Listen then, for I am a soulscaper and have the gift of the story tongue. I am Rayojini, daughter of Ushas, daughter of a skilled line. I have the way of it; into the mind like a bat, I go, and out again, dragging Fear in a net, for that is my profession. I was born in Taparak and, for a long time, could imagine nowhere different. It is a hot, dry place, but the Taps milk the sky-cloud of moisture, channelling it down through the mummified claws of the forest’s hands. Inside the mountain, below the city, there are lakes of icy water, clear and fragranced with the cloud spirits’ soul-scent, and close to the lakes are the sponge-root farms; terraces of pale, phosphorescent fungus.
As a child, I ran through the bough-streets of Taparak, my imagination used only for play. I, as had my playmates, had heard our elders speak of the soulscape, but to us, it was a distant country. We visualised it as a land of monsters and fabulous people - our childish ideas not too far from the truth - and once, in our games, I was crowned queen of this place. Pretty Heromin, son of Sarcander the Wanderer, became my slave for a day. Our soulscape was a place that shimmered with the inchoate buds of later carnal blossoming. As such, it was instrumental in our development.
Sometimes, Ushas, my mother, would call me to her side from play, and I would go clambering like a moth-grub from branch to branch, among the higher reaches of the city, helping her to gather the sweet-clay of scraper bugs - insects that live within the ossified bark - which we took home to make into bread and cakes. Then a client might come and blow upon our door-chimes, and my mother would send me outside again, lighting the resin-bowl before I’d even left the hollow.
Until the age of eight years, I was a simple girl, with no more thought in my head than the sun-gilded notions of a child at play. I was not insular, having many friends, imaginative (though not excessively so) - as was required of a budding soulscaper - and certainly not prey to any sons of the Fear. All this changed on my eighth birthday. I remember it clearly even now. Ushas and I had home-hollows root-vicinity at that time; it was long before my mother gained ascension within her guild. We often talked of the day when her soulscaping accomplishments would secure us a more prestigious high drey among the clouds, although our discussions were a game of wishes rather than a real desire to move home. The hollow was more than enough for our needs and, though a long way from the sky, convenient for ground level amenities and dew-gathering. We lived alone because my mother had never wanted to marry particularly - I did not know who my father was - and for her, one child was enough.
Ushas roused me early and I stretched into the morning knowing that today was the day I would at last learn something of my mother’s professional secrets. Today, I would step off the narrow, twisty path of childhood, with all its secret haunts, and put one foot upon the wide road of womanhood. It would be a long time, I knew, before I advanced more than a few paces up this exciting, new road, but at least it was a beginning. All potential soulscapers underwent a ceremony when they reached a certain age. It was a confirmation of our parents’ desires for us to follow in their footsteps, although it was not irrevocable. However, because of the nature of the rite, changes of heart in later life were rare.
I was to be chanted into the future, by none less than my mother’s guild-scryer, Vasni. Vasni was an extremely powerful individual and, even while he still lived among us, a legend among the Taps. At fourteen, he had castrated himself and had consequently experienced extraordinary visions; most of which had prophesied specific events, all of which had come to pass. He was not only a scryer but also a superlative soulscaper in his own right. Now, he was getting old, so his travelling days were over. In Taparak, work is slim for a soulscaper - there being so many of us - which is why we travel so widely. Since his retirement from active range-guild service, Vasni had to content himself with scrying, but he still held a high position within the guild as a mark of respect for his talents.
Ushas dressed me in new trousers and shirt for the occasion, neatly embroidered with the symbols of our family and of the family profession. I was allowed to rinse out my mouth with bitters-root solution - a terrible taste - but it dyed my teeth and tongue a beautiful cyclamen pink colour with indigo shadows. This was the ceremonial mouth decoration of the soulscapers in our trunk-community and, when I smiled, everyone was sure to know that I too shared this honoured occupation. I had known for some time that my life would begin to change after this event, and had begun to prepare myself for it. The days of play would be past, and I must discipline myself to a deep, and often incomprehensible, education. Naturally, even though I was aware of the hard work required of me, I looked forward with pleasure to the new status I could enjoy. Even trainees in the craft were accorded respect in Taparak - from those outside the soulscape, as well as from those within. Because most of the city’s population had some connection with soulscaping, (even if they were not fully fledged scapers) I did not expect instant elevation to a higher position within the community, but I would no longer be treated as a simple child. Also, I would have access once more to companions who had already undergone this rite of passage. The lovely Heromin, for example, had recently knelt to the scry, and I missed his company.
