and suddenly she thinks of the snail,
and the falcon, and the fronds of the ferns.
He who goes to the cave shouts at her.
She sees she has made a flame and not even known it,
because her eyes are full of the string of the bow.
From the spinning, fire has come
and she touches the end of the torch to the flame.
Hands it to the old man.
Who turns and goes to the cave.
Come, he shouts over his shoulder,
and the boy follows.
She watches them go, then
she slides the basket back onto her back,
and she follows, too, clambering
over rocks and through brush
into the mouth of the cave,
desperate to see what she has always wanted to see,
so desperate she doesn’t heed the warning
that her nose is giving her:
the faintest hint of a smell.
XII
There! Just inside the mouth:
Hands! Dozens of them.
Red hands in negative.
The ancestors of the people,
each hand made by the one who goes to the cave,
made before he goes to work.
The old man beckons to the boy,
points at her, but before she can get the reeds and the red,
the darkness erupts with a roar.
It happens so fast.
So fast, that at first
she doesn’t know what it is.
A shape flies at them.
Before the shape lands, the boy is dead.
His head hangs by a cord from his shoulders,
stripped by a giant paw.
A cave lion.
It lands as the boy’s body
pumps blood across the cave mouth.
The lion roars.
She stands. Frozen.
Her eyes on the boy,
and she remembers how he came from the belly
of the woman that she came from.
In another eye blink, the beast turns,
ready to run at them.
It does, but the old man is quicker
than the dead boy and leaps to one side.
Not fast enough,
the lion catches him with a claw,
and he collapses on the rocks, screaming.
He writhes on the floor.
Blood pouring from between his fingers,
pushing from long wounds in his side.
She scrambles from the cave.
The lion sees her and leaves the old man
to his pain.
It takes two steps, and she turns in time
to see it leap.
But she is fast and her fingers have fitted
an arrow to her bow string.
As the lion leaps, she pulls back the string,
wildly, without aim, the arrow flies, and
it is luck that takes it to its target.
The lion doesn’t know it.
The arrow sticks from its mouth,
and has penetrated its brain,
but it rushes at her, knocking her down.
She falls to the ground, and there is no pain,
only the time in which to save herself.
She pulls another arrow from the basket
as the lion turns and stumbles toward her.
It closes its jaws,
the arrow is broken.
The shaft clags on its mouth, stuck in its teeth
but it makes another leap.
She fumbles to fit the second arrow,
and this time she is not fast enough.
The beast is on her, but with a wild pain brain
controlling its body, it paws at her without control,
and so it is
that without control,
the beast and the girl
tumble away over the edge of the shelf,
the shelf of the cliff,
into the dark
waiting
green.
XIII
On the lake,
the paddles dip.
The boats draw near to the shore.
It has been a long night
but now dawn is coming,
and he who leads the hunt calls softly,
across the water,
to the boats behind.
Paddles dip faster,
eager now to be done with the water,
eager to be at the beasts,
to see them run, to hear them stampede,
to watch them fall under the spears.
He who leads the hunt leaps silently,
landing in the shallow water by the shore,
and as he pulls the prow of the boat onto the shingle,
he looks up at the high cliff,
where the sun will soon strike,
and he hopes that he who goes to the cave
is working hard
in the powerful darkness,
making the magic that must be made.
XIV
She hangs.
Just over the lip of the cliff,
strap-strangled,
suspended by the cords of the basket,
caught on a branch of a high-clinging tree.
She twists, wrestles, fights,
her arms pulled above her head by the cords,
and all she does is make
everything in the basket tumble
to the forest below.
Somewhere down there lies the lion,
its body broken across a rock on the forest floor,
the end of an arrow stuck in the roof of its mouth.
She hangs in the air,
and light begins to seep across the valley.
As she twists,
the black lake turns gray, then silver.
Then orange, and sunlight finds her face.
She hangs.
XV
Thoughts are in her head;
thoughts that collide.
She feels as if she is spinning.
The boy is dead,
his head taken and his blood spilled.
The old man’s blood flowed, too.
