If Glade expected her apprentice to be more shocked than she was by her account of the violence that had decimated her tribe she was disappointed. Ivory was more indignant at the rudeness of rebuffing a welcome than distressed by the account of the bloodshed. In any case, Glade was reluctant to give a full account of the horrors that followed. It was painful enough for her to remember the evil and worse still to describe it. Did she really want to elaborate on how so many of the people she’d known all her life were massacred in a growing orgy of violence; the sexual frenzy of the invaders; the rapes that followed in rapid succession; and the murder of her mother? Simply alluding to the subsequent horrors served only to refresh the shaman’s traumatic memories.

Compared to the younger Glade, Ivory was already fairly familiar with the sight of violent death. The spirits would curse the village for eternity when a crime was committed against the tribe unless swift and appropriate justice was dispensed on the perpetrators. Sometimes the spirits demanded nothing less than capital punishment. Such an execution was never a cause for celebration, although it needed to be staged in front of the entire village. This would openly declare that this extreme action was taken only to placate the spirits’ vengeful inclinations. Thankfully it was rarely necessary, but such punishment acted as a salutary lesson to anyone who might be tempted to anger the spirits. If a villager took another person’s life or property, if a villager showed disrespect to a sacred site, or if a villager plotted treason, then it was just and fitting that such a criminal be punished. The penalty was the expression of the will of the whole village. Every villager would actively participate in the debate as to how best to appease the spirits’ wrath.

The last time the village applied the ultimate penalty was during the Winter exodus. The offender was a hot-headed youth who had planned to kill the Chief and take on his mantle. He was sentenced to death by stoning. This was a horrible and ugly death that took far too long to execute.

As a result of such occasions, compared to the younger Glade, Ivory was relatively inured to the horror of violent death. Indeed, she was one of those most convinced that the most just retribution for the heinous crime of treason was one which was severe and unforgiving. Glade had a different opinion. She believed that there were alternatives to the barbarism of sanctioned murder. She also knew that had the young reprobate succeeded in his attempted coup d’état and become Chief, a very different legend would now be recounted by the village.

“How did your mother die?” Ivory asked. Her own recent loss made the question especially pertinent.

“As horribly as Flying Squirrel’s. As senselessly and brutally as Tarsier’s. As cruel as any other death that day. I had no idea what to do during the chaos of the slaughter. Nor did I know what the other villagers were doing. Some fled. Some tried to help Flying Squirrel as he lay in the blood-soaked undergrowth. Others, like me, stood petrified in fear. I simply couldn’t comprehend what had happened. I knew I was doomed when more strangers appeared from the shadows in all directions. These figures were quite unlike the black-skinned men, although they were similarly shaven and naked. Their faces were different. Their skin was not as black, though none had skin nearly as pale as that of your tribe. They didn’t carry weapons, but they swiftly overwhelmed us and bound our hands and legs together.”

“Who were these people?”

“I didn’t know at the time. In a sense, I didn’t need to know. But they were what we later came to know as ‘slaves’. It was a word that at the time had no meaning to me. Even in your tribe, the word is very rarely used. You only permit slavery as a punishment and it’s only ever for a limited term. We thought the slaves were just more strangers and they appeared equally as fearsome as the spear-carrying black warriors, even though only the black warriors carried out the slaughter. It was they who systematically raped everyone: whether male or female. And it was one of them who clubbed my mother to death with a flint encrusted cudgel when she tried to pull another black warrior off me while he was raping me.”

“He raped you?” gasped Ivory, who believed that such violation was worse than murder.

“Yes, raped,” said Glade softly, as she pulled a bear skin over her breasts. The word in itself didn’t really describe the actual horror. She’d tried to banish from her mind the vivid memory of the grinning black face above her. She tried to suppress her recollection of the pain of brutal anal penetration and how her fruitless struggles incited more passion than sympathy from the man ravaging her. Most of all she wanted never again to recall the sight of her mother being dragged away and speared by a black warrior who was in the same frenzied excitement that accompanied her sexual violation.

