Free Kalik by Jack Lasenby

cast to those eyes. The dribbling lip. The way the Showman bobbed his head to the crowd, nodding, whispering, promising to show them torture and death.
    I saw his curved wet lips again, heard the ingratiating lisp. In my mind, I heard him laugh, wet-mouthed, flaccid. I wiped my face, as if something wet had landed on it. “Idiot,” I said to myself. “You only saw him in a dream.” But I looked at my hand and saw a fleck of spittle there, as if it had flown off the lips of somebody standing beside me while I slept.
    “You’re imagining things! And now you’ve scared yourself with a story!”
    Nip stood, front feet on my bunk, whining, licking my hand. She could tell I was scared.
    “It was the Carny, Nip! But he couldn’t have been in here or you’d have barked. It was just my mind playing tricks on itself.” Nip whined again, pressed against me as I got off my bunk, opened the door.
    “Nobody there,” I said to her, but Nip crouched, whined, and stared. The hairs bristled along her neck as, floating in the dark, I saw the Carny’s face. The wet loose lips. Little beard. The sore-looking eyes that would not look straight at me but dodged, rolled, and slid sideways. The stench again – a swamp reek. And, as I stared at the Carny, his face blurred, merged, changed into the beautiful mask of Kalik smiling on the edge of the darkness. I ran, but he vanished. I listened and heard running feet. So he had been there, watching me: Kalik!
    I could never see him again without seeing the Carny, I realised. And I wondered if that unclean spirit had followed me from the Land of the White Bear – disguised as Kalik. Then I must have closed my door, fallen back on my bunk, because it was morning, and I was waking, remembering.
    I understood the warning of the dream. I must escape. Take the Salt Children with me. And again I remembered the Shaman warning against superstition yet encouraging me to rely upon intuition.
    “Is it superstitious to act upon a dream?” I asked aloud. But the dream had confirmed that Kalik was evil, that in some sense he was the Carny, the servant of the Droll.

Chapter 12
Promise and the Secret of Fire
    Contradiction of the dream, Kalik was at my door next morning. Laughing, friendly. How could I confuse this beautiful face with the Carny’s? Or last night’s cruel eyes watching through the dark? I blushed at my silly imaginings.
    “Still asleep, Ish! Spent the night with some girl, have you?” His mockery light on the air between us.
    “Idiot!” I mumbled at myself.
    “Dreamer!” Kalik charmed away my superstitious fears. “Come on! The bears are on the konny berries. They’ll be fat.”
    We hunted that day up the valley below Grave Mountain. There was plenty of sign in the konny gullies. Nip picked up several scents, but each one petered out. “As if they disappeared down a hole in the ground,” said Kalik. Rueful, but still amused.
    We left the canoe on the beach behind Hekkat’s statue and hunted the south side of the river next morning. Clearings lifting all the way. On one a black bear sat up, a branch of konny berries dropping from its open mouth. It stared at Nip. Something clicked in its mouth, as if it chewed on rocks, and it surged out of sight, as if the earth lifted itself and slid uphill.
    Kalik laughed when Nip came back, whining, telling us about it. “We need a pack to stop them,” he said. I thought of his dog I had killed, but Kalik shook his head. “We’ll breed up a pack. Then we’ll stop some bears!”
    We separated to hunt our way back. On a clearing under a white bluff, the foot of the mountain, I surprised a young stag, two tines standing straight up from his skull, a spiker. My arrow stood out from his belly, a clumsy shot. He would run for hours, unless the broad head cut into a great vein. I sat, my back against a tall grey rock. If he wasn’t chased, he’d lie andstiffen up, and I’d put another arrow into him.
    The rock warm, I drowsed in the sun.