Galway
Page 17
Father brought me back to the present with claims he returned to the Neanderthals’ valley five years later during a journey to Asia Minor and the Euphrates River. Leaving his traveling clan of Cro-Magnon men and women in Swedsissi, he spent a week picking his way up over the mountain and down into the valley beyond. To his surprise, the women were still in residence and the only men in camp were a half dozen four-year-old boys who bore an uncanny likeness to Giovanni Bolzano. Father spent a month getting to know his playful little children and planting another crop in the mothers.
On his way back from Mesopotamia, Father’s Cro-Magnons began driving him batty. Their growing desire to make him God was more than he could endure. One afternoon along the banks of the Rhone River, he delivered a dose of knockout sauce to the bewitched clan of grovelers and doubled back to the hidden valley.
Again, he was surprised to find the women still in residence. And there was a new crop of toddlers. “This is a man, a hunter, your father, the Hunter,” the women explained to the eight-year-old boys and girls who were now too shy to romp and climb on the stranger as they had on his last visit. One month became two, two months became four, and before Father knew it, a pair of years had passed in the valley.
“Those women vowed to await their men’s return and they were determined to keep that promise,” Father said with a sigh. “They also knew their boys could never become true Neanderthal men until they learned the proper ways from Neanderthal men. As women, they were ignorant of male customs and family stories. They had only vague concepts what boys go through during initiations into manhood, except that it was painful and it turned them into hunters and providers.”
The mothers begged the Hunter to see their sons across the mountains to deliver them to a place where “Moilomolo” still live free from the threat of “Spear Throwers” and the “Many Who Fight as One.” Father said he found it interesting that the women insisted they didn’t want the boys back after their training. They also rejected his offers to replenish the valley with fresh male Moilomolo. Speculating, he said he felt they had come to cherish the peace and chatter of their female-dominated society.
Father kept one half of the bargain, he took the boys off their mothers’ hands, but he did not turn them over to a Neanderthal clan. He said he tried, but got the distinct impression the would-be mentors were far keener on eating the young charges than teaching them. In stealth mode, he snuck back into the Neanderthal camp and caught one of clan’s leaders rearing up with a wooden club to bash the biggest and brightest child in the head.
Father said he managed to deflect the club on the downswing, but the boy’s shoulder blade was shattered. Fueled by a blind rage, he methodically gunned down the entire cannibalistic clan. He admitted that he had no business being surprised by Neanderthal perfidy. It is common knowledge in the Cro-Magnon community that Neanderthal cannot be trusted. The saying is, “Help one and he or she will turn around and stab you in the back.” Really. I have already added the homily to my list.
Father’s time in the valley had lulled him into a false sense of belonging. He spoke the words, knew the sign language, understood proper protocol, but in the Neanderthal world he would never be accepted. In the valley, however, he was family. The children were his blood.
Father said the boys had impressed him with their endurance and lack of complaints on the trek through the Alps. They were quick learners and eager to please. As he developed his teaching curriculum, he found they responded best to the same basic techniques he used while training our German Shepherds back in the day.
“They respond to both praise and discipline, but what they most crave is consistency,” he said with pride. “As long as things move according to plan they’re extremely capable workers. Smarter, more mobile and much better winded than pure Neanderthal, my hybrids are loyal to me and me alone. Compared to Cro-Magnon stock, they are far less prone to the mumbo-jumbo of spirituality and the overwhelming desire to sort out why events happen the way they do. As long as my hybrids are fed and get laid every once in a while, they’re happy.
“As they don’t brag to other clans about my abilities, I no longer find myself getting into needless fights with overmatched, frightened men. On the long hunt, they fall into a trance that allows them to run for days on end with minimal food and water.
“I’ve tried quadroons and octoroons in my hybrid packs and nothing beats a straight half-half mix. Half Hunter and half Neanderthal. It’s got to be Hunter, or it doesn’t work. The loyalty’s not there if I’m not the daddy.”
Father put down his shell cup and said, “Most of the boys you have met are the third generation of Sons. It wasn’t easy finding new breeding partners as the valley women died off. There used to be a fairly dense concentration of Neanderthal in the forests around the Bodensee, but that bunch has been just about hunted to extinction by a new wave of Cro-Magnons moving in from the steppes I call the Mongol Horde. I was truly beginning to worry. And then you led me on a wild-goose chase to Southern Spain. While the search was for naught, I did find quite a few suitable Neanderthal cows in which to plant my next crop.
“I’ll leave you with this thought. Living 300 years may sound like a wondrous blessing to you, and in many ways it is. But there are also 300 years of sorrow and struggle to endure. Do you know how many wives, sons and daughters I have buried through the years? This is not the natural way, parents are meant to go first. You never get used to it.
“I love all my sons, and also my daughters, though the two who are jumping around down by the fire often vex me. Look how Pearl has attached a foxtail to Leonglauix’s leather britches. She has always been an instigator, just like her mother.
