Searching for My Wives

By William Pond Bostock

In this imaginative history, reincarnating souls traverse the first thirty millennia of humanity. One soul, Shimmer, searches in life after life for Sita and Ahalya, his beloved wives. From Africa to the Gangetic Plain, he helps good people seek homes and beauty, peace and love, but others raid and kill. The Great Ice Age collapses; near-annihilation follows. Will good people survive when they can no longer move beyond the villains reach? Will there be war? Yes, there are battles and a gigantic bird, a small unicorn, nephelim, pyramids, time travel, the universe of worlds, the first basket, the wheel, Second Dynasty Egyptians, English Romantics, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475906684

William Pond Bostock

William Pond Bostock has been a research professor on an Ivy League university’s medical school faculty, a bay kayaker, and an author of outdoor books and articles. Twenty years ago or so, a spiritualist told him about old souls and past lives, which set him thinking.

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Copyright © 2012 by William Pond Bostock.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-0667-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-0668-4 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 06/29/2012

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter One

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Our Earth turns now much as their Earth turned then, one and one-half million years ago. The time from noon to noon for them would not feel different to us, if we were there, and their midnight skies would also be familiar, albeit perhaps shifted from our own, as projected geographic North precesses from Spica to Polaris and back on a 23,000 year cycle through the ages.

In Africa, where Mankind still aborning lived, the sun at noon baked grass blades stiff and moist earth hard; we hominids retreated into shade beneath tree leaves or grotto rooves in the cliffs and rocky jumbles of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley.

Not many protohumans were alive at any time back then, but all of us had souls, and souls persist, and there are souls which lived in hominids in Chesowanja, northeastern Africa who have lived among us almost to the present day.

One soul, not the first to animate a hominid, when seen appears as billowing patches of refraction in the air, and we may call him ‘Shimmer’. Consistently, through the years that he has walked on earth, he has loved several souls or more. Through his own choice of where and when and who to be on earth or by direction from the higher powers and also by the same kinds of choices made or instructions followed by the souls beloved by him, he and these souls encounter one another and have a chance for happiness in their favorite company.

There is a soul, a dear and precious soul, whom we shall call Ahalya. Shimmer and she will seek each other out time and again through the ages, but their love will not be simple, and they’ll feel great deprivation.

Ahalya, if she sees a chance of encountering Shimmer on earth, follows him to live in the complementary human gender: whatever Shimmer chooses to be, man or woman, Ahalya will almost without exception be the opposite so that there may be no barrier between them.

Stop. Add space before this paragraph. Insert a lovely colophon. Raise a curtain. Shine a spotlight on the stage. Beholders, pause your breathing.

Sita – beauteous, radiant, sweet-tempered, able, constant-hearted, gleaming-pillared soul – be lowered on a silvery line, en pointe descend from Heaven.

Of these three souls, Shimmer, Ahalya, and Sita, Sita seems to have been the first to hit upon her natural human gender; she very, very rarely, maybe only once, lives as a male. Sita perseveres in what she sees as right and holds truth to be a good so utterly high that she can never deviate from her discipleship.

Cradles rock. In one, a babe may roll from side to side. The cradle of the hominids was Africa and Asia. They evolved at first in Africa more than three million years ago and suffered in those early days the same oppressions by the worst of them that one and a half million years later made nightmarish the lives of tribes in Chesowanja, Tunisia, Lesotho, Ethiopia, the Slave Coast – anywhere the infestation took root.

As the people by Lake Tanganyika later did, the tribes three million years ago decided that their future would be better somewhere else. Some came from northeast Africa, while others came from farther off, drawn by news that groups of peaceful souls were gathering to find a better place.

Remarkably, it happened very quickly, once the ones who wanted peace began to move, all well-behaved and pleased to follow those of them who seemed to sense the way to go. Back then, the beings who dwell in dimensions beyond our four found speaking to the hominids a lighter task than now, it is supposed, and leaders of the trek felt guiding tugs. The trip took only 57 years.

