The Earth's Children Series 6-Book Bundle

by Jean M. Auel

  Ayla’s thoughts turned inward, and Jondalar watched a gentle smile soften her face. “Iza would have been so happy for me if she could have known I was going with you. She would have liked you. She told me long before I left that I wasn’t Clan, though I couldn’t remember anyone or anything except living with them. Iza was my mother, the only one I knew, but she wanted me to leave the Clan. She was afraid for me. Before she died, she told me, ‘Find your own people, find your own mate.’ Not a man of the Clan, a man like me; someone I could love, who would care for me. But I was alone so long in the valley, I didn’t think I ever would find anyone. And then you came. Iza was right. As hard as it was to leave, I needed to find my own people. Except for Durc, I could almost thank Broud for forcing me to go. I would never have found a man to love me, if I hadn’t left the Clan, or one that I cared about so much.”

  “We aren’t so different, Ayla. I didn’t think I’d ever find anyone to love, either, even though I knew many women among the Zelandonii, and we met many more on our Journey. Thonolan made friends easily, even among strangers, and he made it easy for me.” He closed his eyes for an anguished moment, flinching from the memory, as a deep sorrow touched his face. The pain was still sharp. Ayla could see it whenever he talked about his brother.

  She looked at Jondalar, at his exceptionally tall, muscular body, at his long, straight, yellow hair tied back with a thong at the nape of his neck, at his fine, well-made features. After watching him at the Summer Meeting, she doubted that he needed his brother’s help to make friends, especially with women, and she knew why. Even more than his build or his handsome face, it was his eyes, his startlingly vibrant and expressive eyes, which seemed to reveal the inner core of this very private man, that gave him a magnetic appeal and a presence so compelling that he was nearly irresistible.

  Just the way he was looking at her that moment, his eyes filled with warmth and desire. She could feel her body respond to the mere touch of his eyes. She thought of the chestnut mammoth, who kept refusing all the other males, waiting for the big russet bull to come, and then not wanting to wait anymore, but there was pleasure in prolonging the anticipation, too.

  She loved looking at him, filling herself with him. She thought he was beautiful the first time she saw him, though she had no one to compare him with. She had since learned that other women loved looking at him, too; considered him remarkably, even overwhelmingly attractive; and that it embarrassed him to be told about it. His outstanding good looks had brought him at least as much pain as pleasure, and to stand out for qualities that he had nothing to do with, did not bring him the satisfaction of accomplishment. They were gifts of the Mother, not the result of his own efforts.

  But the Great Earth Mother had not stopped with mere outward appearances. She had endowed him with a rich and lively intelligence, that tended more toward a sensitivity and understanding of the physical aspects of his world, and a natural dexterity. Abetted by training from the man to whom his mother had been mated when he was born, who was acknowledged as the best in his field, Jondalar was a skilled maker of stone tools who had honed his craft on his Journey by learning the techniques of other flint knappers.

  For Ayla, though, he was beautiful not merely because he was exceptionally attractive by the standards of his people, but because he was the first person she could remember seeing who resembled her. He was a man of the Others, not of the Clan. When he first came to her valley, she had studied his face minutely, if not obviously, even in his sleep. It was such a wonder to see a face with the familiar look of her own after so many years of being the only one who was different, who did not have heavy brow ridges and a sloped-back forehead, or a large, high-bridged, sharp nose, in a face that jutted out, and a jaw with no chin.

  Like hers, Jondalar’s forehead rose up steeply and smoothly, without heavy brow ridges. His nose, and even his teeth, were small by comparison, and he had a bony protuberance below his mouth, a chin, just as she did. After seeing him, she could understand why the Clan thought of her as having a flat face and bulging forehead. She had seen her own reflection in still water, and she believed what they had told her. In spite of the fact that Jondalar towered over her as much as she had towered over them, and that she had since been told by more than one man that she was beautiful, deep inside she still thought of herself as big and ugly.

  But because Jondalar was male, with stronger features and angles more pronounced, to Ayla, he resembled the Clan more than she did. They were the people she grew up with, they were her standard of measure, and unlike the rest of her kind, she thought they were quite handsome. Jondalar, with a face that was like hers, and yet more like a Clan face than hers, was beautiful.

  Jondalar’s high forehead smoothed as he smiled. “I’m glad you think she would have approved of me. I wish I could have met your Iza,” he said, “and the rest of your Clan. But I had to meet you first or I would never have understood that they were people, and that I could meet them. The way you talk about the Clan, they must be good people. I’d like to meet one some time.”

  “Many people are good people. The Clan took me in after the earthquake, when I was little. After Broud drove me away from the Clan, I had no one. I was Ayla of No People until the Lion Camp accepted me, gave me a place to belong, made me Ayla of the Mamutoi.”

  “The Mamutoi and the Zelandonii are not so different. I think you will like my people, and they will like you.”

  “You haven’t always been so sure of that,” Ayla said. “I remember when you were afraid they would not want me, because I grew up with the Clan, and because of Durc.”

  Jondalar felt a flush of embarrassment.

  “They would call my son an abomination, a child born of mixed spirits, half-animal—you called him that, once—and because I birthed him, they would think even worse of me.”

