CRO-MAGNON (22 page)

Her bruised ribs throbbed, and she squirmed on the younger man’s web of muscle, trying to ease the shock of each long stride. To take her mind off the pain, she tried to imagine what a bush-antlered deer was doing in the river bottom, as they usually ranged the higher forests. Perhaps the Flatheads had wounded the animal and trailed it to the river. Even bled-out, it must have run to several man-weights, but the two men treated it as no heavier than an ibex. They were less talkative than her people, their speech running to guttural grunts bolstered by graceful gestures. From occasional exchanges, she learned that the young man carrying her was named Gar, the gap-toothed man was Caw, and the older man in charge was Bor.

At least they hadn’t forced themselves on her and then disposed of her like the deer, she thought, although she sensed that
tegu
was on the gap-toothed man’s mind. Of course, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t have their way later. Why else would they be taking her
?

Unless, of course, they’d lumped her with the deer.

She shuddered. All her life, she had heard campfire stories of cannibalism. As a child, tales of the Flatheads had been used to frighten her into staying inside the camp boundaries.

The three men wended ever upward from the river, the willows giving way to smooth-barked birch. She’d become accustomed to Gar’s supple gait now and accommodated herself to each stride. At least she was still alive.

For the first time, she tried to ponder her situation.

If Caw or one of the others—how many
tegu
sessions would she have to endure?—got her with child it would be almost the same as killing her outright. She had heard of women of the People who had been caught afield by Flatheads and forced to submit. And also of starving Flathead women who sometimes offered themselves to the People.

When a Flathead woman gave birth to a mixed child, the delivery was usually easy. Leya had heard of one or two half-breeds who had had become valued hunters and risen to prominence, though she didn’t think that had ever happened in the Tribe of the Twin Rivers. She guessed that the fate of such mixed offspring depended on the particular tribe. She had heard that half-Flatheads had even sired children who had been People-like enough that their birth was normal.

But when a woman of the People became heavy with a Flathead-seeded child, her belly swelled to half again the normal birth size. And when the infant was born, the big head would not pass through the opening. Then the shaman and midwife would have to cut the woman, who usually died.

The same had happened two autumns ago to Ursi, Leya remembered. Ursi had wandered from the other women while gathering almonds. By the time the guards heard her belated screams and drove the Flatheads away, the poor woman had been seeded. Nine moons later it had been necessary to slice the opening of her canal.

The
baban
had looked as one would expect—partially of the People but with a flattened skull and thick bones. Despite the still-conscious Ursi’s pleas, her grief-stricken mate Arun had dashed the
baban
against a rock, relieving Ronan of the decision. Leya suspected he would have taken the child into the tribe. But of course his decisions were subject to agreement by the other men, and she knew he would have met opposition by Sugn and perhaps others.

Despite Sugn’s sewing of the wound, his chants and ministrations had not saved Ursi from bleeding out. Leya shuddered. Would that be her eventual fate? Would she even live that long?

The three Flatheads exited the birch grove and tramped through a forest of spike-branched poplars. They did not talk much. Leya got the impression they would have trouble uttering the complex sounds that comprised her own people’s speech.

Her crotch was socketed over Gar’s massive shoulder, and she could feel thick muscles flex as he strode over the ascending terrain. Despite her battered condition and her best efforts to remain aloof, she felt her loins grow moist. Wondering if the contact was having an effect on him, she stole a glance at his face. The quizzical stare of a frigid blue eye failed to reassure her, though it did not seem openly lustful like Caw’s.

With his enormous squashed nose, her carrier had to be one of the ugliest members of these exceedingly ugly people. Were these brutes even human? They must be, or cross-mating would not beget offspring. Unless people could mate with animals to produce people with human heads and animal bodies, which she had heard but never accepted. Common sense told her that each kind of creature had a unique makeup that could not be mixed.

She watched the young man called Gar turn his head and focus on the game trail they were now following, his loincloth bulging as his torso twisted. How big must they be down there? If the rest of their body was any indication . . .

Fingering the earth-
mator
through the now-dry skin of her tunic, she pushed the image away. Whatever would be, would be.

#

The Flatheads lived under a cliff at the head of a bowl-shaped valley. Steep hills rose to the east and west, and a brook coursed into a ravine below. A stiff wind blew from the tundra, which Leya reckoned stretched above, and raised goose bumps on her arms.

Bouncing on Gar’s shoulders as he strode the final few yards, she saw a windbreak formed of piled rocks, and the hanging hides of several wisents. She noted that they were plains bison, probably from the tundra. Partly to insulate her mind from what was to come, she wondered idly if these people even distinguished between varieties of bison. Judging from the terse conversation of her three captors—she no longer thought of them as rescuers, if she ever had—en route from the river, she thought they might not distinguish between varieties of plant and animal life as finely as did the People.

Still carrying her weight lightly, Gar ducked beneath the windbreak, and Leya noted that, like the hunters’ garments, the hides had been scraped and smoked but not tanned. A stench of unwashed bodies puckered her nostrils. The cave was only six lengths wide and four deep, really more of a shelter. As far as she could discern, the camp consisted of heaps of crudely scraped skins and two hearths.

One, surrounded by gnawed bones, occupied the center of the shelter. Another, just inside the windbreak, was spanned by a frame of blackened branches and probably was used to smoke meat and hides. Beside it stood a tripod of thick maple branches, obviously used for dressing animals. Coals glowed in the center hearth, and Leya supposed the fire was kept continuously alive.

