Martin Walker - The Caves of Perigord

“Daughter-Little Moon.” It was the voice of her father, the Keeper of the Horses.

“Father.” Her reply was instinctive. Angry with herself for breaking silence she called out, “Why are you here. What do you want?”

He showed himself, standing alone at the cave mouth, his arms stretched out a little from his body to show that his hands were empty.

“I mean you no harm,” he called, and walked up the passage toward them.

“Far enough, old friend,” said Deer, as the Keeper reached the low wall of stones. The older man’s eyes darted to the sketches on the passage walls as the dawn outside strengthened into day. “How many are outside with you?”

“Many,” he said. “The Keepers, the hunters, the leaders of the woodsmen and flint and fishermen. And your mother, Moon.”

“So many?” she said.

“We have lost our cave. We have lost everything that made us.”

“There are other caves,” said Deer, an arrow notched in his bow. He kept looking at the empty passage behind Moon’s father. “The storm took your cave, not me. Not us.”

“The storm came in anger at what you did. That is what the Keepers have decided. You must come back and make everything as it was.”

“You would give me to the Keeper of the Bulls?” spat Moon. “He would not want a woman heavy with Deer’s child. And you would not want a daughter who would be a Keeper and paint with your fellowship.”

“You are having a child?” he said gently. “My grandchild.”

“Look beside you, Father,” said Moon. “The bison and the bear are your daughter’s work.”

They saw that he had aged as he peered at the paintings in the passage.

“How did you find us?” asked Deer.

“After you left, the chief hunter saw that a log had gone and guessed you went down the great river. He followed you, but found no track, until by chance he found people at the great rock who had seen you pass. He went on searching, and coming back, searching farther each time. Then he found a place where there had been a barrage of trees, and began scouting, thinking that is where you would have stopped. He saw your fire, watched you, and came back to summon the rest of us. It has been a long journey, the longest of my life.”

“We will not come back,” said Deer.

“Then I fear the others will seek to kill you,” said Moon’s father. “They are frightened and angry. They want life to be as it was.”

There was an impatient shout from the cave mouth. Moon’s father turned and called for them to stay back. A head appeared, the chief hunter, and then darted back. Deer smelled smoke, and knew that his fire had been moved to the cave mouth and they were using branches to fan the smoke into the passage. They could be smoked out. He had not thought of that. The Keeper of the Horses began to cough.

“You had better go, Father,” said Moon.

“No, little one. I would hold you again, and see your work.”

Deer considered, remembering the kindness of this man, and his love of painting, and then stepped back, inviting him in. “As Moon’s father, as my friend and teacher, you are welcome here,” he said formally. He crouched behind his puny wall. The smoke was less here.

Inside the cave, the smoke was still thin enough for the old man to see the great landscape and then he stood stock-still as he caught sight of the two great portraits on the end wall.

Deer and Little Moon, side by side, human but on the scale of a great bull, and he tottered as if he might faint.

“What have you done?” he demanded of his daughter, his eyes daring in bafflement from the flesh and blood woman before him and Deer’s giant image of her on the wall. His voice was appalled. “This is wrong …” he said weakly, and then muttered, as if to himself, “but it is wonderfully wrought.”

“Deer painted me,” said Moon. “I painted him.”

“You? Did this?” he whispered. The smoke was hanging heavily in the cave, and Deer’s eyes were watering. Another angry shout came from outside, and then an arrow flashed out of the smoke and snapped on a rock of Deer’s low wall. He moved to his left, so that the rock would cover his body when he drew his bow. Another arrow came, higher this time, and bounced off the side of the passage to clatter inside the cave. He glanced back. Moon and her father, their arms around each other, were huddling against the side wall.

Suddenly, the passageway darkened, and he drew his bow and shot into the smoke. A cry of pain. Then a pause, and then it darkened again, and he shot twice to no effect, seeing a black bulk bearing down on him with spears on each side, and realized that they had taken their skins and stretched them over a wooden frame as a shield. He dropped the bow, took his ax in his right hand and Moon’s spear in his left, and waited.

They were as blind as he, but he was closer to his target, and as the spear points came above his wall his ax flashed down onto each of them, and he jabbed the spear down low beneath the shield to hit the unprotected legs. A foot crashed down on his spear and tore it from his hand. The leather shield was charging into him, and he scythed his ax as he went down, feeling it jar as it hit rock. And then there were men all over him, lashing his arms and legs with thongs, and they dragged him down the passage by his hair into the fierce sunlight and the clean air. He gasped in pain as they hauled him over the coals of the fire and then propped him against the rock.

A shadow of a man stood before him, a man who had once been big and strong, but whose flesh now hung in folds over wasted muscles. Where the bones jutted from the skin, there were weeping sores, and the hands were stiffened claws. Only the eyes were fierce and strong beneath the eagle’s headdress. The Keeper of the Bulls was a dying man, just as Moon’s sketch had foretold, and in his hand was the great club with the beaked head.

Two young men brought Moon out of the cave, firmly but gently enough, and her father limped after them. Deer knew them both, his brothers of the ceremony that had made them men. Around him were faces he had known since his childhood, Keepers and hunters, and Moon’s mother hurrying to embrace her daughter, her eyes wide in surprise at the bulge of the child.

“I will not come back,” said Deer, and spat blood and what felt like a tooth from his mouth, repeating himself to say it more clearly.

“No more will I,” shouted Moon.

“You have bewitched us with evil,” said the Keeper of the Bulls, his voice eerily familiar. “You have destroyed our cave and put the sickness upon me. Our hunters find no game and the fish escape our nets and the children cry with hunger. All this you have done.”

“We destroyed nothing,” cried Deer. “You brought evil upon the people. You with your pride and ambition. You brought the new worship. You tried to fool the fates with your false omens of eagles. You set yourself up as lord of the skull, lord of the skies. You put on the head of a beast. You are the evildoer. You destroyed the old customs. You tried to take Moon against her father’s consent. You brought down the sickness upon yourself, the rocks upon the cave, the anger upon the people. It was your madness that we fled.”

“What you destroyed, we made,” called Moon, in a strange high voice, chanting the words, her head held high and her eyes looking far away across the trees and into the morning sky. “What you broke down in lust and anger, we built up in love.

“What you destroyed, we made,” she repeated. “Show them, my father. Show them what had been done under the hand of the Great Mother.”

And the Keeper of the Horses led them one by one into the passage and into the marvel of the cave, and as Moon continued staring far into the sky, Deer watched their awed and frightened faces as they emerged. The Keeper of the Bears was stiff with shock, or was it outrage? The Keeper of the Ibex gazed keenly at Deer, and called to him, “All your work?” And Deer shook his head and said that Moon had shared in it. The Keepers huddled in silence. The young hunters looked uncertainly at Moon. None of them, clearly, knew what to do. The anger and violence of the storming of the cave had passed. Deer’s attack upon the Keeper of the Bulls had sobered them. Moon’s stance and bearing in her pregnancy and chanting as if the Great Mother were speaking through her had awed them.