The Earth's Children Series 6-Book Bundle

by Jean M. Auel

  “You shouldn’t have come with me.”

  For an instant, Jondalar wondered how his brother could know his thoughts.

  “I had a feeling I’d never go back home. Not that I expected to find the only woman I could ever love, but I had a feeling I’d just keep going until I found a reason to stop. The Sharamudoi are good people—I guess most people are once you get to know them. But I don’t mind settling here and becoming one of them. You’re a Zelandonii, Jondalar. No matter where you are, you will always be a Zelandonii. You’ll never feel quite at home any other place. Go back, Brother. Make one of those women who have been after you happy. Settle down and raise a big family, and tell the children of your hearth all about your long Journey and the brother who stayed. Who knows? Maybe one of yours, or one of mine, will decide to make a long Journey to find his kin someday.”

  “Why am I more Zelandonii than you? What makes you think I couldn’t be just as happy here as you?”

  “You’re not in love, for one thing. Even if you were, you’d be making plans to take her back with you, not to stay here with her.”

  “Why don’t you bring Jetamio back with us? She’s capable, strong minded, knows how to take care of herself. She’d make a good Zelandonii woman. She even hunts with the best of them—she’d get along fine.”

  “I don’t want to take the time, waste a year traveling all the way back. I’ve found the woman I want to live with. I want to settle down, get established, give her a chance to start a family.”

  “What happened to my brother who was going to travel all the way to the end of the Great Mother River?”

  “I’ll get there someday. There’s no hurry. You know it’s not that far. Maybe I’ll go with Dolando the next time he trades for salt. I could take Jetamio with me. I think she’d like that, but she wouldn’t be happy away from home for long. It means more to her. She never knew her own mother, came close to dying herself with the paralysis. Her people are important to her. I understand that, Jondalar. I’ve got a brother a lot like her.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Jondalar looked down, avoiding his brother’s gaze. “Or of my not being in love? Serenio is a beautiful woman, and Darvo,” the tall blond man smiled and the worry lines on his forehead relaxed, “needs a man around. You know, he may turn out to be a good flint knapper one day.”

  “Big Brother, I’ve known you a long time. Living with a woman doesn’t mean you love her. I know you’re fond of the boy, but that’s not reason enough to stay here and make a commitment to his mother. It’s not such a bad reason to mate, but not to stay here. Go home and find an older woman with a few children if you want—then you can be sure of having a hearthful of young ones to turn into flint knappers. But go back.”

  Before Jondalar could reply, a boy, not yet into his second ten years, ran up to them out of breath. He was tall for his age, but slender with a thin face and features too fine and delicate for a boy. His light brown hair was straight and limp, but his hazel eyes gleamed with lively intelligence.

  “Jondalar!” he exhaled. “I’ve been looking all over for you! Dolando is ready and the river men are waiting.”

  “Tell them we come, Darvo,” the tall blond man said in the langauge of the Sharamudoi. The youngster sprinted ahead. The two men turned to follow, then Jondalar paused. “Good wishes are in order, Little Brother,” he said, and the smile on his face made it plain he was sincere. “I can’t say I haven’t been expecting you to make it formal. And you can forget about trying to get rid of me. It’s not every day a man’s brother finds the woman of his dreams. I wouldn’t miss your mating for the love of a donii.”

  Thonolan’s grin lit up his whole face. “You know, Jondalar, that’s what I thought she was the first time I saw her, a beautiful young spirit of the Mother who had come to make my Journey to the next world a pleasure. I would have gone with her, too, without a struggle … I still would.”

  As Jondalar fell in behind Thonolan, his brow furrowed. It bothered him to think his brother would follow any woman to her death.

