by David Drake
Heron was beyond helping. He was trying to crawl away from the campfire on his hands and knees. The shaft of the spear through his body got in the way, tripping him repeatedly. He might as well he down where he was and wait for a woman to knock him on the head with a stone. No man wounded the way Heron was could live very long.
“Come on!” Wolf bellowed. “Come on, we’ve got to get their spears and get out!”
The Chief Hunter had grabbed several loose spears from around the campfire. Some of Bull’s men had jumped aside at the first shouts and confusion, leaving their weapons where they lay. There were plenty of hunters who were armed, though.
Wolf was brightly illuminated by the fire. Bull threw a spear at him. Kar saw his Chief Hunter move like a tiger swiping with its paw, raising the spears he had taken as loot. Bull’s weapon clacked on the hardwood shafts and ricocheted out of the camp. “Come on!” Wolf screamed to his men in desperation.
Kar suddenly understood why most of Wolf’s men hesitated. They were brave men. They would have been willing to spear one of the great bison as it bore down on them. The previous night at the mammoth’s carcass, they had stood until the wolves had attacked in darkness after the campfire went out.
But they were afraid to attack another tribe’s fire at night. The folk of Kar’s tribe—probably every tribe in Kar’s world—were raised to think of fire as protection for those who sheltered around it. Because Wolf’s hunters believed deep in their souls that the campfire was a shield, its flickering light drove most of them back unexpectedly when they prepared to attack the other tribe.
Kar had seen a similar reaction sometimes in the forest when he gathered wood for his fire. Often he would destroy the web of a spider when he tore apart a brush pile. Occasionally the displaced creature would be flung into the web of another spider of the same species.
To the Chief Fire-Maker’s surprise, the spider who had built the web would always drive out the newcomer, even when the displaced spider was considerably the larger of the two. The newcomer seemed tentative as it raised its forelegs and mimed stabbing motions with its mandibles. The original owner hopped furiously back and forth, making the web sway to disconcert its rival still further. At last the displaced spider scuttled off the floor of silk and climbed to a new location, where it started to build a small replacement web of its own.
Most of the hunters in Wolf’s tribe were almost as tradition-bound as spiders. They lived according to fixed patterns. Even when the world changed drastically around them, they tried to react the way their fathers’ fathers had done when times were better. If Kar had realized that sooner, he would not have proposed this plan. It was too late now to change what had happened, though.
Boartooth and Longshank wheezed and grunted in their personal tug of war. The folk of Bull’s tribe were also shocked by the new events. They stayed a few paces back from the struggle, across the fire from their attackers.
Bull himself suddenly jumped the campfire. Wolf shouted and pointed a spear at his burly rival. Bull ignored the Chief Hunter and stabbed Boartooth in the throat. The young hunter gurgled and collapsed in a spray of blood.
Wolf backed away. A shower of stones and clubs hit him, far too many to block with his spearshafts. A large rock tore his forehead open. Wolf staggered and dropped the looted weapons.
Bull thrust at the other Chief Hunter. Wolf turned and ran, growling unintelligibly in anger and frustration. The people of the other tribe rushed forward to the edge of the firelight as suddenly as a creek dammed by fallen trees boils forward when one particular log gives way. They hurled a sleet of weapons, spears as well as blunt objects, at the attackers capering nervously in the brush.
Men screamed. Kar thought he recognized two of the voices, Flash and Bigfist. The men who had been afraid to attack the strangers’ camp seemed to be unwilling to flee from the firelight now that the plan had obviously failed. Wolf was too badly injured—or too angry at his hunters’ failure—to give the necessary orders.
“Run away!” Kar shouted from behind the hunters. “Run to me!” This had been his plan, not the Chief Hunter’s, so it was largely his responsibility. Besides, somebody had to act to save the folk who could still be saved.
The men standing uselessly outside the hostile camp suddenly vanished back into the brush and safety. “Come to me!” the Chief Fire-Maker cried again. He was safe from thrown spears where he stood, and surviving hunters would be safe if they reached him. Brush crackled loudly, reminding Kar that men were large animals themselves.
