The crowd about them parted and a man painted all in white stepped up to them. He wore a tall feather headdress of what looked like goose and heron plumage. It was decorated with stones and shells, and he wore many ropes of necklaces of the same type. Some of the stones were dull yellow. Others had been polished to a sheen.
Gold.
This shaman, as Caroline guessed he was, also wore some amulets crudely hammered into animal shapes from unrefined gold ore.
The shaman waved a rod over them. The rod was capped by a gourd with pebbles within it. It made a rattling sound as he moved it over Caroline and Kemp in complicated ritual gestures. He hummed tunelessly as he did so with eyes pressed shut. He then turned his attention to the travois and its gruesome cargo. Squatting, he reached out and touched the fabric covering Phillip’s severed legs. He raised his fingers to his nose and sniffed. He turned to the others and hissed a phrase that drew a gasp of awe from the crowd of squat, naked men and women.
Caroline studied their captors. They looked less than human. Their skulls had a pronounced brow ridge, with disturbingly large eyes set deep over flat noses and obscenely broad mouths lined with pickets of black teeth. Their shoulders were wide, and their spines curved forward. Their feet were longer and narrower than was normal, and their fingers ended in knobbed, calloused tips with thick nailbeds. The ears were smaller and set farther back on the head. She continued to think of them as aborigines, but only because she had no other term for them. They were closer to animals than humans, and she knew she was looking at a vanished race of proto-humans. High-order primates with little shared DNA between themselves and their unlucky visitors.
Standing up, the shaman stiffened his body and pointed his stick at Miles and Caroline and called out a long string of what had to be orders. The pair were dragged up the hill toward the cave opening, where the vile hag that Caroline would name Old Mother waited.
They were shoved and yanked into the dark of the cave, where Old Mother and a dozen or so women of the tribe took over. Caroline was brought to the ground by many small hands. She struggled to rise and was swatted across the face with a stick with enough force to make her vision swim. More weight was brought to bear, and she was pressed to the sand and held still. Old Mother straddled her torso and stared defiantly into Caroline’s eyes. She made clucking sounds and reached out a hand. One of Caroline’s captors placed a curved flint blade in Old Mother’s palm. A skinning knife.
Caroline bucked and writhed but was held firm as Old Mother bent over her and used the knife to cut her clothing away. With sure hands, the ancient bitch sliced away her shirt, t-shirt, pants, and panties. The hiking boots stymied them, so they left them in place for now. Old Mother crouched down by Caroline and explored her mouth with filthy fingers that tasted like ash and rancid fat. The clawed hands worked their way down to painfully squeeze her breasts. She fought hard, but the hands of the women yanked her legs apart, and Old Mother put fingers in Caroline’s vagina and rectum. The toothless old woman then sat back to sniff at her hands. She held the hands out, and others leaned forward to sniff and make hushed remarks.
They released Caroline, who leaped up on her feet with hands fisted. The women used growled threats and gestured with stones in their hands to make her back against a wall at the rear of the cave. She stumbled into a heap of objects that clattered under her feet, and the women shrieked in rage and struck at her with fists and stones until she moved to a wall away from their precious pile. She fell on her ass against the rock and looked back to see what was worth getting so damned upset about.
Heaped high in a corner of the cave was a pile of hammered gold plates, tablets, and talismans. The corner was formed by a niche in the stone with a natural shelf of rock upon which sat the crudely hammered figure of a fertility fetish. It was faceless and crouched on stubby, fat legs. The figure had huge orbs representing breasts, as well as a prodigious phallus jutting from its crotch. It had to weigh hundreds of pounds. The golden penis alone would fund her work for a year, she imagined. At its feet were hundreds, possibly thousands more pounds of objects hammered from soft gold.
She turned as she heard Miles pleading softly with the women, as though he might reason with them. They repeated the same ritual they’d performed on Caroline, but Miles was a big man and kept throwing them off until Old Mother brought a stone the size of a baking potato down on his head. Miles went still. He either lost consciousness or was afraid to move. Caroline couldn’t tell which.
Old Mother sliced off his clothes, leaving the boots as the women weighed down his legs and arms. Much was made of his genitals, and the women hissed and whispered and barked as Old Mother stroked the dazed Miles to an erection. She slapped the reaching hands of the others away with a stream of spitting invective.
The old woman and her entourage turned their attention back to Caroline. They took turns touching her and prodding while Old Mother crushed soft stone mixed with water in a carved wooden bowl using a crude pestle made from a limb bone. The Old Mother slathered Caroline with the lime wash using her calloused hand. She worked the mess into Caroline’s hair while the others watched and exchanged whispers and hisses. Old Mother daubed ashes mixed with gobs of
