One day Eyes came to her. She was led by Ant-eater. Gaunt as they were, Mother could see that they wanted to couple.
Ant-eater was not mocking now, but supplicating. And now it would be a kind of love, or pity, on the part of the young man, for the tattoo Mother had crudely carved into Eyes’s face had become infected by the stagnant lake water. Its spiral shape was barely visible beneath a mass of swollen, leaking flesh that covered one half of the girl’s face.
But Mother frowned. This match wouldn’t be right. She stood and took Eyes’s hand, prizing it away from the dismayed Ant-eater. Then she walked the girl through the scattered people until she found Sapling. He was lying on his back, gazing up at an empty sky.
Mother pushed Eyes into the dirt beside Sapling. He looked up at Mother, baffled. Mother said, “You. You. Fuck. Now.”
Sapling looked at Eyes, obviously trying to mask his revulsion. Though they had spent much time in each other’s company with Mother, he had never shown any sexual interest in Eyes, even before her face had become so badly disfigured, nor had she shown any in him.
But now, Mother saw, it was right that they should couple. Ant-eater would have been wrong; Sapling was right. Because Sapling
understood.
She stood over them until Sapling’s hand had moved to the girl’s small breast.
A full month after Ox’s death, the people were woken by a wild, high-pitched keening. It was Mother. Bewildered, most of them already terrified of this disturbing woman in their midst, they came running to see what new strangeness was going to befall them.
Mother was kneeling beside the sapling trunk that had borne the skull of her child. But now the skull lay on the ground, broken into pieces. Mother pawed at the fragments, wailing as if the child had died a second time.
Eyes and Sapling hung back, unsure what Mother wanted them to do.
Mother, cradling the pathetic, broken bits of skull in her left hand, glared around at the people. Then her right hand shot forward, pointing.
“You!”
People flinched. Heads turned, following her line. Mother was pointing at Honey.
“Here! Walk, walk here!”
The sagging jowls under Honey’s chin shook with terror. She tried to pull back, but those around her stopped her. At last Sapling stepped forward, grabbed the girl by the wrist, and dragged her to Mother.
Mother threw the bits of skull in her face. “You! You throw stone. You smash boy.”
“No, no. I—”
Mother’s voice was hard.
“You stop rain.”
Honey squealed, as terrified as if it might be true, and urine dribbled down her thighs.
This time, Mother didn’t even have to perform the kill herself.
It did not start to rain that day. Or the next. Or the next after that. But on the third day after Honey’s sacrifice thunder pealed across a dry sky. The people cowered, an ancient reflex that dated back to the days when Purga had huddled in her burrow. But then the rain came at last, pouring out of the sky as if it had burst.
The people ran, laughing. They lay on their backs, mouths open to the water falling from the sky, or they rolled and threw mud at each other. Children wrestled, infants wailed. And there was a great round of coupling, an instinctive, lusty response to the end of the drought, this new beginning of life.
Mother sat beside her blood-soaked pallet and watched this, smiling.
As always she was thinking on many levels simultaneously.
Her sacrifice of Honey had once again been politically astute. Honey had not been a calculating opponent, but she was a focus of dissent; with her gone it would be easier for Mother to consolidate her power. At the same time the sacrifice had clearly been necessary. The sky and earth were appeased; mankind’s first gods had relented, and let their children live.
But on still another level of calculation Mother knew that the storm would have come whatever she did. If the rain had not followed her sacrifice of Honey, she would have been prepared to continue, working through the people one by one— pushing her spear even into Eyes’s heart if she had to.
She knew all these things simultaneously; she believed many contradictory things at once. That was the essence of her genius. She smiled, the water running down her face.
Sapling walked slowly along the grassy river bank. He wore a simple skin wrap, and carried nothing more than a spear tied over his back and a net bag containing a few bone tools and artwork— no stone tools; if they were needed, it was easier to knap them on the spot than carry them.
