At last, though, Dela was able to move on to the subject that clearly fascinated her.

"And Mesni," she said carefully. "Has she stayed home with the children? Why, Jahna must be tall now- I remember how she caught the boys' eyes even last year- and-"

"No," Rood said gently, aware of Olith's hand covering his. Dela listened in silence as he described, in painful detail, how he had lost his children to the ice storm.

When he had finished Dela sipped her tea, her eyes averted. Rood had the odd sense that she knew something, but held it back.

To fill the silence, Dela recited the story of her land.

"...And the two brothers, lost in the snow, fell at last. One died. The other rose up. He grieved for his brother. But then he saw a fox, digging under a log, its coat white on white. The fox went away. But the brother knew that a fox will return to the same spot to retrieve what it has buried. So he set a snare, and waited. When the fox returned the brother caught it. But before he could kill it the fox sang for him. It was a lament for the lost brother, like this..."

Like Jo'on's Dreamtime tales, though they were a blend of myth and reality, such stories and songs were long, specific, fact-heavy. This was an oral culture. Without writing to record factual data, memory was everything. If dreams and the shaman's trances were a means of integrating copious information to aid intuitive decision making, the songs and stories were an aid to storing that information in the first place.

Remarkably, the story Dela told was itself evolving. As the story passed from one listener to another, through error and embellishment its elements changed constantly. Most of the changes were incidental details that didn't matter, churning without effect, like the coding of junk DNA. The essentials of the story- its mood, the key nodes, its point- tended to remain stable. But not always: Sometimes a major adaptation would take place, by a speaker's intention or accident, and if the new element improved the story, it would be retained. The stories, like other aspects of the people's culture, had begun an evolutionary destiny of their own, played out in the arenas of the new humans' roomy minds.

But Dela's story was more than a mere tale, or aid to memory. With her story, by her setting out the narrative of her land and by her listeners' accepting it by hearing it, she was proclaiming a kind of title. Only by knowing the land well enough to tell its story truly could you affirm your right to that land. There were no written contracts here, no deeds, no courts; the only validity for Dela's claim came from the relationship of narrator to listener, reaffirmed at gatherings like this.

There was a ferocious sizzling noise, a great celebratory roar from outside the shelter. The first great slabs of the butchered megaloceros had been hurled on to the fire. Soon the mouth-watering smell of its meat filled the air. The festivities of the night began.

There was much eating, dancing, hollering. And at the end of the night, Rood was surprised when Dela approached him.

"Listen to me now, Rood. I am your friend. Once we lay together."

"Actually twice," he said with a rueful smile.

"Twice, then. What I say to you now I say out of friendship, and not to cause you suffering."

He frowned. "What are you trying to tell me?'

She sighed. "There is a tale. I heard it here, not two days ago; a group from the south told it. They say that in a stretch of worthless ground near the coast, a bonehead infests a cliff-top cave. Yes? And in that cave- so it is said, so a hunter claims to have seen- two children are living."

He didn't understand. "Bonehead cubs?"

"No. Not boneheads. People. People. The hunter, engrossed in his prey, saw all this from a distance. One of the children- so the hunter said- is a girl, maybe so high." She held up her hand. "And the other-" The hunter, engrossed in his prey, saw all this from a distance. One of the children- so the hunter said- is a girl, maybe so high." She held up her hand. "And the other-"

"A boy," breathed Rood. "A little boy."

"I apologize for telling you this," said Dela.

Rood understood. Dela perceived that Rood had accepted his loss. Now she had ignited the cold pain of hope in his deadened heart once more. "Tomorrow," he said thickly. "Tomorrow you will show this hunter to me. And then-"

"Yes. But not tonight."

Later, in the deepest night, Olith lay with Rood, but he was restless.

"Morning will soon come," she whispered. "And then you will leave."

"Yes," he said. "Olith- come with me."

She thought briefly, then nodded. It was not wise for him to travel alone. She heard his teeth grind. She touched his jaw, felt the tense muscles there. "What is it?"

"If there is a bonehead buck, if he has harmed them-"

She crooned, "Your mind flies too far ahead; give your body a chance to catch up. Sleep now."

But for Rood, sleep proved impossible.

III.

The bonehead returned to the cave. Jahna saw that he had a seal- the whole animal, whole animal, a fat, heavy male- slung over one shoulder. Even now, after weeks in this cliff-top cave, his strength could surprise her. a fat, heavy male- slung over one shoulder. Even now, after weeks in this cliff-top cave, his strength could surprise her.

