Moon Flights

Gravesite Revisited

The old woman held out her hand. Carver froze, crouched over the grave, the reindeer pendant still swinging slightly on its chain of carved bone.

“You know you can’t put that in with her,” the old woman said.

Carver scowled. “She liked it. She should have it.”

“You can’t. It’s not permitted.” The old woman glanced back over her shoulder, and the old man, Longwalker, nodded, emphasizing his agreement.

Carver clenched his fist on the pendant and chain, furious. “I don’t understand. She wasn’t Wolf Clan…. How could it unbalance the world to carry her own clan sign along?”

“It’s nothing to do with the hunt’s balance,” the old woman said. She reached for Carver’s hand, and pried up his fingers, then prodded the pendant and chain. “It’s this—this chain. The latepeople will see this and think. We don’t want them to think.”

“The latepeople?” Carver had lived in Molder’s family for only four years; he knew there were many secrets they had yet to share with him. By her father’s clan, her seedclan, she was Reindeer, but her mother’s clan, her bloodclan, was Ash, godtalkers. And the old woman, whose name he had never heard, being an outsider and only Molder’s chosen childfather, she was Ash. She had foreseen Molder’s death in a fall, and had withheld warning, for she was Ash, and spoke warnings only at the gods’ will, though she saw (Molder had told him once) all things that would come until the end of the world.

“The latepeople, those who will come when the times change,” the old woman said. “The latepeople find our bones, and our graves—”

“They dig up graves?” Carver was shocked. Animals dug up graves, but only because they were the Elder People, and had rights humans did not share.

“Yes, indeed, they dig up graves. And when they find what they want in a grave, they travel backwards until it is new, and rob it.”

“Backwards? In time?”

“Yes. As I see forward, which is proper for an Ash, and a gift of the gods, they see backwards, and travel backwards, by witchcraft.”

Carver shuddered. The past was past; he had been taught that the past was unbreakable, the foundation of time. Mistakes could not be unmade, so all acts must be carefully considered, but anything done rightly was as safe from error as a mistake from correction. To travel backwards, to tamper with the past, was obscene. The old woman nodded at his expression.

“They are witches,” she said. “Empty hearts, fearing their future, looking for treasures to rob in the past.” She smiled without humor. “We give them nothing to think about, nothing to rob.”

“But her spirit—” Carver’s people made better graves, he thought. Had thought before, and had not said, being a stranger among Molder’s people. It was discourteous to criticize the wife’s family. But his people laid food and tools with the dead, on a nest of flowers (in spring and summer) or fur (in winter), and a gift from each person close in relation or in feeling. He had grown up knowing that the dead lived in the shadowed lands, yet hungered for mortal food and the love of mortals. If not fed or gifted, they might come back as haunts, angry spirits who stole away children or even sprinkled death pollen over a whole encampment, so that sickness bloomed in terrible shades of red and white.

The old woman grimaced, and gestured him away from the grave, the sad little hole where Molder lay curled on her side, nested on nothing but the old piece of hide she had liked to sit on while she worked, the wound in her head against the damp soil. Carver moved stiffly, still angry and worried. Finally the old woman stopped, crouching under a bush, and gestured for him to sit down. He lowered himself slowly to the ground.

“I am an Ash,” the old woman began. Carver shivered; her voice had the tone and cadence of the nightfire chants. “Ash are the godtalkers, and the gods gift Ash with vision of times to come. Days and days, and seasons of days, winters and springs more than anyone’s life, and the latepeople, the witches, will be born.”

“There are witches now,” said Carver, very politely. “Are the latepeople born to the witch clans?”

“We have no witches now!” the old woman said angrily. “No witches!” Carver sat stunned. All his life he had heard of witches. His father’s older brother had been killed by a witch, tranced into sleep in a storm, and frozen: that was true. His father had demanded a callsong, and a visitor from another camp had come, answering that call, and been speared by all the men, and hung from a tree. A witch, his father had told him, and yanked him back from touching any of that dangerous blood. The other tribe had never complained, which meant they had known they harbored a witch—but killing a witch in the tribe was harder than letting another do it.

“My father’s brother—” he began, but the old woman stabbed a finger at him, and he clamped his mouth shut.

