John Norman (18 page)

“Don’t kill me,” she said. “Sell me!”

“It will be necessary neither to kill you nor sell you, my dear,” said Herjellsen.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“The chamber is now open,” he said.

“You are mad, mad!” she screamed.

“Turn their eyes,” said Herjellsen, “to the stars.”

Hamilton threw back her head, and threw her hands to the side of her head, and screamed.

Brenda Hamilton knelt, head thrown back, hands pressed to the sides of her head, screaming, in cold, wet grass, in the half darkness.

“No, no, no!” she wept.

She threw herself to her stomach in the cold grass, and clawed at it, and pressed the side of her cheek against it. She felt her fingers dig into the wet mud at the roots of the grass. “No,” she wept. “No!”

A light rain was falling. “Herjellsen,” she wept. “No!” She felt cold. “Please, no!” she wept.

She rose to her knees, shaking her bead. She felt the cold, wet grass, flat and cutting, on her legs and thighs. She was cold. “No,” she wept. The sky was dark, except for a rim of cold, gray light to her left. “No!” she cried.

She rose to her feet, unsteadily, cold, in the half darkness. She felt mud with her right foot.

The rain, slight, cold, drizzling, fell upon her. She cried out with misery.

“Herjellsen!” she cried. “William! Gunther! Take me back! Take me back! Do not send me away! Please!”

She screamed to the dark, gray, raining sky, standing in the wind, the cold rain.

“Take me back!” she cried. “Do not send me away! Please! Please!”

She knelt down and seized the grass with her hands. “I’m here!” she cried. “I’m here! Take me back! Please!” Then suddenly she screamed, and fled stumbling from the place. “It seems retrieval is not possible,” had said Herjellsen. All that had been recovered of the leopard had been crumbled bone, indexed by carbon dating to a remote era, more than twenty-eight thousand years ago.

She looked at the place, in the early, cold light, where she had lain and knelt.

It seemed no different than other places she could make out, except that the grass had bent beneath her weight, wet, crushed.

She crept back to it, and put her band timidly to the grass. Suddenly there was a stroke of lightning, broad and wild, cracking in the sky, and she screamed and fled away, falling and getting up.

In that stroke of lightning she had seen illuminated what seemed to be an open field, of uncomprehended breadth.

Thunder then swept about her, a pounding drum of sound, a stroke, rolling, of great depth and might, and suddenly the rain, wild with wind, following the turbulence in the sky, lashed about her.

She looked up, crying.

Again and again lightning split the darkness. She stood alone. Thunder smashed the world, pounding about her. Rain lashed her body.

“Herjellsen,” she cried, “I am here!”

Then she threw herself down on the grass, naked, terrified of the lightning, whipped by the rain, covered her head with her hands, and wept.

In a few moments the storm had abated, and there was again only a light drizzle of rain. It was lighter now, and there was, all about her, the gentle, cool, gray of dawn. She could see the field extending away from her, on all sides.

The light was substantially to her left, which direction she surmised was East.

She stood up, in the drizzling, cold dawn, and looked about.

She tried to find where she had first knelt, but could not do so.

She was hungry.

She took grass and sucked rain from it. The grass had a sweet taste. The drops of water were cold.

She looked up into the sky. The clouds were vast, the sky was vast. The rain had almost stopped falling now.

“I am here, Herjellsen,” she whispered.

Then she remembered that in the human reality, in time as it could only be understood by humans, Herjellsen, and Gunther and William could not hear her.

They had not yet been born.

She kept the sun on her left and began to walk, generally south.

Tree’s nostrils flared.

He smelled female. And it was not one of the group. The other men did not notice. Several were sleeping. One was working a peeled, slender shaft, holding the wood over a small fire, softening it, and then inserting it through one of the holes in the drilled board, then bending the shaft carefully, straightening it.

Tree looked about the camp. It was a trail camp, a day’s trek from the flint lode, two days’ trek back to-the shelters, a half day’s march from the salt. Tree had found the salt, following antelope. But Spear had said he had found the salt. Spear was first in camp.

Tree rose to his feet, and stretched.

It was not an attack, for a female would not come in the attack.

The attack would not come from upwind.

It was not the Ugly People. The smell was not the Ugly People.

