by Greg Bear
The events that I speak of happened in the month when the strange star hung in the sky, in the direction of the winter sunrise, which is a time everybody will remember.
It was to impress me that Kugul had gone to the other side of the river, and had returned with the head of the goblin doe, hanging from his belt by its long yellow hair. He threw this to the ground, before the big common hearth, with the squat huts of the Men all around. “Look!” he cried. “Look, Men! Look, Valari! This is the head of the last breeding doe in that cave! I went there alone, I fought off the bucks, I took this doe and I rutted with it and then I killed it and brought back its head! Am I not a great hunter? Am I not a Man?” He faced me, and I saw the blood on his hands and face, and on the front of his hide tunic where he had rutted with this creature.
And I saw the head of the doe. Her face. The pale skin. The eyes open, as if puzzled. The bruised mouth where Kugul had used her. She had freckles, I saw, freckles on her nose.
I remember the moment, as children squalled and the dogs yapped, on that bright autumn day. It was as if I was standing on a mountain, looking down on myself, and Kugul, and the severed head. In that moment I decided I would not let Kugul have me.
I stood before him, not with deference as a woman should, but as a man would, with defiance. “I am Valari-anaro-torkluk! I am not for you, Kugul! I will bring back the head of the last healthy buck. Then we will see who is the greater hunter, Kugul-akoni-ugnal, killer of does!”
There was a moment of shocked silence. Among us, women do not speak to men this way. Remember, there is a reason why our people call ourselves the Men.
Well, I was used to silences and stares of disapproval. And to the slow clapping from the Ghost Man. And the laughter from the men butchering the deer beside the winter store-pits. And the shaken heads of the worn-down women with their babies, labouring at the kilns, weaving baskets of hazel, shelling heaps of hazelnuts.
I raised my hand before them, and showed them the stump of my middle finger. This reminded them that I was the only woman in memory who had taken the Journey, which the boys make to become men—I who had run down a wild stallion alone—I who had taken off the joint of my finger myself, for the Ghost Man would not do it for me. I saw that as they mocked me they feared me, for it was a strange time, when that unusual star blazed in the sky of morning, and I am a strange woman.
Before I could be stopped, before my wretched mother came to plead with me once more to submit to Kugul for fear of being taken by somebody worse, I ran off.
I gathered my kit. I would wear a soft leather tunic and leggings, and stout boots for the trail, and a hat of leather and straw to keep off the rain. I had a spear, flint knife, bow and arrows tipped with wolf bone, and my medicine kit and my fire kit. Though it was not cold I wore my heavy leather cloak which, it was said among the hunters, would deflect the thrust of a goblin’s stabbing spear.
I picked up my figure of the Mother—made for me by my own mother, one of the few gifts she had given me since I turned rebellious at the age of seven. But since I had grown she had told me more than once that I myself lacked the spirit of the Mother. The Earth Powers that course in the blood of women, that quality that makes a cornered aurochs cow fight for her calves—not in me, she said. I placed the Mother in my pack even so.
And I made my way to the valley cut into the plain. The caves where the goblins dwell are cut into the steep rocky bank on the opposite side of the river from the camp of the Men. The land all around belongs to people; the caves are a little island of goblins in a lake of people.
I did not cross the river that day.
I came to the mouth of a cave on the near side. This is a very old place, and the hearth at its mouth is a thick bank of soot and char. Nobody lives here now. Inside the cave I found stuff left by the Ghost Man for those who must use the cave. A soapstone lamp with a bit of grease in it, that I lit with my fire-making stone and a bit of flint. Little wicker baskets of dried paint, that I made flow by adding water from my skin sack.
And, alone, I walked into the deep darkness of the cave.
The narrow passages at the rear have walls worn smooth by the generations who have passed this way. Here, by the flickering light of the lamp, I saw the great animals that dance on the walls, the deer and boar and aurochs and horse, and other beasts that nobody has ever seen, a great hairy animal with a nose that dangled to the ground, another stately beast with a flabby hump on its back.
