The Bone House (42 page)

The response surprised Kit; not because it was unusual in itself, but because he had not given his name to the Clan elder, or heard anyone else speak it aloud in his presence. He must have picked it up from one of the others by way of the mental radio they all shared.

“I have come with a question,” Kit said, settling in beside the old chieftain. “The young men,” he continued, picturing the ones he meant as they had appeared that morning when he saw them leave the camp. “Where do they go? What do they do all day?”

Kit received back an image of the young males along with a sense of doing . . . of work . . . of dedicated labour—
they make with purpose
, was how he interpreted the concept; along with this came the notion of bestowal . . . of presentation . . . of offering allied to the personal designation—
En
-
Ul
.

Linking all this together, Kit tried out this interpretation: “They are making a gift for you?”

This received the standard grunt Kit associated with satisfaction—a
yes
. The old one held Kit’s gaze in his own, and with a slow, deliberate action, placed the flat of his palm on Kit’s forehead. The touch was rough and heavy, but warm. Instantly, into Kit’s mind came the image of a sort of house or shelter of extraordinary design—the most unusual dwelling Kit had ever seen: a house made all of bone.

“They are making a house of bones?” Kit said, half in surprise, half in question. “For you?”

Again, the grunt of satisfaction as En-Ul removed his hand.

They sat for a moment in silence, then Kit received the sensation he had come to associate with the interrogative—a question—and with it the concept of sight, or seeing. “Do I want to see it?” he said aloud. “Yes,” he said quickly. “I would see it.”

“E
-
li,
” the old one said, his voice low as a rumble of thunder, and into Kit’s mind came the image of sunlight flooding the horizon, allied with the concept of something unseen, yet present, along with expectation bordering on certainty . . . the future?

This kept him occupied for some little while. “Tomorrow?” Kit guessed, holding in his mind the image of a rising sun—the new day that would be.

“Unh,” grunted En-Ul.
The day that is soon becoming
.

“I will go with the young ones tomorrow,” he confirmed, picturing himself leaving with the group as they went out the next morning.

“Unh,” grumbled the old chief again.

The next morning, when the young males rose and made ready to depart—arraying themselves with skins worn like capes and wrapping their feet against the snow and cold—Kit did likewise, joining them in their preparations. There were four of them this morning, and they acknowledged his presence with sniffs and nods, and the leader—a large male Kit had begun calling Thag for no particular reason other than he bore an uncanny resemblance to a cartoon character Kit knew—patted him about the head and shoulders in a gesture Kit had come to understand as a sign of friendly greeting; adults often used the same behaviour with the children. As soon as Kit was ready, they picked up their stout, stone-bladed spears and set off.

The track they followed down into the valley was well trod now, the shin-deep snow crushed down by the passing of many feet over the last few days, and it squeaked as they walked. Once again Kit marvelled at the easy grace of the big creatures as they strode along. The trail led down to a bluff only a few dozen yards above the river; the ice at the edges caught the light of the rising sun and gleamed. A few more days of such cold and Kit would not be surprised to see it frozen over entirely.

They paused to rest a few moments and to listen and scent the air. At first Kit wondered about this, but it came to him that this behaviour was a simple defensive action: they were making certain they were not being stalked by one of the large predators that roamed the valley—a lion, say, or wolves. But this day they were not to be challenged, so they moved on.

In a little while the narrow track began to rise, and soon they were walking next to the sheer limestone curtain. Kit enjoyed the exertion. It felt good to stir the blood, feel the cold air in his lungs, and move around after lolling around camp. Silent as shadows, save for the squeak of their feet on the crisp snow, they moved, up and up, following the contours of the undulating wall.

The trail grew narrow and steep, and soon they had climbed out of the valley altogether and onto the thick-wooded plain above. Thag paused at the rim of the gorge to scent the cold air and listen. The forest stretched before them, draped in heavy blankets of snow, softening all sound to a muted hush. From somewhere in the dark wood’s depths Kit heard the keening cry of a hunting hawk and the soft
plip-plop
of snow dropping from branches.

Assured that there was no danger, the group continued, following the deeply entrenched trail into the wood. Here and there Kit spied animal tracks crossing the trail: the small traces of mice and rabbits and the larger tracks of ferret, marmot, and some of the smaller antelope-like animals. Once he saw what must have been the tracks of one of the larger predators they were trying to avoid—either lion or wolf, he could not tell, but his companions would know, and they did not seem to pay them any mind.

If not for the ribbon of beaten-down snow, Kit would have quickly lost his way; the wood was dark and wreathed in hoarfrost and frozen mist. Abruptly, they arrived at a crease in the land—a little canyon formed by a tributary that carried spring melt and summer rain into the larger valley. Here the canyon formed a cliff with a sheer drop of fifty or sixty feet. The group did not linger at the edge but continued along the rim for a way until they came to a defile leading down to the bottom of the dry streambed. They followed the defile as it curved around and back to the cliff.

And there, directly below the sheer drop, lay a fantastic heap of bones. Devoid of flesh, and partially covered with snow, they made a stark white-on-white mound at the bottom of the streambed. All at once, Kit understood what he was looking at: a crude but brutally efficient method of hunting that consisted of driving the fleeing prey over a cliff, where they would either be killed by the fall or injured and finished off by the hunters. Judging by the massive tangle of carcasses, the River City Clan had been using this kill zone for some considerable time.

There were bones of all kinds: some big as dinosaur bones—though Kit was fairly certain there were none of those around . . . mammoths, then? . . . or mastodons maybe, were those the same?—all jumbled together with those of elk, deer, and antelope; and some that looked like they might have come from giant oxen or buffalo—definitely bovine in nature—and even some from horses.

