Michael Crichton - Eaters of the Dead

Now I went to Herger, speaking of my plight and I said to him: “This King is not such a fool as I have taken him to be.”

In reply, Herger said: “You are wrong, for he is a fool, and does not act with sense.” And Herger said he would arrange for my departure with the King.

Here was the manner of it. Herger sought the audience of King Rothgar in private, and said to the King that he was a great and wise ruler whose people loved and respected him, by virtue of the way he looked after the affairs of the kingdom and the welfare of his people. This flattery softened the old man. Now Herger said to him that of the five sons of the King, only one survived, and he was Wulfgar, who had gone to Buliwyf as messenger, and now remained far off. Herger said that Wulfgar should be summoned home, and that a parry for this purpose be arranged, for there was no other heir save Wulfgar.

These things he told the King. Also, I believe he spoke some words in private to the Queen Weilew, who had much influence over her husband.

Then it happened at an evening banquet that Rothgar called for the fitting out of a ship and a crew, for a voyage to return Wulfgar to his kingdom. I requested to join the crew, and this the old King could not deny me. The preparation of the ship took the space of several days. I spent much time with Herger in this interval. Herger had chosen to remain behind.

One day we stood upon the cliffs, overlooking the ship on the beach, as it was prepared for the voyage and fitted with provisions. Herger said to me: “You are starting upon a long journey. We shall make prayers for your safe-keeping.”

I inquired whom he would pray to, and he responded, “To Odin, and Frey, and Thor, and Wyrd, and to the several other gods who may influence your safe journey.” These are the names of the Northmen gods.

I replied, “I believe in one God, who is Allah, the All-Merciful and Compassionate.”

“I know this,” Herger said. “Perhaps in your lands, one god is enough, but not here; here there are many gods and each has his importance, so we shall pray to all of them on your behalf.” I thanked him then, for the prayers of a nonbeliever are as good as they are sincere, and I did not doubt the sincerity of Herger.

Now, Herger had long known that I believed differently from him, but as the time of my departure drew close, he inquired many times again of my beliefs, and at unusual moments, thinking to catch me off my guard and learn the truth. I took his many questions as a form of test, as Buliwyf once tested my knowledge of writing. Always I answered him in the same way, thus increasing his perplexity.

One day he said to me, with no show that he had ever inquired previously: “What is the nature of your god Allah?”

I said to him, “Allah is the one God, who rules all things, sees all things, knows all things, and disposes all things.” These words I had spoken before.

After a time, Herger said to me, “Do you never anger this Allah?”

I said: “I do, but He is all-forgiving and merciful.”

Herger said: “When it suits his purposes?”

I said that this was so, and Herger considered my answer. Finally he said this, with a shaking head: “The risk is too great. A man cannot place too much faith in any one thing, neither a woman, nor a horse, nor a weapon, nor any single thing.”

“Yet I do,” I said.

“As you see best,” Herger replied, “but there is too much that man does not know. And what man does not know, that is the province of the gods.”

In this way I saw that he would never be persuaded to my beliefs, nor I to his, and so we parted. In truth, it was a sad leave-taking, and I was heavy-hearted to depart from Herger and the remainder of the warriors. Herger felt this also. I gripped his shoulder, and he mine, and then I set out upon the black ship, which carried me to the land of the Dans. As this ship with her stout crew slipped away from the shores of Venden, I had view of the gleaming rooftops of the great hall of Hurot, and, turning away, of the gray and vast ocean before us. Now it happened

The manuscript ends abruptly at this point, the end of a transcribed page, with the final terse words “ nunc fit ,” and although there is clearly more to the manuscript, further passages have not been discovered. This is, of course, the purest historical accident, but every translator has commented upon the odd appropriateness of this abrupt ending, which suggests the start of some new adventure, some new strange sight, that for the most arbitrary reasons of the past thousand years will be denied us.

AS WILLIAM HOWELLS HAS EMPHASIZED, IT IS A rather rare event that causes any living animal to die in such a way that he will be preserved as a fossil for centuries to come. This is especially true of a small, fragile, ground-living animal such as man, and the fossil record of early men is remarkably scanty.

Textbook diagrams of “the tree of man” imply a certainty of knowledge that is misleading; the tree is pruned and revised every few years. One of the most controversial and troublesome branches of that tree is the one usually labeled “Neanderthal Man.”

He takes his name from the valley in Germany where the first remains of his type were discovered in 1856, three years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species . The Victorian world was displeased with the skeletal remains, and emphasized the crude and brutish aspects of Neanderthal man; until now the very word is, in the popular imagination, synonymous with all that is dumb and bestial in human nature.

It was with a kind of relief that early scholars decided that Neanderthal man had “disappeared” about 35,000 years ago, to be replaced by Cro-Magnon man, whose skeletal remains were presumed to show as much delicacy, sensitivity, and intelligence as the Neanderthal skull showed monstrous brutishness. The general presumption was that the superior, modern Cro-Magnon man killed off the Neanderthals.

Now the truth of the matter is that we have very few good examples of Neanderthal man in our skeletal material-of more than eighty known fragments, only about a dozen are complete enough, or dated carefully enough, to warrant serious study. We cannot really say with any certainty how widespread a form he was, or what happened to him. And recent examination of the skeletal evidence has disputed the Victorian belief in his monstrous, semihuman appearance.

In their 1957 review, Straus and Cave wrote: “If he could be reincarnated and placed in a New York subway-provided he were bathed, shaved, and dressed in modern clothing-it is doubtful whether he would attract any more attention than some of its other denizens.”

Another anthropologist has put it more plainly: “You might think he was tough-looking, but you wouldn’t object to your sister marrying him.”

From here, it is only a short step to what some anthropologists already believe: that Neanderthal man, as an anatomical variant of modern man, has never disappeared at all, but is still with us.

A reinterpretation of the cultural remains associated with Neanderthal man also supports a benign view of the fellow. Past anthropologists were highly impressed with the beauty and profusion of the cave drawings that first appear with the arrival of Cro-Magnon man; as much as any skeletal evidence, these drawings tended to reinforce the notion of a wonderful new sensibility replacing the quintessence of “brute benightedness.”

But Neanderthal man was remarkable in his own right. His culture, called Mousterian-again, after a site, Le Moustier in France-is characterized by stoneworking of quite a high order, much superior to any earlier cultural level. And it is now recognized that Neanderthal man had bone tools as well.