But how was she to negotiate with the rain? What did she have to trade?
And overlaid on such musings was her suspicions about the people. Which of them could be trusted? Which of them talked about her when she wasn’t present? Even now, as they gazed up at her in a kind of desultory hope, were they somehow communicating, sending secret messages to each other with gestures, looks, even scribbled marks in the dust?
In the end, the answer came to her.
Ox, the big short-tempered man who had challenged her after the death of Sour, came to join her rough congregation. He was weakened by diarrhea.
Mother stood abruptly and approached Ox. Sapling followed her.
Ox, weakened and ill, sat piteously in the dirt with the rest. Mother placed a hand on his head, gently. He looked up, bewildered, and she smiled at him. Then she beckoned him to follow her. Ox stood, clumsy, dizzy, stumbling. But he let Sapling guide him back to Mother’s own pallet. There, Mother bade him lay down.
She took a wooden spear, its end charred, blood-soaked, hardened from use. She faced the people. She said, 'Sky. Rain. Sky make rain. Earth drink rain.' She glanced up at the cloudless bowl of the sky. 'Sky not make rain. Angry, angry. Earth drink much rain. Thirsty, thirsty. Feed earth.'
And, with a single fluid movement, she plunged the spear into Ox’s chest. He convulsed, his fists grabbing the spear. Blood spewed from his wide-open mouth, and urine spilled down his legs. But with all her strength Mother twisted the spear, and felt it rip at the soft organs within. Flopping, Ox fell back on the pallet, and did not move again. Mother smiled and wrenched out the spear. Blood continued to spill onto the ground.
There was silence. Even Sapling and Eyes were staring, open-mouthed.
Mother bent and grabbed a handful of sticky, blood-soaked dust. 'See! Dust drinks. Earth drinks.' And she crammed the dust into the half mouth of her child; it stained its small teeth red. 'Rain comes,' she said gently. 'Rain comes.' Then she glared around at the staring people.
One by one they looked down, yielding before her gaze.
Honey, daughter of Sour, broke the spell. With a scream of despair she picked up a handful of cobbles and hurled them at Mother. They clattered uselessly on the ground. Then Honey ran away toward the lake.
Mother watched her go, eyes hard.
In her heart Mother believed everything she had said, everything she had done. The fact that it served a political purpose to have sacrificed poor Ox — for he was one of those who most openly opposed her — did not perturb her belief in herself and her actions. Ox’s death had been expedient, but it would also mollify the rain. Yes, that was how it was. Leaving Sapling to dispose of the corpse, she walked into her shelter.
Despite the sacrifice, the rain did not come. The people waited as day succeeded arid day, and not a cloud broke the washed-out dome of the sky. Gradually they grew restive. Honey, particularly, became more openly derisive of Mother, Eyes, Sapling, and those who clung to them.
But Mother simply waited, serene. She was convinced she was right, after all. It was just that Ox’s death had not been sufficient appeasement for the sky, the soil. It was simply a question of finding the right trade-off, that was all. All she needed was patience — even though her own flesh was hanging on her bones.
One day Eyes came to her. She was led by Ant-eater. Gaunt as they were, Mother could see that they wanted to couple.
Ant-eater was not mocking now, but supplicating. And now it would be a kind of love, or pity, on the part of the young man, for the tattoo Mother had crudely carved into Eyes’s face had become infected by the stagnant lake water. Its spiral shape was barely visible beneath a mass of swollen, leaking flesh that covered one half of the girl’s face.
But Mother frowned. This match wouldn’t be right. She stood and took Eyes’s hand, prizing it away from the dismayed Ant-eater. Then she walked the girl through the scattered people until she found Sapling. He was lying on his back, gazing up at an empty sky.
Mother pushed Eyes into the dirt beside Sapling. He looked up at Mother, baffled. Mother said, 'You. You. Fuck. Now.'
Sapling looked at Eyes, obviously trying to mask his revulsion. Though they had spent much time in each other’s company with Mother, he had never shown any sexual interest in Eyes, even before her face had become so badly disfigured, nor had she shown any in him.
But now, Mother saw, it was right that they should couple. Ant-eater would have been wrong; Sapling was right. Because Sapling
A full month after Ox’s death, the people were woken by a wild, high-pitched keening. It was Mother. Bewildered, most of them already terrified of this disturbing woman in their midst, they came running to see what new strangeness was going to befall them.
Mother was kneeling beside the sapling trunk that had borne the skull of her child. But now the skull lay on the ground, broken into pieces. Mother pawed at the fragments, wailing as if the child had died a second time.
Eyes and Sapling hung back, unsure what Mother wanted them to do.
Mother, cradling the pathetic, broken bits of skull in her left hand, glared around at the people. Then her right hand shot forward, pointing.
People flinched. Heads turned, following her line. Mother was pointing at Honey.
'Here! Walk, walk here!'
