Plains of Passage (130 page)

Ayla and Whinney fell in beside them. She had the strange feeling that she had done this before.

They rode at a comfortable pace. “I think we are both going to have babies, now,” Ayla said, “our second ones, and we both had sons before. I think that’s good. We can share this time together.”

“You’ll have many people to share your pregnancy with,” Jondalar said.

“I’m sure you are right, but it will be nice to share it with Whinney, too, since we both got pregnant on this Journey.” They rode in silence for a while. “She’s a lot younger than I am, though. I’m old to be having a baby.”

“You’re not so old, Ayla. I’m the old man.”

“I am nineteen years this spring. That’s old to have a baby.”

“I am much older. I am past twenty and three years, by now. That is old for a man to be settling down to his own hearth for the first time. Do you realize I’ve been gone five years? I wonder if anyone will even remember me,” Jondalar said.

“Of course they will remember you. Dalanar didn’t have any trouble, and neither did Joplaya,” Ayla said. Everyone will know him, she thought, but no one will know me.

“Look! See that rock over there? Just beyond the turn in the river? That’s where I made my first kill!” Jondalar said, urging Racer on a little faster. “It was a big deer. I don’t know what I was most afraid of—those big antlers, or missing and going home empty-handed.”

Ayla smiled, pleased at his remembrances, but there was nothing for her to remember. She would be a stranger again. They would all stare at her, and they would ask about her strange accent and where she came from.

“We had a Summer Meeting here once,” Jondalar said. “There were hearths set up all over this place. It was my first after I became a man. Oh, how I strutted, trying to act so old, but so afraid that no young woman would invite me to her First Rites. I guess I didn’t have to worry. I was invited to three, and that scared me even more!”

“There are some people over there, watching us, Jondalar,” Ayla said.

“That’s the Fourteenth Cave!” he said, and waved. No one waved back. Instead they disappeared under a deep overhang.

“It must be the horses,” Ayla said.

He frowned, then shook his head. “They’ll get used to them.”

I hope so, Ayla thought, and me, too. The only thing familiar around here will be Jondalar.

“Ayla! There it is!” Jondalar said. “The Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii.”

She looked in the direction he was pointing, and she felt herself blanch.

“It’s always easy to find because of that outcrop on top. See, where it looks like a stone is ready to fall? It won’t though, unless the whole thing does.” Jondalar turned to look at her. “Ayla, are you ill? You’re so pale.”

She stopped. “I’ve seen that place before, Jondalar!”

“How could you? You’ve never been here before.”

Suddenly it all came together. It was the cave in my dreams! The one that came from Creb’s memories, she thought. Now I know what he was trying to tell me in my dreams.

“I told you my totem meant you for me and sent you to come and get me. He wanted you to take me home, the place where my Cave Lion spirit will be happy. This is it. I have come home, too, Jondalar. Your home is my home,” Ayla said.

He smiled; but before he could answer, they heard a voice shouting his name. “Jondalar! Jondalar!”

They looked up along a path to a cliff overhang, and saw a young woman.

“Mother! Come quick,” she said. “Jondalar is back. Jondalar is home!”

And so am I, Ayla thought.

Each of the books in this Earth’s Children™ series has posed its own unique challenges, but from the beginning, when the sometime novel/six-book outline was first conceived, the fourth book, the “travel book,” has been both the most difficult and the most interesting to research and write.
The Plains of Passage
required some additional travel for the author as well, including a return visit to Czechoslovakia, and trips to Hungary, Austria, and Germany to follow a portion of the Danube (the Great Mother River). But to put the setting into the Ice Age, even more time was needed for library research.

I am again indebted to Dr. Jan Jelinek, Director Emeritus, Anthropos Institute, Brno, Czechoslovakia, for his unfailing kindness, assistance, and astute observations and interpretations of the rich Upper Paleolithic artifacts of the region.

I am also grateful to Dr. Bohuslav Klima, Archeologicky Ustav CSAV, for the wonderful wine tasting in his own cellar from his vineyards near Dolni Vestonice, but more for giving so generously of his lifetime of knowledge and information about that most important early site.

I would also like to thank Dr. Jiri Svoboda, Archeologicky Ustav CSAV, for information on his startling new discoveries that add greatly to our knowledge about our Early Modern Human ancestors who lived more than two hundred fifty centuries ago when ice covered a quarter of the globe.

To
Dr. Olga Soffer, the leading American expert on the Upper Paleolithic people of Central and Eastern Europe, I extend thanks and gratitude beyond measure for keeping me informed about the most recent developments, and supplied with the latest papers, including the results of a new study on the earliest ceramic art in human history.

I want to thank Dr. Milford Wolpoff, University of Michigan, for his insights during our discussion about population distributions on the northern continents during the last Ice Age, when our modern human forebears clustered in concentrations in certain favorable areas and left most of the land, though rich in animal life, without people.