Millo came running forward, his bonehead-style skin wrap flying. "A seal! A seal! We'll eat well tonight!" He hugged the bonehead's tree-trunk legs.

Just as he used to hug his father's. Jahna pushed the unwelcome thought out of her mind; it had no place here, and she must be strong. Jahna pushed the unwelcome thought out of her mind; it had no place here, and she must be strong.

The bonehead, perspiring from the effort of hauling such a weight up the cliff path from the beach, peered down at the boy. He made a string of guttural, grunting noises, a jabber that meant nothing... or at least Jahna didn't think it meant anything. Sometimes she wondered if he spoke words- bonehead words, what a strange idea- that she just couldn't recognize.

She walked forward and pointed to the rear of the cave. "Put the seal down there," she commanded. "We'll soon get it butchered. Look, I've built a fire already."

And so she had. Days ago she had dug out a pit to serve as a proper hearth, and had swept over the ugly ash stains that had randomly scarred the floor. Likewise she had sorted out the clutter of this cave. It had been a jumble, with food scraps and bits of skin and tools all mixed up with all sorts of waste. Now it almost seemed, well, habitable.

For a person, that is. It didn't occur to her to wonder what "habitable" might mean for the huge creature she thought of as the bonehead.

Right now the bonehead didn't seem happy. He was unpredictable like that. Growling, he dumped the seal on the floor. Then, sweating, filthy, his skin crusted with salt from the sea, he stamped off to the back of the cave for one of his naps.

Jahna and Millo fell to slicing open the seal carcass. It had been killed by a spear thrust to the heart, leaving a wide and ugly puncture, and Jahna quailed as she imagined the battle that must have preceded this killing strike. But with their sharp stone blades the children's small hands made efficient work of flensing and dismembering the big mammal. Soon the first slices of seal belly were on the fire.

The bonehead, as was his wont, woke up when the meat was ready. The children ate their meat well-cooked. The bonehead preferred his raw, or almost. He grabbed a big steak out of the fire, took it to his favorite spot by the entrance, and pulled at the meat with his teeth, facing the setting sun. He ate a lot lot of meat, about twice as much as Rood, say. But then he worked very hard, all the time. of meat, about twice as much as Rood, say. But then he worked very hard, all the time.

It was an oddly domestic scene. But it had been like this for the weeks since Jahna and Millo had stumbled in here. Somehow it worked.

It had always hurt the Old Man to live alone; his kind were intensely social. But he had suffered more than just loneliness. His mind was of the old compartmented design. Much of what went on inside his cavernous skull was all but unconscious; it was as if his hands made his flint tools, not him. him. It was only when he was with people that he became truly alive, fully, intensely aware; it was as if without others he was in a dream, only half-conscious. To the Old Man's kind, other people were the brightest, most active things in the landscape. With no other people around, the world was dull, lifeless, static. It was only when he was with people that he became truly alive, fully, intensely aware; it was as if without others he was in a dream, only half-conscious. To the Old Man's kind, other people were the brightest, most active things in the landscape. With no other people around, the world was dull, lifeless, static.

That was why he had tolerated the skinny children, with their jabber and their meddling, why he had fed and even clothed them. And why he would soon face death.

Jahna whispered, "Millo. Look." Watching to be sure the bonehead couldn't see, she brushed aside some dirt, and revealed a collection of blackened bones.

Millo gasped. He picked up a skull. It had a protruding face and a thick ridge over its gaping eyes. But it was small, smaller than Millo's own head; it must have been a child. "Where did you find them?"

"In the ground," she whispered. "At the front of the cave, when I was clearing up."

Millo dropped the skull; it clattered onto the other bones. The bonehead looked around dully. "It's scary," whispered Millo. "Maybe he killed it. The bonehead. Maybe he eats children."

"No, silly," Jahna said. Seeing her brother's fear was real, she put her arms around him. "He probably just put it in the ground when it was dead."

But Millo was shivering. She hadn't meant to scare him. She pushed the skull out of his sight and, to calm him, began to tell him a story.

"Listen to me now. Long, long ago, the people were like the dead. The world was dark and their eyes were dull. They lived in a camp as they do now, and they did the things they do now. But everything was dark, not real, like shadows. One day a young man came to the camp. He was like the dead too, but he was curious- different. He liked to go fishing and hunting. But he would always go deeper into the sea than anybody else. The people wondered why..."

