The Celtic Shelf
by
JD McDonnell
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SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY
JD McDonnell on Smashwords.The Celtic Shelf, Copyright 2010 by JD McDonnell.
SMASHWORDS COPYRIGHT INFO
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Cover Map
The Eye on the Door
“No peeking,” said Laura with a smile as she slipped - behind the old stone shed to change into her bathing suit. I flattened a wrinkle on our beach towel and thought about this for a moment. Was it a command, a request, a challenge? An invitation perhaps? If she had said nothing the thought would have never crossed my mind, yet now that she had mentioned it how could I resist?
We were college students after all, sophomores visiting the Aran Islands on what was tantamount to a class trip from our creative writing program in Galway, Ireland. We had managed to ferret out the one part of Innishmore where no flocks of brightly lit tourists wandered the stone fields with their neon fanny packs flapping out behind them. We were finally free of that dweebish poet, that Niel Gaiman before there was a Niel Gaiman wannabe, a guy who Laura always hatched sheep eyes for whenever he came around. Mostly we were alone. Could one little peek really do so much damage?
I crept up on the stone shed. Its walls were stacked slate and its roof a rusting wave of corrugated steel. While bicycling down the hill towards the beach I noticed a small dark window on its backside where Laura would now be changing. Facing me there was only a door. It was paneled and chipped with the colored flecks of at least four different peeling paint jobs. The last was a layer of soft lead blue curls that must have been applied back during the war. World War I? World War II? It was beyond my ability to tell. The only thing fresh about the place was the single red eye painted on the door. I touched it, the red oil paint was still sticky, barely a few hours old. Bloody eyelashes lifted up off it like sundogs at dawn. The eye stared endlessly off into the sea. I smirked to myself and jiggled the rusty handle, not surprised to find it unlocked. I hadn't given much thought as to what could be inside the shed, probably just a tangle of tourist bikes stolen from outside the pubs, yet something stopped me from pushing the door open. It was the eye impressing on me some strange desire to come inside and not just to see Laura in her birthday suit.
It'll only take a minute.
I creaked the door open a fraction of an inch, just enough to peer in at the musty shadows. I saw shelves and possibly something more, but a sharp snap caught me on the ass. I spun around to catch Laura, spinning up another rat tail with her beach towel. Far too quickly she had finished changing into her bathing suit. Something inside deflated.
“Sneaking up on me, aye?” she said. Always smiling. It's a bit disconcerting to be around people whose mouths always seem to perpetually turn up at the corners and glisten with happy white teeth. It makes you wonder if they truly mean what they say, or if they are just sly and conniving and perpetually planning out snares in the backs of their heads.
“Ah...,” I floundered, “I was just checking the place out. There's been a rash of murderous leprechauns in the area. Or so I've been told.”
Snap!
Yow! I ran for my beach towel and returned fire, all but forgetting the incident with the shed. We were on vacation after all, not a good time for anything besides life in the moment and little thought of anything else. We ran down to the water's edge and made a diamond studded splash into the ocean.
...which quickly turned into just as hasty a retreat.
Even in August the North Atlantic is pretty damn cold. We sat down on the sand and wrapped our towels about ourselves, shivering.
“And to think you came from Oswego,” she said.
“Excuse me Miss Chicago,” I returned, “Miss Life is the thrill and chill of sky born winds running the winter wild through city canyons.”
“If you're going to use my poetry against me, you could at least get it right.”
“Oh. And that would be....”
Laura held out her arm. “Will you look at that? I'm covered in goosebumps. It's August and I'm.... What were we thinking?”
I took her hand and ran my eyes up her wrist and across her elbow. “They look like little cobblestones.” I said, deftly lifting aside a string of suit strap, “like little sand dunes. How far do you think they go?”
“Quite a ways.”
“Quite?”
“A lot farther than you're going to get.”
“Awe come on.”
I kissed her anyway and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to convince her of a smashing idea I had to warm ourselves up, but Laura would have none of it.
Soon the day was over. Then went the week. The month. The trip to London. The flight home. The summer. The year. The decade. Someday soon it will be thirty, fifty, a hundred thousand million years from now. That is how time works. It can travel quite quickly when no one is around to pay it any attention. Yet only fifteen years had actually passed before I was back in Ireland again. Twenty had turned thirty five and it felt like a lifetime had passed between us.
I returned to the Emerald Isle because I could. No one really needs a better reason. Ireland had changed greatly since the Celtic Tiger of Info Tech had risen on its haunches and roared. For one thing, everyone went out and bought a car. Now the once barren roads I fondly remembered hitchhiking across were clotted with brightly colored Euroboxes creeping along, bumper-to-bumper, horns blaring. It was impossible to drive anywhere without running into a mile long traffic jam stemming back from every little one lane bridge and sheep pass.
Dublin had doubled in size. The armored checkpoint on the highway into Belfast had morphed into a restaurant. Even scuzzy little “don't get off the bus lest you enjoy being mugged,” Limerick had sprouted a handful of silvery skyscrapers. They looked about as out of place as Stonehenge at Disney World, but progress always has a bright shimmering air about itself and with all my cards on the table I have to admit that it was still a good sight to see. Even if it was nothing more than a sideways glance through a rent-a-car window.
Inishmore, however, remained Inishmore. Refusing to change for the sake of the tourist dollar was what the small island did best. Judging from the thick clots of rust on my bicycle chain it was safe to say that they even rented and then stole from me the exact same bike they rented and then stole from me the last time around. All that was missing was a bit of my youth, a gaggle of word-buzzing creative writing students and, of course, Laura. You never truly forget the ones that got away.
