The clan people whispered and murmured as Tal led them from painting to painting, from wall to wall. Tal’s animals had all the vitality and colour of the animals they knew so well. The horses were black and stippled, the bison, swathed in black, reds and browns, the giant bull, black as night.
He held the lamp in his left hand, touched his proud heart with his right and announced that this was only the beginning of a long journey for the Bison Clan. The cave was vast, too long for them to even imagine, darker and colder than any place in the world. He told them it was a gift from the ancestors and the spirit world to him, and as head man, it was his gift to them to make it their sacred place. He would continue to paint all the important animals for as long as he breathed. And he would teach the young men. From now on, their passage to manhood would take place in the cave. The boys would drink Soaring Water so they could learn to roam freely among the creatures of the land and learn from them. He would teach them how to paint what they saw. This would be the most sacred place in the world and it would belong only to the Bison Clan.
The elders nodded their approval and all the people agreed. Make no mistake, they had loved Tal’s father, but his son was a leader like no other in their long history as a clan.
Tal and Uboas were the last to leave. Just as he was about to douse the lamp with a handful of dirt, Uboas reached into the pouch hanging on her horse-hair belt and pulled something out with her fingers. She gave it to him. A small statue of a bison that she had carved from the ivory tusk of the bison that had killed his brother. He stood it in his hand and held the lamp close to inspect it. He placed his large hand on the top of her head and held it there tenderly until she laughed and told him the old people would fall off the ledge without their help.
The clan dispersed themselves on the ledge waiting for Tal to emerge. He blinked in the harsh sunlight and waited a moment to regain his sight. The boy, Gos, suddenly began pointing out towards the valley, well over the river. Tal’s eyes focused on the moving forms, small as ants, but unmistakably two-legged. A tribe was moving through the savannah, stalking a bunch of reindeer seemingly unaware of their presence.
The tiny figures in the distance must have seen something or sensed something because one of them began pointing his spear up at the cliffs. From what Tal could see, the entire tribe, a good ten of them, began pointing their spears and jumping like fleas. Though too far away to hear, they must have started shouting because the reindeer bolted, and they too ran off back towards the green forest.
One of the young men of the Bison Clan, a hot-headed hunter, second only to Tal in his spear-throwing ability, started calling for a war. The reindeer belonged to the clan. They needed to drive the intruders away, once and for all.
Tal nodded and told them they were too far away to take any action, but in his heart, he was content to ignore them. Today was a joyous day of spiritual commitment. There would be other days to worry about the Shadow People.
Many years passed.
Every day he was not hunting, healing or helping his clan, Tal was inside his cave, soaring and painting. And twice a year, before each bison hunt, he summoned the boys who had come of age. There, in the yellow glow of his juniper lamps, the clan would gather in the Chamber of the Bison Hunt, Tal’s mystical two-walled mural, where a half man, half bird, stood open-beaked, amongst a herd of charging bison and the chosen beast was felled by a spear, spilling its guts. The chosen boys would chant a prayer to the ancestors. They would call out their pleas in their high sweet voices, and the clan, taking the role of their ancestors, would respond in low, far-away voices.
Tal would then give the boys a long drink of Soaring Water and the clan would watch over them singing until they were able to stand and be led by Tal, trance-like, into the deeper reaches of the cave, past fantastic, brightly painted, lions, bears, red deer, and woolly mammoth. The boys would stare with amazed eyes and from the fire in their eyes, Tal knew they were soaring alongside the creatures, close enough to feel the heat of their bodies, to merge souls. The cave would disappear, the walls would disappear, the boys would pass through them like a man walking through a wall of water to a place on the other side of a waterfall. And later, when their visions turned to anger, the boys would howl at each other and fight for a time, but the Elders always kept them safe.
Uboas gave birth to only two children, both sons, then despite Tal’s desires to father a large brood, she became barren. No amount of exhortation to his ancestors would make her womb fertile. Yet, both his sons survived beyond infancy and grew healthy and strong. There were no prouder moments in Tal’s life than when he initiated his own sons into manhood and took them into the cave for the first time. His oldest son Mem, was, without doubt, his favourite, and he poured his teachings into the boy the way a woman lavished a newborn with her milk. The boy would be a shaman, the clan’s next head man.
Mem was quick to learn and proved to be as nearly as fine a painter as his father. They worked together side-by-side, spit-painting beautiful creatures. Day after day, month after month, father and son would build platforms of tree limbs and vines and stand upon them to reach the high walls and ceilings in chamber after chamber.
One day, early in his tutelage, the boy made a mistake. He was spitting a red ochre against his outstretched hand, using the angle between his thumb and wrist to make the gentle curve of a deer’s back leg. He was momentarily distracted by the unsteadiness and shifting of his wooden platform and instead of delivering the paint to the wall, most of it landed squarely on the back of his hand, coating it orange-red. When he took his hand away from the wall, there was a perfect stencil of his palm and parted fingers. The boy winced, waiting for the opprobrium of his father but instead, Tal was delighted. He thought the handprint was a wonderful thing and he promptly tried the technique himself.
One handprint became two and in time, the cave would be filled with them, joyful marks of humanity and a father’s pride in his son.
And many years later, after Tal had discovered the malachite crystals that he learned how to grind into green pigment, Mem and his other son joined their father in the last chamber. They crawled through a narrow natural tunnel, into the special part of the cave Tal had long reserved for his sanctuary, the most sacrosanct of places, where they would paint the images of the plants that let him soar and connect with the spirit world.
And among the plants, Tal himself painted the life-size bird man, his soaring spirit, his other self.
TWENTY-FOUR
Tuesday
Luc called Sara once, twice, three times then repeated the effort every hour or so. He hammered her mobile with messages. He got her home number in London from directory assistance and tried that. He called her office. When leaving messages got old, he hung up at the beep.
He was back at his flat in Bordeaux, a tidy bachelor pad in a high-rise, minutes from the campus. He was battling a rough sea of roiling emotions, barely keeping his head above the water.
Anger. Frustration. Grief. Longing.
Luc wasn’t the type to dwell on feelings, but he couldn’t avoid them. They were bashing him in the head, ramming him in the gut, making him punch the furniture, scream into a pillow, choke back the urge to cry.
He ducked calls. If he didn’t recognise the number he let them ring through. Reporters, including Gérard Girot from Le Monde, called him incessantly but he was under a gag order from the Ministry; press contacts were in the hands of Marc Abenheim.