The Seventh Tide (18 page)

‘Um…’

Exasperated, MakK looked about and then grabbed two broken bits of antler from the rubble on the ground. He clanged them together.

‘Deer!’ Clack. ‘Listen!’ Clack.

And then Eo heard it. It was the sound of the stags clashing their antlers together during the rut, up in the high hills with the does milling round.

‘I get it! You’re Ma –’ he took the antlers and knocked them together – ‘kK! MakK!’ Eo shook his head. ‘You must think I’m really stupid.’

MakK put a hand on Eo’s sleeve. ‘No, EoG,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you’re different.’

‘Oh well, that’s all right, then!’ Eo laughed and stood up. Hurple had ‘woken up’ and was calling to him from inside the cave. He turned away, not hearing what the other boy said next.

‘No, it’s not,’ MakK murmured sadly. ‘It’s
not
all right.’

Whatever the elders had been discussing, it seemed they’d made up their minds. A delegation was standing in front of Hurple’s rock.

‘Come on, boy’ the Professor called. ‘I need my ears-and-mouth man!’

Again it was TakK who acted as spokesman for the Neanderthals, but this time he dragged another, extremely nervous-looking man forward with him. He bowed in Hurple’s general direction, and then said to Eo, ‘Tell the
god that this is NorekK, our carver. Tell the god he is going to make a likeness of him to take to the place of gods. This is so that we can speak to him, ask for his wisdom and thank him for his aid. Does this find favour with the god?’

It was obvious to Hurple what Eo was thinking…
He’s nght in front of you – why don’t you just speak to him
now
!?
The judicious application of a claw to a bit of bare arm kept his slave’s mouth shut, however. Instead, the god nodded his assent in as haughty a fashion a small weasel-shaped animal can manage. TakK, NorekK and the elders bowed again and then walked away, each being careful not to look the ferret in the eyes. The carver left the cave and the others settled down to another session of talk.

‘That’s so weird,’ muttered Eo. ‘Well, what did you find out? Did you find any secret knowledge they can give us, any special demon weapons?’

‘I found out they’re agitated,’ said Hurple softly.

‘Well, wouldn’t
you
be, if somebody dumped a god on
you
out of nowhere?’

The ferret shook his head. ‘It’s not me,’ he said. ‘They have a mechanism for me – I’ll fit with the other gods without too much of a stretch, once they get the rituals done. It’s
you
they’re worked up about.’

‘Me?!’

‘Yes. They think you don’t smell right.’

Eo was irate. ‘
I
don’t smell right – have they smelled
themselves
lately?!’

Hurple rubbed a paw over his snout impatiently. ‘You are in no position to whinge – you’re not getting the half of it with
that
sad little set of nostrils. But that’s not
the point. They aren’t saying you smell wrong because you smell
bad –
’

‘It’s not me anyway – it’s these manky skins,’ Eo muttered under his breath.

‘– they’re
saying
you smell
different.
And
that’s
bad.’

Eo looked up, startled. ‘That’s what MakK said –
he
said I was different too.’

‘MakK?’

‘Yeah – that boy over there – see, by the opening. We talked. We’re friends, I think. Sort of.’

Hurple shut his eyes for a moment. ‘That’s not good,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I heard the men – when they were speaking of your… not-rightness – they said you were more wrong even than MakK.’

And suddenly, Eo found there was a shift in what he was seeing – as if someone had just sharpened the focus. Groups that had seemed random before began to take on new meaning. Round the main fire it was all boys and men, now that he looked more carefully. The other, smaller ones were the girls and women, some by the cooking fire, some working at other jobs about the place, but all in twos or threes at the least. Only MakK was alone – and he wasn’t by the cave opening to catch the best of the light. He was by the cave opening because he didn’t belong anywhere else.

Eo felt a flicker of dread run up his back.

‘Is it… dangerous? If they don’t think you fit in, do they do something, uh, violent?’

‘No. I think
that’s
what they do,’ said Hurple, indicating the isolated boy with his paw. ‘I think they just gradually,
relentlessly push you out.’ He noticed the stricken look on Eo’s face. ‘That’s just the way they are, lad. You’re not going to change it. Where’re you going?’

Eo didn’t answer.

