by John Hart
“Very big. Like big horse, with wide, wide horns.”
“I know fallow deer, red deer, reindeer but like a horse, no.”
“I show you.”
Urrell turned his head to scan the snow, no easy matter in cold-stiffened leatherwear, furs, headgear, muffler. He saw nothing.
“No Urrell, I show you.”
The tone, the emphasis, puzzled Urrell enough to make him swivel his head, in its casing of furs and neck gear, to see Agaratz’s expression. Only one cheek and one eye managed to peer round his ear muffs to see that his companion’s expression was its frequent, slightly absent self.
“I show you deers, Urrell,” he repeated, “I show.”
They were a few spear-casts from the grove when he said, “See, Urrell,” and pointed ahead.
In and around the trees milled a herd of huge deer-like creatures, on long ungainly legs. Most striking was the immense spread of their antlers, greater than any Urrell had ever witnessed, even among the biggest elks. There was something horsish about them. As he watched the strange animals moved into the grove and through it.
“What are they, Agaratz?”
“Big deers, from great cold, from land of mammurak.”
Urrell pulled harder on his end of the travois, eager to draw nearer, though Agaratz made no effort to speed up. Neither Rakrak nor the lioness seemed to have noticed anything.
By the time the little group reached the trees, the travois lowered and pouches dropped, the deer had vanished. Urrell hurried through the firs and aspens eager to find traces of their passage, curious to check whether their feet were hoofed or cloven. But he found nothing. Beyond the trees the snow lay untrampled and empty to the horizon.
Agaratz was twirling the fire-stick when he came back.
“Agaratz, where have the horse-deer gone?”
No answer. “Agaratz – the deer?”
At his impatience Agaratz raised his eyes from what he was doing, with their mischievous glint Urrell knew too well.
“They far, Urrell, far, far. Land of ice,” adding as if by afterthought, “land of mammurak.” And half rising from his crouch over the fire-log he pointed the fire-stick north, to the land of mammoths.
Old Mother’s memory flashed before the youth’s mind, as vivid as a childhood smell recaptured, vanishing before he could seize it, ungraspable as mist between his fingers. He strove to recapture the vision. She came back, but fainter, and each time still fainter, until the woodsmoke from Agaratz’s new fire brought him back to the present. Soon the smell of thawing fish grilling amid the resinous odours of burning pine-needles would occupy his attention, while Rakrak and the lioness gnawed their fishes, still frozen hard, as they might have crunched bones. The sputter of the fire and the sounds of their eating was all they could hear in the stillness of the snows.
“Eat then rest, Urrell.”
They slept for an hour, propped against trees for fear of freezing had they lain on the snow. As Urrell dozed off his last memory was of the lioness with her head on her forepaws, snub face as close to the fire as she dared, contented at last. The sight of her carried over into Urrell’s dreams, where Old Mother appeared to him with the scarred and battered old face of the lioness, yet perfectly recognisable, and so vivid that he would remember the vision for long after. When he scrutinised the lioness on awakening he thought he descried something of Old Mother’s remembered expression when she cackled with pleasure. He would say nothing about the dream to Agaratz: it would be his own to keep, a sign.
CHAPTER 17
“Soon reach cave, Urrell.”
Exhaustion dulled him. Ahead the line of cliffs showed, renewing Urrell’s strength for the home stretch.
Home it was. Never had he felt a homecoming like this, unlike the shifting camps of his boyhood where he belonged to no-one. They had merely been places to cadge scraps, to creep up to the fire for warmth when the men were absent, to be cuddled by childless old women and to listen to their stories.
Sight of the cave mouth as they rounded the gulch entrance drove all thoughts of the giant elks from Urrell’s mind. They were another of Agaratz’s sleights, to be understood one day. Fire, food and sleep prevailed.
Rakrak shared his mood, speeding ahead to be first into the cave. The lioness trotted behind as though familiar with this way all her life. A little coaxing from Agaratz and she jumped up and into the cave. Agaratz unknotted the bison hide from the travois and tipped the bundles of fish on to the snow.
“Later dig, Urrell.”
Together they dragged the hide up and hung it back across the mouth of the cave, then repacked the snow wall. “Now foods.”
