Departures (38 page)

He threw away the cup of what, for a lack of a suitably noxious word, was called stew.
What dessert comes with this pack
? he wondered, feeling rather like Little Jack Horner. Instead of a plum, however, he pulled out a cellophane package with four cookies in it.

Sighing resignedly, he started to eat one, then stopped and gave it a long look. “Be damned,” he said, and started to laugh. He glanced back toward where his traps were set, then looked at the cookie again. “Why the hell not? How could it make things go worse?”

Harvey Cutter’s nostrils twitched as he walked toward the new exhibit. “Be damned,” he said. “It even stinks like Miocene mud. Good job.”

Lucy Durr beamed at him. She was second assistant curator in the primates section of the zoo, and had designed the enclosure.
“Glad you approve,” she said. “The photos you gave us helped a lot in putting it together.”

“Good. I hoped they would.”

Lucy put her hands on the rail and leaned on it as she peered across the moat at the pair of brown-furred creatures on the far side. “They’re interesting beasts, Miocene hominoids that aren’t part of the dryopithecid group that led to the great apes or the ramapithecids humans are descended from. They’re just—by themselves. I’m glad we have them. Hardly any zoos do.”

“I believe that. They’re bloody hell to catch. From the fossils, they’re supposed to have been common around there. You couldn’t prove it by me. I saw one in a tree for half a second, and I finally managed to catch these two. Other than that, forget it.”

Cutter reached into his pocket, pulled out some cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies, and threw them across the moat to the animals he’d captured. The beasts were nimble enough on the ground. On all fours, they hurried over to the cookies. They grabbed them with hands not much different from Cutter’s and greedily gobbled them up.

Lucy clucked the horrified cluck of any zookeeper who catches a visitor feeding the animals. Then she glanced over at the hunter. “How do they know those are good to eat? They haven’t had any here, I know that, and they certainly never had any back in the Miocene.”

“Oh, but they did,” Cutter said. Now Lucy was frankly staring at him. He went on. “I wasn’t having any luck with fruit for bait, and so—”

“You tried something else. Sure. But why cookies?”

He grinned at her. “Well, what would you use if you were going after
Oreopithecus
?”

I haven’t the slightest idea whether this story is fantasy or science fiction. I think it might have fit well in the old
Unknown
, which often walked the fine pixilated line between the two genres.

MADYU WAS BOILING UP A BATCH OF WILLOW-
bark tea when Jorj, the tribe’s chief hunter, poked his head into the shaman’s tent. “What do you want?” Madyu asked crossly, not caring to be interrupted in the middle of his spells. He was convinced they added to the pain-relieving value of the tea.

“We will be setting out shortly, wizardly sir,” Jorj answered. He was a big, broad-shouldered man of about forty, with strong features and a brown beard just beginning to go gray. His skill with a bow had made him rich; he wore a silver quarter from the Old Time in each ear and owned a necklace strung with many more. He did not have it on now, for fear of a mistimed jingle spooking the prey. He went on, “Some magic to bring the beasts to us would be welcome.”

“Oh.” The spells on the willow-bark tea would have to wait: it was no cure for the ache of an empty belly. Madyu said, “I’ll set to work at once, Jorj Rainbowstar.”

The shaman kept his voice low, but Jorj’s head whipped around in alarm all the same. No one in the tribe save Madyu and perhaps a favorite woman had any business knowing the hunter’s secret name; should an enemy somehow come into possession of it, he might use it to wreak all sorts of baneful sorcery.

Jorj said, “I hope the gods are more in the mood to listen to you than they were last moon-quarter. We came back almost empty-handed.”

Madyu knew the chief hunter was obliquely criticizing him for having used his secret name. He dipped his head to acknowledge the rebuke. “I shall do my best, I promise you. Magic is chancy and imperfect, as you no doubt know.”

“Oh, aye. If it weren’t, we’d all be fatter than we are, and that’s a fact.” Jorj laughed a big, booming manly laugh that finished the job of putting the shaman in his place. Madyu, who
was scrawny, clumsy, and nearsighted to boot, felt his ears turn hot. Laughing still, Jorj left the tent and started shouting to the rest of the hunting band.

