The Shamer's War

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “You’re not going to do anything,” I said. “Not yet. I am.”

  “Dina! You’re not going down there!”

  “No. That won’t be necessary.”

  “How many people can she look in the eye at a time?”

  That was how the Weapons Master had put it, but he hadn’t meant it for a real question. He thought he already knew the answer: not very many. I hoped he was wrong.

  “Tano?”

  “Yes?” He looked up, quickly hiding something he had been filing away at.

  “I… Tano, are you afraid of me?”

  “No,” he said, not hesitating even for a second.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you…” He had to stop and search for the words. “You are not one who—Some strong people use their strength against others. Or abuse it. Sometimes openly, other times just when they think they can get away with it without being found out. But you aren’t like that, even though you are strong.”

  “You are almost the only one I know who isn’t afraid.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I’ve noticed.”

  “That’s why I want to ask you to do something for me.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I have to go elsewhere. But my body will still be here.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That sounds strange.”

  “It is strange. And there are people here—Nico, perhaps, or Rikert—who might be frightened and think there is something wrong with me and do all sorts of things they shouldn’t do. So, Tano, will you look after me? While I’m gone?”

  He looked at me. Straight into my eyes, like almost no one else dared to do.

  “Do you promise to come back?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll do it. How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know. Time is odd there. You’ll have to be patient.”

  “I’m good at that,” he said.

  I knew I needed both my father and my mother if this was to succeed. And there was only one place it could happen. I lay down on the blanket and looked at Tano one last time. He sat next to me, steady as a rock, the kind of rock you moor ships to.

  Then I closed my eyes and let myself slide into the shining mists of the Ghost Country.

  I found the thread I needed and followed it through the mists. This time she would have to listen to me, because now I had my Shamer’s voice back. But where was she? Sitting on a chair, it seemed, halfway between two beds. In one bed lay Callan, in the other, Davin. Davin? Was he ill? He didn’t look healthy, certainly. Sweat beaded his forehead, and he was very pale. But both he and Callan were sleeping, and I think Mama was dozing as well.

  “Mama.”

  “Dina?”

  She was looking in my direction, but not right at me, as if she could hear me but not see me. And she was frightened. When I had been lost in the Ghost Country because of the witch weed, back when Valdracu had captured me, I had tried to reach her through the mists. She had told me to go back. What you are doing is dangerous. Later, much later, it was she who had told me that I must have been close to death to travel the mists like that. Did she think me close to death now? I wasn’t. I would not get lost in the Ghost Country this time. I knew exactly where I was.

  “Mama, I need your help.”

  In the bed, Callan was sitting up now, looking uncertainly at Mama, but she paid him no heed.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Not very far away. Not anymore. But Drakan’s army stands between us. I think I can make most of it crumble. If you will help me.”

  Could she still hear me? Yes, it seemed so.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “First of all, come to me.”

  She knew what I meant. She knew it was the Ghost Country I was talking about. And for the first time ever I saw my mother afraid of something that didn’t threaten anyone but herself.

  “I don’t know if I can,” she whispered, looking around her uncertainly.

  “Give me your hand.”

  “I can’t see you.”

  I hesitated. How could I reach her when she couldn’t see me, and probably couldn’t touch me either?

  And then I knew. It was simple, really. In the Ghost Country, it was desire and longing that moved people and things.

  “Do you want to see me again?” I said, feeling a pang of fear that the answer might not be a wholehearted yes anymore.

  “Dina! Of course I do!”

  “Then think about that. Think of me. And think about how much you… how much you love me.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and I think she did exactly what I asked her to do. Already, I could sense that she was closer to me than she had been a moment ago. And I let my longing reach out too, to bring us closer still, until I could finally touch her.

  We were both standing in the Ghost Country now. Voices were calling in the mists around us. Mama squeezed my hand in hers, and it felt as real as if we were actually standing next to each other in the flesh. She still looked frightened, though.

  Out of the mists came a third figure. And when Mama saw him, she stepped in front of me, still trying to protect me against him.

  “You shall not have her,” she said. “Not here, nor any other place.”

  Papa looked at her. He looked at her for a very long time.

  “She is neither yours nor mine anymore,” he said. “She can make her own choices. But right now she needs us both.”

  Mama hesitated. “For what?”

  “I want all of them to dream the same dream,” I said. “A true dream of the kind you cannot run away from.”

  “All of them?” said Mama. “Who is that?”

  “The Dragon men, of course,” I said. “But not just them. The clans too. Otherwise I think it might go wrong.”

  “She has my help,” said Papa. “Does she have yours?”

  “You never give anything without expecting something in return,” she said. “There is a cost. What is the price of your help, Sezuan?”

  An odd sort of movement went through his shoulders.

  “Will you think of me every once in a while?” he asked. “And not hate me? And will you not hate the part of me that lives on in our daughter?”

  “I don’t hate any part of Dina!”

