Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold
Penric added casually, “Did the Old Weald shamans have much in the way of healing arts or practices, do you know?”
“It is believed so.” Inglis shrugged. “They were largely lost with the rest of their histories. Most shamanic teaching was by word of mouth, mentor to aspirant, and died with its possessors. What little was written, the Darthacans burned, if they could find it. What was hidden fell to the worm and rot and lack of understanding. One of the tasks that the fellowship of the royal shamans has set itself is to try to recover those skills.”
“Are they making any more progress, in this new generation?”
“Mm, it seems the women tribal shamans worked the bulk of healing practices. They either wrote less, or were less recopied, as most of what survives tends to tales of spirit warriors and battle magic, and the rites surrounding the hallow kingship.”
Penric—or was it Desdemona?—vented an ironic snort. “No surprise there.”
“The hints are maddening, cast-away remarks in the midst of accounts about greater matters. There is a small cadre of royal shamans working to try to recreate the skills, relying less on old tales and more on new practices. The skills must have been developed in the first place by such trial and error, after all. Except that error… is a problem for an Easthome city shaman in a way it could not have been in the old forest tribes.” Inglis had straightened up during this recitation, growing more animated, as if briefly forgetful of his woes. “A couple of the senior shamans have attempted healings of animals, to try to get around that. Some of their recent results have been very exciting.”
It came to Oswyl that the reason Inglis had possessed such luck passing for a poor scholar at those inns was that he was one. Well, perhaps not poor. And Learned Penric was another, officially even. Two of them. Dear gods, help me.
“Is the Mother’s Order taking an interest in the work?” asked Penric.
“Some, yes.”
“Helpful, or hostile?”
Inglis’s lips twitched in dark appreciation. “Some of each, but since the fellowship hit upon the idea of becoming physicians to animals, their oversight has grown more favorable.”
“Does this work interest you?”
Inglis slumped again. “What does it matter now? I can’t.”
“Back when you could,” said Penric, blithely ignoring this burst of despair, “how did you go about it? How do you go into your shamanic trance? Meditation, medication, smokes, bells, smells…? Songs, prayers, twirling…?”
Something not quite a laugh puffed Inglis’s lips. “All of that, or any. My teachers said they are training aids, to form habits, and so, arbitrary. Nothing forces it. Or works like a machine, without fail. The more senior shamans make do with less and less, and some without any. Slipping in and out of the plane of symbolic action as silently as a fish swimming, and seemingly with as little effort.” His sigh sounded suspiciously like envy. Or loss, perhaps.
“So how were you taught? Exactly? I have a professional interest in such things, you know.”
Oswyl wasn’t sure what Penric was about with this line of inquiry—the divine was proving more slippery than he’d seemed at first—but Inglis appeared to accept this at face value. Which said something about Inglis, right enough. But the shaman was going on.
“We always began each training session with a short prayer.”
“To invoke the gods, or to placate the Temple?”
Inglis stared at him. “Invoke? Scarcely.”
“Yes, everyone talks to the gods, no one expects them to answer. …Almost no one. Then what?”
“After some experimenting, we settled on a chant for my doorway. It seemed to me the most portable possible aid. And it could never be lost, like objects, or not be around when I needed it. Master Firthwyth first taught me in call and response, like two bards sharing the lines of a long poem back and forth. Except mine was short, just a quatrain. We sat across from each other, with a candle burning between us for me to stare at, and just repeated it over and over. And over and over and over, till my mind grew calm, or at least so bored I could scarcely bear it. We went through nearly a box of good wax candles. I worried about the waste. I can’t imagine how Firthwyth endured.
“After several days of this, one afternoon when I’d been at it so long we both were hoarse, I… broke through. To the plane. Just for a few moments. But it was a revelation. This, this is what I, my wolf-within and I, had been straining for all this time. All the descriptions in words I’d been given weren’t… weren’t false. But it was like nothing I’d imagined from them. No wonder I’d been unable to reach it.
