In later times, archaeologists would find artifacts left behind by people like Rood’s and wonder if some of them signified fertility magic. They did not. Fertility was never a problem for Rood’s folk. Quite the opposite: The problem was controlling their numbers. The people knew they must not overstretch the carrying capacity of the land that sustained them — and that they must stay mobile, in case of flood or fire or freeze or drought.
So they took care over the number of children they raised. They spaced their births by three or four years. There were a number of means to achieve this. Mesni had breast-fed both Jahna and Millo to advanced ages to suppress her fertility. Simple abstinence, or nonpenetrative sex, would do the trick. And, just as it always had, death stalked the very young. Disease, accident, and even predators could be relied upon to take away a good fraction of the weak.
If necessary — though Rood was grateful he had not gone through this himself — if a healthy child arrived for whom there really was no room, death could be given a helping hand.
As long as they met the basic constraint of numbers, even in this sparse landscape at the edge of the habitable world, Rood’s people ate well, enjoyed much leisure and, with their nonhierarchical, respectful society, were granted great health in body and mind. Rood inhabited a boggy, half-frozen Eden — even if a price had to be paid in countless small lives snuffed out in the cold and regretful dark.
But none of this grim calculus applied to Millo and Jahna.
They had both arrived at a time when their parents had been able to cope with supporting them. They had survived the hazards of early childhood. They were growing healthy and intelligent. Jahna had even been approaching her menarche, so that Rood had been anticipating his first grandchild. Now, thanks to a freak spring storm and his own unforgivable carelessness, all of that investment in energy and love had been taken away from him.
Preoccupied, Rood had walked out of the settlement. He was approaching the crude shantytown of the boneheads.
The boneheads looked up dully as he passed. Some of them were gorging on scraps of narwhal skin. One cow had an infant clamped to her scrawny breast; she turned away from him, cowering. The boneheads had no place in this land owned by human beings. Indeed the boneheads would have starved if not for the largesse, and waste, of the people. Neither animal nor person, nothing about the boneheads was worthy of respect. The boneheads didn’t even have names.
But they could be useful.
He came across one cow younger than the rest. In fact she was the cow whom Jahna had tormented not long before the disastrous expedition to the sea.
She looked up at him dully, her absurdly flat skull smeared with dirt. He knew this one was the same age as Jahna, but she was more advanced than his daughter; the boneheads grew up faster, lived harder, died younger. She sat in the dirt, dressed in an untied skin wrap, toying with a worn, broken pendant. The boneheads seemed to have enough mind to be fascinated by the artifacts of the people, yet not enough to make them for themselves: You could buy whatever you wanted from a bonehead for the sake of a mammoth-ivory bead or a carved bone harpoon.
On an impulse he didn’t fully understand, Rood reached down and pulled the wrap away from the cow’s body. If not for that pulled-forward face, that flattened head, her body wasn’t so bad, he thought; she had yet to develop the full, bearlike stockiness of the adults.
He found an erection pushing out of his own wrap.
He knelt down, grabbed the cow’s ankles, and twisted her onto her back. She complied easily, spreading her legs; evidently it wasn’t the first time she had been used like this. Probing at her warm flesh he found her crotch and anus were crusted with filth. He scraped her clean with his fingers.
And then, with a single, savage thrust, he entered her. For a brief, oceanic time, he was able to forget that disastrous moment when the storm closed in and he realized he had lost Jahna and Millo on the ice.
But it was quickly over. Pulling away from the girl he felt a deep, stomach-churning sense of revulsion. He used a corner of his wrap to clean himself.
The girl, still naked, rolled on her back and held up her hands, pleading silently.
Around his neck he wore a pendant, the tooth of a cave bear. He ripped it off his neck, breaking its deerskin thong, and threw it in the dirt. The bonehead girl scrabbled for the pendant and held it up before her face, turning it over and over, peering into its endless mysteries. A trickle of blood seeped from her bruised thighs.
Jahna and Millo continued to follow the coast, still hoping to come across the headland where they had last seen their father and his companions. At night they built snow houses, if there was snow, or slept under hastily constructed lean-tos. Jahna’s bow and Millo’s fast reflexes kept them provided with some food; small animals and birds.
They could keep themselves fed, even build shelter. But already Millo had spent one agonizing night after unwisely eating a fish that had not been properly gutted. Worst of all they had failed, night after night, to make a fire, no matter how earnestly they rubbed sticks or smashed bits of rock together. And that was costing them dearly. The uncooked meat was beginning to make Jahna’s teeth and stomach ache, and in the dead of night she imagined she would never be truly warm again.
