by Ben Bova
“When was The War?” I asked. “What happened?”
“That is something that you must discover for yourself,” Ormazd replied, his image beginning to waver and fade before my eyes. Then he added, “And for me.”
I Was stunned. “Wait! Do you mean that you yourself don’t know what happened? You don’t know what took place in The War? What your race did to his?”
But he was only a pinpoint of light now, dwindling into the all-engulfing blackness. I heard his voice calling, from far away:
“Why do you believe that my race is not the same as yours, Orion? Are we not father and son?”
With a shock I realized that I was staring at the dark night sky. Twinkling stars gazed back at me from the depth of space as I clung to the tree’s rough bark and searched the bowl of heaven for understanding, for meaning. I sought out the constellation of Orion, but it was nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER 24
For days on end I trailed the Goat Clan as it marched across the Neolithic landscape. I had to get them to accept me, but they were totally xenophobic; either you were born a member of the clan or married a member of the clan — or you were an outsider, to be shunned and feared.
But Ormazd’s command was clear. I must save this clan from Ahriman’s plan, whatever it might be; I must use this clan to trap the Dark One.
And the woman — the gray-eyed one whose beauty could not be hidden even by layers of grime and ignorance — I knew she was the one I had known as Agla, and even before then, as Aretha. But she gave no hint of recognizing me. Was she reborn each time I was, but without any memories at all of her previous lives? Why would Ormazd do that?
I thought I knew the answer. She was my local barometer, as native to this time and place as any other member of her clan. If I could get her to accept me, the rest of the clan would.
And I wanted her to accept me. I wanted her to love me, as she had loved me ten thousand years ago, as I have loved her through all time.
But they were a superstitious, fearful troop of savages whose prime instinct was to flee from the unknown — and kill strangers.
I watched them from afar. They spent much of their days hunting, the younger women beating the bushes for rabbits, squirrels, and anything else they could find, while the men roamed farther afield, looking for bigger game and generally finding none. The older women stayed by their campfire, tending the children and gathering edible plants and berries.
By dusk they were all gathered around their fire, the women cooking their meager meals, the men chipping new tools from stores of flint they carried in leather bags or hardening their spear points in the flames. They were a self-contained, self-sufficient group, living off the land, staying just above the starvation-level as long as they did not produce too many children.
Twentieth-century ecologists despaired of “modern” man’s so-called throwaway culture and pointed to primitive tribes who, they claimed, lived in harmony with nature. Here I was watching the origins of the throwaway culture. These Neolithic hunters walked to a campsite, cut down brush and stripped trees of their smaller limbs to build a fire, killed whatever game they could find and tossed their bones away when they were finished gnawing on them. They left discarded flakes of flint, tools and weapons that were no longer useful, wherever they dropped them.
The smoke from their fires did not damage the purity of the Neolithic air. Their scattered refuse piles did not contaminate the soil. Their pitiful little camps did not harm the water table, nor did their hunting endanger any animal species. But the attitudes of these simple nomadic hunters would become the ingrained attitudes of all the generations of humans that followed them. What was acceptable for a few scattered bands of primitive hunters became a major environmental problem when those hunters’ descendants began to number in the billions.
But, despite myself, I had to smile as I watched them, day after day, and thought of the absurd assumptions that twentieth-century ecological moralists made about primitive peoples.
This was not accomplishing my mission, however. After several days of observing them, mostly from hiding, but now and then blatantly enough so that they could see me and know I was trailing them, I hit upon a scheme that would get them to accept me — I hoped.
I had boasted to them of my skill as a hunter. It had been mostly empty words; the only hunting I had ever done had been at Ogotai’s side in the great Mongol killing drive. But I knew that my reflexes and senses were far enough beyond theirs to give me a great advantage over them in anything that required physical exertion and skill. After watching them stalking game and building their primitive snares, and usually failing to catch anything, I knew that I could improve on their methods.
So I began taking game from the countryside and leaving it at their smoldering campfire while they slept. Innocents that they were, they posted no guards as they slept out in the open. The fire protected them from dangerous night-stalking beasts, and other human tribes must have been too far away to pose a threat to them. It was easy for me to leave a brace of fowl or a rabbit or two that I had flushed out of the brush and killed by throwing small rocks at them.
It took me several tries, but eventually I fashioned a crude bow and learned how to make arrows that would fly halfway accurately. I brought down a young doe with my new weapon, although I had to finish the job with my knife. I left the catch at their campfire just before dawn.
I watched them each morning, from a distance and always from concealment behind rocks or bushes. They were startled at first, wondering how the dead game appeared in their midst. They discussed it for hours at a time, some members of the clan apparently believing that others had done the deed. But no one admitted to it, and after a few mornings of finding the gifts by their campfire, they began to realize that it was the work of an outsider.
That made them fearful, even though they ate the offered gifts just as though they had caught it themselves. But they started to post sentries through the night. At first they were drowsing youths, and I managed to slip past them easily enough. Then a few of the adult men stood guard, but it was a rare night when they stayed alert enough to prevent me from leaving a gift near the smoldering campfire.
