Lynn Flewelling - The Oracle's Queen

By the time he finished the claiming song he was light-headed. “It’s good!” he gasped. “Are you ready?”

The old man nodded and hobbled back into the hut.

They’d agreed on the payment their first day together. Mahti lit the bear fat lamp and set it by the piled furs of the sleeping platform.

Teolin shrugged off his cloak and undid the ties of his shapeless robe. The elk and bear teeth decorating it clicked softly as he let it fall. He stretched out on his pallet, and Mahti knelt and ran his eyes over the old man’s body, feeling compassion tinged with sadness rise in his heart. No one knew how old Teolin was, not even the old witch himself. Time had eaten most of the flesh from his frame. His penis, said to have planted more than five hundred festival seeds, now lay like a shrunken thumb against his hairless sac.

The old man smiled gently. “Do what you can. Neither the Mother nor I ask more than that.”

Mahti leaned down, kissed the old man’s lined brow, and drew the fusty bearskin up to Teolin’s chin to keep him warm. Settling beside the platform, he rested the end of the horn close to the old man’s side, closed his eyes, and began the spell song.

With lips and tongue and breath, he altered the drone to a sonorous, rhythmic pulse. The sound filled Mahti’s head and chest, making his bones shiver. He gathered the energies and sent them out through Sojourn to Teolin. He could feel the song enter the old man, lifting the strong soul free of the frail, pain-wracked body, letting it drift up through the smoke hole like milkweed fluff. Bathing in the light of a full moon was very healing for a soul. It returned to the body cleansed and gave a clear mind and good health.

Satisfied, Mahti changed the song, tightening his lips to weave in the night croak of a heron, the booming boast of grandfather frog, and the high, reedy chorus of all the little peepers who knew the rain’s secrets. With these, he washed the hot sand from the old man’s joints and cleansed the little biting spirits from his intestines. Searching deeper, he smelled a shadow in Teolin’s chest and followed it to a dark mass in the upper lobe of his liver. The death there was still asleep, curled tight like a child in the womb. This, Mahti could not cleanse away. Some were fated to carry their own deaths. Teolin would understand. For now, at least, there was no pain.

Mahti let his mind wander on through the old man’s body, soothing the old fractures in his right heel and left arm, pressing the pus away from the root of a broken molar, dissolving the grit in the old man’s bladder and kidneys. For all its wizened appearance, Teolin’s penis was still strong. Mahti played the sound of a forest fire into his sac. The old man had a few more festivals in him; let the Mother be served by another generation bearing his fine old blood.

The rest was all old scars, long since healed or accepted. Allowing himself a whim, he played the white owl’s call through Teolin’s long bones, then droned the soul back down into the old man’s flesh.

When he was finished, he was surprised to see pink dawn light shining in through the smoke hole. He was covered in sweat and shaking, but elated. Smoothing his hand down the polished length of the oo’lu, he whispered, “We will do great things, you and I.”

Teolin stirred and opened his eyes.

“The owl song tells me you are one hundred and eight years old,” Mahti informed him.

The old man chuckled. “Thank you. I’d lost track.” He reached out and touched the handprint on the oo’lu. “I caught a vision for you while I slept. I saw the moon, but it was not the Mother’s round moon. It was a crescent, sharp as a snake’s tooth. I’ve seen that vision only once before, not too long ago. It was for a witch from Eagle Valley village.”

“Did she learn what it meant?”

“I don’t know. She went away with some oreskiri . I’ve never heard anything of her return. Her name is Lhel. If you meet her in your travels, give her my greeting. Perhaps she can tell you the meaning.”

“Thank you, I’ll do that. But you still don’t know if my fate is a good one or a bad one?”

“I’ve never walked Sojourn’s path. Perhaps it depends on where your feet take you. Walk bravely in your all travels, honor the Mother, and remember who you are. Do that and you will continue to be a good man, and a fine witch.”

Mahti left the old man’s clearing at dawn the next day, Teolin’s blessing still tingling on his brow.

Plodding over the crusty snow, Sojourn a comforting weight across his shoulders in its sling, he smelled the first hint of spring on the morning air. Later, as the sun rose over the peaks, he heard it in the dripping of water from bare branches.

He knew this trail well. The rhythmic crunch and rasp of his snowshoes lulled him into a light trance and his thoughts drifted. He wondered if he’d plant different kinds of children now than he had under the Moon Plow sign? Then again, if he were to travel far, would he plant any children at all?

He wasn’t surprised when the vision came. He often had them at moments like these, tramping alone through the peace of the forest.

The winding path became a river under his feet, and the sinew and bent ash of his snowshoes grew into a little boat that bobbed gently on the current. Instead of the thick forest on the far bank, there was open land, very green and fertile. He knew in the way of visions that this must be the southland, where his people had once lived, before the foreigners and their oreskiri had driven them into the hills.

A woman stood between a tall man and a young girl on that bank, and she waved to Mahti as if she knew him. She was Retha’noi like him, and naked. Dark-skinned and small, her fine, ripe body was covered with witch marks. The fact that she was naked in the vision told him that she was dead, a spirit coming to him with a message.

Greetings, my brother. I am Lhel .

Mahti’s eyes widened as he recognized the name. This was the woman Teolin had spoken of, the one who’d gone away with the southlanders on a sojourn of her own. She smiled at him and he smiled back; this was the Mother’s will.

She beckoned him to join her but his boat would not move.

He looked more closely at the others with her. They were black-haired, too, but the man’s was cut short and the girl’s hung in long waves around her shoulders rather than the coarse curls of his people. They were taller, too, and pale as a pair of bones. The young man had an aura of strong magic about him: oreskiri, surely, but with a hint of power Mahti recognized. This witch, Lhel, must have taught him something of their ways. That was troubling, even though Teolin had spoken no ill of her.

The girl did not have magic, but Lhel pointed to the ground at the girl’s feet and Mahti saw that she had a double shadow, one male, and one female.

He didn’t know how to interpret the vision yet, except that these two were both living people, and southlanders. He was not afraid or angry to see them here in his mountains, though. Maybe it was the way the other witch rested her hands on their shoulders, love so clear in her dark eyes. She looked at Mahti again and made a sign of bequeathing. She was giving these two strangers into his care, but why?

Without thinking, he set the new oo’lu to his lips and played a song he did not recognize.

The vision passed and the forest path returned around him. He was standing in a clearing, still playing that song. He didn’t know what it was for; perhaps it was for the southlanders. He would play it for them when they met and see if they knew.

“It’s one thing to accept one’s destiny.

It’s quite another to live it.”