"I am am a man." a man."

"But you do things that no man can do."

"I will teach you how to do them."

Ava asked, "What clan were you born to, if you are a man?"

"My clan lives far from here. I have traveled for a long, long time."

"Can everyone in your clan hunt the way you do?"

"Some can," I said. "Some hunt better than I."

For the first time, a smile curled her lips. "They must be very fat, then."

I laughed. "Some of them are."

"Why are you alone?" Dal asked, still suspicious. "Why have you come to us?"

"My clan is far away, and I have been separated from it for a long time. I was sent here to help you, to show you how to hunt and to protect you from your enemies. I have been alone for more days than any of you can count, and I am weary of loneliness. You are the clan that I have sought. You are the people I wish to be with."

As I spoke the words, I realized the truth that lay in them. I had been alone all my life, except for those few brief months with Agla, so far in the future of this time.

"It is not good for a man to be alone," said Ava, with surprising warmth and understanding in her voice. "Even the mightiest hunter needs a clan and a family."

Like all humans facing a difficult decision, they finally settled on a compromise. Dal spoke earnestly with the two elders of the clan, then with all the adults, male and female. They agreed to let me join them and show them my tricks of hunting. But they insisted that I had to sleep by myself, away from their campfire. Many of them were not convinced that I was not some form of a supernatural being, and they wanted to take as few chances with me as possible.

I accepted their decision. I had to. No one brought up the question of what to do about me after after I had shown them all my techniques of hunting. These people did not think much about their future; they lived in the present, like all animals, and only dimly perceived that tomorrow might be different from yesterday. I had shown them all my techniques of hunting. These people did not think much about their future; they lived in the present, like all animals, and only dimly perceived that tomorrow might be different from yesterday.

I was content with their decision, for the time being. It fulfilled Ormazd's command. And it brought me closer to Ava.

CHAPTER 25.

Dal and Ava stayed close to me at all times as the clan continued its migration across the green, flowering land.

Dal was a good leader, who took his responsibilities seriously. Nearly as tall as I, although much slimmer, he was well-muscled and had keen, alert eyes. He watched me carefully every minute of the day. Dal had no fear that I might be a spirit who posed a supernatural threat to the clan. His worries were very practical and matter-of-fact. He feared that I might be a spy from another clan, an infiltrator who would somehow lead the clan into an ambush.

At first I didn't realize this. But after a few days of his suspicious, wary watch over me, I began to piece it together. At night, when the elders told their tales around the campfire, I heard enough singing over blood and battle to realize that even in this demi-Eden, where human clans were so thinly spread that contact between them was rare, war and killing were still common enough, and still glorified.

Apparently they met other clans on these migration routes, and when they did they generally battled over control of the hunting grounds. Although to me it seemed that the territory was teeming with game, to these nomadic hunters, territorial rights were vital to their survival. It took many square miles of ground to provide enough game to feed even the smallest of clans, because they depended on hunting for most of their nourishment. And the hunting was never good enough to support them very well.

From what I heard from Dal and the others, several clans that were related by marriages generally lived in the same area during the summer. We were heading for the summer camping grounds now, up in the hills that lay close to the big double-peaked volcano that dominated the landscape. The clans would spend the summer together, close enough to each other for regular visits, courting, marriages, and exchange of stories and information. In the autumn they would break up and go their separate ways toward their winter campsites, far to the south.

Ava had her suspicions about me, also. But her fears all centered on the supernatural. She was the clan's shaman, a combination of herbal physician, priestess, psychologist, and advisor to Dal, the clan's leader. It almost amused me to realize how early in human history the roles of priest, doctor, and power-behind-the-throne had come together.

She walked beside me nearly every day, but her interest in me seemed purely professional. She wanted to make certain that if I did turn out to be a demon, she would know about it and be able to do something about it before I could hurt the clan. She questioned me endlessly about where I came from and what my clan was like. I didn't mind; I was happy to be with her, even though I knew that each night, when I had to move far from the campfire, she bedded down with Dal.

