by John Hart
Silence from both the crowd and competitors greeted this feat of marksmanship, all eyes accompanied him to the log to retrieve the lances, the little strut in his stride the only hint that he, Urrell, allowed himself to signal that the apprentice had at last achieved his master’s poodooeic.
To intensified drumming, two fur-clad men from the cavern stepped out and paced off a distance between contestants, Urrell at one end in a small group, a larger one at the other made up of what looked to Urrell like bigger, older men, swaggerers and shovers every one. It was to be a one-to-one contest, with javelins. A yelled signal and one of the tall, striped-faced men stepped forward and shouted a challenge or an insult. His face-streaks reminded Urrell of the clan which had wished to kill Rakrak, that day on the plains. Watching the man’s bravado, he was pleased how little it affected him. A glance at the crowd for a glimpse of Agaratz and Rakrak was met by faces set with the cruel glee of watchers at a fight.
On a signal from the horned giant the duels began. Urrell held back to assess what was to happen, letting others from his side face the first flight of javelins. Two were hit, one seriously in the thigh. Their own throws did no damage. He of the bravado, encouraged by this poor showing, redoubled his strut up and down, raising his lances over his head and yelling defiance. Then, his parading before his group over, the man stepped forward and hurled a javelin straight at Urrell.
It was well aimed. Urrell saw the ripple of muscle in the hurler’s shoulder; he saw the slight curve in the flight of the javelin; he noticed a tassel near its middle; he had time to dodge and catch the shaft as it flew past him. The crowd was hushed by the feat. Then, like Agaratz before him, Urrell gripped the shaft in both hands and snapped it with a strength that he knew was not his.
A gasped ‘oh!’ from the onlookers greeted this. Glancing round, Urrell again hoped to catch sight of Agaratz in the crowd. Instead, cruel faces now looked at him fearfully. What next? He looked towards the master of ceremonies for a hint: was he to skewer his opponent, as he knew he easily could with his new-found strength? Or what?
Then, for his ear only, Urrell distinctly heard the notes of his own mammoth-tusk flute. It was playing one of Agaratz’s ineffable, unseizable melodies. He knew then and there what to do. Holding his three spears over his head he strode across the grass to the group of his opponents, who shrank away, unable to guess his intention. Urrell went up to the one who had tried to kill him with his spear-throw and tapped him on the shoulder with his own spear tip, counting coup. After this, he walked along the line of others, supremely confident, and tapped each in turn on the shoulder before strolling back to his place across the sward to await events.
His bloodless gesture, he knew, was a direct challenge to the horned one, the blood-letter. Utter silence gripped the onlookers.
Again Agaratz’s music played in his ear, this time the melody of the cavern where the mammoths had marched past, head to tail, while he had drawn their outline in tune to Agaratz’s playing, the lead cow’s eye watching him as she led her frieze past him and his crayon into the place whither no-one went and whence no-one came back, the land of mamu. That night he had been on the brink of knowing.
Now the air on the flute hinted as much, in his inner ear. No-one else heard it, neither the crowded banks nor the knots of youths. But did he of the horns, now back in his cavernous den as though to gather strength, hear it and know that it was aimed at him with the accuracy of Urrell’s javelin?
Urrell would not have long to discover. Once more the trumpeting rang out and the huge fur-clad, horned figure stepped forth with his sequel of striped and painted followers, some masked, some near naked. The booming drums inside the cavern shook the very rocks of the cliff face. To Urrell’s surprise these figures began a wild cavorting dance round the tall figure, shrieking and girning like men possessed. The crowd shrank back, so Urrell stood back a little himself with his group, more to follow suit than from concern at the strangeness of events.
But where was Agaratz? Playing his flute out of sight when his acolyte needed him most?
The performance, centred on the leader, rose in frenzy as the dancers leapt and skipped round the giant, driven by the drumbeat. He was sucking their power from them. The air almost crackled.
Total stillness held the crowd, a tense expectation of something about to come. A distant rumble of thunder emphasised the crowd’s stillness.
