by neetha Napew
“Look!” Umak pointed off. Eastward, between them and the still-distant mountain, the shapes of high-humped, shaggy camels could be seen grazing. The old man counted three of them, then squinted and nodded to affirm another. And there were musk ox! “So much game!” he exclaimed.
Torka made no comment; to have spoken would have been to confirm the obvious. The sun was as high as it was going to get this day. Soon it would be dark. The mountain was still for away, and he would not rest content or allow his “band” to hunt until they had made a safe encampment upon its flanks.
“We will go,” he said, and after Lonit had scooped up several more fossil shells, he led them on and on, across the wide, rolling land that had once lain at the bottom of the sea.
They trudged toward the broad, snowcapped mountain that, in future millennia, would not be a mountain at all but an island rising out of a shallow sea. It would be called Big Diomede, after a prince of Argos, a hero among a race of men who would not be born for another forty thousand years.
But Torka’s thoughts were not of the future as Umak, Lonit, and the wild dog followed him toward that shining mountain. He thought of the past—of the dead, of all that he had left behind him as, unknowing, he lengthened his stride and led his people out of Asia toward a new world.
PART III.
MOUNTAIN OF POWER
They walked until the dark came down, but still the mountain loomed ahead, its huge snowcap glistening in the night.
Exhausted, their bodies aching with fatigue, they stopped and dug a communal burrow into the lee side of a tundral hummock. They spread their sleeping skins, and after eating a meal of dried caribou meat, they bundled together like foxes beneath the windswept indigo sky. They slept. Umak smiled in his dreams. He was content. He had matched Torka step for step across the miles. It was the young man who had called for rest, not the old.
Lonit also smiled in her dreams, for now she kept a secret from her men. She lay with her back to them, curled up at the very edge of their sleeping burrow. If they knew her secret, they would make her sleep alone, and she was afraid of that—the tundra was too dark, too strange, and too threatening. So she kept her secret, understanding at last that she would not die from the cramps that had been plaguing her. Had she been among the women of the band, she would have understood long before now. She would not have been surprised when she had made her discovery. Never again would Torka have just cause to call her Almost A Woman. The spirits of her gender had found her worthy. Lonit had begun to shed a woman’s blood at last. Luckily, she had brought enough scrap cuttings of skin left over from her sewing to conceal her secret from her men.
Torka lay awake for a long while. He would have preferred to go on, but the mountain was farther than he had thought. When at last he succumbed to sleep, his dreams were troubled; they kept him on the edge of wakefulness, and for this he was glad. He wanted to remain alert to danger. He had not forgotten the wolves. He could sense the tension ebb and flow within the dog; he shared it and for the first time was grateful for the presence of Umak’s spirit brother, which lay at the crest of the hummock, just out of the wind, a self-appointed sentry. If predators came to sniff out the scent of man, the dog would give warning. Torka conceded that perhaps the animal’s loyalty to Umak was not without advantages.
Because of the dog, Torka allowed himself to sleep in fitful spurts. His dreams were troubled, filled with sound—a low, deep roaring that filled the world. He led Umak and Lonit across miles of darkness, spilled across the endless black plain of his dream. A wall of water surged toward him, as black as night, as high as the mountain toward which he led his band. The incomprehensibly huge wave roared as it threatened to sweep across the world and drown everything before it. In his dream, he ran, and Umak and Lonit and the dog ran with him; but the wave came on and on ... and they were swept away .. . into a black, choking limbo where their life spirits were lost forever. He awoke with a start and sat bolt upright. He stared eastward, toward the mountain, into the face of the rising sun. The night was gone. A new day had been born. And Torka, who could not know that his dream had been a vision of the past—and of the future—was glad to be alive as he was warmed by the light of the dawn that swept across the tundra and turned the entire world to gold.
They walked on, single file, with the dog in the lead now. Umak strode out ahead of the girl, and Torka walked close behind her. She leaned into the wind and watched the dog trotting on, its tail up, curled high over its back.
