Time's Last Gift (9 page)

His two companions were almost as tall as Gribardsun and fully as broad-shouldered. One had reddish hair and the other yellow-brown. Their eyes were blue. Their bones were large, and their supraorbital ridges were prominent. Though they were Caucasian, they had slight epicanthic folds, indicating, perhaps, some Mongolian genes.

Gribardsun strode into camp as if he owned it which, in a sense, he did. The strangers hung back until he turned and gestured for them to join him. They put their spears and atlatls and boomerangs on the ground and climbed up to the ledge. Their wooden-handled flint knives were still in their sheaths, however.

Gribardsun introduced them as Klhmnhach and Rhtinkhlhk. They smiled nervously and spoke in a strange whispering speech.

Von Billmann, hearing them, smiled so broadly that his face threatened to split. Gribardsun laughed and said, ‘Their language is a linguist’s delight, Robert. Very few vowels and most of the consonants are unvoiced. And nothing like anything ever recorded in Europe.’

The Bear People did not like the strangers at all. Thammash protested loudly while he made threatening gestures at the two. They moved closer together, but their faces remained expressionless and their fingers were widespread.

There was a brief interruption when Laminak, Dubhab’s pre-teenaged daughter, ran to Gribardsun and threw her arms around his waist and hugged him while she wept. The Englishman patted her head and murmured something about being happy to see her again. Then he gently pushed her away, and her mother took her hand and led her away while she scolded her.

‘You’ve made another conquest,’ Rachel said. Her smile was hard.

Gribardsun did not reply. He addressed the entire tribe, telling them that he had made peace with the strangers, the Wotagrub, whose name for themselves was Krhshmhnhik. This meant The People. The tribesmen were unable to pronounce the word anywhere near correctly, nor would they make much of an effort. For them, the Krhshmhnhik remained the Wotagrub.

Gribardsun did not say how he had talked the Wotagrub into making peace. Nor did he say anything about taking revenge for their having killed so many Wota’shaimg. From now on there would be peace. The Wotagrub would move even farther away. The borders of the two tribes would be such and such, and he defined them as exactly as he could, using landmarks both tribes knew well. If one tribesman ventured into the territory of the other tribe, he must refrain from hunting there.

The Wota’shaimg did not like anything he said. They wanted an eye for an eye. In fact, two eyes for an eye. And they could not understand why such a powerful magician and warrior as Gribardsun did not exact vengeance.

The Englishman explained that he could have wiped out the whole tribe easily. But he saw no reason to do so. That was that.

He later told his colleagues that it would have done no good to have gone into ethics or morality. The Wota’shaimg would not have understood his modern philosophy. The best thing to do was to issue an edict as if he were a god. They could understand that. If they did not understand rationality, they understood power. The great magician and wicked warrior - to them, wicked was a compliment - required such and such or would punish them. So they would do as he said, even if they did not like it.

Gribardsun ordered a feast, and the two strangers squatted with the elders of the tribe and the scientists and ate with them. After that, they relaxed. The Wota’shaimg were not likely to murder them if they ate with them. The sharing of food implied safety for those who shared. There was no spoken law to this effect. It was just understood.

The time travelers examined the boomerangs of the strangers. These were carved with flint and consisted of a heavy close-grained wood which they could not identify as yet. The wood did not grow in this area. Gribardsun said he could speak only a few words - word-sentences, rather - of the strangers. But through sign language he had learned that their origin was far to the south, and that they had brought these boomerangs from their native territory. That was probably either in southern Iberia or possibly North Africa. The two would be connected with a land bridge, of course, since the Mediterranean Sea was much smaller and lower now. The Wotagrub had once had many boomerangs, but they had been in this country so long that they had lost most of them. And there was no wood appropriate for making new ones.

‘I believe that a trip southward, say about the time fall is due, would be consistent with our purpose,’ Gribardsun said. He chewed on a piece of rare-cooked ibex steak for a moment and then said, ‘We could travel swiftly to get away from the effects of winter here. Winter farther south won’t be so severe that we can’t travel. And I think we should take a look at the land bridge and at North Africa.’

