Chants to Persephone by Jennifer Macaire

Author:Jennifer Macaire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 2018-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

I stepped inside. The cave was immense. From outside, its enormity couldn’t even be guessed. I found myself in a vast cavern.

There was light. Torches flicked from sconces on a wall. Anoramix took one and held it above his head, showing me size of the place. Then he pointed to his right.

I had never seen original cave paintings. I’d only seen photographs in glossy pages of books. What I was seeing now had nothing to do with photos. Vibrant and alive, the animals seemed to leap off the walls.

I stared, losing all sense of myself as I followed Anoramix through time, back further than any of the Time-Travellers had ever gone. Back to a time when man and nature were so close, that with simple handfuls of clay and charcoal, our ancestors had created a masterpiece. The paintings made me shiver. They were so true to life and full of raw energy that the animals seemed to say, ‘See us? We were here before you. We existed before any of you even dreamed of us. We are still alive here on this wall, and we will be here long after you’re gone.

The beauty of the paintings amazed me. Nothing I’d ever seen compared to the power of these animals. They leaped, galloped, and breathed with nostrils flaring. Their eyes blazed with life.

We walked slowly toward the back of the cave. There were horses and bison, bears and lions, wolves and rhinoceros … and handprints. Human hands. Shivering, I raised my own and pressed it against one that was eye level. The hand was slightly broader than mine, the fingers somewhat shorter, but it was a powerful, graceful hand, and it had created a masterpiece.

I pressed my hand to the stone and closed my eyes. I would have given anything to be present while the artist had been at work. I tried to picture the man painting, his bare shoulders gleaming in the torchlight, his hands deft as they wove their magic. However, there was a deep secrecy about the paintings. I was filled with a sense of disquiet and awe. The man had worked alone, and the images were not for all eyes. Perhaps only the chosen ones could see them, the priests and priestesses of that ancient time. Or were they decorations for a ceremony? I didn’t know. The paintings spoke, but in their own tongue, and it was a language more akin to the snarls and whinnies of animals than of the words we used. I stepped back and looked, holding my breath, trying to hear the sound of hoof beats.

Anoramix took my arm and led me further, and there he showed me the bones.

They had been carefully arranged. The skulls sat on top of crossed femurs and placed over the rest of the bones, which were stacked in a strict order. At least twelve layers of skulls stared at me. The ones at the bottom were yellow with age, the bone turning brown around the eye socket and jaw.

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