The children plodded on; they had no choice. But they were losing weight, growing more tired every day, their clothing more ragged. They were slowly dying, Jahna knew. Though they were guided by the elder spirits within them, they did not yet know all they needed to know to keep themselves alive.
They came to a place where the tree line had strayed north, so they had to push through a scrap of forest. The trees, pines and spruce, grew sparse and tangled: gaunt and without leaves, they looked oddly frail. The path the children followed, worn by deer or goats, was soft with moss. It twisted through the trees, passing occasionally through more open glades.
As the light faded, ending another dismal day, the shadows of the trees striped over the ground, and the undergrowth turned black. Jahna and Millo were five million years removed from Capo, their last forest-dwelling ancestor, and to them the forest was a place well stocked with monsters and demons. They hurried forward anxiously.
At last they burst out of the trees. They found themselves on a scrap of snow-littered grassland where the yellow sward terminated in a ragged cliff edge. Beyond that blunt horizon the sea rolled, the pack ice distantly groaning and cracking, as it always did.
But the children faced a wall of flesh and antlers. It was a herd of megaloceros — creatures that would one day be called Irish elk. They walked massively, cropping at the new grass that poked hopefully through the scattered snow.
In the van was a huge male. He peered down his long nose at the children. His back bore a fleshy hump, a mound of fat to help sustain him through harsh times; in this early spring the hump was deflated. And his antlers, each twice as wide as a human was tall, were great heavy sculptures oddly like the open hands of a giant, with fingerlike tines branching off smooth palms.
There were thousands of deer in this herd alone, crowding out of the children’s sight. Like many giant herbivores in this paradoxically rich time, the megaloceros flourished in vast migrant crowds, wandering all across the Old World from Britain to Siberia and China. And this vast herd was bearing down on Jahna and Millo. It was a slow-moving barrier, immense antlers clattering, stomachs rumbling. The air was full of the overwhelming stink of musk and dung.
The children needed badly to get out of the way. Jahna saw immediately that they couldn’t evade the herd by running inland; it was too big, too widespread for that. The deer surely wouldn’t penetrate far into the forest, but they would force the children back into that deepening darkness, which was a place she really didn’t want to go back into.
On impulse she grabbed her brother’s hand. “Come on. The cliff!”
They ran across the frozen grass. The cliff edge sloped away sharply beneath a lip of turf. Hastily the children scrambled down. The bow on Jahna’
s back caught on outcroppings of the rock, slowing her down. But they made it. They huddled on a narrow ledge, peering up at the ocean of black-brown fur that washed slowly along the cliff top.
The huge male looked on indifferently. Then he turned away, his burdened head dipping.
The antlers were heavy to carry, like weights held at arms’ length, and the buck’s neck had been redesigned to bear that load, with huge vertebrae and muscles like cables. The antlers were for sexual display — and for fighting; it was an awesome sight when two of these giant bucks clashed, heads down. But those great antlers would doom these animals. When the ice retreated and their habitat shriveled, there would be a selection pressure for smaller body sizes. While other species shrank to fit, the megaloceros would prove unable to give up their elaborate sexual displays. They had become overspecialized, their tremendous antlers over-expensive, and they would prove unable to cope with change.
The children heard a muffled growl. Jahna thought she saw a pale form, low-slung, stocky, move over the snow like a muscled ghost, trailing the deer. It might have been a cave lion. She shuddered.
“What now?” Millo whispered. “We can’t stay here.”
“No.” Jahna cast around. She saw that their ledge led down the cliff face to a hollow a few body’s lengths below. “That way,” she said. “I think it’s a cave.”
He nodded curtly. He led the way, edging his way down the narrow ledge, clinging to the chalk. But he was more frightened than he was prepared to admit, she realized.
At last, the perilous descent over, they threw themselves into the hollow and lay panting on the rough floor. The cave, worn in the chalk, reached back into dark recesses. The floor was littered with guano and bits of eggshell. It must be used as a nesting ground, by gulls, perhaps. There were blackened patches scattered over the floor — not hearths, but obviously the sites of fires.
“Look,” said Millo, his voice full of wonder. “Mussels.”
