THE STANDING CAVE - JD BAKER
The wind was a keening howl. Angry. Hungry. It swept through the narrow stream bed, chasing a few dusty leaves and scouring a thin layer of powdered snow from the frozen surface. Mrukk watched the snow rise and dance with the leaves, turning his back into the wind and pulling his furs more tightly around his face. It stopped as suddenly as it began. The leaves and scrim of snow fell to the ice, lifeless. Mrukk turned his eyes to the leaden sky. Dusk was only a few hours away, and with the night came the true cold. The chill too deep to survive. Hunger tightened his guts, nearly doubling him over. He set off again, up the thin wash toward the source of the frozen stream.
As the gully opened up into the forest proper he knelt for a moment on the ice, studying a fast-freezing splash of crimson. The wounded deer was fading fast and he was getting close. But he was also running out of time. His people were counting on him to bring food back to the caves before the true cold fell. He was miles away. He needed to find and finish the animal soon if he was to stand a chance of getting back alive. And if he didn’t get back alive, the remaining Democsee would die.
Mrukk stood, his knees popping like ice thawing over a fire. He pulled a fresh stonewood spear from the quiver on his back and scented the air. It clung to his nostrils and the back of his throat, making him cough. He smelled wet fur and desperate copper.
Moving away from the stream, he was thankful the bleeding deer had made for the woods. At least he would be out of the wind. It sapped his strength, made the cold worse. Got him sleepy. He stamped his feet as he approached the shelter of the trees, trying to bring more feeling into his numb toes. He grumbled a quiet curse as one last gust of wind assailed him, pushing him a few steps off course.
This winter had been the worst in the memory of the tribe. One by one, the Democsee elders had succumbed to the coughing death until only he remained. The youngest of the elders, responsible now for the remainder of the people. And what a small number was left to depend on him! A handful of young mothers and half a dozen children were all that remained of a tribe that, in Mrukk’s childhood, numbered in the hundreds. Disease and accident took some. Cold took the rest. When the cold came, game became scarce. The dwindling tribe moved south, south, always south. But they found no warmer land.
He brushed aside a pine bough and entered the wood. At his feet, another spray of blood. He had to be close. There wouldn’t be much blood left in the creature. He followed the reddened tracks deeper, and the forest closed and darkened around him. It quieted as the wind gave way to the trees. He could only hear his ragged breath, the pounding of his pulse, the groaning of his belly. His breath clouded around his face, and icicles clung to his brows and eyelashes. He blinked them away and they scattered fading light as they fell.
As he crested a small rise, Mrukk came to the edge of clearing. There was a hill in the center. It was crusted with brown-gray lichen and moss, and was as tall as three people. The wounded deer stood in front of the hill, its legs shaking.
Mrukk hadn’t gotten a good look at it when he made his first throw, the one that had wounded the animal. It was bigger than he’d hoped. It was a female, and the broken shaft of his spear protruded from her shoulder. She was breathing hard, bloody foam spraying from her open mouth.
Mrukk took two creeping steps forward as she regarded him with deep, unreadable eyes. He raised his spear to end her pain. As he released, she bolted again and the spear sailed into a small thicket growing at the base of the hill. It struck the mossy side of the hill with the brittle sound of breaking ice, and disappeared completely.
He barely registered this because he was running down into the clearing, trying to reach the deer before she made it back into the woods. He caught her at the clearing’s edge, leaping to wrap his arms around her neck. His weight brought her down, and she thrashed against him. Mrukk felt a stab of sorrow for the creature. She had suffered much and fought bravely, but the survival of the Democsee was paramount.
He managed set his grip and twisted her head sharply, hearing the distinctive grinding crack of snapping neck bones. She shuddered and spasmed for a moment, then went still.
Mrukk sighed. His arms were shaking. The deer’s blood was warm on his neck. He seized the legs and hoisted her over his shoulders, pleased with the way her weight settled on him. She would feed them for a week, and they could save some for salting. To prepare for the deeper winter. The real snows would be coming soon.
He carried her back to the mossy hill to retrieve his miscast spear. What he found was a hole the size of his fist in the rounded side of the mound. He set the deer at the base of the hill and pulled the hanging moss away from the hole and stared in wonder. The gap created by his spear was framed in a jagged spray of colored ice. Some of it was the color of the moss that framed the hole, and some was like Jilca’s eyes. One fragment was the color of a clear day’s sunset. Another was a color he had seen only once, in a barely-remembered childhood. Summer thickets of wild berries. He stretched out a finger to touch the ice, then pulled it back with a sharp hiss.
The tip of his finger was bleeding from a neat slice in the pad. He stuck it in his mouth and leaned closer, trying to see inside the hole. The fading light didn’t reveal much, but as he stared into it, one thing became clear. The hill was hollow.