——————————

The deer hide that served as the door to Glade’s tent parted. Startled, Ivory looked up. Although she wasn’t totally naked, a breast and much of her torso were uncovered. As she hastened to protect her modesty, Ivory was further embarrassed when she recognised the intruder as Chief Cave Lion. He was dressed in his customary finery. Bones were threaded through his hair. A splendid snow leopard skin covered his shoulders. Sacred relics were carried in a pouch that hung down over his chest.

Glade bowed down on her knees in deference to the Chief’s status. She smiled as Ivory made similar obeisance.

“To what do we owe the honour of your presence, my lord?” the shaman asked respectfully.

The Chief smiled in return. In fact, his weather-scarred face was cracked by a broad grin. He crouched down and sat cross-legged on the furs that covered the tent floor. Following his lead, Ivory and Glade also knelt. Neither woman wished to be at a height greater than that of the most pre-eminent villager.

“It’s been several days now that young Ivory has been in your service,” said the Chief. “In that time the moon has passed through two quarters. I wish only to see how well her instruction has progressed.”

“You are right to enquire,” said Glade who knew how much her status and welfare was in the Chief’s gift. “She is learning well the ways of the spirits. She is adept in many sacred incantations. Soon she may also be able to summon the spirits to the village’s service.”

“Then we shall be blessed by not one but two shamans,” laughed the Chief contentedly. “Our village will truly be the envy of the tribe.”

Ivory sat quietly as Glade and the chief continued their discourse. Eventually, he came to the point of his visit.

“There is an auspicious day to come in the next full moon,” Chief Cave Lion announced. “Word has come that the Reindeer Herders are to travel here on their annual trek with the great reindeer herds. It seems that the strange beasts have chosen a more southerly route this year. We shall, of course, honour the Reindeer Herders with a feast and the exchange of wares. They have need of ivory and mammoth skin; we of reindeer antler, bone and butter. You and your new apprentice must also prepare for that joyful day. The Reindeer Herders have need of fortune-telling, medicine and sacred rites just as much as we do. We also need you to prepare intoxicants from honey, mushrooms and herbs. The honour of the village and our reputation as good hosts need to be upheld.”

“I understand well,” said Glade. “My apprentice and I shall do all we can to prepare what the village needs to make the day propitious.”

The conversation continued for several beakers of mead and the ceremonial chewing of hemp. Ivory was surprised to see the shaman and the Chief exchange intimate caresses, but she reasoned that this was the privilege of rank. Anyhow, the shaman and the Chief were both much older than her and much the same age as each other, although the Chief’s face was the more deeply lined. Glade’s brown skin retained more of the smoothness of youth, although the heaviness of her bosom and the fullness of her thighs and waist bore testament to her increasing years.

——————————

The Chief made clear that Ivory’s priority was now to assist the shaman in gathering herbs, roots and mushrooms in the woods for the coming day. She was excused her normal duties of foraging for food, tending the village hearth and stitching furs. Ivory was wholly at the shaman’s service for the coming days. Although this work was no less tiring than her customary obligations, Ivory took to them with enthusiasm. She enjoyed roaming about with Glade to previously unfamiliar places within a day’s walking distance of the village.

As the shaman and her apprentice strode off over the barren plain armed with wooden spears and stones to deter predators, Glade recounted more about the terrible days that followed the massacre of her clan.

“At first I thought we would all share the fate of Flying Squirrel, Tarsier and my mother. I almost looked forward to death in the hope that it would eliminate the pain of physical assault and the memories that were already tormenting me. But this was not to be. All the survivors were taken captive. Our hands were bound in cord. Other cords shackled us together from ankle to ankle and neck to neck. We became like a train of ants that march over the forest floor. And we soon came to know who were the slaves and who the masters amongst our captors, although we had no vocabulary to express their status. The black men—there were no women amongst them—marched fearlessly and free. The slaves might have been freer than we were, but they cowered in constant fear of the warriors who treated the slaves almost as brutally as they did us.”