In Asia, then, they stayed and lived their quiet, simple lives. They slowly spread the way that primates tend to – newlyweds moved out away from what to them was ‘settled land’ to find their own domain; when children came they drew back to the tribe, but not quite all the way – and so tribes’ ranges grew by breathing in and out. Two other times the ranges leapt far distances: from 2660,000 to 2570,000 they penetrated Java and the southern seas, and from 2340,000 to 2270,000 they braved the frigid north and also higher ground. Massive and fecund these Asian man-apes were, and a feature of the land for two million years and maybe more, but halfway through this time, again set on the move by the fear of rowdy outlaws, groups drifted back to Africa around 2000,000, 1910,000, 1890,000, 1751,000, and 1640,000 B.C., and the faroff distant tale within a tale of forebears walking overland from Asia came down to those in Chesowanja and from there to a curragh paddler on Lake Tanganyika.

Somewhere, in Africa or Asia or on the road between, they tended to a gracile form and began to show on parts of their physique the start of sparsely hair-decked skin, and from heavy forest apes became lithe dwellers of savannahs. A constant in their makeup, though, and one that seems to have been prized by Shimmer, was that they were the animal that pulls up stakes, packs the tent, figuratively of course, and moves to find a better place. As fond as we may be of plots wherein the bad guys get their lickings from the previously placid citizen who has been driven to the end of his or her restraint, the deeper less dramatic truth is that from ape to protohominid to us the pennant of humanity has oftener been carried by the ones who wanted to live by what they knew was right without a fight, the ones who moved away. Shimmer thought the world of those, the ones who looked for peace and counted that a greater good than fixity.

When, three million years ago, the tribes of northeast Africa walked east to Asia, they were led by one of the first souls on earth, Shiver, Old Shiver, Old, Old Shiver. Even in those faroff days when Shiver was a protoman, even as a youth he had the means, even when his eyes were closed or looking somewhere else, of making you feel that someone had poured two silver streams of cold spring water down the channels by your spine: the means to make you shiver.

Shimmer may have watched for half a million years or so after earthly Pongidae had first advanced to where they made fit vehicles for souls about two million years ago and tried to understand their needs and natures. He watched small groups of hominids explore varieties of social structure, not only watched them failing, dying, succeeding, almost thriving, but also saw dense complications overlaid upon their simple need to live: the responsibilities placed upon the souls associated with the protohumans to prompt this species’ minds both to simulate the consequences of competing ways of acting and then to choose to act in concord with the Lord’s own laws, even though the foreviewing might show the likelihood of discomfort, even death, for those are the chores each soul is obligated to perform, and demanding as it is to have your fate until forever depend on whether you corrected the behavior of a transitory earthly creature unaware of your existence and free to disobey you, nevertheless, so it is for humans’ souls.

Some souls give up, give in, turn bad, decide to cut the trees to reach the fruits instead of climbing. Others – and no one, not even they, understand their reasons – keep plugging on along the paths that foster the Lord’s will and seem to have an interest in the welfare of creation and on earth particularly that of those most complex of creatures, ourselves.

As Shimmer watched our early selves, he seems to have decided that the most effectual beginning to his lives on earth would be made by being not a man or woman singly but both at once, one self in two separate bodies.

In 1542,578 B.C. he arranged to be conceived as twins, one boy, one girl, both sharing the same soul (though stronger in the male); his idea seems to have been to harmonize the genders and improve the lot of each by sampling their experiences and showing by example how the lives of every human could be eased through mutual compassion. It could have been a wonderfully constructive and potent means for hominid advancement, but the babes miscarried: the human frame and mind cannot usually withstand the stress encountered when two minds with no ‘partition’ between their consciousnesses develop and are closeted together in the confines of a womb. Some souls are permitted to ‘split’, to dwell within two people – most often as the only soul in each – but the originating soul and the split produced become insulated somewhat from each other; by contrast, what Shimmer had attempted with these early twins was to have two minds with perfect shared perception.

Shared perception between genders being blocked to him, Shimmer re-examined early hominid dynamics and concluded that more improvements in these protohuman’s lives could filter in through women than through the men: men left camp early, ran after animals or their carcasses all day, and returned to camp before sunset to eat, amuse themselves, and rest, while women rose and worked at many tasks throughout the day in and around the camp, which had the potential to become a laboratory for observing and inventing. Ninety-six years after the twins miscarried, in 1542,482 B.C. Shimmer was again conceived, but this time as a simple female embryo that, as with so many in those days, could not be brought to term.

