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.
But more of the hunters came boiling out of the cover of the rock bluffs and trees. Men and women together, all armed with spears and axes; they were dirt-crusted, lean, hard-eyed. They had come hunting Pebble and his group, as if they were a herd of unwary antelope.
Pebble could see desperation in the eyes of the others. These newcomers were not nomads, not invaders by instinct, any more than Pebble’s people would have been. Only a dire catastrophe of their own could have forced them to this plight, to make them come into a new and strange land, to wage this sudden war. But now that they were here, they would fight to the death, for they had no choice.
There was a howl. The hunter who had taken on his uncle was standing now. One arm dangled, bloody and broken. But he was grinning, his mouth a mass of blood and broken teeth. Pebble’s uncle lay at his feet, his chest split open.
Already Pebble’s folk had lost two of their three adult men, Flatnose and his brother. They had no chance of resisting.
The survivors ran. There was no time to grab anything, no tools or food — not even the children. And the hunters fell on them as they fled, using the butts of their spears to fell and disable. The third man was cut down. The hunters caught two of the women, and the girl younger than Pebble. The women were thrown to the ground, face first, and the young men pulled their legs apart, jostling for the right to be first.
The others ran, on and on, until the pursuers gave up.
Pebble looked back the way they had come. The hunters were pawing through the settlement, the ground that had been Pebble’s ancestors’ for time out of memory.
There were five of them left from the village, Pebble realized. Two women, including his mother, Pebble himself and a smaller girl, and one of the infants — not Pebble’s sister. Just five.
Her face hard, Dust turned to Pebble. She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Man,” she said gravely. “You.”
It was true, he saw with horror. He was the oldest male left: of the five, only the squalling infant in the dirt at his feet was male.
Dust scooped up the motherless infant and held him close. Then she turned resolutely away from her settlement and began to stomp away to the north, her lame gait leaving uneven tracks in the dirt. She didn’t look back, not once.
Bewildered, terrified, Pebble followed.
II
The Pleistocene, this era of ice, was an age of brutal climatic turbulence. Droughts and floods and storms were commonplace: in this age a “once-in-a-century” climatic disaster came around every decade. It was a time of intense variations, a noisy time.
This created an environment that was intensely challenging for all the animals who inhabited it. To cope with the changes many creatures got smarter — not just hominids, but carnivores, ungulates, and others. The average mammalian brain size would double across the two million years of the Pleistocene.