And We Inherited the World

They had always lived upon the land. In the mountains, in the forests, away from our camps and fires. I first saw them as a boy, out on a hunt with my uncles and father. We had been pursuing a young wounded deer up a valley, away from the river where we had made camp with the others. The forests there were dark. Pines made walls about the path. Among the other men of my clan, I did not feel afraid.

It had fallen in a small clearing. My uncle clubbed it and we smoked the meat on fires we built among the rocks. Perhaps they saw the smoke. Maybe they smelled the meat. One of my uncles was telling a story, one from his past, and all our eyes laid on him. Then he stopped and stared at the forest beyond. I turned and saw them for the first time in my life.

There were three of them; three men. They were dressed crudely in rags and carried heavy spears and axes of stone. Thick matted beards; wild, animal eyes. They chirped at us and hummed. My uncle nodded sternly in turn. They pointed fat fingers at the drying jerky. He shook his head. They spat and stamped their feet, and we all stood with our spears afront. Patting one another on the back, they turned and trotted back the way they came, and soon were gone in the dark forest beyond. We finished smoking the meat and returned to camp. The men were astonished and talked the entire way. They had heard stories of the beast-men from their grandfathers, but not in generations had one been seen alive. All had reckoned them to be long dead.

Many summers have gone since I saw them that day. I am a man of my own now. I hunt and teach my son the way my father did in turn.

Our wanderings had returned us to that valley. We camped upon the same broad beach, fished the same river I had when I was a child. I showed my son the forests to hunt, the fruit to pick; told him the names of the mountains that stood in that place. High Fist. Broad Stone. No Trees. I told him stories. Of his forefathers, of hunts, of my imagination, and of my time meeting the beast-men in the trees. He didn’t believe me. I showed him the forest, found the spot where we had smoked the meat, and smoked some there again. I acted out the encounter, playing the parts of my uncle and myself and the creatures that we saw. He laughed and smiled and we enjoyed the morning and climbed back down to the camp once the day had grown hot and we had food enough to feed our folk.

Somebody was screaming.

A woman, one of the younger ones of our clan. Her name was Snow. Her child was dead.

The poor little thing had been crushed underfoot. Stamped to death in a raid on the camp. But the camp stood. No fires were scattered. Nobody had been hurt; apart from Snow’s boy, who was still without a name.

“What happened?” I asked another.

“Beast-men came for the fruit she kept in her tent,” they had responded.

I was wide-eyed. Since that day I met them I had assumed them dead just as my father’s generation had done. I had never seen another. Nobody had ever seen another.

Some of the men were already arming themselves. Bright Star, River, and Quickfoot were gathering arrows and axes and spears. They intended to hunt the beast-men and punish them for what they had done. The trail was fresh. They couldn’t run or climb like us. They couldn’t be far.

“Are you coming?” River asked me.

“I am,” I said. I patted my boy on the head and bade him well and a hundred blessings and took my spear and club and then we were on the hunt.

We were fast over the open ground between the mountain peaks. We stopped little, only to drink from a stream or to pick fruit and nuts from trees we passed by. Their trail was clear in the grass. They were heavy, cumbersome, and clumsy. They left broad swaths of stamped brush anywhere they went.

We followed them over the mountain High Fist and into a place none of us knew. We had never hunted there. The stories of generations past never told us of this place. A broad plain awaited us at the base of the mountain, filled with clumps of pine trees and bushes full of fruit. There were mammoths there, too. They strode upon the open ground and shook their manes and trumpeted at us when we passed. We paid them no mind and let them be as we continued on our chase. In another generation all of them would be dead and consumed.

As the sun grew low we slept between tall pines and made camp without a fire. We ate the fruit and nuts that we had picked that day on the trail and spoke little between us, and soon we were asleep. When the sun rose we shot and dressed a bird and cooked it in a low bed of embers then gnawed on its bones as we followed the killers further into the unknown.   

The trail led up through a field of broken boulders resting at the bottom of a stretch of rolling foothills. The mounds were pockmarked with the gaping mouths of caves.