Without any discussion—there never was any, in fact—the clansmen began dragging the larger bones from the heap, disentangling them and reforming them into a smaller, more ordered heap. Why some bones were chosen and others discarded, Kit could not readily tell, but he joined in all the same. The work party soon sorted out a number of sizeable piles; then, using the ropes made of braided hemp they had brought with them, they bound the bones into bundles. These unwieldy collections were then heaved onto their shoulders and muscled up out of the defile.

When all the bones had been trundled up out of the graveyard, each clansman hefted a bundle or two onto his back and trudged off into the wood once more. Kit could only manage to lift the smaller bundle he himself had made, but picked that up and followed his companions walking single file into the dark, snow-clotted forest and to a clearing that was suspiciously circular in nature—an almost perfect circle, which Kit concluded had been made somehow by the clan. He could not determine how they could have achieved this, lacking anything but simple stone axes. Yet here it was: an almost perfect circle sixty feet or so in diameter, surrounded by tall pines and larches, but offering a clear and unobstructed view of the sky overhead.

And in the precise centre of the clearing: the Bone House.

Kit recognised it at once as the dwelling made of bone that En-Ul had pictured for him—a simple, mound-shaped hut formed of the interlocked skeletons of all manner of animals. There were no windows as such, and but a single low tunnel for a door, over which hung the entire skull of a giant elk with splayed antlers big as palm branches. The lintels of this door were solid ivory in the form of two enormous curving mammoth tusks. More elephant tusks lined the foundation of the house, whose framework was made up of the most fantastical conglomeration of skeletal fragments: pelvises, spines, leg bones, vertebrae, and rib bones by the score; there were skulls from more than a dozen different creatures—deer of several kinds, as well as bison, aurochs, and horses, sheep and antelope, what looked like dog or wolf, and even that of a horned rhinoceros. These were the ones Kit thought he recognised, but there were as many more that he could not readily identify.

Taken as a whole, the bizarre structure possessed a distinctly eerie, alien air. The work party began untying their bundles and fitting the bones they had brought into chinks and gaps in the structure, and Kit imitated their example, finding places to work in what he had brought. They laboured with purpose and in silence. When one or the other got thirsty, he would go outside the clearing to eat handfuls of snow, then return to continue working. When the last bone from the bundles had been placed, it was back to the kill zone for another load.

Three more trips to the bone heap for materials brought them to the end of their labours. The short winter day was hastening on, and the workers were growing hungry—at least Kit was starving, and he imagined the clansmen, who appeared to require more than twice as much to keep them going, must have been ready to eat the trees.

Thag stood back, coiling his hemp rope and regarding the Bone House, his big shaggy head held to one side in the precise manner of a carpenter inspecting his handiwork. It was such a classic pose, Kit smiled to see it. Thag gave a grunt that signified satisfaction and turned away. Now that the official verdict had been received, the others grunted too, and the group departed, making their long way back through the forest. The returning labourers ate a hearty meal and, exhausted with the good fatigue of useful work, went to sleep. Kit drifted off too; but if he imagined a restful day to follow, he was mistaken.

For just before sunrise he was awakened by a touch on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see En-Ul crouching beside him. Into his mind came a possessive urging he understood as:
Attend me
.

The old chief turned away and Kit followed, moving silently through the sleeping camp. The night’s fire had burned to embers, and the sky still held a sprinkling of stars sharp as ice crystals in the cold, cold heavens. They picked their way carefully down from the ledge and found the well-marked trail leading up out of the valley. Within a few minutes of leaving the settlement, Kit realised their destination was the Bone House, and for one who had been carried into the camp, the aged En-Ul surprised Kit with his stamina. They paused only twice to rest and catch their breath—once halfway up the trail and once at the top of the gorge—and arrived in the forest clearing as the sun rose above the trees.

In the thin winter light the strange edifice glowed with a pale and alien pallor—a white mound set in a snow-white field—taking on a ghostly, almost ethereal aspect as if constructed not of bones but of the mammalian spirits of the creatures themselves. A profound apprehension crept like the stealthy cold into Kit’s soul. This curious shelter had been erected for a purpose, and it was for that purpose they had come.

En-Ul turned to him and, gazing into Kit’s eyes, willed him to understand. Kit received an impression of immense importance, of an unfathomable weight of consequence, a significance of unimaginable magnitude—as if whole worlds of significance converged in this place. There was no single word for it, but the force of the concept struck him with an urgency that was as powerful as hunger and thirst.

Kit, trying hard to understand, was overwhelmed by the thought that had been conveyed. “Why have we come here?” he asked aloud.

The old one tilted back his head and looked at the pale white sky for a moment. Then, returning his gaze to Kit, breathed into Kit’s mind the image of living things of many kinds—the creatures of the forest, the entire forest itself, whole Stone Age tribes—combined with a feeling of swimming against the strong flow of the river, or struggling against a powerful grinding, uncompromising force bent on mindless destruction:
survival
.

Their presence at the Bone House had something to do with the survival of themselves and their world, was how Kit explained it to himself; and although he could not see how this was so, he did not doubt En-Ul’s sincerity.

As soon as this thought had passed through Kit’s mind, the ancient chieftain turned and walked to the entrance of the Bone House. He paused at the low doorway and stood for a moment, then raised his hand and placed the palm on the forehead of the skull of the giant elk, and bowed his own head in a gesture Kit had never seen one of them make before. Then, bending low, he entered the bone hut, beckoning Kit to follow.

Inside, the bones formed a dome-shaped room of weird, undulating design lit only by the watery winter daylight that found its way through the chinks and crevices of the interlocking bones. The floor was packed snow over which pine branches had been spread, and these piled with skins and furs. Kit saw that a small cache of food—dried meat and berries—and little heaps of snow for water had been set aside.