Half Shaman: Back to Earth, #1

By Rita de Heer

Jeb is a half-trained shaman when she is imprisoned. Five generations previously, an onboard disaster caused a thousand people to be set down on Lotor, a baleful planet-construct, with the promise that their Ark Ship would fetch them once it had resolved its problems. The settlers survive Lotor's malicious intentions by aligning themselves with Earth-animal totems and training up a class of shamans to guide them home. Three years later, Jeb sees the Ark Ship in Lotor's skies. Lotor in the meantime has decimated her people. After contacting the Ark Ship using her shaman-learnings, Jeb escapes the prison and gathering the remnants of her people, leads them to the last shuttle that can take them off-planet to join the Ark Ship.

Half Shaman is the first instalment of a space-fiction series, Back to Earth. A novella of about 50 thousand words, its young protagonist is an older teenager, mature enough to fall in love, get married, and travel the high road in her story.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rita de Heer
• Release date: Jun 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201331078

Rita de Heer

Rita de Heer cut her storytelling teeth on inventing fantastical bedtime stories for her brothers and sisters, and intricate sagas for walking reluctant children to school. After a dozen years of teaching interspersed with bouts of travelling and motherhood, she studied creative writing at Southern Cross University (Lismore, NSW). Since polishing her speculative fiction ideas at the Online Writers Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, she’s been writing, writing and writing. There’s something very satisfying about building a world, inhabiting it with a people seemingly entirely unlike us, writing their lives and proving in the meantime their essential humanity. Originally from the Netherlands, she lives in the far northeast of NSW, Australia, surrounded by a wild nature garden. A fierce, black-and-white indoor guard-cat helps to keeps wild critters out of the house.

Book preview

1: Vigil

Jeb gulped water. She flailed and splashed, but sank to the top of her head. She hit a wall with her knuckles. Rose. Breathed, big gulps of air. Saw the sky, a round dark disk. No stars. Called. Help! Heard a couple of some-ones running away, their feet pounding on the hard dust of the central yard.

She trod the water faster to keep her head above it. Earth water was thinner than Lotor’s treacle-like stuff. The Earth-born ate Lotor’s water from a spoon. She bent her neck. Sucked in cool melt-in-her-mouth water with hardly a scent or flavor.

No cistern-woman would ever tolerate someone dunking in a cistern. Accidental or not, Jeb would be hauled to the magister and sentenced to waste-and-water-carrying for the rest of her time.

But this was a dream. Lucid dream, she’d had it so often. She stayed upright by paddling with her hands, hating the nightly drowning.

The sides of the dream-well tonight were dressed stone. Impossible. Lotor’s thirst for Earth’s water was legendary. Lotor would suck a human dry ... say a man wandered home drunk between a pair of villages and accidentally stepped from the stone path ... Lotor would’ve tossed aside his husk by the time the man’s friends came looking for him. As a child, Jeb always wondered how Lotor would suck a human dry?

But anyway, real cisterns had seamless metal envelopes inside their extruded-stone walls. How did this water not soak away between the dry-laid stones?

I OPEN MY EYES. ONLY while dreaming can I still be Jeb and even that isn’t my real name. I tip my head back to see the state of the day by the light in the window slot high in the wall opposite the door. The sky is grey. Therefore the time is dawn. Can I recall anything useful from the dream?

The fact that everything followed logically could mean something. I am getting better at lucid dreaming?

Clink.

Be still. Don’t move. I listen. I’ve been here for three years and now they put a prisoner in the next cell? Does it mean they have discovered me? Who I am? What I am? During my first week here, guards told me every day they’d be fixing the gap between the top of the share-wall and the ceiling. Nothing was ever done.

Suspicion flares through me. They left it undone purposely. It took them all this time to find the right informant? The gap is about the height of a ten-cube, enough that I hear every move the new prisoner makes. He snores now. Why not before? He snuffles sometimes. Am I meant to think that a guard broke his nose? To make me believe he is not in their pay?

Clink.

That tells me that he is in chains. He’s meant to be dangerous?

I grin silently and ferociously. He has to be dangerous to be next to me. I creep out of bed. Sling my cloak around me and silently slide down to sit cross-legged against the opposite wall. 

I heard you, you little fake, the prisoner says.

My cloak slithered down the wall. I laugh silently. I’m pretty sure we’ve never met. I doubt he’d call me names if he did know me.

You’re the shaman, he says. It’s up to you to save me.

What? I’m so astounded that I forget that I’m masquerading as a young man.

You’re the shaman that people out there are talking about.

The man appears not to have taken in the girlishness of my voice. I hug myself to hold still my wobbling heart. I’m not a shaman. I was kidnapped from the school after only three years training.

