Mammoth Boy

by John Hart

  Urrell found himself back in total darkness, unsure of what he had seen, or if he had seen anything at all.

  CHAPTER 39

  He 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.

  Before dawn, chilled, he was on his way again. He half expected to meet a wounded bison, hunters crouching to slay it, a kindly crookback holding out a venison haunch…

  CHAPTER 40

  Urrell’s puzzlement deepened: how could he not recognise the cliffs, outcrops, trees if he had foraged so far afield from camp – he could not be that far away from the entrance to the cavern, could he? It was trance-like, this ever-treading weary progress among fallen rocks, scrub, the outfalls of the bluffs overhead. A few wild apples, small red crabs, their acid juice oddly vivid, seemed to startle him into a greater awareness, making him truly awake.

  Then, suddenly, there were the familiar clumps of trees lining the rim of that long descent he had made, it seemed long ago, with Agaratz when they had arrived to camp by their tree and the hidden hearth stones which Agaratz had known about, but how? He had never thought to ask.

  Rakrak saw him first. Her yelps of greeting and dance of welcome brought faces to stare from shelters as he wove his way past. He must look a wraith to them. Even those who knew him seemed startled. Could he have been absent so long? Given up for lost?

  Agaratz rose from his fireside. “Ho, Urrell, you eat now.”

  The food was hot and ready, as for an expected guest. Urrell scarcely gave it a thought. He was suddenly utterly famished, the hunger suspended all those days, gnawing at his insides like a living creature with a hunger of its own.

  “Soon games, Urrell, wrestles, throw spears, girls dance.” If those were the tests and ordeals that Agaratz had trained him for, and the youths who had cringed and snivelled in the caverns were to be his opponents, Urrell felt he had little to fear.

  While he gorged, Agaratz gave the wand his complete attention. He turned it over, stroked the shaft, scrutinised each tiny carving, fingered the head, even smelt it. The yellow eyes darkened as he bent over it, more crookbacked than
Urrell remembered. He held up the wand before him. Then said something to the air.

  Urrell knew enough of Agaratz’s shifting, subtle language to tell that these words to the air were not part of it, nor perhaps language at all. The sounds were addressed over and above the wand, which Agaratz held horizontally, at shoulder height.

  While this was happening people had been creeping from shelters, alerted by the wanderer’s return, emboldening one another forward to form an edgy half-moon of staring faces. Urrell’s absence, while the other youths had come out of the cave, must have been noticed, he thought, with an agreeable little tingle of self-importance.

  However, there was nothing for them to see, except Agaratz’s shaggy shape, motionless, holding aloft a baton as if to ward off something invisible. The wait went on till the onlookers began to shuffle; a boy fidgeted; an infant nuzzled to suckle; the crescent of attention wavered. People drifted off.

  But a gasped ‘oh’ from the lingerers brought drifters scurrying back. The wand, still held aloft, was emitting smoke from both ends, as if blown by something inside the shaft, threatening to make it burst into flame. With a little gesture of showmanship Agaratz released the stick in mid-air, where it stayed, to a greater round of ‘ohs’ tinged with a frisson of fear.

  Urrell had paused in his eating, a meat bone in his hand, as agog as anyone. Rakrak crouching beside him, whimpered. What next? This trick of Agaratz’s surpassed any other. Urrell wondered how he did it, or if the power to hang in the air lay in the wand itself, that wand which had led him out of the labyrinth, had warmed in his grip when he had been so alone deep in the black entrails of the mountain.

  For his next trick Agaratz simply reached out to the wand, caught it and twirled it playfully at the crowd, sending them helter-skelter downhill. His grin as he laid the wand on the grass in the shelter was meant for Urrell alone, his apprentice.

  “Agaratz, where is Piura?”

  “Piura no more.” He waved a hand into the faraway and Urrell knew his lioness, Old Mother’s facesake, was gone. No cairn would mark where.

  CHAPTER 41

  Agaratz asked nothing of Urrell about his adventures in the cavern depths though his hardships had been severe, deserving of notice. Only the wand interested Agaratz.

  As he thought about it, Urrell suspected that Agaratz had known all along what he, Urrell, was undergoing in those dark galleries, the scenes he had witnessed and the perils he had experienced. If so, why did the wand so intrigue him? In an obscure way Urrell felt that he had been sent to fetch this ceremonial object from where it had lain beyond Agaratz’s reach, within the domain of the cave men and their horned leader. Would the wand be missed from its companions? He imagined hide-clad searchers pouring out of the cave mouth in his pursuit. Memories of the mammoth tusks in the pit rose before his mind’s eye, and he relived his boyhood’s terrified scurry up the pine-log from the guardians of the tusks as they had closed in on him. He glanced at the wand lying on the turf, half-expecting a sign from it, a squirm, a puff of smoke. But it lay where Agaratz had left it, its flint-hard shaft dull in the hearth’s glow. It looked safe enough. Should he touch it?

  As he wondered whether to do so, flute music stopped him in mid-move, notes from Agaratz in answer to his thoughts? At first these notes were ones Urrell knew, often played, but then the melody rose and wandered beyond anything he could have drawn from the ivory. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the wand bend, arching itself. A trick too many: it lay dead straight when he looked directly at it. Quickly he turned to Agaratz but the flute player was engrossed in his music-making, pausing only to say, “Dawn, begin games,” before resuming his playing.

