The Ancient One (13 page)

When Laioni and Kate came within ten feet, the two women halted their singing. Seeing Kate, they dropped their work and leaped to their feet, fear clearly visible on their faces. The younger woman, probably Laioni’s mother, barked some stern words at the girl that caused her to frown. Laioni then stepped nearer and engaged in an animated exchange during which she pantomimed Kate’s rescue from the pit. Grimly, her mother took Laioni by the wrist and placed herself between Kate and the girl. She faced Kate, scowling, and spoke sharply, motioning with her hands for Kate to go away and leave them alone.

“Believe me, I’d go if I could,” muttered Kate. “Do you have any bus tickets to the twentieth century?”

Suddenly, the woman’s eyes focused on the walking stick. At the sight of it, she cried out and took a quick step backward. The older woman behind her, who was rubbing her hands together nervously, released a long, low moaning sound.

It struck Kate that somehow they seemed to recognize the walking stick. Perhaps they might even know enough about it to show her how to tap its strange power so it could take her home again. She tried to think of some way, any way, to win their trust.

She scanned the camp, racking her brain. Her eyes fell on the fire pit, ashes glowing orange, and an idea flashed into her head. Moving slowly and deliberately, she took off her day pack and removed the thermos. Then, as the three Halamis watched with a mixture of dread and curiosity, she unscrewed the top, poured half a cup of steaming hot chocolate, and drank a sip herself. Then, bending down, she placed the cup of brown liquid on a flat stone near her feet. Backing up a few paces, she pointed to the cup and said, “
Halma-dru
.”

Monga scampered over to the cup, sniffed it for a few seconds, then reached his long tongue into the hot chocolate. Lapping it into his mouth, he shook his bushy tail vigorously and barked twice.

With that, Laioni darted out from behind her mother, evading the woman’s grasp. Ignoring her worried chattering, Laioni reached for the cup. No sooner did she touch it than she swiftly drew back her hand, yelping as if something had bit her. Turning to her mother, she said in amazement, “
Chu. Chu tkho
.”

“
Chu
,” echoed Kate, guessing she had just heard the Halami word for
hot
.

Waving her mother back, Laioni cautiously picked up the cup and sniffed its contents. After a moment of deliberation, she took a small sip. As she swallowed, her face burst into a broad smile. She turned to her mother and said something in an excited voice.

Laioni then carried the cup to her mother, who refused to try it. After repeated urgings, all of which were rejected, Laioni brought the cup over to the elder woman. With unsteady hands, the old Halami raised the cup, then faltered as Laioni’s mother spoke to her harshly. She answered back in a gruff voice, then brought the cup to her face. She inhaled once, chirped in surprise, and took a small taste. Like Laioni before her, the old woman smiled from one high cheekbone to the other. She took another swallow, smiled again, then held the cup out to Laioni’s mother.

Hesitantly, the woman took the cup, glanced doubtfully at Kate, then inserted her index finger into the cup. Fear melted into wonder as she felt the liquid, warm without the aid of fire. With another glance at Kate, she brought the cup to her lips and, after smelling its contents, swallowed the remaining hot chocolate. The creases on her forehead relaxed and she nodded at Kate, her eyes still afraid but somewhat accepting.

The rest of the day was spent around the encampment. The two women resumed their work, singing together, pausing only when the infant needed to be nursed or cleaned. The men of this group, Kate learned through Laioni’s energetic pantomimes, were away for some time, perhaps on a hunting expedition. Laioni seemed to be concerned for them, almost afraid, though she gave no indication why.

Using her own pantomimes, Kate kept the conversation going, hoping she might eventually learn something useful. She tried to find out whether the Halamis hunted with arrows, with spears, or by digging pits like the one she herself had fallen into. Then she tried to learn whether their prey was elk, deer, rabbit, or squirrel. But she succeeded only in making Laioni laugh.

“So you’ve never seen a rabbit that looked like that?” Kate asked, giggling herself. “How about like this?” She hopped around the campfire, doing her best imitation of a kangaroo. Laioni laughed again, while the two Halami women glanced worriedly at each other.

Deciding to try another line of questioning, Kate pointed across the lake toward the wall of sheer cliffs surrounding the crater. “Is that where your father went?” she asked Laioni. “Past the cliffs and down into the forest?”