At a sign from the huge figure, the dancing stopped dead. The drumming fell silent. He stepped forward and in a deep voice boomed out a call that Urrell could not understand.
The crowd, however, did. Young girls and maidens were ushered and pushed into the grass area before the cavern’s gape. They came shyly and formed groups. There was to be some kind of competition, female this time. Urrell looked keenly at each girl, hoping to see Guimera but she was not there.
As they lined up, the maidens formed pairs. At a signal they discarded their upper covering and stood bare-breasted, their girlish breasts stained and stippled with berry juices, their bare shoulders arrayed with designs of necklets and flowers, bird shapes and insect wings, painted or tattooed he could not tell.
The first pair faced each other. From somewhere inside the cavern a wailing chant of female voices issued to which the two girls began a dance. They jigged and twisted till the master of ceremonies raised his antler-roarer to decide the winner. She went to one side, near the cavern mouth, while the loser regained her place in the throng.
As with the youths’ wrestling contest earlier Urrell saw that the heats would be eliminatory.
Winners in the first round competed against each other to louder chanting and stronger rhythms. The crowd entered into the spirit of the contest. Comments and catcalls increased as the heats went on until the last few girls remained, sweaty and streaked from their exertions.
The weather, till then warm and mild, was fast clouding over, the sky darkening. Black clouds billowed up from beyond the mountain where the cavern lay embedded with all its galleries and chambers, along which he, Urrell, had stumbled and wandered till he had encountered the ice barrier separating him from the she-mammoth and her troop of followers. They had half mocked, half beckoned him to follow, but how could he have gone beyond the ice-shield that shut him off from them, that prevented him from entering their time? Willingly would he have followed, mammoth-led. Were these clouds their vengeance, a jeering gesture at his powerlessness to penetrate their world?
But then he wondered whether it had been Agaratz who had barred his way through. Agaratz who found interstices in rock faces, gaps to wriggle through where none seemed to exist. He would have known if there was a way round the ice-shield, surely. Urrell’s mind struggled with this. He felt, for the first time, forsaken, rejected as a grown cub must feel when its mother spurns its advances, forcing it to fend for itself.
With these thoughts in mind, he was startled by a flash of lightning from beyond the mountain, then a huge clap of thunder.
Even the horned man looked up uneasily. The girls cowered. As for the throng, their upturned faces formed a sea of noses, Urrell thought, a saw-edged pattern.
He scanned the sea of faces, hoping to spot Agaratz up to one of his tricks. Something or someone was teasing the mage, challenging him to a one-to-one contest.
As Urrell waited for what was to happen, he felt detached from events, an observer, a bystander. Not even the louring tempest that was building up, the flashes of lightning across the sky, concerned him. It was a performance to which he was a spectator.
The girls’ competition ended and the winners were led into the cavern.
Then, to Urrell’s surprise and joy, another bevy of older maidens came forth from the cavern, among them none other than Guimera, each girl draped in the flimsiest of garlands and strips of fur.
Had Guimera been secreted in the cavern all this while, hidden from him as he sought her in the encampment?
The judge this time was a female, huge, heavy-bellied, her big breasts
sagging. Only when he looked carefully did Urrell make out that this apparition was entirely naked, like the spongy figure he had stumbled on in her grotto deep inside the cavern.
Of the young women, two were singled out, Guimera and another, both beauties, Guimera with her lion’s mane hair to her waist, the other dark, a sibling perhaps of Urrell’s foes, the swarthy spearmen. These the horned man drew forward, with the female deemer, nearer the crowd. Then, coinciding with yet another peal of thunder, he suddenly stripped each young woman of her whisps of apparel. There stood Guimera, his Guimera, nude. Her body she had adorned with stains and plant juices so that she appeared wreathed in sinuous designs. Her rival, just as ornamented, was streaked and stained in the manner of her clan, her dark hair thrown back.
