The Ghosts of Heaven Read online

  and suddenly she thinks of the snail,

  and the falcon, and the fronds of the ferns.

  He who goes to the cave shouts at her.

  She sees she has made a flame and not even known it,

  because her eyes are full of the string of the bow.

  From the spinning, fire has come

  and she touches the end of the torch to the flame.

  Hands it to the old man.

  Who turns and goes to the cave.

  Come, he shouts over his shoulder,

  and the boy follows.

  She watches them go, then

  she slides the basket back onto her back,

  and she follows, too, clambering

  over rocks and through brush

  into the mouth of the cave,

  desperate to see what she has always wanted to see,

  so desperate she doesn’t heed the warning

  that her nose is giving her:

  the faintest hint of a smell.

  XII

  There! Just inside the mouth:

  Hands! Dozens of them.

  Red hands in negative.

  The ancestors of the people,

  each hand made by the one who goes to the cave,

  made before he goes to work.

  The old man beckons to the boy,

  points at her, but before she can get the reeds and the red,

  the darkness erupts with a roar.

  It happens so fast.

  So fast, that at first

  she doesn’t know what it is.

  A shape flies at them.

  Before the shape lands, the boy is dead.

  His head hangs by a cord from his shoulders,

  stripped by a giant paw.

  A cave lion.

  It lands as the boy’s body

  pumps blood across the cave mouth.

  The lion roars.

  She stands. Frozen.

  Her eyes on the boy,

  and she remembers how he came from the belly

  of the woman that she came from.

  In another eye blink, the beast turns,

  ready to run at them.

  It does, but the old man is quicker

  than the dead boy and leaps to one side.

  Not fast enough,

  the lion catches him with a claw,

  and he collapses on the rocks, screaming.

  He writhes on the floor.

  Blood pouring from between his fingers,

  pushing from long wounds in his side.

  She scrambles from the cave.

  The lion sees her and leaves the old man

  to his pain.

  It takes two steps, and she turns in time

  to see it leap.

  But she is fast and her fingers have fitted

  an arrow to her bow string.

  As the lion leaps, she pulls back the string,

  wildly, without aim, the arrow flies, and

  it is luck that takes it to its target.

  The lion doesn’t know it.

  The arrow sticks from its mouth,

  and has penetrated its brain,

  but it rushes at her, knocking her down.

  She falls to the ground, and there is no pain,

  only the time in which to save herself.

  She pulls another arrow from the basket

  as the lion turns and stumbles toward her.

  It closes its jaws,

  the arrow is broken.

  The shaft clags on its mouth, stuck in its teeth

  but it makes another leap.

  She fumbles to fit the second arrow,

  and this time she is not fast enough.

  The beast is on her, but with a wild pain brain

  controlling its body, it paws at her without control,

  and so it is

  that without control,

  the beast and the girl

  tumble away over the edge of the shelf,

  the shelf of the cliff,

  into the dark

  waiting

  green.

  XIII

  On the lake,

  the paddles dip.

  The boats draw near to the shore.

  It has been a long night

  but now dawn is coming,

  and he who leads the hunt calls softly,

  across the water,

  to the boats behind.

  Paddles dip faster,

  eager now to be done with the water,

  eager to be at the beasts,

  to see them run, to hear them stampede,

  to watch them fall under the spears.

  He who leads the hunt leaps silently,

  landing in the shallow water by the shore,

  and as he pulls the prow of the boat onto the shingle,

  he looks up at the high cliff,

  where the sun will soon strike,

  and he hopes that he who goes to the cave

  is working hard

  in the powerful darkness,

  making the magic that must be made.

  XIV

  She hangs.

  Just over the lip of the cliff,

  strap-strangled,

  suspended by the cords of the basket,

  caught on a branch of a high-clinging tree.

  She twists, wrestles, fights,

  her arms pulled above her head by the cords,

  and all she does is make

  everything in the basket tumble

  to the forest below.

  Somewhere down there lies the lion,

  its body broken across a rock on the forest floor,

  the end of an arrow stuck in the roof of its mouth.

  She hangs in the air,

  and light begins to seep across the valley.

  As she twists,

  the black lake turns gray, then silver.

  Then orange, and sunlight finds her face.

  She hangs.

  XV

  Thoughts are in her head;

  thoughts that collide.

  She feels as if she is spinning.

  The boy is dead,

  his head taken and his blood spilled.

