The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  This was his work, the commemoration of the bulls. And he studied as if for the first time his greatest achievement-the way he had caught movement and a sense of distance by varying the shape of the horns. The farther horn was always a simple curve. The nearer horn began the same way, but then toward the tip he changed the line of the curve, almost reversing it, so that the head appeared suddenly to be moving, to be portrayed not simply in profile like the deer and horses always were but as great beasts that might almost be charging out into the cave itself. He sighed in satisfaction, and nodded gravely as he looked down to the last work he had done, on the chest of the bull when it sank to the forelegs.

  Yes, it had worked. Just as the different shape of the horns had seemed to turn the bull’s head toward him, so the separation of the forelegs maintained the effect. The rear foreleg thrust out forward, at a down-sloping angle to show that the bull was moving. Then before he began sketching the front foreleg he had drawn thickly the deep sagging muscle of the lower chest. Then the foreleg itself, marked off from the chest and belly by pure white space, to make the leg stand out and seem almost to move. It was perfect. Every trick that he had learned here, in the months and years in the semidarkness of the cave, they were all coming to fruition with this bull. It moved, and its movement was not simply forward but at an angle.

  “This is the greatest of your work,” said the Keeper of the Horses. He was standing easily on the scaffolding, each foot braced on a different pole, as he worked in the curve where the cave wall sank to become the wall. He was close to the head of the great bull, sketching lightly in the place between the two horns. “I shall pay tribute to your work with my own.”

  The Keeper of the Bulls squinted to see the faint shape of a horse’s head emerging from between the horns. He picked up one of the lamps and moved closer, climbing easily up the scaffolding poles to stand behind his fellow priest.

  “You see, my work will be here, the finest I have ever drawn, a noble creature who will be imprisoned by the horns, but staring down to honor what you have done,” said the Keeper of the Horses. He was a slim, wiry man, with thinning gray hair bound back from his face with a leather ring. Smaller than the Keeper of the Bulls, and quick in his ways as befitted a Keeper of the Horses, he had the finest teeth in the valley. They were white and even, and had not a single gap. The Keeper of the Bulls tried to remember the face of the man’s daughter. He thought perhaps her teeth were as perfect as her father’s. He enjoyed the thought.

  “He will have a mane of black, a skin of chestnut, a head that is neat and alert, his ears pricked forward as he shows his respect to the greatness that confronts him,” the Keeper of the Horses went on. “Is this well, my friend?”

  The Keeper of the Bulls squeezed his friend’s shoulder and grunted approval. He climbed down, making way for the young apprentice who was waiting to clamber up with two small wooden bowls of freshly mixed red and black clay. The Keeper of the Horses had completed his sketch with charcoal, and with feathers and smoothed blunt sticks in his belt, was ready to begin the real work. His own apprentice was sitting, cross-legged and patient, the colors already mixed on flat stones before him and with a lump of almost black clay soaking in a bowl under a heap of damp moss. There were two lamps ready to illuminate his work. This was good, and the Keeper of the Bulls nodded approval. The youth looked relieved. The Keeper of the Bulls had a strong arm and beat the apprentices who displeased him, or even exiled them from the work.

  “Bring me water to drink,” he told the youth, and turned to consider the day’s work as the apprentice moved swiftly to the cave entrance, carefully avoiding the scaffolding. The previous week, the most senior apprentice had been banished from the cave for knocking away the supports of the higher platform in the narrow cave beyond where the Keeper of the Bison was at work. He had been a talented young man, who mixed a splendid auburn red and whose sketches had won admiration. But for the carelessness and disrespect, he had been sent off to work for the women. Even the hunters would not have him.

  The Keeper of the Bulls pondered how to proceed. He wanted to depict those haunches, that weight and power that had come to him as he chanted over the holy fire. Holding the lamp close to his ear, he looked closely at the rock where the haunches would be painted. There was a jaggedness, a faint thrusting of a yellower rock coming through the thin chalk skin that made the cave such a perfect surface for the work. He passed his fingers lightly over the line of the yellow rock, thinking he could use that line to add bulk to the haunch, to hint at the swell of muscle. The line of the back was already complete as far as the tail, a fine sweeping curve that established the power of the shoulder and then rose for the swell of the haunch. He would leave a space for the root of the tail, knowing that the absence of line could be more telling than the most perfectly drawn one, before starting the curve of the haunch. He would separate the rear legs again, just as he had done with the forelegs, to maintain that illusion of a half-turn. But how to distinguish between the legs, where there was no hanging muscle of chest. Suddenly, he smiled to himself. A beast as noble as this would have mighty genitals. He put his left hand to his own loins, cupping them gently, as his right hand began to sketch with charcoal. And as the thought of the daughter of the Keeper of the Horses came into his mind, he felt himself stirring under his hand. He had not thought of his woman, or of the birth, at all.

  At the fire by the river, the banished apprentice sat tiredly in a brief moment of rest before the women ordered him to feed the fire again, or to get more wood or to bring more water. The screams of the woman lying on the great mat of sewn-together reindeer hides had faded to moans. He could see nothing of the birth. The other women huddled around her, some still holding down her shoulders and legs. Suddenly one turned to him, speaking coldly, and told him to run to the flint makers and bring back the sharpest piece they had.