I had expected that the clan's shaman, or witchdoctor, would have been an old woman, a crone who had either outlived her mate or never attracted one. It surprised me, at first, that someone as young as Ava would fill the role while she was mated to Dal. Then I realized that there were no old women in the clan. No woman over thirty or so, as far as I could see. The two elders, both men, could hardly have been much more than forty; their shaggy beards were just starting to turn gray. But there were no gray-haired women in the Goat Clan. And of the eight children, only three were girls, one of them an infant still being carried on her mother's back. I asked Ava what happened to women as they grew older. "They die," she said calmly. "Their spirits leave their bodies."

"How do they die?" I asked.

She shrugged her slim shoulders. "Many times they die in childbirth, or soon afterward. Some become too sick or weak to keep up with the clan as we march."

"And you leave them?"

Her gray eyes flashed at me. "Of course not! We let out their blood so that their spirits can remain with us. We would not let the spirit of one of our people roam the world all alone."

"I see," I said, and let the subject drop. No need asking her about selective female infanticide. I could see that it was being practiced simply by counting the children.

Women were a liability in this rugged hunting life. They were necessary for procreation, of course, but too many women meant too many babies, too many mouths to feed. So female children were weeded out at birth. Conversely, once a woman was no longer capable of bearing children, her usefulness to the clan was finished and they apparently got rid of her. Not that the men lived much longer: disease and accidents took their toll, and if they were not enough, there was always war. Long before human beings learned to tame the wild ponies that they hunted for food, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse kept human numbers in balance with the rigors of the Neolithic landscape.

Without consciously deciding to do so, I was changing that balance. It took me many weeks to realize that it was so. But as I taught the clan how to make bows and arrows, how to dig pits and camouflage them so that animals would fall into them, I began to realize that I was altering-ever so slightly-the ecological balance of this era. For it was not preordained that humans should live in small, scattered hunting groups and survive on the ragged edge of starvation. Only their lack of knowledge, their lack of proper tools, kept these hunters weak and vulnerable. Given more knowledge, better tools, they would become the masters of this world.

And eventually build nuclear bombs and vast cities choking in their own filth, I knew. Yet, as I woke up each morning in this dawn of human history and watched these people get ready to work another day with little more than their bare hands, I realized that my choice was the only one I could make. They were part of me, I knew, as human as I was. For me to refuse to help them would be the same as for me to refuse to breathe. No matter what the consequences, I had to choose life over death, knowledge over ignorance, humankind over all the other forms of life in the world.

And then I would see Ava walking gracefully among her people, sipping water from a gourd, tending to a crying infant, and I realized that all my fine thoughts were merely excuses. I did what I did to help this clan because she was here, and I could not face the idea that one day, when she grew too slow to stay up with them, her clansmen would open her veins and let her spirit leave her body.

My own knowledge of Neolithic technology was shadowy, at best, but I remembered seeing pictures of spear-throwers, long, grooved handles that effectively extended the length of the throwing arm and allowed one to fling a spear twice the distance that he could unaided. I experimented for the better part of a week and finally taught myself how to make one and use it.

Dal's suspicions of me almost vanished when I showed him how to throw a spear farther than any man had before. The bow and arrow he had regarded with misgivings, mainly because I was far from expert at feathering the arrows and they were consequently far from accurate. But the spear-thrower fit into his experience and expectations beautifully. The first day he used it he brought down a gazelle that fed the whole clan for two nights. I was instantly besieged with requests for more of them. I made three, under the watchful eyes of the men and boys. Then they started making them, and within a week they were building better ones than I could.

Each night I gazed up at the stars longingly, searching their eternal patterns for some sign of where on Earth I might be. Most of the constellations looked familiar. I recognized Bootes, Andromeda, Perseus and the Little Dipper. Clearly, I was in the Northern Hemisphere. The Big Dipper looked strange, lopsided, its stars rearranged. If instinct had not done so already, that would have convinced me that I had moved many millennia through time.

