Mammoth Boy (15 page)

They turned left, hugging the cliff, the direction whence Urrell had come that first day. He expected a long march and determined not to forget a single landmark, memorising each tree, jut, fissure. This time he would not be left facing blank rock. Even so, alert as he was, Urrell was to be confounded when Agaratz vanished into the cliff a few paces ahead of him.

Look as he might, Urrell could not see where Agaratz had gone. Low brush grew thick at the cliff foot, which he shoved aside to look for an opening, but there was only a long vertical crevice little wider than a hand’s span, certainly not big enough to disappear into. He was wavering there, scanning the cliff in the dark, when a faint, teasing tune seemed to come from the rock, through the crevice, mocking him for not finding a way in.

He listened, wondering if he had really heard the elfin sounds. They paused then began again, apparently from lower down where the crevice widened enough to allow nothing much bigger than a fox to get in. Into this he was meant to crawl?

The rank weeds. The women far down in the meadow.

He brushed aside his boyish terrors. Headfirst he wriggled into total darkness, the flute music egging him on – Agaratz must be close ahead – comforted by Rakrak creeping behind him. Piura, too big, would wait outside. On his elbows he slithered and dragged himself forward along the muddy tunnel as the music drew nearer. Not far and he shot into a torch-lit chamber where Agaratz crouched playing his deer-bone flute, absorbed in his music-making, a shaggy figure in a pool of light, oblivious to all else. Rakrak followed Urrell, stood up and shook herself, breaking Agaratz’s absorption.

“Ah, Urrell.”

Urrell hesitated. He felt an intruder. Agaratz, mud-free and dry, compared with Urrell’s muddy elbows and leggings, and Rakrak’s mud-caked paws and belly, seemed to be the denizen of this place into which they had blundered from the outside world.

Agaratz resumed his playing. As Urrell’s eyes adapted to the torchlight he looked eagerly round the chamber walls for engravings and paintings: they were blank. Without stopping his music, Agaratz signalled Urrell to come and squat in front of him, in the light. Rakrak followed, sat on her hunkers, looking at both. The piping went on, a monotony of notes, sequences, pre-melodic tones, thin whistling sounds from the deer-bone flute that Urrell felt no desire to join.

This went on a good while, part of something Urrell felt would be revealed. Finally Agaratz rose, freed one hand from the pipe without ceasing to play, unhitched the antler on its thong from his belt and before the watching eyes of youth and wolf whirled it in time to his playing as he began a slow, stomping dance round the torch, stirring the air so that his shadow flickered on the smooth walls of the chamber. The performance went on and on till the torch began to gutter. Urrell followed Agaratz’s look and nod to his pouch and took out a new torch, which he lit from the stump of the dying one, all this without Agaratz stopping playing, dancing and whirling the antler. He evidently set store on ceaseless movement and music. Why, Urrell no more knew than how Agaratz had managed to vanish into the cave and appear in it dry and mud-free.

Still the dance went on, never gathering tempo, almost stately, Agaratz pivoting on his goat foot, shaggy shoulders bare of tunic, which he had laid by his pouch with his outer garments. Urrell seldom saw him so lightly clad.

Then, so suddenly that Urrell, lulled by the monotony, scarcely had time to notice, Agaratz was back to his squatting position and the music had stopped, though it seemed to float on in the air. This time Agaratz opened his pouch himself. From bark boxes he took contents, like jerked meat but which Urrell saw was dried fungus.

“Chew, Urrell.”

“For
mammurak?
”

“
Mammuraperritxac
, Urrell. Eat. Good.”

It did not taste bad, just a little acrid, and tough. These words were the nearest to an explanation Agaratz had ever come, perhaps because no words existed to say what he wanted, or none that Urrell knew.

Urrell chewed and swallowed the woody fragments.They roughened his throat.

This done, Agaratz produced bundles of dried herbs, roots and seeds. These too were chewed small and swallowed. Although Agaratz ate his share, Urrell surmised that he did so more to encourage him, Urrell, than from any need of his own.

After a short pause, he said: “Now blow, Urrell.”

