The Shawl of Snowflakes, Chapter 2 Temur's Dream

 .........somewhere in the Heartless Waste

Khenbish, the Shaman of the Chambui Tribe, was sent a dream. He was aware: what he saw, bode ill. He dreamt of a newborn left in the snow, in the tracks of the moving tribe. There was no question why her ashamed parents abandoned her: her eyes were covered by white phlegm of a blind-born. Her little body was too small, too stunted to promise a healthy child. Snowflakes circled through the air, settling on the child's bluish skin and did not melt. Soon, she would be covered by a shawl of snowflakes from head to toe. Soon. It was a lucid dream, which Khenbish could shape at will, but nothing was out of the place. He turned from the corpse and started after the sledges of his people.

Snowflakes still fluttered through the air when he went out of the yurt with a mug of steaming herbal brew. The splitting headache confirmed the dream to be prophetic, and he swallowed the burning medicine in big gulps. Khenbish had to think about the child's significance. He closed his eyes to ward off the light of the pale sun: even this was unbearable.

"My father's father."

The voice that addressed him was diffident, but familiar: his own flesh and blood, his descendant.

"Speak, my son's son," the shaman said. "I met Karesha's priestess today," Temur started hesitantly, "she wills the tribe to pay homage to the Frostmaiden." The light blazed Khenbish. He struggled to pry his eyelids open, to look at his grandson, but the snow blindness was upon him. So he hooded his eyes and asked painfully: "Tell me all, my son's son. There is danger to our people in this meeting. Grave danger."  Khenbish could see again, by the time Temur had finished his telling.

"Where," the Shaman asked urgently, "where is the shawl she gave you?" From the look on the Temur's face, he felt that he had done a great wrong: "With my wife. She found comfort in it for her belly, and warmth." "Fool," the shaman's voice thundered with power, "Oh, fool. Are you not my son's son? Had you not enough wisdom to come to me first, with such a thing?"

"I… there was a stag-kill to bring to the yurt. How could I come before you, my father's father, after the many-day hunt? How could I pay you proper respect if I had not touched the floor of my yurt?"

The shaman cringed. He could not fault Temur for doing what he did, in accordance with every custom of his people, but he wished he could. What, by the raven wings, possessed this man to take Karesha's gift to his yurt. How did he allow himself to be claimed for Karesha?

"Come inside," Khenbish said stiffly to Temur, and motioned him into the yurt. It would tax him beyond recovery, the shaman knew, to walk with a non-initiated one through the veil, chasing after the prophetic dream, but that was no time for him to be at ease. A torch, a fire that would burn bright against the cold of Karesha, had to be found or forged. Temur watched in awe as his father's father, the shaman of the Black Ravens, laid out two blankets made of the totem bird's feathers on the floor, and set a brazier – an oval plate on crow's feet - between them. Khenbish motioned for Temur to sprawl himself on the blanket. When Temur hid under the fir-tree, in the blizzard of the day before, he knew that the snow might bury him.

This was a comfortable yurt, made of the woolen blankets and deerskins, and smelling of herbs and firs not unpleasantly. Yet here he felt more apprehensive settling on the black blanket, too short for his lanky legs, than under the branch-and-snow roof of his shelter. Temur turned his face toward the old shaman, but he found little comfort. The old men whom Temur had welcomed in his yurt; the old man who smoked a clay pipe watching the white northern skies long into the summer nights; the old man who stood up in the tribal councils and announced his will as firmly as a chieftain would - that old man was gone. Instead there was a shadowy presence on a dark etched blanket.

It chanted to the fire on the oval adamant plate and watched the fumes and ashes of the herbs he fed to the flames. The last thing Temur saw before the time parted before him was Khenbish, taller than a giant, with a pair of black wings unfurling behind his back.

And then Temur found himself standing, in the tracks left by his people's sledges, and a raven was perched on his shoulder. By his feet was a child of his body, his little daughter, left in the snow.

There was no question why she had to be abandoned: her eyes were covered by white phlegm of a blind-born. Her little body was too small, too stunted to promise a healthy child. Snowflakes circled through the air, settling on the child's bluish skin and did not thaw. Soon, she would be covered by a shawl of snowflakes. Soon. He turned from the corpse and started after the sledges of his people, to find his wife. There she were, sitting on the sledge, still weak from the childbed. Khenbish turned to him, hearing the snow squealing under his foot, and he groped her shoulder roughly: "You will bear another child this spring. A strong son. That what's Khenbish said." She turned away, subdued. The raven on his shoulder preened his feathers and croaked: "Sister, sister."