The fire lit, Agaratz prepared a homecoming feast: collops of bison meat were soon searing on a bed of embers. Onions and garlic, nuts and honey came out. The lioness stared into the flames, her snout twitching with pleasure at the smell of roasting flesh and hot garlic. Deep in her chest Urrell heard a sound new to him – the low rumble of a lion’s purr.
“Piura happy.”
“Piura, Agaratz?”
“Piura is lion.”
“You know her name?”
“My people lion people.”
The statement did not invite questions and Urrell asked none. He would think about it and ask another time.
Meanwhile all four crouched as close as they could to the fire, warmth feeding into their limbs, its light glowing on Agaratz’s shelves and stores, picking out the black entrances to galleries beyond where further piles of objects were stacked. All was familiar now, and comforting.
Hot fat dribbled down Urrell’s eating face, greasing his tunic. He caught Agaratz’s amused look at such gulping. Whatever his own hunger, Agaratz ate carefully, sparingly, cat-like in his cleanliness; Urrell felt gently rebuked for his slummocking. Beside him, Rakrak and Piura feasted in the manner of their kind, Rakrak the more meticulous as she scrunched everything to the last bone, Piura messier, her teeth worn down, a fang broken, daubing her face and whiskers with fat whilst purring and growling with pleasure. Urrell saw her eyes meet Agaratz’s and her gaze soften in a communication between the two that left him out. He was struck by how alike their eyes were, hers slightly the lighter.
Agaratz of the lion people.
For comfort Urrell patted Rakrak.
That feast, with honey and nuts to finish, would remain in his memory as the seal of their clanship – men and beasts. Piura’s matted fur, thawed and warmed by the fire, smelt. Urrell’s own face smarted with dirt, exposure and cold-spreathe. He touched his nose and cheek, felt the crust of grime and chapped skin, and wondered how Agaratz showed no signs of the cold they had been through together. He felt as unkempt as the lioness. His leathers warmed and felt greasy. Black lines criss-crossed his palms and he imagined what his face must look like now in the pool at the spring where he had admired his own reflection last summer.
Drowsiness overwhelmed him as thoughts like these mingled with memories of his past, of the girl with the budding breasts and berries in her hair.
When he awoke Agaratz was binding a spearhead. For all Urrell knew, the hunchback had not slept at all. Rakrak lay alongside; Piura by the fire twitched in dreams of her own.
“Ah Urrell, time go see mammuraka.”
Urrell, though suddenly alert, said nothing, mammoths or not. The elk vision, the untrodden snow beyond the clump of trees, was too recent, too like a dream for him to rush forward a second time. Was this another of Agaratz’s tricks?
“You come, Urrell.”
He took up several torches of resinous wood, lit one and led the way. Urrell fell in behind and Rakrak astern. Piura remained asleep.
At the fork to the privy Agaratz bore right, down the main gallery where Urrell had never been nor thought to go. Agaratz’s torch lit smooth stone walls to the roof. Soon the gallery widened. On one side Urrell made out vast stalactites in a forest of stone, from floor to ceiling. Further on the torchlight hinted at a frozen river, or a series of cascades in ston
e pouring for ever into the interior of the earth. Instead of exploring these Agaratz moved towards the other, plainer cave wall and held the torch aloft, steadying the flame in the airless atmosphere, to show Urrell something.
“See, Urrell.”
At first he saw only the flat wall, with its cracks and discolouring, but as he came nearer and Agaratz tilted the torch, a procession of faint engravings showed up as a frieze such as Urrell had never beheld before: a line of mammoths processing into the cave, shimmering with the tremor of the torch flame, intent on their journey. Why the engraver had drawn his scraper so lightly across the stone, in a single perfect line, then touched in hints of the shaggy coats, Urrell did not think to ask himself. Their creator had perhaps meant them so, never to be seen again as they journeyed eternally into mamu. He was silent with awe.
Agaratz was silent also, absent in thought.
A whimper from Rakrak in the shadows brought him back.
“Did you draw them, Agaratz?”
He must have heard the question but the answer was long coming.
“From old, old time,” and he rolled his free hand over and over in that gesture of a measure of how long ago. Then, by way of after-thought, “When great ice.”
