CRO-MAGNON (50 page)

Mungo ceased his thrusting and lay atop her, panting. He was holding off his orgasm, she knew, perhaps out of desire to prolong the experience but more likely to demonstrate his dominance. He tried to rub noses and she turned her head farther. This seemed to infuriate him, because he resumed his thrusting with such verve that she was afraid her healed canal would tear. Involuntarily, she arched her back and then pulled away, trying to disgorge his swollen member.

“
Bitch!” Mungo swiped at her face and she raised her arm. His own face flushed blood-red, emphasizing the scar on his cheek, and he aimed a sweeping blow. She jerked back, and his palm fanned her nose and struck Brann a glancing blow. The infant spun on his back, howling, stubby arms and legs pumping.

“
Leave him alone,” Leya cried, and grabbed at Mungo’s sleeve. He tore his arm away, cursed, and aimed a hard blow at Brann. Rolling onto her side, Leya barely managed to block it.

She saw that Mungo was enraged beyond rational thought. Shecould not allow another blow.

Her hand dipped into a pocket of her hooded cloak—the same she had fashioned after she had first been brought to the clan—and came out with her kitchen knife. A wood-hafted blade of sharp green chert, it had a broad back, a pointed tip to score bones for splitting, and a keen cutting edge.

As Mungo’s arm drew back again, she jabbed at his face, rather than slashing as she had when he’d mounted her so many
lune
s ago, and felt a squishy resistance.

He bellowed and reared, clapping a hand over his left eye. As soon as his weight lifted, Leya rolled free. Tucking the knife away, she swept Brann up and scrambled to her feet. Mungo was up also, prancing and grunting, pink fluid seeping between his fingers.

In two quick steps, Leya was out of the tent. Clutching Brann, she ran for the entryway of the men’s longhouse, hearing Mungo’s stumbling footsteps behind her. She knew that if he caught her, she was dead and so was Brann. A few young hunters appeared at the openings of their tents as she ran past.

Behind her, a yell filled the longhouse. Leya darted through the entrance and ran toward the path out of camp. As she passed the main longhouse, her mother’s tall form appeared in the entrance, her normally dusky face ashen.

“
What happened?”

“
Mungo hit Brann,” Leya said on the fly. “I stabbed him.”

Behind, sounded another bellow. Alys’s face blanched further.

“
Run, Leya!”

Clasping Brann to her breast, Leya ran. Out of camp, onto the eastern trail, and up toward the pass. Turning once, she saw Mungo kneeling on the common-ground, both hands pressed to his face, the banked campfire bathing the scene in a lurid glow.

#

As soon as Caw and Odd reached the tundra, Caw called a halt and turned to his companion. He remembered how peeved he had been when Bor began more and more to stay in camp. Odd, with his slow thinking and plodding gait, made a poor hunting partner.

But on this day, Caw was glad he had the compliant Odd with him. “Odd and Caw go apart,” he gestured. “Each scout game.”

Odd’s gaze moved over the snowy grass, ice-rimmed ponds, and bushy hummocks. He hitched his poorly tied skins, his rude face perplexed.

“
Bor say stay together.”

“
That when plenty game,” Caw said. “Today we hunt apart. Cover more ground.”

Odd pulled at his lower lip. “How hunt alone?”

“
Meet at noon.” Caw signed. “Willow-tree nunatak to north. See who find game. Go kill.”

Odd’s lip stuck out. “Never go alone before.”

“
Go now.” Without further ado, Caw turned and began to trot west. He had a lot of ground to cover by midmorning. Glancing back, he saw Odd still rooted, now pulling at his ear. Caw hoped the dullard did not try to follow. He did not want a witness to what he had planned.

Skirting ravines that started down from the tundra toward the big river, he struck a fast pace. He knew he was not quite as adept as Gar at forced marches, but Gar would have to slow his pace for at least a day to accommodate the still-weak wolf. The insolence of the wolf, a mere animal, growling at him the time he had reached for Nim set his teeth on edge, and the memory of Gar yanking his spear away brought a flash of pure hatred.