  “It must have a good gripping stone. Just a chip of flint won’t be enough. We’ll have to hold it firmly,” she said, and turned away to shout more instructions to a young girl.

  He rose and began running along the river and then up the hill to the quarry where the flint men worked, the sound of their constant tapping even louder than his labored breaths. He paused as he approached, catching his breath and looking carefully on the ground ahead. Even the most callused feet could still be sliced by the shards of flint that littered the earth. The flint men themselves wore leather moccasins with wooden soles bound to them. They were men he hardly knew, who kept to themselves almost as much as the Keepers who worked in the cave, and were just as strict in their hierarchy. The head of the flint men, whose main work was to teach the craft to the young apprentices, ignored the youth’s approach for a few moments before looking up. The youth explained what the women needed.

  “For a bad childbirth?” the flint man asked. He was old and white-haired, with strips of hide tied around his hands to protect them from the stones. “I’ll have to make something.”

  He rose and went to the pile of stones the youngest apprentices constantly brought down from the quarry. Sifting carefully though them, he picked out a smooth rock that was almost a perfect globe, only one end jagged and split. He came back to the circle of watching apprentices, picked up his knapper, held the globular stone firmly against the flat rock that served as his anvil, and explained what he intended to do, and where his first strikes would be. He lifted his right hand, and brought the knapper down sharply onto the stone, hitting at an angle and just above the first break in the smooth globe. A large sliver of stone broke off. He turned the globe and repeated his strike, and then handed it to an apprentice and told him to do the same. Within the time it took for the banished apprentice’s breathing to return to normal, a sharp flint knife, with a perfectly smooth and round haft to fit the hand, had been produced. The flint man tested the edge against the hair on his own arm, and nodded approval. He tossed it to the waiting youth, who turned and ran back to the women at the fire.

  As he reached th
em the young girl who had been dispatched came running back, breathing easily, with two handfuls of fresh moss from the riverbank. As they handed over their items, the young man caught the scent of fresh blood. There were no more moans coming from the woman lying on the reindeer hide, and the other women had ceased to hold down her legs and shoulders.

  “Is she dead?” the girl asked. A tired woman, bloodstained to the elbow, nodded grimly and sighed. “The child still lives within her.”

  The two young people squatted near the fire, and watched as the oldest-woman took the sharp flint and drew it firmly down the swollen belly of the dead mother into her groin. The girl gasped and turned her head aside. The youth watched intently as the blood welled, trickling slowly down the woman’s sides to the hide. The old woman repeated her stroke, muttering softly to herself, and then two more women began to peel the parted skin aside. The old woman began working with the flint knife inside the belly as yet another woman squatted over the dead one’s head, and began mopping up blood with the moss so that the old one could see to work. The young girl turned her head back to watch as the old one threw the flint aside, and reached deep within to draw out a small, still baby, a multicolored cord hanging from its belly and glistening in the sunlight. She looked at it carefully, poked her finger into its mouth to clear it, and then bent down to blow into its nostrils. She did this three times, squeezing the baby’s tiny chest each time, and then she slapped its rump quite hard, and the baby’s arms waved and it began to cry. It was a girl. The old one held the baby as another woman knotted the cord with a strip of leather, and then cut it. They wiped the baby clean with more of the moss, wrapped it in a reindeer skin, and then laid it by the fire.

  “We helped to save it, then,” the young girl said. He noticed that she wore that plain leather neck cord of the not-yet-betrothed, and her hair was rich and glossy. She turned and smiled at him, and he saw that her teeth were white and perfect. Her eyes seemed very large to him. “But the mother died. Did you know who she was?”

  “Yes, she was the woman of the Keeper of the Bulls. She had borne him sons,” he said. “Did you know her?”

  “Of course. My father is the Keeper of the Horses. And you are the bad apprentice who was sent away from the cave, the young man who now has no craft and no name.” She looked at his naked neck. No bone on a thong to show he was a hunter, no stone to show that he made flints, no piece of bark to show that he was wood gatherer and guardian of fire. Above all, there was no feather to mark him as an apprentice to the Keepers in the cave. They must have wrenched it from his neck when he was banished. “What will you do now?”

  “Wait,” he said curtly. “They will punish me for a season by making me work with the women, and then they will take me back. That is what your father told me when he came to visit me with some food after I had been beaten and sent away. He is a kind man.” He looked at the girl, suddenly intent on the way her cheekbones framed her face and at the soft down on her cheeks. “He is a good man, and his work is very fine. He said that I had talent and the Keepers would not let such a gift go unused. It would do no honor to the beasts of the cave.”

  “He is kind. When I am sick, he goes into the woods to bring me honey, even when the bees sting him,” she said. “But since you have no name, what shall I call you?”

  “Deer-runner was my boyhood name. Keeper of the Deer will be my name when they take me back to the work in the cave. Call me Deer,” he said, very conscious of the soft swelling of her young breasts. This was no child, but a woman soon to be betrothed. He wondered what her father’s plans for her might be. “And what do I call you?”

