The Shamans at the End of Time, page 7
Did they use that fur on purpose? Vlad wanted to know if this was a sign, a reminder of his fight with the bear, something related to his social status, but there was no easy way to ask such questions. I may be able to ask later, when I learn their language.
“Sleep,” Selma said in Vlahin, and she put her palms together, leaning her head on them. Malva pointed at the bed.
““That’s obvious; a bed,” Vlad said, knowing they could not understand him. He wanted to talk; he needed to talk. With the coming of the night, unwanted memories were sneaking into his mind. He was afraid of them. The night before, he had been too tired and numb to care. After a few moments, a burst of nervous laughter escaped him, unnatural and almost strident, yet it seemed to be contagious, and the girls laughed too. He enjoyed their reaction, not knowing that – with their shamane’s senses – they felt his uneasiness, without understanding what could cause it. While the girls were not yet initiated, they came from a long line of powerful shamanes.“But I will not sleep on that fur.” He opened his backpack and took out the sleeping bag. “I know you don’t understand me, but I will sleep in this thing. Sleep,” he pronounced the Vlahin word.
The girls grabbed the bag, and their fingers felt the softness of the material. They touched it with the gentleness of a mother caressing her infant.
“Let me show you,” he said, and unrolled the bag on the bed. Then he unzipped it. “I will sleep inside.” He pointed at the opening, then he mimicked undressing and lying inside the bag.
As if they had received a signal, Malva started to pull up her hide dress. Puzzled, Vlad froze, his eyes following her movements, which revealed her thighs, then a light brown triangle, a flat belly, and perfect breasts that swung slightly when the dress freed them. Like all the Vlahin women, she had only a tanned deer skin made into a sort of dress going down to her knees. It had short sleeves, almost touching her elbows, and intricate patterns of circular painting that intrigued Vlad. They represented the five Rivers of Thought, connecting the Vlahins with the Mother, but there was no way for him to understand their philosophy without learning their language first. Knowing how to say ‘I am Vlad’ and ‘this is my hand’ was not enough. Trying not to ogle, he turned his head away, while Malva slipped inside his sleeping bag. Turning, his eyes met Selma’s who, without fully understanding the reason, recorded his unusual reactions and, a moment later, her dress followed the same path, freeing her body. She slipped inside the bag too, followed by his eyes.
“Come,” Malva said, laughing and gesturing at him to join them.
For them this is natural, Vlad thought. I need to adapt. This is something normal. He sat quickly on the edge of the bed, trying to hide his arousal. “There is not enough place for all three,” he said, knowing that they would not understand. It’s just an innocent game.
Malva grabbed his hand and tried to pull him inside the bag. Understanding that it was just a childish game, without sexual connotations, he resisted playfully, and Selma joined her cousin in the fight against him. His reactions were mainly motivated by his fear of being alone, and he fully engaged in a game that his normal self would have considered foolish. His childhood had ended a few years ago, and the war had matured and hardened him even more. All worries left him. He twisted away from their hands, immobilized Selma’s legs inside the bag and moved to close it. She laughed, realizing that the bag was now half closed in a way she could not understand. Trying to escape, she moved slow and soft, giving him enough time to push her upper body fully inside the bag too. He moved again to close it, but this time Selma was faster, and contorting her body, she sneaked her left leg out of the bag, forcing him to push it back again. After two minutes of wrestling, both girls were now enclosed inside, only their heads still out. From time to time, a leg or a hand or just a finger pushed up through the canvas of the bag, which changed shape constantly, resembling a giant amoeba. With one hand, he kept the bag tight around their necks, so they could not escape. Not that they wanted to. From time to time, one of his fingers pushed into the bag, finding their ribs, and laughter filled the room.
Moira’s head sneaked inside, and she entered, followed by Rune. “I thought that a horde of Kalachs had invaded the village.”
“He is torturing us,” Malva laughed. “Bad man,” she finally said some words that Vlad could understand, pointing at him.
