Mists of Dawn

by Chad Oliver

  In the blue distance at the head of the valley, a mighty torrent of water thundered down from the mountains in a spectacular waterfall. It smashed down for fully one hundred feet into a rock basin, where the white clouds of spray were turned all the colors of the rainbow by the setting sun. From the basin, the water boomed down in a lovely double cascade, one stream on either side of the basin. The cascades dropped into a deep, bubbling pool, and from the pool streamed the water that flowed through the valley, cold and sparkling in the last light of evening.

  Thick green grass covered the valley floor like a soft carpet, and clumps of sweet-smelling pines grew around the edges and up into the surrounding hills. The air was incredibly fresh and clean, with just a hint of campfire smoke and the delicious smell of roasting meat. Under the pines, and spread somewhat up into the hills, were large and well-constructed lean-to structures, built with a framework of poles covered with great cured skins. In front of the lean-tos, small fires blazed cheerily.

  Upon the rock ledges that broke out from the hillsides, Mark could see the dark openings of a labyrinth of caves. Within the depths of the caves, but not too far from the entrance, fires crackled with heat and light.

  The valley was not silent, but neither was it noisy. A soft roar from the cascades in the distance filled the air with a gentle backdrop, and there was the humming sound of many voices. From one of the caves came the sharp tick-tick of rock striking against rock.

  The valley seemed to be filled with people—not that there were really so many there, certainly not over sixty or seventy, but it was the most people Mark had seen together in a long time. There were men, women, and children, young and old. The men and the women were dressed in furs, like Tlaxcan, and the children, for the most part, were as innocent of clothing as the day they were born. Mark noticed that many of the women wore necklaces and bracelets of sea shells, which indicated either that these people were closer to the sea than he had imagined, or were in contact with those who were. The men wore charms of bone, shell, or ivory. Mark saw no animals of any sort about, although he did hear an occasional growl from one of the empty-looking caves that sounded like a wolf or dog of some kind.

  As Mark looked about him in amazement, his earlier hunch about Tlaxcan was abundantly confirmed. There could be no doubt about it whatever now. Mark knew beyond question that he saw before him a camp of astonishing people. He knew that he was looking upon one of the most remarkable cultures in all the fantastic history of mankind.

  He was in the midst of the Cro-Magnons.

  Chapter 11 The Painted Man

  Even as Mark watched, he became aware of a group of men coming toward him. There were ten of them, all strongly built, and they were armed with bows and arrows, spears, axes, and long weapons that looked like harpoons. They did not speak, nor did they smile. They seemed to ignore Tlaxcan as though he wasn’t there.

  The warriors headed straight for Mark, and their expressions told all too plainly that they meant business.

  Mark hesitated, knowing that he was in a ticklish position. He noted with considerable satisfaction that his nerves were steady; there was little danger now of a hysterical outburst. That was good—necessary, even. He had to think his way out of this, he had to make the right decisions. There was no time for mistakes, and he knew that he would get no second chances.

  The Cro-Magnons came closer, threatening. The humming roar of the waterfall seemed to hang suspended in the air of evening, waiting.

  Mark considered drawing his .45 and making a fast break for it, but discarded the idea at once. He had no place to go, and knew that he could not last long alone in this strange world. His future was here with these people, or else he had no future at all.

  He looked at Tlaxcan, quiet by his side. Had he led him into a trap? Had he taken Mark back to his own people as a prisoner, a slave, a trophy of the hunt? Mark didn’t think so. Although as yet they could not talk fluently to each other, he had gotten to know Tlaxcan pretty well during their trip across the plains. Tlaxcan was young, possibly no older than Mark, although he seemed adult in every way. He had a refreshing and genuine habit of laughing wholeheartedly at little incidents; everything, to him, had a humorous side that he invariably sought out to laugh at. But it was not a stupid laughter, the laughter of an idiot who knew no better. It was the laughter of a man who lived in a tough, hard world and had learned that it was wiser to laugh than to cry. Behind Tlaxcan’s laughter, deep in his dark eyes, there was cold steel. He was not a man to fool with, and, if Mark was any judge, he was not a man to betray a friend.