He was right. The little shellfish were piled up in a low heap, surrounded by a scattering of flint flakes. A flicker of curiosity made her wonder how they had got there. But hunger spoke louder, and the two of them fell on the mussels. Frantically they tried to prize open the shells with their fingers and stone blades, but the shells were stubborn and would not yield.
“Graah.”
They both whirled.
The gravely voice had come out of the darkness at the back of the cave. A figure came forward. It was a burly man, dressed in a wrap of what looked like deer hide — no, Jahna thought, not a man. He had a vast, prominent nose, and powerful stocky legs, and huge hands. This was a bonehead, a massive bull. He glared at them.
The children backed away, clutching at each other.
He had no name. His people did not give themselves names. He thought of himself as the Old Man. And he was old, old for his kind, nearly forty years old.
He had lived alone for thirty of those years.
He had been dozing at the back of this cave, in the smoky, comforting glow of the torches he kept burning there. He had spent the early morning combing the beaches below the cliffs at low tide, seeking shellfish. With the coming of evening he would soon have woken up anyway; evening was his favorite time of day.
But he had been disturbed early by the noise and commotion at the cave’s entrance. Thinking it might be gulls coming after his piles of shellfish — or something worse, an arctic fox maybe — he had come lumbering out into the light.
Not gulls, not a fox. Here were two children. Their bodies were tall and ludicrously spindly, their limbs shriveled and their shoulders narrow. Their faces were flat, as if squashed back by a mighty punch, their chins were pointed, and their heads bulged upward into comical swellings like huge fungi.
Skinny folk. Always skinny folk. He felt a vast weariness — and an echo of the loneliness that had once plagued his every waking moment and poisoned his dreams.
Almost without conscious thought he moved toward the children, his huge hands outstretched. He could crush their skulls with a single squeeze, or crack them together like two birds’ eggs, and that would be the end of it. The bones of more than one skinny robber littered the rocky beach below this cave; and more would join them before he grew too old to defend this, his last bastion.
The children squealed, grabbed each other, and scurried to the wall of the cave. But the taller one, a girl, pushed the other behind her. She was terrified, he could see that, but she was trying to defend her brother. And she was holding her nerve. Though panic piss trickled down the boy’s bare legs the girl kept herself under control. She dug into her jerkin and pulled out something that dangled on a string around her neck. “Bonehead! Bonehead man! Leave us alone and I’ll give you this! Pretty, pretty magic, bonehead man!”
The Old Man’s deep-set eyes glittered.
The pendant was a bit of quartz, a little obelisk, gleaming and transparent; its faces had been polished to shining smoothness, and one side had been painstakingly carved into a design that caught your eye and dazzled your mind. The girl swung the amulet back and forth, trying to draw his eyes, and she stepped forward from the wall. “Bonehead man, pretty, pretty…” The Old Man peered into blue eyes that stared straight back at him in that unsettling, direct way of the skinnies: a predator’s gaze.
He reached out and flicked at the amulet. It flew around the girl’s neck and smashed against the wall behind her. She yelped, for its leather string had burned her neck. The Old Man reached out again. It could be over in a heartbeat.
But the children were jabbering again, in their fast, complicated language. “Make him go away! Oh, make him go away!” “It’s all right, Millo. Don’t be afraid. Your great-grandfather is inside you. He will help you.”
The Old Man let his huge hands drop to his sides.
He looked back at the mussels they had tried to take. The shells were scraped and chipped — one showed teeth marks — but not one was broken open. These children were helpless, even more so than most of their kind. They couldn’t even steal his mussels.
It had been a long time since voices of any kind had been heard in this cave — any save his own, and the ugly cawing of gulls or the barking of foxes.
Not quite understanding why, he stalked off to the back of his cave. Here he stored his meat, his tools, and a stock of wood. He brought back an armful of pine logs, brought down from the forested area at the top of the cliff, and dumped them close to the entrance of the cave. Now he fetched one of his torches, a pine branch thick with resin and bound up with fat-laden sealskin. The torch burned steadily but smokily, and would stay alight all day. He set the torch on the ground and began to heap wood over it.
The children still cowered against the wall, eyes wide, staring at him. The boy pointed at the ground. “Look. Where’s his hearth? He’s making a mess…” The girl clamped her hand over his mouth.
When the fire was burning brightly, he kicked it open to expose red-hot burning logs within. Then he picked up a handful of mussels and threw them into the fire. The mussels’ shells quickly popped open. He fished them out with a stick and scooped out their delicious, salty contents with a blunt finger, one after another.
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.
Evolution Page 49
