The Tenth Chamber (19 page)

Then Luc raised his glass to the memory of Zvi Alon and Hugh Pineau and begged them all to take care on their journeys home.

The team drank and chatted into the night but Luc withdrew to his caravan. Sara was looking for an excuse to go to him. Checking her email, she found it.

‘Hi,’ she said gently, when he opened the door. ‘Mind some company?’

‘Sure, come in.’

The was only one small light on. He hadn’t been reading, he hadn’t been drinking. It looked like he’d just been sitting and staring.

‘I’ve been really worried about you,’ she said. ‘We all are.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘No, I don’t think you are. When you get back to Bordeaux, maybe you should see someone?’

‘What, like a shrink? You’re joking.’

‘I’m not. You’ve been through a lot.’

He upped his volume. ‘I said I’m fine!’ But he saw her mouth was twitching so he continued, softer, ‘Look, when I get back to the university and I get into my usual routine I’ll be right as rain, as the Brits say. Really I will. And thanks for caring.’

She let them both off the hook with her news. ‘I got an email tonight from Fred Prentice, my contact at PlantaGenetics. They finished their analysis.’

‘Yes?’

‘It sounds like he’s pretty excited but he didn’t want to say anything by email – he said there were intellectual property issues and patent rights that needed to be sorted out. He wants us to come to Cambridge personally.’

‘When?’

‘He suggested Monday. Will you come with me?’

‘I need to close up the dig.’

‘Pierre and Jeremy and the others are quite capable. I think you should come. It’ll do you good.’

Luc mustered a chuckle. ‘If the choice is between a psychiatrist and a visit to the UK, I guess I’m in.’

Instead of sleeping, Luc broke his own rule and went to the cave for one last visit.

Director’s prerogative, he told himself.

Climbing down the ladder in the dark, his miner’s helmet illuminating the cliff wall, he had an unpleasant image of the moment Zvi slipped a rung and plunged to his death, but he shook it off and kept descending.

On the ledge, he put on his Tyvek suit in the dark, unlocked the heavy gate and hit the switch. The halogen lights made the cave bright and harsh, so different from the way it would have looked in prehistory.

He slowly walked to the rear towards his favourite place, the tenth chamber. The bats had all but departed and the cave was truly quiet now.

At the furthest point, he stood face to face with the life-sized bird man in the field of wild barley. He had a candle. He lit it with a disposable lighter then killed the electric lights. Zvi Alon had wanted to do this, to experience the cave in this natural way. It was the right instinct.

In the faltering candle light, the barley seemed to wave. The bird man’s beak seemed to move.

What was he saying?

Luc strained to hear.

What I wouldn’t give, he thought, to be able to stand beside the man who painted these images, to watch him, to understand him, to speak to him.

He blew out the candle to spend some moments in the most complete darkness he had ever known.

The first spear glanced off the tough hide, angering the animal but doing it no harm.

The hunters circled.

The beast was a good-sized male. The fact they had been able to isolate it from the herd so easily, spoke, they believed, to its willingness to be sacrificed. The huge animal had certainly heard them chanting the previous night and had agreed to surrender itself to their purpose.

But it was too noble to go down without a fight.

Tal’s only brother, Nago, moved in for the kill.

The bison was backed against the bank of the swiftly flowing river, its hooves sinking into the mud. Its nostrils flared and steamed. It would have to charge. It had no choice.

This is how men died, Tal thought.

He was seventeen, a grown man, already the tallest in his clan, which made his brother suspicious, because for generations, the head man of the Bison Clan was always the tallest. Their father was still head man, but his broken leg had never healed. It stank like rotten meat. At night he groaned in his sleep. There would be a new head man soon. Every clan member knew something was destined to happen to one of the brothers. The smaller Nago could not be their leader if the taller Tal lived. The younger Tal could not be the head if the older Nago lived.

It was not their way.

Nago made sure the butt end of his spear was flush against the bone spear-thrower.

A man could hurl a spear without a thrower and kill a reindeer, but to take down a bison, one needed extra power. They took only two bison a year, once, like now, in the hot season and once in the cold season. It was their right, their sacred calling to do so, but to kill more than one at a time was forbidden.

A single animal gave them enough hide to mend their winter clothes and fashion new ones for the children. One animal gave them enough bones to make digging tools and flaking tools and spear throwers. One gave them enough meat to feed the entire clan for a long while before it became rank.

They had a reverence for the bison, and the bison, they were certain, had a reverence for them.

Nago screamed the kill shout and swung his arm forward.

His spear flew straight and low and struck the bison in the breast, squarely between its front legs but the flint tip must have hit bone because it did not penetrate far.

Shrieking in agony and fear, the animal leaped forward, lowered its head and planted one of its thick horns in Nago’s shoulder.

Tal’s cries for the other men to converge was drowned out by Nago’s howls. It was up to him to save his brother.

Running forwards, he slung his thrower as hard as he could and the spear found the bison’s flank. It stuck deep and true but he took no chances. He ran to the beast, grabbed hold of the spear shaft and pushed it deeper and deeper until the animal’s front legs buckled and it collapsed on its side, bleeding from the mouth.

Nago was on the ground gasping, his shoulder a mass of blood and torn muscle.

Tal kneeled over him and began to wail. The other men converged, pointing at the wound and whispering to each other.

Tal had seen horn wounds before. They did not close or heal on their own. If Nago had been wearing a hide shirt, perhaps the wound would not have been so deep but owing to the warmth of the day he was bare-chested, his shirt tied around his waist.

Nago was the hunt leader but Tal had to take over as leader now. To slow the blood, he took Nago’s shirt and wrapped it as tightly as he could around the wound and told two cousins to carry him back to the camp.

