The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

that her man would light at dusk as the women stood around and sang the death song of motherhood. He rose to go, and hardly knowing what he was doing, stopped and said, “Little Moon, I shall be a Keeper this winter. Wait for that.”
    She looked at him, expressionless, as he turned to go. She had never seen before any young man without the mark of his craft around his neck. The bareness of his chest rose unchecked to his neck and head. When he turned, she was suddenly aware of the intentness with which she studied the slimness of his waist and the way it swelled out to the muscles beneath his shoulders, and the way his fair hair fell and splayed in curls upon them. She watched him run, Deer-runner. She could call him Deer, he had told her so. Her hand came up to touch her own bare thong, the mark of the virgin.

    The Keeper of the Bulls thrust his torch into the stack of wood, and stepped backward as the fire began to crackle beneath the body of his woman. They had told him it was a girl child. His sisters could take care of it. The woman had brought him two sons. She had kept a decent home. His water was always warmed at the fire for his morning drink. Her thighs had always opened dutifully to his desire, and there had been moments when she clasped him with warmth. He thought back to the earliest days, when she had been young and lithe and at first frightened beneath him, and then languorous and eager. That time had passed with the first son, passed along with the sleepy talk and the laughter, passed along with his growing obsession with the work and the cave. With the bulls. He could name them in the privacy of his own mind. But not to others, and never to those outside the chosen circle of the Keepers. For those others, it was only to be named the work, or the beasts.
    He looked around at the gathering people, flickering in the firelight that held the dusk at bay. Grease on their faces after the feast. A long, low moan coming from the women at the far side of the fire, rising into the chant of mourning. Then the men of her kin came forward. A hunter, to lay a bone upon the pyre, and a waterman, with a wriggling crayfish, his splayed thumb and fingers squeezing its head into stillness as he laid it on the fire. The Keeper of the Bulls waited, until all had done, and then stepped forward to lay his own feather upon the flames that would consume the mother of his sons.
    It was the cave that had brought so many others here, to pay respect at the pyre of his woman. The leader of the flint men, the chief woodman, and all the men who led the hunt. The leaders of the fleet young men who chased the game and of the spearmen and slingers who killed it. The trackers and even the limping old head of the small group of crippled and older men who set the traps and placed the nets for the birds and fishes. And it was the cave that had brought the headmen of the other communities along the river, for while they had their own priests and artists and their own holy caves, none of them had had his vision to fill a whole cave with the holy beasts.
    Still, there were men here whose skills he envied, not for himself, but for the greater power of the cave itself. His Keeper of the Bison—only to himself did he ever think of his colleagues as “his” men—was old, half-blind, and barely adequate. The bull he had worked on today had almost openly showed his contempt, painting over a crude red bison that he thought of as little more than a stain on the wall. He hadn’t even bothered to consult its Keeper about painting over it. He caught himself. He must not do that. There was an etiquette in the cave, as the Keeper of the Horses had come to him in the morning to consult about the placing of his horse between the horns of the bull. That was the proper way, showing respect. That was how it must be done, he cautioned himself. But it was hard. It was his vision, his cave, not to be demeaned by the daubs of second-raters. In their hearts, his colleagues must know this, which made it all the more important that he be seen to show them proper deference.
    He would miss this woman, lying dead before him, about to go into the flame. Not just her body or her care, but her counsel. She had understood his vision from the moment that the hunters had first entered the miraculous cave and summoned him to see the great white space of the walls, the perfect round of the ceiling where it narrowed. He remembered the sense of lust as he had first seen