Shaman

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Some of the men in the relief carried staffs topped by the same fat crescent or fan Ets-eket’s sported. She supposed they could be weapons of some sort. She was honest enough with herself to recognize that she didn’t want to see war helms and weapons because that’s what Burton saw.

  She sighed. Bias made objectivity tough.

  “This is amazing,” Rhys murmured. “There’s actually still a tiny bit of pigment left in these. The state of preservation is... exquisite.”

  “The elements on Etsatat are merciful,” said Tzia. “The forest root systems have done the most damage.” She shifted so Rhys could see the four foot section to the left of the central figure.

  Rhys scooted closer. “Looks like a wagon train. Goods for the god?”

  Tzia affected the Xthni equivalent of a smile. “We’re not exactly in agreement on this one. When Dr. Burton looks at it, he sees a train of tribute and an army of sacrificial victims or slaves.”

  Rhys studied the two slabs for a moment. “What do you see?”

  Tzia hesitated, her neck frill rippling with thought, then said, “I’m not certain. But I don’t see slaves or victims. Where are their manacles? And notice that they seem to be wearing the same basic clothing... uniforms, one might say—that their so-called guards are wearing.”

  Rhys nodded. “Except for the crested helmets and staffs.”

  Tzia’s head rose and fell. “Not only that, but those staffs look like dreadfully ineffective weapons. More like... ceremonial objects, symbols of power or rank.”

  “How does Professor Burton explain the anomaly?”

  “There’s no anomaly to explain,” said Burton’s voice from the scaffold ladder.

  Tzia jumped guiltily, her sagittal frill flattening, and moved to put Rhys and Yoshi between herself and the older archaeologist. Burton pulled himself up onto the platform, his face a furious red.

  “Tzia’s mistake is that she has read the symbolic as literal. She tends to view archaeological evidence in the same way many people read mythology or scripture. How many different literal interpretations of the Revelation of Saint John existed before hindsight rendered interpretation irrelevant? No, we must read this as we would read any religious script. To do otherwise would be to stumble into lazy and simplistic thinking. This is the symbolic record of a primitive people. If you want to see the meaning of the group, look to the representative figure.” He rapped Ets-eket’s stone kilt with the tips of his fingers. “Here is your warrior-king, armed with spear and scepter. Here is your man-god, wearing the crown of lordship. I’d appreciate it, Tzia, if you would leave the search for archaeological truth to those uniquely qualified to perform it—those with the human quality of imagination.”

  Neck frill rigid, sagittal frill completely collapsed, Tzia dipped her head in a gesture of defeat. Appalled, Yoshi glanced at Rhys. For the second time that morning, his face and hair matched.

  “Professor Burton,” he began, but the older man cut him off with a gesture.

  “Come, Rhys. They’ve made another find in the Chapel.” He had gone over the edge of the scaffolding before anyone could react to the news.

  Rhys glanced apologetically at Tzia. “I’m very sorry. I... I thought your commentary was perfectly reasonable.”

  Tzia offered a thin-lipped Xthni smile. “Thank you. But you should not let Professor Burton hear you say that. He... does not like my unlaundered ideas.”

  Rhys frowned and opened his mouth—possibly to ask what she meant—but Burton interrupted from below. “I say, Llewellyn! Are you coming or not?”

  He gave Tzia another apologetic look hurried down the ladder.

  “What did you mean,” asked Yoshi, as they watched the two men disappear beneath the arching gate, “unlaundered ideas?”

  Tzia uttered a sigh that needed no translation. “When first we saw what this relief depicted, it was yet early in the dig. I did not then know it was wise to... advance my theories through Professor Deer-Walks-Here. Now, I am more careful.”

  “But surely Professor Burton respects your skills, otherwise he wouldn’t have included you on his team.”

  Tzia’s laugh was a thin trill of sound. “He respects Nyami. For his dig, Nyami, he must have. I, Nyami, must have. So, to get Nyami, he gets me.”