Mutterings and growing sounds of threats from the men Urrell had bested, with others of their group milling behind, confirmed Urrell’s surmise that Guimera’s rival was indeed a sister of theirs. They meant their girl to win. And they wanted revenge.
Again thunder pealed overhead on the tail of the greatest, longest flash of lightning Urrell had ever seen. The ground shook. The air smelt. For a trice Urrell could not place the smell, then he did. It was like the brimstone stench from some of the geyser pools they had lingered by during their journey through the glacier.
Instead of frightening the crowd, the crashes and flashes among the rolling black clouds overhead seemed to excite them. They ignored the reddish tints in the sky. People pressed nearer the open area before the cavern where the contest was taking place, on one side of which Urrell and his little band of fellow spearmen had lingered to watch. They were outnumbered by the supporters of Guimera’s rival. If it came to a clash, they would be overwhelmed, slain even. Yet Urrell surprised himself by feeling unconcerned, almost contemptuous of his adversaries. A nonchalant ‘come what may’ took over, a sense of of things being out of his hands. Now that he had Guimera before him, nothing and no-one could outface him.
It was at this point that once again he heard Agaratz’s music of the cave where the mammoths had marched past, head to tail, while he had drawn their outline in tune to Agaratz’s playing, the lead cow’s little eye watching the lad in his daze as she led her frieze past his crayon into the unknown and the unknowable. Yet that night he had been on the brink of knowing.
Slivers of stone fell down the cliff near him, unheeded. The sky had lit up yet more, reddening the underside of the clouds rolling and swelling overhead. He sniffed the acrid air.
Meanwhile the mage and his assistants had paused to gaze with the crowd at the skies. Their unease showed. Urrell’s mind-drift kept him calm, detached. The longer he stood there, waiting for whatever was to happen, the more he questioned matters that hitherto had been straightforward. And the more he thought, the less he understood.
These thoughts were soon cut short however as, with a burst of drumming that seemed to imperil yet further the arch of the cavern, shaken by the thunder, the horned man decided to proceed with the rituals and competitions. Some of his assistants ushered back onlookers and the disgruntled spearmen.
Now came the turn of the ponderous female judge, it seemed to Urrell, as she waddled forward to decide the winner in the beauty contest.
From the shouts and catcalls of the crowd it was plain that most supported their clanswoman as opposed to Guimera, the outsider. Both were tall and well made but to Urrell’s eyes Guimera outshone her rival. Yet it was obvious which way the decision would go. Whirling his antler-roarer over his head the horned man stepped past the female judge to tip the dark-haired girl on the shoulder.
A clap of thunder, in the darkling clouds, seemed, to Urrell at least, to signal dissent at the decision. With a yell the dark girl’s supporters rushed into the arena intent on clinching the win by avenging themselves on Urrell and his small group.
They tried to seize Guimera, knocking aside the mage’s men, even jostling the mage himself. He, enraged to have his authority disregarded, drove them back, whirling his antler-roarer at them. Urrell waited to intervene, ready to rescue Guimera.
Driven back they might be but the spearmen still had revenge in mind. They hurled javelins and stones, yelled insults and issued what sounded like challenges to single combat across the grass at Urrell and his little band.
Urrell now watched as from nowhere Agaratz appeared.
The yells fell silent. The crowd stared intently at the apparition. Agaratz, shrunken in Urrell’s eyes, circled the arena with his familiar rolling gait, going up to the spearmen and forcing them back with a simple twirl of a baton: the one Urrell had retrieved. It had puffed smoke, lain stone-like on the grass, arched to flute music.
Guimera, the other girl, their female judge, the mage and his men stood struck still. Over their heads the sky had reddened so much that it seemed to reflect a cauldron of fire beyond the cliffs and caverns. Rumblings sent tremors through the ground underfoot. Loose stones fell from the cavern roof.
Agaratz turned his attention to the horned man as he limped towards the two beauty competitors. Both men’s eyes locked.
