Evolution Page 34

  But she noticed some lumps of crimson rock scattered deeper at the back of the hollow. She picked them up, turning them over curiously. Their redness was bright in the daylight, and they were soft. They were lumps of ocher, the iron red of ferric oxide. Someone had been attracted by their color and, on impulse, brought them here.

  She saw scrapes of red on scattered basalt rocks at the back of the hollow: red the same color as the ocher, red like blood. Experimentally she pushed the ocher over the rock, and was startled to see more bloody streaks smear over the rock surface.

  For long minutes she played with the bits of ocher, not really thinking, her clever fingers working by themselves to add their own meaningless scribbles to the scrawls on the rock.

  Then she heard the hollers of the people as they started to drift back to their temporary base. She dropped the bits of ocher where she had found them, and made for her corner.

  But the palms of her hands were bright red: red like blood. For an instant she thought she had cut herself. But when she licked her palms she tasted salty rock, and the scraping of ocher came away.

  Red like blood. A tentative connection formed in her mind, a chink of light shining between her compartments of thought.

  She went back to the bits of ocher. Now she tried scraping them over the back of her hands, where she made a hatchery of lines, and on the healing pithecine cut on her shoulder, which she made bright red again.

  And she marked herself between her legs — marking her skin red like blood, as if she were bleeding, as she had seen her mother bleed.

  She went back to her corner and waited until the light faded. As the people tended and crooned to each other, she huddled over and tried to sleep.

  Someone approached: warm, breathing softly. It was Ax. She could smell the dusty scent of rock chippings on his legs and belly. His eyes were pits of shadow in the fading light. The moment stretched. Then he touched her shoulder. His hand was heavy and warm, but she shivered. He leaned toward her and sniffed quietly, scenting her just as had Brow before she had become separated from her family.

  She opened her legs, so he could see the “blood” in the fading light. She sat tense, watching him.

  Her life hung on his acceptance; she knew that. Perhaps it was that basic desperation and longing, a longing for him to see her as a woman, which had driven her to come up with this peculiar deceit.

  Unlike his forest-dwelling ancestors, Ax was a creature of sight, not smell; the message from his eyes overrode the warning of his nose. He leaned forward. He touched her shoulder, her throat, her breast. Then he sat beside her and his strong fingers began to comb through her tangled hair.

  Slowly she relaxed.

  Far stayed with Ax and his people for the rest of her life. But as long as she could, whenever she could — as she grew in wisdom and strength, as her children grew until they gave her grandchildren to protect and mold in turn — she ran, and ran, and ran.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Crowded Land

  Central Kenya, East Africa. Circa 127,000 years before present.

  I

  Pebble had found a yam vine. He bent and inspected it.

  He was eight years old, naked save for smears of ocher on his barrel chest and broad face. He pulled out a little grass from around the yam’s base. This was a spot for yam, not grass, and it was best to keep it that way.

  People had been here before to dig out these tubers. Perhaps he had even been here himself. At eight years old he had already covered every scrap of his people’s range, and he thought he remembered this spot, here between these eroded bluffs of sandstone.

  He took his digging stick. This was a heavy pole shoved through a hole crudely bored in a small boulder. Despite the tool’s weight, he lifted it easily, and he used the mass of the boulder to ram the digger’s point into the hard ground.

  Pebble was a solid slab of muscle built over a tough, robust skeleton. If Far, his long-dead, distant grandmother, had looked like a long-distance runner, Pebble might have been a junior shot-putter. His face was large, massive-featured, dominated by a great ridge of bone over his brow. He had a mountainous nose and large sinuses that gave his face an oddly puffed-out look. His teeth were flat-topped pillars of enamel. His skull, which would become considerably larger than Far’s, housed a large and complex brain — in fact comparable in size to a modern human’s — but it sat much more directly behind his face than a human’s brain would have.

  When he had been born, wet from the womb, Pebble’s body had been sleek and round, inspiring an odd image in his mother’s mind, a pebble worn by a stream. Names for people still lay far in the future — with just twelve people in Pebble’s group there was no need for names — but nevertheless this boy’s mother would often look on a glistening rock in a stream, and remember her child as he had been as a baby in her arms.

