Death Chants (16 page)

Already he missed
the warm den, the soft fur of his wolf mother and the loving ways of the wolf people, for wolves
love (heir children as much as any who walk the earth.

Yasheya and the old
thunder and lightning man went far. They traveled through the day and well into the next night.
When the
sun began to walk across the
next day, they were in a hot land beside the edge of the great sea.

It was here by the
great water that the further education of Yasheya began. The old man taught him the ways of wind
and thunder. He taught him the dances and the languages of the night people, the dawn bird, the
hurtling hawk, the night-seeing owl and the coyote and deer people.

And he learned the
many lying tongues of men and the strange commerce of their speech.

The wolf mother
became a buried love as Yasheya became a brother to everything that flew or walked or ran or
burrowed beneath the ground.

The seasons
unfolded and Yasheya grew with them. There was something now of winter in the speed with which he
moved across the ground. There was something of summer in his heart when he stared at the night
and saw things.

Like the frost
winds, he painted his face on the hidden ledges of the high places. He made his way deep inside
the mountain through caves no human beings had ever seen or would ever see. He held converse with
great blind fish and lizards, rulers of a darkness complete and age-old. He learned the secrets
of hidden pools, the infamy and treacheries of medicine wrought in darkness. From the blind fish,
he learned something of eternity.

From the eyeless
lizards, pale, boneless-looking beings who seemed more like the obscene white fingers of
exquisite corpses, he learned stealth and solitude.

He had eyes from
the hawks and learned their ways of seeing when he held them in his hands. He ran on the legs of
the deer. In time he became as cunning as night coyote and could move like the shadow of a
falling star when he made medicine.

Listening, he could
hear the grass growing at his feet.

One day shadow
father made camp on a secluded ledge high in the mountains. He built a small fire of dry wood and
they warmed themselves against the chill of night.

"Father," said
Yasheya, speaking now in the language of men, which was the language of troubles. "I grow
restless."

"It comes when it
comes. I have been waiting for it. I have prepared you for it," said the shadow man.

"I don't know why I
am restless."

The old one threw
more wood upon the fire, sending red-hot sparks soaring into the chill night air.

"It is time for you
to take your place among your own kind," said shadow father.

"Why?"

"Because you must.
Soon you must. You cannot waste all the things I have taught you. I want you to take these gifts,
these ways of understanding, back to the people of your mother. You have learned much of the
world that few living men know. In the days that will come, your people will face threats to the
life of their world. You, Yasheya, are a knower of a way of holding truth, a truth that someday
may end this threat to the life of all. That is what your whole life has been shaped to
do."

"But why am I
restless? I have always been happy here. Why am I changing now? What is wrong with me? I feel
changes inside me. My body is changing and I do not understand it."

The old one held
out his hands to the warmth of the fire. "It is the circle of life. Your body is changing into a
man body. It asks to go back to its people. That is why you are so restless."

"And if I choose
not to go," said Yasheya, "if I choose to stay among the animal people that are my brothers,
among my wild friends with whom I share the same wild heart, what then?"

"Then you will be
living a lie. You will be only a living dead man in this world. You must always live the life of
the being that you are. You must know in your heart what it is to be a human being. That is what
you are. To not try to learn to be a human being and walk in wisdom, is to be blind and to always
ride the wind."

"But I don't know
that other world. The human world is strange to me."

"You will
learn."

"Will you help
me?"

The shadow man
stared into the fire. There was fear in his face. "I will try. I must not fail in this. I am not
of that world, but as much as I know of it, shall be yours. I have put the tongues of many men
within you, so that you might speak to them. So we have passed many of our long nights together.
But I have so little time. It may be too late. I hope it is not too late, for I have lived past
my time of being already and the knife of winter is
deep in my heart. I do not think I will walk out of this winter. You may have to
walk alone. If that misfortune should happen, it will be your first lesson about being
human."

"Is that the way of
the human world?" asked Yasheya. "Are human beings alone?"

The old one turned
from the fire, a smile of unknown things on his face. "If that is the way of the human world, you
must find it out for yourself. Tomorrow at first sunlight, we shall start for the village of your
people."

Shadow father lay
down by the fire, pulling his heavy white buffalo robe over him. Yasheya, like a wolf, turned
around three times before settling in comfortably to sleep.

The shadow man felt
a pain in his chest, and he sat up sud­denly, and the fear leaped up strong in him. "Yasheya!
Wake up!" cried the shadow man. With a snarl, Yasheya leaped upright, animal-quick, sense reading
the all-around world for danger.

"What is it, shadow
father?" Yasheya's alert senses had de­tected no intruder or threatened danger. "Who attacks
us?"

"Time," said the
shadow man. "It is time which drills a fine arrow point from a heavy bow into my heart. Yasheya,
I am afraid to sleep for fear I will not wake."

"You are a being of
thunder and lightning. How can you die?" "Every storm must pass," said the old shadow man.
"Summon the thunder and lightning, as you have so often done. They will keep you strong," said
Yasheya.

"Something stronger
calls me," said the old one. His hand reached out for the boy. He put the palm of his shadow hand
on Yasheya's face.

"Feel the power,
Yasheya."

Thunder crashed on
the mountain. Lightning streaked the angry sky. The wind came roaring down at them from the house
of the north and scattered the fire.

