Departures (40 page)

“The gods be praised forthat,” Madyu said, and meant every word of it. Grasshopper stew was vile; no matter how long the insects cooked, they crunched horridly between the teeth. And Chief Ralf had been about to run him out of the tribe for weak magic before the famine finally broke. Madyu never had figured out why the gods got so angry at him, or why they finally decided to relent.

Shaman and chief hunter walked back to the encampment in companionable silence, each well enough pleased with his day’s work. Thanks to his tasty burden, Jorj got the big half of the wishbone’s worth of greetings, but Madyu created some enthusiasm among the men when he told them about the pictures of Old Time girls he’d found.

Neena happened to be standing close by just then, and let out a sniff loud enough to make him regret for a moment having come across the volume with pictures. Soon enough, though, thoughts of profit ousted regret. It wasn’t, worse luck, as if Neena were his woman.

After supper but before sunset made reading impractical, Madyu settled down with the other two books he’d brought back from the ruin. One of them, its title page proclaimed, was about the diseases of cats. He read three or four pages, then put the book down with a grunt of disgust. It was as imcomprehensible as the one with which the other shaman had cheated him.

He wondered if he was the problem, but shook his head. He read pretty fluently, and the Old Time language wasn’t that far removed from the English his tribe spoke (he never had figured out why the language bore that name; he didn’t know of a place called Eng anywhere within shouting distance of Eestexas). But this book was crammed full of words he not only didn’t know but couldn’t define from context: What did
distal
mean, for instance, or
pancreatic function
?

He thought about trading the book to a Maykano; maybe the peculiar words were Spanyol, not English at all. If they were, someone from a southern tribe might get more out of the volume then he could. And if not, well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d diddled someone in a trade.

He picked up the other volume with a certain amount of resignation, convinced from the outset that it would be even worse
than the one he’d just set aside. Even its title looked like a nonsense word:
Taxonomy
. “Tax-on-uh-me?” he said, sounding it out. He had some idea what taxes were—tribute that you paid to your chief, or that a weak tribe paid to a strong one next door. He couldn’t see why anyone would want to write a book about that, or why a veterinarian would need it once it was written. He also doubted Old Time folk had had to worry about anything so mundane as taxes.

But, being a stubborn sort, he decided he would keep going in the book until he found out what its name meant—names, after all, were powerful. He turned to the preface and found, to his surprise, that not only did it tell him what he wanted to know, it did so in a fashion he had little trouble understanding.

Taxonomy, he gathered, was a way of organizing living creatures by how they were related to one another, something like the genealogical charts some shamans drew for their tribes. He whistled softly to himself. The Old Time folk thought big if they aimed to keep track of how everything was related to everything else. He admired their presumption without wishing to emulate it. Just to begin with, how did they propose to keep track of all the different names every living thing had?

Two paragraphs further on, the preface told him: binomial nomenclature. That formidable pair of words almost made him put down the book then and there. But the preface went on to explain what it meant: two names, one generic, to tell what sort of creature an animal was, and the other specific, to tell exactly what sort it was.

That had the shaman scratching his head again. But this
Taxonomy
book, despite its intimidating title, did a much better job of explaining things than did the volume on the diseases of cats. It gave the example of the dog—which, for no reason Madyu could see, it called
Canis familiaris
—and the wolf—which it styled
Canis lupus
. The generic name they shared said they were closely related to each other, while their different specific names said they weren’t the same.

“Makes sense of a sort,” Madyu admitted. It made enough sense, at any rate, for him to keep reading. His eye lit on a sentence in the next paragraph and would not go away:
The so-called scientific name attached to any organism remains constant throughout the world, enabling researchers to communicate effectively and accurately regardless of their native languages
.

He stared at those words until darkness made them illegible.
If they meant what he thought they did, he’d just stumbled across the biggest Old Time treasure ever, bigger than gold, bigger than jewels, bigger even than the usable firearms and ammunition that still turned up every once in a while. If the whole world had once recognized a single (or rather, double) true appellation for every animal and plant, was he not holding a book full of secret names?

