The Reindeer and the Shaman

  In the darkness of the nightfall, the Kangar tribesmen erected a great bonfire to celebrate the Arsen-baghatur’s raid against the southerners. Huge longtables assembled by slaves and servants groaned under the weight of the feast - seasoned flatbreads, cuts of fatty mutton, lamb dumplings dripping with broth, and enough southern wine to turn the great Cherech river red.

  Men and women sat together by the fires and beneath the open night sky, laughing and brawling in equal measure as they feasted for what might well be their final time. War was to be on the horizon come the morning, and though talk in the camp had seldom broached the subject, Yesugei sensed how the atmosphere in the camp had grown colder once the joy of Arsen’s tribute faded. The bonfire was a final send-off for warmth and plenty - and once it faded there would come the cold, and ranks of the Kangar widows and orphans would grow ever more once again.

  From the shaman’s tent, Yesugei heard the clash of blades and the twang of bowstrings as warriors honed their craft to the cheers of onlookers. Tonight, the green boys played at war. Tomorrow, they might see their first man die.

  The thought of his own duel churned Yesugei’s stomach. A sharp prod from the shaman wrenched a hiss from his teeth as a dull knife of pain twisted through his leg.

  “Your pain is a gift,” Aysen told him as he pulled forth a wooden box decorated with painted Ormanli swirls and healing glyphs. “The bone was not shattered in the fall. But the rest of your wounds - I’ve no means to bring you to health in such a short time.”

  “Healed enough for your khan to make sport of me, you mean,” Yesugei replied bitterly. “No honor in killing cripples and the wounded, I suppose. And even less so in dying to one.”

  “Poor sport never stopped your own tribe’s cruelty,” came a bitter voice from the other side of the tent, where another Ormanli dressed in furs stood up from her prayers. When she drew near, Yesugei saw the girl to be half Aysen’s age, her bitter face framed by long, black hair which fell around her shoulders loose, rather than braided in the fashion of the Ormanli. “Before your Qarakesek set out on their conquest, our people’s shamans had never been touched by your wars. Now look at my father - show him what sins he answers for!”

  The elder shaman gave a sigh, and set down the poultice in his hand to remove his veiled headdress. The dim, flickering candlelight cast the shaman’s face in a reddish hue - and it was only when Aysen twisted his head to the side that Yesugei saw the grim ruin hidden by the shadows.

  The flesh running from the crown of the shaman’s head down to the nape was a ruin of twisting scars, craters, and deep fissures that exposed hints of skull. The borders of the ruined flesh were defined in a manner that could only have been made with a razor-sharp blade - a skinning knife, taken to human flesh in a terrible sin.

  Without his scalp, the shaman’s head was completely bald - bereft of the long braids into which other Ormanli weaved their charms and crystals, and a sight as wrong as a bird without wings. The Ormanli wore their hair long, never cutting it as a symbol of their devotion to the gods’ perfection of the mortal form - without their braids and charms, it was said that the Ormanli were powerless, severed from their connections to the spirits and the earth.

  “A Qarakesek knife took my pride, my honor,” Aysen said quietly, replacing his headdress. “A band of warriors thought to cow our shamans into submission… Whether they acted alone or on one of your brothers’ orders, I never learned. But that was long ago. The men responsible are dead.”

  “It had to be one of his brothers,” muttered the girl shaman, helping her father lay out the contents of his medicine chest. “Even the Qarakesek know shedding a shaman’s blood is a sin beyond measure—yet only the White Khan’s children would think themselves beyond heaven’s judgment.”

  Fire from within rushed to Yesugei’s face as he spat back, “And who are the Kangar to speak of heresy? Your own tribe was among the ones who raised Naizabai as the Universal Khan - one above the gods and the Eternal Sky! Yet did your father dare raise talk of heresy then?”

  “Enough, both of you.” Aysen placed a hand on his daughter’s arm. “Tuyaara, I have kept you here for a reason. His wounds are too severe for my work - I doubt he’ll even be able to stand come tomorrow.”

  Tuyaara’s sharp eyes narrowed at her father’s words. “You cannot mean her.”

  Aysen nodded. Tuyaara’s face twisted with rage. "Why should I help him? Why should she help him, of all people? The pup will die tomorrow anyway by B?ri's hand."

  Aysen's lips set in a hard line, but then his look softened. "Then let him die by his foe's greater strength, rather than his own weakness. It is as the Qarakesek himself said - there’s no good sport in killing wounded dogs."

  The girl-shaman crossed her arms, matching her father’s gaze with her own. When she sensed no relent on her father’s part, she turned to Yesugei, her jaw clenched. “This is no mercy for you, Qarakesek. It is merely justice for what will come.”

