SHAMAN

We met a Shaman at the southernmost end of a deserted landscape. An arid, parched, and desperate land, it was; starved with a foreboding quietness under the blistering sun. We had been riding west for long, among specters and shells and soulless wanderers; along scorched, cracked paths and dusty shops, abandoned.

It seemed, for a while, that our heading had lost meaning; that we’d strayed beyond anything of any lasting consequence. We’d near forgotten why we left our home. And then we strayed south, away and far from the center of this region.

There was a storm in the mountains, far north. It clouded the horizon ahead and the thunder thundered out far enough to resonate over the galloping.

Tysun signaled me to stop for water with his gloved hand. We had been riding so long that the horses had begun to heave and sort of weep, you know. We stopped off at a nearby trench and drank, looked on to our landing as we quenched.

The rest of the ride was trying. We had come to a point, in stride, at which the pony knew more than I did about where we were headed. Damned near kicked I off once we landed. Good horse, that one. Strong lady, she was. Just grand, really.

We arrived at his home and he greeted us with a drink he didn’t explain. We drank it. It was like a strong tea that tasted of hot cinnamon. It helped us to stay awake.

His hair was white-gray and long and his form was lean and lithe. Skulls and medallions of all faiths adorned his frame. Some were familiar but some were strange and an unearthly long black feather hung from off his unruly mane. He didn’t tell us a name but he stared at us long when we entered the front room of his domain. After a while, he smiled warmly.

We followed him through a house that was unkempt but more like a studio. He left us awhile in the kitchen with a steaming kettle that had emanated a hypnotic steam while he went to a basement area to gather our things.

I was going to ask him if all of the tall paintings were his but then I figured that they must had be, this far out near the foot of the mountain range. They were, in style and form, all quite the same.

Spent, we stood at herb, fire, and song for many a day. The number had become obscure. We had needed supplies and rest.

He wore an image of a man with a hat and coat on his chest in many colors of ink, so as to challenge the array of his garden out back. His skin was a pure and oily light brown, lean and sweating in the sun so as to magnify the visage.

The man gazed at the world with a pipe on a bench, among alleged other members of his tribe that were vague, in what looked as a clear meadow of poppies of an immeasurable range of colors. He claimed it had spoken of the virtue of pondering, measuring, communing, and receiving at every level. And such had been his trade.

We paid for our things and returned to the path that led us back to our land.

The wind had been still enough in those days that our trek was still stamped out in the sand.