The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

Keeper of the Bulls knew that there was more to his people than the sounds and signs of their presence. More than speech, more than communication, more than the skill at working in groups that kept the meat coming to the caves, there was the work that was worship. It glared and pranced and brooded on the walls of the cave behind him. The Keeper of the Bulls looked down at his hands, spread out the fingers, looking at the red and yellow clays that filled his nails and stained his skin. He lifted a hand to his mouth. He could smell the colors. Idly, he sucked, wondering for the hundredth time whether he could taste any difference between them. He fancied that he could, when he took the soft moss to paint the blackness of the bulls, smelling their power, tasting their darkness. He felt the familiar tug of the beasts’ presence, and took a deep breath to begin the chant that would prepare him for a new day of work, the song that he made to the bulls.
    As he sang, he knelt before the small fire glowing at his feet. To his left hand lay the feather, the most perfect and precise of his painting tools. To his right hand lay the moss, the most crude of them. Beyond the fire lay the small piece of dung from the holiest of animals. He had rolled it himself, mixed it, moist and warm and fresh, with the colors that he would use. Blowing on the fire as he chanted, he waited for the precise words to place at the fire’s heart first the feather, then the moss. He smelled the acrid burning of the feather, waited for the billow of smoke from the damp moss, and then he reverently placed one red and one yellow ball of dung into the flames. He stood, stretching his arms wide, ending the chant as the sun burned through the mists and sent glints of sparkling yellow fire along the river. Closing his eyes and bowing his head, he thought of the great haunches that he would paint this day, of their power and their solidity, feeling in his head the swelling shapes that he would use to portray their force. Awake, and purified, he dreamed of the bulls. But then came the voice.
    “Father, you must come.” The voice was high and piping, almost squeaky with nervousness. Or perhaps fear. The Keeper of the Bulls tried to think clearly through his shock, his anger that the boy would be foolish and disrespectful enough even to come to this place, which he had no right to see. At least the child had waited until the chant was complete. He understood that much of the ritual, although he could not take his place among the workers in the cave until he had grown to manhood and killed his beast. He was a good boy, the Keeper of the Bulls thought proudly, always scratching shapes and drawings in the mud with a stick, born to the work. “The women …” the boy squeaked on. “It’s Mother.”
    “Go,” shouted the Keeper of the Bulls, his anger suddenly overcoming his concern that the birth was going badly. “I cannot come now. I am purified. I must do my work. I will come after.”
    He heard a scurrying down in the rocks, and suddenly saw the boy’s back as he ran downhill toward the fire close to the river where the women gathered. Childbirth so often went ill. This was his second wife, who had given him two sons since his first wife died in childbirth. Now perhaps he might be able to take another. He turned and marched solemnly to the cave, ducking under the low roof of the entrance, and then standing motionless while his eyes became accustomed to the darkness. There were too many poles supporting the scaffolding to risk blundering ahead until his eyes adjusted to the light of the small lamps with their wicks of juniper. He heard the scuffling above him of other painters, crouched on the scaffolding as they worked, and the first sight that came to him clearly was the Keeper of the Horses, the other priest whose work he most admired after his own. The Keeper of the Horses had a young daughter, who would soon be old enough to wed. A girl, young and fresh, and awed by his status as the Keeper of the Bulls. He smiled to himself as his sight improved and the head of the greatest of the bulls began to emerge in the dim light of the lamps.
    This was his work, the commemoration of the bulls. And he studied as if for the first time his greatest achievement—the way he had caught movement and a sense of distance by varying the shape of the horns. The farther horn was always a simple curve. The nearer horn began the same way, but then toward the tip he