The boy squirmed and got his mouth free.
“I can smell them. I’m hungry.”
“Hold still; just hold still.”
When the Old Man had had his fill of the mussels he lifted his leg, let out a luxurious fart, and clambered painfully to his feet. He lumbered to the entrance to his cave. There he sat down with one leg folded under him, the other straight out, with his skin wrap over his legs and crotch. He picked up a flint cobble he had left there days before. Using a granite pebble as a hammer-stone he quickly began to shape a core from the flint. Soon waste flakes began to accumulate around his legs. He had seen dolphins today. There was a good chance one of those fat, lithe creatures might be washed up on the shore in the next day or two, and he needed to be prepared, to have the right tools ready. He wasn’t planning, exactly— he wasn’t thinking as a skinny might have thought— but a deep intuition of his environment shaped his actions and choices.
As he let his hands work— shaping this lump of compressed Cretaceous fossils, as the hands of his ancestors had worked for two hundred and fifty millennia— he gazed out to the west, where the sun was starting to set over the Atlantic, turning the water to a sheet of fire.
Behind him, unnoticed, Jahna and Millo crept to the fire, threw on more mussels, and gulped down their salty flesh.
As the days passed, the spring thaw advanced quickly. The lakes melted. Waterfalls that had spent the winter crusted with ice began to bubble and flow. Even the sea ice began to break up.
It was time for the gathering. It was a much-anticipated treat, a highlight of the year— despite the walk of several days across the tundra.
Not everybody could go: The very young, the old, and the ill could not make the journey, and some had to remain behind to look after them. This year, for the first time in many years, Rood and Mesni were freed of the burden of children— save for their youngest, still an infant small enough to be carried— and were able to travel.
Rood would not have chosen the situation; of course not. But he believed they must make the best of their damaged lives, and he urged Mesni to come with him to the gathering. But Mesni wanted to stay at home. She turned away from him, retreating into her dark sadness. So Rood decided to walk with Olith, Mesni’s sister, the aunt of his children. Olith herself had one grown boy, but his father had died of a coughing illness two winters ago, leaving Olith alone.
The party set off across the tundra.
In this brief interval of warmth and light, the ground underfoot was full of life, saxifrages, tundra flowers, grasses, and lichens. Clouds of insects gathered in the moist air above the ponds, mating frantically. Great flocks of geese, ducks, and waders fed and rested on the tundra’s shallow lakes. Olith, taking Rood’s arm, pointed out mallards, swans, snow geese, divers, loons, and cranes that looped grandly, filling the air with their clattering calls. In this place where the trees lay flat, many of these birds built their nests on the ground. When they stepped too close to a jaeger’s nest, two birds dived at them, squawking ferociously. And, though most of the migrant herbivores had yet to return, the people glimpsed great herds of deer and mammoth, washing across the landscape like the shadows of clouds.
Yet how strange it was, Rood thought, that if he were to dig just a few arms’ lengths anywhere under this carpet of crowded color and motion, he would find the ice, the frozen ground where nothing could live.
“It has been too long since I walked this way,” said Rood. “I had forgotten what it is like.”
Olith squeezed his arm and moved closer to him. “I know how you must feel—”
“That every blade of grass, every dancing saxifrage, is a torture, a beauty I do not deserve.” Distantly he was aware of the scent of the vegetable oil she rubbed into her cropped hair. She was not like Mesni, her sister; Olith was taller, more stringy, but her breasts were heavy.
“The children are not gone,” Olith reminded him. “Their souls will be reborn when you next have children. They were not old enough to have gathered wisdom of their own. But they carried the souls of their grandparents, and they will bring joy and exuberance to—”
“I have not lain with Mesni,” he said stiffly, “since we last saw Jahna and Millo. Mesni is— changed.”
“It has been a long time,” Olith murmured, evidently surprised.
Rood shrugged. “Not long enough for Mesni. Perhaps it will never be long enough.” He looked Olith in the eyes. “I will not have more children with Mesni. I do not think she will ever want that.”
Olith looked away, but dipped her head. It was, he realized, startled, a gesture of both sympathy and seduction.