The Halami girl’s expression swiftly darkened. She looked toward the cliffs, frowning, as if some grave danger lurked beyond them. She said a few sentences and then kicked angrily at a clump of grass.

Kate did not need to understand her words to know that something was wrong in the forest outside the crater. Yet she had no clue what it might be. Aunt Melanie, she felt sure, would know. But Aunt Melanie was somewhere very, very far away.

Then Laioni gestured toward the walking stick, a look of awe on her face. She asked Kate something in a soft voice, but Kate could not make sense of her words. Yet the impression was clear: Laioni, like her mother, knew something about the stick. With luck, if she waited for the right moment, Kate might learn something from them about its secrets.

Later that afternoon, Laioni showed Kate a simple game of throwing polished sticks at a stake planted in the ground. Since Kate had often played horseshoes with Grandfather, her aim was impressive, though not as good as Laioni’s. Whenever Kate missed a throw, Laioni would look at her strangely, as if she thought Kate was not playing as well as she could.

Next, Laioni led her to the confluence of two bubbling rivulets that emptied into the lake not far from camp. Revealing three miniature carved canoes resting in the hollow of a nearby rock, she carried them to the flowing water and placed them in a small whirlpool formed by the meshing currents. The canoes, shaped with pointed bow and boxlike stern, were each carved from a single block of wood. They reminded Kate of the dugout canoe she had seen once with Aunt Melanie in a museum close to the airport.

Airport, mused Kate. She had never thought about life without one within an hour’s drive. Cars, too, she had taken for granted all her years. She doubted she could ever explain to Laioni that people, ordinary people, would one day cruise faster than the swiftest deer and fly higher than the soaring eagle. And she wondered whether Laioni’s intimate knowledge of this place, her place, would be possible in the age of automobiles and airplanes. Motion and speed were so addictive, crowding out the calmness and focus needed to know one special place well. Then, with a pang, she wished she could simply board some time-traveling airplane that could bring her back to Aunt Melanie.

Laioni took three pebbles from the swirling streams of water—one buff, one black, one slightly crimson—and placed one into each of the toy canoes. Released into the whirlpool, the little boats floated in small circles, sometimes spinning rapidly, sometimes gliding into choppier waters, where they inevitably capsized.

Kate was soon captivated by the miniature canoes. She laughed with Laioni whenever one tipped over, dumping the pebble occupant into the water. By vigorous gestures, Laioni indicated that the same thing had happened to her once or twice. Monga, having positioned himself by the edge, batted at the boats with one of his paws.

What a far cry, Kate reflected, this was from the television and high-tech video games of her own world. Not since she had played Pooh Sticks as a small child down by the river with Aunt Melanie had she had such a good time with so few props.

As she bent low to take a drink from one of the rivulets, Kate viewed the fragmented reflection of Laioni’s face in the water. She watched the Halami girl slowly cock her head to one side. Strange. For an instant, she saw not Laioni—but Aunt Melanie. Sitting up with a start, she gazed at the girl seated next to her and all at once realized why she had seemed so familiar from the first moment they met. Laioni’s eyes were the eyes of Aunt Melanie, black as ebony, with a few flecks of hazel green around the edges. Kate thought about the crumpled photograph she had seen at the cottage of two youngsters on the Isle of Skye. The dark-eyed girl in the picture taken fifty years ago (or four hundred fifty years from now, depending on how one counted) looked so much like Laioni it was uncanny. Of course, the very notion that they could be related was absurd, yet Kate couldn’t banish the feeling entirely.

Abruptly, Kate noticed that Laioni was also staring at her. Not at her face, though: She was examining her green cotton sweatshirt with keen interest. Kate raised her forearm so that Laioni could feel the material. As the Halami girl rubbed the cloth between her thumb and forefinger, her face assumed the wondrous expression of someone encountering silk or satin for the very first time. “Mmmmmmm,” she said, closing her eyes.

Kate reached to touch the strips of cedar bark constituting Laioni’s skirt, and the Halami girl started to giggle. Kate smiled at her and said, “Pretty different, huh?” Laioni seemed to understand, and giggled again.