The first day of Glade’s capture was etched more indelibly on her memory than the subsequent days that were, after their capture, much the same as each other. The day had begun in freedom and joy and ended in misery and shackles. Glade marched along between Leaf Mulch and Anteater, her ankle pulled by Leaf Mulch’s stumbling foot and pulled back, as was her neck, by the much younger and smaller Anteater. Glade’s physical torment matched her mental one. The pain of rape stabbed her stomach from within. Blood stained her inner thighs as it trickled from her ravished anus. One eye was so swollen that she could barely see through it.

The physical pain Glade felt was as nothing to the despair that gripped her. Her head felt as if it had been torn open and its contents scooped out. She was sure the horror that tormented her was as visible as any scar. Her eyes gazed outwards but her vision was clouded by inner turmoil. She frequently stumbled against what she could very clearly see. Her skin flushed as if stung by the whip of her all too vivid memories. Her stomach constantly heaved. Sometimes she tasted the thin gruel of regurgitated food at the back of her mouth, but she never managed to release her vomit as did the other prisoners. She’d pissed and shit all she could in the terror of the onslaught, but her belly was insisting that there was yet more to let loose.

Worse humiliation was to come when the procession of captives was ordered to stand still after they’d endured nearly half a day of their stumbling, agonising march. The familiar and normally so friendly forest now had a sinister aspect. Although respite from walking was welcome, the black warriors decided that their prisoners shouldn’t rest. Instead the brutal captors sated their lust on each other and the weary traumatised Forest People in a brutal orgy that renewed the trickle of blood down Glade’s inner thighs. Although any rape is horrific, it seemed doubly cruel that the warriors never visited their captives’ vaginas, but violated each and every one of them, not discriminating at all on age or gender, by the tighter more vulnerable anus.

It seemed that this was the warriors’ definite preference even amongst themselves. Glade witnessed them take pleasure in each other’s arses while they frenziedly jerked their penises.

The Forest People soon discovered that rape was not to be the final humiliation. When the warriors had finally spent their seed and still watchful of their slaves, they crouched together, their black flesh still sticky and luminous. The man who was in a position of seniority to the others sat apart from his fellows, although he had been as one with his minions when they had sex together.

The slaves, who had watched the sexual activity in silence and with no apparent enjoyment, then descended on the Forest People armed with sharp stone implements and huge slabs of beeswax.

Glade was convinced that this would now mark the time when she and her clan would depart the living world and become one with the forest soil. Their attackers had sated their bestial lust and would now discard the objects of their ravishment with the same contempt they had shown in so many other ways. However, instead of bringing blessed death to the Forest People, the slaves began to methodically shave off every blade of hair from their body.

“Just as I’d never witnessed murder before, never been raped before, nor ever known the loss of freedom, I’d never known what it was to be shaved. And certainly not in such a brutal and peremptory fashion,” said Glade as she strode with Ivory over the open steppes.

Ivory had never visited this region of the plain before, but this didn’t trouble her. She was sure that Glade knew exactly where they were heading. Mammoths were grazing in the middle distance. Further ahead was a solitary woolly rhinoceros that they would do well to avoid. Herds of horse, deer, antelope and bison were scattered across the grassy plain. This was a comforting sight because they would provide plenty of warning should a wolf or hyena be prowling across the steppes.

“If I’d thought about it, which I was too distraught to do,” Glade remarked contemplatively, “I would have attributed the hairlessness of the black warriors and their slaves to the will of nature. Our tribe had no more concept of depilation than we had of clothing.”

