Departures

SECRET NAMES

I haven’t the slightest idea whether this story is fantasy or science fiction. I think it might have fit well in the old Unknown, which often walked the fine pixilated line between the two genres.

Madyu was boiling up a batch of willow-bark tea when Jorj, the tribe’s chief hunter, poked his head into the shaman’s tent. “What do you want?” Madyu asked crossly, not caring to be interrupted in the middle of his spells. He was convinced they added to the pain-relieving value of the tea.

“We will be setting out shortly, wizardry sir,” Jorj answered. He was a big, broad-shouldered man of about forty, with strong features and a brown beard just beginning to go gray. His skill with a bow had made him rich; he wore a silver quarter from the Old Time in each ear and owned a necklace strung with many more. He did not have it on now, for fear of a mistimed jingle spooking the prey. He went on, “Some magic to bring the beasts to us would be welcome.”

“Oh.” The spells on the willow-bark tea would have to wait: it was no cure for the ache of an empty belly. Madyu said, “I’ll set to work at once, Jorj Rainbowstar.”

The shaman kept his voice low, but Jorj’s head whipped around in alarm all the same. No one in the tribe save Madyu and perhaps a favorite woman had any business knowing the hunter’s secret name; should an enemy somehow come into possession of it, he might use it to wreak all sorts of baneful sorcery.

Jorj said, “I hope the gods are more in the mood to listen to you than they were last moon-quarter. We came back almost empty-handed.”

Madyu knew the chief hunter was obliquely criticizing him for having used his secret name. He dipped his head to acknowledge the rebuke. “I shall do my best, I promise you. Magic is chancy and imperfect, as you no doubt know.”

“Oh, aye. If it weren’t, we’d all be fatter than we are, and that’s a fact.” Jorj laughed a big, booming manly laugh that finished the job of putting the shaman in his place. Madyu, who

was scrawny, clumsy, and nearsighted to boot, felt his ears turn hot. Laughing still, Jorj left the tent and started shouting to the rest of the hunting band.

With a last mournful look at the bronze tea kettle, Madyu decked himself in the raiment required for hunting magic. He, too, had a coin necklace. His, unlike Jorj’s, was made of quarters silvery on the outside but with a copper center. Most shamans preferred those to silver. For one thing, they had to have been made by sorcery; no modern smith could turn out anything like them. For another, the numbers they bore were consistently bigger than those on silver coins. Each shaman had his own explanation for why that was so, but all agreed it had to have some sort of magical import.

Madyu bowed to north and south, east and west. He patted the ground to show his reverence for the earth powers, waved his hands through the air to draw the attention of the sky gods. Then he began the first prayer of the ritual, the one to make keen the noses of the hunting hounds.

He was a conscientious craftsman and did his best to ensure the hounds’ success. Not only did he call the beasts dawgs after the fashion of his own tribe and those closest to it, he also named them sheeyas, as did the KayJun clans to the east, and perros, as did the Makykanoes to the west and south. He did not know or presume to guess which language the gods spoke, but preferred to cover as many bets as he could.

He went on to bless the hunters’ boots to ensure that they slipped through plain and woods without making a sound. He also blessed their bows and arrows to make the shafts fly straight and true. Again he used all three local languages, and a couple more besides. When tribes met to swap pots and horses and women and metal, shamans generally went off by themselves and traded names. Things were, after all, merely things, and manifested themselves only in this world. But their names, now, their names held power, for names echoed through the spirit world as well.

At any rate, true names, secret names, created those echoes. Madyu remembered the war he’d headed off by ascertaining the secret name of a rival tribe’s chieftain and threatening to do dreadful things to the man’s ghost unless he called off his warriors.

While never easy, that sort of coup was at least possible with human beings, who acquired their secret names from one another. But who could be sure what the secret name of a dog was, or a willow, or a shoe? That was why shamans swapped names back and forth: in the hope of hitting the one true one among the many.

Having done his utmost with the hunters’ animals and gear, Madyu cast the best spells he knew on the beasts they hunted. As he incanted, he thought that any visiting shaman would have admired his technique: He had the cup made from the tip of a wild bull’s horn, the turkey feather, the white-haired deer tail, the rabbit’s foot, and the squirrel skin all ready where he could reach them without interrupting his ritual. He summoned the prey by every name he knew, no matter how exotic. As he did whenever he said the word, he wondered what tribe called a simple, ordinary squirrel a bepka.

He was hot and tired and covered with sweat by the time he finished the hunting magic. Heat and sweat had to be lived with in Eestexas. Legend said that in the Old Time people could make the air around themselves cool whenever they wanted. Madyu, a thoroughgoing realist, did not believe the legend for a minute: if people had ever enjoyed such a useful skill, they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to lose it.