In his thirties now— fifteen years after the deaths of Ox and Honey and the installation of Mother as the troop’s de facto leader— Sapling had filled out, his face harder, his hair thinning and streaked with gray. But his body was as whiplash thin as ever. It wasn’t possible to hide the tattoos that covered his arms and face, but he had been careful to rub dirt and mud over his skin to subdue their effect. Over the years the tattoos had proved alarming to strangers, and the barrier of mistrust was high enough anyhow.
He looked like a hunter, out exploring at random far from his troop, perhaps seeking to trade. But he was not alone; others watched every step, hidden in the foliage of the riverbank. His appearance was an elaborate lie. And his exploration was anything but random. He was scouting.
He was spotted first by a child, a chubby little girl playing with worn pebbles at the water’s edge. Aged maybe five, she was naked save for a string of beads around her neck. She looked up, startled. He smiled at her, eyes wide and empty. She screamed and bolted down the riverbank, as he had expected her to do. He walked slowly after her.
The signs of settlement were soon apparent. The muddy ground underfoot was pocked with footprints, and he saw fishing nets strung across the river. After following a tight curve in the river’s flow he came into view of the settlement itself. From a cluster of huts, roughly conical, threads of smoke curled up into the afternoon sky.
This was no temporary camp, he saw immediately. The huts had been built on sturdy logs driven deep into the ground. These river folk had been here for a while, and they evidently intended to stay.
A glance at the river showed why. Not far along the bank, the vegetation on both sides of the water had been trampled down, and he could see the glimmer of stones on the riverbed. This was a ford, where the migrating herds could cross the water. All the people had to do was wait here for the animals to come to them. And, indeed, he saw a great pile of bones, what looked like antelope, ox, even elephant, stacked up behind the huts.
But he was puzzled by the huts themselves. Their walls were solid, save for a break at each cone’s apex to allow the smoke out, and there was no way for light to get in. Who would live in such darkness?
Two adults came running toward him— both women, he saw. They carried unremarkable wooden spears and stone axes, and wore straightforward skin wraps, much like his own. Their faces were daubed with crude but fierce-looking ocher designs, and they both had bits of bone pushed through their noses. One of the women raised her spear toward his chest.
“Fu, fu! Ne hai, ne, fu! . . .”
He recognized none of the words. But he could tell that this crude jabber was like the pidgin he had grown up speaking, with none of the richness that had been steadily developing among Mother’s people.
This was going to be easy.
He forced a smile. Then, moving slowly, he slid his bag from his shoulder and let it fall open. Watching the women, he produced a carved seashell. He put the shell on the ground before the women, and backed away, hands spread and empty.
I am a stranger, yes. But I am no threat. I want to trade. And this is what I have. See how beautiful it is
. . . The women were disciplined. One kept her weapon aimed at his chest, while the other bent to inspect the shell.
The shell itself had last seen the sea a decade ago, and had since traveled hundreds of kilometers inland via tenuous, long-distance trading chains. And now it had been engraved with an exquisite elephant-head design by one of the people’s best artisans, a young girl with long, delicate fingers. When the woman recognized the elephant’s face, she gasped, childlike. She grabbed the shell and clutched it to her chest.
After that, the women beckoned Sapling to follow them toward the settlement. He walked easily, not looking back, confident his companions would remain concealed.
In the settlement of the river folk he created a stir. People glared as he passed, though they stared greedily at the carved shell. A couple of children, including the little girl who had first raised the alarm, tailed him, skipping, curious.
He was led into one of the huts. This was a typical living space, with an elaborate hearth, sleeping pallets, and food, tools, and skins stacked up. It looked as if ten or a dozen people lived here, including kids. But the family had cleared out, leaving only a couple of bearded men, at least as old as he was, and the women who had brought him here. The floor was well trampled and littered with the usual detritus of human occupation— bones, stone flakes from knapping, a few half-eaten roots and fruit.
The men sat before the smoldering embers in the hearth. They all had huge bones stuck through the septa of their noses. One of them gestured.
“Hora!”
The word was unfamiliar, the gesture unmistakable.
