The Chukchi Bible (6 page)

“We'll ask the Outer Forces again,” he said.

 

Keu's yaranga seemed on the verge of collapsing as it shook with the force of the beating tambourine, over the heads of father and son, both dripping with sweat, hoarse from chanting, exhausted by their movements inside the close, fur-lined polog.

But no sooner did they fall silent and quiet the ringing tambourine than the Voices from Above would repeat the Sacred Order. Mlakoran must die by his own daughter's hand.

“But how,” wondered Keleu, “could a small weak child kill a strong grown man?”

He had addressed the puzzling question to his father, but the latter's reply was curt: “The Higher Powers know . . .”

Meanwhile, the people of Uelen continued to die, and the rekken had barely made it halfway through the village. Soon a third of the people had
gone to the place of eternal sleep, the Funerary Hill also known as the Hill of Hearts' Peace.

Keleu rounded up and harnessed the dogs – gone half wild and starving, they now fed on human remains – and set off for the Kaaramkyn camp. Were it not for the grave mission destined for the young shaman, the sled ride, in such clear weather and with the sun already noticeably warming, would have been a real pleasure. But Keleu was shadowed by his grim thoughts and paid no notice to the beauty of the distant blue mountains, nor to the partridges bursting into flight, nor to the lovely color of the spring sky. What words could he find to tell Mlakoran about the Sacred Order, about the strange and unusual human sacrifice required?

If Mlakoran did not believe him, he would have the right to test the shaman. In the past, this had sometimes meant inhuman torture . . . If the shaman managed to withstand it, the Sacred Order must be satisfied.

Spotting the first nutlike little clumps of deer droppings, Keleu deduced that the herders' camp must be nearby.

Mlakoran greeted Keleu warily, asking him for news from Uelen. When he heard about the continuing deaths, his face darkened.

“We haven't any old people anymore,” Keleu told him dourly.

“How is Keu's health?” asked Mlakoran.

“He's recovering,” answered Keleu.

He didn't know quite how to come to the main point, to tell Mlakoran about the terrible Order from Above.

“We'll load your sled with deer meat,” Mlakoran promised him. “You will bring back as much meat as you can carry.”

Mlakoran's little girl was playing with walrus tusks on the fur-lined polog's floor, raising a smiling face toward the visitor from time to time.
Keleu looked at her, and with a growing horror wondered how it would be possible for her to kill her father, still such a strong man. Tul'ma served the food and did not intrude on the men's conversation, despite having become proficient in Luoravetlan speech by now.

“There is a bad piece of news,” Keleu finally managed to get out. He fell silent for a moment, marshaling his strength. “There is an Order from Above, to save the people of Uelen. It pertains to you.”

“I'm ready to do my all to help the people,” was Mlakoran's answer. “If you need me to, I'll drive the deer closer to the village, to the edge of the lagoon, so people can take meat.”

“My father and I divined for a long time, asking the Gods. But they were immovable, and I can still hear their voices, even here in the tundra.”

“We are prepared to make any sacrifice to save the people,” Mlakoran repeated.

“They want a human sacrifice,” Keleu said quietly.

Mlakoran had thought that this custom was a thing of the long ago, never to return. Nowadays, a living creature was still killed to placate the spirits – a dog, a deer . . . But a human sacrifice?

“They take human sacrifices from us every day as it is,” Mlakoran grumbled. “You said yourself that the Hill of Hearts' Peace is already crowded with dead.”

“But the Higher Powers are demanding a special sacrifice,” Keleu said with difficulty. “They want a specific person.”

“Well, then, who is it?” Mlakoran asked impatiently.

“You!” Keleu blurted out, and cringed, expecting a blow.

But there was none.

When he raised his head, Mlakoran was not there.

He was standing outside the yaranga and looking at the distant mountains, radiant with the glow of spring. His face was a mask of deepest sorrow.

An Order from Above was never rescinded. Neither Keu nor Keleu could turn their back on one. Mlakoran heard the young shaman's footsteps and asked, without turning:

“Did you ask many times?”

