Spirit Walker

Anyone would have described Cotton as clever. He built things. He fixed things. He looked at things, studied them like an artist studied his subject, turned them, touched, sometimes tasted, closed his eyes and caressed them until he knew them with the kind of intimate familiarity usually reserved for a twin or a beloved.
Cotton was not joined to anyone though, and had no twin—in fact he had no one—but these things seldom, if ever, occurred to him. He was self-possessed. Content in his solitude.
He knew people certainly; the village wasn’t far and they all came to him eventually. But his neighbors no longer invited him to meals or the modest celebrations they cherished. They knew he would decline uncomfortably, dissemble, and say ‘another time’, although he never meant it.
His hands were limber, facile and graceful. His eyes, like pooled Lapis veined with gold, were set deep, almost as if under a cliff of bone, saw everything, noticed, knew to be still until the way of a thing, the heart of a thing, was known. His name—Cotton—had been born in his childhood, but was not his given name. He had been a tow-head, but when the silky hair of infancy gave way to a few months growth, new hair had appeared; white as the simple shifts of skin the young women wore on their joining days. His hair became curly and soft, and the adults took to patting his small head for luck and called him their ‘Little Cotton ball’. They had never seen hair so white. Naturally, the nickname stuck and eventually was truncated to Cotton.
But as he grew in stature and skill, he grew apart as well. He wasn’t shy, nor did he seem morose or unhappy. He was merely quiet, comfortable in his own head, and prone to wandering imaginations. Cotton did not avoid people—in fact, over the years and to his eventual surprise, he found himself the village wise man. People came to him with questions and troubles, fears, heartache and suspicions. His willingness to listen, which was more the result of unfailing courtesy than any sense of intimate concern, gave the impression that he had found a calling. His silence drew them, led them to believe he had been imbued with a gift unique to him alone.
His home set him apart as well. The villagers, indeed all people known to them, built with rock and mud, when they built at all, using timber as rough lintels and other supports, but fashioning their spaces on both the limitations and strengths of native stone. Cotton built a home of wood. He lived outdoors for two years, under a rude shelter and lean-to, while he thought and watched and studied the trees and how they grew, how they bent to the wind and why. Only then did he begin to fell the trees and split them with rough stone wedges, using rocks as mallets, so he could study the wood itself, the grains and patterns, the flow of it, the breath and heart of it. He learned how to tell the heart from the sap wood, how to deal with limbs as they grew inside the tree, eventually erupting through the bark. He fashioned tools to work the wood, adz stones and scrapers, working from intuition alone, and practiced with them until he knew the secrets of the mighty trees, how best to treat them, how long to wait before working them, and how to orient the grain for the best strength and the greatest economy. He never thought about beauty. Two years had turned to eight, and still he slept on the ground, tending his little garden, endlessly observing, practicing, experimenting. Finally he began to search for the timber he knew he would need and dragged them to the place he had chosen, villagers helping, mostly to see what he might be doing. Felling trees was beyond the scope of their understanding, but the wind always blew many of them down. He separated the logs by function. These would become the beams, these the lintels and braces, these others were for roofing and walls. When he judged them dry, he worked methodically, one task at a time, neither hurrying nor dawdling, picturing the next stoke in his mind, feeling the blow before he struck it, and holding the entire image before him always. He worked from first light to last light each day for months, his years of preliminary labor and study allowing him to make few mistakes and to design a stout structure based on the forms always in his head.
He set his home on the rise of a hill, adjacent to a rock outcropping which would afford shelter from rain and prevailing winds, as well as protection from raids. The structure followed the lines of the cliffs, the curving striations of the rock, subtle over-hang and cove-like forms which reminded him of the shells he had found along the edge of the Farthing Sea. It looked nothing like the villagers’ homes, the stout and strong and plain structures nestled in the little valley a short walk down-river. It seemed to rise from the ground unbidden, as if a part of the sand and stone and forest, natural and abiding. He set clever openings in the walls and filled them with mica from the mine over the mountain in order to let light into the rooms. He designed the rafters to be useful for storage and drying skins. He fashioned latches of wood and cured leather, made hinges from the hardest wood, and set his skins around, as robes and rugs, each exactly where it needed to be. His hearth and chimney were exquisitely fashioned of worked stone, the draw efficient, the ambient heat maximized by the placement of large stones around the crude fire-box.