Ushas marched me out into the main root thoroughfare, striding along in her brightly dyed, layered skirts, telling anyone who paused to greet our day that she was taking her daughter, Rayojini, to Vasni the scryer. ‘Her distance is to be endowed this morning,’ she said, a ritual phrase. As a response, people pinned shards of polished bark into my hair.
Our beliefs might seem strange to those who hale from other lands, where it is understood that no person has one future alone. It might seem primitive or wayward that, in our society, a person’s life is chosen for them at the age of eight, when so many (an infinity in fact) of possible futures await them. Much later in life, one man was to say to me (a lover, so he was frank) that it is as if the Taps cut away all but a sliver of their children’s lives, and that to condemn them to one future alone was a torment worse than slow murder. He was a foreigner, of course, and what he said might have been true in the mindscapes of foreign folk, but to us, it is the way, and no scryer ever blew out a future that caused a parent to break down in despair. Vasni and his kind are compassionate as well as wise. My mother and I were happy enough, swinging along through the morning; me with my bright, beautiful smile, and Ushas with her news for everyone.
Vasni lived high in the city, on the seventh of the central trunks, no less, and two tiers down from the aesthetes. Ushas and I walked the thoroughfare from Great Root to Spiral, where we entered a pulley carriage and were drawn aloft. The young man tending the pulley made bright and hopeful remarks to my mother, but she just smiled and said, ‘I promise you my daughter instead, when she’s a mind.’
I was flattered but didn’t, for a minute, believe either of them would remember the message for that long.
Ushas was always very lovely - right until the day she died, which was from a poisoning she picked up somewhere off continent, long after I’d climbed my own bough. That day, she was radiant; her long black hair twisted into ropes and greased in place, with sparkling metal pins threaded through the lobes of her ears. She leaned back over the side of the pulley-cart, her hair-ropes swinging free, hanging onto the cables. She had strong, bony features, perfectly sculpted, and wiry muscled limbs. Her skin had the matt, silky sheen of black plums. How she loved life in that body. In later years, I was glad she had died before she lost her beauty; it would have distressed her so.
We jumped out onto Vasni’s platform and Ushas blew heartily onto his wind chimes to tell him we were there. A boy, wearing a ceremonial robe of russet cloth, came out from the hollow to answer us, and took us into the smoky chamber where Vasni worked. All the light-boles were curtained with yellow sacking, round which the most vigorous beams of sunlight streamed in penetrating spears. What with the smoke and the sharp rays, and the row of elderly scry-women mumbling in the corner, it was a strange place for a child to find herself. Only two of my relative
s, apart from my mother, had been able to attend the ceremony. Brothers of my mother, older men of (what seemed to me) vast experience and therefore intimidating, they squatted silently near the scry-women at the back of the chamber, still dressed in travelling coats as if they’d had to hurry to arrive on time. They were strangers to me; I hardly knew them.
Vasni rocked in front of his smoky embers, legs crossed, palms on each knee. Even as an old man he was handsome, run to forest thinness rather than the matronly fat carried by many of the castrati scryers. He wore a loose robe of stained orange; the symbols of his family and guild burned into the cloth. His arms were covered in fading tattoos, his brown-skinned skull shaved but for the liana-braids hanging from the back of his head. It was said that, as a youth, he had been stunning in appearance. One of my friends, a girl named Aishar, had once told me Vasni kept his genitalia, mummified, in a wrap of bark and silk, just to remind himself how much he had given up, back then. I had also heard that he was scorned for ending his line in that way; beauty is appreciated among our people, and the most favoured are expected to breed and thus continue their bloodline. I had seen Vasni before on ceremonial occasions, and he had once blessed me by touching my face, but he seemed a strange and awesome figure to me this day, and I shrank back behind my mother. She gently put her hand on my shoulder, and murmured a few words of encouragement.