An ugly girl was in camp, who had been captured when Spear and two others had killed her group. She was short, and stooped and had large bones. Her head did not sit on her shoulders as did that of the Men; it leaned forward, looking at the ground; it was hard for her to lift her head; she had a squat body; her knees were slightly bent. The Ugly People, though, were good hunters. They could follow a trail for days, by smell, loping, heads down, like hunting dogs, on the scent. But Tree was a greater hunter. He did not envy the Ugly People. They were not of the Men. In the camp, only Runner could outdistance Tree, and Runner was slight, but heavy chested. Tree was stronger, and could throw further. Tree was strongest in camp, except Spear, who was first.

Tree did not count as we would, nor was there need for him to do so. We would have found that there were forty-seven individuals in the camp. If Tree had spoken of this, and he might have, for he had a language, the language of the Men, he would have told us that there were two hands in camp, for there were ten men, and it was these that were counted. But he would have grasped the concept of counting beyond this, if it had seemed important. If there had been eleven men in camp, he would have said there were two hands and one finger in camp, for that would be eleven individuals. Further, if one had asked him, if all in the camp were men, how many men would there be, he would have thought and said, then there would be nine bands and two fingers, or forty-seven individuals, only, of course, that there were really only two hands, for there were only ten men. If Tree’s group had dogs, or goats, for example it would not have occurred to him either to count those, but he might have done so, if asked. For example if each dog was also a man, then how many men would there be, and so on. But Tree’s group did not have dogs, or goats. They did have, though, like other groups, children and females.

There were ten men in Tree’s group; there were sixteen women; a woman is a female who can or has borne young; there were twenty-one children; a child is a female who is too young to bear young or a male who is not yet able to run with the hunters. There was only one woman in camp who was too old to bear young. Such women were rare. She was Old Woman. There were no old men. There had been one, but when he had gone blind, Spear had killed him.

The men in the camp were Spear, who was first, and then Tree finest of the hunters; Runner, who could single out an antelope and in hours, run it to death, until it fell, gasping, and be would cut its throat; Arrow Maker, whose hands were the most cunning of all; Stone, who never laughed; Wolf, who did not look into one’s eyes, and hid meat; Fox, quick shrewd, who had once come from far away to trade flint for salt, and had stayed; he could speak the hand language of the Horse Hunters and Bear People; Spear bad not killed him; he stole meat from Wolf; Knife, ill-tempered, cruel, the son of Spear; Tooth, a large man, fearsomely ugly, with an atavistically extended canine on the upper right side of his jaw, teller of stories, popular with children; and Hyena, whose brother was said to be a hyena who spoke to him in dreams; the medicine of Hyena was thought to be the most dangerous in the camp.

There were sixteen women in the camp, but few of them are important. We might remark, at this time, Short Leg, docile with men, fierce to the women, dominant among the females; Old Woman, who tended the night fires; Flower, sweet-hipped, blond, sixteen years of age, most avidly sought, most frequently used, of the camp women; and Nurse, a large woman, fat, whose breasts had not been permitted to dry, whom the camp keeps to give suck to the young.

There were too, twenty-one children in the camp, nine boys and twelve girls, ranging from infancy to the age of fourteen. These knew their mothers, but not their fathers. The others were only the Men. Kinship lines were simple because of the small size of the group, and relationship was traced through the female. This was not a matriarchy, if that implies that women had power, for the women, being women, had no power. We may, however, perhaps speak of the group being matrilineal, meaning by this only to denote the fact that kinship ties, such as they were, were, and, under the circumstances, could only be, established through the mother. The men, of course, stood in awe of the growth of a child and its bringing forth. They, too, of course, stood in awe of the growing of the moon, the coming of grass in the spring, the appearance of fruit on hitherto barren branches. Specific paternity, puzzling as it may seem to us, was not of great account with them. But that the group should have young, that it should continue, that there should be new hunters, was for them a matter of great concern. Fertility was of great moment. It was not that the men did not know the connection between conception and birth, for it was familiar to them, but rather that the family, as we often today think of it, insular and monogamous, was not yet an economic or social practicality. There might, under such circumstances, be women who did not bear young; and there might be men who, protecting or defending a given woman or given set of children, would not stand with the group, and the group might thus perish. One might say either that the family, as we know it, did not then exist, or that the group, the whole, was the family. It is somewhat misleading to speak in the latter sense, however, for the emotions of men and women being what they are, one could not, in the group, under the circumstances, have the same sense of love or loyalty that can bind together smaller social structures. There was, in Tree’s group, little love, save that of mothers for their children, a phenomenon of significant evolutionary consequence, pervasive among primates. There were, of course, in the group, shifting couplings, and favorites. The instinct to pair bond, strongest in the female, who needed a protector, was present; she had a biological desire, constantly rebuffed, to attach herself to a given male, thereby assuring her his attention and her feeding; he, the hunter of meat, was less instinctually driven to pair bond, but he, too, when the female was pleasing and served him well, was not unaverse to maintaining, at his will, a longer-term relationship. But the facts were simple. The female needed the male. The hunter did not need the female. The hunter could choose his women. No one in, the camp would starve, but to be fed well, if one we’re not a child and not pregnant, it was well to be a hunter’s woman.

