The Sorcerer Read online

  Yes, Lefthand knew that he could do this. This was the one thing he could do; this was his magic. From his childhood he had worked this magic, sketching in sand or snow the prey his father followed. If his spear-hand was unsteady, his eye was faultless. He knew the forms of animals, he loved every line of them. In the dark cavern of his own mind he now found eager images forming; a pony mare cropped the last brown grass. He saw her mild eyes clearly, the fuzzy curve of her side, her shining hoofs. That image, welling from his mind, could flow through his hand onto stone, through stone, and back into reality.

  The paintings were a dream of the sleeping earth; men would wake the earth, would make them real.

  He looked at the blank spaces remaining on the stone walls and his hands ached to fill them. He looked at the sorcerer patiently holding out to him a gift of light. Did he know that Lefthand had followed him to kill him?

  Lefthand laughed at himself a little grimly. He bowed through the jagged entrance and took the gentle light in his hands.

  2

  The winter spent itself. Lefthand waked and came more alive each day, while in the depth of the cave, a creature slept. He dreamed of a spring hillside bright with brave flowers, rich with the scent of ant and grub and the hint of honey. In his dream he waggled his head, looked this way and that, and wondered which of many promising paths to take. Still he slept, pushing his huge head deeper into his warm flank, his claws scrabbling at the clay bed. He lay comfortably curled in utter darkness against a rough rock wall, his brown fur crushed against stone. No light ever reached this resting place, but the sleeper knew of passing time. His heart beat its passing and his fat shrank. Now he was beginning to feel empty, dissatisfied, and was almost conscious. Dim ghosts flitted in his brain whispering of hunger. He dreamed often and as he dreamed he moved, snuggled to himself, scratched his bed.

  Not far away, Sorcerer laughed in delight. “I knew it,” he cried. “I knew it when I saw you at the magic circle! I looked out and saw you sitting there, crumpled up like a leaf, and I saw it in your face. I said to myself, ‘There is one who eats with his eyes!’”

  He held a slab of stone to the lamp, gleefully examining the sketch scratched on its flat surface. It showed a reindeer fawn poised in profile. Head high, ears forward, he tasted the air.

  “Eats with his eyes,” Sorcerer had said. Lefthand stood beside his teacher, trying to maintain dignity and not hug himself or laugh! The fawn was good. It was really there in all its innocent strength. If he had killed and eaten it Lefthand would not have possessed it as he did now, and he understood quite well what the sorcerer meant. But he wanted to hear it said again. He wanted to be sure that there was one other human being in the world who felt like this.

  “You and I,” Sorcerer explained slowly, feeling for words, “we look at an animal and we take it inside our eyes, like meat. Only the animal is still there, outside us. He is himself, we are ourselves, you see, but we have him in us. So I say, we eat with our eyes. Everyone does this, I think, but the others don’t know they do it. You and I, we know this secret.”

  Now Lefthand did hug himself. Impulsive in his joy, he said, “I will tell you a secret, Sorcerer. I have a friend who is a reindeer!” He pointed to the sketch. “He looks like that.”

  Sorcerer nodded, not at all surprised. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

  Encouraged, Lefthand went on to tell him about the fever dream; the moonlit running, the search for the doe, the lonesomeness. And Sorcerer kept nodding.

  “Yes, Lefthand, that is what I tell you. You do not live in your stomach like my grandson Onedeer. He is a fine young man, Onedeer, and he will kill more animals than you will paint. His children will eat. But he will never look at a fawn and see what you have seen. For Onedeer, a fawn will never be anything more than meat and hide and bone. But you, Lefthand, will live in your eyes and your heart. And sometimes you will stretch out your heart like a hand and reach beyond yourself.” Sorcerer gave back the sketch. “Now, go paint this on the wall. Paint it big, strong. Then I will show you how to chisel it.”

  Lefthand took his stone lamp and his sketch. He felt that he floated on joy, rather than walked, to the other side of the rock chamber. Here he had a space picked out and waiting—a narrow space, squeezed between two strange beasts. He set the lamp down on the floor and crouched beside it, drawing with his finger where he would make the actual soot lines.