“Yes. We chanted and danced, asking and asking, for many days. It took all our strength, but the order was always the same – you must fall by your young daughter's hand.”

“But she's still a small, weak child . . .”

“They,” Keleu flicked his eyes upward, “insist on exactly that.”

“You know that I can put you and your father to the test?”

“We are ready,” answered Keleu.

If both of the shamans were prepared to be tested, the matter was serious indeed. On the other hand, Mlakoran knew that the two of them, Inspired from Above though they were, did not approve of his behavior, especially his kinship with the Kaaramkyn and the fact that he had become a deer person.

Yet the thing Mlakoran was being asked to do was too heavy a price. If indeed this originated within the shamans' heads, it was inconceivable treachery. So then, he would have to test them . . .

Mlakoran went to Uelen, taking his daughter and a small herd of deer to feed the ill and the dying. Keleu rode ahead on his own sled.

Never in Mlakoran's life had he loved the spring so much! Clear skies, a sparkling sun that lent its brilliance to the slightly melting snow. A comb of blue mountains on the horizon, air as soft as melted snow, the kind you could breathe in with mouth wide open, without fear of freezing the tops
of your lungs. And the anticipation of warmth spilled all around, nature's turn toward the season when life bursts forth. Then, even the does are heavy with young, carrying future deer inside them; even the tundra mice leave their warrens and beat trails over the softening snow. The sun is high in the sky, signaling to all that lives: hurry and live, be quick to enjoy life and the contemplation of nature returning to life, go on and delight in everything that lives, together with your friends and your dear ones! Forget quarrels, remember instead kind words and melodious songs!

But that is all for those who remain alive, those whose living eyes are to see the new fawns, the tundra in bloom, the first of the walrus herds, and the sea free of winter ice!

If the Order from Above were to be fulfilled, he, Mlakoran, would see none of these things. He would be resting within the symbolic ring of stones, naked, surrounded by his private possessions – his harpoon, his light sled, the wooden ladle from which he had drunk broth and water.

 

From a hilltop Uelen appeared in the distance, across a lagoon encased in ice and shimmering snow. The yarangas were strung along the shingled beach like a chain, from the foot of the mountain over Irvytgyr
⁷
to the ice-locked bay between the lagoon and the open sea. There was no sign of smoke over any of the dwellings, no sound of dogs barking, nor of human voices. An ominous, glittering silence filled with blinding sunlight enveloped the scene that was so dear to him, and his heart contracted in anticipation of grief. A thought fluttered in Mlakoran's mind, exacerbating his suffering: perhaps he was seeing all this for the last time . . . Another's eyes will gladden to the sight of the rows of yarangas appearing along the shingled beach; another's heart
will feel the mounting joy of nearing the warm hearths of his birthplace. Mlakoran felt his heart emptying, its hot blood replaced by a deadly frost.

Mlakoran walked up to his yaranga and entered the
chottagin
, the cold outer part of the yaranga. While his eyes adapted to the gloom after the blinding brightness outside, all he could hear were muffled moans from behind the fur curtain. Raising the polog he saw his older children and first wife lying beneath some deerskins. It had been a long time since a grease lamp burned here and the dwelling's inner walls were limned in hoarfrost.

“Save us!” his wife moaned from beneath the fur blankets. “You're our only hope!”

“But did you hear what the shaman demands in exchange for saving the people of Uelen?” Mlakoran asked her.

“It's not the shaman's demand, it's an Order from Above,” answered his wife.

 

The testing of the shamans began that very night in their own yaranga. Everyone had left the dwelling, save Keu and Keleu. Mlakoran entered the close polog and saw the two shamans – father and son – naked from the waist up, in the dim light.

“Take it all off!” Mlakoran shouted.

Both shamans began to unlace the plaited deer tendons that held up their fur-lined trousers, obeying the order. Keu was a pitiful sight – a skeleton of sharply jotting bones, tautly covered by dry, dark brown skin. But it was he who was the main source of danger. There was no question in Mlakoran's mind that Keu had been the one to introduce the idea of the cruel Order from Above to his son.