“After that, it quickly grew easier. We dispensed with the candle flame. It took less and less time to break through, and then I began reciting it all by myself. I was working on doing so silently when…” Inglis broke off. He added lamely, “My teacher said I was good.”
“So what’s it like for you? To be in this spiritual space.”
Inglis’s lips parted, closed, thinned. He turned his hands palm-out. “I can give you words, but they won’t teach you any more than they did me. I don’t know if you can understand.”
“Inglis.” For such a gentled tone, it was oddly implacable. “From the strangest hour of my life, on a roadside four years ago, I have been sharing my mind with a two-hundred-year-old demon with twelve personalities speaking six languages, and an underlying yen to destroy everything in her path, and I expect to go on doing so till the hour of my death. Try me.”
Inglis recoiled slightly. And Oswyl wondered at what inattentive point on this journey Penric had started seeming normal to him.
Penric sighed and came about to another tack. “Is it intrinsically pleasurable, this trance state?”
“It is a place of wonders.” Inglis hesitated. “Some find it fearful.”
“And you?”
“I was exhilarated. Maybe too much so.” Inglis frowned. “The material world does not vanish from my perceptions, but it is… overlain, set aside. Non-material things appear as material ones, symbols of themselves, but not just hallucinations, because in my wolf-form—I appear there as a wolf, or sometimes a hybrid between wolf and man—because I can grasp them. Manipulate them. Arrange them to my will. And in the material world, they are made so.
“This does not move matter in the world, not the way chaos demons can, only things of the mind and spirit, yet mind and spirit can have strong influences on the body that bears them. The mind that moves the matter is the mind that is affected. A shaman can convince a person to perform an act, or bind two minds together, so that one person knows where the other is. Persuade a body to heal faster, sometimes. Give visions to another shaman, share thought. At full strength, move a sacrificed animal spirit to another body, bind it to that body’s nourishment. Animal to animal, to build up a Great Beast. Or animal to… to a person, to share its fierceness…” He faltered. “Making a spirit warrior was considered the most challenging of all rites, apart from the transfer of the hallow kingship itself, and is presently forbidden.”
So, it wasn’t just the Father’s Order who would be wanting a word with this young man when Oswyl returned him to Easthome. It sounded as though his assorted authorities were going to have to get in a line.
“At the sty, for the first time, I made the entry-chant work unvoiced. I was so excited, I almost lost the way again. Since I take the form of a wolf, things usually come to me in a sort of, of symbolic wolf-language. The spirit of the sacrificed boar and the spirit of a kin Boarford were already in sympathy. I chased them like a hunt even as Tollin was struggling to get his knife in, till they superimposed and became one. And then I came down and then… oh gods…” Inglis buried his face in his hands. Arrow whined and licked at him, and Blood rolled over and rested his head mournfully on his knee. Automatically, Inglis reached down and stroked the silky fur.
“Enough of that,” said Penric firmly. Inglis gulped and looked up. Penric wrapped his arms around his knees and regarded the shaman through narr
Inglis and Oswyl glowered at him in equal bewilderment.
“Is sleep,” Penric finished. “Yes. Definitely that. Go to bed, Penric.” He uncoiled and picked his way to the trundle, blowing out the smelly candles on the way.
That was Ruchia, Oswyl thought. He recognized her pithy style, and then was a little appalled that he could now do so. But the advice was certainly sound.
“We need to talk,” Oswyl murmured to Penric as he settled down just below him in the darkness.
“Yes, but not now. Tomorrow morning. I need to think.” Penric pulled up his covers. “And, the white god help me, compose. Only Mira of Adria was a poetess, and she spoke no Wealdean, apart from some rude phrases she learned from her customers. She was a famous courtesan, did I ever mention that? Now there are your bedtime stories. Although not ones for the nursery. Well, we shall contrive.” He flopped over, and whether he closed his eyes, Oswyl could not make out.
Inglis, Oswyl decided, could not get out without tripping over a dog. The darkness pressing upon him like a blanket, he, too, slept.
