‘The womb,’ Tayan confirmed.
They’d stopped back at home to collect Tayan’s ritual tools before making the long climb uphill out of the city to the womb. Unlike the two large healing caves dug into the bones of the city, this system was different: tunnels of dark rock leading to a small cavern made from a paler stone and flecked with tiny crystals. Malel’s womb. The birthplace of the world and all the creatures within it, and the place from where the Tokob first children had sprung.
The birthplace of the shamanic magic, the shamanic ritual.
Tayan knelt on a square blue mat facing the rows of spirit carvings, representations of ancestors and the gods in their many guises. Carefully, he mixed the dried herbs and fungus into the small clay vessel containing the drops of diluted frog-venom, adding a little water before grinding them into a thick paste. He breathed deeply and set out the drum, the idols of his spirit guides and ancestors, and his paints. In the wavering candlelight, Lilla used a thin feather to draw vision symbols on Tayan’s brow, black against the blue.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
Tayan nodded and licked his lips, then began the drumbeat that would bind heart and mind and spirit to the realm of the ancestors. Lilla nodded in his turn, made sure the gourd of water was at hand, and then rose to stand behind him, a familiar, beloved pillar of strength and protection who would guard his flesh. The warding of his spirit, Tayan would have to see to himself.
The drum was the rhythm of life itself, of Malel the mother, who was at once the world, its goddess, and the hill inside which he knelt. She was home and judge and the route to rebirth. She was ancient and new, mother of gods and all the creatures that lived upon her skin. She was life and death, the bringer of disease and its cure. She was all things, and Tayan strove to connect the tiny wisp of his being, brought to life through Malel’s magic, to her immensity.
His spirit vibrated to the drum’s rhythm and the walls of the womb seemed to take the sound and double it and feed it back to him, as if the stone itself breathed. When his spirit was prepared, he swallowed the paste that would spark the journey-magic. It was bitter, sucking the moisture from his mouth and clinging to the insides of his throat, but he fought it down, fingers never faltering as they tapped the beat.
It didn’t take long for the magic to pull him into its grip; the flesh world began to glow and then disappear, the spirit realm, over and within and around it, fading into view. At his feet lay a wide trail, spiralling gently upwards. Innumerable others twisted around, above and even through it. Only one path was true: the others would take him to the Underworld, even as they seemed to lead upwards. If he concentrated, Tayan could see the flesh world too, his hand on the drum and the idols laid on the mat before him. But the flesh world could not answer his questions and so he let it sink and vanish.
Tayan changed the beat, calling on his spirit guides for aid. Something brushed his senses: a presence hot and volatile, a barely contained volcano. A huge black cat appeared on the path before him, tail lashing and fangs bared. Tayan allowed himself no unease, despite the fact that, of all his usual guides, this was the least predictable. Young Jaguar was often filled with caprice and sometimes with malice. More than once he had sought to trick Tayan’s spirit onto the wrong path for his own amusement. And yet his power was undoubted, and if he chose to stand with Tayan’s spirit and defend him, none could harm him.
‘Young Jaguar, I honour your presence here and offer you my thanks. I seek wisdom from the ancestors on the spiral path. Perhaps even from Malel herself. Will you show me the way to them as you have before?’
The spirit guide crouched lower, as if to spring, his eyes glowing with inner fire. Then his lips covered his teeth and he spun on his haunches and bounded away. Tayan spared a single glance down at himself: the golden thread connecting spirit to flesh was strong and anchored within him. It would lead him back to his body. He set out after Young Jaguar, hurrying in the giant cat’s pawprints. The spirit guide leapt onto a particular path and didn’t bother glancing back; Tayan ran after him, stepping off one trail onto another, questing outwards with his senses and his magic to see whether he had been led false. He had not.
When they reached the Gate of the Ancestors, tall and imposing, blocking their advance, Young Jaguar let out a roar that knocked Tayan back a step and then vanished, not waiting for the shaman’s thanks or offering. He provided them anyway, his empty body picking up the carved stone idol of the jaguar from the mat and spitting on it. ‘My body and breath, Young Jaguar,’ he murmured in both the flesh and spirit worlds. ‘My thanks and adoration.’
The Gate of the Ancestors swung open and the path continued on through it. A single path now, the true path, for the lords of the Underworld had no power to confuse here. Tayan checked the golden thread of his life again and stepped forward. From the mists, ancestors began to coalesce, drifting towards him, their translucent outlines shimmering and ragged, motes of light swirling deep within their forms.
The shaman strove for calm as dozens and then scores pressed in around the bright, life-filled shape of his spirit with its golden thread leading back to his body. The ancestors lusted to live again, even though only spirit could animate flesh and the ancestors were what remained when a spirit ascended to rebirth.
Still, if one of them could rip the thread from Tayan and follow it back to his flesh, it would possess the shaman’s body, leaving him formless on the spiral path, neither living nor dead and unable to ascend to Malel for rebirth or return to his form. Eventually, his wanderings would lead him to the Underworld and eternal torment. He would not be the first shaman lost in the spirit world.
And while he was lost, the ancestor would do its best to live again, even though it was but a memory. A half-life in a hollow shell, Tayan’s body stumbling around unable to communicate, food sickening in his belly until he fell down in the dirt and the ancestor was expelled with his flesh’s final breath.
Malel, guide my steps and my words. Malel, watch over me.
‘Ancestors, I honour you. I am Tayan, shaman of the Tokob, called the stargazer,’ he called, drumming faster now, louder, to better tie his spirit to his flesh. Young Jaguar had been one potential danger; the confusion of trails another; but this was the greatest. ‘I come for wisdom about the war, about the Empire of Songs. I come to ask what we must do for peace. Will any advise me?’
Anit, Tayan’s two-times distant father, drifted closer, the shape and feel of him familiar to the shaman. While Anit’s spirit had been reborn more than once since his death, the memory of him, the shape made of light and shadow, remained as an ancestor able to impart wisdom to his people.
Yet Tayan hesitated. Anit was one of the Tokob elders who had rejected the Chitenecah call for aid fifty sun-years before. He had been there when the Pechaqueh began their insatiable expansion and he had let Chitenec fall and its people be taken into slavery.
A low, disturbing chuckle rose from Anit’s form and Tayan realised he’d been lost in thought for too long – and that the ancestors could read strong emotion. ‘You wonder what help I can be, yes? And yet, how are we unalike, stargazer? You let Xentiban fall four sun-years past. You let Quitoban be overrun eleven years before that. Time’s circle turns and old mistakes are made anew. How Malel must grieve for us.’
Tayan let himself hear the beat of the drum in the flesh world. His way home. ‘Then your advice remains the same as it did when you lived: to abandon all others until the might of all Ixachipan is arrayed against us?’