For a start, laying Keu on his back, Mlakoran pressed his thumbs forcefully
into the man's eye sockets. The old shaman did not make a sound. Mlakoran could tell that any moment the eyes would burst under his fingers. Easing the pressure, Mlakoran turned the old man over and began to twist his arm behind his back. Keu was silent. It was obvious that the old sick man no longer even felt pain to the same degree as a healthy person.

Letting go of the father, Mlakoran set to work on the son.

Again he began with pressing his thumbs into the other man's eyes, but Keleu only groaned and ground his teeth. For a moment Mlakoran thought that the young shaman was ready to ask for mercy, and letting up a little, asked loudly:

“Do you still insist that you had an Order from Above?”

“Yes,” Keleu breathed out with a moan.

Mlakoran kneaded and crumpled the younger man, bent his spine and throttled him, cutting off his air supply, but each time Keleu answered that the Order from Above was genuine and not the product of the shamans' imagination.

Then Mlakoran came to the worst of it. He clenched the young shaman's genitals in his own strong fist and began to tighten his grip, slowly, pausing from time to time to give Keleu a chance to catch his breath and speak. The young man's balls were slippery, as though trying to escape, but Mlakoran's sturdy fingers brooked no such thing. Keleu was screaming, his face ran with a mixture of salty sweat, tears, and snot; rivulets of blood from his bitten lips coursed from the edges of his mouth, but the answer remained always the same: the Order had come from Above.

An ordinary person could not have withstood the tortures that Mlakoran practiced on the young shaman.

And at some point Mlakoran realized that Keleu would lose his gentials,
die of agony, before he admitted that there had been no Order, and that the wishes of the gods were invented by himself and his father.

Sticky with sweat, he let go of Keleu. The young shaman reeked of shit and urine; the terrible pain had caused an involuntary voiding of bladder and bowels.

Barely able to control his revulsion and nausea, Mlakoran walked out of the shamans' yaranga and into the fresh air. The bright sunlight was blinding.

Slowly, pausing often, he ascended the Crag that hung over the eastern part of Uelen and looked back.

This was his favorite spot from which to gaze on his birthplace, the chain of yarangas stretching along the long shingled beach. In that world where the souls of dead heroes and those who gave their lives for their tribesmen went, the world near the North Star, there was no room for little Uelen.

 

Mlakoran took his spear off the wall of his yaranga and spent a long while sharpening the volcanic glass spearhead.

All the people of Uelen already knew about the Order from Above and about the shamans' confirming the wishes of the gods by their terrible suffering.

The people of Uelen were silent as they watched the preparations for the holy ritual of human sacrifice.

The shamans had chosen the place of the sacrifice. They cleared the snow from the icy center of the frozen lagoon and lit a sacred fire. Its pale flame, interspersed with the sun's bright rays, rose toward the sky.

But no one came down from the yarangas.

The people of Uelen had shut themselves inside their dwellings, and only
Keu, who could barely walk, and Keleu, with huge black bruises under his eyes, stood beside the sacred fire, clad in their long ceremonial robes.

Mlakoran appeared, wearing a white deer
kukhlianka
, white
kamuss
(deer leg hide) trousers, and white kamuss
torbasses
. His hair, so black just yesterday, had turned the color of his death garments. He carried his spear in one hand; the other led his daughter, who was similarly dressed in ceremonial clothes – a light kerkher of white fawn skin, trimmed with wolverine fur.

Silently they walked into the center of the icy circle. Mlakoran planted the spear deep into the ice and placed his daughter's hand onto the spear shaft, so she could hold it at an angle.

All this happened in complete silence, in blinding sunlight.

Setting his daughter down and checking that the spear was firmly held upright, Mlakoran drew back a little and then threw himself onto the spear, hard enough to pierce both his white kukhlianka and his breast. Blood spurted down the spear's shaft and Mlakoran toppled, taking the spear with him.

A child's wail rang out amid the thick, tense silence, and then the howling cry of Mlakoran's first wife as, loosened hair streaming, she came running toward the brightly bloodstained circle of ice.