And I came to the deepest dark, where the crevice narrows so you can scarcely pass. Here the newest paintings have been made by hunters still alive, Kugul and his brothers among them. And here, among the prancing horses and elegant deer, I saw the hunched forms of goblins.
Once, the Ghost Man says, the goblins were people. They held the land in the age of the ice giants, before the Men had come from out of the winter sunrise. You might fear them, you might despise them, you certainly fought them and raided their food and took their females, but they were people nonetheless. Now the last of them, huddled in their caves, are prey animals to be fixed on the walls in paint, with the horses and the deer.
With a twig brush I sketched my own prey quickly, a big buck goblin with a stern face, and yellow hair wild around his head. And I drew myself with my bow, pointing at his eye.
What else was done I must not tell.
I hoped it was enough. The Ghost Man should have been with me, making spells for me, and the other hunters chanting and dancing their support. I hoped the Sky Hunters looked on me.
I spent the night in that cave. I did not sleep.
In the morning light I came out of the cave and gathered my kit. I saw the smoke rising up from the caves of the goblins, across the river.
And I saw the strange star hanging in the sunrise sky, over the goblin caves. I quailed at the sight of this strange marker. But I had stated my purpose to the people, I had painted the moment of my victory in the cave. I could not go back.
I clambered down the trail to the river. The valley is a rocky gash in the land, much wider than the river which trickles along its floor. The track leads to a place at the river where you can cross easily, on foot, by means of stones long ago pitched in there. The old ones say that their grandparents remembered a time when you needed to swim or float on a log to cross this flow, but the river has dwindled since then.
The goblins never cross the water. Nobody knows why.
I paused before crossing the river.
I was going alone into the goblin country. I had seen them, the big ferocious bucks who would look a bull aurochs in the eye, and thrust spears like tree trunks into its heart. Some muttered of stranger powers. That the goblins could crush you with a look, or a roar from their cavernous chests. That they ate people, and you would see ghosts clamouring to be released if you looked one of them in the eye.
If I died here alone, even if I were not eaten by the goblins, my ghost would be lost, it would blow away, to be forever chased across the plains by the wind ghosts. I felt very small, very alone, in a huge and old land.
So I cut off a lock of my hair, and offered a prayer to the Sky Hunters, who sometimes dance in the winter nights. “I am Valari-anaro-torkluk, a woman of the Men, and I give you here a piece of my life. I ask no return for this gift. But know that I will kill a goblin buck, or I will be killed in my turn. For any aid I receive I offer you a portion of every kill I make for the rest of my days on this earth . . . ”
And I saw a goblin on the far bank.
He was squatting by the gently flowing water. He wore skins roughly wrapped around his body; the goblins do not cut or sew their clothes as people do. You might have thought him a person, save for his massive shoulders, and that thick brow under a mop of yellow hair that hid his eyes. He was doing none of the things you think of a goblin as doing. Not eating, not fornicating, not shitting, not scratching the filth from his skin. He was just staring at the water, and his own face reflected there.
He was shorter than me, but
must have been twice my weight.
I mastered my fear. Across the river, I challenged him. “Goblin! I come to take your head, to show it to the Men!” I waved my bow at him.
He looked up, startled. But he showed no fear. He stood, a squat dark mass of muscle topped by that shining yellow hair. Under his heavy brow his face was not unlike a person’s. He had a beard, and I have seen rougher trims. He jabbered at me in that strange goblin tongue nobody understands, not even Agnich-areolu-urgan who understands the tongues of all people.
His mouth was twisted, his skin lined, his eyes hard. I saw grief and anger warring in his face.
He had an expression. I would have no more expected to see an expression on a stone.
He opened his arms, and I thought he was threatening me. But I saw he was exposing his chest, his torso, goading me to strike him.
Then he turned away, flapping his huge hand at me in disgust, and walked up a rough trail to a cave mouth.
