Authors: John Hart
Before dawn, chilled, he was on his way again. He half expected to meet a wounded bison, hunters crouching to slay it, a kindly crookback holding out a venison haunch…
U
rrell’s puzzlement deepened: how could he not recognise the cliffs, outcrops, trees if he had foraged so far afield from camp – he could not be that far away from the entrance to the cavern, could he? It was trance-like, this ever-treading weary progress among fallen rocks, scrub, the outfalls of the bluffs overhead. A few wild apples, small red crabs, their acid juice oddly vivid, seemed to startle him into a greater awareness, making him truly awake.
Then, suddenly, there were the familiar clumps of trees lining the rim of that long descent he had made, it seemed long ago, with Agaratz when they had arrived to camp by their tree and the hidden hearth stones which Agaratz had known about, but how? He had never thought to ask.
Rakrak saw him first. Her yelps of greeting and dance of welcome brought faces to stare from shelters as he wove his way past. He must look a wraith to them. Even those who knew him seemed startled. Could he have been absent so long? Given up for lost?
Agaratz rose from his fireside. “Ho, Urrell, you eat now.”
The food was hot and ready, as for an expected guest. Urrell scarcely gave it a thought. He was suddenly utterly famished, the hunger suspended all those days, gnawing at his insides like a living creature with a hunger of its own.
“Soon games, Urrell, wrestles, throw spears, girls dance.” If those were the tests and ordeals that Agaratz had trained him for, and the youths who had cringed and snivelled in the caverns were to be his opponents, Urrell felt he had little to fear.
While he gorged, Agaratz gave the wand his complete attention. He turned it over, stroked the shaft, scrutinised each tiny carving, fingered the head, even smelt it. The yellow eyes darkened as he bent over it, more crookbacked than Urrell remembered. He held up the wand before him. Then said something to the air.
Urrell knew enough of Agaratz’s shifting, subtle language to tell that these words to the air were not part of it, nor perhaps language at all. The sounds were addressed over and above the wand, which Agaratz held horizontally, at shoulder height.
While this was happening people had been creeping from shelters, alerted by the wanderer’s return, emboldening one another forward to form an edgy half-moon of staring faces. Urrell’s absence, while the other youths had come out of the cave, must have been noticed, he thought, with an agreeable little tingle of self-importance.
However, there was nothing for them to see, except Agaratz’s shaggy shape, motionless, holding aloft a baton as if to ward off something invisible. The wait went on till the onlookers began to shuffle; a boy fidgeted; an infant nuzzled to suckle; the crescent of attention wavered. People drifted off.
But a gasped ‘oh’ from the lingerers brought drifters scurrying back. The wand, still held aloft, was emitting smoke from both ends, as if blown by something inside the shaft, threatening to make it burst into flame. With a little gesture of showmanship Agaratz released the stick in mid-air, where it stayed, to a greater round of ‘ohs’ tinged with a frisson of fear.
Urrell had paused in his eating, a meat bone in his hand, as agog as anyone. Rakrak crouching beside him, whimpered. What next? This trick of Agaratz’s surpassed any other. Urrell wondered how he did it, or if the power to hang in the air lay in the wand itself, that wand which had led him out of the labyrinth, had warmed in his grip when he had been so alone deep in the black entrails of the mountain.
For his next trick Agaratz simply reached out to the wand, caught it and twirled it playfully at the crowd, sending them helter-skelter downhill. His grin as he laid the wand on the grass in the shelter was meant for Urrell alone, his apprentice.
“Agaratz, where is Piura?”
“Piura no more.” He waved a hand into the faraway and Urrell knew his lioness, Old Mother’s facesake, was gone. No cairn would mark where.
A
garatz asked nothing of Urrell about his adventures in the cavern depths though his hardships had been severe, deserving of notice. Only the wand interested Agaratz.
