A cool hand pressed down on my forehead, a cold, wet cloth placed on my neck. I looked up and saw the young female the taller of the two males had been trying to protect that first night. She went to the mortar, crushed and pounded herbs with a pebble; she mixed the powder with water and warmed it with her breath. After spreading the mixture on my forehead, she lifted my head and squeezed a liquid from a sponge into my mouth. It tasted sweet; like a diluted honey or sap. I saw that her limbs were long and sallow, her hair dark and plaited, her eyes, green. I dozed slowly off to sleep and had no thought of the whereabouts of my backpack or the vial. For some inexplicable reason I thought only of my mother.
*
What seemed like a few hours later, though it may have been days or even weeks, I was awakened by the creature. I could hear its light, erratic walk across stones and implements within the cave. When it squawked and flapped its wings I was relieved, glad at least that it wasn’t a wolf or worse. It was tawny with some white through its chest, and stared with pewter-coloured eyes straight at me. It seemed tame enough. The female who had nursed me sat in a corner huddled up under fur. She had fallen asleep, and not even the loud cry of the bird had woken her. It was then I saw my clothes – my jacket and trousers, on top of which seemed to rest my gun, lying up against where she slept. I wondered where the other gun had gone, and hoped it was still inside the backpack – wherever that was. I struggled against the two shards of flint fixing my arms to the earth. I felt stronger than the previous time I’d awoken and, bending my neck towards my right wrist, bit myself free and untangled my other bind – which was a mixture of wool and grass, and very tough.
It was freezing outside the furs and my thoughts raced. I crept to the pile of my things. My neck and shoulders ached, though there was a numbness in the upper-left part of my torso, which, I deduced, was as a result of the herbs the female had applied. In two or three swift movements I retrieved the pile without waking her. I quietly dragged on my shirt and trousers. I found my boots close to the furs where I’d lain and put these on. Finally, as I went to put on my jacket, the bird, which I saw now was a hawk by its size and imperial poise, flew to the corner where the female slept. It rested on her shoulder and eyed me. Suddenly, the female dived out of the corner and I was thrown back. She pointed a long (and rather sharp-looking) piece of rock straight at me. She indicated to sit back on the bed, which I did, then picked up the one thing I had not yet taken up from the furs. I whispered, forcefully: ‘please, no!’ She laughed and, seeing my alarm at the sight of the gun in her hand, passed it from one hand to the other then tried to goad me by swinging it close to my face. I repeated: ‘please, please, no.’ I immediately saw that she was not young but an adult of perhaps twenty or twenty-five years. I kept my silence and made no further attempt to leave. Evidently puzzled by my new calm, she thrust the gun onto me and sat back. I was shocked, though damned glad, too, that the gun had not fired in the ruckus. I soon saw why: somehow the barrel and nose had been beaten down, rendering the piece useless. My heart sank as I realised I was now among these beings without a weapon (at least until I could find my bag). I tucked the battered gun into my pocket. As I zipped up my jacket the female gasped, evidently transfixed by the two pieces of fabric becoming conjoined. She came towards me but I pushed her aside, not wanting to leave the cave gunless and with a broken zip (and so risk dying of the cold). I shooed her as if she were a small animal and she backed off into her furs, afraid. With enormous effort, I got to the mouth of the cave, moved aside the large pelt that covered it. The moon was pear-coloured and full, the sky clear and immense with stars. I felt my head swoon. A new, stronger sweat broke, and I felt as hollow as the gourds that hung from the ceiling and walls of the cave. Then a sudden coil of hunger in my lower legs, and I fell over, weakly, back onto the bed of furs.
