The Shaman and the Droll

by Jack Lasenby

  It all seemed so long ago. Taur had been so easy to live with. Life with him such fun. I never knew any awkwardness with Taur.

  Again I felt that strange thing. Head cocked, alert, the Bear Man seemed to be reading my mind, listening to my thoughts. I told myself not to be silly. But, just in case, I stopped thinking of Taur.

  One thing about the Bear Man that was easy to see: he was worried about Jak. And he was good with Nip. Even if he didn’t like me, he liked the dogs. And Nip liked him back.

  At least Jak had wanted to go outside. And had taken one lap of water. He was going to live! I shot a quick glance at the Bear Man. Sitting, staring into the fire, he smiled to himself, as if he knew what I was thinking. I called Nip away from him.

  Chapter 13

  The Bear Man’s Secret

  Next morning Jak wobbled outside on his own. Crouch. Piss. Wobble inside again. Lapped half the bowl. The Bear Man ran his hands over him. “Did you notice? He’s chewed off the gristle. The bit hanging out.”

  Of course I had noticed.

  “Good dog! You’ll be all right now.”

  After all, Jak was my dog. If the Bear Man liked dogs all that much, why didn’t he have any of his own?

  Jak closed his eyes and lay still again, but there was something different about him. His coat didn’t stare. It hadn’t turned glossy overnight, but he had tried to have a lick at it, what he could reach. A day or two, he should be running around again.

  That evening, Jak went outside again, came in, and had a long drink.

  “It would be all right,” the Bear Man said as Jak lay down, “if we could make ourselves better, get over a ripped belly just by lying still for a couple of days.

  “You can cut open a man’s leg, it’ll heal. But open his guts – it’s as if the air is poisonous to us.

  “I remember a young man years ago, chopped his calf muscle with an axe so you could see lines like the growth rings on the stump of a tree, before it started to bleed. I ran a few stitches around the leg, and he was right again in no time. Same man cut off the thumb on his left hand. I made a flap of the skin that was left, stitched it over the stump. Healed up fine. He held things between his hand and chest. Better than most with two thumbs. All the usual cuts and knocks a man has, they never even slowed him down.

  “Then a stag tossed its head as he bent over, going to pith it through the back of the neck. The antler went into his belly: pop! I heard it. And one of his innards bulged out of the hole like a grey worm, thick as your finger.

  “I pushed it back, like you did with Jak, stitched him up, but he died. You’d think if it works for a dog it’d work for a man, too, but we’re different that way.”

  The Bear Man had sat all that day, repairing the harness. He stared through his bone mask into the fire while his hands did the work, as if by touch. Well, I thought to myself, he’s probably done it so many times…

  I had gone over the bearskin tunic he had given me, sewing patches where it was worn thin on the shoulders and under the arms. All day we had worked by the fire, the Bear Man only grunting when I said anything. Now he talked as if he could not stop. Like the night he told the story of the bear hunt.

  He talked on about injuries, cuts, bruises, split heads. Strapping broken ribs. How to match the ends of bones so they grow together. Tying lengths of wood or bone alongside broken arms and legs to hold them still, so they heal.

  “An odd thing, that. A broken bone sometimes heals stronger than it was before. I’ve seen that often enough.”

  I listened and wondered why the Bear Man was so interested in damaged bodies. Why was he talking so much? Just to lapse back into silence, as he had after telling the bear story?

  I fetched coal, took up my work, and waited for the Bear Man to go on. But he was gazing into the fire, unaware of me. I tried saying something. It was as if he did not hear. I had got used to the mask, but his silences always seemed as if his mind had gone away into another country, leaving his body uninhabited.

  Once Jak was better we’d thank the Bear Man for his shelter and find somewhere for ourselves. I didn’t want to spend too long cooped up in a cave with somebody who wasn’t there half the time.

  Beside old bearskin tunics and leggings, there were other clothes hanging around the walls. Lighter summer gear. Gloves. Mittens. Hats. Leather and skins. Furs. Boots! I found a pair that fitted. There was plenty of wear left in the soles, but both toes were worn through, probably from repeated wettings and brushings through snow and rocks.

