He had not desired this mystic path. No, as a young man he had dreamed the dreams of all Nadir warriors: many ponies, many women, many children. A short life filled with the savage joy of battle and the grunting, slippery warmth of sex.
It was not to be. His Talent had denied him his dreams. No wives for Nosta Khan, no children to play at his feet. Instead he had been taken as a boy to the Cave of Asta Khan, and there had learned the Way.
Lifting his hand from the water he touched it to his brow, closing his eyes as several drops of cold water fell to the wrinkled skin of his face.
He was seven years old when Asta took him and six other boys to the crest of Stone Hawk Peak, to sit in the blazing sunshine dressed only in breech-clouts and moccasins. The old shaman had covered their heads and faces with wet clay and told them to sit until the clay baked hard and fell clear. Each child had two reed straws through which to breathe. There was no sense of time within the clay, no sound and no light. The skin of his shoulders had burned and blistered, but Nosta had not moved. For three blazing days and three frozen nights he sat thus within that tomb of drying clay.
It did not fall clear and he had longed to lift his hands and rip it away. Yet he did not . . . even when the terror gripped him. What if the wolves came ? What if an enemy were close? What if Asta had left him here to die because he, Nosta, was not worthy? Still he sat unmoving, the ground beneath him soiled with his urine and excrement, ants and flies crawling over him. He felt their tiny legs upon his skin and shivered. What if they were not flies, but scorpions ?
Still the child did not move. On the morning of the fourth day, as the sun brought warmth and pain to his chilled yet raw flesh, a section of the clay broke clear, allowing him to move the muscles of his jaw. Tilting his head, he forced open his mouth. The two reed straws dropped away, then a large chunk of baked clay split above his nose. A hand touched his head and he flinched. Asta Khan peeled away the last of the clay.
The sunlight was brutally bright and tears fell from the boy’s eyes. The old shaman nodded. ‘You have done well,’ he said. They were the only words of praise he ever heard from Asta Khan.
When at last he could see, Nosta looked around him He and the old man were alone on Stone Hawk Peak ‘Where are the other boys?’
‘Gone. They will return to their villages. You have won the great prize.’
‘Then why do I feel only sadness?’ he asked, his voice a dry croak.
Asta Khan did not answer at first. He passed a water skin to the boy and sat silently as he drank his fill. ‘Each man,’ he said at last, ‘gives something of himself to the future. At the very least the gift is in the form of a child to carry his seed onward. But a shaman is denied that pleasure.’ Taking the boy by the hand, he led him to the edge of the precipice. From here they gazed down over the plains and the distant steppes. ‘See there,’ said Asta Khan, ‘the goats of our tribe. They worry about little, save to eat, sleep and rut. But look at the goat-herder. He must watch for wolves and lions, for the flesh-eating worms of the blowfly, and he must find pastures that are safe, and rich with grass. Your sadness is born of the knowledge that you cannot be a goat. Your destiny calls for more than that.’
Nosta Khan sighed and once more splashed his face with water. Asta was long dead now, and he remembered him with little affection.
A golden lioness and three cubs came into sight on the trail. Nosta took a deep breath and focused his concentration.
The rearing rocks are part of the body of the Gods of Stone and Water, and I am one with the rocks.