CRO-MAGNON (23 page)

“
Kam,” the woman said, pointing to herself then at Leya.

“
Leya,” Leya said.

“
Ley . . .”

“
Ley-a.” She had noticed that the Flatheads all had one-sound names and that female names, whether by choice or coincidence, seemed to end with the “m” sound. She hoped these primitive people would not feel alienated by her name. Maybe she should change it to Lem, she though belatedly.

“
Huh.”
Kam pointed to the deer carcass.

#

As the sun sank and the temperature fell, the Flatheads wrapped themselves in individual skins, fur side in, until they resembled piles of discarded hides. Leya began to shiver inside her lightweight cloak and thin tunic, until the gray-haired Wim handed her a ragged argal pelt. Gratefully, Leya wrapped herself. The rough-haired hide was warm but, she soon discovered, teeming with fleas, a nuisance she knew she would have to endure until she could make other arrangements.

If she was still around.

The evening meal was obviously the main one for the Flatheads, just as for the Tribe of the Twin Rivers. After the arduous day, Leya was famished.

The food, though lacking the variety of vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, bulbs, and berries that she was accustomed to even in spring, looked filling enough. It consisted mainly of a haunch of the bush-antlered deer chopped into chunks, plus delicacies like the brains, tongue, and balls. A wood paddle was used to scrape coals from the flat cooking hearth, and chunks of meat were spread on the hot rocks.

Beginning with Bor, the men took first choice of the grilled meat, then the women, Leya being accommodated in accordance with her relative age, and finally the children, which was opposite to the way of her own tribe. She noticed they ate by clamping the meat between their big front teeth and slicing off a chunk with an unhafted flint knife instead of cutting the food into morsels as did her own people.

As she had suspected, meat constituted the bulk of the meal, the only vegetables being some long white nettle tubers that had been baked in the coals and a communal mound of raw cattail shoots. Instead of herb tea sweetened with honey, they scooped gritty water from the nearby stream. Leya guessed these people had not learned how to boil water by dropping hot river cobbles into a pit lined with rawhide and birch bark. Or perhaps they knew but simply did not bother, as the small size of the group did not make for specialized division of labor.

Speech consisted of strings of grunts and gestures. As far as Leya could tell, their language did not have much structure, being limited to single-sound action and object words, with no abstract meanings. There was no apparent division between past and present or, she supposed, future.

She wondered if this lack of temporal awareness made it difficult for them to plan their hunts, keep track of seasonal migration routes, and otherwise take advantage of their environment. But of course if they stayed in this camp year-round, hunting and gathering in season, they would have less need for detailed planning.

Leya had inherited an affinity for language from her
mator,
Alys, and the simplicity of the Flathead language, coupled with their habit of bolstering almost every word with stylized gestures, allowed Leya to pick up meaning rapidly. She had expected these people to be curious. But to her surprise, they seemed to be discussing the fact that her own people, whom she learned by their gestures they called “Shortfaces,” were filling up the hunting grounds and pushing the Clan, as her captors called themselves, into the mountains.

The main issue, raised by the man she guessed to be Gar’s older
brator,
who was named Puk and who seemed nattier than the others, concerned whether to make a stand against the Shortfaces’ superior numbers or whether to retreat into less desirable territory. From its rather stale sound, Leya guessed this discussion took place often.

Caw, waving his thick arms and shouting, was vociferous in favor of fighting the newcomers now. Bor, who indeed seemed to be the leader, doubted they could prevail. When Gar suggested they might try to reconcile with the Shortfaces, Leya saw Caw shoot him a murderous look. The consensus seemed to be that another retreat was inevitable but not yet necessary.

It was obvious to Leya that the clan’s society was even more male-oriented than her own, with females assuming a supporting role. As far as she could tell, the fact that a Shortface woman was now among them went unstated. This lack of curiosity amazed her, since she was probably the only member of the People they had seen at close range. Weren’t they curious about the tall newcomers who encroached on their territory?

The Flatheads gorged, she noted, swallowing great chunks of meat, wolfing even the entrails of the deer, and consuming almost twice as much as her own people. She guessed their strenuous lifestyle, lack of tailored clothing, and muscular bodies required large amounts of food.

Given the permanent-looking nature of their camp, she wondered how they managed to find enough game, moon in and moon out, in the relatively barren valleys below the tundra, especially in winter. According to their earlier conversation, they believed her people had driven them to this place where food was relatively scarce, and she wondered how this would color their perception of her. The thought reminded her of the stories of cannibalism in winter, which she quickly put out of mind.

After the meal, Bor heaped more wood on the glowing coals of the outer hearth. They maintained their fire in the same labor-saving manner as her own people, she noted, feeding whole logs by one end instead of chopping them into sections.

“
Ull.” Nodding at the one-eyed man, Bor lifted his hand and flexed his fingers awkwardly, and Leya confirmed that he had more than a touch of stiff-joint.

She was surprised to see the half-crippled Ull put a short length of hollow bone to his lips. She stared at the instrument. Instead of having a plug with a slit as her people fashioned, the wind-flute used a reed.

Bor gestured at the man with the close-set eyes. “Odd.”

Moving deliberately, the man wiped a rope of drool from his chin, reached behind him and picked up a bone instrument. Leya immediately recognized it as a tinkle-note fashioned from the shoulder blade of a mammoth. The group was too small for yearly mammoth hunts like those of the home tribe of her
mator,
she thought, so they must have scavenged the bones. Unless the huge animals occasionally ranged this far south on the vast plain that must lie above the valley, these people must range from their permanent camp as far north as the edge of the Big Ice. Either that or these savages traded with the Tribe of the Great Plain, which Leya found hard to believe, although she had heard of small groups of the People acquiring Flathead women through trade after being decimated by one or another of the sicknesses that sometimes took whole tribes without warning.