Then, in the silence between two claps of thunder, Agaratz began what Urrell immediately recognised from their years together, from that very first encounter between a famished boy and a singular creature bearing food. Agaratz was about to mimick a creature into reality.
For an instant he hoped it would be a mammoth.
Instead Agaratz moved about with jerky movements, spinning on his goat foot, flapping his arms with invisible speed: to all those watching eyes he became the bee, symbol of womanhood, maker of honey, best of flies, fertility itself. He seemed to rise off the grass.
A swarm appeared and hovered over him.
In total silence the crowd, now gripped not so much by fear as by awe, stared transfixed by the scene.
The swarm buzzed round the hunchback, controlled by his twirling hands and Urrell’s wand. He held the insects aloft, as he stood eye to eye with the glittering glare of the masked man, twice his height, escorted by his henchmen in their motley garbs and guises.
Breath pent, the crowd awaited. Overhead a flash of lightning tore through the clouds, followed by a roll and clap of thunder louder than anyone had heard so far, rocking the ground underfoot and bringing down more rock from the face of the cavern.
Agaratz rose with the bees, lifted by their whirling density till his good foot and his goat foot seemed to clear the ground.
He seemed slighter to Urrell, shrunken, drained of substance.
The crowd, up the bank, could not all see the gap under his feet. Voices and cries of those who could shouted their astonishment to those higher up.
But this was more than one of Agaratz’s sleights.
Urrell kept his eyes on the mage and his gang to see what their reaction might be to this fight to the death, of one against many, of force pitted against force. No shaman could live down being outfaced like this.
Both beauty contestants had remained standing still in their places. Would the mage’s men close in on them, or try to seize Agaratz?
Again lightning flashed, holding long enough for the swirling bees to be visible as a dark mass hovering over the two maidens. Agaratz had vanished. The swarm, in one swoop, alighted on Guimera, clothing her from her russet hair to her thighs in a teeming mass, as though drawn to the sinuous designs of flowers and twining plants that adorned her nakedness.
A roar this time rose from the assembly. She had won. The bees had chosen their queen.
People surged forward to her. Women to touch her. The horned one and his men backed off into the cavern as the crowd poured down and the world seemed to quake. Urrell was borne along, nearer his beloved.
The trembling of the ground increased and there were shouts and screams as the top of the cavern, loosened by the quaking, crashed down. Within minutes the throng had dispersed, the bees leaving Guimera a naked princess in her regal body paintings for Urrell to embrace and carry off.
They came to the camp, where R
akrak lay crouching alone. He noticed how grizzled she was round the snout. Of Agaratz there was nothing to be seen. Had he perished in the collapse of the cavern?
That night they slept together, wed.
In the morning, the skies now clear as after a storm, Agaratz was still nowhere to be seen. Urrell sought high and low, enquiring of the last few of the crowd gathering their belongings ready to disperse to their hunting grounds in time for the onset of winter. He looked for the baton, for the ivory flute, for his very identity. All had vanished. He descended to the silent cavern entrance, half blocked by falls of stone, even climbing over the rubble to look inside. Nothing of the inhabitants, their master, their lamps remained. He had a distinct sense that they had never been, or at another time long ago, so damp and uninhabited did the gloomy place feel. He shouted. His voice rang away into the blackness and he was struck by the lack of an echo. That blackness sucked in the sound and gave nothing back.
Then they both heard the distant flute-playing. In Guimera’s eyes Urrell saw the look, that remote look that was Agaratz’s.
The flute bade them depart. It was time to bury the hearthstones and turn towards home cave. They would just have time to reach the grasslands and cross them amid the heaving migrating herds of bison, horse and deer to reach the bluffs he knew so well, he, Urrell, clan leader, before winter set in.
When spring returned, he would take his woman upstream by raft along the Nani, to the island in mid-river where Agaratz, curled up and shrivelled in his pit with his forebears, would be awaiting their arrival and the libation of egg-yolk accompanied by the keening of Guimera in their antique tongue, evokatrix of memories of the age of the mammoths.
Finis
