The Caves of Périgord (24 page)

They turned off at Montignac, crossed the river, and then ignored the signs that steered the tourists toward the mock cave that had been built for them, taking a side road that wound up the hill and through a thin screen of trees. Looking down, Lydia saw a long slope falling to a stretch of flatter land by the river, then the ground rising from the small town of Montignac beyond. Screen out the town, she thought, and this is the view the artists of seventeen thousand years ago saw as they left the cave each evening.

CHAPTER 11
The Vézère Valley, 15,000 B.C.

D
eer was sketching, as he always did. Down by the riverbank, sitting cross-legged by the water, a small stretch of moist clay smoothed flat by his hand, and a twig drawing lines that seemed to flow unbidden from his fingers. Somehow it was never beasts that sprang from the clay at times like this. What was emerging now was that fallen tree on the far bank of the river, the sad way one branch leaned into the water, while the heavy trunk just squatted on the shore. The water built up around the obstruction of the branch, making a fat lip that flowed into two arms that raced along either side of the bough and set the
leaves dancing into the sudden turbulence of the river. Heavy lines for the tree, lighter lines for the flow of water, but how could he capture the way the leaves danced? Quickly, he scratched three tiny shapes alongside each other. One leaf that was curling up, another that curled down, another bent into a suggestion of movement and merged into the one of the lines of the water. That was almost right.

“It’s the tree,” said a surprised voice. “The tree in the river.” Little Moon put down the skin in which she was fetching water, and bent over the sketch in the clay.

“Those are the leaves in the water, and that is the river,” she said eagerly, while Deer’s eyes fixed on the dappled lights that flowed over her face from the sunlight reflected on the water. She turned, looking at the fallen tree. “I didn’t think you could draw trees. I mean, I didn’t think you could just draw what you see. What is just there.”

“How can we draw anything unless we see it?”

“But I thought only the beasts were drawn.” Her voice was low with an automatic respect.

“In the caves, yes. Only beasts. But if you want to draw beasts, you must be able to draw other things. At least, I do. What I learn when I draw a tree, I can use when I draw a beast. Look, you see this water?” He pointed at the clay. “How do you draw water? I cannot. So I draw movement, and the shape in the movement. You see how the river flows around the tree, piling up behind the branch. That is what I try to draw. If I can find the movement in the water, I can put movement into the beasts.”

She looked again at the stretch of clay, and then at him.

“I am not to talk with you, my father says.” Quick as a bird, she flicked her head to look up toward the village. “I just happened to come to this stretch of bank for the water. We are smoking the meat you brought back from the hunt.”

“It is the easiest way down to the river,” he said reasonably. Along with the other apprentices from the cave, he had spent the previous day
cutting saplings and fixing the frames that the women would use to scrape and dry the reindeer skins. Then they had dug the fire pits and erected the teepees above them where the reindeer meat would be smoked.

“What else do you draw?” she asked.

“Flowers, and those hills over there, and the moon at night, and the ways caves appear in the curves of rock like a smile appears on a face.”

“A face? You cannot draw faces. You cannot draw people. That is forbidden.”

“Does your father say that?”

“When I was younger, I used to make shapes in the clay. Like you, only not as good. I did little figures once, like sticks. Big thin ones for men and round ones for women and little ones for children and my father was angry and rubbed them out. Drawings capture the spirit, he told me, which is why they paint the beasts in the caves. It is forbidden to draw people.”

“It is not forbidden to draw trees or water.”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly he leaned forward to put a hand into the river, splashed water on the clay, and smoothed out his tree. “Show me what you draw,” he instructed, and put the twig into her hand.

“I cannot,” she said, darting her eyes up toward the village again. “I must take the water to soak the skins and dampen the fires for the smoking.”

“Do it without me looking. I’ll get your water.” He rose, a fluid movement, picked up the skin and its carrying stick and splashed through the shallows to the deeper water where the current flowed fast and looked back to see Little Moon kneeling over the clay, the twig darting quickly across it. He threaded the stick through the holes that had been carefully sewn in the edges of the skin, filled it with water, and used the little thongs to secure it. He came back with deliberate slowness, watching the village and the small humped tent where the
old Keeper of the Bison used to sleep. It was his now. The village was stirring busily, smoke already rising from the narrow holes at the top of each of the teepees where the meat already hung, sliced by flintknives. The sun was already a hand’s breadth above the hill. His eyes turned back to Little Moon, and he felt that strange sensation when he was not just looking, but seeing. There was the curve of Moon’s back, the fall of her hair, and then the flat plane of the clay, and the river dancing below it. The shapes fitted together in a way that he could almost feel, a balance of curve and flatness and movement. She looked up and broke the pattern, but in a way that pleased him. Her eyes danced, just like the water. Her limbs were smoother than the clay.

He splashed toward her, holding out the dripping log with its sagging skin full of water. She rose and took it, their hands touching, and then she turned and left, as quickly as she could under the heavy burden, staggering once as she changed her step to avoid stepping in her sketch in the clay.

He stayed in the shallows, reluctant to step forward and see what she had done. He looked across once more to the village and at the bustle beyond where smoke rose and the sound of the Flint men knapping their stones brought the accustomed rhythm to the day. Way up the hill, a thin trail of smoke twirled by the entrance to the cave. The Keeper of the Bulls had made his morning sacrifice. The other apprentices would be trudging up the slope to mix colors and build more scaffolding. The Keeper of the Horses might need his help today. Deer had already learned the way the Keeper of the Horses made the manes, blowing the colors from his mouth through the different shapes he could make with his thumb and finger.