  The path zigzagged its way down a steep slope in switchbacks, which made the descent more gradual, through a deeply shaded forest. The way ahead opened up as they approached a stone wall that brought them to the edge of a steep cliff. A path around the stone wall had been laboriously hewn out of the face wide enough to accommodate two people abreast, but not with comfort. Jondalar stayed behind his brother as they passed around the wall. He still felt an aching sensation deep in his groin when he looked over the edge at the deep, wide, Great Mother River below, though they had wintered with the Shamudoi of Dolando’s Cave. Still, walking the exposed path was better than the other acess.

  Not all Caves of people lived in caves; shelters constructed on open sites were common. But the natural shelters of rock were sought, and prized, especially during the winter’s bitter cold. A cave or rock overhang could make desirable a location that would otherwise have been spurned. Seemingly insurmountable difficulties would be casually overcome for the sake of such permanent shelters. Jondalar had lived in caves in steep cliffs with precipitous ledges, but nothing quite like the home of this Cave of Shamudoi.

  In a far earlier age, the earth’s crust of sedimentary sandstone, limestone, and shale had been uplifted into ice-capped peaks. But harder crystalline rock, spewed from erupting volcanoes caused by the same upheavals, was intermixed with the softer stone. The entire plain through which the two brothers had traveled the previous summer, that had once been the basin of a vast inland sea, was hemmed in by the mountains. Over long eons the outlet of the sea eroded a path through a ridge, which had once joined the great range on the north with an extension of it to the south, and drained the basin.

  But the mountain gave way only grudgingly through the more yielding material, allowing just a narrow gap bounded by obdurate rock. The Great Mother River, gathering unto herself her Sister and all her channels and tributaries into one voluminous whole, passed through the same gap. Over a distance of nearly a hundred miles, the series of four great gorges was the gate to her lower course and, ultimately, her destination. In places along the way she spread out for a mile; in others, less than two hundred yards separated walls of sheer bare stone.

  In the slow process of cutting through a hundred miles of mountain ridge, the waters of the receding sea formed themselves into streams, waterfalls, pools, and lakes, many of which would leave their mark. High on the left wall, close to the beginning of the first narrow passage, was a spacious embayment: a deep broad shelf with a surprisingly even floor. It had once been a small bay, a protected cove of a lake, hollowed out by the unwavering edge of water and time. The lake had long since disappeared, leaving the indented U-shaped terrace high above the existing water line; so high that not even spring floods, which could change the river level dramatically, came close to the ledge.

  A large grass-covered field edged to the sheer drop-off of the shelf, though the soil layer, evidenced by a couple of shallow cooking pits that went down to rock, was not deep. About halfway back, brush and small trees began to appear, hugging and climbing the rugged walls. The trees grew to a respectable size near the rear wall, and the brush thickened and clambered up the steep back incline. Close to the back on a side wall was the prize of the high terrace: a sandstone overhang with a deep undercut. Beneath it were several shelters constructed of wood, partitioning the area into dwelling units, and a roughly circular open space, with a main hearth and a few smaller ones, that was both an entrance and a gathering place.

  In the opposite corner was another valuable asset. A long thin waterfall, dropping from a high lip, played through jagged rocks for a distance before spilling over a smaller sandstone overhang into a lively pool. It ran off along the far wall to the end of the terrace, where Dolando and several men were waiting for Thonolan and Jondalar.

  Dolando hailed them when they appeared around the jutting wall, then began descending over the edge. Jondalar jogged behind his brother and reached the far w
all just as Thonolan started down a precarious path alongside the small stream that dropped down a series of ledges to the river below. The trail would have been impossible to negotiate in places except for narrow steps tediously chiseled out of the rock, and sturdy rope handrails. As it was, the cascading water and constant spray made it treacherously slick, even in summer. In winter it was an impassable mass of frozen icicles.

