CRO-MAGNON (53 page)

Blaine felt a leaden weariness descend. She fought it off and hunched her back again, trying to balance the tank’s weight.

“
I want to compare the wolf’s genome with modern wolves, as soon as their genome is sequenced.”

“
You could do that with a core sample, same as you’re going to do with the lion. You just don’t want to leave this particular wolf.”

She went on sawing.

“
I feel the same, Caitlin. But we could already be in trouble. We need to use our common—”

“
You get the other heads ready, melt the ice, and shoot your pics.” She swept her arm. “And don’t forget to take the woman’s necklace. Someday she’ll want it.”

With a sigh that was audible through his mask, Calder moved to the Cro-Magnon woman and took out a tenpenny nail attached to a cord. Blaine watched him shove the nail into a hole in the woman’s severed windpipe, jam it up upward, and draw it out through her open mouth. He took a moment to cut the thong-and-shell necklace and tuck it away. She watched him clamber onto the lion’s body, his head extending into the natural chimney at the end of the cave, and pour vegetable oil on the thick spear. Perched on the beast’s shoulders, he grabbed the shaft behind the point where it protruded from the lion’s skull and braced one foot against the side of the cave.

He yanked, trying to draw the shaft straight through. The lion’s massive head moved a few inches, but the spear held.

“
The damn thing is iced in. But brain matter can’t be all that solid.”Calder braced and heaved. The spear moved perhaps an inch.

Blaine took a breather from hacking the wolf’s neck. “That doesn’t look like a go, Ian.”

“
If you’re taking a souvenir, so am I. This spear is probably the very latest in short-range weaponry, circa thirty thousand years ago.”

He set his shoulders and heaved again, and Blaine saw the shaft slide another four inches.

“
And as with the woman and her necklace, someday he’ll want it,” he said, panting above the rattle of his regulator.

“
Hurry, then. And please see if the paintings are legible yet.”

Three minutes later, concentrating on her sawing, she heard a loud grunt, then a satisfied “Yes!”

Calder straightened, holding the blooded spear.

Blaine kept sawing, bearing down with her whole weight. She watched Ian crouch by the paintings, saw his camera flash, heard him say, “Damn!”

“
What?”

“
I’ve violated the first rule of archaeology—I damaged the artifact.”

She kept hacking. “Under the conditions, it couldn’t be helped. Are the paintings readable at all?”

“
They’re scorched and blurred. I’ve destroyed a priceless piece of art.”

“
Couldn’t be helped,” she said.
Yes, it could. If you’d tended to business . . .
“Are they intelligible at all?”

In a testy voice, Calder began to describe the penultimate panel of the prehistoric woman’s paintings.

A man—I can’t make out his features— is lying face up in the snow beside a stream, among tumbled boulders and blocks of ice. His right arm looks awkward. Some streaks behind him could represent drag marks.”

Blaine’s blade encountered a mass of frozen blood that felt impervious. Determined to take the wolf’s head, she kept sawing.

“
Next, two figures with spears—javelins by the slimness—are pursuing someone—a woman I think—who’s carrying a bundle up a hillside.”

Blaine kept sawing. Under the onslaught of the serrated blade, the wolf’s crystallized blood began to yield.

Calder’s voice warmed to the task. “The next picture shows what looks like the Neanderthal lying on his back, the wolf standing over him.”

Blaine felt dismay. This did not fit her developing theory.

“
Attacking?”

Calder’s camera flashed, flooding the cave with brilliant light. “No. The colors ran, but I think something’s coming out of the wolf’s mouth.”

The last of the wolf’s blood crumbled, and Blaine’s knife sliced between vertebrae. “What about the final painting?”

“
I seared it all to hell. I think it looks down on a pass. I can make out two figures. A man and maybe an animal in the distance. The man looks hunched, or maybe his arm is in a sling. I can’t make out any weapon. He’s approaching the summit. Three
more figures, one in the lead by fifty or sixty yards, are nearing the crest from the other side. I think the other two are carrying spears.”

Blaine’s knife rasped against the frozen skin beneath the wolf’s ruff. She cut through a final integument and the head rolled free. Tucking the muzzle under her arm, she duck-walked to where Calder crouched. The three human heads were strung behind the Neanderthal’s thirty-thousand-year-old spear, the boy’s head resting in the middle as if protected by the two adults.

She studied the four damaged paintings. “The final painting conveys exhaustion and desperation.” She leaned forward, squinting. “In the third picture, I think the wolf may be—”

The tremblor was so low-pitched that she experienced it as a series of pressure waves rather than a rumble. Both divers crouched for a space of perhaps five seconds until the floor of the cave stabilized.

“
That’s it,” Calder said. “Time to catch the train.”

Blaine noticed that he said nothing about a possible tunnel collapse, because there was no point. Either it had closed or it hadn’t.

Donning her fins while watching Ian string the wolf’s head behind the others and loop two half hitches, she felt her thoughts begin to wander away from their predicament. Perhaps as a protective mechanism, her mind began to visualize the action depicted in the paintings. The initial impression was of the Neanderthal with the battered nose lying helpless, unable to come to the aid of a loved one.

A loved one.
Why did she think that?

She tried to push the meanderings away.
This is no time for displacement thoughts.

“
You go first,” Calder said.

“
No. I need to be able to free the heads if they jam. We don’t know what that latest tremblor did to the tunnel.”
And I need to be behind you if you panic.
“You go.”

Calder, abandoning the heater and his other equipment, slid under the water, dragging the tethered heads behind. As Blaine slid under the surface headfirst behind him, her subconscious persisted, trying to make sense of the sequence of scorched paintings.

