Chapter 26

Glade was the only one of the captive Mammoth Hunters who knew what to expect. It was much more startling for the other expedition members when at last, after trudging for most of the day through the fresh snow across a long flat plain, their captors brought them to the Cave Painters' settlement by the mountainside. This comprised of the mouths to several caves scattered about the base of the limestone hills around which were gathered dozens of Cave Painters all attired in their superior quality furs and all far too intent on their own business to pay much attention to their new guests. What made Chief Cave Lion gasp in amazement and his hunters ask forgiveness from the ancestral spirits were the mud and straw effigies that guarded the path to the caves and the lurid paintings on bare rock on either side of the entrance to each cave.

"Is it real?" the Chief asked in anxiety. He shook a tremulous hand towards a life-size model of a mammoth whose fur was made from reeds and grass and which sported real tusks on either side of a straw trunk.

"These people are magicians!" exclaimed Pine Marten with wonder at the painted murals of hunters pursuing horse and elk.

"Now you see why they're called Cave Painters by the southern tribes," said Glade. She was pleased to see familiar signs of Cave Painter culture and was sure now that the villagers would conform to the moral codes and practice of the tribe.

The Cave Painters greeted Glade and her fellow captives more with indifference than anything resembling friendliness, although there was mild curiosity at their crudely stitched furs. Their hunting tools were laid down on the ground and examined with poorly disguised derision.

The Chief and his warriors were taken aside to a patch of ground that was cleared of snow well away from the cave entrances while Glade, as the only one who spoke the Cave Painters' language, was treated with significantly more respect. She saw nothing more of her fellows until their eventual departure and all she knew about their confinement was what they later told her. It wasn't that they were treated badly as such. The Cave Painters were understandably wary of these crudely dressed Mammoth hunters. Their furs were stripped off to ensure that they weren't hiding any weapons. Two woolly rhinoceros furs were thrown towards the now naked warriors and it was under this that they had to huddle together through the cold days and nights. They were thrown scraps of meat not much better than fed to the ragged wolves tethered to a post set not far apart from them. A single Cave Painter with a whip crafted from aurochs hide and a flint-tipped spear was posted to guard the Mammoth Hunters, but he wasn't especially worried that they might escape. What could seven naked huntsmen do if they fled through the falling snow and icy wind away from the only protection they had from the unforgiving elements?

It was Glade who had to do all the negotiation, while Chief Cave Lion and his men were totally ignored. Although she was relatively privileged, she was initially left to wait alone on a cold hard boulder just beside a straw and earthen statue of a wild horse. Nobody came to speak to her and she didn't know how long she'd have to wait. She pulled her now ripped furs tightly across her bosom and observed the Cave Painters with much the same intense curiosity as they did her. This was not just because of the darkness of her skin, but also because of her willingness to offer her body to the village men. Naturally, this wouldn't make her very popular with the village women.

Her current predicament reminded Glade of her first encounter many years before with another company of Cave Dwellers. This was the time when she first arrived at the caves where her future husband Flint lived.

This was several days after she'd left the Red Haired family. She expressed her gratitude to her hosts when she departed as best she could in the few words she'd learnt while living with them. They were touched by her stumbling efforts, but her clumsy hand gestures still amused them. She knew they didn't really want her to stay with them for much longer as she was a drain on their resources, but they'd taught her how to forage in the woods and she was now far better able to manage on her own.

Glade strode along the beach for the following few days armed with a sharpened stick and some hastily knapped flint tools. Following her experience of itinerant life with Demure, she was well prepared for the daily struggle to find food and shelter, but she still wasn't accustomed to the practice of covering her naked flesh. This was a particular failing at night when she was totally defenceless against the gusts of chill wind. She eventually resorted to covering her naked flesh under the fur of a dead sea-otter she found on the shore. Although the meat was probably no longer safe to eat, it was a large enough beast for it to be worth skinning and then to shawl its fur over her shoulders.

Despite her valiant efforts, the Cave Dwellers still didn't consider her either adequately or decently clothed when they emerged from the shadows to challenge her as she approached their village. Almost all their body was totally covered in fur apart from the legs, arms and faces. What most offended them was the fact that her genitals and bosom were displayed. They gestured to her while they shaded their eyes from the unseemly sight that she should cover both with her hands. This custom puzzled Glade, but she'd seen so many strange customs in her travels in the southern lands that she assumed there would be similarly odd ones in the north.

It was Glade's nudity rather than her skin colour that the Cave Dwellers were first aware of. When she was judged to be sufficiently modest the men and women clustered around her and their considerable fascination was now focused on the colour of her skin, the proportion of her features and the darkness of her hair. Like all the tribes Glade was ever to meet in the northern lands, the Cave Dwellers' skin was generally pale but still less so than the skin of the Mammoth Hunters. The Cave Dwellers also saw that their dark-skinned visitor was tired and hungry and without demur decided to offer her shelter. Glade didn't know at the time whether the Cave Dwellers were kind to her merely because she was a solitary woman and therefore no threat, but she later discovered that such generosity and kindness was characteristic of the tribe. Like the Raft People, this was a tribe that lived in relative plenty and had never experienced conflict with other tribes. Although Glade was an outsider who couldn't speak their language, they recognised her as a woman in need and their immediate response was to help her in any way they could.

It was amongst the Cave Dwellers that Glade settled down and continued to live for the next four or five years. She very soon became fluent in their language. She married the village shaman, Flint, who showed especial kindness towards her. He was the father of her two boys who they named Granite and Sandstone in the Cave Dwellers' tongue.

