The Shaman of Kupa Piti

by A. Nybo

  “Don’t know. When I told Sergei this Pavlova bloke was looking for him, he said he didn’t recognise the name.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Leon knocked on the bar a few times and fought himself all the way to the door to keep from looking back at Sergei. Curiously weightless and light on his feet, Leon left Soda Bob’s.

  “Did you discover anything useful?” asked Charlie when Leon got into the car.

  “Well, we’ve finally found someone who recognised Pavel Bobrinsky.”

  “Sergei?”

  “No, Soda Bob. He said Pavel—or as Soda Bob calls him, Pavlova—came in looking for Sergei about a week ago, but Sergei didn’t recognise the name. We’ve also established that Sergei doesn’t think it is connected to his religion in any way. And if he hasn’t had contact with anyone from the region since he left fourteen years ago, as he claims, then I think it very unlikely that it has anything to do with him personally. Still, it is a bizarre coincidence that both he and Bobrinsky are from Murmansk Oblast and that Pavel was looking for Sergei.”

  Charlie pulled into the police station car park, and they were about to get out of the vehicle when Leon had a thought. “What if Bobrinsky is drawn to Sergei because he is a fellow countryman? In his statement, Sergei said he called out a number of times to Miro before he entered the drive. Maybe the killer recognised his accent, and that’s why he didn’t attack him.”

  “It’s a possibility, but at this point, almost anything is a possibility.”

  “Very true.”

  THAT NIGHT, Sergei took his frame drum from where it hung on the wall in his bedroom and ran his hand across the hide of the drumhead. Although made in the traditional Sámi fashion, there was little left of Sámi culture to differentiate it from any other shamanic drum. The symbols of his past—reindeers, the lavvus in which the Sámi lived, and the njallas where they stored goods—were now mixed with painted symbols significant to his current life, such as dugouts, kangaroos, wombats, mines, opals, and a variety of other symbols of which only he would ever know the meaning.

  His purpose firmly in mind, Sergei settled on a rug on his lounge floor and set the drum on his legs, preparing to discover to which gods he needed to make offerings in order to once again make his claim safe.

  With the hammer, he started a slow, steady rhythm, and he quietly yoiked as he drummed. Sergei’s traditional Sámi chanting filled the room. With closed eyes, he consciously yoiked through the subtle shifting of his spirit that indicated he had accessed a thread between the worlds. No longer aware of his body or what it was doing, he focused on the images that flittered before him, the smells that filled his nostrils, the sensations that caressed his skin, and the feelings that rose within, some more vivid than others.

  As sometimes happened when he awoke from a dream, a sense of importance attached to his emergence from the trance in which he’d accessed the thread between the skyworld, earth, and the shadow world. Inexplicable knowledge of which images held the greatest import filled him. The gods to which offerings must be made had been revealed—Beaivi, Lieaibolmmai, and Biggolmai—god of the sun, the hunter, and the man of winds.

  THE FOLLOWING day, Sergei collected the objects he would give as offerings, tiny figurines he’d carved from sun-bleached bones, rudimentary figures of animals, some of which were from his past, such as bears, seals, and wolves. Some he wrapped in lace, the gaps symbolic of the winds breezing through universal channels, and some in hide.

  With his drum carefully placed in the front of his ute, he went to his claim and, after ensuring no one was around, performed a ritualistic cleansing of the area. The spirits hadn’t trained him as a psychopomp, so he avoided entering a trance state as he didn’t feel capable of defending himself from Miro’s spirit should it try to access him.

  If he tried to explain any of this to anyone, they’d probably resurrect the name Rasputin for him—despite the unspoken local policy of only one person ever having a particular nickname. Previous attempts to explain that the existence of a spirit in one’s own mind was what made it a reality had not gone well. Either he was incapable of clear explanation, or those he’d tried to explain it to were unable to comprehend such a thing.

  A spirit taking him over wasn’t some dramatised version like in an exorcism movie. To him it was thoughts of Miro allowed to fester and fill him with all the emotion and pain Miro had suffered to reach death. Miro’s loss of potential, hopes, and dreams would haunt Sergei—especially when he was accessing the thread or when he slept.

