A KNOWLEDGE SHARPER THAN FLINT- Part 1

A KNOWLEDGE SHARPER THAN FLINT- Part 1, by Adrian Simmons, pending art by Miguel Santos

 1.  A Shaman Amok in Dreamtime

The chieftain of the scout-birds circled over Selu’s head, black wings glinting in the sun.  She turned and dove, passing over him so close he could touch her.

“He’s here!  He’s here!”  Her beak, yellow and bright as the petals of a shade stone flower jabbed toward a point behind him.

Selu ran on, his feet sinking ankle-deep into the mud.  He reached into the hut-bird nest tied around his chest and drew out the one thick wriggling grub that he carried within.  He stopped and knelt.  Sweat, from both exertion and fear, dripped down his brow as he placed the thumb-sized bug on a flat stone.

He stood and the chieftain of the scout-birds dropped from the sky with a happy cry of “Thank you!  Thank you!”  Then she pecked up the grub and flew away.

One gave offerings to one’s allies in the spirit world, and besides, the neck-breaker was smart enough not to get too close, not if the scout-bird was about.

The shaman took a moment to look behind him:  knee-high grass and a scattering of trees.  The great cat was surely there, but it was patient and skilled.  He could see claw-marks on some trees, proof of the neck-breaker’s presence, others were stripped of bark, signs of elephants.  There was a hollow stump, the mud and earth clumsily torn from its roots- a marsh-elephant making a basket.  The sky above was bright and cloudless, but night’s spine stretched across it.  He could see the amber wanderer in the heavens as well—always a good sign.

Such sights as these, the stars in the day-blue sky, were not rare here.  Signs and omens abounded in the spirit world, like tracks and spore did in the lands of flesh.  But he was not here for signs, he was after something bigger.

Selu pressed on through the mud, and the neck-breaker surely followed on silent pads.  Selu’s steps, wet and flapping, were sure, driving him toward a slow wide creek.   He could hear, barely, the occasional slosh of the neck-breaker’s paws in the mud behind him and the swish of its passing through the sparse underbrush.

His steps turned to a jog, and he darted toward the bank of the creek.  He turned back to look and saw the neck-breaker step from the grass.  In the way of the spirit world, the neck-breaker was bigger than in the waking life, and in waking life he was big enough—here he was the size of a forest elephant, his fur a light brown spotted black.  He shook the mud from a paw, then crouched to spring, yes, even across this great distance.

To look into the eyes of the neck-breaker was to look into a yellow flame against the blue of the sky; to look was to become trapped as surely as hooked by her claws or pierced by her fangs.  Selu was a great shaman and he looked and was not trapped.  He turned his back and ran, ran and slid behind a great tree.   The neck-breaker leapt, covering the distance easily, but by then Selu had picked up a stone and summoning the sorcery of men he threw it far to the side.  As it crashed through the leaves and branches the neck-breaker leapt after it, and Selu ran the other way to the flowing creek.

“Treachery!” the neck-breaker roared, wheeling about.  “Tricks and deception!”

All the marsh served to help the neck-breaker, the sucking mud would slow a man; the tangled vines would catch a man; the scattered trees would hold a man; all so that neck-breaker could catch and devour him.  Selu was a shaman, powerful, wise and determined, and he was not stuck in the mud; not caught in the vines; not slowed by the trees.

The mud grew deeper and Selu put his foot on a fallen tree trunk to cross the little stream. Behind him he heard the neck-breaker tear through the vines, slosh through the mud.

The fallen tree was rotted and squelched with each step.  It crossed from the mud over the languid flowing creek, with only a tangled mat of broken limbs and branches reaching the other side.  Selu ran across the trembling trunk and into the spongy mat; here his feet slipped, sinking down through the soft branches as he churned his way up the bank, clawing forward with his hands.

“Oh,” whispered the neck-breaker behind, stepping around the splayed roots of the fallen tree.  “You are caught, little one.  I fear no spit of water.”

Selu’s hands and feet sank into soft mud and he turned to see the great cat was crouching, claws digging into the tree-trunk before it exploded forward.  He could not watch!  He must not watch!  Selu clawed and kicked his way through breaking branches and sucking mire and behind him he heard the neck-breaker land and then—as he had planned!—the soft tree trunk cracked beneath its weight.  With a great sodden splash the huge cat sank into the mud.

Selu struggled to his feet.  He could reach out and touch the neck-breaker with his hand.  For a moment the spirit’s eye’s betrayed its shock as it sank, almost to the shoulder; betrayed its hesitation about killing him, or fighting its way out of the muck.  Then the neck-breaker yowled and began flailing and clawing, flinging broken branches and mud; a storm upon the plains contained in a body.

Only three items can be taken into the spirit world, and only a few words can be said there, and with the will of a man forcing his hand into a fire Selu spoke.  “The horror of the forest, flopping in mud—I will tell it in the waking world and children will laugh!  We will make a song of it and not even toothless babes will fear you!”

The chieftain of the neck-breakers stopped in her struggles and bent her will back to killing, as Selu knew she would.  Slinging mud and water, a great paw lashed at him, catching him along the shin, the claws tearing though the flesh, kissing the bone, and then sliding off.

“Tell that to your children!”  roared the cat.

Pain, even in the spirit world, can drive all thoughts from a man’s head, but Selu was a great Shaman, old and strong, and did not let the wound on his leg confuse him.  He dug his hand into the muck, and using the true sorcery of man he threw a handful of it into the blazing eye of the neck-breaker.  The great cat lurched back.