He wanted to run screaming through the encampment, shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” He wanted to get drunk. He wanted to get laid. He wanted to beat Chief Ralf at checkers and then laugh in his face. He wanted to do all those things at once. But none of them, or even all of them at once, would have given him a tenth part of the exaltation he felt sitting there quietly in the dark.

He did his best to keep a sense of detachment. For one thing, he might have been wrong, though he didn’t think he was. For another, even if he was right, he didn’t know which secret name went with each animal.

That night, he slept with the book beside him on his pallet. When he woke up, the first thing he did was make sure it was still there. When he saw it was, he couldn’t have been happier even if it had been Neena there, looking back at him with her big green eyes full of love. He weighed that thought, was a little surprised to find it true, and stroked the book’s faded cover as tenderly as if it had been Neena’s soft, smooth skin.

Without bothering to break his fast, he opened
Taxonomy
. He felt like cheering when he discovered that many of the scientific names contained therein had more familiar ones alongside them, though the latter were written in brackets and in smaller letters, as if to show they really weren’t quite as good or as scientific—a word to conjure with, he thought, and smiled to himself inside his tent—as the impressive products of binomial nomenclature.

Navigating through classes, orders, families, and genera took some doing, but before too long he found that the white-tailed deer’s scientific name, its secret name, was
Odocoileus virginianus
. He said it several times. It filled the mouth in a way that
white-tailed deer
never could. Saliva filled his mouth, too, at the thought of venison roasted with bacon and wild onions.

He left
Mammalia
and went over to
Aves
. He ran his finger down each column of names until he found what he was looking for. “
Meleagris gallopavo
,” he intoned reverently, and then again: “
Meleagris gallopavo.
” Not only were the secret names
true, they were also beautiful. He knew he’d never be content just to say
turkey
again.

At this point hunger, excitement, and a bursting bladder drove him outside. After imagining the rich savor of
Odocoileus virginianus
and
Meleagris gallopavo
, duck hash made from rather stale duck proved a disappointment. He was even more disappointed to see Jorj sitting around fletching arrows. “You’re not going out today?” he asked in tones of despair.

“Hadn’t planned to, no,” the chief hunter said. His big, blunt fingers picked with surprising delicacy through a pile of feathers. He found one that suited him and began trimming it to fit the groove in an ashwood arrow.

“But if you do—if you give me time to make a proper magic, a
scientific
magic first—if you do, you’ll bring back deer and turkey both,” Madyu said. Jorj stared at him; he’d never made that definite a prediction before. “I promise,” he added, thinking he’d already said enough to ruin himself if by some disastrous mischance he was wrong.

“How can you promise what we’ll catch?” Jorj demanded. “You don’t know what we’ll stumble on out there in the woods. You don’t know the first thing about what hunting is like; you’re only good for stumbling over yourself.”

“But I know what I’m talking about when it comes to magic, I truly do,” Madyu said. The hunter shook his head and started to go back to feathering his arrow. Desperately, Madyu added, “Did I help you bring in all those ducks?” He knew the real answer to that was
no
, but since Jorj didn’t know it, he played the card without compunction.

Jorj looked at the bright blue duck feather he held in his hand, then back up at Madyu. Slowly, deliberately, he set aside the feather and put away his tiny fletching tools. When he got to his feet, he towered over the shaman. “All right,” he said. “We’ll hunt. But if you’re wrong—if you’re wrong, wizardly sir, you’ll not have the chance to make many more such mistakes. Do you understand me, Madyu?”

“I understand you—Jorj.” The tiny pause there should have reminded the chief hunter that Madyu knew and might have used his secret name. It was not as good a threat as Jorj’s big, hard, bunched fist, however. Even with a secret name, magic had a way of going wrong (Madyu suddenly wished he hadn’t remembered that just before the most important conjuration of his life). Brute force was inelegant but always worked.