  Sergei saw sleeping life and waking life as a continual state of being, albeit separate realities, neither one lesser. Between those two states was where the threads between the worlds connected—the place where he communicated with the dead and the gods.

  For some, ghosts or spirits only manifested when the dead visited them in dreams; for others, the manifestation occurred when they were awake.

  Turning his mind back to the task at hand, Sergei took the biggest bit he could find to fit his hand drill and bored into the earth around the mineshaft at points of the four cardinal directions. Annoyed that Doris had tampered with his offerings, he now had to replace them and add new ones that would keep him safe while in the mine.

  Whether by luck, fine management, or the beneficence of the spirits, Sergei was one of the few miners who hadn’t suffered a cave-in for the five years he’d been mining, and he intended to keep it that way.

  With the holes drilled, he poked his offerings into each one and refilled them. Hopefully, if anything more occurred at his claim, his offerings would be safe.

  Cautiously, Sergei started the genset and climbed down the ladder, uncertain whether he might meet anyone down there. Finding he was alone in the mine, he collected a handful of dirt from the end of the drive. He took it to Miro’s claim and threw it down the shaft in a symbolic gesture of returning Miro’s stolen body parts to his own place of belonging.

  His shamanic instincts satisfied, Sergei returned to his mine, climbed down the shaft, and back to the life he’d made for himself.

  Chapter 5

  LEON’S CALL to his superintendent ended with his being tasked to the case for its duration—until the perpetrator was caught or the trail went cold. In other words, he was in Coober Pedy for the foreseeable future. He was uncertain how to feel about that. The heat and flies were killing him, but there were other aspects that had him marvelling at the place.

  Rodney appeared at the door of George’s office, which Leon had commandeered for the moment.

  “Line three. Lars Andersson.”

  “Thanks, Rodney.”

  He picked up the receiver and pressed line three. “Hi, Lars. Leon here.” They had spoken so often in the past week, their camaraderie had developed quickly.

  “Leon, I’ve found out a bit more about Sergei Menshikov.”

  Leon gathered up pen and pad. “Okay, go ahead.”

  “His father, Ramman Menshikov, grew up in Lovozero, where the Sámi were relocated.”

  “Sámi?

  “The indigenous people of Sápmi, which covered the northern aspect of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia.”

  “Okay, go ahead.” He wrote the pertinent names down as he was going to have to look all this up if he decided it was useful.

  “Ramman moved down to Kandalaksha and became a White Sea fisherman. It was said he was a noojd, known outside the Kola Peninsula as a noaidi, and it was rumoured Sergei was following in his footsteps.”

  “Wait up. What’s this noojd or noaidi or whatever it is?”

  “A Sámi shaman.”

  “Sergei was, or is, a shaman?”

  “I don’t know. At this point the only information I have is that he was following in his father’s footsteps. I say that because from what I can determine, becoming a noaidi isn’t something that is passed down or learned from the living. Noaidis are chosen and taught by the spirits. So to have a father and son both noaidi is a very rare thing.

  “An
yway, his father was murdered, and the rest of the family—his mother, younger sister, and two older brothers—fled to Finland.”

  “Why did they flee to Finland?”

  “That is unclear, but there seems little doubt it had something to do with Ramman’s murder.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “Executed. There was suspicion the Bratva were responsible, but no one was ever arrested for it.”

  “If Sergei did something to the Russian mafia, or stole something from them, are they likely to chase him through the years?”

  “No, no. Very unlikely. Not for fourteen years. That would take a lot of resources.”

  They spoke for a few more minutes before ringing off.

  Leon doodled as he considered the new information. A shaman in training. Perhaps that was the intensity or discomfort people experienced around him. Leon was uncertain what to make of that piece of information.

  Sergei’d had plenty of years to continue his training if that was what he’d desired, not that Leon knew how long it took to be a shaman. He supposed it was a lifelong pursuit. He sensed he’d been looking at this from a completely wrong perspective. What was it Sergei said? A different way of seeing?

