CRO-MAGNON (39 page)

The chief surveyed the others. He fingered the eagle feather above his right ear and gazed at the surrounding mountains.

Leya waited. She had done all she could. What would she do if . . .

Ronan turned back. “You, your child, and the wolf will live with Alys for the time being.” A pause. “So long as the animal does not cause trouble.”

“
Fair enough,” she answered, as if she had some say in the matter. She felt her stomach unclench. Her little family was provisionally accepted, and she would not be molested by Mungo.

But it was clear that that her nemesis did not consider the matter closed. He already resented Brann, and he was a violent man. She also knew that he aspired to become chief and, as the tribe’s best hunter, might eventually do so. And that, she knew, did not bode well for herself, Brann, or Fel.

#

The tall woman met the party half way up the hill from the Shortface encampment. Gar saw tears in her dark eyes. Ignoring him, she pushed past Ronan and bestowed a big kiss on Leya, wrapping her carefully in her long arms so as not to squash Brann.

“
I thought you drowned,” she said.

Leya’s eyes were also wet. “I almost did.” She turned to Gar, who now stood beside her holding Fel’s ruff. “My friend, Gar; my
mator,
Alys.”

“
Life you,” Gar said, failing to get his tongue completely around the newly learned Shortface greeting.

“
Life to you,” Alys replied, her tone reserved.

Leaning back, she inspected Brann, and Gar could see no emotion as her dark eyes ranged over the heavy brow and swept cheekbones of the
tot.

She said to Leya, “Is Gar the father of your
baban?
”

“
No. I’ll tell you later.” Beckoning to Gar, Leya started down the hill with her
mator
. Gar, still holding Fel’s ruff, hurried to catch up.

Sandwiched with Fel between the two women and the greeting party, he was mindful of the five armed men. But he sensed that these people’s social customs were more finely tuned than his clan’s and that his status as a guest carried weight.

Still, he was a Flathead and they were Shortfaces. There had long been an uneasy truce between the two peoples, and he knew that the aggressive man called Mungo had disliked him on sight, a mutual feeling. The flesh on his back crawled, but he kept his gaze straight ahead.

The other females were waiting for the group near the first longhouse. The closest, a subdued-looking woman trailing a boy just out of the toddler stage, embraced Leya. Gar could see no reaction as she, too, saw that Leya’s
tot
was half Flathead.

“
So, you’re a
mator
also, Leya.”

Leya dipped her head. “Life to you, Nola.” She smiled at the boy. “I see Vonn walks.”

So far so good.
Gar wondered how the others would react to Leya’s return with a Flathead companion and a half-breed
tot
.

The little boy called Vonn suddenly reached out and tugged on Fel’s gray fur. Gar jerked the wolf back, as no clan kid would have done such a thing without first getting to know the animal. Did these people not have common sense?

“
Fel!” Leya said, and Nola rushed forward. But Fel only wagged his bushy tail.

The party moved on, Leya causing a stir as she walked through the small crowd carrying Brann on her shoulder so that everyone could see, Alys walking ahead and looking defiant, Nola and Vonn trailing the duo. Gar, watching the Shortfaces closely, perceived a gamut of emotions.

Bringing up the rear with Fel, he was the subject of “oohs” and “ahhs” and furtive touches as he walked the gauntlet of women and children. He supposed that none had seen a Flathead close up.

Not all the exclamations were directed at him, he realized. Leya had taught him the Shortface word for
tot,
and also the disparaging term
Flathead.
Several times he heard the words spoken together.

As the group approached the larger of the two longhouses Gar saw frost pits with buckskin covers, and a blackened bonfire hub circled by peeled logs. Alys held aside a large rawhide drape while Leya entered with Brann, Nola with Vonn, and himself with Fel.

Inside, the smoky air was filled with a heady aroma of slow-roasting meat. Gar saw a half-score of peaked skin tents stretching away, each facing its own small stone hearth under a separate vent hole in the arched ceiling. Beneath a larger vent in the center of the structure, logs ringed a common hearth with a large wood turnspit. Beneath the bare shaft some kind of sliced root with a nutty aroma was grilling on flat rocks, and mounds of vegetables gave off a steamy redolence. Gar saw river cobbles heating in the coals.

He was puzzled. The meaty scent could not be coming from the hearth. Then he noticed a mound of loose earth to one side that probably covered a baking-pit. On the other side sat a bark-and-skin lined boiling-pit, a larger version of one Leya had designed for the clan.

Nola murmured to Alys and Leya, and she and Vonn and stepped toward one of the tents. Gar remembered that Leya had told him Nola was mated with the dour man called Jarv.

The individual hearth outside Alys’s tent consisted of a griddle of fitted stones, a small spit, and a miniature boiling pit. Many implements of stone, bone, antler and ivory were arrayed by a log bench. Some, Gar had never seen, and he wondered at their purpose.

Leya’s
mator
raised a skin drape, and Leya and Gar stooped to enter her tent. The interior was surprisingly spacious. A bison sleeping-sack lay atop a platform of brush and dried grass. Across from it stretched an empty sleeping-space that Gar supposed had belonged to Leya. Two truncated logs provided seating, and fur and buckskin garments hung from the tent’s frame. Gar, inspecting the construction of the conical shelter, wondered why Nola and her mate had bothered to peel the interlocking branches. For that matter, why did they erect individual tents inside the longhouse? Did they perhaps live in them year-round, moving them with the seasons?

One of the seating logs faced a broad stump that had been leveled with an adz, the surface crowded with household implements. Gar saw quartz side- and end-scrapers, bone needles, lengths of sinew, hafted flint blades, translucent chert micro-blades, awls, and several gadgets at whose uses he could only guess. Leaning against the unpeeled wood was a frame for stretching skins. Nearby, squares of birch bark bore food stains, and bark cups hung beside the stretch-frame.

