The Earth's Children Series 6-Book Bundle

by Jean M. Auel

  “I’m glad you understand that, Broud. When you are leader, you will be responsible for the safety and welfare of the clan.” Brun’s comment not only let Broud know he was still heir apparent, it relieved the rest of the hunters. They wanted the security of knowing that the traditional rightness of the clan hierarchy, and their own place in it, would be maintained. Nothing disturbed them quite so much as uncertainty about the future.

  “It is the welfare of the clan I was thinking about,” Broud motioned. “I don’t want a man in my clan who can’t hunt. What good will Ayla’s son ever be? Her disobedience does deserve severe punishment, and if she wants to be cursed, it will satisfy her, too. We’d be better off without them. Ayla defied Clan traditions, deliberately. She doesn’t deserve to live. Her son is so deformed, he doesn’t deserve to live.”

  There was a general round of agreement. Brun detected a certain element of insincerity in Broud’s reasoned argument, but he let it go. The animosity between them had dissipated and he didn’t want to stir it up again. Open strife with the son of his mate disturbed Brun as much as it did the others.

  The leader felt he should add his agreement, but something made him hesitate. It is, the right thing to do, he thought, she’s been a problem from the beginning. Of course Iza will be upset, but I didn’t promise to spare either of them, I only said I would consider it. I didn’t even say I would look at the baby if she returned; who ever expected her to return, anyway? That’s just the problem, I never know what to expect from her. If the grief weakens Iza, well, there’s still Uba. After all, she was the one born to the line, and she can get more training from the medicine women at the Clan Gathering.

  If the part of Brac’s spirit she carries dies with Ayla, is it really so much of him to lose? Broud isn’t worried about it, why should I worry? He’s right, she does deserve the severest punishment, doesn’t she? Such strong love for a baby isn’t even normal. What do old women’s tales prove? She can’t even see that her son is deformed; she must be out of her mind. Can there be that much pain in giving birth? Men have suffered worse, haven’t they? Some have walked all the way back after a painful hunting injury. Of course, she’s only a woman, she can’t be expected to bear as much pain. I wonder how far she went? The cave she mentioned can’t be that far, can it? She nearly died giving birth, she was too weak to travel very far, but why couldn’t we find it?

  Besides, if she’s allowed to live, I’ll have to take her to the Clan Gathering. What would the other clans think? It would be worse if I allow her deformed child to live. It’s the right thing to do, everyone thinks so. Maybe there wouldn’t be so much of a problem with Broud, maybe he could control himself better if she wasn’t around. He’s a fearless hunter; he’d make a good leader if only he had a little more sense of responsibility, just a little more self-control. Maybe I should do it for Broud’s sake. For the son of my mate, it might be better if she was gone. It is the right thing to do, yes, it really is; it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?

  “I have reached my decision,” Brun signaled. “Tomorrow is the naming day. At first light, before the sun breaks …”

  “Brun!” Mog-ur interrupted. He had kept himself out of the discussion; none of them had seen much of him since the birth of Ayla’s child. He had spent most of the time in his small annex searching his soul for an explanation of Ayla’s actions. He knew how hard she had struggled to accept the ways of the Clan, and he thought she had succeeded. He was convinced there was something else, something he hadn’t realized that had driven her to such an extreme.

  “Before you commit yourself, Mog-ur would speak.”

  Brun stared at the magician. His expression was enigmatic, as usual. Brun had never been able to read Mog-ur’s face. What can he say that I have not considered? I’ve made up my mind to curse her and he knows it.

  “Mog-ur may speak,” he motioned.

  “Ayla has no mate, but I have always provided for her, I am responsible for her. If you will allow it, I would speak as her mate.”

  “Speak if you will, Mog-ur, but what can you add? I have already considered her strong love for the child and the pain and suffering she went through to have him. I understand how difficult it may be for Iza; I know it may weaken her too much. I’ve thought of every possible reason for excusing her actions, but the facts remain. She defied Clan customs. Her baby is not acceptable to the men. Broud made it clear neither one deserves to live.”