As he thought about it, Urrell suspected that Agaratz had known all along what he, Urrell, was undergoing in those dark galleries, the scenes he had witnessed and the perils he had experienced. If so, why did the wand so intrigue him? In an obscure way Urrell felt that he had been sent to fetch this ceremonial object from where it had lain beyond Agaratz’s reach, within the domain of the cave men and their horned leader. Would the wand be missed from its companions? He imagined hide-clad searchers pouring out of the cave mouth in his pursuit. Memories of the mammoth tusks in the pit rose before his mind’s eye, and he relived his boyhood’s terrified scurry up the pine-log from the guardians of the tusks as they had closed in on him. He glanced at the wand lying on the turf, half-expecting a sign from it, a squirm, a puff of smoke. But it lay where Agaratz had left it, its flint-hard shaft dull in the hearth’s glow. It looked safe enough. Should he touch it?
As he wondered whether to do so, flute music stopped him in mid-move, notes from Agaratz in answer to his thoughts? At first these notes were ones Urrell knew, often played, but then the melody rose and wandered beyond anything he could have drawn from the ivory. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the wand bend, arching itself. A trick too many: it lay dead straight when he looked directly at it. Quickly he turned to Agaratz but the flute player was engrossed in his music-making, pausing only to say, “Dawn, begin games,” before resuming his playing.
No trumpet call heralded the competitions, yet as the sun rose all was astir in the encampment. Urrell got ready, ate, and following the instructions of Agaratz rubbed his upper body with goose grease that his mentor produced from a pouch. He checked his lances. Then Agaratz kneaded his back and shoulders, twisted his head till his neck bones cracked and his skin tingled.
“Now you ready, Urrell.”
They set off downhill.
An autumnal briskness filled the air. Watchers were banked many deep on the sloping ground to witness events. Children ran in and out, mothers held infants, men leant on staves or spears.
In the open area before the cave mouth youths waited to compete. Urrell joined them. Inside the cave mouth stood men in furs, faces painted with stripes, some masked, and in their midst the towering figure of the horn-wearing leader clad from head to foot in skins, his face masked. He held his trumpet in one hand and an antler-roarer in the other.
The first pair of young men faced up to wrestle. They pulled and tussled till one fell. Another pair entered the rink. Again they wrestled till one bested the other. It seemed simple enough and when Urrell was summoned he stuck his lances in the ground and stepped forward. Though his opponent was taller Urrell floored him with a feint taught him by Agaratz. A ripple of applause ran round the crowd. Two officiants led Urrell to one side with the other winners.
H
alf the day went by like this. Then pairs of winners were pitted against each other. Again Urrell had little difficulty in upsetting his man. He glanced round the crowd to see if Agaratz was watching how his coaching was being successful, but there was no sign of him or of Rakrak.
His third bout proved harder. Stronger contestants were surviving the eliminations and this contender stood a handspan above Urrell. He had observed Urrell’s technique and was ready to parry his feints. They clasped each other round the shoulders and swayed one way and the other, the big man trying to kick Urrell’s legs from under him. Urrell stumbled onto one knee and it would have been over but for a surge of strength that came to him as from nowhere; he slid his grip to the man’s waist and in an extraordinary effort lifted him off his feet and threw him on his back, winding the fellow.
The feat earned a murmur of applause from the throng as Urrell rejoined the winners’ group. It was a subdued murmur. He sensed surprise among the onlookers at his unexpected throw and that it challenged something or someone. When he looked round for Agaratz to seek an explanation, the hunchback was again nowhere to be seen.
From the skin-clad officiants there came no corresponding congratulatory murmur. Behind his mask the horned man’s eyes glittered.
A pause in proceedings followed, a sort of break for refreshments. At their shelter Urrell found no-one, though the fire was banked and food laid out on leaves.
Hostility filled the air on his return. Urrell sensed that the onlookers awaited something to happen, that his outsider’s successes had gone against expectations. His true test was to come.
Instead of the bullroarer’s whir, and the blaring trumpet that had announced the earlier wrestling heats, there came a long echoing resonance from the mouth of the cave. Deep in its black throat huge hollow logs were being drummed. The resonance was enough to make Urrell wonder if blocks of stone might not be shaken loose from the cliff face on to the entrance. Old men during his boyhood by the winter sea had told of caverns sealed by falls, trapping people inside, whose cries could be heard by those with ears to hear pressed up against the rocks.
All of a sudden, with a clarity that surprised him, Urrell realised that the drumming was not intended for him, or his fellow competitors, but for the missing Agaratz. The apprentice would be tested in the absence of the master.
It was to be a spear-throwing contest.