Refuse from butchered animals was heaped near the windbreak, a paucity of vegetable matter hinting at a diet of mostly meat.

Neither of the hearths incorporated the air channels that her people fashioned even in seasonal camps, and she supposed that if the Flatheads needed a hotter fire they just blew on it. At least they cooked their food, she thought, instead of swallowing it raw like animals.

The camp looked as if the inhabitants had no pride. Gnawed bones were strewn everywhere, and crude-looking stone tools lay where they had been dropped. Leya thought the cooking hearth looked too large to be temporary. Flatheads must stay in one place year-round or at least for extended periods, rather than following the game and fish in their yearly cycles. She wondered how that affected the amount and variety of food, especially during winter.

But the people themselves drew her primary interest, for she knew that their nature would determine whether she lived or died. During the trek east and north from the river she had promised herself she would do whatever was necessary to survive, no matter how odious.

Besides her three captors, she counted seven rugged Flathead adults—three men and four women—and nearly a half-score children, including two almost-grown boys and a girl-woman.

All were blond like Gar, Caw, and the mostly grizzled Bor, though some heads showed hints of red. The hair and beards of the males had been crudely hacked, unlike the trimmed hair of the People. The men included an individual who looked like an older and less ugly version of Gar without the squashed nose, plus a man a few seasons older with close-set eyes, and another almost as old as Bor who exhibited a shriveled and empty eye socket, limbs that had obviously been broken, and numerous scars, as if he had tangled with a cornered animal.

The women wore the same laced fur tunics as the men except for a central slit, probably for nursing. Leya was abashed to see that their round breasts were partially bared to the cold draft that seeped around the windbreak, particularly when they moved around. In her tribe, it was considered vulgar to go topless except when sleeping or swimming.

All the females parted their hair in the center and wore twin braids hanging to their waists, she saw, unlike the individually styled hair of her own people. Like the men, they sported bulging calves and muscled arms. She noticed that a little girl who looked about four seasons, her hair already in braids, was still nursing at the breast of a woman with a wandering eye who looked about one-score. Like her own people, perhaps these savages had discovered that extended weaning made the children more disease-resistant and kept the women from getting with child again too quickly.

She wondered what these people—if that was what they were—did with surplus babies. Probably the same as her tribe, she thought, which would explain the small size of the group. Even so, the number of children seemed high, and she supposed a lot of them must die prior to adulthood.

These jumbled impressions filled her mind as Gar carried her into the shelter and set her down under the overhang. All seven adults gaped at her, some of the men running hot eyes over her body, which must look unusually slim and, in her tailored tunic, shapely. The men of her own tribe liked their women to look like women, and she supposed these people were no different.

She thought about her probable fate if she were allowed to live, and wished she were not so well-endowed. She’d worried about becoming Mungo’s mate.

Now, she supposed, a much worse fate awaited her.

Behind her, a cheer went up as Bor and Caw dipped under the windbreak with the big deer. Everyone’s attention instantly shifted to carcass slung on the pole. They all ran forward, inspecting the kill and running their hands over it as if they’d never seen such an animal, though Leya could tell from the scattered marrow-bones that deer meat was a staple.

She ran her eye over the bunched group. A flesh-eating group this big, particularly one that obviously did not eat many plants, must require three or four people-weights of lean meat per week.

Two good-sized animals.

So, scenes such as this could not be as unusual as the people’s enthusiasm suggested. She guessed they were more boisterous than her own people, among whom such outbursts were considered unseemly.

“
Clud, clud,”
some of them were chanting, and Leya supposed this was their name for bush-antlered deer.

Bor and Caw, muscles flexing, hung the carcass from the skinning tripod and Bor turned toward the rear.

“
Kam?”

A Flathead woman with a lined face, gray-streaked pigtails, and breasts beginning to sag emerged from the shadows and clapped her hands. At the sound, the other women and the children fell silent. Leya thought the woman looked in her thirties, but her body language hinted she was younger. Probably this primitive life aged women and men alike.

“
Em.” Kam pointed to a woman a few years younger, who was missing the middle two fingers of her right hand.

“
Huh.”

Without a word, the woman bent to pick up a stone blade in her left hand. She stepped to the deer and began to skin the carcass, starting from the tail in the fashion favored by Leya’s people.

So, they assigned duties as did her own tribe, Leya thought. She expected to see the awkward movements of a converted right-hander. Most of the People, herself included, favored their right hand. But the woman cut deftly along the deer’s backbone.

Ignoring the nursing woman, Kam turned to the fourth female, a wrinkled crone. Leya reckoned the old woman must have been close to two-score seasons—in the twilight of her life.

“
Wim.”

Leya noticed that Kam’s voice had turned gentle. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gar, and the somewhat older man who resembled him, turn and watch.

“
Hum?”
Kam said.

With a snaggle-toothed smile, Wim hobbled to the carcass and reached to steady it while the woman named Em began to peel the hide. Leya could see that both women had strong grips. Both were both left-handed, she noted, as were all of the men. So, that answered that question.

She also noticed that none of the men offered to help, which she thought was strange. In her world, men were the principal cooks, while the women tended babies, sewed clothes, gathered vegetables, and kept the living quarters habitable, besides keeping themselves clean and presentable—something that did not seem to concern these Flatheads, with their greasy hair and ripe bodies. They could all use a good scrub with boiled cattail leaves and hardwood ashes, she thought.

When Kam turned to her, Leya felt apprehensive, sensing that her fate would depend at least partially on the head female’s attitude.