Free The Dead Man's Doll by Kathleen O’Neal Gear Page A

ground.
    The weeping stopped, and he felt a change in the air. She was staring at him.
    Asson sat down beneath the spreading branches and expelled a breath. “Please remember that not even the greatest shaman can help a soul that clings to this world as if its survival depends upon it. You must allow me to help you.”
    Crackling erupted as the frozen branches shifted and resettled. It startled him when images flashed through the forest. He glimpsed her running through the shadows dressed in a girl’s fringed dress, laughing with three friends. A chubby girl trailed far behind, panting and stumbling. Madyrut’s long black hair flew up when she jumped a fallen log. The winking light that appeared and disappeared was sunlight reflecting from the shell pendant she wore.
    The other girls feared Madyrut. He could see it in the glances they gave her. She was big and strong. When Madyrut was angry, she ripped their hair and lashed out with her fists. She could swing a club as well as any boy. And they all knew there was something wrong with Madyrut. Sometimes, when the winter nights were very dark and still, Madyrut rose up from her warm hides and ran outside into the icy wilderness with her bow to hunt voices that she said lived in bark and twigs. Even in the end, when she died in battle, her friends could not feel sorry for her. Though her village had searched for days trying to find her body, they hadn’t found a thing. Chubby had actually laughed out loud when Madyrut’s anguished mother cried, “You were always a rock-headed child! You had no business becoming a warrior! It’s your own fault you’re dead!” Then Madyrut’s mother had kicked the dirt, sending up a gray puff, and tramped away to the longhouse.
    For her laughter, Chubby had received a stern pinch from her uncle.
    Asson blinked to clear his eyes. The girls were still there, but young women now, stalking through the forest without Madyrut. Asson looked around, trying to find her. Finally, he saw her soul twinkling off to the side, mostly hidden behind a tree. About the size of a clenched fist, the light pulsed as though it had a heartbeat. She watched her friends, and heard them say,
I hated her, she was ugly, I’m glad she’s dead.
They laughed and nodded to each other.
    Barely audible weeping seeped through the air, or maybe it was just the breeze whimpering through the branches.
    â€œWhy do you still let them hurt you? Why does it matter now?”
    Asson shoved his black hair behind his ears, and reached down to untie one of the Spirit pouches from his belt. He placed the red pouch with green zigzagging lines before him. As he opened the laces and began to lay out the tools he would need, Wind Mother rushed through the forest, and leaves swirled upward before lightly fluttering down.
    â€œIs that why you weep? Are you afraid of meeting the girls in the Land of the Dead? Souls change once they reach the afterlife. They will be your friends, not your tormentors.”
    Best to cover my eyes and leave the things I’ve lost in holes in the ground.
    â€œThings locked in darkness have a way of slipping up through the cracks and coming after you with loud thumping feet. We have to dig up the lost things, all of them, turn them over in our hands, smell them and taste them, until we know them for what they are.”
    The soul was a thing of glimmers and whispers. Grieving, feeling lonely beyond human understanding, it could become obsessed, or even go mad. Madyrut’s had gone empty from longing too hard.
    â€œYes, I see her. You don’t have to point her out to me.”
    At the edge of the battlefield, the chubby girl, now a woman, was dragging a body. It was heavy, very heavy, for Madyrut had worked hard to develop her muscles so she could swing a war club and shoot a bow, both necessary to get her out of the girls’ world and into the proud world of warriors, where men valued her loyalty and her