Ordinarily, the sight of the animal would have been comforting to Lonit. The dog’s manner often amused her, and she was certain that, if danger lay ahead, the dog would alert its human pack. But then Lonit began to sense that they were being watched. She frowned. Aar kept his pace, heading ever eastward toward the mountain. If he sensed eyes watching them, he showed no sign of it.
After a while, although the sensation of being watched remained strong, Lonit told herself that she was being a foolish female. After all, Umak, Torka, and the dog were hunters. Her senses were not nearly as acute as theirs. And it was well-known that when a woman was in her time of blood, her thinking was as erratic as her moods. Had she been traveling with the People, she would have been isolated from all except females in the same condition. They would have trudged along at the very rear of the column lest their condition infect the others with all sorts of bad luck.
Flushed from her guilty feelings, she was glad that neither Torka nor Umak could see her face. Her cheeks blazed with her deception, and if her men saw her, they would know she was keeping something from them and be angry. They might even command her to walk away from them forever. She would deserve no better. But no, she was the only female in the world, and they would not send her away. But they would make her walk behind them. Tradition and taboo would demand it. And it was this that she feared, for the one who walked at the end of a traveling column was the one most vulnerable to predators. A group of women might be safe enough, but long ago, when she had been a little girl, she had seen a straggler mauled by a lion. The woman had fallen back to relieve herself, and the huge, shaggy feline had leaped upon her from behind a tundral hummock where it had lain in wait until the entire traveling column had passed. By the time the men of the band had rallied to kill the marauder with their spears, it had been too late for the woman. Lonit had never forgotten what the woman had looked like when the lion had finished with her.
She shivered and kept up with her men. Torka, Umak, and the dog would know if something observed them. In the meantime, she tried not to think of either lions or the wind spirits, which might be observing their approach from the cold, savage heights of their distant mountain. With her eyes turned down, she willed herself to think of nothing but the next step, and the next, and the next, until Umak came to a sudden stop and she bumped right into him.
“Look!” He seemed unaware that she had blundered into him. He pointed off as, wilting, the girl followed his gaze.
There, directly ahead of them, a huge skeleton lay upon the land. Torka’s hand curled so tightly around the hafts of his spears that his fingers ached. His teeth clenched. It was all he could do to keep himself from crying out. The Destroyer .. . Thunder Speaker .. . He Who Parts the Clouds .. . World Shaker .. .
“No!” Torka shouted his disbelief of a truth that was unbearable. If that enormous rubble heap of bones belonged to the great mammoth, then he would never be able to kill it with his own hands. Until this moment, he had not known just how much he still longed to do this, regardless of Umak’s sage advice and of all odds and obstacles—even if, in killing the beast, he forfeited his own life. The confrontation was all that mattered, to stare once more into the red, man-hating eyes, to drive his spear home ... in memory of his slain people, for Egatsop, his woman, and for Kipu, the beloved little son whom he would never hold proudly upon his shoulders while the child’s laughter rang out with the joy of life.
Bile was bitter at the back of his throat. Tears stung beneath his lids as he c
hoked back a cry of agonizing frustration. With his spear arm raised, he ran forward, with the dog at his heels and Umak and Lonit racing after him.
They stood together in silence, examining the skeletal remains of a creature unlike any they had ever seen. Torka experienced a soaring sense of relief, even as Umak grunted to express a disappointment that he shared with the girl.
“No mammoth this,” said the old man, wondering where the great beast grazed now, hoping that it was far, far from this stretch of tundra.
Lonit stood stiffly against unwelcome memories. She stared at the strange elongated bones. She was sorry that they were not those of the mammoth that had destroyed the lives of the People. Somewhere, that beast still lived. Somewhere, it shook the world with its mighty, hateful trumpetings. Somewhere. But not here. Umak had led them away from it. But what if it had veered eastward? What if it had come out of a tundral valley onto this very plain? What if it walked ahead of them? What if it were the thing that she had sensed watching them across the miles? She shuddered. It was too terrible to consider. The dog whined softly. It circled the enormous carcass, sniffing ardently before losing interest when its nose told it that these were ancient bones, without promise of a meal. With an exhaled snuff of disdain, it trotted around the massive length of bones, sniffing and snorting, and leg-lifting here and there to mark its places of passage. Seating itself at last, it yawned and stared eastward as though to inform its fellow travelers that there was nothing of interest to keep them here and it would just as soon get on with their journey.