The double-peaked volcano that loomed ahead of us seemed strangely familiar, but I could not place it. When I asked Dal what its name was, he gave me a strange stare. Either this clan did not name mountains or the name was too sacred to be spoken casually.

The landscape was rising now, and we climbed grassy slopes that grew steeper with each passing day. After almost a week of that, the land flattened out into a broad plateau covered by a dark and gloomy forest. Huge boles of pine and spruce alternated with groves of birch trees and mighty oaks. Beneath the trees the undergrowth was sparse, but it grew thick and tangled wherever the green canopy overhead thinned enough to let sunlight filter through to the ground. Dal kept us on a trail that meandered through the shadows of the trees-bare ground, softened by fallen pine needles. Easy hiking.

The forest was rich with game. Every morning the men and older boys went out to hunt boar, deer, and whatever else they could find. Often a few of the women went with them. The other women and younger boys stayed at the campsite, some of them trapping smaller game. I became expert at the sling and could usually kill a couple of rabbits or squirrels in an hour or so. The clan ate well in the forest. I wondered why they ever left it.

I asked Ava, one afternoon when she had stayed in camp instead of going off with the hunters.

"We go to the valley, to our camping place for the summer," she told me. "There we will meet other clans. There will be marriages and feasting."

I sat with my back against the bole of a huge oak, while she knelt on the thin grass, sorting out the roots and herbs she had spent all morning collecting.

"Why don't the clans meet here in the forest?" I asked. "There's more game here than anywhere else I've seen."

She gave me the kind of patient smile that a teacher might offer a struggling student. "The valley is better. There is plenty of game there. And other kinds of food as well. Here in the forest..." She looked around the gloomy shadows cast by the trees, highlighted here and there by shafts of ghostly sunlight filtering through the leaves overhead. "Here there are dark spirits, dangerous and foul."

I knew of a dark spirit that was very real. I wondered if Ahriman was lurking in these dreary woods.

"And enemies who can ambush us," Dal's strong voice broke into our conversation. "The forest is an easy place for enemies to trap us."

He strode up to us, strong and confident and smiling through his coppery red beard. Over one shoulder he had slung a young boar, its hind legs tied together by a thong.

Ava jumped to her feet, so obviously happy to see him that I felt instantly jealous and resentful. "Why are you back so soon?"

Letting his catch drop to the ground, Dal pointed and said, "We found a new watering place, further up the hill. All the animals go there to drink. It wasn't there last year; something has dammed the stream to make a big pool. At sundown we can take enough game to carry us through the rest of the way to the valley!"

By sundown the whole clan was staked out by the watering spot, a large, still pool fed by a tiny stream that trickled through the woods from far above, where the snows still lay on the mountainside. Only the two elders, the babies, and the four oldest women had been left behind. Dal brought everyone else and carefully supervised our placement around the pool and on either side of the trail that led to it.

He was confident enough of himself to direct even me to a hiding place. I accepted his orders with a smile; Dal no longer feared me, and I felt good about that. I had been accepted.

We waited, hunkered down into the ground, covered with leaves and foliage, hoping that the wind would not change and give away our hiding positions to the animals that would come to the pool for their evening drink.

The afternoon light faded. Birds chattered and swooped through the trees. A procession of ants marched two inches in front of my eyes as I lay on the ground, itching and sweating despite the coolness of the forest shadows. Three spears lay beside me. A leafy oak branch lay over me. On either side of me I could see other clan members, similarly hiding and camouflaged. We were all to wait until Dal made the first move.

We waited. The shadows grew darker. The calls of the birds slackened and stilled. But no animals came to the pool. I began to wonder if something had gone wrong.

Then I heard a snuffling noise from behind me. I dared not turn around to look. I stayed absolutely still, barely breathing. I could hear my heart thumping in my ears. My palms were sweaty. I was as excited as any of these Neolithic hunters, perhaps even more excited than they.

Singly, in pairs, animals came warily down the trail to drink at the pool. Deer, boar, a strange kind of goat, others that I could not identify. They came warily, knowing full well that hunting dogs and wolves lurked in the woods. But they were not aware of the predators who lay hidden in their midst.