He shot a look into the sky above the clearing and decided he had a little time to examine the strange hill further. He began clearing moss away from the hole that was holding the pattern of ice-but-not-ice. Soon he had cleared a patch nearly as tall as himself. He stood back and stared. The brightly colored not-ice shaped a pattern half as tall as he was, and around that hole, the mound itself seemed to be made of evenly shaped blocks of stone. He approached the hole again, this time wrapping a slip of hide around his hand. He broke a piece of the colored not-ice away from the jagged edge made by his thrown spear. It was green, deep and clear like water. He lay it in the palm of his hand, where it glinted even in the dimness. He touched its flat surface with his fingertip, avoiding the sharp edges. It was cold, because everything was cold. But it wasn’t cold like ice.
He drew his last remaining spear and walked a slow circle around the mound. Every few paces, he thrust the blunt end of the spear through the overgrowth. Probing. Each time, the spear made the the thick, hard tapping of wood on rock. That is, until he’d reached the near-opposite side of the hill. Then, the spear struck the hill with the hollow thwock of wood on wood. He began clearing the moss again, more frantically than before. He felt every cut of colder air, every whisker of new shadow, every sliver of sinking sun.
Doggedly, he tore at the moss and lichen. It flaked away in dusty chunks, making him cough. He wanted to understand this hill. It contained a cave, standing alone. But it was not a cave. The shapes of the stone, the colored not-ice--these were things he had never seen. It was, he thought, the kind of thing he might have built for his people, if he’d had the time and the way of shaping stone and wood and ice-but-not-ice.
His efforts revealed a slab of wood, slightly taller and broader than himself. He struck it again, this time with the fire-sharpened point of the spear, and the tip sank into the dry, brittle wood. A crack appeared. He laid his ear against it, next to the crack. As if he was tracking a deer by listening for its steps on the hard earth. Keeping his head against the wood, he pounded his fist against it. There was a small echo. He leaned his shoulder into the surface, pressing. The slab gave a little. He pushed harder, driving his legs, and the wood gave way beneath him, opening with a creaking groan. He stumbled forward into the cave. The weak gray rays of the setting sun shone in over his shoulder.
The floor of the cave was made of stone. It was also evenly shaped and laid carefully. It was smoother, and darker, than the sides. Mrukk stepped carefully forward, his spear ready. Dust rose under his feet and a dry stone smell rose around him. There was something else too. A hint of leather, perhaps. Something that had once been animal, but was long decayed to dust. His eyes adjusted at last, and he half-turned, almost ran like a rabbit. The thought of his people, of shelter, of usefulness, stayed him. He forced himself to walk forward on trembling legs. Deeper.
The dead sat in rows on ornately carved wooden benches. There were more of them packed into this cave than any group of living people he’d ever seen in one place. More than twenty. Their furs weren’t furs at all. Here and there he spied pieces of leather, but the majority of the bodies were wearing something unknown to him. Different somethings, with hints of colors like the not-ice. The stuff moldered to dust under his hands. The skin had stretched and shrunk and dried down into the bones of their faces. The empty eyes of the skulls were pools of blackness that seemed to follow his every move. His breath froze, caught like a fish under ice, until he thought about the act of breathing and his lungs remembered to respond.
His eyes were drawn to the brightly colored hole of not-ice across from him. He stopped briefly as he came to the end of the rows of dead. Before him knelt a final corpse, facing the others. On the ground before the desiccated frame was an object the rough shape of his hand, partially encased in crumbling leather. A breeze from the cave's opening brushed across it and it fell apart, revealing thin, impossibly frail and whitened leaves that blew into scraps in the slight wind. The leaves were covered in small, dark lines of intricate design.
Mrukk raised his eyes to the colored hole and realized it was bigger even than what he’d seen from the outside. Dozens of pieces of the colored not-ice were set in a frame of some unrecognizable wood or stone or, by the way the faint light reflected from it, something else entirely. He realized that if he looked at the frame as a whole, instead of focusing on each piece of not-ice, an image revealed itself.
He recognized the shape of a man. The man was bearded with long hair, much like Mrukk himself. The man's arms were outstretched and his feet rested upon each other. His head was turned up, his gaze cast toward the ceiling of the cave, and he seemed to be resting on a pair of crossed pieces of wood. There was a hole in the man's side where Mrukk’s spear had crashed through from the outside. Dim light poured from the wound like watery gray blood.
A shiver danced up Mrukk’s spine like a creeping snow-fox. This image, this man made of brightly colored ice-that-was-not-ice that cut like the sharpest flint, disquieted him more than the bodies of this bizarre tribe, more than the very presence of this strange, standing cave. He wanted to turn, to walk away, but his feet were frozen to the stone beneath him. The face of the not-ice man was turned up, grimacing in pain. But the eyes were turned down, looking in. Looking at him. Calling.
Mrukk’s belly rumbled, threatening cramps. It was enough to thaw his legs.
He passed through the dead quickly, careful not to touch. He closed the wooden slab behind him. The deer lay where he’d left it. He hoisted her body over his shoulder and made for the frozen stream bed.
He pushed down the thoughts about the cave, the dead, and the man on the totems of crossed wood. That tribe was dead, and whoever they’d been was lost forever. His people, the last of the Democsee, would have warm and full bellies tonight. For now, that was enough.
JD BAKER
JD Baker is a former counterintelligence agent and combat veteran. An author of speculative fiction, he writes about the things that keep him up at night.
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