  “Can I use these boots?” He stared on into the fire. “I could mend them.” Silence.

  I recognised what the boots were made of, its dense fur. Among the skins rolled and hanging on the wall were several sealskins. I brushed my hands across them and thought of the creatures on the ice island as we crossed the strait from the North Land: fur that kept us warm, meat that fed us.

  With a sharp metal spike it was easy to punch holes in the patches I cut out of the new skin. I used a bone needle and the split deer sinews, took a stitch, settled it flush. Stitches wear through where they stick up proud of the leather. I poked the sinew through a second hole with the tip of the needle, pulled it tight, snugged it in, took another stitch.

  Jak opened one eye. “Do you want something to eat?” He closed his eye again. Wind riffled a drum in the chimney. Outside the storm still ravaged. Warmth from the fire bathed the cave. On the other bench, the Bear Man slumped. All that afternoon he neither moved nor spoke. I could not see him breathing, had the feeling he was not there in his body, told myself not to be so stupid.

  I took much satisfaction from the stitching. Neat and tight. Tendon thread swells, so the boots should keep out water. They would be much warmer than my goatskin wrappings. The boots had dried out, where they had been hanging on the wall. What they needed now was something to give life back to the leather. The Bear Man had been rubbing seal oil into the harness.

  I must have fallen asleep because a sound like a distant chuckle woke me. Wind in the chimney? The huge mound of coals might have made a noise as it crumbled. The Bear Man still slumped on his bench. Nip yawned, shoving her chin along the floor.

  On a shelf were lamps. I had seen something like them before, just where I could not remember. Perhaps Hagar had described them in her stories. Several times I had recognised things she used to talk about. Or had I dreamed the lamps? I thought of the Garden of Dene, Sodomah’s house. Many things there had been new to me, but some I had recognised, things Hagar had talked about in stories.

  It was all so long ago. Besides, Taur said I dreamt everything about Sodomah and the Garden. He had not seen what I saw, a difficult idea to hold in my mind. I saw a beautiful young woman, he an old hag. I saw three dwarfs, he some aged Salt Men. I saw flowers, trees, running streams of bright water: he saw a dead stick, a muddy puddle.

  The Travellers’ tent lamps were made by Tara’s Metal People. Sodomah’s lamps were polished silver. These lamps in the Bear Man’s cave were carved stone: a bowl of hardened oil, a wick of what looked like moss. When I lit one, the oil melted, and the wick smoked. Trimmed, it burned a clear bud.

  Holding up the lamp I looked for the noise that had wakened me. The wall back here was free of gear. Curving up to the vault of the roof. The cave continuing around a bend into darkness. The stone creamy-white. Marks! I held the lamp higher. The marks turned themselves into pictures which swam out of the darkness. I was a painter myself. It seemed right to find drawings there.

  A stack of lines, untidy as a hawk’s nest. Cramped, stick-like strokes that missed the life of the creatures. What was meant to be a bear surrounded by dogs, awkward on the curved wall. A hunter thrusting a spear into its side. A dog on its back, torn open. None of the urgent taunt of bailing dogs. Flash of eye. Fang. Tail upright. Ear pricked. As Jak stood up to the bear.

  Black against the creamy stone. It was so small, the tight drawing on that great curve of wall. If only I had something to draw with! Then I noticed a row of
marks, not scattered scratches like the drawings, but marks, circles and straight and curved lines, a row of them, carefully, deliberately made, even and level. As if they meant something.

  Then there were no more drawings and marks, just those perfectly-curved walls vanishing into darkness. And I saw some sticks under the drawings, a few short bits of charcoal. Nip whined.

  “I’ll only be a little while.” The lamp on the floor. The creamy wall soared empty. I took up a stick of charcoal.

  The lake. What did the Shaman call it? Lake Ka. The raft. Jak catching the parry ducks. Wild dogs pulling down the deer, all plunging backs. Using their weight, dragging, bringing the deer over on its side. Tossed head, rolling eye, then only antlers jerking to the chop of fangs at the neck.