As she sucked on her regulator and began to flutter-kick in the silt-clogged void, her mind’s eye saw the unconscious man’s eyes blink open . . .

Chapter 22

Gar awakened to a sick headache. He suffered a raging thirst and his tongue felt leathery. Chilled to the bone, his right arm throbbing in cadenced with his heartbeat, he stared at a bank of sunlit clouds. The cape that Leya had made for him must have kept him from freezing.

As soon as he tried to move, pain shot through his arm. He gasped, and more pain racked his ribs, nausea gagging him. Crossing his left arm over his chest, he felt a soft resistance. Ignoring it, he rucked the long sleeve Leya had made for him, freed his fingertips, and ran them along his right forearm. And found a break in the bone.

The headache, concentrated on the left side, worsened and he eased his head down. Exploring with his fingers, he found a knot by the rearward bulge of his skull.

He lay still, trying to think.

He remembered being swept off the trail by a wave of snow, ice, and rocks, free-falling several lengths, bouncing hard off a ledge, falling much farther, and slamming onto the snow-covered ground, boulders crashing down around him. He started to shake his head, but stopped as the back of his skull threatened to come apart. He had been caught in an avalanche, which must have been started by the vibrations from his feet. This late in winter, he should have been more careful of snowmelt loosening the rocks.

His right hand, which had been closer to the end of his sleeve, felt tingly. He clenched the fingers, ignoring severe pain in his forearm, to work out the frostbite. The balls of flesh covering his fingertips were mushy, but he could still feel them.

At least he was alive. He wanted to raise his head, but the fierce ache warned him not to. Moving only his eyes, he glanced around. He was on the bank of the stream that ran through the narrow valley. Stones, rocks, and blocks of ice lay nearby, though most were scattered toward the bluff along with boulders and a mass of dirty snow.

A pale sun shone down, the slanting light telling his it was late afternoon. He wondered how he had ended up so far from the slide. After hitting the ground, he must have tumbled.

There was no sign of Fel. The slide must have killed him or he would have made his way down. He had had time, because Gar’s thirst and the angle of the sun told him he’d been lying here not just part of an afternoon but right through the night.

He started to sit up, but headache and queasiness sent him into a cold sweat. Fel would soon have company, he thought. Without food, his chill would deepen until it brought death. He looked around for his shoulder bag with its dried rhino meat and bladder of water but it was nowhere. Nor did he see his spear or sleeping-skin. Probably buried under the slide, he thought.

Well, that was that. Disabled, without food, shelter, or weapon, he was finished.

But he was a clansman, and he would not just wait for death. The first thing was to drink or he would grow weaker, and for that he had to be facedown. Bracing with his good arm he pushed with his legs, ignoring the pain and nausea. As he rolled away from his broken arm, something slid off his stomach and plopped onto the snow, but he had no time for it. Above all, he must assuage his thirst.

His head whirling, he broke the crust of ice and scooped a palmful of water with his left hand. The snowmelt ran down his throat and spread through his tissues like one of Leya’s potions.

Leya! That’s why he was here.
He must do everything he could to survive.

Scooping again and again, he drank deep of the silty water, his throat aching from the cold.

When he had slaked his thirst, he inched aside and looked down. A small pile of mangled meat lay on the snow.

He stared at it. Where could it have come from? He slid his hand under it and felt a vestige of warmth. Raising it to his mouth, he saw that it had been partially digested.

Suddenly, he understood. Wolves regurgitated meat for their pups. So, that was why Fel was not around. He was out hunting.

He tried to kneel, and again nausea flattened him. He waited. When the hollow feeling receded, he quickly turned his head, brought the meat to his mouth, and took a bite.

Hare.

Still warm inside, it slid down easily. He took another bite, and another, and felt energy flow into his body, though not nearly enough.

When he had eaten all the meat, he tightened the hood Leya had stitched for him and tucked his hands back into the long sleeves. As he lay gazing at the pink sky, drawing small breaths to minimize the ache in his ribs, his vexation at blundering into a rock slide gave way to a flicker of hope.

Then more than a flicker. Experience told him that the whirling in his head and the ache in his ribs would recede. And the arm was, after all, not a vital part of his body. If he could keep from freezing during the nights and if Fel would keep bringing food, he might yet survive his own carelessness. He tried to rise, but nausea forced back down. His headache intensified. Despite his effort to stay awake, his eyes closed.

#

Without breaking stride, Mungo swiped at his left cheek. Despite Sugn having coated the eye socket with cattail goo and packed it with sphagnum, a colorless liquid seeped from the chamois bandage and collected above the scar Leya had given him below his cheekbone. An image of her sprang to mind.

The bitch! With only one eye, he would not be able to throw his javelin with the long-range accuracy that had made him the tribe’s best hunter and practically ensured that he would one day be chief. The Flathead-loving slut had ruined his life. When they caught her, he would take her little half-breed and strangle it in front of her eyes before slowly killing her.

He had waited a night and a day because Sugn wanted to see if the socket festered. At least, he thought, the wait had provided time for his
brator
to return from his scouting mission.

He had wanted Drem to accompany them, but the older man said that Leya had only been protecting her child. The traitor even hinted that Mungo’s misfortune was his own fault.

That was the end of that friendship!

Now he and Hodr—even his own
brator
had hemmed and hawed—were making good time. They had stopped to sleep only once. Leya, burdened by the
baban
she called Brann—as if an animal Flathead could have a name—and hampered by lack of food, could not be traveling at more than half his speed. Her tracks showed her sticking to the eastern trail. Judging by their crispness, she couldn’t be more than a few hours ahead. He was surprised they hadn’t already come upon her.