“Kill me,” Selu shouted, “and live forever without your eye!”  He reached into the hut-bird nest at his chest and pulled out the second item he had taken into the spirit world:  a piece of elephant tusk, smoothed and round and gleaming white, painted in yellow and blue to look like the very eye of the neck-breaker itself.

“No!” shouted the cat.  “Give it back!”  Still she struggled forward, but hesitant now, fearful.

“Grant me a gift!” shouted Selu, struggling backward across limbs and mud. “A gift for your eye!”

The neck-breaker growled, found better footing.

“A great gift!” shouted Selu.  “Great as chipping stone!  Great as summoning fire!  Great that the name of Selu will be whispered in awe the same as the name of the neck-breaker!”  He cocked his arm back, ready to throw the eye away using the true sorcery of man.

The neck-breaker thought, her tongue licked the mud from her muzzle; the mud from her eye trickled away.  Selu’s deception would not last long.

“Hurry!” shouted the shaman, using the true sorcery of man to toss the eye from one hand to another.

“Yes!” shouted the spirit.  “Can you not smell it?  Have you not heard it?  There is a man who is not a man!”

“Lies!” Selu said.  “You think to trick me!”

“It is true!”  the spirit wailed, more a frightened child than a killer of men.  “To sun-up, among the seer-folk!  I swear it!”

The spirit turned stretched its mouth wide, wide enough to catch a man’s skull—which is exactly what they did in the waking world.  Then it bit into the soft earth, turned and drooled out the mud and roots and began digging through the mess with paw.  Then it daintily picked out a thick roundish root with its great fangs.

“Do you see?”  It slurred through the side of its mouth, “Do you not see?”

The root, fist-of-nothing, Selu knew, was of no use to anyone.  You could not eat it, you could not eat any part of it, nor could you cook any part of it to eat, nor did anything worth eating desire any part of it.   He tightened his grip on the cool ivory orb and looked into the eye—the good eye—of the spirit.  He found no treachery there, only the desperate, disparate logic of the spirit world.  If fist-of-nothing could be made valuable in any way it would be a great gift.  But what of the man who was not a man?  What did that mean?

Selu thirsted to ask, needed to know more!  But the spirit world had its rules, it’s order.  And he had little time, the neck-breaker would know soon, surely, that she still had both eyes.

“You have told me a great secret and given me a great gift.”  He dipped the ivory ball into the murky water, made a show of washing it.  “See!  I return your eye to its empty socket.”  He stood, limped forward on his torn leg and reached out with both hands, slipping the palmful of water in front of the great ivory orb as one would fool a child.

To touch a spirit, to touch a great spirit like neck-breaker, was to stand naked in the storm, to hear the great ancient tree fall, and he savored its strange flavor before roughly rubbing the filthy water into the thick mud still caked on the face of the spirit.  He dropped the ivory eye and set his foot upon it, sinking it into the mire.

He leaned forward, almost embracing the great head, the dripping whiskers sliding across his face and he whispered into the wide triangular ear.  “Behold.  Close your good eye and look about and see that I have kept my word.”

The neck-breaker edged back, and then snapped her clean eye shut.  She stretched wide the lids of her muddy eye and gazed about, then her lips turned up and he ran a great long lick across Selu’s chest and face.

“Thank you!  Thank you!”

Faster than could be believed, the neck-breaker turned and leapt back across the creek and slunk away into the underbrush.

Selu began to laugh, laugh as only a shaman who had tricked a spirit could; laughed as only an old man who had tricked a young man could; laughed such that it drowned out all the other sounds of the mire; laughed such that neck-breaker and a hundred other spirits heard and shuddered.

He looked down, somehow the great ivory eye had come back to the surface and gazed at him, and next to it was the fist-of-nothing, a cone of useless root, from which spring three sad crumpled leaves and a wilted flow-stalk.  And suddenly, in the disparate way of the dream world, nothing was funny, nothing was funny at all.

 

2.  A Shaman With Little Time Left in the Waking World

Selu came out of the trance suddenly, his dying laughter echoing in his tent.  It was dark.  He was hungry and thirsty.  He dropped the neck-breaker tooth that he had held, that had led him to the chieftain spirit and clapped his hands.  Kimaiya opened the hide door, daylight lancing around him, and bearing a gourd of water and handful of nuts.

The young man’s face split into a grin as the old man struggled to sit up.  “I heard you laughing, did you finally outsmart the spirits?”

“Kimaiya,” he said between deep breaths.  “I went far into the realm of the spirits, I confronted the neck-breaker herself, and I tricked her. “

Selu took the gourd, surprised at the weight of it.  He took a long drink.  “She has given me a great gift, but also a great riddle.”

He took another drink, chewed and swallowed the nuts.

“How long was I in the trance?”

“Three nights.”

Selu struggled to his feet.  In the spirit world he had been young!   Three hands and a finger of summers and no injuries.  But no, he was old, two hands of hands and three fingers—or was it four?  He didn’t remember.  It didn’t matter.  What mattered was that toward sunrise, in a camp of the Seer Folk, was a man who was not a man, and who could tell him how to make fist-of-nothing into something useful.

In his younger days he would have packed immediately and left.  But an old man who lays down for three days will take at least five days to recover from it.  And an old man who faced a long trek needed a young man to help, and the Ridge of Dreams would be crowded with those soon enough.  He would be patient like the neck-breaker herself.