With a paralyzing scream Dal leaped to his feet and threw a spear at the biggest of the deer, hitting the doe just behind the forelegs. It fell, splashing, at the pool's edge. We all leaped up, roaring with pent-up passion, and began killing.

Ava was the wildest one of all, absolutely fearless and as fierce as any demon out of hell. She nailed a fawn with her first spear, then jumped out onto the trail to block the animals' easiest escape route. A tusked boar charged at her, head down, eyes burning with hate. Ava spitted it on her other spear, but the beast's furious charge wrested the weapon from her grasp. I came up beside her and pinned the animal's hindquarters to the ground with my remaining spear. Without an instant's hesitation, Ava straddled the boar's squirming back and slit its throat from ear to ear.

Blood spurted over us both as she leaped to her feet, arms upraised, brandishing her bloody stone knife in the air and screeching like a wild beast herself.

I stood there, suddenly transfixed by this vision of primitive ardor, the death-lust unmasked, unbridled, soaked with the blood of the prey. The killing was still going on all around us, filling the air with screams and the stench of blood. Ava flung her arms around my neck, laughing and sobbing all at once.

"Blood-mates!" she shouted. "We killed it together. We have shared a death."

I wanted to share love with her, not death. But, to her, the passions seemed much the same.

We carried and dragged the slaughtered beasts back to the campsite, where the elder men and women oohed and ahhed appropriately. All of us were smeared with blood, stinking with the lust of killing and the disemboweled entrails of our prey. None of us had been seriously hurt; one of the teen-agers had been gashed on the calf, but it did not look serious.

I was still trembling by the time we got back to the camp. I had hunted before, alone. I had hunted with Dal and others of the clan. But this evening's work was something different, something wild and passionate that stirred the savage killer-instinct within us all. We killed far more than we could eat; most of the game would rot before we could get to it. But like sharks in their feeding frenzy, we killed everything we could, sparing only those beasts that were fast enough or lucky enough to escape our spears.

Dal eyed me suspiciously as we made our way back to camp. But he was not worried that I was a spy from another clan or a spirit who would steal his soul. He was simply a jealous human male. He had seen Ava embrace me, and it did not please him at all.

The two elder males insisted that the clan perform a blood ritual to thank the gods for such a miraculous catch. They even wanted me to take part in it, as a representative of the gods. Dal adamantly refused.

"Orion has told us that he is a man, not a spirit," he insisted.

"But we never had such good hunting before he came to us," countered the eldest. "Whatever he says, out of modesty or the wisdom of the gods, he has still brought us incredible good fortune."

I stayed out of the argument, knowing that it was better to allow them to make up their own minds while I kept silent-out of modesty or wisdom.

But Ava spoke up. "Orion helped me to kill the boar. We are blood-mates. He should take part in the celebration."

Which, of course, set Dal's mind even more firmly against me. The clan was a rough sort of democracy. Dal was not an absolute ruler. But like most democracies, a strong-willed minority can usually prevail over the wishes of the majority. Dal was firmly set against allowing me to participate in their tribal ritual. His purpose was reinforced by jealousy and suspicion. The others had only fairness and good will to support them. Dal won.

So I sat alone in the darkness, far from the blazing campfire, as the clan danced wildly and split the night with their strange whoops and cries. All around me the tree trunks loomed black and unyielding. They made me think of Ahriman, brooding dark and evil, as he plotted our extinction.

For hours I watched them dancing, listened to their howls and screams as I told myself that I was glad that I was not one of them, glad to be more civilized than these savages, glad to be separate and apart from them. I told myself that, over and again.

The eerie cries at last dwindled to silence and the glow of the fire sank to a sullen glower of red among the black pillars of the trees. I finally lay back on the pine needles and closed my eyes to sleep.

Glad not to be one of them. The thought swirled around and around in my mind until I almost became physically sick. I was not one of them. I was alone, totally alone, thousands of years away from the nearest friend, my memory so blocked that I did not even know if I had a friend anywhere in the whole long continuum of time and space.