Vasni leaned over the embers of his fire and inhaled the smoke deeply, before raising his head and saying, ‘Ushas, my child, let me greet you.’
My mother gently pushed me from her skirts and went to lean over the fire. She inhaled the smoke and then put out her tongue, onto which Vasni smeared a fingerprint of ash, or what looked like ash. Then he pressed his thumb onto her forehead and chanted a line or two. My mother responded with a soft murmur of notes, and then sank down into a cross-legged sitting position opposite him.
Vasni nodded in satisfaction and slowly raised his head again, fixing me with his steady stare. He beckoned. ‘You, child of the child, approach!’
Cautiously, I went towards the embers. Behind Vasni, the row of scryers started to chant, swaying from side to side. Vasni’s boy began to beat out a simple rhythm on a carapace drum. My uncles began to hum softly; a low, deep, masculine sound. Slowly, the sense of ritual stole around the smoky chamber and entered my mind and body. The outside world was eclipsed from my mindscape; rarely have I experienced such moments of total reality. My mother sat with bowed head, intoxicated by the fumes, although I did not know that then. I went around to where Vasni was sitting and, at his direction, sat down by his side. He smiled at me and, in the dim light, the indigo dye on his teeth looked as brown and tarnished as old blood. For a while he spoke to me of soulscaping, the history of our people, our responsibilities and vocations.
The Tappish are descendants of the great Deltan Kings of ancient times, a guild of healers who colonised the island. Being scholars and mystics, as well as healers, our ancestors had sought to probe the secrets of the human mind. They discerned two areas within the psyche, which are very closely linked; the mindscape, which is the realm of conscious thought and decision-making, and the soulscape - a deeper, more inaccessible area - in which the hidden desires and compulsions, the most esoteric symbols of the entire human race, reside. ‘Within the soulscape,’ Vasni said, ‘dwell all the gods that ever lived, all the thoughts that have ever been thought, all the memories of the human race.’
Perceiving interconnectedness between all living things, the ancient Taps believed that every individual was somehow linked through the abstract country of the soulscape. By understanding the soulscape, it might be possible to understand human motivation. The fortunate discovery of the properties of certain herbs and their parasites had been instrumental in developing the soulscaping craft. Through prudent use of the mind-altering substances they had found - burning the crushed wings of ‘scaper beetles’ - our ancestors had been able to prove their theories to be correct. They had learned how to expand their awareness and actually enter the soulscape themselves. By doing this, they found they were able to have a direct effect upon the soulscape’s reality: they could change it.
The soulscape, Vasni told me, can be visualised exactly like a vast city. ‘Your personal scape,’ he said, ‘can be seen as a many-roomed house within this city. Each of us has our own house there, and most people never open their doors to look outside. They do not know how to. Yet we Taps are able not only to go outside our personal dwellings in the soulscape, but also to enter other people’s dwellings too. We can travel wherever we wish to, on the streets and in the parks of this place, always aware of each house’s relation to the city, perceiving the greater picture. And, because we can see the houses from the outside, as it were, it is easy for us to discern where they are damaged and how to repair them.’
Through soulscaping, we can heal the human mind of most hurts and, because the majority of illnesses are connected with the mind, we can often cure the body of physical ailments as well.
‘But healing is not our only task,’ Vasni said, raising a stern finger. ‘No. We are hunters too.’ He spoke to me then of the great Fear that haunts the minds of humankind, always lurking in the shadows, seeking for weaknesses that are doors into the soulscape. Finding ingress, the Fear breeds madness, hysteria and weird moon-cycle delusions. While soulscapers travelled abroad, plying their trade, it was also their duty to be alert for the Fear, to pursue it into the soulscape, corner it and slay it.
The alarm I felt at this news made me confident enough to ask questions. ‘What is the Fear? What does it look like?’
