Evolution

When they saw what Eyes and Mother were doing, others, immediately fascinated, tried to copy them. Gradually the new imagery spread, and throughout the little community ocher animals leapt and sooty spears flew. It was as if a new layer of life had entered the world, a surface of mind that changed everything it touched.

For Mother it was a new kind of power. When she had recognized that the shapes she saw in her head had matches in the world outside, she had begun to understand that she was at the focus of the global web of causality and control — as if the universe of people and animals, rocks and sky, was just a map of what lay inside her own imagination. And now, with this new technique of Eyes’s, there was a whole new way to express that control, those connections. Taking the horse into her head and then transferring it, frozen, to a rock or a bit of skin was as if she owned it forever — no matter that the animal ran unimpeded across the dry plains.

Many people feared the new images and those who produced them. Mother herself had grown too strong to be challenged; few would meet the sightless gaze of that skull on the post. But Eyes, her closest acolyte, was an easier target.

One day she came to Mother, weeping. She was bedraggled and muddy, and the elaborate designs she had painted on her skin were smudged and washed away. Eyes’s language skills remained poor, and Mother had to listen to a lot of her circumlocutory pidgin before she understood what had happened.

It had been Ant-eater, the boy who had shown interest in Eyes. He had pursued her again. When she had shown no desire for him he had tried to force himself on her. But still she resisted. So he carried her to the lake and threw her into the water, smeared her with mud, tried to destroy her skin markings.

Eyes looked at Mother as if she expected comfort, a hug, as if she were an upset child. But Mother merely sat before her, her face hard.

Then she went to her pallet and returned with a fine stone scraper. She made the girl rest her head in her lap — and Mother jabbed the stone into her cheek. Eyes cried out and pulled away, baffled; she touched her cheek and looked in horror at the blood on her fingers. But Mother coaxed her back, made her lie down again, and again punctured her cheek, this time a little below the first wound. Eyes struggled a little, but she submitted. Gradually, as the pain seeped through her, she went limp.

When Mother was done with the awl she wiped away the blood and took a piece of ocher, rubbing the crumbling rock deep into the wounds she had made. Eyes mewled as the salty stuff stung her damaged flesh.

Then Mother took her hand. "Come," she said. "Water."

She led the reluctant, baffled girl through the listless herbivores down to the lake. They splashed out into the water, their toes sinking into the clinging lake-bottom mud, until the water came up to their knees. They stood still until the ripples had settled, and the muddy water lay still and smooth before them.

Mother bade Eyes look down at her reflection.

Eyes saw that a vivid crimson spiral looped from her eye and over her cheek. Blood still seeped from the rudimentary tattoo. When she splashed water over her face the blood washed away, but the spiral remained. Eyes gaped and grinned — though the flexing of her face made her aching wounds hurt even more. She understood now what Mother had been doing.

The tattooing was a technique Mother had tried out on herself. It was painful, of course. But it was pain — the pain in her head, the pain of her loss of Silent — that had given birth to the great transformations of her life. Pain was to be welcomed, celebrated. What better way to make this child one of her own?

Hand in hand, the two of them walked back to the shore.

For day after relentless day the drought continued.

The lake became a dank puddle at the center of a bowl of cracked mud. The water was fouled by the droppings and corpses of the animals — but the people drank it nonetheless, for they had no choice, and many of them suffered diarrhea and other ailments. Among the animals the die back continued. But there was little fresh meat now, and there was ferocious competition from the wolves and hyenas and cats.

The bands, of skinny folk and bone-brows alike, stared at each other sullenly.

Among Mother’s people, the first to die was an infant. Her little body had been depleted by diarrhea. Her mother keened over the little corpse, then she gave it up to her sisters, who took it away to put it in the ground. But the dirt was dry, hard packed, and the weakened folk had trouble digging into it. Next day another died, an old man. And two the next, two more children.

It was after that, after they had started to die, that the people began to come to Mother.