Aryuk heard her cry out. He tensed. “What is wrong?” he asked.
The screen showed her extended arm and the tiny figures at which her finger pointed. “There! Can you see them?”
Aryuk shaded his eyes, squinted, strained. “No, things blur away.” That savages all have keen sight is a superstition on a par with their all enjoying robust health.
“Men. And—and—oh, come.” The scene jounced. Tamberly had broken into a run. Aryuk tightened his grip on the hand ax and loped at her side, though fear stood naked on his face.
The strangers spied them, poised, briefly conferred, and sped likewise toward a meeting. Tamberly counted them: seven. That was as many adults as dwelt at Aryuk’s place, if you included the half-grown, and these were entirely male.
They did not make straight for her and him, but at an angle. Soon she could see their leader beckon, and altered her course accordingly. She recalled thinking between breaths: Yeah, they don’t want to alarm the mammoths. Must’ve been trailing them for days, skillfully harassing, to bring them into parts where they wouldn’t ordinarily go, an area poor in their kind of food but rich in mudholes and suchlike spots where hunters have a fair chance of trapping one and killing it.
They were stocky, black-haired, attired in leather coats, trousers, boots. Each carried a spear with a head of bone slotted to hold a row of flint bladelets, a cutting edge long and keen. At his waist hung a pouch, which doubtless bore provisions and a sharpened stone that served as a knife. Under the belt was a hatchet. A roll of hide across the shoulders must be a blanket. It wrapped two or three more lances. Readily accessible beneath the lashings was tucked a spearthrower of the grooved type. Stone, wood, antler, bone, skin were beautifully worked. As Tamberly and Aryuk neared, the men halted. They took loose formation, ready to fight.
No band of Tulat would have done that. Personal violence, including homicide, was not unknown among them, though rare. Collective conflict did not exist, whether in action or imagination.
Both parties stopped. “What are they?” Aryuk gasped. Sweat shone on his sun-darkened skin and he breathed hard, not because of the sprint. To him the unknown was always supernatural, terrifying unless he could come to terms with it. Yet she had seen him venture out on broken ice floes in a storm, to club a seal pup that would feed his family.
“I will try to find out,” she said, her voice not altogether steady. Palms raised, she walked toward the strangers; but first she had loosened her pistols in their holsters.
The peaceful approach eased them a trifle. Her vision flickered from one to the next. Beneath their individuality, she searched for underlying sameness, race. Twin braids framed broad countenances with naturally bronze complexions, almond eyes, strong noses, whiskers sparse or absent. Lines of paint patterned brows and cheeks. I’m no anthropologist, she had thought amidst her heartbeats, but I’d guess these count as archaic or proto-Mongoloid. They have surely come from the west….
“Rich be your gathering,” she greeted as she reached them. The Tula language had no word for welcome, which was taken for granted. “What do you find lucky to tell me?” Certain revelations might give an opening to evil spirits or hostile magic.
The tallest of the men, almost her height, young but hard-featured and bold-mannered, trod forth to confront her. What purred and growled from his lips was incomprehensible. She signed as much, smiling, shrugging, shaking her head.
He peered. She understood how weird she must be to him, size, coloring, clothes, accouterments. But he showed none of the initial timidity of the We. After a moment, inch by inch, his free hand crept forward until the fingertips touched her throat. They moved downward.
She had stiffened, then stifled a lunatic impulse to laugh. Copping a feel, are you? The exploration moved over her breasts, belly, crotch. It remained moth-gentle and, she saw, impersonal. He was simply verifying that she was the female she seemed to be. What’d you do if I gave you a gotcha? She had suppressed that too. Avoid conveying any wrong ideas. When he had finished, she stepped back a pace.
He snapped something to his fellows. They also scowled, first at her, next at Aryuk. Probably women in their tribe didn’t go hunting. Probably they supposed she was his mate. Okay, why did he hang behind her?
The leader called to Aryuk. It sounded contemptuous. The Tula cowered the least bit before he braced himself. The leader raised his spear and moved as if to cast it. Aryuk threw himself to the ground. The newcomers barked laughter.
“Now hold on there. Just a minute, bo,” Tamberly exclaimed in English.
In the shelter, she lost desire to watch further. She directed the capsule to transfer its remaining information immediately, sighed, and spoke: “As you’ve seen, we didn’t stick around. Those were tough customers. Not stupid tough, though.” Her show of indignation, as she brandished her steel sheath knife, had quieted them down. They couldn’t decide what to make of her, but stayed put when she and Aryuk withdrew, staring after them until the horizon walled them off. “I’m glad I didn’t have to shoot into the air or any such demonstration. Heaven knows what the consequences would have been.”
A second later: “Heaven knows what they will be anyway. Those are surely Paleo-Indians out of Siberia. I’ll sit tight and wait for further orders.”
Removing her recording, she bore it over to one of the message capsules stored by her vehicle, inserted it, set the controls, activated. The cylindroid vanished in a pop of air. It wasn’t bound for milieu headquarters, because none was maintained this far in the past. Its leap through space-time took it to the project office, which happened to be in her home country and century. All at once she felt very lonesome, very tired.
No prompt response came. They’d figure she needed a night’s rest. And a square meal. Scrambling it together, eating, washing dishes relaxed her a lot. However, she wasn’t sleepy. She sponge-bathed, donned nightclothes, stretched out on her bunk shelf with a pillow against the dome side for a backrest. As the sun lowered more and the interior darkened, she turned on a light. For a while she hesitated over what show to screen or book to read. She’d brought War and Peace along, thinking that on this expedition she’d finally get around to it; but she never had, and after a day like today, she wasn’t about to start. How about the Travis McGee novels she’d been saving, carried here from her last furlough? No, MacDonald cut too near the bone.
Ah, yes, good old Dick Francis.
II
Red Wolf and his men could not harry the mammoths much farther onto ground well suited for taking one. The beasts no longer gave way, almost carelessly, to their small pests. Oftener and oftener they stopped, stamped their feet, only moved on when they had eaten everything in reach. Yesterday a bull charged, forcing the hunters to scatter and wait till dawn to return. Clearly this herd had come about as far from its wonted range as it would endure.
“By now, hunger dwells in the camp,” Horsecatcher said. “I think our undertaking was foredoomed. If the land-wights are angry, let us not offend them more, but go after other game instead, and give them our first kill.”
“Not yet,” Red Wolf replied. “You know how badly we need to bring down a mammoth. And we shall.” More than the flesh and fat were the great bones, tusks, teeth, hide, hair, for making things grown scarce among the Cloud People. More even than that was the victory itself, luck reborn. The trek had been long and grim.