Örgöö, wandering monastery-town, Wide Fields
In the middle of a clearing she stood, surrounded by a low wall made of stacked teacakes, tall, white, and leafless.
Eej Mod, the Mother Tree, was bright with colourful scarves. They wrapped around her trunk, swirled from her branches, and lay humbled near her roots. Some of the scarves were stiff and sour, doused with offerings of days-old milk by opportunistic hands. On other branches, travellers had hung rubber tires and engine parts, hoping to be granted safe travels, seeing no irony in their vehicular abandon.
The Zunghar held that she was once a woman, promised by her father to a rich foreigner. The woman did not want to marry the old stranger, and so she ran away. The old man, of course, sent his soldiers after her, but before they could catch up, she turned into a tree. And there she stayed, the most kind, most special tree, and so the forest people named her Eej Mod and began to make offerings to her.
Of course, it wasn’t true. Nearby the swathe of scarves, a low building had been constructed around the root of the previous Mother Tree, obscuring it from view. That particular incarnation had perished in a fire started by a soldier’s cigarette years ago. Allegedly, anyway. The shaman remembered the blaze well, and the story his uncle had concocted to cover it up. The negligent constable had been quietly reassigned; everyone spared the wider conflagration of truth so soon after Ragnarök. The shack was a testament to short memories.
The shaman was a stout man in his early seventies, with grey hair pulled back in a thinning ponytail. He was already dressed, even though it was dark outside: the rites began at dawn, as they did every year on the first morning of the spring, in this dusty copse. There were thousands of dilapidated tents around the Khan’s palace-yurt. They had all seen better days. When he was a boy, the monastery-town had moved every few years, as supplies and the demands of merchants dictated, drifting between various sacred sites along the Selenge, Orkhon, and Tuul rivers. But that was before the Children of Ülgen fell from the Eternal Blue Sky. Before Ragnarök. The Termagant said the Sleeping Lands had borne the brunt of the starburst. The steppe wouldn’t awaken any time soon.
Every year, he arrived early to visit the low building and the ossuary within. When he closed his eyes tightly enough, he could still see the truth. The woman imprinted there, at the base of the tree. Of course, there was no bringing the girl back from the flames. The shaman had tried, countless times, calling on Tengri-Thórr until there were no more of her scarlet locks to offer him. She had been his first greeting. Perhaps that is why she had lingered long after all of the other lights of his life had faded.
He resigned himself to his fold-out chair, drinking milk tea with a vodka chaser. It was never too early for vodka. He cast some juniper twigs into his cast-iron stove, to call the spirits. Beyond the white tree, there was nothing but steppe and sky. It was a harsh land, where bad weather could break a herder, and where the gods were cruel. Vodka helped him make his peace with leaving his goats behind. Today, ravens were perched amongst the Mother Tree’s branches, representatives of spirits come to parley. The shaman was glad of that. He could claim that only the greatest shamans could command such allegiance. He might mention that the ravens had come to heal Eej Mod at last. It had been a long time since he had told that story.
Soon, there were scores of other shamans, doling out advice or dancing around fires in reindeer-skin boots, and innumerable worshippers circling the Mother Tree, praying, muttering, and tossing milk and vodka at it. They stuffed sweets and banknotes into the bark, as payment for their salvation.
In the field they used for parking, vendors sold succulent marmot organs from the backs of wains, and nomads peddled trinkets and squirrelskin coats. One ger, the domed fur tent used by his people for millennia, doubled as a kindergarten, ringed by children playing in the parched grass. Clouds of gnats and the smell of boiled mutton hung in the air. A sheep had been ceremonially slaughtered and quartered and was simmering away in a massive pot.
By the hour of the horse, hundreds of faithful had gathered. The shaman roused himself and donned his plumes of eagle feathers, before he began to channel the spirit of the tree into his body. It was a practised performance. His headdress was like a warrior’s helmet, and his face was a painted shadow. He walked slowly at first, mechanically, his breathing laboured. To invoke the other world, he twanged a mouth harp with his fingers, while a young assistant held a microphone to his lips to capture the eerie sound. The onlookers held their palms up and cried “Hree! Hree!”—come! come!—as the shaman banged his large sheepskin drum.
