Origin

Joshua:

Joshua crouched by a bubbling stream. His nostrils were filled by the musky smell of the hunters” skins, the soft green scent of grass.

The giant horse had become separated from its herd. It snorted, stamping a leg that seemed a little lame. Forgetting its peril in the foolish way of all horses, it nibbled at grass.

The Ham hunters crept forward. Most of them were men. There was no cover, here on the open plain, but they hunkered down in the long grass, and the drab brown skins they wore helped them blend into the background. They were patient. They worked towards the horse step by silent step, staying resolutely downwind of the animal. Lame or not, the heavy old stallion could still outrun any of them-or punish them with its hooves should they fail to trap it properly.

This small drama took place on a plain that stretched from the foot of a cliff. To the east, beyond a stretch of coarsely grassed dunes, the sea glimmered, a band of grey steel. And to the north a great river decanted into the sea via a broad, sluggish delta system. The plain was wet and scrubby, littered by pools. At the base of the cliff itself, a broad lake was fed by springs that sprouted from the cliff’s rocks.

The coastal plain, with its caves and streams and pools and migrant herds, was the home of Joshua’s people. They called themselves the People of the Grey Earth. Others called them Hams. They had lived here for two thousand generations.

To Joshua, the landscape was a blur, marked out by the position of the other hunters, as if they glowed brightly — and by the horse, the centre of their attention.

A soft call came. Abel was waving his arm, indicating they should approach the horse a little closer. Abel was Joshua’s older brother.

Joshua crouched lower and moved through the grass, towards the incurious horse.

But now his questing fingers found something new, lying hidden in the grass. It was a stick, long and straight. No, it was a spear, with a stone tip fixed to the wood by some black, hard substance; he could see where twigs had been sheared away from it by a stone knife. He picked up the spear and hefted it, testing its weight. It was light and flimsy; it would surely break easily on a single thrust. Its shaft was oddly carved, into fine, baffling shapes.

A bear.

He dropped the spear, crying out, and stumbled back. Suddenly a bear had been looking at him, from out of the shaped wood in his hands.

A massive hand clamped over his mouth and he was pushed to the ground.

Abel loomed over him. His skins, of horse and antelope, were tightly bound about his body by lengths of rawhide thread. His eyes were dark pools under his bony brow. “Th” horse,” he hissed.

“Bear,” Joshua said, panting. “Saw bear.”

Abel frowned and cast around, seeking the bear. Then he saw the broken spear. He picked it up, briefly fingering its dense carving, then hurled it from him with loathing. “Zealots,” he said. “Or En’lish. Skinny-folk.”

Yes, Joshua thought uneasily. Skinnies must have made the little spear. But nevertheless there had been, briefly, a bear glaring at him from out of the carved wood.

“Ho!” It was Saul, another of the Ham hunters. “Horse breakin’!”

Abel and Joshua struggled to their feet. The horse, startled, was coming straight towards the brothers, a mountain of meat and muscle, a giant as large as a carthorse.

Joshua grabbed a cobble, and Abel raised his thrusting spear. They grinned at each other in anticipation.

Joshua ran straight into the animal’s mighty chest.

He was knocked flying, and he landed in the dirt in a tangle of loosened furs. Winded, he got straight up, and ran back towards the fray.

He saw that his brother had grabbed the horse around its neck. The horse was bucking, still running, and it carried Abel with it; but Abel was stabbing at the horse’s throat with his spear. The spear was a short solid pillar of wood, stained deep with the blood of many kills. It was a weapon of strength and utility, without carving or decoration of any kind.

The slender spear of the Skinny-folk was meant to be thrown, so that an animal could be brought down from a distance, sparing such hard labour; the Hams had no such technology, and never would.

In a moment Abel’s thrusts had reached some essential organ, and the animal crashed to the dust. The other men closed, yelling, hurling themselves on the animal to subdue it before it died. With a gleeful howl, ignoring the pain of his bruised chest and back, Joshua joined in. Before the animal was overpowered they all suffered bruises and cuts; one man broke a finger.

When the horse was dead, the butchery began.

Joshua found a flat cobble. He sat on the ground with one leg folded under him, tucked a flap of antelope skin over each hand, and began to work the cobble with fast, precise motions.

With fast blows of a pebble, he knocked away bits of stone, working around the cobble until he had left a series of thin ridges on a domed surface. After twenty or thirty strokes, with bits of stone littering the ground around him, he pulled a bone hammer from the cord around his waist. The hammer was a bit of antelope thigh bone, broken, discoloured, heavily worn with use. With care, he struck one of the ridges. A thin, teardrop-shaped flake fell away. He picked it up and inspected it; it was fine and sharp, good enough for use without further work. He returned to his cobble and knocked out a series of flakes, with one confident blow after another, until the core had been returned to convexity. Then he began to prepare the core to make further flakes.

Joshua was good at working stone. It was a high art because each nodule of stone had its own unique properties; the toolmaker had to find a path through the stone to the tools he or she wanted. It was a question of seeing the tools in the raw stone. Men and women alike would watch his fast, precise movements, seeking to copy him. The women pushed their children towards him, making them watch. Nobody asked him about it, of course; people didn’t talk about tool making.

Making such tools was the thing Joshua did best, the thing for which he was most valued, the thing for which he valued himself. And yet it set him aside from the others.

He tucked his bone hammer back in his rawhide belt and took his flakes to the horse. He began work on a leg. With a series of swipes he cut down the skin on the inside of the limb, pulling it away from the muscle. Some of the horse’s thick brown hair stuck to the edge of the tool. Then he moved to the belly, opening up the hide. He grasped the open skin and pulled it sideways. Where membranes clung to the skin, he swiped at them gently with his flake, holding the stone at its centre between his fingers. The membranes parted easily. There was no blood, no mess.