  “No? I couldn’t bear it if you became like him. Those were your words, Melussina.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you really here, Sezuan? Or is this something I am dreaming, since you know things I never told you?”

  And suddenly I knew that it wasn’t just because I needed him that he was here.

  “He wouldn’t be here if you didn’t still long for him,” I said quietly.

  Mama spun as if I had touched her with something very sharp.

  “I have Callan now. And I have never—” But then she stopped. Her eyes were full of tears.

  Callan? Mama and Callan?

  Yes, of course. That was why. That was why he sometimes deferred to her, and to me too, a little, when normally he never listened to anyone except Maudi Kensie.

  But right now it wasn’t about Callan. And I knew I was right. Papa would not be here if Mama did not still long for him.

  “Damn you,” she whispered. “Why do you have to be so clever.”

  And then she looked directly at me.

  “Yes, I loved him,” she said defiantly. “More than I have ever loved any man. And yes. I still long for him.”

  Something inside me came loose. A deep, deep knot of fear and longing. I couldn’t bear for her always to hate him. And now that she herself had admitted it, then surely I too might love him and be like him, at least a little?

  My father laughed, and it was very strange to hear laughter in this place of loss and yearning.

  “Did it really hurt you so much to say that? Melussina, it is no crime to love another human being.”

  “Isn’t this where you are supposed to tell me that you love me too?” she asked.

 
; “Would you believe me if I said it?”

  “I might.”

  “I told you once, back at the Golden Swan. And you knew I was telling the truth.”

  She bowed her head. “Yes. I knew that.”

  “Do you need to hear me say it again?”

  She shook her head. “No. You said it when you were alive. I would rather remember that than hear the words from… from a vision that might not even exist.” She turned to me once more. “All right, Dina. If a mother and a ghost can help you, let us begin. What is it you want us to do?”

  “I want them to dream,” I said. “And I want them to dream of you.”

  DINA

  The Shamer’s War

  I raised the flute. Poised between two worlds, I stood in the pass between the snow-clad walls of rock and here, in the Ghost Country, where the notes lit up the grayness like small stars. They went spinning from one rock face to the other, back and forth, as if weaving an invisible cloth. They wove their way into the mists of the Ghost Country, in a world that did not belong to the waking and the living. And they wove a dream.

  No nice dream, but a dream of the sort you would rather forget but cannot. It stays with you forever. Because no one forgets my mother, once they have looked into her eyes. And no one forgets the things she makes you remember.

  Look at me.

  The words were not spoken aloud, and yet everyone heard them in the dream. Dreams will find you wherever you go. You can’t hide, and you can’t run. And a Shamer’s eyes are a pitiless mirror.

  Some moaned loudly in their sleep. Others screamed. Most people cried. Because this had been a cruel war, and many things had happened that they would rather forget.

  “He would have done the same to me!”

  “I was just doing what I was told to do.”

  “I thought she had a knife. I really did!”

  Look at me.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing!”

  “The others did it too! I wasn’t the one who wanted to do it.”

  “It just happened.”

  “He was no angel either!”

  “But they are not—They are not like us. Not human like us.”

  Look at me.

  And there was nowhere else to look, nowhere to go. Little by little, the chorus of excuses fell silent. And shame spread.

  It came most strongly on the Dragon Force, where it had been cast out and rejected for so long. There was so much to be ashamed of there. But the clans felt it too, Skaya and Laclan and Kensie. There, too, some dreamers tried to wriggle free and get away, to avoid remembering. But the Shamer’s eyes would not let them go.

  Remember. And never do it again.

  For if you don’t remember your evil deeds as well as your good ones, how can you learn? If you do not remember, how can you be sure it won’t happen again?

  I lowered the flute. With a stab of sadness I suddenly knew that I would never play it again. Other flutes, perhaps, but not this one. It could do too many things. It knew too much. Sometimes I felt the flute was playing me and not the other way around.

  “They will fear me even more now,” said Mama, softly and sadly. “And you too.”

  I nodded. “I know. But as long as there are a few who don’t. A few who know that… that I’m also just a girl.”

  My mother gave me a rapid, curious glance. “Have you met someone like that?” she asked. “Someone who knows that you’re a girl?”

  How can one stand in the midst of shining gray mists, in a Ghost Country beyond the waking world, and still be thirteen years old and blushing furiously? But I was.

  I opened my eyes. It was morning. There was daylight everywhere around me.

  Tano hovered over me. “Are you back now?” he asked cautiously.

  “Yes.” My voice was so hoarse it was barely audible.

  “Were you the one playing?” he said. “It sounded like you, even though you were just lying there.”

  I nodded. “That was me.”

  “I didn’t fall asleep,” he said, “even though the flute wanted me to.”

  “It’s not easy to avoid.”

  “No, but if I had fallen asleep, I wouldn’t have been able to look after you. But even though I wasn’t sleeping, I still saw her.”