With a last mournful look at the bronze tea kettle, Madyu decked himself in the raiment required for hunting magic. He, too, had a coin necklace. His, unlike Jorj’s, was made of quarters silvery on the outside but with a copper center. Most shamans preferred those to silver. For one thing, they had to have been made by sorcery; no modern smith could turn out anything like them. For another, the numbers they bore were consistently bigger than those on silver coins. Each shaman had his own explanation for why that was so, but all agreed it had to have some sort of magical import.

Madyu bowed to north and south, east and west. He patted the ground to show his reverence for the earth powers, waved his hands through the air to draw the attention of the sky gods. Then he began the first prayer of the ritual, the one to make keen the noses of the hunting hounds.

He was a conscientious craftsman and did his best to ensure the hounds’ success. Not only did he call the beasts
dawgs
after the fashion of his own tribe and those closest to it, he also named them
sheeyas
, as did the KayJun clans to the east, and
perros
, as did the Makykanoes to the west and south. He did not know or presume to guess which language the gods spoke, but preferred to cover as many bets as he could.

He went on to bless the hunters’ boots to ensure that they slipped through plain and woods without making a sound. He also blessed their bows and arrows to make the shafts fly straight and true. Again he used all three local languages, and a couple more besides. When tribes met to swap pots and horses and women and metal, shamans generally went off by themselves and traded names. Things were, after all, merely things, and manifested themselves only in this world. But their names, now, their names held power, for names echoed through the spirit world as well.

At any rate, true names, secret names, created those echoes. Madyu remembered the war he’d headed off by ascertaining the secret name of a rival tribe’s chieftain and threatening to do dreadful things to the man’s ghost unless he called off his warriors.

While never easy, that sort of coup was at least possible with human beings, who acquired their secret names from one another. But who could be sure what the secret name of a dog was,
or a willow, or a shoe? That was why shamans swapped names back and forth: in the hope of hitting the one true one among the many.

Having done his utmost with the hunters’ animals and gear, Madyu cast the best spells he knew on the beasts they hunted. As he incanted, he thought that any visiting shaman would have admired his technique: He had the cup made from the tip of a wild bull’s horn, the turkey feather, the white-haired deer tail, the rabbit’s foot, and the squirrel skin all ready where he could reach them without interrupting his ritual. He summoned the prey by every name he knew, no matter how exotic. As he did whenever he said the word, he wondered what tribe called a simple, ordinary squirrel a
bepka
.

He was hot and tired and covered with sweat by the time he finished the hunting magic. Heat and sweat had to be lived with in Eestexas. Legend said that in the Old Time people could make the air around themselves cool whenever they wanted. Madyu, a thoroughgoing realist, did not believe the legend for a minute: if people had ever enjoyed such a useful skill, they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to lose it.

When he went outside, he squinted against the glare. The sun beat down with almost physical force. The tribal encampment was nearly deserted, with most of the men at the hunt and the women out in the fields. Children ran between tents, raising hell. One of them stopped to grin at Madyu. “Look, look, look!” he squealed, pointing proudly. His grin had a gap in it.

“I see, Hozay,” Madyu answered gravely. “What did the tooth fairy leave you?” As he spoke, his hand twisted in the gesture that kept the fairy from stealing teeth that weren’t ready to leave their owner’s head.

Hozay reached into his belt pouch and took out two good iron arrowheads. “Look, look, look!” he said again.

“Very nice indeed.” Madyu fought down a stab of jealousy. The tooth fairy hadn’t left him anything so fine when he was a boy. But then, Hozay’s parents were close kin to Ralf, the chief, and the tooth fairy seemed to favor people who were well off.
Those that have, get, even from fairies
, the shaman thought resentfully.

He couldn’t stay mad at Hozay, though. For one thing, he looked almost irresistibly cute with his missing tooth. And for another, he didn’t stick around as a focus for Madyu’s pique—he dashed off yelling after his friends.

The shaman walked over to the creek, stripped off his linen
shirt and buckskin leggings, and dove in. He came up snorting and blowing and at least a little relieved. Then he went down again, swam underwater over to a rock on which a red-ear turtle was sunning itself. The turtle stared in disbelieving reptilian horror when he splashed up in front of its pointy nose. It leapt off the rock and into the creek, frantically churned away. In the water, it was more graceful than Madyu.