“Bad girls,” Vlad retorted. He tried to add thieves, but the Vlahin word was still unknown to him. “My bag. Bad girls out.” He tightened the bag around their necks and then released it, but he did not unzip it, testing their reactions.
Selma frowned for a few moments, then she realized that the small metallic thing, resembling a blade, was the key to opening the bag. Her wide eyes followed the sliding blade, opening the zipper. She moved it back and the zipper closed. Moira came closer, followed by Rune, both puzzled by the new thing. Six times, Selma’s hand moved left and right, closing and opening the zipper. They understood the effect, but they couldn’t work out the cause. After a while, she decided that there was nothing more to learn and slipped out of the bag, followed by Malva. Vlad eyed Rune, but he did not see any reaction on the man’s face when the naked girls pushed him aside to recover their clothes from the floor. The zipper and the sleeping bag were more interesting.
They left the room, one by one, followed by his anxious eyes. Moira stared at him, her piercing eyes feeling his uneasiness, but she could not understand it. His mind was too strange for her, and she decided to allow things to follow their course. He wanted to say something, to ask them to stay longer, or even to stay with him overnight. He could not do it. Alone, Vlad tried to sleep, but sleep eluded him. A few flies and his own thoughts harassed him. After a few minutes of hunting, the room was free of its unwanted guests, and the physical activity seemed to keep his mind away from bad thoughts. For the first time, he looked at the walls, and found many holes in them, through which a mouse could sneak into the room. Moonlight filtered in too, patching the floor with faint spots of light. This will wait for me each evening; he shrugged. I’ve slept in worse places during the war; he shrugged again; the movement seeming to release some of his inner tension. He went back to his bag to sleep, but chasing his own thoughts away was a lot harder than swatting flies. I am here and, barring some spectacular and improbable event, I will stay here. I have to learn to live here. The repetition of ‘here’ annoyed him. He still wanted to be in a different ‘here’. I am here to stay, he repeated, stubbornly. They are Stone Age people, but not like the other ones who... I am at least that lucky. Catalin wasn’t. His friend’s face and fate resurfaced, and he curled inside his sleeping bag, biting his lip to stop a sob. I can’t change anything. It took him a while to calm down and, strangely, he wanted to talk to Andrei’s head, the only link to his lost world that now seemed so far away and unreachable.
“Andrei,” he whispered. “I feel so lonely. I don’t like to be alone. I am afraid.”
He waited patiently, turning his head left and right, but the head stayed away. Instead of Andrei, the figures of his parents came to him – Vlad had an almost eidetic memory. Tears ran down his face. He cried silently, knowing that he probably would not see them again. It was late when he finally fell asleep and, in an unwanted turn, Andrei’s head chased him through several nightmares during the night. It had two large and slightly curved teeth, seeming to belong to a saber-toothed tiger, and drops of blood dripped from them.
“A vampire tiger,” Vlad moaned in his sleep. “What kind of world is this?”
Chapter 6 - Vlad
It is my third full day with the Vlahins and,despite my undeveloped senses, I feel some excitement filing the village. As usual, Malva and Selma come early in the morning to wake me up. They use the same method as on the days before, one of them tickling my face with her hair. I am a late bird, but there is no way to resist to such an insidious assault on my skin. It is Malva this time;yesterday, Selma woke me up, and the day before it was Malva again. This rotation still puzzles me, as I don’t understand if there is a hidden meaning in it. Malva looks at me, and I know well what is in her mind; she likes the softness of my clothes. The Vlahins are good at tanning animal skins, but they can’t compare with my cotton shirts. I play the game and pretend not to know what she wants. She shoves me with her shoulder, and I fall over the sleeping bag. Laughing, I take out a shirt from the place where I hid them, and lend it to her. She pulls the shirt over her head and dress. It’s too big for her, and looks like a second, smaller dress. Her palms move over her waist, feeling the softness of the shirt. That only underlines her curves. Her movements are sensual, but not provocative. I doubt that they know the notion of being provocative. She is just playing for fun, and I have to cast aside almost everything I know about girls from my previous life.