When he went outside, he squinted against the glare. The sun beat down with almost physical force. The tribal encampment was nearly deserted, with most of the men at the hunt and the women out in the fields. Children ran between tents, raising hell. One of them stopped to grin at Madyu. “Look, look, look!” he squealed, pointing proudly. His grin had a gap in it.

“I see, Hozay,” Madyu answered gravely. “What did the tooth fairy leave you?” As he spoke, his hand twisted in the gesture that kept the fairy from stealing teeth that weren’t ready to leave their owner’s head.

Hozay reached into his belt pouch and took out two good iron arrowheads. “Look, look, look!” he said again.

“Very nice indeed.” Madyu fought down a stab of jealousy. The tooth fairy hadn’t left him anything so fine when he was a boy. But then, Hozay’s parents were close kin to Ralf, the chief, and the tooth fairy seemed to favor people who were well off. Those that have, get, even from fairies, the shaman thought resentfully.

He couldn’t stay mad at Hozay, though. For one thing, he looked almost irresistibly cute with his missing tooth. And for another, he didn’t stick around as a focus for Madyu’s pique-he dashed off yelling after his friends.

The shaman walked over to the creek, stripped off his linen shirt and buckskin leggings, and dove in. He came up snorting and blowing and at least a little relieved. Then he went down again, swam underwater over to a rock on which a red-ear turtle was sunning itself. The turtle stared in disbelieving reptilian horror when he splashed up in front of its pointy nose. It leapt off the rock and into the creek, frantically churned away. In the water, it was more graceful than Madyu.

He swam a while longer, then went back to reclaim his clothes. He discovered they were not there to be reclaimed. None of the small boys was in sight, either, which gave him more than a little reason to suspect the clothes had not ambled off by themselves. The shaman said a couple of choice things under his breath, added a couple of choicer ones out loud. The shirt and leggings failed to reappear. Swearing and dripping, Madyu went back to his tent without them.

A few of the women had come back to the encampment for a midday meal. They giggled when they saw Madyu. Ralf’s tribe had no strong nudity taboo, nor did its neighbors; given the Eestexas climate, nudity was often more comfortable than clothes. But a wet, angry, naked shaman had obviously just fallen victim to a prank, and so became fair game.

Among the gigglers was Hozay’s older sister, Neena. That only made Madyu more furious. Some shamans eschewed marriage, believing a celibate life made their magic stronger. Of those who did take a woman or two, most chose from outside their own tribe. That was not a law, but it was fairly strong custom: knowing as he did the secret names of his tribesfolk, a shaman might be tempted to try using sorcery to win a girl’s heart.

Madyu would never have stooped to such a thing, however pleasant he found the picture of auburn-haired, softly curved Neena sharing his tent. He resolved to go courting at the trade fair a couple of moons hence. But despite that resolution (which he had made, and broken, before), he did not care to have Neena laughing at him. Even a scrawny, clumsy, nearsighted man has his pride.

As the shaman had expected, his missing garments lay close by the tent. The imps who’d absconded with them-and if Hozay wasn’t one of them, Madyu would go out and eat grass for supper-knew how far they could go in provoking him. Had leggings and shirt vanished for good, some small backsides would have had an encounter with the switch. Madyu sighed as he got dressed: this one was a clean win for the boys.

Toward evening, a commotion announced the return of the hunting band. Madyu put away the Old Time book he’d been trying to decipher ever since he’d traded another shaman a six-tool pocket knife for it. The man was a cheat; if Madyu ever learned his secret name, he’d regret the day he was born. The book’s faded cover proclaimed that it had to do with medicine, but instead of talking about how to fix a broken leg or what to do about measles or lockjaw, it went on and on about genes and enzymes and other such incomprehensibilities. Madyu was sometimes tempted to use its pages for kindling, but keeping it around and looking through it every now and then reminded him not to be too eager in a deal.

With some trepidation, he came out of the tent. If this hunt proved as bad as the last one had been, Jorj was liable to clout him into the middle of next week. But the chief hunter wore a grin as wide as a longhorn’s span. When he saw Madyu, he clouted him, all right, but it was a happy clout, not an angry-one. The shaman staggered just the same.

Jorj caught him, steadied him, and patted him on the back. “Look at the fine wizard we have here!” he shouted to anyone who would listen-and he hadn’t even been into the blackberry wine. “Look at all the ducks we brought back, thanks to his spells.”

