The Tenth Chamber

TWENTY-THREE

Ruac Cave, 30,000 BP

Tal had begun calling the red liquid Soaring Water.

No one could say a man was meant to fly. But after drinking Soaring Water, no one could say where a man ended and a bird began.

How often had he looked up at birds on the wing and wondered what they could see and how they felt?

Now he knew.

Fear quickly gave way to exhilaration and a sensation of overwhelming power.

The power to soar on the wind, to see great distances, to feel more deeply, the power to understand.

He would always return from his journeys where they had begun – by the fire. He was sure he had been on remarkable adventures, spanning time and great distances but his people insisted his body had been rooted, restless, to be sure, thrashing, spouting strange utterances, but very much rooted to one spot. And everyone learned how to deal with the aftermath, a turbulent period they called, Tal’s Anger.

Throughout the clan, there had been anxiety and worry during his first soaring journey. Tal’s fate was fixed by his brother’s death. His father was growing weaker by the day and the very existence of the Bison Clan was dependent on his ability to rise to his position and lead them into the future.

His insistence on trying the red liquid was a matter of furious debate. Tal had argued that the boy Gos had been made to drink the liquid by their ancestors to show the clan a new path forward. A grand plan was playing out in front of their eyes. First Tal’s father was sickened and weakened by his accident. Then Nago was killed by the sacred bison. Then Gos drank the powerful liquid Tal had prepared to heal Nago.

These were not unconnected events.

Tal argued he was meant to learn from the teachings of the Soaring Liquid. When his father passed, he was meant to be a bold new clan leader.

The Elders counselled otherwise. If Tal were lost, what would become of the clan? The risk was too great. The world was a dangerous place. The Shadow People were lurking in the woods.

In the end, Tal’s father made the decision, perhaps his last great one. He was weak in body but strong in mind.

Tal could embark on his quest.

The first time Tal swallowed Soaring Water, Uboas told him she would sit by his side and stay awake as long as it took for him to return. Deep into the night, she stroked his hair, tried to respond to his guttural sounds and touched his dry lips with her water-dipped fingers.

When he finally came back to her, in the bluish dawn, hers were the first human eyes he saw.

He reached out to touch her face and she asked him where he had been and what he had seen.

And this is what he told her.

He felt his body transform. First his hands turned into talons then his face elongated into a hard beak. With a few easy flaps of his arms he was airborne, making lazy passes over the fire, peering down on his own people, circling protectively, getting accustomed to tilting and turning. The whistling wind and the light, effortless travel exhilarated him and made his heart sing. Was he the first in his clan to experience such things, the first man?

In the distance he saw black horses grazing in the savannah and he flew towards them, attracted by their grace and power. He swooped over their broad rippling backs, making them gallop and sweat. He flew among them, eye-to-eye, matching their speed. Of course he had seen horses before. He had crept up to them and pierced them in the flank, spilling their blood. He had eaten their flesh, worn their hides. But he had never seen them before. Not like this.

Their huge brown eyes were clear like puddles on dark stones after a rain storm. There was no fear in those eyes, just a life force as strong as he had ever experienced. He saw his own reflection in those brown globes, the shoulders and arms of a man, the head of a hawk. And then he saw beyond his reflection into the heart of the beast. He felt its freedom and wild abandon. He felt its life force, its determination to survive.

He felt a stirring in his loins and looked down. He was large and erect, prepared for mating. He felt more alive than ever before.

He arched his neck and soared higher, leaving the horses behind. Something caught his keen hawk’s eyes. On the horizon. A dark mass. Moving.

He tilted and rode the wind across the flowing river, towards the vast plain.

Bison.

A huge herd, the largest he could remember, moving as one, thundering the earth with the power of their stampede. Would they let him into their midst?

He lowered his head and dove until he was skimming the ground, following behind, catching up. Haunches and tails, as far as the eye could see. His ears filled up with the sound of churning hooves.

Then they parted.

They were letting him inside.

Bison to the right, bison to the left, he flapped his arms and matched their speed until he was level with the lead beasts, two huge males with heads the size of boulders and horns as long as a man’s forearms.

While the horse eyes were full of freedom and spirit, the black bison eyes were brimming with wisdom. He was talking to them, not with words, but with a language more powerful. He was them, they were him. They spoke to him of his ancestors and their ancient ways. He spoke to them of his love and reverence. He told them he was Tal, of the Bison Clan.

They honoured him by letting him run with them. In turn, they demanded he honour them.

