Eventually there had come a day when the skinnies had decided they wanted the place where the Old Man’s people lived, their riverbank home.
It had been simple for them. They had killed most of the men, and some of the women. They chased the survivors away, to forage for themselves as best they could. By the time the Old Man returned, from a solo expedition to the river, the skinnies were burning the huts and cleaning out the caves, places where the Old Man’s grandmothers’ bones lay a hundred generations deep.
After that, the people wandered aimlessly, sedentary creatures forced to be nomads. If they tried to set up a new base, the skinnies would quickly break it up again. Many of them starved.
At last, inevitably, they had been drawn to the camps of the skinnies. Even now, many of his kind still lived on, but they were like the boneheads who followed Jahna’s encampment, where they lived like rats on garbage, and even then only as long as the skinnies tolerated them. Their eventual fate was already obvious.
All save the Old Man. The Old Man had stayed away from the dismal skinny places. He was not the last of his kind. But he was the last to live as his ancestors had before the coming of the moderns. He was the last to live free.
When Mother had died, just sixty thousand years before the birth of Christ, there had still been many different kinds of people in the world. There had been Mother’s humanlike people in parts of Africa. In Europe and western Asia lived robust folk like Pebble, like Neandertals. In eastern Asia there were still bands of the skinny, small-brained walkers, the Homo erectus types. The old hominid complexity had reigned still, with many variants and subspecies and even hybrids of the different types.
With the revolution started in Mother’s generation, with the great expansion that had followed, all this changed. It was not genocide; it was not planned. It was a matter of ecology. The different forms of humans were competing for the same resources. All over the world there had been a wave of extinctions — human extinctions — a wave of last contacts, of regret-free good-byes, as one hominid species after another succumbed to the dark. For a time the last of the walkers had hung on in isolation on Indonesian islands, still living much as Far had, so long ago. But when the sea levels dropped once more, the bridges to the mainland were reestablished, and the moderns crossed over — and for the walkers, after a long and static history spanning some two million years, the game was up.
And so on. The outcome was inevitable. And soon the world would be empty of people — empty, save for just one kind.
After he had lost his family the Old Man had fled from the skinnies, heading ever west. But here, in this coastal cave, the Old Man had reached the western shore of Europe, the fringe of the Atlantic. The ocean was an impassable barrier. He had nowhere left to go.
Jahna’s encounter with the Old Man was the last contact of all.
Rood, silhouetted against the sunset, looked dusty, hot. At his side was Olith, Jahna’s aunt. Rood’s eyes were wide, as he took in what he saw in the cave.
For Jahna, it was like snapping awake from a nightmare. She dropped the bit of hide she had been working, ran forward across a cave floor that suddenly seemed filthy and cluttered, and hurled herself into her father’s arms. There she wept like a very small child, while her father’s hands hesitantly patted the crude bonehead wrap she wore.
The bonehead roused. The shadows of the two adults, cast by the setting sun, striped over him. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. Then, bleary with sleep, heavy with meat, he struggled to get to his feet, growling.
Rood pushed the children to Olith, who held them. Then he raised a cobble over the struggling bonehead’s cranium.
Jahna cried, “No!” She struggled free of Olith and grabbed her father’s hand.
Rood stared down at her. And she realized she had a choice to make.
Jahna thought about it for a heartbeat. She remembered the mussels, the seals, the fires she had built. And she looked at the ugly, lumpy brow of the bonehead. She released her father’s arm.
Rood let his arm fall. It was a heavy blow. The bonehead fell forward. But bonehead skulls were thick. It seemed to Jahna that the Old Man could have got up, fought on even now. But he didn’t. He remained in the dirt of his cave, on his hands and knees.
It took four, five blows before Rood had gotten through his skull. Long before the last blow Jahna had turned away.
They stayed in the cave one more night, with the fallen bonehead slumped on the floor, blood pooled beneath his shattered skull. In the morning they wrapped up what was left of the seal meat, and prepared to begin the journey back. But before they left Jahna insisted they dig a hole in the ground, wide but shallow. Into the hole she dropped the bones of the infant she had found, and the big carcass of the bonehead. Then she kicked the dirt back into the hole, and tamped it down with her feet.
After they had gone the gulls came. They pecked at the bits of seal meat, and the patch of dried blood in the entrance of the cave that faced the sea.
CHAPTER 14
The Swarming People
Anatolia, Turkey. Circa 9,600 years before present.
I
The two girls, lying side by side, nibbled at their kernels of wild grain.
“So you like Tori better than Jaypee,” said Sion.
Juna, at sixteen a year younger than her sister, flicked her hair out of her eyes. Her hair was a pale blond, strikingly bright. She said carefully, “Maybe. I think he likes me better than Jaypee does.”
“But you said Tori was a runt. You said you liked the way Jaypee’s hair falls when he runs, and those big thighs he has, and—”
“I know what I said,” Juna said uncomfortably. “But Tori has a better—”
“Cock?”
“A better personality,” Juna forced out.
Sion’s pealing laughter billowed out over the empty space. A dog, slumbering in the shade of the men’s hut, deigned to move one eye to check out the disturbance, then fell back asleep.
The girls were surrounded by the bare, trampled dust of the village. The place was dominated by the great slumped form of the men’s hut, a ramshackle construction of timber and reeds. The women’s huts were smaller satellites of this rude giant. Gravelly snoring from within the men’s hut told the girls that the shaman was sleeping off another hard night of beer and visions. Nobody was moving: not the dogs, not the adults. Most of the men were out hunting; the women were dozing in their huts with their infants. There weren’t even any children around.
Sion sprinkled a little more ground fennel on her grain. The fennel’s aromatic oil was actually a defense evolved by the plant before the death of the dinosaurs, intended to make its leaves too slippery for the legs of boring, nibbling insects; now the result of that ancient evolutionary arms race flavored Sion’s snack. “You are joking,” said Sion. “Juna, I love you dearly. But you are the most shallow person I know. Since when has personality mattered a dried fig to you?”
Juna felt her face burn.
“Ah. There’s something you aren’t telling me.” Sion studied Juna’s face with a hunter’s expert knowledge of her prey. “Have you two lain together? ”
“No,” Juna snapped.
Sion was still suspicious. “I didn’t think Tori was lying with anybody yet. Apart from Acta, of course.” Acta was one of the oldest of the men — not to mention the fattest — but he continued to prove his strength with his wily leadership of the hunts, and so he continued to assert his rights over the boys and young men. “I know Tori’s getting sick of being poked with Acta’s stinking dick; that’s what Jaypee told me! Soon he’s going to want to be with a woman, but not yet—”