It was then that Ava came to me. Even in the darkness I could smell the blood and entrails that smeared her naked body.

"You could not come to the ritual," she whispered, her voice still breathless with excitement, "so I have brought the ritual to you."

Part of me was disgusted with her and her primitive blood-lust. Part of me knew that Dal would never forgive me for making love with his woman. Part of me was repelled at the thought of taking her in my arms and wallowing in her stench and passion. But with a suddenness that overwhelmed every thought in my mind, I became as wild and fierce as she was, and at least for a little while I was alone no longer.

CHAPTER 26.

The next morning we resumed our trek northward, each of us staggering under a heavy load of dead game. We traveled under clouds of flies, and the smell of meat decaying in the warmth of the day was enough to make me sick. But no one else seemed to mind it; they all seemed happy with their burdens.

Ava walked up at the head of our little column, beside Dal. If he knew what we had done the night before, Dal gave no sign of it.

Nor did Ava. When I awakened that morning, she had already left me and returned to her usual sleeping place, I supposed, beside Dal. She gave me no sign that our relationship had changed. I began to think that what happened under the maddened passion of the clan's blood ritual was a sort of privileged event, not to be considered by the same rules as everyday life, not to be remembered or regretted once the sun arose again.

Two days later we emerged from the brooding forest and started across a broad, sunlit upland where the grass was green and sweet and dotted with flowers. Wild grains sprouted here and there, and lines of trees showed us where streams flowed. The people seemed to grow happier and lighter of heart with every step now. They knew this territory intimately, and they remarked on each and every jut of rock, bend of a stream, stand of grain that we passed.

Ava dropped back to walk with me one hot afternoon. I had taken to remaining toward the rear of the procession. For some unfathomable inner reason I had the uncanny feeling that we were being followed, watched. But, whenever I looked back, I could see no one, nothing, as far as the horizon. Yet the feeling remained, prickling the back of my neck.

"Soon we'll be at our valley," Ava told me, smiling.

"Our valley?" I asked. valley?" I asked.

She nodded, looking as pleased as a traveler who was at last making her way home.

"The valley is a good place. Others will come there to share it with us. Plenty of water and grain and good hunting. Everyone is happy in our valley."

When we finally reached it, nearly a week later, I saw that it was truly a lovely, sheltered Eden.

We stood by the bank of a gently meandering stream that afternoon, looking down across the valley. The stream dropped down in a series of terraced stone steps to the floor of the valley, then made its way along its length and disappeared into the cliffs at the other end. I saw that those cliffs actually formed the base of the big, double-peaked mountain that smoked quietly, far up at the top where snow still lay glittering white under the late springtime sun.

I could see why the clan was so happy to be here. The valley was sunny and green. From its U-shaped cross section I could tell that it had been scooped out by a glacier, probably from the looming mountain, which had now melted away. It was a very snug niche, quite defensible against invaders. The only easy access to the valley was down the stone terracing of the waterfall, the way we were entering. The trail was slippery, but not terribly difficult to get down. On the other sides the valley walls rose fairly steeply to heights of at least several hundred feet.

Our clan was the first to arrive that year. Dal's people raced down the wet stone terraces, laughing and happy, to the valley floor. Before the day ended they had felled some trees and chased some game. By nightfall they had erected a few primitive huts with mud walls and tree branches and hides for roofs. The huts were dug into the ground, more underground than above it, but to Dal's people they seemed like palaces.

One note of sadness touched us that night. The boy who had been injured in the hunt sank into a fevered coma. I had thought at first that the gash on his leg would heal soon enough, but it had become infected despite all that Ava could do in the way of poultices and bandages made from leaves. By the time we had reached the valley, the poor youngster could barely walk; his leg was swollen and inflamed. That night he was delirious, burning with fever. Finally he grew quiet and still. His mother sat at his side all night long. At dawn her keening cry told us all that her son was dead.