  Pebble, then.

  In this age there were many kinds of robust folk like Pebble’s spread through Europe and western Asia. Those who inhabited Europe would one day be called Neandertals. But just as in Far’s time, most of these new kinds of people would never be discovered, let alone understood, classified, linked to a hominid family tree.

  His were a strong people, though. Even at eight years old, Pebble performed work essential to his family’s survival. He wasn’t yet up to joining the adults on the hunts, but he could dig out yams with the best of them.

  The wind picked up a little, bringing him the delicious scent of wood smoke, of home. He went at his work with a will.

  Already his digging had broken up the earth. He plunged his hands into the dry ground and began exposing a fat tuber that looked as if it might go down a long way, perhaps as deep as two meters. He went back to his digging stick. Bits of dust and rock flew up, sticking to his sweat-covered legs. He knew what to do with yams. When he had the tuber he would cut off the edible flesh, but then replace the tuber’s stem and top in the ground so that it would regrow. His digging aided the yam in more subtle ways, too. He was loosening and aerating the soil, further fostering regrowth.

  His mother would be pleased if he brought home three or four fat tubers, ready to be thrown onto the fire. And yams were useful in a lot of other ways besides eating. You could use them to poison birds and fish. You could rub their juice into your head to kill the lice that crawled there…

  There was a crunching noise.

  Startled, Pebble pulled back his digging stick. He leaned forward, shielding his eyes from the sun’s brightness, trying to see what was down there in the hole. It could be some deep-burrowing insect. But he could see nothing but a scrap of rust brown, like a bit of sandstone. He reached down and, his clumsy fingers stretching, grabbed the scrap and pulled it to the surface. It was a ragged-edged dome, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. When he held it up before his face two empty eye sockets peered back at him.

  It was a skull. The head of a child.

  That was no great horror. Children died all the time. This was a harsh place: There was little pity to spare for the weak and hapless.

  But all the children who had died within Pebble’s own short lifetime had been put in the ground close to the huts. Like all the dead, they were buried to keep the scavengers from harassing the living. Perhaps this child was long dead, then. Perhaps its people had buried it here before Pebble was born, where the yam clump grew now.

  But the skull was oddly fine, light. Pebble weighed it in his hand. Its brow was a heavy lid of bone, from which a forehead sloped back almost horizontally. Pebble ran a hand over his own scalp and compared the slightly bulbous swelling of his forehead. There were tooth marks in the little cranium, he saw: precise puncture wounds inflicted by the teeth of a cat — but inflicted after the child was already dead, its body abandoned on the plain.

  Pebble could not know that he was holding the remains of the Brat, brother of Far, who had lived and died not far from here. The Brat had succumbed to his infant vitaminosis and died while still a child, without issue.
It would have been little comfort to the Brat if he could have known that one day, when his brief, forgotten life was already more than a million years gone, his small head would be cradled in the hand of a remote great-nephew.

  And the Brat would have recognized little of this landscape, the place where he had once played.

  The geological infrastructure of the Rift Valley — the plateau, the rocks, the volcanic mountains, the great sweep of the valley itself — had been left largely unchanged by time. But since Far’s time this had become a sparse, dry place. Scattered stands of acacia, leadwood, and wild laurel had replaced the denser thickets and forest pockets of the past. Even the grasslands were subtly different, great swaths of them dominated by a handful of fire-resistant species. Meanwhile, the great animal communities of the past had imploded. There was not an elephant to be seen across this great dust bowl, not an antelope or giraffe. It was as if life had crashed here. The place was depleted. Far would have been startled by its impoverishment.

  But the Brat’s wretched remains had left their mark on the world: a scrap of moisture trapped in that buried, upturned skullcap had been enough to help establish the yam.

  Incuriously Pebble closed his fist. The little skull was crushed to thin shards, and he let the dust fall back into the hole. He reached for his digging tool; there was still some root to be dug out.