This abortive pregnancy, as it happens, brings up a nasty side of primate life; two sides, in fact: incestuous forced rape and abortion by sexual battery. The brothers of the protowoman carrying this fetus had made her pregnant, but because the brothers did not want to have their object of pleasure distracted by an infant and not wanting to be known as the fathers of their sister’s child, they caused her to miscarry by bouts of gang rape during which the sister/mother’s internal organs and the fetus were battered and pummeled until the fetus died and, blessedly, was expelled. This became a habit for these souls, and if these behaviors should seem beyond the bounds of imagination, consider that a brief six hundred years ago, Chaucer’s Parson said: ‘Homicide is eek if a man approcheth to a womman by desir of lecherye thurgh which the child is perissed, or elles smiteth a womman witingly thurgh which she leseth hir child. Alle thise been homicides and horrible dedly sinnes.’

One hundred seventeen years later, Shimmer on his third attempt to live on earth arrived as a dark-eyed infant girl born into a family where she had four older brothers, indwelt by the same four souls who had been the agent of Shimmer’s prior female form’s conception and her death, and when their little sister was ten years of age, they raped her as they in other bodies had their sister those few generations before. This time too, when their sister’s pregnancy was not quite six months along, they descended, enraged and stiff, upon the child, for events, in the absence of a change of heart, repeat, and this had become a family tradition, passed on and on by each father to his sons.

*** 1542,348 B.C. *** Chesowanja, Kenya, Africa ***

At Seventeen years of age

The land here is flat, but the horizon, when I lift my head, is blocked by a range of cliffs and scree. Behind me there may be trees, but they are few and as good as leafless, not a forest or a shading grove. We are in the sun, and it is hot.

The grass. The grass is everywhere our flat land goes; it grows not quite as high as my legs are long. We have moved around in this space, our camp, and matted down the grass. The stalks and leaves, when they are bent against the ground, rub and fray beneath the soles of our feet, and the baking, dusty ground has been exposed and is starting to pack down to form a floor where it is comfortable to walk and sit or lie.

I see my arms. They are brownish-black and thin but capable. Smooth hair seems to cover me and lie along my skin, but the longest I can see, neither coarse nor fine but dark and unshiny, grows an inch and a half high along the upper surface of my forearms. It protects the backs of my hands, too, and the backs of my fingers halfway out to their second joint, although the palms and fingertips have no hair. I seem to be a large monkey.

I seem to be a woman, too, because the things I have to do today all will happen in this clearing that is no more than a dozen paces wide and which we have made in the grass; my tasks lie also out along the path of half-broken grass that leads to a place where water once flowed and cut a shallow, rocky-bottomed trench. On top of the near bank of that trench grows a grass which it is our job to find, because each plant has, or ought to have, a thing, an important part of the bushy top of that part of the plant that is neither leaf nor stalk, and we can pick these little things and roll them between our thumb and fingertips and when the men come home in the late afternoon eat them together here in our clearing.

It feels to me that there are five or six of us women here, and there may be one or two babies, but I cannot hear or see them now. I do see two women heading out along the path to pick the little bits of food. Their legs are almost straight, but their upper bodies curve forward from the waist. Like my arms, theirs hang down before their hips, but are flexed, and their hands are loose. Their gaze is on the ground in front of them, where they are going to step, where they might see something to keep or brush aside. The characteristic motions we make with our hands are outward backhand flicks: flicking aside a briar, flicking away a fly, flicking blood or water from our fingers. So often our intent seems to stop at our wrists, as though we had not yet discovered what our hands and fingers do.

When I rise up I see four of the men, off across the grasslands. They are about fifty yards from each other in a square, facing in towards something they will rip and cut apart to bring the pieces home. Those men will come back with food for us to eat, and they will demand to know what food we have for them.

I am looking at the backs of my companions going down the path, and I am thinking of the grains they will bring back. I wonder how we will prepare the grain to eat, and a picture forms in my mind of a flat rock a little wider than two hands, worn into a hollow on the top, where the seeds could lie and maybe then be rubbed or crushed by our hands, a bone, a piece of wood, a stone. But first the seeds must be collected, and my companions can carry back a bare few grains from the dry creek bank to camp, one cupped handful at a time or squeezed inside a fist. The seeds trickle out between their fingers as they walk bent forward. We need something to carry grains in, something big enough so that we only have to go and come once or twice a day along the path, something to fill up this flat stone I have pictured with a generous mound of grains.