  In the spring, though it was inundated with heavier runoff and icy patches which threatened footing, the Sharamudoi—both the chamois-hunting Shamudoi, and the river-dwelling Ramudoi, who formed their opposite half—scampered up and down like the agile goatlike antelope that inhabited the steep terrain. As Jondalar watched his brother descend with the reckless disregard of one born to it, he thought Thonolan was certainly right about one thing. If he lived here all his life, he would never get used to this access to the high shelf. He glanced at the turbulent water of the huge river far below and felt the familiar ache in his groin, then took a deep breath, gritted his teeth, and stepped over the edge.

  More than once he was grateful for the rope as he felt his foot slip on unseen ice, and he expelled a deep sigh when he reached the river. A floating dock of logs lashed together, swaying with the shifting current, was welcome stability by comparison. On a raised platform that covered more than half the dock were a series of wood structures similar to the ones under the sandstone overhang on the ledge above.

  Jondalar exchanged greetings with several inhabitants of the houseboats as he strode along the lashed logs toward the end of the dock where Thonolan was just getting into one of the boats tied there. As soon as he got in, they shoved off and began pulling upstream with long-handled oars. Conversation was kept to a minimum. The deep, strong current was urged on by spring melt, and, while the river men rowed, Dolando’s men kept an eye out for floating debris. Jondalar settled back and found himself musing on the unique interrelationship of the Sharamudoi.

  People he had met specialized in different ways, and he often wondered what had led them along their particular path. With some, all the men customarily performed one function, and all the women another, until each function became so associated with a certain gender that no woman would do what she considered man’s work, and no man could bring himself to perform a woman’s task. With others, tasks and chores tended to fall more along lines of age—younger people performing the more strenuous tasks, and older ones the sedentary chores. In some groups, women might be in full charge of children, in others much of the responsibility of tending and teaching young children belonged to the elders, both male and female.

  With the Sharamudoi, specialization had followed different lines, and two distinct but related groups had developed. The Shamudoi hunted chamois and other animals in the high crags and tors of the mountains and cliffs, while the Ramudoi specialized in hunting—for the process was more like hunting than fishing—the enormous sturgeon, up to thirty feet long, of the river. They also fished for perch, pike, and large carp. The division of labor might have caused them to split into two distinct tribes, except for mutual needs they had of each other which kept them together.

  The Shamudoi had developed a process for making beautiful, velvety soft leather from chamois hides. It was so unique that distant tribes in the region would trade for them. It was a closely guarded secret, but Jondalar had learned that oils from certain fish were involved in the process. It gave the Shamudoi a strong reason to maintain a close tie with the Ramudoi. On the other hand, boats were made from oak, with some beech and pine used for fittings, and the long planks of the sides were clenched with yew and willow. The river people had need of the mountain dwellers’ knowledge of the forests to find the proper wood.

  Within the Sharamudoi tribe, each Shamudoi family had a counterpart Ramudoi family related to it by complex kinship lines that might or might not have anything to do with blood relationship. Jondalar still hadn’t sorted them all out, but after his brother mated Jetamio, he would suddenly be endowed with a score of “cousins” among both groups, related through Thonolan’s mate, although she had no living blood relatives. Certain mutual obligations would be expected to be met, though for him this would involve little more than using certain titles of respect when addressing acquaintances among his new kin.

  As an unmated male, he would still be free to go if he wished, though he would be even more welcome to stay. But the ties that bound the two groups were so strong that if living quarters became congested, and a family or two of the Shamudoi decided to move away and start a new Cave, their counterpart family of Ramudoi had to move with them.

  There were special rites to exchange ties if the counterpart family did not want to move and another family did. In principle, however, the Shamudoi could insist and the Ramudoi would be obligated to follow, because in matters concerning the land, the Shamudoi had the right to decide. The Ramudoi were not without some leverage, however. They could refuse to transport their Shamudoi kin, or to help them look for a suitable location, since decisions dealing with the water fell to them. In practice, any decision as major as moving away was usually worked out together.

