we skulked through the shadows to the windbreak shelter that the woman had shared with my latest victim. Here we lay down side by side, nuzzling each other like rootling cubs. Then we fed our passions beyond the limits of her former lover’s appetite. Thus did we cuckold the dead. Afterward we curled together into a ball and jointly dreamed this dream.
Eventually Helen awakened me. Upright among my fellow habilines, I lifted my voice in the fearsome tabernacle of the dawn.
* * *
Our numbers were diminishing. The deaths of Genly and Jomo had left only six adult males, myself included, among the Minids. Mister Pibb, the sole adolescent male in our band, had recently taken up with a sweet young thing of the Hunnish persuasion, and we could no longer expect to compensate for our losses from within our own ranks. Ham was visibly aging, growing increasingly more decrepit as the days passed, and I felt sure that one day soon he would emulate Jomo’s voluntary walk to oblivion.
The Minids, of course, were in no danger of either disbanding or dying out. Our population was twenty-one, down only three since my arrival, and of the eight remaining children, three were girls, two of whom would soon be passing through the fires of adolescence. They were the salvation of the Minids, for when they began to attract suitors, our band would open its constricted throat and swallow these young males like fingerlings. The franchise would not fold. It would begin a rebuilding program with its nubile females’ first-round draft choices. Indeed, I was one of these choices.
A brief digression:
Never during my sojourn with the Minids, in this region a few hundred miles north of the equator, did I have a clear sense of seasonality. I had dropped into the Pleistocene during a drought-stricken July in 1987, but since my arrival I had been unable to distinguish any significant gradations between hot and not quite so hot. Often, owing to the elevation of the areas around Mount Tharaka and even Lake Kiboko, the nights were cool—but the relative coolness of the nights did not translate into any significant variation in the daytime temperatures of the savannah. I could not have said that this hot day occurred in August, this one in September, and this other in April. Months had no meaning.
Of course, the true measure of seasonality in equatorial regions is not temperature but rainfall. The Somalis call the rainy period from March through May gu, and that from September to late November dayr, but if you believe that the precipitation during these periods never slackens, your brain has absorbed a crucial portion of the rainfall intended for the Somalis. Drought traditionally parches the area, even in the “rainy” seasons. Although Blair had assured me that the Lower Pleistocene was a wetter period than our own, and the vegetation accordingly more lush, I must have stepped into an unusually protracted dry spell. Lake Kiboko, just as Blair had predicted, rode higher then, but to obtain relief from the anomalous drought afflicting the grasslands, the Minids had left their traditional territory for a highland haven on the skirts of Mount Tharaka. There we had finally seen rain.
And rain brings me back to Helen’s pregnancy.
In the aftermath of a rainfall, I had discovered that Helen was carrying our child.
Well, some considerable while after Jomo’s funeral, rain seemed to be in the air again. The wind blew in warm gusts from the east, screaming over the countryside from the Indian Ocean, then whispering away into muggy, nerve-racking stillnesses. At night we could hear the sepulchral grumbling of thunder, and sheet lightning lit up the horizons. Spooked by the weirdness of the sky, the herds on the grasslands ricocheted from place to place. Sometimes lions roared rebuttals at the thunder, and sometimes the gazelles and wildebeest settled down to watch the horizon-wide lightshows. Up on Mount Tharaka where the lightning flashed its bridgework, we were apprehensive, too.
This kind of weather—maybe you could call it a season—lasted for several days. Every evening was a siege. I saw theater scrims of rain over Lake Kiboko, but in our balcony seats in Shangri-la these storms never touched us.
Helen’s time came upon her suddenly, on a night of cannonading thunderheads. In spite of the noise I had been sleeping—until Helen rose from our pallet of grasses and, one hand in the small of her back, ducked outside into the artillery din of the storm. I waited for her to return.