  These would be his first lines on the eternal wall of the earth’s womb. Now, after all the sketches, he was ready. His practice slates were tossed here and there about the cavern floor. Mares were scratched on them, foals and pigs and bison. Through all the winter days Lefthand had been sketching, transferring to the stones all the brightness of his life in the shining, sunlit world above—or so he thought until he looked at the drawings a second time. Then he saw them as cold, fumbling lines, about as effective as the first babblings of a baby. And he cast them aside impatiently, not showing them to Sorcerer.

  But Sorcerer would come limping along behind and pick them up and cluck over them.

  “Why do you make only two legs?” he asked once, pointing scornfully, “I think most ponies have four legs.”

  “I know, I know,” whined Lefthand, “but how can I draw the legs on the other side? You don’t see through him.”

  “Look.” And Sorcerer drew the legs for him, one bent behind another. Lefthand sucked his lips and nodded, while stars burst in his expanding mind.

  Another time Sorcerer remarked, “You know, you can turn his head back over his shoulders … like this. You don’t always see animals standing looking right ahead, like clay images.”

  “Mmm,” said Lefthand, and got another slate.

  This fawn was the first living, graceful animal he had made. And now it was time to take soot and ocher, and with his own trembling hand mark the deep of the world. A narrow jut of stone made a beautiful hind leg for the fawn—Lefthand had sketched it with this in mind—but it would cut through the head of one of the strange beasts.

  “Sorcerer,” Lefthand called, and his voice echoed loudly in the enclosed chamber, “what are these animals?”

  Sorcerer was squatting near the entrance hole, chiseling the tail of a huge bull bison, and he did not stop work to look around. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have never seen any creature like them. There are more of those in the cavern across the passage.”

  “The holy one, where we don’t go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why it is holy?”

  “No, it is holy because men’s bones lie there.”

  Lefthand studied the beasts. They marched across the wall, one behind the other, with majestic tread. Their bodies were wonderfully thick, heavier than those of pigs, and each had a second tail swinging from his head, and long, sweeping tusks.

  “Someone has painted over these,” he called. Indistinct ponies ran up and down through the huge bodies. “Can my fawn touch them?”

  “Their magic is dead,” came the brief reply. Lefthand dipped his finger in the hot soot of his lamp and began to draw.

  The dreamer withdrew his head from his flank. He snuffled and waggled his ears. Sounds were attacking those ears, sinking into his dreams. An occasional dull roar became, in his dreams, his own voice, or that of a stream. But the harsh clinking sound that now accompanied the roar reminded him of nothing and called up no dream image. Then his stomach rumbled insistently and he opened one small eye.

  “Sorcerer,” Lefthand called. “This fawn is going to be strong magic!”

  “I know that.”

  “I want to show it to Snowbird.”

  “What?”

  Sorcerer rose, turned, and hobbled over to Lefthand. “You want to show it to whom?”

  Puzzled, Lefthand looked up from the fawn’s hind leg and saw the old man glaring down at him, being the Bear. But he knew the sorcerer too well now to be awed.

  “I want to show it to your daughter, Snowbird.”

  Sorcerer slowly
, dramatically, shook his head. “Oh no, Lefthand. You don’t want to do that.” He rested his hands on his knees and brought his face down to Lefthand’s. More softly he explained, “Snowbird is a woman.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Soon she will have magic of her own, plenty of magic. You don’t want to give her yours, too. You would have nothing left.”

  Uncomprehending, Lefthand stared up into the sharp old eyes. He thought of all women as being powerless, quite without magic. Bright had always seemed to him very little more important than he was himself—and that little, only because she was grown up. Now that he had found a source of power for himself, he wanted to share it with Snowbird as she had shared her fire and food with him. But the old man looked down at him with a brainful of memories, a heartful of power, and said: “No. No woman comes into this cave. Have you forgotten the little drum?”

  The little drum. Oh yes, Lefthand remembered the secret, tender rhythm that he had tapped one night so that Snowbird could join the circle of women dancing to celebrate a mystery.

