Kim Robinson - Shaman

On the upper edge of this drunken forest, the little trees gave way to low scattered ground willow and pine scrub, and they could see a long way ahead, to a range of hills. Then, as they topped a low ridge that headed northwest, and stayed on it, on a broad trail, they could see above the range of hills a white mass, a mass of ice overtopping all the hills in a stupendous white wall. Ice fingers fell down from this wall, filling the valleys between the hills under it, then splaying out onto the steppe in steep-walled ends, rounded like horse hooves. Some of these ice splays had overrun forests, so that crushed trees lay in a tangle under the bottom of the ice hooves. The big ice mass above looked like the ice caps in the mountains west of the Urdecha, but immensely bigger. Everywhere they could see to the north, ice ruled. Maybe it went north forever, in the same way Pippi had said that the land continued forever to the east, and the great salt sea to the west.

They came to a rise and could see down into a shallow valley under the hills and the ice, running toward the great salt sea in the west, which formed the mouth of the valley. Across the valley, under the hills, lofted columns of campfire smoke. As they got closer, Loon saw that there was a line of poles like bone needles, standing between the great salt sea and the smoke columns. Closer still he could see they were the dead trunks of immense trees, trees taller than any he had ever seen, and much taller than any growing up here. These barkless bare tree trunks were stuck upside down in the ground, their root balls at their tops all white and broken to the sky, with skulls hung on colored string from the outer tips of the roots. They were much like the dead trees at the eight eight, and something in that Loon found reassuring.

The northers lived in a camp of some ten or twelve houses, made of wood, bone, and hide. The houses were tucked in the gap between a hill and the rounded ice wall at the end of a great spill of ice flowing down between the hills from the ice mass. The open end of the gap faced south, with the ice wall to their east. Patches of snow lay everywhere on the ground, even now, in the latter half of the eighth month. A breeze dropped on them from the north, cold even in full sun. A grumbling shallow creek emerged out of the bottom of the ice hoof to the east of their camp and ran southwest toward the great salt sea, which was just visible from camp, a long curve of blue in the distance.

They walked into camp. More giant barkless tree trunks had been used for the corner posts of their houses. As there had been no tall trees at all in the last two days of their trek north, Loon guessed these immense trunks must be driftwood cast up by the great salt sea, suggesting a land somewhere to the west that must be home to giants.

The biggest house of all was about ten strides on a side, and about three times as tall as a person. They entered it through a low cut in the loam before it, a kind of long trap you could walk down a ramp into. When they had walked through this cut and gotten under their big house, the northers took off some of their outer garments, before stepping onto a tall block of wood and pulling themselves up through a person-sized hole, onto an earthen floor cut less deeply than the trap into the ground. Half of it was planked over, and on the planks another tall block of wood gave one a step up through a hole and onto a full plank floor set about head height above the earthen floor.

The captives were urged to climb up through both holes into the house.

Up inside, the only light came from a fire and from a hole made by a hollowed branch set in the roof’s high point. The walls were covered with overlapping bare hides. The air on the lowest plank level was cool, but there was a platform above it filling over half the house, and up there was where most of the northers sat. Some children were perched even higher, on raised wooden beds that put them not far from the roof. The children were naked, and the men and women on the upper platform were dressed only in leggings that covered them from the waist to the knees. Up at their level the fire made the air not just warm but hot, and the northers’ rounded brown bodies shone with sweat. They handed around ladles of water from wooden buckets, sipping as they talked. The fire was set on a large hearthstone under the roof hole, and it proved to be made up of several big fat lamps, set around a small wood fire burning atop a bed of embers. The fire was so small that it would require constant tending, and Loon saw that the northern women were doing that. They each had different sizes and kinds of breasts, in the usual way.

He counted a score and eleven people in the dim room. Elga was not one of them; she must have been taken into a different house. There were several more houses, so if this was just one pack’s camp, it was a very big pack.

They laughed a lot as they talked to each other. To Loon and the other captives they were curt. After spending some time on the first plank floor and getting inspected by some of the men, Loon and the two other new captives were directed to return to the earthen space under the floor, where he found seven other people lying on hides, and a few frozen ducks in cedar root bags.

It was cold down there on the ground floor. There were several caribou skins covering the planked part of the floor farthest from the step-up, and the other captives lay wrapped in these hides, clumped together for warmth. None of them responded when Loon asked what was going on. He couldn’t tell if they understood him or not.

The northers above were exchanging news, it seemed, the newly arrived travelers no doubt describing the trip they had just completed. Some of them cut up a frozen caribou and handed the pieces to the cooks by the fire, and the cutters threw the caribou’s heart and lungs down to their captives, and later the intestines, scraped of their fat coating. The group below shared this food without fuss, taking a few bites and then passing the chunks along. When they were all sated there was still a good quantity of caribou organs left, neatly piled in the far corner: the least palatable bits, it was true, but they would have eaten them too, if they had still been hungry.

Loon waited until all the other captives were bundled in hides, and then went to an unused half-hide consisting of the rear legs and back of a small caribou, and rolled it around himself. He would be covered if he kept his knees tucked up. He burrowed in and tried to sleep with as little as possible of his side pressing on the hide over the ground. He needed a second hide under him, and got up to use a scrap in the corner for that purpose. The caribou meat was a cold mass in his stomach. His thoughts were as stunned as they had been on the night Elga was taken. He could not quite get a grip on what was happening. It was so bad that he could scarcely move, and even rolled in the hide and lying on the free scrap, he started shivering, more from fear than cold.

I stepped in to help him. With my help he would change over between worlds and sleep while waking, wake while sleeping, and live on in the dream world, but nowhere else. And thus endure.

Some of the other captives spoke in ways he somewhat understood. They seemed to say that the northers did not consider the captives to be people. They were just captives, kept alive to help the jende, the real people, by working for them.

So they went out by day, a pair or trio of jende men carrying spears and blades, accompanied by one or two captive men. Usually the jende led the way downstream to the sea shore, to haul back travois and sleds loaded with bags of fish, or entire frozen seals, or blocks of skin and fat cut from giant furred seals, or from beached whales. If there was soft snow on the ground, the captives were given snowshoes to wear. Their travois for hauling loads had antler blades tied to the back ends of their poles, giving them a broader surface to let them ride higher over the snow. Their sleds had runners made of whale rib bones. The jende wore backsacks tied to wooden frames, which they filled on the sea shore and carried back up to camp.