The wind blew soft, the sun rose high, and the ground trembled under heavy weight from both ends of the pasture.
The cattle raised their heads. A procession of apes approached, sticks in hand, fires in stick, shouts in mouth and gleams in eye.
“Listen!” they called. “Listen to us! Bend to us! Do as we wish! We are tool-makers, and we are in the hands of Tool-Maker, and through us Tool-Maker demands you bend! Look!” they shouted, and they hoisted up a tall pole on which they had strung the skulls of cattle. “Here, place your god here! We will hold them as easily as we hold your bodies! Now submit!”
The cattle packed tightly and stood firm, but they did not charge, and this was all the bravery needed for one of the most adorned and adored apes to march forwards – he wore a cattle skull over himself, as if to compensate for the fur he lacked.
“You are large, but simple,” he said in a tired, matter-of-fact voice. “You are strong, but slow. Do as we ask and we will put you to better use. Look“- he shook the staff in his hand- “I bear the old horns of your old mothers and fathers, and through them I bear their manifestation of your Oldest Parent. You will do as your Oldest Parent bids, and your Oldest Parent is in my hands, and I am in Tool-Maker’s hands. This is how it is, now and forever.”
The cattle stared at the adorned ape. A calf bleated, but briefly – as if too frightened for full song in full voice. Then one after another the horned heads dipped, and with a snort hither and thither, the herd relaxed. The ape walked, and they followed behind.
“Yay! Woo! Hurrah!” shouted the other apes, capering along behind and around and clapping hands with each other. “He’s done it again! They said he couldn’t, but he did! Another victory for our Tool-Maker!”
***
It really was a great victory, even the apes who were lower in Tool-Maker’s esteem grudgingly admitted. It brought them meat and milk, and so large, and with tough skin you could peel loose from the meat and dry into usefulness. True, sheep had milk and meat and were soft, but they were smaller. True, the traitor-wolves who had named Tool-Maker their new family were cleverer and more useful to hunt and to warn of the cats that still roamed at night where Tool-Maker’s light did not shine, but they were smaller. Size meant a lot, even to apes that told themselves that size meant nothing with tools in your hands.
So they hurrayed the cattle into their new pasture, and hurrayed the priestly apes who had led them there, and above all else they hurrayed the great Tool-Maker, who was the one being in this world who realized that others were more than friend or foe, but objects in your grasp, and who most munificently and mercifully bestowed this knowledge and power upon its children when the other idiot weakling beings beyond of the world left their children to their idiot play.
They also hurrayed eating a cow. That was nice. But one cow less still left many, and cows eat more than sheep. So it was that the next day, and the next day, and the day after that found many of the apes in their fields, sowing and reaping and sweating and bleeding so that they might have bread and their new tools might have fodder in harder times.
They didn’t mind. Tool-Maker demanded it, and Tool-Maker would reward them with more victories over more weak things and weak gods. Soon their mouths would touch meat once more. So they heaved and pulled and toiled and laboured and finally rejoiced, for lo – the crop sprouted, and it was good, and great, and gritty and spiny and poked harshly against their sunburnt and raw hides, and they gathered it all and heaped it away from the rain and wind and sun under cover of roof-and-walls, as Tool-Maker had told them to do.
Then the time came when the pastures the cattle were confined to ran dry under the rainless sun, and food was scarce. Able apes unsealed the grain’s caskets, and within found a least savory sight: dozens and dozens of cute little pink noses and black little eyes and brown-and-white waist-coats of fur, fleeing at speed with naked tails trailing behind.
“Rodents!” they complained to the most adorned apes of the city. “Miserable thieving rodents have stolen our crop, with which we feed our captive tools! This is outrageous! We are outraged!”
“Yes,” agreed the most adorned ape, wearily donning an extra necklace or eight, and choosing a suitably impressive headpiece. “This is true. We will correct this behaviour permanently and thoroughly.”
So the apes marched through their shelters and brandished sticks and fires and shouted not with fierce joy but with smouldering rage, and more than one errant spark had to be hastily quenched with dirt and singed ape-flesh lest it catch aflame their own property. At the head stomped the most adorned ape, whose staff was now festooned with the trophies of sheep, traitor-wolf, AND cattle, and in his gaze was a businesslike no-nonsenseness that was far more dreadful than the wrath of his followers, and he stopped before the most plundered and desecrated of the grain-storages and held his staff aloft.
“Squeakers,” he proclaimed, “you are tedious, but you are small. You are vexing, but you are fleeting. Look“- and here he shook the staff in his hand –“we have subdued far greater and more impressive beasts than you will ever be, by the work of Tool-Maker subduing their gods that are far greater and more impressive than yours will ever be. You will do as your Quickly-Hiding bids, and your Quickly-Hiding is in my hands, and I am in Tool-Maker’s hands. This is how it is, now and forever.”
There was no response for an instant. Then the adorned ape jumped and said an unforgivable word – a small mouse had crawled down his arm and hopped into his palm, where it squeaked at him, then leapt free. Then another, another – a little flood of rodents seeping from his adornments and flowing out from his hands, launching from between his fingers like salmon over rapids. All the other apes drew back in confusion as he capered and cursed and swatted, and when at last his dance had ended he had not one speck of adornment upon his naked ape frame – all was discarded, chewed, and damaged – nor was there a single mouse clutched in his hands.