 

3.  A Hunter Displays His Trophies

Kiptum the hunter leaned against his spear, the summer sun laughing above him and the rest of the supplicants that stood facing the Ridge of Dreams.  The cliff, higher than he could throw a spear, loomed over them, its face tilting gently outward as it approached the ground, and then suddenly dipping in.  That overhang, in which the shamans kept so many secrets, was covered by hide and bark walls, some rounded, some flat.

Here the First Tribe had made shelter and here Lafula had heard the voice of the earth and she became the first shaman.  Here the hunters of all the other tribes brought dried game and sought wisdom and renown.

Those bulging shelters, be they of skin or bark, flat or round, so impressive at first, after five days of waiting, now looked to Kiptum like ticks crowded into a seam of skin.

Today, though, was the day of the new moon, when darkness and ignorance sat in full strength.  The day of judgements and appeals.  The two hands of elders and Shamans sat upon their semi-circle of stone in the shadow of the ridge, along with the tamed scout-birds of the First Tribe and the various supplicants.  Even the birds knew enough not to sit in the sun!

One of the elders stood and motioned at him to come forward.

“I am Kiptum, of the Red Wasp clan,” he held up his trophy necklace, “each red incisor is a hand of spiral-horns hunted and butchered, each flat disk of buffalo ear is a hand of buffalo, the sharp hooked toe is five ostriches.  Thus have I proved myself as a man, and so I have come to Ridge of Dreams to seek wisdom and memory.   It was known in my father’s time that a man could reach into the slow river and pull out a fish as long as his arm.  But that knowledge has been lost, and I have asked all the other elders, even among the Eagle clan, and the Digger folk, and none remember the skill.”

Kiptum stepped back among the rest of the supplicants.

One of the shamans struggled to his feet and limped out among them.  The old man was no taller than Kiptum, but seemed to be all limbs, all elbows and knees.  Beneath his headband of twisted ulsa bark his face was round, as were the nostrils of his wide nose.

“Each of you have come and each of you will have your questions answered,” the old man said.  “But we have our own hunts to conduct.  Hunts that cross the face of this world and the world of dreams, hunts into the day before the sun rises and the day after the sun sets.”

This shaman paced a moment.  “I am in need of a companion to accompany me on a great journey.  He who comes with me, he will return to his folk and his name will live among them long after he himself is dust.   Beyond the answers you have come here to seek, do any of you crave such fame?  Crave it like water in the grass sea?”

Perhaps it was all the time spent standing in the sun, but Kiptum could not deny that he had such a thirst.  He had proven himself against all creatures of the world, almost all.  But many men had done so, even some women.   Hunting down the lost secret of grabbing fish, that was a prey that would lead to more prey, which would lead to fat bellies and smiling faces; reward enough for a hunter.  But to gain fame among the elders at the Ridge of Dreams?  That was a track he would follow.

He stepped forward, as did the tall hunter of the Cheetah Folk, and the solid middle-aged man of the Leaf-Spider clan.

The old shaman looked over them, as an elephant might while it decided to leave you or crush you.  “Who among you have ever traveled among the Seer Folk?”

Kiptum and the tall Cheetah Folk walked forward another step.

Kiptum disliked the Seer Folk.  They made the best flint, though, it could not be denied.  If you brought them the core of an elephant tusk they could give you a spear tip made of black glass that was magic.  And that’s why he didn’t like them, the tusk was the only useless part of an elephant, what could they want with it?

The old shaman spoke, “Only one may come, and I must decide.”  He limped past Kiptum and tapped the tall Cheeta-Folk hunter on the chest and pulled at his trophy necklace.  “You have many teeth and claws of the creatures who hunt men.”

The tall hunter held up a long curving tooth.  “A neck-breaker had stalked our people, killing my nephew and stealing the game we caught.  I swore to put an end to it, and I did.”

“A neck-breaker?”  the old shaman held the long tooth, squinting and tracing a lean finger along it.

“And you,” he said to Kiptum, barely turning.   “Why do you not have a string of predator teeth?”

What a foolish question!  Best to answer honestly.  “The Red Wasp clan is wise, our elders do not let children wander untended. And our children are born wise and would not wander untended even if they could.  In my three hands and one years, I’ve never had to spill the blood of a predator.  I have been fast, I have stood tall and frightened them with shouts, with thrown stones, and with the unblinking gaze.”

The old shaman gently placed the great tooth back on the hunter’s chest.  He took two limping steps, and pressed his hand against Kiptum’s chest.

“You.”

 

4.  A Woman of the Seer-Folk Gambles on the Future

Clauviku shared her brother-in-law’s dislike of the men of the Red Wasp Clan, and his distrust of the shamans of the First Tribe.  Her brother-in-law, Wafulu, especially did not like these two, who had travelled for three days across the wide grassland to talk to him about his missing wife.  But their same act had gained them favor in Clauviku’s eyes, as his missing wife was her sister.

Still, the old witch-man looked like a long-legged leaf-spider; the kind that tangled one’s hand in a web.  The younger was more compact, the kind of spider who would leap suddenly onto you.

But they had brought a small black-stripe deer and eight pebble-turner birds as was proper for guests and travelers, and so Mosi, the head man, had insisted hospitality be observed.  And here they were, the four of them sitting in the sparse shade with a skin of barely warm spice-root between them.

“My wife took sick,” Wafulu explained.  “Thrashed around in her sleep like she was on an anthill, then lay still for two nights.”