*
At first she fed me with crushed pistachios and a kind of sweet date. Later, she gave me flat, unleavened bread made from a cereal, perhaps wild wheat. As I gained strength there was meat – bitter, rough, gamey. As soon as I could move she bade me sit outside my dark asylum each day to take in the light and air. From here I would watch the tribe. Often I would see groups of males return with dead beasts; usually deer, boar, a bear once, two seals. And I remembered that the wide lake, huge as a sea, was not far away, maybe nine or ten miles east. I kept the backpack and the vial to the fore of my mind. That I and the others were still alive was a sign at least that the vial had not been found and tampered with, and was probably under several inches of snow somewhere. But where?
*
Sitting outside the cave, as weak as I was I quickly came to consider that perhaps we, my peers and I, had been wrong in our studies of these early Homo sapiens. They were as graceful as any man or woman I knew. Their facial bone-structure was wider than my own, and though the terrain I had arrived in was an ice-mass which, by my time, would become the hot and arid Middle East, they resembled, especially around the eyes, Inuits, or some tribe from the North, from Lapland perhaps. There were times I would look out at this tribe of snow-dwellers and consider that I was among a tribe very close in ways and appearance to my own. As they would pass, the tribes-people would acknowledge me, as if they were aware of how I’d come to be there. I did not see again the short, thickset male I’d seen fight with the tall male who, I now believed, had been my nurse’s brother, though I could not be sure of this. (It was just that the older female who’d cried that first night seemed to be my nurse’s mother by her absolute likeness and attention to me.) She (the older female) would work close by me as I sat snug in my bearskin outside the cave (usually scanning the sky for birds and wondering about migratory patterns), keeping her eyes on me like a sentinel as her quick hands skinned some animal, the entrails of which would gush a carmine-coloured river across the white snow. There were many females in the area of the valley in which I was domiciled, including my nurse, (though the males kept close account of my convalesence). Each day the women would comb down pelts, and from these make clothes and the caves’ furnishings.
I was taken one day from my study of the sky above the valley when the younger female pressed firmly on my shoulder, as if urgently seeking my attention. One of the elders stood beside her, his face markedly wizened. He stared down at me with bright, suspicious eyes. He touched my head, examined the healing gash. I did not react or resist for I was well aware of my weakness, that my limbs were heavy and thin. The elder pulled my head from side to side, and somehow I knew he meant me no harm. He turned to the female and spoke. It was some miracle of language*, as fluent as my own. We had supposed language the last of the major transitions towards modern man, and here it was, passing between these two primitive beings, perfectly musical and structured. It was as far as could be from the sound of apes and chimps (with their unorganised squeals and cries), and was rich and detailed, rather like the sound of Korean or Japanese with similar drawls and drags and, to my English-attuned ear, had irregular silences. It seemed to be a language that was rarely resorted to (each time I would hear them speak it I would be thrown by its strangeness and would be reminded of something William Burroughs had once said, that ‘language is a virus from outer space’). For it was as if this tribe preferred physical action, as I myself had witnessed here. But this was different. The female and elder were trying to explain something to each other and, I realised, to me. (I could not help but feel sad that whatever language they spoke, it was lost now to my world, like an unheard symphony or story.) ‘Mayga,’ the elder said to me, over and over, while pointing to my gashed skull. He walked in front of me carrying a stick, and stabbed it into the snow. He drew a circle, and within it an elementary map of the valley. Outside the circle he drew a shape, as common in my world as a symbol of evil and danger as it seemed to be in his. It was the body of a man with a maze of horns – antlers – on his head. He went from my head to the figure in the snow. His message was clear: someone was outside the tribe, and this someone had gashed my head open.
Quite likely the squat figure I had seen kill the tall male that first night.