“No witches like the latepeople will be,” she said. “Now we have one or another who makes a bargain with the wrong gods. One person may be killed, perhaps two or three. But it is all water running downhill, as water should do. Your father’s brother—I know about that. He boasted to that witch about his skill in foreseeing storms, and more shame to him that was no Ash, but a Mink. What does a Mink know about storms? So that one gave him drink sweetened with wild honey, and he drank more than he should; and slept on a night when the moon was ringed by cloud, and snow came. Is that witchery? No, you could do that, if you wished.”

Carver could not imagine it, giving death in the drink of welcome.

“He didn’t mean to kill your father’s brother. He thought to have him boast more, and then waken to snow in the camp, safe but shamed. But your father’s brother quarreled with another, and walked out into the darkness, and no one would follow. There he died, when the snow came. The witch came to your father’s callsong, yes, but he already knew he must die.”

“But he was a witch—”

“No. Not like the latepeople. Listen, Carver, and I will tell you. But this is a secret, and you must not tell others.” He touched his hand to his own clan emblem, and she went on.

“It was in my mother’s day that we first noticed it. Like your people, we made comfortable graves for our dead then: nests of soft grass or fur, and grave-gifts to comfort them in the shadow lands. Even the winter graves had flowers, for we dried the yellow lilies of the swamps, and saved them, so that all the dead would have color and light in the darkness. And we did something else, which no other people I know of tried to do. When we could, we buried our dead with their kin: bloodclan with bloodclan, in joined graves, then linked head to foot, so that the Eldest could be honored by their descendants.

“My mother told me that she was just swelling with her first child when the people returned to their summerlands one year and found all the graves open. Freshly open.”

Carver stiffened, and the old woman nodded.

“Yes, it was shocking. At first they thought a plague of bears or wolves had torn the graves open, or the earth itself had split, but the best hunters looked carefully and said no. There were prints enough in the ground: some of people with strange clothing on their feet, some of animals with no feet at all, a pattern like this—” And the old woman scooped the reindeer pendant from Carver’s hand, and pressed the chain into the ground, then again beside the first print, leaving an odd pattern that looked like nothing he had seen.

“People had robbed the graves,” the old woman went on. “They had taken the bones of the dead, and all the grave-gifts in the most recent graves, those of the year before.” She paused a long time. Carver sat thinking about it, what they must have thought, coming on those graves all open to the sky, as Molder’s was now. He would have been terrified of the spirits, sure that the air was full of death pollen. But these people had the Ash Clan with them, the godtalkers, so they may have felt less fear.

“My mother told me that everyone went a day’s journey away to camp, walking all night. They were frightened of the dead, and of the people who had taken them. But a man of Ash, and three hunters, went back very early the next day. And what do you think they found?”

“The latepeople?”

“No. Worse. The next day, they found the graves still open, but open for a long time. Deserted, empty, weathered: the hollows nearly filled in the older graves, grass and moss growing all over.” She peered at Carver’s face, intent on something he could not imagine. “You don’t understand?”

“No.” Open graves weathering overnight? It had to be witchcraft, but nothing he had ever imagined. Why would a witch do that?

“It had been years—years since the graves opened. Years in a night. The man of Ash then burned sweet woods, and spoke in a way we know of, we of Ash, and the gods answered. By their wisdom, he could see that it was the latepeople. Far in the future, in their own time, they found one grave. In it was that which made them search for another. And by witchcraft then they walked back in time, just as a man might walk upstream to find the place where berries grow, if he sees one float by in the water. And they found our gravesite, and robbed it, and then came back earlier, and robbed it again, in what was to our people a day and a night, at most.”

“Did anyone ever see them?”

The old woman looked away. “Some have said so. Some say they take the children who disappear—that it is not our witches, but those latepeople witches. I have not seen them myself. But I know what they look for, and where. If our dead are to have any comfort, and be safely housed until the gods turn the world over, we must leave them nothing to interest the latepeople. I have seen graves opened, and left alone, when no treasure was in them. Now. Give me that pendant.”

So compelling was her voice that Carver had opened his hand again before he thought. The old woman took the pendant and chain, and led him to a small tree growing nearby.