And the lion’s is leaking onto leaves below.
But not hers.
Not yet,
though she knows it will if she falls,
and that she will be eaten by birds if she does not.
Her strength is leaving her.
She twists, looking at the cliff,
looking up, looking down,
and she knows that is her chance:
to climb down the tree that saved her.
But she needs to be free of the branch.
She hangs for a moment more and thinks,
and then she sees
that with one heave,
she could lift herself out of the strap.
She waits.
Then she pulls, pulls hard,
lifts herself up;
her foot has found a branch,
she pushes, and slides her shoulders
out of the cord.
The tree sways.
Her head sways with it.
and she looks down at the drop and wants to be sick.
She waits,
and then hand over hand, one branch at a time,
she begins to descend the trunk
as the light grows harder with every passing beat of her heart.
The softness of dawn is leaving.
Down she climbs,
and as she goes, the way becomes harder.
The branches are bigger, but farther apart.
But now that she knows she is not going to die,
she moves faster and finally jumps to the forest floor
where she lands by the lion,
who is still, but still warm.
Heat comes from its body,
and flies are already dancing on its wounds.
She looks at it,
<
br /> and sees the blood on the claw
that took the head from the boy
who came from the same belly as her.
She turns.
Blood runs from cuts on her back.
The inside of her thigh is badly bruised,
the skin of her breasts is grazed.
The trees are sparse on this shelf of the cliff.
A narrow shelf, like the wider one above.
It runs away to nothing to her left,
to her right, it slopes up and widens out.
With fewer trees, she can see across the whole valley.
And though she is lower than before,
she sees the sun striking the plains.
She sees tiny black dots:
boats touching the shore.
The people have landed.
And there is no magic.
XVI
The softness of dawn is leaving
as she panics.
No magic!
No hunt can prosper without magic.
She looks up at the cliff,
down which she half fell, half climbed.
There is no way back.
But maybe the slope on which she stands
finds its way back to the higher shelf.
Maybe the old man is dead,
and the boy is dead,
but she can make the magic
if only she can find the cave again.
She scrabbles in the scrubby grass at her feet,
hunting.
She pushes plants aside and grows desperate,
and then she finds them:
the things from the basket.
The red ochre wrapped in leaves,
the reeds,
the second torch,
the fire sticks and bow.
Charcoal.
She gathers them together,
makes a bundle, which she binds with summer-dried grass
and hurries up the slope,
hoping to make her way to the cave.
Fern fronds and snail shells crush under her feet,
as she steps,
one eye on the path ahead,
one eye on the sunlit valley.
She must find the cave, and make magic soon;
she knows what to do, but she must find the cave first.
And then,
as the shelf narrows, then turns a twist
as it runs round the cliff face,
she comes to a corner, and her heart leaps.
A cave.
Not the cave, but another.
which, just like their own, looks across the water.
She looks ahead:
the shelf shows no sign of meeting the higher one.
It starts to lead down the cliff.
But here is a cave,
from which she can see the people
on the plain.
She can see long grass where the dawn deer will be grazing.
And here, here is a cave.
Something calls to her from inside.
Deep in the dark.
Something waits for her.
Come! it says.
Come, and understand.
She bends, and makes fire.
XVII
As she crosses the threshold,
a thought.
She must make the mark.
She must make the red hand on the wall.
The red hand, to make her part of the cave,
or the magic will not work.
She leans the torch against a rock,
and by its glow, she chooses a smooth face
on which to work.
And she works quickly.
A freshly sharpened flint knife takes the ends off a reed.
It is dry and hollow, and she pushes its end into the red.
The red ochre.
She places her hand against the smooth rock wall,
presses hard.
Then, the reed to her lips, she blows.
The red powder sprays perfectly,
a strong, narrow blast
that sticks to the wetness of the wall,
absorbed by the moon-milk there—
the soft white wetness that seeps from the rock.
Her heart beats.
She has covered only one finger and her thumb.
She bends to the powder,
refills the reed,
puts it to her lips.
And blows.
