Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Loyd- loa continued his hike uphill. The fragrance of coffee blossoms hovered over everything, wonderfully fresh after the rain. Where was Agarou going? If the loa riding him tried to take him very far, he—his body—would collapse. (You can ’t ride a dead horse.) He had worn himself out crawling through the habiline caves, and a forced diet of chicken innards was not likely to counteract his body’s fatigue. Then Loyd heard himself laugh. Or was Agarou laughing through him, having found his ignorance of the mechanism of possession amusing? His body would do whatever Agarou demanded for as long as Agarou spurred and controlled it. (You can ride a dead horse—at least until its last vestiges of mind have decayed into insentient randomness.) Loyd resigned himself to a long hike, and an even longer captivity.

At last the horse came to a palisade of mastodon skulls, sabre-tooth tiger tusks, and chalicothere skeletons twenty or thirty feet high. These bones were locked together like pieces of an enormous ivory puzzle, grim and dazzling in the lightning-riven night. Loyd- loa approached them, intent on finding a solution. He gripped a pair of weather-polished tusks and swung between them into the labyrinthine heart of the puzzle. Inside the barrier, he ducked and climbed and twisted to find passage through the bones. A spur on a set of wildebeest horns stabbed him in the side, and he cried aloud, Let me out of here! His plea was for escape from both Agarou and this treacherous ivory maze. I’m in the picket of sablier trees, not a pile of interlocking tusks and antlers, Loyd thought, more coherently. And he was. The image of a bone-surrounded Mount Tharaka had disguised the reality of the Haitian mountain. It was Agarou who preferred the surrealism of the ancient African past, and because of Agarou’s ascendancy, Loyd had not seen the sablier hedge. Well, they were through it now, scrambling uphill in the open toward the shrub-lined cut where the entrance to the caves was hidden. Agarou-on-Loyd halted in a three-point stance and in a gust of ozone-heavy wind looked downhill at Inagua Bay. Sea and savannah did their dizzying switch, a sail boat metamorphosing into an albino elephant and a flight of bats into a flock of prehistoric flamingos.

Then reality came back.

How will I see down there? Loyd wondered. His hand raised a flashlight to face level (an instrument he could not recall the god picking up), but when he thumbed its button, no beam shot forth. This won’t do, Loyd told the god of ancestors.

Agarou replied, Do gods need eyes to see in your material darkness? We possess the second sight of divinity.

But—

Shut up, nag. Nag me no more. And Agarou laughed at the timidity and lack of faith of his human horse, and yanked him into the bush through which Hector habitually entered the caves, and pushed him down a body-worn slide into total darkness and the breathy cool of the buried past.

I can’t see! Loyd cried to his vaudun rider.

Open your eyes, mon! Open your eyes!

Not realizing that they’d been closed, Loyd opened his eyes. He could see. What he saw, though, came as if by ultraviolet illumination. The cave walls glinted silver and purple-red, as if each rock fracture disclosed a sweating seam of liquid mercury or grape jelly. Also, in order to make out the size and shape of surrounding objects, Loyd had to look at them peripherally. A direct gaze dissolved into mist whatever he sought to view. So, to unlock the gloom’s ultraviolet secrets, he did many quick or slow double takes, lifting or lowering his eyes, ducking and feinting. He felt like a soul in hell.

Yagaza, Agarou corrected him: Africa. The afterlife.

Finally, he realized that Agarou had permitted his own consciousness to resume control of his body. He was still possessed—the loa had not dismounted, had instead just dropped the reins—but now his own peculiar Loyd-ness was free to direct his steps here or there in these weird caves. Agarou had retreated to a spectator’s place behind his eyes. (Undoubtedly, it was Agarou who allowed him to see.) Thus it was now Loyd’s will rather than the loa ’s that counted. My will be done, Loyd thought. My kingdom’s come, and it’s hell rather than heaven….

Shadows in the ultraviolet told him that he was not alone. Habiline wraiths encircled him, a hunting party of naked Early Pleistocene males. He walked in their midst in his glowing cambric baptismal gown, a sunlit saint in a pit of resurrected time. He told himself to stop, to turn back and climb out of the gloom just as he’d entered it—but the habilines about him carried him forward against his will. My will, he thought. I can’t do my will. I do theirs. And although he marched with them in apparent freedom, a head and a half taller than the tallest of the ghostly hominids, he had no real choice but to follow their lead and to wish he were less gaudily dressed and a good deal smaller. And when the habilines began to run, they pulled him along: He tottered over them like an effigy on a shoulder-borne float in a religious procession.

They were in the caves and also in an arroyo on the African veldt. The paintings that Loyd had already photographed spun by on the walls like fissures and fault lines, intrusions and alluvial deposits. The habilines tracked a potential kill, carrying bone clubs and stone knives. A two-legged shadow before Loyd threw its club, which disappeared end over end into darkness—to strike something that yelped in pain. In the wake of this yelp, more clubs flew. If Loyd could trust the piteous ensuing sounds, many of these tosses hit their target. Excitement built among the hominids. Loyd was pulled along faster than before.

A gravity well, he thought. A singularity. I’m being sucked into bottomless night with a horde of protohuman spirits…. Agile ghosts scampered away from him, toward their kill, releasing him confused and breathless to the dark. Now, if he wanted, he could turn and grope his way back to the exit. No. No, he couldn’t. Curiosity about what the habilines had wounded in this pocket of space-time had him in its grip. He had to see—if seeing it was—their mysterious victim. And so, in his blood-spattered robe, biting his split lip, he walked toward the place that the habilines appeared to have gone. Gradually, the odd red light visible all about them flooded this hidden place, and he pushed his way through the befuddled hunters to look down on their prey.

It was a monstrous hyena, a prehistoric specimen. Or else it was a large quasi-human creature with a hyena’s head. In the bad light, Loyd could not decide. Whatever it was, the weirdness of its anatomy had halted the habilines. It sat against an outcropping of rock like a man recovering from a long run: hyena or hominid? The head gave one message, the body another. Chest, arms, pelvis, and legs suggested a deformed primate, but the ears, snout, and teeth said hyena… or dog… or jackal. The eyes had a pleading human twinkle that also confused things. The habilines knew that no wounded hyena had ever assumed this manlike posture, and they were chary of the beast.

Once, Loyd realized, something like this had actually happened. With Agarou’s blessing, I’m witnessing what a real band of habiline hunters witnessed in Africa two million years ago. For them, this is an archetypal event. It defined them as human—before the advent of speech—in a spiritual or metaphysical sense. And they know it…. Exhausted and bleeding, the hyena-hominid pulled itself to its feet. It towered over the hunters. It was taller than Loyd too, if only by a little. Although by every objective sign, the creature appeared to be at the mercy of the habilines, they made no attempt to deal it a death blow. The creature commanded their awe. Humbling them by its height and its indifference to its own suffering, it wholly disarmed them. Loyd was frightened. He felt like running, but the habilines, expecting revelation, held their ground. This eerie stand-off continued.