The two strangers just looked at him.  That was one of the things she didn’t like about their kind; they stared like they were children and her brother-in-law was telling a story, or maybe like they were adults and he was a child trying to tell them a falsehood.

The older man broke eye contact just long enough to dip his hand into the skin and pull out a small ball of spice-root and delicately put it in his mouth.  He chewed and said nothing.  His scout-bird glided from the tree and perched on his shoulder a moment, then flitted back up into the branches.

Mosi, the Seer-Folk head man, broke the silence.  “We are strong, with many clever women and many fine hunters, and we took care of Mukali until she awoke.”

“But she was like a newborn,” Wafulu said.  “She could not stand or speak, her hands were clumsy, like someone struck by a stone.”

For the first time that day, the younger stranger spoke.  “Did you leave her out in the sun?”

“Do not be a fool!”  Wafulu snapped.

Clauviku had to agree.  Why would the stranger, why would anyone, think that?

It was obvious to anyone with eyes that Wafulu disliked talking about it.  He had lost a wife, and whether she was stolen or simply left hm, it was the same—a loss of face and status.  It was also obvious that Mosi the head-man only had eyes for trying to wheedle the shaman into figuring out if this was a new sickness sent to fret at the Seer folk.

“We are strong,” Mosi said, “and we took care of her even then, and we helped her to walk, and we taught her to use her hands and even to speak.”  He pointed with his lion-mane-tufted stick at her.  “She did much of it, and Wafulu Six-Antelope the rest.”

“She did not know how to talk?” the old shaman said.  He settled his gaze on her.

Clauviku answered. “She did not, and she had always been good at language.  My sister knew all the tongues of each tribe and clan.  A wonder and a pride of the Seer Folk.  But she lost that skill, and could not speak for many days, and… and,” she hesitated.  “She learned quickly, as she always did.  But even faster.”

The two strangers looked at each other.  Finally, the hunter reached into the hide pot, took a tiny bite of the spice-root, and flicked his fingers, scattering what didn’t get into his mouth.  In moments three beggar-birds descended from the tree and began pecking them up. In another moment his scout-bird flew down to join them.

Her brother-in law, Wafulu, dipped his hand into the pot, took a bite, a big one—and that meant he was even more annoyed.

“She was not Mukali, not my wife,” he said at last.

Clauviku nodded.  It was still painful to say.  “She was not Mukali, not my sister.”

“She was not Mukali,” Mosi the head man said, “not the girl I have known half my life.”

The head-man reached in, scrapped the bottom of the hide and brought his fingers to his mouth.  “Tell me,” he said to the older man.  “You are a witch-doctor, you go to the valley of dreams.  Is it true what is said, that something from the valley of dreams come into a person?”

The old man looked almost childishly surprised by the question.  “No.  The spirits may cling to a shaman as he comes out of the valley of dreams, but they cannot do what you say.  And if one untrained in the ways, or eats guadro root or dream sap they may find themselves in the valley of dreams-”

“Or if a man is out in the sun too long,” the young hunter volunteered.

“We didn’t leave her in the sun!” both she and Wafulu shouted.

“Did she eat fist-of-none?” the old man asked.

It was such an odd thing to ask that for a long moment nobody said anything at all.  Finally, Mosi, with the odd skill that a head-man has to have, said:   “Nobody does anything with fist-of-none.  You can’t eat it, you can’t sear it and eat it, you can’t use it to attract anything that you would want to eat.”

“Did she make a paint out of it?” the old man asked.

“You can’t make paint out of fist-of-none,” Clauviku, who knew of paints and dyes because that is how the Seer Folk, and all decent folk, did things.

The two strangers looked at each other for a moment.

“How long ago did you leave her behind?” the old man asked.

“She left us!” Clauviku said, finally growing as annoyed as Wafulu with the accusation.  “We leave none behind!  We are strong and will carry an injured person for a hand of hands, and Mukali was learning again all the things that a child knows, yet we would not have left her.  It is she who departed from us!”

Unfazed by their anger, the old man asked, “What band did she join up with?”

The three Seer Folk were very quiet.  Finally, Clauviku said, “None.”

It was clear that the First Tribe shaman and the Red Waste hunter did not believe her, and with good reason.  For all the gifts of man, the world was hard and tricky and full of danger enough for a mobile tribe, much less a lone woman.

“No,” the young hunter said, as if he had caught them in a lie.  “No one would do that.”

“She did!” Wafulu said.  “She got up with the sun, rolled up her bag of tools, took two spears and began walking to sunrise.  Alone.”

Clauviku knew there was something else, something else that Wafulu had not said, perhaps they had fought?  It was unlikely, in a troupe of six hands of people someone would have heard, someone would have known.

For a long time, they all sat quite under the tree while the beggar-birds pecked and bobbed in the grass.  The young hunter’s scout-bird flew back up to sit at his shoulder.

Wafulu said, “She rolled up her bag of tools, took two spears and…” he turned to her with an unreadable expression, then to Mosi, and then to the two strangers.  “And… she had another face.”

He put his open hand on the back of his head, “Another face, here!  She walked away to sunrise and she… she watched me with her other face.”

Wafulu turned to her suddenly, “Clauviku, I swear by my mother that bore me and the red hunter’s star, Mukali is gone, whatever… whatever walks in your sister’s skin is… is….”

He surged to his feet, startling the beggar-birds back into the air. “Maybe we should have left her in the sun!” he shouted, then turned and stalked away.

Silence reigned until the beggar-birds flapped back down and the old man asked:  “Did anyone follow her?”