“Ducks?” Madyu quacked, but his startled voice was drowned by a chorus of cheers from the rest of the hunters and from the women of the tribe. Madyu looked from one smiling hunter to the next. Sure enough, they were carrying two or three or even four fat ducks apiece, with some of the shining feathers now dark with blood.

“Hardly ever seen such a big flock before,” Jorj boomed. “They were tipping up in that pond-you know, the one near what’s left of the Old Time road-and they were so busy eating, they barely noticed us shooting at ‘em till they were dead. Wonderful spells, Madyu! I wish they’d work that well all the time.’’

“So do I,” Madyu said in a hollow voice. He’d magicked rabbits and squirrels, turkey and cattle and deer-he hadn’t said word one to the gods about ducks. But here they were, dozens of them. The tribe would feast for a week.

He saw Neena looking right at him and cheering as loud as anybody. When he smiled at her in a tentative way, she smiled back, not tentatively in the least. All at once, the world seemed a brighter place. Maybe he hadn’t asked the gods for ducks, but if they sent ducks his way, he’d take credit for them.

He puffed his chest out as far as it would go (standing there beside Jorj, he still looked like nothing much). “I tried something new this time,’’ he declared. “It had to do with genes and enzymes.”

“Never knew ducks wore jeans,” Jorj said. Joke as he would, though, the meaningless and therefore necessarily magical words impressed him. “Whatever those en-things are, use ‘em some more. They were something else.”

“I’m glad,” Madyu said, bemused still.

By then the women of the tribe were busily plucking the ducks, putting aside feathers for ornament and for fletching arrows, and the soft underdown for pillows, quilts, and jackets. As casually as he could, the shaman strolled over to Neena and asked her for one of the metallic green feathers from a male mallard’s head. Their fingers brushed for a moment when she gave it to him. He felt a spark, and from her friendly expression, she might have, too.

Before long, the savory odor of roast duck drove even lustful thoughts from his mind. Some of the women took out crocks of currant jelly to accompany the feast. Crisp skin crackled under Madyu’s teeth as he bit into a juicy thigh; rich hot fat filled his mouth. He ate until he could hold no more, then licked every finger clean.

The rest of the tribe stuffed themselves. Dogs yapped and snarled over gnawed bones thrown in the dirt. A little girl hit her baby brother over the head with a drumstick. He toddled off, crying. Their mother paddled her. She ran after him, crying even louder.

“Here, wizardry sir.” Jorj passed Madyu a skin of wine. “Always goes good.”

Madyu took a pull, then another one. He smiled, nodded his thanks, and belched enormously. Not to be outdone in politeness, Jorj belched back.

Then the chief hunter said, “Oh, what with all the ducks and everything, I almost forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Madyu asked absently. He was watching Neena again. Even if she had been his woman, he was too gorged to imagine anything but watching at the moment. Yet watching was a pleasure, too, albeit a small one.

Jorj’s answer brought back his full attention:”We came across an Old Time building nobody’s ever seen before, far as I know.’’

“Did you?” The descendants of the handful of people who had survived the Big Oops (a term that had as many interpretations as there were shamans), had been picking their ancestors’ bones for the past two hundred years. There were a lot of bones to pick, though. Every so often, somebody came across one with meat still on it. Madyu glanced at the dogs, which were still quarreling over remnants of roast duck. He wondered if the godlike men of Old Time would look at his scavenging tribesfolk the same way. No matter. “Where is it? How do I get to it?”

“It’s on a patch of fairly high ground that overlooks the pond where we took all those ducks, thanks to your magic.” Jorj thumped Madyu on the back and almost knocked him over even though he was sitting on the ground. “It’s surrounded by oaks and creepers. I suppose that’s why nobody noticed it before.”

“Oh.” Madyu’s spirts plummeted. So many Old Time buildings were nothing more than tumbledown ruins, hardly worth going through. By the way Jorj had spoken, he’d hoped for something better from this one.

The chief hunter was better at noting animals’ vagaries than those of his fellow men, but he saw how disappointed Madyu looked. “Cheer up, shaman. I didn’t mean there are oaks and creepers growing up through the building. They’re just around it. One must have blown down in the last storm, to let us see the walls through the new gap. The building is in halfway decent shape, maybe better. Part of the roof still looks to be on.”

At that, Madyu did feel better. If it was true-let the gods make it true! He bent his head, muttered a quick prayer. Then he said, “Will you take me to it tomorrow?”

“Me?” Jorj frowned but finally nodded. “I suppose I owe you that much after you brought us all those lovely ducks.”

“What I find in there might make me a better wizard yet,” Madyu declared. The ducks hadn’t been his doing, but if Jorj insisted on giving him credit for them, he wasn’t too proud to take it.