Hurple watched, shaking his head ruefully, as Eo walked back to the entrance of the cave, back to the boy who didn’t fit, and sat down beside him.

NorekK the carver was a fast worker – before any of them looked for him to be done, he came back to the cave with a bundle carefully wrapped up in animal skins.

It was time to leave for the place of the gods.

The whole tribe emptied out of the living cave, minus a few of the oldest women, who stayed behind on fire duty. TakK, carrying the bundle, took the lead. He was moving very carefully, but even so, he powered on up the steep incline of the valley as if it were on the flat. Everyone, even the smallest child, seemed fitter than their visitors.

‘This better not be far,’Jay panted.

It wasn’t. As they came out from among a stand of trees, they stumbled to a ragged halt and stared. Instead of continuing upwards between the hills, the valley stopped. Abruptly. In a wall of white.

A glacier rose sheer before them, a fluted surface of painfully bright light. Its lower leading edge was pocked and dirtied with the rocks and trees and soil it had engulfed, scraping everything in its path forward with it. The river slid out from underneath and ran away towards the sea like a thing escaping. They could feel a whole new level of cold coming off it.

Between them and the glacier was a narrow area of broken trees, a rubbled battlefield littered with branches and rocks and ploughed-up soil. It was a battlefield where one side was clearly losing.

The Professor shuddered along the whole length of his body. ‘That thing eats landscapes,’ he murmured.

‘Where are they going?’ whispered Jay, clutching Adom’s sleeve for comfort. ‘It looks like they’re going…
inside
!’

She was right.

In single file, the tribe picked its way across the broken ground to an insignificant-looking crack in the wall of ice. One by one, they disappeared inside the opening…

‘Come on, then,’ urged Hurple. ‘Let’s see what’s in there!’

Wide-eyed, the slaves of the god did as they were told.

The entrance was narrow, and the passageway leading off it was low, even for the short Neanderthals. Bent almost in half, the children stumbled forward in the strange blue half-light, unable to see clearly where they were going and stricken to the bone by the intense cold coming off the ice that surrounded them. The passage seemed to go on for a very long time until, suddenly, they emerged, blinking, into the place of the gods.

A great cavern had been dug out of the heart of the glacier, low-ceilinged but vast. The pitch torches the tribes people held smoked and spat, leaving black smudges on the roof, but their light made the ice walls and floor sparkle. In the centre of the space an enormous ice stag had been carved. It seemed to grow out of the floor like a tree. A proud span of antlers, shed by a
flesh-and-blood stag, had somehow been planted on to its head. The frost inside the temple had silvered the antlers so that they glinted weirdly in the torchlight. For a moment, the sight of the great tribal god of the kK blinded them to anything else in the temple, but then they saw the others. In niches carved out of the ice walls, other, more minor gods had their places. Statues of owl and boar, wild sheep and rabbit, half-sized bear and cat – and there, in a space newly carved from the body of the glacier, TakK carefully placed the statue of the most recent incumbent, and unwrapped it. The ferret god.

‘Oh!’ said Hurple. ‘It’s beautiful!’

The others agreed.

It was a little more than life-size, in a standing pose, with its front paws tucked under its chin and its tail curled to the side. Hurple turned in Eo’s hands and looked up at him, his eyes shining.

But before he could speak, the music started. It was an old man, one of the elders, playing a flute – a flute made of a deer bone. The music made Eo feel as if his skin were crawling. Each note was sounded, and left to bend as the player’s breath failed. It was like hopeless wailing that would never end, unbearably mournful to Eo’s ears. It filled his mind with thoughts of how these people were going to die, and not just
these
people, but all the people like them. Dying away. Utterly gone.

Shut up, shut up
, he thought, partly talking to the musician and partly to himself.

From the way he was squinting, it looked as if Hurple wasn’t enjoying the concert much either, and Jay and Adom appeared to be fighting the temptation to cover their ears with their hands.

And then it was over. The last note wailed away and the visitors unscrunched their shoulders and shuffled their cold feet, ready and eager to leave. But no one else moved. There was an uncomfortable silence, in which everyone in the tribe was staring at their little group, or at any rate, at the ice floor beside their little group. They still did not seem able to look the ferret god straight in the face.