Gradually I began to let them see me, but always at a distance. I would hold a fowl in my upraised hand or carry a young buck across my shoulders. They would huddle together and stare at me in awe. In the dark of night I would sneak in close enough to their crackling fire to listen to their talk, and before morning streaked the sky, I would leave the prize that they had seen me with the previous day.
Soon enough they turned me into a legend. Orion was eleven feet tall. His eyes darted flame. He could leap across rivers and stop spears in midair merely by glancing at them with his fierce countenance. He was a mighty hunter who could bring down a mastadon single-handedly.
Their talk of mastadons intrigued me. Apparently the clans came together, later in the year, and hunted down truly big game together. The elders — who may have been all of thirty-five years, or even forty — told tales of grand hunts where they chased entire herds of mighty tusked behemoths over the edge of a cliff and then feasted on their carcasses to bursting.
I listened also to the names they called themselves, and I learned that the red-bearded leader was Dal and the teen-ager with the cracking voice was Kralo. The woman I had loved in other times was known as Ava — and she was Dal’s woman, I soon realized. That hurt. For days I wandered away from the clan, feeling alone and betrayed by a woman who had none of the memories I had, whose only sight of me had been that first day when I had surprised and terrified the entire clan. What did you expect? I raged at myself. These savages don’t have the time or the resources to allow women to go unmated. Did you think she would wait for your arrival? She didn’t even know you existed until a few weeks ago. Even now she thinks you are a demon or a god, not a man who loves her and wants to possess her.
Still I moped and sulked, filled with self-pity and a smoldering anger at Ormazd, who could put me into thi
s situation without a thought about my feelings.
After three days away from them spent nursing my aching heart, I realized that I was not doing myself or them any good. I decided to return to the task that had been set before me. In truth, there was nothing else that I could do. I was a pawn in Ormazd’s game, and the emotions of a pawn are not important to the chess master.
I sneaked back to their camp that night and listened to them asking themselves why the mighty Orion had abandoned them. What had they done to offend the great hunter? It took all my self-control to keep from laughing. How quickly the miraculous becomes common-place! The gifts of food that had frightened them, at first, they now considered quite normal. It was the absence of the formerly wonderful gifts that troubled them.
I decided to give them a real gift. First I thought back to the marches they made each day, the distances between one night’s camp and the next. They were obviously moving through this springtime with a definite objective in mind. I calculated where they would camp two days hence and made for that spot. To my pleasure, I saw that the area I arrived at had obviously been used as a campsite before: beside a shallow, swiftly gurgling brook there was a patch of earth already blackened by the fires of countless earlier camps and a mound of weathered bones where they had tossed their garbage.
I spent that night and all the next day really hunting. With my rickety bow and with a sling I had devised for throwing rocks, I amassed a huge pile of slain meat for the clan: rabbits, birds, deer, even a succulent young boar. I left the food at the intended campsite, spending almost as much time defending the cache against wild dogs and other scavengers as I did in hunting down more game.
The dogs were my biggest difficulty. These were not the half-tamed companions of the humans; they were more like wolves than pets. They were ferocious and intelligent. They hunted in packs, and they would have dragged me down and killed me if I had not been fast enough and smart enough to outwit them. I hated to do it, but I had to kill several of them before they finally gave up on my horde and left the area.
I guarded the cache of meat through that long night and most of the following day. Finally, as the late afternoon shadows lengthened toward sunset, I saw the vanguard of the clan approaching from over the grassy horizon two of the teen-agers whom Dal often sent out ahead of the rest. I splashed across the rushing brook and hid in the foliage on its other side.
The boys saw the pile of game first and began leaping into the air and yelling madly. The rest of the clan hurried toward them, gaped, and then ran for the campsite. They were ecstatic. Never had they seen so much food in one place before. They gathered around the cache, swishing their hands through the air to shoo off the flies, and simply stared in awe at the pile of meat.
From my hiding place in the bushes I heard their leader, Dal, say gravely, “Only Orion could have done this.”
“Can it be all for us?” Ava asked.
“We are his people,” replied Dal. “This has been our clan’s camp since before even old Makar can remember. It is Orion’s gift to us. He has returned to his people. He is no longer angry at us.”
I let them build their fire and settle down to feasting as the evening slowly pulled its violet blanket over the cloudless sky. I slipped away, went upwind along the bank of the stream, and where it eddied into a wide pool, I saw a fine solitary stag dipping his antlered head to drink.
Unlimbering my bow, I slowly walked toward the stag. It saw me, but it was so unused to humans that it allowed me to get within deadly range of it. I felled it with a single shot through the neck, then slit its throat swiftly and cleanly with my stone knife. I felt a twinge of conscience, the memory of a later century when human hunters stalked such beautiful animals for sport, not for food. With a determined shake of my head, I lifted the carcass onto my shoulders and headed back toward the clan’s camp. It was heavy, and I walked slowly, carefully, through the gathering dusk.
