Robert Silverberg - House of Bones

After the evening meal Paul starts tapping on his drum and chanting quietly to himself, and Marty picks up the rhythm, chanting too. And then the two of them launch into that night’s installment of the tribal epic, which is what happens, sooner or later, every evening.

It all sounds very intense but I don’t have a clue to the meaning. They sing the epic in the religious language, which I’ve never been allowed to learn. It has the same relation to the everyday language, I guess, as Latin does to French or Spanish. But it’s private, sacred, for insiders only. Not for the likes of me.

“Tell it, man!” B.J. yells. “Let it roll!” Danny shouts.

Paul and Marty are really getting into it. Then a gust of fierce stinging cold whistles through the house as the reindeerhide flap over the doorway is lifted, and Zeus comes stomping in.

Zeus is the chieftain. Big burly man, starting to run to fat a little. Mean-looking, just as you’d expect. Heavy black beard streaked with gray and hard, glittering eyes that glow like rubies in a face wrinkled and carved by windburn and time. Despite the Paleolithic cold, all he’s wearing is a cloak of black fur, loosely draped. The thick hair on his heavy chest is turning gray too. Festoons of jewelry announce his power and status: necklaces of seashells, bone beads, and amber, a pendant of yellow wolf teeth, an ivory headband, bracelets carved from bone, five or six rings.

Sudden silence. Ordinarily when Zeus drops in at B.J.’s house it’s for a little roistering and tale-telling and butt-pinching, but tonight he has come without either of his wives, and he looks troubled, grim. Jabs a finger toward Jeanne.

“You saw the stranger today? What’s he like?”

There’s been a stranger lurking near the village all week, leaving traces everywhere—footprints in the permafrost, hastily covered-over campsites, broken flints, scraps of charred meat. The whole tribe’s keyed. Strangers aren’t common. I was the last one, a year and a half ago. God only knows why they took me in: because I seemed so pitiful to them, maybe. But the way they’ve been talking, they’ll kill this one on sight if they can. Paul and Marty composed a Song of the Stranger last week and Marty sang it by the campfire two different nights. It was in the religious language so I couldn’t understand a word of it. But it sounded terrifying.

Jeanne is Marty’s wife. She got a good look at the stranger this afternoon, down by the river while netting fish for dinner. “He’s short,” she tells Zeus. “Shorter than any of you, but with big muscles, like Gebravar.” Gebravar is Jeanne’s name for me. The people of the tribe are strong, but they didn’t pump iron when they were kids. My muscles fascinate them. “His hair is yellow and his eyes are gray. And he’s ugly. Nasty. Big head, big flat nose. Walks with his shoulders hunched and his head down.” Jeanne shudders. “He’s like a pig. A real beast. A goblin. Trying to steal fish from the net, he was. But he ran away when he saw me.”

Zeus listens, glowering, asking a question now and then—did he say anything, how was he dressed, was his skin painted in any way. Then he turns to Paul.

“What do you think he is?”

“A ghost,” Paul says. These people see ghosts everywhere. And Paul, who is the bard of the tribe, thinks about them all the time. His poems are full of ghosts. He feels the world of ghosts pressing in, pressing in. “Ghosts have gray eyes,” he says. “This man has gray eyes.”

“A ghost, maybe, yes. But what kind of ghost?”

“What kind ?”

Zeus glares. “You should listen to your own poems,” he snaps. “Can’t you see it? This is a Scavenger Folk man prowling around. Or the ghost of one.”

General uproar and hubbub at that.

I turn to Sally. Sally’s my woman. I still have trouble saying that she’s my wife, but that’s what she really is. I call her Sally because there once was a girl back home who I thought I might marry, and that was her name, far from here in another geological epoch.

I ask Sally who the Scavenger Folk are.

“From the old times,” she says. “Lived here when we first came. But they’re all dead now. They—”

That’s all she gets a chance to tell me. Zeus is suddenly looming over me. He’s always regarded me with a mixture of amusement and tolerant contempt, but now there’s something new in his eye. “Here is something you will do for us,” he says to me. “It takes a stranger to find a stranger. This will be your task. Whether he is a ghost or a man, we must know the truth. So you, tomorrow: you will go out and you will find him and you will take him. Do you understand? At first light you will go to search for him, and you will not come back until you have him.”

I try to say something, but my lips don’t want to move. My silence seems good enough for Zeus, though. He smiles and nods fiercely and swings around, and goes stalking off into the night.

They all gather around me, excited in that kind of animated edgy way that comes over you when someone you know is picked for some big distinction. I can’t tell whether they envy me or feel sorry for me. B.J. hugs me, Danny punches me in the arm, Paul runs up a jubilant-sounding number on his drum. Marty pulls a wickedly sharp stone blade about nine inches long out of his kit-bag and presses it into my hand.

“Here. You take this. You may need it.”

I stare at it as if he had handed me a live grenade.

“Look,” I say. “I don’t know anything about stalking and capturing people.”

“Come on ,” B.J. says. “What’s the problem?”

B.J. is an architect. Paul’s a poet. Marty sings, better than Pavarotti. Danny paints and sculpts. I think of them as my special buddies. They’re all what you could loosely call Cro-Magnon men. I’m not. They treat me just like one of the gang, though. We five, we’re some bunch. Without them I’d have gone crazy here. Lost as I am, cut off as I am from everything I used to be and know.

“You’re strong and quick,” Marty says. “You can do it.”

“And you’re pretty smart, in your crazy way,” says Paul. “Smarter than he is. We aren’t worried at all.”

If they’re a little condescending sometimes, I suppose I deserve it. They’re highly skilled individuals, after all, proud of the things they can do. To them I’m a kind of retard. That’s a novelty for me. I used to be considered highly skilled too, back where I came from.

“You go with me,” I say to Marty. “You and Paul both. I’ll do whatever has to be done but I want you to back me up.”

“No,” Marty says. “You do this alone.”

“B.J.? Danny?”

“No,” they say. And their smiles harden, their eyes grow chilly. Suddenly it doesn’t look so chummy around here. We may be buddies but I have to go out there by myself. Or I may have misread the whole situation and we aren’t such big buddies at all. Either way this is some kind of test, some rite of passage maybe, an initiation. I don’t know. Just when I think these people are exactly like us except for a few piddling differences of customs and languages, I realize how alien they really are. Not savages, far from it. But they aren’t even remotely like modern people.

They’re something entirely else. Their bodies and their minds are pure Homo sapiens but their souls are different from ours by 20,000 years.

To Sally I say, “Tell me more about the Scavenger Folk.”

“Like animals, they were,” she says. “They could speak but only in grunts and belches. They were bad hunters and they ate dead things that they found on the ground, or stole the kills of others.”