Authors: Robert Holdstock
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Contemporary, #Fantasy, #Fantasy Fiction, #Great Britain, #Forests and Forestry
9
The man who had been the girl's father (or the boy's, it was hard to tell)
wept silently again.
'Uth guerig,' I murmured aloud, and the older man glanced up at me. He tugged
the partridge feather from the girl's right hand and crushed it in his own. 'Uth
guerig!' he said angrily.
So they knew of Christian. He was
uth guerig,
whatever that meant.
Killer. Rapist. Man without compassion.
Uth guerig!
I dared not tell them that I was the brother of that
murderous creature.
The deer gave cause for some concern. After all, it belonged to us. The
haunches and cadaver were brought close by, and the ring of men stood back, some
of them smiling and indicating that we should take the meat. It took very little
in the way of gesturing to indicate that the
meat would be
a gift from us to them. I had hardly smiled and shaken my head before six of
them swooped upon the pile and slung the great joints over their shoulders,
walking briskly along the river's edge, towards their community.
Life-Speaker
Sixth night. We are with a people who guard river crossings, called the
shamiga
according to Steven, who remembered their name from his father's account. A
strangely touching burial for the two youngsters we found. Also unnervingly
sexual. They were buried across the river, in the woods, among other graves, the
earth piled high above the ground. Each was painted with white spirals, circles
and crosses, the pattern on the girl different from that on the boy. They were
laid in the same grave, straight out, arms crossed on chest. A piece of thin
twine was tied to the tip of the boy's member, and tugged around his neck to
simulate erection. The girl's passage was opened with a painted stone. Steven
believes this is to make sure they are sexually active in the other world. A
large mound of earth was raised over the grave.
The
shamiga
are mythagos, a legendary
group,
a tribe out of
fable. Odd to think of it. Odder than being with Guiwenneth. They are a
legendary people who guard - and haunt, after death - the river crossings. They
transform into stepping stones when the river floods, or so the legend goes.
There are several fables associated with the
shamiga,
all lost in our own
time, but Steven learned a fragment of one such tale, concerning a girl who
stepped into the water, ducked down to assist the crossing of a Chieftain and
was taken to help build the wall of a stone fort.
The
shamiga
do not appear to specialize in happy endings. This became
clear later when the 'life-speaker' came to us. A girl in her early teens, quite
naked, painted green. Quite alarming. Something happened to Steven and he seemed
to understand her perfectly.
At dusk, after the burial, the
shamiga
feasted on our fresh kill of
venison. A great fire was kindled, and a ring of torches placed around us, about
twenty feet away. Around the fire gathered the
shamiga,
more menfolk than
women, I noticed, with only four children, but all
wearing
brightly coloured tunics, or skirts, and waist-length cloaks. Their huts - away
from the river, where the ground had been cleared - were crude affairs, square
plan, with shallow thatch roofs, each building supported by a simple frame of
hardwood. From the waste-tips and the remains of old buildings - indeed, from
the graveyard itself - we could see that this community had been here for many
generations.
The venison, spit-roasted and basted with a herb and wild-cherry sauce, was
delicious. Politeness required the use of twigs, sharpened and split into forks,
with which to consume meat. Fingers were used to tear the meat from the carcass,
however.
It was still quite light when the feast finished. I discovered that the
grieving man had been the father of the girl. The boy was
inshan:
from
another place. A crude communication by sign language continued for some while.
We were not suspected of being evil; reference to
uth guerig
were rudely
shrugged away - it was not our business; questions about our own origins
produced answers that puzzled the gathered adults, and after a while made them
suspicious.
And then a change came over our hosts, a buzz of anticipation, a great deal
of understated excitement. Those among the gathered clan who did not watch
Keeton and myself with a sort of amiable curiosity, glanced around, searching
beyond the torches, watching the dusk, the woodland, the gentle river. Somewhere
a bird shrilled unnaturally and there was a moment's cry of excitement. The
tribe's elder, who was called Durium, leaned towards me and whispered, 'Kushar!'