  She reached for her headdress - a simple brass band, adorned with two painted eyes and crowned by wide antlers that glistened in the dim firelight. When she settled it upon her head and unfolded the leather veil, the air in the yurt seemed to shift - and for a brief moment, the girl-shaman was no longer herself. Tuyaara knelt by Yesugei’s side - she brushed her hands against the floor of the yurt, and whispered something in the tongue of the Ormanli. There was some power in her speech - the words charged the air, like the feeling of coming lightning as clouds gathered overhead.

  Then the chant grew. Aysen joined his daughter, pounding out a slow, deliberate beat on a drum lined with bells. The vibrations thrummed to Yesugei’s heart. He had felt this before - this sense of the world stretching, the air rippling as if something vast and unseen were pressing against the walls of the mortal world, yearning to break free. Sergen’s calls to the spirit realm were much the same - only this time, the strength of the Kangar shamans was tenfold.

  That same force pressed in from all sides, pushing at the walls of the yurt itself. The sensation pressed upon all of Yesugei's senses at once, heightening them until everything became unbearable - the dim glow of the fires became blinding, the chanting voices deafening. Through the foreign incantation, a name reached him, clear and distinct: "Aldynay."

  A sudden glow kindled in the air above them - a pale, shifting golden glow, a threshold into a space between spaces. Whatever was pressing against the walls of the mortal world was pushing through. The chant reached a fever pitch. Tuyaara’s voice rose, and then she reached for her own drum, pounding it in rhythm to her father’s, and the glow began to solidify. Giant hooves emerged from the light, settling weightlessly on the yurt floor. Antlers - adorned with woven charms and cloths of many colors - rose up until they scraped the felt roof. The formless light became flesh, revealing the majestic form of a reindeer, its body luminous, though the glow did not reflect against the walls of the tent.

  The chanting of the two shamans ceased, and then the world of the yurt was ruled by silence once more. Yesugei looked upon the majestic creature, and it stared back at him with two deep pools of sadness.

  "Do you see her?" Tuyaara’s voice barely rose above the crackling bonfires. "Do you see my mother?"

  Mother...? The great reindeer knelt, its towering antlers still stretching above them. It rested its head on Tuyaara’s shoulder, and the girl shaman ran a gentle hand along its neck.

  "He bears a tooth of night," said Aysen. Yesugei saw his back turned to the spirit and his daughter, his head hung low in shame. "He can see a great many things, if he knew to look for them."

  Tuyaara’s voice, edged with bitterness, addressed Yesugei. "Even I can’t see her unless I veil my face. But she knows me. She knows my scent—just as she knows you, Qarakesek, and your blood."

  At the name Qarakesek, the reindeer huffed and shook its head. Tuyaara pressed her face into its chest, whispering until it calmed. Then, guiding its head toward Yesugei, she let the reindeer over his battered body. The spirit hovered over him, taking silent measure of his wounds—broken bones, half-healed cuts, bruises that made a yellow and purple patchwork of his skin. Then the reindeer exhaled a soft, almost human breath.

  Warmth sprang to his skin, and it spread through his whole form like rivers snaking through the land. Everywhere, the pain slowly receded to the warmth, replaced with a gentle numbness that made Yesugei realize how used he had become to sharp pain with every breath. Now, he tasted the warm air of the tent without the halting pain of a broken rib, nor the whine of the bruises dealt by Stribor's men.

  Tuyaara’s sharp gaze burned behind her leather veil. As the reindeer breathed life into his wounds, she asked, "Shall I tell you her story, Qarakesek?

  "When your father exiled our tribe, it was my mother, Aldynay, and my father who counseled B?ri to make for the west. Unlike many other khans, he listened well to their words. When we arrived, it was my mother who helped B?ri strike a pact with Prince Gvozden of Gatchisk. It was Aldynay, the Golden Moon, who helped our sick when all the other healers had died; who counseled the widows on how to manage the gers and herds of their husbands who were slain by Qarakesek, or the cruelties of the road.”

  Tuyaara hesitated. "She saved everyone she could—except herself. A cruel winter came eight years ago. And my mother, who had survived so much, fell with a fever. No one in camp knew how to save her."

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Aysen’s head sank lower.

  "My father and I were at Gatchisk, bartering for supplies. When we returned in the spring thaw...she was already gone."

  Tuyaara leaned against the reindeer, her voice trembling—whether with anger, sorrow, or both, Yesugei could not fathom. "Do you see her now, son of the Qarakesek? Even now, she helps us all. Even you, whose father exiled us here, who kept her from being buried in the Mother Woods. His exile that left her confined to this..."

  She gestured at the reindeer, its breath filling Yesugei's broken body with warmth. "...this beautiful, terrible fate. Her soul lives on and saves us all because she was robbed of her place in the Eternal Sky."

