Can the spirits answer questions?
Oh yes, but only certain kinds.
Can they tell me why Palindor hates me?
What? Ammadin looked up with a laugh. I dont need spirit power to answer that. Palindor wants to marry me, and here you are, sleeping in my tent.
It was just the sort of thing that might get in the way of his mission.
I can sleep outside under a wagon.
Why? Im not going to marry him, and hell have to get used to it. If he gives you any trouble, just tell me. I said you could sleep here, and thats that.
Look, Im totally dependent on the comnees charity. I dont want to cause any trouble.
Youre a strange man for a Kazrak. Which reminds me. Ive been meaning to ask you something. Every other Kazrak Ive ever known prayed to your god five times a day. You dont. Why? No one here would say anything against it, if thats whats bothering you.
Zayn froze. He could never tell her the truth, could never admit that men like him were forbidden to pray, that prayers from such a polluted creature would only offend the Lord.
Uh well, he said at last. I do pray, but silently. Usually were riding when the time comes, and I dont want to advertise my piety or anything like that. The Lord wont mind.
The Lord? I thought his name was Allah.
Thats not a name, its a title. It just means the lord in the sacred language.
Ammadin nodded, then took pieces of cloth from her saddlebags and began wrapping up the spirits. She laid each crystal down in the exact centre of a cloth, then folded the corners over in a precise motion while she murmured a few strange syllables under her breath. Once wrapped, each went into a separate soft leather pouch; while she tied a thong around the mouth, she chanted again. As he watched this long procedure, Zayn felt his body growing aware of her. There they were, in the dim tent together, with the rain drumming a drowsy rhythm on the roof.
She was a comnee woman, not one of the chastity-bound girls at home. Ammadin raised her head and looked at him.
No.
Zayn nearly swore aloud. What had she done, read his thoughts? When she looked him over as if she could see through his eyes and into his soul, all his sexual interest vanished. He got up and busied himself with arranging his bedroll on the far side of the tent.
The rain came down intermittently all night. When the morning broke grey with clouds, the comnee decided to stay in camp. After he tended the horses, Zayn went to Dalladors tent mostly because Ammadin had told him to leave her alone to work, she said, and he wondered what strange ritual she had in hand.
A fire burned on the hearth stones under the smokehole, and Dallador sat near it, carving slices of a red animal horn into the little pegs used to fasten shirts and tent bags. His small son sat nearby and watched solemnly and silently where a Kazraki boy would have been pelting his father with questions. Zayn joined them and studied the way Dallador cut peg after peg with no wasted motion.
Can I ask you something? Zayn said at last.
What?
Its about Ammadin. Uh, is there something odd about her eyes?
Very. Dallador looked up with a quick grin. Youve seen them flash, Ill bet.
Yes. I certainly did.
Thats the mark of the spirit riders. It shows up when a childs about as old as Benno here. Thats how the parents know their childs going to be a spirit rider.
What if a person didnt have those eyes but wanted to study the lore anyway?
They wouldnt have a hope in hell. No one would teach them. Its a sign that they can see things ordinary people cant. If they have the spirit eyes, then they have spirit ears, too, and they can hear spirits talking.
Hear spirits? How?
How would I know? Dallador smiled briefly, then laid his knife down and considered the little heap of horn pegs. Thats enough to last us a while. Now let me show you how to shell land-shrimp. I found a whole nest of them this morning, and if theyre cooked right, theyre pretty tasty.
When Zayn returned to Ammadins tent, he brought her a skewer of grilled land-shrimp and some salted breadmoss in a polished stone bowl. He found her sitting cross-legged on her blankets with her saddlebags nearby.
That smells good, Ammadin remarked.
Dalladors teaching me how to cook.
He handed her the food, then laid his palms together and greeted the god figures before sitting down opposite her. She plucked a shrimp off the skewer, bit into it, and smiled.
Very good.
While she ate, Zayn considered the god figures, sitting on a multi-coloured rug opposite the tent flap. There were six of them in all, most about a foot high, carved of different coloured stones, then decorated and dressed with cloth and feathers. One figure was obviously human, but the others hed never seen creatures like them before. Two were roughly human in shape, but the green one had scales and a wedge-shaped head like a ruffled lizards, and the small black one had what appeared to be fishs gills pasted on either side of its chest. Another seemed to be only half-finished: a torso, studded with bits of gold to represent what might have been eyes, rose from an ill-defined mass of grey stone. The fifth had furled wings of stiffened cloth, huge in relation to its frail, many-legged body, and the sixth, the largest of them all, resembled a worm with leather tentacles at one end and paddle-shaped chips of shell stuck at the other.
