Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (27 page)

The lawman had sat nearly motionless on the floor of the hut while Kent had related his outlandish tale, and now continued to sit. Rowan felt himself strangely divided. On one hand, he could hardly allow himself to believe Kent’s insane story. On the other, he wanted to ride out of this valley of nightmare superstition and back into the familiar world of common experiences and rational explanations. But he knew that was out of the question. Action had to be taken, and he was the only law within fifty miles. He stood up and hiked his gun belt a bit higher on his waist. As he drew a breath to place Kent under arrest for the murder of Israel Paulson, the flap of hide over the dwelling’s entrance was drawn back and two imposing tribesmen entered. One was tall and still well-muscled despite the onset of his middle years. The man’s authoritative bearing assured Rowan that he was chief of these people. The other was as impressive, though in an altogether different manner. Where the tall man was plainly dressed and unadorned by headdress, this one was small and wizened, and bedecked with a variety of ornaments, most of these of a clearly reptilian origin. Viper rattles decorated his snakeskin headband and hung from straps about his wrists, elbows, and ankles. A dark, painted coil encircled the man’s torso from waist to neck, ending in a diamond-shaped head which seemed to nuzzle against his throat. While the chief remained near the entrance with his arms crossed stoically, the spirit-talker approached and stood before Rowan. In the lawman’s mind, he seemed somehow to be looking upward into those ancient eyes, even though he knew this to be patently impossible. And when the shaman spoke, his voice reminded the white man of the snapping crack of distant lightning.

“You are Rowan. I have seen your face,” he stated cryptically. “I am Tanat-Sha. You have heard Ken-te-ni-pa’s words?”

“Yes, I’ve heard,” Rowan replied firmly. “Now hear my words. I stand as the law of my people. Johnson Kent is under arrest for the killing of Israel Paulson. A judge of my people will decide whether the killing was murder. He must return with me.”

Tanat-Sha gazed puzzledly into the bigger man’s face, and turned to Kent, still seated before the lodge pole.

“You told him of this valley? Of your place with our people?” he asked.

“I told how I came here,” Kent responded. “I did not speak of the Blessing, or of the Dreams.”

Tanat-Sha nodded, grunting, and sat himself cross-legged before the fire. As he began to speak, he raised his left hand toward the flames and sprinkled what looked to Rowan like grains of sand over the glowing embers.

“The dreams of Father Yig are given to few and, once given, are never reclaimed,” the shaman intoned. “Yig dreams of the world that once was, and of that which will be. The dreams of Yig become the souls of his priests, and those priests themselves become dreams.”

Tanat-Sha rocked back and forth slightly as he became lost in his chanted litany. The lawman rubbed a hand across his face, wondering at the sudden onset of his strange fatigue. He judged there to be no harm in just sitting a bit until he felt up to making the arrest and moving out, and so squatted down opposite the old Indian, peering curiously at him over the dying flames. The spirit-talker’s voice droned on and Rowan’s attention slowly became fixed upon the shimmering coals of the fire. He was dimly aware that the ceremony outside was continuing unabated and he heard, as from a great distance, the beating of drums, the shaking of rattles, and the muted repetitions of ancient prayers.

“The dreams of Yig do not always come to those who seek them, and sometimes come to those who seek them not,” said Tanat-Sha. “Father Yig sent his dreams to me when I was still young, and not yet known as a man of powers. I sat upon a high hill for many days…no food, little water…until Yig came to me in his own shape. He wears man-shape when he speaks to the sons of men or visits the daughters to beget upon them. But that day he came to me in his own form…the snake-shape. From the desert far below he raised his head until he looked straight into my eyes. And I knew then the dreams of Yig.

“Before Tirawa made the first men, the people of Yig possessed the earth. They walked upon two legs, like men, but their faces were the face of Yig. Their medicine was very strong, and their cities were so mighty that when they crumbled at last they became as great mountains, and still seem so today.”

The shaman paused, and Rowan realized that he had been staring into the fire as though entranced by the old man’s words. This seemed odd to him and wrong somehow, although he could not think why that should be so. He recognized again the beating of the drums outside, which seemed to merge in their droning cadences with the words of Tanat-Sha as the spirit-talker continued.

