Authors: John Hart
“Now you
usashin
, Urrell. Heal sicks.”
Urrell’s arms ached slightly and his shoulders felt stiff. A momentary weariness overtook him but then power seemed to flow back through. He felt a need to play his flute and to recapture the melody from the mammoth cave that had so enraptured him, oh so long ago.
“You play, Urrell. Pipe ready.” There it lay by his couch, not where he remembered he had stored it in his innermost pouch. The ivory was warm to the touch – warm as from another hand. It came alive as he blew, tentatively, fingering the holes, creating notes, and he felt that he was being strengthened in order to extend its range, and to be at one with many things, even with mammoths.
Since the revelation of Agaratz’s healing powers seldom a moment passed without gawpers hanging round the shelter, expecting who-knew-what, watching and staring. At Urrell’s first notes these now drew near, some waving to summon others from a distance, heralds of an event. In a trice Urrell had an audience. Scarcely aware of their presence, he was borne away by the sounds issuing from this warm, living ivory thing that he held and handled and which willed him to sway and jig to a compass of its own, not his.
It must have been quite a while. Returning as from a trance, Urrell noticed with a little shock that he must have moved whilst he played, for the grass was trampled in a circle. He remembered nothing. Squatting in front of the lodge were numbers of people from other shelters who shook themselves as the music ceased, released as the animals had been when Agaratz played to them. They got up and drifted away, while one or two shyly approached to see the pipe Urrell had been playing, as the deer had done with Agaratz.
“Good,” said Agaratz. “You play
mammurakan-a
. If mammoths, they come.”
Nothing Agaratz had ever said to him equalled that. He fell into the sleep of the weary and did not wake till hours, nights, whole days perhaps, had elapsed.
It was then he thought of the strange ragged folk in their outlying camp, with their knack of evoking mammoths. His strip of hide was real enough. Would they have reappeared, as they had vanished? They might like him to play, he thought, so he took his pipe. He knew the way perfectly well, yet when he got to the campsite nothing remained. Their shelters, their very untidiness, had vanished as though they had never been. Rakrak showed no interest, or sniffed around as she might have been expected to when a group whose scent she knew had decamped. Urrell observed that even the grass was unruffled: nothing and no-one had ever been there that his eye could discern.
He said nothing of this to Agaratz on his return.
W
hatever was to take place before the main cavern hung fire. Urrell saw now how the cavern roof was fissured, and was surprised he had not noticed before. Agaratz seemed listless, as though waiting for events to unfold. Since the maidens’ dance, the whole camp site had gone quiet. Wherever Urrell now wandered with his wolf among the shelters the inhabitants acknowledged him. Was it his pipe, or the power in the healing hands of Agaratz, that accounted for his prestige, he wondered? Some came to him with ailments, as they had gone to Agaratz, mostly children and old women who seemed to have most faith in him. When his healing worked he knew it by the ache in his body, the weariness, as though the patient’s pains had transferred to him.
One night Agaratz pointed at the near full moon. “Cave for mens soon.”
The initiation ceremonies, the contests, anything else Agaratz had hinted at would be about to begin. Urrell felt confident, despite trepidation before the unknown, confident that nothing could best him now – Urrell the music-maker, the healer, the apprentice of Agaratz the master-healer and master of
poodooec
who was initiating him, little by indirect little, into his mysterious abilities. He thought of Guimera and the thought of her gave him strength and added purpose. That night both Piura and Rakrak cuddled up to him as never before.
A pre-dawn blare on a hollowed bone trumpet from the biggest cave summoned the young to its gaping maw. From lodges and hollows across the wide combe youths and boys shuffled down to the green in front of the cliff face. He of the horned headgear directed them in, helped by other elders clad and muffled in skins. There was quite a throng already entering as Urrell slipped in behind them, stooping a little not to be noticed. He was older and taller than most.
What to expect, none knew. Fearful tales recounted by old men, wont to redouble the content of their own far-off initiation rites, were no help. The boys and youths crowded together for comfort, in the grip of a fear which no bravery, no crowing, no boasting can allay – the fear of an unknowable yet inevitable ordeal to come.