Just as the first star showed itself in the dark sky, I stepped into the flickering light of the clan’s camp with the stag across my shoulders. They were still eating, stuffing themselves as only people accustomed to long hunger can do, their fingers and faces greasy with meat, the campfire blazing hot and shining in their eyes.
I stepped into their midst and dropped the stag with a heavy thunk at Dal’s feet.
No one spoke a syllable. For several moments the only sound was the hissing of spitted meat burning on the fire.
“It is me,” I said at last. “Orion. I bring you another gift.”
They were victims of their own propaganda. They had puffed up their stories about me so far out of proportion that now they seemed terrified of my presence. None of them moved. Their faces were rigid with fear and surprise. They probably expected me to strike them with lightning, or something equally drastic, I suppose.
Ava recovered her wits before any of the others. Rising slowly to her feet, she extended both her arms toward me.
“We thank you, O mighty Orion. What can we do to show our gratitude?”
She was filthy, her face and hands stained with the bloody, charred meat she had been eating. But in the firelight I saw the calm gray eyes that I had known and loved in other eras, and it took all my self-control not to clasp her in my arms.
I took a slow, calming breath and tried to speak in the somber manner they would expect of a demigod.
“I grow weary of solitude,” I said. “I wish to be among you for a while.”
That sent a murmur through them. Dal got to his feet and stood slightly behind Ava.
“I will teach the ways of hunting that I use. I will show you how to catch more game than you ever thought possible.”
They remained unmoving, Dal and Ava standing, facing me, the rest of them still sitting in a semicircle around the crackling, hissing fire. I could see the conflict warring in their grimy faces. They were scared half out of their wits by me. Yet, to be able to hunt down animals like that! It was a tempting offer. Which would it be, their fear or their bellies?
Ava stepped closer to me and studied my face in the dancing firelight. I suppose I was none too clean myself, shaggy and unkempt.
“Are you a man or a spirit?” she asked boldly.
She was as beautiful as I remembered her. Tall and slender, almost my own height, taller than most of the men of the clan. Yet her strong, lithe body was completely female; the skins she wore could not hide that. Her bare arms and legs were dirty, scratched here and there. A scab covered one knee. Her matted filthy hair was reddish, like the others, instead of the darker tones I remembered. But she was the same woman — beautiful, intelligent, courageous — the woman I loved.
I made myself smile. “A man,” I answered. “I am only a man.”
Dal moved from behind Ava to examine me more closely. There were no weapons in his hands, but he was clearly being protective of her.
“You look like a man,” he said. “Yet…”
“I am a man.”
“But you do things that no man can do.”
“I will teach you how to do them.”
Ava asked, “What clan were you born to, if you are a man?”
“My clan lives far from here. I have traveled for a long, long time.”
“Can everyone in your clan hunt the way you do?”
“Some can,” I said. “Some hunt better than I.”
For the first time, a smile curled her lips. “They must be very fat, then.”
I laughed. “Some of them are.”
“Why are you alone?” Dal asked, still suspicious. “Why have you come to us?”
“My clan is far away, and I have been separated from it for a long time. I was sent here to help you, to show you how to hunt and to protect you from your enemies. I have been alone for more days than any of you can count, and I am weary of loneliness. You are the clan that I have sought. You are the people I wish to be with.”
As I spoke the words, I realized the truth that lay in them. I had been alone all my life, except f
or those few brief months with Agla, so far in the future of this time.
“It is not good for a man to be alone,” said Ava, with surprising warmth and understanding in her voice. “Even the mightiest hunter needs a clan and a family.”
Like all humans facing a difficult decision, they finally settled on a compromise. Dal spoke earnestly with the two elders of the clan, then with all the adults, male and female. They agreed to let me join them and show them my tricks of hunting. But they insisted that I had to sleep by myself, away from their campfire. Many of them were not convinced that I was not some form of a supernatural being, and they wanted to take as few chances with me as possible.
I accepted their decision. I had to. No one brought up the question of what to do about me after I had shown them all my techniques of hunting. These people did not think much about their future; they lived in the present, like all animals, and only dimly perceived that tomorrow might be different from yesterday.
I was content with their decision, for the time being. It fulfilled Ormazd’s command. And it brought me closer to Ava.
CHAPTER 25
Dal and Ava stayed close to me at all times as the clan continued its migration across the green, flowering land.
Dal was a good leader, who took his responsibilities seriously. Nearly as tall as I, although much slimmer, he was well-muscled and had keen, alert eyes. He watched me carefully every minute of the day. Dal had no fear that I might be a spirit who posed a supernatural threat to the clan. His worries were very practical and matter-of-fact. He feared that I might be a spy from another clan, an infiltrator who would somehow lead the clan into an ambush.
At first I didn’t realize this. But after a few days of his suspicious, wary watch over me, I began to piece it together. At night, when the elders told their tales around the campfire, I heard enough singing over blood and battle to realize that even in this demi-Eden, where human clans were so thinly spread that contact between them was rare, war and killing were still common enough, and still glorified.
