Ancient Enemy by Michael McBride Page B

standing on some sort of level ground and surrounded by deer and bison. The sarcophagus-man was inverted beneath them, his feet touching those of the central monkey figure, as though he were its reflection upon a placid lake. There were others like him now, only smaller and darker and with holes for eyes.
    The next etching reminded me more of the first, except for the style in which it had been carved. The men now had trapezoidal bodies with ovular heads and rode horses through fields overflowing with wild game. They danced and played flutes of some kind amid what could either have been stylized wheat or maize.
    And then came the sarcophagus-man, beside whom other sarcophagus-men with the horns of different animals erupted from the ground like a geyser. A crescent moon shined down upon a forest from which animals and men alike had been hanged by their heels.
    The subsequent petroglyph depicted men armed with shields emblazoned with clockwise spirals, spears, and bows and arrows on what looked like a cliff, underneath which a ladder led downward to where the trees now stood with empty boughs and the ground was littered with dead animals. The sarcophagus-men hung upside down from beneath the trunks of the trees like roots.
    There was no mistaking the next few panels, for I already knew this part of the story. There were battles between men with shields; the trapezoidal men with their clockwise-spiral shields and the sarcophagus-men with counterclockwise spirals on theirs. The House of Many Windows with small faces looking out from each and their spirits rising from above its roof into a sun with extremely long rays. Men on horseback with large bundles of their possessions and a mass exodus into the trees, leaving behind a band of warriors whose depictions demonstrated an increased amount of care and detail. I couldn’t help but think that was because they had been the ones who carved the more recent drawings.
    The next picture showed these men descending from beneath the sun and the trees into darkness represented by the moon. Each stood on an invisible stair, as though captured in the moment of descent toward where the sarcophagus-men hung upside down like bats. There was no sign of a struggle, only the victors holding high the horned heads of their enemy and binding them to the stalagmites that would eventually absorb their bodies and serve as a warning to all who entered. And then the passage was sealed with a stone upon which the plus sign inside two concentric circles had been carved and placed beneath the counterclockwise spiral.
    When I reached the end, I stopped and looked back toward the beginning, at the two figures first emerging from the darkness into the light, now halfway across the chamber at the farthest extent of my beam’s range. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, but felt as though I’d followed the flow of the narrative well enough. I just stared at the sarcophagus-man, whose primitive depiction stared back at me through eyes carved with such care that their ferocity was impossible to mistake.
    The next images were in a different style and an undeniably different hand, but were no more recent. There were seven men: one held out a palm from which smoke rose, the second a staff, the third a plus-wheel, and the other four combinations of weapons and shields. I had a pretty good idea who they must have been. This time it was they who were underground and a lone sarcophagus-man standing above them, outside of a house surrounded by trees and beneath a crescent moon. And then there were only four, lying on the floor of a circular room. The fifth stood over them, holding high a horned head.
    Then there was the plus-sign stone again, sealing off the hole in the mountain once more.
    A part of me rebelled against the idea of a literal interpretation of the storyline. Here I was, trying to make sense of eight-hundred-year-old petroglyphs of monkey-men and horned sarcophagus-guys in an effort to understand