Half shaman, then. A fake. Couple of hundred of Lotor-born sleep in the right-hand yard. A Field of Dreams is their destination and you know what happens there?

I don’t say a word of what I know. All settlers know Soowei’s story inside out. She who was the daughter of the first Captain-of-the-Ship, saved herself from the first Field of Dreams and told her story to all who came after her.

The man continues without even taking a breath. The twenty-thirty Totems in the left-side yard are here for saving and though I’m not one of them, so am I. They’re saying that all the shamans know the way home and that there’s only the couple of you remaining. Process of elimination, wouldn’t you say?

My heart rolls over, I swear it. When I was taken three years ago, there were eighteen shamans still in the world. Oh tell me tell me what to do, someone?

There’s never any answer to such whims, of course. Next time I have a minute, I’ll have to recall Soowei’s story. Might be something in it that I can use.

The prisoner is the griping sort. Where I want to go too, he says. Home, I mean. I picked a fight so I could get in here alongside you, to get you going. If you do nothing, I’ll be taken to the Field of Dreams with the worn-out Lotor-spawn. So get your act together and save us.

I narrow my mind’s eyes. Him fighting in the Lotor-born yard or in the yard with the settlers makes a big difference to my suspicions as to whom he might be. I niggle at his logic. And if you hadn’t picked a fight?

The salt mines. No one comes back from them either.

With that he tells me he picked his fight among the settlers.

Clink. Clink.

Something going on outside, he says. Damn it, I can’t reach the window.

Every night I stand below the wide slot in the wall that serves as my window and look up to see the stars. I look for a fast-moving speck crossing the sky. The Ark Ship. Never seen it yet.

To see the exercise yards at the base of the building, I need to step up onto the piss-pot and grab hold of the bars in the slot that stop me escaping. I cling to them while I wedge my elbows into the sides of the blessed width.

The slot’s narrow vertical dimensions are to prevent a grown man crawling through. How would it even help him with the cell not on the ground floor? Never mind, a prisoner’s lot is not to reason why. I push my right toe into a depression in the mud-bricks worn there by every prisoner in this cell since the beginning of time. With my other foot I scrabble for a hold in the angle between the back wall and the side wall.

Spread-eagled, I can see out. The Lotor-born are being encouraged to rise, I say. They that need it, are helped quite gently. They are allowing themselves to be marshaled into lines. There’s a soldier doling out hunks of bread.

To chew during their walk, the prisoner says.

I contradict him. Their gates remain shut. It seems to me that they are being trained in the lining-up procedure. I am chilled by the sight of the Lotor-born cast out from their villages for being sick, lame, old and unproductive. They are being ministered by prison guards. I slide down to the floor. I sit down again, hunching my cloak around me.

If the guards don’t come to get me in the next three minutes, you’ll have till tomorrow to spare me from the salt mines, my neighbor says.

2: Wake-Up Call

We have till the following day.

Hear that? he says. Guards tramping up the stairs. Do something!

I hear them. There’s nothing gentle about the sound of guards and their echoes tramping. I wake into the moment. We will sing the Eagle’s Totem. Repeat each phrase exactly as you hear it. I don’t tell him which Eagle’s Totem we’ll sing.

A sing-and-response chant. Easy-peasy.

I begin. He soars with his great wings reaching across the ... His yellow feet clench the fish that is his ... I aspirate the final word of each phrase, needing that little silence to keep track of the guards marching along the stone corridor. The prisoner copies me exactly.

The guards stop halfway and make a lot of noise unlocking and opening a fiber-glass cell door. An awkward squawk comes from the person they thrust into the cell. They tramp back the way they came, and down the stone stairs again. My neighbor and I sing the rest of the Fishing Eagle’s lines: He grasps a problem as if it is prey. Tears it apart and consumes it.

When the guards come tramping up again, I begin to sing the Harpy Eagle’s difficult qualities. Lest the soul in a harpy eagle’s care founders ... The harpy tears through the self-imposed ... This time, I also hear a light syncopated hard-edged pattering in the echoing stairwell.

My fellow prisoner hears it too. They’re bringing up the fauns, he chants instead of the eagle’s words. They’re throwing them into the cells.

By my calculations the guards have just closed a door on one of the younger fauns—men with hooves said to have descended from genetically engineered stock from the Ark Ship—and stand silent.

Are they listening only to the prisoner, or to both of us? Was he singing to them, telling them what he is telling me? Is he in league with them and telling them he has my trust?

He does not have my trust.

The prisoner continues to sing, continues to rephrase the traditional replies. They’re just kids. Except for the faking headman. He’ll probably double-cross you.

The guards laugh as if they know exactly what’s going on. They have one up on me there, for I have no idea what the prisoner intends me to achieve with this information. I worry that the Lotor-born guards might begin to really listen, though the totem learning was never a secret. 

