The Earth's Children Series 6-Book Bundle

by Jean M. Auel

  “Let me help you,” Ayla said, propping her up.

  “It’s straight! My arm looks right. You did it,” the woman said. Then tears filled her eyes as she lay back down. “Now I won’t have to be a useless old woman.”

  “You may not have full use of it,” Ayla cautioned, “but it is set correctly now and has a chance to heal right.”

  “Dolando, can you believe it? Everything is going to be fine now,” she sobbed, but her tears were of joy and relief.

  17

  “Be careful now,” Ayla said, helping Roshario to ease forward toward Jondalar and Markeno, who were stooped down on either side of her beside her bed. “The sling will support your arm and hold it in place, but keep it close to you.”

  “Are you sure she should get up so soon?” Dolando asked Ayla, frowning with worry.

  “I’m sure,” Roshario said. “I’ve been in this bed too long as it is. I don’t want to miss Jondalar’s welcoming celebration.”

  “So long as she doesn’t tire herself too much, it will probably be good for her to get up and be with everyone for a while,” Ayla said. Then she turned to Roshario. “But not too long. Rest is the best healer now.”

  “I just want to see everyone being happy for a change. Every time someone came in to see me, they looked so sorry for me. I want them to know I’m going to be all right,” the woman said, easing off the bed into the waiting arms of the two young men.

  “Steady now, watch the sling,” Ayla said. Roshario put her good arm around Jondalar’s neck. “All right, together, lift her up.”

  With the woman between them, the two men stood up, moving forward a little so they could straighten up under the sloping roof of the dwelling. They were close to the same height, and they carried her easily. Though Jondalar was more obviously muscular, Markeno was a powerful young man. His strength was disguised by his more slender build, but rowing boats and handling the huge sturgeon the Ramudoi regularly hunted had given his flat, wiry muscles plenty of use.

  “How do you feel?” Ayla asked.

  “Up in the air,” Roshario said, smiling at each man in turn. “It’s a different view from up here.”

  “Are you ready, then?”

  “How do I look, Ayla?”

  “Tholie did a good job of combing and fixing your hair; I think you look fine,” Ayla said.

  “The washing you both gave me made me feel better, too. I didn’t even feel like combing or washing before. That must mean I’m better,” Roshario said.

  “Some of it is the pain medicine I gave you. It will wear off. Be sure to tell me as soon as you start to feel very much pain. Don’t try to be brave about it. And let me know when you begin to get tired, too,” Ayla said.

  “I will. I’m ready now.”

  “Look who’s coming!” “It’s Roshario!” “She must be better,” several voices exclaimed as the woman was carried from the dwelling.

  “Put her down over here,” Tholie said. “I’ve made a place for her.”

  At some time in the past, a large piece of sandstone had broken off the overhang and lodged near the gathering circle. Tholie had placed a bench against it and covered it with furs. The men took Roshario there and lowered her carefully.

  “Are you comfortable?” Markeno asked after they had settled her on the padded seat.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Roshario said. She was unaccustomed to so much doting attention.

  The wolf had followed them out of the dwelling, and, as soon as she was seated, he found a spot and lay down beside her. Roshario was surprised, but when she saw the way he looked at her, and noticed how he watched everyone who approached, she had the strange but distinct feeling that he thought he was protecting her.

  “Ayla, why is that wolf staying around Roshario? I think you should make him go away from her,” Dolando said, wondering what the animal could want with a woman who was still so weak and vulnerable. He knew that wolf packs often hunted the old, sick, and weak members of a herd.

  “No, don’t make him go,” Roshario said, reaching over with her good hand and patting his head. “I don’t think he means to harm me, Dolando. I think he’s watching out for me.”

  “I think he is, too, Roshario,” Ayla said. “There was a boy at the Lion Camp, a weak, sickly child, but Wolf had a special attachment to him and was very protective. I think he senses that you are weak now, and he wants to protect you.”