What do you think those are? Ammadin said abruptly.
Well, your gods. Or representations of them, I should say. I know you dont worship the bits of stone, of course.
Of course. She smiled, but only faintly. Why do you think our gods look so strange?
I have no idea.
Neither do we.
He waited for her to say more, but she merely finished her meal. When she handed him the dirty bowl he went to wash it out in the stream. Night had fallen, and the storm clouds had broken up. He could see the last of them off to the north, a lighter smudge on a dark horizon. When he turned to the east he saw the Spider glittering in the sky, a huge spiral of distant light, but the Flies had already set.
Zayn hunkered down at the stream bed and scrubbed the remnants of food out of the bowl with the side of his hand. Little flashes of blue light in the water greeted this gift from the heavens tiny fish, dotted with luminescence, snapped at the crumbs as they sank. As a boy hed wondered if the animals in grass and stream believed that their gods were the humans, those baffling beings who fed them or killed them according to some whim. Wed look just as strange to them as those bizarre little fetishes do to me, he thought. And what of Ammadins remark? Neither do we. Somehow, he knew, it held a challenge.
With the rising of the pale sun the comnee struck camp and moved on. Since the day promised heat, Ammadin folded up her saurskin cloak and put it away in its special tent bag. She had Zayn saddle her grey gelding, then rode out ahead, where she could think away from the noise and dust of the herds and wagons. No one, of course, questioned her leaving. Her people assumed that on her lonely rides Ammadin worked magic for the good of the comnee, perhaps invoking spirits to gain hidden knowledge or maybe driving away evil with powerful spells. In one way she was riding alone for their good, she supposed. How would it affect her people if they knew that their spirit rider, the guardian of their gods, their defender from dark forces, their healer and spiritual leader, was rapidly losing her faith in gods and magic both? Better that she take herself away than let her doubts show.
All around her the lavender grasslands stretched out to an endless horizon. As she rode, the grass crackled under her horses hooves. Yellabuhs swarmed but never bit. Now and again turquoise-blue winged lizards leapt from the grass and flew off, buzzing furiously at these huge intruders. Otherwise, nothing moved in the summer heat, nothing made a sound. Here and there she saw a cluster of blood-red pillars rising from the grass that meant distant spear trees and thus water. Eventually, when the sun was reaching its zenith, she headed for one of the groves to give her horse and herself some relief from the sun.
Along a violet stream bank, the red spears leapt from the earth and towered, far taller than a rider on horseback. Close up they appeared to have grown as a single leaf, wound around and around on itself to the thickness of a childs waist, but down at the base, hidden by a clutter of mosses and ferns, were the traces of old leaves that had died back and withered. The spears grew in clumps from long tuberous roots, spiralling out from a mother plant. How the mother plants got their start, no one knew.
Ammadin unsaddled her gelding and let him roll, then led him to the stream to drink. When he finished she got a tin cup from her saddlebags and scooped up water for herself. She drank, then took off her floppy leather hat and poured a couple of cups of water over her head. While the horse grazed she sat on the bank in the blessed shade and gazed into the stream, running clear over pale sand. In a little eddy grew skinny reddish-brown leaves, trailing in the current, and among the leaves lay a clutch of spirit pearls, milky-white spheres about the size of a closed fist, that were absolute Bane for anyone, even a spirit rider, to harm in any way. Rarely did one find them in a stream this small and this far west of the Great River.
Ammadin ached to know what lay inside them. Something alive, like a lizard chick in its egg? It seemed a good guess. The name, spirit pearl, made no sense. Down at the southern seacoast there were Kazraks who dove to bring up shells with pearls inside hard little things, no bigger than a fingernail. But since spirits had no bodies, they could never lay eggs, no matter how much like eggs these seemed. At times, when the sun struck the water very late or very early in the day, and a spirit pearl sat in just the right place, the light would seem to flow through it, and then she would see the faint shadow of something that might have been a curled chick. If she could only lift one out and hold it up to the light of a lamp, like the farmers on the Kazrak side of the border did with the eggs of their chickens and meat lizards, she would be able to settle the question once and for all, but the Bane upon them stopped her.