Finally, unable to put off the moment any longer, he moved slowly forward through the water, as if it were as thick as mud, to look at Little Moon’s sketch. And caught his breath with surprise.

It was a man’s shape, thighs emerging from the river, the waist curved and the weight of the chest and shoulders taut to take the weight
of the log and the skin, filling in the river. The head was just a suggestion of shape, and a few swift curls of hair. There was no face, no identity, but it was him, as he had been just a few moments ago. Him in the river, as caught by her. Caught. No, that was not the word she had used, the word she had learned from her father. Captured. She had captured his spirit. Indeed she had. He admired her work, the curve of thigh and back, the suggestion of hair. The water was just three quick lines, scored deeper where they began and then becoming shallower, in a way that suggested both movement and direction. There was a curl of wave by his forward thigh that he liked. A man in the river. Him.

Guiltily, he looked up at the village, and then splashed water over her sketch with his foot and smoothed the clay clean again. As he went to his work, he thought that his spirit did not feel caught, but that he would like to be captured by Moon. She had seen something in him and been moved by it, and had depicted it. But then, the sketch had already disappeared, taken by the river. Would it be so easy to capture her? A few hasty lines in clay? It could not be so easy, or everyone would do it. But that way she had balanced the curve of his thigh against the curl of the water, that was good. He could use that. She had the talent, Little Moon. She should be working in the cave, but women never did. He had never asked himself why not before. But then he had never seen a woman draw before. He had never seen a drawing of himself before. Looking up to the cave and feeling eager to begin, Deer felt as if the world had suddenly been reinvented and he was bursting with possibilities.

The Keeper of the Horses was becoming angry. All the other Keepers were agreed save the Keeper of the Bulls. There was a gap amid the ranks after the old man’s death. They needed a new Keeper, and Deer had done his part in the hunt and was now a man. He was the obvious
choice, the most talented of the apprentices, and had been chosen by the old man himself. Had he not told the Keeper of the Horses that the boy should have his own lamp after his death?

“Why do you object?” he repeated, angrier still by the way the Keeper of the Bulls had perched himself on this rock above the other Keepers, looking down upon them rather than sitting with them in the circle, as was the custom. The Keepers were all equal. The man was becoming insufferable, as if he were trying to become leader. They were a brotherhood, bonded by the great work of the cave. There were no leaders or followers among them, only Keepers and apprentices. And the cave itself was ritual enough, without this new business of skulls and eagles and great ceremonies that rested on clever tricks. He had taken the other Keepers up the hill to show them the pit and the brushwood where the eagle had been caught and then released.

“The boy is still young,” objected the Keeper of the Bulls.

“He is a man. He killed his beasts,” said the Keeper of the Ibex, who had been more offended than any of them when he saw the eagle’s pit, aware that he had been fooled. “We all saw him kill them well, leaping from back to back like a mountain goat. Deer is no boy any longer.”

“We nearly banished him from the cave,” came the next objection. “We only just decided to let him back in. Perhaps that was a mistake.”

“You know as well as I do that the old man stumbled on his own. He felt very bad about blaming Deer. That was why he took the boy under his wing, made him his special apprentice, taught him all that he could, left Deer his lamp,” said the Keeper of the Horses, striving to keep his voice reasonable.

“The old man made his choice,” said the Keeper of the Ibex. “He made Deer his heir. He passed on his lamp. You know what that means. We cannot go against a Keeper’s final wish.”

“The old man was wandering in his own head. He was not what he had been,” said the Keeper of the Bulls, his voice sullen at not getting his own way. “He even left his work unfinished.”

“Deer is finishing the coloring of the two bison. He has a master’s touch that boy, and the old man knew it and welcomed Deer’s completion of the work.”

“So let him finish that work. The boy has shown a certain talent with his deer, but as apprentice he must complete his dead master’s work. The two beasts on which the old man worked are but half-done.”

“They are done, save for the last of the coloring. And Deer has improved on what he was left,” said the Keeper of the Horses. “The old man told me of his pleasure at Deer’s idea to depict one of them shedding its winter coat. It is no apprentice’s common task that Deer has done. It is a master’s work. The old man knew that, and treasured the boy for his talent.”

“I need to think more of this,” said the sullen voice. “There is no rush to decide, and the work awaits us.” He rose to go.

“The work requires a full brotherhood of Keepers,” said the Keeper of the Bears. A squat, dark man who lived apart, he seldom spoke, and remained stubbornly seated on the ground. Nobody else rose. The council was still in session, whatever their high and mighty colleague might want. Odd, thought the Keeper of the Horses, how much resentment had built up toward the Keeper of the Bulls. As if that ritual he had staged before the hunt had offended the other Keepers, just as much as the trick he had played. It had certainly offended him, something new in the world that threatened changes he could not foresee.

The Keeper of the Bulls studied his colleagues thoughtfully, and instead of walking back to the cave, slid down the face of the rock to join them in the circle. He was shaking his head almost sorrowfully.

“Perhaps I am being harsh on the boy,” he said, his voice different, almost ingratiating. “Forgive me, my friends, if I am still dark and low in my spirits after the death of my woman. I still think of her, and my bed is cold and lonely.”

Silence as the rest of them considered that. Certainly he had been acting strangely since her death.

“This is not about your bed. It is about filling the brotherhood of Keepers,” said the Keeper of the Bears, in the stubborn way of a man who has seized on a single point and will not let it go.

“You are right,” said the ingratiating voice. “But we are all men here. We know that a man needs his bed filled and his heart lightened by a woman.”