Two hunters, then a third, burst out of the dark. Bull’s tribe had built up their fire. The strangers stood like a wall between the light and their attackers. They flung weapons and screamed their hatred. Children too young to speak more than a few words stood between the legs of their mothers, tossing chips of bark while the women cast rocks and the men aimed spears into the night.
Kar thought of spiders and shivered.
The brush crashed again. Wolf and another hunter, Redhair, staggered to the group around the Chief Fire-Maker. Redhair held the Chief Hunter’s arm over his shoulders and helped support the injured man. Neither of them carried spears.
Wolf tossed his head, trying to clear hair bloodied by the cut of his forehead from his eyes. He looked around him. “We must go back for the others,” he muttered. “Flash and Bigfist are not here.”
He didn’t mention Heron and Boartooth. Wolf knew where they were.
There was a terrible cry from the brush just beyond the firelight. It ended with the hollow thock of stone hitting bone. The sound was familiar from the evenings after a successful hunt, when the women began cracking the thighs of the prey to get out the delicious marrow. This time it was a skull, not a thighbone, but the principle was the same.
“That was Flash,” the Chief Fire-Maker said simply. “Bigfist will be next. We must return to our camp, before Bull leads his hunters out to find the rest of us.”
Wolf groaned with a pain that did not come only from the blows his powerful body had received. “Yes,” he said. “We must leave before dawn. And we must never return.”
Kar led the hunters back the way they had come. Behind them, the triumphant shouting of the other tribe almost hid the sound of Bigfist’s screams.
BISON
It had begun to rain before the surviving hunters reached the camp. The women must have suspected what had happened, because they already had the tribe’s goods bundled and ready for flight.
The fire made the drizzle glitter like sunlight on an outcrop of mica. For a moment, the women and children remained impassive as the men stumbled into view. When those waiting realized that there were only five survivors, they began to scream and wail.
“I told you!” cried Elm. “I told you what would happen if you ignored the spirit of the bison!”
“We didn’t ignore anything, old woman,” said Wolf. He was trying to remember what had happened at the other tribe’s camp. Kar had brought the Chief Hunter a wad of wet grass with which Wolf mopped the blood from his forehead. His mind still moved in flashes rather than a connected trail. He remembered a spear coming at his face—and Boartooth spraying blood like a horse whose throat has been cut to finish it quickly. “I perform the rites as my father did. We needed good spears to take game.”
Elm stood with her hands and her hips and her elbows out, shrieking at the hunters with a voice as raucous as a crow’s. “You should have—” she began.
Redhair knocked the medicine woman down with his hand. She squawked in surprise. Redhair had lost his spear, but he still carried a club. He drew the weapon from beneath his waist thong and started for Elm again.
Wolf grabbed him from behind. “No!” the Chief Hunter shouted. “We are a tribe! We do not harm one another!”
Redhair turned away angrily. “Tell her to keep her mouth shut, then,” he snarled. “If she speaks again tonight, I’ll treat her as Flash was treated. Flash was my friend.”
“Come,” said Wolf to the ot
hers. “We must leave at once. Bull will not follow us any distance, but if we meet his hunting parties on the plain they will surely attack.”
“It’s night,” said Grassblade, one of the women. “How will we . . . ?”
Wolf opened his mouth to reply, but his vision suddenly blurred. He saw two of everything, fuzzy images which were no more material than wisps of fog. He swayed and would have fallen except that old Kar put an arm around his shoulders.
“We will carry torches,” said the Chief Fire-Maker. “The animals will not harm us. They don’t hunt in the rain either.”
Wolf felt his vision clear and his balance return. “The rain will put our torches out,” said a young boy—Heron’s son, the Chief Hunter thought. He was too young to have the right to argue with one of the chiefs, but all discipline was breaking down under the crushing weight of hunger and catastrophe.