Actually, that's not true. You often forget the ones who got away and sometimes you wish you could forget the ones who didn't. It is this tug-o-war between want and risk that makes memories. It's the setting of a hook in each others lip and then the fight to bring each other ashore that is what calls the mind back. While I had occasionally sprouted a few faded thoughts of Laura over the past few years. Stepping off the ferry and onto those ancient shores returned her to me in a storm. I wanted to stay in the cottage we once shared, the pub where we downed pints of Guinness and pretended to enjoy the beat of bodhrn and bones. I wanted to walk along the edge of the dizzying cliffs we strode across at midnight, waiting for the moon to rise. And lastly there was the beach.
Over wind bent hills I pedaled, rushing through the tall wet grass, only stopping to hitch the bike up on my shoulder and carry it over the shin high rock walls that kept the cove a local secret. Nothing about it had changed. The rocky hollow was exactly as we had left it, sans footprints and psychedelic beach towels. I rested my rusty one-speed against the side of the stone shed and stepped back to snap a photo of it.
Click. Snap. Flash. Pause.
To say the shed had not changed since I had last seen it was a gross understatement on the matter of causal eventuality. The door still stood flecked with the flaky remnants of four different paint jobs. The top coat was still a soft leaden blue peeling away in ragged curls, but.... I cautiously ran a finger over the bright red eye painted on the door. It was sticky to the touch. I stepped back, took a few breaths and waited for the shock to recede. I listened to the silence. There came no whispering or giggling from a near-by hiding place, no sudden clomp of running feet, no jokers to precipitate a prank. I was perfectly alone and hearing nothing but the lapping of the water on the shore and the wind sliding effortlessly over the waves. If anyone was playing a trick on me that person had to be me.
Soon curiosity returned and I tested the red paint again. The thin skin tore ever so gently under my fingertips, just a bit beyond fresh. Crafty little devil, I thought to myself, appear old to begin with and no ever questions your age. Go up like a skyscraper in Limerick and people can count your age to the day.
I jiggled the door handle. It was unlocked. Just as before it seemed to beckon me inside.
Only one minute, that's all it'll take.
I checked my watch. 11:59. Sure. Why not? Aside from being arrested for breaking and entry, or possibly having my belly blown out by some shotgun toting marble-mouthed farmer, what was the worst that could possibly happen? I creaked open the door about a foot before the prow of a dusty rowboat stopped me. Turning sideways, I slipped inside. Orange light filtered in through rust holes in the ceiling. The musty shadows of tools hung on the walls. Shelves stocked high with old jelly jars, wooden crates and dirt-caked burlap sacks blocked my view of the rear window.
“Well,” I muttered to myself, “at least I didn't miss anything the last time around.”
“Perhaps you did,” said a small girls voice.
I nearly jumped through roof as a match flickered into existence and lit up the face of a child standing off in the darkness.
“Cowardice is never anything to be proud of,” she said, more at me than to me. The match light found a candlewick and brightened into a steady flame. The girl couldn't have been more than four or five years old. Thin curly tresses of blond hair framed a round yet solemn face. Her dress was simple affair, made of many folds of white linen and fringed with bits of lace.
“What are you doing here,” I nearly shouted, terrified.
She looked at me as if I were stupid. It was a blank stare that by being a writer I have become well acquainted with, although admittedly it usually only comes from having to explain what it is I actually do for a living.
“This is my home. I live here.” she said.
“You live here? With all this must and dirt?”
Her countenance wrinkled and eyes rolled.
“You're not much of a guest, now are you?”
She turned to a wall of dinge caked tools and searched for something of humming importance. “Here it is,” she said with a happy tone and took down a giant silver skeleton key tied to a wide red ribbon. She presented it to me but would not let me touch it. Not that I was eager to be near the thing. Unlike everything else in the shed, not a single spec of dust rested upon its metal. The key shimmered in the candlelight and appeared to be crawling with glyphs and runes the likes of which could drive a man mad.
“Why, that's ah, that's a very nice key,” I stuttered, “What does it open?”
Now she looked at me as if I were not just stupid but pitifully stupid. “A door of course!” she said and then added as an afterthought, “Silly.”
The girl picked up the candle and wandered back between the shelves. “Wait a minute,” I called after her, “who are you? Where are your parents.”
“My name is Sara Jane,” she said without stopping, “and my parents are dead.”
We went quite a ways before finally coming to a door. It was tall with thick oak beams. It was the kind you might expect to find deep inside the bowels of a medieval castle and shod with cast iron latches. This one however was held together with fasteners made of gold, solid gold, an absolute fortune in handles and hinges.
Unreal! I thought to myself, shivering with amazement.
“Most certainly,” said Sara Jane. She fitted the key into the door lock, gave it a twist and a push. Although the wood was knotted and warped from a long time spent underground, it opened effortlessly. A long stone passageway stretched out before us. Sara Jane drifted into it, leaving me standing in the darkness.
“Are you coming,” she asked, “Or are you just going to stand there and let all the cold come in behind you?”
“Sorry!” I said and shut the door behind myself. It slid easily but slammed loud.
After quite a walk we came to a set of stairs leading up from a stone archway. At the top of it another door opened out into a Victorian parlor filled with stiff velvety furniture, exotic potted plants, book cases, tables and a giant Persian rug spread out before a crackling fire place. Gas lamps built into the sandalwood paneled walls flickered at her command and a whiskey tinted light fell over everything. A fat black cat arched its back and dug its claws into the soft red cushion of a heart shaped chair covered in carved acanthus leaves.
“Bad Methuselah, Bad!” she chided the cat. Methuselah rested his head away from her and purred towards the fire.
Beyond a small stand of jungle ferns was a widow's watch that looked out over the sea. It was the same view I could have had standing in the doorway of the stone shed on the beach.