“I did,” Clauviku said.  “After I heard of it.  For perhaps half a day… then I grew frightened and came back.”

It wasn’t entirely true.  She had been almost glad that her not-sister had gone.  Deep inside she knew that what Wafulu had said had been true.  Something else walked in her sister’s skin.  Like a stranger living in her tent.

But still, the moon had made almost two journeys since Mukali had left, Clauviku had wondered if she could not have done more.  Watched over the tent until her sister came back.

The old witch-doctor nodded.  “The spirits guided me here to find a man who is not a man.  We have set ourselves to this goal.  Tomorrow I will set Kiptum on the trail and we will find her, if she still lives.”

Clauviku did not like the First Tribe, but everything they had said was true.  The question came out of her mouth before she could fully think I through.  “Can you drive this thing out of my sister’s skin so that she can return?”

The old man looked surprised, as if it had not occurred to him.  “Let us find her first and from there we will see.”

She thought about the next thing she said, decided to say it.  “If I go, if I set up your tent and make your fire, will you swear to do what you can to help her?”

The old man thought, his fingers strumming against the hut-bird nest tied around his chest.

“Yes.”

 

5.  A Shaman Limps To A Mystery

Selu’s leg hurt, where the neck-breaker had caught him in the spirit world.   He had hoped if he just walked it would go away.  But from the Ridge of Dreams to the camp of the Seer Folk, three nights of travel, it had not gotten better; it had gotten worse.  Leaning on his spear helped at first.  He knew it was slowing them down, but neither Kiptum nor Clauviku said anything about it.

Clauviku, for being a Seer Folk was a strong walker, she could build a fire quickly, and had a keen eye for leaves and roots that they could eat.  She did spend a lot of time painting herself—her face mostly.  A practice that he and Kiptum found very odd.  Today she had three blue stripes running up the right side of her face.

Like most Seer Folk, she was tall, and had a large forehead and a strong curving jawline.  Clauviku had a slight overbite and her top teeth pointed outward just a bit.

She also had a huge basket, not a hut-bird nest like he and Kiptum.  This was a great-tear-drop of woven bark that she wore against her back.  What an odd people the Seer Folk were!  For all their talk of strength and cleverness they made baskets with their own hands as if they were too poor or stupid to get the birds to do it for them.

Kiptum’s legs devoured the distance, and Selu was glad to see that, for a hunter who was not actively hunting, the young man had not become angry or bitter about it.  Tracking the Seer Folk had been easy, so easy even Selu himself could have done it.  Perhaps the young man found tracking the missing woman Mukali to be a harder task, one that was a proper challenge.

Over the past three nights Kiptum had led them unerringly, passing by the small charred fire rings Mukali had built, pointing out the trees that she had climbed and slept in, places where she had emptied her bowels.

This morning Kiptum’s scout-bird was gone.  Not a good sign.  Selu’s own scout-bird was still gliding over them, for now.

Kiptum led them toward a second bad sign:  a great swirling flock of hooded vultures.   Where hooded vultures circled that meant that the bigger white-back vultures were beneath them, feasting.  But as they crossed the high grass, they could see the white-back vultures were not clustering around Mukali’s corpse, they were feasting on a lion.  It was a male, one of the wandering bachelors, and from the way it had been spread out and torn by the vultures, and by the types of flies about it, it had been dead a hand and four days.

“Was it Mukali?” Clauviku asked.

“There is no way to tell,” Kiptum answered her.  “I see no spears sticking out of the hide.”  He reached into the hut-bird nest tied about his chest, pulled out a run-for-a-day- leaf, chewed on it, and said what they were all thinking.  “A lone walker might kill a lion, but… It would not be easy.  And she would likely have been killed in the process.”

The young hunter frowned.  “She had come this way, though.  See the tracks?”

“No,” both Selu and Clauviku said.

Kiptum signed like a man who had been left in camp to take care of all the children.  “They are here, and they go that way.”

The lion’s carcass on their minds, they followed Kiptum, who followed Mukali into the thickening woods and into the realm of the neck-breaker.

There was a certain quality to the deeper woods, it was quiet, unlike the plains.  And Selu strained his ears to listen for the alarming squawk of his scout-bird.

Before sunset Kiptum had led them to another gang of hooded vultures, and beneath them they found the white-backed vultures luxuriating in the carcass of a neck-breaker.

Its condition was even worse:  a nation of ants flowed out of its smashed skull, which itself was torn from the spine, which was separate from the back legs.

“No person could do this,” Clauviku said, as they skirted around the mad scene.

“A person didn’t,” Kiptum said, “a marsh-elephant did.”

The hunter knelt by a small hollow in the earth, “see here, a print.”  He pointed, “See there?  Where the marsh elephant came through the forest.  And this,” he pointed to a tree limb stripped bare of leaves and limbs, “Where it pulled the limbs off.”

Still, Selu’s heart beat hard; something was not right.   Why did it kill the great cat?  Why tear it to pieces?  “Marsh-elephants have no fear of a neck-breaker.”

Clauviku shrugged, “Perhaps it got too close to a calf?”

“Kiptum, do you see any tracks of a calf?”

The hunter stood back up, “No.”

Marsh-elephants were a sacred creature to all the tribes of men, for they could carry things in a basket like men could.  Usually a bird’s nest, and it was not lost on the shaman that they often used the nests of vultures.  Once, when he was an apprentice he had seen a marsh-elephant carry a hollowed tree stump.  But still, why would one of them do this to a neck-breaker?

