Then they all sat down near the torches and watched the walls pulse around them in silence, holding hands. It got so quiet that they could hear each other breathing, hear their own heartbeats tocking at the back of their open mouths. All the oh-so-busy year came to a still moment of silent thanks. It went on for a long time; watching the animals pulsing redly around them, looking as if they were in their women’s initiation, it felt like the longest moment of the year, something like the spindle the stars turn around.
Then Thorn set a tone, by humming it loudly, and they all hummed it with him; and humming their good-byes, the rest of the pack stood up and filed out of the chamber, back up to the day room and the cave opening, through the baginaren of the world to be reborn yet again into Loop Meadow. They left their shamans Thorn and Loon inside to speak further for them.
Thorn used their torches to light oil lamps, and when the little wick flames were burning, he ground the torches out in the wet clay underfoot. For a while it was shockingly dark, and then Loon could see again, although never as clearly as he had when the torches were lit.
They continued down into the cave, Loon following Thorn’s black back. Their lamps flickered in their hands with every step, so that their shadows danced on the flickering walls, and the whole cave seemed to tremble.
As Loon’s eyes adjusted to this, he saw the walls more clearly. The whitish rock often glistened wetly, and it bulged or receded away from him, making the stone appear glittery or darker. In places the stone looked to be coated with a thin clear layer of wet stone, like ice; in others it was covered with smooth sheens of mud; in yet others it was spalled as cleanly as if it had been recently knapped.
Suddenly a black lion appeared out of the wall to his right, leaping right at him, and he started back in fear. He could hear Thorn’s low laughter ahead of him; Thorn had seen his lamplight jump.
Now black animals drawn in full emerged from the walls on both sides of their passage. Stepping slowly through them, Thorn and Loon came into a big irregular room where clusters of animals were drawn on all the walls, from about chest height to easy arm’s reach above, making for a kind of belt of paintings around them. Thorn stopped in the middle of this room and turned in a slow circle, and Loon turned with him.
Underfoot the floor of the room was damp, in a few places muddy. Depending on the flickering of the lamplight and shadows, different animals seemed to shift or slide. There was a black hole at the foot of one wall, from which a faint gurgling sound came. Otherwise it was very quiet.
For a long time they looked at the paintings, some of them three-liners, most fully fleshed. All the sacred animals were there, bear and lion, bison and horse, mammoth and rhino; they all both stood still and moved a little, and as they were overlaid one over the next, and at very different sizes, there was an intense quivering movement inside their stillness. In the end every beast held its place, and only quivered a little with the lamplight.
Thorn laughed shortly and moved on. Loon followed him, staying in his line of footprints as instructed, which was apparently out of respect to the goddess, although it also allowed him to avoid sinking into the mud covering much of the floor.
The passageways between rooms were narrow. The rooms were big in comparison, bigger than any house’s interior. Though irregular, and thus full of black shadows, they were fully present to the eye, flickering with the flicker of the lamps. Red lines and spirals marked some walls, and when Loon looked closely at these, they crawled under his gaze until they detached from the wall and floated out ahead of him among the shadows, like floating bubbles of paint lodged right on his eyeballs. Even when he closed his eyes he still saw these dots, and a web of red lines connecting them, all jigging up and down with his pulse. When he opened his eyes again, everything had become a matter of woven red and black patterns, variously fine or large in their weave. Mother Earth’s womb was woven like a basket.
They walked on, very slowly, for what seemed to Loon like a long time. Going down in a twisty passage, they stepped once onto a big square stone that had obviously been placed there by someone who had come before, to break a big drop into two parts. Farther along it briefly got so narrow they had to squeeze through sideways, feeling the earth give them a clammy squeeze before allowing them passage.
Now they were truly in the womb of Mother Earth, the kolbos, the sabelean. I like her kolby, men would sometimes say, adding things like, It’s just like a deer’s, so inviting. But down here was too deep and dark and cold for that. This was the womb of Mother Earth, who had birthed the sky along with everything else. They were moving inside her. The walls around them were slightly slick with damp, just as it was in Elga’s vixen. Their paintings were impregnating Mother Earth with her most sacred animals; it was as clear as could be. Thorn would paint her kolby’s walls with his paint, and she would birth the animals he painted, and on they would go.
Thorn sang a song that said something much like what Loon had been thinking:
Now we come to you, mother, sister
Singing and bringing you some of your people
Bison and horses, favored by the sun
Hunters and hunted, cats and mammoths
Every manner of brother and sister
The ones you love, the ones we love
Talk to me, mother. You are the one I listen to
You are the one I want to speak. Not me
But you. You speak to me and through me
Thorn sounded more relaxed in the singing of this song than Loon had ever heard him. It was almost like a different voice, or a different person inside the voice. Apparently this was Thorn happy; Loon had never seen it before.
— You’re making them come to us, Loon said.-Mother Earth gives birth from here. We’re in her womb.
— I’m telling the great mama that we love these animals in particular, Thorn said.-She gives birth to all the creatures of the sun, no matter what we do. But we can show what we love. So in here we paint only the sacred animals. It’s nice to hang them up there on the wall like they’re floating, as if you’re spearing them to the sky. That’s what Pika used to do. He would even paint them with their legs hanging and their hooves round. The heavier they are in the world, the more he would do that. He had a lot of little tricks like that, little jokes for himself and whoever might see them.
Thorn’s voice was relaxed even now, when he was speaking of his bad shaman. His shadow jiggled against the wall like a living painting, or as if his spirit was dancing before them. The echoes of his voice seemed to indicate a space around them much bigger than what the lamps’ light revealed. The walls of the room were pulsing in and out, very distinctly, and not in the rhythm of Loon’s pulse, which beat much faster inside him. The sounds and sights around him did not cohere in the way they would have in the world outside. The cold mud sometimes squished under his feet, then firmed to cold wet stone again. When it went soft it felt like he would slide down into the rock, and once, looking down fearfully, he saw he was in the floor up to his ankles; somewhat desperately he hopped from one foot to the other to free himself.
Thorn noticed this, and he reached out and took Loon’s right hand and pulled him by it over to the wall, and put his hand against the cave wall.
— Touch it. Hold still.
He put a little hollowed bird bone to his lips, like Heather’s blowdart branch, and blew a cloud of black powder over the back of Loon’s hand. It disappeared into the new black splotch on the wall, and Loon felt the stone swallow his hand, felt himself jerked forward, pulled by the hand. The wall could suck in his whole body; his wrist had been pulled in, and now he started pulling back hard. He was too frightened even to cry out.