Eric Brown - Rites of Passage

That day, in the darkness of the cave, I made love to Nohma with greater passion than ever before, making her shout and squeal and hoping that Kenda could hear everything.

At one point during the night I woke, in need of emptying my bladder. I moved to the entrance of the cave. The sun was on the other side of the sky now, and soon twilight would be descending. I was surprised to find Kenda crouching in the natural arch of the rock, staring down the long valley.

I stood beside him and pissed across the hot rock.

When I’d finished, I leaned against the rock wall and asked, “Why did you decide to join us, Kenda?”

He stared down the valley. “As I said, there is safety in threes. In twos, if one of you were to have an accident, then the one remaining might lose heart, and courage, and weaken. With three, that is less likely to happen. The two survivors would give each other support, succour.”

“Fine words, “I said. “But I for one do not intend to meet with an accident.”

He did not reply immediately. But then he shifted his gaze from the valley and stared at me. He smiled. “You can never be too sure about such things,” he said.

I pushed myself from the wall, moved back into the shadows and pulled Nohma’s nakedness to me.

We set off at twilight, moving through a pass in the hills, and all night walked the length of a rock-strewn valley slung between two peaks. Towards dawn, with the sky roseate in the east, we made our way through another pass — scouting all the while for suitable cover. Unlike the previous day, we found none until we had passed between the peaks and emerged on the other side. Here it was I who found the long, low crevice between two great slabs of rock — high enough to allow us to stand, and deep enough so that we could sleep in its nethermost shadows.

We ate sitting on the flat slab of rock overlooking the high plateau that we would cross that evening. I was feeling pleased with myself at having found the cave, levelling the score between Kenda and me.

As I chewed dried crab meat, Nohma leaning against me, I swept an arm at the expanse before us. “Hundreds and thousands of winters ago,” I said, “all this, everything we can see apart from the mountain peaks themselves, was submerged beneath more water than you can imagine. Old Tan tells of the time, many winters ago, when explorers found the bones of armless animals that lived in the water — great long things twenty times as big as the biggest crab! Imagine that!”

Beside me Nohma was staring into the distance, wide-eyed. Kenda looked unimpressed.

“And you know how Old Tan adds fanciful details to his stories,” he said. “For all we know there was no water filling the valleys; there were no dwelling places on the mountaintops. And there were certainly no people living there.”

I wondered if he were arguing against me because he really believed what he was saying, or because he wanted to ridicule me before Nohma.

I stared at him. “Very well, then, what do you think, Kenda? Where did we come from? Was there water filling all the valleys, all across the face of the Earth?”

He sneered at me. “Old Tan’s a fool, an entertaining fool, but still a fool. And Old Hath before him — whose stories were even more fanciful and absurd! They tell such tales to amuse children, to while away the daylight hours so we don’t get bored and fight amongst ourselves.”

“That’s rubbish!” I said. “Their stories are true, or are based on truths. Who knows, even greater things than what they tell might have happened, long ago. Wonderful things! Why, Old Hath says that our people, many winters gone, came across the shell of a… a thing … that moved across the desert like… like a crab on wheels!”

Kenda flung his head back and snorted with laughter. “Listen to him. A giant crab on wheels! Whatever next, Par? You’ll be telling us that our ancestors could fly!”

Enraged, I stared at Nohma. “What do you think. Nohma? You believe, don’t you? You believe that there was more than just what we have now? You believe that once we lived on the mountaintops and had more water than we could possibly drink, and we had things that moved across the deserts on wheels!”

Nohma was watching me, as I ranted, with a sweet accepting expression on her face. She smiled and said, “To be honest I don’t know what to believe. But I do believe that, one way or the other, we might find out over the course of our initiation. Now, I’m tired. Are you coming, Par?”

And so saying, she rose from her cross-legged position, unfolding herself with a sinuous grace, and padded deep into the cave’s shadows.

Ignoring Kenda, I pushed myself upright and joined her.

On the third night we crossed the silver sands of the high plateau, passed through a range of serried hills and came to yet another saddled plateau hammocked between two lofty mountain peaks. Ahead we made out, against the full moon, the rise and fall of the mountains beyond which Old Old Old Marla had made her discoveries.

I tried to discern the shapes of dwellings on the distant skyline, but the horizon was too far away to see anything but the line of jagged mountain peaks.

“Where are your dwellings and wheeled crab-things now, Par?” Kenda sneered. “Come to that, where are all the other things that would be lying around if we had covered the Earth in our millions?”

I ignored his taunts and trudged on, staring ahead.

His words made me uneasy. Where was the evidence of teeming life on Earth? Surely millions of people would have left behind some trace of their existence? When you looked about the Valley where we lived now, and looked closely at the Caves, you could see all manner of things that denoted our presence, from carved bones to discarded wood, from the way we farmed in stepped terraces to the trees we planted in orderly rows.

But all there was at this rarefied elevation, between the mountain peaks, was sand and more sand, and tumbled rocks and giant boulders — no sign that humankind had come this way at all, never mind settled and tamed these wild lands.

Perhaps, I fell to thinking as we slogged on through the drifting sands and daybreak approached, as the heat increased and the humidity became almost drinkable, and the crab shell weighed heavily on my shoulders — perhaps Kenda was right and all the fabulous stories told by Old Tan were no more than lies spun to while away the daylight hours and keep our people amused. Perhaps humankind had always scrabbled for existence in caves at the very bottom of the world.

Perspiration ran in a cataract down my chest and soaked the waistband of my loincloth. Every step was a painful labour. The crab shell weighed twice as much, I swear, as it had when we set off. It was the fourth night of our travels and we were halfway across the silver plateau.

Kenda called a halt. We caught up with him and squatted, breathing hard. We looked ahead.

Kenda voiced my fears. “Daybreak is about two hours off. How long before we reach the next range?”

We stared ahead, at the jagged line of mountain peaks that sliced into the night-sky. The foothills were many hours away, and I said as much.

“So why don’t we walk on for another hour or so, and then pitch camp for the night?” He dug his bare heel into the sand and said, “The ground is soft. We’ll dig a trench, as deep as we can, and arrange the shells across the top. This way we’ll be in better shade than merely lying under our shells above ground.”

We nodded; what he said made sense, though I resented him for taking the initiative. I saw Nohma regard Kenda with renewed respect.

We drank a little water and then set off again.