That night, in the crisp cold of the open tundra, under a lean-to hastily constructed of pine branches, they lay together for the first time. As when he took the young bonehead cow, Rood felt relief from the guilt, the constant nagging doubts. Olith meant much more to him than any bonehead animal, of course. But afterward, when Olith lay in his arms, he felt the ice close around his heart once again, as if in the midst of spring he was still stranded in the depths of winter.
After four days’ steady hiking, Rood and Olith reached the riverbank.
Already hundreds of people had gathered. There were shelters set up on the bank, stacks of spears and bows, even the carcass of a great buck megaloceros. The people had marked themselves with exuberant flashes of ocher and vegetable dye. Their designs had common elements, proclaiming the unity of the greater clan, and yet were elaborate and diverse, celebrating the identity and strength of their individual bands.
Probably around five hundred people would come to this gathering— not that anybody was counting. That would comprise about half of all the people on the planet who spoke a language even remotely resembling Rood’s.
The group from home who had walked with Rood and Olith fanned out. Many of them were looking for partners: perhaps for a quick spring tumble, or perhaps with a view toward a longer-term relationship. This few days’ gathering was the only chance you got to meet somebody new— or to check out if the skinny kid you remembered from last year showed signs of blossoming in the way you hoped he would.
Rood spotted a woman called Dela. Round, fat, with a booming laugh, she was a capable hunter of large game. In her younger days she had been a beauty with whom Rood had lain a couple of times. He saw that she had, typically, set up a large, flamboyant shelter of stretched hide painted gaily with designs of running animals.
Rood and Olith marched down the bank. Dela welcomed him with an embrace and a hearty back slap, and she served them bark tea and fruit. Though Dela eyed Olith, evidently wondering what had become of Mesni, she kept her counsel.
A huge fire already blazed on open ground before the shelter, and somebody was throwing handfuls of fish grease onto it, making explosions and crackles. It was Dela’s folk who had brought in the megaloceros. Brawny young women were carving open the deer carcass, and the smell of blood and stomach contents filled the air.
Rood and Olith sat with Dela around a low fire. Dela began to ask Rood how this year’s hunting had gone so far, and he responded in kind. They talked of how the season had unfolded this year, how the animals were behaving, what damage the winter storms had done, how high the fish were jumping, on a new way somebody had found to treat a bowstring so it lasted longer before it snapped, a way somebody else had found of soaking mammoth ivory in urine so you could straighten it out.
The purpose of this gathering was to exchange information, as much as food or goods or mates. Speakers did not exaggerate success or minimize failure. To the best of their ability they spoke with detail and precision, and allowed other participants in the discussion to ask questions. Accuracy was much more important than boasting. To people who relied on culture and knowledge to keep themselves alive, information was the most important thing in the world.
At last, though, Dela was able to move on to the subject that clearly fascinated her.
“And Mesni,” she said carefully. “Has she stayed home with the children? Why, Jahna must be tall now— I remember how she caught the boys’ eyes even last year— and—”
“No,” Rood said gently, aware of Olith’s hand covering his. Dela listened in silence as he described, in painful detail, how he had lost his children to the ice storm.
When he had finished Dela sipped her tea, her eyes averted. Rood had the odd sense that she knew something, but held it back.
To fill the silence, Dela recited the story of her land.
“. . . And the two brothers, lost in the snow, fell at last. One died. The other rose up. He grieved for his brother. But then he saw a fox, digging under a log, its coat white on white. The fox went away. But the brother knew that a fox will return to the same spot to retrieve what it has buried. So he set a snare, and waited. When the fox returned the brother caught it. But before he could kill it the fox sang for him. It was a lament for the lost brother, like this . . .”
Like Jo’on’s Dreamtime tales, though they were a blend of myth and reality, such stories and songs were long, specific, fact-heavy. This was an oral culture. Without writing to record factual data, memory was everything. If dreams and the shaman’s trances were a means of integrating copious information to aid intuitive decision making, the songs and stories were an aid to storing that information in the first place.
