CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE – THE WEEPING HILLSIDE

Life is a few moments of joy scattered on a field of misery....

When two people choose to be together and are parted by death there can only be one outcome, and that is utter and complete misery. The emotional attachment honed over countless millennia by the evolutionary need to rear the young has created a powerful bond, and when Umbaga returned home to his comfortable cave and found Juju and his infant Idju dead, he was distraught, fort hat bond was as strong in those early years as it would ever be.

His neighbours had kept well away when it was known that the woman Juju was dead, for despite the primitive lives that they led they had a deep understanding and respect for the way illness can traverse even short distances and spread like raindrops on dry sand until all are infected. It happened from time to time and created its own misery.

So Juju was left to the cooling world and the wolves, and having been lifeless for several days by the time Umbaga returned there were parts of her missing, and there was a great deal of dried blood, some of which had been lapped up by greedy tongues before it dried, and some that hadn’t.

He let out a howl.

A howl that went on and on as the reality of what had happened to his world sunk in. Aurora had come with him, for he was still far from steady on his feet and although Melvin had offered she said someone ought to be around to make sure their prisoner was all right. She said that the responsibility ought to be his. After all, the lad was his blood relative, and she left it at that.

Melvin knew and in a way agreed, though he might have said that there was nothing he could do one way or another so why did either of them need to be there? The question went unasked because he really knew the answer. They were on a strange and somewhat alien world and neither of them knew much about it.

Meanwhile, Umbaga howled.

Through his mind like images carved in the stone wall of his brain ran memories of Juju.

He saw the way she’d been when she’d shyly agreed to be his woman. Her monthly bleeding had started and that made it all right. He had taken her, bright eyes, sweet smile and all, and that first night they had made love for the first time.

Then, moons later, she had given birth to Idju. He had vaguely been aware that it might have had something to do with the games they played after darkness had fallen, but he wasn’t so sure. Juju was, though, and she told him.

He remembered the light in her eyes when she had seen Idju for the first time, and he howled again.

He saw the pride in her eyes when he returned from the hunt with meat, and he howled yet again.

She had been the one with the brains, he knew that. Why need a man have brains if all he did was hunting and providing and all the manual work that life demands he do?

He looked at Aurora.

This woman in the shining clothes, with the antiseptic hair, with the almost totally unmarked complexion, had healed him. She had done something to him, he had no idea what it had been, he had no notion of syringes and the diagnosis by a computer or medicines, but he had got better rather than doing what he’d expected to do, and dying.

Yes, that’s what he had expected. To pass beyond the realm of light that he called living and onto the unknown darkness where the dead all lived. His ancestors: everyone’s ancestors, and in their black realm he was sure they passed judgements on the newly dead. It was talked about on dark winter nights when friends and neighbours gathered and they told each other stories.

For what was life but a preparation for their realm, and if life was lived well and the ancestors were pleased then so much the better.

He knelt by the gored and bloodstained remains of Juju.

“Juju wait for Umbaga,” he whispered, “Juju be there in the Afterlife with past mamas and daddas, past grandmas and granddads, our Ancestors. And Umbaga will come soon enough. And Idju wait, child so little and so young … Idju’s dadda will come….”

Aurora could understand most of his whispered words and she felt tears forming in her eyes. She had learned a little bit about sorrow before she left Terra, for her own grandparents had all died within a short time of each other, and tears had been spilt for all of them, one after another. So her heart could go where Umbaga’s was weeping, and she could go some way to empathising.

She put one hand lightly on his shoulder as it shook with grief.

“Umbaga,” she whispered, and he looked up at her with his tear-stained face so filled with misery she could have wept herself.

“Aurora...” he murmured, and it was the first time she heard him call her by her name. The language had all been Juju, and Umbaga had looked on, dispassionately.

“Is there … something I could do?” Her words were a hybrid language, some she had learned from Juju and others she had known since her own infancy, but he knew what she meant, and shook his head.

There was nothing anyone could do.

But then, she knew that.

So she sat by him, and gently so he barely noticed she rubbed his shoulder. It was and wasn’t a comfort, but he knew she meant well.

By and by and presently he picked the bloody remains of his woman into his arms and carried her out into the autumn day. The sun was beaming down, but he barely noticed as he made his way with his burden to the Weeping Hillside where a level plateau was littered with the bleached bones of the dead. Then he lay Juju down in a space free from the litter of others and knelt by her. He was returning her to the nature of a world they had shared, and before too many seasons had passed her bones would be as bleached and bereft of flesh as the others.

Then she would be with the Ancestors and part of Eternity.

After a while he turned in order to fetch Idju. Idju had been his hope for the future, and that future was gone with the spark of her life. But he didn’t have to go far, for silently and just behind him stood Aurora, and she had Idju gently in her arms, and she was weeping.

Then she moved up to Umbaga and gently like a goddess might be gentle she lay the tiny scrap of meat that had been Umbaga’s child in the arms of her mother, and looked up at the Neanderthal man and his grief.

“This is tragedy,” she whispered.

And the two of them spent a long hour by the remains of his loved ones before he took the woman from another time by one hand and slowly led her away.

Then the Weeping Hillside was silent for a while, and nothing moved until, here and there and from burrows in the ground and from the skies came hungry creatures, and they moved furtively to the new gift, and ate their fill.

© Peter Rogerson 08.11.16