I did not hesitate. I crossed the river, dancing over the stepping stones, and walked easily up the trail the goblin buck had followed. I felt fear, of course. Yet, in action, the body follows its own will. The body never anticipates its own death, I suppose. Only the spirit does that.
And as I climbed the world opened up around me. I saw the hilly country on the far side of the valley, and the wider plain beyond, which shimmered with water courses and the green clumps of trees, oak and juniper and pine. A distant cloud might have been reindeer. Autumn is the time when the animals are fattest, their hair the thickest—the best hunting season.
I saw people working the marshes, cutting reeds and checking eel traps. Smoke rose up from distant fires, set by hunting bands of the Men, perhaps, or by other folk.
None of those fires would have been set by goblins, I was sure of that. With those big muscles they can’t run far, as we can, and they don’t throw spears or shoot arrows as we do. They prefer to hunt in the hills for lone ibex, where they can hide behind rocks or bushes, and jump out at the prey and stab it with their spears. Not for them the elaborate games you must play to trap your prey out on the plain, where there is nowhere to hide.
I came to the cave. In its mouth huge logs smouldered, the smoke washing out into the air. Nobody was about outside, but I thought I heard voices from within the cave—deep rumbling voices like big men. I pushed back my cloak to free my arms, took my bow, found my best arrow, and notched it.
I walked into the smoke, so I was hidden.
I became smoke.
It was as if I sat on a high hill, far away, watching this cave, the goblins, the smoke. It was as if nothing had been quite real since the moment Kugul had dropped the goblin head in the dirt. As if I were already half a ghost.
But I stepped forward, and I became a person again, made from the smoke, and I walked into the cave. “You goblins! Which of you will die first?”
Gradually, as my eyes awoke to the dark, I saw the cave. Skins, scraped and cut. A heap of stones, for making into tools. Lengths of wood, waiting to be worked into spears. Evidence of eating—a heap of ibex bones, and many, many rabbit bones and skulls.
And I saw the goblins. A kind of rustling at the back of the cave—filthy skins—shambling bodies, all pressed together so I could not tell one from the other. There was a smell of piss, or ordure, of blood, of meat and meaty farts—and milk.
I took a step forward, and another. They had been silent, but now they muttered at each other as they pressed back. None challenged me. As a good hunter I was reluctant to shoot into that mass, indiscriminate.
And I saw that the goblins in their huddle were old. Limping, hunched over, their bodies worn down, their gray, yellow-streaked hair—and that’s no surprise, for everybody knows how hard the goblins work, all their lives.
And they were all female. I could see that from their smooth hairless faces, and from the dugs that hung beneath their loose skins. Yet when they spoke their voices were deep and gruff like a man’s. I tried to count them. More than on the fingers of one hand, less than the fingers on two.
This was not the scene I had drawn on the wall of the holy cave. Still I pressed forward, my bow raised.
And now he emerged, the male I had seen at the river. He had one of their stabbing spears in his right hand, a thick pole held as easily as a child holds a reed, its sharpened tip hardened by scorching. Once more his face was twisted, with anger or sadness. He, at least, looked at me.
“So, you buck! Would you hide behind these old hags?”
I danced back, one step, two, and readied my arrow. This is how you kill a goblin. He will not throw his spear; all you have to do is kill him from a distance, before he comes close enough to strike. Now my picture in the holy cave was enacted, the savage buck goblin, my arrow pointing at his head.
Yet I did not loose the sinew of my bow. This despite my pledge to the Sky Hunters.
The goblin puzzled me.
He showed no fear. Unlike the females he stared straight at me, at the tip of the arrow-head that pointed at his eye.
When I did not strike he began to jabber in that unknown tongue. He hurled the spear away. It clattered against the rough, filthy wall. Again he opened his arms wide, exposing his body to my weapons, inviting me to destroy him.
Something shifted in my head.
Perhaps the doe Kugul had taken was this one’s mate. I had seen no other bucks, after all, no other young does. He hadn’t been able to stop Kugul rutting her and killing her. Now, such was his grief, he wanted only to die.