‘Isn’t that rather dangerous, putting ourselves so far away from our vessel?’ Drummond said. ‘I admit the scientific desirability of studying the southern area. But we must weigh the possible results against the chances of killing ourselves off and so ruining the entire expedition. After all, the power spent on getting us here and back, the fact that this is absolutely the only chance we’ll get for a personal look into the Magdalenian period - well, I don’t think we should get too far away from our base of operations. Here we have the situation well in hand. But if we wander around, just four of us, we’re subject to attack, to accident, to many things. We might be cut off. We might…’

‘Anything that could happen south could happen here,’ Gribardsun said. ‘Let’s think about it. We have a month before autumn comes. We’ll consider the feasibility of austral explorations then.’

‘Meanwhile,’ von Billmann said, ‘I’d like to record the language of the Wotagrub. Do you think it would be all right if I returned with these two?’

‘Why not?’ Gribardsun said. ‘But I’d like you to collect some animal specimens, too, including entomological specimens, if you could. And get samples of the blood of the Wotagrub if you can. Don’t push too hard at first about that, though.’

The German was delighted. He stood up and said, I’ll get my tent and recorder and other equipment and leave as soon as possible.’

‘Sometime tomorrow,’ Gribardsun said, smiling. ‘We have some things to thresh out, a policy to determine regarding the Wotagrub. It’s necessary that everybody understand exactly where we stand. And that won’t be easy, since we have to communicate with the Wotagrub through signs.’

It was late when the fires were allowed to dim and the time travelers, the elders, and the two strangers went to bed. But Gribardsun was satisfied that everybody understood, in general, what the relationship of the two tribes was to be.

The following afternoon, von Billmann, carrying a large pack on the duraluminum rack on his back, walked off with the two strangers. They also carried packs, the German’s equipment and supplies. Von Billmann was exhilarated, and he joked with his two companions. They could not understand a word he said, of course, but they understood his joy, and they smiled back at him.

Rachel, watching him march off between them, said, ‘Do you really think that it’s wise to let him go off alone, John?’

He did not answer. He had a habit, annoying to her, of not answering questions if he thought they didn’t deserve an answer.

Rachel bit her lip and looked at Drummond. He shrugged and moved away. He knew that she wanted him to give her moral support when she questioned Gribardsun about his past. But von Billmann had left them so suddenly that they felt weakened. It had been easy to talk about the questions they would ask Gribardsun when he returned. But now that he was here, he seemed formidable. He would doubtless resent their questions and refuse to answer them. And even if he did, then what? The fact was, they were all here together and they must all work together. In any case, Rachel did not credit a word of their absurd suspicions that Gribardsun had somehow got on the expedition through foul play.

Drummond had asked her how she knew. Did she really know the Englishman that well?

Rachel had admitted that she did not, certainly not in any sense that Drummond may have implied. But her feminine intuition, her perceptivity, irrational perhaps but nevertheless valid, told her that Gribardsun was not a felon or a maniac. She knew he was a decent human being, just as a moth knows that certain flying objects are not bats. But her antennae were invisible.

Drummond had laughed at that and asked her how in the world she had ever gotten her doctorate in zoology. Angrily, she had replied that perhaps he was right about her intuitions. They had told her that Drummond was a strong man, a good husband, and that he was in love with her. But she had been mistaken. So perhaps her intuitions about Gribardsun were also wrong.

Drummond had then become angry in turn, and they had quarreled again.

FOUR

The summer passed swiftly, the short autumn of the glacial age was upon them. Gribardsun had by then apparently given up the idea, at least temporarily, of traveling to the south. There was so much to be done in this little area that it would have seemed shirking their duties to travel elsewhere.

Gribardsun’s study of the Wota’shaimg language had so far revealed a vocabulary of more ‘words’ than he would have expected. He was convinced that there were at least that many more. Although it was a poor language for communicating intellectual ideas, it was surprisingly versatile in words for emotions, sensations, and impressions. And, it had a highly technical language for those things most important to the Wota’shaimg: hunting, fishing, various types of animals and stones, shades of light, kinds of snow and ice.

