When the horse was dead, the butchery began.
Joshua found a flat cobble. He sat on the ground with one leg folded under him, tucked a flap of antelope skin over each hand, and began to work the cobble with fast, precise motions.
With fast blows of a pebble, he knocked away bits of stone, working around the cobble until he had left a series of thin ridges on a domed surface. After twenty or thirty strokes, with bits of stone littering the ground around him, he pulled a bone hammer from the cord around his waist. The hammer was a bit of antelope thigh bone, broken, discoloured, heavily worn with use. With care, he struck one of the ridges. A thin, teardrop-shaped flake fell away. He picked it up and inspected it; it was fine and sharp, good enough for use without further work. He returned to his cobble and knocked out a series of flakes, with one confident blow after another, until the core had been returned to convexity. Then he began to prepare the core to make further flakes.
Joshua was good at working stone. It was a high art because each nodule of stone had its own unique properties; the toolmaker had to find a path through the stone to the tools he or she wanted. It was a question of seeing the tools in the raw stone. Men and women alike would watch his fast, precise movements, seeking to copy him. The women pushed their children towards him, making them watch. Nobody asked him about it, of course; people didn’t talk about tool making.
Making such tools was the thing Joshua did best, the thing for which he was most valued, the thing for which he valued himself. And yet it set him aside from the others.
He tucked his bone hammer back in his rawhide belt and took his flakes to the horse. He began work on a leg. With a series of swipes he cut down the skin on the inside of the limb, pulling it away from the muscle. Some of the horse’s thick brown hair stuck to the edge of the tool. Then he moved to the belly, opening up the hide. He grasped the open skin and pulled it sideways. Where membranes clung to the skin, he swiped at them gently with his flake, holding the stone at its centre between his fingers. The membranes parted easily. There was no blood, no mess.
When the horse was skinned, it was easily dismembered. Joshua cut away the meat of the neck. It fell open and was pulled away. He turned his axe over and over, seeking to use all its edge. When he was done he moved to the rib cage, and sliced down it with a crunch.
The people talked softly, steadily. They talked boastfully about their own and each other’s prowess in the hunt of the horse, the people waiting for them at the hut — especially young Mary, whose breasts and hips were beginning to fill out, making her a centre of intense interest among the men, and amusement for the women. Their attention was filled with each other; the horse, now it had turned to a mere mine of meat, had receded.
But even here, as the people worked together on the fallen horse, they sat a little away from Joshua. They were reluctant to look at him directly, and did not respond to what he said, as they responded to others.
Joshua was short, robust, heavily built. He was barrel-chested, and his arms and short, massive-boned legs were slightly bowed. His feet were broad, his toes fat and bony. His massive hands, with their long powerful thumbs, were scarred from stone chips. His skull, under a thatch of dark brown hair, was long and low with a pronounced bulge at the rear. His face was pulled forward into a great prow fronted by his massive, fleshy nose; his cheeks swept back as if streamlined, but his jaw, though chinless, was massive and thrust forward. Over each of his eyes a great ridge of bone thrust forward, masking his eyes. There was a pronounced dip above the brow ridges, before his shallow forehead led back into a tangle of hair.
He looked powerful, ferocious. But in his pale brown eyes there was uncertainty and confusion.
Joshua was twenty-five years old. Already he was one of the senior members of the group; only a handful of men and women were older than he was. And yet he still felt something of an outsider, as he had all his life.
The problem was his tool-making. He would always be valued for it. But others were suspicious of what lay at the centre of that profound skilclass="underline" his ability to see the tools in the stone.
It was uncomfortably like what the Zealots did, and the English. Skinny-folk spoke to the sky and the ground as if they were people. Their tools were carved and painted in ways that, sometimes, made even Joshua see people or animals that weren’t really there.
Just as the knives and burins and scrapers he saw in the cobbles weren’t really there either, not until he dug them out. The others sensed that his head was full of strangeness, and that was why there was a barrier around him, a barrier that never broke down.
Now the hunters had completed their butchery, and the meat lay scattered around them in neat crimson piles. Joshua dropped his stone flakes, and soon forgot them. The hunters picked up cobbles and smashed open the bones. They would bring the meat back to their hut at the base of the cliffs. But first they would enjoy the warm, greasy, delicious marrow, the privilege of successful hunters. There was a mood of contentment. They knew that they need not hunt again for several days, that the women and children would welcome their return with joy, and that the evening would be filled with good food, companionship, and sex.
And, while the men lolled contentedly, Abel began to talk of the Grey Earth.
The Grey Earth was the home of the people.
The Hams had fallen, baffled, to this strange place of red dirt and grass. They lived here, but it was not as the Grey Earth had been. On the Grey Earth, the animals ran past the people’s caves like great rivers of meat. On the Grey Earth, there were no skinny Zealots or English or troublesome Elf-folk; on the Grey Earth there were only Hams, the people of the Grey Earth.
The men listened. The Grey Earth lay two thousand generations in the past, and now it made the people’s only legend, relayed from one generation to the next, utterly unchanging and unembroidered; they were a people conservative even in their story-telling.
But Joshua looked up into the sky. The sun was fading now, and the earth shone brightly. This earth was not the Grey Earth, for it was not grey, but a bright, watery blue.
The Hams lived in an unchanging present. Joshua’s sense of his life was of a series of days more or less-like today, stretching ahead of and behind him like images in a hall of mirrors, reaching from his dimly recalled days as a toddler begging scraps from his mother, all the way to no-longer-remote times when he would become as toothless and broken-down as old Jacob, back in the hut, again helpless and dependent on the kindness of others. The Hams knew of life and death and the cycle of their lives. But of the world beyond themselves they knew of no change.
…No change but one, Joshua reflected: in the past, they had lived on the Grey Earth, and now they did not.
Joshua looked at his companions as they rested, lolling against the ground, licking marrow from their fingertips, listening amiably to Abel’s loose legends. He knew that not one of them would share his thoughts, of past and future and change, of knives buried in rocks. Joshua kept silent, and peered up at the earth’s cool loveliness.
The hut was in the overhang of the cliff, close to the lake. It was built of beech saplings stuck in the ground, bent over and tied at the top. Skins of horses and antelopes had been laid loosely over the frame, weighted down with rocks. More massive rocks had been dragged to the rim of the hut. The area around was scattered with debris, animal bones, abandoned tools, cobbles scooped from the hut floor, and handfuls of ashes.
As the hunters returned with their haul of meat, Joshua saw that smoke was already rising from rents in the roof. Only a few children were outside, playing with the scattered cobbles and bits of skin. Joshua saw bats pecking hopefully at the abandoned bones.