  Once again, he put his trust in Tlaxcan. He was not sorry. At once, as though sensing Mark’s decision, Tlaxcan stepped forward, between Mark and the oncoming warriors.

  “Orn,” Tlaxcan said clearly, pointing at Mark. Then he spoke again, too rapidly for Mark to catch what was said. The Cro-Magnons slowed their pace, but they kept coming. “Tlan!” ordered Tlaxcan coldly. “Stop!”

  The warriors kept coming. Tlaxcan slipped an arrow from his quiver and fitted it to his bowstring. He drew the bow taut, and it was clear that he was not bluffing. He was ready to shoot. The warriors stopped. At the time, Mark wondered greatly at the fact that Tlaxcan was quite evidently ready to put an arrow through a lifelong friend for the sake of someone he had known for a few days, but the explanation was simple enough. The band of Cro-Magnons was seldom together in the valley as a unit, each extended family group following the herds alone for most of the year. The warriors who confronted them now were not members of Tlaxcan’s immediate kinship group, and so were not close to him. Probably he had not seen them twenty times in his life. They were known not to be enemies, but that was all. They were not his personal friends.

  For a long moment, the tense scene held. Then five more warriors came up and arranged themselves behind Tlaxcan. Tlaxcan greeted them by name, and they were obviously friends of his. They looked at Mark coldly, but offered him no harm as long as he was under Tlaxcan’s protection. Mark began to realize that helping Tlaxcan when he had been in trouble was the smartest thing he could have done. Strangers around here were clearly presumed to be enemies unless they could prove otherwise in a hurry. They were declared guilty until proven innocent—if they had time to prove anything before someone ran a spear through them. With Mark’s halting command of the language, he would not have had a prayer without Tlaxcan.

  The ten warriors milled about uncertainly for a moment, and then went back the way they had come. Mark breathed more easily again. He turned and smiled at the five friends of Tlaxcan and, after Tlaxcan had explained the situation to them, several of them smiled in return. They did not, however, welcome Mark with open arms. Mark knew that getting himself accepted into this tribe as an equal was apt to prove something of a job. Desperately, he wished that he could talk with these people in a way that would make them understand that he meant them no harm.

  “I am your brother,” he said in their language. “I come in peace.” That was the best he could do, and he saw Tlaxcan smiling at his accent.

  Four of the warriors did not respond, but the fifth, an older man of perhaps forty years, iron-hard but with streaks of gray in his long hair, came forward and put his hand on Mark’s shoulder, much as Tlaxcan had done. “I am Nrani,” he said in a friendly voice. “I am Tlaxcan’s brodier. You are Tlaxcan’s brother. I am your brother.”

  Mark nodded, wishing fervently that he knew how to say “thank you” in Cro-Magnon. The term “Cro-Magnon,” of course, was not the name that these people used in referring to themselves. They had been named the Cro-Magnons because the original scientific discovery of five modern-type skeletons had been made at the rock shelter of Cro-Magnon in the French village of Les Eyzies during the late 1800’s. The Cro-Magnon peoples themselves, living as they did in the dawn of man, had never heard the name by which they were to be known to science. They referred to themselves as the Danequa, with the middle e pronounced as in the English “neigh” or like the a in “ate.” Literal
ly translated, Danequa meant simply “the people,” which, as Mark knew, was a common practice among isolated primitive groups. Many primitive societies thought they were the only human beings in the world, all others being mere animals.

  With the five warriors for an escort, Mark and Tlaxcan made their way across the valley floor and climbed a narrow trail up to one of the rocky ledges where the caves were. The sun was gone now, although there was still light enough to see by. The cold night wind was already whipping through the hills, and in the distance the great waterfall sang its lullaby of power. The whole scene seemed to Mark to partake of the unreal, of fantasy. It was a moment sliced out of legend, the time-frozen landscape of a dream . . .

  Or was it the other world, the world of 1953, that was a dream? His uncle, the space-time machine, his dog, Fang, did they really exist? Mark shook his head. It was useless to think such thoughts. He was where he was, and his problem right now was staying alive.

