Chapter 23

Clouds obscured the stars and moon when Glade and Demure emerged from their shelter carrying as many of their belongings as they could in deer-hide sacks, but more than the dark what mostly helped secure the lovers' escape as they crept away from the Raft People's village towards the Great Sea was that the rest of the village was far more preoccupied with other matters than the fate of the two women. Other villagers were suffering the same humiliation and possibly rape that Glade and Demure had suffered.

The screams were terrifying.

"There may be others who'll be trying to escape," Glade remarked.

"Where to?" wondered Demure. "Nobody in the village knows of anywhere else but here. Where else could they run to?"

The quickest route to the deep water inlet that acted as harbour for the villagers' rafts was across the fine sands of the beach, but the couple decided against allowing themselves to be so visible across such a distance and instead took a more circuitous route over some grassy sand hillocks and through a tangle of woodland. Demure reasoned that it was best for two women who were clearly on the run to attract as little attention as possible. The couple could see shadowy figures on the sandy beach and hear the distant sound of mournful sobs. Glade tried to see what was happening, but Demure didn't want to be delayed for even a moment.

"If we launch out to sea on the rafts we'll be safe," she said, tugging Glade's arm. "And if you want to see what's going on we can do so from a safe distance."

As they approached the inlet, Glade could hear another extraordinary gasping noise amongst the animal snorts and cries of the night. As she suspected, they were passing another person who'd fled the village but the young girl was hardly aware of the two women's presence. She was stumbling aimlessly forward, as naked as Glade and Demure, with streaks of blood lining her inner thighs and choking with irrepressible sobs. Glade's initial instinct was to offer assistance, but Demure insisted that they should continue on regardless.

"Do you want us all to get caught and raped?" she hissed.

"I've already been raped," Glade reminded her lover.

"Come on!" said Demure urgently.

The rafts were moored by ropes made from grasses and sinews that were tethered to stumps of wood that were either naturally situated by the waterside or had been pegged into the ground. The raft that belonged to Glade and Demure was secured to a thick upended log and it was this rope that Glade untied. As always, Demure was no help whatsoever and Glade had to remove the rope and push the raft onto the water herself. But when she jumped aboard with her deer-hide sack of tools and memorabilia (but no clothes as neither women regarded them as essential), she was surprised to find that her lover hadn't joined her.

"Demure!" Glade hissed. "Where are you?"

"Here," said Demure from the shore where she was securing another raft for herself and not one that belonged to her. It was Glade who was usually careless of property rights. After all, ownership wasn't a concept she'd ever been aware of before she came to live amongst Demure's people. But it seemed somehow especially wrong that Demure should claim for herself the best-made and most sturdy raft when she, of all people, had a very clear idea of what was hers and what belonged to someone else.

"What are you doing?" Glade asked as Demure pushed the raft that was already carrying her possessions into the water.

"What do you think I'm doing?"

"It's not right."

"Do you really think the skull-head fuckers are going to give a shit about which raft belonged to which villager?" said Demure. "We need as much as we can get. We have no idea how long we're going to be out at sea."

"Not long I hope," said Glade as she steered her raft towards Demure's as both rafts bobbed out of the natural harbour into the open sea.

"But at least we're surrounded by the sea's bounty," said Demure, who now had to raise her voice to be heard over the lapping waves. She held up her fishing spears and flint knife. "And we've got the means to catch some of it."

The matter of food and how to find it was also paramount to Ivory while she waited for Glade's return in the shadow of the steep Mountain Valley hills, so she didn't welcome the arrival of several more people into the valley. They were from the same tribe as the first few who'd wandered in. Although she and Ptarmigan welcomed these new people when they arrived, Ivory wasn't now so sure that Grey Wolf's more robust response mightn't, after all, have been better.

However, she weighed up the options in her mind as she lay under a comforting fur blanket with Ptarmigan's arms around her. How should restive spirits be appeased if it ever became necessary to evict the new arrivals? If they were killed, their spirits could haunt Ivory's tribe for generations and bring evil upon her descendents. Even if they were just evicted, this would anger the spirits of the Mountain Valley. But if they stayed, this might also put her tribe's survival at risk.

The strangers weren't at all hostile. The River People, as she got to call them, were a humble tribe and did their best to be useful to the Mammoth Hunters in their preparation for more snow and the greater chill to come. Ivory wasn't a great linguist like Glade and she learnt very few words of the River People's peculiar language, but she conversed as best she could with two of the women whose names sounded like the strangled cry of a mammoth. She gathered from them that a catastrophe had happened to their tribe. Judging from the women's mimes, it appeared to have involved rushing water and many falling boulders. There were also hyenas, lions and evil spirits. Just like Ivory's tribe, the River People had struggled to find a place to stay and were rightly fearful of the approaching Winter. And, as they stressed so often, they were grateful for the compassion Ivory's tribe had shown them and wanted to help as much as they could.

"I still say they should be evicted," said Grey Wolf in a hastily arranged assembly of the remaining huntsmen to which only Ivory and Ptarmigan were the only women privileged to attend. Ivory saw this as a significant improvement over his earlier view that they should be killed.

"How do we do that?" asked one of the older huntsmen, Cave Bear.

"It shouldn't be difficult," said Grey Wolf. "They are weak and passive. They'll just leave if we push them in the right direction."

"The women and children are helping the village to gather food and cook," said Ptarmigan. "The few men, despite their frailty, have helped in the hunt and one of them threw his spear at a horse. That was food for the entire village."

