prepare the village square with positions for two shamans and gather the villagers. We’re going to make a lot of rain, and everyone must help.”
When the square had been prepared according to Ugard’s instructions and the villagers had all assembled around the square, Ugard gave a speech that was uncharacteristic of him. In his prior rituals, he had proceeded in silence. This time because of the gravity of his effort, he wanted to be sure that the villagers understood what was happening.
“As you all know, we’ve been preparing for conflict with a vicious army coming from the south. They’ve overrun and killed or enslaved every village they have encountered. They think they’re invincible, and most of the other villagers in our region think there’s no hope of defeating them. Those who despair are wrong. We can and shall defeat this enemy army. We’ll defeat them for three reasons they can’t predict. First, we’ve made preparations to make these savages feel vulnerable before they ever get here.”
The WIglaff Tales (The Wiglaff Chronicles Book 1) Page 5