The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  He splashed toward her, holding out the dripping log with its sagging skin full of water. She rose and took it, their hands touching, and then she turned and left, as quickly as she could under the heavy burden, staggering once as she changed her step to avoid stepping in her sketch in the clay.

  He stayed in the shallows, reluctant to step forward and see what she had done. He looked across once more to the village and at the bustle beyond where smoke rose and the sound of the Flint men knapping their stones brought the accustomed rhythm to the day. Way up the hill, a thin trail of smoke twirled by the entrance to the cave. The Keeper of the Bulls had made his morning sacrifice. The other apprentices would be trudging up the slope to mix colors and build more scaffolding. The Keeper of the Horses might need his help today. Deer had already learned the way the Keeper of the Horses made the manes, blowing the colors from his mouth through the different shapes he could make with his thumb and finger.

  Finally, unable to put off the moment any longer, he moved slowly forward through the water, as if it were as thick as mud, to look at Little Moon’s sketch. And caught his breath with surprise.

  It was a man’s shape, thighs emerging from the river, the waist curved and the weight of the chest and shoulders taut to take the weight of the log and the skin, filling in the river. The head was just a suggestion of shape, and a few swift curls of hair. There was no face, no identity, but it was him, as he had been just a few moments ago. Him in the river, as caught by her. Caught. No, that was not the word she had used, the word she had learned from her father. Captured. She had captured his spirit. Indeed she had. He admired her work, the curve of thigh and back, the suggestion of hair. The water was just three quick lines, scored deeper where they began and then becoming shallower, in a way that suggested both movement and direction. There was a curl of wave by his forward thigh that he liked. A man in the river. Him.

  Guiltily, he looked up at the village, and then splashed water over her sketch with his foot and smoothed the clay clean again. As he went to his work, he thought that his spirit did not feel caught, but that he would like to be captured by Moon. She had seen something in him and been moved by it, and had depicted it. But then, the sketch had already disappeared, taken by the river. Would it be so easy to capture her? A few hasty lines in clay? It could not be so easy, or everyone would do it. But that way she had balanced the curve of his thigh against the curl of the water, that was good. He could use that. She had the talent, Little Moon. She should be working in the cave, but women never did. He had never asked himself why not before. But then he had never seen a woman draw before. He had never seen a drawing of himself before. Looking up to the cave and feeling eager to begin, Deer felt as if the world had suddenly been reinvented and he was bursting with possibilities.

  The Keeper of the Horses was becoming angry. All the other Keepers were agreed save the Keeper of the Bulls. There was a gap amid the ranks after the old man’s death. They needed a new Keeper, and Deer had done his part in the hunt and was now a man. He was the obvious choice, the most talented of the apprentices, and had been chosen by the old man himself. Had he not told the Keeper of the Horses that the boy should have his own lamp after his death?

  “Why do you object?” he repeated, angrier still by the way the Keeper of the Bulls had perched himself on this rock above the other Keepers, looking down upon them rather than sitting with them in the circle, as was the custom. The Keepers were all equal. The man was becoming insufferable, as if he were trying to become leader. They were a brotherhood, bonded by the great work of the cave. There were no leaders or followers among them, only Keepers and apprentices. And the cave itself was ritual enough, without this new business of skulls and eagles and great ceremonies that rested on clever tricks. He had taken the other Keepers up the hill to show them the pit and the brushwood where the eagle had been caught and then released.

  “The boy is still young,” objected the Keeper of the Bulls.

  “He is a man. He killed his beasts,” said the Keeper of the Ibex, who had been more offended than any of them when he saw the eagle’s pit, aware that he had been fooled. “We all saw him kill them well, leaping from back to back like a mountain goat. Deer is no boy any longer.”

  “We nearly banished him from the cave,” came the next objection. “We only just decided to let him back in. Perhaps that was a mistake.”

  “You know as well as I do that the old man stumbled on his own. He felt very bad about blaming Deer. That was why he took the boy under his wing, made him his special apprentice, taught him all that he could, left Deer his lamp,” said the Keeper of the Horses, striving to keep his voice reasonable.

  “The old man made his choice,” said the Keeper of the Ibex. “He made Deer his heir. He passed on his lamp. You know what that means. We cannot go against a Keeper’s final wish.”

  “The old man was wandering in his own head. He was not what he had been,” said the Keeper of the Bulls, his voice sullen at not getting his own way. “He even left his work unfinished.”

  “Deer is finishing the coloring of the two bison. He has a master’s touch that boy, and the old man knew it and welcomed Deer’s completion of the work.”

  “So let him finish that work. The boy has shown a certain talent with his deer, but as apprentice he must complete his dead master’s work. The two beasts on which the old man worked are but half-done.”

  “They are done, save for the last of the coloring. And Deer has improved on what he was left,” said the Keeper of the Horses. “The old man told me of his pleasure at Deer’s idea to depict one of them shedding its winter coat. It is no apprentice’s common task that Deer has done. It is a master’s work. The old man knew that, and treasured the boy for his talent.”

  “I need to think more of this,” said the sullen voice. “There is no rush to decide, and the work awaits us.” He rose to go.