“The young trees are best, Carver. Old trees may die, or blow down. Choose always one too large for the reindeer or other horned ones to break when they clean their antlers, but one small enough to live long.” With her best blade, the old woman slit the bark, lifted a section, slipping the blade underneath as a skilled hunter skinned game, and pressed the pendant and chain under it. “We never place more than one gift in a tree. Some things can be buried under a live root, where the root will grow over it. The dead are not like us; they can reach their gifts even through the wood of trees, or the roots. As long as we give them clues.” Now she twisted off a twig of that tree, and took it to the grave, where she dropped it carelessly onto Molder’s folded body. Carelessly? Carver looked up as another twig fell along Molder’s cheek, and saw the old woman nod toward another tree. One by one the family came, each dropping a twig—in one case a pebble—beside the dead woman. And then they closed the grave, piling stones more carelessly than Carver’s people—or more carefully, he finally thought, watching the caution with which they chose stones and placed them.

“She will sleep long, and waken without pain,” said the old woman. “When the gods turn the world over, she will have her other children.”

“It’s got to be climate.” Ann leaned on the counter and squinted at the computer screen. Her new glasses were driving her nuts; bifocals were not the answer. She wanted the new surgery. Maybe next year, if the bigger grant came through.

“Invasion,” said Chris. He was being difficult, as usual.

“Climate. It matches with the onset of the interglacial—”

“You think you take four lousy trips backtime, and you know everything.”

“I know four trips more than you do.” She knew he thought she was being bitchy, but she did have four trips back to Stone Age Europe, and he had yet to be cleared for one.

“You never even saw them. You just robbed graves. You can’t be sure of anything just from the graves—”

“Chris, you’re never going to get clearance for backtime research if you stay an interventionist. No one is about to let any of us make actual contact with the primitives.” Ann punched up the climate data again. The match wasn’t exact, but then the climate data were approximations from pollen analysis—old dates, not direct measurement. They couldn’t leave a team onsite in the past long enough to do climate studies, much as she’d have loved it. The match was close enough. Warming climate had sent the prim’s main prey north, had changed their society, and that must be why their grave customs changed, from the lavishly decorated and prepared graves of the previous centuries to the plain, stark burials she’d found recently.

Chris leaned over her shoulder, peering at the screen. “That stuff’s outdated. Pollen analysis! If you’d put a team down for even one week, real time, in decent weather, and let them do an astronomical scan—”

“Interference.”

“Who cares? Those old stone-carvers? Ann, what if they do see a team? They won’t know what it is. They’re savages, primitive, superstitious—they’ll just call ’em gods and run away. Didn’t you say you’d found contemporary tracks at Site 402?”

Ann pushed her chair back slightly and bumped into his knees. Site 402 still scared the hell out of her. They’d gone in, found a couple of six-month-old graves, still untouched, and some other obvious graves nearby. They’d done a bounce-scan and decided to drop back fifty years, then another fifty: a fast in-and-out each time, plucking the graves clean. Then a final stop at the first time, maybe a day later real-time, and they’d seen tracks. Human tracks, recent, clear evidence that some of the primitives had arrived just after the first sampling. How long after? Ann still wondered if they’d come before, or after, the older graves changed. And had the graves changed then, at the theoretical fork in time, or along the main line back when they’d been opened?

She mentioned that chilling possibility. Chris shook his head.

“Ann, they can’t think—not like we can. They won’t be able to reason anything out. And if they did figure it was people from the future, what could they do?”

“I don’t know.” It was the not knowing that was worst. Would they fumble around for a new set of words to express that concept? Would they migrate away from the place where their graves had been robbed? What could they do, primitive hunters that they were? They couldn’t change history, surely. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said, pushing all that aside. “What matters is this paper for the meeting, and that means coming up with a reasonable explanation for the change in burial practices. Climate fits well enough. If you have to hunt different animals in the same place, or follow familiar animals to new places, you won’t have time to accumulate the same quantity of grave goods, or build elaborate graves—”

“Behavior is conservative. I still think it’s invasion—different people, with different customs. Look what you found this last time: twigs and pebbles in the graves, with nothing but a scrap of skin under the bodies. Stones carelessly tossed on top. If you’d brought back even one whole gravesite, we could have found evidence of a new culture—”

“It wasn’t worth it. Chris, the body type’s the same. Biochem sampling on the one indicates it’s the same genetic type, same everything… they just aren’t putting any cultural goods in the graves, and it has to be because they can’t afford to, they don’t have enough. An impoverished culture, struggling to maintain its way of life—”

“Twigs! Dammit, that’s a different religion.” She was fascinated that the change from carved bones to uncarved twigs could excite him on religion, but the possibility of a resurrection myth didn’t move him at all. “Ann, think about it. They used to bury their dead with carved bone and wood: animals, mostly. Bits of stone, yes, but carved or shaped into ornamental items. Carved bone buttons, awls, that amber whatsit from Site 327, fancy leather items. Animals, dammit. Not twigs, not plant life. Maybe it’s not an invasion, but something’s made them start worshipping trees instead of reindeer and wolves.”