After a breakfast of duck soup and porridge, Madyu followed Jorj into the woods. The chief hunter moved as confidently as if he were walking down the Old Time road not far from camp. Toting a spear he wasn’t used to, Madyu blundered along behind him, peering this way and that at every noise. He didn’t know why he bothered; he never could see what made them. He thanked the gods he didn’t have to go out hunting all the time; he would have been the laughingstock of the tribe.

Because he didn’t hunt all the time, he was soft. He’d been puffing and panting for quite a while when Jorj stopped and pointed. “There it is. Do you see?”

“No.” Madyu had to walk a fair way in the direction Jorj’s finger gave before he could make out a smear of lighter color against the greens and browns of the woods.

“I’ll come along, if you like,” Jorj said, but he didn’t sound as if he meant it. The magic that often lingered in Old Time buildings was dangerous even to shamans. The chief hunter wanted nothing to do with it.

“You don’t need to,” Madyu told him. If anything worth having did rest inside the building, he wanted it all to himself. But after a moment he added, “Could you stay within earshot in case there are snakes instead of demons in there?”

“Fair enough,’’ the chief hunter agreed. He reached into the pack he wore on his back. “Figured you’d say that, so I brought along a songbird net. The ducks won’t last forever, however much we wish they would. Pigeons and starlings aren’t bad eating, either.”

While Jorj looked for a likely spot to string up his net, Madyu scrambled over the moss-covered trunk of the fallen oak. When he made it to the other side, he let out a soft whistle. Jorj had been right: the newly revealed building wasn’t badly overgrown at all. After a moment, he saw why: it was surrounded by a stretch of the same hard black tarry stuff the men of Old Time had used to make their roads.

He’d seen other buildings protected that way. They never failed to puzzle him. For a road, the black, hard stuff was almost ideal; even if it was too hard for horses’ hooves, it kept the roadway from being overgrown. But why offend the earth powers by slapping it over what could have made a perfectly good vegetable plot? It made no sense that he could see.

For the moment, though, whys did not matter. The black stuff had cracked here and there, allowing some bushes to push up through it, but enough remained to hold the worst of the woods at bay. Windows bare of glass stared blankly out at Madyu like dead men’s eyes. Hefting his spear, he advanced on the building.

He tried the door once. When it didn’t open, he went over to one of those windows; Old Time locks were tougher by far than any made these days. Had he not known for a fact that the men of Old Time enjoyed both godlike power and godlike goodness, that might have made him wonder about their integrity.

Before he scrambled in through the window opening, he paused to sniff. His nose caught none of the rank order of cat piss, so no cougar-otherwise known as puma, catamount, or, though Eestexas had no mountains, mountain lion-had denned in there any time recently. Just to stay on the safe side, the shaman thrust in his spear and poked around as far as he could reach. Nothing screeched or hissed or writhed under the point, so he scrambled in himself.

His boots scrunched on drifted leaves. He stood still for a couple of minutes, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom. Then he looked around to see what sort of building this was.

A few feet ahead stood a closed door, the frosted glass panel inset into its upper half still miraculously intact. When Madyu saw that door, hope that he’d come upon a real find began to flower in him. If this place had been looted before, the door would have been ajar, the glass broken, or, more likely both.

Gilded letters marched across the glass. Some had peeled away, but the shaman could still read the words they made: veterinarian’s office. All at once his breath came quick and short, as if he and Neena lay joined together on his pallet. In the Old Time, veterinarians had been shamans specially charged with healing animals. An unplundered veterinarian’s office might yield-

“Anything,’’ he said aloud, in soft, wondering tones. “Anything at all.”

He went up to the door and twisted the knob. He let out a whoop when it refused to turn-would a looter have locked a door behind him when he was through? It seemed anything but probable. He smashed the glass with the butt of his spear. After the rest of his searching was done, he would gather up the sharp shards to use in cutting blades and as arrow points. Nothing from the Old Time went to waste.

He reached into the opening he’d made and opened the door from the inside. The chamber thus revealed was better lit than he’d expected. A quick look showed why: part of the roof had fallen in, baring the office to the sky-and the rain.

“Oh, a pestilence,” Madyu groaned. Everything that had lain anywhere near floor level was long years ruined. Cobwebs lay thick upon every shelf. They covered countless jars of pills. Madyu would have fought shy of those no matter what. Old Time medicines, whether meant for animals or men, were likelier to kill than cure when given by someone who did not thoroughly understand them, which, in the days since the Big Oops, meant everybody.