  “Ayla, before we left the Summer Meeting, you made me promise to tell you the truth, and not to keep things to myself. The truth is that I was worried in the beginning. I wanted you to come with me, but I didn’t want you to tell people about yourself. I wanted you to hide your childhood, lie about it, even though I hate lies—and you never learned how. I was afraid they would reject you. I know how it feels, and I didn’t want you to be hurt that way. But I was afraid for myself, too. I was afraid they would reject me for bringing you, and I didn’t want to go through that kind of thing again. Yet I couldn’t bear to think of living without you. I didn’t know what to do.”

  Ayla remembered only too well her confusion and despair over his agony of indecision. As happy as she had been with the Mamutoi, she had also been miserably unhappy because of Jondalar.

  “Now I know, though it took almost losing you before I realized it,” Jondalar continued. “No one is more important to me than you, Ayla. I want you to be yourself, to say or do whatever you think you should, because that’s what I love about you, and I believe, now, that most people will welcome you. I’ve seen it happen. I learned something important from the Lion Camp and the Mamutoi. Not all people think alike and opinions can be changed. Some people will stand by you, sometimes those you least expect to, and some people have enough compassion to love and raise a child whom others call abomination.”

  “I didn’t like the way they treated Rydag at the Summer Meeting,” Ayla said. “Some of them didn’t even want to give him a proper burial.” Jondalar heard the anger in her voice, but he could see tears threatening behind the anger.

  “I didn’t like it either. Some people won’t change. They won’t open their eyes and look at what is plain to see. It took me a long time. I can’t promise you that the Zelandonii will accept you, Ayla, but if they don’t we’ll find some other place. Yes, I want to return. I want to go back to my people, I want to see my family, my friends. I want to tell my mother about Thonolan, and ask Zelandoni to look for his spirit in case he hasn’t found his way to the next world yet. I hope we will find a place there. But if not, it’s not so important to me anymore. That’s the other thing I l
earned. That’s why I told you I would be willing to stay here with you, if you wanted me to. I meant it.”

  He was holding her with both his hands clasping her shoulders, looking into her eyes with fierce determination, wanting to be sure she understood him. She saw his conviction, and his love, but now she wondered if they should have left.

  “If your people don’t want us, where will we go?”

  He smiled at her. “We’ll find another place, Ayla, if we have to, but I don’t think we will. I told you, the Zelandonii are not so different from the Mamutoi. They will love you, just as I do. I’m not even worried about it anymore. I’m not sure why I ever was.”

  Ayla smiled at him, pleased that he was so sure of his people’s acceptance of her. She only wished she could share his confidence. He might have forgotten, or perhaps not realized, what a strong and lasting impression his first reaction to learning about her son and her background had made on her. He had jerked away and looked upon her with such disgust that she would never forget it. It was just as though she were some dirty, filthy hyena.

  As they got under way again, Ayla kept thinking about what might await her at the end of her Journey. It was true, people could change. Jondalar had changed completely. She knew there was not the least bit of that feeling of aversion left in him, but what about the people he had learned it from? If his response was so immediate, and so strong, his people must have taught it to him as he was growing up. Why should they react any differently to her than he had? As much as she wanted to be with Jondalar, and as glad as she was that he wanted to take her home with him, she was not altogether looking forward to meeting the Zelandonii.

  4

  They stayed close to the river as they continued on their way. Jondalar felt almost certain that the course of the stream was making a turn toward the east, but he worried that it might only be a wide swing in its general meandering. If the waterway was changing direction, this would be the place they would leave it—and the security of following an easily defined route—to strike out across country, and he wanted to make sure they were in the right place.

  There were several places they could have stopped for the night but, consulting the map often, Jondalar was looking for a campsite that Talut had indicated. It was the landmark he needed to verify their location. The place was regularly used and he hoped he was right in thinking it was nearby, but the map showed only general directions and landmarks and was imprecise, at best. It had been quickly scratched onto the slab of ivory as an aid to the verbal explanations he had been given, and a reminder of them, and it was not meant to be an accurate representation of the route.

  When the bank continued to rise and pull back, they kept to the high ground for the wider view it offered, though it was drawing away somewhat from the river. Below, closer to the flowing water, an oxbow lake was drying into a marsh. It had begun as a side loop of the river that swayed back and forth, as all flowing water did when traversing open land. The loop eventually closed back on itself, and then filled in with water to form a small lake, which became isolated when the river changed course. With no source of water, it began to dry out. The sheltered lowland was now a wet meadow where marsh reeds and cattails thrived, with water-loving bog plants filling its deep end. Over time, the green swale would become a grassy meadow enriched by this wetland stage.

  Jondalar almost reached for a spear when he saw a moose break out of the wooded cover near the edge and walk out into the water, but the large deer was out of range, even with his spear-thrower, and it would be difficult for them to retrieve it from the bog. Ayla watched the ungainly-seeming animal with the overhanging nose and large palmate antlers, still in velvet, walking into the marsh. He lifted his long legs high, plopping his broad feet, which kept him from sinking into the mucky bottom, until the water reached his flanks. Then he submerged his head and came up with a mouthful of dripping duckweed and water bistort. Nearby waterfowl, nesting in the reeds, ignored his presence.