But the carcass had captured Torka’s interest. Never had he seen anything even remotely like it. Half-buried in the tundra, from head to toe it was over seventy-five feet long. He paced the distance twice, just to be certain that he was not imagining it. Legless, tusk less and toothless, it had the look of an enormous fish. But how could a fish have come to its death upon dry land? And of all the streams and pools and rivers he had ever seen, where was there water wide enough or deep enough to contain the swimmings of such a fish?
Umak seemed to know his grandson’s mind. Their eyes met. Umak nodded, grunted, and puckered his lips. “In the time of the great rain, when the waters gathered to walk upon the earth, in this time such a fish would have had wide water to swim in and deep water to hide in. It is said that the flesh of the People was food for fish in that time.” He paused, and the Creation stories that he had learned from the old men in the long-gone days of his boyhood returned to fill his mind. Again he nodded, comforted now by the sight of the impossibly huge carcass; it confirmed the truth of the tales. Only in great waters could such a fish exist. Still, Umak was a man of his own time, of the tundra. It was difficult for him to imagine an ocean, much less a whale.
Torka recalled his dream, the great black wall of water sweeping across the plain. He reached out and touched a portion of the skeletal remains of the whale. His hand rested upon a portion of fossilized rib. He knew from experience that fish bones dried and blew away in the wind and were not like the hard bones of man and beast. But this .. . beneath his ungloved palm, the bone was rough, as unyielding as rock. The dream washed through his mind again. He saw the wave coming toward him from the south, north, east, and west. It surrounded him, reared up, and showed a mile-high wall of watery death as black as the fluid that filled the eyeball of a caribou. The blackness thickened and shone as sleek as obsidian. It roared. It rose higher and higher, and then it began to fall, to curl into lips that foamed like the mouth of a man filled with mad spirits.
Torka willed himself up and out of his vision before it drowned him. As he did so, he brought his hand up from the whalebone, then down again in a reflex action that had so much power behind it, it cracked the fossilized bone in two. The upper portion fell at his feet.
Umak’s eyes went round. Both he and the girl made sounds of wonder, and then the old man’s face clouded. Torka took a step back from the broken bone and would have turned away had Umak not cried out to stop him.
“No! The hand of Torka has cleft the bone. The life spirit of the great fish has yielded to Torka’s power. It has given a part of itself as a gift to the man. Torka cannot walk away!” He wanted to add: Or it will follow. It will become a crooked spirit. It will feed off Torka’s soul, and Torka will die. But he dared not speak so, lest he guarantee that his warning come to pass. He said instead: “You take!”
Torka recognized Umak’s words as an undeniable command. The old man was right. Although he had not spoken his warning aloud, Torka saw it clearly on his face. He could not disobey. He knelt and stared at that which had fallen at his feet.
Torka sucked in his breath, amazed. The bone was slightly shorter than his forearm, with a natural arch, and it was clear that the force of his blow had done more than merely fracture it from the main portion of the rib. Where the break had been made, the bone was as sharp as a dagger. He could not have flaked it more cleanly if he had tried, nor could his most meticulous knapping have achieved a sharper edge. He ran the inner edge of his thumb lightly along the break to test it, then quickly drew it back again. Although he had applied only the slightest pressure, he had drawn blood.
“Hmph!” exclaimed Umak. His chin went up, and he nodded his head with approval.
Torka smiled despite his dark mood. He did not like this piece of fish rib that was neither bone nor stone, but it was good to see that Umak was feeling arrogant again, assuming credit for the discovery by having ordered Torka to take the bone. He lifted the blunt end of the broken piece of whalebone into his hand; he hefted this gift from the life spirit of the great fish that he knew was, somehow, not a fish. He raised it high as he got to his feet. He tested it for balance and decided that, like it or not, it would make an extraordinary weapon. “I take,” he said, conceding.