Sapling sat on the far side of the fire. He was offered a cooked root to eat and a drink of some thick liquid. As he laid out his goods he cast greedy looks around the hut. The hearth was elaborate— far more so than the simple holes in the ground made by Mother’s people. And there was a pit nearby, skin-lined and filled with water and big flat riverbed boulders. He could immediately see how the water could be heated by dropping in fire-hot stones. There was a structure of clay bricks and straw that he failed to understand: He had never seen a kiln before. There were a few unusual artifacts, like well-made baskets— and a bowl made of what he thought at first was wood, but turned out to be a strange kind of hardened clay.
But most entrancing were the lamps.
They were just clay bowls of animal fat, with bits of juniper twig used as wicks. But they burned steadily, filling the hut with a clear yellow light. He could see now why these huts needed no windows— and his mind raced as he realized that with these lamps it would be possible to have light whenever it was wanted, even in the depths of night, even without a fire.
It was clear that these people were far ahead of his own in toolmaking. But their art was much more limited, although several of them wore strings of the beads he had spotted around the little girl’s neck, beads that turned out to be made of elephant-tusk ivory.
So he wasn’t surprised when the elders were stunned by the array of goods he was able to lay out before them. There were ivory and bone figurines of animals and humans, images, abstract and figurative, carved in relief into shell and bits of sandstone— and one of Mother’s own more extraordinary figures, a creature with the body of a human but the head of a wolf.
It was a reaction he had seen many times before. The art of Mother’s people had advanced hugely in the couple of decades since her own first uncertain fumblings. The people had been
ready
for it, with their big brains and nimble fingers; all it had taken was for somebody to come up with the idea— just as these river folk’s roomy minds were ready for the art too. It was as if Mother had dropped a grain of dust into a supersaturated solution, and a crystal had immediately formed.
Sapling had no way of communicating with these river folk save for gestures and guessed-at words. But soon the parameters of the discussion were clear. There would be trade: Sapling’s art for these sedentary strangers’ advanced tools and artifacts.
By the time he left to rejoin his hidden companions, about midday the next day, he had a bag full of sample goods. And he had carefully memorized the location of every kiln, every elaborate hearth.
He had done all of this for Mother, as he had carried through so many other similar assignments. But Mother was not here, at his side, sharing the labor and the risks. In his heart he found, somewhat to his surprise, a dark particle of resentment.
Mother sat by the entrance to her shelter. Legs folded under her, hands resting on her knees, her face was in the sun, her back warmed by the remnants of last night’s fire. She was growing old, gaunt, and she seemed to have trouble staying warm. But for now she was comfortable. Oddly satisfied.
Every square centimeter of her skin was covered with tattoos. Even the soles of her feet were adorned with lattice designs. She wore a skin wrap today, as she usually did, so much of her decoration was covered up, but the skin itself was alive with color and motion, leaping animals, darting spears, exploding stars. And on a wooden pillar beside her sat the skull of her long-dead child, stuck back together with a gum made of tree sap.
She watched the people come and go about their daily work. They would glance at her, sometimes nodding respectfully— or else they would turn away hurriedly, avoiding the stare of Mother and her eyeless son— but either way they were deflected, like planets drifting past the gravitational field of some immense black star.
After all, it was Mother who spoke to the dead, Mother who interceded with earth and sky and sun. If not for Mother, the rain would no longer fall, the grass would no longer grow, the animals would stay away. Even sitting here silently she was the most important person in the community.
The latest camp was a riot of color and shape. It was as if Mother had gradually taken the whole of this troop into her head, into her lightning-threaded imagination— and, in a sense, she had. The forms of animals, people, spears, axes— and strange beings that were mixtures of people and animals and trees and weapons— leapt from every surface, from rocks selected for their smooth workability, and from the treated hides that were draped over every shelter. And interlaced with these figurative forms were the abstract shapes that had always marked out Mother’s domain, spirals and starbursts and lattices and zigzags. These symbols were invested with multiple meanings. The image of an eland could represent the animal itself— or people’s knowledge of its behavior— or it could stand for the hunting activity that was required to bring it down, the toolmaking, planning, and stalking— or something more subtle yet, the animal’s beauty, or the richness and joy of life itself.