  No trumpet call heralded the competitions, yet as the sun rose all was astir in the encampment. Urrell got ready, ate, and following the instructions of Agaratz rubbed his upper body with goose grease that his mentor produced from a pouch. He checked his lances. Then Agaratz kneaded his back and shoulders, twisted his head till his neck bones cracked and his skin tingled.

  “Now you ready, Urrell.”

  They set off downhill.

  An autumnal briskness filled the air. Watchers were banked many deep on the sloping ground to witness events. Children ran in and out, mothers held infants, men leant on staves or spears.

  In the open area before the cave mouth youths waited to compete. Urrell joined them. Inside the cave mouth stood men in furs, faces painted with stripes, some masked, and in their midst the towering figure of the horn-wearing leader clad from head to foot in skins, his face masked. He held his trumpet in one hand and an antler-roarer in the other.

  The first pair of young men faced up to wrestle. They pulled and tussled till one fell. Another pair entered the rink. Again they wrestled till one bested the other. It seemed simple enough and when Urrell was summoned he stuck his lances in the ground and stepped forward. Though his opponent was taller Urrell floored him with a feint taught him by Agaratz. A ripple of applause ran round the crowd. Two officiants led Urrell to one side with the other winners.

  CHAPTER 42

  Half the day went by like this. Then pairs of winners were pitted against each other. Again Urrell had little difficulty in upsetting his man. He glanced round the crowd to see if Agaratz was watching how his coaching was being successful, but there was no sign of him or of Rakrak.

  His third bout proved harder. Stronger contestants were surviving the eliminations and this contender stood a handspan above Urrell. He had observed Urrell’s technique and was ready to parry his feints. They clasped each other round the shoulders and swayed one way and the other, the big man trying to kick Urrell’s legs from under him. Urrell stumbled onto one knee and it would have been over but for a surge of strength that came to him as from nowhere; he slid his grip to the man’s waist and in an extraordinary effort lifted him off his feet and threw him on his back, winding the fellow.

  The feat earned a murmur of applause from the throng as Urrell rejoined the winners’ group. It was a subdued murmur. He sensed surprise among the onlookers at his unexpected throw and that it challenged something or someone. When he looked round for Agaratz to seek an explanation, the hunchback was again nowhere to be seen.

  From the skin-clad officiants there came no corresponding congratulatory murmur. Behind his mask the horned man’s eyes glittered.

  A pause in proceedings followed, a sort of break for refreshments. At their shelter Urrell found no-one, though the fire was banked and food laid out on leaves.

  Hostility filled the air on his return. Urrell sensed that the onlookers awaited something to happen, that his outsider’s successes had gone against expectations. His true test was to come.

  Instead of the bullroarer’s whir, and the blaring trumpet that had announced the earlier wrestling heats, there came a long echoing resonance from the mouth of the cave. Deep in its black throat huge hollow logs were being drummed. The resonance was enough to make Urrell wonder if blocks of stone might not be shaken loose from the cliff face on to the entrance. Old men during his boyhood by the winter sea had told of caverns sealed by falls, trapping people inside, whose cries could be heard by those with ears to hear pressed up against the rocks.

  All of a sudden, with a clarity that surprised him, Urrell realised that the drumming was not intended for him, or his fellow competitors, but for the missing Agaratz. The apprentice would be tested in the absence of the master.

  It was to be a spear-throwing contest.

  He gripped his three lances and waited. At one end of the green a mark was being set up, a log with a human, lifelike shape and a white blaze in the middle.

  Young men stood about, with lances. Most wore face paint, some had feathers in their hair, others were bedizened with splashes of colour and fur that Urrell assumed marked them out by clan or blood group. He recognised several from the band of tall dark men whose leader Agaratz had slain with that single spear-cast.

  In the pushing and shoving for position Urrell received knocks and jabs in t
he ribs from ill-intentioned lance butts. On one he recognised the pattern of the javelin thrown at him and Agaratz aboard their raft on the River Nani. He had been recognised too.

  The jostlers threw first, bullying aside competitors, eager to show off their greater skills. Lesser youths stood back, awed, in little clan groups. Urrell, belonging to no group, stood alone. He watched as the javelins flew at the mark, set at a good range. Several missed, some fell short to jeers from the crowd. Urrell began to realise that it would take him a powerful throw to reach the target, let alone hit it, but he felt confident enough to let other youths throw first. Few managed the range or hit true. Round them swaggered the swarthy louts, putting them off their aim. This, too, Urrell noted, with rising anger.

  Then, as he stepped forward, two of the bullies jostled him and one muttered, in a broken version of Urrell’s language, “Where’s your lion?” The other let out a wolf ’s howl in mockery of Rakrak – a single swipe of Urrell’s lance butt to the man’s midriff crumpled him on its way to the leering face of his companion, cracking the fellow’s jaw. Fired up, without faltering, Urrell drew the lance back and let it fly at the target. No need to aim or wait. A sort of exultation seized him. He hurled both other lances, one behind the other, almost before the first reached the mark, knowing with unthought certainty that both would follow the first to the target. All three lances stuck in the blaze side by side.