And after Tal told her everything, he drifted off to sleep, but when he awoke a short time later, his mood was as dark as the night. He yelled at her to withdraw. He threw off his skins. He was shouting, in blind anger, cursing the night, demanding the sun to rise. When the clan was awakened by his shouts and one of his cousins approached to calm him, he attacked the young man and tried to throttle him before other men pulled him off and held him down.

Uboas was frightened by his wild eyes but she came back to his side and rubbed his shoulders even as he strained against the hands and knees of the men who were restraining him with all their might.

And when his anger finally passed and he returned to his normal self, the men cautiously released him. Talking among themselves they drifted back to their skins. Uboas stayed with him, pressing herself against his now-calm body until the morning.

Following his first Soaring, Tal’s mind was never more active. He approached his commitment to the Bison Clan with a fury of purposeful activity. His determination was a source of awe and inspiration. It was almost as if he were growing into the role of head man before the clan’s eyes. His post-soaring rage scared them, but they also knew that a head man had to be fierce. The world was hazardous and they needed a warrior.

Tal became a font of activity, even more than usual. On one day he was leading a hunt, landing a good reindeer buck with one thrust of his spear. On the next day he was off on his own, collecting plants. Then he was knapping fresh sharp cutting blades and teaching Uboas how to chop the vegetation, crush the berries and place his mother’s stone bowl into the embers of the fire until the red liquid bubbled into Soaring Water.

He felt a tug towards the magical place he had found the time he had climbed the cliffs to commune with his ancestors – Tal’s cave. Uboas went with him, to watch over him and keep him safe. At the mouth of the cave, he lit a fire and the two of them sat in silence as night came to the valley. He warned her to leave him when the anger started.

Then he soared.

And she watched over him and trembled later in the night when he flew into a rage and charged deep into the black cave, shouting for his ancestors to reveal themselves.

The next morning she fed him chunks of reindeer stomach, roasted over the fire, its contents full of the mashed grasses that had been the animal’s last meal. He told her about the soaring and the creatures he had visited as half man, half bird. When he had eaten his fill he rose and paced the mouth of the cave until his legs became strong and sturdy once again.

The pale stone walls of the cave, that outermost zone that caught the morning sun dazzled his eyes. A few steps deeper and all was dark. He thought about his journey. He had been with the bison again. And the horses. And the deer. And the bears. Before his eyes, on the cave walls, he saw the images his hawk eyes had seen, these animals in all their glory and power. They demanded respect. The bison demanded his honour.

He rushed to the fire and grabbed a kindling stick, its end charred black. As Uboas watched, he strode back to the sunny wall and began to draw a long curving line, at eye level, parallel to the ground. The charcoal line was thin and poorly adhesive and the result was not pleasing to his eye, no better than the outlines he had drawn at his mother’s knee. He complained out loud. In a flash of inspiration, he poured out the remnants of the Soaring Water from his stone bowl and pressed a hunk of reindeer fat into the concavity. He took another kindling stick with a heavily burned end and twirled it into the fat until it was black and greasy. Then he retraced the curving line and this time it was thick and black and stuck smoothly to the rock surface.

He quietly worked into the morning, dipping fatted kindling sticks and painting in equal measures with his hand and his heart. When he was done he grunted and summoned Uboas to stand beside him.

She gasped at what she saw. A perfect horse, as real and beautiful as any living creature. It was running, its hooves in full gallop, its mouth open, sucking air, its ears pointing forwards. Tal had given it a thick mane that looked so real she was tempted to stroke it to feel its silkiness. It had a captivating oval-shaped eye with a black disc in the centre, a piercing, all-knowing eye. It was the most beautiful inanimate form she had ever seen.

She began to sob.

Tal wanted to know what was wrong and she told him. She was moved by its magnificence but she was also scared.

Of what?

Of this new power that Tal possessed. He was a different man than the one she knew. The Soaring Water had transformed him into a mingler with the world of spirits and ancestors, a shaman. The old Tal was gone, perhaps for ever. She feared him now. Then her real concern erupted in a geyser of tears. Would he still want her as his mate? Would he still love her?

He gave her his answer. Yes.

When Tal’s father finally died he had become an emaciated bag of bones. He was carried to a hallowed spot, a stretch of the river where the tall grasses and reeds gently sloped to the water, a spot he had come to throughout his life to listen to the voice of the flowing water. His body was quietly left on the slope. From a distance, Tal looked back one last time. It appeared as if the old man was resting. If he were to come back in a day there would only be bones. In three days, nothing.