  The healing glow faded as the reindeer raised its head. The glow of the great spirit’s form began to recede, like a dream fading in the awakening mind. When the final pinprick of light was gone from the world, the darkness that replaced it felt heavier. As Aysen turned to tend to Yesugei, his daughter stepped away, removing her headdress at the yurt’s threshold. She paused.

  "Pray my mother’s healing gives you strength, Qarakesek prince. The other spirits of this land will not be so kind."

  Once she was gone, Aysen sighed and uncorked a foul-smelling bottle. “My daughter learned her hatreds from B?ri—proud, headstrong, unafraid to speak her mind. She'd talk circles around you till morning, condemning every heresy but the one that matters—the one only I know.”

  He leaned in close, and his voice took on a new, dangerous edge. “I smell death on you, Yesugei-mirza. Your death. The deaths of too many others. Apostle magic. Betrayal.”

  Yesugei stiffened, pain lancing through his calf as he tried to rise. “Apostles? You know of them?”

  “The elders taught me and my brothers the ways of healing and spirit-calling," said Aysen. "But knowledge of those foul spirits…I received from these."

  He pulled back his sleeve, a thin arm pierced by five crystal fangs swirling with red, gold, and deep purple. Within them was a life Yesugei had not seen in Sergen's own braided crystals. The flesh around the crystals was raw, burned by their shrinking. Even as Yesugei watched, the crystals withered.

  “I saved these when your brother’s men scalped me. For ten years, they never changed. But since the ash began falling, they’ve burned—and the pain has never been so great as when you entered our camp.”

  The swirling colors seemed to fill Yesugei’s whole world. Within them, he saw strange black figures flickering against the clouds. In the world of the swirling colors and dancing figures, Aysen’s voice sounded muffled, distant. “My shards sense what others, even lay shamans, cannot. You reek of dark magic—oathbreaker, a slave to the Dreamers.”

  Yesugei wrenched his gaze away, meeting the shaman’s eyes. “Oathbreaker? I am no one’s slave—least of all the Apostles’. I killed one of their kind in the Devil Woods.”

  “Yet you still carry their magic with you,” said Aysen, his mouth set into a hard, thin line. "A Khormchak drawing on the magic of the Dreamers...did Sergen never tell you of the stories, the sacred pact that you broke?"

  "Never." He was too busy seeking the bottom of a cup, most times. “Of what pact do you speak?”

  Aysen pointed to the largest crystal shard embedded in Yesugei’s arm. “A pact all our peoples carry in memory, woven into these shards when the world last saw ashfalls and madness.

  “In those days, five hundred years ago, the steppe was torn apart by war between forgotten tribes and empires. From the bloodshed, a man arose—a prophet of sorts. We know him as Elsen, the Messenger. He bore witness to a spire of black glass falling from the sky, awakened by the suffering below.

  “The Elsen communed with the being inside—the first Dreamer. Together, they called down an age of darkness, choking the sun with ash and ruling over your people and mine for an age as cattle. Our ancestors were butchered in the thousands, and their agony fed the Dreamers, waking more of their kind.

  “But the gods heard our prayers: a woman named Khariija struck down the Elsen, and with the Messenger dead, the Dreamers retreated into the sky. Then Khariija forged a pact between your khans and our elders: should the Dreamers, the Apostles ever return, the Khormchaks and Ormanli would stand as one to bring back the reign of the sun.”

  He rolled his sleeve down over his pierced arm. “We restored the sun once. Now the steppe has lost its way.” His gaze was not accusatory, but heavy with pity. “And its sons wield magic they should have left buried.”

  Yesugei’s head swam. The pact… He thought of his father, whom the Ormanli had prophesied to unite all Khormchaks under one ulus, and who had spent much time in the company of shamans when he was young. Did he know what was coming? Did Naizabai? Then why had Sergen never told his blood what they were being armed for? And what more...

  “If this pact was made so long ago, how can the Qarakesek be sworn to it?” Yesugei replied. “Back then, there were only…”

  Aysen’s expression darkened. “The Qara-Isyqs? The Qyzylkurans? The Western Gur? The great tribes your father destroyed?”

  Yesugei remembered the banners and notched blades that hung on display in his father’s grand yurt - the last relics of empires that had reigned for centuries. Where there were once three, then there were none. So, too, were their oaths.

  “The Great Tribes vanished, but their blood remains,” Aysen continued, smearing a pungent salve onto Yesugei’s wound, cooling the burn. “Do you not know your own history? The Qarakesek descend from the Qyzylkurans, and the Qyzylkurans trace an unbroken line back to the first khan who rose up alongside Khariija, Alasha. Your blood is their blood. Their oaths, yours.”