They walked away from the unnerving scene, and Kitum led them through the woods over the later half of the day.  Disconcerting to Selu, even more than the odd omens of the lion or the neck-breaker, was the fact they were moving toward one of the rivers.  It struck him as being far too much like his last trip into the dreamworld.  But not a small creek like in the dreamworld, but a large one, the Ollissim river.

“Stay together,” Selu warned, “the chiefs of the riverbank can scoop up a man.”  Selu may still have had a scout bird, which while good at warning of things that stalked upon the land, but it did not seem to know or care about the crocodiles.

The woods thinned, then opened into a fire-cleared clearing.  Right next to the slow river stood a thing beyond experience, something he had never even seen in the spirit world—a great sweeping circle of broken trees—and within, another clearing.  From the inner clearing rose a thing even stranger.  It was not a tree, but like a tree it shot up into the sky, four legs like a giraffe, and atop it a tent.  But worst of all, within the tangled mass of the barrier were faces, dozens of them, hundreds of them, brown with unblinking white eyes.

 

6.  A Hunter Wishes He Had Lost the Trail

Kiptum stood stock-still, starring into the unblinking eye of the faces in the barrier of tangled limbs.  He was a bold man, a strong hunter, who feared no beast, not even the other neck-breaker padding after them.  He had two companions, and no beast could match them.

But this, this was beyond anything he had ever seen or heard of.  He did not know what to do and so he did nothing, struck dumb by the uncanniness of it all.

Clauviku of the Seer Folk walked forward.  Kiptum tightened his grip on the spear, falling into the habits he knew:  look ahead to the river for the crocodile, listen behind for the neck-breaker, always keep an eye out for snakes.

Next to him Selu did the same, breathing slow and shifting back and forth off his bad leg.

Clauviku prodded on of the faces with the butt of her spear.  Then reached out and touched it with a hand.  “It is tied to the tree,” she called back.

Some quiet instinct pricked at Kiptum’s mind and he looked up in time to see a flap of the sky-tent open and saw a person—of all things!—look out then dip back inside.

“I see you!” he bellowed, just like he would with a lioness.

“Mukali!”  Clauviku shouted.  “Can you hear me, sister?”

Out of the dark opening of the sky-hut the odd quarry that he had tracked for two hands of days, Mukali came out.  For a moment she looked like she was going to jump, but then she hooked a hand around the lip of the platform and climbed down the giraffe-leg of the improbable structure.

Mukali reached the ground and walked toward the tangle of limbs and pulled on a small rope that wound in among the branches, and two of the massive tree limbs lifted as if hauled by a team of men.  She tied off the end of the rope and then walked out.

“Hello my sister,” Mukali said.  “You should come inside; it is dangerous out there.  There is a neck-breaker roaming the forest, trying to get in.  And the marsh-elephants like this place for a watering hole.”

“What about the chief of the riverbank?”  Selu asked before Kiptum could.

She looked at them for a moment, stared at them like a child who was trying to please both a mother and an aunt.  “The king of the river is easy to frighten.”

“What is a ‘king’, sister?” Clauviku asked, before Kiptun could.

Mukali licked her lips, looking angry for a moment.  “A king is a chieftain of other chieftains.  I will show you.”

She turned and led them back in.  And since Clauviku, a woman of Seer Folk, and Selu, an old shaman of the First Tribe had the courage to step through that tangled archway, Kiptum the hunter disobeyed his every instinct and followed.

 

7.  A Seer and A Piece of the Dreamworld Broken Away to Walk Free

In Mukali’s camp there was an outlandish order that Selu had only experienced in the spirit world; the meanings escaped him, but there were meanings none-the-less.  She had several fire-pits and there were things… not baskets, but like baskets, not weaved but solid, like they had been chipped from stone.  But they were smooth, almost like they were giant eggshells.

She actually did have some baskets, some basket-like things.  Four of them that hung among the branches of one of the downed trees.  They were not small, and two of them had monkeys in them.  At first he thought they were sleeping, but they moved sometimes, clumsily, especially for a monkey.

“Are you starving those two collared-monkeys?” he asked finally.

She turned her head slowly, gazing at the two monkeys while she thought about her answer.

It was obvious she and Clauviku were sisters.  She had the same forehead, and the curving jawline.  Mukali, while she still had a slight overbite, her teeth were straighter.  But she was gaunt, as if she had not eaten well.  She also wore no paint like her sister.  In fact she was covered with dust and dirt.

“Oh no,” she finally said, “I feed them and they have water.  They have simply eaten too many fire-tail tadpoles.”

“Fire Tale tadpoles are poisonous,” Kiptum said.  “You shouldn’t eat them!”

“I don’t eat them,” she answered, “the collared-monkeys do, and they are not poisonous to them.  It effects them like strong honey affects us.”

“Sister,” Clauviku said, “why would you do that?”

“You know how the dumber clans will take grasses and leave them for birds so they will make nests so they can wear them as baskets?”

There was an awkward silence.  Selu lifted his hut-bird nest from his chest.  “Yes.  I know.”

Mukali looked at his face, looked at the basket, then nodded.  “Yes, it is like that.  I have trained the collared-monkeys to bring me Fall-out-the-tree flower.”

“Fall-out-the-tree flowers are poisonous!” Kiptum said. “You shouldn’t eat them!”

Mukali giggled, an odd and disconcerting gulping noise.  “I don’t eat them.  I trade them to the marsh-elephants, who do eat them.  They eat them and in return they do favors for me.”  She waved to the barrier of downed trees.  “And I can teach you how to do all those things as well!”

