Authors: John Hart
His grip tightened on the mammoth carving; his fear receded as he held on, like a flush of fever; he felt well again, out of danger, and went on.
This passage seemed a long one, as far as he could judge in the near-total blackness, twisting and turning into the mountain. With care, led by the wand held before him, he advanced in the wake of the throng of youths, more aware of their smell than of the sounds they made, now fainter with distance while their body reek hung in the still air along with the smeech and reek of guttering lamps in the motionless atmosphere.
He caught up with them, turning a corner. They were crouching and being fed in a sort of dimly-lit hall. Figures in furs, masked, handed the youths morsels that Urrell could not make out. They were allowed to drink from what looked like skins full of liquid. Beyond them he vaguely discerned an overbearing dark shape. Keeping in the shadows, Urrell edged round, alert both to the scene before him and to the sense of an impending event that would explain why the youths had been driven here. He also wanted to make out what the shape might be.
To his surprise the youths were allowed to rest, to drowse. Accordingly, Urrell squatted too, with his back to the cave wall, feeling hunger for the first time at the sight of the food being handed out. He too dozed off.
When movements roused him he saw that the masked figures were urging the youths up to dance, each youth holding a short lance which must have been distributed while Urrell dozed. Their purpose he waited to see, through the dimness of smoky torches stuck in cracks in the cave walls. There was no pipe music for the dancers, just a drumming from somewhere out of sight, on hollow logs or the like. Urrell’s eyes watered from the torch smoke as he watched the jigging mass go round and round the dark shape in the centre, urged on by their masters of ceremony. What the shape was he could still not make out, though it looked animal-like.
No rest was allowed the dancers. They were being goaded to ever greater speed as the drumming grew faster till Urrell realised that they must have been fed a stimulant of some sort with the food, like the fungus Agaratz had given him to chew in the mammoth cave. That would drive them till they fell, with little recollection afterwards of their feat of endurance.
How long the dance went on Urrell had no way of telling. In caves another, slower, time holds sway, or so those old men by the sea had told him when they recounted tales of bygone wonders and monsters. That, they said, is why the dead were laid in hollows in certain deep caverns, so that they could escape into the land of
mamu
deep in the centre of the earth, beyond time. He had listened round-eyed; now he thought he better understood.
Y
ouths were beginning to fall exhausted amid the feet of the others.
The rhythm became yet faster, as well as louder. Dancers stumbled under the urgency and prodding of the goads. The culmination was close.
Urrell strove to guess what it might be, peering with smarting eyes through the smoky air. He had almost stepped beyond the shadows to get a better look when, to a crescendo of drumming and a resounding yell from the masked figures, the mass of youths, as though caught in a spell, turned towards the shape and stabbed it repeatedly with their spears. The act released them and they stared around. Some spears stayed embedded in the shape. Some lay where they were dropped, as the mass of youths allowed themselves, almost sheepishly, to be led away down a tunnel, leaving Urrell with the whole vast chamber to himself, somewhat surprised at his own composure. He collected a guttering torch and approached the shape, sniffing the acrid smell of humans mixed with grease, the earthen floor churned and filthy from so many feet.
Close up, the shape was that of a bison, in clay, thrice life size, and covered along the back with a bison hide complete with head and horns. Urrell walked right round it, holding up his failing torch and his mammoth wand. Stab marks in the clay flanks were plain to see. He even pulled out a lance to see how deep it went and leapt back, startled, when liquid seeped from the wound. He screwed up his courage to look more closely. In the poor light he could not be sure whether it was blood or not that oozed.
The overhang. His boyhood fear of the unseen creature in the den.
On his neck the small hairs rose. Shivers seized him and he would have fled headlong down a combe had there been one, a boy again gripped by untellable fears. For the first time since entering the caverns he felt the huge strangeness of where he was, entirely alone, deep in the earth. The others had gone. Suddenly he longed for human company – theirs. He was about to hasten off in their wake when he heard, from an unimaginable distance, but in the opposite direction, the unmistakable trumpeting harrumph – he quivered – of a mammoth. He listened again. It had gone. Then it came again, the blare he knew from Agaratz’s mimickries.
