It sailed out of Joshua’s sight, beyond the line of the cliffs. He watched, open-mouthed, noting where the extraordinary bat-creature fell.
Shadow:
Shadow didn’t want to wake up. In her sleep she was warm and cushioned by the woven branches, dreaming arboreal dreams five million years old.
It was the baby that dispelled her dreams, with a bout of savage kicking that led to a stabbing stomach cramp.
Her green mood shattered in a hail of red. She rolled over, groaning, and her gullet flexed, as if she were about to vomit. But it was a dry retch; her stomach was empty.
She sat up, rubbing the base of her belly. Slowly the cramps eased. The sun was already above the horizon, the sky tinged subtly pink by the air’s dust.
She inspected this tree to which she had fled in the dark. Elf-folk had been here. The branches were twisted and torn where they had been pulled together for nests, and much of the green fruit of the tree was missing.
She had not come far. She was still within the range of the people. The sun was already high, glimmering down through the canopy. The people woke with the dawn. They might be close already.
She grabbed a handful of fruit and pushed it into her mouth.
The people. As she did every time she woke, she remembered in grim red shards what had happened to her. Claw and Big Boss and Little Boss and the rejection by her mother. The fragmentary, terrified images broke up into a wash of green and red and blue. She hooted in alarm, as if some predator had come wheeling out of her own head to threaten her.
She abandoned her nest and scurried down the tree to the ground. She crashed through the undergrowth, twisting aside small branches and shrubs without a thought for the noise she was making. She saw no people, and did not hear them.
And she did not stop until she was in a place she did not know.
For the first time in her life, she was in a place without the guidance of her elders, who had known the position of every fruiting tree, every bubbling stream. Everything was new. the trees, the rocks, the subtle crimson shades of the dust, even the way the sun lanced down through the canopy. She had no way to figure out a path through this new landscape, a way to survive. Her kind did not see patterns in the natural world; they learned the features of the environment around them — the dangers, the sources of food and water — by rote.
Panic struck her. She longed to run back the way she had come.
She thought of Claw.
One of the trees had a hole in its trunk, a little above her eye level. Suddenly she was thirsty. She probed at the hole with one finger. She was rewarded with cool dampness. She pulled out her finger and licked it. Hastily she gathered leaves, chewed them to a spongy mass, and stuck them in the hole. When she pulled out the leaf mass it was dripping wet, and she sucked the water gratefully.
Her stomach clenched abruptly. She squatted on her haunches and briskly, painfully, passed watery shit. She took some soft, crumbling wood from a rotting tree trunk, mashed it up to a wool, and used it to wipe her backside clean of the sour-smelling stuff.
She heard a distant hooting, an answering scream. It was the Elf-folk.
As soon as she was able, she got to her feet and walked on, feeding on whatever fruit and shoots she found, heading resolutely away from the noises of her people.
But soon, very soon, she ran out of forest. She stood on the fringe of the open savannah, clinging to the forest’s green shade.
And a bat came drifting across the sky, a great black and white bat with blue wings.
She howled and lunged back into the green mouth of the forest.
Emma Stoney:
After getting away from Fire’s Runner group, Emma had followed the beckoning Ham woman into the forest. It was an arduous trek, through increasingly dense foliage. But after perhaps a mile they came to a small clearing.
There were shelters here, made of skins stretched out over saplings driven into the ground. There was an overpowering stench, of people, of sweat, wood smoke, excrement and burning fur. Even the walls of the huts stank, she found, a musty, disagreeable odour of a kind she associated with the clothing of old people who didn’t wash or change enough.
But, stench or not, it was a kind of village.
A Ham village.
A village of Neandertals. She approached cautiously, following the Ham who had found her.
The Hams barely seemed to notice her. They were utterly wrapped up in each other. Some of the children plucked at her clothing with their intimidating, strong fingers. But otherwise the Hams stepped around her, their eyes sliding away.
But however coolly the Hams greeted Emma, they did not expel her.
She dug out her own hearth and built a fire.
Nobody shared food with her that first night. But the next day she managed to catch a rabbit with a home-made snare, and she brought the meat back to the camp and cooked it, even sharing a little with the adults. They took the meat, sniffing the burned stuff gingerly, but ignored her.
So it went on.
There were many of them, she soon learned, perhaps eighty or ninety, in shelters that faded into the dense green forest background.
With their hulking bodies and broad bony faces the Hams seemed like extras in some dreadful old movie to Emma, wrapped up in their animal skins, knocking their crude tools out of the rock. Everything they did, from cracking open a bone to bouncing a child in the air — was suffused with strength — they seemed much more powerful even than the Runners — and Emma quailed before their brute power. But it was apparent that such strength was not always wisely applied, for she saw evidence of a large number of injuries, bone fractures and crushing injuries and scarred skin.
They were humans, of a sort, but humans who made a living about the hardest way she could imagine. Their favoured hunting technique, for example, even for the largest prey, was to wrestle it to the ground. It was like living with a troupe of rodeo riders.
But they cared for their children, and for their ill and elderly.
And they spoke English, just like Fire’s people, the Runners. Who could have taught them? That central mystery nagged at her — and she sensed her own destiny lay in unravelling it.
The forest, like the savannah, was full of predators: cats and bears and dogs, not to mention snakes and insects, some of them giant-sized, that she didn’t trust at all.
But the most dangerous creatures of all were the people.
There seemed to be many types of homimds wandering around this globe. She knew there were Hams and Runners and Elf-folk and Nutcracker-folk, and presumably others. The vegetarian Nutcrackers seemed content to chew on bamboo and nuts in the depths of the forest, following a sleepy, untroubled, almost mindless lifestyle that Emma sometimes envied. The Runners conversely generally stuck to the plains.
The forest-dwelling Elf-folk — three or four feet high, like upright, savage chimps — were, for Emma, the most dangerous factor in the landscape. Having glimpsed what that troupe of Elf-folk had done to the Runner child, to finish her life as a living food source in the hands of Elf-men remained her abiding nightmare.
But everybody pretty much left the Hams alone.
For one thing, with their clothing and comparatively elaborate tool kit and distorted English they were a lot smarter than the rest. And they were beefy besides, even the women and children, more than a match for any Elf.
For all the Hams jabbered their broken English, Emma knew she could never become part of this inward-looking, deeply conservative community. But she also knew she was a lot safer here than wandering around, alone in the forest.