Time's Last Gift Part 22

'She's been pining away ever since Koorik left,' Amaga said. 'Then she brightened up when the time came for him to return. But as the days pa.s.sed and he did not come, she became sick. Last night, she started to burn, and she will not stop now until she is dead, unless Koorik comes back. And there is not much time for that.'

'I can't believe that she could get so sick just grieving for John,' Rachel said.

'But she can,' von Billmann said. 'The tribe has stories of men and women, and children, who have made themselves sick, killed themselves, with grief at the loss or prolonged absence of a loved one. It's a psychological mechanism, true, but it operates far too effectively.'

'We don't know that that is the cause of her sickness,' Rachel said.

'True. But until we have a better explanation, I'll accept grief.'

Rachel stayed with Laminak even after Glamug returned and began to make the camp hideous with his howlings, shrill chantings, rattlings, bull roarings, and sudden shrieks. She did all she could to help the girl and at the same time stay out of Glamug's way. She also kept a close observation of the progress of the illness for the expedition's records.

The morning of the third day, just as the sun came up, Laminak breathed her death rattle.

Glamug stopped his shuffling and chanting, got down on his knees, and marked her forehead and b.r.e.a.s.t.s with red ocher.

Then he stood up, removed his mask, and looked at Rachel with tired eyes and drooping face.

'For a little while last night, I rested,' he said. 'And I had a vision. I saw Koorik running toward us across a field with a high cliff ahead. And behind him bounded a lion. The lion was very close, and then Koorik was running through the shallow stream at the base of the cliff. This slowed him down, and the lion roared with triumph, and it seized Koorik. And then they were rolling in the water, and Koorik had only his s.h.i.+ning gray knife to defend himself against the great lion. His thunder stick was empty; it had lost its death-dealing powers. And his spear was in the throat of a lioness, the mate of the lion that pursued Koorik.'

Rachel understood that Glamug had fallen asleep for a few minutes, though she could have sworn that his racket had gone on all night without a second's break. He had had a dream and, as was the custom, he must tell the nearest person the dream as soon as possible.

'Did Koorik get away from the lion? Or was he... ?'

'Was he killed?' Glamug said. 'I do not know. The vision faded, and I was sitting outside the tent of Laminak and s.h.i.+vering with the cold. Not with the cold of the night wind, because that was warm. With the cold of the wind that blows death.'

Rachel told Drummond and Robert of Glamug's vision. Drummond scoffed at it, saying that it was a wish on the part of the witch doctor, who must resent Gribardsun's takeover of his role as healer. That was all there was to it. Von Billmann, who had experience with sanctuary people, was not so skeptical.

'But if his dream was a form of telepathy, why didn't I see John instead of Glamug? I'm much closer to John than that primitive quack!'

'He's no quack; he believes in what he does and practices to the best of his ability,' von Billmann said. 'As for why he received the message - if there was a message - well, he is a receiver, and you are not. He's tuned in, on the proper wavelength.'

Rachel sneered, but she was worried. She would have laughed about the vision in her own environment, the towering many-leveled twenty-first-century megalopolis, but in this savage world it was as easy to believe in ESP and ghosts as it was to believe in mammoths and cave lions. It was summer and therefore hot. The huge deer flies and the smaller flies were numerous, and the tribe must not be kept too long from reaping the summer. The wake took place that day, and Laminak was buried at dawn the next morning. A hole five feet long and three feet wide and two feet deep was dug. A mammoth hide was placed in the bottom of the hole and on this bear hides were placed. Laminak, wrapped around the loins with the fur of a female bear cub, her body elsewhere daubed with red ocher, and a chaplet of bright saxifrage around her head, was carried by four men to the grave. There, while drums beat, flutes wailed, and a bull roarer boomed, she was placed on her right side. Her face was toward the rising sun. She wore a strand of sea sh.e.l.ls around her neck, and a wooden doll with human hair, the doll she had put aside two years ago but kept with her few valuables, was placed by her side.

More bright saxifrage petals were strewn over her and two mammoth tusks were crossed over her. Then dirt was thrown over her with wooden shovels, and afterward large rocks were piled over the dirt to keep the hyenas and the wolves off.

Rachel wept as the dirt fell over the blue-gray, red-streaked face and the bright yellow hair. She had resented, even disliked the child, because of her love for Gribardsun and his obvious affection for her. But she was crying, and it may have been for both reasons. Even she did not know. But there was no doubt that in the death of the girl she saw more than one death. Perhaps she was reminded of the inevitability of the death of everyone who had been born and who was to be born. Of what use was life when it must end? Once you were dead, it did not matter if you had lived a hundred years, a happy hundred years. You did not know that you had lived, and you might as well never have lived.

Time had discarded Laminak, and Time would remove even the evidences of her burial. Rachel knew every inch of this area, because part of her training for the expedition had been an archeological survey of the territory. Every bit had been dug up, and there was no grave here in Rachel's time. There was not even evidence that Laminak's tribe had camped for generations under this overhang. Sometime in the postglacial age, storms, heavy rains, and floods would wash away everything from under the overhang down to the time when Neanderthals had lived here. And then the dirt deposited above the Neanderthal layers would be free of human traces. And Laminak's grave would be washed out and her bones carried down the valley and lost somewhere in the river. The waters would come with such force they would roll away even the large stones piled above her.