Still shaking his head, Jorj went off to gather the hunting
band. Madyu hurried back to his tent. He began to incant as he’d never incanted before; whatever his doubts and worries, they washed away in ritual chants and passes, dances and prayers.

Again and again he intoned the majestic secret names he’d learned. When he held the white-furred deer tail, his cry was, “
Odocoileus virginianus
!” When he pranced with a turkey plume, “
Meleagris gallopavo
!” rolled trippingly off his tongue. As an added touch, he tried to pronounce the secret name as if he were a turkey himself. “
Gallopavo
!” he gobbled. “
Gallopavo
!”

Being a meticulous man, he did not forget some magical encouragement for the pack of
Canis familiaris
that coursed with the hunters. The dogs had as much to do with a hunt’s success as the men, sometimes more. They were more susceptible to magic, too, as they lacked the wit that sometimes blunted it when it was turned against people.

At last he had done all he could do. He stayed in his tent regardless, not caring for the loss of dignity that would come from the women of the tribe watching him pace nervously back and forth while he waited for the hunters to return.

Staying inside didn’t end up helping his dignity, either. Hozay and some of the other boys started chanting, “Madyu don’t dare show his face, show his face, show his face …!” With the insane persistence small boys would sooner show in mischief than in honest work, they kept chanting it for a good part of the afternoon.

Madyu looked through the
Taxonomy
book again. If the secret name for
pest
or
infernal nuisance
appeared therein, however, he could not find it.

After much too long, Hozay got tired of singing his old song. If he’d kept quiet because of that, Madyu might possibly have found it in his heart to forgive him. Instead, though, he came up with a new one, which he proceeded to bellow out in a boy’s falsetto that hurt like a sore tooth: “Neena says Madyu’s too skinny! Neena says Madyu’s too skinny! Neena says—”

The shaman’s temper went up in flames like a dead, dry pine struck by lightning. He burst out of the tent, aiming at nothing less than Hozayicide. Neena’s little brother ran like a rabbit, dodging Madyu’s every effort to lay a hand on him. And as he ran, he kept singing his new and infuriating one-line ditty.

Finally, puffing and defeated, Madyu drew to a halt. At almost the same time, Hozay decided to shut up. The one had
nothing to do with the other. Hozay had heard—as Madyu did, too, a moment later—the hunting band coming back from the woods. Little boys know instinctively that adults do not take kindly to their mocking other adults. This does not stop little boys, but it will sometimes make them cautious.

Adults, however, commonly do not care in the least about punishing mockery when they are the ones dishing it out. Madyu stood alone in the middle of the encampment, waiting for the hunters’ scorn to land on him—and to obliterate him. The way the rest of the day had gone, he knew his sorcery had to have failed.

Jorj came into the clearing, spotted the shaman. Pointing at Madyu, he looked back over his shoulder and yelled, “Here he is!” His bass bellow made Madyu cringe—by the sound of it, the hunters would not be content with mere insults. They’d want his blood. Had he thought running would do any good, he would have run.

Shouting, the rest of the hunting band followed Jorj into the open space around the encampment. They roared down on Madyu. He needed a few seconds to realize they were cheering him, not cursing.

The ones who came out of the woods first were carrying turkeys, some more than one bird. The ones who came later had tied gutted deer carcasses to spearshafts that they bore on their shoulders, two men to a spear. All in all, they were bringing back three or four times as much meat as they usually did even on a good day.

Jorj, who as chief hunter did not have to haul prey, hurried into his tent. He came out with his necklace of silver quarters, which he proceeded to throw around Madyu’s neck. “Best magic since Old Time!” he shouted, loud enough to be heard in the next encampment. “The turkeys waddled right up to us, the deer just stood there waiting to be killed, just the way our great shaman said they would.”

Madyu hadn’t quite said anything like that. He hadn’t really expected to achieve anything like that; he thought he knew what magic could and couldn’t do.
But I never made hunting magic with
real
secret names before
, he thought dizzily. He let a big grin stretch itself over his face and did not bother setting the record straight.