  Additional ties had developed, both practical and ritual, to strengthen the relationship, many of them centering on the boats. Though decisions regarding boats on the water were the prerogative of the Ramudoi, the boats themselves also belonged to the Shamudoi, who consequently benefited from the products of their use, in proportion to benefits given in return. Again, the principle which had evolved to resolve disputes was much more complicated than the practice. Mutual sharing with unspoken understanding of and respect for each other’s rights, territories, and expertise made disputes rare.

  The making of boats was a joint effort for the very practical reason that it required both the products of the land and the knowledge of the water, and this gave the Shamudoi a valid claim to the craft used by the Ramudoi. Ritual reinforced the tie, since no woman of either moiety could mate a man who did not have such a claim. Thonolan would have to assist in the building, or rebuilding, of a boat before he could mate the woman he loved.

  Jondalar was looking forward to the boat building, too. He was intrigued with the unusual craft; he wondered how they were made and how to propel and navigate them. He would have preferred some other reason than his brother’s decision to stay and mate a Shamudoi woman as a means of finding out. But from the beginning, these people had interested him. The ease with which they traveled on the great river and hunted the huge sturgeon surpassed the abilities of any people he had ever heard of.

  They knew the river in all her moods. He’d had difficulty comprehending her sheer volume until he had seen all her waters together, and she wasn’t full yet. But it wasn’t from the boat that her size was so apparent. During the winter when the waterfall trail was icing over and unusable, but before the Ramudoi moved in with their Shamudoi kin above, commerce between the two was accomplished by means of ropes and large woven platforms suspended over the ledge of the Shamudoi terrace and down to the Ramudoi dock.

  The falls hadn’t yet frozen when he and Thonolan first arrived, but his brother was in no shape to make the precarious ascent. They were both lifted up in a basket.

  When he saw her from that perspective for the first time, Jondalar began to understand the full extent of the Great Mother River. The blood had drained from his face; his heart pounded with the shock of comprehension as he looked down at the water and the rounded mountains across the river. He was awed and overcome with a deep reverence for the Mother whose birth waters had formed the river in her wondrous act of creation.

  He had since learned there was a longer, easier, if less spectacular ascent to the high embayment. It was part of a trail that extended from west to east over the mountain passes and dropped down to the broad river plain on the eastern end of the gate. The western part of the trail, in the highlands and foothills leading to the start of the series of gorges, was more rugged, but parts of it dipped to the river’s edge. They were heading to one such
place.

  The boat was already pulling out of midchannel toward an excitedly waving group of people lining a beach of gray sand when a gasp caused the older brother to look around.

  “Jondalar, look!” Thonolan was pointing upstream.

  Bearing down on them in ominous splendor, following the deep midchannel, was a large, jagged, glittering iceberg. Reflecting crystal facets of the translucent edges haloed the monolith with insubstantial shimmer, but the blue-green shadowy depths held its unmelted heart. With practiced skill, the men rowing the boat changed pace and direction, then, feathering the stroke, they paused to watch a wall of glistening cold glide by with deadly indifference.

  “Never turn your back on the Mother,” Jondalar heard the man in front of him say.

  “I’d say the Sister brought that one, Markeno,” the man beside him commented.

  “How did … big ice … come here, Carlono?” Jondalar asked him.

  “Iceberg,” Carlono said, first supplying him with the word. “It could have come from a glacier on the move in one of those mountains,” he went on, moving his chin in the direction of the white peaks over his shoulder, since he had resumed rowing. “Or it could have come from farther north, probably by way of the Sister. She’s deeper, doesn’t have as many channels—this time of year especially. There’s more to that berg than the part you see. Most of it is underwater.”

  “It is hard to believe … iceberg … so big, come so far,” Jondalar said.

  “We get ice every spring. Not always that big. It won’t last much longer, though—the ice is rotten. One good bump and she’ll break up, and there is a midchannel rock downstream, just below the surface. I don’t think that iceberg will make it through the gate,” Carlono added.

  “One good bump from that and we would be the ones to break up,” Markeno said. “That’s why you never turn your back on the Mother.”