“Come, eat,” Malva says, using our short way of communication, as I am not yet able to speak or understand complex phrases. She pulls off my shirt and gives it to me, so I can dress.
“Language, first,” I say, and ponder for a while how to learn about pronouns. “I,” I finally say, pointing at me. “You,” I point at Malva. “She,” I point at Selma.
“Man, woman,” Malva says, but I shake my head and repeat the pronouns, pointing again in the same specific way.
This time Malva does not hurry to answer, and both girls frown, then they speak to each other in low voices.
“I, you, she ...,” Selma pronounces my words with a funny accent, making a long ‘sh’. The following words don’t mean anything to me, and she stops speaking, frustrated by my lack of knowledge. “I, you, she,” Selma repeats. “Different words,” she says after a brief pause. “I,” she points to herself. “You,” she points at me, and I nod. “Eo,” she points at her. “Teo,” she points at me. “Ea,” she points at Malva. “En,” she speaks to Malva, pointing at me. A threshold seems to be already passed and she puts her arm around Malva’s shoulders. “Neo,” she points at both of them, then she pushes Malva into my arms. “Veo,” she points at us. She frowns, and I understand that she is struggling to find an example for ‘they’. We need another person.
“Edna.” I point at my backpack, thinking that if she understands what I mean, it will be confirmation that indeed she has taught me the pronouns and not something else.
The girls laugh, then Selma pushes Malva toward the backpack and she takes it in her arms. Their laugh is contagious, and takes me over too. “Ede,” Selma points at Malva and the backpack, impersonating Edna. “Rune,” Selma points again at the backpack still in Malva’s arms, preparing for the masculine form of ‘they’. “Edi,” she says, gesturing at both girl and object.
She lifts her hands, and I understand that there are no more pronouns. It seems that, while they have gender, they don’t have the neuter form for the third person singular or plural.
I repeat all the new words just to be sure and, when they nod, I write everything into my dictionary. For them, my accent seems to be as funny as is theirs when they speak a modern language.
After eating, we go to one of the meadows surrounding the village, as we did yesterday. This time, Rand is not joining us, and Malva stays close to me, while Selma keeps her distance. Yesterday, Selma stayed with me, and Malva was with Rand, only a few paces from us. We sit in the grass; Malva’s shoulders are touching mine, and I feel the same expectation in her that I felt in Selma the day before, but I don’t understand what they want from me. I wish to pass an arm around Malva’s shoulders, but I know that she is Rand’s girlfriend, and my position is too weak to challenge him on that. The strange thing is that I feel the same with Selma as I do with Malva. I hope that after a while the trouble in my mind will vanish, and I will start to act normally. It is not pleasant to understand that I am even more deranged than I acknowledged at first, but three days may be not such a long period of time. The mind has a tendency to heal slowly. Born from the bloody landing in this more than foreign place, my feelings are unnatural, and I want them to leave me, allowing something new with one of them, or with another girl. I am here to stay, to integrate, and that means having a family, at a certain point. For the moment, I feel as if my mind is conditioned by fear to search for human support, and the girls arrived when I was at my worst point, mourning and running from the savages who killed Catalin. There is nothing normal in my feelings, and I wonder what would have happened if they were three or four girls instead of only two. A harem... I fight to stop a burst of laughter, just because I may upset Malva and Selma; they are too kind to deserve that. I want to understand them better.
I see Selma, rubbing her forehead in a meaningful way, as if she is trying to communicate something to me. Hereyes lock with mine, but her gesture tells me nothing, though there is a clear expectation in her look. After a while,fed up with my lack of understanding,she turns to look at the valley. Less than a mile away, the Great River is glittering in the sun. For no particular reason, I am more and more convinced that it is the Danube, not the Tigris or Euphrates. If this is Earth... With a sudden thought, I open my notebook and count the words in my dictionary: there are more than three hundred already. If I am able to find some similarities with the Sanskrit or other Indo-European languages, I may have the proof that I am on Earth and the Vlahins’ land is north of the Danube. For all my efforts, I am able to remember only eleven Sanskrit words, not enough to make a statistical analysis.
