Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,89
he works, I don’t doubt that they’ll soon turn to him and ask him to lead them to you.”
“Son of a bitch. If you’ll pardon me for saying so.” Samuel leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes, feeling completely helpless and hopeless right now. “So how does going to my cabin make this any better for me? Or is it just so I can die in my own home instead of some stranger’s place?”
She squeezes his hand. “I never touched that frozen body, Samuel, but I’ll bet you that if I had I’d be the one being hunted right now instead of you. There’s one other piece of ancient magic that somehow came out of this, something that ties it all together. Can you think of what it might be?”
Samuel casts his mind back, looking through the memories of his current life and memories from his two experiences back in time, once as the baby mammoth, the other time as the shaman. And then he remembers the molar sitting on the shelf beside his wood stove in his cabin. The mammoth molar. “I’ll be damned,” he whispers. “That tooth. The shaman, he cast a final spell as he left after all the hunters died, something that was meant for the adult mammoth that killed them all. Do you suppose the tooth is from that very animal?”
“I think it’s likely. At least, as likely as any of this has been. That last spell he did must have tied everything together, and whatever is happening now it’s the remnants of that spell and of any others he cast playing themselves out, all these thousands of years later.”
Samuel starts to stand, then catches himself. “Wait,” he says. “What the hell do we do when we get the tooth? Do we just bash them over the head with it? Don’t know how many I could hit before they got a hold of me and I was skinned to feed the remainder of the tribe, of course.”
Fanny Alice stands and then takes Samuel’s hand and pulls him fully to his feet. “What’s on that spear point that Pete Marliss gave you?”
He strokes the edge gently with his thumb. “Blood,” he answers. “My blood, and the blood of the shaman . . .” At first he doesn’t know what the feeling is, having never sensed it before, but suddenly he knows how this could work, how everything over the eons connects to this one point of time and space. His voice quavers with wonder as he finishes his sentence, the pieces all slowly coming together: “And of the entire tribe.”
“And?”
“And . . .” He tightens his grip on the artifact. “Blood from the baby mammoth!” He leans forward and looks out the window, happily sees no sign of the cavemen. “So what do we do with the tooth when we get there?”
“I’m not really sure,” she answers. “All we can do is hope an idea reveals itself to us.”
Samuel shrugs and grunts.
One last check out the window, and then the door is open, and they are running.
The run to Samuel’s cabin is remarkable only in the fact that so much of it is rather unremarkable. Every noise and every shifting of shadow sends his heart jumping and his mind racing off into new and frightening territory, but for almost the whole distance there is no sign at all of his Paleolithic pursuers. He begins to think that this might be his lucky day, but then he notices that Fanny Alice, whose hand he is holding, is chanting something as she runs, and he realizes that she is using what magic she has, probably to keep them off his trail.
Then they round the final corner, and he can see his cabin down the street, but Fanny Alice slips on the ice. As she falls to the street, she loses her grip on him and stops her steady stream of incantations. Just like that, the protection or charm or whatever it is has been broken, and he hears the shouts and cries of the prehistoric hunting party as they suddenly appear behind him. Samuel reaches down and hauls Fanny Alice to her feet, and they are running again, luckily avoiding the oncoming spears—spears? where did they get spears?—that clatter to the road on either side of them. And then he is inside his cabin and reaching up onto the shelf to pull down the mammoth tooth.
Fanny Alice has for some unknown reason stayed outside,