  “You will never touch that drum again,” said Sorcerer, straightening up. “You will never hear that beat again because you will soon be a man. Let Snowbird be a woman.” And he turned away, chuckling at the amazement on Lefthand’s face. Did Sorcerer know everything?

  Sorcerer went back to his bison and Lefthand slowly drew the back of his fawn; the long, upstretched neck, the stiffened ears. He stopped, got up, and stepped back to look. The line was perfect, living and alert. Lefthand gulped to quiet his excited stomach and stooped again to draw the fawn’s chest and throat. He paused because his hand was shaking. He crouched down to look closely at his vision tangible on stone. As he did so, he heard a noise.

  It came softly through the chisel noise. It was a noise such as Sorcerer sometimes made when he scratched a finished painting with an amazingly crude stone spearhead to soften and blend the colors. But Sorcerer was not scratching now, he was chiseling with both hands, ding-ding-ding.

  Lefthand heard a distinct scratching noise.

  “Sorcerer!” he called, and the walls repeated it. “What made that sound?”

  “Sound?” asked Sorcerer above the clink of the chisel. “You’ll be making this sound yourself when you finish that painting!” Clank, clank, clank, said the chisel, and again a scratch whispered between blows.

  “I heard a scratch,” said Lefthand, and his voice shook.

  “A scratch?” Sorcerer paused and looked around. As the echo of the chisel died, the scratching became clearly audible.

  Sorcerer turned pale. In the flickering lamplight Lefthand saw his face fade to the whiteness of the very rock behind him. He whispered “a spirit!” and the whisper echoed “spirit!”

  Lefthand was suddenly conscious of the immense, silent mountain all about them. It was honeycombed with caverns, passages, underground streams, of which he knew only this room and the two passages that led to it. The chambers were endless. Even Sorcerer did not know them all.

  Some of the near rooms, like the one across the passage, were holy. Men had died there and bones lay stretched on the rock floors. In imagination Lefthand now saw those bones sitting up, the dry fingers brushing the stones. With shaking hands he snatched up his lamp. The bones were out in the dark; the vast, waiting dark. In the face of a spirit, the light in his hands was better than a spear.

  Sorcerer picked up his own lamp. He turned to face the low, jagged entrance through which the bones would have to come.

  In the silence that followed the scratching, the only sound was of their teeth chattering uncontrollably.

  The sleeper was now fully awake. He stood up swaying, weak and bewildered. He was very, very hungry.

  He strained his eyes into the dark. They were not good eyes in any light. He relied more upon his nose and his nose told him food was near.

  He swung his sagging bulk toward the smell and stumbled forward, feeling his way. He staggered against the rock wall, rubbed his side against it, then rose on his hind legs and scratched the rock. It felt good to sharpen his claws; it sent pleasant tingles through his paws and forelegs. His muscles awoke.

  As he scratched, luxuriously stretching to his full height and drawing his sleep-dulled claws along the rock, the clinking noise stopped.

  Now the smell of living flesh became very strong and acrid. It annoyed his nose—it angered him, and roused in him an itch to destroy. He dropped to his four legs and moved purposefully toward the smell of fear.

  Light surprised him. He had not expected to see the sun! But this was not the sun. It was a small light flickering through a hole. He would have passed it by, blinking and looking away, but the smell of flesh and of fear came out of this hole.

  Squinting, he pushed his head into the light.

  Lefthand dropped his lamp. He stood stupefied by terror. The huge, hairy head thrust in through the entrance, the slits of eyes and gleaming teeth, was more dreadful to him than any skeleton. He could have attempted to fight off the dead. But this was the face that he still saw in the depths of frequent nightmares. If he had been alone, the bear could have pushed in and devoured him.

  Sorcerer heard the crash of the stone lamp hitting the floor and knew what it meant without looking. The light was brighter now, as the spilled fat flared, and the bear closed his eyes against it and opened his long, black jaws. From his throat came a whining growl.

  In that moment Sorcerer felt relief. So it was a bear coming out of his winter sleep who scratched in the darkness. It was not a ghost, the ghost of his father, become alien and hostile in the strange realm of death; not a small, hairy ghost with tremendous, humped shoulders; and not his woman come to find him, impatient with her long, long wait. It was only a bear, an animal, who could be fought. Sorcerer’s teeth stopped chattering.