  Yoshi caught up with the others in the large rear room of the Chapel. Rick sidled up to her, a puzzled expression on his face. “You all right? You look like the bluebird of doom.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What happened up on that scaffold? Rhys looks like he ripped his favorite kilt, and Burton’s all red in the face.”

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” Yoshi murmured. “What’d they find?”

  “Looks like their first real treasure trove.”

  It did indeed. The abundant coinage was rectangular and cut from some soft stone. The diggers had found it in a deposit in the far corner of the room, where Rhys and Burton were already hunkered down between photonic grid lines. Next to them, the three diggers assigned to the room stood and beamed. A fourth worker recorded everything with a holocam.

  Burton’s pale eyes were exultant as he held two of the coins up for the camera. “As you can see each one is embossed with the image of Ets-eket on one side and a sacrificial altar on the other. Further evidence of his pervasive force in this society.”

  “Looks almost like jade,” murmured Rhys, turning a piece over in his hands. He ran an exploratory finger over the sculpted surface, noting the neatly cut hole in the center of Ets-eket’s headdress.

  There was more. Further digging unearthed what appeared to be a calendar. It had four rows of nine squares each; most squares embossed with one of three symbols—the tower with what appeared to be a flame dancing atop it, a rectangle that looked like a wagon with spoked wheels, and a second rectangle which may have represented an altar, as Burton suggested, or anything else that was rectangular in shape. At the top of the stone slab was one of the ubiquitous carvings of Ets-eket. The symbols appeared in regular alternating order, except for the last three squares of each row, which contained circles.

  Burton was thrilled with the discovery. “To find a religious calendar of this type is extraordinary luck. This will tell us much more about the nature of the religion practiced here.”

  o0o

  The day continued to go well for the archaeologists. By evening, the team working in the quartet of pits along the southern wall reported that the detritus was exceptionally full of humus and animal bones abounded. Outside of these areas, bone finds were limited to partial skeletons or the carcasses of local vermin. The character of the bones was also of interest; most of them had been broken, many had even had the marrow removed and a great many more showed definite gnaw marks and cuts. Meanwhile, the team in Temple One turned up an incredible variety of ceramic—pieces of plates, bowls, ewers and cups from the plain to the ornate.

  “I think we’ve found the banquet hall of an Etsatat Henry the VIII,” joked one of the diggers.

  The evening meal was taken in an air of celebration. Everyone, Rhys included, basked in the glow of discovery. As the glow faded and exhaustion from the busy, discovery-filled day took over, Rhys excused himself and went to the Finds tent. Yoshi was already there, poring over coins and calendar in the steady glow of the camp lights in the empty room. Rhys sat down opposite her at a sorting table, watching her make notes in her field journal. Eventually, he began a lazy examination of the calendar.

  “Rhys?”

  He raised his head. Yoshi had laid five coins in a row before her and was studying them intently. A sixth stone rectangle was in her hand. “Do you agree with Dr. Burton about these markers? That they were coins paid in tribute to Ets-eket?”

  “Markers?” Rhys repeated, rubbing his eyes. “Dare I suppose your use of that term means you don’t agree with him?”

  Yoshi shrugged. “I’m not sure.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “No sir, I don’t believe I do. Look.” She pushed her journal toward him. An enhanced
image of one of the coins was displayed in its flat hologrid. “This is the first marker in this set. The back of it. See the scroll design under the little building?”

  “The little building? Not a sacrificial altar?”

  “Well, that’s what it looks like to me.” There was a definite note of defensiveness in that. “Frankly, I think it looks more like a... a transport shuttle than it does a sacrificial altar.”

  Rhys smiled crookedly. “Whatever. Aye, I see the scroll work.”

  Yoshi brought up a second image on the journal. “This is the second marker. Same area.”

  Rhys concentrated on the play of looping lines below the squat, raised rectangle Burton had dubbed an altar. His brow furrowed of its own accord before he realized what he was frowning at.

  “It’s different,” Yoshi prompted. “A different pattern than the first. And here’s the third...”