  Beyond the marsh, well-drained slopes with gullies and cut banks offered protected crannies for forbs such as goosefoot, nettles, and mats of hairy-leaved, mouse-eared chickweed with small white flowers. Ayla loosened her sling and took a few round stones from a pouch in readiness. At the far end of her valley there had been a similar location, where she had often observed and hunted the exceptionally large ground squirrels of the steppes. One or two could make a satisfying meal.

  With the rugged terrain leading to open fields of grass, it was their favored habitat. The rich seeds from the nearby grasslands, stored safely in caches while the squirrels hibernated, sustained them in spring to breed so that at just the time new plants appeared, they would bear their young. The protein-rich forbs were essential for the young to reach maturity before winter. But no ground squirrels chose to show themselves while the people were passing, and Wolf seemed unable, or unwilling to flush them.

  As they continued south, the great granite platform beneath the broad plain that stretched far to the east warped upward into rolling hills. Once, in ages long past, the land they were traveling over had been mountains that had long since worn down. Their stumps were a stubborn shield of rock that resisted the immense pressures that buckled land into new mountains, and the fiery inner forces that could shake and rend a less stable earth. Newer rock had formed on the ancient massif, but outcrops of the original mountains still pierced the sedimentary crust.

  In the time when mammoths grazed the steppes, the grasses and herbs, like the animals of that ancient land, flourished not only in great abundance, but with a surprising range and diversity, and in unexpected associations. Unlike later grasslands, these steppes were not arranged in wide belts of certain limited kinds of vegetation, determined by temperature and climate. They were, instead, a complex mosaic with a richer diversity of plants, which included many varieties of grasses and prolific herbs and shrubs.

  A well-watered valley, a highland meadow, a hilltop, or a slight dip in elevation, each invited its own community of plant life, which grew close beside complexes of unrelated vegetation. A slope facing south might harbor warm-climate growth, surprisingly different from the cold-adapted boreal vegetation on the north face of the same hill.

  The soil of the rugged upland Ayla and Jondalar were traversing was poor, and the grass cover thin and short. The wind had eroded deeper gullies, and in the upper valley of an old spring-flood tributary, the riverbed had gone dry and, lacking vegetation, had drifted into sand dunes.

  Though later found only in high mountain reaches, in this rough terrain not far from lowland rivers, singing voles and pikas were busily cutting grass, to be dried and stored. Instead of hibernating in winter, they built tunnels and nests under the snowdrifts that accumulated in dips and hollows and on the lee side of rocks, and fed on their stored hay. Wolf spied the small rodents and took out after them, but Ayla didn’t bother with her sling. They were too small to make a meal for people, except in large numbers.

  Arctic herbs, which did well in the wetter northern land of bogs and fens, benefited in spring from the additional moisture of the melting drifts and grew, in an unusual association, alongside small hardy alpine shrubs on exposed outcrops and windswept hills. Arctic cinquefoil, with small yellow flowers, found protection from the wind in the same sheltered pockets and niches preferred by pikas, while on exposed surfaces, cushions of moss campion with purple or pink blossoms formed their own protective hummocks of leafy stems in the cold drying winds. Beside them, mountain avens clung to the rocky outcrops and hills of this rugged lower land, just as it did on mountainsides, its low evergreen branches of tiny leaves and solitary yellow flowers spreading out, over many years, into dense mats.

  Ayla noticed the fragrant scent of pink catchfly, just beginning to open their blooms. It made her realize that it was getting late, and she glanced toward the sun lowering in the western sky to verify the hint her nose had detected. The sticky flowers opened at night, offering a haven to insects—moths and flies—in return for spreadin
g pollen. They had little medicinal or food value, but the pleasant-smelling flowers pleased her, and she had a fleeting notion to pick some. But it was already late in the day and she didn’t want to stop. They ought to be making camp soon, she was thinking, particularly if she was going to make the meal she had been thinking about before it got dark.

  She saw blue-purple pasqueflowers, erect and beautiful, each rising from expanding leaves covered with fine hairs and, unbidden, the medical associations came into her mind—the dried plant was helpful for headaches and women’s cramps—but she enjoyed it as much for its beauty as for its usefulness. When her eye was caught by alpine asters with long thin petals of yellow and violet growing from rosettes of silky, hairy leaves, her fleeting notion became a conscious temptation to gather a few, along with some of the other flowers, for no reason except to enjoy them. But where would she put them? They would only wilt, anyway, she thought.

  Jondalar was beginning to wonder if they had missed the marked campsite, or if they were farther away from it than he had thought. He was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that they were going to have to make camp soon and look for the landmark campsite tomorrow. With that, and the need to hunt, they would probably lose another day, and he didn’t think they could afford to lose so many days. He was deep in thought, still worrying about whether he had made the right decision in continuing south, and imagining the dire consequences, and was not paying close attention to a commotion on a hill to their right, except for noticing that it seemed to be a pack of hyenas that had made a kill.