  Mog-ur pulled himself up to his feet, then threw his staff aside. Wrapped in his heavy bearskin cloak, the magician was an imposing figure. Only the older men, and Brun, ever knew him as anything but Mog-ur. The Mog-ur, the holiest of all the men who interceded with the world of the spirits, the most powerful magician of the Clan. When moved to eloquence during a ceremony, he was a charismatic, awe-inspiring protector. It was he who braved the invisible forces far more fearsome than any charging animal, forces that could turn the bravest hunter into a quaking coward. There was not a man present who did not feel more secure knowing it was he who was the magician of their clan, not a man who hadn’t stood in fear of his power and magic at some time in his life, and only one, Goov, who dared to think of trading places with him.

  Mog-ur, alone, stood between the men of the clan and the terrible unknown, and he became part of it by association. It imbued him with a subtle aura that carried over into his secular life. Even when he sat within the boundaries of his hearthstones, surrounded by his women, he was not really thought of as a man. He was more than, other than; he was Mog-ur.

  As the dread holy man fixed a baleful eye on each man in turn, there wasn’t one, including Broud, who didn’t squirm in the depths of his soul with the sudden realization that the woman they had condemned to die lived at his hearth. Mog-ur seldom brought the force of his presence to bear outside his function, but he did then. He turned last to Brun.

  “A woman’s mate has the right to speak for the life of a deformed child. I am asking you to spare the life of Ayla’s son, and for his sake, I am asking that her life be spared, too.”

  All the reasons Brun had so recently considered as rationale for sparing her life seemed to have far more weight now, and the arguments for her death, insignificant. He almost agreed on the force of Mog-ur’s request alone, and it attested to the strength of his own character that he did not. But he was leader. He could not capitulate so easily in front of all his men, and despite a strong desire to give in to the force of the powerful man of magic, he held firm.

  When Mog-ur saw the look of firm resolution replace the moment of indecision, the magician seemed to change before Brun’s eyes. The otherworldly character left him. He became a crippled old man in a bearskin cloak, standing as straight as his one good leg would hold him without his staff for support. When he spoke, it was with the common gestures punctuated with the gruff words of everyday speech. His face held a determined, yet strangely vulnerable look.

  “Brun, ever since Ayla was found, she has lived at my hearth. I think everyone will agree that women and children look to the man of their hearth to set the standard for men of the clan. He is their model, their example of what a man should be. I have been Ayla’s example, I have set the standard in her eyes.

  “I am deformed, Brun. Is it so strange that a woman who grew up with a deformed man as her model would find it difficult to understand a deformity in her child? I lack an eye and an arm, half my body is shriveled and wasted. I am half a man, yet from the beginning, Ayla has seen me as whole. Her son’s body is sound. He has two eyes, two good arms, two good legs. How can she be expected to acknowledge any deformity in him?

  “She was my responsibility to train. I must take the blame for her faults. It was I who overlooked her minor deviations from Clan ways. I even convinced you to accept them, Brun. I am Mog-ur. You rely on me to interpret the wishes of the spirits, and you have come to rely on my judgment in other ways. I did not think we were so wrong. Sometimes it was difficult for her, but I thought she had become a good Clan
woman. I think now I was too lenient with her. I did not make her responsibilities clear. I seldom reprimanded her and I never cuffed her, I often let her go her own way. Now she must pay for my lack. But Brun, I could not be harsher with her.

  “I never took a mate. I could have chosen a woman and she would have had to live with me, but I did not. Do you know why? Brun, do you know how women look at me? Do you know how women avoid me? I had the same need to relieve myself as any other man when I was young, but I learned to control it when women turned their back so they would not see me make the signal. I would not force myself, my crippled, deformed body, on a woman who shrunk from me, who turned away with disgust at the sight of me.

  “But Ayla never turned from me. From the first, she reached out to touch me. She had no fear of me, no revulsion. She gave me her affection freely, she hugged me. Brun, how could I scold her?

