Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

When she waved dismissal, the weathered, big-nosed visage crinkled with more laughter. It had been evident that his proposition was mere teasing. Quick to realize that the foreigner meant them no harm, and indeed could occasionally use her powers to relieve distress, the We were soon joking and frolicking in her presence. She was mysterious, true, but so was well-nigh everything else in their world.

“We shall go on,” she said.

Volatile, Aryuk sobered and agreed. “Wisest. If we make haste, we can be home before sundown.” He flinched. “Yonder is not our territory. Perhaps you know what ghosts prowl it after dark. I do not.” That mood also breezed away. “Perhaps I will knock down a rabbit. Tseshu”—his woman—“loves rabbit.”

He picked up the rudely chipped, almond-shaped stone he carried along, missile and knife and bone-cracker. Other tools were as primitive and little more specialized. The style traced to the Mousterian or a similar tradition, Neanderthal man’s. Of course, Aryuk was fully Homo sapiens, archaic Caucasoid; his ancestors had drifted here from western Asia. Tamberly had sometimes reflected on the irony that the very first Americans were closer to being white than anything else.

At a swinging, energy-conserving, mile-devouring pace, he and she had proceeded northwest. In the dome, she fast-forwarded. Why’d I stop for that scene? Nothing significant. Unless it’s the last of its kind for me, ever.

She let herself relive two more. Once she saw a herd of wild ponies, shaggy and long-headed, gallop on a ridge against the sky. Once she saw, afar, a herd of Pleistocene bison, the lead bull eight feet at the hump. To those mighty ones Aryuk sang a song of awe.

His folk were not really hunters. They took fish from the rivers and lakes with their hands or in crude weirs. They collected shellfish, eggs, nestlings, grubs, roots, berries in season. They snared birds, rodents, other small game. Now and then they came upon a fawn, calf, whelp, or upon a large carcass still edible; in the latter case they took the hide too. It was no wonder they were scarce and had left hardly a trace of their presence, even in lands far south of the glacier.

A flicker in the screen caught Tamberly’s eye. She stopped the playback, recognized the view, nodded. Restarting the record function, she moistened lips gone suddenly dry and said, “About noon, we reached what we were after.” Distorted molecules held a notation of the precise local time. “I will enter this unedited.” She could have done so in a fractional second, but decided to sit back and watch it through. Maybe she’d notice details that had escaped her before or think of a new interpretation. In any event, it was wise to refresh memory. At mission headquarters she was bound to get a skinningly intense debriefing.

Again she saw where she had been. The scattered woodlands of the seaboard were behind her. Watery though it was, this open country was better called steppe than tundra. Herbal growth spread like a carpet, dull greens occasionally interrupted by a few scrub willows or silvery patches of reindeer moss. In the offing were some birch, not much larger than the willows but densely clustered, vanguards of an invasion. Pools and sedgy marshes glinted manifold. Two hawks cruised the wind, theirs the only wings in sight; grouse, ptarmigan, and the rest must be lying as low as the muskrats and lemmings. The mammoths moved slowly, feeding, less than a mile away. Stomach rumbles rolled across the distance.

Aryuk heard her cry out. He tensed. “What is wrong?” he asked.

The screen showed her extended arm and the tiny figures at which her finger pointed. “There! Can you see them?”

Aryuk shaded his eyes, squinted, strained. “No, things blur away.” That savages all have keen sight is a superstition on a par with their all enjoying robust health.

“Men. And—and—oh, come.” The scene jounced. Tamberly had broken into a run. Aryuk tightened his grip on the hand ax and loped at her side, though fear stood naked on his face.

The strangers spied them, poised, briefly conferred, and sped likewise toward a meeting. Tamberly counted them: seven. That was as many adults as dwelt at Aryuk’s place, if you included the half-grown, and these were entirely male.

They did not make straight for her and him, but at an angle. Soon she could see their leader beckon, and altered her course accordingly. She recalled thinking between breaths: Yeah, they don’t want to alarm the mammoths. Must’ve been trailing them for days, skillfully harassing, to bring them into parts where they wouldn’t ordinarily go, an area poor in their kind of food but rich in mudholes and suchlike spots where hunters have a fair chance of trapping one and killing it.

They were stocky, black-haired, attired in leather coats, trousers, boots. Each carried a spear with a head of bone slotted to hold a row of flint bladelets, a cutting edge long and keen. At his waist hung a pouch, which doubtless bore provisions and a sharpened stone that served as a knife. Under the belt was a hatchet. A roll of hide across the shoulders must be a blanket. It wrapped two or three more lances. Readily accessible beneath the lashings was tucked a spearthrower of the grooved type. Stone, wood, antler, bone, skin were beautifully worked. As Tamberly and Aryuk neared, the men halted. They took loose formation, ready to fight.

No band of Tulat would have done that. Personal violence, including homicide, was not unknown among them, though rare. Collective conflict did not exist, whether in action or imagination.

Both parties stopped. “What are they?” Aryuk gasped. Sweat shone on his sun-darkened skin and he breathed hard, not because of the sprint. To him the unknown was always supernatural, terrifying unless he could come to terms with it. Yet she had seen him venture out on broken ice floes in a storm, to club a seal pup that would feed his family.

“I will try to find out,” she said, her voice not altogether steady. Palms raised, she walked toward the strangers; but first she had loosened her pistols in their holsters.

The peaceful approach eased them a trifle. Her vision flickered from one to the next. Beneath their individuality, she searched for underlying sameness, race. Twin braids framed broad countenances with naturally bronze complexions, almond eyes, strong noses, whiskers sparse or absent. Lines of paint patterned brows and cheeks. I’ m no anthropologist, she had thought amidst her heartbeats, but I’d guess these count as archaic or proto-Mongoloid. They have surely come from the west….

“Rich be your gathering,” she greeted as she reached them. The Tula language had no word for welcome, which was taken for granted. “What do you find lucky to tell me?” Certain revelations might give an opening to evil spirits or hostile magic.

The tallest of the men, almost her height, young but hard-featured and bold-mannered, trod forth to confront her. What purred and growled from his lips was incomprehensible. She signed as much, smiling, shrugging, shaking her head.

He peered. She understood how weird she must be to him, size, coloring, clothes, accouterments. But he showed none of the initial timidity of the We. After a moment, inch by inch, his free hand crept forward until the fingertips touched her throat. They moved downward.

She had stiffened, then stifled a lunatic impulse to laugh. Copping a feel, are you? The exploration moved over her breasts, belly, crotch. It remained moth-gentle and, she saw, impersonal. He was simply verifying that she was the female she seemed to be. What’d you do if I gave you a gotcha? She had suppressed that too. Avoid conveying any wrong ideas. When he had finished, she stepped back a pace.