I was shocked by my own thoughts. Could goblins have such feelings?
And what were the old ones protecting?
I lowered my bow. I took a deliberate step forward, past the buck, deeper into the cave.
The old ones in their grimy leathers were like huge crows, rustling, bent over. They hissed at me from toothless mouths, and they snarled at the lone buck, but he did not respond.
The crones stood aside.
And I saw a crib.
If I had found this thing in a house of the Men, I would have had no hesitation in calling it that. It was a nest of twigs and moss. Within it a cub had been laid down, a newborn. It was wrapped in soft leather, skin from a kid perhaps—I saw teeth marks, the leather had been chewed to make it soft.
The cub was sleeping soundly. The skin had fallen away, and I saw it was a boy. I saw his round face, a hint of soft flesh at his neck. Save for a hint of brow ridge you would not have known he was a goblin cub at all.
I saw all this by the faint light of the day.
I reached out my hand.
The females muttered, but when they saw the missing joint of my middle finger, the mark of a man among the Men, they pulled away, dismayed.
I pulled the blanket over the cub’s body so he would not be cold.
The darkness grew around me.
I touched the cub’s cheek. It was soft, warm.
I fell into night.
And I fell, and I fell.
And I was a goblin, a woman, and the land was thick with forest, and we ran, laughing, big as young bears, our massive spears light in our hands, and we jabbered of how we would hide and trap the boulder-beast, the huge animal with its long curling teeth and thick orange hair. It was goblin country, goblins across the land as far as anybody travelled, as there always had been and always would be.
And ice flashed. And I was a child who looked out at an empty land, white as bone, and my cave was a warm mouth behind me, and the river was fast-flowing, dark, swollen with meltwater.
And I was a man, not a goblin, not a person, yet a man even so, and I sat naked with other men as we chipped hand-axes from a flint outcrop, as children ran and played around us, and an animal like a fat horse with a huge heavy head lumbered over the horizon, and people chased it, another sort of people, taller, skinnier.
And there was ice.
And the ice fled, and I was a woman, or a girl, and I had no words, and I ran and ran, naked on the plain.
&nb
sp; And I was small and covered with hair, and I cowered in a plain filled with teeth, and I longed for the safety of my nest high in the trees. I had no words, no words—
My face stung.
A slap. I was back in the cave.
The buck goblin stood before me. My cheek ached where he had struck me. And my wrist ached. He held it in his huge fist. He had pulled my stroking fingers away from the cheek of the cub.
He released me. I stepped back.
The cub wriggled in his soft blanket, his dreams unknowable. The buck fixed his blanket, murmured to him, and bent over him and kissed his forehead.
And I saw it. This was his cub. He was the only buck here—the last buck. The doe Kugul had killed must indeed have been his mate, the mother of this cub. The last cub-bearing doe. Now there was none left but these old females, their wombs like dust. And when the cub grew, if he lived, even the old does would be gone.
The buck looked at me again, with that odd pleading on his face. Kill me.
I would not. Time would do that for him.
But, on impulse, I took my knife. The females cowered back. The buck did not react.
I took a lank of his long yellow hair, and sawed it briskly, and cut away a lock. This I tucked inside my tunic. I would not go back to Kugul with nothing. I would show him the lock and tell him I had scalped the buck. Kugul was too stupid not to believe me, and it would keep him at bay a little longer, and his brothers.
Then I turned, walked out of the cave into the bright light of day, and made for the river.
The world did not seem real. I had trouble following the path, as if I could not see the stones. When I walked across the sluggish river, I thought I felt the torrent that had once poured from the ice.
Across the river I went to the holy cave. I lit a lamp quickly, and went to the picture I had made, and I spat on my hands and rubbed the wall until my skin was raw, and the picture had gone.
Then I left the cave. As I climbed the slope, ghosts walked beside me, stocky, heavy-muscled ghosts with the strength of oxen. I came to the plain, where the dung-like houses of the Men gathered, and I thought I saw forests shimmering like heat haze, before sheets of bone-white ice.