XI
In the gray dawn, a bleary Inglis sat up in his bedroll and begged Penric, “Let me blood my knife.”
Pen eyed him dubiously. “You’ve done this every day? All through your flight?”
“Yes.”
Was this necessary? Tollin’s ghost was surely still lingering, if in an odd form, wrapped around the knife like fine wool on a woman’s distaff. And no more faded than Scuolla’s spirit, sitting sadly on its rock. And no less faded, either. Penric was extremely curious to witness the inner working of this shamanic rite. Opinions, Des?
I am out of my reckoning, here. Ruchia’s shaman never demonstrated more than the weirding voice in front of us, small help though it was to him. His other enthralling skills were entirely human. If, perhaps, informed by a superior perception…
Pen cut off what promised to be a lengthy, if ribald, reminiscence. It seemed he was on his own for this judgment. “Very well, then.”
Oswyl, halfway through shaving at the basin, turned around, folded his razor and stuck it in his trouser pocket, caught up his short sword from where it had stood propped by the head of his bed, grabbed Pen by the arm, stepped around a dog, and hauled him out into the narrow hallway, shutting the door firmly behind them. He drew Pen along to the head of the staircase, and whispered in a furious undervoice, “Are you mad? You want to hand him back a weapon, that weapon? Which is also vital evidence, may I remind you.”
“It’s more vital than that. He’s not lying about the knife. It does anchor Tollin’s spirit.” And an uncomfortable itch in Pen’s perceptions it was, Tollin’s not-quite-yet-sundered soul held so close to his heart. “Once I watch him through this, I’ll be sure of a lot more.”
Oswyl’s glare heated. “Scholars,” he said in a voice of loathing. “You would dangle your arm in a bucket of adders, just to see if it was true that they bit.”
Pen’s grin flicked, quickly suppressed. “Once I’ve seen, I’ll know if it’s true he must do this daily to sustain Tollin. In which case you’re going to have to let him do it every morning all the way back to Easthome, as routine as washing his face or shaving.”
“I’m not letting him have a razor, either.”
Pen sobered. “That, I would agree with. Nevertheless, I would ask you to stand prepared for any sudden moves.”
“Quite. Sorcerers aren’t immune to steel, I understand.”
“Actually, Des has a clever trick for that, though I still don’t understand how she can equate steel to wood.” And this was one knife he most certainly couldn’t let her change into a puff of rust in a heartbeat. “But I think Inglis is more likely to turn the knife on himself.” As Oswyl’s scowl failed to shift, he added, “I can’t think you’d be any happier explaining the suicide of your prisoner than you would his escape.”
“Much less,” Oswyl bit out.
“There’s more. If we lose him, through escape or escape into death, I suspect Tollin can’t be sustained, and any hope for Scuolla is lost as well. And Inglis’s soul hangs in the same balance. They are like three men roped together on a glacier. If the last man can’t hold the other two, all will perish in the crevice together.”
Oswyl, the lather drying on half his face, thought this over. “I don’t see how Inglis can rescue anyone if he doesn’t have his powers.”
“Neither does he, but I have an idea or two in that direction.”
“Five gods, you don’t imagine to restore them?” said Oswyl, exasperated. “That would be worse than handing him knife, razor, and dogs together. Why not a saddled horse and a purse of gold, while you are about it?”
“Haven’t got a purse of gold,” Pen said primly, and was rewarded with the sight of the half-shaved Grayjay baring his teeth. “Besides, in any country so well supplied with precipices as this one, a man doesn’t need special tools to end his woes.” By his expression, this, too, was a picture Oswyl would have preferred to live without. “As for those dogs… I’m still thinking about those dogs.”
Stiff with reluctance, Oswyl followed Pen back into the bedchamber.
“All right,” said Pen, dropping down cross-legged on the bedroll in front of Inglis. He reached back and untied the thongs, sleep-snarled with his queue. After pulling out a few fine hairs, he fished the sheath from his shirt, laid it in his lap, and drew the blade. It was a lovely piece of the armorer’s art, all lethal curves, capped with old gold and blood-red gems. He held it out hilt-forward to Inglis. “Do what you must.”
