by Tia Reed
“Lazy puffer. Get here and crack these nuts,” her mam said as she crept down the steps.
Sian squinted through the leaves. The sun was at full height. She would have to work extra hard to make up for the time she had lost to exhaustion and the porrin daze. She picked up the rock her mam had been using and began to pound the nutshells, not even glancing up when Mam took herself to sit on a reed mat, wriggle her brown toes in a patch of sunlight, and chat with her friends.
She had cracked a handful of nuts and eaten half of them when her grandmother wandered past, a plaited reed bowl of whiteroots on her slender hip.
“The soothsayer wanted to see you, child. Go. Go. Where are your manners?” Vila said, depositing the basket next to Sian.
Unmarried nobodies did not keep Soothsayers of the Tribes waiting. Sian scampered from the village, and her grandmam’s tirade at a mam who forgot to pass on such an important message. The thickening ashes and oaks along the winding trail soon dampened their shrill bickering. She twirled to bird whistles, danced with a purple butterfly and dodged the peach stones the monkeys tried to pelt her with. At the old hollow bole, she turned onto a ledge that led up the hill. The Soothsayer’s cave, hidden by bushes and outcrops, had few visitors, except when the need to summon her arose. That need was seldom. Ishoa, Sacred Soothsayer of the Ho’akerin Tribe, Second Soothsayer of the Akerin, showed uncanny intuition in that regard.
The mouth of the dry cave yawned like the maw of a bear. It swallowed the relief she had felt when she ran from the village. One hand on the wall, Sian peered inside. A fire crackled in the centre, its column of lavender-scented smoke trailing up through a fissure in the roof. By some trick of the air, sounds carried up from the longhouses: a piercing voice, the wail of a child.
A twig cracked behind her and Sian spun. The soothsayer stood there, a bundle of reeds in one arm, her knobbly staff with the large pods dangling from the top in the other. No taller than Sian, and no wider though she had a woman’s curves, she was an imposing figure with her painted face and feathered hair. With her milky eyes that held the wisdom of the ancient oaks. Sian wrapped her ungainly arms around herself and bowed her head.
“Is that you, Sian? Are you recovered?” Ishoa asked.
Her tongue tied itself in a knot. Sian could only nod. It was a stupid thing to do. She blushed as she started to stammer the formal greeting.
The soothsayer cut her off. “Come inside.” The reeds prickled her skin as Ishoa nudged her around, taking her elbow for guidance. “It is not my intention to stress you into another fit.”
They sat on stitched rabbit furs, the smoke of the fire curling between them. Ishoa cupped her chin and peered at her face as its woody smell drew her nerves from her fluttery stomach. When Ishoa passed her some reeds and bade her seed the heads, she was glad of a task to occupy her hands. The humdrum task, the burning herbs, Ishoa’s gentle voice, speaking of their beloved woods as if they were alive, demanding nothing of her save a description here and there, of the season’s blooms or a kid’s frolics, eased her. By the time she had woven half the reeds into a bowl, Sian had never felt more comfortable next to another person in her life. She tied off the ends of the reeds as Ishoa gathered a mix of herbs from baskets lining the back of the cave.
“I want you to drink the tea of these leaves twice a day,” the soothsayer said, passing her a mortar so she could crush the herbs with the seed. “It might be they help control your fits.”
Sian stiffened. Ishoa reached out, felt only air, adjusted the direction of her hand and tucked Sian’s wayward hair behind an ear. “The spirits burden us for a reason, and only in a measure we can endure.” It was an oft-repeated proverb around the dwellings, one nobody ever said to her. Sian pounded that little bit harder.
“I dreamt of you,” Ishoa said.
A soothsayer’s dreaming was prophesy; Sian knew the lore. She put head down, let her hair fall over her face, kept grinding.
“You are important to this tribe.”
The pestle clunked out of her hand. She mumbled an apology. Ishoa seemed not to hear.
“There is change ahead for our people, and you must be the one to lead.”
