Long Ago
The boy shouldn’t have been in the cave. He knew this. He was a good boy, the sort of boy who cared about shoulds and shouldn’ts, but the thrill of this particular shouldn’t made him feel like a different sort of boy, the sort of boy he wished he were. It was why he was there. The air outside the cave was wavy with late-summer heat, but the air inside was cool, and on his tongue it tasted of dust and daring. He was twelve years old, and he was alone for the first time in his life.
The cave was some distance from where his people made their camp by the great lake, but they could see it, a black eye in a cliff that surveyed the wide, flat basin. They came to this shore every few seasons, following rabbits and other small game through the wetlands. In their stories the cave was a place that drove men so mad that they returned from it unable to speak, even the seers, who lived mostly in dreams. There was a seer among them now, a bent old man who had visited the cave the summer the boy was born. The boy kept his distance from him, as all the boys did, but he watched as the old man spent long, wordless hours drawing circles in the dirt. Sometimes the seer looked up from his tracings, and in his bottomless black eyes the boy thought he saw not madness or terror but something like awe.
As he stood at the mouth of the cave, the boy marveled at the earth stretched wide below him. The grasses close to the lake gave way to low brush at the feet of the rocky bluffs that rose above the basin floor like blisters. The lake itself was vast, a blue sheet vanishing into the shimmering sky to the north and east. His people called it Allelu, which in their language meant ‘water of life.’ Ten thousand years later a different people, half the world away, would make allelu a song of praise. By then the great lake would be gone, leaving a flattened desert in its wake. Above the boy’s head an eagle soared, black against the sky, a beautiful, wild thing that would be dead before the season was done.