Annoyed by my silence, Malva jumps up and leaves the meadow. With a reproachful look, Selma leaves me too. She signals loosely with her right hand, as if I should do something about Malva but, again, her gesture tells me nothing. I make a mental note that I must learn the meaning of the most common gestures too. In such hunter-gatherers communities a lot of everyday communication is done by hand or body signals. Alone, I repeat all the words in the dictionary twice, and I feel satisfied that I am able to remember each of them in a reasonable timeframe.
The sun is high now, and even though it’s mid-spring, the warmth makes me feel lazy. My last day on Earth was the fifteenth of April, I can’t stop thinking, but even if I am still on Earth why should I arrive here on the same calendar day? Why not? I shrug, and for the first time, I try to understand if there is a reason for my presence here, or if everything was just a kind of cosmic accident triggered by that missile hitting the top of the hill and the vortex in whose power I have started to believe. The word cosmic makes me laugh. Why should I be so important for the universe? My ruminations stir memories of Catalin, and tears run down my face and, when my mind calms, I become annoyed for crying so often. I am a soldier after all, and I force myself to think of something else. I can’t. At least, I am no longer sobbing, and Andrei doesn’t come to bother me. I both fear and want that bloody head. It’s the only ‘person’ from my previous life, and ‘he’ acts like someone from there, not from here. My desire is strange, as everything is in this new life. I am sicker than I thought. The new understanding passes through my mind like a burning arrow. It doesn’t help.
Feeling movement in the corner of my eye, I realize that both girls are only a few paces from me. There is a touch of guilt in their stare, and they sit close to me, each of them taking one of my hands. I feel both relieved and ashamed, and again, I have no clue how to behave toward them. I choose to stay silent, and they don’t speak either. After a while, the closeness becomes pleasant, and I am able to leave Catalin’s memory behind.
“Today, we have catamara,” Malva finally speaks.
“Catamara?”
She starts to whistle, and it’s clear that she is interpreting an unknown song. On my left, Selma is mimicking playing a flute, and she stands up and moves her hips in a rhythmic way. It looks like dancing.
“We offer the bear to the Mother, tonight. Your bear. River...”
I could not understand her last phrase, but her words stir some involuntary associations in my mind, and I start to sing Moon River. They are clearly delighted, and the moment I feel it, I can’t remember the next verse, and stop abruptly. I still hum for a few moments. “Word?” I ask, and point at my mouth while I sing again.
“Cante,” Malva says, and the name strikes me as being very close to the Latin languages.
I point at Selma and, without standing up, I move my legs as if I am dancing.
“Lune,” Selma says their word for dancing, and does some more steps just to make me understand. This time, the word doesn’t sound Latin at all. Her hand describes an arc over the sky, stopping at a certain angle. “Catamara starts ... sun...” She sees that I am unable to understand most of her words. “Starts... sun there,” she says, pointing at some distance, in the sky, away from the highest peak, and I understand that the party will start in the afternoon. That makes me almost happy; my mind will have something to do other than going over awful memories or longing for so many lost people and things.
Chapter 7 - Vlad
It’s too much for me: the infernal rhythm of their dances, the long sequence of dancing with no breaks between the pieces. My watch tells me I have been dancing for more than half an hour already. The others had been dancing for more than an hour, the girls included, and all of them look like they are just done with the warming up. The ‘orchestra’ consists of two women playing with a flute, and three men. Two of them have drums, the third one has both a flute and a large pouch of semi-rigid skin, which is filled with sand and small stones. When he is not playing the flute, he shakes the bag in time to the music. Both women and men have bracelets resembling castanets too. Exhausted, I barely manage to walk toward Moira’s hut and then I collapse, leaning against the wall of my room. After ten minutes or so, Malva and Selma notice I’ve disappeared, and come after me.