“Soon it will be dawn,” said Kar. “Besides, the night is less dangerous than being here at dawn when Bull’s hunters come.”
He spoke mildly instead of slapping the child to assert adult authority. Perhaps the Chief Fire-Maker wanted to avoid additional violence on a night in which violence had proved disastrous for the tribe . . . but perhaps Kar, like Wolf himself, had doubts about the traditional rules which had brought them to this state.
“Quickly,” said Wolf. He felt another spasm of dizziness when he bent to snatch a branch from the fire to use as a torch. While the hunters were gone, the women had built the blaze high so that its heat would prevent it from being extinguished by the slow rain.
Wolf led his tribe into the chill darkness. They were not going anywhere, just away from Bull and his angry tribe. Old Elm stumbled along near the end of the column, bent under the weight of her herbs and magical equipment. She muttered under her breath, but she was wise enough to believe Redhair. She did not raise her voice loud enough to be heard by others.
It continued to rain all day. The only change was that long periods of pelting, hammering downpour interspersed the drizzle. In a way the rain was a good thing, since Bull’s tribe certainly wouldn’t bother struggling out in it to look for their beaten enemies.
But if the rain kept up, Wolf feared that it would wash him and his tribe completely away.
The Chief Hunter had never felt as miserable before in his life. The cut on his forehead bled severely, which left him weaker than usual. The blow had done him other injury as well, he knew, because he suffered several attacks of dizziness and double vision.
Once Wolf fell down because of the spell of dizziness. The rest of the tribe was so dulled by hunger and fatigue that most of them ignored their fallen chief. They continued plodding onward, stepping around Wolf’s legs as he thrashed in the mud, trying to rise.
Kar helped the Chief Hunter to his feet. The Chief Fire-Maker was old but wiry, well familiar with awkward weights from his experience in dragging loads of timber into camp through the clinging undergrowth.
“I’m all right,” Wolf whispered. He moved his arms to prove that he could. His whole side was smeared with gray mud almost the consistency of the tar which oozed from pits on a hot day.
His vision cleared as suddenly as it had blurred. There was nothing to see but a bleak expanse of meadow pounded down by the rain. It was past noon, but the light which filtered through the heavy clouds was too weak to awaken any colors from the grass.
As if to mock the humans, the whitened skull of a giant bison lay beside the trail the tribe was taking. All traces of flesh and hair had been cleaned away by scavengers. Field mice had even begun to nibble the bone.
The black, smoothly curved horns were still attached to the skull, though they had begun to weather loose on their bony cores. They were immense. Tip to tip, they spanned almost twice the height of a woman. To the Chief Hunter in his present state, the curve of the horns was a sneering smile.
There were no living animals in sight, and there was no hope of food for the tribe.
“I can walk,” Wolf repeated.
“Yes,” said Kar. “We will walk together, Chief Hunter.” Most of the tribe had trudged past them by now. Kar put his arm around Wolf’s waist as the two chiefs resumed their trek. A stranger would not have realized that the small fire-maker was helping the burly hunter instead of the reverse, but Wolf was glad of the older man’s touch.
The Chief Hunter had several more spasms of double vision and dizziness. Because the Chief Fire-Maker was beside him, he did not fall again.
They set up a camp of sorts at night. A long limestone outcrop a little taller than a man provided some shelter from the weather.
The rain continued.
There was no food at all. The women had not been able to forage while need for escape drove the tribe on at the best speed it could manage. When Wolf finally called a halt, a few of the women went out with digging sticks to see what they could find. They were tired to the bone, and it was almost impossible to see anything in the rain-swept darkness anyway.
Magnolia still carried her infant. The child had died of hunger before dawn. When two of the other women, crooning their sympathy, tried to remove the tiny corpse, Magnolia snarled and slashed at them with a digging stake of sharpened antler. After that, the rest of the tribe stayed a cautious distance away from the grief-maddened mother.
