…And now the pain hit, sharp and deep like a series of paper cuts, and she yowled. She went to a stream to drench her cut palm in cold water until the slow bleeding had stopped.
Scarhead waited patiently for her, no expression she could read on his broad, battered face.
You aren’t doing too well here, Emma.
She tried again. She spread a skin apron over her lap, and improvised a protective binding for her hand from a bit of tough leather. Then she resumed her work at the ligaments and tendons.
Think about the work, Emma. Think about the feel of the stone,. listen to the rasp of the tendons, smell the coagulated blood; feel the sun on your head, listen to the steady breathing of Scarhead…
She reached bone. Her axe scraped against the hard surface, almost jarring from her hand. She pulled the axe back and turned it over, exposing fresh edge, and began to dig deeper into the joint, seeking more tendon to cut.
A last tough bit of gristle gave way, and the leg disarticulated.
She stared, oddly fascinated, at the bone joints. Even Malenfant, who had never shown the slightest interest in biology, might have been interested at this bit of natural engineering, if he had gotten to take it apart in his own hands.
And she was still analysing. Wrong.
She glanced up at Scarhead. Not watching her, apparently immersed in the work, he had begun to fillet the meat from the shoulder joint he was holding. Emulating his actions, she did the same. She dug her blade into the gap between meat and bone, cutting the muscle that was attached to the bone surface. She soon found the easiest way was to prop the scapula on the ground between her legs, and pull at the muscle with one hand to expose the joint, which she cut with the other hand. She got into a rhythm of turning the axe in her hand, to keep exposing fresh edge.
She tried not to think about anything — not Earth, Malenfant, the wind wall, the destiny of mankind, her own fate — nothing but the feel of the sun, the meat in her hand, the scrape of stone on bone.
For brief moments, as the hypnotic rhythms of the butchery tugged at her mind, she got it.
It was as if she was no longer the little viewpoint camera stuck behind her eyes; it was as if her consciousness had dispersed, so that she was her working hands, or spread even further to her tool, the flesh and bone she worked, and the trails and bits of forest and scrub and the crater walls and the migrating herds and all the other details of this scrap of the world, a scrap inhabited by the Hams, unchanging, for generation upon generation upon generation.
…Her hands had finished the butchery. On one side of her, a flensed shoulder bone; on the other, a neat stack of filleted meat.
She looked into cavernous eyes, feeling the sun’s heat, feeling the pleasurable ache of her arms and hands. She forgot the name she had given him, forgot her own name, forgot herself in his deep stare.
Shadows beside her. It was Joshua, and Julia… No, no names; these people simply were who they were, everybody in their world knew them, without the need for labels. She took their hands and let herself be raised to her feet.
The Hams led her up the hillside, away from the caves, towards the place where the unnatural wind moaned.
It was not like a dream; it was too detailed for that. She felt the sharpness of every grain of red dust under her feet, the lick of the air on her cheeks, the salty prickle of sweat on her brow and neck, the sharp, almost pleasant ache of her cut palm. It was as if a veil had been removed from her eyes, stops from her ears and nose, so that the colours were vivid and alive — red earth, green vegetation, blue sky — and the sounds were clear, grainy, loud, their footsteps crunching into the earth, the hiss of wind over the scrubby grass that clung to these upper slopes. It was like being a child again, she thought, a child on a crisp summer’s Saturday morning, when the day was too long for its end to be imagined, the world too absorbing to be analysed.
Was this how it was to be a Neandertal? If so, how — enviable.
They had reached the crest of the crater-rim hill. They began to walk forward, in a line, hand in hand.
That wall of air spread across the land before her, a cylinder so wide it looked flat. She felt a lick of wind, touching her cheek, disturbing her hair, the first prickle of dust on her skin. She dropped her head, concealing her Homo sap protruding chin, and walked steadily on. She concentrated on the sun, the texture of the ground, the bloody iron scent of the dusty air.
Anything but the wind.
They went into the dust. She walked steadily, between her Ham friends, immersed in crimson light. She was ten paces inside the dust. Then fifteen, past her previous record. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two…
Maybe it was the counting. Hams did not count.
The wind hit her like a train.
Her hands were wrenched from the Hams” grip. She was lifted up off the ground, flipped on her back, and slammed down again.
The light dimmed to a dull Venusian red. Suddenly she couldn’t see Julia or Joshua, nothing but a horizontal hail of dust particles and bits of rock, looming out of infinity as if she were looking into a tunnel. If she turned her head into the wind she could barely breathe.
Another gust — she was rolled over — she scrabbled at the ground. And then she was lifted up, up into the air, limbs flailing, like a cow caught by a Midwest tornado. She was immersed in a shell of whirling dust; she couldn’t see ground or sky, couldn’t tell how far away the ground was, couldn’t even tell which way up she was. But she could tell she was falling.
She screamed, but her cry was snatched away. “Malenfant!—”
She was on her back. She could feel that much. But there was no wind: no hot buffeting gusts at her face, no sting of grit on her exposed skin. Nothing but a remote howl.
She opened her eyes.
She was looking up into a dark tunnel, like gazing up from the depths of a well, towards a circle of cloud-scattered blue sky. The light was odd, greyish-red, as if shadowed. Was she back in the caves? She tried to sit up. Pain lanced through her back and stomach.
A face loomed above her, silhouetted by the patch of bright sky, backlit by diffuse grey light. “Take it easy. We don’t think any bones are broken. But you are cut and bruised and badly winded. You may be concussed.” The face was thin, capped by a splash of untidy black hair. Emma stared at an oddly jutting chin, weak cheekbones, an absurd bubble skull with loose scraps of hair. It was a woman’s face.
It came into focus. A human woman.
The woman frowned. “Do you understand me?”
When she tried to speak Emma found her mouth full of dust. She coughed, spat, and tried again. “Yes.”
“You must be Emma Malenfant.”
“Stoney,” Emma corrected automatically. “As if it makes a difference now.” She saw the woman was wearing a faded blue coverall, scuffed and much-repaired, with a NASA meatball logo on her chest. “You’re Nemoto. Malenfant’s companion.”
Nemoto regarded her gravely, and with a start Emma recognized for the first time the Oriental cast of her features. A lesson, she thought wryly. Compared to the distance between humans and other hominids, the gap between our races really is so small as to be unnoticeable.
“…Malenfant is dead,” she said hesitantly. “I’m sorry.”
She thought she saw hope die, just a little, in Nemoto’s blank, narrowing eyes.
“I don’t know how well you knew him. I—”