Kim Robinson - Shaman

After that they smoked a pipe they passed among themselves, and when they were done, Loon was allowed a puff too. It was a harsh bitter smoke, Loon found. The jende coughed as they expelled it, and Loon decided he wouldn’t, but he did anyway.

One of the jende men, named Orn, made apologies to the great windy ice. Then he pointed north. There on the horizon was a low black prominence. That was their destination. The nuna, they named it. A rock island in a sea of ice. The pupil of the eye, they called it, pointing at their squinting eyes. It was the reverse of the ice caps on the hills to the west of the Wolf pack’s camp.

The jende took off toward the nuna. Loon followed them head down, eyes nearly closed to reduce the glare of beaten sunlight off the ice and the sky. He would have closed his eyes entirely, but he needed to see the ice under his feet to set them properly against the nobbling.

When they came closer to the island of rock, they found that the ice had reared up over its edges, like a wave that was about to crash on a shore, frozen at the last moment. It was not possible to cross the blue trough between the frozen wave and the scraped rock under it; they had to walk around the island to the west, until they came to a break in the ice wave which allowed them access to the rock’s edge. Here, however, the rock, which was reddish black, and as smooth as chert, was a short cliff with no obvious way up. The jende led the way left, down what became a flat floor of blue ice separating the rock cliff and a growing ice wave. They descended this little rounded slot, which grew deeper as they hiked, walking on blue ice covered with reddish rubble scattered on it, each bit of rock half-buried in the ice. It was strange to walk down this rubble-floored gorge, with a wall of rock to their right and an overhanging wall of blue ice to their left. It seemed as if the wave of ice would fall on them at any moment, though it never moved, nor groaned, nor scarcely even breathed. Nevertheless the jende walked in silence, and Loon nervously followed their lead, letting his sled down ahead of him. After a fist or so of this uneasy trek, they came around a curve of the island and the rock wall shrank in height until the ice and rock were the same height, and they could simply step from the one to the other.

They walked on flat blocks of dark red stone. The sled’s bone runners scraped, but the rock was so smooth that Loon could still pull it behind him. The blocks rose in distinct steps, and the jende helped him lift the sled up each of these knee- or waist-high walls. By the time they reached the center of the nuna, they were two or three trees’ height above the ice. The tops of all the red blocks were smoothed to a polish, with straight lines scoring the polish north and south. There were also crescent breaks, the shape of day three or four of the moon, cut into the rock. Small shallow gaps between the red blocks were filled with scree and sand that was dotted with black lichen, the only living thing on the island.

They reached the high point of the rock. From there they could see out over the great windy ice for a great distance in all directions. A turn of the head gave Loon the ring of the whole earth, its western edge blazing with sunblink. The ice below them was a creamy blue marked by patches of white, lined with gray lines of broken stone. That they had walked in a single day onto this new world was astonishing. The stories at home all spoke of three worlds, one inside the earth, one in the sky, one on the surface between them. Loon had had glimpses of all three. But here the northers had simply walked north onto a fourth world, bulking over the earth. A higher realm, a frozen sky.

The northers were looking around attentively. It was not their way to speak much when they were out by day; later, in the evenings around the fire, they would talk at length about the day’s happenings, but in the moment itself they did not like to talk.

At the northernmost end of the big block at the top of the island, there was a ring of waist-high stone shards, standing on their ends. The northers walked to this circle of stones, and before they got there, indicated to Loon that he should stay behind.

The highest block had been cleared of any of the small stones that lay scattered on much of the rest of the island: only the ring of standing stones was left on it. These stones were all roughly rectangular, and had been balanced on their ends so that they seemed to stand like short men. There were about a score of them. Gathering them must have been a considerable task, accomplished by a big group of men; the stones were big enough to be very awkward to move.

A squarish boulder lay flat at the center of this circle of standing stones, and on it the northers prepared a fire with branches and twigs they had brought from Loon’s sled. They dripped fat from a bag onto them, and soon had a fire sparked to life. On the fire they burned the wing of an eagle and the wing of a raven, while singing in their harsh voices. When the fire was at its biggest, though still nearly invisible in the glare of the sun and the sky and the ice, Orn took a red swath of cloth from his backsack and unwrapped it to reveal a human skull, missing its jaw but otherwise clean and fresh. He held it up to look at the sun one last time, and all of them likewise looked right at the sun, eyes closed, singing together. Then Orn put the skull in the fire, and they watched as it blackened and, when they had poured some fat on it, burned as well, not like wood, but like the tip of a giant lamp wick. As with a wick, it took a long time to burn away. White flame danced in its eye sockets and out of its gaping mouth as if it were comfortable living in fire, but eventually it broke and fell in on itself, and joined the embers under it. As the fire burned itself out, the skull became no more than black chunks, like the other bits of char there in the ash.

When the fire went out, the men stirred the ashes gently, waited again. In the frigid chill of the breeze out of the north, the heat quickly left the ashes, and as soon as they were cool enough to handle, the northers all scooped up double handfuls and carried them outstretched to the ring of stones, where they walked around the outside of the circle and stopped to sing at each of the cardinal points; after which they surrounded one of their company and tossed their ashes into the air, such that the wind caught the ashes and blew them over this man. He held his arms out and his face up, and took the rain of ash on him as if he wanted it.

This was as close to shaman stuff as Loon had ever seen in the northers, and he watched with a pang in his chest as he thought of Thorn, and wondered what Thorn would have made of this, and whether he would ever see Thorn again and thus have a chance to describe the northers’ ceremony, their ring of stones, this immense fourth world of ice that they had walked right up onto. He still did not see how getting back to Thorn could happen, and the pain of that made his body weak. His stomach shrank, his knees buckled, he had to collect himself to be able to walk. With all the standing around their feet had gone cold, and they had to proceed carefully as the jende walked west and north, to an edge of the rock island where they had not yet been.

Here the rock stood high over the ice. At their feet a steep cliff of cracked stone dropped away to the creamy blue. All the narrow ledges of this cliff were green with moss, so they saw it as mostly green; then the cliff steepened as it dropped, such that much of it could not be seen from above. The ice beyond the green moss looked a long way down.

The jende had gone quiet on the approach to the cliff’s edge, and by signs required that Loon do the same. They stood back from the edge and looked around them. The great windy ice covered everything they could see, extended to the distant sun-singed horizon.