“A climate change could do that. Forest expanding, with higher temperatures, or—”

Chris leaned against the wall, and she could tell he was thinking about it. She considered the possibility herself. A change in religion leading to tree worship? Certainly there was tree worship later in Europe, on the edge of historical time. Trees hung with offerings to forest deities, trees in sacred groves. But would people really change from worshipping animal totems to trees just because the forest was expanding? She tried to think herself back into a primitive mind…would they see it as trees chasing the animals away? It didn’t make sense, but then primitives didn’t have to make sense. They were primitive, nonrational, that was the whole point….

Two summers later, Carver saw that Molder’s grave had not been disturbed. The bulge of his gift was hardly noticeable now beneath the bark of its tree. He plucked a twig from it, and dropped it on the stones piled not-quite-carelessly atop Molder’s grave. They had had good luck, the past seasons, and he wished he could share more with her spirit. But the others agreed that their luck lay partly in the quiet rest of their dead… a rest that depended on fooling the witches of the future. He still found it hard to think about, the way they could walk backwards through time and change the past. Why would they rob graves, when they could gain more power by undoing their own mistakes? He thought what he could do with such ability—prevent Molder’s fall, find where the herds had gone when they didn’t appear in the usual ranges, know which trail he should have taken, and what had happened to those who disappeared. He would not bother to find old graves and rob them. Unless the dead had more power than anyone had believed until now, more power even than the spread of death pollen.

But they had fooled the latecomer witches. This tribe, at least, was safe from them, its dead resting peacefully and properly gifted throughout time. Once he believed, he’d wanted to tell the others, at the trading sites and hunting conclaves, but the old woman of Ash had forestalled him.

“We must first protect ourselves,” she had said. “If the witches find no graves’ goods to rob, they may rob bare bones or search the trees for gifts, and leave us to the wrath of our dead. Other tribes have godtalkers of their own—if they listen truly, they can learn for themselves.” And she had bound him with terrible oaths, so that he could not tell even his mother’s brother, when they met at the rapids of the river where the fish leaped into their basket, answering their need.

“Climate,” Chris finally agreed. “It’s spread through the whole region, and no invaders could move that fast. There wouldn’t be that many of them, anyway. But I still think it was a change in religion, not just cultural impoverishment from the climatic change. Some weird superstition, maybe like the Ghost Dancing thing in the American Indians.”

“Wish I knew how it started,” said Ann. Now that he agreed it was climate, she found herself looking for something else. “A big storm, or bad year, or what?”

“A god came out of the sky and told them to put twigs in the graves instead of tools,” said Chris sarcastically. “It could have been anything. Primitives don’t think—they just react.”

“Whatever. We might as well cancel the rest of the series. It’s not worth it, spending all that money to find scraps of deerskin and twigs. We already have enough botanical samples; we need more artifacts. And since they’ve quit putting the graves in clusters, it’s getting damned hard to find one at all. We can come all the way up to Neolithic, and get a lot more for our money.”

Carver sat nearest the fire, an honor due his age and position in the tribe. He sang the Year Dance, and it was to him that the godtalker spoke of plans and seasons. His sons and daughters carried his seedclan here and there across the hunting grounds. And this night he had proclaimed the good news: the Ash Clan reported from all the campfires that the latecomer witches had departed from their graverobbing. In less than three lifetimes of men, they had come, and robbed, and departed, fooled by the wisdom of the godtalkers and those who loved their dead enough to send them bare into the afterworld. For three more lifetimes, the Ash decreed, they must leave grave gifts only in secret, outside the graves, but after that it would be safe to restore honor as it had always been. He thought, himself, that this was needless: if the dead were happy enough with their grave gifts in trees and roots and hollow stone, why not continue that way? It hadn’t hurt the trees any.

He wondered, in the sleepiness that often overtook him now in the long firelit evenings, what the latecomer witches had thought when their luck ran out and the graves held no treasure. Had they returned to making their own tools and tokens? Had they spent the gift of time-walking on better things? Had they finally learned that walking backwards was wrong, that the power of the dead could not be used well by the living? The Ash would not say, for the gods had not commanded that song.