Finding the pieces of the puzzle that were necessary to create this
fictional world of the prehistoric past was a challenge; putting them together was another. After studying the material available about glaciers and the environment that surrounded them, I still could not get a completely clear picture of all the northern lands, so that I could move my characters through their world. There were questions, theories at odds with each other—some of which did not seem very well thought out—pieces that did not fit.

Finally, with great relief and growing enthusiasm, I found the one clearly explained and thoughtfully constructed study that brought the Ice Age world into sharp focus. It answered the questions that had risen in my mind, and enabled me to fit in the rest of the pieces from other sources and my own speculations so that I could make a logical setting. I will be eternally grateful to R. Dale Guthrie for his article “Mammals of the Mammoth Steppe as Paleoenvironmental Indicators,” pages 307–326, from
Paleoecology of Beringia
(Ed. by David M. Hopkins, John V. Matthews, Jr., Charles E. Schweger, and Steven B. Young, Academic Press, 1982). More than any other single work, that paper helped this book come together as a cohesive, comprehensive, and comprehensible whole.

Since woolly mammoths symbolize the Ice Age, considerable effort was devoted to bringing those prehistoric pachyderms to life. My research included searching out everything I could find on mammoths and, since they were so closely related, modern elephants. Among these sources,
Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family
by Dr. Cynthia Moss (William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1988), stands out as a definitive work. I am indebted to Dr. Moss for her many years of study and her intelligent and highly readable book.

In addition to research, a writer is concerned about the way her words come together and the quality of the finished work. I am forever grateful to Laurie Stark, Executive Managing Editor of the Crown Publishing Group, who makes sure the finished manuscript becomes the printed pages of a well-made book. She has been responsible for all four books, and, in a changing world, I appreciate the continuity and consistently high quality she has given them.

I am also thankful for Betty A. Prashker, Editor-in-Chief, Vice President, and more important, outstanding editor, who marshals—or mothers—the manuscript I turn in to its finished form.

My thanks go in full measure to Jean V. Naggar; in the Literary Olympics, a world-class, first-place, gold-medal-winning agent!

And finally to Ray Auel, love and appreciation beyond words.

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P
eople were gathering on the limestone ledge, looking down at them warily. No one made a gesture of welcome, and some held spears in positions of readiness if not actual threat. The young woman could almost feel their edgy fear. She watched from the bottom of the path as more people crowded together on the ledge, staring down, many more than she thought there would be. She had seen that reluctance to greet them from other people they had met on their Journey. It’s not just them, she told herself, it’s always that way in the beginning. But she felt uneasy.

The tall man jumped down from the back of the young stallion. He was neither reluctant nor uneasy, but he hesitated for a moment, holding the stallion’s halter rope. He turned around and noticed that she was hanging back. “Ayla, will you hold Racer’s rope? He seems nervous,” he said, then looked up at the ledge. “I guess they do, too.”

She nodded, lifted her leg over, slid down from the mare’s back, and took the rope. In addition to the tension of seeing strange people, the young brown horse was still agitated around his dam. She was no longer in heat, but residual odors still clung from her encounter with the herd stallion. Ayla held the halter rope of the brown male close, but gave the dun-yellow mare a long lead, and stood between them. She considered giving Whinney her head; her horse was more accustomed to large groups of strangers now, and was not usually high-strung, but she seemed nervous too. That throng of people would make anyone nervous.

When the wolf appeared, Ayla heard sounds of agitation and alarm from the ledge in front of the cave—if it could be called a cave. She’d never seen one quite like it. Wolf pressed against the side of her leg and moved somewhat in front of her, suspiciously defensive; she could feel the vibration of his barely audible growl. He was much more guarded around strangers now than he had been when they began their long Journey a year before, but he had been little more than a puppy then, and he had become more protective of her after some perilous experiences.

As the man strode up the incline toward the apprehensive people, he
showed no fear, but the woman was glad for the opportunity to wait behind and observe them before she had to meet them. She’d been expecting—dreading—this moment for more than a year, and first impressions were important … on both sides.

Though others held back, a young woman rushed toward him. Jondalar recognized his younger sister immediately, though the pretty girl had blossomed into a beautiful young woman during the five years of his absence.

“Jondalar! I knew it was you!” she said, flinging herself at him. “You finally came home!”

He gave her a big hug, then picked her up and swung her around in his enthusiasm. “Folara, I am so happy to see you!” He put her down and looked at her at arm’s length. “But you’ve grown. You were just a girl when I left; now you’re a beautiful woman … just as I always knew you’d be,” he said, with slightly more than a brotherly glint in his eye.

She smiled at him, looked into his unbelievably vivid blue eyes and was drawn by their magnetism. She felt herself flush, not from his compliment, although that’s what those standing nearby thought, but from the rush of attraction she felt for the man, brother or not, whom she had not seen for many years. She had heard stories of her handsome big brother with the unusual eyes who could charm any woman, but her memory was of a tall adoring playmate who was willing to go along with any game or activity she wanted to play. This was the first time as a young woman that she was exposed to the full effect of his unconscious charisma. Jondalar noticed her reaction and smiled warmly at her sweet confusion.