The Ghosts of Heaven Read Free Page B

behind,
    and behind him, lower down,
    she knows why she was brought to carry,
    because the boy is not strong enough to
    climb with the basket on his back.
    As she comes to the treetops,
    she can see handholds ahead of her,
    and yet the boy is holding her up.
    She calls to him, gently,
    worried he might fail and fall back to the forest floor.
    He doesn’t reply, but he moves on,
    and so, slowly, they lift their way up the rock wall,
    which runs with water and young green moss.
    Her back is hurting, and her arms ache
    as she pulls herself higher,
    one reach at a time.
    She looks up.
    He who goes to the cave has gone from sight,
    and with relief she knows the climb is nearly done.
    Three more reaches and the boy goes, too,
    slips from sight onto the shelf.
    Three more reaches, and her hand waves into air,
    her wrist is grabbed by the old man,
    and he pulls her onto the shelf.
    Crawls to safety, next to the boy,
    who lies panting beside her.
    She rolls onto her back,
    sits up, and her eyes widen.
    There is the world before her,
    the whole world
    wide and far below her.
    The forest through which they walked,
    the lake, and the plains beyond.
    The far hills still too dim to see,
    but the lake sits like a slab of black.

 
    XI
    Hurry , says the old man, and they get to their feet.
    He leads the way along the shelf,
    wide enough not to fear falling,
    uneven enough to make the going slow,
    but he will not go slowly, because the sun won’t wait for them.
    The boy is lagging,
    and her feet are dragging;
    the way has been long and the man
    though old, is strong.
    He has surprised them both
    with this strength, and they hurry to keep up,
    through the skinny trees that dare to grow on the cliff side.
    Then, they are at the cave.
    He who makes the marks stops,
    and for the first time,
    he looks at her.
    Fire , he says, and with beautiful relief
    she slips the basket from her back.
    Fire.
    She has brought two torches,
    each a haft of good, strong wood,
    wound around at the end with
    resin-soaked hair.
    She bends to work fast,
    taking the fire-sticks;
    spinning one on the other
    by means of a bow,
    a miniature version of the thing on her back,
    but with a looser string.
    A string that winds around the stick,
    so that by working the bow the stick spins.
    She’s done it a thousand times before.
    Spinning the first stick
    in the hole she’s made on the flat of the second,
    till smoke comes, and then flame.
    A thousand times, and yet,
    it’s only now that she sees something.
    She sees how the string of the bow winds round the spinning stick,
    and suddenly she thinks of the snail,
    and the falcon, and the fronds of the ferns.
    He who goes to the cave shouts at her.
    She sees she has made a flame and not even known it,
    because her eyes are full of the string of the bow.
    From the spinning, fire has come
    and she touches the end of the torch to the flame.
    Hands it to the old man.
    Who turns and goes to the cave.
    Come , he shouts over his shoulder,
    and the boy follows.
    She watches them go, then
    she slides the basket back onto her back,
    and she follows, too, clambering
    over rocks and through brush
    into the mouth of the cave,
    desperate to see what she has always wanted to see,
    so desperate she doesn’t heed the warning
    that her nose is giving her:
    the faintest hint of a smell.

 
    XII
    There! Just inside the mouth:
    Hands! Dozens of them.
    Red hands in negative.
    The ancestors of the people,
    each hand made by the one who goes to the cave,
    made before he goes to work.
    The old man beckons to the boy,
    points at her, but before she can get the reeds and the red,
    the darkness erupts with a roar.
    It happens so fast.
    So fast, that at first
    she doesn’t know what it is.
    A shape flies at them.
    Before the shape lands, the boy is dead.
    His head hangs by a cord from his shoulders,
    stripped by a giant paw.
    A cave lion.
    It lands as the boy’s body
    pumps blood across the cave mouth.
    The lion