Then she watched them like a poor storyteller to see if they were keeping up with the tale.  After long stretching moments, she turned to look at him, and Selu turned to watch the sluggish river.  The Ollissim often had steep sharp banks, but here it was wide and shallow—the worst kind of place.  Crocodiles could come out of the sluggish water at any moment.   Above it all was the strange legged-hut.

Once, when he was a boy, he had realized that a hyena had followed him, and as he bent to pick up a stone to drive it away he realized there was another one in front of him, and a third beside.   That feeling, that he had been cornered, that he had walked into a trap, was what he felt now.  Kiptum, following the etiquette of a visitor, broke the silence.

“We have sharp-gill-white fungus, three hands of half-shell-nuts and a rock python we killed this morning” the young hunter said.

“I have….” Mukali frowned, bit at her lip.  “I have monkey.  And fish.” She smiled, straightened.  “Yes.  Fish, I can share.  Let me check the trap.”

She walked to the edge of the water and Selu’s heart quickened.  She had no spear!  She had no stone!

“Let’s throw stones, first,” Clauviku said, reaching for her sister.  “To drive away the crocodile.”

“Stones?” Mukali said.  “I have a better way.”  She walked among the oddities and debris and picked up a section of brambles, one that clattered and clanked with an uncountable number of palm-sized disks of her strange stone.  She carried it toward the river and shook it.  It was madness!  The crocodile would explode out and drag her in.

Selu’s leg complained but he forced himself forward and around, his spear at the ready; to the other side Kiptum moved to do the same.  Sick or not, driven away from the Seer Folk or not, one does not let a person get pulled down by a chieftain of the shore.

A piece of riverbank broke away, then another—three crocodiles, huge and nearly invisible in the lazy water, surged away from the bank, stirring and foaming the muddy water as they edged away from Mukali and into the center of the river.

She set the bramble hedge down and began pulling a poorly made grass rope and out of the water.  Tied to the end was one of the stone-eggs, covered with dozens of small holes and a mass of branches over its mouth.  Water sluiced out of the hand-of-hands of holes.

She looked back at him with a hard frown, “Can you help? It is heavy!”

As he hesitated, she waved her gaunt dirty arm toward the river.  “They will not bother us!” she reached back and shook the brambles.  “To the them, this might as well be a wall.  They do not know it is mostly empty air, that they could smash through it with no effort. “

It was like a dream—not a spirit-world dream—but a regular dream, with all its chaos and unreasonableness.  Still, Selu pulled on the slick rope and together he and Makuli dragged the thing out.  Inside he could hear the flopping and slapping of many fish.

Kiptum, still eyeing the water and clutching his spear eased up.  “I am looking for a way to catch fish—big ones, that one reaches into the water and pulls one out, but it is lost to us now.  Do you know it?”

Mukali looked at him and grinned.  “No.  But I have been into the spirit world and come back with a hundred secrets and have many other things to show you.  To show everyone.”

“Sister, before we do that,” Clauviku said, “you are covered with ticks and we should take care of that.”

 

8.  A Woman of the Seer-Folk Searches Still for Her Sister

Clauviku marveled at an evening that was overran with luxury and oddness.  They gutted and cooked the fish, drying those they didn’t eat over a smoky fire as the sun fell.  Now she picked ticks off of Mukali, out of her hair, off of her back.

Clauviku had not found a chance to whisper to her companions, but they obviously felt it, too.  The utter strangeness of the camp, of this… being that walked in her sister’s body.

“You missed one, in her hair,” Selu said.  He reached over her shoulders and lifted a piece of Mukali’s natty hair just above the neck, and with a deft move cut a bit of it away with a flick of flint.

Her sister, what walked in her sister’s skin, seemed utterly unaware that she should check her back for ticks.  She seemed unaware that she should rub her teeth with hill-tang root.  But she knew so many other things, the mystery of clay and ‘pottery’, the strange trick with the bramble screen at the water’s edge.  Kiptum had asked about the fish, and Selu had asked about fist-of-none.  Mukali had not even known what fist-of-none was.

It was also obvious to Clauviku that Mukali—no—she could no longer call her that.  This stranger was mostly eating the cat-tails that grew thick along the banks of the river.  Yet there were several days’ worth of cufa-plant growing by the river that she seemed unaware of.

Beside her, Kiptum suddenly stood and grabbed for his spear. Then she felt it, through ground, a low thud like far away thunder.

“Elephant!”  Kiptum warned.  “Close!”

From the woods came three marsh-elephants.  One, a young male, held a ragged hollow tree stump in its short trunk, the other, a small female, a long tree-root broken in a rough “L” shape.  The third, a larger and older female, walked with nothing.  But this third one had a great yellow stripe painted across her wide head, angling down over her left eye.  Above and below the yellow swath were lines of orange ochre, and above and below those was a deep blue stripe.

Clauviku glanced at her companions.  Both were watching the old female as if they were watching rain falling up into the sky.   Spreading out, the three beasts pawed at the ground and pushed the barrier with their great wide heads.  The clay faces rattled in the tangle of branches.

Clauviku had never seen a marsh-elephant, it was much less impressive than the huge elephants that roamed the plains where the Seer Folk preferred to live.  Marsh-elephants were  sacred animals: they could use baskets.  They were sacred but unpredictable; dangerous sometimes.  They were not nearly as big as the elephants that stirred up clouds of dust on the plains.  Bigger than a water-buffalo, maybe the size of a hippo.  They had the same large ears, but their trunks were thin and not as long, and their small tusks curved downward out of their mouths.

