I emerged into a tongue of land cut deep into a crevice of the mountain. Leopold had described the village as a seed pressed into a rocky furrow, and it seemed exactly that: a furtive garden in a fold of stone. The mountains angled up on all sides, shielding the village, protecting it. I understood then how the Icemen had survived. The only way in or out of the village was the narrow arcade of caves, that single crack in the wall. They were surrounded by a fortress of rock.
As Vita had told me, the village had grown since Leopold had described it in his field notes. Where once there were only caves, now there were stone huts. They were primitive shelters, cut from the mountain, the walls constructed of rough stone that appeared to be nothing more than the natural outcroppings of granite, the stone rooftops speckled with moss. This explained why the village hadn’t been discovered from above—not by helicopter or airplane or satellite. Even if a helicopter had flown overhead, the curve of the mountains hid the Icemen so completely that it would be difficult to discern life below. The mountains enfolded the valley so that everything—the stone huts, the cultivated plants, the population of archaic humans who came to greet me—remained invisible to the outside world.
I walked over an expanse of moss-covered rock toward Aki’s tribe.
I have never taken it lightly, that moment of contact with the Icemen. I knew that they were vulnerable to the modern world. Vulnerable to me. They had persevered through the millennia without contact with the rest of humankind. Only pure, inviolate isolation had protected them.
Through the vicissitudes of time and geography, through the cruel workings of evolution, through all the hazards of climate, of migrations, food shortages, sickness, invasion: we stood face to face there, then, together. It was a miracle. By all measures, they should have been extinct. Like their direct ancestors, Neanderthals, or their more distant relations, Cro-Magnon, or any of the other dozens of archaic hominids that had evolved and perished—they should have been crushed by disease and competition. If the Icemen were a rare treasure of biology, I was the most privileged person on the planet: their witness. What I did not anticipate, and what has remained a source of wonder through all the years since that day, is how our meeting would transform me.
“My name is Alberta,” I said to the gathering crowd. “Granddaughter of Vittoria Montebianco.”
At the sound of my voice, more Icemen emerged from the stone huts, men and women and a few children. They looked at me, staring at me in wonder. I couldn’t help but imagine Leopold Montebianco there, standing at my side, his jet-black hair and flamboyant cravat, surveying these pale men and women as they crowded around. I imagined the thrill of discovery he must have felt upon realizing what he had found. I felt it, too, a buzzing in the chest, the rare privilege of seeing something only a handful of people had ever seen before.
The Icemen gathered around. There were fifty of them, perhaps fewer. I scanned their faces, looking for aberrant traits, but they were all eerily similar to Aki in appearance. The defining features of their kind—the lack of pigmentation of skin and hair, the enormous blue eyes, the rough-hewn brow, the high cheekbones and long limbs—showed little variation. The full lips and the flatness of the nose, the pointed ears, the particular mold of the chin—these features were uniform. There was nothing of Leopold in any of these people. Nothing of me.
There was no variety in their clothing either. The women wore white woven tunics over loose pants, while the men wore cargo pants and leather vests that revealed their hair-covered arms. I remembered the picture of the Yeti in Justine’s article, thick white hair covering its body, and while the Icemen might be mistaken for such a creature from a distance, up close they were far more human than anything that might resemble a beast. They were all as beautiful as Aki.
It surprised me to find them so different from Leopold’s descriptions. While Vita had told me of the community’s progress, I had imagined a struggling and ragged community on the brink of extinction. I had imagined the Icemen to be primitive, without resources, suffering the elements like animals in a cave. But that was not at all how I found them. Theirs was a human civilization, one with all the elements we would recognize as such: cultivated plants, shelters, clothes, and tools. Their technologies were simple, but simple in the way materials of the medieval period would seem simple to the modern eye. They raised goats and stored the milk. They wove very simple rough fabrics on a loom. Although they needed Vita’s assistance, they had developed all the basic skills that could lead, one day, to survival.