  “I have lived with this clan since my birth, but I never learned how to hunt. How can a one-armed cripple hunt? I was a burden, I was taunted, I was called woman. Now I am Mog-ur and no one ridicules, but no manhood ceremony was ever held for me. Brun, I am not half a man, I am no man at all. Only Ayla respected me, loved me—not as a magician, but as a man, as a whole man. And I love her as the child of the mate I never had.”

  Creb shrugged off the cloak he wore to cover his lopsided, malformed, wasted body and held out the stump of an arm he always hid.

  “Brun, this is the man Ayla saw as whole. This is the man who set her standard. This is the man she loves and compares with her son. Look at me, my brother! Did I deserve to live? Does Ayla’s son deserve to live less?”

  The clan started gathering outside the cave in the dim half-light of predawn. A fine misty drizzle cast a glistening sheen on rocks and trees and collected in tiny droplets in the hair and beards of the people. Thin wispy tendrils snaking down from fog-shrouded mountains clung to hollows, and thicker masses of the ethereal vapor obscured all but the nearest objects. The ridge to the east rose indistinctly from a nebulous sea of mist in the fading darkness, wavering vaguely just on the edge of visibility.

  Ayla lay awake on her furs in the darkened cave, watching Iza and Uba moving silently about the hearth stoking coals in the fireplace and putting water on to boil for a morning tea. Her baby was beside her making sucking noises in his sleep. She hadn’t slept all night. Her first joy at seeing Iza had quickly given way to a desolate anxiety. Initial attempts at conversation broke down early and the three females of Creb’s hearth spent the entire long day after Ayla’s return within its boundary stones communicating their despair with anguished looks.

  Creb had not set foot inside his domain, but Ayla caught his eye once as he left the small adjoining cave to join the men in the meeting Brun had called. He looked away quickly from her silent appeal, but not before she had seen the look of love and pity in his soft liquid eye. She and Iza exchanged a tremulous, knowing glance when they saw Creb hurry into the place of the spirits after a talk with Brun held in a remote section of the cave in guarded gestures. Brun had made his decision and Creb went to prepare for his part in it. They did not see the magician again.

  Iza brought the young mother her tea in the familiar bone cup that had been hers for several years, then sat quietly beside her as she sipped it. Uba joined them, but she could offer no more than her presence for comfort, either.

  “Nearly everyone is out. We’d better go,” Iza signaled, taking the cup from the young woman. Ayla nodded. She got up and wrapped her son in the carrying cloak, then picked up her fur wrap from the bed and threw it over her shoulders. Eyes glistening with moisture that threatened to overflow, Ayla looked at Iza, then Uba, and with an aching cry, reached out to both of them. All three huddled in a clinging embrace. Then, with a heavy heart and dragging step, Ayla walked out of the cave.

  Staring down at the ground, seeing an occasional heelmark, the imprint of toes, the blurred outline of a foot encased in a loose leather covering, Ayla had the uncanny sensation that it was two years before and she was following Creb out of the cave to face her doom. He should have cursed me forever that time, she thought. I must have been born to be cursed; why else must I go through this again? This time I will go to the world of the spirits. I know a plant that will make us both go to sleep and never wake up, not in this world. I will get it over quickly, and we’ll walk in the next world together.

  She reached Brun, dropped to the ground, and stared at the familiar feet wrapped in muddy foot coverings. It was getting lighter, the sun would soon be up. Brun would have to hurry, she thought, and felt a tap on her shoulder. Slowly, she looked up at Brun’s bearded face. He began without preliminaries.

  “Woman, you have willfully defied the customs of the Clan and you must be punished,” he motioned sternly. Ayla nodded. It was true. “Ayla, woman of the Clan, you are cursed. No one will see you, no one will hear you. You will endure the full isolation of the woman’s curse. You may not go beyond the boundaries of your provider’s hearth until the next moon is in the same phase as now.”

  Ayla gazed at the stern-faced leader with astonished disbelief. The woman’s curse! Not the death curse! Not utter and complete ostracism, but nominal isolation confined to Creb’s hearth. What did it matter that no one else in the clan would acknowledge her existence for an entire moon, she would still have Iza and Uba and Creb. And afterward, she could rejoin the clan just like any other woman. But Brun was not through.