Their numeral system went up to twenty, and past that they used the word for ‘many.’ But they could describe exactly each member of a group exceeding the number of twenty, some of them being able to list with all necessary distinguishing features each bison of a herd of forty.

They all had a phenomenal ability for reciting long tales and certain common magical formulae. Wazwim, the singer, could chant four thousand lines of a poem without prompting. He did this three times over a period of two months for Gribardsun, and his lines seldom varied. However, whenever he thought of an improvement, he would promptly make it then and there.

The chant was only roughly a poem. The feet were based on quantity, though far removed from the classical Latin or Greek quantity. The line was roughly composed of a sort of trochaic hexameter. There was no rhyme but much alliteration. Nor could the poem be called an epic in the true sense of the word. It was a loose collection of narratives of heroes and totem animals and evil spirits intermixed with magical formulae and folk wisdom. The closest parallel to the ‘epics’ that modern man knew was the Finnish Kalevala. Everything had taken place long long ago, starting, in fact, before the creation of the universe and continuing up until a dozen generations ago, when the last of the heroes had died. Men today were only ordinary men, according to the song, weaklings and poor-spirited. They didn’t make men like they did in the old days.

Gribardsun was surprised that such a small, technologically retarded society could have produced such a relatively sophisticated poem; and with, for all its serviceable flexibility, a nonetheless essentially primitive vocabulary. Its existence in such a society went against all, that he knew and had been taught. He said as much.

‘That’s the frustrating thing about the limitations of time travel,’ Drummond said. ‘We can’t go even farther back to check out the origin and the development of the so-called epic. Or of anything.’

Gribardsun nodded, but he did not seem too unhappy about it. It was obvious that he was, in fact, very happy. He went out hunting with the others, or sometimes alone, and he always came back with meat. He seldom used his modern weapons but confined himself to using the tribal ones. He broke his own rule only when a big animal charged and made it necessary to use a rifle. Or when he went bird hunting. There were enormous flocks of ducks and geese settled around the lakes, and he went out happily dawn after dawn to hunt these. At first he killed them with a small spear or stones from a sling, or trapped them. But he occasionally took a shotgun and brought down dozens in one day.

‘This is a paradise!’ he said one evening to the Silversteins. ‘A world such as it should be! Damned few humans, and an abundance of wild life! And yet this place is barren compared to what Africa must be! We must go down there when spring comes!’

Drummond sometimes felt like remonstrating with Gribardsun. He thought that the Englishman spent too much time hunting when he should have been doing his scientific work. But Rachel said that he was learning the inner intimate life of the tribe by participating in their activities - not just by observations. Moreover, could Drummond truthfully say that Gribardsun had neglected any of his scientific work?

Every second day, von Billmann reported via their tiny transceivers. By the time the first snows came, he had recorded and noted enough of the language to keep him busy for years. He had also succeeded in gaining some fluency in the strange whispering speech.

‘I’ll be coming tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Leaving here, that is. They’re giving a big shindig for me tonight. We’ll be eating mammoth and bison and horse meat, lots of duck, and plenty of berries and greens. And that fermented berry and fruit juice I told you about. It tastes like hell, but it sure packs a punch.’

That was another unexpected discovery. It had not been suspected that alcohol had been made so early. But the knowledge of alcohol was apparently not extensive as yet. The Wota’shaimg, for instance, knew nothing of it.

The main reason that von Billmann was returning, aside from his longing for civilized companionship, was that the Wotagrub were moving out.

This was another discovery that went against the supposed facts. It had been assumed that they roamed during the warm seasons and holed up in caves or under overhangs during the winter. The arctic winters of middle Europe were surely too harsh to permit much movement by humans.

But the Eskimos traveled over the arctic ice and lived off it during the winter. They were integrated with their environment. They had all the technology needed to enable them to cope with it. And so had the Magdalenians.