Tal’s elevation to head man simply happened. There was no ceremony and no words said. It was not their custom. If the clan people had any doubts about Tal’s ability to lead them, perhaps there would have been whispers, but the elders who remembered Tal’s grandfather, and the one wizened old soul who remembered his great-grandfather, agreed that Tal would be a powerful head man. Yes, he was very young but he was a healer and a soarer who was able to commune with the natural world and the realm of the ancestors. And they very much feared Tal’s Anger, that time when he was unapproachable and violently malevolent. And there was furtive talk about a magical cave in the cliffs that no one but Tal and his new mate, Uboas, had ever seen.

One day, Tal announced that he would lead the clan up the cliffs to see for themselves what had been consuming him. Even though the weather was fine the trek was slow because the oldest people had to walk with sticks and Uboas was heavily laden with a child in her belly. They arrived with the sun at its highest, splashing the river with its rays. Tal made a fire on the ledge and lit a torch slathered in bear fat for a rich, slow burn.

He stepped inside the cave and the clan shuffled at his heels.

The light of the torch eased the transition from light to dark. In the hissing glow, his people were stunned. One young woman yelped in fear because she though she was going to be trampled by horses to her left and bison to her right. A small boy became giddy at the sight of a huge black bull floating overhead and he jumped up and down making sure his mother saw what he was seeing.

Tal had been working steadily, preparing this place. With his father’s blessing, he had taken Uboas as his mate and the two of them had fallen into a joyous rhythm. When he was not hunting or catching fish or resolving arguments among clan members, he would prepare a batch of Soaring Water and climb to the cave with her. He would drink the tart red liquid, spend the night lost in his dream world and when he came back to her, energised and virile, his loins aching, he would lie with his mate on his father’s bison hide laid on the cave floor and thrust his hips until they were both spent. After a sleep, he would rage for a time, like a wild animal until his body was limp and exhausted from demon exertions.

And then he would come back to himself, cleansed, and he would paint.

Drawing upon his childhood pastime of mixing pigments from crushed coloured rocks and clays, he had prepared wonderfully rich paints which, through trial and error, he adapted to adhere to the cool, moist walls.

It was not enough to draw the outlines of the animals as people had done in the past. He saw them in vivid colours and that was the way he wanted to capture them. He chose his spots by the light of his lamps, which in and of themselves were an invention that sprang from his mind. He used his skills as a stone-shaper to fashion a shallow, ladle-shaped lamp from limestone, and in the bowl, he placed lumps of bear fat mixed with juniper twigs, which when lit, gave a yellow, slow-burning flame that Uboas held for him while he worked.

He also considered the topography of the wall. If a bump suggested a horse’s rump, then there he drew the rump. If a depression suggested a creature’s eye, that is where he placed the eye. And he was always keen to see how the lamp light played against the rock surface. He loved the sense of motion he could achieve with light and shadows.

He would draw the outlines of the animals with fat and charcoal or a lump of manganese but his desire to capture the true colours of the beasts led him to devise ways to deliver ochres and clays to the walls in a way that would faithfully coat the surfaces. When smearing pigments with his hands failed to produce the effect he was seeking, he conceived a radical solution, based on his belief that through his visions, his mission was to breathe life into these cave walls.

Breath.

Uboas tried to stop him the first time he tried the manoeuvre, thinking him mad. In a stone bowl he mixed ochres and clay and added water and spittle to make a slurry then scooped it into his mouth. He chewed at the slurry and sloshed it from cheek to cheek and when it felt the right consistency, he pursed his lips, stood a short distance from the wall and spat the colour out in a mist of fine droplets, using his hand like a stencil to shape the spray to the contour of his outlines. When he wanted to give the animal’s hide texture and body, he had the inspiration to blow his paint through a hole punched through leather to concentrate the spray into dots. It was slow, painstaking work, but he was happy, even when Uboas teased him on one day about his red tongue, on another day about his black lips.

The clan people whispered and murmured as Tal led them from painting to painting, from wall to wall. Tal’s animals had all the vitality and colour of the animals they knew so well. The horses were black and stippled, the bison, swathed in black, reds and browns, the giant bull, black as night.

He held the lamp in his left hand, touched his proud heart with his right and announced that this was only the beginning of a long journey for the Bison Clan. The cave was vast, too long for them to even imagine, darker and colder than any place in the world. He told them it was a gift from the ancestors and the spirit world to him, and as head man, it was his gift to them to make it their sacred place. He would continue to paint all the important animals for as long as he breathed. And he would teach the young men. From now on, their passage to manhood would take place in the cave. The boys would drink Soaring Water so they could learn to roam freely among the creatures of the land and learn from them. He would teach them how to paint what they saw. This would be the most sacred place in the world and it would belong only to the Bison Clan.

The elders nodded their approval and all the people agreed. Make no mistake, they had loved Tal’s father, but his son was a leader like no other in their long history as a clan.

