The Year of Rice and Salt

One of the girls danced by holding an egg painted red, one of their toys, and Fromwest stared after her, startled by something. He looked around, and they saw that the cut on his head had started to bleed again. His eyes rolled, and he slumped as if struck, and dropped the flute. He shouted something in another language. The crowd grew quiet, and those nearest him sat on the ground.

'This has happened before,' he declared in a stranger's voice, slow and grinding. 'Oh yes – now it all comes back!' A faint cry, or moan. 'Not this night, repeated exactly, but a previous visit. Listen we live many lives. We die and then come back in another life, until we have lived well enough to be done. Once before I was a warrior from Nippon – no – from China! ' He paused, thinking that over. 'Yes. Chinese. And it was my brother, Peng. He crossed Turtle Island, rock by rock, sleeping in logs, fighting a bear in her den, all the way here to the top, to this very encampment, this council house, this lake. He told me about it after we died.' He howled briefly, looked around as if searching for something, then ran off to the bone house.

Here the bones of the ancestors are stored after the individual burials have exposed them long enough to the birds and gods to have cleansed them white. They are stacked neatly in the bone house under the hill, and it is not a place people visit during dances, and rarely ever.

But shamans are notoriously bold in these matters, and the crowd watched the bone house needling light through the chinks in its bark walls, sparking as Fromwest moved his torch here and there. A huge groaning shout from him, rising to a scream, 'Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!' and he emerged holding his torch up to illuminate a white skull, which he was jabbering at in his language.

He stopped by the fire and held up the skull to them. 'You see it's my brother! It's me!' He moved the broken skull beside his face, and it looked out at them from its empty eye sockets, and indeed it seemed a good match for his head. This caused everyone to stop still and listen to him again.

'I left our ship on the west coast, and wandered inland with a girl.

East always, to the rising sun. I arrived here just as you were meeting in council like this, to decide on the laws you live by now. The five nations had quarrelled, and then been called together by Daganoweda for a council to decide how to end the fighting in these fair valleys.'

This was true; this was the story of how the Hodenosaunee had begun.

I Daganoweda, I saw him do it! He called them together and proposed a league of nations, ruled by sachems, and by the tribes cutting across the nations, and by the old women. And all the nations agreed to it, and your league of peace was born in that meeting, in the first year, and has stayed as designed by the first council. No doubt many of you were there too, in your previous lives, or perhaps you were on the other side of the world, witnessing the monastery that I grew up in being built. Strange the ways of rebirth. Strange the ways. I was here to protect your nations from the diseases we were certain to bring. I did not bring you your marvellous government, Daganoweda did that with all the rest of you together, I knew nothing of that. But I taught you about scabbing. He brought the scabs, and taught you to make a shallow scratch and put some scab in the cut, and save some of the scab that formed, and to go through the smallpox rituals, the diet and the prayers to the smallpox god. Oh that we can heal ourselves on this Earth! And thus in the sky.'

He turned the skull to him and looked inside it. 'He did this and no one knew,' he said. 'No one knew who he was, no one remembers this act of mine, no record of it exists, except in my mind, intermittently, and in the existence of all the people here who would have died if I had not done it. This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.'

The next part of his address was in his own language, and went on for some time. Everyone watched attentively as he spoke to the skull in his hand, and caressed it. The sight held all in its spell, and when he stopped to listen so raptly to the skull speaking back to him, they seemed to hear it too, more words in his own birdlike speech. Back and forth they spoke, and briefly Fromwest wept. It was a shock when he turned to speak to them again, in his weird Senecan: 'The past reproaches us! So many lives. Slowly we change, oh so slowly. You think it doesn't happen, but it does. You ' using the skull to point at Keeper of the Wampum – 'you could never have become sachem when I knew you last, 0 my brother. You were too angry, but now you are not. And you '