The Land of Painted Caves (40 page)

Both Jondalar and the First had come to see what had been brought out and displayed for Ayla. Though they had both been aware of the Fifth Cave’s status, partly because of their jewelry-makers, seeing so much at once was almost overwhelming. They couldn’t help but make comparisons in their minds to the Ninth Cave, but when they thought about it, they knew that their Cave was equally wealthy, in a slightly different way. In fact, most of the Zelandonii Caves were.

The Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave took them into another shelter nearby, and again it was well decorated, primarily with engravings of horses, bison, deer, even a partial mammoth, often accented with both red ocher and black manganese paint. The antlers of an engraved deer, for example, had been outlined in black, while a bison had been painted mostly red. Again they were introduced to the people who were there. Ayla noticed that the children who had been around their shelter, which was on the same side of the small stream, had gathered around again; she recognized several of them.

Suddenly Ayla felt dizzy and nauseous, and had a very strong need to get out of the shelter. She couldn’t explain her intense urge to leave, but she had to get outside.

“I’m thirsty, I want to get some water,” she said, walking out quickly, and heading toward the stream.

“You don’t have to go out,” a woman said, following behind her. “We have a spring inside.”

“I think we all need to go anyway. The feast must be ready, and I’m hungry,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said. “I should think you must be, too.”

   They returned to the main shelter, or what Ayla had come to think of as the main shelter, and found everything for the feast set up and waiting for them. Although extra dishes were stacked up for the visitors, Ayla and Jondalar got their personal eating cups, bowls, and knives out of their pouches. The First carried her own dishes as well. Ayla took out Wolf’s water bowl, which also served as an eating dish if one was needed, and thought that she should start making eating dishes for Jonayla soon. Though she planned to nurse her until she could count at least three years, she would be giving her tastes of other food long before that.

Someone had recently hunted an aurochs; a roast haunch, turned on a spit over coals, was the main dish. Lately, they only saw the wild cattle in summer, but it was one of Ayla’s favorite foods. The taste was similar to bison, except richer, but then they were similar animals, with hard, round, curving horns that grew to a point and were permanent, not shed every year like deer antlers.

There were summer vegetables, too: sow-thistle stems, cooked pigweed, coltsfoot, and nettle leaves flavored with sorrel, and cowslips and wild rose petals in a salad of young dandelion leaves and clover. Fragrant meadowsweet flowers gave a honey-like sweetness to a sauce of crabapples and rhubarb served with the meat. A mixture of summer berries required no sweetening. They had raspberries, an early-ripening variety of blackberries, cherries, blackcurrants, elderberries, and pitted blackthorn plums, though pitting the small sloes was a time-consuming job. Rose leaf tea finished off the delicious meal.

When she took out Wolf’s bowl and gave him the bone she had chosen with a little meat left on, one of the women looked at the wolf with disapproval, and Ayla heard her say to another woman that she didn’t think it was right to feed a wolf food that was meant for people. The other woman nodded her head in agreement, but Ayla had noticed that both of them had looked at the four-legged hunter with trepidation earlier in the day. She had hoped to introduce Wolf to the women to perhaps reduce their fearfulness, but they made a point of avoiding both Ayla and the meat-eater.

After the meal, more wood was put on the fire to provide stronger light against the encroaching darkness. Ayla was nursing Jonayla and sipping a cup of hot tea with Wolf at her feet in the company of Jondalar, the First, and the Zelandoni of the Fifth. A group of people approached, including Madroman, though he stayed in the background. Ayla recognized others, and gathered that they were the acolytes of the Fifth, probably wanting to spend some time with the One Who Was First.

“I have completed Marking the Suns and Moons,” said one of them. The young woman opened up her hand and revealed a small plaque of ivory covered with strange markings.

The Fifth picked it out of her hand and examined it carefully, turning it over to see the back side and even checking around the edges. Then he smiled. “This is about a half year,” he said, then gave it to the First. “She is my Third Acolyte, and started the Marking this time last year. Her plaque for the first half is put away.”