  “Mama?”

  “Yes. It must have been her. Her eyes were just like yours.”

  “Was it bad?”

  He shook his head a couple of times, like a horse trying to be rid of a fly. “It wasn’t pleasant. There are some things one doesn’t like being reminded of.”

  “I’m sorry. It… it had to be everyone. Otherwise some people might try to… to take revenge.”

  “On the Dragon men, you mean?”

  “Yes. And if this worked the way I hoped it would work, they are not in any condition to defend themselves right now.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It was a strange sight. Weapons lay in huge piles, or scattered where people had dropped them. There were men who just sat, crying openly or hiding their faces in their hands. Others wandered aimlessly, looking more like ghosts than living human beings. Some had already begun the long trek back to the Lowlands and whatever homes they had left down there, but most seemed unable to move and to act, as if some great disaster had come upon them and left them stunned and helpless—and perhaps that was not so far off the mark.

  The small army the Weapons Master had brought with him had been thoroughly shaken as well, and nobody wanted to look at me.

  “Nico?”

  He was standing a little way up the slope, looking down at the disarray.

  “They have fallen apart,” he said disbelievingly. “Completely apart.”

  “You said yourself that this might be a war that would not be decided by weapons.”

  “Yes. I said that. But still, I hadn’t imagined… Dina, what you and your mother did last night, it’s like an earthquake. Nothing is the same.”

  “Anything less would have been too little.”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  He wouldn’t look at me at all. The way he held his head, the distance he kept between us, was he afraid to touch me now?

  I was very, very tired, or I might not have said it.

  “Nico. I’m not venomous.”

  He knew what I meant. But this time there was no offer of a comforting hug, no crying on his shoulder.

  “I am sorry, Dina. I’m not myself. None of us are.” He touched my cheek, very lightly, like he sometimes did. But I saw a hesitation in his movements that had not been there before, and it almost made me cry.

  “Drakan is still down there,” I said.

  He nodded. “I know. And perhaps now you will let me go down to find him? Without calling me spoiled and suicidal?”

  Did he mean for me to smile? I didn’t feel like it.

  “Only if you take the Weapons Master and his men,” I said.

  “I was planning to.” He sighed. “At least we will no longer see children running around with weapons. At least we will be spared that.”

  Or so we thought. But a little way into the pass we were met by a sight that made us stop abruptly.

  Some sort of snowslide had blocked most of the pass, and a narrow passage had been cleared. Across that narrow bit of free road, a line of child soldiers were ranged. Behind them were ten Dragon knights, standing shoulder to shoulder. And behind them, that must have been where Drakan was.

  Why were they still protecting their Lord? Why were they not as stunned and shaken as everyone else? The Dragon knights, that I might understand. There were rumors that Drakan let his elect drink the blood of his dragons. But the children?

  I stared at their faces. So serious and determined. So unshakable in their obedience. That in itself was so eerie that I could barely stand to look at them, and yet I could not take my eyes off them.

  And then I suddenly knew why they were not crushed by a sense of shame. They were only doing what they had been told was right. Some of them might well be Gel
t children, taken from their villages and their parents and brought up to believe that the word of the Dragon Lord was the ultimate law. Perhaps the peddler who had sold Tano and Imrik was not the only one from whom Drakan had bought children.

  How could one fight these eerie little warriors? One could not use force and sharp weapons against these serious faces. Not if one was a decent human being. Yet if we didn’t—

  The weapons were real. And the children would use them.

  Nico was standing right next to me, and I was sure his thoughts were very like to mine. To him it was a nightmare reborn. An evil dream he thought he had escaped once, and now it was coming true right in front of him. Nico hated swords at the best of times. He would never be able to use a weapon against a child. His anger was so colossal I could feel it even without looking at him. But what could he do with all his fury?

  “Oh, the bastard,” murmured Carmian and lowered her bow. “What can you do against something like that?”

  Even the Weapons Master had grown pale and looked sickened.

  “We cannot let him escape,” he said, “even if it costs… we’ll have to. If we don’t kill the bastard, he will find his way back into the Lowlands and the troops he has left there, and everything will have been in vain.” He raised his voice. “Break off your arrowheads and spear points,” he ordered. “And use the flats of your swords. Perhaps we can overcome them without having to kill anyone.”

  But “perhaps” wasn’t good enough for Nico.

  “Drakan!”

  His shout echoed between the rock walls that rose steeply on either side. And the second time he shouted, there was an answer. From behind the lines of children and Dragon knights came a voice I hadn’t forgotten, even though it had been two years since I had heard it last.

  “Little Nico. What are you doing out there? I thought you were hiding behind the walls.”

  “Drakan, I want to talk.”

  “Talk away.”

  “Face to face.”

  “Be my guest. If you come alone and unarmed, they’ll let you through.”

  I dug my fingers into Nico’s arm.