"And tasty it was too," agreed Cave Bear. "Do you believe then, Wife of Our Chief, that these strangers have proven their worth and should stay?"

"Food is scarce and will become scarcer still when fresh snow falls," Grey Wolf objected.

"It is difficult to make a decision with the Chief and shaman absent," remarked Snow Hare, another older huntsman who was possibly in the last few years of his hunting life.

"I have consulted with the spirits," said Ivory, who'd spent many hours deliberating with Ptarmigan and meditating on potent mushrooms. "What they say is that we must treat these people with kindness. They have shown only kindness towards us and the spirits will be angry if we repay them ill."

"Is that all the spirits have said?" wondered Falcon, who had a trace of scepticism in his voice. Ivory understood his reservations. After all, she had been the shaman's assistant for only a few months and her fellow villagers were bound to doubt her ability at communicating with spirits.

"The spirits never say what they mean by just words," said Ivory. "They govern the weather, the snow and the cold. While the strangers have been here, the winter chills have abated. We await the return of our chief and the spirits are waiting too. We must do nothing to anger them."

"This talk of spirits is all very well," said Grey Wolf, "but we must eat. We have too little food and too many mouths."

Ptarmigan spoke up, her oddly accented voice querulous and nervous. "I miss my husband. While he is gone, we are as a partridge without a head that runs around without purpose. We need to find out what has happened to my husband and the brave hunters that accompanied him."

"Perhaps some of the fittest of us should follow the Chief's trail before it becomes too cold," said Cave Bear. "Then we can find where he is and bring him back if harm has befallen him."

"If some of us leave the valley to rescue the Chief," said Falcon, "then there will be more food to share amongst those left and the strangers rather than being a burden may well become an asset."

"I am a hunter before all else," said Grey Wolf. "This interminable sitting around waiting for the Chief to return makes me restless. I would rather hunt for the Chief and my brother who is also with him than sit here with women and waste my time in mere discussion."

"Do the spirits look favourably on such an expedition?" wondered an anxious Snow Hare.

"That isn't a question I've addressed the spirits," Ivory admitted, "but it is auspicious that the wind is fair and that not one boulder or rock of great size has rolled down the cliff face. I believe that the spirits will be compassionate if we should venture on such an expedition."

"But these are spirits of the Mountain Valley," Snow Hare objected. "They aren't the spirits of our tribe. Why should they care about our welfare?"

"As you know," said Ivory carefully as she grasped Ptarmigan's hand for support, "the spirits of our tribe have accompanied us from the northern savannah. They are here in the Mountain Valley and have spoken with the spirits that lived here before. If the spirits of the Mountain Valley didn't want us to be here or had wished us evil then they would have cursed us, as did the spirits curse the strangers in our midst."

"And are these strangers still cursed?" wondered Cave Bear.

This was a deep theological question that left Ivory flummoxed, but Ptarmigan spoke on her behalf. "The strangers have paid the price and many of their families have died as a result. They have travelled far and found this Mountain Valley where we now stay. The spirits have rewarded them for their endeavours as they have rewarded us. The spirits that they have brought with them have commingled with ours and with those of the Mountain Valley. It would be foolish to disrupt this harmony."

Grey Wolf frowned as he tried to make sense of Ptarmigan's words, but as one of the Chief's most loyal huntsmen he couldn't quarrel with the Chief's wife. He gripped his flint-tipped spear. "So, when the new dawn rises yet another mission will set off over the hills. And I wish to lead this expedition."

"I can see no objection to that," remarked Cave Bear who looked for guidance at Ptarmigan who nodded her assent.

Glade's flight from the lands south of the Great Sea that she would never again see was driven by nothing other than the whims of the wind, the tide and the sea. Glade and Demure had innocently imagined that the only difference between sailing far out to sea and close to land was the proximity of the shore. And indeed for a while the two women were able to steer their rafts relatively close to each other—near enough to hear each other over the lapping waves—but as the hours passed and land receded behind them and no shore appeared ahead, the waves changed in character and it was all either woman could do to stand on the raft without toppling into the sea. At the same time, their rafts drifted steadily apart however frantically Glade tried to row back towards her lover. Soon her priorities were not so much concerned with rowing the raft but rather more to prevent her possessions sliding off and falling into the sea, so she tied them securely to the logs and branches from which the raft was mostly assembled

At some stage in her frantic efforts to keep herself and all she had from capsizing into the waves that crashed onto the surface of her raft, Glade somehow lost sight of the raft where Demure had also been manically securing herself. She looked towards the horizon. In one direction she could see the now strikingly friendly shore from where she'd come as a distantly orange and brown strip stretching from East to West. In all other directions, there was nothing but empty sea that stretched towards only the horizon where she assumed the world ended and into which the Sun sank each night.

At last, she managed to catch a glimpse of Demure's raft. It was nothing more than a small dot that bobbed up and down on waves that were taller than the masthead that her lover had raised on the boat and to which she'd tied herself and her deer-hide sack. Up it bobbed. Down it bobbed. And heading further and further north and away from the distant strip of land that for all Glade knew was all the world there ever was that wasn't water.

Glade's raftmanship, like all her practical skills, were rather better than Demure's. She was sure that left to herself her lover would soon topple over the side of the raft and be eaten by a shark or an orca. That wasn't a fate she wanted her lover to suffer, so she secured both feet to the logs, picked up the flattened branch that acted as a paddle and propelled the raft as fast as she could towards the ever-diminishing dot on the horizon. But try as she would, however fast and furiously she paddled, the raft bobbing up and down ahead of her was getting further and further away.