“Yig commands all the scaled brothers, and it has always been so. He showed me this valley as it was before men…as it was when the children of Yig ruled the land and the sea. All of this valley, and beyond was ocean, and the ocean was filled with the life that Yig had bestowed.”

Rowan sat cross-legged before the fire, mesmerized by the visions which the words of Tanat-Sha summoned up before him. It seemed to the white man that he could all but see the ancient ocean which the spirit-talker described, and the thousands of forms of fish and reptilian life which swarmed beneath its waves, some astonishingly beautiful and others terrifying in their ferocity. The shaman again waved a hand before the embers of the fire, and Rowan’s visions became clearer and more immediate…as if he had been bodily transported to a pre-human world. All sense of his position in time and space, of his mission, even of his personal identity were submerged beneath the dreams of Yig, and further dreams unfolded as the voice of Tanat-Sha droned on. Rowan saw cities rise and fall…cities in which no human foot ever trod. He saw all the world under the dominion of the snake-headed people, and witnessed the spread of their empires from continent to time-lost continent. Now he seemed to leap thousands of years ahead, and watched the great cataclysms which ended the rule of the serpent-men forever. He saw humankind rise and fall, rise and fall, until it seemed finally that man had achieved mastery over the world. Now was the era of the human hordes, and their civilizations spread far and wide. Rowan seemed to look through the eyes of an observant god as he watched mighty temples as well as thatch-roofed huts rise beneath the hands of their builders, both eventually crumbling beneath the mightier hand of Time. His consciousness flashed from continent to continent, from age to age, until the passage of the centuries became meaningless and insubstantial as a shadow of dissipating smoke. Some part of his mind recognized the architecture of ancient Egypt and of Athens in their glory, and of Imperial Rome. But far greater were the number of lands and empires which were utterly alien to him. He viewed colossal step-pyramids atop which human captives had the hearts torn from their breasts by blood-mad priest-executioners. He seemed to enter the palaces of saffron-skinned kings with almond eyes, and to peer into the sod huts of white-skinned slaves. At one point he saw an immense undersea city which, some sense told him, could be of no human origin. Its structure, its angles, were subtly wrong in some undefinable way, as though his mind could not translate what his eyes told him to be true. And he sensed a presence in that place which, even in his transported state of mind, awoke in him a mind-devouring panic which persisted until the scene again shifted and he found himself looking down upon some desert valley from a tremendous height. As his view descended, he seemed to approach a village of huts and conical tents which he recognized as being the very village which he had entered…when? A million years in the past? A thousand years in the future? Time and the passage of time now seemed merely part of some vast, cosmic joke. The roofs of the village rose up to meet him, and he seemed to be moving downward toward a hut in the central part of the compound. His vision passed through the roof of stiffened horse hides, and suddenly he beheld himself sitting cross-legged before the dying fire, with the aged shaman across from him rocking gently and muttering as though conversing in a dream. And now Rowan’s normal consciousness began to assert itself, and he felt an electric jolt of disorienting terror as he viewed his own body through eyes not his own. He felt himself to be falling, and was enveloped in a nausea-invoking mist of dancing, shimmering sparks.

With conscious effort, he opened his eyes to see the last flickering flames playing about the embers of the dying fire. The lawman leaped to his feet and drew his revolver, only then realizing that he was alone in the hut with the old man, who simply stood serenely with his arms folded across his chest. The marshal pointed the barrel of his .45 at a spot between the shaman’s eyes and pulled the hammer back with his thumb.

“What the flamin’ hell did you do to me?” he demanded furiously. “How did you make me see those things?”

“You have been greatly honored,” declared Tanat-Sha quietly, as though completely unconcerned with the deadly weapon being held before him. “I have never known Father Yig to share his dreams with a white man. You must be an exceptional man indeed, Marshal Rowan.”