Urrell’s eyes soon accustomed themselves to the interior. Caverns, he realised, held less fear for him than for most of his companions due to his visits to caves with Agaratz. Despite which, this cavern astonished him. In size, judged by lights placed in crevices and on ledges all around, it could easily have swallowed Agaratz’s funeral cavern along with the cave of the honeycombs. The light came, Urrell saw, from little clay lamps like those cave painters used – a wick burning smokily from the edge of a puddle of fat in a palm-sized holder. The air reeked of them. Several hundred pairs of frightened eyes flickered to right and left at the impenetrable blackness overhead; at black gaps where other caverns led off from the main hall; at what unimaginable horrors and trials those caverns held; at things no quivering mind could conjure with, any more than a sleeper can control the nightmare that engulfs him.
They were herded by figures dressed in skins, complete with animal heads, antlers and claws. Some wore pelts of creatures no-one had ever seen. Each guardian carried an antler swinging by his side from a thong in his belt, a pierced antler such as the one Urrell recalled from the hoard of ancient objects Agaratz stored in their home cave. He had wondered then at its purpose. Here they seemed to be some kind of a symbol of power, perhaps a power itself packed with
poodooec
. As though in answer to these thoughts, the leader stepped on a rock and started to whirl his antler overhead on the end of its thong, swooping it within a finger’s breadth of the cowering heads bunched in front of him. The instrument whirred through the air, ever faster, ever nearer, driving heads down till a tine struck a boy’s skull and sent him flying to the ground among the others’ feet. All around him Urrell smelt the fear of the cringeing mass, and he vividly recalled his own terrors of the abyss of the tusks.
He had been a boy then. Now he was grown, a healer, a player of music, strong with his own
poodooec
, so that the terror rising amid these cowering, shoving youths drew only disdain from him. And as for the guardians of the cavern, their faces masked behind animal skins, wielding their whirrers, he intended to observe them without drawing attention to himself, and to pit his own power against theirs. In the gloom he would not be noticed, whereas he would be able watch them, high above their prey on stones or stands.
When their herders deemed they had instilled terror enough into the troop of youths they began barking orders at them, with snarls and yells meaningless to Urrell who waited to see what the outcome of all this might be. It soon came. The animal-men hived off groups of youths, parting them from the packed mass with shoves and prods from their antlers, using these like staves of office. Each grouplet was driven off towards a side cave, those that Urrell had noticed on arrival, and disappeared within. He was one of the last to be rounded up, with the remaining four or five others, all practically out of their wits with fear, eyes staring, mouths dribbling, nether clouts none too clean.
They were shoved into a small chamber, unlit, and left there. Instinctively Urrell found the wall and edged round it in search of openings or any features, but the surface was unbroken. While he felt his way round, the others were whispering and moaning in a huddle somewhere in the middle, unused to total dark. There was nothing to which their eyes could become accustomed, not a glimmer to comfort their minds. They whimpered like small children. Meanwhile Urrell continued round the chamber wall, intent on finding clues as to why they were held there. His fingertips would tell him if anything was engraved on the walls, even a trace of painting, but they felt nothing. When he was something like halfway round, the floor grew wet underfoot. He went on feeling his way, ignoring the terror of his fellows, convinced the wet had to enter by some gap or hole which might explain why they were herded there. So, fingering his way he came to what seemed to be the source of the wet cave floor, a sort of alcove with water oozing from it. The recess was about an arm’s length deep where, reaching in, his fingers traced water trickling down a slimy surface of spongy contours so flesh-like that he flinched back as from a body.
That seemed to be the signal for a chorus of shrieks from his companions. Something or someone was tormenting them. They were being whipped or prodded in the total dark and milling about to avoid the blows. Urrell kept back and waited to discover what would transpire.
He soon saw. One of the masked man-like beings entered with a light. Its feeble illumination revealed a tangle of terrified youths on the floor of the cave, cowering from a half-human half-animal shape, like a huge upright wild boar. It might have been a human or might have been a gryphon from campside stories of creatures that slid along the bottoms of lakes or lurked in the depths of forests for all the quaking youths knew. Urrell, in shadow out of range of the light, leant right back against the cave wall to watch. He felt detached.