“Impossible,” I exclaimed.
“It's also over here and over here and over there and there and there,” said Sara, pointing to different windows, every one of which looked out on the same view.
“But how?”
“This is the Home By The Sea. Therefore by definition it is by the Sea and it is my home. All views look out onto the Sea.”
“Um. Why did you bring me here?”
“Excuse me?” said Sara. She had changed, quite suddenly, while I wasn't looking. Sara Jane was now a teenager, still in a long linen dress but now with sandy blond hair hanging down to the middle of her back. Shaggy bangs fell over her forehead to almost cover her eyes. She sat down on the couch and kicked up her feet.
“If I recall correctly,” she continued, “you let yourself in. You chose to follow me. And I've got to say that that probably wasn't a very wise choice considering the length of the tunnel we just walked through. Any fool could see that the shed was no more than ten feet deep at best.”
Sara had a point. I sat down on the curl of a recamier and watched the cat lick himself. What had happened? What was happening? Had I stepped on a rake in the darkness and knocked myself flat? I faintly remembered the story of a fierce Japanese warrior who perished in just such a way, after surviving thousands of battles the samurai stepped on a rake while working in the garden and was found fertilizing the fields later that week. Was I just an unconscious heap on the dirt floor? Was I dead? I thought to ask Sara about this but was afraid of the answer. Instead I asked her about the door on the shed and the red eye painted in somewhat fresh paint.
“But you called me inside,” I said, “with that red eye on the door. It beckoned me to come in, just the way it did the last time I was here, fifteen years ago.”
“So you were the one,” said Sara with mild surprise, “the one with that girl who had the tan skin and the long brown hair and the big smile and the really big knockers and-”
“Her name is Laura,” I interrupted.
“Laura. Yes. How is she doing? How did that go?”
“As good as can be expected I guess. Quite nice, actually.”
“Nice? Really? That's not what I heard. I heard everything between the two of you was smashing until you work-shopped that story you wrote. Which one was that? Oh yes, the terribly dull one. The terribly boring one. The one about the kid staring up a rope slowly drawing back into the ceiling of his room. What the hell were you thinking? I heard that half the class skipped that day just so they wouldn't have to read your story – including Laura.”
“Would you like some munchies? Tea and biscuits?” Sara jumped up off the couch and hurried over to an adjacent kitchen.
“But that was artistic vision!” I called to her, slightly miffed, even though I had been one of the first to admit that the story was a festering pile of printer feces.
“Artistic compromise,” she called back, “I believe it is what the people on this side of the ocean call crapppppp.”
She really did enjoy rolling those P's. A bit of exasperation slipped into my voice, “Well, what was I supposed to do? I had just turned twenty one. I was visiting a foreign country on my own for the first time, falling in love with a beautiful woman, and they want me to write a story?
“See, this is why all the good creative writing schools are in boring places: Bowling Green, Tucson, Saskatoon, Tallahassee. Writers don't get distracted from their work in places like that. I don't know how you get anything done around here.”
Sara was somewhere off in the kitchen. I couldn't tell if she was listening to me or not, so I returned a bit of her snark by adding quite loudly, “Good writing does not come out of Disney World!”
A tea kettle whistled and puffed. Water dribbled into two cups. Soon Sara returned to the parlor with a delicate silver tea set, complete with bell bottomed carafe, thin china cups and sugar tongs. She set it down on the claw footed table before us.
“Let's not get snippy shall we,” she said while handing me a saucer, “one lump or two?”
My mind lit up with warnings gleaned from a childhood of Saturday morning cartoons and so I skipped on the sweetener.
She took two lumps, stirred and sipped, then added, “but what did I ask you to write?”
“I have no idea what you're talking about.”
“Back when you were hitchhiking north of Galway, by that billboard for a carnival with Uncle Sam looming over it like a vampire. Right then and there, what were you thinking?”
I searched my mind a bit. It wasn't hard to find. It's funny how the stories left untold never seem to fade away. “I was thinking of a monologue, a rambling monologue on the side of a highway between myself and a punked out leprechaun in chains and black leather.”
“Wonderful!” Sara smiled, “Social satire! You were going to compare the Ireland you were discovering with the stiff brogue laden bullshit they fill the emerald green travel brochures with.”
“It had a leprechaun in it. A leprechaun with a mohawk and a ripped Sex Pistols T-Shirt. It was nonsense!”
“It was funny nonsense. It was something everyone in the class could relate to and enjoy. You could have knocked it out in an evening and everyone would have loved you for it. Instead you went all artsy and wasted a whole week on something which added up to nothing.”
Fighting to remain social I sneered out the obvious once again for her, “It had leprechauns in it.”
“Many stories about Ireland do.”
“I don't write about leprechauns.”
“And why not!” she snapped back at me, “If it needs to be there then it needs to be there - that is artistic vision. I've watched your career from afar and the reason why you suck is because all you've ever done is compromise. You don't even realize it but – compromise. Compromise. Compromise. Like turds falling from a pigs bottom. You never write what you know you should write.”
I was almost ready to get up and storm out. The stairwell leading down to the passageway hadn't disappeared. It could be done. Then she said, “Remember your great uncle Merlin? He had a metal plate in his head. Nazi's torpedoed his submarine. He was captured twice and escaped both times. He spent the 1950's as a merchant-marine brawling with the dockhands in Indo-China. You have been gnawing at the bit to write about him ever since your childhood, but you refuse to because his tales sound too much like Indiana Jones and his character sounds like something cut from the fabric of King Arthur's court. Yet he was very real and quite fascinating.”
I grumbled something into my teacup which to this day better remains lost.
“And what about that vision you had while doing your laundry in Galway?”