*
I began to gain weight and take walks to build up my strength, sometimes to the edge of the valley. This would also give me time to go over in my mind who I was and why I was here at all: I’d been elected to my task by my peers, the modern world’s leading scientists – ecologists, paleontologists, biologists, environmentalists. In the end, the premise for our decision (which we, as a group, had made unilaterally, without the consent of corporations and governments) had been simple. By 2320 the earth’s population had swelled to over thirty billion. Apart from polar regions, most rural areas had been urbanised. The world was dying from man’s relentless anthropocentricity, and our conclusion was that if the modern world must die then best it not be born at all. Extinction at this point of the tribe’s development would mean that a far lesser number of humans would perish, by some billions. (Because those billions would not have been born.) And with the combined invention of the virus* and the Personal Odyssey Drive® system, we had finally found a way to ensure the earth would survive. (Whereas, in my time, we were taking the earth with us.) The task had fallen to me to come back to the snow and ice from which mankind had emerged, to Qal’at Jarmo, on the edge of the Fertile Crescent, from where we had begun our journey towards the destroyed planet I’d left behind. In these very mountains, modern archaeologists had found advanced implements – sickles, cutters. The tribes at Jarmo were considered the first sustained settlements on earth. Around them other tribes would watch and develop. Our hope was that from Jarmo the virus would circulate as coldly and quickly as an ice stream, with eventual global impact.
Had I doubts about the project? None. I had watched the most sophisticated societies on the modern earth implode. I’d visited extinguished cities as my forbears had visited Pompeii, walked their silent streets. (I’d seen the Hudson myself, the morning of the New Jersey chemical spill, had travelled by helicopter to see it from the air: a huge film of dead fish had covered the entire surface of the water so that it appeared like a vast bright Jello, stiff and unmoving.) As important animal species began to die out, it did not take my peers and I long to work out what would happen next: catastrophe, not just for humans but for the whole earth. And there was another, rather unpalatable, realisation: that we as a species were not unlike a virus ourselves in our modus operandi, one that could not conceive of its own toxicity. We believed we were divine, which was our trick; how we convinced ourselves to continue. In my age we had at last seen through to that trick. Therefore, throughout my trip I had been completely convinced of my task. I had seen the bee species die out from complex mites and plagues; observed with my own eyes the last of the Pine Island Glacier turn to meltwater. The world had not heeded the warnings of previous generations and was about to expire. I knew what needed to be done, and like some kind of Prometheus in reverse, I was prepared to do it.
But I was a suicide bomber without a bomb: I needed to find the vial. I had begun to wish that I’d shaken the virus loose when I’d had the chance. If the earth was to have a future, I knew I had to do what I’d come to do, and soon: destroy this tribe and the tribes of the earth before Homo sapiens made their speedy and terrific leap forwards, which they were about to do. Soon, the tundra would leave much of the earth, now a great glacial plain. In a thousand years hence the New Stone Age would begin here and in Egypt. In less than four thousand years Mesopotamia would give rise to numerous towns and cities, Newgrange would welcome the winter solstice, Stonehenge would be erected and, soon after, the Pyramids would be built. Then the Chaldeans would map the skies. And all that came after would furiously devour the planet. Once I had cast the contents of the vial into the day, the earth would survive, though mankind would not.
I had lost time. Those I had left behind in the world would see it continue its rapid descent into a new dark age, and they would wonder why I had not put an end to it all; why they could not close their eyes on the devastated world and wake as atoms and molecules in the morning. Now they would awaken as they had always done, my beloved mother, those friends of mine – good people, scientists, lab technicians, cleaners, actors, poets. It had become obvious to them and me that hope had died for human beings, that the most dignified thing we could do was let the earth have the earth and exit gracefully, and that it would have been better for the planet if modern man had not been born, had not developed at all. Yet here I was, weak and doubtful in an ancient valley; my days spent watching young birds make their first flights across the spring sky. I could, if I tried hard enough, forget that the modern world awaited its ending, its swift unbirthing. I could. But I would not.
*
The air was milder than it had been, and across all the mountains I saw that the snow had melted in places. Patches of saffron-coloured gorse began to emerge across the hills.