Then he stood over the bison and thanked it for providing for their clan. He had never before been privileged to deliver the bison kill chant but he knew the words and delivered them with feeling. The rest of the men nodded their approval then fell upon the hot carcass to start the ritual butchering.

Tal peeled off and ran as quickly as he could towards the high grasses of the savannah. His father had taught him how to hunt and how to chant. Now it was time to use the knowledge passed to him by his mother.

His mother had been dead for two years. She left the world along with her newborn daughter after a tortuously difficult child-birth. She was not from the Bison Clan. She called her kin the People of Bear Mountain. As a young woman, she had been caught in a flash flood and separated from her tribe. Maybe they escaped or maybe they perished. She never knew. Tal’s father, then a young man, hunting with elders, came across her in the forest, cold and hungry and took her in. He liked her, and though it caused jealousy and conflict within the clan, he chose her for his mate.

Her people were healers and she was skilled in making poultices and had the knowledge what leaves, roots and barks to chew for various maladies. When Tal was young, he remembered a bitter leaf that stopped his gums from aching and a tasty bark that cooled his body when it was hot.

As soon as the boy could walk he would toddle after his mother, collecting specimens in the forest and grasslands and helping her carry them back to camp in pouches sewn from reindeer hide.

His memory had always been prodigious. He only had to hear a bird call or a clan chant one time to remember it for ever. He would smell a flower petal, see an animal track or a cluster of leaves just once, or listen a single time to an explanation of a phenomenon – and it would never leave him.

And it was not only his mind that was active. From the earliest age he excelled with his hands too. He learned how to strike long thin blades off a flint core. Even before he came of age, he was the best tool maker in the clan. He could carve wood and bone as skilfully as the older men and he was adept at making spears that flew straight and shaping perfectly balanced spear-throwers. Nago spent years stewing in anger at his skills but Tal never stopped respecting his brother because he always believed that one day Nago would become head of the clan.

Tal’s mother also taught him how to paint. The People of Bear Mountain had a long tradition of adorning rock shelters and caves with the outlines of great animals in charcoal and ochre. She would scratch naturalistic outlines of bears, horses and bison in the mud or hard dirt and the boy would take the stick from her hand and copy them.

When he was older, he would pick up colourful rocks and clays and crush them into pigments that he would smear on his body to the amusement of the adults.

He was never idle. He was perpetually in motion, scurrying to do something.

Now his lungs ached with all-out exertion. He didn’t have much time. The blood was draining from Nago’s body with each of his strides.

His mother had taught him many poultices. There were ones for colic, ones for the flux, for sores, for boils, for head pain and tooth pain. There were others for wounds, some for old wounds that oozed and stank, like his father’s and some for fresh bleeding wounds like Nago’s.

The key ingredient for staunching fresh blood was a bright-green vine that twisted itself around the bark of young trees. In much the way it choked the trees, his mother had explained, it would choke the flow of blood. He knew where to find it, in a glade near the river.

He also needed a particular kind of berry, known to keep a wound clean. There was a good patch of them growing on bushes, not far from the glade.

And finally, to bind the poultice together and give enough bulk to pack the wound and draw its edges together, he needed a generous amount of yellow grasses. These were all around, ever abundant.

Because the weather was warm, the Bison Clan was in an open-air camp. Two days’ journey towards the evening sun was a rock shelter they favoured for the cold months but the only protections they needed during this season were the skin lean-tos, made from reindeer and saplings that were flapping in the afternoon breeze.

Nago was laid out in the shade of one of these shelters. He gritted his teeth in pain. His shirt bandage seeped blood.

Tal ran to him. He had shed his own shirt and had used it to carry the plants and berries he needed to make the poultice.

All twenty-two members of the clan, men, women and children, gathered around but parted when Tal’s father limped up. He implored one son to save the other.

Tal set to work. His mother’s old limestone mixing bowl was fetched for him and he furiously began cutting the vine down to manageable pieces with a flint blade. One of his aunts crushed the berries between large shiny leaves with the heel of her hands and channelled the juices into the bowl. Tal added the vine segments and mashed them into the berries with a smooth river stone. Then he cut clumps of yellow grass into short lengths and mixed a large handful into the bowl’s red mush.

The finished poultice was thick and sticky.

Tal told his brother to be as strong as the bison they had killed. He scooped the poultice into the open wound and pushed more and more into the gaping hole until there was room for no more.

Nago was brave but the exertion of keeping silent overcame him and his eyes fluttered shut.

Tal kept vigil that night, and the next, and the next.

He left his brother’s side only long enough each day to collect more ingredients to keep the poultice fresh.

He took these brief journeys on his own, not because others did not want to join him, but because he relished being alone. One of his cousins, a girl named Uboas, was particularly keen on following him. And so was her small brother, Gos who tagged along wherever she went.

Uboas was fast and pretty and Tal knew they were meant to be mates, but he still wanted to be by himself. When she refused to return to the camp, he simply outran her, as she outran her brother. When he was free of her, he looked back. In the distance, he saw her reunite with the child and take his hand.

Tal was in the glade, cutting vines off a tree when he saw them.

Actually, he heard them first, a low jabbering. Words of some sort. He strained to hear but could not understand.

At the edge of the glade two trees were parted enough to see one, then two.

He had heard of them, the Shadow People, the People of the Night, the Others – his clan had several names for them – but he had never seen them before. And this first encounter was brief, lasting only a few heartbeats.

One was old, like his own father, the other younger, like him. But they were both shorter and thicker than his own kind and their beards were redder and longer. The younger one had a heavy growth, not a wispy one like his own. The older one looked like he had never trimmed his beard with flint as was the custom of the Bison Clan. They carried spears but they were heavy thick ones, good for direct strikes, useless for throwing. Their clothes were rough and fur-bound, bear-skin by the looks of it, uncomfortable in this kind of heat.