It was a summons.
Urrell’s wand drew him on. He collected several torches from their niches, burning low but making a tolerable light, enough to show him that yet another gallery led off from the hall of the bison. It had been from deep inside that the mammoth sound had come. He entered, eager, and for the first time since the start of the trials and tests felt a presence steering him. His strength grew; he felt neither hunger nor thirst; no more was he that frightened boy.
It was a long gallery, with twists, turns, narrows – and total silence. Had he heard the sound? He had been in no doubt what it was, but had he really heard it? To venture so deep into an unknown gallery, with a poor light likely to burn out, was a folly, yet the head of his staff, warm in his palm, lent him confidence and seemed to tug him forward.
He tapped the side of the tunnel with its tip as he went, more for company from the tap than guidance. His light was still strong enough to see by. He knew anyway that, light or no light, he would go forward, that he could find his way back in pitch dark under the guidance of the wand, with a new-found confidence and sense of direction that the wand, or something else in the cavernous silence, seemed to give him.
The air was quite still, neither cold nor threatening, just the deep chill of a cave atmosphere. Though he scrutinised the cave wall as he went for any signs of engravings, dots, dashes, devices, within the patch of light his torch cast, he found nothing. He, Urrell, was treading where none had trodden before.
Lost in this thought he turned a bend and was stopped by a wall of pure cold. One step forward and the cold rose so dense it felt like an ice-sheet; one step back and he was in the cave air again, bearable in his light furs. He tried again. Again the ice–cold air barrier stopped him short, making him blink. In his hand the wand hung limp, an ordinary stick, powerless beyond the barrier. His last torch had sputtered out.
As this was happening his eyes were becoming aware of a faint luminosity beyond the cold, of a greenish-blue tint in the air, as if filtered through a wall of ice. He began to make out shapes, a bulky one with other smaller ones grouped round it.
Their outlines became clearer. In the centre the bulky shape took the form of a huge beast, encircled by humans or semi-humans, devotees swaddled in furs. Then it came to him why he, Urrell, had been guided hither to see this, for before him stood a full-grown cow mammoth. As he stared and squinted in the faint light, she raised her trunk and trumpeted a huge blaring note which reached him, despite her apparent nearness (he could even make out the creature’s long eyelashes), from a great distance. He heard this remote signal – meant for him? — and watched as, having delivered it, she cumbersomely turned round and strode away out of sight followed by her escort of humanish beings. They raised their short, clumsy spears in a sort of salute, whether to him or to something else out of sight ahead, he would never know. Then they were gone with their puzzling yet familiar gait. His impulse to follow them was cut dead by the barrier of pure cold. With them faded the faint light.
Urrell found himself back in total darkness, unsure of what he had seen, or if he had seen anything at all.
H
e must have stayed there a good while, stunned. Hunger began to make itself felt. His body had awoken. It was time to find his way back, his light having burnt out, trusting to instinct, to his hunter’s sense of direction. If ever he needed Agaratz’s certainty, it was now. He held on to his mammoth-headed stick as to an amulet.
With outstretched hand along the cave wall, tapping ahead with his wand lest he stumble into a sink-hole or pit, one of those abysses that trap creatures blindly venturing underground, Urrell crept along. Hunger and thirst now plagued him. Water sometimes oozed down rock faces and his fingers found these traces so he was able to lick the wet stone to dampen lips and tongue. But of food there was none in this mineral world, not the least sound of insects or of tiny rodents in the eternal blackness. He was longing for light. Even sight of his companions’ taskmasters wielding their command antlers would have been welcome: he might have rushed up to them in gratitude for their company.
Never straying from touching distance of the cave wall to his left he reached a point where a feeling of unease warned him that he must have reached the chamber where the youths had danced round the bison figure with their spears. No lights remained, nor even a whiff of their wicks hung in the air. The sharp odour of all those frightened bodies had vanished. It was as if nothing had happened. Yet he sensed the bison was there, in the never-ending dark, master of the chamber. Did it know he was edging round by touch back the way he had come, avoiding the masked and fur-swaddled masters of ceremonies bullying and driving his fellows until they lost their wits from fear and fatigue?