“I will not apologize, and instead suggest that you two climb off your high horses and crunch the numbers. My genetics will be so diluted in five or 10 generations as to be negligible. I’m no Lorenzo Martinelli. I have no desire to build an empire or found a religion. All I want is to hunt, explore and sample the comforts of life as they present themselves.
“Let’s join the party, shall we?”
We danced, we sang, Leonglauix shared a tale about a long-ago trek across the ice that was part story and part practical guide on how to travel properly in the bitter north–tips like how eating snow makes you thirsty, and not to lick your lips or they will become red and chapped. After a so-so choir performance, the daughters entertained us with their version of a mirror dance–what they call a “water dance.” I did my best to enjoy myself but my heart was not in the effort. Father and I found ourselves back up at his table with the white owl, observing the swirling chaos from afar. It was a surprise when out of the blue he invited me to accompany him on a private journey north.
“If it’s just the two of us, we can travel faster and with far less distractions,” he said. “There are places I can show you that you will not believe are real. Do you think you might enjoy seeing a cache of opalized dinosaur eggs?”
How could I turn him down?
CHAPTER SEVEN
TRANSMISSION:
Bolzano: “My mind has been on the Americans this morning. I do hope they travel well in this weather.”
Hunter: “I’ve assigned my most capable boys to look after them. What could possibly go amiss?”
Bolzano: “And your two daughters also serve as escorts. We must not forget them.”
Hunter: “Try as I might. Ah...Salvatore?”
Bolzano: “Yes, Father?”
Hunter: “Would you be so kind as to sit down and touch your toes? Be a good lad now. There you go.”
From the log of Salvatore Bolzano
Firefighter II
(English translation)
The first 100 kilometers were but a blur of drifting snow and ice-covered waterways. Trapped inside my suit, unable to stop my legs from churning, I sprinted north by northeast, seemingly alone, but never free of Father’s iron-fisted control. Midway through the second day, he altered his force field to allow me to see his silvery shape as he
loped beside me with long, confident strides.
Running atop a network of frozen rivers and lakes, Father and I passed towering, creaking forests of oak and ash stripped bare by winter’s winds, and expanses of silvery-green evergreens that assailed my nostrils with their pungent sap. When the snow grew deep, Father programmed our boots to flare into snowshoes–a function I had not been aware existed. Retracting on the up-step to reduce drag, spreading wide to keep us atop the snow crust, our boots produced round tracks that could easily be mistaken for mammoth.
Father knows quite a bit about these damnable suits–including how to keep me locked inside one for going on eight days. When the bastard found he could not cajole, goad or order me into donning the infernal apparel, he knocked me out and performed the job himself. I awoke to a cascade of familiar electrical sensations flooding my being, creating a hyperawareness to sound and smell, to a constant stream of readouts flashing across my visor. Wind speed, temperature, barometric readings and head-to-toe medical data ranging from my heart rate to white and red blood cell counts. The information barrage is endless and sadly, quite addictive.
Attempts to rip off the helmet and climb free of the suit are thwarted by Father and his loathsome belt. Though my mind may order the latches to release, Father now has final say on what my suit will and will not do.
“Stand on one leg,” he barked that first morning. Like some wooden puppet with strings, I felt my left leg rise into the air. “Sing my favorite aria.” Puccini himself would have been entertained by my booming rendition of his E lucevan le stelle. It was no matter that I had never learned the words to his romanza from the opera, Tosca. My diction was flawless. I danced a solo tango, and then, for good measure, repeated the steps on my hands. Father had a grand time playing puppeteer. My absolute inability to countermand his whims continues to be most disconcerting.
“Don’t fight it, you sot,” he scolded. “I’ll run you clear to the Crystal Cave if I must, but you will learn to take the bit.”
Three days striding without stop merged body and suit into one. Where I should have felt fatigue there was only euphoria. Impervious to weather and pain, invisible to predators and prey, able to navigate in all light conditions–from full dark to blinding whiteout–we gobbled up the terrain. Father did not slow our pace until we arrived at the cave’s unassuming entrance.
The man-sized gash was situated midway up a low hill, one of hundreds of similar low hills in a rolling countryside that what will one day be the North Sea. If not for the abundance of human footprints leading to and from its mouth, the opening resembled something a sleepy bear might dig for a temporary den. Synapses firing, brain lightly spinning, my head swiveled of its own volition, scanning the surrounding terrain for threats visually, thermally and with radar. I felt as if I might vomit, though I knew I would not. The suit would quash the reflex.
“May I don my civilian clothes now?”
“Idiot! We just ran more than 380 kilometers without halting. Your bloody heart would burst the instant you disconnected.”
“How long?”
“A couple days should do.”
Squeezing through the snow-filled passageway into the cave’s roomy upper chamber, we found a Cro-Magnon clan of 13 men, women and children in residence. Father recognized the clan’s leader, as well as his wife and older children. He was kind enough to give me a snapshot of the Black Wolf Clan as it went about its business in the flickering, yellow light of three fires.