Jabi, the man I had met with Aki on the east lawn with Vita, stepped from the crowd and turned to the others. From the way he pointed at me, and the sharpness of his voice, I knew he was angry that Aki had brought me there.
One of the children started to cry. She hid her face in her hands to block me from view.
“Jabi is telling them to be afraid of you,” Aki whispered.
“They have no reason to be afraid,” I said.
“He is telling them that you are dirty. He says you will bring disease. That you will kill with metal weapons.”
“I’m healthy,” I said. “And I have no weapons.” I remembered the knife in the leather sack. No weapons that I intended to use.
Aki listened to Jabi, his expression dark.
“I thought Vita has helped the village,” I said.
“She has not been here for two generations,” he said. “The oldest remember her. But most do not.”
As Jabi spoke, the others turned their eyes to me, watching, assessing. I could feel them turning against me. I glanced back, to the opening in the mountain, aware of my precarious position. I wouldn’t be able to protect myself if they attacked me. The narrow passage was the only way in or out of the village. If they blocked the passage, I would be trapped.
Just as I was assessing my chances of escaping, Aki came to my side, his arm brushing against mine.
He lifted an arm into the air, to announce that he would speak. The others quieted and listened. He opened the leather sack, showing them that I had brought gifts. The energy of the crowd shifted, and they came to me, touching me, greeting me in their strange, guttural language. They said the word “Simi,” the word Joseph had written on his drawings of the blue men, a word I would come to learn meant “fellowship.” It would be months before I would understand even the rudiments of their speech, but I saw from Aki’s gestures—and the way his voice softened when he looked at me—that he had convinced them of my intentions.
“Now,” Aki said, “give them the gifts.”
I distributed jars of preserved fruit, a few rings of dried sausages, a container of goat cheese from the mews. I pulled out medicine and bandages, a sharp kitchen knife. Jars of aspirin and tubes of antibacterial disinfectant. Small things to us that could prove invaluable to them.
I removed a box of plastic freezer bags I’d found in the pantry, opened one up, and demonstrated how it worked. The bags interested them the most. They pulled the bags out of the box and passed them around, dropping in sausage and goat cheese, opening and closing them.
Aki gestured to a woman, who stepped close to meet me. It was Uma, the woman Vita had taught at the castle. She took the leather sack with its jars of painkillers and tubes of antibacterial ointment. The rolls of bandages and packs of antibiotics. A big bottle of rubbing alcohol and cotton. She threw the sack over her shoulder and smiled at me. “Welcome,” she said.
I may have mollified the others with my gifts, but Jabi watched me, his expression filled with animosity and accusation. I didn’t understand why he hated me so intensely, but it was clear that he wanted me to leave. He said something to me, and when I didn’t respond, he moved closer, then closer still, until he stood inches from me, his blue eyes piercing, his smell overwhelming. I stepped back, alarmed by his proximity, ready to turn and walk away, when he struck me.
I understand now that this attack was much bigger than Jabi and me, or even the Montebianco family and the Icemen. This was a moment of reckoning, an evolutionary clash, a confrontation between past and the present. We were part of a war begun some forty thousand years before, when Homo sapiens surpassed other humans to become the dominant life-form on the planet. My people had survived through strength and intelligence, by taking over shared resources, by gradually pushing out the less adept hominids. We survived by creating communities to protect us. We ate well, formulated medicines, reproduced more often, lived longer. We developed speech and advanced tools, grew crops and built shelters. We created language, religion, writing. We became masters of our reproduction, our habitat, our environment. Our technologies allowed us to exist apart from nature and to regard it as something other than ourselves. From this position of dominance, I watched Jabi, knowing that he could easily kill me, but it wouldn’t change a thing. His kind would die. Mine would survive.
Jabi pushed me to the ground. I fell, pain slicing through me. I pulled myself up and tried to stand, but a second blow knocked me flat onto my stomach, socking the wind from my lungs. I gasped, trying to breathe, as Jabi stood above me, growling, his long yellow teeth bared. There was a rock in his hand. A sickening, triumphant smile grew on his face as he brought it down on my head.