This was a strange concept to Ivory as well who occasionally trimmed the scraggly ends of her bushy hair with a sharp flint edge but she’d never heard of anyone actually removing the hair: certainly not to the extent that it would expose the bare skin underneath. The spirits had blessed people with hair on the heads, under the armpits and on the crotch for good reason. They also blessed men with hair on their chests and so much on the face that only the eyes and nose were visible. Ivory believed that this was so that no one could mistake an adult man from a boy who had no facility to bestow the bounty of motherhood on a woman. Indeed, the notion of disregarding the wishes of the spirits in such a way seemed as hugely perverse as everything else she’d heard about these barbarous black warriors.

She studied with sympathy and sadness what she could see of Glade inside her voluminous furs. The older woman’s eyes were clouded and her lips pursed. Ivory held Glade’s gloved hand in hers and kissed her tenderly on the nose, neither expecting nor receiving a kiss in return. This was a different kind of affection to that which the women expressed in the privacy and warmth of their bed-sheets.

“The rite of shaving removed a head of hair that had previously cascaded down to my buttocks. It even cleared the bush of hair that masked my vagina. It exposed an expanse of my skin that I’d never seen before. I’d never known that this hidden flesh was as relatively pale as the palms of my hands or the soles of my feet. I had no notion that exposure to the sun might make the skin darker.”

“Is that why your skin is so much darker than ours?” asked Ivory who’d never uncovered enough skin to experience the sun’s darkening affect.

“You’re born with pale, almost white, skin and it never gets as brown as mine,” said Glade. “All the people of the North where the Sun shines so weakly have skin that’s paler than those of the South, so I suppose the Sun must have some affect. I still find your white skin peculiar. The tribes of the South have much darker skin than your tribe. Perhaps it is no more than the other ways in which one tribe differs from another. Some tribes are small, never taller than children. Others have blonde or reddish hair. Yet others have flat noses.”

“The spirits do indeed move in mysterious ways,” Ivory asserted.

The act of depilation added bloody scratches to the wounds of rape and the smart of the hand-warmed beeswax that the Forest People suffered. Glade looked at the unnatural baldness of her sister’s head and crotch and knew that this was exactly how she looked. She was more bare and vulnerable than she’d been since she was less than a year old. Their hair was collected together and bundled into antelope-hide sacks for what purpose Glade was never to discover.

There was little time to rest under the arching tree canopy after this fresh ordeal. The Forest People were dragged to their feet, still tethered to each other, and forced onwards on their march.

——————————

“The forest where I was born is very different from the small woods that scatter the steppes,” Glade explained when she and Ivory at last reached a patch of woodland by the side of some hills.

Ivory had mixed feelings about forests. They were intimidating enough during the day and when she was accompanied by other villagers. Tall conifers towered above with only the occasional clearing in which flowers might grow. She might see the occasional pine marten or squirrel in the trees, but what she feared were the predators, especially wolves, bears or scimitar cats. They might be lying in wait behind a bush or thicket, as did the lion that killed her mother, though they generally kept their distance. At night, however, only the most foolhardy would venture under the dark canopy where light from the moon and stars barely reached. Night was the province of the predators and well they knew it.

“We were less frightened of the night than you,” Glade elaborated, as they clambered out of the plain into shadowy undergrowth and startled a previously hidden deer or fox. “We were always together in a group, night and day. No beast attacks a group of people even though our weapons were much less sophisticated than yours.”

Glade showed Ivory what herbs, berries and mushrooms she should gather for the coming feast. It was a strange assortment: quite unlike anything she’d normally pick. Some mushrooms were distinctly unappetising and there were flowers and leaves scattered in the motley collection. Glade was a patient teacher. She took the time to explain just how the fruits of the forest could be prepared to make intoxicants.

“Did you learn these things when you were young?” asked Ivory.