The air thrummed with that telling. Sian managed to raise her dubious face. Not to say anything, though. She did not think the soothsayer would say this to make her feel better, but this dream could not be a true seeing. Ishoa was young to hold her power. All the tribes said so. It was true, too. Under the paint and feathers, her nut-brown face was smooth, her sap-brown hair glossy.
Sian shook her head. Her heart was pounding denial. “Not I.”
Ishoa groped until her hand found Sian’s. She squeezed tight. Her white eyes centred on some secret place. “Tell your grandmam I wish you here every morning. Tell her you are to have three afternoons an eight-day to wander the hills alone.” Her hand relaxed. She fumbled it across, to the mortar, tipped the contents into a cloth bag, and handed it to Sian.
“I’m not allowed,” Sian said. She turned her head as her cheeks flushed. There was shame in saying she could not be alone, in a fit striking her down, helpless-weak in the path of bear or ogre.
An owl too-hooed, early in its waking.
“I wish it,” Ishoa said. It was reason enough for anyone in the Tribes. “Go now, child.
On the narrow path back to the valley floor, Sian passed Leadsman Draykan. Erok’s father smiled at her, and she smiled back, a tentative thing but it reached her eyes.
“You had us worried,” he said.
She bowed her head, the smile gone. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
His hand on her head felt like a blessing. “It is not, I think, your fault.”
He was on his way before she could reply, up to the soothsayer’s cave, a strong warrior even with the first lines of age on his broad face, and strands grey in his hair. She watched him disappear into the mouth before she dawdled on her way to peas and scoldings and belittling glances, stealing a few last shadow-lengths of freedom.
When she sat by Grandmam Vila and her pile of crunchy stalks, Mam glanced over from where she leaned on a twig broom. Seeing Sian had something to say and nothing to do, she squawked her way over. Sian clutched the bag of herbs as she waited for Mam to pause for breath. Then she fumbled her way through Ishoa’s message.
Grandmam eyed her with wary suspicion. “If that’s what the soothsayer said,” she granted, shaking a beetle off a leafgreen. She tore off the stem and tossed the leaf into a clay pot.
“Today you work,” Mam scolded, hands on hips and a frown longer than the broom on her brow. “You have done nothing but sleep and chat.”
“Ah, put your own hands to work, Larpa,” Grandmam said, and then, under her breath, “Lazy as a puffer.”
A smile twitched at Sian’s lips but she was careful to drop her head and let her hair hang to hide it. This was the best day of her life; she did not want a cuffing to spoil it.
“Stash those greens before you squash them,” Grandmam said.
Sian was up the steps into the longhouse with a springier gait than she had shown in a while. A hop carried her over the sleeping tribesman. She even began to hum. At the doorway to the girl’s sleeping room, she paused. Her stick insect was watching her pah rummage through her basket of possessions. It did not contain much: a comb; a wooden goshawk her grandpah had carved not long before he passed; a few coloured stones she had stumbled across. Pah stood all guilty-awkward and angry-tense as she shuffled to the door. The embroidered bag of porrin Ishoa had left was in his hands.
“This is too dangerous for you to leave about.” He pushed past her.
The tears began welling when she saw him open the bag and inhale before one calloused foot had found a stair. By the time Daesoa shed her light, he would be as wasted as the other layabouts in the village.
Sian put the bag of herbs into her basket, sat on her bedding and hung her head. When her stick insect waved one spindly leg, she let the tears flow.
Ishoa took up
her staff, rattled the dangling pods, and hailed Draykan.
“Let’s stand at the entrance. I have need of a clear head,” she told him.
Draykan, familiar but not quite at ease with her smokes and hazes, acquiesced with a grunt. They stood together in silence so he might watch Sian dawdle her way back to the longhouses. The tap of the girl’s slowing footfalls saddened her. No child should suffer as she had.
“She smiled at me,” Draykan said.
“That child has much need of smiles,” Ishoa replied.
The leadsman sighed. “She is not well regarded in the tribe.”
