they were not deer, though they loved the deer. Did they know the word ‘love’, or think it? I believe not.
They thought often and with increasing urgency and curiosity about the Clefts, who lived exactly as they had always done, and not so far away. What had been an impossible distance for small boys was now nothing much. For the Clefts the walk to the Eagles’ Hills was impossible because they had never thought of doing it. The idea of simply walking there, climbing, and seeing what was on the other side had never occurred to them. They did not know that on the other side of the mountain was the wonderful valley where the Monsters were living. It had never come into their heads to wonder. Out of sight, out of mind; and never has this been better exemplified.
Yet they were full of doubts now, and fearful. Their numbers were falling fast. They had never been very numerous, their instinctive inner regulator had seen to that. Some caves were half full, and then soon there were empty caves. Only half a dozen caves were occupied, and the old distinctions of Fish Catcher, Seaweed Gatherer and so on were blurring. The babies born Cleft were watched over, fretted over, were precious, while the Squirts were born to even stronger dislike, because it would have been better had they been born Clefts.
Two girls, young things, lying half in and half out of the waves on a favourite rock, watched as a certain sea creature inserted a tube into another of its kind, and emitted a cloud of milky eggs. They felt they had been granted a revelation – perhaps from the Great Fish himself – and they went to the Old Shes and told them what they had seen, and what they now thought likely to be the truth.
They were met by the slow tranquil gaze of eyes that had never been troubled by thought, even if they had learned anxiety, and no matter how these young Clefts persisted, saying that the Monsters might have a use, nothing would convince the old ones, if they had properly heard what was said.
Next time a Monster was born, these two snatched it away from the mother, and shielded it from the eagles, and examined the ugly thing that made it a Monster. They saw the tube was not unlike the one on the fish. Rubbed, it became stiff, but there was no emissions of cloudy eggs. The babe screamed, the eagle, waiting there behind a rock, rose up and broke its great wings into the girls’ faces, and with its claws gently snatched the babe and carried it off. But it left behind questions and doubts.
So the two communities were thinking about each other, though the Clefts did not even dream of walking past the Killing Rock, to the mountain and over it.
As for the young lads, who were ranging further every day over their part of the island, fear of the Clefts kept them well away from those rocks and caves they had escaped from. Some did go up to the mountain where the eagles were, and stare towards the shore where they could see a rash of little pale splodges on the dark rocks – the Clefts, as usual lying half in, half out of the waves. But the boys did not go down that side of the mountain, they were too afraid.
Some did run along the rocky hills behind the shore where, if they persisted, they would reach the Clefts, but they did not persist, but always stopped where they could hide themselves, close enough to see what the females were doing. But they did not do much, only lazed and yawned, and swam a little and shook their long hair out over their shoulders to dry, and then swam again.
long hair in obedience to some imperative they were hardly conscious of. Historian]
The Clefts spent all day, days, many days in this way of doing nothing – as the boys saw it. They got tired of watching, but sometimes did go back, irresistibly pulled, their hungers pulling them, and one day saw a young Cleft walking alone by the waves not far from them. She stopped, turned her back on the watchers, and leaned her head back into her hands and stared out across the waves. This description of the girl, alone – the Clefts did not like being alone – taking her time to dawdle along the beach, hints that she was already one of the new Clefts where some kind of developmental yeast was brewing.
There were four boys (or Squirts) that day, on the higher rocks. An impulse took them and they crept down behind her, quiet, not really knowing what they intended to do. Then her nearness, and their hungers, defeated their fear of her and they ran forward and in a moment had her arms down by her sides, and were running her back towards their home valley. She let out short angry cries, her voice constricted by terror. She was not in the habit of panic, of alarm, and probably had never ever screamed or yelled. She was shocked into compliance. Taller than they were, much larger, but she was not stronger than four tough, well-muscled boys. They kept her running, while they cried out in triumph, which was fear, too. This was a Cleft they had there – and they had most thoroughly been taught fear of them. It was a good run from the part of the beach where they had found her, along the shoreline, then over the rocky hills to where the great river ran, before it burst in foam into the seas. Up the edge of this river they went, always running. She had begun to scream, roughly, in her unused voice. They stuffed handfuls of seaweed into her mouth.
Now, exhausted with running, half stifled with the weed, she moaned and gasped and then at last they were in the valley where the males lived. They were on the wrong side of the river. They swam her across it at a place where the waves ran less fiercely: that was no hardship to a girl who had swum and played in water since she was born. Then she was standing in the middle of a large group of Monsters, whom she had seen as babes, mutilated, or in the few moments between birth and being snatched away by the eagles. They were of all sizes, some children, some already past middle age, and these were the ones worst damaged, when they had been ‘pets’. All of them naked, and seeing them there, the monsters, with their squirts pointed at her, she spat the weed out of her mouth and screamed, and this time it was a real scream, as if she had been doing it all her life. One of her captors stuffed the weed back, and another tied her hands with strands of weed – all this clumsily and slowly, because this was the first time hands had been tied, and never had there been a captive, or prisoner.
And now instincts that had ranged free and untrammelled and often unrecognised spoke all at once in this crowd of males, and one of the captors threw down this soft, squirming female, and in a moment had his squirt inside her. In a moment he was off her and another had taken his place. The mass rape went on, it went on, they were feeding hungers it seemed they could never sate. Some lads who had gone off into the forest to find fruit came back, saw what was going on, and soon enough understood it and joined in. Then she no longer squirmed and kicked and moaned but lay still, and they understood, but not at once, that she was dead. And then, but not at once, that they had killed her. They dispersed then, not looking at each other, feeling shame, though they did not know what it was, and they left her there. The night was long and fearful and they were by now sickened by what had happened. If questions that had been tormenting them in some cases for years were being answered, by their flaccid squirts, their feelings of rest, relaxation and assuagement, they had killed, and they had never killed purposelessly.
In the morning light she lay there on the grass by the river – dirty, smeared, smelling bad of their ex cretions, the wide empty eyes accusing them.
What were they to do?
Carry her to where the eagles would find her? But something forbade them to do this.
In the end they carried her stiff soiled body to the river bank where the water ran faster and pushed her in, and watched her being swirled away downstream towards the sea.
This was the first murder committed by our kind (I except the exposing of crippled newborn infants) and it taught them in that act what they were capable of; they learned what their natures could be.
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