Umak harrumphed again.
Once again, they went on toward the mountain. This time, not only Lonit was discomfited by the sensation of being watched. Torka felt it, too, but the eyes of his vision stared from within, and now again he turned to look back, half expecting to see the wave of his nightmare vision rising to follow. There was nothing there—only the empty miles and the skeleton of the whale growing smaller and smaller. Then it was gone.
And still they walked on. The land tilted upward as they neared the mountain. They left behind the broad, open expanse of rolling grassland and entered a realm of high hills. There were grasses here, too, interspersed with wide stretches of tussocked marsh plants and communities of familiar mosses and lichens, but now they passed stands of droop-branched, man-high spruce trees. Umak and Torka instinctively looked for signs of mammoth. They knew that spruce was the favorite fodder of the great beasts; but if mammoth browsed here, they left no sign. Relieved, Umak walked on with Lonit and the dog at his heels.
Torka paused, his eyes inextricably drawn back across the way they had come. The plain lay far below. The miles seemed to tremble in a glaring haze born of distance. And in that haze, upon the far horizon, he could just make out a dark form following ... its back as high as the distant hills, its tusks glinting in the sun, its color as red as dried blood.
Squinting, he put a hand across his brow to cut the glare and saw .. . nothing.
Still he stared, his eyes burning and his heart pounding. Mammoth. Thunder Speaker. World Shaker. The Destroyer. He nearly raged the words aloud. He wanted the beast to be there, to be coming toward him across the plain, to be following him into the high hills where, hidden by the
scrub spruce, he could lie in ambush. As in the dream that he had dreamt after he and Umak had slain the condor, he could see himself swooping down upon the mammoth from the heights. He could see himself driving home a killing spear. In memory of his lost family, he could see himself
“Torka!” Umak called, gesturing him on. He stood still. Memories of the dream ebbed away. He knew that he would need a spear fashioned out of the power of a lightning bolt if he were ever to pierce the hide of that monster and drive a killing point deep enough to rupture
its heart. In all the world, there was no such weapon. And except in his dreams, no man could hope to stand against the Destroyer twice and live to tell the tale.
He went on, troubled by his thoughts, satisfied that what he had seen on the horizon had been a trick of the haze induced by his overly active imagination. Still, he thought of the mammoth as he walked. He was so absorbed in his frustrated lust to kill, he took no note of the changing landscape.
The dark stands of fragrant spruce were rare now. The travelers had entered a forest that was unique to the high Arctic: a mixed woodland of tiny conifers and hardwoods, of dwarfed trees that were products of extreme cold and endless wind, of a paucity of light during one half of the year and an excess of it during the other. Composed of willow, spruce, and birch in the main, many of the trees were hundreds of years old, yet not even the most ancient of them reached a height much above the travelers’ ankles. They grew with the inexorable slowness of lichens, adapting to their environment so perfectly that, in places, it was difficult to tell that they were trees at all. They grew flat to the ground as though consciously seeking to absorb the maximum warmth of the sun as they sprawled out, not up, extending their branches protectively out of the way of the wind.
The mountain was close now. A huge, black-shouldered, ice-mantled giant, it filled the sky ahead of them. They paused to rest, staring up at it in awed silence. The mountain seemed to exhale its breath upon them from out of the frozen heart of its soaring, glacier-choked canyons. From somewhere within the massive ice cap that sprawled across its summit, there came a grinding, wrenching sound, which caused Lonit to wince against her fear of wind spirits. Umak frowned. Never had he seen a mountain so massive. Torka eyed it with cool speculation. The peak itself was intimidating, but where its tundral flanks rose to merge with hard, unyielding walls of rock, a safe encampment might be made upon any of dozens of wide, high ledges that erosion and time had conspired to carve into a base of the mountain.