Tal and Uboas were the last to leave. Just as he was about to douse the lamp with a handful of dirt, Uboas reached into the pouch hanging on her horse-hair belt and pulled something out with her fingers. She gave it to him. A small statue of a bison that she had carved from the ivory tusk of the bison that had killed his brother. He stood it in his hand and held the lamp close to inspect it. He placed his large hand on the top of her head and held it there tenderly until she laughed and told him the old people would fall off the ledge without their help.

The clan dispersed themselves on the ledge waiting for Tal to emerge. He blinked in the harsh sunlight and waited a moment to regain his sight. The boy, Gos, suddenly began pointing out towards the valley, well over the river. Tal’s eyes focused on the moving forms, small as ants, but unmistakably two-legged. A tribe was moving through the savannah, stalking a bunch of reindeer seemingly unaware of their presence.

The tiny figures in the distance must have seen something or sensed something because one of them began pointing his spear up at the cliffs. From what Tal could see, the entire tribe, a good ten of them, began pointing their spears and jumping like fleas. Though too far away to hear, they must have started shouting because the reindeer bolted, and they too ran off back towards the green forest.

One of the young men of the Bison Clan, a hot-headed hunter, second only to Tal in his spear-throwing ability, started calling for a war. The reindeer belonged to the clan. They needed to drive the intruders away, once and for all.

Tal nodded and told them they were too far away to take any action, but in his heart, he was content to ignore them. Today was a joyous day of spiritual commitment. There would be other days to worry about the Shadow People.

Many years passed.

Every day he was not hunting, healing or helping his clan, Tal was inside his cave, soaring and painting. And twice a year, before each bison hunt, he summoned the boys who had come of age. There, in the yellow glow of his juniper lamps, the clan would gather in the Chamber of the Bison Hunt, Tal’s mystical two-walled mural, where a half man, half bird, stood open-beaked, amongst a herd of charging bison and the chosen beast was felled by a spear, spilling its guts. The chosen boys would chant a prayer to the ancestors. They would call out their pleas in their high sweet voices, and the clan, taking the role of their ancestors, would respond in low, far-away voices.

Tal would then give the boys a long drink of Soaring Water and the clan would watch over them singing until they were able to stand and be led by Tal, trance-like, into the deeper reaches of the cave, past fantastic, brightly painted, lions, bears, red deer, and woolly mammoth. The boys would stare with amazed eyes and from the fire in their eyes, Tal knew they were soaring alongside the creatures, close enough to feel the heat of their bodies, to merge souls. The cave would disappear, the walls would disappear, the boys would pass through them like a man walking through a wall of water to a place on the other side of a waterfall. And later, when their visions turned to anger, the boys would howl at each other and fight for a time, but the Elders always kept them safe.

Uboas gave birth to only two children, both sons, then despite Tal’s desires to father a large brood, she became barren. No amount of exhortation to his ancestors would make her womb fertile. Yet, both his sons survived beyond infancy and grew healthy and strong. There were no prouder moments in Tal’s life than when he initiated his own sons into manhood and took them into the cave for the first time. His oldest son Mem, was, without doubt, his favourite, and he poured his teachings into the boy the way a woman lavished a newborn with her milk. The boy would be a shaman, the clan’s next head man.

Mem was quick to learn and proved to be as nearly as fine a painter as his father. They worked together side-by-side, spit-painting beautiful creatures. Day after day, month after month, father and son would build platforms of tree limbs and vines and stand upon them to reach the high walls and ceilings in chamber after chamber.

One day, early in his tutelage, the boy made a mistake. He was spitting a red ochre against his outstretched hand, using the angle between his thumb and wrist to make the gentle curve of a deer’s back leg. He was momentarily distracted by the unsteadiness and shifting of his wooden platform and instead of delivering the paint to the wall, most of it landed squarely on the back of his hand, coating it orange-red. When he took his hand away from the wall, there was a perfect stencil of his palm and parted fingers. The boy winced, waiting for the opprobrium of his father but instead, Tal was delighted. He thought the handprint was a wonderful thing and he promptly tried the technique himself.

One handprint became two and in time, the cave would be filled with them, joyful marks of humanity and a father’s pride in his son.

And many years later, after Tal had discovered the malachite crystals that he learned how to grind into green pigment, Mem and his other son joined their father in the last chamber. They crawled through a narrow natural tunnel, into the special part of the cave Tal had long reserved for his sanctuary, the most sacrosanct of places, where they would paint the images of the plants that let him soar and connect with the spirit world.

And among the plants, Tal himself painted the life-size bird man, his soaring spirit, his other self.