Yeluc
Many times the gods have summoned me to their place in the firmament so that I can see their power. The first time I journeyed there I burnt with a light as intense as theirs and everything I touched was seared: my outline on the shell of my faithful Tortuga, my footsteps like blackened holes on the membrane of their kingdom, and my breath burning the air in front of me so it smelt of soot. Other times they have permitted me to enter their lower world and in there is a black sea with a grey beach of cinder skirting its edge. It is a place of small fires: points of lights rising in the distance, each one an island, sometimes spurting out columns of red liquid rock. In both these places is Tortuga, and sometimes his friend Piche, both of them armoured animals: one with the shell of a turtle, the other the mantle of the armadillo. Tortuga is silent, but Piche talks like a mountain-brook. Sometimes I can choose where I wish to go, but most often it is decided for me. I shut my eyes and enter with the beat of a drum, or the taste of the black herb, or sometimes I need nothing at all, just my body becoming so numb with hunger and fatigue that my soul escapes.
It is all this that makes me a shaman, chosen by Elal to see his world. I can bring good spirits and bad, and because of this I am to be feared and left alone with Seannu and her sisters. Yet sometimes they come to me: the Gallatts and the Chiquichan. There are some things only a shaman can know and do. There are some things only I can do. I know the ways of both Cristianos and Galenses, and sometimes they need me to help them.
This time Chiquichan comes with a message for the government. He wants payment for the land he thinks is his, and he trusts me to get it. No one can own the land, Chiquichan, I tell him, but he shakes his head. You live too much in the old times, Yeluc, he says. The old spirits are getting weaker, and the Cristianos have different rules. And he tells me to go to Buenos Aires with one of the Galenses called Ed-wyn. He is their chief and a good man, he says. And when I am there he knows I will make sure that Chiquichan has a voice.
So I leave on one of their swans. Not one with white mantles, but one which breathes hotly and noisily in its sleep. It rocks me so hard that it wakens strange dreams and demons. My body burns. My breath comes bursting from me. Oh, such sickness in the stomach. I cannot heal it. I shut my eyes and ask Elal to help me make a journey but I go nowhere. I call out for Tortuga, but he doesn’t come. The white men shift before my eyes like ghosts. The one called Ed-wyn smiles and says he is my friend, but I don’t know him. I call out for Elal but he covers his ears and I don’t know why.