What she was talking about wasn't a vision in that I actually saw something. That would make it more of a hallucination. Instead it was a feeling given to thoughts and pictures. I was crossing a grassy field with a duffel bag full of dirty laundry, heading towards a local strip mall. Car traffic bleated in the distance. I passed a woman with long dark hair and about eight or nine children trailing out behind her. Then suddenly there was nothing. I was alone in an endless field of tall grass wearing scale mail armor. The green duffel bag had been replaced by a long wooden pike. A purple chevron hung from its tip and whipped back like a loose sail in the wind.
Sara's voice came to me. “All the things you could write about and choose not to. It's actually quite amazing you manage to write anything at all.”
“But it was gold” I muttered, “the armor, the fasteners, the buckles. Everything which should have been made of metal was made of gold – even the spear tip. I can't write about that!”
Sara sipped her tea but did not sip long.
“Why not? Because of some stupid artistic hang-up you have about being on the back wall of Barnes & Nobel? At least those authors are in print.”
“No,” I said contritely, “Trust me. At this point I would love to have a fantasy novel or two under my belt. But Gold? For a spear tip? That wouldn't even fly in a half-assed game of Dungeons and Dragons. Everyone knows gold is a weak metal. It's too soft. It would bend and crumple just as soon as it hit a shield. It's also too heavy to wear and tacky to boot. Egads, why gold?”
“Because that is what it was.” she answered quite succinctly.
For a flashing second I saw it again – autumn field, purple chevron, golden spear – then it was gone with barely a chill left in its wake. It was a bit like having a door drift open on its own or having your car keys fall off a table in the middle of the night.
“They're calling you,” she smiled.
I glinted my eyes conspiratorially. “And who might they be?”
Now a woman, Sara stood up and walked over to the widow's watch to look out over the beach. She sounded just as distant as I felt. “They are the ones who dared to think differently, thousands upon thousands of years ago. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, they built a home in the least likely of places and in turn created our world. Then they were gone, forgotten.”
I stood up to join her. For a brief moment the room was a cave. The walls had turned to limestone, the carpet sand, and Sara was an old crone with twisted joints, hunched over beneath a black cowl, staring out at the sea.
“Why me,” I asked with flat seriousness.
“It's certainly not the talent,” she said, “don't let that go to your head. In this day of big budgets, plot formulas and focus groups - you are actually something of a rarity. Someone smart enough to do it and yet dumb enough to try.”
“With the way the world is turning, you are a last ditch chance, the story's one last desperate roll of the dice.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said, “What's the story?”
Teenaged Sara flitted back into the parlor, over to the bookcase and said, “For that we need to start at the beginning.”
“The very beginning,” I asked.
“Give or take a few billion years.”
The Ice Age
Despite the herd of leather spined tomes and atlases and lexicons and codexes crowding the bookcase, Sara didn't bring down a book. Instead she stretched up on tippy toes and carefully brought down a globe from the uppermost shelf. It was an odd globe. Stitching marked the longitudes. Burnt etchings marked the latitudes. A rough bumping of small mountains and valleys made a crude attempt to show terrain, but otherwise it had no borders, no cities, no territories, no distance markers and not even the customary baroque compass besieged by giant squid. It was our world but without us in it. Sara moved the tea set over to make some room and set it down before us.
She jingled her fingers over the globe and clouds billowed out across the arctic circle. As she talked they began to steadily build up and cover the top of the world in a pile of sugar fine dust.
“What we're looking at is the Earth at around 40,000 BC - right at the start of the last great ice age.”
A thick crust of glacial ice piled up around the north pole and descended like a crunchy white beanie over the Northern Hemisphere. The whole world became amazingly dry as the ice cap locked up the world's water supply and refused to release it. Forests died and turned into grasslands. Grasslands died and turned into deserts. Deserts crept over the equator, turning the middle of the Earth into a barren flaming waste. Tribes of early men pushed away from the deadly region, moving north and south in a vain attempt to stay in the green temperate zones they knew as home. Many silently perished in the heartless wilderness. Around them lakes, rivers, ponds and streams dried up and disappeared. It became so dry that even the oceans fell, losing hundreds of feet of depth and pulling back to the edges of the continental shelves. Ireland doubled in size and connected with Wales and England. Both the English Channel and the North Sea vanished. The Mediterranean was split in two at the boot of Italy. And then the whole world gave off a terrible grating noise and stopped.
“What was that?” I exclaimed.
Sara smiled a wicked smile. “It's the weight of the ice on top of the Earth. Continents are like giant rock rafts floating on a sea of lava. Having too many people standing in the back causes the front to lift up – or in this case too much ice. The Eurasian plate has just been hoisted up and slammed south, closing off the Straight of Gibraltar, pushing up the Caucasus Mountains in Iran, elevating the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and adding a few thousand feet of elevation to the Himalayas. There have been hundreds if not thousands of Ice Ages in the past but none quite like this one.”
“How so,” I asked.
“For one thing. On going into it mankind has an advantage which none of his ancestors ever had. Betcha can't guess it.”
“Um. Fire?”
“No.”
“Spear?”
“Uh-uh. Both have been around for quite some time.”
“Dogs?”
“Not just yet.”
If I ever needed the Jeopardy theme song, as well as a loud buzzer to jar my memory, it was now. Sara pulled a needle from the collar of her dress. It was made of bone, smooth yet finely crenelated. It had the requisite sharp point on one end and an overly large hoop on the other. She handed it to me. The needle was about as long as my index finger.
“A big sewing needle?”
“The Sewing Needle,” said Sara, “Through the eye of that needle mankind inherited the world.
I was speechless, but not exactly in an awestruck way.