  That was when he glimpsed the strangers.

  He crouched down behind a bluff, holding his breath.

  They were hunters; he could see that immediately. They were following an old elephant track. Elephants walked to water, and where there was water, there would be many animals, including the medium-sized creatures like deer that people hunted by preference.

  There were four of them, three men and a woman, all adults. As they walked the hunters’ legs swung powerfully, with their torsos tipped a little forward. It was a gait built for strength, not elegance or speed: the hunters had none of the fleetness of Far. Thick beards hid the men’s dark faces, and the woman had tied her long hair back with a bit of leather. Unlike Pebble this group wore clothes: just bits of hide, unsewn and tied around the body with strips of leather or plaited bark. Pebble could see the bite marks in the clothes. Leather was treated by chewing and stretching it with the teeth, and a major function of that big ridge of bone on Pebble’s brow was to provide an anchor for the jaws that must do such mighty work.

  And they carried weapons: narrow wooden throwing spears, and shorter, stubby thrusting spears, great logs of hardwood with slabs of stone stuck to the end with blobs of resin and leather ties. They were giants’ weapons that a human would have had trouble lifting, let alone wielding in anger.

  They were robust folk, people like Pebble’s kind. But Pebble could see ocher markings scrawled on the skin of their faces, hands, and arms. Where Pebble’s own adornment was made up of vertical lines — bars and stripes and bands, all pointing to the sky — these people wore a kind of clumsy Crosshatch, sketched by thick fingers.

  They were strangers. You could tell that by the markings. And strangers meant trouble. That was a law that worked as invariably as the rising of the sun, the waxing of the Moon.

  Pebble waited until the newcomers had passed out of sight behind a stand of sparse acacia. Then, as silently as his slablike body would allow him, he began to run for home. The yam tubers he had dug up lay abandoned on the ground behind him — with his digging stick.

  Pebble’s home was a kind of village, with four large huts set roughly around a clearing. And yet it was not a village, for his people lived not quite as any humans ever would.

  Pebble stood, panting, in the central clearing. Nobody was around. Close to the door of one hut a fire smoldered. The trampled ground was scattered with bone, vegetable debris, tools, mattresses of leaves and grass, trays of bark, pegs, wedges, a broken spear, discarded bits of leather. The place was a mess.

  The huts were crude and ugly, but serviceable. They had been built of thick saplings set in rough circles in holes in the ground. The gaps between the saplings were filled with rattan cane split into switches, and overlapping leaves, bunches of rushes, bark. The saplings were bent over together and their ends pushed over and under each other. It was a kind of weaving that Capo would have recognized, for five million years earlier he had made his treetop nests in much the same way: Every innovation of necessity was built on what had gone before.

  The huts were old. The people had lived here for generations. The dirt beneath Pebble’s feet was thick with the bones of his ancestors. The people felt safe here. This was their place, their land.

  But now, Pebble knew, all that might change.

  He raised his head to the washed-out sky. “U-lu-lu-lu-lu! U-lu-lu-lu-lu!…” It was a cry of danger, of pain, the first cry any child learned after the feed-me yell.

  Soon the people came running, from the huts, from the land beyond where they foraged and hunted. They gathered around Pebble in concern. There were twelve of them: three men, four women, three older children — including Pebble himself — and two infants in their mothers’ frightened grasp.

  He tried to tell them what he had seen. He pointed back to where he had seen the strangers, and ran a few paces back and forth. “Others! Others, others, hunters!” He began an elaborate performance, gesticulating, posturing, puffing himself up to walk like powerful hunters, even miming to show how they would smash in the people’s heads with their mighty fists.

  His audience were impatient. They turned away, as if eager to return to their foraging, or eating, or sleeping. But one man watched Pebble’s performance more carefully. He was a squat man even more powerfully built than most, and his face was distorted by a childhood accident that had smashed the cartilage in his great fleshy nose. This man, Flatnose, was Pebble’s father.

