Consider the Neanderthal 2:2

(This is part 2 of the story. Click here for Part 1)

Death Head is only a child, but it is already clear she will be taller than her age-mates when she grows. Thinner, too. And, according to everyone but her father, Red Knife, Death Head will be more useless.

Death Head was born retarded from the corpse of her mother, the infant’s bulging skull plugging a narrow birth canal. Her father managed to save her with a knife of flint he knapped specially for the purpose, earning names for both himself and his hybrid daughter.

The baby was slower than the others, her hands unable to grasp, her eyes blank. Hide a piece of meat behind your back and a normal infant would peer around you, looking for it. Death Head would just gape at you, as if shocked you’d made the object vanish. Point out a bird’s nest in a tree and she wouldn’t even be able to follow your finger to find it, let alone climb the tree to retrieve the eggs.

Recently, though, Death Head had started to do something strange when she called.

All of the children squat around the fire, as well as about half the adults. Some are men fallen out of practice on the hunt, but most are the women they have stolen on raids, who do not know the calls of this camp. Teaching them is everyone’s responsibility, and who better than a man fresh from the hunt?

Bevwm starts simple, with a call that comes naturally to everyone.

“Āāy!”

Even the foreign wives look around for the hyena.

Klèy jumps out from the shadows beyond the camp-fire, skins piled over her shoulders so her back is hunched, severed yellow fangs raised in her hands, giggling eerily.

“Āāy!” calls Bevwm again, and makes the signs with his hands: coming-together-in-defense. There is a call for that sign, but at the moment it escapes Bevwm’s memory. He should really have studied before beginning the class: If menaced by hyenas, the camp should come together and defend each-other.

Bevwn repeats the lesson, this time to the accompaniment of two hunters, one atop the shoulders of another, both wrapped in dark wooly skins. The one on top holds his arms like curved tusks, while his partner stumps forward, his hands pressed together and upraised.

“Fwāām!” calls Bevwm, and everyone scatters to allow the mammoth its right of way.

Next, a pack of hunters panting in sleek gray pelts: “ààw!”

The men pick up branches and spears, while the women help the children climb trees. Death head loses her grip on her branch and falls, knocking over the two children under her. In a real wolf-attack, the three of them would be dead.

Furious, Bevwm closes on Death Head, hand lifted to punish her.

She turns, eyes flashing in the firelight, signing no, no, no. “Aa!” she says.

Bevwm stops. He doesn’t know that call.

Death Head repeats herself, mixing sign and call: No “aa-aa.” No “aa-aa” from “Bevwm. Bevwm drăăw” good. Begging. “Glááng?”

Bevwm doesn’t understand. This “aa-aa” sounds like the word for “danger from hyena,” “danger from wolves,” and “danger from mammoth,” but is none of them. It is all of them. It means, he sees, “danger.”

“Bevwm aa-aa drăăw,” says Death Head, pointing to herself. “You teach me about danger.”

Once, Death Head’s father created a new type of knife. Now his daughter is creating a new type of call.

No, he signs, kneeling by the girl. He cringes as if in death, taps her bulging forehead, and flicks his fingers out from his mouth. “Drăăw.” He says, palms up.

What he means is: “Teach me, please?”