“Because he didn’t want a tribe, milord. He wanted to save a bunch of innocent victims.”
“Victims?” Rod frowned. “Who was picking on you?”
“Everybody.” Yorick spread his arms. “The Flatfaces, for openers—like you, only bigger. They chipped flint into tools, same as we do—only they’re a lot better at it.”
“The Cro-Magnons,” Rod said slowly. “Are your people the last Neanderthals?”
“Oh, nowhere near! That was our problem, in fact—all those other Neanderthals. They’d’ve rather’d kill us than look at us.”
Suddenly, Rod could place Yorick—he was paranoid. “I thought it worked the other way around.”
“What—that we’d as soon kill them as look at them?”
“No—that you’d kill them when you looked at them.”
Yorick looked uncomfortable. “Well, yes, the Evil-Eye thing—that was the problem. I mean, you try to cover it up as best you can; you try to hide it—but sooner or later somebody’s gonna haul off and try and whack you with a club.”
“Oh, come on! It wasn’t inevitable, was it?”
“Haven’t lived with Neanderthals, have you?”
“Oh.” Rod cocked his head. “Not very civilized, were you?”
“We lived like cavemen,” Yorick confirmed.
“Oh. Right.” Rod glanced away, embarrassed. “Sorry—I forgot.”
“Great.” Yorick grinned. “That’s a compliment.”
“I suppose it is,” Rod said slowly. “But how come your quarrels had to turn violent?”
Yorick shrugged. “What can I tell you? No lawyers. Whatever the reason, we do tend to clobber—and you can’t help yourself then; you have to freeze him in his tracks.”
“Purely in self-defense, of course.”
“Oh yeah, purely! Most of us had sense enough not to hit back at someone who was frozen—and the ones who didn’t, couldn’t; it takes some real concentration to keep a man frozen. There just ain’t anything left over to hit with.”
“Well, maybe.” Rod had his doubts. “But why would he want to kill you, when you hadn’t hurt him?”
“That made it worse,” Yorick sighed. “I mean, if I put the freeze on you, you’re gonna feel bad enough…”
The clanking and rustling behind Rod told him that his soldiers had come to the ready. Beside him Tuan murmured, “ ‘Ware, beastman!”
Yorick plowed on, unmindful of them. “But if I don’t clobber you, you’re gonna read it as contempt, and hate me worse. Still, it wasn’t the person who got frozen who was the problem—it was the spectators.”
“What’d you do—sell tickets?”
Yorick’s mouth tightened with exasperation. “You know how hard it is to be alone in these small tribes?”
“Yeah… I suppose that would be a problem.”
“Problem, hell! It was murder! Who wants you around if you can do that to them? And there’s one way to make sure you won’t be around. No, we’d have to get out of the village on our own first. Usually had a lot of help…”
“It’s a wonder any of you survived.” Then something clicked in Rod’s mind. “But you would, wouldn’t you? If anyone got too close, you could freeze him.”
“Long enough to get away, yes. But what do you do when you’ve gotten away?”
“Survive.” Rod stared off into the sky, imagining what it would be like. “Kind of lonely…”
Yorick snorted. “Never tried to make it on your own in a wilderness, have you? Loneliness is the least of it. A rabbit a day keeps starvation away—but a sabertooth has the same notion about you. Not to mention dire wolves or cave bears.”
Rod nodded thoughtfully. “I can see why you’d want to form a new tribe.”
“With what?” Yorick scoffed. “We weren’t exactly over-populated, you know. It was a long way between tribes—and not very many Evil-Eye espers in any one of ‘em. You might have one in a hundred square miles—and do you know how long a hundred miles is, on foot in rough country?”
“About two weeks.” But Rod was really thinking about Yorick’s choice of word—he’d said “esper,” not “witch” or “monster.”
“This is where your ‘Eagle’ came in?”
Yorick nodded. “Just in time, too. Picked us up one by one and brought us to this nice little mountain valley he’d picked out. Nice V high up, plenty of rain, nice ‘n’ cool all year ‘round…”
“Very cool in winter—I should think.”
“You should, ‘cause it wasn’t. Pretty far south, I suppose—’cause it never got more than brisk. ‘Course, there wasn’t enough game for the whole four thousand of us.”
“Four thousand? A hundred miles or more apart? What’d he do—spend a lifetime finding you all?”
Yorick started to answer, then caught himself and said very carefully, “He knew how to travel fast.”
“Very fast, I should think—at least a mile a minute.” Rod had a vision of a ground-effect car trying to climb a forty-five-degree slope. “And how did he get you up to that mountain valley? Wings?”
“Something like that,” Yorick confessed. “And it wasn’t all that big a valley. He taught us how to use bows and arrows, and we had a whee of a time hunting—but the Eagle knew that could only last just so long, so he got us busy on planting. And, just about the time game was getting scarce, our first maize crop was getting ready to harvest.”
“Maize?” Rod gawked. “Where the hell’d he get that?”
“Oh, it wasn’t what you think of as maize,” Yorick said quickly. “Little bitty ears, only about four inches long.”
“In 50,000 B.C. maize was just a thickheaded kind of grass,” Rod grated, “like some parties I could mention. And it only grew in the New World. Neanderthals only grew in the Old.”
“Who says?” Yorick snorted. “Just because we weren’t obliging enough to go around leaving fossils doesn’t mean we weren’t there.”
“It doesn’t mean you were, either,” Rod said, tight-lipped, “and you’ve got a very neat way of not answering the question you’re asked.”
“Yeah, don’t I?” Yorick grinned. “It takes practice, let me tell you.”
“Do,” Rod invited. “Tell me more about this ‘Eagle’ of yours. Just where did he come from, anyway?”
“Heaven sent him in answer to our prayers,” Yorick said piously. “Only we didn’t just call him ‘Eagle’ anymore—we called him the ‘Maize King.’ That way, we could stay cooped up in our little mountain valley and not bother anybody.”
“A laudable ideal. What happened?”
“A bunch of Flatfaces bumped into us,” Yorick sighed. “Pure idiot chance. They came up to the mountains to find straight fir trees for shafts, and blundered into our valley. And, being Flatfaces, they couldn’t leave without trying a little looting and pillaging.”
“Neanderthals never do, of course.”
Yorick shook his head. “Why bother? But they just had to try it—and most of ‘em escaped, too. Which was worse—because they came back with a whole horde behind ‘em.”
Rod was still thinking about the “most.”
“You’re not going to try to tell me your people were peaceful!”
“Were,” Yorick agreed. “Definitely ‘were.’ I mean, with five hundred screaming Flatfaces charging down on us, even the most pacifistic suddenly saw a lot of advantages in self-defense. And the Eagle had taught us how to use bows, but the Flatfaces hadn’t figured out how to make them yet; so we mostly survived.”
Again, “most.”
“But the Eagle decided he hadn’t hidden you well enough?”
“Right.” Yorick bobbed his head. “Decided we couldn’t be safe anywhere on Earth, in fact—so he brought us here. Or to Anderland, anyway.” He jerked his head toward the west. “Over that way.”
“The mainland,” Rod translated. “Just—brought you.”