  “Wasn’t that Rydag?” Tholie said. “The one Nezzie adopted who was …”—she paused, suddenly remembering Dolando’s strong and unreasonable feelings—“… an outsider.”

  Ayla was aware of her hesitation and knew she had not said what she originally intended to say. She wondered why.

  “Is he still with them?” Tholie asked, unaccountably flustered.

  “No,” Ayla said. “He died, early in the season, at the Summer Meeting.” Rydag’s death still upset and saddened her, and it showed.

  Tholie’s curiosity vied with her sense of discretion; she wanted to ask more questions, but this was not the time to ask questions about that particular child. “Isn’t anyone else hungry? Why don’t we eat?” she said.

  After everyone had their fill, including Roshario, who didn’t eat much, though it was more than she had eaten in one meal in some time, people gathered around the fire with cups of tea or lightly fermented dandelion wine. It was time to tell stories, recount adventures, and, especially, to learn more about the visitors and their unusual traveling companions.

  The full complement of Sharamudoi were there, except those few who happened to be away: the Shamudoi, who lived on the land in the high embayment throughout the year, and their river-dwelling kin, the Ramudoi. During the warmer seasons the River People lived on a floating dock moored just below, but in winter they moved up to the high terrace and shared the dwellings of ceremonially joined cross-cousins. The dual couples were considered to be as closely related as mates, and the children of both families were treated as siblings.

  It was the most unusual arrangement of closely related groups that Jondalar knew of, but it worked well for them because of their kinship ties and a unique reciprocal relationship that was mutually beneficial. There were many practical and ritual bonds between the two moieties, but primarily the Shamudoi contributed the products of the land and a safe place during rough weather, while the Ramudoi provided the produce of the river and skilled water transportation.

  The Sharamudoi thought of Jondalar as kin, but he was kin only through his brother. When Thonolan fell in love with a Shamudoi woman, he had accepted their ways and had chosen to become one of them. Jondalar had lived with them just as long and felt they were family He had learned and accepted their ways, but he had never gone through any ritual joining in his own right. In his heart he could not give up his identity with his own people, could not make the decision to settle with them permanently. Though his brother had become Sharamudoi, Jondalar was still Zelandonii. The evening conversation began, understandably, with questions about his brother.

  “What happened after you left here with Thonolan?” Markeno asked.

  As painful as it might be to talk about, Jondalar knew Markeno had a right to know. Markeno and Tholie had become cross-tied with Thonolan and Jetamio; Markeno was as close in kinship as he, and he was a brother born of the same mother. Briefly he told how they had traveled downriver in the boat Carlono had given them, some of their close calls, and their meeting with Brecie, the Mamutoi headwoman of Willow Camp.

  “We’re related!” Tholie said. “She is a close-cousin.”

  “I learned that later, when we lived with Lion Camp, but she was very good to us even before she knew we were kin,” Jondalar said. “That was what made Thonolan decide to go north and visit other Mamutoi Camps. He talked about hunting mammoth with them. I tried to talk him out of it, tried to convince him to come back with me. We had reached the end of the Great Mother River, and that’s as far as he always said he wanted to go.” The tall man closed his eyes, shook his h
ead as if trying to deny the fact, then bowed his head in anguish. The people waited, sharing his pain.

  “But it wasn’t the Mamutoi,” he continued after a while. “That was an excuse. He just couldn’t get over Jetamio. All he wanted was to follow her to the next world. He told me he was going to travel until the Mother took him. He was ready, he said, but he was more than ready. He wanted to go so much that he took chances. That’s why he died. And I wasn’t paying attention either. It was stupid of me to follow him when he went after that lioness who stole his kill. If it hadn’t been for Ayla, I would have died with him.”

  Jondalar’s last comments piqued everyone’s curiosity, but no one wanted to ask questions that would force him to further relive his grief. Finally Tholie broke the silence. “How did you meet Ayla? Were you near Lion Camp?”

