CHAPTER TEN: THE SHAMANTEN-1
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Lee Scoresby disembarked at the port in the mouth of the Yenisei River, and found the pla chaos, with fishermen trying to sell their meager catches of unknown kinds of fish to the ing factories; with shipowners angry about the harbor charges the authorities had raised to cope with the floods; and with hunters and fur trappers drifting into town uo work because of the rapidly thawing forest and the disordered behavior of the animals.It was going to be hard to make his way into the interior along the road, that was certain; for in normal times the road was simply a cleared track of frozeh, and now that even the permafrost was melting, the surface was a s of ed mud.
So Lee put his balloon and equipment into ste and with his dwindling gold hired a boat with a gas engine. He bought several tanks of fuel and some stores, a off up the swollen river.
He made slress at first. Not only was the current swift, but the waters were laden with all kinds of debris: tree trunks, brushwood, drowned animals, and ohe bloated corpse of a man.
He had to pilot carefully ahe little engiing hard to make any headway.
He was heading for the village of Grummans tribe. Fuidance he had only his memory of having flowhe try some years before, but that memory was good, and he had little difficulty
in finding the right course among the swift-running streams, even though some of the banks had vanished uhe milky-brown floodwaters. The temperature had disturbed the is, and a cloud of midges made every outline hazy. Lee smeared his fad hands with jimsonweed oi and smoked a succession of pu cigars, which kept the worst at bay.
As for Hester, she sat taciturn in the bow, her long ears flat against her skinny bad her eyes narrowed. He was used to her silence, and she to his. They spoke when they o.
On the m of the third day, Lee steered the little craft up a creek that joihe main stream, flowing down from a line of low hills that should have been deep under snow but now were patched and streaked with brown. Sooream was flowiween low pines and spruce, and after a few miles they came to a large round rock, the height of a house, where Lee drew in to the bank and tied up.
"There was a landing stage here," he said to He<bdi></bdi>ster. "Remember the old seal hunter in Nova Zembla who told us about it? It must be six feet under now."
"I hope they had sense enough to build the village high, then," she said, hopping ashore.
No more than half an hour later he laid his pack down beside the wooden house of the village headman and turo salute the little crowd that had gathered. He used the gesture universal in the north to signify friendship, and laid his rifle down at his feet.
An old Siberian Tartar, his eyes almost lost in the wrinkles around them, laid his bow down beside it. His wolverine dasmon twitched her Hester, who flicked an ear in response, and then the headman spoke.
Lee replied, and they moved through half a dozen languages before finding one in which they could talk.
"My respects to you and your tribe," Lee said. "I have some smokeweed, which is not worthy, but I would be hoo present it to you."
The headman nodded in appreciation, and one of his wives received the bundle Lee removed from his pack.
"I am seeking a man called Grumman," Lee said. "I heard tell he was a kinsman of yours by adoption. He may have acquired another name, but the man is European."
"Ah," said the headman, "we have been waiting for you."
The rest of the villagers, gathered ihin steaming sunlight on the muddy ground in the middle of the houses, couldnt uand the words, but they saw the headmans pleasure.
Pleasure, and relief, Lee felt Hester think.
The headman nodded several times.
"We have been expeg you," he said again. "You have e to take Dr. Grumman to the other world."
Lees eyebrows rose, but he merely said, "As you say, sir. Is he here?"
"Follow me," said the headman.
The other villagers fell aside respectfully. Uandiers distaste for the filthy mud she had to lope through, Lee scooped her up in his arms and shouldered his pack, following the headman along a forest path to a hut ten long bowshots from the village, in a clearing in the larches.
The headman stopped outside the wood-framed, skin-covered hut. The place was decorated with boar tusks and the antlers of elk and reindeer, but they werent merely hunting trophies, for they had been hung with dried flowers and carefully plaited sprays of pine, as if for some ritualistic purpose.
"You must speak to him with respect," the headman said quietly. "He is a shaman. And his heart is
sick."
Suddenly Lee felt a shiver go down his back, aer stiffened in his arms, for they saw that they had been watched all the time. From among the dried flowers and the pine sprays a bright yellow eye looked out. It was a daemon, and as Lee watched, she turned her head and delicately took a spray of pine in her powerful beak and drew it across the space like a curtain.
The headman called out in his own tongue, addressing the man by the he old seal hunter had told him: Jopari. A moment later the door opened.
Standing in the doorway, gaunt, blazing-eyed, was a man dressed in skins and furs. His black hair was streaked with gray, his jaw jutted strongly, and his osprey daemon sat glaring on his fist.
The headman bowed three times and withdrew, leaving Lee aloh the shaman-academic hed e to find.
&qurumman," he said. "My names Lee Scoresby. Im from the try of Texas, and Im an aeronaut by profession. If youd let me sit and talk a spell, Ill tell you what brings me here. I am right, aint I? You are Dr. Stanislaus Grumman, of the Berlin Academy?"
"Yes," said the shaman. "And youre from Texas, you say. The winds have blown you a long way from your homeland, Mr. Scoresby."
"Well, there are strange winds blowing through the world now, sir."
"Ihe sun is warm, I think. Youll find a benside my hut. If you help me bring it out, we sit in this agreeable light and talk out here. I have some coffee, if you would care to share it."
"Most kind, sir," said Lee, and carried out the wooden bench himself while Grummao the stove and poured the scalding drink into two tin cups. His at was not German, to Lees ears, but English, of England. The Director of the Observatory had been right.