  Whether it was the oddity of the crimes, the bones and feathers, or something else completely, Leon was certain that whatever was going on was in some way related to shamanism. Maybe that something else was as simple as his own stupidity and stereotyping, but now that shamanism had been mentioned, his brain wasn’t going to let it go.

  He did an internet search for Sámi and discovered they’d suffered the same fate as most indigenous peoples the world over—forced relocation, loss of culture, displacement, loss of languages, and ongoing discrimination.

  Leon rubbed his forehead. He needed to question Sergei.

  He knocked on Charlie’s door and opened it when Charlie called out. Keeping hold of the door handle, he leaned in. “I need to make another visit to Sergei Menshikov.”

  “You’ll need to take one of the others with you. I’m waiting on a call from Adelaide.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take Rodney. He needs to learn to deal with the miners.”

  Was that a grin Charlie was wearing as he’d turned away? Leon got the distinct feeling Charlie was playing him.

  Leon nodded and backed out of the office, closing the door as he went. The way he was going with Sergei, it was unlikely Rodney would learn anything from him except how to lose his equilibrium, and by the sounds of it, Rodney was quite proficient in that regard already.

  They tried Sergei’s home and looked for his ute at the pub, but he was at neither of those places, which according to Charlie’s previous musings only left one place.

  “We’ll drive out to Sergei’s claim and see if he’s there,” said Leon.

  Rodney cast a wide-eyed gaze at him. “Should we go out there?”

  “Is there some reason we shouldn’t?”

  “Wh-what if the perpetrator has been out there?”

  Leon’s brow furrowed. “What if he has?” Was he missing something? “What are you trying to say?”

  “Shouldn’t Sarge be with us?”

  Leon tried not to lose his shit with the kid. Maybe that’s why Charlie had sent Rodney with him, trying to break Rodney’s dependency on him. “Rodney, you are a policeman, not a child. You need to be able to deal with situations like this without Charlie holding your hand. Now drive.” How the hell did Charlie put up with having this child under his command? Then again, it could be Charlie’s behaviour that left Rodney lacking confidence. Even in a tiny backwater like this, that attitude could get you killed.

  The flat landscape enabled them to see Sergei’s ute from a distance. Rodney drove up the track that passed as a road and pulled the car up beside the 4WD.

  “Wait here,” Leon said. “I’ll call down to him. Just be ready to radio in if there’s trouble.” He rolled his eyes as he got out of the car. He could almost see Rodney shaking in his police-issue boots. How he’d become a constable without shooting anyone was beyond Leon’s understanding. Now that he thought about it, Rodney was kind of unusual. The typical young cop was often gung-ho and eager to prove themself. Maybe it was the brashness of the Coober Pedy inhabitants that had him overwhelmed. Add to that Sergei’s manner, and it was little wonder Rodney was timid.

  Leon walked to the mouth of the shaft, called down, and then listened. He couldn’t really hear much over the genset. “Sergei,” he yelled down again. He waited for a response before calling again. This time he heard a voice but couldn’t understand what was said. He waited.

  Sergei appeared at the bottom and looked up before ascending the ladder. Moving back to wait, Leon flapped his shirt in an attempt to get some air circulating beneath it. He used his uniform baseball cap to wave away the welcome party of flies that had descended upon him the moment he stepped from the vehicle.

  “What can I do for you, Doris?”

  Putting his cap back on, Leon turned around, and his mouth fell open.

  Until that moment, Leon never knew there was a chance he might find a grimy miner sexy. Sergei was covered head to foot with orange dust, except portions of his face where the goggles now perched upon his head had sat and the dust mask that now held his beard to his throat had rested. His grubby jeans had cleaner creases where he had been bending over and the denim had folded in on itself, and the tops of his steel-cap boots were covered by the most unfashionable ankle gaiters Leon had ever seen. Somehow, Sergei managed to make the outfit look as sexy as fuck.

  Aware he was ogling, he inhaled to clear his throat and a fly hit the back of his gullet. He went into a choking fit and tried not to think where the fly might have been. Too late, he dry retched. He spat several times as he strove for a composure so easily destroyed by a single little fly.