The shaman went over to a low cabinet with a great many drawers. He pulled one open, tearing more cobwebs. He felt like shouting-in fact, he did shout-when he discovered it was full of little sharp knives of several sizes and shapes. They were as bright and unrusted as if they’d been forged the day before. He scooped them out of their neat pigeonholes, stuffed them into the stout leather sack he’d brought for booty, then tried another drawer.

This one held hollow needles attached to glass cylinders. No one these days knew why the men of Old Time had chosen to imitate rattlesnake fangs, but they had. The shaman took a few of the bigger ones; sometimes women in the tribe used them to stick sauces deep inside a joint of meat. Other than that, so far as he knew, they had no use.

Other drawers were full of things that had no use whatsoever that he knew about. A lot of them, however, were made of metal and glass, so they were valuable even if not useful in and of themselves.

But next to the cabinet stood a real prize, a metal bookcase full of books. Or, rather, almost full of books: those on the bottom two shelves had at some time in the unknown past been chewed up and turned into rats’ nests. The bookcase, though, was sheltered from the elements, and had kept its smooth coat of paint. Rodents hadn’t been able to get at the volumes on the upper shelves.

Madyu pulled one out, dusted it off, held it close to his nose to read the title on the spine: Collected Numbers of the Journal of American Veterinary Medicine. That looked as if it might be interesting. But when he opened the volume, the collected numbers flaked to pieces under even the gentlest touch.

“Pox-ridden paper!” Madyu growled. So many books from Old Time were like girls who teased but wouldn’t deliver; instead of giving up the precious information they contained, they crumbled away to nothingness.

Scowling at yet another such betrayal, the shaman pulled out another volume, this one also labeled Collected Numbers. He opened it even more cautiously than he had the first. All at once, he grinned in startled pleasure. The numbers collected here were not what the title claimed. Bound inside the spine were half a dozen copies of an Old Time magazine with which he was already familiar, one whose pictures displayed not only incomprehensible ancient artifacts like cameras, CD players, and Toyotas, but also a good many perfectly comprehensible ancient pretty girls in various interesting states of undress.

He closed this volume with the same care he’d used to open it, then stowed it in his leather sack. He had more than a little hope that he would be able to get it safely back to the encampment. Unlike the real Journal of American Veterinary Medicine, the magazines that had hidden behind the lying binding were made from a shiny, coated paper that was better at withstanding the ravages of time than was the more common kind.

The shaman plucked out more books, searching for others printed on the coated paper. He found a couple and put them into the sack. Several others, made from the ordinary variety, disintegrated as soon as he opened them. He murmured a prayer of regret at having destroyed so much irreplaceable wisdom, but did not know what else he could have done.

He picked up the heavy sack, closed the office door behind him, and left the ruin by the window through which he’d entered. He was surprised to note how far the sun had crawled across the sky; he hadn’t paid attention to the shadows as he ransacked the Old Time office.

He hallooed for Jorj, and felt a good deal of relief when the chief hunter hallooed back a moment later. Jorj had the knack for moving quietly through the undergrowth; in a couple of minutes, he simply seemed to appear in front of Madyu out of thin air. He pointed to the bulging leather sack. “Ha! No demons, eh?”

“None that I saw, anyhow,” Madyu answered. He’d only meant to be strictly accurate, but saw he’d also succeeded in frightening Jorj. Well, that wasn’t such a bad thing. Hiding a smile, he went on, “No snakes, either.”

“Good, good. What do you have in there, anyway?”

“Some little knives of good steel, some hollowed needles, glass and metal junk, and some books.”

“Books,” Jorj’s voice informed the word with scorn. “Why bother bringing out books, shaman? What good are they?’’ Like almost everyone else in the tribe, the chief hunter was illiterate.

“You’ll like some of them. Pictures from Old Time.” Madyu’s hands shaped curves in the air. As they did so, he thought again of Neena.

Jorj’s eyes lit up. “You’ll trade some?”

“Why not?’’ Madyu said. “I see you’ve also done pretty well for yourself.’’

More than a dozen dead songbirds, their little yellow legs bound together with twine, hung head down from Jorj’s belt, along with a possum and a couple of chipmunks. “Could be worse,” the chief hunter allowed. “I just wish there was more meat to each one. But as long as I do even this well, we won’t be down to eating grubs and grasshoppers the way we had to a couple of years ago.”

“The gods be praised for that,’’ Madyu said, and meant every word of it. Grasshopper stew was vile; no matter how long the insects cooked, they crunched horridly between the teeth. And Chief Raff had been about to run him out of the tribe for weak magic before the famine finally broke. Madyu never had figured out why the gods got so angry at him, or why they finally decided to relent.