“Think about it.... Birds need to fly for months on end to do what you or I can do by just pulling on a jumper. With that needle mankind went from being able to do nothing more than wrap skins about his waist to building what he needed to survive the hardships of the age. With that needle he made snowsuits, boots, hats, gloves – all pretty commonplace to us now, but back then it was stunningly high-tech. It would be like you or I putting on space suits and moving into outer space to escape utter destruction here on Earth. The yurt, the teepee, the mammoth bone hut - these were the spaceships of the age.
“If it weren't for the sewing needle mankind would have never been able to move beyond that thin green strip above the world-wide desert. Thanks to that needle Homo Sapiens was able to follow the hunt into Russia, China, the Americas, Australia and last but not least Northern Europe.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, stumbling a bit, “Last but not least? You mean there were people in South America before Europe?”
Sara sipped air through clenched teeth. It did seem a bit hard to believe. “Well,” she said, “It's more complex than that but – yes. Even though Europe was right next door to Africa the terrain made it the dark continent of its time. We call our ancestors cavemen, but in truth we have always been plainsmen. Since that first step out of the jungles of Ethiopia, millions of years ago, man has lived for the wide open spaces. He learned to walk upright so he could see over the tall prairie grass. He hunted in packs after fleet-footed herd animals who rarely left the grasslands. He followed the food and went with what he knew. Man never bothered with the forests or the mountains, not if he could help it. These were strange places of fear, starvation and dangerous spirits.
“Terrain-wise, up until 40,000 BC, Europe was a gated community. If you were traveling up from the south, first you hit the Mediterranean and then the sharp peaks of the Transylvanian Alps and then the nigh-impassable Carpathian Mountains. Above these, in Germany and Poland, there stood a super-dense pine forest stretching for thousands and thousands of miles between the fields of France and the cold steppes of Russia. But look at what happens when the Ice Age kicks in.”
Sara Jane stopped
the world so we could get a better look at the forests of Germany. As
the glaciers grew the rainfall dwindled, reducing the dense pine
green expanse to a snow covered
stubble.
A northwest passage opened up, leading into the plains of western
Europe. Haggard tribes of hide and fur covered men curiously ventured
near it from the Russian Steppes. They were quite hesitant to go in
at first, and then herds upon herds of bison, elk, woolly rhino and
woolly mammoth lumbered out of it, slowly rumbling eastward.
Where the herds of wild horses, deer and goats that man hunted on the Russian Steppes had learned to bolt as soon as a pack of hunters was seen, these hairy giants were magnificently laid-back and completely oblivious to the peril that surrounded them. At first they meandered around the men as if they didn't exist, sometimes walking straight through a tribe as if it was nothing more substantial than a dream. When pestered the mammoth brushed them off with a heavy sweep of their tusks. When attacked the creature's own heavy bulk often forced them to fight rather than flee, and while it didn't take much for a mammoth to turn a primitive hunter into a bloody footprint in the snow, man had brought with him yet another simple yet terribly vital tool of survival – the Atlatl – or spear thrower.
An atlatl is a piece of antler as long as a man's forearm with a handle on one end and a flat hook on the other. On the perfectly straight groove down its center rides a light spear called a dart. The leverage the weapon creates effectively doubles the distance, strength and accuracy of the spear it flings. Against a well coordinated tribe of hunters bearing such long range weaponry the big creatures didn't stand a chance. The carnage that ensued was stunning, even from a sky-eyed view. On a wave marked by bloody carcases sprinkled like red rain across the frost-encrusted barrens of Northern Europe, Homo Sapiens migrated westward, growing in size, stature and ferocity to become the first Cro-Magnons.
“It's funny,” said Sara Jane, bringing me back to the room, “Most people think of life in the Ice Age as brutal and harsh but out in northern Europe it was a frost gilt paradise. The retreating coastlines of the North Sea and the Celtic Shelf uncovered some of the most fertile soil on the continent. Granted this was tundra and permanently frozen no more than two feet down, during the Spring and Summer it would explode with grasses and wildflowers and other good things for the big creatures – the megafauna – to graze on. Then during the winter they were hit by the Arctic Effect.”
I searched my head and drew a blank.
“The Arctic Effect?”
Sara rolled her eyes as if searching for an explanation which might fit my caliber or lack thereof. “Well,” she said, “The megafauna are still with us. Zebras are megafauna. Elephants are megafauna. Tigers are megafauna. They're not very big, not in comparison to the creatures of the Ice Age, but they're still big creatures.”
“The Mega-Megafauna,” I added, peering down to watch some hunters chase a thundering woolly rhino across a bright green swatch of North Sea tundra.
“Right.” she continued, “Everyone puzzled over why they grew so large until it was discovered that in cold climates, big creatures have an evolutionary advantage over smaller ones. They have an easier time holding in heat and storing up fat. That's why the polar bear is the largest of all the bears despite living in the most barren of worlds. When you combine cold with abundance you get huge and that is the Arctic Effect.
“Everything fell under its power, even the Cro-Magnons themselves. It took just a few generations of cold living to change the men from thin-limbed fleet-footed Middle Eastern tribesmen to the brawny, lumbering embodiment of the megafauna that they hunted.”
“So,” I said, “more Fred Flintstone than Barney Rubble?”
“Actually, the average Cro-Magnon man was no laughing matter. He was the spitting image of Conan the Barbarian. Dark tan skin, bright blue eyes, straight black hair, hard chiseled face and of course, bulging pecs and biceps.”
“What about his woman?” I asked.
Sensitive territory? I was starting to pick up on Sara's minute expressions of contemplation, like nibbling on the inside of her lip when dealing with anything delicate.