At that moment, a strange but lovely smell, almost like almonds roasting, came wafting through the air to them. With the ease of a springing fawn, Laioni jumped to her feet. Monga at once sprinted to her side, his tail swishing expectantly. She pointed to her mouth and patted her abdomen, indicating the time had come for a meal. Kate suddenly observed the slanting light crossing the cliff wall of the crater, and realized that it was late afternoon already. She was hungry, powerfully hungry, having eaten nothing more substantial all day than hot chocolate.

As Kate stood, Laioni plucked the three small boats from the water and returned them to their resting place on the rock. Meanwhile, Kate happened to glance toward the reflectionless blue lake. Beyond the rising mist floated the same sinister island, as unnerving now as it had been the first time she had seen it with Aunt Melanie. Eerie in its utter blackness, it seemed to slide slowly across the surface. With a slight shiver, she turned away.

Laioni led her back to the fire pit, where her mother continued to chant as she worked. At that moment, she was parching some type of seeds on a flat rock next to the hot coals. Kate could not keep herself from investigating the source of the rich aroma. Drawing closer, she watched the woman skillfully moving the seeds around with a wooden stick, taking care to heat each one evenly. It reminded Kate of making popcorn over an open fire, and she felt a sudden sense of loss amidst her swelling hunger. The last time she had made popcorn was with Aunt Melanie.

Just then, the Halami woman put down the stick and directed her daughter to do something. Laioni quickly picked up a round, broad-bottomed basket with straight sides and very tight weave. Taking care to avoid the walking stick that Kate had leaned against a rock, she carried the basket to the nearest rivulet flowing into the lake. Dipping it into the water until its pattern of repeating parallelograms was submerged, she then brought it back to her mother.

Kate turned to see the older woman pounding some seeds into meal on a flat stone between her legs. Every so often she put down her cylindrical pestle and sifted, lightly tapping a shallow basket of meal with her finger to make the finest meal fall into a woven hopper. All the while she watched Kate with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

By now, Kate’s hunger was almost unbearable. She watched expectantly as Laioni’s mother, using wooden tongs, placed two round stones from the fire pit into the water-filled basket. Why is she cooking stones? Kate wondered. Then the woman added a bowl of rootlike tubers to the basket. Methodically, she began removing cooler stones and replacing them with freshly heated ones from the fire pit. Soon the water began to boil, and a new smell overpowered the aroma of the parched seeds. The baby, hungry as well, started to cry.

At last, Laioni’s mother nodded to Kate to sit down. She said something to the older woman and to Laioni, and the meal was served. In addition to the freshly cooked tubers, Laioni produced a basket filled with red berries, seeds, and strips of some unknown vegetable. Her mother retrieved from the brush hut a tray of dried fish, as tasty as the smoked salmon Kate had eaten in Scotland once on a trip with Grandfather.

For her own part, Kate contributed what little hot chocolate remained in the thermos, complementing the herbal tea brewing by the fire. Everyone ate ravenously, including Monga, who tore into a generous clump of fish meat by Laioni’s side. Lifting her baby from the cradle, Laioni’s mother began to nurse the child, who squeaked and squealed like a rusty wheel while drinking.

As they ate together, the sun dropped below the line of cliffs to the west. The air grew a touch colder, though heat from the steaming lake and the fire pit kept them warm. In the distance, a lone owl called
hooo-hooo, hooo-hooo.

Kate surveyed the various tools and utensils scattered on the ground. They seemed so different here, freshly used and lit by the glow of fire coals, than they would hundreds of years later in some natural history museum or art gallery. Each one was made with such care and grace and pride that it was really a work of art. Yet they were made to be used, not shown. That, she suddenly realized, was the point: In this time, art and life were still the same.

Soon Laioni’s mother replaced the now-sleeping baby in the cradle, lacing the strip of deer hide carefully across the tiny body. Kate could see no moon above them, and she shuddered to think that soon they would have no light at all but the campfire. The crater swiftly filled with darkness, the sort of deep impenetrable darkness that always made her feel uneasy. She wondered what might have happened to Jody.

Then the Halami women began to chant, singing to the vanishing light ringing the rim of the crater. Laioni’s mother tapped lightly on the bottom of a large basket, while the old woman shook a rattle made from a deer’s hoof. Laioni hummed in the background, climbing a scale and then dropping back, joined on occasion by Monga’s high whining howl. Kate gazed into the glowing coals and listened, her eyelids growing heavier with each repetition.