As the first light broke outside the cave, the infant seemed to rally. He lifted his head on his own to accept water. Tal let it be known they would leave the cave because the healing was working. The child’s father grunted his approval.
Then, a catastrophe.
In a wet intestinal gurgle, the chamber suddenly filled with a foul odour as the child suddenly evacuated much of its weight. There was a high-pitched sigh and the little body simply stopped breathing.
The men looked down on the lifeless body in stunned silence.
The boy’s father kneeled and shook him, trying to wake. He cried out something and Kek yelled back at him. By his tone, Tal could tell his son was trying to avert disaster.
Osa slowly rose to his feet. In the low light of the hissing lamps his sunken eyes were the brightest objects in the chamber. Then he let out a curdling scream which seemed from another realm, an amalgam of a man’s cry and a beast’s roar, so loud and reverberating that it froze all the other men into paralytic inaction.
For a lumbering man, he moved like a lion. In a blink he had Tal’s stone bowl in his massive hand. Tal, nor anyone else, had a moment to react. He saw a dark blur as the Neanderthal’s arm swung in an arc and bashed the bowl behind his ear.
The world became bright for a time as if the sun had moved from the sky and made its way through all the chambers of the cave into the last chamber.
He was on the ground, on all fours.
He was aware of shouts in the distance, the sounds of flint thrusting through flesh, great shouts of pain and war.
He heard the sound of men falling, the thud of death.
He lifted his head.
The bird man was towering over him, his beak proudly open.
I will soar, he thought. I will soar forever.
His head was too heavy to keep up. What was that on the ground? He struggled to see it through the pain and fog in his head and the poor light.
It was the small ivory bison, fallen from his belt pouch.
He reached for it as he fashioned his last thoughts.
Bison Clan.
Uboas.
Tala was the only one to make it out of the cave alive. It was he who killed Osa by bashing his head against the wall. Kek was smitten by his own brother and Mem fell to one of the Neanderthals. In close quarters men stabbed and stomped and gouged until there was nothing but a bloody mess of humanity.
Tala’s arm was broken, either from a blow that he had struck or one he received, he did not know. He ran into the sunlight crying out in alarm. Tal was dead. The Shadow People had attacked. There must be revenge.
Quickly and brutally, the men of the Bison Clan fell on the frightened Neanderthals. Since they had been obliged to leave their spears at the camp, it did not take long until every one of them, every man, woman and child was run through or thrown off the high ledge.
They had called themselves the Forest People. They were no more.
Tala was head man now. There would be time for ceremony. In the midst of the crisis, the clan simply fell into line and began to obey his commands. And Uboas stoically ignored her own sorrow and busied herself making a wooden and sinew splint for her son’s arm.
All the dead and broken men were dragged out. Except for Tal. Tala ordered that the dead infant, the son of Osa, have his hand cut off before he was carried out. One of the clan men used Tal’s good blade to separate the small finger bones into a bloody pile and then carefully put the blade back against the wall where Tal had left it. The finger bones would be used to make Tala a trophy necklace, but in his haste one of the tiny phalanges was dropped into the dirt, never to make it around Tala’s neck.
The Neanderthals, whether dead or alive, were pitched over the ledge onto the rocks below to join their brethren. The lions, the bears and the hawks would have a feast.
They carefully bore the bodies of their dead down the cliffs for burial in the soft earth beside the river. That was their custom. The clan waited to hear Tala’s decision about Kek. Was he of their clan or the Others?
He was my brother, he declared, and one of us. He would be treated in death as a member of the Bison Clan.
The young man’s decision was well received and there was a sense of confidence that he would also know how to honour their extraordinary leader’s bodily remains. He withdrew back into the cave. He would sit beside his dead father, drink the Soaring Water, and when he was done, he would know what to do.
It was nearly sunset when the clan finished restoring order to their world. They ascended the cliffs one more time and gathered around the cave mouth.
Tala emerged, spoke to them clearly and with resolve, waving his one good arm for emphasis. He had soared with the bison herd and in the distance, he saw the bird man flying into the cave and disappearing.
He had his answer.
Tal would be left in the Chamber of Plants, in the sacred place he had created. He would have his soaring bowl with him. He would have his ivory bison. His best flint blade. His bird man would be his company. No one would ever enter the chamber again.
Whereas the other ancestors dwelled around their camp fires in the sky, the great Tal would forever dwell inside his painted cave.
THIRTY
Thursday Afternoon
Luc still had several hours until dinner with Isaak. He lay on the hotel bed, his computer, warm on his belly, ready to doze off and retreat to a sanctuary of oblivion. His email inbox was staring him in the face. He wavered in indecision whether to snap the laptop closed and let it be for now.
Instead, he clicked on the message from Margot.
He had to do it some time, why not now? Take the bitter with the sweet, have a glance at the last happy interlude in a life. The message line simply read: H UGO ’ S PHOTOS. He took a deep emotion-choked breath and clicked on the attachments.
A series of a dozen jpegs downloaded in a daisy-chain of embedded images.
He scrolled down and took each one in.
Shots of Luc, Sara and Odile, strolling through Domme.
Table shots inside the restaurant – Sara and Luc together, Hugo, with a cheesy grin, his arm slung around Odile, a hand resting casually on her bosom.
Then a group snap of the four of them, taken by the waiter, a selection of house desserts spread on the table. You could almost hear the laughter.
At the bottom of the scroll there was one more photo.
He stared at it. It didn’t fit – its presence made no sense.
He clicked to render it full screen.
What the hell?
It was an oil painting, on a yellow wall. A young man, of the Renaissance perhaps, seated and staring suspiciously at the artist. His face was long and effeminate, his hair flowing onto his shoulders. He had a black foppish hat, a white shirt with impossibly puffy sleeves and, most strikingly, his shoulder was draped with a rich fur coat from a spotted leopard.
What was this doing on Hugo’s mobile? Did someone use the camera after he was dead? Who would take a dead man’s mobile phone to a museum and use it to photograph a painting?
Wait! The time and date stamp!
The date of the photo time marked in crisp digital display: 11:53 p.m.
What was it the gendarme had told him at the crash scene?
‘He didn’t make it to the village. If he left your camp at eleven-thirty, the accident must have happened no later than eleven-forty.’
Luc was sitting on the edge of the bed now, raking his hand through his hair over and over, as if the static electricity would fire more synapses in his brain.
11:53 p.m.! Thirteen minutes after he was supposed to be dead, Hugo takes a picture of an oil painting?