“You mean young as when I was a child?” said Glade with a smile, reminding Ivory of the extent of their age difference. “No not really. The trees in our forest are totally different to those in the Northern lands. It was much more lush and a deeper kind of green. We knew of the intoxicating effects of some of the forest fruits, but we shared those we found equally amongst ourselves. They weren’t things we would find every day. No. It was much later that I learnt about such things when I lived amongst the Cave Painters. Intoxicants are a necessary part of their culture. I’m sure that’s why their paintings are so weird.”

“Paintings?” wondered Ivory, who’d never heard of such things.

“You still have a lot to learn, my sweetness, but never fear, I shall tell you all before I die,” said Glade with an indulgent smile.

——————————

Glade and her fellow captives were still deep within the forest on the first day of her capture. When night fell and even the black warriors were reluctant to continue their march, the procession arrived at a settlement where there were many more alien black men and a rather greater number of slaves.

It was here that Glade saw many others of her tribe who were also shackled under the tall trees. They were sullen and weeping and huddled together. Around them was the first artificial construction Glade had ever seen. At first she thought it was a natural if peculiar feature of the forest. A row of sticks were penned around the miserable prisoners and between each stick was a lattice of cord and branches, stripped, Glade noticed with dismay, from the nearby trees. The spirits of the forest must be appalled and she was sure that they would visit their vengeance on these disrespectful intruders.

Alas, there was no incidence of divine intervention during the next few days while she was cooped in shared misery amongst the many other prisoners from her tribe. They were kept in silence that was enforced by their captors who rained brutal blows on anyone whose wails or moans was deemed too annoying.

It was during these days that Glade got a more complete view of the motives behind her capture. Every morning, just before the sun rose, the black warriors went together in a contingent led, she was shocked to realise, by one or two slaves from her own tribe who were now as shaved and bald as their captors. Like all the other slaves they had been beaten into servitude by brutality and fear. Glade recognized that their choices were stark—obedience or savage death—but she still regarded them as traitors for having collaborated with these black monsters.

At the end of the day, not long after the sun had descended, the warriors and their slaves returned with another group of brutalised, traumatised and thoroughly unhappy captives who were then pushed into the pen that was never made more spacious to accommodate the greater crush of bodies.

Only a few black warriors remained with the camp during these excursions. Their task was as much to guard the many slaves—who were despondently engaged in mundane chores—as it was to oversee their captives who, trussed as they were, could make little attempt to escape. The slaves’ duties included those of shaving and feeding the prisoners which were attended to at the same time. A few slaves would enter the pen and select those captives whose hair was deemed to have grown sufficiently and who would then be unshackled from his or her fellows and taken away. After not very long, the captive would return: the body totally denuded of hair but the belly fuller.

Glade was initially so blinded by her grief for her mother and lost comrades that she didn’t notice how much she was consumed by hunger. She moaned and wept with her fellows, who huddled together to ask “Why? Why? Why?” Why had they been treated so brutally? Why had the forest spirits so deserted them? What had they done to deserve such punishment? After a while, her hunger was such that she hoped and hoped that she would be one of those dragged away from the pen. She dragged her fingers over her pate, willing the blue stubble to grow long enough to now attract the slaves’ attention as they periodically wandered though the cowering bodies in the pen.

When her time came Glade was dragged away by two slaves. One had skin almost as dark as the black warriors, but had thicker lips and a longer nose. The other’s skin was as light brown as hers, but with a squashed nose and small ears. She wondered whether she would be ravished, but although the slaves weren’t especially gentle to her they weren’t nearly as gratuitously cruel as the black warriors.

The shaving was less painful than the first time. The slaves scraped sharp flints over her pate, her crotch and under her armpits. If a longer hair remained from the first depilation this was plucked out by the darker man’s tapering fingers. The whole process took very little time and then she was allowed to eat a mush of cooked tubers, fruit and grasses. It was far less than she would normally eat during a day in the forest, but it was enough to hold at bay the hunger that gnawed inside her.

She also learnt from the other captives how much their story was much the same as for her clan.