  The old man’s blood flowed, too.

  And the lion’s is leaking onto leaves below.

  But not hers.

  Not yet,

  though she knows it will if she falls,

  and that she will be eaten by birds if she does not.

  Her strength is leaving her.

  She twists, looking at the cliff,

  looking up, looking down,

  and she knows that is her chance:

  to climb down the tree that saved her.

  But she needs to be free of the branch.

  She hangs for a moment more and thinks,

  and then she sees

  that with one heave,

  she could lift herself out of the strap.

  She waits.

  Then she pulls, pulls hard,

  lifts herself up;

  her foot has found a branch,

  she pushes, and slides her shoulders

  out of the cord.

  The tree sways.

  Her head sways with it.

  and she looks down at the drop and wants to be sick.

  She waits,

  and then hand over hand, one branch at a time,

  she begins to descend the trunk

  as the light grows harder with every passing beat of her heart.

  The softness of dawn is leaving.

  Down she climbs,

  and as she goes, the way becomes harder.

  The branches are bigger, but farther apart.

  But now that she knows she is not going to die,

  she moves faster and finally jumps to the forest floor

  where she lands by the lion,

  who is still, but still warm.

  Heat comes from its body,

  and flies are already dancing on its wounds.

  She looks at it,
<
br />   and sees the blood on the claw

  that took the head from the boy

  who came from the same belly as her.

  She turns.

  Blood runs from cuts on her back.

  The inside of her thigh is badly bruised,

  the skin of her breasts is grazed.

  The trees are sparse on this shelf of the cliff.

  A narrow shelf, like the wider one above.

  It runs away to nothing to her left,

  to her right, it slopes up and widens out.

  With fewer trees, she can see across the whole valley.

  And though she is lower than before,

  she sees the sun striking the plains.

  She sees tiny black dots:

  boats touching the shore.

  The people have landed.

  And there is no magic.

  XVI

  The softness of dawn is leaving

  as she panics.

  No magic!

  No hunt can prosper without magic.

  She looks up at the cliff,

  down which she half fell, half climbed.

  There is no way back.

  But maybe the slope on which she stands

  finds its way back to the higher shelf.

  Maybe the old man is dead,

  and the boy is dead,

  but she can make the magic

  if only she can find the cave again.

  She scrabbles in the scrubby grass at her feet,

  hunting.

  She pushes plants aside and grows desperate,

  and then she finds them:

  the things from the basket.

  The red ochre wrapped in leaves,

  the reeds,

  the second torch,

  the fire sticks and bow.

  Charcoal.

  She gathers them together,

  makes a bundle, which she binds with summer-dried grass

  and hurries up the slope,

  hoping to make her way to the cave.

  Fern fronds and snail shells crush under her feet,

  as she steps,

  one eye on the path ahead,

  one eye on the sunlit valley.

  She must find the cave, and make magic soon;

  she knows what to do, but she must find the cave first.

  And then,

  as the shelf narrows, then turns a twist

  as it runs round the cliff face,

  she comes to a corner, and her heart leaps.

  A cave.

  Not the cave, but another.

  which, just like their own, looks across the water.

  She looks ahead:

  the shelf shows no sign of meeting the higher one.

  It starts to lead down the cliff.

  But here is a cave,

  from which she can see the people

  on the plain.

  She can see long grass where the dawn deer will be grazing.

  And here, here is a cave.

  Something calls to her from inside.

  Deep in the dark.

  Something waits for her.

  Come! it says.

  Come, and understand.

  She bends, and makes fire.

  XVII

  As she crosses the threshold,

  a thought.

  She must make the mark.

  She must make the red hand on the wall.

  The red hand, to make her part of the cave,

  or the magic will not work.

  She leans the torch against a rock,

  and by its glow, she chooses a smooth face

  on which to work.

  And she works quickly.

  A freshly sharpened flint knife takes the ends off a reed.

  It is dry and hollow, and she pushes its end into the red.

  The red ochre.

  She places her hand against the smooth rock wall,

  presses hard.

  Then, the reed to her lips, she blows.

  The red powder sprays perfectly,

  a strong, narrow blast

  that sticks to the wetness of the wall,

  absorbed by the moon-milk there—

  the soft white wetness that seeps from the rock.

  Her heart beats.

  She has covered only one finger and her thumb.

  She bends to the powder,

  refills the reed,

  puts it to her lips.