Bane ruled the life of the plains. This plant must never be eaten, that stream must never be forded. If anyone found a pure white stone, he had to leave it in place. Spirits lived in certain fern trees and might offer a shaman help. Other spirits in other trees were pure evil and had to be avoided at all costs. If anyone found a green plant, whether grass or flower, growing outside of Kazraki gardens, she had to pull it up immediately and throw it onto the next fire she saw. For years as a child she had memorized lists of these Banes and learned how to place them into her memory in such an organized way that she could sort through them at need. She remembered the boredom of those years so well that she felt like weeping still.
Why not just write them down, as the Kazraks wrote their lore? That, too, was Bane. The lists of Banes existed only in the spirit language, which could never be written down.
And why did that particular Bane exist? Her teacher had told her that the spirits disliked having their language frozen into letters, something that made no sense to Ammadin, not that she would have dared to say so. After all, the spirits never minded that shamans spoke their language to talk together about the most mundane things; some even used it to tell funny stories about Kazraks. Still, Bane was Bane, beyond argument.
Who laid down the Banes? The gods, of course. Of course. She remembered Zayn, making a clumsy attempt to hide his bad manners. At least hed tried. Every other Kazrak shed ever met had dismissed the tribal gods as stones and sticks and nothing more. Idols, they called them. But what if they were right? Just whom, or what, did those figures represent, then?
Ammadin got to her feet and looked out over the purple grass, shimmering under the summer sun. If there were no gods, then there were no spirits. If there were no spirits, then how could there be magic? Yet the magic worked. The Tribes people rarely fell ill, the spirit crystals told her things she needed to know, the holy herbs had exactly the effects they were supposed to have. How could there not be spirits and gods?
Or so thought every other shaman out on the grass. None of them shared her doubts, and yet her doubts remained. She could think of only one remedy to find another spirit rider to watch over her comnee while she herself rode off alone on a spirit quest similar to those she had undertaken as part of her training. If she suffered enough, if she mounted a vigil for long enough, if she had the right dreams, if she saw the right visions, perhaps they would answer the question that had come to consume her life: who were the gods? why did they give us magic?
If she could see them, if they would come to her in vision, once again she could believe. But if they didnt? If she discovered that her doubts were true? Fear clotted in her throat like dried moss.
By late afternoon the heat had grown so bad that the women began to worry about the pregnant mares and new foals. Along a good-sized stream they made an early camp. While the men raised the tents, the women drove the herd into the shade of a stand of spear trees. After the herd had drunk its fill, they tethered the vulnerable mares and foals in the shade and the rest of the herd, as usual, out in the grass. When Zayn offered to help, they laughed at him and sent him back to Dalladors fire.
In a few minutes Apanador joined them, and Dallador brought out a skin of keese and three bowls. In daylight it was allowable to talk over drink, and Dallador and Apanador discussed the long summer ahead while Zayn merely listened.
When we reach the Great River, Apanador said, well have to be careful. We cant turn directly south. Ricadors comnee will be coming up from the coast about then.
Theyll want another fight, thats for sure, Dallador said. We beat the shit out of them last time. He glanced at Zayn. They tried to steal some of our womens horses.
Ah. Zayn had heard of the feuding out on the plains. Do they always ride north the same way?
Yes, they have a Bane on them. Apanador hesitated, then shrugged. You dont need to know more.
Whatever you say. Zayn bobbed his head in the chiefs direction.
The hunting should be good this summer. Apanador changed the subject. Well have to teach you how to handle a bow from horseback.
Id like that, Zayn said. Ive always loved hunting.
The wild saurs came with us from the spirit country at the birth of the world, Apanador went on. In time youll learn all about them, Zayn. The gods gave horses to women, and the saurs to us. Horses are fit for women, because they come when theyre called. But a man has to hunt his gifts, with the bow we received from the Father of Arrows, back in the dawn of time.
Ive heard a little about him. Hes not a god, is he?
No. He was the first comnee man, and his wife was the first comnee woman Lisadin, Mother of Horses. So you see, theres a lot for you to learn.