Urrell, on his mammoth-tusk flute, blew as bidden. He started a melody of his own, waveringly, till Agaratz joined in, picked up the line of music and expanded it, leading Urrell on in ever greater confidence as he started to move in time to his own playing round Agaratz and Rakrak, round the torch and its pool of light. He noticed the resinous smell of the torch as never before, sniffing with delight. Crevices, knurrs, flaking patches on the half-lit cave walls leapt out; every hair on Rakrak’s coat grew discernible; pouch and garments revealed creases made by the identity of their user and wearer. He felt he could touch his music in his head.

Slowly this clarity blurred. No longer were Agaratz and Rakrak so present.

His mind drifted to the shelter under the overhang, huddled women; Blueface; the brook; rubbish where he scavenged; Old Mother looking up, her eyes blinking through smoke, gone before he could speak; his trip over the moors; hawks; the bison with the trapped hoof. When he came to the present he felt giddy, ill, retching as he jigged round, unable to play and following only Agaratz’s music.

New visions started up – dim distances, lakes and forests, herds of bison and horses stretching to the horizon, groups of aurochs, musk-oxen, a giant bear, followed by beasts he had never seen, with shaggy fur, stripes, scales, strange horns and snouts, giant fangs. They slank into his vision and back out into oblivion. None of this frightened him. He felt – intensely – that this was leading somewhere.

By now exhaustion was taking over. His gyrations dwindled until he sank to the floor, accompanied by Rakrak’s whimpers of concern. He could not see her clearly, unable to focus his eyes, but felt her fur and warmth, fondled her ears and was soothed.

This was the prelude to another phase. He felt better but weak. Lights in his head shifted and shone with the phosphorescent gleam of rotten wood, the elf-light he had sometimes found in the forest. It seemed to get into his mind’s eye. He was rising shakily, bidden on by Agaratz’s incessant playing, when he saw them – there, in front of his eyes, in single file, at a slow loping stride of their own, came the mammoths. They were perfectly clear on the cave wall, alive. He stopped dead in his excitement.

“
Mammurakan, mammurakan
, Agaratz,
mammurakan!
” He could only croak the words, his voice hoarsened by the fungus and roots chewed, retching, slipping into Agaratz’s language as the only one fit for such an event.

Agaratz’s response was to continue playing while he rummaged in his pouch with one hand. He drew out pieces of charcoal.

“Draw, Urrell, draw
mammurakan.
”

Impelled by Agaratz, who for once showed urgency, Urrell guessed exactly what to do. The music from Agaratz grew wilder, longing, mournful as Urrell drew the outlines of the mammoths with long, sure strokes, seizing their movements, using excrescences to emphasise here a shoulder, there a domed head, instinct with an artistry he could never have explained. He drew at speed. The column strode by on the stone for him. Its lead animal, an old cow, watched him with her small, reddened eye. As he caught her oblique glance, for the time of a glimpse it turned golden, like Agaratz’s, then back to ill-tempered ochre – he might have imagined it but he knew he had not. He drew till the frieze extended across the lit surface of the wall to the edge where darkness began and the beasts filed away into the mountain. His frenzy of drawing only stopped when Agaratz’s piping ceased.

He subsided to the floor.

“Now I paint, Urrell.”

Holding a lump of greasy blacking, and balancing on his club shank with the delicacy of a bird, Agaratz underscored Urrell’s outlines, picked out features, touched in the shaggy flanks, hinted at the sweep of tusks, till the mammoths stood out in the torchlight.

With reddle he doodled a deer and a pony, beneath the frieze, neither larger than a man’s hand, both ones Urrell recognised – animals from long ago, before he had met Agaratz.

“Agaratz, how do you know that deer, that horse?”

But already Agaratz was gathering up their things to leave.

Old Mother, were you that lead cow?

CHAPTER 21

W
hen Urrell revived he was deep in the pine-needle and bracken litter of home cave, huddled with Rakrak. Instantly wakeful he expected the torchlight, the mammoth frieze he had drawn, but as instantly knew he was mistaken. Wrapped in a pelt, he lay with Rakrak’s forepaws solicitously on him, as though she had been waiting for him to come round. A strong smell of body sweat issued from the fur wrapping when he stood up, teetering on the springy litter. He felt thin, feeble, and could not understand why he was in such a state at all.

He parted the hangings of the alcove. Agaratz was at his usual place, by the fire, carving by the light of a torch, with Piura curled on some old furs as near the embers as she could without singeing herself. The air of the main cave felt chill after the sweaty wrap in the alcove.

“Ho, Urrell. Good. You much sick. Now better.”