  Sergei watched his choking dance with open amusement. “There’s your protein for the day, Doris,” he said when Leon’s coughing died down.

  Trying to pretend he didn’t look like a complete nong, he gave a last cough. “It would have been a little more palatable with some pepper.” He shook his head. “Everything as it should be when you came out here?” Okay, feasible question. Now he needed a follow-up. What had been so important he’d needed to see Sergei?

  “Da, nothing unusual.”

  Shamanism, that’s right. “I wanted to ask you about your father.”

  Sergei’s eyes shuttered. “Why?” His tone was hard and cold.

  “Some information came through that suggested he might have been killed by the Murmansk Bratva.”

  A wild, angry look lit in Sergei’s eyes and drilled into Leon, who battled to maintain eye contact. Sergei abruptly turned and headed back to the mouth of the shaft.

  “Sergei!”

  Without hesitation or a backwards glance, Sergei proceeded down the ladder.

  Rodney stood at the open car door, concerned eyes flickering between Leon and the mineshaft. Leon sighed. He was going to have to go down there, and the fear on Rodney’s face indicated he’d rather not be asked to accompany him.

  Choosing to forego the excuses he was likely to receive, Leon held up a staying hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  Climbing down the ladder, he second-guessed himself, deciding he should’ve probably insisted Rodney come down as well. Too late now. He reached the landing and looked ahead to where the string lights started.

  “Sergei,” he called into the depths.

  He was a few metres in when Sergei stomped towards him. “What?” he demanded.

  “Your father?”

  “That is none of your business. That is past.”

  “The intelligence I received said your father was a noa… a shaman.”

  Sergei stepped into Leon’s space, nostrils flaring, eyes flashing with rage. “What about it?”

  He was one scary bastard. Leon struggled to hold his ground. The sheer force in Sergei’s unblinking gaze threatened to push him back, bu
t he was damned if he was going to let Sergei see how it affected him. “You were training with him?”

  “What do you want from me?” Sergei shouted. The veins in his temple bulged. Sergei pushed him hard and Leon stumbled back, trying to remain upright.

  Sergei spun on his heel and made to walk off, but Leon leapt forwards and grabbed his arm to keep him from walking away again. He vaguely recognised it as the most unprofessional move he’d made in years, but something told him he couldn’t allow Sergei to turn his back on him a second time.

  Wheeling around, Sergei unleashed a storm of slaps to Leon’s head. The stinging pain they delivered was surprising. Flabbergasted by the unusual tactic, Leon tried to block the blows as he backed away. Coming up hard against the mine wall with no place left to go, he had little choice but to retaliate. Either that or endure the attack.

  Leon shoved Sergei back, and Sergei grabbed him around the upper arms, holding them in against Leon’s body. Leon threw himself forwards, crushing Sergei between the opposite wall and his body. Air whooshed loudly from Sergei’s lungs, and it was obviously enough of a shock to break Sergei’s grip.

  They grappled with each other until they fell to the dusty ground, rolling around, wrestling for dominance. There wasn’t an ounce of give in Sergei’s tough body. Every muscle was as hard as the rock he dug in, and he managed to get the upper hand.

  “Is this what you want?” Sergei demanded as he fumbled with Leon’s belt.

  Alarm ricocheted around in Leon’s head like a bullet as he became aware for the first time of what Sergei clearly already knew—Leon had an erection. He smacked at Sergei’s hands and wriggled around, trying to wrest his buckle from Sergei’s grasp. Shocked by the man’s brute strength, Leon fought to throw him off, but it was like Sergei was a born rodeo rider, easily counteracting every twist and turn Leon made.

  Sergei grabbed both Leon’s thumbs in one hand and held them together. Leon tried to pull his hands apart, but the grip was so tight, he’d dislocate his thumbs if he pulled any harder. Sergei got the belt’s tongue free of the first part of the buckle post, but then Leon threw a leg up and kneed Sergei in the back, sending him off balance, and then flipped them over.