Two more fingers.
Good.
Again she bends, and when she blows this time,
her hand is done.
She steps away in awe.
She made the mark.
She is part of the cave.
She hurries.
A mark is not enough.
She must make magic;
she must make the deer
as they are hunted,
and she knows the hunting will begin very soon.
But for this magic to work,
she must be in darkness.
The dark light of the cave mouth is not enough.
She takes the torch back from the rock
and walks into the blackness.
As she climbs over boulders,
and slides in wet mud,
and turns to look behind her
every once in a while
to see how small the cave mouth has become,
she grows aware that something
something,
some thing
is waiting for her in the heart of the cave.
She can feel it.
She can almost hear it,
but she pushes it away,
because she needs to make magic.
The light from the world outside has gone.
She has come far,
and now she is in the place that connects to the magic.
This, the place the teller of tells has spoken of:
the place that connects this world and others,
where words are not enough to say anything,
where only actions can speak;
where magic made on the walls
can make meaning in the world.
She finds a place to plant her torch,
and takes the charcoal from her bundle.
All she has is two thick sticks,
but that is more than she will need.
She chooses a rock.
She likes it.
It bulges,
and in that bulge she sees the curve of a stag’s back.
It was made for the magic,
and she places the tip of the charcoal on the rock.
Her first mark is good.
Her first mark is so good,
she can already see the stag on the wall,
before she’s even made it.
She has made its back,
but her line is light.
She makes it again and makes it hard;
she makes it fast and she makes it bold,
and the back is done and it too is good.
Then a sweep of the neck,
a turn, a line,
and there is the head,
erect and proud,
held up just as it will be
when the spear strikes.
Good.
Now she makes the antlers.
Like branches, grown from the head,
strong and fierce, and she does them well.
The beast is almost alive in the rock.
She moves to the foreleg,
and her marks are power;
the lines are strong,
full of magic, and then,
then she notices something she had not seen before.
A mark on the wall
that was already there.
A mark that frightens her.
Her heart pounds and she grabs the torch.
She spins around;
she cries out as if someone is there.
She’s alone.
She’s alone, but t
here is still the matter of the mark on the wall.
She takes the torch closer, and now she gasps.
A hand.
A negative print of a hand.
A black hand.
Now the torch is closer,
she can see that the hand is not alone.
There is another.
And another.
Her breathing comes fast as she goes farther along the wall,
and the wall is covered with black hands.
Unlike the red hands,
with their marks inside,
these hands are empty.
Just the black powder outline, and …
Now she looks again, she knows why the hands scare her.
They have fingers missing.
All have thumbs,
but here is one with a half finger gone.
Here is one with half of two fingers missing.
She looks at them all.
Each misses at least one half finger.
Some have two stumps.
Some have three.
And here’s one with stumps for all four fingers.
She doesn’t understand.
She doesn’t know what it means.
She doesn’t know who made them,
but she senses something is wrong.
She runs, back to the light,
dropping the torch as she approaches the world.
She runs to the edge of the cliff shelf,
and there is the lake.
And there, she can see the people,
who have left their boats.
And there
she sees others,
other boats.
Heading for the far lakeshore.
And in them, other people.
Other
people.
She runs.
XVIII
Across the lake,
the people hunt.
They have allowed themselves
to judge the wind on which their scent will carry.
They have allowed themselves
to grow into the grass,
and for the sun to move so their shadows do not show.
He who leads the hunt
lies in the grass,
his spear light in one hand,
his spear thrower loose in the other.
He crawls.
Stops, waits.
Listens.
Then crawls again, and the people move behind him.
It takes an age, to move like this,
but the rewards will be greater.
Then, though the people have made no sound,
cast no shadow, and been careful with their scent,
there is a stampede.
The deer run.
the great uncountable many of them,
all run, at once.
He who leads the hunt leaps to his feet,
and cries out.
He sees the deer running, terrified,
bolting away, and he turns to see
what has caused this chaos,
and as he turns
a spear lands in his chest.
The Ghosts of Heaven Page 3