He swam a while longer, then went back to reclaim his clothes. He discovered they were not there to be reclaimed. None of the small boys was in sight, either, which gave him more than a little reason to suspect the clothes had not ambled off by themselves. The shaman said a couple of choice things under his breath, added a couple of choicer ones out loud. The shirt and leggings failed to reappear. Swearing and dripping, Madyu went back to his tent without them.

A few of the women had come back to the encampment for a midday meal. They giggled when they saw Madyu. Ralf’s tribe had no strong nudity taboo, nor did its neighbors; given the Eestexas climate, nudity was often more comfortable than clothes. But a wet, angry, naked shaman had obviously just fallen victim to a prank, and so became fair game.

Among the gigglers was Hozay’s older sister, Neena. That only made Madyu more furious. Some shamans eschewed marriage, believing a celibate life made their magic stronger. Of those who did take a woman or two, most chose from outside their own tribe. That was not a law, but it was fairly strong custom: knowing as he did the secret names of his tribesfolk, a shaman might be tempted to try using sorcery to win a girl’s heart.

Madyu would never have stooped to such a thing, however pleasant he found the picture of auburn-haired, softly curved Neena sharing his tent. He resolved to go courting at the trade fair a couple of moons hence. But despite that resolution (which he had made, and broken, before), he did not care to have Neena laughing at him. Even a scrawny, clumsy, nearsighted man has his pride.

As the shaman had expected, his missing garments lay close by the tent. The imps who’d absconded with them—and if Hozay wasn’t one of them, Madyu would go out and eat grass for supper—knew how far they could go in provoking him. Had leggings and shirt vanished for good, some small backsides would have had an encounter with the switch. Madyu sighed as he got dressed: this one was a clean win for the boys.

Toward evening, a commotion announced the return of the hunting band. Madyu put away the Old Time book he’d been trying to decipher ever since he’d traded another shaman a six-tool pocket knife for it. The man was a cheat; if Madyu ever learned his secret name, he’d regret the day he was born. The book’s faded cover proclaimed that it had to do with medicine, but instead of talking about how to fix a broken leg or what to do about measles or lockjaw, it went on and on about genes and enzymes and other such incomprehensibilities. Madyu was sometimes tempted to use its pages for kindling, but keeping it around and looking through it every now and then reminded him not to be too eager in a deal.

With some trepidation, he came out of the tent. If this hunt proved as bad as the last one had been, Jorj was liable to clout him into the middle of next week. But the chief hunter wore a grin as wide as a longhorn’s span. When he saw Madyu, he clouted him, all right, but it was a happy clout, not an angry one. The shaman staggered just the same.

Jorj caught him, steadied him, and patted him on the back. “Look at the fine wizard we have here!” he shouted to anyone who would listen—and he hadn’t even been into the blackberry wine. “Look at all the ducks we brought back, thanks to his spells.”

“Ducks?” Madyu quacked, but his startled voice was drowned by a chorus of cheers from the rest of the hunters and from the women of the tribe. Madyu looked from one smiling hunter to the next. Sure enough, they were carrying two or three or even four fat ducks apiece, with some of the shining feathers now dark with blood.

“Hardly ever seen such a big flock before,” Jorj boomed. “They were tipping up in that pond—you know, the one near what’s left of the Old Time road—and they were so busy eating, they barely noticed us shooting at ’em till they were dead. Wonderful spells, Madyu! I wish they’d work that well all the time.”

“So do I,” Madyu said in a hollow voice. He’d magicked rabbits and squirrels, turkey and cattle and deer—he hadn’t said word one to the gods about ducks. But here they were, dozens of them. The tribe would feast for a week.

He saw Neena looking right at him and cheering as loud as anybody. When he smiled at her in a tentative way, she smiled back, not tentatively in the least. All at once, the world seemed a brighter place. Maybe he hadn’t asked the gods for ducks, but if they sent ducks his way, he’d take credit for them.

He puffed his chest out as far as it would go (standing there beside Jorj, he still looked like nothing much). “I tried something new this time,” he declared. “It had to do with genes and enzymes.”