Departures

He went on to bless the hunters’ boots to ensure that they slipped through plain and woods without making a sound. He also blessed their bows and arrows to make the shafts fly straight and true. Again he used all three local languages, and a couple more besides. When tribes met to swap pots and horses and women and metal, shamans generally went off by themselves and traded names. Things were, after all, merely things, and manifested themselves only in this world. But their names, now, their names held power, for names echoed through the spirit world as well.

At any rate, true names, secret names, created those echoes. Madyu remembered the war he’d headed off by ascertaining the secret name of a rival tribe’s chieftain and threatening to do dreadful things to the man’s ghost unless he called off his warriors.

While never easy, that sort of coup was at least possible with human beings, who acquired their secret names from one another. But who could be sure what the secret name of a dog was, or a willow, or a shoe? That was why shamans swapped names back and forth: in the hope of hitting the one true one among the many.

Having done his utmost with the hunters’ animals and gear, Madyu cast the best spells he knew on the beasts they hunted. As he incanted, he thought that any visiting shaman would have admired his technique: He had the cup made from the tip of a wild bull’s horn, the turkey feather, the white-haired deer tail, the rabbit’s foot, and the squirrel skin all ready where he could reach them without interrupting his ritual. He summoned the prey by every name he knew, no matter how exotic. As he did whenever he said the word, he wondered what tribe called a simple, ordinary squirrel a bepka.

He was hot and tired and covered with sweat by the time he finished the hunting magic. Heat and sweat had to be lived with in Eestexas. Legend said that in the Old Time people could make the air around themselves cool whenever they wanted. Madyu, a thoroughgoing realist, did not believe the legend for a minute: if people had ever enjoyed such a useful skill, they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to lose it.

When he went outside, he squinted against the glare. The sun beat down with almost physical force. The tribal encampment was nearly deserted, with most of the men at the hunt and the women out in the fields. Children ran between tents, raising hell. One of them stopped to grin at Madyu. “Look, look, look!” he squealed, pointing proudly. His grin had a gap in it.

“I see, Hozay,” Madyu answered gravely. “What did the tooth fairy leave you?” As he spoke, his hand twisted in the gesture that kept the fairy from stealing teeth that weren’t ready to leave their owner’s head.

Hozay reached into his belt pouch and took out two good iron arrowheads. “Look, look, look!” he said again.

“Very nice indeed.” Madyu fought down a stab of jealousy. The tooth fairy hadn’t left him anything so fine when he was a boy. But then, Hozay’s parents were close kin to Ralf, the chief, and the tooth fairy seemed to favor people who were well off. Those that have, get, even from fairies, the shaman thought resentfully.

He couldn’t stay mad at Hozay, though. For one thing, he looked almost irresistibly cute with his missing tooth. And for another, he didn’t stick around as a focus for Madyu’s pique-he dashed off yelling after his friends.

The shaman walked over to the creek, stripped off his linen shirt and buckskin leggings, and dove in. He came up snorting and blowing and at least a little relieved. Then he went down again, swam underwater over to a rock on which a red-ear turtle was sunning itself. The turtle stared in disbelieving reptilian horror when he splashed up in front of its pointy nose. It leapt off the rock and into the creek, frantically churned away. In the water, it was more graceful than Madyu.

He swam a while longer, then went back to reclaim his clothes. He discovered they were not there to be reclaimed. None of the small boys was in sight, either, which gave him more than a little reason to suspect the clothes had not ambled off by themselves. The shaman said a couple of choice things under his breath, added a couple of choicer ones out loud. The shirt and leggings failed to reappear. Swearing and dripping, Madyu went back to his tent without them.

A few of the women had come back to the encampment for a midday meal. They giggled when they saw Madyu. Ralf’s tribe had no strong nudity taboo, nor did its neighbors; given the Eestexas climate, nudity was often more comfortable than clothes. But a wet, angry, naked shaman had obviously just fallen victim to a prank, and so became fair game.