“Do not worry,” Mukali said, walking slowly up from behind them.  “They are my friends, like the monkeys.”

She took one of her clay bowls and carried it to the edge of the enclosure, walking to a part of the wall and then standing on a tree trunk.  Mukali held the clay bowl high over her head and the big female marsh-elephant dipped her trunk into it, scooping out a cluster of fall-out-the-tree flower and curling it around to her mouth.  The other two placed their items on the ground and did the same.  The three of them reached and dug and ate and cooed until finally the old matriarch pulled the bowl from Mukali’s hands, and with a shake of her head sent it flying away across the clearing where it shattered.

The traveler—for that was as close to a proper name, a description of Mukali could be—laughed her odd laugh.  “You see, they are my friends.  As you say, sacred and so very very smart.  They need only a little nudge and they would be as smart as you are.”

She turned back to them, “The sun is going down.  You can stay in the lower hut. You have seen it is safe from the crocodile, and the neck-breaker will not climb the branch-wall.   He could jump it, but he will not.

“Tomorrow, tomorrow I will show you the secret of clay.  How to make a clay mask to wear on the back of your head so that lions and hyenas and neck-breakers will always think you are watching them.  Then I will show you the sling, which will let you throw a stone five times as far as you could with your arm.  And perhaps, if there is time, how to make glass.”

With that she returned to the leg of her tower and climbed up.  For a moment the three people stood together in the growing dark, their shadows fretting in the flickering firelight while just outside of that the three marsh-elephants picked up the root and the stump and shuffled off into the dark woods on the far side of the clearing.

“She is not my sister,” Clauviku said to her companions.  Some part of her had hoped that, like a fever, the odd possession might end.  She thought she herself would be more emotional, but after the long days of tracking and the unreality of this place it was simply what was.

“Perhaps she has become a great shaman,” Kiptum said.  “She surely knows great secrets.”

“Many secrets,” Selu said, leaning on his spear.  “Many more secrets than she shares.”

Clauviku felt a tension between her shoulders release.  “I thought the same.  I feared I was the only one.”

“Oh no,” Kiptum said, “I saw it, too.  Like a man who has been in the sun too-”

Selu faltered suddenly and Kiptum reached out to steady him.  The old man’s shadowed face looked dazed.  “There are ways to find secrets.”  His tongue darted out and licked his lips.  “I’ve eaten the guadro root and will journey to the spirit world.”

He looked at Clauviku.  “I promised to find your sister’s spirit.  I will…” he lost his thought, his words.

Then he whispered, to them or to himself, Clauviku did not know.  “A hard journey after a hard journey.”

The old man leaned hard against the young hunter and together they walked back to the ground hut.  By the time they got there, Selu could barely keep his feet, his pupils were huge, his breathing shallow and quick.

“Clauviku,” the shaman whispered, “tie my left hand closed.  I must not let go.”

In the flicking light she saw that the lock of natty hair he had cut from Mukali’s neck was held in his left hand.  As she worked a line around his wrist, around his knuckles and fingers, his other hand dug clumsily at the hut-bird nest at his chest.

“Kiptum,” he muttered.  “Empty this nest.  Three things… only three.”

The hunter knelt and dumped out the beads, bones, and other bits from the nest.

“What three things do you want take?” he asked.

Selu made no answer.   Had he not heard?

“Selu,” Clauviku said, sharper, like one would with a child.  “What three things do you want to take?”

“A…”  he started, and then stuttered for a moment.  He put his right hand to his forehead trying to remember.  “a…. and a…” then he fell back, lost in his trance.

She and Kiptum looked at each other, then at Selu’s still form.  They arranged him where he looked comfortable, put his arms to his sides and then his hands to his chest.

“We should build up the fire,” Clauviku said at last, because the idea of being without one in this place was too terrifying to bear.

“Yes, that is wise.”

Together they put more branches and limbs into the fire until it grew so high and hot they had to back away from it.

Kiptum came close and whispered, “Do you see light coming from beneath the door of Mukali’s sky-hut?”

She looked up and through the smoke and drifting embers of their own fire she did see a dim shine around the hanging hide door.  But not yellow or orange like a fire, but white, like the traveler had captured a piece of the moon.

“Do not go near the water,” Kiptum whispered, and when she looked she could see, reflected in the firelight, at least four sets of crocodile eyes.  She turned away from the sight.  Crocodiles, even if they did not fear the bramble wall as Mukali promised, had no desire to get more than a stone’s throw from the water and had no interest at all in being near a fire.

For long moments she stood then walked a step or two away from the fire.  She looked out at the clearing, a wall of blackness beyond the hedge-wall.  With a start she realized that she could see, just barely, the fire gleaming in the eyes of one of the marsh-elephants.  It was watching her; she knew it in her marrow.   A moment later she could see the eyes of a second.  Then a third set, that of the matriarch, with her yellow-paint glowing like a dying ember, watching her and waiting.

________________________________________

Adrian Simmons is co-founder and cheif editor of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.  His work has appeared at Tales From the Magician’s Skull, Cirsova, and Savage Realms.  He has a story forthcoming in Baen’s “Swords and Larceny” anthology.  

Miguel Santos is a freelance illustrator and maker of Comics living in Portugal.  His artwork has appeared in numerous issues of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, as well as in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 2.  More of his work can be seen at his online portfolio and his instagram.