Well, this morning the better man would win. Also, he would rid himself of a rival for leader when Bor was no longer able to hunt. Only Puk would be left, and accidents could happen.

As would one today.

But he needed to reach the proper place in time. Shifting his club for better balance, he stepped up his pace. He had considered leaving both club and spear behind, but decided he might need one or both to pry with.

He recalled that a solitary oak marked the spot. An hour later, he rounded a barren hillock and spotted the gnarled tree at the edge of the drop.

Caw began to descend the steep slope, using leafless bushes as anchors. The going was slow. One slip would plunge him to the bottom of the ravine. No man could survive such a fall.

A half-hour later, he arrived at the bluff above the trail, just before it jogged south. Small boulders and occasional large ones lined the icy lip. Below, a scree of loose shale and icy rocks overlooked the trail, which hugged the mountain and skirted a deep gorge. Although he could not see the bottom of the narrow valley, Caw knew the drop to the stream was even steeper than the one above. As this was the only way west without going out of one’s way over the oft-inhospitable tundra or detouring far to the south, a pair of clansmen would climb down each spring to pry loose the winter’s frost-heaved rocks and let them tumble. As the many piles of rock in the valley attested, the scree was so unstable that an avalanche, once started, would spread.

Caw made an initial survey and was gratified to see that several large boulders had frost-heaved during the winter and were cemented only by ice. Picking the most insecure-looking, he shucked his furs and began using the point of his spear to chip away the boulder’s underpinning, carrying each loosened rock away before it could fall and start a premature slide.

It was hard going, and he labored mightily in the cold wind, his muscles straining, sweat dripping from his face and chest. Periodically, he worried that Gar might already have passed, but he did not think that was possible.

Finally, he was able to work the small end of his club under the loosened boulder and feel the big rock teeter when he pried. Exhausted, he flopped down, and quickly felt chilled. Re-donning his furs, he began to wait.

Today he would avenge Gar’s unforgivable insult and advance his own campaign to be leader.

When Gar did not appear, Caw grew impatient. He needed time to climb back to the tundra and get to the nunatak to meet Odd. Suppose the dullard returned without him, described the new hunting-alone tactic to the others, and mentioned that Caw had been late. When Gar failed to return from the Shortface camp, Bor and the others might . . .

He spotted a flash of brown and watched a figure move into view, food bag slung from one shoulder and sleeping-skin folded over the other. Crouching so that only his eyes cleared the rim, he watched Gar pick his way along the narrow trail. Several lengths behind, the wolf with the peculiar yellow ruff treaded among small rocks and chunks of ice.

Gar was stepping carefully, using his spear as a staff and his club for balance, and Caw felt a flash of contempt at the show of caution. He would have gone faster than that, although perhaps not much.

He waited until Gar was almost directly below, then scurried behind the boulder, grasped the club, and heaved. The boulder crunched free and began to pick up speed. Peering between two rocks, Caw saw Gar look up and heard him shout, the words drifting up the steep mountainside: “Fel! Rock fall.”

A wall of tumbling rock, ice, and earth swept down the steep slope, broadening and gathering momentum. Caw saw Gar glance forward and back, then drop his spear and club and spring forward along the trail. The wolf was already loping in the other direction.

Caw focused on his enemy. A thrill prickled his neck as he saw that Gar would not come close to outrunning the slide.

Gar must have known he could not escape. Just before the snowy wave reached him he threw himself flat, hunched his back, and covered his head. The last that Caw saw of his nemesis, he was tumbling over the edge of the gorge inside a snowy moil of earth, rocks, and ice.