I step to the tall grass and pick several tough, straight, flexible stalks and a clutch of long leaves. I cross three stalks on top of my half-closed fist and drape leaves over them into my hand and pull the ends and hold them tight. Then with my other hand I tuck a leaf’s end in near the center of this star of stalks and begin – flick, flick – to go around the star, over, under, over, under, poking the leaf in towards the center – flick, flick. Another leaf, this time under, over, under, over. Keep shaping the stalks up, keep winding the leaves around. Come close to the end of the stalks and bend them over and tuck them in to lock the leaves in place. Look: when I let go my hand it holds together. It could be better, but it will work for now, and it is a start.

I walk down the path after my companions; I hoot to them to turn around and wait. We shall all pick grains into this – what? – this basket together and bring it back together. Their days will be a little happier and better now.

The four monkeys that the little lady had seen hunting out upon the grasslands were her older brothers, bullying and belligerent, who injected murder, cruelty, enslavement, torture, and perversion deep into the foundations of anthropic cultures; as their souls will encounter Shimmer time and again, they unfortunately have to be named: Mud, Muck, Mire, and Murk should make the point. Mud and Muck are thugs. Mire aspires. Murk is truly dangerous and unceasingly connives at mischief. Do not expect these four to hunt with any shred of mercy; indeed, do not expect them usually to hunt at all, for their specialty is throwing stones to drive away hyaenas from a greater predator’s kill: they are scavengers, in fact.

They have another sister, Morass, bad luck for her. Mud, Muck, Mire, and Murk, her brothers, use her for release of sexual arousal when they come back to the camp with, say, a scrawny forelimb of an inexpertly butchered young gazelle. Morass, for their game to work, must always be kept hungry, so her brothers snatch away from her the nuts or grains that she may find, and terrorize and even kill the ones who dare to share their food with her. Morass may only eat what Mud, Muck, Mire, and Murk throw to her, and only eat that while bent over, rump in air, face to ground, while her brothers hammer their erections in, turn after turn, monkey-style, from behind. Their concept of invention is to ravage both of Morass’ exposed openings, while Morass’ mind becomes confused, for she conflates sex with eating, never understands affection, panics at the thought of sharing love, conceives her deep resentful jealousies and lust for power, conceives, too, poor ambiguously fathered offspring, most of which will be aborted. The females of Morass’ line have been, will be sex slaves of fathers, uncles, and brothers who for their part find their arousal to depend on terror in their victims: as said above, it’s a family tradition.

*** 1542,345 B.C. *** Chesowanja, Kenya, Africa ***

At twenty years of age

It was night in the clearing in the grass. One of the men had been trying to get my attention; now he lay on his back full-length on the ground, offering himself and enticing me. His body was trim, and the hair all down his front looked clean and brushed; his face promised gentle enjoyment. What attracted my attention most was the erection which had appeared on his body, so new, bold, cheerful, and hope-filled, a treat for me to use to have an interval of time when there would be no world beyond my feelings. His black scrotum hung below it, strange and glossy like a dark-skinned twin-globed fruit.

I stroked the scrotum with my fingers, stepped across his body, and sat down on his erection, still on my feet. Our legs are strong. Now I was leaning forward over him and moving up and down to feel that delicious friction inside me. Then twice as fast, and reached down beside me with both hands to pull him deepest in, and he helped. Then, I was in a place away from grass and heat and night and constant, grinding needs, and while the erection added to the fluid down below, I raised my head, saw the stars, then closed my eyes and opened my throat from which escaped a rushing, whistling, hissing cry.

I lifted off him and crouched above his thighs to clean him off. I sucked out the last of his milk, licked all around the erection’s glossy tip, then down the sides, slipped up the skin to enclose it all, then licked the outside clean and bending low dried him in the soft hair on my stomach. I reached between my legs to take some of the honey and milk, tasted it, and held my fingers to his lips to suck and lick. Then I moved up and let him lick me clean.

Consciousness of being in the clearing in the grass returned, and I walked the perimeter, looking out over the grass into the night, stood at the paths and checked every speck and detail I could see, assigning every one to a feature remembered from the day. After these rounds, the man was lying there still, half watching me, and I thought, why not, and settled down to sleep not touching him, but close enough to feel his body’s heat. As I fell asleep, I thought I felt his palm and fingers just lightly cup the top of my head.