We’ll repeat the qualities of the Sea Eagle, I say.

This time the prisoner sings them proud and strong.

More tramping. The cell door to my right squeals open. Click clack go the feet of a faun into the cell. The door squeals shut and the guards tramp away, chatting and laughing.

You are a Sea Eagle, I sing.

And you were a Harpy Eagle. He laughs. Is that why you went to be a shaman? Because to be shaman you get to drop your totem for the chance to study all totems?

He knows that? By every word he speaks and sings, I learn things about him. He has a lot of volume to his singing, so he is strong and fit. I learn that he is taller than me from where his voice echoes against the wall between us.

He continues his teasing. He must have hated you who gave you that totem.

She, I say, wanting to hear the lengths he will go to, to discomfort me. A woman shaman gave me that totem. I don’t tell him what she added. With the Harpy Eagle’s qualities to live up to, you may turn into a decent person. At the time it sounded more like a curse than a compliment.

I hear no sound all night from the cells to the right (this is with me facing the cell door) not even via the gap under the door. Only when the porridge is brought next morning, do I hear a whisper like the rustling of someone pushing through dry corn stalks. I imagine that the head-faun speaks strength into his men though I can distinguish no words. 

The Sea Eagle tries to spoon his porridge up exactly when I spoon up mine. I try not to feel satisfaction at the times when he merely achieves an echo. The exact moment I put my spoon down after my last mouthful, he says, I’m Simmon. What do they call you? I was thinking that we should keep your half-title a secret?

Secret from whom? He knows me hardly at all and he expects me to tell him my name? And he thinks we should keep a secret together? Hmph, I think not. But still ... the totem singing unleashes in me a river of future possibilities. In one scenario I imagine someone recalling who I once was. My name then. Me barely recognizing it and therefore not answering. What if it was a life and death situation? That mustn’t happen. My name is Jeb.

So. Jeb, Simmon says. When you look at the gap above the wall between our cells, what do you see? What color is the light from over my side?

It seems to me that Simmon wants me to think that he speaks ideas as they come to him. And that this is meant to be just such an artless comment. Um, I say. I see the color of unpainted stone.

He confirms my observation. "The walls in here are unpainted stone. I see a glaring white stripe on your side. Why?"

I wonder if it is safe to tell him. Because everything in here is painted white. Floor, walls, ceiling. I need to peer from under a blindfold half the day to protect my eyes against the sun-soaked brightness. I add that detail to deflect him from ...

You’ve sketched the totems of course? Simmon says hungrily.

To deflect him from exactly that.

They teach you the totems in relation to the constellations, don’t they? he says. I’m imagining the wall covered with their glory. The Harpy Eagle at the top, her wings outstretched over the whole pantheon.

What would I use for a sketching stick? I ask though a fingernail is the only implement I had, or needed, to inscribe the constellations as they appear to anyone living on Earth. My half-training has readied me to imagine the lines between.

I shiver. What if the prisoner is an emissary of Lotor? One of the secrets taught at shaman school is that Lotor is a manufactured entity: a hostile self-learning construct that wishes to learn the map of Earth’s skies.

3: The Ark Ship in the Night Sky

Many nights already I’ve stood below the window gazing into the quadrant of sky where I was instructed that the Ark Ship might re-appear. Tonight I see a speck of light on a regular if speedy trajectory. My heart lurches. Is it the Ark Ship? I reach up and clutch the edge of the window hole. Can that fast-moving spot of light really be our Ark Ship? Lightness-of-being fills me: its other name is hope.

If it is, then the Ark Ship has repaired itself and is coming to fetch us, as it promised Soowei. The whole three years at the shaman school, I wondered why the Ark Ship even needs a human captain? At one time I worried about that more than anything. Today it again doesn’t make sense. The Ark Ship travelled to the place where it went for repairs and returned to the Lotor system all without the help of any human pilot?

The shaman school had eighteen teachers when I was taken. All of them were shamans and therefore all of them were the Ark Ship’s designated human crew. They were six-year trained in the shaman school’s model ship-control pods. Are they or am I even needed?

My father died early and next in line, I was deemed to be our Ark Ship’s rightful captain by my DNA. Deemed seems to mean as said by an authority. Rightful sounds as though somebody might try to take the job without rights.

Whatever the eventual need or not, my first concern has to be to get free. There’s a crow living in my belly saying dark things about that escape. I tell it that I am still alive. The crow tells me that I am nothing but a piece of flotsam, a scrap caught in a plot organized by Lotor.

I feel my lightness-of-being start to leak away. Who am I to hope? Hope too drains to my feet. Where I also keep