by Kevin Ashman
‘Where’s Brola?’ asked Golau eventually, noticing the Neanderthal’s absence for the first time.
‘He follows,’ answered Kraiach simply, continuing his task.
‘This is surely the place of the soul eaters,’ said Afon to Golau staring at the desolate landscape. ‘No one can live up here.’
‘You are wrong, Afon,’ said Golau quietly, ‘the Baal live here. Somehow, up here in this place of death, the Baal exists.’
Kraiach managed to collect an armful of charred wooden remnants from the Baal fire, before stopping, staring into the ashes.
‘Golau come!’ he said. All the party followed Golau over to the large cold hearth, watching silently as Kraiach leaned forward to pick up an item from the ash pile.
He held it up for everyone to see, and then indicated more of the same in the ash. The horrors they had witnessed inside the glacier now made sense as they recognized the gruesome shapes of the burnt human skulls peering up from this lonely black resting place.
The skulls were empty and the fact that they had been used nothing more than convenient packages of meat had surprisingly little effect on the group. They had started to become immune to the continued horrors of the Baal. Within an hour, the darkness fell like a heavy black cape. Brola had joined them silently and sat with the rest of the group. ‘How much food do we have left?’ asked Golau, as they sat around the small fire Kraiach had nursed into life? They opened their bags and placed the remaining rations on the ice.
‘Three days at the most,’ estimated Afon looking at the meagre dried meat strips. ‘Water won’t be a problem and we can probably walk for two more days after the food runs out, but if we don’t find any animals to hunt, we have five days before we die.’
‘We will not survive one night without shelter,’ said Golau gathering his cape around his shoulders. ‘The Ice is too hard to dig a hole and there is no shelter from the wind.’
Brola stood and walked into the dark. Within seconds, he returned carrying a large pile of furs and threw them to the floor.
‘Two for each,’ he said, ‘you must fold one to sit on. This will protect you from the cold death below. The other you must place over your heads. Keep your breath under the skins. This will keep you from the cold death above.’
‘Where did you get these?’ asked Gafr.
‘It matters not,’ said Brola.
Golau stared at Brola coldly.
‘You took these from the dead by the river,’ he said quietly.
‘They have no more use for them,’ said Brola, ‘they will now help you live.’
‘I cannot use these’ said Gafr, ‘they should be buried with the people’
‘Then you will die,’ said Brola shrugging his shoulders and walked away.
The three men from the clan looked at each other in silence.
‘Do as he says’ said Golau eventually, ‘we have come too far to fail now.’
Slowly, the three hunters rose and followed Brola’s instructions.
‘You do not have extra furs,’ called Golau as he worked.
‘We do not need them,’ answered Brola, and following the example of the other Neanderthal, curled up until totally enveloped inside his giant hunting skin. The three fur covered huddles eventually looking like nothing more than rocks upon the starlit glacial expanse.
The following morning, the six bodies emerged slowly from their fur wraps as the dawn light resumed its futile onslaught on the glacial advance. They ate some dried meat quickly and resumed the trek northward, following the wide and deep trail left by the Baal and their captives. Within minutes, the forced exercise warmed their chilled bodies and their pace quickened as they climbed countless false peaks of ice and trekked around crumbling chasms in the glacial sheet.
At night, they carved holes in the snow or huddled together under their skins for mutual warmth. It seemed that the ice was endless and they wondered why anyone would cross this place.
Eventually, it became apparent that in the distance lay another seemingly solid barrier blocking their way, though this time, unlike when they first saw the glacier upon which they walked; they could not see the top.
‘Surely, it cannot be another wall of ice,’ said Afon as they waded through the snow.
No one answered, and they continued their expedition forward, but as they got closer, Kraiach spoke up.
‘It is mist,’ he said simply.
They all peered into the distance. Wisps of the ground level cloud reached out its tendrils toward these intruders in its domain. The face of the fog wall seemed almost solid in its density and they all stayed that much closer as the visibility dropped to less than two paces.
Within a few hundred metres, the ice petered out and it became apparent that the ground started to rise through the cloud. The higher they went, the steeper it became and soon they were clambering up almost vertical rock faces. Eventually, the ever confident Kraiach came to a halt at the base of a vertical rock buttress.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Golau.
‘There is no way forward,’ responded the Neanderthal staring upward, ‘the rock cannot be climbed.’
‘There has to be, the Baal passed this way.’
‘Perhaps not, I lost their trail many hours ago.’
‘How?’ asked Golaun. ‘I know that there is no snow for their trail, but I thought you could sense them.’
‘The mist has dulled my thoughts as it has Brola’s and Aarnoy’s.’
‘Well,’ said Golau, ‘we will get nowhere standing here, there must be a way up, and all we have to do is find it. Let’s go.’ He started to retrace their steps back down the rocky climb.
They spent the next two days wandering around the fog bound rocky slope trying to find the way up. The nights were uncomfortable, with even their heavy winter skins soaked through with the moisture from the water-filled mist. At last, they had a breakthrough when they found the newly dead body of a Baal warrior at the base of a rock face, the smashed bones paying testament to the fall he had taken. Soon a cleft in the rock face indicated the way forward and the group resumed their pursuit upward through the never ending mist.
