“You had better go, Father,” said Moon.
“No, little one. I would hold you again, and see your work.”
Deer considered, remembering the kindness of this man, and his love of painting, and then stepped back, inviting him in. “As Moon’s father, as my friend and teacher, you are welcome here,” he said formally. He crouched behind his puny wall. The smoke was less here.
Inside the cave, the smoke was still thin enough for the old man to see the great landscape and then he stood stock-still as he caught sight of the two great portraits on the end wall.
Deer and Little Moon, side by side, human but on the scale of a great bull, and he tottered as if he might faint.
“What have you done?” he demanded of his daughter, his eyes daring in bafflement from the flesh and blood woman before him and Deer’s giant image of her on the wall. His voice was appalled. “This is wrong …” he said weakly, and then muttered, as if to himself, “but it is wonderfully wrought.”
“Deer painted me,” said Moon. “I painted him.”
“You? Did this?” he whispered. The smoke was hanging heavily in the cave, and Deer’s eyes were watering. Another angry shout came from outside, and then an arrow flashed out of the smoke and snapped on a rock of Deer’s low wall. He moved to his left, so that the rock would cover his body when he drew his bow. Another arrow came, higher this time, and bounced off the side of the passage to clatter inside the cave. He glanced back. Moon and her father, their arms around each other, were huddling against the side wall.
Suddenly, the passageway darkened, and he drew his bow and shot into the smoke. A cry of pain. Then a pause, and then it darkened again, and he shot twice to no effect, seeing a black bulk bearing down on him with spears on each side, and realized that they had taken their skins and stretched them over a wooden frame as a shield. He dropped the bow, took his ax in his right hand and Moon’s spear in his left, and waited.
They were as blind as he, but he was closer to his target, and as the spear points came above his wall his ax flashed down onto each of them, and he jabbed the spear down low beneath the shield to hit the unprotected legs. A foot crashed down on his spear and tore it from his hand. The leather shield was charging into him, and he scythed his ax as he went down, feeling it jar as it hit rock. And then there were men all over him, lashing his arms and legs with thongs, and they dragged him down the passage by his hair into the fierce sunlight and the clean air. He gasped in pain as they hauled him over the coals of the fire and then propped him against the rock.
A shadow of a man stood before him, a man who had once been big and strong, but whose flesh now hung in folds over wasted muscles. Where the bones jutted from the skin, there were weeping sores, and the hands were stiffened claws. Only the eyes were fierce and strong beneath the eagle’s headdress. The Keeper of the Bulls was a dying man, just as Moon’s sketch had foretold, and in his hand was the great club with the beaked head.
Two young men brought Moon out of the cave, firmly but gently enough, and her father limped after them. Deer knew them both, his brothers of the ceremony that had made them men. Around him were faces he had known since his childhood, Keepers and hunters, and Moon’s mother hurrying to embrace her daughter, her eyes wide in surprise at the bulge of the child.
“I will not come back,” said Deer, and spat blood and what felt like a tooth from his mouth, repeating himself to say it more clearly.
“No more will I,” shouted Moon.
“You have bewitched us with evil,” said the Keeper of the Bulls, his voice eerily familiar. “You have destroyed our cave and put the sickness upon me. Our hunters find no game and the fish escape our nets and the children cry with hunger. All this you have done.”
“We destroyed nothing,” cried Deer. “You brought evil upon the people. You with your pride and ambition. You brought the new worship. You tried to fool the fates with your false omens of eagles. You set yourself up as lord of the skull, lord of the skies. You put on the head of a beast. You are the evildoer. You destroyed the old customs. You tried to take Moon against her father’s consent. You brought down the sickness upon yourself, the rocks upon the cave, the anger upon the people. It was your madness that we fled.”
“What you destroyed, we made,” called Moon, in a strange high voice, chanting the words, her head held high and her eyes looking far away across the trees and into the morning sky. “What you broke down in lust and anger, we built up in love.
“What you destroyed, we made,” she repeated. “Show them, my father. Show them what had been done under the hand of the Great Mother.”
And the Keeper of the Horses led them one by one into the passage and into the marvel of the cave, and as Moon continued staring far into the sky, Deer watched their awed and frightened faces as they emerged. The Keeper of the Bears was stiff with shock, or was it outrage? The Keeper of the Ibex gazed keenly at Deer, and called to him, “All your work?” And Deer shook his head and said that Moon had shared in it. The Keepers huddled in silence. The young hunters looked uncertainly at Moon. None of them, clearly, knew what to do. The anger and violence of the storming of the cave had passed. Deer’s attack upon the Keeper of the Bulls had sobered them. Moon’s stance and bearing in her pregnancy and chanting as if the Great Mother were speaking through her had awed them.
“Untie me,” said Deer to the young hunter beside him, and without thinking, the man bent and began to loosen the thongs.
The last to enter the cave, and the last to leave it, was the husk of the man he knew as the Keeper of the Bulls. As the old man emerged, he leaned weakly against the rock, even the feathers around his beak seeming to droop. Then he gathered himself as if he felt challenged by the new uncertain mood of the vengeful band he had brought here. With a visible effort, his back straightened and he marched across to where Deer lay trying to free himself, and pushed the young hunter aside.
“Evil,” he cried in a voice that echoed like thunder. “Evil that would bewitch your souls, evil that would dry up the rivers and empty the plains and destroy us all.”
He turned as if to confront Moon, but it was a movement that brought the great beaked club high and gave it a whirling force and with a great shout he slammed it down onto Deer’s helpless head.
Moon screamed once as he advanced upon her, the rest all stunned and immobile, and only this still powerful man with the head of an eagle and the great beaked club that dripped blood and loomed high above his shoulder seemed capable of movement.
“Evil,” he cried again, and took the last fateful step, the club whirling down. But Moon had broken the spell, darted forward beneath the blow, and came close to his chest as if to embrace him. Faster than the falling club, she slid to one side with Deer’s flint knife still in her hand. And the Keeper of the Bulls sagged slowly to his knees as his entrails gushed out from the great slash in his belly and slopped to the ground before him. The eagle’s head bent to look at the steaming, bloodied loops, and then lifted to look at Moon as she spun on her heel to slam her foot into the side of his beaked head and send him toppling into the mess that had leaked from his guts. She leaned down and brutally wrenched the eagle mask from the Keeper’s head, and threw it onto the fire. A gush of fresh blood surged from his mouth, and his body stiffened, and then shuddered into death.
She walked slowly across to Deer and studied the crushed and lifeless head, as intently as she had studied him for her sketches, placed both hands on her swollen belly as if to embrace her unborn child, and closed her eyes. The only sound was the crackling of the fire, as its smoke and the stench of burning feathers drifted across the stretch of grass where all stood immobile around the two dead men.