When the last stone had been placed, Glamug danced nine times around the grave, shaking the baton to the north, east, south, and west. Then he abruptly quit the place, walking toward his tent, where his wife had prepared a broth of water and various boiled roots in a bowl made from the skull of a reindeer. He would drink that cleansing drink, and the ceremony would be over.

Two days later, Rachel saw John Gribardsun. She had been filing away the film pellets and specimens in the vessel. Her work completed, she left the vessel and at once saw the tiny figure far to the northwest. Even at that distance, it was obviously John. Using her binoculars, she was able to amplify him enough so that she could see the details of his face. Her heart began beating even more rapidly.

He recognized her and waved at her but did not increase his pace. He was trotting along at a rate that would have prostrated the other scientists and would have left even the strongest of the tribespeople far behind. Yet, when he stopped before her, he was not breathing overly hard.

He smiled and said, 'h.e.l.lo!' and she came to him put her arms around him, and wept. She told him of Laminak and, with a cruelty she could not understand until later, told him that Laminak had died of grief for him.

Gribardsun pushed her away and said, 'You don't really know what killed her, do you? The a.n.a.lyzer isn't infallible or panoramic in its coverage of diseases, you know.'

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I shouldn't have told you that. But all of us thought that was why she died. It was so evident.'

'I can't be bound to one place or to one person,' he said. 'If what you say is true, then she would have been...'

'Unsuitable for you?' she said. 'She wouldn't have made a good wife for you after all? John, you must be out of your mind. She couldn't have gone with you to our time. She would have died there, in an alien and completely bewildering world, and cut off from her tribe. If she died just because she thought you would never return, she surely would have died if she were separated forever from her own people. You know how these primitives are.'

'I didn't say I planned to marry her,' he said. 'I was very fond of her. And I feel - I feel...'

He turned away and walked around to the other side of the vessel. Rachel wept again, this time partly for her sympathy with him, because she was sure he was crying for Laminak, and partly for herself, because his grief for Laminak meant that he did not love Rachel. Or perhaps her tears were for everybody.

A few minutes later, his eyes red, he reappeared. 'Let's go to the camp,' he said. 'You tell me what's happened while I've been gone.'

But Rachel insisted on knowing whether or not he had been attacked by lions. He was surprised, but when she told him of Glamug's vision, he said, 'He does have a form of ESP. Nothing too rare in that among preliterates. Yes, I had a run-in with a lion and his mate, and things went much as Glamug said.'

'But he said you had only a knife to defend yourself against an unwounded lion.'

'That's true,' he said. 'And here I am, and the lion is dead.'

And that was all he would say about the incident.

That night, while his colleagues and the chief men of the two tribes sat around a large fire, he described his journey. He had traveled northwestward on as straight a line as he could maintain. He averaged about fifty miles a day, though there were a few days when he just walked along so that he could make a rapid study of the terrain and the fauna and flora. He had crossed the land that would be under the English Channel when the glaciers had sufficiently melted. He found the Thames and the site of what would be London, much of which was covered with marsh or shallow lakes.

The land was even more barren and tundra-like than in France. He had seen a few mammoths and rhinoceroses, but exceedingly few lions, bears, or hyenas. But there were many wolves, which hunted mostly the reindeer and horses.

He had seen not a single human being, though there should be a few in England along the southern coast.

He journeyed northward and found that the glacier did not cover the site of his ancestral hall between the sites of Chesterfield and Bakewell in Derbys.h.i.+re-to-be. But it had only recently retreated, and nothing but moss and some azaleas and saxifrage were growing. Gribardsun's other main ancestral holding, in Yorks.h.i.+re, where his family's twelfth-century castle would stand, was still covered with hundreds of feet of ice.

'I made a number of observations along the glacial front, traveling a hundred miles along it,' he said. 'And then I turned back and headed toward home. But I was held up for two days in a cave in the land bridge by a pack of wolves who didn't seem to know they should have an instinctive fear of man. There must have been over fifty in the pack; I've never seen such a large one.'

'What happened to your rifle?' von Billmann asked.

'I lost it when I was climbing up the hill to get away from the wolves. I was stopping now and then to shoot one, but they were not discouraged by their losses. They just ate their dead and kept on after me. I think they were especially hungry, otherwise they wouldn't have been so determined.

'Anyway, I slipped and had to grab hold of indentations in the rocks to keep from falling into their mouths. And the rifle went down a fissure, and I could not reach it after I got rid of the wolves. So I went on.'

'You should have taken a revolver,' Rachel said.

'I wanted as little weight as possible.'

'But how did you get rid of the wolves if you had only your knife?' Drummond asked him. Gribardsun had told them that the spear he had used on the lioness had been made after the wolf incident.

'I killed a few as they came up the hill at me,' Gribardsun said. 'They could only squeeze through the opening into the cave one at a time. After a while, they gave up. I think they'd eaten so many of their own pack, the edge of their hunger was gone.'

When told that Drummond had regained his sanity, Gribardsun had made only one comment. He said that he hoped that Dummond had regained all of his mind. Rachel supposed that he meant by that that he hoped Drummond had gotten over his desire to kill her and Gribardsun.

Drummond a.s.sured them that he had accepted reality, and that, whatever they did, he would not try any violence. Not that he ever had, except for the time when he had shot at Rachel.

Gribardsun gave Drummond a series of psychological tests designed to uncover deeply hidden feelings of violence toward particular persons. The results seemed to satisfy him, since he gave Drummond firearms. But Rachel noticed that Gribardsun never allowed Drummond to get behind him when he was armed.