The large woman looked at the piece with the same careful scrutiny as the Zelandoni of the Fifth, but not as long. “This is an interesting method of marking,” she said. “You show the turns by position and the crescents with curved marks for two of the moons you’ve marked. The rest are around the edge and on the back. Very good.”

The young woman beamed under the praise from the First.

“Perhaps you could explain what you’ve done to my acolyte. Marking the Suns and Moons is something she has yet to do,” the First said.

“I would have thought it was something she had already done. I’ve heard she is known for her medicinal knowledge, and she is mated. There are not many acolytes I know who are mated and have children, not even many Zelandonia,” the Third Acolyte of the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said.

“Ayla’s training has been unconventional. As you know, she was not born to the Zelandonii, so the order in which she has gained her knowledge is not the same as ours. She is an exceptional healer. She started young, but she is just beginning her Donier Tour, and hasn’t yet learned to Mark the Suns and Moons,” the Zelandoni Who Was First carefully explained.

“I’ll be happy to explain the way I Marked them to her,” the Third Acolyte of the Fifth said, and sat down next to Ayla.

Ayla was more than interested. This was the first she had heard of Marking the Suns and Moons, and didn’t know it was another task she’d have to complete as part of her training. She wondered what else there was that she didn’t know she would have to do.

“You see, I made one mark each night,” the young woman said, showing her the marks she had etched into the ivory with a pointed tool of sharp flint. “I’d already marked the first half year on another piece, so I was getting an idea of how to keep track of more than just the count of the days. I started this just before the moon was new and I was trying to show where the moon was in the sky, so I began here.” She indicated a mark that was in the middle of what seemed to be just random haphazard pitting. “The next few nights it snowed. It was a big storm and blocked out the moon and the stars, but I wouldn’t have been able to see the moon anyway. It was the time when Lumi was closing his great eye. The next time I saw him, he was a thin crescent, waking up again, so I made a curved mark here.”

Ayla looked where the young woman indicated and was rather surprised to see that what had appeared at first to be a hole made by a sharp point was indeed a small curved line. She looked more closely at the group of markings and suddenly they didn’t look so random. There did seem to be a pattern to it, and she was interested in how the young woman would proceed.

“Since the time of Lumi’s sleeping is the beginning of a Moon, that’s here on the right where I decided to turn back to mark the next set of nights,” the Third Acolyte continued. “Right about here was the first eye-half-closed; some people call it the first half-face. Then it keeps getting bigger until it’s full. It’s hard to tell when it’s exactly full—it looks full for a few days—so that’s here on the left where I turned back again. I made four curved marks, two below and two above. I kept marking until it was the second half-face, when Lumi starts to close his eye again, and you notice it’s just above the first half-face.

“I kept marking until his eye was closed again—see here on the right, where I curved down? All the way around the line with the first right-end turn. You take it and see if you can follow it. I always make the turns when he’s full face, on the right, or when he’s sleeping, on the left. You’ll see that you can count two Moons, plus another half. I stopped at the first half-face after the second Moon. I was waiting for Bali to catch up. It was the time when the sun is as far south as it goes and stands still for a few days, then changes direction and goes north again. It’s the ending of First Winter and the beginning of Second Winter, when it’s colder but has the promise of Bali’s return.”

“Thank you,” Ayla said. “That was fascinating! Did you work it all out yourself?”

“Not exactly. Other Zelandonia showed me their way of marking, but I saw a plaque at the Fourteenth Cave once that was quite old. It wasn’t marked in quite the same way, but it gave me the idea when it was my time to Mark the Moons.”

“It’s a very good idea,” the First said.

It was very dark when they started back to their sleeping place. Ayla was holding the baby, who was sound asleep wrapped up in her carrying blanket, so both Jondalar and the First each borrowed a torch to see their way.

As they approached the visitors’ shelter, they passed by some of the other shelters they had seen earlier. When she came to the one where she had felt so uncomfortable, Ayla shuddered again and hurried past.