Clearly, these people led a comfortable life.

A few hands away was another work space, this one littered with quartz and antler hammers and anvils, flint burins and punches, bone spear points, and hooks of ivory that puzzled Gar at first, but which he finally decided were for catching fish. Laid against the rim of the tent were slim wood shafts for the javelins that Leya had tried to get the clan to adopt. Hanging near the entrance were dozens of dried herbs whose uses he could not fathom.

Gar was mesmerized by the technology of these newcomers from the west. How could his own people, living in small and isolated groups, ever hope to compete?

#

Gar could hardly believe the variety in the Shortfaces’ evening meal. The baking pit was opened and a whole ibex lifted out, then a young argal, the rich smell of baked meat suffusing the longhouse. The cook, a grizzled oldster with a withered leg, palmed a long obsidian knife and began to slice the meat into portions.

When all was ready, he picked up a pair of curved wood paddles and scuttled on his gimpy leg to drop heated cobbles into the communal boiling pit, which soon issued a plume of steam. The women and children formed a line, each holding a square of trimmed bark and a cup. Leya and Alys took their places in line, while Gar waited with Fel by Alys’s small hearth.

The people each scooped their portions of meat and vegetables, dipped boiling water from the pit, and carried the food to their tents. Gar saw that the livers of both animals were portioned in the manner that Leya had recommended to the clan, everyone receiving a share. As Leya and Alys returned, balancing their cups and barks—which Leya had called a plate—loaded with food, Gar was surprised to see that leaves, stalks, and roots of plants formed the major portion of the meal, with meat as a side dish.

The opposite of the clan’s diet.

Gar waited until the men had lined up and, at Leya’s urging, joined the end. When he reached the big hearth and took his food, he was surprised to find that the grilled slices were not root at all but some kind of material that must have been ground and pressed. The rich scent of baked meat made his mouth water, but he restrained himself from taking more than his share.

What kind of people were these, he wondered, who lived on food that hares might eat? The situation was improved, he found, by the vegetables that had baked with the meat, acquiring its flavor. Trying to scoop water from the boiling pit into his bark cup he nipped his fingertips but then got the idea.

Although it was now dark outside, the interior of Alys’s cozy tent was illuminated by firelight glimmering through the entrance. The food was like none Gar had ever tasted, each bite an experience. Finding himself unable to manipulate the little sticks the others used for picking up food, he ate with his fingers. The vegetables gave off much more taste than they did raw, and the pressed stuff had a nutty flavor that went with its smell.

Most of the vegetables he had not tasted before, but if these scrawny people could eat them, so could he. He sampled a sweet root that Leya called cow parsnip, a crunchy stalk called cel that he thought he had seen in river bottoms, and broad legumes known as horse beans. And of course, there were the familiar cattail shoots.

Tiny smoked fish that Alys produced from her own larder provided a tasty side dish. Gar noticed that Leya and Alys folded the fish, which he thought were marinka,
into the greenish-brown cake.

He held up a piece. “What this?”

“
We call it
non,
” Alys said, a morsel of fish clamped in her eating sticks.

Gar turned it in the ruddy light. “Not thing that grow.”

“
It’s made of crushed grass seeds, pounded chickpeas, and grinded proso kernels.”

Gar marveled that the Tribe would go to this much trouble to fill their bellies. The clan ate whatever they killed or picked that day, with a minimum of preparation.

He indicated the varied spread, so many different foods that his “plate” could barely hold them. He pantomimed, “I not complain but why so many foods?”

“
We find it works better,” Leya said. “Sugn says it is because we take in the spirits of many plants and animals.”

Gar mouthed a length of cel. “Plants have spirits?”

“
He says so.”

Gar swallowed the tender stalk, fingered a crust of non.
“What is ‘spirit’?”

“
We don’t know,” Alys said. “But Sugn says they are all around us.”

The idea of a world beyond the one he could see and touch was too much for Gar. He wondered if it was not something the women had invented to play with his mind. Or maybe their “shaman” wanted to impress them with his other-world knowledge. Shrugging, he went back to his food.

Accustomed to eating in order to fill his stomach rather than for pleasure, especially during hunts when—before Leya had introduced them to trail mix—he would subsist for days on nothing but raw meat, Gar found himself chewing slowly in order to savor individual tastes and textures. Instead of finishing the meal, then scooping cold water from the stream below the clan’s cave, he sipped the chamomile-and-rose-hip tea that Alys had sprinkled into his cup. It was both bracing and soothing. Perhaps, he thought, because of a blending of the herbs’ “spirits.” Why, he wondered, had the clan declined to make tea a staple after Leya had demonstrated it?

He watched her sitting cross-legged beside her mother, a position he could not assume because of his heavy thews. He would not mind settling into this life, he mused, especially with her.

But as soon as the thought occurred, he knew that such a thing could never be. Shortfaces were from their world, he from his.

Just as the three finished their meal, topping it with tart red berries sweetened with honey, Gar’s musings were interrupted by someone at the entrance of the tent. He looked up and saw the scar-faced man called Mungo. Fel, sitting with his haunch against Gar’s hip, must have objected to something in the man’s manner, because Gar felt the young wolf tremble. Reaching back he crooned, smoothing the young wolf’s stiffened fur.

Though he hailed from a different culture than the newcomer, Gar felt the same as Fel. He could see that the man meant trouble. Glancing around the small tent for his spear, he remembered he had left it at the pass.

Just as well, he thought, as he could not contend with this man and his friends here in camp if they were armed. Gathering his feet, he swallowed a mouthful of berries and awaited whatever was to happen.