When the horse was skinned, it was easily dismembered. Joshua cut away the meat of the neck. It fell open and was pulled away. He turned his axe over and over, seeking to use all its edge. When he was done he moved to the rib cage, and sliced down it with a crunch.

The people talked softly, steadily. They talked boastfully about their own and each other’s prowess in the hunt of the horse, the people waiting for them at the hut — especially young Mary, whose breasts and hips were beginning to fill out, making her a centre of intense interest among the men, and amusement for the women. Their attention was filled with each other; the horse, now it had turned to a mere mine of meat, had receded.

But even here, as the people worked together on the fallen horse, they sat a little away from Joshua. They were reluctant to look at him directly, and did not respond to what he said, as they responded to others.

Joshua was short, robust, heavily built. He was barrel-chested, and his arms and short, massive-boned legs were slightly bowed. His feet were broad, his toes fat and bony. His massive hands, with their long powerful thumbs, were scarred from stone chips. His skull, under a thatch of dark brown hair, was long and low with a pronounced bulge at the rear. His face was pulled forward into a great prow fronted by his massive, fleshy nose; his cheeks swept back as if streamlined, but his jaw, though chinless, was massive and thrust forward. Over each of his eyes a great ridge of bone thrust forward, masking his eyes. There was a pronounced dip above the brow ridges, before his shallow forehead led back into a tangle of hair.

He looked powerful, ferocious. But in his pale brown eyes there was uncertainty and confusion.

Joshua was twenty-five years old. Already he was one of the senior members of the group; only a handful of men and women were older than he was. And yet he still felt something of an outsider, as he had all his life.

The problem was his tool-making. He would always be valued for it. But others were suspicious of what lay at the centre of that profound skill: his ability to see the tools in the stone.

It was uncomfortably like what the Zealots did, and the English. Skinny-folk spoke to the sky and the ground as if they were people. Their tools were carved and painted in ways that, sometimes, made even Joshua see people or animals that weren’t really there.

Just as the knives and burins and scrapers he saw in the cobbles weren’t really there either, not until he dug them out. The others sensed that his head was full of strangeness, and that was why there was a barrier around him, a barrier that never broke down.

Now the hunters had completed their butchery, and the meat lay scattered around them in neat crimson piles. Joshua dropped his stone flakes, and soon forgot them. The hunters picked up cobbles and smashed open the bones. They would bring the meat back to their hut at the base of the cliffs. But first they would enjoy the warm, greasy, delicious marrow, the privilege of successful hunters. There was a mood of contentment. They knew that they need not hunt again for several days, that the women and children would welcome their return with joy, and that the evening would be filled with good food, companionship, and sex.

And, while the men lolled contentedly, Abel began to talk of the Grey Earth.

The Grey Earth was the home of the people.

The Hams had fallen, baffled, to this strange place of red dirt and grass. They lived here, but it was not as the Grey Earth had been. On the Grey Earth, the animals ran past the people’s caves like great rivers of meat. On the Grey Earth, there were no skinny Zealots or English or troublesome Elf-folk; on the Grey Earth there were only Hams, the people of the Grey Earth.

The men listened. The Grey Earth lay two thousand generations in the past, and now it made the people’s only legend, relayed from one generation to the next, utterly unchanging and unembroidered; they were a people conservative even in their story-telling.

But Joshua looked up into the sky. The sun was fading now, and the earth shone brightly. This earth was not the Grey Earth, for it was not grey, but a bright, watery blue.

The Hams lived in an unchanging present. Joshua’s sense of his life was of a series of days more or less-like today, stretching ahead of and behind him like images in a hall of mirrors, reaching from his dimly recalled days as a toddler begging scraps from his mother, all the way to no-longer-remote times when he would become as toothless and broken-down as old Jacob, back in the hut, again helpless and dependent on the kindness of others. The Hams knew of life and death and the cycle of their lives. But of the world beyond themselves they knew of no change.

…No change but one, Joshua reflected: in the past, they had lived on the Grey Earth, and now they did not.

Joshua looked at his companions as they rested, lolling against the ground, licking marrow from their fingertips, listening amiably to Abel’s loose legends. He knew that not one of them would share his thoughts, of past and future and change, of knives buried in rocks. Joshua kept silent, and peered up at the earth’s cool loveliness.

The hut was in the overhang of the cliff, close to the lake. It was built of beech saplings stuck in the ground, bent over and tied at the top. Skins of horses and antelopes had been laid loosely over the frame, weighted down with rocks. More massive rocks had been dragged to the rim of the hut. The area around was scattered with debris, animal bones, abandoned tools, cobbles scooped from the hut floor, and handfuls of ashes.

As the hunters returned with their haul of meat, Joshua saw that smoke was already rising from rents in the roof. Only a few children were outside, playing with the scattered cobbles and bits of skin. Joshua saw bats pecking hopefully at the abandoned bones.

The children ran to the hunters, and playfully grabbed at their meat.

Inside the hut the air was smoky, but the fires in their shallow hearths gave off a yellow-red glow that sent long flickering shadows over the dome of skin above. Beside the hearths, many of the women and children were already eating. The women had been hunting too. Impeded by their children and infants, women mostly did not tackle the huge game taken on by the men, but the steady flow of smaller game they returned, like beavers and rabbits and bats, provided more than half the group’s provisions.

Joshua began to shuck off his skins, loosening or cutting rawhide ropes and letting the skins fall where they might. In the hot, stuffy air of the hut he began to scrape dirt and sweat from his skin with a bit of antelope jaw bone.