  Up and across the wall. The smoke cloud at the foot of the lake; the Floating Village, women clattering spears against the palisades; naked-breasted girls singing, beckoning. A man tumbling off the raft in foolishness, carrying away down the river. Lutha, her canoe. The charcoal paused, swept: her rounded knees raised in the canoe. I gasped, closed my eyes, felt my flesh tighten.

  Monstrous as the guardians in the pass, the statue of Hekkat, its two faces looking west and east. Lutha again. The Island of Bones. The Salt Men. I would have to make a ladder so I could draw right across the vault of the cave. I sketched faster. Our raft of goatskins. Salt Men again. The river under Grave Mountain. The waterfall of fire. The three of us gasping, recoiling from the stench, the fearful bellow. The white bear in its snow and ice world. Blood-trodden snow. Jak and Nip inside the frozen carcass. Me wrapped in the bearskin.

  And I found myself drawing Lutha again. The way her hair fell at her neck. Her breasts, their softness. Her hands, hard from constant use of the paddle. Not quite right. As I crouched at the wall, a sound. I straightened. Dizzy. Coming back.

  “You are drawing.” The Bear Man’s voice ran like water from wall to wall. He stared into the dark. Not at me. Not at my drawings. Seeming to stare past my shoulder. In the lamplight, I saw one side of his face. He turned and looked the other way, again not at my pictures, and I realised for the first time that the two sides of his face were so different. As if they belonged to two different people. Two faces divided by that great nose.

  “What are you drawing?” Echoes from the darkness. “Drawing – drawing – drawing?” And I heard other sounds, other voices returning, a trick of the cave’s long echo.

  “I’m drawing our journey down Lake Ka. After we came down from the mountains, Jak and me. Stealing Nip. The Floating Village and the women. The Island of Bones. The Salt Men, and our goatskin raft,” I said, pointing. “And here, where we went into the tunnel under the mountain, and came out in the pool.” I did not explain the drawing of Lutha, but the Bear Man was staring at her.

  “So you came under the mountain, too?” He might have been speaking for a long time, but I had been too busy thinking about Lutha. It was the question that stopped me. Made me listen. “So you came under the mountain, too?” asked the Bear Man. The light from my lamp threw his face into relief. Around the bone mask, the cracks and lines seemed a pattern chiselled deep.

  “Who else came under the mountain?” I almost asked the question. But something like a chuckle echoed far back in the cave, a sound I had heard before. Perhaps the noise that had wakened me.

  A third time the Bear Man asked, “So you came under the mountain, too?” And I realised he was not looking where I was pointing – at my drawing of the pool, at the raft coming down that slide of water out of the tunnel’s oval mouth. Nor was he gazing at the drawing of Lutha, but past it into the darkness. I had discovered the Bear Man’s secret.

  Chapter 14

  How Big is the World?

  “Under the mountain?” I repeated. So that’s why his regard always seemed unfocused, why he looked past and through me! Why his raking stare sometimes seemed to be scoring across my face, sometimes seeing beneath the skin, looking into my mind.

  “I told you, we were trying to swing the raft across the river when the Salt Men cut our rope.”

  So that was why all his gear was so neatly stacked and hung. Why everything had its place. He could feel with his hands, for everything. Could find it at once.

  That was how he had found us that first time. He’d been fishing downwind of the cave and was following the smell of smoke home. It explained so many things. The way he felt Jak’s side. How he touched my face, the first time we met. He kept the mask on to hide his eyes.

  Perhaps it explained other things, too. His staring into the fire. Not answering my questions. Seeming to be away in another world.

  “Yes, we came under the mountain, too. On a raft of blownup goatskins. Luck again, I suppose.”

  “People who are lucky usually deserve it.” It was about as close as he could bring himself to saying I had done well.

  “Drawing!” There was a wild note in the exclamation, then his mouth snapped shut. He had given too much of himself away. I looked down so I could not see his embarrassment.

  “This drawing of yours, I can see what you mean by it. The bear. The dogs. The hunter.” I shut up. My voice sounded false to me. I did not want to hurt the Bear Man.