As she crooned the story, Millo relaxed against her, sinking into sleep just as the sun sank into the ocean. Even the big bonehead was dozing, she saw, slumped against a wall, belching softly. Perhaps he was listening too.

Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales- which said that Jahna's group were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human- taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.

But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such nonpeople as the Old Man's kind.

"...One day they saw that the young man was with a sea lion. He was swimming in the waves with it. And he was making love to it. Enraged, the people drove out the young man, and they caught the sea lion. But when they butchered it they found a fish inside, in its womb. It was a fat fish." She meant a eulachon. "The fish had been fathered by the young man. He was neither person nor fish, but something different. So the people threw the fish-boy on their fire. His head burst into flames and made a bright light that dazzled them. So the fish-boy flew into the sky. The sky was dark, of course. There he sought the place where the light was hiding, because the fish-boy thought he could trick the light to come down to the dark world. And then..."

And then her father walked in.

The Old Man was a Neandertal.

His kind had endured in Europe, through the savage swings of the Ice Age, for a quarter of a million years. In their way the robust folk had been supremely successful. They had found ways to live here in the most marginal of environments, on the edge of the world, where the climate was not only harsh but could vary treacherously fast, where animal and plant resources were sparse and prone to fluctuate unpredictably.

For a long time they had even been able to resist the children of Mother. During warming pulses the new humans pushed into Europe from the south. But with their stocky bodies and big air-warming sinuses and heavily meat-tolerant digestion systems, the robusts were better able to withstand the cold than the moderns. And their bearlike builds made them formidable infighters: tough opponents for the humans, better technology or not. Then, when the cold intensified again, the moderns would retreat back to the south, and the robust folk could repopulate their old lands.

This had happened over and over. In southern Europe and the Middle East there were caves and other sites where layers of human detritus were overlaid by Neandertal waste, only to be reoccupied by humans again.

But during the last thaw the moderns had looked again to Europe and Asia. They had advanced, culturally and technologically. And this time the robusts hadn't been able to resist. Gradually the robusts were eliminated across much of Asia, and pushed back into their chill fortress, Europe.

The Old Man had been ten years old when skinny hunters had first stumbled on his people's encampment.

The camp had been constructed on a south-facing riverbank a few kilometers back from the cliff top, placed close to the trails of the great herds of migrant herbivores that washed over the landscape. They lived here as they had always lived, waiting for the seasons to bring the herds to their porch. The riverbank had been a good place.

Until the skinnies came.

It wasn't a war. The engagement had been much more complex, messy, and protracted than that.

At first there had even been a kind of trade, as the skinnies swapped sea produce for meat from the giant animals the people were able to kill with their thrusting spears and great strength. But the skinnies seemed to want more and more. And, as they came roaming over the land with their strange slender spears and the bits of wood that would hurl them far, the skinny hunters were just too effective. Soon the animals grew wary and changed their habits. No longer did they follow their old trails and gather at the lakes and ponds and rivers, and the robusts had to roam far in search of the prey that had once come to them.

Meanwhile, for the Old Man's folk, contact with the skinnies had inevitably increased.

There had been sex, willing and unwilling. There had been fights. If you got a skinny in close combat you could crush his or her spine, or smash that big bubble skull with a single punch. But the skinnies wouldn't close with you. They struck from a distance, with their hard-thrown spears and flying arrows. And the people could not strike back: even after tens of millennia of living alongside the skinnies the descendants of Pebble had failed to copy even their simplest innovations. Besides, as the skinnies ran around you hollering to each other in their birdlike voices- with their elaborately painted clothes and bodies, and with a restless blur of speed as if the world was too slow, too static for them- it was hard to even see see them. You couldn't fight what you couldn't see. them. You couldn't fight what you couldn't see.

Eventually there had come a day when the skinnies had decided they wanted the place where the Old Man's people lived, their riverbank home.

It had been simple for them. They had killed most of the men, and some of the women. They chased the survivors away, to forage for themselves as best they could. By the time the Old Man returned, from a solo expedition to the river, the skinnies were burning the huts and cleaning out the caves, places where the Old Man's grandmothers' bones lay a hundred generations deep.

After that, the people wandered aimlessly, sedentary creatures forced to be nomads. If they tried to set up a new base, the skinnies would quickly break it up again. Many of them starved.