Urrell’s interest, he must have known, would be roused. Was he teasing the lad? He went on, “Then olden mens. All time ice.”
“Your people, Agaratz?”
“Not. Before my fathers.”
He moved on, torch aloft. Urrell noticed how he hugged the smooth wall, as though he knew the way, till the stalagmites and stalactites lay behind them and the gallery narrowed to less than a man-wide gap. He stopped when the torch lit a row of palm-sized red dots at face level. Before Urrell’s wondering eyes he paused and muttered something in front of each, addressing the dot or the rock, and then moving to the next. At the end of the row Urrell watched him dab a new dot in red ochre from a pad in his belt. To this he muttered also.
Farther on the passage inclined and widened, then steepened sharply so they slithered and sent gravel rattling ahead of them into the dark. Somewhere in that dark the rattling vanished.
Urrell was to see why: the passage stopped on the lip of a swallow-hole, a black chasm beyond the range of their resin light. Agaratz was exploring the rim, his unconcern comforting. From boyhood Urrell had heard how folk lost in caverns never came out, sucked into unimaginable underworlds. One slip by Agaratz, the torch dowsed or dropped into that hole, and death of the fearfullest kind would be theirs. He gripped Rakrak. Meanwhile Agaratz had found what he was looking for, sticking up over the rim of the pit – the tip of a fir tree. It was another climbing pole, like the one in the honey cave, as old, perhaps left there by the same honey-seekers. Agaratz intended to go down it. He handed the torch to Urrell as he lowered himself over the edge and felt for a foothold. His mane of hair was level with the rim when he found one. He reached for the torch.
“I go down, Urrell, and light for you. Rakrak stay.” And down he went, hand over hand, the pole flexing till he stood in a small pool of light at the bottom.
“Come, Urrell. Safe.”
It did not feel so. Urrell gingerly lowered himself over the edge, clinging to the quivering tip of the fir tree, his leg swinging in search of a foothold. At last his foot found a snag thick enough to bear his weight. He looked up at Rakrak’s intelligent face faintly lit from below and began his descent.
By the time he reached the bottom and stood on the sandy floor Rakrak was invisible. He called to her and she responded. Rakrak, wolf spirit.
There was no way Urrell could guess how big the chasm bottom was, or where it led. Beyond their circle of light all was blackness. Agaratz peered intently around until having found some bearing known to – or distantly recalled by – him alone, he set off. As they went Urrell made out footprints on the sandy floor, tracks of others going in the same direction, the owners of the fir-log perhaps, the honey men. He tugged Agaratz’s arm to show him the tracks, with their splayed toes and heavy outer-foot impression.
Agaratz shrugged. “Olds mens, Urrell, make these.”
They all led the same way. Beside them Agaratz added his own distinctive club foot imprint in the sand, as fresh as those of the long-gone ‘olds mens’. Urrell, intent on looking down and around within the pool of light from the torch for more signs of those earlier folk, had not noticed what the light showed ahead when Agaratz stopped.
Stacked in a jumble against the farther wall of the pit lay a pile of tusks – mammoth tusks. Urrell held his breath.
“Olds mens put here.” Then, turning aside, Agaratz said: “Look, Urrell,” and holding the torch as high as he could he walked with it to one side. “See.” Perched on a boulder, guardian of the tusk hoard, with one long tusk still in place, was the skull of a huge bull mammoth. In the torchlight its gaping eye-sockets glowered at the intruders.
Urrell froze. Agaratz, however, approached the skull and addressed it much as he had the mammoth drawings in the painted cave, intoning in a language unknown to Urrell, appealing, pleading. When he had finished, Agaratz remained silent in front of the skull, the only sound in the huge space around them being the hiss of burning resin from the torch. Whatever Agaratz awaited did not happen.
“We take tusk, Urrell, but quick.”
As Urrell remained rooted to the spot, he added, “For flute.”
In his practical way, changing from incantation to tool-making, Agaratz handed the torch to Urrell while he chose a tusk from the pile. This done, without another glance at the guardian of the hoard, he shouldered the tusk and gestured for Urrell to lead the way back along their tracks to the climbing pole.