His eyes were closed, his voice was rough and the melody repetitive, like an ancient ballad: “Oh, great blue sky, which is my blanket, come to me.”
He slowly drew the drum up and over his face, dancing as he went into his trance. The crowd pressed in, a sea of expectant visors, as keen as he was to hear from the spirit world. The first sign of his gift had been a yellow snake that came into the ger where he was born. He began receiving spirits as an adolescent, with the guidance of his uncle, who was zaarin before him. He had performed this ritual every year since.
Once the spirit was in him, the shaman seemed transformed. He certainly had the rapt attention of the spectators. The spirit spoke in a throaty voice, but its first utterance fell short of the supernatural. The audience, it said, should stop falling for such obvious blinkbait. Then it cackled like a sightband villain, downed a shallow bowl of vodka and smoked a cigarette through a long, thin pipe, surveying the acolytes.
“In the summer there will be a deluge,” the spirit predicted. “Malignant winds that will not cease. The world will sink towards Ginnung’s abyss. We suffer time because we must lose what we have. Perhaps the gods have many more seasons in store for us, or perhaps this is to be the last winter.” The shaman sucked the gaps in his teeth.
And that was it. The shaman banged his drum again to exit the trance, and as the spirit left his body he blinked and jerked his head, as if returning to consciousness. The crowd immediately mobbed him, a formless queue snaking to receive his blessing. The assistant grabbed the sounder and yelled at them until they stopped shoving.
And that was that, for another year. All that was left was to watch the fires slowly burn out, the shamans and believers to wander back to their horses. The shaman paid his assistant well, then said goodbye, happy to relax in his chair and watch as the spirits retreated to their higher plane.
Except, not all of them had left.
“You are lost, great sky,” he said to the darkness.
He reached for a nearby bottle and, finding it empty, stood and lurched in search of another. The ger where he slept was rich with the symbols of his people. Behind his fur-lined throne was a large relief of two fierce wolves and a portrait of the Great Khan; in the middle of the tent was a tasselled helmet perched on a pole, black yak hair flowing down from it—an ancient war banner. And inside that, his hidden stash of vodka.
His eyes refocused on the table, to the taped-over menu of services it held. It cost twenty thousand tukgrik for a first consultation, ranging all the way up to 300,000 tukgrik for Fire Worship and Vodka Curing. The shaman wondered if his laggardly spirit might take offence. He slid the tasselled helmet to hide it from view.
“Sky of the wolf, please help me. I am man in need, with a heart of peace,” he moaned.
He took a generous swig, then turned the bottle sideways, holding it to the corner of his eye. He recognised him at once—the impossible old man, Boru, the sky god who rode with the wolf and the raven. His uncle had mentioned him, and the duty his family owed to this great Wayfinder. The shaman dipped his fingers into the clear liquid, flicking a few drops into the air and then toward the ground for good measure. The last moisture, he daubed on his crinkled forehead. It was an auspicious moment, after all.
“You have come to the right place,” he said, nervously. “I am glad you found me. You cannot throw a rock in Örgöö these days without hitting a shaman, who will probably tell you the rock has a spirit in it. Did you know, we even have a Corporate Union? Of shamans. Who ever did hear of such a thing?”
The shaman sank heavily into his chair, sour sweat gathering in the folds of his neck. He combed at his beard with a greasy hand, then began rummaging in his coat for his snuff box. Suitably invigorated, he slouched behind a man-sized tripod of wood and reached for another of his totems: a round oak shield, glazed with colours, well preserved with charms and oils. All of the mortal realms were there, in bands of red, green, and blue. The script was Norse, although neither the shaman nor his uncle had ever deciphered it. His family had been told to keep it hidden. The old man Boru took it, scrutinising it in the light of the fire, and smiled.
The shaman was glad the spirit was contented.
“My uncle says it saved us, when the sunspear fell. The Shield of the World. Right where you left it.”
He searched behind the frame again and drew out a square of yew wood, dotted with holes, and ornamented around the edges with carved panels. There was another relic too, an exquisite six-stringed khuur, that his guest embraced like long-lost family. There was no disguising his delight.
“Heim again, heim again,” the old man said, dancing a veritable jig. “The Second Coming of Óðinn. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”