  “My family calls me Little Moon. My father says the moon was very small when I was born.”

  “He has not sought to betroth you yet?” he asked.

  She laughed, almost childishly. She was still very young. “No, he says we must wait until Little Moon is more of a full moon. But my new mother thinks it soon will be time.”

  He looked at her silently, enjoying her face but somehow alarmed by his own pleasure in her. He would not be eligible for betrothal until his apprenticeship was complete. Another season of banishment from the cave would take him into the summer, then at least two more seasons of apprenticeship meant that it would be midwinter before he became a Keeper. If her mother thought it was time, this girl would be betrothed before the summer was over. She could be carrying her first child by the time he became a Keeper and was entitled to take a woman. The thought put a hollowness into his belly, a feeling he had never known before. Little Moon. She was looking shyly at him from under her lashes.

  The cackle of the old woman cut into his reverie. He had to bring firewood to build the pyre for the dead woman, the pyre that her man would light at dusk as the women stood around and sang the death song of motherhood. He rose to go, and hardly knowing what he was doing, stopped and said, “Little Moon, I shall be a Keeper this winter. Wait for that.”

  She looked at him, expressionless, as he turned to go. She had never seen before any young man without the mark of his craft around his neck. The bareness of his chest rose unchecked to his neck and head. When he turned, she was suddenly aware of the intentness with which she studied the slimness of his waist and the way it swelled out to the muscles beneath his shoulders, and the way his fair hair fell and splayed in curls upon them. She watched him run, Deer-runner. She could call him Deer, he had told her so. Her hand came up to touch her own bare thong, the mark of the virgin.

  The Keeper of the Bulls thrust his torch into the stack of wood, and stepped backward as the fire began to crackle beneath the body of his woman. They had told him it was a girl child. His sisters could take care of it. The woman had brought him two sons. She had kept a decent home. His water was always warmed at the fire for his morning drink. Her thighs had always opened dutifully to his desire, and there had been moments when she clasped him with warmth. He thought back to the earliest days, when she had been young and lithe and at first frightened beneath him, and then languorous and eager. That time had passed with the first son, passed along with the sleepy talk and the laughter, passed along with his growing obsession with the work and the cave. With the bulls. He could name them in the privacy of his own mind. But not to others, and never to those outside the chosen circle of the Keepers. For those others, it was only to be named the work, or the beasts.

  He looked around at the gathering people, flickering in the firelight that held the dusk at bay. Grease on their faces after the feast. A long, low moan coming from the women at the far side of the fire, rising into the chant of mourning. Then the men of her kin came forward. A hunter, to lay a bone upon the pyre, and a waterman, with a wriggling crayfish, his splayed thumb and fingers squeezing its head into stillness as he laid it on the fire. The Keeper of the Bulls waited, until all had done, and then stepped forward to lay his own feather upon the flames that would consume the mother of his sons.

  It was the cave that had brought so many others here, to pay respect at the pyre of his woman. The leader of the flint men, the chief woodman, and all the men who led the hunt. The leaders of the fleet young men who chased the game and of the spearmen and slingers who killed it. The trackers and even the limping old head of the small group of crippled and older men who set the traps and placed the nets for the birds and fishes. And it was the cave that had brought the headmen of the other communities along the river, for while they had their own priests and artists and their own holy caves, none of them had had his vision to fill a whole cave with the holy beasts.

  Still, there were men here whose skills he envied, not for himself, but for the greater power of the cave itself. His Keeper of the Bison-only to himself did he ever think of his colleagues as “his” men-was old, half-blind, and barely adequate. The bull he had worked on today had almost openly showed his contempt, painting over a crude red bison that he thought of as little more than a stain on the wall. He hadn’t even bothered to consult its Keeper about painting over it. He caught himself.
He must not do that. There was an etiquette in the cave, as the Keeper of the Horses had come to him in the morning to consult about the placing of his horse between the horns of the bull. That was the proper way, showing respect. That was how it must be done, he cautioned himself. But it was hard. It was his vision, his cave, not to be demeaned by the daubs of second-raters. In their hearts, his colleagues must know this, which made it all the more important that he be seen to show them proper deference.

  He would miss this woman, lying dead before him, about to go into the flame. Not just her body or her care, but her counsel. She had understood his vision from the moment that the hunters had first entered the miraculous cave and summoned him to see the great white space of the walls, the perfect round of the ceiling where it narrowed. He remembered the sense of lust as he had first seen it, probing into the belly of the earth as he had later probed into the belly of his woman. She had understood that this could be the holiest cave of them all, and it was her counsel that made him raise the idea so carefully. She had told him to sound out the oldest Keepers first, to make it sound like their idea, while she had subtly worked on their women. He would miss that, miss her gentle reminders of the need to pay respect to their other Keepers, to praise the crude work of that fool, the Keeper of the Bison. He had only himself now to keep voicing the warnings, to bite down on the urgency that seized him when he saw how the cave should be, and to keep silent when his heart cried out in pain at the sad daubings others made as they carried out his vision.