Sometimes, the tribes did hole up in one place all winter, if there was enough game in the area to support them. But when the game became scarce, the tribe packed its tents and belongings and went wherever the herds went. The game was getting scarce around here, partly because of the strangers’ magical weapons. Everybody had eaten very well indeed, and fewer babies had died. But the big animals, the mammoths and the rhinos, had been scared out. They were becoming scarcer every year, anyway. The bison and the horses had moved on to some other area. The ibex were scarce for some reason. Even the great predators, the cave bear and the cave lion, had been killed or decided that the area was unsafe for them. And the reindeer had cropped up all the lichen and fungi and moved on.

Gribardsun solved the conflicting problems of remaining with the tribe to study them intensively and of exploring the land to the south.

Knowing that the tribesmen talked much among themselves of their dreams, and that they depended much on Glamug to interpret their dreams for them, Gribardsun planted the idea of going south. He described how much easier life would be where the snows weren’t so deep, and soon some people did dream of traveling far south. They discussed these dreams among themselves and then went to Glamug with them.

Several had dreamed that Gribardsun led them south. Since the dreams were obviously wishes, and since they felt protected and provided for under Gribardsun, they wished him to conduct them into the paradise.

Glamug came to the Englishman and told him of what his people had dreamed. Gribardsun agreed with Glamug’s analysis. Yes, he would be happy to guide them into the unknown lands to the south. They should start as soon as the long gray vessel was hauled up to the top of the hill and secured.

The ground was frozen, and a thin coat of ice had covered it after a partial snow. Even though they had gotten over most of their awe of the travelers themselves - though they retained all the original respect - they had never approached the vessel. Now, under Gribardsun’s urgings, they poled over the vessel until they had it on wooden and bone sleds. Ivory and bone wedges were driven into the slots on top of the sleds to keep the vessel from rolling off.

Meanwhile, other workers had chopped with reindeer antler picks through the ice and into the frozen earth. Stakes were driven into the holes. The long rawhide ropes were attached to the sleds and the other ends run several times around the stakes. The tribe, digging in their boots into the chopped-out steps along the slide, heaved on the ropes. The sleds and their three-hundred-ton burden moved slowly} oh, so slowly, upward.

It took until past dusk to get the H. G. Wells I over the crest of the steep hill. The work was carried on by burning pine torches and by lights set up by the travelers. The air was cold; the breaths steamed; and their sweat froze on their faces and on their beards. But they had eaten well, and Rachel had made gallons of hot cocoa, which the tribe tasted for the first time and could not get enough of. Gribardsun kept up a stream of jokes and worked alongside them, pitting himself against Angrogrim, who tried to show that he was not only as big as a horse but as strong as one.

By ten o’clock that night, without the death or injury of a single person, they had restored the vessel to its original position. Large boulders were rolled alongside to keep it from moving in any direction.

‘There’s nothing to keep some wandering tribe from rolling it down again if they want to go to the trouble,’ Gribardsun said. ‘But I doubt that anybody will touch it. It’s too frighteningly alien for these people.’

The following morning was bright and clear, though cold. The tribe packed their tents and other artifacts and piled them on travois-like poles. These had broad ends, somewhat like skis, which slid over the snow without sinking much. The women and the juvenile males pulled the travois while the men spread out ahead, behind, and on the flanks as guards. They all sang the Going-Away Song, taking farewell of the place which had protected them for three seasons and to which they would return - if they were fortunate.

They also sang the Song of Shimg’gaimq, a legendary hero who had led the tribe from the far south in the far past. At the end of the song they substituted Gribardsun’s name for Shimg’gaimq; the implication was that he was a new hero and even greater than the old.

The trek southward was slow. Heavy snows began to fall, and there were days when they could do nothing but hole up. Rachel and Drummond tended to stay huddled up inside their foam hut, which had been transported on skis. Gribardsun and von Billmann went out with the hunters, and they used their rifles. To have restricted themselves to native weapons might have meant that the tribe would starve, or at least go very hungry for some time. The game just seemed to have disappeared. Yet they knew that the deep snows hid plenty of bison and reindeer. The behemoth mammoths and rhinoceroses should also be somewhere around, penned in by high walls of snow. If they could be located, they could be speared with little chance of their escaping.

