The shaman strove for calm as dozens and then scores pressed in around the bright, life-filled shape of his spirit with its golden thread leading back to his body. The ancestors lusted to live again, even though only spirit could animate flesh and the ancestors were what remained when a spirit ascended to rebirth.

Still, if one of them could rip the thread from Tayan and follow it back to his flesh, it would possess the shaman’s body, leaving him formless on the spiral path, neither living nor dead and unable to ascend to Malel for rebirth or return to his form. Eventually, his wanderings would lead him to the Underworld and eternal torment. He would not be the first shaman lost in the spirit world.

And while he was lost, the ancestor would do its best to live again, even though it was but a memory. A half-life in a hollow shell, Tayan’s body stumbling around unable to communicate, food sickening in his belly until he fell down in the dirt and the ancestor was expelled with his flesh’s final breath.

Malel, guide my steps and my words. Malel, watch over me.

‘Ancestors, I honour you. I am Tayan, shaman of the Tokob, called the stargazer,’ he called, drumming faster now, louder, to better tie his spirit to his flesh. Young Jaguar had been one potential danger; the confusion of trails another; but this was the greatest. ‘I come for wisdom about the war, about the Empire of Songs. I come to ask what we must do for peace. Will any advise me?’

Anit, Tayan’s two-times distant father, drifted closer, the shape and feel of him familiar to the shaman. While Anit’s spirit had been reborn more than once since his death, the memory of him, the shape made of light and shadow, remained as an ancestor able to impart wisdom to his people.

Yet Tayan hesitated. Anit was one of the Tokob elders who had rejected the Chitenecah call for aid fifty sun-years before. He had been there when the Pechaqueh began their insatiable expansion and he had let Chitenec fall and its people be taken into slavery.

A low, disturbing chuckle rose from Anit’s form and Tayan realised he’d been lost in thought for too long – and that the ancestors could read strong emotion. ‘You wonder what help I can be, yes? And yet, how are we unalike, stargazer? You let Xentiban fall four sun-years past. You let Quitoban be overrun eleven years before that. Time’s circle turns and old mistakes are made anew. How Malel must grieve for us.’

Tayan let himself hear the beat of the drum in the flesh world. His way home. ‘Then your advice remains the same as it did when you lived: to abandon all others until the might of all Ixachipan is arrayed against us?’