Shaman and chief hunter walked back to the encampment in companionable silence, each well enough pleased with his day’s work. Thanks to his tasty burden, Jorj got the big half of the wishbone’s worth of greetings, but Madyu created some enthusiasm among the men when he told them about the pictures of Old Time girls he’d found.

Neena happened to be standing close by just then, and let out a sniff loud enough to make him regret for a moment having come across the volume with pictures. Soon enough, though, thoughts of profit ousted regret. It wasn’t, worse luck, as if Neena were his woman.

After supper but before sunset made reading impractical, Madyu settled down with the other two books he’d brought back from the ruin. One of them, its title page proclaimed, was about the diseases of cats. He read three or four pages, then put the book down with a grunt of disgust. It was as incomprehensible as the one with which the other shaman had cheated him.

He wondered if he was the problem, but shook his head. He read pretty fluently, and the Old Time language wasn’t that far removed from the English his tribe spoke (he never had figured out why the language bore that name; he didn’t know of a place called Eng anywhere within shouting distance of Eestexas). But this book was crammed full of words he not only didn’t know but couldn’t define from context: What did distal mean, for instance, or pancreatic function?

He thought about trading the book to a Maykano; maybe the peculiar words were Spanyol, not English at all. If they were, someone from a southern tribe might get more out of the volume then he could. And if not, well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d diddled someone in a trade.

He picked up the other volume with a certain amount of resignation, convinced from the outset that it would be even worse than the one he’d just set aside. Even its tide looked like a nonsense word: Taxonomy. “Tax-on-uh-me?” he said, sounding it out. He had some idea what taxes were-tribute that you paid to your chief, or that a weak tribe paid to a strong one next door. He couldn’t see why anyone would want to write a book about that, or why a veterinarian would need it once it was written. He also doubted Old Time folk had had to worry about anything so mundane as taxes.

But, being a stubborn sort, he decided he would keep going in the book until he found out what its name meant-names, after all, were powerful. He turned to the preface and found, to his surprise, that not only did it tell him what he wanted to know, it did so in a fashion he had little trouble understanding.

Taxonomy, he gathered, was a way of organizing living creatures by how they were related to one another, something like the genealogical charts some shamans drew for their tribes. He whistled softly to himself. The Old Time folk thought big if they aimed to keep track of how everything was related to everything else. He admired their presumption without wishing to emulate it. Just to begin with, how did they propose to keep track of all the different names every living thing had?

Two paragraphs further on, the preface told him: binomial nomenclature. That formidable pair of words almost made him put down the book then and there. But the preface went on to explain what it meant: two names, one generic, to tell what sort of creature an animal was, and the other specific, to tell exactly what sort it was.

That had the shaman scratching his head again. But this Taxonomy book, despite its intimidating title, did a much better job of explaining things than did the volume on the diseases of cats. It gave the example of the dog-which, for no reason Madyu could see, it called Canis familiaris-and the wolf-which it styled Canis lupus. The generic name they shared said they were closely related to each other, while their different specific names said they weren’t the same.

“Makes sense of a sort,” Madyu admitted. It made enough sense, at any rate, for him to keep reading. His eye lit on a sentence in the next paragraph and would not go away: The so-called scientific name attached to any organism remains constant throughout the world, enabling researchers to communicate effectively and accurately regardless of their native languages.

He stared at those words until darkness made them illegible.

If they meant what he thought they did, he’d just stumbled across the biggest Old Time treasure ever, bigger than gold, bigger than jewels, bigger even than the usable firearms and ammunition that still turned up every once in a while. If the whole world had once recognized a single (or rather, double) true appellation for every animal and plant, was he not holding a book full of secret names?

He wanted to run screaming through the encampment, shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” He wanted to get drunk. He wanted to get laid. He wanted to beat Chief Ralf at checkers and then laugh in his face. He wanted to do all those things at once. But none of them, or even all of them at once, would have given him a tenth part of the exaltation he felt sitting there quietly in the dark.

He did his best to keep a sense of detachment. For one thing, he might have been wrong, though he didn’t think he was. For another, even if he was right, he didn’t know which secret name went with each animal.

That night, he slept with the book beside him on his pallet. When he woke up, the first thing he did was make sure it was still there. When he saw it was, he couldn’t have been happier even if it had been Neena there, looking back at him with her big green eyes full of love. He weighed that thought, was a little surprised to find it true, and stroked the book’s faded cover as tenderly as if it had been Neena’s soft, smooth skin.

Without bothering to break his fast, he opened Taxonomy. He felt like cheering when he discovered that many of the scientific names contained therein had more familiar ones alongside them, though the latter were written in brackets and in smaller letters, as if to show they really weren’t quite as good or as scientific-a word to conjure with, he thought, and smiled to himself inside his tent-as the impressive products of binomial nomenclature.