At last, inevitably, they had been drawn to the camps of the skinnies. Even now, many of his kind still lived on, but they were like the boneheads who followed Jahna's encampment, where they lived like rats on garbage, and even then only as long as the skinnies tolerated them. Their eventual fate was already obvious.

All save the Old Man. The Old Man had stayed away from the dismal skinny places. He was not the last of his kind. But he was the last to live as his ancestors had before the coming of the moderns. He was the last to live free.

When Mother had died, just sixty thousand years before the birth of Christ, there had still been many different kinds of people in the world. There had been Mother's humanlike people in parts of Africa. In Europe and western Asia lived robust folk like Pebble, like Neandertals. In eastern Asia there were still bands of the skinny, small-brained walkers, the Homo erectus Homo erectus types. The old hominid complexity had reigned still, with many variants and subspecies and even hybrids of the different types. types. The old hominid complexity had reigned still, with many variants and subspecies and even hybrids of the different types.

With the revolution started in Mother's generation, with the great expansion that had followed, all this changed. It was not genocide; it was not planned. It was a matter of ecology. The different forms of humans were competing for the same resources. All over the world there had been a wave of extinctions- human extinctions- a wave of last contacts, of regret-free good-byes, as one hominid species after another succumbed to the dark. For a time the last of the walkers had hung on in isolation on Indonesian islands, still living much as Far had, so long ago. But when the sea levels dropped once more, the bridges to the mainland were reestablished, and the moderns crossed over- and for the walkers, after a long and static history spanning some two million years, the game was up.

And so on. The outcome was inevitable. And soon the world would be empty of people- empty, save for just one kind.

After he had lost his family the Old Man had fled from the skinnies, heading ever west. But here, in this coastal cave, the Old Man had reached the western shore of Europe, the fringe of the Atlantic. The ocean was an impassable barrier. He had nowhere left to go.

Jahna's encounter with the Old Man was the last contact of all.

Rood, silhouetted against the sunset, looked dusty, hot. At his side was Olith, Jahna's aunt. Rood's eyes were wide, as he took in what he saw in the cave.

For Jahna, it was like snapping awake from a nightmare. She dropped the bit of hide she had been working, ran forward across a cave floor that suddenly seemed filthy and cluttered, and hurled herself into her father's arms. There she wept like a very small child, while her father's hands hesitantly patted the crude bonehead wrap she wore.

The bonehead roused. The shadows of the two adults, cast by the setting sun, striped over him. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. Then, bleary with sleep, heavy with meat, he struggled to get to his feet, growling.

Rood pushed the children to Olith, who held them. Then he raised a cobble over the struggling bonehead's cranium.

Jahna cried, "No!" She struggled free of Olith and grabbed her father's hand.

Rood stared down at her. And she realized she had a choice to make.

Jahna thought about it for a heartbeat. She remembered the mussels, the seals, the fires she had built. And she looked at the ugly, lumpy brow of the bonehead. She released her father's arm.

Rood let his arm fall. It was a heavy blow. The bonehead fell forward. But bonehead skulls were thick. It seemed to Jahna that the Old Man could have got up, fought on even now. But he didn't. He remained in the dirt of his cave, on his hands and knees.

It took four, five blows before Rood had gotten through his skull. Long before the last blow Jahna had turned away.

They stayed in the cave one more night, with the fallen bonehead slumped on the floor, blood pooled beneath his shattered skull. In the morning they wrapped up what was left of the seal meat, and prepared to begin the journey back. But before they left Jahna insisted they dig a hole in the ground, wide but shallow. Into the hole she dropped the bones of the infant she had found, and the big carcass of the bonehead. Then she kicked the dirt back into the hole, and tamped it down with her feet.

After they had gone the gulls came. They pecked at the bits of seal meat, and the patch of dried blood in the entrance of the cave that faced the sea.

CHAPTER 14.

The Swarming People Anatolia, Turkey. Circa 9,600 years before present.

I.

The two girls, lying side by side, nibbled at their kernels of wild grain.

"So you like Tori better than Jaypee," said Sion.

Juna, at sixteen a year younger than her sister, flicked her hair out of her eyes. Her hair was a pale blond, strikingly bright. She said carefully, "Maybe. I think he he likes likes me me better than Jaypee does." better than Jaypee does."

"But you said Tori was a runt. You said you liked the way Jaypee's hair falls when he runs, and those big thighs he has, and-"