‘Nobody but a soulscaper can see the Fear,’ Vasni answered, leaning towards me. ‘And they look for it in the eyes of their fellow creatures. A good soulscaper can always see the Fear, looking out, if they have trained themselves to recognise it. As to what it is, I can only say this: it is a very old thing, perhaps a renegade fragment of the soulscape itself that has escaped into the world. Once a person is infected with it, only a soulscaper can drive it away.’
‘Is it ever dangerous for us?’
Vasni pondered my query. ‘If there are dangers, they are those of ill discipline, carelessness and pomposity. A dedicated, well-schooled soulscaper would rarely accost something they could not handle. But... there are always exceptions. It is important for you to apply yourself diligently to your training.’
How exciting my future sounded! I would be trained to enter this subconscious realm and work with the creatures found there. I would be a healer and huntress. It seemed as if, one day, I would tread the soil of my invented playtime worlds, for they existed within the soulscape. All imaginative creations lived in this place, where myth was tangible and could be experienced through all the senses. I listened earnestly to everything Vasni said, wanting to please him, to show him I was capable of following my mother’s path.
He finished his narrative with a closing gesture; hands spread out, palm downwards, extended from breast to arm’s length. ‘Now, we shall see,’ he said. ‘Lean forward, child.’
His long, hard fingers curled around the back of my neck. I was puzzled for a moment and then, with unexpected force, he pushed my head down towards the glowing embers at our feet. I remember that I struggled. I remember the glow of the charcoals suddenly becoming large and livid in my eyes, looming towards me like fiery boulders. My mother, still slumped with her head upon her breast, didn’t even look up. ‘Relax, child,’ Vasni said, behind me, in a sibilant voice. ‘Trust me and breathe. Breathe deep.’
Close to, the smell of the embers was bitter and stifling; the heat scorched my throat. My eyes began to sting, and I blinked them furiously, hot tears falling down onto the charcoal; turned to steam, no doubt, even before they met the heat. I coughed, and it seemed that my whole body convulsed; the cough came from somewhere very deep inside me. It was terrible. I was afraid that Vasni was going to burn my face and that my ritual was to be one of scarring and torment. Vasni was pinching the nerves in my neck so tight
ly, I could not move at all. The only sounds I could make were insignificant mews, barely audible.
Just when I was sure I was about to pass out, if not lose my eyes and skin to the heat, Vasni yanked me backwards, right back, and thumped me in the centre of my chest with his free fist. I gulped air, so disorientated that I tried to swallow it, like food. Vasni pressed me gently onto the floor, into the rough, gritty folds of his perfumed sacking-mats. ‘Lie still!’ he commanded.
I lay on my back, trying to remember how to breathe properly. Vasni inhaled loudly, and I could visualise great columns of smoke being sucked off the fire and into his nostrils. His voice, when he spoke, was full of the power of the fire, and the women nearby bleated affirmatives between each slowly-intoned word. ‘Now,’ he boomed, ‘I will scry for the child’s future and, as part of this ceremony, invoke those who will watch over her in this life; the guardian-pursuers.’
The scryers behind him began to keen in high, warbling voices, and I lay there, with eyes squeezed tight, my fists clenched across my belly. My head was full of the potent smoke; I had never felt so dizzy, and my limbs ached in a strange way that was both uncomfortable and pleasant. What would happen now? Who were the guardian-pursuers? I had not heard of such people before.
Vasni chanted in ancient Tappish for a while and then slipped into the modern tongue. His voice was perfectly pitched; no crack of age, no falter of lips and tongue. ‘Heed us, unseen ones,’ he began, his voice sonorous above the crooning of the women. ‘We bring to you a fledgling soulscaper. May one of your number assign their soul to hers. May they urge her to excellence in life, protect her from the Fear, drive her ever to inquiry, fill her dark corners with their shadow, be with her from this moment until she leaves the flesh and crosses to the soulscape in body and mind. Hear us and approach! Reveal yourselves in this one instant to the child Rayojini, daughter of Ushas! Make yourselves known, oh unseen ones. This I, your servant, Vasni, request; I, who gave you my manhood for eternity. Hear me and approach!’