“It's easy to say that the men ate so much meat it went to their heads. And it did. They ate way too much red meat and they could be quite dickish about it. But before Cro-Magnon man entered Ice Age Europe the tribal system was quite balanced between the sexes. The men did the hunting, scouting and protecting. They brought home the big kills, the skins that everyone wore, as well as an occasional treat of meat. The women maintained the camp, prepared food and scraped skins. Women gathered roots and nuts and used snares to hunt smaller creatures like rabbits and birds. They were the ones who actually kept the tribe fed from day to day.
“During the Ice Age however, the balance of life tipped in favor of the men. Everyone ate mammoth steaks and were quite happy to do so. Women did little gathering and almost no hunting whatsoever. They stayed in camp to prepare meals, scrape skins and make babies. If anything, the arctic had the exact opposite effect on Cro-Magnon women as it did on the men. By being constantly bundled up in far more fur and hide than they needed to stay warm – a convenient way of hauling about extra skins for the tribe – the women often found themselves overheating and in need of less body mass rather than more. With time and generations Cro-Magnon women shrank. They grew smaller, more diminutive. They lost most of their body hair-”
“Not necessarily a bad thing,” I interjected.
“No, but by being smaller physically, they also came to be seen as inferior to men and soon found themselves with little or no say in the matters of the tribe. They followed the men and did whatever they were told, socially one step above children.”
“Doesn't seem fair.”
“No one ever said life was fair.”
“So how long does it last?”
“Thirty thousand years.
“Despite the violence of the hunt it would actually be the greatest period of peace and stability mankind would ever know. For mankind this is the time of plenty. This is the Garden of Eden. Sharing was a virtue. After killing a beast they would freeze what they couldn't finish by pitting it in the permafrost. They would mark the spot with a stick for anyone to come along, up-earth, and eat if they needed it. These people were wanderers. Without food or territory to fight over, tribal skirmishes were unheard of. Everyone spoke the same language. Everyone-”
“Really,” I interjected, “the same exact language?”
“For the most part,” said Sara, “a simple language for simple times.”
“How come I feel like they should all be talking a thousand different languages.”
“Something you ate?”
“Well, this is Europe.”
“No. This is pre-agricultural Europe. And they were wandering people, all descendants of just five or six tribes who came in from the east. It's only when farms sprout up, when people live their whole lives in one spot and never wander anywhere that communication breaks down and nobody understands anyone.
“But thankfully that's still thousands of years into the future. Right now, if you were living on the plains and you saw another tribe wandering in from the distance you wouldn't have to guess if they were friendly or speak the same tongue. It was just an accepted fact. Nobody was different, nobody was a stranger. Everyone got along quite peacefully.”
“Until a mastodon stomped them flat,” I added.
“I'm serious,” said Sara, swatting my shoulder, “Imagine thirty thousand years of doing the same thing over and over again, day after day. That repetition hardwired this one incontestable existence into their heads, carved it out the way a river carves a canyon. They lacked the knowledge of any other way to live and so they never regretted anything they did. They never second-guessed or questioned their leaders. Absence of knowledge, Garden of Eden. Everyone was wanted. No one was worthless. Everyone was young and beautiful because few ever lived to see old age. It may seem crude and barbaric to us, but have you seen the people wandering the aisles of Malwart lately? As a species we pale in comparison to the Cro-Magnons. Not only were they better built than us but they even had bigger brains.”
“Ok, now you're making me feel a bit substandard here. So when does paradise fall,” I asked, egging her on again. I spun the globe and hovered my finger over the blur of land and water, “Where does it hit? Some catastrophe has to strike. An asteroid? An exploding volcano? A titanic flood? I am a vain and vengeful god who hates those with beefier biceps than my own. Let's wreak some havoc.”
Sara gently put a break on the globe. She did so with one finger in the way that a mother might silently remind a child that this toy is not a toy.
“It happens everywhere and yet nowhere at all,” said Sara, “And it's nothing so big as an exploding volcano, just a simple change in weather patterns. The Ice Age gets colder and colder until a peak is hit around 18,000 BC.”
“-or pit, don't you mean a pit-”
“Okay. A pit is reached around 18,000 BC. And from there it steadily grows warmer. And herein lies the irony of the Ice Age. It wasn't the cold part that was hard, it was the warming up, The Great Thaw which was a killer. Over the next eight thousand years the temperature would trickle upwards. The coastline would creep in. The giant pine forest of Germany and Poland would regrow. A huge deciduous forest would rise up to cover the west coast of France and because of this the tundra so vital to maintaining the megafauna would not entirely disappear but shrink and take with it most of the giant mammals.
“It wasn't until the woolly rhino was no more and the woolly mammoth had been hunted to near extinction that the Cro-Magnons finally decided to try hunting something else - namely the large fast moving herds of elk, red deer and wild horses that were rapidly filling in the vacuum left by the vanishing beasts. But this presented a unique problem.”
“Cro-Magnon man wasn't as fast as he used to be?”
“Cro-Magnon hunters could sprint, but not for long distances. The problem was that the tribes themselves had grown tail heavy. All the supplies they needed to survive the still brutal winters were weighing them down, causing them to be easily outrun by the herds they hunted. So they divided. Women, children, the elderly and a few guards stayed at the tribe's Winter settlements all year long, usually in caves along the alps. Then the men went out by themselves to hunt during the Spring and Summer and return with their kills in the Autumn.”
“Let me guess, while left on their own the gatherers began to experiment, planting lentils and laying the groundwork for agriculture.”
Sara's face scrunched into a tight little ball of disgust. “Lentils? Are you kidding me? After eating nothing but meat for thirty thousand years do you think they're going to settle for lentils? There are no lentils yet. No agriculture. No way. Another six thousand years of relative meat-eating peace goes by and then we get a cataclysm.