The man called Ull blew a few preparatory notes, and she realized that the instrument was fully as functional as those of the People. A multi-noted tapping started, the rhythm matching that of the flute. If Odd was slow in the head, as he appeared to be, it didn’t seem to affect his musical talent.

Soft drumbeats began to cadence the tune. Leya saw her rescuer—if that was the word—Gar thumping a skin stretched over an mamoth skull. The combined music was unlike anything she had heard before—elegant and haunting and strangely plaintive.

“
Jym,” Bor said, and the woman with the wandering eye handed her toddler to the crone and stepped to the fire. Glancing at Puk, she began to sway with the beat of Gar’s drum. Gradually the music grew less plaintive as Jym dipped, whirled, and gyrated, her chunky body graceful in the flickering firelight. The clan watched in a trance.

Glancing around, Leya saw Bor watching her, and realized that the entertainment, if that’s what it was, was for her. So, he recognized her as a person.

With a shock she realized that both the subtleties of the music and the dynamics of the dance were beyond anything her own people could produce. The performance was out of her ken, a breath from another world.

What was the leader trying to tell her? That now she was one of them? That if she meshed with the clan they would not harm her?

Or was the presentation in the manner of a last pleasure for a doomed person?

Glancing around under her eyelashes, she saw Caw staring at her, his lips pulled back above the gap in his teeth. She flicked her eyes toward Gar and saw him watching her also while he beat the drum seemingly without thinking. She imagined she saw a hint of something in his broken-nosed face—an ineffable empathy, as if he sensed what she was thinking, and again she felt that this was beyond her own people’s ability. She glanced back at Caw and found him staring at the swell of her breasts.

The music grew urgent, Gar’s drum beating faster, Ull and Odd keeping pace, until Jym whirled in frenzy, her bulging thighs highlighted by the reddish flames. The dance brought out emotions Leya had never felt, transporting her to a time and place where hairy figures gyrated against leaping flames.

And was there also a hint of sadness for the unrealized future? There was more to these primitive-looking people than met the eye, she realized. She watched, mesmerized, until the music peaked and Jym ended the dance in a swoon.

#

After the festivities Kam pointed to a motley pile of skins near the edge of the shelter. Dragging her injured leg, Leya hobbled to them.

She glanced at the clan members, who were already beginning to groom each other’s hair, picking lice with their fingernails, holding them to the firelight and biting them before swallowing. Kam was paired with Bor. Em with Ull, with a young girl named Nim, obviously their daughter, nearby. Jym, the four-year-old at her breast again, with Puk. The crone, Wim, lay down alone, as did Caw, Odd, and Gar.

Subliminally aware of Caw’s gaze, Leya did not want to sleep by herself. She brought the oddments of fur to the rear where Wim nested.

“
Leya not like be alone,” she said, knowing she was bungling the hard sounds and intricate gestures of her newly acquired vocabulary. “Sleep here?”

Wim nodded. “For now.” Although the words came from back in her throat, she sounded hospitable.

Maybe the clan were not the grunting animal brutes her own people claimed, Leya mused, the notion more of a hope than a conclusion. Certainly their music displayed abilities undreamed of among the Tribe of the Twin Rivers.

The fire faded to coals and the camp grew quiet. Leya gathered handfuls of bunch grass from a communal pile for a pillow, wrapped herself in her cloak, and distributed the discarded furs as best she could. Among the couples, the grooming continued, obviously a nightly activity that not only kept the lice to a manageable level but probably also tended to bind the clan. Apparently, these people did not congregate around the evening fire to exchange gossip or thrill to tales from a storyteller. Their lives seemed to revolve around the daily quest for food and warmth.

And probably, she thought, glancing toward the huddled forms of the single men,
tegu.

Nearby, Wim turned on her side, and Leya could see that her eyes were open. She was a little bothered by the old woman’s response to her request.

She said tentatively, “Wim?”

“
Ay?”

“
What mean you, sleep here ‘for now?
’
”

“
Caw come.”

Leya’s heart lurched. “Tonight?”

Wim dipped her head, her gray hair catching a moonbeam that slanted above the windbreak.

Leya did not want to ask the next question, but knew she must. Nor did she know the Flathead word for “mate.” Raising her brows, she pointed to where each of the couples had nestled.

Wim nodded and mouthed the correct word, and Leya lost no time mouthing it.

“
Leya mate Caw?”

Wim, looking uncomfortable, shook her head and said something unintelligible. At Leya’s blank look, she fashioned her right thumb and forefinger into a circle and thrust her left index finger in and out in the universal gesture.

“
Fuhfuh.”

So, Leya was to be more of a
tegu
partner than a recognized mate. Though she had expected as much, she was dismayed.

So soon?

She looked over at the single-men’s section and tried to see who was who. In the dark, she couldn’t tell which huddled form was Caw. Picturing the gap-toothed man with the rapacious manner, she imagined his thick fingers prying at her privates. Her stomach turned and she tasted grilled deer meat. If she had to make
tegu
with a Flathead, Caw would not be her choice.

She peered at the old woman, and then pointed at herself to denote “I,” and Wim furnished the word. “I not be”—the clan seemed to use their word for
be
in connection with everyone, singular or plural—“clan woman”—this mimed—“why
fuhfuh?
” She winced at the ugly Flathead word.

With a combination of words and gestures, Wim conveyed, “Clan need new blood. In hard times keep fewer women. Men important for hunting.”