When Mother was done with the awl she wiped away the blood and took a piece of ocher, rubbing the crumbling rock deep into the wounds she had made. Eyes mewled as the salty stuff stung her damaged flesh.

Then Mother took her hand. “Come,” she said. “Water.”

She led the reluctant, baffled girl through the listless herbivores down to the lake. They splashed out into the water, their toes sinking into the clinging lake-bottom mud, until the water came up to their knees. They stood still until the ripples had settled, and the muddy water lay still and smooth before them.

Mother bade Eyes look down at her reflection.

Eyes saw that a vivid crimson spiral looped from her eye and over her cheek. Blood still seeped from the rudimentary tattoo. When she splashed water over her face the blood washed away, but the spiral remained. Eyes gaped and grinned — though the flexing of her face made her aching wounds hurt even more. She understood now what Mother had been doing.

The tattooing was a technique Mother had tried out on herself. It was painful, of course. But it was pain — the pain in her head, the pain of her loss of Silent — that had given birth to the great transformations of her life. Pain was to be welcomed, celebrated. What better way to make this child one of her own?

Hand in hand, the two of them walked back to the shore.

For day after relentless day the drought continued.

The lake became a dank puddle at the center of a bowl of cracked mud. The water was fouled by the droppings and corpses of the animals — but the people drank it nonetheless, for they had no choice, and many of them suffered diarrhea and other ailments. Among the animals the die back continued. But there was little fresh meat now, and there was ferocious competition from the wolves and hyenas and cats.

The bands, of skinny folk and bone-brows alike, stared at each other sullenly.

Among Mother’s people, the first to die was an infant. Her little body had been depleted by diarrhea. Her mother keened over the little corpse, then she gave it up to her sisters, who took it away to put it in the ground. But the dirt was dry, hard packed, and the weakened folk had trouble digging into it. Next day another died, an old man. And two the next, two more children.

It was after that, after they had started to die, that the people began to come to Mother.

They approached her pallet, with the gleaming skull on its post. They would sit on the dusty ground, gazing at Mother or Eyes or the animals and geometric designs they had scratched everywhere. More of them began to copy Mother’s practices, pasting spirals and starbursts and wavy lines on their faces and arms. And they would gaze into Silent’s empty eye sockets, as if seeking wisdom there.

It was a matter of why. Mother had been able to tell them why her son had died, of an invisible illness nobody else had even been able to name; she had been able to pick out and punish Sour, the woman who had caused that death. Surely if anybody knew why this drought was afflicting them, it would be Mother.

Mother studied this rough congregation, her mind working relentlessly, ideas and interconnections sparking. The drought had a cause; of course it did. Behind every cause there was an intention, a mind, whether you could see it or not. And if there was a mind, you could negotiate with it. After all her people had already been traders, instinctive negotiators, for seventy thousand years.

But how was she to negotiate with the rain? What did she have to trade?

And overlaid on such musings was her suspicions about the people. Which of them could be trusted? Which of them talked about her when she wasn’t present? Even now, as they gazed up at her in a kind of desultory hope, were they somehow communicating, sending secret messages to each other with gestures, looks, even scribbled marks in the dust?

In the end, the answer came to her.

Ox, the big short-tempered man who had challenged her after the death of Sour, came to join her rough congregation. He was weakened by diarrhea.

Mother stood abruptly and approached Ox. Sapling followed her.

Ox, weakened and ill, sat piteously in the dirt with the rest. Mother placed a hand on his head, gently. He looked up, bewildered, and she smiled at him. Then she beckoned him to follow her. Ox stood, clumsy, dizzy, stumbling. But he let Sapling guide him back to Mother’s own pallet. There, Mother bade him lay down.

She took a wooden spear, its end charred, blood-soaked, hardened from use. She faced the people. She said, “Sky. Rain. Sky make rain. Earth drink rain.” She glanced up at the cloudless bowl of the sky. “Sky not make rain. Angry, angry. Earth drink much rain. Thirsty, thirsty. Feed earth.”

And, with a single fluid movement, she plunged the spear into Ox’s chest. He convulsed, his fists grabbing the spear. Blood spewed from his wide-open mouth, and urine spilled down his legs. But with all her strength Mother twisted the spear, and felt it rip at the soft organs within. Flopping, Ox fell back on the pallet, and did not move again. Mother smiled and wrenched out the spear. Blood continued to spill onto the ground.

There was silence. Even Sapling and Eyes were staring, open-mouthed.

Mother bent and grabbed a handful of sticky, blood-soaked dust. “See! Dust drinks. Earth drinks.” And she crammed the dust into the half mouth of her child; it stained its small teeth red. “Rain comes,” she said gently. “Rain comes.” Then she glared around at the staring people.

One by one they looked down, yielding before her gaze.

Honey, daughter of Sour, broke the spell. With a scream of despair she picked up a handful of cobbles and hurled them at Mother. They clattered uselessly on the ground. Then Honey ran away toward the lake.

Mother watched her go, eyes hard.

In her heart Mother believed everything she had said, everything she had done. The fact that it served a political purpose to have sacrificed poor Ox — for he was one of those who most openly opposed her — did not perturb her belief in herself and her actions. Ox’s death had been expedient, but it would also mollify the rain. Yes, that was how it was. Leaving Sapling to dispose of the corpse, she walked into her shelter.

Despite the sacrifice, the rain did not come. The people waited as day succeeded arid day, and not a cloud broke the washed-out dome of the sky. Gradually they grew restive. Honey, particularly, became more openly derisive of Mother, Eyes, Sapling, and those who clung to them.

But Mother simply waited, serene. She was convinced she was right, after all. It was just that Ox’s death had not been sufficient appeasement for the sky, the soil. It was simply a question of finding the right trade-off, that was all. All she needed was patience — even though her own flesh was hanging on her bones.

One day Eyes came to her. She was led by Ant-eater. Gaunt as they were, Mother could see that they wanted to couple.

Ant-eater was not mocking now, but supplicating. And now it would be a kind of love, or pity, on the part of the young man, for the tattoo Mother had crudely carved into Eyes’s face had become infected by the stagnant lake water. Its spiral shape was barely visible beneath a mass of swollen, leaking flesh that covered one half of the girl’s face.

But Mother frowned. This match wouldn’t be right. She stood and took Eyes’s hand, prizing it away from the dismayed Ant-eater. Then she walked the girl through the scattered people until she found Sapling. He was lying on his back, gazing up at an empty sky.

Mother pushed Eyes into the dirt beside Sapling. He looked up at Mother, baffled. Mother said, “You. You. Fuck. Now.”

Sapling looked at Eyes, obviously trying to mask his revulsion. Though they had spent much time in each other’s company with Mother, he had never shown any sexual interest in Eyes, even before her face had become so badly disfigured, nor had she shown any in him.