Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Six: Little Mother and Little Sister

30,000 years ago: 

Five miles under the Alps, where the pressure was so intense and the darkness so fertile that it managed to squeeze a life out of nothingness, Eve woke up, and wanted to know who she was. She knew she existed, because she was thinking, but she didn't know what it was that was doing the thinking, or how.

The first thing she did was imagine a space for herself to be in, and the living rock shuffled up to make room for her. It shrank back from her outstretched hand to form a dark, dripping cave.

Next, she discovered that she could feel, and spent a few minutes happily patting the rocks, enjoying their slick and jagged texture. Then she raised her hands to her face and felt its contours – much softer and squishier than those of the rocks, much harder to read. She wanted to see herself, but, never having encountered anything like a mirror, she imagined herself the way she had imagined the cave. 

She made a replica of herself – a sister – as accurate as she could make it from simply feeling her face in the darkness. It was prettier than her: its face was more symmetrical, its chin stronger, its mouth broader. But it burned with the same curiosity, and it was soon discovering its own senses, running its hands over the slick outcrops of rock.

Later, when Eve had seen such a thing as a mirror, she called her Mirror – or Myrrha, as it came to be spelled after her sojourn in Ancient Greece. But for now, she just called her sister.

Eve saw her own nature reflected in her sister's face, but she found that it answered nothing. Her nature was unformed. The only thing she knew about herself was the fact that she wanted to know. 

Still, she welcomed the company. She imagined more caves and more tunnels for them to explore, and the rock bowed its head to her like a faithful servant. Stalactites grew down from the ceiling to touch her hair. If she wandered off a ledge, the rock rose up to meet her. If she tried to climb, a sheer wall would arrange itself into steps beneath her feet.

And so the two just-born girls wandered through the darkness under the world hand-in-hand, always climbing, always looking for new things to see. After days or months of this, they came to a place where the rocks would no longer obey Eve. It was quite easy to spot. The currents of air were fresher, and kissed their faces with a slight breeze. But it was only an accidental kiss, and not a kiss of allegiance.

Myrrha and Eve concluded that this was no longer their realm, but they still wanted to see it. Besides, they soon discovered that Eve could make an opening into 'the deep world', as they called it, wherever she was, just by tracing the outline of a door in the air and grasping an imaginary handle. 

Eve couldn't make steps anymore, so they clung on to handholds in the rock, clambered over ledges, all the time guessing, with the utmost excitement, what they would find around the next bend in the tunnel. And this new realm wasn't inert. As they went on, they discovered spiders, centipedes, and best of all, bats – chittering and swooping, hanging from the ceiling like curled-up leaves. 

Eve fell in love with them at once. She spent so long trying to get one to land on her outstretched arm that even Myrrha got bored and dragged her away, promising new wonders – maybe even better than bats – in the next cave.

Then, so slowly that they didn't realize what was happening at first, daylight filtered down to them, dividing things, infusing them with colour, giving them a finer level of detail. The world that they had thought so lovingly simple became a lot more complicated then. But neither of them could have guessed how complicated it would get when they encountered human beings.

First came a cave of red hand-prints. Eve and Myrrha measured their own hands against them and giggled. Then came a huge cavern filled with animal-paintings in shades of ochre-red, clay-brown, charcoal-black and sulphurous yellow. Black bulls and round-bellied horses, woolly rhinoceroses butting horns, cave lions with sleek muzzles and serenely-closed eyes. Everything was infused with a sense of motion, because the cave-walls were so uneven, and the light played such devilish tricks.