Robert Silverberg - House of Bones

“This is dumb,” I tell the Neanderthal. “You shouldn’t be doing this.”

He smiles again. You don’t understand shit, do you, fellow?

We are past the garbage dump now, past the butchering area. B.J. and his crew are at work on the new house. B.J. looks up when he sees me and his eyes are bright with surprise.

He nudges Marty and Marty nudges Paul, and Paul taps Danny on the shoulder. They point to me and to the Neanderthal. They look at each other. They open their mouths but they don’t say anything. They whisper, they shake their heads. They back off a little, and circle around us, gaping, staring.

Christ. Here it comes.

I can imagine what they’re thinking. They’re thinking that I have really screwed up. That I’ve brought a ghost home for dinner. Or else an enemy that I was supposed to kill. They’re thinking that I’m an absolute lunatic, that I’m an idiot, and now they’ve got to do the dirty work that I was too dumb to do. And I wonder if I’ll try to defend the Neanderthal against them, and what it’ll be like if I do. What am I going to do, take them all on at once? And go down swinging as my four sweet buddies close in on me and flatten me into the permafrost? I will. If they force me to it, by God I will. I’ll go for their guts with Marty’s long stone blade if they try anything on the Neanderthal, or on me.

I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about any of this.

Then Marty points and claps his hands and jumps about three feet in the air.

“Hey!” he yells. “Look at that! He brought the ghost back with him!”

And then they move in on me, just like that, the four of them, swarming all around me, pressing close, pummelling hard. There’s no room to use the knife. They come on too fast. I do what I can with elbows, knees, even teeth. But they pound me from every side, open fists against my ribs, sides of hands crashing against the meat of my back. The breath goes from me and I come close to toppling as pain breaks out all over me at once. I need all of my strength, and then some, to keep from going down under their onslaught, and I think, this is a dumb way to die, beaten to death by a bunch of berserk cave men in 20,000 B.C.

But after the first few wild moments things become a bit quieter and I get myself together and manage to push them back from me a little way, and I land a good one that sends Paul reeling backward with blood spouting from his lip, and I whirl toward B.J. and start to take him out, figuring I’ll deal with Marty on the rebound. And then I realize that they aren’t really fighting with me any more, and in fact that they never were.

It dawns on me that they were smiling and laughing as they worked me over, that their eyes were full of laughter and love, that if they had truly wanted to work me over it would have taken the four of them about seven and a half seconds to do it.

They’re just having fun. They’re playing with me in a jolly roughhouse way.

They step back from me. We all stand there quietly for a moment, breathing hard, rubbing our cuts and bruises. The thought of throwing up crosses my mind and I push it away.

“You brought the ghost back,” Marty says again.

“Not a ghost,” I say. “He’s real.”

“Not a ghost?”

“Not a ghost, no. He’s live. He followed me back here.”

“Can you believe it?” B.J. cries. “Live! Followed him back here! Just came marching right in here with him!” He turns to Paul. His eyes are gleaming and for a second I think they’re going to jump me all over again. If they do I don’t think I’m going to be able to deal with it. But he says simply, “This has to be a song by tonight. This is something special.”

“I’m going to get the chief,” says Danny, and runs off.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I say. “I know what the chief wanted. I just couldn’t do it.”

“Do what?” B.J. asks. “What are you talking about?” says Paul.

“Kill him,” I say. “He was just sitting there by his fire, roasting a couple of birds, and he offered me a chunk, and—”

“ Kill him?” B.J. says. “You were going to kill him?”

“Wasn’t that what I was supposed—”

He goggles at me and starts to answer, but just then Zeus comes running up, and pretty much everyone else in the tribe, the women and the kids too, and they sweep up around us like the tide. Cheering, yelling, dancing, pummelling me in that cheerful bonesmashing way of theirs, laughing, shouting. Forming a ring around the Scavenger Man and throwing their hands in the air. It’s a jubilee. Even Zeus is grinning. Marty begins to sing and Paul gets going on the drum. And Zeus comes over to me and embraces me like the big old bear that he is.

“I had it all wrong, didn’t I?” I say later to B.J. “You were all just testing me, sure. But not to see how good a hunter I am.”

He looks at me without any comprehension at all and doesn’t answer. B.J., with that crafty architect’s mind of his that takes in everything.

“You wanted to see if I was really human, right? If I had compassion, if I could treat a lost stranger the way I was treated myself.”

Blank stares. Deadpan faces.

“Marty? Paul?”

They shrug. Tap their foreheads: the timeless gesture, ages old.

Are they putting me on? I don’t know. But I’m certain that I’m right. If I had killed the Neanderthal they almost certainly would have killed me. That must have been it. I need to believe that that was it. All the time that I was congratulating them for not being the savages I had expected them to be, they were wondering how much of a savage I was. They had tested the depth of my humanity; and I had passed. And they finally see that I’m civilized too.

At any rate the Scavenger Man lives with us now. Not as a member of the tribe, of course, but as a sacred pet of some sort, a tame chimpanzee, perhaps. He may very well be the last of his kind, or close to it; and though the tribe looks upon him as something dopey and filthy and pathetic, they’re not going to do him any harm. To them he’s a pitiful bedraggled savage who’ll bring good luck if he’s treated well. He’ll keep the ghosts away. Hell, maybe that’s why they took me in, too.

As for me, I’ve given up what little hope I had of going home. The Zeller rainbow will never return for me, of that I’m altogether sure. But that’s all right. I’ve been through some changes. I’ve come to terms with it.

We finished the new house yesterday and B.J. let me put the last tusk in place, the one they call the ghost-bone, that keeps dark spirits outside. It’s apparently a big honor to be the one who sets up the ghost-bone. Afterward the four of them sang the Song of the House, which is a sort of dedication. Like all their other songs, it’s in the old language, the secret one, the sacred one. I couldn’t sing it with them, not having the words, but I came in with oom-pahs on the choruses and that seemed to go down pretty well.

I told them that by the next time we need to build a house, I will have invented beer, so that we can all go out when it’s finished and get drunk to celebrate properly.

Of course they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but they looked pleased anyway.

And tomorrow, Paul says, he’s going to begin teaching me the other language. The secret one. The one that only the members of the tribe may know.