  Pebble’s language was sparse. It was just a string of concrete words with no grammar, no syntax. And, a million years after Far, talking was still basically a social skill, in fact used mainly for gossip. To convey detail or complex information, you had to repeat, use endless circumlocution — and mime, gesture, perform. Besides, Pebble had to convince his audience. It was hard for the adults to accept what Pebble had to say. They couldn’t see the strangers for themselves. He might be lying or exaggerating: He was, after all, little more than a child. The only way they had to gauge his sincerity was by the passion and energy he put into his performance.

  It was always this way. To get anyone to listen, you had to shout.

  At last Pebble gave up, panting, and sat squat in the dirt. He had done his best.

  Flatnose kneeled beside him. Flatnose believed his son: His performance had cost him too much to be lies. He rested his hand on his son’s head.

  Reassured, Pebble touched his father’s arm. There he found a series of scars, long and straight, following the line of the forearm. These scratches were the marks of no animal. Flatnose had inflicted them on himself, with the sharp blade of a stone knife. When he was older, Pebble knew he would join in the same game, the same silent, grinning self-mutilation: It was part of what his father was, part of his strength, and Pebble found it reassuring now to stroke those scars.

  One by one the other adults joined them.

  Then, the moment of silent acceptance over, Flatnose got to his feet. There were no words now. Everybody knew what had to be done. The adults and the older children — Pebble and a girl a little younger than himself — started to move around the settlement, gathering weapons. There was no particular order to the settlement, and weapons and other tools lay where they had last been used, amid piles of food, debris, ash.

  Despite the urgency the people moved sluggishly, as if even now reluctant to accept the truth.

  Dust, Pebble’s mother, tried to soothe her squalling baby as she gathered up her gear. Her loose, prematurely grayed hair was, as always, full of dry, aromatic dust, an eccentric affectation. At twenty-five she was aging quickly, and she limped when she walked, the effect of an old hunting wound that had never
healed right. Since then Dust had had to work twice as hard, and the cumulative effect showed in her stooped posture and careworn face. But her mind was clear and unusually imaginative. She was already thinking of the difficult times ahead. Watching her face, Pebble felt guilty at having brought this trouble down on her.

  There was a soft sigh, a flash. Pebble turned.

  In a dreamlike moment, he actually saw the wooden spear in flight. It was hewn from a fine piece of hardwood, thickest near the point and tapered back toward the other end, shaped to make it fly true.

  Then it was as if time began to flow again.

  The spear slammed into Flatnose’s back. He was thrown to the ground, the spear sticking straight out of his back. He shuddered once, and a burst of shit cascaded from his bowels, and a black-red pool spread under him, soaking into the dirt.

  For a heartbeat Pebble couldn’t take this in — the thought that Flatnose had gone so suddenly — it was as if a mountain had suddenly vanished, a lake evaporated. But Pebble had seen plenty of death in his young life. And already he could smell the stink of shit and blood: meat smells, not person smells.

  A stranger was standing between the huts, squat and powerful. He was wrapped in skins, and he held a thrusting spear. His face was daubed with crosshatched ocher marks. He was the one who had hurled the spear at Flatnose. And Pebble saw his own abandoned digging stick in the stranger’s hand. They had seen him at the yam stand. They had tracked his footsteps. Pebble had led them here.

  Full of rage, fear, and guilt, he hurled himself forward.

  But he went clattering to the ground. His mother had grabbed his waist. Lame or not she was still stronger than he was, and she glared at him, jabbering, “Stupid, stupid!” For an instant sanity returned to Pebble. Naked, unarmed, he would have been killed in an instant.

  A man burst out of the heart of the settlement. He was naked and he carried his own thrusting spear. He was Pebble’s uncle, and he hurled himself at the killer of his brother. The stranger fended off the first blow, but his assailant closed in. The two of them fell to the dirt, wrestling, each trying to get in a decisive blow or thrust. Soon they had disappeared in a cloud of blood-spattered dust. They were two immensely muscled beings using all their mighty strength against each other. It was like a fight between two bears.