  When they reached the ledge, no one spoke. The people there looked at him curiously, neither hostile nor friendly. They seemed to be waiting. Waiting for what? Mark soon found out.

  From one of the caves there came an eerie, high-pitched whistle. This was repeated six times, and then there was a sort of chant, delivered in a rather high, rhythmical voice. Mark could make no sense out of the chant, although he thought he caught a familiar word now and then, mixed in between strings of singsong syllables that were to all intents and purposes meaningless. Finally, the chant stopped. There was a complete, hushed silence.

  Out of the mouth of the cave, through the black shadows of evening, danced a painted man. Mark did not move.

  The man came toward him in a strange, dancing motion. He hopped first on one foot for six steps, then on the other for six steps. As he danced, his hands and arms writhed like snakes and his head bobbed forward and backward as though disconnected from his body. Even in the fading dead light of evening, the colors of his body were startling. Arms, legs, face, chest, back— the man was completely covered with brilliant paints. The paint was striped in thin series of sixes, each series composed of red, brown, black, white, gray, and green. Shells and ornaments of bone and ivory adorned the painted man as necklaces, arm bracelets, and leg rattles. They clicked and whirred together with the motion of his body, and in the silence they reminded Mark of nothing so much as the warning whirrrr of a rattlesnake.

  The man was frightening, but Mark was not as unnerved as he would have been had he not seen similar painted men before. He knew the grotesque dancer coming toward him was much the same sort of official as the Neanderthal with the red band on his forehead had been. He was a type of person that Doctor Nye had often discussed with him, a type of person he himself had seen among the Indians. He was a shaman, popularly known as a witch doctor.

  Knowing these facts was helpful. It changed the oncoming dancer from a supernatural horror to an understandable human being, one who could be dealt with. But it did not change the fact that Mark was skating on very thin ice and had to watch his step. Knowing that the painted man was a shaman did not dispose of him—and shamans could be dangerous.

  Shamans had the power of life or death.

  A lot depended on the individual, as always. In common with other professional people, a shaman was a human being first and a witch doctor afterward. They were sometimes insane, sometimes subject to fits, sometimes not. Is the driver of a car dangerous? It depends on who the driver is, and where you happen to be. The painted man was completely unknown to Mark; he was an X factor. What should he do?

  Once more, Tlaxcan came to his aid. He touched Mark on the arm to reassure him and smiled his quick and ready smile.

  “Orn,” whispered Tlaxcan. “Do not be afraid.”

  Mark smiled back, but his smile was a little shaky. That word “orn” was apt to be used pretty loosely from his point of view. The painted man coming toward him might be lots of things, but if the expression in his eyes was friendship, then Mark wanted no part of it. It looked like the sort of friendship a vampire might feel for its victim.

  The painted man stopped. Tlaxcan at once began to talk, speaking too rapidly for Mark to follow him. The shaman talked back, his voice a trifle high for a man’s, although not abnormally so. Then Tlaxcan started in again, and now Mark was able to catch enough of the words to understand the general drift of the conversation. Tlaxcan elaborated the details of how Mark had saved his life, and then recounted the story of how he had first come upon Mark on the plains. He spoke in awed tones of the reindeer that Mark had killed without any weapons except a small knife, and Mark realized that Tlaxcan was speaking the literal truth so far as he knew it—he probably regarded the .45 as a magic charm of some sort, or at most as a clumsy fist-ax. Tlaxcan told about the amazing knife that was not made of stone, and he spoke of the red flower—fire-that Mark had kindled by magic.

  The shaman was visibly impressed, although he tried not to show it and muttered something to the effect that all that was old stuff to him and he could do it himself if he really wanted to. Tlaxcan did not contradict him, but he was plainly skeptical.

  The shaman turned to Mark. “Come,” he said, and his voice was not entirely without fear. Mark suddenly realized that this shaman was doing a very brave thing, from his own point of view. To him, Mark had just been represented as no mean witch doctor himself, and for all he knew he might be out looking for trouble. Mark relaxed a little, and after another reassuring smile from Tlaxcan he followed the shaman back across the ledge toward the cave.