She was among us before I realized it, passing among the
shamiga,
a
dark, slim shape, silhouetted against the burning ring of torches. She touched
each adult on the ears, eyes and mouth, and to some she gave a small, twisted
twig of wood. These were held reverently by most,
though
two or three of the
shamiga
made little graves in the ground and buried
the offerings at their feet.
Kushar dropped to a crouch before Keeton and myself and examined us closely.
She was daubed with green paint, though her eyes were ringed with thin circles
of white and black ochre. Even her teeth were green. Her hair was long and dark,
combed out very straight. Her breasts were mere buds, and her limbs thin. She
had no body hair. The feeling I had was that she was only ten or twelve years
old, but how hard it was to gauge!
She spoke to us and we spoke back in our language. Her dark eyes, gleaming by
torchlight, focused more upon me than upon Keeton, and it was to me that she
gave the small twig. I kissed it, and she laughed briefly, then closed her small
hand around mine, squeezing gently.
Two torches were brought and placed on each side of her and she settled into
a more comfortable kneeling position, facing me, then started to speak. The
shamiga
all turned to face us. The girl - was she
called
Kushar? Or was
kushar
a word for what she was? - closed her eyes and spoke in a slightly higher
pitch than I thought was normal for her.
The words flowed from her tongue, eloquent, sibilant, incomprehensible.
Keeton glanced uncomfortably at me, and I shrugged. A minute or so passed and I
whispered, 'My father managed to understand somehow -'
I said no more than that because Durium glanced at me sharply, leaning
towards me, his hand outstretched in an angry gesture that clearly indicated,
'Be silent!'
Kushar kept talking, her eyes still closed, unaware of the gesturing going on
around her. I grew very conscious of the sounds of the river, the torches, the
rustle of the woodland. So I almost jumped when the girl said, and repeated,
'Uth guerig! Uth guerig!'
Aloud I said, 'Uth guerig! Tell me about him!'
The girl's eyes opened. She stopped speaking. Her face
looked
shocked. Around me the rest of the
shamiga
were shocked as well. Then
they became restless, upset, Durium loudly expressing his own irritation.
'I'm sorry,' I said quietly, looking at him, then back at the girl.
. . .
tells all stories with her eyes closed, so that the smiles or frowns
of those who listen cannot effect a shape-change upon the characters within the
story.
The words, from my father's letter to Wynne-Jones, were haunting fragments of
guilt in my mind. I wondered if I had changed something at a crucial point, and
the story would never be the same again.
Kushar continued to stare at me, her lower lip trembling slightly. I thought
tears welled up in her eyes for a second, but her suddenly moist gaze became
clear again. Keeton remained dutifully silent, his hand resting against his
pocket where he carried the pistol.
'Now I know you,' Kushar said, and for a moment I was too surprised to react.
'I'm sorry,' I said to her again.
'So am I,' she said. 'But no harm has been done. The story has not changed. I
did not recognize you.'
'I'm not so sure I understand -' I said. Keeton had been watching the two of
us peculiarly. He said, 'What don't you understand?'
'What she means . . .'
He frowned. 'You can understand her words?'
I looked at him briefly. 'You don't?'
'I don't know the language.'
The
shamiga
began to make a hissing sound, a certain sign that they
wished silence, that they wanted the history to continue.
To Keeton, the girl was still.speaking the language of two thousand years
before Christ. But I understood her, now. Somehow I had entered the awareness of
this young life-speaker. Is that what "my father had meant when he
referred
to a girl with 'clear psychic talents'? And yet, the astonishing fact of our
establishing communication stopped me thinking about what had really happened. I
could not have known, then, what a devastating change had occurred in me, as I
sat by the river and listened to the whispered voice of the past.
'I am the speaker of the life of this people,' she said, and closed her eyes
again. 'Listen without speaking. The life must not be changed.'