Finally, they broke through the top of the cloud into glorious sunshine and the steep rocky ground gave way to a bleak wasteland of arid grey desert interspersed with dusty shale and thin scraggly scrub. The ground still sloped gently upward into the distance, but at least they could now see their destination. A few miles to their front, was a final escarpment sharply outlined against the deep blue sky.
‘Golau look!’ said Afon pointing toward the ridge that spread along their front for many miles in the distance. The entire group stared forward and saw the tail end of their quarry trudging up the last few hundred metres to the plateau summit, the body language of the few visible prisoners telegraphing the pain and suffering their terrible plight had inflicted.
Golau and his colleagues dropped to the ground to avoid detection, the natural skills they used in the hunting of animals coming to the fore, hiding them from the eyes of their prey.
‘They are within our reach,’ stated Golau quietly, ‘now is the time for care. If we can see them, then they can see us. We will wait and we will climb when it is dark. The stars will help, and it will be difficult, but we have no choice, they must live up on the plateau.’ They retreated a hundred yards back down the trail and around a bluff, comfortable they could not be seen by the Baal.
‘I will collect wood for a fire,’ said Afon and set out to collect the gorse scrub that struggled to eke out its lonely existence on the mountain slopes.
‘Make sure there is no smoke and put it out when the darkness falls,’ said Golau, ‘they must not know we are here.’
Soon the fire that was so essential to survival in these hard times was crackling away, and though small, it gave great comfort to the pursuers. The three members of the Fire-clan had emptied their pouches of food days earlier, now relying on the meat provided by the Neanderthal who often disappeared for hou
rs at a time to hunt in this wilderness. Golau was constantly amazed at the success of these people in these hard conditions.
‘Have you been here before, Kraiach?’ he asked, as he ate the latest meat offered by the Neanderthal at the fire.
‘We know of this place,’ he said.
‘Do the Baal live here?’
‘They do, it is a place of death.’
‘How do you know?’
Kraiach shrugged his shoulders.
‘It is known.’
Golau did not pursue the reason as often Kraiach and his kind just seemed to know things.
Taking their meat with them, Kraiach and Golau left the fireside and walked up to the edge of the desert plain to check there was no one descending the path from the escarpment. Soon they were out of hearing range of the fire, and they stood alongside each other, staring up at their mutual destination.
‘How do you know how to live in such harsh places?’ Golau continued.
‘We have wandered for many years and lived through many great colds,’ answered Kraiach quietly, ‘many of our ancestors died, but those who survived learned many things. These we pass down to our children.’
‘Tell me about the ice,’ said Golau.
Kraiach didn’t answer for a long time.
‘The great cold comes again,’ he said eventually, ‘it will continue on its quest south for many generations, killing all but the hardiest in its path. Your kind must change or they will die forever, as did the others.’
‘Others, what others?’ asked Golau intrigued.
‘There have always been others,’ answered Kraiach. ‘Every time the ice retreats, different Two-feet come to hunt in the forests and on the plains. Even in the time before, my kind watched people such as you roam these lands. All were similar to you, yet all were different. Sometimes, tall men with skins like the colour of the fire ash hunted in times of plenty. They were taller than your people are. In other times, small people came, living only on the fish of the sea. Others were little more than beasts themselves covered with fur yet still walked like Mwrllwch. Since the time before, many Two-feet have walked these lands, yet all have died.’
‘Where did the others come from?’
‘The great place where the sun burns the trees from the ground,’ he said. ‘It is known that Mwrllwch can walk for all his days and never cross this land. Many different people live in those distant places. They are the homelands of the others.’
‘And when times are good, they come here?’
‘Many have come, all have died except the Mwrllwch’ said Kraiach.
Golau realized the implications.
‘Did my people come from this place, Kraiach?’
‘Yes, and they too will die, like all before them.’
‘But we have been here for many, many years. I do not have enough numbers to count the grandfathers.’
‘The ice is slow and it is patient. A snail can move quicker than its advance. Yet slowly it still comes. It may not affect your kind until the time of your grandchildren’s grandchildren. Yet it will come. You and I will not see this Golau, we will be but dust on the wind, but it will come, and it will go. It has always been so.’
‘I do not agree. The Fire-clan has lived through the winters before. We can prevail again.’
Kraiach looked up at Golau.
‘The winters that you speak of are but a grain of sand on a beach when compared to the great cold’ he said, ‘There will be no summers and the storms rage for many moons. The beasts move south and there is no meat to hunt. All the grass dies, and what beasts are left will die of hunger. Soon there is nothing; no grass, no trees, no beasts, nothing.’
‘Yet, you survive,’ said Golau.
‘Huan has given us knowledge of such things,’ he said. ‘There were some places where a few such as the Mwrllwch and the Mammoth could survive. Many died. We froze, we starved and we died.’
Golau was silent for a while.
‘If we came from the south, then we can return there to flee the cold,’ said Golau, ‘you could bring your people as well.’
‘It is too hot for us there. My people know only the cold. It is said that there are evil places where nothing lives on burning sands as wide as the seas.’