Vaguely, Temur realized that he was walking with his father, in the winter before his mother bore him under her heart. Then his wandering spirit latched onto another soul, which had gone beyond the veil of time. A cold soul of ice and power.

The High Priestess of Karesha, Cachlia, did not sleep or take food for five days. For five days, she did not need sleep or food, led by the vision and by her Mistress' will. Now she knelt by a blind, naked child in the snow. The child, little girl, lived, and smiled at the High Priestess, catching snowflakes into her toothless mouth. "Let your will be done, Frostmaiden," Cachlia announced to the winter, her voice chiming in the cold air like icicles.

 The High Priestess covered the newborn's head with the wide sleeve of her robe, in a gesture of blessing. The pale blue fringe looked brighter than the summer skies against the white of the garment and snow and that which the child was lovingly wrapped into. Cachlia lifted the girl into her hands and gathered the blanket, no, a shawl of snowflakes around the light body. For five more days Cachlia walked alone, carrying the blind child, until the procession of the Priests in white robes met her by the foot of a glacier, and escorted her to the Ice Temple of Karesha.

The Ice Gates, the crystal arch, soaring fifty feet above the edge of the ice circus. The Temple buzzed with life, all of its inhabitants running out to meet Cachlia and to follow her. Without stopping, without caring to make summons, because she knew that they would all come, the High Priestess walked through the courtyard and into the Ice Hall, the heart of the Temple build to hold all the faithful of the Frostmaiden. Once inside, Cachlia put her precious burden on the altar, in the view of every priest, acolyte and servant that manned the temple and who now stood in attendance on her. The babe turned her small head toward the gathering, and the white phlegm of her eyes came alight. Underneath, the shiny eyes of crystal were revealed. The tiny mouth opened, and instead of a newborn's cry, came the voice that one hears in the wind of the snowstorms. "I am Karesha's own eyes. I have come to serve."

The High Priestess Cachlia bowed to no one in the temple; she kneeled so rarely that she'd almost forgotten how to do it. Yet in front of the girl she prostrated herself on the ice floor.

The rustle of robes and muted prayers told her that the whole assembly, from the full priests to the last acolyte that polished the glistening floors, followed her example.

It was then that the High Priestess felt that for ten days she took neither food, nor sleep. "Leave her," Cachlia heard, and floated toward the gates, behind which there was nothing, but the shining snow.

Still blinded by the light, Temur left Cachlia to her afterlife, and hang in the darkness for a while. Then, suddenly, he was with the child priestess Hallveig, when she was growing into womanhood amidst ice and reverence, and under a great burden. As she matured, her own self emerged, as it would in any child, and tried to root herself. From very early on she knew, that the price of being for her was to know no desires, but the glory of Karesha, and a will fully subservient to her deity's.

At times, it felt that it would crash her, but she went about, cool and collected, as a High Priestess should. And they bowed after she'd passed them in the ice-walled halls. But there was another annoyance. A raven circled above her head continuously, asking and probing every minute: "Can you do that? Or this? Are you shielded against fire? Do you…" Tired of these questions, Hallveig ran to her blue chamber where frost flowers, she draw with her breath, were more beautiful, than the real ones encased in the ice cubes. She crawled into her bed and pulled the white shawl over her head.

As she was falling asleep, free of the raven at last, a leathery hand pushed her back onto the black blanket. "A few more questions, Temur." And again, she was strolling purposefully through the halls, and the raven was drilling her.

Then, Khenbish led Temur away from his sister's past, to his own body and into the day before. Not until Hallveig the Ugly draped the shawl around his shoulders, did Khenbish let him return to the blanket in front of the adamantine brazier. Dizzy and weak, the hunter stared at the diminishing flame, where his own figure, and Hallveig, and even his dog were turning into unrecognizable wisps.

Khenbish the Shaman was no longer a winged giant. He was an ancient man, and his fingers curled inward, digging into his palms, like claws. His whole body was shaking. Fighting a fainting spell, Temur found a clay pot filled to the brims with black paste that the shaman put out before the séance, and fed some of its content to the old man. When the shaman's eyes brightened, and he was able to take the pot and the wooden stick, used to scoop the sticky mass out of the pot, from Temur's hands, Temur fell asleep where he sat. At length, he came to, feeling neither well, nor refreshed, and was greeted only by Khenbish's back and the grinding noise of a pestle. "Father of my –" Temur started finally, lifting his head and shoulders of the floor, but the shaman made a gesture with his hand that ordered him to silence. He obeyed, sagging back onto the feather blanket.