Chapter One
Ivory tugged aside the curtain of mammoth hide that was all there was to secure the relative warmth inside the tepee from the chill wind. She crawled outside and stood upright in the bulky furs that muffled her body from hooded top to swaddled toe. She needed reprieve from the dark distress that was overwhelming her during her bedside vigil. Inside the tepee lay prone the fur-covered body of her mother who was exhaling her last few painful dying breaths.
There had been no warning, of course. No one had noticed the cave lion before it pounced. Despite the villagers' courageous onslaught on the predator, the only remaining consolation was that Ivory's mother had now lived long enough to die in her own bed. Ivory was fully aware that her mother could never survive such a mauling. Even the shaman's considerable medical skills were no match for the savagery of a lion's teeth and claws. The sudden loss would be especially distressing now that Ivory was her mother's only surviving child. There had been other brothers and sisters, but they were now all dead and most not even surviving childbirth. Ivory's father was also dead. He'd been gored to death by an aurochs during a disastrous hunting expedition two winters ago.
Ivory surveyed the chill steppes. It was Spring: the season most celebrated by her tribe. Game was plentiful on the grasslands. There was a rich harvest to gather from the woods. Ivory's face burnt in the glow of the sun which, however bright, was never warm enough to counter the chill wind that blew from the mountainous glacial cliffs not that far to the North. She bent her neck to follow the transit of a flock of storks flying west. In every direction were the wide steppes that were her Summer home. It teemed with game of every species: woolly rhinoceros, antelope, deer, horse, bison, aurochs, and, the mainstay of her tribe, mammoth.
It was for this reason, of course, that her tribe was universally known as the Mammoth Hunters.
Ivory made a silent prayer to the spirits of the wind whose sharp chill was what she now felt most keenly. She soon knew that the spirits hadn't answered her prayers when a cacophony of wailing and ululation erupted inside the tepee from the neighbours gathered by her mother's bedside.
Ivory now realised how unprepared she was for the shock of her mother's death. It was no longer hypothetical. It was real and actual. Ivory was now an orphan. No father. No mother. And, in addition, no husband. She was wholly and utterly at the mercy of the village's generosity. And in these straitened times, with mammoth migration increasingly unreliable and the winters worsening each year, such charity could not be taken for granted.
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"The Shaman needs an apprentice," remarked Aunt Partridge several days later when it was deemed that Ivory had grieved for long enough to be approached. "She's says she wants a young girl. I'll put in a word with the chief."
Overwhelmed by grief as she was, Ivory understood the need for shelter and security for an orphan in an unkind world. She grasped at this straw of comfort with all the enthusiasm she could muster.
"I'm sure I could help the shaman in her duties, Auntie. I've always wanted to be tutored in the mystic arts."
This last was a lie, but Ivory had faith that the spirits would give her dispensation in her hour of need. And anyhow, as her sorrow gradually subsided over the following days, this promise of relief awoke in her a desire she'd never noticed before. She'd be more than happy to take instruction in the arts of divination. She'd be honoured to partake of the wisdom dispensed by the only person in the village from whom even the chief sought advice. It also frightened her. The spirits were fickle and cruel. Surely it was only after great sacrifice and labour she could hope to acquire the skills possessed by a shaman.
The shaman was a mysterious figure. She'd not been born in the village. She hadn't even been born to the Mammoth Hunters' tribe. She came from a distant Southern land. These were lands where not only the language was different, which was to be expected, but where a person's skin and hair was of a different colour. Because the shaman's skin was brown, like clay or river mud, she was known as the Dark Shaman. There was no one else in Ivory's experience who had such dark skin. It was a pigment utterly alien to a tribe of pale-skinned, fair-haired people. The shaman's hair was as black as the night. Her lips were thick, her nose was small and her dark eyes were spaced wide apart. She seemed so strange that Ivory sometimes wondered whether she was a spirit or an animal rather than a person. But Ivory knew she was a person because she spoke the language of the Mammoth Hunters and was reputed to enjoy sex as much as a normal person might.
Ivory knew little else about the shaman. She was best known from her public appearances which were usually on such auspicious occasions as the Chief's Birthday, the Anniversary of the last Chief's death, the Equinoxes, the Summer Solstice, and, most important of all, the Winter Solstice. The Dark Shaman didn't often appear in public. She was even excused the foraging duties that was such a necessary duty for all other women in the tribe.
Who knew what evils might befall the village were the shaman not there on those auspicious days to utter the right incantations, dance the right steps or bestow the right intoxicants? Perhaps the spirit of the last Chief would bring evil on the tribe if he was not revered with due dignity? Maybe the Sun would sink deeper still after the Winter Solstice and never be seen again? The village was envied by all others in the tribe for the privilege of having a shaman whose mysterious provenance was from beyond the Southern Mountains and further south than even the Great Sea. She was a woman who'd travelled from beyond barriers once supposed impassable through which no Mammoth Hunter had ever ventured.
However, it was not just the spirits that Ivory would have to contend with as another aunt explained to her while Ivory and she scrabbled in the woodland dirt and soil for truffles and tubers. Aunt Sycamore rested her hand on Ivory's equally filthy wrist and smiled at her niece with sad sympathetic eyes.
"Although the shaman is a woman, to be her apprentice is like being wed," she said.
"I know," replied Ivory carelessly, whose mind was too fogged by bereavement to contemplate her future clearly. "I vow to pursue the shaman crafts with the same dedication and selfless devotion that I shall give my husband when I wed."
"You misunderstand me, my dear," continued Aunt Sycamore. She brushed the back of her hand, which was less thickly pasted by soil, on her niece's cheek: almost the only part of her face not shielded by musk ox fur. "It will be exactly like being wed in the ways that best characterise matrimony. You'll need to be faithful not only to the shaman's craft, but also to the shaman herself."
"What do you mean, Auntie?" wondered Ivory as she gazed into her aunt's light blue eyes.
"The shaman is a woman reputed to prefer the flesh of young girls to those of men," Aunt Sycamore said with as much objectivity as she could muster. "To be the shaman's apprentice, you will also have to share the shaman's bed."
"How do you know? The shaman has never needed an apprentice before. She is a woman of advanced years. How do you know she desires female flesh? How do you know she's even interested in sex at all?"