These years of married life in the shadows of the caves were by far the happiest days of Glade's adult life. She had a husband who loved and cared for her. She made many friends in the village. She was respected by the villagers as a woman who worked hard to become part of the community. She was also accorded respect for having chosen to marry the shaman and this was principally because he wasn't the sort of man most women would choose to marry.

Although Flint possessed many good qualities, chiefly relating to his role as shaman, he could not be said to have an attractive appearance or a pleasing aspect. His legs and arms were short and stumpy, so although he was of ordinary height from his neck to his groin when he stood up he was as short as a prepubescent child. His head was similarly deformed. He was blind in one eye which as a result was grey and dull although his other sparkled with life.

No one could deny Flint's excellence as a shaman. He knew every word of every incantation and myth. He sang the sacred songs with dignity and clarity. He was skilled at healing the diseased and injured with herbs and poultices. He revered the Cave Dwellers' spirits that resided in the earth, the caves and in the mountains. He was tireless and ardent in his duties. He was an inspiration to his fellow villagers who valued his understanding of the motion of the stars; his knowledge of the migration of birds and animals; his skill at predicting how the weather would change; his ingenuity in applying technical solutions to the practical problems that beset the village every day; and his aptitude at craft, music and prayer were beyond all compare.

But he still wasn't a man that any woman would choose to marry.

That is, until Glade arrived.

And she genuinely loved Flint. Of course, Glade had already lost the real love of her life: the woman she last saw floating adrift on a raft on the turbulent sea. She'd fucked enough men and women in her life to know that physical pleasure wasn't necessarily contingent on physical beauty and that the quality of a man or woman couldn't be measured by looks alone. Although her two sons possessed a strange admixture of the features of her tribe and Flint's their bodies were no more stunted or deformed than those of other children.

It was when Glade better understood the Cave Dwellers' language that she became aware just how many differences there were between Flint's tribe and any other she'd come across before. Most exceptional, of course, was their attitude towards sex and nakedness. This tribe resolutely disapproved of the public display of anything that suggested sexuality. This included even bare breasts and such relatively innocent behaviour as holding hands or kissing. Sex was deemed to be an activity best hidden from sight. Although the villagers clearly practiced sex, as was evident from the presence of babies and children, it was kept as discreet as possible.

The Cave Dwellers' culture was also one that in other ways encouraged and even expected bold investigation into the unknown as long as it didn't conflict with their deep faith in the wisdom of the spirits. They studied the motion of the stars and identified at least two stars whose orbits across the heavens were as variable as the Moon's. They studied minerals and discovered ingenious ways to fashion rocks into tools of astonishing beauty and superb functionality. They even attached a flint axe to a shaft to make a frighteningly efficient tool for cutting down trees and branches. They studied the magical properties of plants and animals to derive new medicines, new food recipes and other new uses that continued to amaze Glade.

Faith in the spirits was critically important to the Cave Dwellers' culture and this was most especially so for Flint. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the myths and legends of his tribe. He told a tale of the world's creation that involved the growth and retreat of the glaciers that were only a few days walk away in the mountains. Flint taught Glade much about the customs of the shaman that was both comprehensive and astounding.

It was Glade's first introduction to shamanism as it was practiced in the northern lands. Tribes in the southern lands also had shamans, but they were not normally held in the same great reverence as those of the northern lands. In the southern lands, they were the custodians of the tribe's wisdom from one generation to the next and they understood the mystical significance of the sacred rituals and celebrations. The shaman had a pivotal role for the communities in the northern lands where the difference between seasons was so much more marked. Glade reasoned that this was because of life's greater precariousness in the crippling cold.

Glade had seen snow and ice before, but it had been nothing more than a curiosity and a nuisance. Here in the northern lands, the snow settled in the cold Winter months and persisted for entire cycles of the Moon. The cold was so intense and deadly that Glade was now very grateful for the warmth provided by the furs the Cave Dwellers wore. They kept her modest if uncomfortably warm in the Summer, but in the Winter they saved her life from the chill that froze her very breath. In his capacity as shaman, Flint convened a festival in the very depths of every winter when the night was at its longest. As he explained to Glade this always came after the end of the twelfth complete lunar cycle since the last winter solstice. The Cave Dwellers would chant non-stop in this festival until the rays of the midday sun shone onto a sacred point marked in the depths of one of the caves on which the sun never shone except on that day.

After this ceremony, the days became steadily longer and the midday sun shone at ever higher elevations in the cave's dark recesses.

This ritual especially impressed Glade and she made a point of diligently learning from Flint the wisdom passed through the generations by the Cave Dwellers' shamans. Although Flint attributed everything virtuous in his tribe to the spirits, Glade's scepticism in his faith became steadily greater. Every tribe she'd ever come across since she left the forests of her childhood had a novel explanation for how the world came to be and these always involved supernatural beings of one kind or another. Since the spirits of her tribe must surely have passed away with the fortunes of her people, she could now no longer truly believe in anything. Nevertheless, Glade resisted adopting Demure's view that all faiths were false and that self-interest was the only immutable truth in the world. That seemed to deny something very real in humanity, but at the same time she didn't believe that all these competing belief systems could all be true. So, at the same time as becoming better practiced in and more knowledgeable of the Cave Dwellers' religion the less she believed in its literal truth.