With the tines of its whirrer the apparition prodded the youths to their feet. They, half upright, half crawling, were driven towards the recess from which Urrell had just stepped back into the shadows. As the jumbled bunch of fearful youths approached the recess the light disclosed a vague shape inside, glistening with damp. It was the thing Urrell had touched. He edged round behind the group and its tormentor to glimpse what it was – a female, heavy-bellied, over-breasted, so life-like that even Urrell was dumbstruck. In the poor light, a tremor ran over its skin. In front of the figure, squirming, terrified youths, some out of their wits, were being shoved and poked towards the thing. Each had to touch its breasts and belly, run his fingers down the slimy thighs and fall down before it. No words were uttered but the pelt-clad figure’s instructions were clear enough.
This done, the youths were herded towards the other side of the chamber where the faint light revealed a gap wide enough for one at a time to go through. No one wanted to be first. Noises could be heard through the gap, coming from whatever lay beyond. They were more grunts and howls than human sounds. By dint of prodding and pushing by the figure, first one then the others were driven ahead into the cleft towards this, their next ordeal. Urrell hung well back. He felt in control, curious, pitting his wits against those of the cavemen. This sense of control flowed through him, like a new power, in some way connected with the chamber he was about to leave. It was then he heard – he was certain he heard – a long deep gurgling sigh from behind him, from the direction of the squelchy figure in its recess, which sent him hurrying to find the gap and grope his way down.
Faint but steady light in the still air of a large cavern lit up a scene to test the stoutest heart. Sprawled, crouching, trembling, his companions and the youths from other groups were assembled in one large mass. All must have undergone trials in side caves like the one he had witnessed. He hung back to watch what came next.
At some invisible signal, from several openings, bison-headed creatures leapt forward and charged the mass of defenceless youths. Yells echoed amid sobs and cries in the dimness. The beasts seemed half human. Urrell, squinting closely in the gloom, was certain he made out the fore legs of bison, complete with hooves, in several of the creatures that rushed forward on all fours, snorting and tossing their huge heads. Then no sooner had they arrived, knocking down quite a few of the youths, than they turned and disappeared back into their lairs.
Over all this the pelted bull-headed figure reigned, his seven-tined antler whirrer held aloft. He was waiting. Dozens of fear-crazed eyes were fixed on him. All they could see would have been what Urrell saw from his place in the darkness: an outsized creature, a man-beast in fur, with power of life and death over them.
The antler came down. On the signal, skin-clad figures sprang from the gloom. With switches they roused the youths from their prostration and drove them towards the back end of the cavern, beyond the range of the few lamps. Those behind, whipped by their tormentors, pushed and shoved those ahead who held back from stepping into total darkness. The seething mass slowly disappeared from Urrell’s view. Not till he of the antler moved to follow did Urrell dare bestir himself, edging round the cave wall and keeping well out of range of the meagre light.
By feel, and by following the receding sound of moans and cries, careful not to stumble or dislodge anything that might betray his presence to whatever lurked in the side caves, Urrell worked his way forward. His groping fingers found loose flakes of stone and he was wondering whether to choose one as a weapon of defence when his hands fumbled on several staves leaning against the rock face. He felt along them, fingering incisions and carvings along their shafts. They were some kind of wands of office. On the heaviest, almost a cudgel, his exploring fingertips found the knob end carved with the head of a mammoth. His hand closed on it, this wand which had awaited his coming for so long in that forlorn passageway. Who might have placed it there? For him? That was not a question he would have asked himself a few moons ago. He would simply have accepted it. Now all his senses were alive to what this meant, sharpened by lack of food, drink, sleep, into a higher awareness of what might lie ahead. In his palm, the mammoth head settled.
Guided by sounds, Urrell moved on. He used the staff as a blind man uses his stick. And like a blind man’s stick it acted as an extension of his arm, feeling its own way. It seemed to lead. He wondered at this, wondering if it was his imagining, or whether his heightened awareness was playing tricks on him. He had never thought like this before. Into his mind’s eye rose the image of Agaratz, of Old Mother behind him, and beyond her his boyhood cave. He saw again the bear’s outline, his trek in the summer warmth, home cave and the savannah. The bison hunt. Rakrak, Piura. They were many journeys away, in another time, beyond any harm from this cavern. While thus lulled – his detachment was suddenly shattered and he was back in the pit, the heaped tusks glinting under the guard of the huge skull perched on its boulder, and he was reliving his shivering boyhood terror as he had shinned up the pine bole to safety and to Agaratz.