You will not be surprised to learn that the male who loved the protolady was Ahalya; yes, their genders in that life were backwards from the usual configuration.

*** 1815 A.D. *** Dove Cottage, England ***

At thirty years of age

These tales are told as dreams to a man upstairs in the bedroom of Dove Cottage in the Lake Country of England, in that part sheltered on the north by the fells and open on the downhill southern side to Grasmere, one of the smaller lakes. At birth the man had been called Thomas Quincey, but he prepended a genitive to the family name so others call him now De Quincey.

William Wordsworth used to have Dove Cottage. Wordsworth had been the principal target of De Quincey’s admiration for a decade, even more, back before he had met the Wordsworths in 1805. Wordsworth and his household had left Dove Cottage in 1808, and he, De Quincey, had taken the place over the next year, in 1809.

The Wordsworths had not moved more than a pleasant walk away, to Allen Bank, a place with rough edges – the flues smoked – but always merry. De Quincey had dropped by often, held in close regard back then and struck by deep affection for all the Wordsworths, especially their children and, of their children, in particular baby Catherine.

That daughter had been born the year the Wordsworths left Dove Cottage, and she lived her short life, four years long, at Allen Bank and then at the Grasmere Rectory. There had been other reasons why the Wordsworths had moved from the Rectory to Rydal Mount in 1813, the year after losing both Catherine and Thomas, born in 1806, but for Mary Wordsworth not to have to see each day and evening the places where her babes had played and died may have been a cause to leave, or maybe not: would parents rather be where they could bow their heads in memory of tiny lives as each hour passed? Even though we as souls have had to face the deaths of our children in one lifetime after another, no single answer to that question will ever fit all people, times, and places. For whatever reasons, the Wordsworths had closed the doors of Allan Bank and the Rectory behind them, and De Quincey too had had to add those losses to his others.

For consider this: Sita dwelt in Mary Wordsworth. And consider this as well: Thomas De Quincey, in whom dwelt Shimmer, paid a visit to the Wordsworth household in 1805. Remember this: Shimmer and Sita had seen each other last one Arabian night in 1788. They had been a little family, with a baby daughter whose soul was one whom we may call Beata; Ahalya visited in the daughter often for the pleasure of being with Shimmer and Sita once again. They were sitting before their campfire underneath the starry desert sky when riders appeared out of the darkened sands behind them. One rider, Mud in another body, had held his rifle by the barrel and swung it so that its heavy stock dashed in the father’s left cheekbone and temple as he turned, killing him at once. The riders grabbed the infant daughter out of the mother’s embrace – one held an arm, another held a leg – and spurred their mounts in opposite directions: the child was torn apart before the mother’s eyes. They tore each half in half again. The riders turned and dumped the pieces of the body over the mother’s head, then leapt down and raped the mother. They left her to wander bleeding in the desert for three weeks before death released her. At that moment De Quincey was a toddler almost three years old, so sick with raging fever and grief for a dead, beloved sister that the soul who had been with him since conception left, returned to Heaven, and from the desert in Arabia, Shimmer flew to England and restored De Quincey, a bereaved soul for a sorrowing child.

And now imagine these two poor sundered souls meeting: Mary Wordsworth walks through the vestibule to answer the knock at Dove Cottage’s front door, she gravely swings it open, and there stands revealed De Quincey, twenty years of age. Of course they both are swept away. Of course the boy born next year is christened Thomas. To watch over his son, Shimmer splits and dwells in William Wordsworth beginning in 1806; the soul present from conception stayed, and the two souls shared one body. In 1807, Shimmer and Sita, De Quincey and Mary, still are ardently in love, and Catherine is conceived.

William Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, had a good soul although a young one, but she was in love with her brother, loved him in all the ways that it is possible for a woman to love a man, would go to any length to protect him, as she saw it, and to cleanse the house the outsider’s offspring had to be expunged: incest but no cuckoo’s nest. So Catherine had to die; it was not the child’s fault, but just something that had to be done because of who she was. Thomas had to follow, but the measles took him, providentially, before Dorothy could act again. And Shimmer knew, and Sita knew, and everyone suspected, and the grief that De Quincey and Mary felt was like a toppling black basaltic cliff.