  “As further punishment, you are forbidden to hunt, or even mention hunting, until the clan returns from the Clan Gathering. Until the leaves have dropped from the trees, you will have no freedom to go anywhere that is not essential. When you look for plants of healing magic, you will tell me where you are going and you will return promptly. You will always ask my permission before you leave the area of the cave. And you will show me the location of the cave where you hid.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, anything,” Ayla was nodding in agreement. She was floating in a warm cloud of euphoria, but the next words of the leader pierced her mood like an icy shaft of cold lightning, drowning her elation in a deluge of despair.

  “There is still the problem of your deformed son who was the cause of your disobedience. You must never again try to force a man, much less a leader, against his will. No woman should ever try to force a man,” Brun said, then gave a signal. Ayla clutched her infant desperately and looked in the same direction that Brun was looking. She couldn’t let them take him, she couldn’t. She saw Mog-ur limping out of the cave. When she saw him throw his bearskin aside, revealing a red-stained wicker bowl held firmly between the stump of his arm and his waist, incredulous joy flushed her face. She turned back to Brun hesitantly, unsure if what she thought could possibly be true.

  “But a woman may ask,” Brun finished. “Mog-ur is waiting, Ayla. Your son must have a name if he is to be a member of the clan.”

  Ayla scrambled to her feet and raced to the magician, taking her baby from her cloak as she dropped at his feet and holding the naked infant up to him. His first squall at being taken from his mother’s warm breast and exposed to the damp cool air was greeted by the first rays of the sun breaking over the top of the ridge, burning through the misty haze.

  A name! She hadn’t even thought about a name, she hadn’t even wondered what name Creb would choose for her son. In formal gestures, Mog-ur called the spirits of the clan’s totems to attend, then reached into the bowl and scooped out a dab of red paste.

  “Durc,” he said loudly above the lusty cries of the cold and angry baby. “The boy’s name is Durc.” Then he drew a red line from the junction of the baby’s supraorbital ridges to the tip of his smallish nose.

  “Durc,” Ayla repeated, holding her son close to warm him. Durc, she thought, like Durc of the legend. Creb knows that’s always been my favorite. It was not a common Clan name and many were surprised. But perhaps the name, dredged from the depths of antiquity and fraught with dubious connotations, was appropriate for a boy whose life had hung i
n the balance of such uncertain beginnings.

  “Durc,” Brun said. He was the first to file past. Ayla thought she saw a glimmer of tenderness from the stern, proud leader as she looked at him in gratitude. Most of the faces were a blur seen through tear-filled eyes. As hard as she tried, she could not control them, and kept her head down in an effort to conceal her wet eyes. I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it, she thought. Is it really true? You have a name, my baby? Brun accepted you, my son? I’m not dreaming? She remembered the glittering nodules of iron pyrite she had found and put in her amulet. It was a sign. Great Cave Lion, it was truly a sign. Of all the artifacts in her amulet, she treasured that one the most.

  “Durc,” she heard Iza say and looked up. The joy on the woman’s face was no less than Ayla’s for all that her eyes were dry.

  “Durc,” Uba said, and added with a quick gesture, “I’m so glad.”

  “Durc.” It was said with a sneer. Ayla glanced up in time to see Broud turn away. She suddenly remembered the strange idea about the way men started babies she had while she was hiding in the small cave, and shuddered at the thought that somehow Broud was responsible for the conception of her son. She had been too busy to notice the battle of wills between Brun and Broud. The young man was going to refuse to acknowledge the newest member of the clan, and only a direct order from the leader finally forced the issue. Ayla watched him walk away from the group with clenched fists and tense shoulders.

  How could he? Broud walked into the woods to get away from the hated scene. How could he? He kicked a log in vain attempt to vent his frustration, sending it rolling down a slope. How could he? He picked up a stout branch and sent it crashing into a tree. How could he? How could he? Broud’s mind kept repeating the phrase as he smashed his fist again and again into a moss-covered bank. How could he let her live and accept her baby both? How could he do it?

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