  “The work requires a full brotherhood of Keepers,” said the Keeper of the Bears. A squat, dark man who lived apart, he seldom spoke, and remained stubbornly seated on the ground. Nobody else rose. The council was still in session, whatever their high and mighty colleague might want. Odd, thought the Keeper of the Horses, how much resentment had built up toward the Keeper of the Bulls. As if that ritual he had staged before the hunt had offended the other Keepers, just as much as the trick he had played. It had certainly offended him, something new in the world that threatened changes he could not foresee.

  The Keeper of the Bulls studied his colleagues thoughtfully, and instead of walking back to the cave, slid down the face of the rock to join them in the circle. He was shaking his head almost sorrowfully.

  “Perhaps I am being harsh on the boy,” he said, his voice different, almost ingratiating. “Forgive me, my friends, if I am still dark and low in my spirits after the death of my woman. I still think of her, and my bed is cold and lonely.”

  Silence as the rest of them considered that. Certainly he had been acting strangely since her death.

  “This is not about your bed. It is about filling the brotherhood of Keepers,” said the Keeper of the Bears, in the stubborn way of a man who has seized on a single point and will not let it go.

  “You are right,” said the ingratiating voice. “But we are all men here. We know that a man needs his bed filled and his heart lightened by a woman.”

  “Nothing to stop you taking one,” said the Keeper of the Ibex. “The mating time is soon.”

  “My colleague of the horses, you have an unwed daughter,” came the voice, confident now rather than ingratiating. “Come, let us settle everything at once. Give me your blessing and the hand of your daughter and we shall bring Deer into our number.”

  By the manes of my horses, the man is as crafty as he is brazen, thought Little Moon’s father. He is making a bargain over this. He has no right to block Deer’s advancement, but seeks to win something for himself in return. In his irritation, the Keeper of the Horses was about to dismiss the idea out of hand, but forced
himself to control his tongue. He could have no credible objection to the match. Most of his colleagues would think it a wise move. It would bring honor to Little Moon, to be the woman of such an influential man, and useful to him, to be linked by kinship as well as the craft of the cave. But not like this. And not at all, he suddenly thought, as he studied the big man leaning back easily against his rock, in the circle but still somehow separate from it. This was a man who would do anything to get his own way, use the trickery of the eagle, and seduce the hunters and the fishers to him. Looking at the man’s eyes, shadowed but cruel and somehow contemptuous of fellows in the brotherhood, he knew that the Keeper of the Bulls was a dangerous man, a man too touched by his sense of the power of the bulls that obsessed him. Some of their angry, stubborn spirit had invaded his, just as the Keeper of the Horses felt touched by the grace and lightness of movement in the beasts that he drew.

  “This is not a matter for our council,” objected the Keeper of the Ibex. “This thing of the daughter is between the two of you. Deer has nothing to do with it. The matter of Deer is for us to decide, and speaking for myself, we have decided. The youth is the new Keeper.”

  “I must speak to my woman. She will want a say in the future of our daughter,” said the Keeper of the Horses, suddenly seeing how best to seize this moment and get the decision on Deer settled. He wanted to think more about this sense of danger he felt from the Keeper of the Bulls. The man would not be crossed, but he could be guided, and perhaps outmaneuvered. Even as he began to speak, the Keeper of the Horses felt he might pay a heavy price for this day’s work. “But I am glad that you have changed your view and seen the wisdom of your colleagues. We can now tell Deer that we are as one, all agreed, and with the shade of our departed colleague guiding us to the right decision. The Keeper of the Bison will rest happily, now that Deer has taken his place. Let us go and greet our new brother, our new Keeper.” He rose, saw the other Keepers rise with him, and leaving the Keeper of the Bulls alone, walked back into the cave.

  Deer filled his mouth with the bitter ocher, and putting his cupped hand to his lips began to blow the reddish-brown color onto the calcite. He had mixed it with care, not too brown, for that would look like the background wall of this narrow part of the cave, far around the corner from the great hall of the bulls. The air was bad here, and the lamp flickered feebly, smoking and making his eyes weep. It was a bad place to work, but the old Keeper had chosen this spot for his great work, and Deer must complete the bison. It was the least he could do for the old man, who had shown him such kindness after his early coldness, as if making up for having Deer banished from the cave. But it was also such a pleasure, taking the outline sketch of the two great beasts, back to back, which the old man had left for him to complete.

  He had skill, that old one, thought Deer as he stood back, bracing himself to fill his mouth again with the thick liquid he had brewed. The beast to the front was poised to charge, its horns raised and its massive shoulders tense. The old man had used a flint in the wall to give a different color and texture to the front hoof, a flash of lightness that suggested the ground was about to be pawed. And the other beast to the rear, caught in mid-charge, its mouth gaping open as it sucked air and its horns high and vicious, leaped away. Such movement in both directions, but the whole kept tensely together by that point of stillness where their haunches joined and overlapped. Deer felt ashamed that he had ever doubted the old man’s talent, and humble, for not having seen before the real force of this work he was now completing. Earlier, he had looked at the two beasts separately, and neither one had seemed to him well done. Now that he was working on them himself, he understood that they were not two separate beasts but one mass of force and color held in a balance so tense that he could feel it.