“What’s wrong?” Jondalar asked.

“I don’t know,” Ayla said. “I’ve been feeling strange all day. It’s probably nothing.”

When they reached their shelter, the horses were milling around outside, rather than in the large roomy space she had made for them inside. “Why are they out here? The horses have been acting up all day; that may be what’s bothering me,” Ayla said. As they turned into the shelter toward their tent, Wolf hesitated, then sat down on his haunches and refused to enter. “Now, what’s wrong with Wolf?”

17

“W
hy don’t we take the horses for a run this morning?” Ayla said softly to the man who was lying beside her. “Yesterday they seemed restless and edgy. I am too. They don’t really get to go free and fast when they are pulling the pole-drags. It’s hard work, but not the kind of exercise they like.”

Jondalar smiled. “That’s a good idea. I don’t get to exercise the way I’d like to either. What about Jonayla?”

“Maybe Hollida would like to watch her, especially if Zelandoni will keep an eye on them,” Ayla said.

Jondalar sat up. “Where is Zelandoni? She’s not here.”

“I heard her get up earlier. I think she went to talk to the Fifth,” Ayla said. “If we leave Jonayla, perhaps we should leave Wolf, too, though I’m not sure how the people of this Cave feel about him. They seemed a little nervous around him while we were eating last night. This is not the Ninth Cave.… Let’s take Jonayla with us. I can take her in her carrying blanket. She likes to ride.”

Jondalar pulled the top of their sleeping roll back and got up. Ayla got up too, leaving the baby who had been sleeping at her side to wake up while she went to pass her water.

“It rained last night,” Ayla said when she got back.

“Now aren’t you glad you stayed inside, in the tent and under cover?” Jondalar said.

Ayla didn’t answer. She hadn’t slept well. She just couldn’t get comfortable, but they did stay dry and the tent aired out.

Jonayla had rolled over on her stomach and was kicking her legs and holding her head up. She had also rolled out of her swaddling, and the soiled absorbent wadding it held in place. Ayla collected the unpleasant material and dumped it in the night basket, rolled up the damp, softened-leather swaddling blanket, then picked up the baby and headed down to the small stream to clean the little one, herself, and the blanket. She rinsed herself and the baby in the running water, a procedure to which the baby was now so accustomed, she didn’t even fuss about it, though it was cold. Ayla hung the swaddling across some brush near the water, then got dressed and found a comfortable place to sit outside of the stone shelter to nurse her infant.

In the meantime, Jondalar had found the horses not far up the valley, brought them back to the abri, and was tying riding blankets on the backs of both Whinney and Racer. At Ayla’s suggestion, he tied equally balanced pack baskets across the mare’s rump as well, but had some difficulty when Gray started nuzzling her dam, trying to nurse. About the time they were ready to go to what Ayla thought of as the main shelter in this place of many shelters, Wolf returned. She assumed he had gone off to hunt earlier, but he appeared so suddenly, he spooked Whinney, which surprised the woman. Whinney was normally a calm horse and the wolf didn’t usually alarm her; it was Racer who was more excitable, but all the horses seemed skittish, even the little filly. And Wolf, too, Ayla thought as he pressed against her as though looking for attention. She felt odd herself. Something seemed off, just not quite right. She looked at the sky to see if any storm threatened; a film of high clouds made the sky white with telltale traces of blue. They probably all needed a good run.

Jondalar put the halters on Racer and Gray. He had also made one for Whinney but Ayla used it only on special occasions. Before she even knew she was training Whinney, she had taught the mare to follow her; she still didn’t think of it as training. When she showed Whinney what to do, and repeated the instruction many times until she understood, then the mare did it because she wanted to. It was similar to the way Iza had trained Ayla to remember the many different plants and herbs, and their uses, by repetition and rote memorization.

When they were all packed, they walked to the shelter of the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave, and again the procession of man, woman, baby, wolf, and horses caused the people to stop what they were doing and watch, hard pressed to avoid the discourtesy of outright staring. Both the Fifth and the One Who Was First walked out from the shelter.