#

Leya’s right arm began to ache, so she shifted Brann to her left, a move she had made scores of times last night and today because, in her headlong flight, she had not had time to retrieve his travel pouch from Alys’s tent. Snow had fallen during the night and had partially melted. As if she didn’t have trouble enough, now she slogged through a layer of slush. The wool inserts and grass padding in her lace-up moccasins kept her feet from freezing, but her toes were damp and numb. She was dead on her feet and soon would need to sleep.

No one had followed her out of the winter camp, perhaps because the other men felt it was Mungo’s affair. She thought she’d probably put out his left eye. If so, he would have to wait for Sugn’s treatment, because it was known that a lacerated eye would fester. The shaman would have to pull the ruined eyeball, apply antiseptic to the socket, and pack it with sphagnum to keep it from running.

Mungo would not have been in shape to travel before this morning. And even then he probably wouldn’t go out alone, because at the end of winter the trails were likely to harbor half-starved lions, tigers, and leopards. Remembering the attack by the knife-tooth, Leya glanced around. Without Gar and Fel to protect her, she and Brann would be easy prey for any big cat.

Yesterday, Mungo’s half-
brator,
Hodr, had gone with a party to scout the southern pass for reindeer migrating back to the tundra. They wouldn’t have returned before this afternoon. By now, Mungo would have recovered sufficiently to travel. She knew he would pursue her, not only because she had put out his eye but because of humiliation at having been bested by a woman.

She had a night-and-a-day lead, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough. Burdened with Brann, she would never outpace the enraged man and whoever he might enlist.

What to do? If she left the trail to hole up in the mountains, they would track her through the new snow. If she stayed on it, they would overtake her.

Reaching a stream in a small valley, she knelt by a backwater, set Brann on the snowy bank, and chipped away the rime. Water riffled over greenish cobbles. She scooped some and found it clear and cold, tasting of rock and faintly, she thought, of
fer
. Any other time she would have been delighted at the find, which hinted that somewhere upstream was a deposit of the fire-starting mineral that now the tribe had to trade for.

But not today.

Too exhausted to go farther, she picked up Brann and shambled to a swale, where she used her kitchen knife to construct a crude shelter of willow and holly oak branches. Gathering rushes for a mattress and headrest, she sank down, wrapped herself and Brann in her cloak and set him to nursing.

At least he was feeding, she thought. She herself was starved, but she knew that trying to gather food in this barren place would consume more energy than it would provide.

She felt powerless and hopeless. The world seemed to have conspired against her. She’d been forced to become pregnant—no complaint there, she loved little Brann with all her heart—and had then been expelled by the clan as a cause of contention, and finally by her own tribe because of her drive to be independent.

And now the end was fast approaching, for she knew that Mungo would not leave her or Brann alive.

The fact that the whole affair had arisen because she had refused to accept a woman’s proper place no longer mattered. Even if she managed to escape Mungo—an impossible proposition, she knew—what then? Alone in this barren land of harsh weather and hostile beasts, how could a lone woman support herself and a child?

Her desperate mind fastened on the northern tribe of mammoth hunters that Ronan had planned to exile her to. But where was their territory? She had no idea.

If only Bor had let her choose her mate among the men of the clan, everything might have worked out. She wondered if there was any possible way to . . .

But even as the thought crossed her mind, she let it go. She and Brann would never be allowed to live with the clan. And there was Caw, who in his way was as bad as Mungo.

She fell into a daze, her mind questing endlessly, going over the same ground and finding nothing. She felt herself nodding off. Within two or three days, Mungo would be upon her. Then there would be nothing to decide.

As she glanced at the now sleeping Brann, so obviously of two bloods, her own concerns leached away. She would do anything to save him. Between Caw and the murderous Mungo, Caw was the lesser evil. Maybe if she could make it to the clan’s cave she could offer herself to him as his number-two mate in return for Brann’s life.

But in her heart she knew that was wishful thinking. Caw, having once been humiliated over her, would never accept her even as his
tegu
slave. As her eyelids sagged, a phantom floated in the air—yellow-haired, big-nosed, blue-eyed.