Remarkably, the story Dela told was itself evolving. As the story passed from one listener to another, through error and embellishment its elements changed constantly. Most of the changes were incidental details that didn’t matter, churning without effect, like the coding of junk DNA. The essentials of the story— its mood, the key nodes, its point— tended to remain stable. But not always: Sometimes a major adaptation would take place, by a speaker’s intention or accident, and if the new element improved the story, it would be retained. The stories, like other aspects of the people’s culture, had begun an evolutionary destiny of their own, played out in the arenas of the new humans’ roomy minds.
But Dela’s story was more than a mere tale, or aid to memory. With her story, by her setting out the narrative of her land and by her listeners’ accepting it by hearing it, she was proclaiming a kind of title. Only by knowing the land well enough to tell its story truly could you affirm your right to that land. There were no written contracts here, no deeds, no courts; the only validity for Dela’s claim came from the relationship of narrator to listener, reaffirmed at gatherings like this.
There was a ferocious sizzling noise, a great celebratory roar from outside the shelter. The first great slabs of the butchered megaloceros had been hurled on to the fire. Soon the mouth-watering smell of its meat filled the air. The festivities of the night began.
There was much eating, dancing, hollering. And at the end of the night, Rood was surprised when Dela approached him.
“Listen to me now, Rood. I am your friend. Once we lay together.”
“Actually twice,” he said with a rueful smile.
“Twice, then. What I say to you now I say out of friendship, and not to cause you suffering.”
He frowned. “What are you trying to tell me?’
She sighed. “There is a tale. I heard it here, not two days ago; a group from the south told it. They say that in a stretch of worthless ground near the coast, a bonehead infests a cliff-top cave. Yes? And in that cave— so it is said, so a hunter claims to have seen— two children are living.”
He didn’t understand. “Bonehead cubs?”
“No. Not boneheads.
People.
The hunter, engrossed in his prey, saw all this from a distance. One of the children— so the hunter said— is a girl, maybe so high.” She held up her hand. “And the other—”
“A boy,” breathed Rood. “A little boy.”
“I apologize for telling you this,” said Dela.
Rood understood. Dela perceived that Rood had accepted his loss. Now she had ignited the cold pain of hope in his deadened heart once more. “Tomorrow,” he said thickly. “Tomorrow you will show this hunter to me. And then—”
“Yes. But not tonight.”
Later, in the deepest night, Olith lay with Rood, but he was restless.
“Morning will soon come,” she whispered. “And then you will leave.”
“Yes,” he said. “Olith— come with me.”
She thought briefly, then nodded. It was not wise for him to travel alone. She heard his teeth grind. She touched his jaw, felt the tense muscles there. “What is it?”
“If there is a bonehead buck, if he has harmed them—”
She crooned, “Your mind flies too far ahead; give your body a chance to catch up. Sleep now.”
But for Rood, sleep proved impossible.
The bonehead returned to the cave. Jahna saw that he had a seal— the
whole animal,
a fat, heavy male— slung over one shoulder. Even now, after weeks in this cliff-top cave, his strength could surprise her.
Millo came running forward, his bonehead-style skin wrap flying. “A seal! A seal! We’ll eat well tonight!” He hugged the bonehead’s tree-trunk legs.
Just as he used to hug his father’s.
Jahna pushed the unwelcome thought out of her mind; it had no place here, and she must be strong.
The bonehead, perspiring from the effort of hauling such a weight up the cliff path from the beach, peered down at the boy. He made a string of guttural, grunting noises, a jabber that meant nothing . . . or at least Jahna didn’t think it meant anything. Sometimes she wondered if he spoke words— bonehead words, what a strange idea— that she just couldn’t recognize.
She walked forward and pointed to the rear of the cave. “Put the seal down there,” she commanded. “We’ll soon get it butchered. Look, I’ve built a fire already.”
And so she had. Days ago she had dug out a pit to serve as a proper hearth, and had swept over the ugly ash stains that had randomly scarred the floor. Likewise she had sorted out the clutter of this cave. It had been a jumble, with food scraps and bits of skin and tools all mixed up with all sorts of waste. Now it almost seemed, well, habitable.