It was a longish speech for Agaratz, yet did not reveal why he had been ill, how he had got out of the mammoth cave or back home. He knew then, and he knew firmly, that the mammoth cave had not been an illusion, one of Agaratz’s tricks: it was graven in his mind. Nothing Agaratz did was going to fool him this time. With a determination that surprised him, he decided there and then to put the matter out of his mind, away from Agaratz’s reach, so that later, when he was better, he would return alone and find the cave, squirm back in and rediscover his frieze, his very own frieze. Agaratz would not foil him this time.

“Eat, Urrell.”

He shuffled to the fire, still in his pelt wrap, his legs trembly, body shivery, but his mind unwontedly clear and bright.

Hot venison lay on the slab. Agaratz had hunted while he lay comatose.

He wondered how long he had lain thus. Instead of asking he bit into a hunk of meat and with it chewed a whole head of garlic. There were onions and scallion bulbs laid out too as though expecting his arrival. The concert of flavours held his full attention. Some nuts and seeds, autumn’s last offerings, were also set out. He munched on, deliberately, methodically, making up for lost time to fill out the hollows in his body. No thoughts of mammoths, caves, fungus-food or wild dances entered his mind, or if any did they were dismissed as fast as they came.

No, this time Agaratz would not learn of his resolve to retrace his steps.

On a frame he saw his leggings, jerkin, skins and even moccassins hanging where Agaratz must have put them when he had fallen ill. They were the same old worn and greasy things, creased with use. However, he realised there was something amiss with them; not a trace of the mud he had wriggled through in that funnel to the rock chamber remained…

While Urrell devoured his food, half out of his pelt by the fire, Agaratz left the cave. When the bison hide was lifted, Urrell could see the snow was half gone – during his sickness winter had moved into the short spring of the north. How long must he have lain senseless since that foray to the mammoth cave?

Agaratz returned with a pouchful of mushy snow.

“Urrell, now need clean. You stand.”

He stood, two handspans taller than Agaratz, a lanky youth turning into a man.

Agaratz nodded, approvingly. Then with handfuls of snow and tufts of fern and dried grass he scoured Urrell’s flinching body from top to bottom. There was no let up. With a woman’s skill he scrubbed away a winter’s grease and dander, enlivening Urrell’s blood till he glowed.

“Now dress, Urrell.”

Instead of his old leathers Agaratz handed him a new set of garments, cut and sewn while he had been unconscious – a tunic, kirtle, leggings, cap, moccassins – all assembled and adorned here and there with quills and tassles, as for a special occasion. He donned his outfit, its soft inner leather pleasurable on his newly scoured skin, a suit of clothes made to mark a turning point in his life in the unspoken scheme of things by which Agaratz lived.

Within days Urrell’s strength returned. They went on brief outings, mainly to gather green stuff, shoots of herbs, the first bulbils of the allium plants that throve in pockets of earth where the snow first melted away. Overhead, skeins of geese honked on their way to elsewhere. Soon herds of bison, horses, flocks of deer and wild sheep would pour back over the plains for the summer grazing, calving and plenty. Their main occupation was carving. Agaratz seemed in haste to make as many necklets, pierced disks, antler points as time allowed. He decorated shoulder blades, femurs, antlers, horns with scenes and designs from a world unknown to Urrell: lion and deer entwined, bison running with aurochs, strange flightless fowl sometimes, bears and tigers, and creatures that Urrell had never heard tell of, even in the fearful tales recited by tribelets in those winter quarters by the sleety sea. When asked, Agaratz gave them names that meant nothing to Urrell. They might have been drawn from a bestiary of another time, known only to his mentor.

One evening, when Agaratz took his pipe and played, Urrell looked about for his mammoth flute, inwardly surprised for not having given it a moment’s thought all these days since his illness, as though it had been a figment of the mind, or part of a mammoth dream. He began to look for it along the ledges, under piles of objects heaped against cave walls, like a dreamer pursuing something forever just out of reach, a finger’s length ahead of his clawing grasp, beyond the tip of recollection. While he was searching thus, in mounting exasperation and panic, he distinctly heard Agaratz play the notes of the mammoth dance. He glanced at Agaratz, to be met with that teasing sidelong look, the yellow eye mischievously mocking, akin to the glance of the lead cow in the frieze he had drawn. Then the notes were gone and Agaratz was looking at him.