Hurple, Eo, Adom and Jay went into a huddle.

‘I think they want me to do something,’ said Hurple, while trying not to move his lips. ‘Something to do with the statue.’

‘What – like, greet it somehow?’ said Jay. ‘Is that it?’

‘Well, perhaps…’

‘OK, don’t be thrown by it being made of ice. Just think about if it were a
live
ferret, what would you do, then?’

Hurple rubbed his nose with a paw. ‘Well, I’d probably touch noses and then grab it by the scruff and wrestle it to the ground, yipping loudly.’

The others exchanged glances.

‘Not perhaps what the moment requires…’ murmured Eo.

‘
I
think they want you to
bless
the statue,’ said Adom. ‘Not engage it in a bit of rough and tumble.’

‘It’s good to have a religious expert on board, for an expedition such as ours,’ said Hurple, nodding graciously at him. ‘That’s what I’ll do, then… uh, now, any advice on how to bless something?’

‘Look, it’s not as if you’ve never
been
blessed,’Jay put in impatiently. ‘You just have to do whatever the Columba guy did to
you.
’

Three pairs of utterly shocked eyes fixed on her.

‘What? What did I say?’ she asked.

‘Columba was a
saint!
’ said Eo. ‘Is a saint. Er, will be a saint.’

‘Well, he should know what he’s doing, then, shouldn’t he?’Jay had no time for their scruples. ‘You’re just going to have to wing it.’

There was a tiny pause, and then Hurple nodded. He flowed down from Eo’s shoulder and lolloped over the ice, as solemnly as his cold little paws would let him. Then he made a single graceful leap up into the ferret god’s niche. He leaned forward and touched his warm live nose to the statue’s icy one, and then, with an almost tender touch, he placed his paw on its forehead and closed his eyes. The ice cavern was utterly still for a moment, and then Hurple jumped lightly down again and ran across to Eo and the others.

‘I hope that was what they wanted,’ he murmured.

Jay made sure no one was watching, then leaned down and stroked his nose. ‘It was just right,’ she said. ‘I knew it would be.’

Just right,’ Adom agreed.

The Neanderthals seemed content as well. Each member of the tribe now came up to the statue to bow and murmur a few words. There was no polite way to leave before they had finished, so the four waited over to one side, trying not to let their teeth chatter too loudly.

Adom invited Hurple up on to his arm and then stepped away a little.

‘Could I have a word?’ he said quietly.

‘Surely What’s your problem?’

Adom looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s this – you know, the glacier – it’s just that there’s nothing like it in my time. Not that I’ve ever seen or heard tell of. So, what happens between then and now?’ he asked.

‘The world gets warmer,’ said Hurple. ‘The leading edges of the glaciers will recede hundreds of kilometres as the Ice Age ends.’

‘It all melts?!’ said Adom. All this?!’

The ferret nodded.

‘But… how will they feel, when
their gods
melt?!’

Hurple shrugged one narrow shoulder. ‘I expect they’ll feel abandoned.’

There was a moment’s pause in which the worshippers’ words could be heard whispering round the space in the icy air.

‘Hurple, is that why they – the Neanderthals – is
that
why they became extinct?’

‘It’s
never
just one thing… but I don’t see how it can have helped. Do you?’

‘No.’

‘They’re leaving now,’ said Eo, coming up behind them. ‘Can we go too? –
I’m
freezing
!’

They waited until the last of the worshippers had filed out of the ice temple and then followed. Gratefully, they walked out of the glacier’s blank white wall, picked their way over its bow-wave of destruction and carried on into the trees. It was only then that they realized they had been left behind. It seemed the entire tribe had moved off down the hill without waiting for them.

‘It’s as if they’ve forgotten all about us!’ said Eo, surprised and hurt.

‘There’s no place for you.’

It was MakK. He was standing by a lichen-covered rock, so still in his scruffy furs that he looked like a rock himself.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Eo, so MakK explained, slowly and carefully, as if he were speaking to children.

‘Now that the god has breathed himself into the statue,
it’s
the god. There is no need to consider any other. Now that the slaves of the god have carried him to the place of the gods, there is no need to consider them either.’

Eo, Jay and Adom exchanged glances.