  “Oaths sworn by the dead,” Yesugei shot back, though he felt more spite than conviction. “The forest folk might dwell on the past, but steppe tribes rise and fall like the wind.”

  “Why do you think our elders sent shamans to your khans?” muttered Aysen as he wrapped a bandage around Yesugei's leg. “Even before the Great Tribes fractured, our elders feared the pact would be forgotten. They charged a chosen few to leave the Mother Woods, and to carry with them the memories of the pact to your people. Now every khan keeps a shaman from the Mother Woods in his company—and every khan’s ear is held by those whose duty it is to remind them when the time comes.”

  The shaman spoke the truth - or at least half of it. In the last kurultai he had attended, Yesugei remembered how the khans had each ascended the holy Khurvan with their shamans in tow, Ormanli all. Yet he also remembered the mockeries and disgust the Ormanli attracted - and how most had spent more time at the bottom of a cup, in the arms of their harems, or glutting themselves on foreign delicacies rather than tending to any spiritual duties. Faith and ancient oaths took second place to the luxuries and vices of being a khan’s right hand.

  “A clever plan,” he laughed. “If only your own shamans still believed those legends themselves. How many speak of the Apostles now? Perhaps Sergen did—if my father’s gifts were his doing—but the others…”

  “Have lost their way, indeed,” sighed Aysen as he tied off the bandage and sat back on his knees. “Too many generations have passed, and too many no longer remember what they were sent to do. And those whose crystals still remind them of our ancestors' suffering drown their visions with wine or opium.”

  Sergen...Yesugei saw the old Ormanli’s red-tinged face, his squat nose, his ever-present arkhi. What did he see? Why did he abandon his duty?

  When Aysen spoke again his voice was bitter with sorrow, and his hands curled into fists. “Even my own daughter no longer dreams as I do… But I still see things in my crystals when the stars loom large, oathbreaker. Yesugei. Do you know what I saw the night before you arrived?”

  The shaman’s fangs swirled with shadows as he revealed them and peered into the murky depths. “I dreamt of a woman carved from wood and bound in thorns, calling for one who would never return. I dreamt of a pale eagle racing across a dead sky, chasing a serpent of stars. And worst of all, I saw falling ash choking the earth beneath a silent heaven, then a great flood to scour the world clean once all was dead. I walked through the ruin to the root of sorrow and saw two places: a black mountain and a white city. And I heard the city's bells tolling the world's death knell.”

  “Black for the east… white for the west,” Yesugei muttered.

  “Yes,” Aysen murmured, his eyes alight with understanding. “The black mountain—the Khurvan. And the white city, astride a great flooding river…”

  The name formed on Yesugei’s lips. “Belnopyl. The White City. The Jewel on the Cherech.”

  “That is where it began. That is where our answers lie.” Aysen met Yesugei’s gaze. “And that is why you must live.”

  Yesugei's eyes widened. “I thought you took me for a heretic and an oathbreaker. You would let me free?”

  “An oathbreaker who knows what is coming is more valuable to me now than a man loyal and ignorant,” Aysen replied as he stood to his feet. “And I did not say I will let you go free. You will survive the duel against my khan. Then you will go west, while I will convince B?ri that the Kangar must return to the steppe. Perhaps one of us will make sense of this madness. And we will meet again—I have seen it in my dreams.”

  “Your dreams will be for naught if I die,” said Yesugei. “Who’s to say B?ri won’t gut me come tomorrow?”

  “Then you would be an oathbreaker twice over.” Aysen’s lips curled into a grin. “I swore an oath. I cannot die. Not now. Were those not your words?”

  A chill ran through Yesugei - it felt as though the night air had suddenly grown claws and cut him to the bone with its cold. Yes…Vasilisa…I will return…I must return.

  Targyn, Kenesh, Sergen, and Kaveh…I will return for them.

  I will fight for them.

  He looked up, and the shaman no longer seemed human in the dim light. The chill he felt seemed to radiate from the shaman's hunched form, which no longer seemed human in the half-darkness. The voice that flowed from the shaman’s cracked lips was that of a singer’s - high and soft.

  “A burden heavier with every stride is yours and hers, oathbreaker.” spoke the spirit. Aysen’s lips twisted into a crooked smile.

  Aysen moved to the tent’s entrance. Firelight cast flickering shadows across his beaded veil, but behind the leather strips, Yesugei saw two pinpricks of molten gold staring back.

  Yesugei tried to rise, but the shaman raised a hand against him. Lethargy struck him like a wave - his arms failed him, and the princeling sank onto his back, staring up at the night sky through the crown of the yurt.

  “A burden heavier with every stride…the sorrows of the world, an endless tide. You must live, oathbreaker. Suffer, and live."

  That’s my curse, is it not? To live…

  Then sleep claimed him, and Yesugei remembered no more.