The Distant Eye pt. 1

The Distant Eye

Table of Contents:

Prologue

Different Skeletons
The White Sorcerers
The Two-Faced Mask
The Reindeer Man
The Fallen Star

Part 1: The Monster

Chapter 1: Ten Winters
Chapter 2: The Thunderbird
Chapter 3: Wakandi's Song
Chapter 4: Brimstone
Chapter 5: The Glowing Heart

Part 2: The Ghost

Chapter 6: Kalo and the Waves
Chapter 7: Firelight and Starlight
Chapter 8: Buried Treasure
Chapter 9: The Scheme
Chapter 10: Among the Bone Collectors

Part 3: The Shaman

Chapter 11: The Snowflake
Chapter 12: The Mourning Cloak
Chapter 13: The Eyes of the Forest
Chapter 14: Strange Creatures
Chapter 15: The Last Deception
Chapter 16: The Box of Leaves

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.

-from The Cloud by Percy Shelley


Prologue

Different Skeletons

The sky was dark. Snowflakes fell like detritus at the bottom of the sea, so windless was the air. They materialized out of the cold black above, landed on a ring of fur hats, and disappeared in their warmth. The only light for miles was inside this ring. It was the light of a bonfire, and even this light, already as meager as a distant star in the vast space of the steppes, was eclipsed again and again as cloaked figures orbited between it and the ring, swaying rhythmically to the ponderous beat of a drum and the low chanting of the drummers.
The figures were dancers, but their bodies were distorted by their costumes. Their cloaks were made of dark cedar shavings and on their backs they wore long cedar masks in the shape of whales. The masks were heavy, so the dancers had to bend forward as they moved. But the illusion was complete: they looked like whales swimming meditatively through a quietly changing sea. Ellipses and sigmoid stripes were carved into the wood, and as shadows filled the bas-relief it appeared as if the whales breathed and stretched, and that water rippled over their sides.
Within the ring of hats, nestled between her mother and grandmother on the bench, a little girl watched the ceremony, her golden eyes wide and unblinking. A dancer came close to her and his mask swooped dangerously over her head. She cried out, afraid he would fall on her.
"Shh, Zia," her mother said.
But the dancer didnât fall, despite the force of his dive. How could that be? It's magic! Zia decided. But what did that mean?
She'd been told there was a man under the mask, but she couldn't believe it. It looked as if his torso disappeared and the carved, wooden whale took its place, merging with him into some kind of spirit, or maybe a monster. She had seen one of these masks earlier that day, in the sunlight, when the dancers were unloading them from their canoes. But here, in the darkness, as the flickering light made their shapes change and change again, they didn't look like what she had seen under the unequivocal light of the sun. During the day they were dead, carved wood, but in the darkness they came alive.
Zia had never seen masks or dances like this before. In fact, these dancers were strangers to her land. She belonged to the Reindeer tribe, so called because generation after generation had spent their lives following the herds of reindeer over the subarctic steppes. Their land was too cold to grow anything, so the reindeer were their primary source of life. They provided the tribe's clothing, their transportation, their food, and their shelter.
"Grandmother, where do the whales come from?" Zia asked.
"Whales come from the ocean," her grandmother responded, "but these whales are the spirits of the Orca People, brought to life again by their dancers. See how they throw themselves from side to side, as if they are caught in the waves? The whales still feel the pull of the sea, and it is hard for the dancers to control them."
Zia nodded, though she understood only pieces of what her grandmother was saying.
"What are waves?" she asked.
"Like a wind in the water."
Zia frowned, trying to imagine this. She'd spent all five of her years on the land-locked steppes, where even the lakes surrounding them froze so thick in the winter that the whole tribe could walk across them.
She turned back to the center of the circle, to watch the wooden masks dance.
"The wind in the water must be very strong," she observed.
"Yes," her grandmother said, "it can even close over your head and pull you under."
Zia's eyes widened in horror and amazement. As the dancer moved, the strips of cedar bark hanging from his cloak flowed around him, rippling like dark water. Again the dancer came close, until the sweeping arm of his cloak transformed, becoming a wave closing over Zia's head.
She grabbed her grandmother's arm like a sinking man grabs a floating log. Zia had great faith in her grandmother and always believed everything she told her. Grandmother was a powerful and respected healer in their tribe. She had traveled to many lands, met many varieties of people, and heard many stories. Zia loved to listen to her tell about the days long ago, before anyone could remember, when all of the people had been animals, and the days before that, when all of the animals had been spirits.

Her favorite story of Grandmother's was about how the animals had become people, how their very skeletons had changed under their skin. Many ages ago, she said, the Great Mystery changed a few of the animals' bones with magic, making them clear like crystal. Those animals discovered they could change their shapes and become a wholly new creature; a hairless animal that walked on two legs, wore the skin of other animals, cooked its food in a fire, and communicated using an astounding variety of sounds produced by their new throats and teeth and tongues. In time, these new creatures almost forgot that they had ever been animals.
That had disappointed Zia, until her grandmother told her that the Great Mystery had not given the people crystal skeletons so that they would forget about their origins.
"The gift he gave them was not a new shape to take; a new body," Grandmother told her. "His gift was the ability to choose."
With enough practice, Grandmother said, any human could learn to be an animal again. That was Zia's favorite part.
"However," Grandmother had been careful to tell her, "most people are afraid to change their shape completely. They're afraid of losing their identity. So instead, they change their clothes. They put on masks and costumes so that they look like animals, or, rather, like the spirits of the animals."

These were the words Zia remembered now. She looked up at her grandmother's ear, perched like a cave door on top of a mountain, and she leaned into it to ask her if that's what the Orcas were doing- dressing up as animal spirits to remind themselves of who they used to be.
"Yes," Grandmother nodded. "Every winter, the season when they need the spirits" help the most, the Orca People make these masks and clothing in the spirits' shapes. The work takes their most valuable resources, like wood from their towering cedar trees and paint made from copper. No expense is spared, for if the spirits are not pleased with their ceremony they might take the land and the animals back, and then the Orca people will have nowhere to live and nothing to eat. Even as their human eyes have grown blind to the spirits that live alongside them, their lives still rely on those spirits, and no matter how their people change in the future, the spirits will always remain."
Zia gave this some thought, then looked suddenly worried. "Will the spirits take our land away if we don't dance like the Orcas do?" she asked.
"No, Wakandi dances for us. He is as powerful as ten Orca men."
Wakandi! The very name made Zia shiver with fear and excitement. She had only seen glimpses of this mysterious man, the tribe's greatest shaman, though she had heard many stories about him. But the dancing Orca men were huge and strong, and she hadn't guessed that Wakandi- or any man- could be as powerful as ten of them.
"His power is not in his body, but in his mind," Grandmother explained, as if reading her granddaughter's thoughts, "and that is what makes him so much stronger."
As Zia wrapped her head around this, another question came to her. She was at the age when questions flourished in her mind like mushrooms after a rain, and disappeared just as quickly.
"But Grandmother, if the Orcas live in the ocean, then why have they come here?"
Grandmother smiled sadly. This was one story she did not know how to explain to her granddaughter. She knew that a great tragedy had befallen the Orca People, forcing them to accept that despite their differences, all tribes were the children of their mother, the Earth, and their father, the Great Mystery who created all things.