“The Older Dryas event hits circa 12,000 BC. An ice sheet collapses in the north sea and arctic winds normally vented over Russia are funneled into the valley between Norway and Scotland. This venturi focuses the wind, channels it and strengthens it into a blast so fierce and relentless that it destroys the once fertile north sea basin and literally sands Northern France and Western Germany down to its bedrock. The rest of Central Europe is buried in rolling dunes and duststorms of freezing silt. In the midst of this nothing can survive. These are The Dustlands.
“Anything living in the Dustlands either moved or died. Anything trying to travel or migrate through the desert risked starvation, dehydration, or sinking to ones death in a hill of super-fine silt. With the Alps and the Pyrenees to the south still choked by glaciers, the only available escape route for both man and animal alike was west out onto the Celtic Shelf.”
* * *
West.
Past the desert, over the plains, through a small scraggly forest and down to the sea shore; there a completely different frame of life was at hand. A warm wind blew in off the silver waters of the Atlantic. Sara and I walked along a sandy beach. The air was absolutely pristine. It smelled as fresh as a newly shucked oyster.
“Seems kinda nice actually,” I said with a tinge of disbelief, “It's warm.”
“It's October.”
“You're kidding me! Ice Age Europe?”
“Early October.”
“Still.”
Sara stepped into the softly crashing waves and crouched down to scoop up a handful of water. She sipped some off the top. I saw her lips purse briefly.
“Here, taste this.” she said.
I hate it when people do that. It's just not proper to make a face as if what just crossed your lips is the worst sleech in the world and then offer it to someone else.
“No,” I snapped, “That's disgusting.”
“Don't be a wuss,” said Sara. She was a teenager again. This seemed to be her favorite form. “It's not like there are any factories dumping mercury into it or anything.”
Reluctantly I walked over and crouched for a sip. It tasted clean yet in no way fresh. In fact, it was so salty it made soy sauce seem like spring water. I spat it out with a defiant spray.
“Oh my God! What are you trying to do? Give me a heart attack? That's pure salt!”
“Isn't it though,” smiled Sara. “Even though it's the tail end of the Ice Age there's still a lot of water locked up in the glacial caps. The ocean is still super dense and super salty. It's also the reason why it's so warm out here.”
I tried to remember my high school chemistry class but could only recall the lusty dreams I had of the two cheerleaders who were lab partners in the booth next to mine. Still, I took a flying leap. “Is it something to do with salt water retaining heat?”
“Close,” said Sara, “More so a trick of density. All of the ocean's currents run on something called the Thermohalide Conveyor Belt. The saltier the water becomes the more solidly it moves, so all this water, right to the bottom of the ocean was not long ago heating up off the coast of Africa.
“The ocean keeps the coast warm, but you don't have to go too far inland to feel the temperature drop.”
“What's over there?” I asked, pointing ahead of us.
Down the shore, towards the south, a hillside rolled up to the coast and suddenly stopped with a series of chalk white cliffs. Small gray wisps of smoke curled up the steep precipice and into the sky. A group of people could just barely be seen beneath them. They stood perfectly still along the mouth of a stream, staring quite intently at the surface of the water, mysterious sticks in hand. Hoes? Rakes? We were still too far away to tell.
“That's Tal.” said Sara, “A small fishing village on the coast.”
“They fish?”
“The women and children do. The men can't stand it but it beats going hungry.”
We drew closer, walking among them like ghosts. Unlike the cavemen depicted in my old college textbooks, these women were not stooped over wretches with sagging breasts and faces worn thin with lines and wrinkles - far from it. It was like stumbling onto a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot which just happened to have a fashion for fur boots and rawhide bikinis. These women stood tall, statuesque, with bronze skin, black hair, and bright broad smiles. They wore buckskin loin clothes and loose fitting jerkins stylishly decorated with frills and beads and neat looking jangly dangly things. Feathers on leather cords had been woven into their hair, accenting their manes with the white flashes of duck, goose and gulls. Around their necks hung heaps of necklaces crafted with everything from pearls and amber to bleached bone, shells and even polished animal teeth. Could it be? My eyes fixed on a smooth bronze calf sticking out of a wet furry boot. I blurted out, “They shave their legs!”
“With a sharpened shell,” Sara added nonchalantly.
“You know,” I said, “they don't seem very distraught. In fact, they seem quite happy to be here.”
“That's because they are. Without writing the memory grows short. Their passage out of the Dustlands has already become the stuff of legend. The battle to get the tribe to eat fish has been forgotten too. Life has returned to normal.”
Something was missing. I took a look around. In among the cliffs of chalk were the mouths of sea caves striped algae green and russet orange by tide bands. Beneath them sat broad sandstone flats on which people teemed. Girls wove baskets from sea grass and knotted sinew into cord. Boys fractured flint with a shared burin, looking to learn the magic of turning unassuming rocks into spear tips and knives. Skins were dried. Oysters shucked. Fish gutted. Old people, the few who had made it past forty, sat around in groups, dreaming of their glory days and working marine clay into pots that would later be glazed with sea salt and hardened in a fire. Everyone seemed to have a place and a purpose. Except....
“Where are all the men?” I asked.
With the exception of a few grizzled coots leaning on their spears, most of them swaddled in bandages and missing different body parts, I hadn't seen a single able bodied man anywhere.
“They're around.” said Sara, “Probably in the big cave sharing stories of their latest hunt. It's another reason why everyone is so happy. The hunters have just come home. Instead of months they talk of moons and the men have been away for two moons too long. Here. Put this on.”
Sara stood up from a tidal pool with a dripping wet lei of sea shells in her hands. She draped the glistening thing over my head. It sat heavy and wet on my shoulders. Sara grabbed my hands and locked them together with surprising strength.
