Chapter 27 - The Cave of the Gray Stone People part 7

The first fatality in our war party was chubby Bukhult. He died because he got the shits.

It's okay. You can laugh. I think "comic tragedy" might be the most apt description for what happened to him. People die in the most awful and embarrassing ways imaginable every day. They die with their pants down. They die from pratfalls, while masturbating, with foreign objects lodged in their colons. Most mortals shit themselves at the moment of death, the Final Indignity. As the greatest mass murderer in all of human history, I can assure you this is true. Sometimes you can't help but laugh at a thing, even when it's awful, but that's what keeps us sane. It's what keeps the steadily mounting weight of all our human tragedies from crushing us to paste.

Before I describe how poor Bukhult managed to get himself killed, however, I think I ought to tell you a little more about the people we called the Foul Ones, because they're central to our decision to send a war party to the land of the Gray Stone People. Despite Poi-lot's advice, and our own frightening experiences with the lizard man, we thought the Fat Hands were merely being plagued by a hitherto unknown clan of Foul Ones.

The Foul Ones were a tribe that lived to the north of us, some three or four days journey from our valley. Although their culture was the antithesis of our own, they were Cro-Magnon like us. Also like us, they were a semi-nomadic people, moving between several seasonal camps throughout the year. Species was about the only thing our two peoples had in common, however. They were scrawnier than us, and they filed their teeth into points, and they seemed to revere filth and depravity and death almost as much as we revered family and honor and procreation. Even their language was offensive to our ears. They had a guttural, hissing language that sounded like an asthmatic with dry heaves. They had raided our village several times when I was a boy, sneaking into our territory to harass and steal from us until we adopted a policy of killing them on sight. After a half-dozen of their warriors fell to our arrows and spears, their raids came more infrequently. I imagine they set their sights on weaker prey, for they hadn't raided our village in years by the time we had our trouble with the "lizard men".

As far back as I could remember there had been hostility between our peoples. In fact, my clansmen were revolted by the very thought of our distant neighbors. Just the mention of their name was enough to make the lip curl back from the teeth. Our women shuddered at the thought of them. Children would hide their faces betwixt their mothers' breasts. Our revulsion had become an instinctive thing, almost an involuntary reflex, ingrained in our psyche from early childhood. Thump a man's knee and his leg kicks. Mention the Foul Ones and our people retched.

They were just so, well... foul!

They seemed, as a group, to be gripped by some kind of mental derangement. They ate their own dead. By the smell of them, they wallowed in their own filth as well. They adorned themselves in the bones of their ancestors, a most disrespectful thing to our reckoning, and tried to kidnap our children and the children of neighboring clans for use as slave labor, and for sexual sport and food.

It was known that they practiced genital mutilation, slicing off the outer flesh of their organs, both male and female, as religious offerings to their deities. They also practiced blood sacrifice. One of our people, who escaped from captivity, described how the Foul Ones would cut out the hearts and brains of their captives and eat them raw, still hot and wet from the bodies, as part of their obscene religious rites.

I saw them up close just once as a boy, when a small group of them raided our camp. In fact, I came very close to being abducted by one of them.

I was young, no more than six or seven years old at the time. I had discovered a praying mantis trundling across the ground not far from my father's wetus and was ruthlessly pestering the creature with a stick. Prodding it. Giggling as the insect swiped angrily at my tool with its strangely folded forelimbs. Engrossed with my play, I paid little attention to the clamor that had arisen at the outer fringes of the camp.

The goggle-eyed insect, bright green and fierce-looking, swatted at the twig I was poking it with. It grabbed the stick and tried to bite it, mouthparts wriggling. I twisted the twig from its grasp and poked the insect again, completely oblivious to the footfalls approaching rapidly behind me.

And why should I be alarmed? People were always racing around the village. That's why the Neanderthals called us Fast Feet. I only turned to look when the runner's shadow fell across me.

The sun flashed in my eyes when I craned my head to look at him. I raised a hand to shield them and froze in shock at the utter alienness of the being. To my child's eyes, he was the very definition of "monster". Thin to the point of emaciation and dressed in bones and rotting hides, he scowled down at me. His teeth were very sharp. His eyes bulged from their blackened sockets much like the eyes of the praying mantis I was entertaining myself with. All the strength seemed to drain from my body at once. I think I might have urinated on myself, as my bladder felt very hot and heavy. The scary man-thing looked back over his shoulder, grinning in exultation, and then reached down to grab me with his filthy, long-nailed hands.

He crowed something in the weird, sibilant language of his people. Probably, "Gotcha!"

I couldn't move. I don't think I even cried out. Fear had seized me around the throat, bearing down like a strangler. But before his fingers could catch ahold of me, the tip of an arrow burst from his mouth like a bloody, pointy tongue.

The raider's eyes swiveled toward me with an expression of fierce outrage, like I was the one who had struck him the mortal blow. Blood spilled over his chin and ran down his neck in a torrent. He reached for the blade at his hip, lips writhing around the bloody shaft protruding from his mouth-- cursing me, I'm sure-- and then he collapsed... almost on top of me.

I jumped out of the way and then stood numbly, blinking down at the arrow protruding from the back of his neck. I had never seen a man murdered before. I had seen men die by sickness and accident, but never in battle. A pool of blood was expanding around the Foul One's shaggy head, soaking into the earth. He had shit himself a little, as men were wont to do.

I examined the dead man, too shocked to feel much of anything apart from curiosity. He seemed strangely lessened by death, as if some vital force had departed his flesh. In its absence he seemed shrunken, spent, like a shed snakeskin.

"Gon!" my father bellowed, and then I felt myself seized roughly and lifted from my feet. A moment later, my uncle dashed past, bow in hand. "Oh, son! You must pay more attention!" my father moaned, squeezing me to his chest so hard I couldn't breathe.

I remember catching a fistful of his thick beard, and then the numbness faded and I began to cry, pressing my face into his fuzzy mane.

I don't like to think what my fate might have been if my father and uncle had not saved me from my would-be abductor. Would I have been enslaved, used for sport, or sacrificed to their bloodthirsty gods? What indignities would I have suffered? What terrible rituals would they have performed on me? I never forgot the look in the Foul One's eyes when he stumbled upon me and thought, for just an instant, that he was about to make away with a plump little Fast Foot child.

Such greed and wickedness!

These were the people we thought were plaguing the Fat Hands. These Foul Ones. We, in our arrogance, believed that the superstitious Neanderthals had attributed their harassment to the work of devils.

Ours was not that great a misjudgment, to be fair. The Fat Hands could have easily confused Foul One trickery with the supernatural. Even our own people threatened rebellious children with the flesh eaters, as your people sometimes threaten your youngsters with the boogeyman. "Don't wander off or the Foul Ones will get you!" we said, or, "If you don't behave, I'm going to give you to the Foul Ones!" The Foul Ones lived far enough away, and were strange enough to us, to have achieved semi-mythic status, but we weren't frightened of them. We had always vanquished them before. We thought we were just going to march on over there and chase the Foul Ones back to their own territory, send them running home with their tails tucked between their legs.

Because of that, we were foolishly incautious.

And I paid the highest price of all.