  The waterfall moaned and boomed in the distance, and night had fallen like black snow in the valley. Despite Mark’s realization that the shaman was uneasy, he was none too confident himself. As he followed the painted man into the dark cavern, Mark could not help wondering whether or not he would ever come out of the cave again—alive.

  The cave was large, roomy, and dry. They turned one corner, and then proceeded down a long, straight tunnel to where a small fire burned in a tiny chamber. The fire, Mark noticed, fed on dry bones, not wood— a logical enough fuel source in a land that was somewhat short on wood. The painted man did not stop, but continued on into a larger chamber beyond. It was dark, with only enough light coming in from the flickering fire outside to gray the air and throw great twisting shadows on the walls.

  With startling suddenness, things began to happen. The shaman, as far as Mark could tell, stood quite still in the center of the chamber. The chamber was otherwise empty. But weird songs, chants, and screams filled the air, coming from the ceiling, the floor, the corners. Voices came from nowhere at all, and not only voices of humans. Bison snorted, horses nickered, lions roared, and grim trumpetings that could only have come from mighty mammoths echoed through the cave.

  Mark shivered. In spite of himself, he edged back toward the light. Something snarled right behind him and he stopped abruptly. Ventriloquism, his mind whispered, but he was growing nervous nonetheless. This shaman knew his stuff; he was good.

  An eerie, violet light filled the cavern. Mark was startled. Radioactive rocks? Some kind of glowing mineral? He didn’t know, but he could see that the painted man now had a long coat on. And in his hands was something large, white, and gleaming. A skull.

  Not just a skull, either. A monster skull, with two huge curving tusks of ivory. The thing was enormous. Mark wondered wildly how in the world the shaman was holding it up, and decided that it must be suspended on a rope of some kind that he could not see in the gloom. The shaman looked straight at him, his eyes gleaming.

  “Mark,” he intoned, his voice like blue ice in the empty chamber. Then his eyes looked down at the skull in his hands. “Quaro,” he said distinctly. “Mammoth.”

  Mark watched intently. The shaman took his hands off the skull and it hung whitely in mid-air. A rope, Mark reminded himself in desperation, a rope. A knife appeared in the shaman’s hand as if by magic, and he whipped it around in a blazing arc into the skull of die mammoth.

  The skull disappeared
. That was all. Disappeared.

  Mark gasped, and realized for the first time that he had been holding his breath. He thanked his lucky star that he knew enough anthropology and Indian lore to interpret what he had just witnessed. Unless he was very much mistaken, the import of what he had seen was simple enough, in theory at least. He had come into the tribe, seeking status as a member. Very well. The tribe, naturally, wanted no weaklings, no incompetents. Mark had to prove himself first. How? In a way that would leave no doubt of his manhood. He had to kill a mammoth.

  That, Mark knew, was easier said than done. It was out of the question that he could kill a mammoth with a pistol shot, even with a .45. He did not know how these people went about hunting the giant monsters— surely not just with a bow and arrow—but he could only hope that they didn’t do it alone; he would need plenty of help. He had a feeling, however, that he would not be asked to do anything impossible. He simply had to show that he could do what any other man of this time could do—no more and definitely no less. That, too, he knew, would take some doing.

  The shaman led the way out of the dark chamber, back into the small cave room where the fire was. The show was over. Even in 50,000 b.c., it appeared, magicians had found that magic worked better in the dark where no one could see too clearly. But it had been a spectacular performance, judged by any standards. Mark noticed that the shaman was having trouble holding back a satisfied smile. He was evidently well pleased with his night’s work.

  The painted man, now dressed in a heavily decorated coat, placed his arm on Mark’s shoulder in the

  Danequa gesture of friendship. “Qualxen,” he said, giving his name. Mark realized that he was being honored, and smiled his appreciation. lie returned the gesture, giving his own name despite the fact that Qualxen obviously already knew it.