When they were sea<u>?</u>ted, Hester narrow-eyed and impassive beside Lee and the great osprey daemon glaring into the full sun, Lee begaarted with his meeting at Trollesund with John Faa, lord of the gyptians, and told how they recruited lorek Byrnison the bear and jouro Bolvangar, and rescued Lyra and the other children; and then he spoke of what hed learned both from Lyra and from Serafina Pekkala in the balloon as they flew toward Svalbard.
"You see, Dr. Grumman, it seemed to me, from the way the little girl described it, that Lord Asriel just brandished this severed head packed i the scholars there and frightehem so much with it they didnt look closely.
Thats what made me suspeight still be alive. And clearly, sir, you have a kind of specialist knowledge of this business. Ive been hearing about you all along the Arctic seaboard, about how you had your skull pierced, about how your subject of study seems to vary between digging on the o bed and gazing at the northern lights, about how you suddenly appeared, like as it might be out of nowhere, about ten, twelve years ago, and thats all mighty iing. But somethings drawn me here, Dr. Grumman, beyond simple curiosity. Im ed about the child.
I think shes important, and so do the witches. If theres anything you know about her and about whats going on, Id like you to tell me. As I said, somethings givehe vi that you , which is why Im here.
"But unless Im mistaken, sir, I heard the village headman say that I had e to take you to another world. Did I get it wrong, or is that truly what he said? And one more question for you, sir:
What was that name he called you by? Was that some kind of tribal name, some magis title?"
Grumman smiled briefly, and said, "The name he used is my own true name, John Parry. Yes, you have e to take me to the other world. And as for what brought you here, I think youll find it was this."
And he opened his hand. In the palm lay something that Lee could see but not uand. He saw
a ring of silver and turquoise, a Navajo design; he saw it clearly and he reized it as his own mothers. He knew></a> its weight and the smoothness of the stone and the way the silversmith had folded the metal over more closely at the er where the stone was chipped, and he knew how the chipped er had worn smooth, because he had run his fingers over it many, many times, years and years ago in his boyhood in the sagelands of his native try.
He found himself standing. Hester was trembling, standing upright, ears pricked. The osprey had moved without Lees notig between him and Grumman, defending her man, but Lee wasnt going to attack. He felt undone; he felt like a child again, and his voice was tight and shaky as he said, "Where did you get that?"
"Take it," said Grumman, or Parry. "Its work is do summoned you. Now I dont ."
"But how—" said Lee, lifting the beloved thing from Grummans palm. "I dont uand how you have—did you—how did you get this? I aihis thing for forty years."
"I am a shaman. I do many things you dont uand. Sit down, Mr. Scoresby. Be calm. Ill tell you what you o know."
Lee sat again, holding the ring, running his fingers over it again and again.
"Well," he said, "Im shaken, sir. I think I o hear what you tell me."
"Very well," said Grumman, "Ill begin. My name, as I told you, is Parry, and I was not born in this world. Lord Asriel is not the first by any means to travel between the worlds, though hes the first to open the way so spectacularly. In my own world I was a soldier and then an explorer. Twelve years ago I was apanying an expedition to a pla my world that corresponds with your Beringland. My panions had other iions, but I was looking for something Id heard about from old legends: a rent in the fabric of the world, a hole that had appeared between our universe and another. Well, some of my panions got lost. In searg for them, I and two others walked through this hole, this doorway, without even seeing it, a our world altogether. At first we didnt realize what had happened. We walked on till we found a town, and then there was no mistaking it: we were in a different world.
"Well, try as we might, we could not find that first doorway again. Wed e through it in a blizzard. You are an old Arctid—you know what that means.
"So we had no choice but to stay in that new world. And we soon discovered what a dangerous place it was. It seemed that there was a strange kind of ghoul or apparition haunting it, something deadly and implacable. My two panions died soon afterward, victims of the Specters, as the things are called.
"The result was that I found their world an abominable place, and I couldnt wait to leave it. The way bay own world was barred forever. But there were other doorways into other worlds, and a little searg found the way into this.
"So here I came. And I discovered a marvel as soon as I did, Mr. Scoresby, for worlds differ greatly, and in this world I saw my daemon for the first tune. Yes, I hadnt known of Sayan Kotor here till I entered yours. People here ot ceive of worlds where daemons are a silent voi the mind and no more. you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, aiful?
"So with Sayan Kotor beside me, I wahrough the northern <cite></cite>lands, and I learned a good deal from the peoples of the Arctic, like my good friends in the village down there. What they told me of this world filled some gaps in the knowledge Id acquired in mine, and I began to see the ao many mysteries.
"I made my way to Berlin uhe name of Grumman. I told no one about my ins; it was my secret. I presented a thesis to the Academy, and defe ie, which is their method. I
was better informed than the Academis, and I had no difficulty in gaining membership.
"So with my new credentials I could begin to work in this world, where I found myself, for the most part, greatly tented. I missed some things about my own world, to be sure. Are you a married man, Mr. Scoresby? No? Well, I was; and I loved my wife dearly, as I loved my son, my only child, a little boy not yet one year old when I wandered out of my world. I missed them terribly.
But I might search for a thousand years and never find the way back. We were sundered forever.
"However, my work absorbed me. I sought other forms of knowledge; I was initiated into the skull cult; I became a shaman. And I have made some useful discoveries. I have found a way of making an oi from bloodmoss, for example, that preserves all the virtues of the fresh plant.
"I know a great deal about this world now, Mr. Scoresby. I know, for example, about Dust. I see from your expression that you have heard the term. It is frightening your theologians to death, but they are the ones whhten me. 1 know what Lord Asriel is doing, and I know why, and thats why I summoned you here. I am going to help him, you see, because the task hes uaken is the greatest in human history. The greatest in thirty-five thousand years of human history, Mr.
Scoresby.
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