“Let’s split up,” ordered Quickfoot. We all agreed. We spread ourselves across the hill in a long and narrow line, and climbed slowly up, taking our time, checking each of the caves one by one. Around noon, River let out a birdcall. I followed the sound. We met him in the brush before a narrow ravine cut into the hillside. Voices were coming from within and the smell of a fire.

We prepared our weapons and stepped into the little canyon. They didn’t expect us.

There were five in all: one man, three women, and one girl. All of them were dressed in filth and their skin, pale and sickly, clung to their wide, bony frames. The child shrieked and ran deeper into the crack, while the adults scrambled for weapons. They weren’t quick as us. River ran his spear through the man as Quickfoot and Bright Star shot the women. One was wailing while blood ran from her neck. We clubbed her in the head until she too was gone.

I went in search of the child. It hadn’t made it far. She had blonde matted hair and her little grey eyes were savage atop her strange nose and cheekbones. She was chirping at me in her odd animal tongue. I hefted my spear forward and it landed heavy in her chest. She died.

Then I saw it all.

I saw grand expansive seas of sand and stone columns built on the rivers and lived in by people and they lived among animals and brought water to fenced-in fields where they watched over blankets of golden wild grass. The columns grew across the sand and flat-sided mounds were made to surround them made of mud and stone and over the sandy sea were other such places filled with different people but they were people all the same. These places met on an open field and made battle and the violence was terrible and they rode atop the backs of horses and sat in baskets dragged by the creatures and flung spears and arrows at one another until the desert was red and muddied with their blood and then the victors turned their weapons on the walled place of stone towers and they set it alight and the fire was immense and terrible and made the night into day. When they were done they took the women and the children and all the animals and they brought them to their own place across the sea of sand.

Then more people, different yet all the same, appeared in other wild and fantastic places. They lived upon the snow and the sea and forests so dense one could not see ten paces ahead as they walked. Then they levelled these places and their numbers grew beyond my knowing or understanding. They covered the very ground upon which they walked until the Earth itself was a churning sea of moving people, all chattering in unidentical and unfamiliar tongues. They set about building new places of stone or wood and these places stood forever and generation after generation passed within their walls as the places grew and the people alongside and these places confounded together and made war with people different from their own and the fighting would never end and so many would die yet they could not stop. I thought the dead would outnumber the living but more always came. Then no more came and their places were burned and the fighting stopped but always they spoke of violence more and violence soon came and more would die. Then this would cease and the people sat waiting for more to start anew.

Across the sea, people built mountains and columns of ice and stone and they lived within these things and wherever they walked and breathed the ground beneath them became stone and the people flowed like rivers. Animals lived within squares of fences and riled in their own filth and were fed until they burst and then slaughtered by the kind but there were always more to come and they would always grow fatter but everything beyond these fences withered and died and faded and fell upon the Earth. All of the fish in the sea boiled in the water and the skies were blackened with smoke from fires in their camps. Always there were more people and there were more every moment I watched and these people fought amongst themselves and people not like themselves and again all they spoke of was violence and all they wanted was war.

Then their wish was realized and it was fantastic as the sun touched the ground and the great places of ice and stone became heaping ruins and nowhere the people ran was safe because they could not run from what they wanted and the fires scorched everything anyone had ever seen or known or spoken or dreamed about and the people became dust and their homes ash and then burning winds levelled the trees and butchered the last wild beasts in the field and then the fires stopped and the world grew cold and a lone whining wind blew over nothing because everything that ever was or will be was blackened ash and dust drifting on the breeze.

“Are you alright?” Bright Star asked.

He and the others were standing over me and the beast-child. I was shaking on the ground. My spear still sat in her chest and her wild grey eyes were open and staring at me. The others helped me to my feet and I collected my weapon.

Then I turned away with the others and never again did we look upon that place. The food they had stolen was gone so we killed wild game in the meadow and cooked it over an open fire and spent that night talking and sharing stories from our past. When the sun rose we walked upon land that was newly familiar yet beyond our knowing all the same.