The sagging jowls under Honey’s chin shook with terror. She tried to pull back, but those around her stopped her. At last Sapling stepped forward, grabbed the girl by the wrist, and dragged her to Mother.
Mother threw the bits of skull in her face. 'You! You throw stone. You smash boy.'
'No, no. I—'
Mother’s voice was hard.
Honey squealed, as terrified as if it might be true, and urine dribbled down her thighs.
This time, Mother didn’t even have to perform the kill herself.
It did not start to rain that day. Or the next. Or the next after that. But on the third day after Honey’s sacrifice thunder pealed across a dry sky. The people cowered, an ancient reflex that dated back to the days when Purga had huddled in her burrow. But then the rain came at last, pouring out of the sky as if it had burst.
The people ran, laughing. They lay on their backs, mouths open to the water falling from the sky, or they rolled and threw mud at each other. Children wrestled, infants wailed. And there was a great round of coupling, an instinctive, lusty response to the end of the drought, this new beginning of life.
Mother sat beside her blood-soaked pallet and watched this, smiling.
As always she was thinking on many levels simultaneously.
Her sacrifice of Honey had once again been politically astute. Honey had not been a calculating opponent, but she was a focus of dissent; with her gone it would be easier for Mother to consolidate her power. At the same time the sacrifice had clearly been necessary. The sky and earth were appeased; mankind’s first gods had relented, and let their children live.
But on still another level of calculation Mother knew that the storm would have come whatever she did. If the rain had not followed her sacrifice of Honey, she would have been prepared to continue, working through the people one by one — pushing her spear even into Eyes’s heart if she had to.
She knew all these things simultaneously; she believed many contradictory things at once. That was the essence of her genius. She smiled, the water running down her face.
IV
Sapling walked slowly along the grassy river bank. He wore a simple skin wrap, and carried nothing more than a spear tied over his back and a net bag containing a few bone tools and artwork — no stone tools; if they were needed, it was easier to knap them on the spot than carry them.
In his thirties now — fifteen years after the deaths of Ox and Honey and the installation of Mother as the troop’s de facto leader — Sapling had filled out, his face harder, his hair thinning and streaked with gray. But his body was as whiplash thin as ever. It wasn’t possible to hide the tattoos that covered his arms and face, but he had been careful to rub dirt and mud over his skin to subdue their effect. Over the years the tattoos had proved alarming to strangers, and the barrier of mistrust was high enough anyhow.
He looked like a hunter, out exploring at random far from his troop, perhaps seeking to trade. But he was not alone; others watched every step, hidden in the foliage of the riverbank. His appearance was an elaborate lie. And his exploration was anything but random. He was scouting.
He was spotted first by a child, a chubby little girl playing with worn pebbles at the water’s edge. Aged maybe five, she was naked save for a string of beads around her neck. She looked up, startled. He smiled at her, eyes wide and empty. She screamed and bolted down the riverbank, as he had expected her to do. He walked slowly after her.
The signs of settlement were soon apparent. The muddy ground underfoot was pocked with footprints, and he saw fishing nets strung across the river. After following a tight curve in the river’s flow he came into view of the settlement itself. From a cluster of huts, roughly conical, threads of smoke curled up into the afternoon sky.
This was no temporary camp, he saw immediately. The huts had been built on sturdy logs driven deep into the ground. These river folk had been here for a while, and they evidently intended to stay.
A glance at the river showed why. Not far along the bank, the vegetation on both sides of the water had been trampled down, and he could see the glimmer of stones on the riverbed. This was a ford, where the migrating herds could cross the water. All the people had to do was wait here for the animals to come to them. And, indeed, he saw a great pile of bones, what looked like antelope, ox, even elephant, stacked up behind the huts.
But he was puzzled by the huts themselves. Their walls were solid, save for a break at each cone’s apex to allow the smoke out, and there was no way for light to get in. Who would live in such darkness?
Two adults came running toward him — both women, he saw. They carried unremarkable wooden spears and stone axes, and wore straightforward skin wraps, much like his own. Their faces were daubed with crude but fierce-looking ocher designs, and they both had bits of bone pushed through their noses. One of the women raised her spear toward his chest.
He recognized none of the words. But he could tell that this crude jabber was like the pidgin he had grown up speaking, with none of the richness that had been steadily developing among Mother’s people.
This was going to be easy.
He forced a smile. Then, moving slowly, he slid his bag from his shoulder and let it fall open. Watching the women, he produced a carved seashell. He put the shell on the ground before the women, and backed away, hands spread and empty.
The women were disciplined. One kept her weapon aimed at his chest, while the other bent to inspect the shell.
The shell itself had last seen the sea a decade ago, and had since traveled hundreds of kilometers inland via tenuous, long-distance trading chains. And now it had been engraved with an exquisite elephant-head design by one of the people’s best artisans, a young girl with long, delicate fingers. When the woman recognized the elephant’s face, she gasped, childlike. She grabbed the
