She began to rub his hand, his wrist, and suddenly his sizraels popped. She studied them.
"But I want you to know, Bron, that there is nothing you have done that others have not done. There is no longing so strange that I have not seen it before, no desire so perverse. You think that your greatest secrets, your greatest fears, are unique to you. But they're the same secrets and fears that we all share. I will leave the choice to you. I can teach you, but first I must be sure of you. The world is infinitely more vast and strange than you can imagine, Bron. You see it through a thin filter of the things that you know of and have learned over the past dozen years. But we can share with you memories of people who have lived over the past million years, through tens of thousands of lifetimes. Have you ever wondered how Einstein saw the world? Or Rasputin? Or William Shakespeare? Or Jesus? The memory merchants can reveal it all to you—the secrets of those people and others vastly more interesting, ancient people whose legacies have been lost in time. If you will but permit me, I can show you something you would never have imagined."
Bron didn't entirely trust this woman. She was too intense, too strange, and the way that she looked at him hungrily as she studied his hand, left him unnerved. His mouth suddenly went as dry as the desert, and his palms began to sweat. He felt an electric tingle pass through them, a current that went up through his body and warmed him. She smiled.
She wasn't very old, he realized. She couldn't have been more than thirty, about Olivia's age. He would never have admitted it, but he suddenly wanted to kiss her, and he could tell by the way that her pupils went wide that she felt something, too.
His palms had begun to sweat, as if the heat in the room were growing. He tried to pull his hand back, to wipe it off, but she clutched it all the tighter.
Almost against his will, he nodded.
Monique reached up with her left hand, as dainty as a child's, and tenderly touched his temple, as if to sweep the hair back from his brow. He felt an electric tingle, heard a sizzling. Golden lights flashed around his head like a halo.
"I want to show you something," she said. "I won't add it to your memories, just show you something that has been passed down among memory merchants now for a quarter of a million years."
She closed her eyes and planted her fingers across half of his face, touching the eyelid under his brow with a thumb, his forehead with her forefingers, and others spread out until her pinky reached just behind his ear.
Suddenly Bron's eyes seemed too heavy to stay open, and he found himself....
Straddling the back of a woolly mammoth, his legs lost in thick hair. At this season in the year, the mammoth's fur was burnt orange on top, bleached by the sun, and hung in long ragged wisps that fell out in the slightest breeze. The mammoth was shedding, its winter coat coming in. The hair smelled rancid, almost moldy.
Ahead and on either side, the land was scarred and torn. Mastodons had come this way on their migration north in the spring, tearing down trees and eating every green plant in their path—grass, bush, tree.
It had been a hard year, and now weeds cropped up among the rocks, while broken trees with scraggly limbs clung to life. What should have been fertile ground had been trodden to mud, creating a broad highway that wound through the hills.
His mammoth suddenly grew wary, paused in its tracks, raised its trunk and waved it in the air as it sought an elusive scent. Its small ears flapped forward. Then it drew back and blew a warning call, much like that of an elephant, but far deeper.
Tutuk, for that was the rider's name in this memory, peered across a broken horizon, covered in rough hills and rocky bluffs, and searched among the rocks for any sign of a hill tiger, or a pack of dire wolves. To the left, a river ran. Wheat grew beside it to a height of fifteen feet. This was ancient wheat, Bron realized, a species that had become as extinct as the mammoth.
Tutuk could smell the autumn-ripe grain, but the air also carried a taste of cold and coming winter.
He did not trust the wheat field, for too often he had found that humans hid in there, and the humans in this area were craven things that hunted their own kind by night and wore the skins of their enemies. They worshipped serpents and jackals, and smelled of putrefaction, for they believed that if they smelled of death, death would love them and pass them by.
Tutuk dug his heels into the mammoth's neck, and stopped. He pulled a ram's horn from his pack and blew hard upon it, twice. If an animal heard that call, the horn would give them pause. If friends heard it, they would reveal themselves. If humans heard it, they would merely hide and wait for a chance to strike.
Wheat stalks swayed, and something rushed out. At first Tutuk thought that it was a tawny lion, but instead a woman with a broad nose and weak chin burst from the rushes. Her skin was pale and creamy, her hair a light red. She wore a skirt of woven reeds, and had lines running down her chest, tattoos created by poking a sharp stick in ashes and then sticking it under the flesh. The ashen tattoos circled her small breasts in double rows, and an ivory nose ring announced her wealth. There was wisdom in her eyes, and she smiled in relief to see Tutuk.
"Tcha khaw!" she called in greeting. Come, member of my family. "Tcha khaw!"
She was short and stocky, Bron thought. Stockier than any person he'd ever seen, and there was something odd about her face, deformed. She had deep-set eyes, and almost no chin.
Tutuk recognized her immediately. She wasn't human. She was Neanderthal, or as he called them, "the hunting family." Humans were scavengers, eating mussels and locusts and nuts, stealing dead kills from lions. But the khaw were a nobler sort, taking only fresh meat that they hunted with their own spears. They were brave in the face of danger, gentle with one another.
The woman raised her hand, palm outward, and Tutuk did the same, flashing the sizraels on his fingertips.
The Neanderthal woman smiled at that and gave a shout of joy. She was so happy to meet Tutuk that she did something Bron had never seen before—she broke into dance, leaping forward a couple of steps, then leaping back, swaying and singing, "Yi, yi, yi!"
Soon more Neanderthals came lunging from the wheat, dancing and singing. There was a young man with a scraggly beard that could have been the female leader's little brother, and old men with rheumy eyes, and naked children, and a dozen warriors with spears.
One of the warriors shouted, and girls ran out of the tall wheat, bearing fine skins—an offering of tiger hides—along with bone knives. A pair of boys came out bearing the skin of a wooly rhino, and upon it was part of a recent kill, the rhino's haunch. Last of all, the leader of the tribe motioned to the tall hay and called out the name, "Neptu!"
A girl of thirteen or fourteen crept forward. She wore a skirt of woven grass, and she had green ivy and wild pea flowers in her hair. She blushed prettily and ducked her head.
These Neanderthals had seen memory merchants before, and they knew what Tutuk had to offer. Wisdom was valuable beyond measure, and anything that he wanted in the village was his for the taking—their clothing, their weapons, their food, their daughters.
Tutuk smiled and looked the tribe over. There was a wealthy man in the back, a Maker by the looks of him. He would be the kind of man who napped spearheads from obsidian, or carved idols from the sacred oak. He was old, but not so old that Tutuk feared that he would die soon. He was the right age to craft weapons for the tribe, and to teach his apprentices his skills.