To be a hunter’s woman meant, in effect, to be his favorite. This did not preclude the hunter using the bodies of other women for his pleasure, as the whim or urge came upon him. He could do what he wished, for he was a hunter. If he were a successful hunter, he might add to the number of women he fed. Spear fed five women. Tree, greatest of the hunters, fed what women he wished, when he wished. He had not permitted any of the women in the camp to kneel regularly behind him at the feeding, at his shoulder. Out of the relationship of favorite to hunter, and jealousy, and pride in one’s children, not yet understood, would come in time marriage, intragroup mating restrictions.

In short, the women belonged to the men, but relationships were in actuality much more complex than this. Each woman did not, so to speak, belong to each man in the same way. Women, in whom the pair bonding instinct is stronger than in males, tended to attempt to become the females of given hunters, their favorites; and among the men, too, there were those who felt more attracted to one woman than another, and, accordingly, tended, as one would expect, to feed her more often, or regularly. If she should displease him, he would then throw her no more meat, and then, if she were not pregnant, she would try to please another hunter, to be fed. If she were pregnant, of course, she would be well fed. But, interestingly, after the child was cast, she would again have to compete for food, with the other women, trying to please a hunter. If she was unsuccessful, she would have to creep to the bones when the others were finished, and scavenge what she might, for herself and the child. There was usually little ‘left. It was important to a woman to be pleasing to a hunter, if she would eat.

Tree bent down and picked up his pouch, his spear and rawhide rope.

Arrow Maker looked up.

“I am going hunting,” said Tree.

He took his way between the huts, which they built far from the shelters.

These huts, most of them, consisted of poles and branches. First a round pit was scraped, a foot deep, some eight feet in diameter. In the center of this circle a rooftree was planted, a peeled pole, with projecting, peeled branches. Other poles then, planted in the rim of dirt-about the edge of the circle, the dirt from the pit, leaned against the center tree. They were, further, tied in place with root and vine. This framework of poles completed, branches were then interlaced among them. Then, beginning at the bottom, that each layer overlap the lower layer, a thatch of broad-leaved branches was woven into the lateral branches, those placed in and about the pole framework. Rain, thus, falling from one thatch of leaves, dripped to the next, and did not enter the hut. The rim of dirt provided not only an easy foundation for the poles, even and soft, but kept rain from entering the house pit. In the front of the pit, in front of the tree, was the cooking hole. There were six such huts, round huts, and two others, built quite similarly, except that they were rectangular in shape and had two rooftrees; and a roof beam between them, consisting of a long pole. The poles of the side walls leaned against this elevated, central pole, running the length of the hut. The back poles, closing the rear of the hut, leaned against the back rooftree. Both sorts of huts, the round huts and the rectangular huts, were open in the front. In the rectangular huts the cooking hole was in the center. The rectangular huts had a width of some eight feet, and a length of some twelve feet. The group had made only round huts, but Fox, who had come from far away, had introduced the rectangular hut. Spear had had Hyena dream on the matter before permitting Fox’s women, those he fed, to build according to his directions. Hyena’s dream had been favorable. The Horse Hunters built such huts, and there was luck for horse hunting in them. Spear wanted his hunters to be able to hunt not only antelope, and moose, and elk, but, if the need should arise, horse, too. No one in the group knew the horse prayers, but this did not mean they might not, if the need arose, be able to hunt horse. The horses might be fooled by the rectangular huts. Too, Hyena could make horse prayers, and if they were good prayers, maybe the horses would let themselves be killed. If one who was not a Horse Hunter killed a horse, of course, there could be danger. If the horse was angry, the men might die from the meat. But if the huts were rectangular and the prayers were flattering, perhaps trouble could be avoided. The horses might be gracious, and the group could feed. There was no reason why horses should let themselves be killed only by the Horse Hunters. Spear’s hunters were good hunters, and it was not dishonorable for horses to let themselves be killed by them.