"Take it into your
being, Yasheya! Surrender your heart to the great unliving storm! Let it be you!"

Yasheya's body
stiffened. The shadow man's hand seemed to be living fire, burning into Yasheya's skull. His face
contorted in pain, his mouth hung agape. He writhed like a wild creature trapped in a sudden
brush fire.

He screamed once,
like a soul in the land beyond earthlight's torment, in the thirteenth and final hell of man, and
then the surging current of the sky river, the raging fire storm, lessened.

And found every
storm's season of calm.

Yasheya plunged
downward like a man fallen off a mountain. He spread his arms and was uplifted. He found himself
adrift on a great wind, and became a shadow being riding the mighty fist of the great north wind.
He released himself, let his mind and body join with the great unfolding.

Yasheya vanished
from the mountain. He became a summer storm, riding the crooked back of the highest far
mountains, casting thunder-driven lances of fire, bleeding from his shadow eyes, unburdening
cascades of fireborn rain. He was a terrible blizzard, burying the great world in a frost-woven
blanket of white. He was a tornado tearing up the human forest and all in its path. He was a
sudden squall at sea, racing across the face of the water, making widows for the men gone to
sea.

And he was a gentle
rain on the long green hair of mother earth.

The old one lifted
his hand away, the transformation almost complete.

A bolt of blue
lightning, as bright as turquoise, arced between them, the final passage.

It passed from the
old one's eyes, gone from him forever, into the eyes of Yasheya, and the giving forth and passing
on, was ended.

"It is yours now,
Yasheya. I am an empty husk," said the old one, and he seemed to wither and shrink in the night
even as he spoke. His strength was like sand in the river.

"Listen, Yasheya. I
must hurry now. Before I teach you the last magic, before I teach you how to summon this great
power and how you must use it, before this, I must tell you of the trouble yet to come, of the
great world change."

Yasheya glowed with
inner light, a storm newborn, yet his ears were not dulled. He listened.

"Strangers come
into the land below. They will take the land of your people. They will point the people to a new
home in the West, but no home will be there for them. But life will go on. The people will
survive as they have in the past. But in the time to
come, a thing grows, an evil, that no one may live through. A cloud, a brown
toadstool, with sky poison, it stalks the days to come. It lives in a forest of arrow trees aimed
at the moon. Someday the strangers will shoot these thick arrow trees at the moon, for these men
are maddened by life. The arrow trees will catch the poison of falling stars and come back down
on their houses and the houses of all the world. All will die, the human people, the animal
people, the reptile and the bird people. Even mother earth's holy hair, the grass, will die and
the river of life will stain with a big death and the earth, wounded, will weep."

"Who are these
strangers?"

"Human
beings."

"Creatures like my
mother?" asked Yasheya.

"Different in skin
but the same, so I think."

"If they are like
my mother, as you have told me of her, they would not do this," said Yasheya.

The old one shook
with sudden pain. "It is when they are not like your mother, that they allow terrible evil in the
world. A mother does not poison its young."

"What is to be
done?"

"You must help save
the heart of the world. You must tell the people where the heart of the earth is, and knowing
that, the evil will go away."

"How?" asked
Yasheya, fearing what he could not under­stand. "I am small. The world is big. I am only one
being."

"NO!" cried the old
shadow man with passion. "You are all the things that walk the earth. You are strong with the
hearts of many. You only need to know how to unlock the power, to summon the thunder and
lightning heart of mother earth it­self!"

"If you knew this
power, if it dwelt in you, why could you not save the world and all the people in it?" asked
Yasheya.

"Because I was not
human," said the shadow man. "I am just a creature of the old flesh of mother earth and I am
powerless against the destroyers. It takes a human heart and human will to stay the hand of the
world slayer.

"Will you do this
thing?" asked the old man. "You must join with those who fight against the evil. Wedded with
their desire, you would be the hope of the world."

"Is that my place
in the world? Why me? Why am I chosen for this?" asked Yasheya.

"Many are chosen,
many must choose. You have power and need only to know the secret of its use."

"Teach me to summon
the power and I will," said Yasheya. "For unknown world that it is to me, I am restless and must
have some place in it."

The old one started
to lift his arms to the sky, to ask the thunder and lightning for the great and terrible words
that give birth to power.

But the thing that
called the old man was stronger, and he toppled, falling back into the dust, into the cold ashes
of the extinguished fire.

Yasheya took shadow
father in his arms and the old one strug­gled to speak with his last breath. "Learn to be ... a
human being. The secret is . . ."

The old shadow
man's voice faded into nothingness.

The wind died in
the night and a shadow disappeared on a moonless sky.

"Come back, shadow
father!" cried Yasheya, imploring the dark night. "Don't leave me! Be a human being? Is that the
secret? SHADOW FATHER! HOW AM I TO KNOW?"

Yasheya's question
echoed down the mountain, but the cold ashes of the fire were all that marked the passing of the
old one.

Yasheya was
alone.

With a strangely
aching heart, Yasheya walked down the side of the mountain. An ancient rat enemy rode on his
shoulder, invisi­ble, all-seeing, hoping to cause the final pain.

Another pain, rode
in Yasheya's heart.

He was on a journey
with cold friends.

He saw the world
with a thousand animal eyes and heard a thousand animal voices in the wind, but none of them saw
how Or spoke how he could become a human being.

He walked down into
the world of his forgotten past.