Inglis took it gingerly, as if he expected Pen to snatch it back like some child’s cruel game of keep-away. The dogs on their bellies crept up to either side of him, like furry buttresses. His hand spasmed as it closed on the ivory hilt, and Oswyl, standing over them all with his sword drawn, twitched. But Inglis only rolled back his sleeves and looked his arms over.
Pen stared too. There was scarcely a patch of skin unmarred by red scars, brown scabs, or sticky red lines, with angry pink welts of flesh puffing up between. Double that for the trip back to Easthome, and the man would be flayed. Inglis found a bare spot and lined up the edge, and Penric thought, Des, lend me Sight.
The trembling blade sliced, skin split red, and Pen’s teeth twinged in sympathetic echo. The view was not much different from his unaided vision, except that Inglis’s welling blood bore a strange silver sheen, like moonlight rippling off a wolf’s pelt. He stropped the knife up and down, coating every inch. The spirit-wool moved with it, trailing smoke that circled back and settled on the blood. Pen tried not to think of flies swarming on carrion. But the spirit did, indeed, seem to draw nourishment from the strange feast, its density thickening as the blood dried and the silver sheen died.
No, indeed. I don’t think our blood would serve the same, murmured Des. As Inglis’s fingers started to clench again, Pen leaned forward and wrapped his hand around the shaman’s. “I’ll just be having that back now. For safekeeping.”
After a brief moment of tension, Inglis let his fingers grow slack, and Pen pried the hilt out of his grip. Oswyl waited sword in hand, not yet standing down.
Inglis choked out, “Don’t sheathe it till the blood is fully dry. It won’t take long. The brown rubs right off with a cloth.”
“Right,” said Pen, and waited. The trailing smoke seemed to withdraw into the main body of the bound spirit. The sticky turned to crumbly, a few passes on the thighs of Penric’s trousers brushed it away, and he slid the gleaming steel out of sight again. Des let the vision of Tollin’s ghost disappear, a debatable relief.
* * *
Breakfast was a quieter meal, as the house’s children had not yet returned, although the servant girl had. The six guests, or five guests and one prisoner, were fed on oat porridge with butter, cheese, barley bread, and autumn apples. The dogs loitered lazily by the doors, not enticed by the meatless repast. Conversation was desultory and practical. But Gallin and Gossa seemed
Penric had to agree, Inglis had made a terrible criminal. His heart wasn’t in it at all. Whatever visions of heroic capture of a villain had beguiled Pen on the ride here, the event had been sadly disappointing. Though if stupid panic is what’s wanted, there’s your man, muttered Des.
I doubt I would have done much better, if I’d killed my best friend by mistake with my new powers, Pen thought back.
I wouldn’t have let you. Nothing remotely like that has happened to a rider of mine… Des seemed to hesitate. For a very, very long time.
Your argument nibbles its own tail, I think?
Humph. But she settled again.
The guard sergeant asked Oswyl, “Should we prepare for the road, sir? We need to see to securing an extra horse.”
Oswyl set down his spoon and sat back. “If we can do nothing more here, we should depart, yes.”
“You are most welcome to stay longer,” put in Acolyte Gallin, with studied emphasis. “A day or so more will not matter.”
“Thank you, Acolyte, but I must disagree. Every day we linger risks us being caught by the next snow.”
Pen disagreed with both. Might a day or two more here make all the difference, to some?
Gallin bit his lip. “Learned Penric, I would like to speak to you apart. About some Temple matters that concern me.”
As a Grayjay, Oswyl was just as much a servant of the Temple as Penric or Gallin, but he permitted Pen to be abstracted from the table with no more than a dry glance Pen’s way. The guards looked alarmed to be thus deprived of whatever magical protection they imagined Pen to be providing them, but even if Inglis, Pen didn’t know what…weirded them all to sleep and hobbled off, he wouldn’t even be able to get as far as the stable before Pen caught him again.