I called the younger female Dara. It sounded like the name I’d heard others in the valley call her. It seemed to suit her. Whenever I would wander away from the cave she would emerge from her own and watch me, her eyes beaming with pride in my growing strength. Once, catching me following the hawk’s lofty movements, I thought she might have seen something of my plans to leave the valley (one way or another). She called to the bird with pursed lips; a loud, shrill sound. The hawk was her own bird and answered her immediately, landing on her outstretched arm. She brought it to me. The bird’s speckled feathers heaved and vibrated as it beheld me with a familiarity that made me feel strange – as if I belonged here in some way.
A short while after the day of the snow-drawing, Dara urged me to walk with her into the mountains. We climbed slowly. As the air thinned, my legs felt weak and we rested on top of a hill. Below us I could see tribe members hunting, some gathered wood or plants, and the valley seemed to me as busy as any modern town. I saw, too, that where upland fields had begun to thaw, wild grain grew in abundance. Also emmer and einkorn and a primitive kind of barley. Goats and their kids roamed freely around the summits, and I realised that these animals were not yet farmed – merely killed from time to time for meat, or occasionally milked. This tribe was just at the beginning of its farming genesis; they took only what they needed. They buried their dead, danced and sang, had a primitive kind of art – but had not yet been so numerous in number that they would turn to the earth and command it to feed them. This had not yet happened. And with the (dark) plans I had for this place, I was loath to assist them with any kind of encouragement or instruction in animal husbandry.
We walked further into the mountains. The range was long and extended southwards for hundreds of miles, as far as the landmass known in the modern age as Iran. Dara let the hawk fly off and it circled above us making cackling sounds. She had a wide smile, and clearly saw the land she looked upon as precious and beautiful. She seemed to alter up here, became more contemplative and private, and this surprised me as I had not expected a break, a gradation, in the emotions of this tribe. I had already seen their pain and grief – why should I be surprised at this female’s sense of repose? She caught my look, a strange mixture, I suppose, of surprise and admiration. (I could feel everything inside me opening up, like a ripening fruit. I was, bizarrely, coming alive in this place. In this place that was the cold, less-developed past, filled with a savage but also more innocent, child-like people, with their stones and fires and fur and herbs, and, I realised, feeling dead – as my world had more latterly caused me to feel – had had its uses. Now was not a good time for my heart, my – for the sake of argument – ‘soul’ to open, to thaw: because whenever I would find the vial I planned to use it.)
Our happy excursions into the mountains did not, however, last. One late-spring morning, the hawk having left us for its own fun and privacy, we heard below us in the valley an explosion of cries. Dara clung to me and I dragged her, weak as I was, to the ground. I gestured to her to be quiet as I peered over the bank. A group of about twenty males with blue and ochre markings on their faces and pelts, wielding axes
and what looked like spears made from sturdy lengths of pinewood, had made their way down the mountainside. At the helm was a familiar figure: the short squat male, adorned now in beads, and necklaces of bones and teeth. There were antlers on his head. He was the male I’d seen the night I’d first arrived, and clearly the figure from the snow-drawing and, I realised, probably the same male who had gashed my head open. He led his group of marauders into the valley. We watched as the snow below us turned all shades of crimson. The antlered male searched where the women were. He looked perhaps for me, perhaps for Dara, whom he had fought over that first night. Some of the males threw stones – violently – in all directions. Then Dara let out an aching, breathless cry, as a burst of long, speckled feathers floated on the air, and the body of her hawk fell to the valley floor with a low but devastating thud.
*
Eventually, the invaders began to leave in the direction from which they came. I looked down to see nine or ten bodies lying scattered on the snow. I could feel Dara wriggle from my grasp and dart for the top of the ditch. When I pulled her down she began to cry and I urged her to be still. The floor of the ditch was soft and I saw that an oily, dark-red substance trickled underfoot. Even in the middle of all this mayhem, the environmentalist in me observed that the earth here was rich in fuel, and that this tribe had thankfully not yet learned to burn it. As I bent down to touch the resinous substance, I made my next extraordinary discovery: my backpack. I dragged it from its oily burrow and checked inside: the vial was still in the flask, and still inside its compartment was my gun – wet, but very much intact.
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