Urban Shaman

“I want to try an experiment. I went somewhere yesterday when Cernunnos stabbed me. I want to see if I can go there again.”

“Spirit journey,” Gary guessed. I nodded. “Thought you Injun types knew all about that.” He grinned as I rolled my eyes. “Got a drum?”

“Nope. I thought you could use one of my stainless steel pots.”

Gary blinked at me. I laughed out loud, and his blinking faded into mild chagrin. “Makin’ fun of an old man,” he grumbled, but his gray eyes held a spark of humor.

“I don’t see any old men here,” I said as I went back through the living room into my bedroom. I heard his snort of pleasure and the creak of the floorboard as he followed me out of the kitchen. I came out with a drum and handed it to him, trying not to look proud. It must not have worked, because he took it with a great deal of grace and care.

“Where’d you get this, Injun?”

Trying not to sound proud didn’t work, either. “It was a birthday present. One of the elders made it for me.”

I didn’t own much that qualified as art. In fact, the drum was probably the sum total. It was about eighteen inches across, thin stretched hide evenly tanned and evenly pulled over the wooden frame. A raven whose wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake was dyed into the leather, bright colors that hadn’t faded in the fourteen years I’d owned it. Bone and leather strips decorated the frame, hand-carved polished beads dangling down from the ends of stays that crossed under the head to make a handle. The drumstick that went with it had a knotted leather end and a cranberry-red rabbit fur end. I brushed my fingers over the soft drumhead, smiling. “He said I’d need it some day. I thought he was crazy, but it was the most beautiful thing anyone’d ever given me. No one ever made anything just for me before.”

Gary grinned. “Not even a valentine?”

“I wasn’t ever at any schools long enough to get valentines.” Half-truths were a lot easier than whole truths, sometimes.

Gary brought the drum and drumstick together with a deep ringing boom. “Looks to me like that was their loss.”

“You’re too old to flirt with me, Gary.” I grinned, though. I’d been complimented more in the day I’d known Gary than in the past year put together.

“Listen to her. A minute ago she’s sayin’ she didn’t see any old men. ‘Sides, the day I’m too old to flirt is the day they nail the coffin shut, lady. Keeps you young.” He reached out and poked me in the chest with the drumstick. “You oughta remember that. This gonna wake up the neighbors?” He knocked the drumstick against the drum again.

“I don’t care if it does. I have to listen to them having kinky sex at two in the morning. They can listen to my drum at two in the afternoon.”

Gary sat down on the couch. “How do you know it’s kinky?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said fervently. “Can you keep a heartbeat rhythm?”

The answer was a pair of beats, the sound of a heartbeat. I snagged a pillow off the couch and stretched out on my back on the floor, eyes half-closed. The drum had a deep warm sound, and Gary’s rhythm was close enough to my own heartbeat to send a wash of chills over me.

“How long we playing for?” Gary asked over the drumbeat.

“Half an hour after my breathing changes.” I admired how confident I sounded, just like I knew what I was talking about. “I’ll wake up when the drum stops.” Well, that’s how the book said it ought to work, anyway.

“Gotcha,” he said, and I drifted.

I knew where I was going this time. I wasn’t sure if I could get there, but I knew what I was looking for. The drum bumped along steadily. I wondered, briefly, about the sanity of inviting someone I barely knew to sit in my living room and watch me zone out, but the idea set off no alarm bells and I performed a mental shrug.

The room wasn’t quite warm enough for this kind of behavior. I could feel a cool draft from somewhere, and while I’d always appreciated the breeze in the summer, discovering it while lying on the floor in January wasn’t as pleasant.

On the other hand, the floor was remarkably comfortable. I’d slept on it for two months after I’d moved into the apartment, too broke to afford a bed. The carpet was soft enough to sort of sink down into, like I might fall through the floor.

I did fall through the floor, and into the coyote-sized hole I’d traveled before. It got smaller and smaller, and so did I, until I was mouse sized. A stream appeared alongside me and I jumped onto a palmero leaf that bobbled along the water’s surface. A moment or two later it dropped over the edge of a newly appeared waterfall, and I spread hawk wings to glide to the edge of the pool before landing on my own two perfectly human feet. I felt dizzy and exhilarated by the shifts, even if I didn’t know how I’d performed them. I stretched my arms, feeling like I might be able to sprout wings again, then relaxed.

“You’re back soon,” Coyote said. He hadn’t been there an instant earlier, but somehow it didn’t surprise me as he trotted up beside me and sat down. I scratched his ears and his tongue lolled out blissfully while I looked around.

The garden was healthier than it had been yesterday. There had been a lot of function, no form, precise trees and neatly cut grass, like an English maze. The trees had been browning, as if they needed watering, and nothing had bloomed, like the flowering season was long over. I was surprised at how much I remembered. I didn’t think I’d looked around that much.

“It’s your garden,” Coyote said lazily. “You should know what it looks like.” He stuck his nose in my hand and flipped my hand back on top of his head. I skritched his ears again, obediently, and looked around some more.

It still favored function, with austere stone benches and narrow pathways leading from bench to bench, to the pool, and to flowerbeds that had been empty of life yesterday. Today they were greening, and wind dusted up fallen leaves, shuffling them away in favor of growing grass. There were, I could see clearly, twigs sticking out from the carefully clipped trees, so they were no longer perfectly symmetrical.

It was very quiet, though. “Is everyone’s garden this quiet? I don’t hear any birds or squirrels or anything.”

“Some people like it quiet.” Coyote snapped his teeth together and wagged his tail, eyeing my hand hopefully. “I didn’t think you’d come back so soon. What happened?”

I sat down cross-legged and scruffled his ears again. “Is it undignified to scratch a spirit guide’s ears?”

He thumped his tail against the grass. “Not if the spirit guide likes it.” He lay down and put his nose against my leg, looking hopeful. I grinned and rubbed the top of his head.

“I went and visited a bunch of dead people.”

Coyote’s ears pricked up in alarm. “That’s dangerous.”

“Now you tell me. Did you know you were making me a…shaman?”

He sat up, paws placed mathematically in front of him. “I didn’t make you anything. You almost died. You chose to live, and that woke possibilities in you.”

“But you knew it was going to happen.”

He lay down again, chin on his paws. “There are so many people.” He sounded sad. “There are lots of new shamans, and they make a difference, but the Old Man thinks he needs someone with a little extra power.”

My eyebrows went up. “Old Man?”

Coyote licked his nose. “Grandfather Sky. The Maker. He has a hundred names. Brand-new souls are hard to make,” he said. “He worked hard on you. I knew if you chose to live everything you keep inside would start to spill out.”

“Damn,” I murmured. “I like my intestines where they are.” Coyote snapped his teeth at me again, like I was an aggravating fly. “I know,” I said. “That’s not what you meant. You meant…” I trailed off again. “What did you mean? Somebody made me? On purpose? Come on, Coyote. There’ve got to be jillions of new souls every day. There’s lots more people than there ever were before. Besides, who would make me?”

“The Old Man would. There are many more people than there used to be, but there are far more souls than there have ever been people. They recycle.”