Navigating through classes, orders, families, and genera took some doing, but before too long he found that the white-tailed deer’s scientific name, its secret name, was Odocoileus virginianus. He said it several times. It filled the mouth in a way that white-tailed deer never could. Saliva filled his mouth, too, at the thought of venison roasted with bacon and wild onions.

He left Mammalia and went over to Aves. He ran his finger down each column of names until he found what he was looking for. “Meleagris gallopavo,” he intoned reverently, and then again: “Meleagris gallopavo. “ Not only were the secret names true, they were also beautiful. He knew he’d never be content just to say turkey again.

At this point hunger, excitement, and a bursting bladder drove him outside. After imagining the rich savor of Odocoileus virginianus and Meleagris gallopavo, duck hash made from rather stale duck proved a disappointment. He was even more disappointed to see Jorj sitting around fletching arrows. “You’re not going out today?” he asked in tones of despair.

“Hadn’t planned to, no,” the chief hunter said. His big, blunt fingers picked with surprising delicacy through a pile of feathers. He found one that suited him and began trimming it to fit the groove in an ashwood arrow.

“But if you do-if you give me time to make a proper magic, a scientific magic first-if you do, you’ll bring back deer and turkey both,” Madyu said. Jorj stared at him; he’d never made that definite a prediction before. “I promise,” he added, thinking he’d already said enough to ruin himself if by some disastrous mischance he was wrong.

“How can you promise what we’ll catch?” Jorj demanded. “You don’t know what we’ll stumble on out there in the woods. You don’t know the first thing about what hunting is like; you’re only good for stumbling over yourself.’’

“But I know what I’m talking about when it comes to magic, I truly do,’’ Madyu said. The hunter shook his head and started to go back to feathering his arrow. Desperately, Madyu added, “Did I help you bring in all those ducks?” He knew the real answer to that was no, but since Jorj didn’t know it, he played the card without compunction.

Jorj looked at the bright blue duck feather he held in his hand, then back up at Madyu. Slowly, deliberately, he set aside the feather and put away his tiny fletching tools. When he got to his feet, he towered over the shaman. “All right,” he said. “We’ll hunt. But if you’re wrong-if you’re wrong, wizardry sir, you’ll not have the chance to make many more such mistakes. Do you understand me, Madyu?”

“I understand you-Jorj.” The tiny pause there should have reminded the chief hunter that Madyu knew and might have used his secret name. It was not as good a threat as Jorj’s big, hard, bunched fist, however. Even with a secret name, magic had a way of going wrong (Madyu suddenly wished he hadn’t remembered that just before the most important conjuration of his life). Brute force was inelegant but always worked.

Still shaking his head, Jorj went off to gather the hunting band. Madyu hurried back to his tent. He began to incant as he’d never incanted before; whatever his doubts and worries, they washed away in ritual chants and passes, dances and prayers.

Again and again he intoned the majestic secret names he’d learned. When he held the white-furred deer tail, his cry was, “Odocoileus virginianus!” When he pranced with a turkey plume, “Meleagris gallopavo!’’ rolled trippingly off his tongue. As an added touch, he tried to pronounce the secret name as if he were a turkey himself. “Gallopavo!” he gobbled. “Gallopavo!”

Being a meticulous man, he did not forget some magical encouragement for the pack of Canis familiaris that coursed with the hunters. The dogs had as much to do with a hunt’s success as the men, sometimes more. They were more susceptible to magic, too, as they lacked the wit that sometimes blunted it when it was turned against people.

At last he had done all he could do. He stayed in his tent regardless, not caring for the loss of dignity that would come from the women of the tribe watching him pace nervously back and forth while he waited for the hunters to return.

Staying inside didn’t end up helping his dignity, either. Hozay and some of the other boys started chanting, “Madyu don’t dare show his face, show his face, show his face…!” With the insane persistence small boys would sooner show in mischief than in honest work, they kept chanting it for a good part of the afternoon.

Madyu looked through the Taxonomy book again. If the secret name for pest or infernal nuisance appeared therein, however, he could not find it.

After much too long, Hozay got tired of singing his old song. If he’d kept quiet because of that, Madyu might possibly have found it in his heart to forgive him. Instead, though, he came up with a new one, which he proceeded to bellow out in a boy’s falsetto that hurt like a sore tooth: “Neena says Madyu’s too skinny! Neena says Madyu’s too skinny! Neena says-”

The shaman’s temper went up in flames like a dead, dry pine struck by lightning. He burst out of the tent, aiming at nothing less than Hozayicide. Neena’s little brother ran like a rabbit, dodging Madyu’s every effort to lay a hand on him. And as he ran, he kept singing his new and infuriating one-line ditty.

