Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

A slab of meat, a haunch from one of the great animals of the clearing perhaps, lay on top of the fire. More butchered meat lay in the cave, and skins, stripped but bloodied, evidently not yet treated, lay in a neat pile beyond. The sizzle of fat and the rich aroma of the meat made Zena suddenly feel hungry herself. If time was swimming here, how long did her body think it was since lunch?

And the people: she counted eight of them, six men and women, one adolescent, one infant. A small band, a family perhaps. It was hard to judge their height as they sat close together in their circle, swathed in their furs, unstitched wraps that obscured their bodies. She thought the adults were short, stocky, surely no more than five feet tall.

A woman reached over now and began to pluck at the tangled beard of one of the men, picking out bits of meat, what looked like insects. Her wrap fell away, and where her arms were exposed Zena saw how her flesh was scarred with what looked like healed cuts, and a discoloured patch like a burn. And she was muscular, her biceps bulging, like an Olympic shot-putter. The woman’s face, as she worked quite tenderly at the man’s beard and hair, was odd: the nose broad and flattened, the chin receding, the forehead shallow over a heavy brow. Yet she was somehow beautiful, Zena thought. Calm. Strong. Enduring.

Zena watched for a timeless time. They had not noticed her. Occasionally the people spoke, in what sounded like short, sharp sentences.

Then they shifted, as one man left the circle and went behind the rock bluff, perhaps to urinate. Zena was able to see now what the little circle of people had surrounded. In a shallow pit in the ground, scraped out and lined with a kind of bowl of leather, another child lay, a mere infant, unmoving, swaddled in fur. The child, no more than a year old perhaps, was evidently dead, Zena saw immediately, and she thought she could smell a whiff of decay. Yet the little pit was adorned with what looked like trophies: bits of horn and antler, and one complete skull – of a unicorn, she thought, a heavy, horse-like head with a single tusk protruding from the nose.

There was movement from beyond, in the shadows of the cave. Another figure came forward, naked, the body hairless, shivering. He stumbled out of the dark, muttering, and with his hands held out; he seemed to be asking for water. But when he opened his mouth Zena saw he had oddly long teeth – a very carnivorous mouth – a feature that distorted the jaw.

At first, despite the deformed jaw, Zena thought this must be a normal man – normal? of modern appearance, at least – slim, perhaps six feet tall, not stocky like the others but well built: like a rugby player rather than a shot-putter, perhaps. But his forehead was oddly flat, his head misshapen. He seemed injured, his bare skin bruised and scraped, and one leg dragged. Zena was astonished that, naked, he wasn’t disabled by shivering. But his eyes were dull, as if he were concussed.

The group watched him approach, considered his outstretched hands. The adults shared a glance, though no words were spoken. Zena thought she could read their unspoken message. It’s time.

Two of the women lunged at the tall outsider, and wrestled him to the ground. Struggling, he began to scream. Massive fists fell like hammers on an anvil.

And a hand was clamped over Zena’s mouth, and she was dragged back.

A face loomed over her: Nathan’s, of course, gaunt, bearded, caked with dirt and dried blood. He whispered, “If I let you go will you keep quiet?”

She just glared back.

He uncovered her mouth and stepped back cautiously. He was dressed in rags, she saw now, the remains of his clothing supplemented by scraps of fur. He wore his boots, but they had lost their laces – an odd detail. He looked gaunt, wiry, wasted. His face was pale, and seemed to shine in the shade, as if the bone were glowing within.

“Try that again,” she hissed, “and I’ll bite your finger off.”

He grinned. “Isn’t it marvellous, though?”

She longed to punch him. But she turned to look again at the people in the clearing. Nathan had dragged her a little deeper back in the trees, and she had only an occluded view of the camp site under the bluff.

“They accept me,” Nathan said now, peering out as if enviously. “I think. I bring them bits of food I’ve trapped. Hares and such. Once I fixed a spear – set the stone blade back on its shaft with a bit of gum and twine. They do make complex tools, unlike the other fellows – by complex I mean made of more than one thing, stone blade and wooden shaft stuck together, as opposed to just a wooden stick.”

“What other fellows?”

“ Him . The tall chap with the bad teeth.”

“Bad teeth? Is that all it is? But the shape of his head… And what of these others?” Their conversation was a thing of urgent whispers. “Since when have we had savages camping out in our Wood, Nathan?”

“Savages?” He grinned, looking feral himself. His gums were bleeding, Zena saw. “Not that. Very sophisticated fellows, these, and very successful – of their time.”

Zena was no expert on prehistory, but she had visited the museums. “I think I know what you mean.”

“Neanderthals,” he whispered, as if in delight. “I think they are Neanderthals. The shape of the skull, the jaw, the squat bodies. The very fact that they are living here, in the cold climate that suits them. It all fits, you see.”

“What climate? Nathan, you know as well as I do – or perhaps you don’t, given the time you’ve spent in here – that Holmburgh hasn’t seen a flake of snow this winter.”

“Not outside,” he said easily. “But here, you see, it’s different. Look – everyone says this bit of forest is a relic of the Ice Age. Beyond the advance of the glaciers, never cleared by the farmers. Isn’t it logical that where a scrap of the Ice Age persists, its denizens might too?”

Zena scoffed. “What, in this bit of wood? And for all this time – what, thirty thousand years? Just eight or ten of them?”

“What’s the alternative? After all they could be self-sufficient in here, in this Wood, a handful of hunters. Generation after generation. You saw the herds – I saw the way you came, past the clearing. The Neanderthals were here a long time before us – three hundred thousand years, the palaeontologists say, expert hunters who roamed all over a frozen Europe. If they always lived in small, scattered bands, like this –”

“It makes no sense,” Zena said, abruptly bewildered by the impossible illogic of this place. “This Wood makes no sense. A three-mile forest that contains a clearing five miles wide, at the minimum. Where it snows only here, and nowhere else. Where relics from thirty thousand years ago live on, and nowhere else.” She looked at her brother. “And what of the storm?”

“Storm?”

“In the summer. The tall structure you saw, the explosion – the multiple lightning strikes…”

But Nathan was paying no attention. He watched, fascinated, as the heavy people subdued the tall, terrified, lone man. “They’re getting ready, Zee-zee. Look, I think we’re watching a sort of funerary rite. They’re honouring the child they lost – I saw it, it got a cough in the autumn, and wasted quickly. And what they will do now – I’ve seen it before… Can’t you feel it? Can’t you sense the rightness of it?”

One of the Neanderthal types, a heavy-set man, was picking up a shard of bone that had been sharpened and chipped to give a kind of serrated edge, like a rough saw. The man on the ground struggled harder, if still feebly, but massive hands held him down in the littered dirt.

“You’ve seen what? What is this, Nathan? What are they going to do?”