He had witnessed them being herded off. Should he try to guess the way and follow them? Hunger and thirst, weariness from how long he could not tell, were making him light-headed.
Better to retrace his way in.
Once he knew he was beyond the reach of the bison he let himself drop to on the floor, cuddling his wand, and fell into a sleep so deep it was akin to dreamless unconsciousness.
How long this lasted he could not have told. Ordinary sleep has markers, intervals when the mind works of its own, times when the sleeper rises almost to the surface of consciousness, like a fish approaching the surface, then replunges into the depths. Thus the sleeper marks some sort of rhythm and his body knows when to waken. Nothing like this occurred to Urrell. Sleepers like this may sleep till they die. It is akin to the sleep of hunters caught in the snows who drowse to death.
A hand on his shoulder shook him alert.
“Agaratz,” he blurted, but he was alone. His back and limbs felt as stiff as the stone they lay on. With effort he sat up. The wand in his palm felt ready to go while an urgent need to urinate hinted how long he had lain, and its painful discharge how long he had drunk nothing.
As he moved again it felt less that the wand led him than that he was guided through the dark. Somewhere in a side cave the female shape oozed; elsewhere lay the caves where the masters of ceremonies must dwell, yet not the slightest sound, nor the least glimmer of light, told of their existence.
It was his sense of smell that warned him, when the air changed, that he was close to a mouth of the cavern. A little further on he reached the exit into overcast daylight and looked eagerly around for the shelters studded up the combe, but it was not the cavern he had entered with the throng of trembling youths, nor the open sward where the maidens had danced before the crowds. He must have come out of a side entrance. He would have to scout round the bluff, through the scrub and trees till he found the moot.
Hunger, muted so long while he had been cut off in the dark, woke as from a sleep of its own, hand in hand with its sister, thirst. The air felt chill, as if the season had advanced in his absence. He rubbed his face, with its growth of young beard, a true measure of the passing of days and nights. Withal, his feeling of a new, lean strength, of manhood, comforted him: he had entered the cavern a grown youth and had come out a grown man.
Right or left? He waited to know which way, as he had waited for a hint on that scarp brink as a boy. The wand would say. He held it tight, his keepsake of the cavern. In the gloaming he saw how old it was, the shaft made of a wood unknown to him, hardened almost to stone with age, its mammoth knob of yellowed ivory worn down with handling. Only now did he wonder who had propped those wands against that cave wall, and why, and how long ago; and why had it been this wand rather than another that had chosen his hand.
It led. Hunger drove him. He must find the camp. Brushing through the undergrowth in the chill lee of the bluff there rose the acrid smell of the mottled stems and the big leaves, and his fear of the hole beneath the scarp: a boy again, he was fleeing down dale to the women berry-picking in the sunlight below. But there was no combe, no sunlight, no berry-pickers.
He hastened on, almost scurrying. Cold air hung in the shadow of the cliff. There was nothing he recognised despite his weeks of roaming and hunting around the camp. He must have come out of a distant cave, he thought, far from the main cavern he had entered such a while ago. On and on be pressed, blundering and weaving his way through the thick growth along the base of the bluff, convinced, thanks to his sense of direction, that the camp and its shelters and clumps of people lay round the next outcrop.
But for his wand and the comforting warmth of its ivory head in his palm he would have felt lost, lost not like going astray in the wilderness but more as in those dreams where no landmarks or recognisable objects assist the dreamer to wrench his way back to wakefulness, like a drowner in a slough reaching out to grasp an overhanging branch. He had known dreams where he knew he was dreaming, but could not shake the dreaming off. He wondered if he was dreaming like that now.
That night he camped down in brush and ferns, armed only with his wand, unafraid of beasts as the undercliff was silent, empty of game. He had found raspberries and eaten them by the handful, ravenous. He felt again as he had as a lad, bedding in bracken brakes on his journey over the moorland, hungry on a diet of berries and birds’ eggs.