“And me?” I asked, feeling anger welling up inside me. “What about me?”
She looked deep into my eyes. “You are strong, Orion, with a strength that no ordinary man has. You were sent among us to help us, I know that. Taking me from Dal, from the clan, would not be a help. It would destroy Dal. It could destroy the clan. That is not why you have come among us.”
I could have replied. I could have simply picked her up and carried her off. But she would have run back to her clan the instant I relaxed my hold on her. And she would have hated me.
So I turned away from her and glanced at the sun, low on the western horizon.
“It’s time to start back,” I mumbled. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 29
The grain grew taller than my shoulders, and the people of all the clans grew more excited and impatient to harvest it with each passing day.
I stayed aloof from them. I had taught them all I could. Now I waited, just as they did. But not for the time of harvesting. I waited for Ahriman. He would return; he was planning his attack on these people, on me, on the whole future existence of the human race. I waited with growing impatience.
I combed the valley, poked into the caves among the rocky cliffs, seeking the Dark One. All I found were snakes and bats, clammy, cold dampness and dripping water. And one cave bear that would have crushed my skull with a swipe of its mighty paw if I had not been fast enough to duck out of its way and scramble out of its cave before it could get to me.
I knew he was there, somewhere, biding his time, picking his point of attack. All I could do was to wait. Ormazd did not appear to me again to give me more information or even the slight comfort of showing me that he still existed and still cared that I existed. I was alone, placed here like a time bomb on a buried mine, waiting to be triggered into action.
Ava kept her distance from me. And the less I saw of her, the more I did of Dal. He came by my hut almost daily now. At first I thought he was trying to work up the nerve to pick a fight with me. But gradually, as he tried to strike up a conversation in his halting, pained way, I realized that he was trying to work up the nerve for something else, something that was far more difficult for him than merely fighting.
“The grain will be ready to cut soon,” he said, late one afternoon. I was sitting on the ground in front of my hut, fitting a new flint blade to the stone hilt of my knife. One of the clan’s elders was an artist when it came to making sharp flint tools; that was why he was allowed to remain with the clan even though he was too old and slow to hunt.
Dal squatted down on his haunches beside me, forcing a smile. “If it doesn’t rain in the next two days, then we can cut the grain.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Yes.”
I looked up at him. “What’s troubling you, Dal?”
“Troubling me? Nothing!” He said it so sharply that it was clear he was deeply bothered.
“Is it something that I’ve done?” I asked him.
“You? No, of course not!”
“Then what is it?”
He traced a finger along the dirt, like an embarrassed schoolboy.
“Is it about Ava?” I asked.
His glance flicked up at me, then down to the ground again. I tensed.
“It concerns her,” Dal said, “and the things you’ve been telling her. She thinks we should stay here in this valley… all the time.”
I said nothing.
“She claims that you said we could pen the animals against the cliffs and stay here even when the snows come,” he gushed out rapidly, as if afraid of stopping, “and next spring we can plant seed from the grain all across the valley and make more grain than anyone has ever seen before.”
He looked at me almost accusingly. “I told you these things, too,” I replied. “I told you both.”
Dal shook his head. “But she really believes them!”
“And you don’t.”
“I don’t know what to believe!” He was honestly confused. “We live well here, that’s true. We could move into caves when the snow comes. As long as we have fire we can stay in the caves and keep them warm and dry.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“But our fathers never did this. Why should we stop living the way our fathers have always lived?”
“Your fathers have not always lived this way,” I told him. “Long ages ago your ancestors lived far from here, in a land where it was always warm and they could pick fruit from the trees and live a life of ease and happiness all year long.”
His eyes showed that he did not want to believe me. But he asked, “Why did they leave such a paradise, then?”
“They were driven out,” I replied, “by a change in the climate. The trees withered. The land changed. They had to move elsewhere. They began to roam the land, as you do, following the herds of game.”
“But each year the herds get smaller,” Dal said, his mind focusing on the present and dismissing old legends that he only half believed. “Each year we must travel farther and our kills are harder to make.”
I gestured toward the fields. “But the grain grows high. And there are enough game animals here to feed all the gathered clans, if you keep them penned up and let them breed. They will provide you with all the meat and milk and wool you need, if you learn how to take care of them.”
He was truly perplexed. It was a gigantic hurdle for him.
“The grain is good,” he admitted slowly. “We make food from it — and a drink that makes you feel as if you’re flying.”
Bread and beer, the two staples of farming. I wondered which offered the bigger lure in Dal’s mind and swiftly decided that beer would be more important to him than bread.
“Then why not stay here, where the grain grows so well? You can store it in the caves after you’ve cut it. If you grow enough grain, you can even feed some of it to the animals you keep.”
With a deepening scowl, Dal wondered aloud, “But what would the spirits of our fathers do if we stopped following the game trails? How would they feel if we turned our backs on their ways?”
I shrugged. “They will probably rejoice that you have found a better way to live.”
“The elders say that the grain won’t grow if we stay here all year long.”
“Why wouldn’t it grow?”
“Its spirit would wither if we watched the fields all the time.”
I wondered if the elders were groping toward the idea of environmental pollution. But I said, “The grain grows just as the sun shines and the rain falls. It is all completely natural, and it will happen whether you are here to watch it or not.”
“Hunting is good,” Dal muttered. “Hunting is our way of life.”
And I’m going to destroy that way of life and turn you into farmers. In my heart, I could see that Dal’s every instinct was urging him away from the strange new ideas I had planted in his mind. For untold thousands of generations humankind had been hunters. Their minds and bodies were shaped for hunting; their societies were built around it. Now I was telling them that they could live fatter, easier lives by giving up their hunting ways and turning to farming and herding. It was true; farming would be the first step toward total domination of the planet by humankind. But they would have to turn their backs on the “natural” lives they now led; they would have to abandon the freedom they had, the rough democracy in which each clan member was as good as any other.
For an instant I wondered if I was doing them any good. But then I realized that it was not a choice between lifestyles; the choice these people had was between farming and eventual extinction. They would have to pay a bitter price for survival, but it was either pay that price or die.
Is this part of Ormazd’s plan? I wondered. Does Ormazd have a plan? Or is he merely determined to keep himself safe from the Dark One, no matter what it costs? As I sat there studying Dal’s face, so deeply etched with doubt and concentration, I was tempted to tell him to forget the whole thing and keep on living as he had always lived. But then I thought of the boy who had died of a simple infection. I thought of how lean and ragged these people were when they were following the game trails and living off what they could catch each day. I remembered that their elders were at an age that would be considered still youthful in later centuries. I realized that the clan’s hunting life kept them just barely alive; they lived constantly on the edge of extinction. Ahriman would not have to push hard to wipe out the human race.