“Come and join us for a morning meal,” the man said.

“The horses are agitated and we’ve decided to take them out for some exercise to run off their restlessness and settle them down,” Jondalar said.

“We just arrived yesterday. Don’t they get enough exercise traveling?” the First said.

“When we’re traveling and they are pulling loads, they don’t run or gallop,” Ayla explained. “Sometimes they need to stretch their legs.”

“Well, at least come and have some tea, and we’ll pack up some food for you to take with you,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth said.

Ayla and Jondalar looked at each other, and understood that although they would have preferred to just leave, it might offend the Fifth Cave, and that would not be appropriate. They nodded to each other in acquiescence.

“Thank you, we will,” Jondalar said, reaching into the carrying pouch attached to his waist thong and pulling out his personal drinking cup. Ayla also found her cup and passed it down to a woman near the fireplace who was ladling out the hot liquid. She filled the drinking containers, and handed them back. Rather than settling down to graze while they were waiting, the horses were markedly apprehensive, displaying their anxiety. Whinney was dancing in place, sniffing loudly as furrows appeared over her eyes. Gray was picking up her dam’s nervous symptoms, and Racer was sidestepping with his neck arched high. Ayla tried to comfort the mare, running her hand along the side of her neck, and Jondalar was having to hang on to the rope halter to keep the stallion from breaking away.

Ayla glanced across the stream dividing the valley and watched some children running and screaming alongside the waterway in some kind of game that to her seemed more frenzied than usual, even for excited youngsters. She watched them dashing in and out of the shelters, and suddenly had a feeling that it was dangerous, though she didn’t see how it could be. Just as she was about to speak to Jondalar and tell him they had to go, some people brought them rawhide-wrapped packages of food. The couple thanked everyone as they stashed the parfleches in the pack baskets on Whinney; then with the help of some nearby rocks, they climbed up onto the horses’ backs and started riding out of the valley.

As soon as they reached a clear, open field, they eased their control and let the horses run. It was exhilarating and lessened Ayla’s nervousness, but didn’t eliminate it. Finally the horses grew tired and slowed down. Jondalar noticed a stand of trees in the distance and guided Racer in that direction. Ayla saw where he was heading and followed. The young filly, who could already run as fast as her mother, trailed behind. Young horses quickly learned to run fast; they had to if they were going to survive. The wolf raced along with them; he also enjoyed a good run.

As they neared the trees, they could see a small pool, obviously spring fed, that overflowed its banks in a rill that ran off across the field. But as they neared the pool, Whinney suddenly stopped short, which nearly knocked Ayla to the ground. She wrapped her arm around her baby, who had been sitting in front of her, and quickly slid down from the mare’s back. She noticed Jondalar having trouble with Racer, too. The stallion reared up, neighing loudly, and the tall man slid back, then quickly stepped off. He didn’t fall, but had trouble regaining his footing.

Ayla became aware of a loud rumbling, feeling it as much as hearing it, and realized it had been going on for some time. She glanced ahead and saw the water in the pool shoot up in a fountain as though someone had squeezed the spring and sent a squirt of liquid up in the air. It was only then that she noticed the ground was moving.

Ayla knew what it was—she had felt the earth shift beneath her feet before—and felt a gorge of panic rise up in her throat. The earth was not supposed to move. She struggled to keep her balance. Petrified, she clung to her baby, afraid to take a step.

She watched the knee-high grass of the open field perform a strange, quivering dance as the groaning earth moved in unnatural ways to unheard music deep within. Ahead, the small stand of trees near the spring amplified the movement. The water bounced up and fell back, swirled over its bank, churned up dirt from its bed, and spit out muddy globs. She smelled the stench of raw earth; then with a crack, one fir tree suddenly gave way and slowly began to tip over, pulling up and exposing half its circle of roots.