Gribardsun finally located a ‘yard’ which held a herd of thirty bison. He shot three males, and they butchered them while the other bulls pawed the snow-streaked grasses and snorted and made rumbling noises. But none charged, and presently the carcasses of the bulls were hauled away in many pieces. Then the big gray wolves appeared and devoured what the men had left behind. The last Gribardsun saw of them, they were slinking toward the herd. He doubted that they would dare attack in the ‘yard’ where the bulls had freedom of movement and the wolves could not get away swiftly.

The tribe ate for three days and then set out again. They continued through the deep snows, with frequent rest stops, until they came to the foothills of the Pyrenees. The passes of the range were blocked with snow and ice. The tribe could either camp until after the spring thaws - and much of the snow never melted even in the summer - or go around the mountains by way of the sea.

Here Gribardsun met his first serious resistance from the Wota’shaimg. They knew nothing of boats; they did not even know how to swim. When they learned what was expected of them, they refused. They would not set out on the ghastly gray seas even if they could stay dose to the shore. The very idea paralyzed them with terror.

The travelers built a boat by hollowing out a log. (This far south there were some trees large enough to provide adequate trunks for dugouts.) The four worked energetically for three days, and on the fourth they launched the craft in the heavy-rolling bitterly cold surf of what would some day be called the Bay of Biscay. They paddled around for an hour to demonstrate to the tribe what could be done with a boat. Then they returned to the beach to still unconvinced observers. And that was all the people wanted to be: observers. Participation was unthinkable for them, or so they claimed.

There were only two exceptions. Angrogrim volunteered to accompany them, since he felt that his reputation for courage must be upheld. The other was Laminak, who said she would go wherever Gribardsun went.

The Englishman seized on this chance to hold up the others to scorn. Were they fearful to go where a twelve-year-old girl dared to go? Were the men of the Wota’shaimg really less brave than a girl-child?

Gribardsun pressed this line and finally said that he would make up a song about the cowardly warriors of the Bear People if they did not show some guts very quickly. And so the men, and then the women, reluctantly agreed to build boats and set out along the coast. But it was two weeks before the people were able to handle the craft well enough, and several times a boat was capsized and the paddlers dumped. Three caught pneumonia but were brought quickly back to health with Gribardsun’s medicine. Every person wore an inflatable preserver around their waist. These had been brought from the time-vessel stores. There were so many in the stores because Gribardsun thought they might come in handy if supplies and specimens were to be hauled by boat at any time. The floaters could support large heavy containers if they should chance to get dumped into the water. In the meantime some were used as stabilizers on the primitive craft.

The fleet of ten large dugouts left the shores of what would some day be Gaul, and then France, and the boats, staying close to the shore, crept around the northern edge of the Iberian Peninsula. Near what would be the site of Lisbon, the boats put in for the last time and were dragged inshore and hidden. The Bear People were much relieved; at no time had they become fond of sea life, and they hoped never to have to endure it again.

Gribardsun led them across the peninsula, angling southeastward most of the time. They crossed great plains and went through heavy forests. Here the animal life was somewhat different; red deer and wild pigs were numerous, and there were many shaggy forest horses. But there were also great brown mountains of bison and woolly rhinos and mammoths, though these were not as numerous as on the other side of the Pyrenees. Conditions were changing, and within a thousand years or perhaps even less, the behemoths would be extinct in Iberia. The forest elephant was replacing them. The cave bear and lion and hyena were numerous enough to require caution in hunting. And the tribesmen of Iberia were as hostile as their northern kinsmen. These, however, were easily dispersed with a few shots fired into the air or, if they persisted, were routed with a few hypodermic missiles containing a drug. The missiles were not harmless; they struck with considerable impact and left great painful bruises and sometimes broke ribs or arms. But they did not kill except once, when a hostile warrior, allergic to the drug, died in a seizure a few minutes after being shot.