‘So we cannot survive?’
‘No. Unless you change your ways, as must we. We should share knowledge and learn from each other. Your kind is different to the others who came. You share our values and live in groups such as ours. We have watched you for many years, yet you have much to learn.’
‘You can teach us the ways to hunt on the ice,’ said Golau, ‘I have seen no animal sign, yet you bring daily meat from your hunt. This is a valuable skill I would learn.’
‘There are no animals this high,’ said Kraiach.
Golau held up the half-eaten piece of cooked flesh he was devouring.
‘Where do you get this?’ he asked.
‘You eat Baal,’ said Kraiach as easy as if he had said Pig or Auroch.
Golau stopped chewing, eventually spitting out the meat and staring in horror at the piece left on his knife.
‘I am eating a man?’ he hissed.
‘It is Baal!’ repeated Kraiach.
‘You hunted them and gave them to us to eat?’ he asked incredulously.
‘We did not hunt them; it is the flesh of the one who fell. The meat has kept us alive.’
‘We do not eat the flesh of people, Kraiach, why did you not tell us?’ he growled, his anger rising.
‘You would not have eaten.’
‘No, we wouldn’t,’ shouted Golau, ‘we are not beasts, we are better than the beasts.’
‘Then you would now be dead.’
‘If so, then that is my choice!’ shouted Golau.
‘And what about your son? If he were starving would you let him die or feed him the flesh of an enemy?’
‘That is different.’
‘Why? All must eat to stay alive.’
‘Our people have survived many generations without eating the flesh of others,’ argued Golau, ‘You have made monsters of all of us.’
‘You have only done what those that went before have already done.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have said too much; it is better that you do not know.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It would not help.’
‘Tell me!’ shouted Golau, causing raised heads from the rest of the party sitting at the distant fire.
Kraiach stared at Golau for several moments considering his answer.
‘Your ancestors also ate the flesh of Two-feet,’ Kraiach said quietly. ‘The first time you walked this land your kind killed the animals, and grazed the berries, much as you do now. It was a time of plenty, for there were many beasts, and then the cold came. The animals died or moved on, and the berries failed to grow. The birds flew toward the sun and the rivers froze over. There was no food. They starved.
‘And?’ asked Golau.
‘They sought out the villages, killing other Two-feet for meat.’
‘I do not believe you.’
‘It does not mean it is not true.’
There was a long silence.
‘What happened to the villagers? he asked. ‘Did any escape?’
‘They fled to the forest and the mountains where they could not be found, disappearing into the mist. Soon your kind died out from hunger and cold.’
Golau stared at Kraiach still disbelieving his account.
‘So if your ancestors witnessed these things,’ he said, ‘why did you not stop them?’
Kraiach stared at Golau, and for the first time Golau saw a hint of anger in his eyes.
‘We could not.’
‘Why not, Kraiach, why did you not stop this horror?’
Kraiach did not answer.
‘Tell me!’ he screamed grabbing the Neanderthal by the shoulders.
Kraiach’s temper snapped and he grabbed the taller man’s throat in his huge vice-lik
e grip, pushing him back against a rock, his face contorted in fury and the spittle from his overpowering breath spraying the Cro-Magnon as he spat his astonishing reply:
‘It was us, Golau!’ he snarled, his voice quivering in rage. ‘You hunted Mwrllwch.’
Golau returned his stare, registering the anger and sorrow in the Neanderthal’s eyes. He tried to draw breath through his constricted windpipe, his lungs screaming for oxygen, slowly losing consciousness, as his hands gripped Kraiach’s wrist trying to free his clenched fingers.
As the hunter passed out, Kraiach dropped Golau to the floor. The rest of the group had seen the short sudden conflict and they ran to the scene shouting as they approached and grabbing their weapons on the way. Afon thrust his spear point against the throat of Kraiach as the Neanderthal stared down unflinchingly at the recovering body of Golau at his feet.
‘What are you doing?’ screamed Afon, pushing the spear point harder against his throat.
Kraiach turned slowly and faced Afon.
‘Lower your spear, Afon,’ said Gafr gently from one side.
‘No!’ he snarled. ‘This creature almost killed Golau. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill him?’
‘Afon,’ said Gafr again slowly, ‘lower your spear.’
Afon quickly glanced over at Gafr only to see him held back against a rock by Brola, a flint knife held tightly against his throat. Afon became aware of a pressure on his back and looking over his shoulder, saw that Aarnoy held a spear against the small of his back. Realizing they had been outflanked, Afon slowly lowered his spear and the pressure on his back eased.
Spinning around, the three Neanderthal walked away leaving Afon and Gafr to help Golau to his feet.
‘What happened?’ asked Afon.
‘Nothing,’ answered Golau rubbing his throat.
‘Tell us, Golau,’ he replied, ‘we have a right to know.’
‘Leave it, Afon,’ said Golau looking at the back of the retreating Kraiach, ‘what is done is done. He was within his rights.’
Golau slowly walked up to Kraiach, and after a moment, the Neanderthal dismissed his colleagues who returned to the fire. They stood for a long time looking back over the vast rolling tops of the clouds far below, covering the way they had come.