Finally, puffing and defeated, Madyu drew to a halt. At almost the same time, Hozay decided to shut up. The one had nothing to do with the other. Hozay had heard-as Madyu did, too, a moment later-the hunting band coming back from the woods. Little boys know instinctively that adults do not take kindly to their mocking other adults. This does not stop little boys, but it will sometimes make them cautious.

Adults, however, commonly do not care in the least about punishing mockery when they are the ones dishing it out. Madyu stood alone in the middle of the encampment, waiting for the hunters’ scorn to land on him-and to obliterate him. The way the rest of the day had gone, he knew his sorcery had to have failed.

Jorj came into the clearing, spotted the shaman. Pointing at Madyu, he looked back over his shoulder and yelled, “Here he is!” His bass bellow made Madyu cringe-by the sound of it, the hunters would not be content with mere insults. They’d want his blood. Had he thought running would do any good, he would have run.

Shouting, the rest of the hunting band followed Jorj into the open space around the encampment. They roared down on Madyu. He needed a few seconds to realize they were cheering him, not cursing.

The ones who came out of the woods first were carrying turkeys, some more than one bird. The ones who came later had tied gutted deer carcasses to spearshafts that they bore on their shoulders, two men to a spear. All in all, they were bringing back three or four times as much meat as they usually did even on a good day.

Jorj, who as chief hunter did not have to haul prey, hurried into his tent. He came out with his necklace of silver quarters, which he proceeded to throw around Madyu’s neck.”Best magic since Old Time!” he shouted, loud enough to be heard in the next encampment. “The turkeys waddled right up to us, the deer just stood there waiting to be killed, just the way our great shaman said they would.”

Madyu hadn’t quite said anything like that. He hadn’t really expected to achieve anything like that; he thought he knew what magic could and couldn’t do. But I never made hunting magic with real secret names before, he thought dizzily. He let a big grin stretch itself over his face and did not bother setting the record straight.

“Well, wizardry sir, what do you have to say for yourself?” Jorj boomed.

The shaman blurted the first thing that came into his head: “Let’s eat!”

The hunters cheered again, louder than ever. Boys and girls came running to gape at the enormous catch. Among them was Hozay. Madyu was so full of triumph that gazing at his tormentor only made him wonder how much the tooth fairy would bring if he knocked all the little monster’s teeth down his throat.

The racket the hunters and children made brought the women in from the fields early. They stared at the young mountain of meat, too, and then sent up their own screams of joy. Jorj yelled, “We’re rich, do you know that, rich! We have more food than we know what to do with. We have so much, we can smoke some and sell it to tribes that aren’t lucky enough to have a shaman as clever and-what was that fancy word you used, Madyu? — as scientific, that’s it, as ours. We can-”

Madyu stopped listening about then, because Neena threw herself into his arms, kissed him, and exclaimed “Oh, Madyu, you’re wonderful!”

The shaman came up for air stunned and gasping, but his hands knew what to do. They grabbed Neena here and there. An instant later his idiot mind yammered that she would surely pull away-after all, hadn’t she said he was too skinny? But she didn’t. In fact, she snuggled closer. Off to one side, Hozay looked as if he were about to be sick. That felt almost as good to Madyu as Neena’s warm and yielding softness. By way of experiment-he was a scientific man-he kissed her this time. Not only did she return the kiss, but, he noticed dimly, Hozay looked even sicker. Since the experiment was successful, he repeated it.

Emboldened further still by the results of the second trial, he whispered, “Will you come to my tent tonight?”

“Of course I will,” she whispered back, her breath moist in his ear. Then she went on, “Why didn’t you ask me a long time ago?”

He stared at her. “I–I didn’t think-”

“Why ever not?”

“Well-well-” The more he pondered that, the more he wondered himself. He found only one answer that made any sense whatever: “After all, Neena, I know your secret name.”

“So what?” She tossed her head so her shining hair flipped back over her shoulder. Then she pointed to one of the gutted deer carcasses. “Did you use it in a spell on me, the way you did with those?”

“Of course not,” he said, indignant at the very suggestion. “I ‘d never do such a thing.’’

“Well, then,” she said, as if that settled everything. By the way she was looking at him, maybe it did. Her premise wasn’t even slightly scientific; Madyu knew that. But however scientific he thought he was, he was a shaman first, and also knew logic sometimes didn’t matter. This felt like one of those times.

His arms tightened around Neena again. She sighed against his cheek. He nodded happily, pleased at the logical confirmation of his illogic. Sure enough, this was one of those times.