“Her affliction impedes neither her limbs nor her mind. It is the superstitions that erode her self-respect.”
“The tribe fear what they do not understand.”
“And you, Draykan? What think you of the daughter of Larpa and Vorn?”
“I think I would rather have a longhouse full of women like her than of hunters wasted on the drug of bliss.”
“Ah.”
A baby’s wail reached them. “That infant has been screeching most of the morning,” Ishoa observed.
“His mother is more concerned with her other younglings’ next meal.”
“Then Nak has not returned from the Wander?”
Draykan shook his head. “We are losing them,” he said through clenched jaw. “We are losing them all.”
Far away, thunder rumbled, thickening the air. The afternoon rains would fall heavy. Ishoa thrust her staff high in the air, tossed her head back and let forth an ululation that shook leaves off the surrounding trees. When she finished, utter silence reigned. A last leaf whispered through the air. She caught it and ran a practiced finger over its surface: caterpillar-eaten; veins bare. An ill omen that. “The babe will sleep,” she said, thudding the butt of her staff on rock. That much, at least, she could do. “Come. I will cast the bones for you.” She turned into the cave. She felt Draykan’s humility. She was Soothsayer. She knew why they came to her. All these years and Draykan still could not fathom that.
His reason was dire. She had trailed it in the dance, had glimpsed it in the dream. From beside her sleeping furs, she fetched a sandalwood box. Her finger traced the sacred runes inlaid on its lid as Draykan laid her staff in front of her. He helped her kneel upon the furs, as solid in his strength as his son. It remained for her to open the box, and to remove the bones, an odd assortment that had once held the life of a mouse, an eagle, a monkey, a squirrel, a lizard, a bear. One bone for each manner of creature that crawled, walked or flew the forest, each carved with a sigil that drew on the mysteries of its kind. Ishoa set them in front of her, praying her thanks for their gift. When Draykan began to fidget, she offered him a fond smile, and threw a handful of stupor-inducing seeds atop the flames. They crackled and jumped from the hearth, red hot if she remembered right. Waving the fresh smoke that wafted up towards her, she inhaled deep. The only sound from Draykan as he lowered himself onto a fur was another grunt. She smiled, guessing he had tilted his nose to avoid the acrid fumes. Settling into the cross-legged position, she bade the Spirits of the Forest to mark her path, beseeched the Spirits of the Sky to bear her forth and the Spirits of the Earth to ground her soul, lest she fly too high, too far.
It came of a sudden, as always, the dizzying spin of the vision, the heightening of her senses. She gathered the bones in a single scoop and flung them across the fire, adding the last leaf downed by her wild call, the crucial element which trigged the tug of her soul. Season after season she had thrown the bones, and so she could time the moment she left her body to be borne on the Spirit Winds across the planes. Season after season she had entered the trance, but never could she foresee the disconcerting moment time jolted to a stop. The moment the bones hung suspended above the flames as the Spirit Winds whooshed through the cave, sweeping around the hearth, chilling her to the marrow. She hovered above them, over the fire, looking down with her inner sight at her immobile form; at Draykan huddled in on himself, too proud to retreat from the buffeting; at the ominous, black cast of the bones. They held at their centre the snake vertebra carved with the rune for the cursed drug. It was the newest acquisition to her set, placed there not eighteen moons ago when Nak had first returned from Tarana with his powdered prize. What amusement the young men had found in tossing the serpent a dead mouse sprinkled with porrin she would never know. Drug of bliss. Drug of curses. The Ho’akerin had once revered the land that succoured them. Now they tottered on the edge of sowing desolation as bleak as the lowlanders did. The spirits were fleeing, severing themselves from the Tribe, like the veins snapping from the midrib of the leaf she had tossed to the hungry flames. This it seemed was the fate of the Akerin. Not a rune emerged to temper the ill fortune, and the desolation cut to her soul. She released an ululating cry of despair, a cry as cold as she. The winds whirled faster, spinning the cave, the fire and time itself aside. Then there it was, clearer in the pattern, the smallest of her bones, the one she had cut from a fish out of water. It had flapped before her in the final throes of life, for some inexplicable reason reminding her of Sian. The spirits had whispered their blessing in the swish of the wind through the leaves that day, and so she had carved it with the girl’s name. Now here it shone, leading the way through the mire, more important than she had intuited in her dreaming.