“Mumbles runs a rather tight ship,” Father said. “I suppose that’s a common enough trait among the leaders of the northern clans. Sloppiness will not do when you live in the shadow of the ice. Bad things happen, even to those who are smart and careful. Mumbles is proof of that. He once sported a fine voice for chanting, and led a clan of more than 30 strong, but a kick from a dying bobolox broke his jaw and nearly killed him... oh...this must have been six or seven years ago. I wonder if his people still chew his meat for him.”
Though we walked within meters of the natives, not one showed any suspicion he or she was being spied upon. Finding a comfortable place to prop our backs against the cave’s wall, we took seats on a dusty floor flecked with bits of charcoal and shards of bone and flint. The cave was an anthropologist’s wet dream.
Mumbles squatted in the glow of the largest fire, mending rents in a pile of his clan’s heavy fur moccasins. Long, oily hair tied back in a ponytail, outfitted smartly in a red fox cape with leggings to match, the broken-faced clan leader drooled only slightly while employing a sturdy ivory needle, yellowed, flat and long as my pinky, to stitch hanks of braided fiber cord through fur. His valuable brown cord was spooled on what looked to be a squirrel thighbone. Boots judged beyond repair were tossed to separate pile for deconstruction and recycling.
“Mumbles will sort that pile of castoffs and come away with enough material to make a pair or two of decent shoes,” Father said with admiration in his voice. “I’ve seen him do it. Mumbles doesn’t miss many tricks.”
Around another fire, against the far side of the cavern perhaps 10 meters distant, a gaggle of women conversed in a low murmur, speaking a language new to my ears. Working in a loose assembly line, the round-faced gals skinned and butchered a pair of newly killed deer–harvesting the meat and organs for food, and skins and brains for leather.
Nearby, a cooking crew rotated red-hot rocks into a trio of leather cook bags, bringing the beginnings of their stew to a simmer.
The truth of Father’s assessment was evident. These people worked clean, and without wasted movement. Compared to the antics of the Sons who had been preparing our meals and building our fires of late, the Black Wolves were quite fastidious. The manner in which the ladies dusted their cubed venison with herbs and salt before loading them into the cook bags made my stomach gurgle.
“I heard that,” Father laughed. “Don’t worry, I too am hungry. We’ll let Goose Goose and her girls prepare their dinner, and when it is finished, help ourselves. We’ve earned it.”
Slowly, a most wonderful scent began to permeate the cavern. If it is possible to drowse in a jumpsuit, that is what I did, drifting along the edge of sleep, winding down like an air car engine that ticks and pings as it cools. This was about the time I resumed speaking to Father. Conversation over the com line was one bodily function I still had control of, and though it pained me, I had been withholding my opinions and witticisms for more than two days and 200 kilometers. If that makes me sound like a petulant child so be it. Once the dam burst, however, we covered a wide range of topics.
I learned that Father’s magical belt was developed as part of a program to bring the problem jumpsuits to heel. Once he began, the CEO of the family corporation was quite forthcoming in detailing some of the more wretched atrocities perpetrated by wearers of the suits. Mass killings, government overthrows, rape, pillage and plunder, the jumpsuits became the blackest eye in our company’s long history of black eyes.
“You do not make and sell weapons without ruffling feathers,” he said, all too matter-of-factly.
Father shrugged off genocide as easily as some of our former friends doffed their tall polymer hats.
“It was our mess and we promised to clean it up. That we had to manufacture an even more dangerous and expensive weapon to counter the threat did not seem to bother a soul. Salvatore, do you remember the fable about the old woman who eats the fly and ends up consuming a cat and dog in an effort to resolve her problems? The world was that woman and this belt was the next thing, the horse or cow it must eat to rid itself of the dog. I was the only person of authority who recognized the flawed logic. Despite great pushback, I pulled the plug on the project. One belt was completed, this one. With my nanos, I am able to harness a power that would transform a normal person such as yourself into a maniac.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Labeling me ‘normal.’”
“Don’t let your head swell. Merely a figure of speech.”
On the plus side, Father is able to use his belt to mitigate many of the negative impacts I previously felt while inside the suit. The intensity of input settings, such as audio volume and scent levels, have been stabilized so they no longer creep ever higher until they become excruciating. Anxiety levels have also been greatly reduced. I wonder if it would be just as easy for Father to ratchet them upward?
If I must be honest, I do find it beneficial to see in the dark, to hardly ever grow tired and to know I am safe in this cold, dangerous world. Snow lion, cave bear or Mumbles and all his gang–if I cannot kill my enemies, I can just disappear.
TRANSMISSION:
Bolzano: “Except for those simple cave doodles, this cavern is quite bleak. Where are the crystals you advertised?”
Hunter: “Way down.”
Bolzano: “Deep?”
Hunter: “Deeper than any of these hairy buggers will ever go.”
Bolzano: “How deep?”
Hunter: “It’s difficult to gauge depth, but my guess is not overly so. It’s not the center of the Earth. What you should be asking is, how far.”
Bolzano: “OK then, how far?”
Hunter: “The descent will take nearly two full days of rock climbing, rappelling and swimming–plus a few rather exciting leaps of faith. The return leg is harder, you know, working against gravity and all that. The ascent takes four to five days.”