As the end of 1815 neared, there was a local girl of country ways De Quincey saw, a farm lass, and although Rydal Mount was a mere mile and a half to the east, an easy, pleasant walk, the Wordsworths were becoming finer, and what with the awkwardness and the way De Quincey flouted social mores, their door opened to him with less enthusiasm and to even walk in that direction caused De Quincey pain, so he was most days and nights alone, in fact lonely, and he used an aid to sleep in doses that by all rights should have killed him.

Four or five years later, looking back, he wrote:

‘. . . at night, when I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were so sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before Oedipus or Priam – before Tyre – before Memphis.’

*** 1542,343 B.C. *** Chesowanja, Kenya, Africa ***

At twenty-two years of age

I see us walking through the grass, moving to another place. My companions and I walk in a tight group, and the men are ahead and to both sides in an arc, nearly a semi-circle, about a hundred feet away.

We are starting to have things that we take with us when we leave a camp. There is a basket of food that one woman carries in her hands with great care, but it encumbers her and could all too easily be dropped. What to do about the problem is not clear, but I shall find a way to carry what we need while keeping our hands and arms free.

I see a baby at my breasts, and I think that infants are the most fascinating part of this world. I am utterly entranced by the small one, and the fact that I can and do nourish her – it is a little girl – from my body amazes me and brings me bliss.

I see a path through the grass leading to a silted pool. A grazing animal, a wildebeest perhaps, lies on its side in the water, almost completely covered except for a patch over its left ribs. It has been there for months, for it reeks, it stinks, it poisons air and water: there will be no drinking from this pool today. The woman who found it sidesteps down the banking towards the water and the corpse, does not force herself closer to the smell but springs sideways back up the bank, giving a scream of disgust mixed with alarm. The bloated body kills any desire to ease my thirst at this waterhole, but something else I see gives me an idea: patches of this animal’s skin glisten where hair has loosened and slipped away, and that smooth, dead hide looks, how else to put it, useful. I carry a sharp-edged flake of stone with me these days, and squinting my eyes and covering my nose I step into the water beside this rotting beast and scrape away more hair. I slice the skin on the animal’s left side, peel it away, and drag it to the far side of the pool, where I scrape the outside clean of hair and the inside free of soft tissue, then wash and rub the hide with sand.

I carry it up to an open grove of trees and drape it across the flat surface of the split trunk of a fallen tree and place rocks along its edges to hold it down while it dries in the sun, then wait.

The hide got smaller and very stiff when it dried, but after it had been soaked again in water in an attempt to resoften it, it could also be stretched somewhat. I cut a band off one of the wet hide’s long edges and wrapped it around a stick, tucking in the ends the way we do with the baskets, and when that dried it gripped the wood more tightly than bark grips a tree. I split the stick partway down its length and wedged a splintered rib bone into the cleft, then bound the wood and bone with strips of hide: the combination held together, and holding the stick in both hands I could scrape a furrow in the ground and dig up roots.

My companions do not seem to mind that I take time to do such things, and in fact I think they find it fair that I should make things they can use instead of always helping them find food. They bring me curious objects now, glassy stones, long thorns, strong fibers pulled from bark, and I begin to be content.

*** 1542,342 B.C. *** Chesowanja ***

At twenty-three years of age

On the last day of my life I walked up a shallow rise through dry stiff grass no higher than my ankles to reach a grove of leafless trees with dusty pale gray trunks. I stopped with the nearest tree trunk ahead and to my left, as cicadas rattled and sang, and looked first at the wide ridges and deep furrows of that tree’s bark, then peered past it farther into the grove. My attention and mind were cast out ahead of me, trying to spy danger and at the same time imagine whether anything I saw – some stick, some material, something new – could become part of an idea about how it might be used, and so I had no sense at all of anyone behind me, but in the two seconds between the first painful dizziness and then the final spread of darkness, these thoughts spun through my damaged brain.

I thought: I have been struck on the upper right rear domed portion of my skull, and the bone has given way so completely that I could rest my cupped hand in the wound. I have been hit by a large round stone which must have been thrown, because no one is within an arm’s reach behind me. A powerful man must be killing me, for none of my companions could throw so large a stone that hard. But how did it come partly from above? That would mean that it was thrown from some way off, but then it should not have struck so hard or accurately. The darkness has erased half of what I see, my body from my shoulders down no longer matters, and I seem to have retreated into the undamaged side of my head. Now I am lifting partway out beyond my skull. A stone