“Don’t give me that horseshit!” shouted the lawman, his voice betraying a mix of both anger and fear. “This was all some damned trick to get Kent out of here before I could arrest him. That dust you threw on the fire was a drug of some sort that made me think I was seeing things that couldn’t be true, and while I was under, you took Kent out of here and hid him someplace. Well, I didn’t track a man all those weeks just to give him up because you want him for God-knows-what. If I don’t leave this village with my prisoner, this valley will run red with the blood of your people, and then we’ll see how much good your damned snake-god does you.”

Rowan threw open the flap door of the hut and strode out into the desert twilight. He had expected to be confronted by the chief and warriors of the tribe, and to have to bluff his way out of a potentially unpleasant situation. He was surprised to find not a single soul anywhere in sight. He holstered his gun and began to move surreptitiously toward the sound of drums and flutes which continued their monotonous rhythms somewhere toward the rear of the compound. He knew of no other course of action except to put up one hell of a bluff…face down the whole tribe if necessary…and hope to live to tell about it. He had to move quickly, before the old man had a chance to sound an alarm. He ran around to the eastern side of the hut, keeping to the shadows as much as possible and trying to get a clear fix on the exact location of the ceremony. The pitch and tempo of the raucous music somehow growing more frantic each moment. He slid from shadow to shadow, his Colt held low in his right hand, until the racket of the flutes, drums and rattles was so loud that he was sure that the entire clan must be massed just beyond the teepee he now crouched behind. Flattening himself to the ground, he cautiously peered around the base of the structure until he could scan the entire astonishing tableau.

Atop a flattened earthen mound, about man-height, four tremendous torches formed a rough square. Their uneven light played weirdly across the figure of the clan’s chief, who stood at the center of the square, his arms upraised and his eyes fixed on some point in the darkening desert sky. Every member of the tribe seemed to be present, the men and boys furthest from the mound and the females, youngest child to oldest grandmother, grouped in a crescent before the front of the mound. All had their backs to Rowan, for which he was profoundly grateful, and appeared to be raptly and reverently attentive to the ceremony being conducted before them. Rowan had just decided to begin a search of the empty dwellings in the hope of finding Kent unattended while so many of the tribe were occupied, when his eyes flashed to the rear of the platform where two figures were ascending. As they stepped within the square of torchlight, Rowan suddenly cursed beneath his breath, for the figures were those of Kent and Tanat-Sha. How the aged shaman had covered such a distance so quickly Rowan had no idea, and he mentally shook off the question in favor of more immediate problems. As determined as the he was, he recognized the futility of trying to take Kent prisoner while the tribe was engaged in some sort of religious ritual. While he might have been able to execute a successful bluff at some other time, it would be nothing short of suicide to try such a tactic now. He decided that his best bet would be to leave the compound and return the next day with a plan for getting Kent and himself out of there in one piece. He only hoped that his horse had been left where he could find it. Just as he was about to withdraw, however, his attention became fixed upon the figure of Kent, who had stepped forward into the center of the mound. Perhaps now he would learn why the man had chosen to stay with these savages and turn his back on his own people. Maybe the “real purpose” he’d mentioned had something to do with this weird religious ceremony, and maybe…just maybe…he could use that knowledge to his benefit in his plan to get Kent back to civilization.

The chief, finished with his invocations, had left the mound and joined the men standing behind the cluster of women. Only Kent and the old shaman were now visible in the shifting torchlight, and all was silence for several seconds. The spirit-talker stepped to the front of the platform and raised his arms to the night sky, much as the chief had done before him. His eyes closed, he began a low chant of prayer which rose in volume until Rowan could hear, if not understand, the words,. Only the frequent mention of the name of Yig was recognizable to him. Even so, the prayers of Tanat-Sha seemed to call back to the white man’s mind the strange visions he had seen in the hut. His very sense of self seemed to betray him, and he waged a mental battle for control of his thoughts and the reason for his being in the valley in the first place. Rowan’s strength of will had rarely failed him, and it didn’t fail him now, although the effort to retain his sanity had drenched him with sweat and left him trembling. Clutching his Colt as if it were his only link to reality, he opened his eyes once more and looked out at the continuing ceremony.