He declared it finished on the day winter arrived, bringing sleet and snow from the north, with ice forming along the banks of the river. Three rooms, which was unheard of in the village. The main room where he cooked and ate and did all those things an enigmatic man might do, a small room for his pallet with its own small fireplace and hearth, and an even smaller one where he could store things. Everyone else built one room, large enough to hold a growing family, and small enough to hold the beams of timber which held up the thatching on the pitched roofs.
On that evening, when he announced to himself the end of his labors, never thinking of the years at all, he dressed in his warm skins, the coarse, woven undergarments acting as a mid-barrier, the thick fur hide nothing more than a hooded wrap thrown over the head and shoulders, bereft of clasps or other such devices, and went out into the darkening day-end to scout up the little river a ways, looking for sign of any animals he might want to trap or hunt. All the men hunted, even Shaman’s and wise men, even tinkerers like Cotton. The trails were full of the prints of fur-bearing kin, as well as birds and the small but dangerous cats which prowled the hills and mountains further away. There were few people living around the Farthing Sea and Cotton knew winter would not be a hardship. Game would be plentiful, he had a store of wild berries and roots, a few vegetables he knew were good to eat and his loud friend, the one called Teller, had brought a new kind of grain with him from his trek over the mountains. The village had grown a good crop of the little golden kernels and put it up in clay jars stacked in the caves above the village. As a member of the village a portion of the grain was his, even though he had not helped grow it. After all, he fixed things, and knew things, and these skills were as important to the villagers as farming or hunting.
He took note of the best places to set snares and plodded back to the new dwelling, his feet booted with thick hide from the Whistlers, the large, antlered Elk. He was thinking about the antlers the great beasts grew each year in the Moon of Death, and how one might cut a piece of the horn and fasten it to a hide and then cut a hole in another piece so that the antler tip could be threaded through. He could see it in his head as he walked, his breath billowing out his mouth and nostrils, unseen in the dark. Two small holes on one side, and thread a string of sinew through them, wrap the horn tip with them then do it again and again until it could be knotted and sealed with hot bees wax. Then pass the horn through the other hole—he could see how it would work, how tying it in the middle would allow both halves to stay put on the other side of the hide. Cotton smiled as he walked. It would work. He spent the rest of the time wondering what it might be good for.
He had left a small oil lamp burning in his home, and through the mineral in one of the holes he’d put in the walls, he saw a shadow move, someone going from the door to the fire, he thought. He was not surprised, people came to see him and never cared much as to time or day and night.
He shuffled snow from his feet and opened the door to the pleasant structure, ducked his head and stepped inside. A young girl, no more than three hands of years, sat huddled in a robe of woolly fur, wrapped up around herself as if trying to pull her own body into a ball and vanish. He knew her. She was the third daughter of the village Headman. Her name was Spring because her mother had been fetching water when she came. The Headman and his woman had four daughters and three sons. Others had been born but had flown back to the Place Where Life Began on the same day. One had died of a sickness no one had seen before. The Shaman had been helpless, but had done his best. It was how the world was, and no one argued or complained about it. A person might as well complain about the sun rising, or trees dying each year—what would such complaining change?
“Spring,” Cotton said her name, almost in a whisper. “It is late. The hunters are out. You should not be here alone.”
She turned her head to face him, the light from the fire dancing shadows across her cheek and one eye. Her hair was long and dark, with streaks of ocher in it, and she kept it braided like the other girls. He had seen such a face many times. Something troubled her. Her eyes told him everything but the exact problem. She had been crying. His people did not cry much, so it must be something bad.