'Tell me of
uth guerig,'
I said.
"The life of the Outsider has gone for the moment. I can tell only the
life that I see.
Listen!'
And with that urgent statement I fell silent -
Outsider!
Christian was the
Outsider!
-
and attended to the sequence of tales that the life-speaker recounted.
The first tale I remember easily; others have faded from mind because they
meant little, and were obscure. The final tale affected me strongly, for it
concerned both Christian and Guiwenneth.
This was Kushar's first tale:
On that far day, during the life of this people, the Chieftain, Parthorlas
took the head of his brother, Diermadas, and ran back to his stone fort. The
pursuit was fierce. Forty men with spears, forty men with swords, forty dogs the
height of deer, but Parthorlas outran them, holding the head of his brother in
the palm of his left hand.
On that day the river had flooded and the
shamiga
were hunting, all
save the girl Swithoran, whose lover was the son of Diermadas, known as Kimuth
Hawkspeaker. The girl Swithoran stepped into the water and ducked her head, to
aid the crossing of Parthorlas. She was a stone as smooth as any stepping stone,
with her back so white and pure as it rose above the water. Parthorlas stepped
upon her and jumped to the far bank, then reached back and plucked the stone
from the river.
It nestled in his right hand. His fort was stone built and there was a gap in
the southern wall. And on that day Swithoran became a part of the fort, stuck in
the hole to stop the winter winds.
Kimuth Hawkspeaker summoned the clans of his
tuad,
which is to say of
the lands he controlled, and made them swear allegiance to him, now that
Diermadas was dead. This they did, after a month of bargaining. Then Kimuth
Hawkspeaker led them and charged them to lay siege to the stone fort.
This they did, for seven years.
For the first year, Parthorlas alone shot arrows at the assembled host on the
plain, below the fort. For the second year Parthorlas flung metal spears at the
host. For the third year he fashioned knives from the wood of carts, and so kept
the furious host at bay. In the fourth year he flung the cattle and wild pigs
that he kept in the fort, keeping just enough to sustain him and his family. In
the fifth year, with no weapons and little food and water, he flung his wife and
daughters at the army on the plain, and this scattered them for more than six
seasons. Then he flung his sons, but Hawkspeaker flung them back, and this
frightened Parthorlas even more, for his sons were like broken-backed hens, and
pecked for favours. In the seventh year Parthorlas began to fling the stones
from the walls of his fort. Each stone was ten times the weight of a man, but
Parthorlas flung them to the far horizon. In time he came to the last bits of
the wall, where the winter draughts were blocked. He failed to recognize the
smooth white stone from the river and flung it at the War Chief Kimuth
Hawkspeaker himself, killing him.
Swithoran was released from the stone-shape and wept for the dead chieftain.
'A thousand men have died because of a hole in a wall,' she said. 'Now there is
a hole in my breast. Shall we slaughter a thousand more because of that?' The
clan chiefs discussed the matter, then returned to the river, because it was the
season when the big fish swam up from the sea. The place in the valley became
known as
Issaga ukirik,
which means
where the river girl stopped the
war.
As she spoke the history, the
shamiga
murmured and laughed, involved
with every phrase, every image. I could see very little amusing in the story at
all. Why did they laugh more loudty at the description of pursuit (eighty men
and forty dogs) and of the stone fort than at the image of Parthorlas flinging
his wife, daughters and sons? (And why, for that matter, did they allow
themselves to laugh at all? Surely Kushar could hear that response!).
Other histories followed. Keeton, listening only to the fluent sound of an
alien language, looked glum, yet resigned to patience. The stories were
inconsequential, and most of them I have now forgotten.
Then, after an hour of speaking, and without pausing for breath, Kushar told
a story about the Outsider, and I scribbled it down with pen and paper,
searching for clues as I wrote, unaware that the story itself contained the
seeds of the final conflict that was still so far away in time, and woodland.