“We offered the black monsters hospitality and welcome, and in return they murdered my father and one of my sisters,” moaned a boy much the same age as Glade, who sat beside her and whose penis she stroked in a friendly manner although she had no intention of having sex with him. The hunger and the pain she still felt between her legs made her disinclined. In any case, she couldn’t imagine that the guards who beat up anyone whose moans were too loud would tolerate any exchange of affection between the prisoners, however much custom might demand it.

The boy spoke in a dialect that suggested he came from a part of the forest far from where her people normally wandered, but at least he could be understood. This was not so for the slaves and black warriors who Glade learnt from her whispered conversations didn’t understand a word she and her people spoke. This notion was yet another revelation to her. She’d never suspected that there was ever more than one language in the world and now she was surrounded by people who spoke many other languages. And each language was as incomprehensible to a speaker of another language as it was to any one of her tribe.

“There is a story I heard from one of the slaves who comes from our tribe,” said a woman who was amongst the first to be captured nearly a moon ago. “Once there was one language and one tribe, but the people climbed the trees to commune with the spirits of the sky and they were punished for their presumption by becoming many different tribes speaking many different languages.”

“Do you believe that?” Ivory asked, as Glade helped her to her feet after they had crouched down so long to dig for truffles in the soil.

“Of course not,” laughed Glade. “Why would the spirits of the sky, who have so much of it to themselves, be in the slightest bit perturbed? People speak different languages because they live apart from each other. Each tribe has its distinct language and sometimes more than one. It’s like how they dress differently from each other and worship different spirits. It’s just the way it is and how it has always been.”

“Since the beginning?” asked Ivory.

“If there was a beginning, yes, I’m sure they did.”

——————————

It was eventually time for Ivory and Glade to return to the village although there was much more that could be foraged from the forest. It was essential to be back before nightfall when two women in the middle of the open steppe could fall easy prey to a lion or bear.

Glade’s earlier rest in the forest in the pen similarly came to an end after little more than half a moon. The black warriors had gathered enough captives and there was now little space left in the pen to accommodate them. Their huddled bodies pressed against each other: the conjoined sweat yet further worsening their distress.

It was the time in the morning when the black warriors normally gathered together to set off, whooping and laughing, on their excursions into the dark forest to inflict more misery on Glade’s tribe. Today there was no such gathering. The prisoners were dragged out of the pen, shackled together by cord, and then led on a procession which was at first a blessed relief from their confinement and soon became an ordeal of many days’ march through the forest.

“I believed the world was one enormous forest,” Glade told Ivory as they trudged across the mammoth steppes and carried what they had foraged in their deerskin bags. “I didn’t know that further to the North there are massive cliffs of ice and plains of mammoth. I didn’t know that there was a world that held oceans, deserts, mountains or caves. All I knew was forest. And not one person from my tribe knew otherwise. So it came as a complete shock to us when several days later we walked out the forest.”

“Is the forest so very big?”

“As big as the mammoth steppes,” said Glade. “It was so big that our roving never took us to the forest edge. A new fear gripped us when we realised that the approaching break in the forest didn’t herald a river or a clearing, but was in fact the very end of our world. And when we emerged, blinking and trembling, into a world where there was no tree above our heads and ahead of us was open tree-spotted savannah, we believed that we had entered another world altogether. I was not alone in wishing every day for the rest of our journey that we should return to the comfort of the forest that sheltered us from the cruel sun. But alas that was not to be.”

The sunlight that shone on them was more intense than Glade thought light could ever be. She blinked and stumbled in the blinding glare that was reflected off the yellow and orange grassland. The sky above was a huge expanse of blue, not broken at all by a canopy of leaves. Ahead was nothing but a vast intimidating expanse of space. Glade was not alone in her tears and sorrow at being plunged into this terrifying ocean of openness.

“Did you ever return to the forest?” asked Ivory.

Glade sighed long and deep.

“I didn’t know it then, nor could I really comprehend it, but I was never ever to return home again.”