He pulled the fur over his head and set in onto a peg in the wall, then sat in on of his thick furs in front of the fire, opposite the girl. He would wait and eventually she would decide to talk. But it took a while.
When she did, it was in between barely controlled bursts of sobbing, her chest rising, breath catching in short gasps.
“I have lain with Hunter’s boy, Good Spear,” she told him. Her eyes were wide. Even now the sound of her deed surprised her, took her breath away and frightened her. How had she managed to say the thing at all, he wondered, if she was this frightened.
Their people’s law concerning such things was plain. One did not lay with another unless the Headman and Shaman approved and joined them. There were good reasons for such a restriction and Cotton knew them all. It was he, after all, who had reasoned out the connection between seeding a woman and the birth of a child. Some still did not believe such a thing, but he knew it was true and so did most of the women. He thought carefully, slowly, looking into the heart of her words and seeing the distant outcomes as if standing on a high peak and looking down into the future.
“Why?” He asked. Spring looked at him with anguish.
“He . . . he drew me,” the girl told him. “Is there a magic to these things? Because I could not help myself. A spirit took me and hid my mind from me. I wanted only Good Spear and thought of nothing else.”
Cotton nodded. He had heard such things before. The seeding spirit was powerful, he knew. It overcame a person, drove them to the act. Those who were joined were free to pursue that spirit with one another except on sacred days, but never with anyone else. It was the law, and Cotton knew why better than most.
“There is a spirit,” he told the girl. “When did it take you?”
Spring looked down and away from him, letting the fire draw her attention.
“Has the spirit visited you more than once?” He asked, confident of the answer.
She nodded without looking up. He could see new tears falling, glinting in the firelight like drops of crystal. She wiped across her nose with a forearm.
“Has your blood flown from you?”
Spring turned back and was able to look at him as she nodded.
“You are making a child,” he told her. No need to be gentle. She knew. But this time she didn’t respond.
“Headman will be angry,” he said. And this is why she had come. Her father might kill her. He would certainly beat her, possibly make her a slave and give her to some unjoined man. She was terrified.
He did not tell her this was the result of her actions; of letting herself be carried away by the seeding spirit. She knew it already and there was no reason to dwell on what could not be undone.
“What will happen to Good Spear,” she asked, her voice trembling.
Cotton made the gesture for ‘who can say?’ and mentioned a few possibilities, all of which she knew. Good Spear would be punished and that would end his part in the broken law. Women were held to a higher accountability. They made children and the people would vanish from the land without the new ones. This was one of the reasons they were careful to follow the law. They had to be sure each child would be cared for, kept safe and taught the ways of the people. Her child would have no people. It would have no village, no place to which it could return from its sojourn. If the Headman, her father, allowed it to live.
He looked into the fire for a while and the girl remained silent. In the village they taught the children the correct behavior when visiting Cotton. When he was quiet, thinking, they were to let him be. He spoke only when he deemed himself ready to do so and children were not to disturb him. She readjusted the robe she had wrapped around her. It was one of his but this kind of sharing was proper among the people. What one had was their own, but when someone needed a thing, it belonged to everyone.
“You will come here to live in this house,” he told her. There was no room for discussion in his tone. She hid her fear and waited.
“Your father will be angry and you should be away from him. Your wrong will shame your family and they cannot keep you, but I am alone. There will be no wrong if I take you for a hearth girl.” It was decided. She knew what would happen. In the morning Cotton would walk to the village and speak with her father. They would come to an arrangement which would no doubt include her banishment, and they would all pretend she was gone. Cotton could use some help. He hoped her mother had taught her well.
Spring finally gave him a single, weak nod and lowered her head onto her chest.
He pointed to a corner of the room. “Sleep there,” he said, and took a bowl of stew from the hearth and retreated into his sleeping room, as he called it.