  That scroll, too, was slightly different than either of the others. Rhys rubbed a finger over his lower lip. “Well, they are hand-carved. Could be minor variations.”

  “Some of them aren’t so minor. There’s a second set with the tower on the back. The scroll work on those is also unique to each piece, almost like a signature. But look...” She adjusted the display so it showed the flip side of the coin. “Here’s marker number one... and number two... and number three. And here’s one from a tower set. The effigies of Ets-eket are identical. Any variation could be accounted for by wear—it’s fairly soft material, almost like, oh, soapstone.”

  Rhys picked up the journal and examined it closely, rotating the image on its display. The flame of fascination kindled in his weary brain.

  “They are identical. These aren’t hand carved, they’re... pressed. Good God, look! Here’s a mold mark!” He ran his finger along one edge of the 3-D image.

  “That’s another thing,” said Yoshi, her eyes gleaming, “they’re not stone. But they’re not synthetic either. They’re... smelted composites. Maybe that’s what the tower was used for.”

  “Or this could be a hoax.”

  Yoshi shook her head. “I dated some of these myself. They’re anywhere from four thousand five hundred to five thousand years old. The Etsatat evidently had some low-level technology even then. I suppose they’d have to, they moved those building blocks of theirs from a quarry ten klicks away. There’s something else, too. These ‘wear marks’ of Dr. Burton’s?” She pointed out the feature in the journal image with the end of a tiny scraping tool. “I don’t think they’re wear marks. They’re too... regular. I think these markers were intentionally scored. And I also think they were worn or carried on a thong of some sort. Look how the holes are worn at the top edge.”

  Rhys took the coin she offered him and peered at the top edge of it. She was right, it did seem to be scored, if randomly. And the hole in Ets-eket’s headdress was indeed elongated toward the top. He picked up a second marker. This one bore the same scratches along the top edge, but unlike those on the first coin, they continued down one side edge as well. A third specimen had score marks almost all the way around it. Something ticked the back of Rhys’s mind.

  “Record keeping,” he murmured. “Not coins, but punch cards?”

  “I don’t know, sir. But that would make sense, taken in context with the calendar. Maybe the scores represent days.” She nodded to the tablet of stone that lay between Rhys’s forearms.

  He glanced at her sharply, then turned his eyes to the calendar. “If you don’t stop calling me ‘sir,’ I’m going to have to cast a spell on you.” His right hand gave an absent tug on the thong of the Pa-Kai spirit bag that hung, always, around his neck. “And don’t think I can’t. It’s well within my shamanistic abilities.”

  Yoshi blushed and fell silent.

  Rhys was fingering the series of representations on the flat hunk of carved rock. “Okay, we know these things: Etsat’s rotation is thirty-one-point-two hours. The modern Etsatat week is divided into nine days and the month is four weeks long; intercalary days are added once a year at new year.” He ran his finger down one side of the tablet. “I’d say that we’re looking at basically the same calendar here.”

  Yoshi nodded. “The calendar—if that’s what it is—seems to show one Etsat month.”

  “So,” Rhys continued, “Burton thinks the altar represents worship days, the tower and flame represent sacrificial days, and the wagons, days when tribute is collected.”

  Yoshi raised dark eyes to his face. “Three sacrifice days, three tribute days and three worship days in every week? Doesn’t that seem...” The word hung, uncertain, on her lips, then she dropped her eyes.

  “Excessive?”

  She shrugged one slender shoulder and Rhys knew that had not been what she had been going to say.

  “There is the matter of the tribute train depicted on the gate.”

  The other shoulder shrugged. “And the dancing slaves?”

  Rhys was momentarily speechless. In the three years he’d known her he had never heard Yoshi use that sarcastic tone of voice. “You really don’t like Professor Burton, do you?”

  She was toying with the end of the blue-black braid that fell across one shoulder. “Is it necessary that I do?”

  “It... It distresses me that you don’t. Drew Burton is an important person in my life. Why don’t you like him?”

  The braid’s thong loosened under Yoshi’s nervous fingers. “I suppose... he... reminds me of... Uncle Kenji.”

