“I didn't, the monsters did,” she said.
“What monsters?” he asked.
She explained her story to him, and he became increasingly nervous, hefting his spear and eyeing the forest as if the monsters were about to return.
“I remember them. We must go,” he said.
“My village is that way,” she said pointing to the west.
“Mine is that way,” he replied, hefting the meat onto his broad shoulders and nodding to the south.
She looked at him critically.
“Have you a woman?” she asked.
“Not yet, why?”
“You have now,” she said, taking some of his load from him and so allowing him more freedom to use his spear to protect them both. He examined her and after a few moments, smiled and nodded, turning away and starting to walk east.
“What do they call you?” he asked as she walked beside him.
“Phullima, and you?”
“G'mom.”
She smiled and felt safe for the first time in ages.
History fails to reveal what happened to G'mom and Phullima, but I'd like to think they had loads of children and they all thrived and prospered, but for all we know, they could have all been eaten by bears.
As for the crew on board the scout ship, history wasn't kind to them.
For all their science and technology, the crew suffered at the hands of the smallest predator of all – micro-organisms. They lasted another six months, having ironed out the bugs in the two torcs. Their first effort was reasonable, but failed to maintain the transformation for longer than a couple of hours at a time.
Unfortunately, one of the crew, Fytin was actually with some humans at the time. She was trying quite successfully to trade some crude tools for some food. The torc ceased working and suddenly the humans had a weird-looking monster appear in their midst. Despite wearing some protection she was seriously wounded and died a short while later. Graton took her death personally, so after repairing and improving the torcs, withdrew and became unapproachable.
Within a month of Fytin's death, the first symptoms of the disease appeared, and a few short weeks later the last crew member, the captain, died. Her last act was to lift the ship off and fly up out of the atmosphere. There she detached a small satellite that repeated the message in their language as a warning for all her kind never to land of this planet. Knowing that the organisms were deadly to her kind, she simply set the craft to fly towards the sun. She died some two days before the air ran out. Eventually, the craft and dead body were burned to a crisp long before they reached their destination.
What about the torcs? I hear you ask.
Shortly before her last flight, the captain buried the ashes of her crew with her infant and her dear friend Graton. As she looked out at the beautiful vista before her, she felt a heavy sadness of knowing what might have been. Instead, she knew that the brutes would grow and multiply, dominating and probably destroying everything that was beautiful.
The torcs were a testimony to the intelligence, ingenuity and imagination of her people. Therein lay an even greater sadness, that none would ever know of what they had been able to achieve.
She was in a quandary, for should her people find this planet and heed her warnings, then given the advances in medical science, it might be possible for them to make this place their home. However, they would need the technology in the torcs only if the brutes were still an issue. If she left them in space and another civilisation, perhaps even the descendents of the brutes themselves found them, then that could be disastrous. If she left them on the planet below, then the only creatures to find them would be the brutes, and the chances would be slim that the devices would survive the thousands of years that it might take for these beings to advance to a civilised state, if ever.
It seemed a shame, but she originally intended to keep them with her on her final journey. However, there might be a chance her people would come here, and the metal was so rare as to be immediately identifiable to any of her people.
She returned with the torcs to her ship, and flew slowly over the changing landscape below. She flew north, over the advancing glaciers, until she decided that this was as good as anywhere.
She didn’t want the brutes getting hold of them, but she didn’t have the heart to destroy all that effort by her dear friend. Instead, she set the craft to hover, and threw the torcs onto the ice.
Their warmth melted the surface and she watched as they slowly sank from view.
They would keep on sinking, until their energy was spent. Then, if the glaciers ever retreated, they would fall into the ocean below and settle on the bottom forever.
If, and it was an infinitesimal if, her kind ever found this place and managed to conquer the disease that killed her crew, they might just locate the torcs and put them to use. Otherwise, they should remain where they were until the Brutes managed to kill themselves and possibly the entire planet of abundant life.
Those rather insignificant circlets of metal were the only evidence of her and her people. Nothing else remained, not even a boot print, to tell their story. It should have been a different story, but as she turned her eyes outwards, she cried for her kind.
Two.......
England.... Autumn 1954.
Jacob Morely sat on his elderly Massey Harris and ploughed the lower field, hoping that the tractor would last the job, but fearing he'd have to stop several times to coax the old beast into life again. He'd love a new tractor, but until business got better, he'd have to make do.
It was only nine years since the end of hostilities, but he still carried the stigma of never having gone off to fight. People were funny. They wanted meat and potatoes, so he'd been classed as especially useful so as to stay and keep the farm going. But now it was all over, even the children in the village called him Old Custard or Yellow Jake.
He was over sixty-five now, so what he really wanted was to sell up and bugger off to somewhere that no one knew him. However, Oxfordshire was in his blood, so he knew that he would never leave. He did not believe that his wife Maggie would want to go as the kids were all settled up hereabouts.
The Thames Valley had been his home all his life, as it had been for his father and his father before him. The wide, flat plain of the river was particularly fertile, as it was often re-invigorated by the flooding river Thames, depositing the silt from further up-river each spring.
He sighed and concentrated on keeping the furrows straight.
As he watched he saw a brief gleam of something different. It made him smile when he read about people finding stuff in the ground, and they often said that it gleamed at them. Stuff that’s been buried for any length of time never gleamed; it was always covered in mud and so the only thing that caught the eye was the shape not being either earth or stone.
He’d dug up lots of stuff over the years, particularly since the war, with all the aircraft falling in pieces across the Home Counties during the Battle of Britain, not to mention the German mines and bombs. He’d dug up one bomb and had to wait for a day for the army to come and diffuse it. In the end, as it was in the field and not close to any buildings, they just blew it up. He was left with a bloody great hole in the middle of this self same field, and so now was forever unearthing pieces of shrapnel.
That’s what he thought it might be. If it was, there was always a chance that something metallic could harm the plough blades.
He stopped immediately and raised the plough. Just the other day there was something in the papers about a farmer turning over a golden Celtic torc worth many hundreds of thousands. The farmer didn't get it all, but he got enough to stop worrying about foot and mouth and potato blight.