Shaman's Crossing (The Soldier Son Trilogy #1)

I fell. I did not scream or even shout. I made that passage in silence, the wind ripping at my worn clothing as I fell. I cannot now judge how long or how far I fell. My feet struck something, and my knees buckled under the impact. I windmilled my arms wildly, trying as much to fly as to catch my balance. In the darkness, a hand caught me by the front of my shirt and jerked me close. A voice I did not recognize as Dewara’s said, “You have passed the first gate. Open your mouth.”

I did.

He thrust something inside it, something small and flat and leathery hard. For a second it tasted not at all, and then my saliva wet it, and a pungent taste filled my mouth. It was so strong that I smelled it as much as I tasted it. I felt it, too, a strange tingling that sent saliva cascading and made my nose run. An instant later I heard the taste as well, as my ears began to ring. All my skin stood up in gooseflesh, and I felt the press of the night, not the air but the darkness, touching my body. Darkness was not the absence of light, I suddenly knew. Darkness was an element that flowed in to fill spaces such as the one I now occupied. The hand that gripped my shirtfront pulled, and I stumbled forward. Somehow I walked out of darkness and into another world. Light and the sweet scent of the burning torch overwhelmed my senses. I tasted light and heard the smell of the torch. I felt Dewara was there, but I could not see him. I could not see any distinct object. All distance around me faded to an equal blue. All of my senses were aware of every sensation.

A god spoke to me. “Open your mouth.”

Again, I obeyed.

Fingers reached between my lips and took a frog from my mouth. The man who smelled like Dewara set the frog on the flames of the torch, which was suddenly a tiny campfire on a hearth of seven flat black stones. The frog burned and sizzled and sent fine threads of fiery red smoke up along with the sweet smoke. The man pushed my head forward so that I leaned over the tiny fire, breathing the fumes. The smoke stung my eyes. I closed them.

Again, I closed them.

But the landscape that had opened up around me the moment I shut my eyes did not disappear. I could not close my eyes to this world, for it existed inside me. We were on a steep hillside. Huge trees surrounded us, blocking the twilight that filtered down to us, and the forest floor was almost bare of plant life. It was carpeted instead with centuries of fallen leaves. A fine rain of dewdrops fell from the leaves above. A fat yellow snake slithered by, sparing us not a glance. The air was cool and full of moisture. The world smelled rich and alive.

“This is an illusion,” I said to Dewara. He stood beside me in that twilight world. I knew it was he, even though he was several feet taller than I was and wore a hawk’s head on his shoulders.

“Gernian!” He spat the word at me. “You are the one who is not real here. Do not profane the hunting grounds of Reshamel with your disbelief. Go.”

“No,” I begged him. “No. Let me stay. Let me be real here.”

He just looked at me. His hawk’s eyes were gold and round. His beak looked very sharp. His fingernails were black and curved like talons. I knew he could reach into my breast and lift out my beating heart if he chose to do so. Instead, he waited, giving me time to think.

Suddenly the right words came to me. “I would be a man. I would be a warrior. I would be Kidona.”

In some distant place, I was ashamed of myself for disowning my heritage and becoming a savage. Then, like a bubble popping, that life no longer mattered. I was Kidona.

We journeyed in that place. I do not remember what time passed, and yet I do. I cannot, for the most part, summon up what we saw or did or spoke there. It is like trying to recall a dream after one has fully awakened. Yet to this day there are moments when I smell a resinous fragrance or hear a distant roar of rapids, and it will bring a sudden vivid recall of a moment in that place and time. I recall that Dewara wore a hawk’s head, and that I sometimes rode on a horse with two heads, one the bristle-maned head of a Kidona pony and one very like my own Sirlofty. The memories come, sharp as broken glass, and then ripple away like a disturbance in a pond. Sometimes I wake from ordinary sleep, grieving that I cannot recall the dreams of that place.

Only one incident remains clear in my mind from that experience. There was a time, neither evening nor morning yet twilight all the same, as if twilight were the only time that place knew. Dewara and I stood on a bare bluff of deep blue stone. It was the place we had been journeying to all that time. The forest on the steep hills behind us was a crouching guardian that watched over us. Before us was a chasm, sculpted more by wind than by water. Within it, like strange towers of churches built to a wild god, tall pinnacles of stone rose from the distant floor of the canyon. The blustering air had carved spiraling towers and bulging knobs from the rock as neatly as a good cabinetmaker might turn a spindled leg for a chair. The freestanding spires of deeply swirled blue stood like a stony forest in the chasm before us. In the distance, I saw the sag and swoop of the wandering bridges that led from the stony cap of one hoodoo to the next, a meandering pathway across the divide. Dewara pointed across the rift that blocked us, to a land where slices of yellow light revealed stripes of ancient forest and rippling meadowland. The light moved across the land in the same way that cloud shadows dapple over a hill when the wind blows them.