  Rhys listened for a moment to the antiphonal tag team of night insects, using that sparse cover to regroup. “Yoshi Umeki, I don’t believe you’ve ever lied to me before in your life.”

  Her hands jerked, the thong disappeared and her unbound hair washed about her shoulders in a black tide. The look she gave him was both tragic and defiant. “I’m not lying! You remember Uncle Kenji. Father’s eldest brother. An odious man—”

  “I remember him. What particular odious trait of Uncle Kenji’s comes to mind in this case?”

  The insect chorus swelled into the pause. “He was a xenophobe.”

  Stunned, Rhys murmured, “Actually, he was a bigot. Your father’s word for it, I believe.”

  He got up and went to the ever-ready coffee carafe to pour over-strong coffee into a blue metal cup. He didn’t return to the table, instead moving to stare out into a stygian forest night that was interrupted only briefly by the golden glow of camp lights.

  Funny, how some clichés of dig life were allowed to perpetuate themselves regardless of technology’s advance. Dr. Burton’s camp was like a slightly off-kilter reproduction of its ancestors—industrial strength coffee in tin enameled cups, camp lights that flickered as if a fuel-powered generator drove them and not the photon core of a time-altered spacecraft. Rhys sipped the coffee; it was comfortingly bitter.

  Behind him, Yoshi stammered over her words. “Uncle Kenji... Uncle Kenji was a man with strong feelings about his place in the world. I’m surprised he ever left Japan.”

  Rhys turned to look at her. “And Dr. Burton is also a xenophobe, is that what you’re saying?”

  Yoshi set her chin. “I deplore the way he treated Tzia this morning. As if she were a rank novice. As if she didn’t have Nyami’s respect and a Cambridge degree in archaeology. As if she were...”

  “As if she were an alien?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tsk-tsk. Remember the spell, Yoshi.” Rhys tapped his spirit bag. “I have to admit, I didn’t want to read the incident that way, but...” He shook his head. “I suppose I could say he’s an old man. One who’s only recently been exposed to other races of people.”

  “That would be excusing him. He doesn’t deserve your defense.”

  Rhys turned to look at her, eyes narrowed. “This goes pretty deep, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s not just Tzia. It’s his whole attitude toward this planet, its people. The living cultures of Etsatat are repugnant to him. He’s only comfortable with the dead ones.”

  “Mercy. And I’d’
ve thought that impossible for an archaeologist.” He came back to the table and laid his hand, palm down, on the calendar. “It’s the love of my life, Yoshi. Looking at these little bits and pieces of the past and trying to see how they relate to the present—to the future. Looking at a dead culture in the hope of snatching a glimpse of its living shade. We’re ghost hunters, Yoshi. Mediums.” He smiled. “Shaman. Holding vast, expensive séances in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the dear departed will put in an appearance and solve their own mysteries. I thought we were all like that.”

  “You mean you thought he was like that.”

  “Ah, yes. Because when I sat in his lectures, read his works, studied his field journals, I thought, ‘Here’s a kindred spirit. A mentor. An icon.’”

  Yoshi gazed up at him with honest pain in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Rhys.”

  He directed a wry grimace at his own naïveté. “I’m too old for heroes and role models, I suppose. But a kindred spirit would have been nice.”

  He glanced at Yoshi’s suddenly still face and experienced a twisted epiphany. “Aye well, maybe one kindred soul is enough, after all.” He lifted her hand from where it lay beside her field journal and raised it to his lips. “I’ll clean up here. You go settle in and get some sleep.”

  Face rose-gold in the camp light, Yoshi stared at him, her hand suspended between them. He retrieved it and tugged her to her feet, jerking his head toward the tube to their cabin. “Go on. You’ve got smudges under your eyes. In the morning, you’ll be dead on your feet and blaming me.”

  She got up and moved to the access tube, her every move tentative, as if she’d only just learned to walk. At the door, she turned back to look at him, then—fingers curled into a fist against her chest—she ducked into the tube.