Here the once-adorned ape might have fixed things, had he his full presence of mind to him. But he was tired and upset and had lost his temper for the first time in years and was currently unadorned, whereas the (formerly) second-most-adorned ape was fresh and alert and had been waiting for this sort of thing and was now the most adorned ape, so when he stepped forwards without hesitation or apparent haste and called “So! The battle is a draw! We will not be troubled by the squeakers, but nor shall we be spared them – more labour is needed! More tools to be made! Tool-Maker did not raise us to be lazy – while they work apace on this, we shall clear new fields! The swamps must be made tools!” everyone was happy to listen to him and hurrayed him and they did not look upon the (formerly) most-adorned of apes, or wish to think of him any more. Or to think of how it was that small things might resist Tool-Maker, who brought them victory over the mighty.
Better to think of the victories yet to come.
***
The swamps were thick, and green, and wet, and to dam them and drain them took many stones and much time. Oh so much time. Time spent groaning, and heaving, and dropping rocks on sensitive ape toes and bruising thin-skinned ape arms and (once) flattening an over-ambitious ape like a pancake underneath a boulder ten times their weight.
But it was done, because the fields must be expanded, because the cattle must be fed, because Tool-Maker’s grasp was inescapable and firm. Anything less was unthinkable and impossible.
What was extremely thinkable and possible were the mosquitoes. A mosquito for every inch of skin for every ape in the swamp, turned red and flushed and impossibly, horrifically itchy.
This was horrendous. This was vexing. This was an obstacle. So the apes assembled the sticks and the fires and their irritation and (scratching themselves many, many times), trailed behind the most adorned ape, who was carrying a big stick with a foul-smelling fire made from damp and odorous herbs upon it and taking care to stand in the smog let off by it. They proceeded into the heart of the swamp, and a great fire was built up with bundles of herbbs to spread the smoke farther and higher, and there the most adorned ape began to preach.
“Listen well, you perfidious gnats!” he scolded the whining marsh around them. “You are no obstacle! You are irritation! You are barely even alive, barely even animate – who are you to put yourself so against the will of us, and thereby Tool-Maker, the greatest of gods? What does your own Careful Bloodsuck bid of you – nothing! Nothing but to exist! You are barely alive; now leave us this patch of shameful waste you covet and find yourselves a better role. As you are in no ways fit for tool use, maybe repent long enough and return to us as something useful. Now do as Tool-Maker bids!”
The whining stopped.
For a long, slow, glorious moment the adorned ape could barely fight to keep the smile from his face. Oh, he had done it! He had triumphed! He had dismissed the purposeless!
Then, one at a time and all very quickly, each ape of good hearing realized something: they couldn’t hear the whining because so many wings were beating that the sound resembled a rumble. And then the sky turned black, not from smoke, but from bodies.
By the time everyone was back in town – everyone who hadn’t run into the swamps in their panicked flight, or into the fire, or over each other – it was impossible to say who the most adorned ape was. Everything that impeded flight had been dropped or torn away.
Besides, there were other distractions. Two hours after the retreat, the chills came.
***
With the chills came aches. With the aches came fever. With the fever came trembling.
The apes sickened. They laid low in their shelters, they sprawled in the (empty, rodent-haunted) grain stores, they packed into the walls of the Home of Tool-Maker, where the adorned apes had not the energy or time to protest their presence. Anywhere was better than lying prone in the open where more mosquitoes or a cat or even a rogue traitor-wolf (considering, perhaps, a second betrayal) might fall upon you.
“This will end,” croaked the doughtiest remaining of the adorned apes, arms trembling as he donned as much regalia as his frail body could support. “To be set back by foes is one thing; to suffer recalcitrance from a masterless, heedless divine in delusion of its place beneath Tool-Maker is another… but to perish at mindless, thoughtless disease? No!”
So the last adorned ape tottered through the moans and shivers of his kin and stood at the great gate to the Home of Tool-Maker and looked out over the homes (full of the ill) and the fields (fallow and weed-choked) and the pastures (empty; when had THAT happened?), and he raised his hands, thumbs and fingers curled in opposition, and he spoke thusly.
“Oh wretched illness, you are not even alive. You have no god of your own. You have no will of your own. You are but a tool of the mosquitoes – and no tool shall fell those who follow Tool-Maker! I call upon them to cast you away and turn you to better purposes. Away now, empty thing, neither follower nor followed! Begone, and make no reply nor retort lest you make it from a god of your own unto mine!”
The words were remembered most clearly by some of the survivors from the outermost homes, as was the moment that the entire Home of Tool-Maker liquefied into a thin, clear fluid and sank into the ground without a bubble.
And when enough time had passed that even the ground where that Home had once stood was simple bare, unstained stone again; when enough time had passed that the order of events was lost, then the events themselves; when once again divinity essayed forth from apes, it did so with a softer tread, a quieter voice, and a hand that trembled, as if ever-ready to flinch.
Few begrudged it thus.