“I go up,” with which Agaratz swarmed up the tree trunk into the gloom above, almost in haste. The long swirled tusk over one shoulder seemed to be no hindrance. Only the quivering of the trunk betokened his progress to the top. When Urrell heard Rakrak’s greeting, it was his turn.
Till now, the presence of Agaratz had kept his fears at bay. To make things worse, the torch was burning low, drawing the circle of darkness closer round him. He hardly dared turn his back to the chasm. Carefully he edged round the trunk to scale it up the under side. His arms almost managed to encircle it, one hand grasping the torch, feet scrabbling for holds. His free hand found a grip just as his feet swung away, leaving him suspended within reach of anything on the pit floor. In a flurry of panicking effort he hauled himself round the trunk and, using his legs, scissored himself up over knurrs and stumps, scratched and cut, towards the safety of Agaratz and Rakrak. He glanced down. Was it a glimpse he caught of forms in the half gloom closing in on the foot of the bole? With a little shriek he flung the guttering torch at them. As it hit the sand, sending up sparks, he knew he saw heavy-browed faces looking up at him just as they vanished back into the dark, things as surely seen as those glimpsed from the corner of an eye yet invisible head-on.
Those last few lengths of the fir trunk he shinned up in a frenzy, by touch, till he almost shot over the rim, grasped by Agaratz and hauled over to lie quaking by Rakrak, ashamed at his own panic and the insides of his leathern breeches, warm and wet.
Rakrak licked his face.
“I fetch light. Wait.” Agaratz swung down the bole, retrieved the glowing stump and was back up in what seemed a trice to Urrell, still face down on the ledge. Agaratz twirled it back alight and from it lit a spare torch, shouldered the tusk and led off up the incline. To Urrell bringing up the rear, gripping Rakrak’s fur, his moccasins slipping on the gravel, it felt as if the presences were pressing up behind him, mocking his fears. Not till the narrow passage and its dots, at which Agaratz paused as before to mutter words, did the sense of being pursued lift from Urrell.
And not till they were back in their cave, the fire still alight, Piura dozing in its warmth, Agaratz busying himself with fish and bison meat, did Urrell feel himself truly safe. To one side, the tip of the tusk caught the firelight, a reminder that this had not been one of Agaratz’s tricks; while
his own scratches and wet trews were real enough.
“Agaratz, how did you know about the tusks?”
Agaratz went on with his tasks. After a longish pause, as an adult answers the unanswerable questions of a child, he said: “Fathers know. Fathers’ fathers tell. My father tell me.”
Urrell removed his leggings and skins down to his breech clout to scour himself clean with handfuls of grass dipped in snow water and ashes. As he did so he noticed several toes were discoloured under the filth.
“Agaratz, my feet.”
Agaratz came over and looked intently at their condition.
“Uh-huh.”
He beckoned the youth to sit on a stone while he went to his stores for remedies. Urrell watched him grind bulbs and herbs with a pebble on a flat stone, adding honey as a binder. This paste he applied to Urrell’s toes, dabbing it on with a twist of moss, his touch as delicate as a girl’s. Then, to Urrell’s surprise, he said: “Eat,” handing the stone pallet with the remainder of the paste to Urrell. It tasted vividly of its herbal ingredients, some flavours familiar to him, some strange, the honey making the whole palatable.
“Now cure,” said Agaratz but not before intoning a low chant with his hands over Urrell’s head, who noticed nothing but felt better, even a trifle euphoric.
“Agaratz, I know some plants for medecine. Tell me yours.”
“I tell, but you not know.” And he reeled off a litany of names in his own tongue, or perhaps the tongues of others, not one meaningful to Urrell.
“But you want to know?”
“Oh yes.”
“I show.”
To Urrell’s delight, Agaratz, in expansive mode, fetched his pouches and bags of simples and laid out the contents on skins, naming them as he went, so that the strange names took on meaning. Urrell would remember them every one, as he knew he was meant to, and their uses.
“This garlic, for cure ills of neck, this iris of the rock for throat, this for sick stomach, this…” The list went on and on.
Many of the plants Urrell recognised without knowing their uses, so he remained keenly attentive to Agaratz’s explanations.