He gripped his three lances and waited. At one end of the green a mark was being set up, a log with a human, lifelike shape and a white blaze in the middle.
Young men stood about, with lances. Most wore face paint, some had feathers in their hair, others were bedizened with splashes of colour and fur that Urrell assumed marked them out by clan or blood group. He recognised several from the band of tall dark men whose leader Agaratz had slain with that single spear-cast.
In the pushing and shoving for position Urrell received knocks and jabs in the ribs from ill-intentioned lance butts. On one he recognised the pattern of the javelin thrown at him and Agaratz aboard their raft on the River Nani. He had been recognised too.
The jostlers threw first, bullying aside competitors, eager to show off their greater skills. Lesser youths stood back, awed, in little clan groups. Urrell, belonging to no group, stood alone. He watched as the javelins flew at the mark, set at a good range. Several missed, some fell short to jeers from the crowd. Urrell began to realise that it would take him a powerful throw to reach the target, let alone hit it, but he felt confident enough to let other youths throw first. Few managed the range or hit true. Round them swaggered the swarthy louts, putting them off their aim. This, too, Urrell noted, with rising anger.
Then, as he stepped forward, two of the bullies jostled him and one muttered, in a broken version of Urrell’s language, “Where’s your lion?” The other let out a wolf ’s howl in mockery of Rakrak – a single swipe of Urrell’s lance butt to the man’s midriff crumpled him on its way to the leering face of his companion, cracking the fellow’s jaw. Fired up, without faltering, Urrell drew the lance back and let it fly at the target. No need to aim or wait. A sort of exultation seized him. He hurled both other lances, one behind the other, almost before the first reached the mark, knowing with unthought certainty that both would follow the first to the target. All three lances stuck in the blaze side by side.
Silence from both the crowd and competitors greeted this feat of marksmanship, all eyes accompanied him to the log to retrieve the lances, the little strut in his stride the only hint that he, Urrell, allowed himself to signal that the apprentice had at last achieved his master’s
poodooeic.
To intensified drumming, two fur-clad men from the cavern stepped out and paced off a distance between contestants, Urrell at one end in a small group, a larger one at the other made up of what looked to Urrell like bigger, older men, swaggerers and shovers every one. It was to be a one-to-one contest, with javelins. A yelled signal and one of the tall, striped-faced men stepped forward and shouted a challenge or an insult. His face-streaks reminded Urrell of the clan which had wished to kill Rakrak, that day on the plains. Watching the man’s bravado, he was pleased how little it affected him. A glance at the crowd for a glimpse of Agaratz and Rakrak was met by faces set with the cruel glee of watchers at a fight.
On a signal from the horned giant the duels began. Urrell held back to assess what was to happen, letting others from his side face the first flight of javelins. Two were hit, one seriously in the thigh. Their own throws did no damage. He of the bravado, encouraged by this poor showing, redoubled his strut up and down, raising his lances over his head and yelling defiance. Then, his parading before his group over, the man stepped forward and hurled a javelin straight at Urrell.
It was well aimed. Urrell saw the ripple of muscle in the hurler’s shoulder; he saw the slight curve in the flight of the javelin; he noticed a tassel near its middle; he had time to dodge and catch the shaft as it flew past him. The crowd was hushed by the feat. Then, like Agaratz before him, Urrell gripped the shaft in both hands and snapped it with a strength that he knew was not his.
A gasped ‘oh!’ from the onlookers greeted this. Glancing round, Urrell again hoped to catch sight of Agaratz in the crowd. Instead, cruel faces now looked at him fearfully. What next? He looked towards the master of ceremonies for a hint: was he to skewer his opponent, as he knew he easily could with his new-found strength? Or what?
Then, for his ear only, Urrell distinctly heard the notes of his own mammoth-tusk flute. It was playing one of Agaratz’s ineffable, unseizable melodies. He knew then and there what to do. Holding his three spears over his head he strode across the grass to the group of his opponents, who shrank away, unable to guess his intention. Urrell went up to the one who had tried to kill him with his spear-throw and tapped him on the shoulder with his own spear tip, counting coup. After this, he walked along the line of others, supremely confident, and tapped each in turn on the shoulder before strolling back to his place across the sward to await events.