  “You can tell what it is?”

  “It’s not well-drawn.” I must be honest. “But I can see what you meant.”

  “How do you know I drew it? There have been many others before me in the cave. What are you drawing now?”

  “Just finishing what I was doing.” In fact, I was covering Lutha’s nakedness with a stroke or two so she now wore a tunic. “In case I forget.” A few more quick strokes, and I had sketched the Bear Man’s face: masked eyes, high-raised blade of the nose, strong chin. “There!” As I had first seen him, the hood falling back off his head, body hidden beneath the white bearskin. The heavy forehead, lined and cracked skin. The sense of power. Something to do with awe.

  He stirred uneasy. “Finished!” I didn’t want him to guess what I was doing. “How far does the cave go?” I dropped the last fragment of charcoal.

  “Further than anyone has explored, so it’s said.” He turned.

  We were walking back towards the fire when again I heard that distant mutter. Like a chuckle. Or was it a grumble of pain and loneliness? A far bellow?

  “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “Like something bellowing.”

  “A rock falling. Echoes.”

  Probably the floor of the cave told his feet where he was. And the heat from the fire. I closed my own eyes, walked a few steps, and had to open them. The Bear Man went straight to his bench and sat, not even touching it with his fingertips.

  “The cave is a world within a world,” he said. “How far it goes, its end nobody knows. How do you draw the end of something, the edge of it?”

  “With a line, I suppose,” I told him. “Or by shading it. The axe, there’s no edge to its blade in this light. It just curves away into the dark like the wall of the tunnel. The back of its head, though, that finishes in a black line, from where I’m looking. Change the light, you change what you’re seeing. A drawing’s got to change, too.”

  “So sometimes there’s no edge?”

  “Mmm. I don’t suppose there is. Especially where its turning away from you. No clear edge. Like the wall of the cave, disappearing around that bend. You wouldn’t draw an end to it, but you draw the arch of it disappearing out of the light and into the darkness. Or the darkness appearing into the light. It depends which way you look at it.”

  “Did somebody teach you all this?”

  “I grew up drawing with a stick in the sand as we followed the Animals. Drawing on the walls as we walked through Hammertun. Scratching with a stone on the cliffs we passed. And thinking about it. Nobody taught me anything.”

  “Did you see other people drawing?”

  “Sometimes. And there were old drawings, scratches. I suppose I worked out that things don’t always end in a neat line. Maybe it depends on t
he light.”

  I’d got interested now, trying to understand it. But the Bear Man seemed to be thinking of something else. I got the axe. “Feel this!” I guided his fingers. “Here where the handle goes into the head. It’s a clear line in this light. But if I take the axe back and lean it against the wall, the line disappears into a shadow. You have to show that in a drawing by shading. There’s no line then.”

  His hand was cold as stone. Had I gone too far? I sat down in my place. But the Bear Man was sitting, the axe across his knees, running his fingers along the line, the meeting of its head and handle. “I see. Yes. I think I could draw that, the line, but not the darkness, the shading.

  “What you’re saying.” He stopped and thought. “What you’re saying is: things look different at different times.”

  “We see them differently, too. Not just because of the light. Because of how we’re feeling. If we’re not interested, it shows in our drawing.” I thought of Lutha. How she had been different at different times. How she growled the first time. How she had been different the other times I had seen her. No, I hadn’t seen her the second time. Only heard her in the darkness of the cell. Felt the soft round of her breast as she adjusted the cord around my neck. Her lips. The hardness of her hands.

  “If you see differently at different times,” said the Bear Man, “how can you draw the same thing twice?”

  “Just draw it as you see it each time.” I thought a moment. “But you can draw it from memory. And you’ve got to remember some things do change, too. Like Jak. He looks different today, better than yesterday.”

  “What if you start drawing and go back and finish it another time?”

  “Then I suppose you finish it the way you’re seeing it now.” The Bear Man was making me think. “Or,” I said, “you could finish it – the second time – looking the way you saw it the first time. You remember what you saw and what you drew the first time and keep to that picture, not the one you’re seeing now.”