“Don't freak out,” she said.
Just as I was about to ask why, thorny chitinous claws and legs and tickling antenna emerged from the dark hollows of the whelks and conchs.
“No way.” I said, “Get it off. Get it off right now.” The sharp points tapped and tickled the skin of my neck, sending chill vibrations up and down my spine.
“Sorry,” said Sara, “That's a hermit crab ring. And don't worry, they're friendly. They're the world's translators. Without one you're not going to understand a single word anyone out here has to say.”
I peered down my chin to see two black eyes on curious stalks peering back up at me. Try anything funny, I thought to myself, and I'll every boil every last one of you in old bay and lemon butter.
“They read minds,” said Sara.
Oops.
“They translate what they hear into the closest words you have for it, tapping the translation in through the nerves in your neck, almost like acupuncture but considerably more effective.”
I relaxed, despite the creepy feel of so many alien prickles around my neck.
Sara let go of my wrists. She pulled back the curls of her sandy blond hair to show that she now wore one too. Small, timid, blue red claws stretched out of their hallows to tap-dance on her skin. Something in me, permanently trapped at age eleven and desperate not to be outdone by any girl, goaded myself to relax and try to forget the whole thing. Still. These couldn't be the nice dry tree climbing hermit crabs they sell in pet stores. These were cold and wet aquatic ones still stinking of dead seaweed.
“The translation can get a bit wonky at times,” said Sara, “but so long as the idea gets across, that's what makes them happy.”
“What about making me happy?” I said.
Sara smiled, turned away and was off again, walking down the shore. She stopped and bent over to make the acquaintance of a small dark haired girl sitting by herself in the surf.
Pearl of the Coast
Aegia couldn't explain it.
That was fine. Being only three years old the world was full of things she couldn't explain and very few words to use when she tried. With her new toy the pearl usually dropped from one shell to the other, yet just this one time it decided to circle around the outer rim of the upper shell without coming to a stop. With quizzical eyes and chubby cheeks she looked up and grinned. Crouching over her was a beautiful woman with hair the color of sand and eyes like the sky. This was like her mommy but it was not her mommy. Still she felt no reason to be afraid. Standing not too far behind the sky woman was a man in strange clothing, picking at a necklace of shells around his neck. The shells were big and gaudy and the sight of him tickled her to laughter. As she giggled the two faded, slowly disappearing into a glint of sunlight. This also was inexplicable but not unacceptable. It was a strange world she had been born into. Undoubtedly everything would be explained in time. Aegia returned to playing with her new toy when she heard her real mommy's voice calling her.
“Mommy!” cried Aegia, jumping to her feet and running down the beach to where Tala was walking towards her with a spear balanced on her shoulder. Eight small flanks of salmon hung from the shaft. It was spawning season and the new fish were running back out to sea, never as meaty as the salmon that ran upstream during the Spring yet still quite tasty once roasted over a fire.
“Mommy, Mommy! Look what daddy brought me!”
Aegia gave Tala the oyster shell, which she opened and tried not to frown on. It was clean, bright, polished inside and out and held together by a leather cord that had been wrapped and tied through four holes painstakingly drilled into the foot of the shell. The pearl wasn't perfect. It had a slight dent in one side but was good enough for a child. The bauble was nice, but it was nothing Atouk could have created on his own. It had to have come from somewhere. Tala handed the toy back to her daughter and then stooped down to lift the girl into the crook of her elbow.
“So your father has finally come home,” said Tala.
“Yeah!” cheered Aegia. She began to sing to herself a simple rhyme about it. Technically it was more a chant than a rhyme, yet it should be said that the word daddy does rhyme with itself when chanted over and over and over again.
It would be good to see him again, thought Tala, it would be good to sleep with him again. What she dreaded was the inevitable discussion of how the hunt had gone wrong and how it seemed to be nothing more than a continuation of all the other times the hunt had gone wrong. Having Atouk bring Aegia a gift was not necessarily a good sign. Only children believed that gifts appeared out of thin air. He must have traded something for it.
In the cave Atouk was asleep or at least trying to sleep. He lay on a stack of furs, eyes closed but with his mind never wandering far from the sharp aches in his feet and the soreness in his shoulders. The hide curtain which separated their sleeping quarters from the rest of the tribal cave was pulled aside and Tala appeared. Aegia was not with her. Tala slinked in to wake him from his nap with a kiss on the lips.
“Oh no,” said Atouk, rising up on his elbows, “Now I know I'm in trouble.”
Tala smiled and brought the toy shell from behind her back. “Where did you get this?”
Atouk fell back flat and gave off an exasperated wheeze. “It's nothing, just a gift for Aegia.”
“I know, but where did you get it?”
“Lars gave it to me.”
“And what did you give to Lars in return?”
Atouk turned on his side so he wouldn't have to look at her and said, “I gave Lars some elk pelts so he wouldn't have to go home empty handed.”
Tala put the toy aside and crawled in next to him.
“Atouk. You're too nice. Lars is a mooch. You shouldn't-”
“Lars is the best friend I have. He can't help his brothers heavy feet. Lars is a good hunter. He gave me the toy. That is something isn't it?”
“Yes. But it's not an elk pelt. It's not even the promise of an elk pelt. And that's why he gives you this junk. It's so he doesn't ever have to pay you back for anything.”
Tala knew this wasn't easy for him. Atouk and Lars had been friends since childhood, even before the rights of puberty initiated them into their separate totems. Atouk was by birth a White Condor, the spirit of the flash which falls from a storm, shakes the earth and leaves fire in its wake. The White Condors were not the top totem in Tal, but they often came close. Lars and the Red Bears more often vied for the bottom of the pole.