  Deer had traced a great double curve with a carefully shaved charcoal twig to guide him, and filled in the bulk of the bison with a paste of charcoal and the two kinds of hard, dark earth that seemed almost to flow when they were placed in a hot fire. That gave the great looming blackness that had appeared to Deer to be too overwhelming, until he had suddenly thought of making the forward beast appear to be in molt. In one of their last conversations, he had excitedly put the idea to the old man, that a great curving band of reddish brown would lighten the composition, and the curve could be used to balance the power of the other beast’s charging motion. And that was how the beasts looked in spring, when they began fighting for mates. The thick dark winter coat gave way to the reddish brown of summer. The old man had nodded and pondered the proposal. That night, he had plucked a handful of the dark winter hair of the bison from the skin on which he slept, and studied it by the firelight before telling Deer that he was right. They would use the red-brown color to show a molting beast.

  “You are almost done,” said the voice of Little Moon’s father beside him. “But there is still one trick for you to learn.” The Keeper of the Horses leaned forward and cupped his hand along the charcoal line, and called back for one of the apprentices to join them to watch what he did.

  “You can use a hand to guide the blowing of the color, to make a line over which the color will not pass. Otherwise, you will have to paint over it again. See, the line of the hand can follow your charcoal trace. Now you, young apprentice, watch how I put my hand, for you must learn how this is done. Come, Deer, blow your color, just a small amount, so as not to overlap my hand.”

  Deer did as he was told, saw how the line of color stopped. The apprentice stepped forward and replaced the Keeper’s hand with his own. Deer filled his mouth once more and blew again.

  “Your color is good and thick,” said the Keeper of the Horses. “Now, watch how I use my two hands together down here, where your tracings meet in the pointed curve. You see, my hands are not quite enough, they gape where the two palms meet. So we take a scrap of deerskin from our pouch like this, and you, youngster, fold it small to fill that gap between my hands and cover up to the traced line. Like that, yes. Now, blow again, and the curve will be properly filled with color.”

  They all stood back, and admired the way the colors now met without blurring. And then, without need for a word, all gathered around the haunch of the bison to repeat the trick where the traces formed another point as the red-brown color dwindled away at the root of the beast’s tail. Again the two hands, again the folded scrap of deerskin, again the gentle blowing, as they panted in the bad and smoke-filled air. Then it was done, and they all staggered back down the narrow passage, clambered up and around the bend in the rock, and out through the great cave into the open air to fill their lungs and clear their blurring eyes.

  “It is done,” said the Keeper of the Horses when their breath had eased. “You are the new Keeper, a full member of the brotherhood. It was decided this day.”

  “All were agreed?” asked Deer.

  “All were agreed, eventually. All admire your talent. And all will be impressed by the way you completed the old man’s work. They are probably clustered around now to look, while we take our air.”

  “Then when will the ceremony take place?”

  “It is not decided, Perhaps the night before the time of mating. That might interest you. A man now, and a Keeper, you will be able to take a woman of your own.”

  Deer studied him cautiously. Little Moon’s father must know that Deer had already made his choice. Would he even have raised the topic if he had not been prepared for the question Deer must now put? Would he have backed Deer so strongly to become a Keeper if he did not think Deer worthy of his daughter’s hand?

  “There is only one maid whom I would take at the mating,” he said, more boldly than he thought he could.

  The man was silent, studying him carefully, a half-smile on his face. He looked down at his hands, still stained with the ocher that Deer had blown in the cave. He rubbed the sides of his palms together, and watched the grains crumble and fall, some of them sparkling in the sunlight. The color bonded him to Deer in a certain way, he thought, Deer’
s breath and the liquid from Deer’s mouth, where they had worked together.

  “I seek your Little Moon,” Deer plowed on.

  “You are not alone in that,” said the Keeper placidly. “The Keeper of the Bulls also seeks my Moon.” The shortened name was what they called her in the privacy of the family. The Keeper caught himself; he was treating Deer as if they were already kin.

  “But he is old and….” Deer’s voice trailed off. “Little Moon herself would not take him.”

  “What my Little Moon wants is not the most important thing in this. I have to take the decision, with my woman, and think what is best for us, for the brotherhood of Keepers, for the village. And he is a very powerful man, renowned among the villages up and down the river. It is a great honor for Moon.”

  “She would be a great honor for me,” said Deer simply, hanging his head. Now he knew why her father had done it this way, raising him up with the news that he would be a Keeper, and then casting him down with this warning that Moon would be given to another. A thought came to him.

  “Do you know she has the talent, your daughter?” he said.

  “I know. So does her mother, but women are women. There is no place for them in the cave. The brotherhood would never allow it.”

  “The brotherhood seems suddenly to be allowing a lot of strange new things,” Deer retorted. “Did the brotherhood know of this new thing of the eagle’s head and the bull’s skull? Did the other Keepers support the Keeper of the Bulls in this?”

  “No, and many are troubled by this.”

  “And yet this is the man to whom you would entrust Little Moon?”