  Lefthand watched, unable to move, as Sorcerer walked straight up to the bear, holding his lamp towards its face.

  “Go out,” said Sorcerer gently to the bear. “Go on up to the sun. Go out of this cave. There is nothing for you here.” He waved the lamp close to the bear’s nose.

  The bear’s head withdrew and a huge paw swung through the hole and whacked at the lamp. Sorcerer let the paw hit the lamp but held onto it firmly. Burning fat spattered all around. Just outside the hole the black jaws opened and howled. The howl echoed through the caverns, bouncing from depth to depth.

  “Go up to the sun,” Sorcerer kept insisting, waving the lamp in the hole to keep out the jaws. “Go up on the mountain.”

  The bear pulled his burned paw back through the opening and licked it. His huge tongue, lapping at the hurt, uttered an astonishing sound—a whimper, a baby’s complaint. Lefthand found he could move. He stooped and picked up the spilled lamp.

  The bear might try again. Lefthand knew he was needed. Sorcerer’s lamp had been spilled now and less than half the fat remained in the bowl. Lefthand’s lamp was almost empty but a tiny flicker of flame wavered at the bottom. He must add this light to Sorcerer’s.

  Holding the lamp out before him in both hands, Lefthand took a step away from the wall. The face in the hole bared its teeth and snarled at him. Lefthand stopped, trembling. Then he realized that the bear could not see him through the light thrust before its eyes. He made himself move forward again.

  Sorcerer was talking. Lefthand slowly became conscious of his words. In the same gentle, soothing tone he was saying, “Go on up, go up on the mountain, bring me that light, there is food out there, none here, hurry up, up on the mountain you will find food, my light is dying.”

  The cadence of his words was like a soft drumbeat. Lefthand stepped to its beat and came up by Sorcerer’s shoulder before he realized where he was. There was the gigantic, fearful head right in front of him, the paw beginning to reach out again as Sorcerer’s light sank feebly.

  Lefthand took one look in the bear’s face and did not look again. Quickly he tipped the remainder of his burning grease into Sorcerer’s bowl. The combined flames reared up, pie
rcing the dark with writhing red pain. The bear made his decision.

  Whatever the morsel in that hole, it bit too hard. He moaned querulously to himself and turned away. The face vanished from the hole, leaving a blank darkness. Lefthand heard the click of the bear’s claws on the stone passage, moving away.

  They stood together, panting. “Will he go out?” asked Lefthand.

  “Yes. I told him to.”

  “Will he wait for us in the passage?”

  “No, no. He’s too hungry to wait for anything. He just woke up.”

  Mentally, Lefthand followed the bear’s progress up the passage … through the water … through the hole to the upper passage … along the winding way toward the light.

  “Sorcerer!” His cry echoed again through the painted room. “He will meet Snowbird out there!”

  Sorcerer stared at Lefthand. His face, which had regained color paled again to a sickly gray.

  “The mountain is wide,” he muttered. “She may be far away.”

  “She and Jay will be at the entrance. They are there every evening!”

  Sorcerer’s eyes, wild and shallow, darted around the room. They had brought no weapons with them into the holy place. “Take stones,” he mumbled, his tongue thick and slow. “Stones are all we have.”

  Lefthand dropped his unwieldy bowl at Sorcerer’s feet. He rushed around the room, collecting his scribble stones from the floor. Scratched with rough, amateurish attempts, they had only a little magic; but they were his hope. An armful of these stones would do the bear little or no harm, but the magic might deter him. It was their only chance.

  Lefthand charged first out of the hole, the stones clasped in his arms and one in his fist. Sorcerer followed, holding the weak lamp.

  Lefthand ran along the passage, chasing his own furious shadow cast by the sputtering light behind him. He could see only a few steps ahead and suddenly remembered his former fear: will he wait for us in the passage? He no longer cared. If the bear were waiting, Snowbird might hear the uproar and retreat from the entrance.