The return to her body was smooth, if sorrowful, the bones tumbling to the floor in front of her. Shivering, she groped for them. One by one, she replaced them in the box, thanking the spirit of each animal as she did.
“Was the reading good?” Draykan asked when the fire had warmed the shivers out of her blood. His voice was taut with the effort of his wait.
Neither the smooth surface of her box nor the rough pole of her staff gave her comfort. “It is not news to make you rejoice. A storm brews on the horizon, and it blows much hardship for the Tribes, much change.”
“The Akerin have always weathered change.”
“This time it is our traditions, our way of life,” she bowed her head, “our home,” she murmured, “which is at risk.”
She heard him draw a bulky breath. “Why?” he asked. “What did we do to anger the spirits so?”
She stood, leaning heavily on her staff, gazing out of the cave into the heart of the cheeping, chattering, rustling Forest she loved like a child. A strange foulness seasoned the moisture clinging to leaf and frond. She had never tasted its like. “Need you ask?”
The fur rubbed Draykan’s clothes as he too rose. “I must hear it from you, Soothsayer. I must have it from the spirits themselves.”
“It began with the drug.”
Curses ran rife among the women of the Tribe. They spat their disgust at the trees, condemning the spirits for bringing porrin into their midst, and then turned a blind eye while their men succumbed. Not a one admitted the weakness was the devilry of men. Not a one understood what disrespect the spirits felt. Stupors were for the shamans alone. They summoned evil magic down on the uninitiated. So haughty had the tribe become in blaming and demanding that Ishoa quaked to commune with the spirits on their behalf.
As if sensing her thoughts, Draykan padded to the mouth of the cave. When he made no rustles of leave, she shuffled her way over to join him. Were it not for her staff, she would have crawled so draining was her ordeal.
“I am thinking to banish those that imbibe the drug,” the Leadsman said at length. “What say you?”
“It is a decision for our leader alone.” Then, because she sensed his need for support, she said, “I believe that step is long overdue, but on this all five Hill Tribes of the Akerin must unite.”
Draykan grunted. “I thank you, Soothsayer.”
“There is one more thing,” she said, listening to the whoops, and tweets, and roars. They reminded her of a time when these fertile valleys nurtured a proud people. “The child Sian is our hope.”
“It will be a joyous day if the tribe returns to succouring its most dependent.”
“The dream
leads beyond that. Others must follow where she treads.”
He shook his head. “That I cannot believe. And even if I did, it will never happen.”
It was with her Spirit Voice that she answered, “At the Ho’akerin’s peril, Draykan.”
From the direction of the village, a babe began to scream.
Chapter Twenty-one
Timak stood on tiptoe, reached into the fifth drawer of the tall oak chest, and organised the last of Ahkdul’s things. If he could somehow climb under the fine kameez, he might hide for a time, perhaps an entire night. The mysterious man with the blue crystal had softened his aches, but the hooded soldier’s magic hadn’t packed the big hole in his middle. It felt like that was all he had ever known, that his parents’ loving hugs and kisses were a figment of his longing, especially here, in this dim room. Heavy with dark tapestries, gigantic desk and poster bed, the room bore down like it wanted to bury him alive.
The monster, with his hunched bulk and menacing voice, turned the brooding room oppressive. His first instruction to the servant sent to pour his bath had been to close all the shutters on the light of day. Then, while soaking off the grime of the journey, he had murmured his appreciation of the horrible stitched battle scenes.
Timak shuddered. Headless men and gouged horses were scarier when lit by the flicker of candles. Making himself as inconspicuous as possible between the chest and the wall, he closed his eyes and hoped Yazmine could find him in this strange realm.