Kar seated Wolf as comfortably as possible with his back to the outcrop. The blow to the head had drained away Wolf’s strength. The Chief Hunter watched dull-eyed as Kar stretched a piece of deer hide between short poles and began to build a fire-set of punk and dried moss beneath it.
“You can’t get a fire to burn in this weather,” Wolf said. The remainder of the tribe huddled together, watching the Chief Fire-Maker without enthusiasm. They had nothing better to do.
“I will build a fire,” Kar said calmly. He shaved at a dead branch with his hand axe. When he got through the rain-soaked outer layers of the wood, he began to add the dry chips to the fire-set.
“Chief Hunter!” cried Elm in her normal shrill voice. She had just reached the camp. She must have been far behind the rest of the tribe. In the darkness and general feeling of misery, no one else had noticed that the old woman was missing—or had cared.
Besides her previous load of herbs and magical apparatus, Elm carried a horn from the bison skull the tribe had passed. It was almost as tall as the stooped old woman.
“Why did you bring that?” demanded Redhair. “Did you think we could eat horn?”
Wolf saw that Redhair’s thigh had been badly bruised by a club flung from Bull’s camp. The pain caused by having to walk for so long on an injured leg made the young hunter even more sullenly angry than he had been when the men first returned in defeat from the other tribe. He was too tired to get up to strike Elm as he had threatened.
“Chief Hunter!” the medicine woman repeated, ignoring Redhair’s gibes. “Since you have not sufficiently apologized to the spirit of the bison, I will talk to him on behalf of the tribe. We are not all to blame for you! The spirit of the bison will relent and send his children back to us.”
Everyone except Kar was staring at Elm. The expressions of the tribespeople ranged from the fury of Redhair’s face as he tried to stagger to his feet, to agreement—even admiration—on the part of some of the women and starving children.
The Chief Fire-Maker kept on at his task. He had completed his fire-set and was striking flints together with exquisite care under the shelter of the deer hide. The coals in his gourd had gone out while he helped Wolf walk. A pair of sparks touched the cushion of dry moss. A gust blew a single droplet of rain sideways beneath the hide. It extinguished the sparks before they could turn into a true fire.
Kar continued striking his flints together with a rhythmic Tik! Tik! Tik!
“Get away from us, woman!” Wolf snarled. He didn’t think he was strong enough at the moment to prevent Redhair from killing Elm, and he wasn’t sure he even wanted to save her again. “We have enough trouble now without your foolishness.”
Elm scuttled off into the rain. Wolf relaxed. Even Redhair looked thankful as he lay back down, rubbing his thigh. No one had enough energy for trouble. Besides, trouble would come to the tribe whether or not they made trouble for themselves.
The Chief Hunter thought about Hawk. Surely they had been right to drive the young man away. Hawk had violated tradition. But . . . Wolf and the rest of the tribe were performing all their rites in perfect harmony with tradition—and they were dying, either from sudden disaster or by cold and starvation.
The wind was gusting. When it was in the right direction, Wolf could hear Elm’s voice worn thin by the distance it traveled. The medicine woman was chanting something. Wolf could not understand the words. They might not have been words at all, just a wail of rhythmic wretchedness to call the spirit of the bison’s attention to her.
Wolf wondered if cold and hunger had driven Elm mad. Even if the old woman did manage to fashion a medicine that brought game to the tribe, it would do them no good on a night like this. The hunters had only two spears remaining. They would need to run animals over a high cliff or into a bog with a traditional fire drive in order to kill them. It would be impossible to light the grass in such rain, much less keep it burning with an intensity that would make animals panic and ignore the terrain.
Kar had his moss and punk alight. A wisp of flame lifted toward the deer-hide cover. The Chief Fire-Maker fed chips of dry wood into the tiny blaze. All eyes in the tribe were focused on him. Despite their hunger and general misery, the folk were thrilled to see one of their number achieving a sort of success.
The rain hammered down. It seemed to be growing colder. Lightning flashed in the near distance. “Bring me wood!” shouted the Chief Fire-Maker. “Small branches, and crack them open so that the dry wood shows!”