The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

to work for the women.”
    “Does your mother know that you are here now?”
    He felt, rather than saw, the quick shake of her head. “It doesn’t matter. I am here on my father’s bidding. But I must go back soon.”
    “Not yet,” he said, and ran his hand along the smoothness of her arm. She flinched back, and then relaxed.
    “Do you remember what I told you, that you should wait until I am made a Keeper?”
    “Yes, I remember,” she whispered. “But this is for my father to decide.”
    “He is a good man, Little Moon, and a great worker in the cave, Perhaps the greatest. His beasts love him, and stir with life at his touch.”
    “You should not talk of this with me. The cave is not for women.”
    “Every other cave of every other clan is for women,” he said. “There are women in other clans who do the work of the cave. I have seen them. It is only us who have this law, and only in this cave.”
    “I should like to see it, someday,” she said. “My father says it is a place of marvels.”
    “Then you shall, when I am Keeper. I shall show you. I want to show you my work.”
    “But you are only an apprentice. They have not let you begin yet.”
    “I had passed the last test of the apprentice. I had done my first work, not in the great cave, but far deeper in, where the passage narrows and the floor falls away. That is where the apprentices who are about to be made Keepers do the work that the other Keepers judge. That was where I made my work, my swimming beasts. There is a line of rock within the rock of the cave, a dark and curving line like a river that is in flood. And that was where I plunged my beasts, into this flood as you have seen them swim in the river after winter when the waters rush. They are part of the water, and the water is a part of the rock. They flow together—” His voice broke off. “They are good work, Little Moon, and I would show them to you, my swimming deer.”
    She gasped in shock, her hand leaping to her mouth. “You named them! You must not—you named the beasts.”
    “Only to you, Little Moon, and you will see them. You will see them and know what they are, and inside your head you will think that these are indeed swimming deer and this is indeed a river. And then you will think like me that naming them in your head is the same as naming them in your mouth, and wonder why we have this strange rule that says we only call them beasts or the work.”
    “My father says …” she began, but he interrupted. “This is me speaking now, not your father. This is me, thinking that I do not like this rule that says the cave is not for women, and I do not like this rule of never saying the names of the beasts. And I do not understand the rule that says the work can show bulls and horses and deer and bison and bear, but we never work on the one beast that sustains the people. The reindeer that feed us, that clothe us, that give us their horns for the flint men to work with and the needles for the women to sew with and the hides that make our tents and keep us from the wind and rain, they are not honored in the cave. And this is strange. So many rules are strange.”
    She rocked back on her heels, bewildered by his words, which challenged so many of the rules that she had grown up accepting as if they were as much a part of the laws of life as the heat of fire, the wet of rain. And then hearing the names of the beasts, and him telling her more of the cave than she had ever heard, and then saying he would show her. And the touch of his hand on her arm.
    “I must go back now,” she said. But did not move.
    “I say them only to you, Little Moon. Until this night, I have not even said them to myself.” He let go of her arm. “I will wait here for your father. And I will wait even longer for you.”
    She rose, a sudden shiver on her skin although she felt warm, and looked down on him for a long moment before slipping silently back through the trees, and then darting back downhill to the tents of her family.

    They came out of the cave at dawn, drawn and silent from the long night watch, to find the women waiting with water and cold meat. As they drank, the spell was broken. Men strolled off to the trees to piss, hawked the cave’s damp from their throats, cleared their noses and broke wind. The Keeper of the Horses paused on the patch of level ground before the cave, looking quickly to left and right, drifting across to the edge of the trees and standing so that he