  And blows.

  Two more fingers.

  Good.

  Again she bends, and when she blows this time,

  her hand is done.

  She steps away in awe.

  She made the mark.

  She is part of the cave.

  She hurries.

  A mark is not enough.

  She must make magic;

  she must make the deer

  as they are hunted,

  and she knows the hunting will begin very soon.

  But for this magic to work,

  she must be in darkness.

  The dark light of the cave mouth is not enough.

  She takes the torch back from the rock

  and walks into the blackness.

  As she climbs over boulders,

  and slides in wet mud,

  and turns to look behind her

  every once in a while

  to see how small the cave mouth has become,

  she grows aware that something

  something,

  some thing

  is waiting for her in the heart of the cave.

  She can feel it.

  She can almost hear it,

  but she pushes it away,

  because she needs to make magic.

  The light from the world outside has gone.

  She has come far,

  and now she is in the place that connects to the magic.

  This, the place the teller of tells has spoken of:

  the place that connects this world and others,

  where words are not enough to say anything,

  where only actions can speak;

  where magic made on the walls

  can make meaning in the world.

  She finds a place to plant her torch,

  and takes the charcoal from her bundle.

  All she has is two thick sticks,

  but that is more than she will need.

  She chooses a rock.

  She likes it.

  It bulges,

  and in that bulge she sees the curve of a stag’s back.

  It was made for the magic,

  and she places the tip of the charcoal on the rock.

  Her first mark is good.

  Her first mark is so good,

  she can already see the stag on the wall,

  before she’s even made it.

  She has made its back,

  but her line is light.

  She makes it again and makes it hard;

  she makes it fast and she makes it bold,

  and the back is done and it too is good.

  Then a sweep of the neck,

  a turn, a line,

  and there is the head,

  erect and proud,

  held up just as it will be

  when the spear strikes.

  Good.

  Now she makes the antlers.

  Like branches, grown from the head,

  strong and fierce, and she does them well.

  The beast is almost alive in the rock.

  She moves to the foreleg,

  and her marks are power;

  the lines are strong,

  full of magic, and then,

  then she notices something she had not seen before.

  A mark on the wall

  that was already there.

  A mark that frightens her.

  Her heart pounds and she grabs the torch.

  She spins around;

  she cries out as if someone is there.

  She’s alone.

  She’s alone, but t
here is still the matter of the mark on the wall.

  She takes the torch closer, and now she gasps.

  A hand.

  A negative print of a hand.

  A black hand.

  Now the torch is closer,

  she can see that the hand is not alone.

  There is another.

  And another.

  Her breathing comes fast as she goes farther along the wall,

  and the wall is covered with black hands.

  Unlike the red hands,

  with their marks inside,

  these hands are empty.

  Just the black powder outline, and …

  Now she looks again, she knows why the hands scare her.

  They have fingers missing.

  All have thumbs,

  but here is one with a half finger gone.

  Here is one with half of two fingers missing.

  She looks at them all.

  Each misses at least one half finger.

  Some have two stumps.

  Some have three.

  And here’s one with stumps for all four fingers.

  She doesn’t understand.

  She doesn’t know what it means.

  She doesn’t know who made them,

  but she senses something is wrong.

  She runs, back to the light,

  dropping the torch as she approaches the world.

  She runs to the edge of the cliff shelf,

  and there is the lake.

  And there, she can see the people,

  who have left their boats.

  And there

  she sees others,

  other boats.

  Heading for the far lakeshore.

  And in them, other people.

  Other

  people.

  She runs.

  XVIII

  Across the lake,

  the people hunt.

  They have allowed themselves

  to judge the wind on which their scent will carry.

  They have allowed themselves

  to grow into the grass,

  and for the sun to move so their shadows do not show.

  He who leads the hunt

  lies in the grass,

  his spear light in one hand,

  his spear thrower loose in the other.

  He crawls.

  Stops, waits.

  Listens.

  Then crawls again, and the people move behind him.

  It takes an age, to move like this,

  but the rewards will be greater.

  Then, though the people have made no sound,

  cast no shadow, and been careful with their scent,

  there is a stampede.

  The deer run.

  the great uncountable many of them,

  all run, at once.

  He who leads the hunt leaps to his feet,

  and cries out.

  He sees the deer running, terrified,

  bolting away, and he turns to see

  what has caused this chaos,

  and as he turns

  a spear lands in his chest.