The shaking seemed to go on forever. It brought back recollections of other times, and the losses that had come with the moving, groaning earth. She shut her eyes tight, trembling, and sobbed with grief and fear. Jonayla started to cry. Then Ayla felt a hand on her shoulder, and arms wrap around her and the baby that offered solace and comfort. She leaned against the warm chest of the man she loved, and the baby quieted. Slowly, she became aware that the quaking had stopped and the shuddering earth had stilled, and she felt the tightness inside her lessen.

“Oh, Jondalar,” she cried. “That was an earthquake. I hate earthquakes!” She trembled in his arms. She thought, but didn’t want to say it aloud—voicing thoughts could give them power—that earthquakes were evil; bad things always seemed to happen when the earth shook.

“I don’t much like them either,” he said, holding his fragile little family close. Ayla looked around, and noticed the tilted fir tree near the spring. She shivered with an unexpected memory of a scene long ago.

“What’s wrong?” Jondalar asked.

“That tree,” she said.

He looked where she was gazing and saw the tree near the spring, canted over and roots exposed.

“I remember seeing many trees tipped over and leaning like that, and some on the ground and fallen across a river. It must have been when I was very young …,” she said, hesitating, “before I lived with the Clan. I think it was when I lost my mother, and family, and everything. Iza said that I could walk well and talk; I suppose I could count five years when she found me.”

After she told him of her memory, Jondalar held her until she relaxed again. Though it was just a brief recitation, it gave him a better understanding of the terror she must have felt as a little girl when an earthquake had brought her world crashing down around her, and life as she had known it came to an abrupt end.

“Do you think it will come back? The earthquake? Sometimes when the earth moves like that, it doesn’t settle down right away. It comes back,” Ayla said, when they finally let go of each other.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But maybe we should get back to Old Valley, and make sure everyone there is all right.”

“Of course! I was so scared, I wasn’t thinking about anyone else. I hope everyone is safe. And the horses! Where are the horses?” Ayla cried, looking around. “Are they all right?”

“Aside from being as frightened as we were, I think they’re fine. Racer reared up and made me slide off, but I managed not to fall. Then he started running in big circles. As far as I could tell, Whinney didn’t move, and Gray stayed by her side. I think she must have run away after it stopped.”

Off in the distance on the level field, Ayla spied the animals, and breathed out, relieved. She whistled her special summons loudly and saw Whinney’s head go up, then start in her direction. Racer and Gray followed, and Wolf behind them.

“They’re coming now, and there’s Wolf, too. I think he must have run off with them,” Jondalar said.

By the time the horses and Wolf arrived, Ayla was more composed. Since there was no convenient rock or stump of wood nearby to help her climb on Whinney’s back, she gave Jonayla to Jondalar for a moment, and holding on to the mare’s stand-up mane, she jumped up, threw her leg over, and found her seat. She took the child from the man and watched while Jondalar climbed up on Racer’s back in much the same way, though he was so tall, he could almost step up onto the back of the compact, sturdy stallion.

She looked toward the spring, where the tree still leaned at a precarious angle. It would fall soon, she was sure. Though she had wanted to go there before, she didn’t want to go near it now.

As they started toward Old Valley, they heard a loud crack, and when they glanced back, there was a more muffled boom as they watched the tall fir hitting the ground. Riding back to the Fifth Cave, Ayla wondered about the horses, and the implication of their recent actions.

“Do you suppose that the horses knew the ground was going to shake like that, Jondalar? Was that why they were behaving so strangely?” she asked.

“They definitely were nervous,” Jondalar said, “but I’m glad they were. That’s why we left and were out in the open when it happened. I think it’s safer to be out here; you don’t have to worry about things falling on you.”

“But the ground can open up under you,” Ayla said. “I think that’s what happened to my family. I remember that smell of deep earth, of wetness and decay. But I don’t think all earthquakes are the same. Some are more powerful than others. And most of them can be felt a long distance away, but not as strongly.”

“When you were young, you must have been very close to the place where the shaking started, if all the trees toppled over and the ground opened up. I don’t think we were as close to this one. Only one tree fell.”