  Jondalar looked up at Tholie and then at Ayla. He had been speaking in Sharamudoi and he wasn’t sure how much she had understood. He wished she knew more of the language so she could tell her own story. It was not going to be easy to explain, or rather to make the explanation believable. The more time that passed, the more unreal it all seemed, even to him, but when Ayla told it, it seemed easier to accept.

  “No. We didn’t know Lion Camp then. Ayla was living alone, in a valley several days’ journey away from Lion Camp,” he said.

  “Alone?” Roshario asked.

  “Well, not entirely alone. She shared her small cave with a couple of animals, for company.”

  “Do you mean she had another wolf like this one?” the woman asked, reaching over to pat the animal.

  “No. She didn’t have Wolf then. She got him while we were living at Lion Camp. She had Whinney.”

  “What is a Whinney?”

  “Whinney is a horse.”

  “A horse? You mean she had a horse, too?”

  “Yes. That one, right over there,” Jondalar said, pointing to the horses standing in the field, silhouetted against the red-streaked evening sky.

  Roshario’s eyes opened big with surprise, which made everyone else smile. They had all gone through their initial shock, but she hadn’t noticed the horses before. “Ayla lived with those two horses?”

  “Not exactly. I was there when the stallion was born. Before that, she lived with just Whinney … and the cave lion,” Jondalar finished, almost under his breath.

  “And the what?” Roshario changed to her less than perfect Mamutoi. “Ayla, you should tell us. Jondalar’s confused, I think. And maybe Tholie will translate for us.”

  Ayla had caught bits and pieces of the conversation, but she looked to Jondalar for clarification. He looked absolutely relieved.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been very clear, Ayla. Roshario wants to hear it from you. Why don’t you tell them about living in your valley with Whinney, and Baby, and how you found me,” he said.

  “And why were you living alone in a valley?” Tholie added.

  “It is a long story,” Ayla said, taking a deep breath. The people settled back with smiles. That was exactly what they wanted to hear, a long, interesting new story. She took a sip of her tea and thought about how to begin. “I told Tholie, I don’t remember who my people were. They were lost in an earthquake when I was a little girl, and I was found and raised by the Clan. Iza, the woman who found me, was a medicine woman, a healer, and she began to teach me healing when I was very young.”

  Well, that explained how the young woman could have such skill, Dolando thought, while Tholie was translating. Then Ayla picked up her narrative.

  “I lived with Iza and her brother, Creb; her mate had died in the same earthquake that took my people. Creb was like the man of the hearth; he helped her raise me. She died a few years ago, but before she did, Iza told me I should leave and look for my own people. I didn’t go, I couldn’t leave …” Ayla hesitated, trying to decide how much to tell. “Not then, but after … Creb died … I had to leave.”

  Ayla paused and took another sip of her tea while Tholie restated her words, having a little trouble with the strange names. The telling had brought back the powerful emotions of that time, and Ayla needed to regain her composure.

  “I tried to find my own people, as Iza had told me to do,” she continued, “but I didn’t know where to look. I searched from early spring until well into summer, without finding anyone. I began to wonder if I ever would, and I was getting tired of traveling. Then I came to a small green valley in the middle of the dry steppes with a stream running through it, even a nice little cave. It had everything I needed … except people. I didn’t know if I would find anyone, but I did know winter would be coming and if I wasn’t ready for it, I would never live through it. I decided to stay in the valley until the next spring.”

  The people had become so involved with her story, they were speaking out, nodding in agreement, saying she was right, it was the only thing to do. Ayla explained how she trapped a horse in a pit trap, discovered it was a nursing mare, and later saw a pack of hyenas going after the little filly. “I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “She was just a baby, and so helpless. I chased the hyenas away and brought her to live in my cave with me. I’m glad I did. She shared my loneliness, and she made it more bearable. She became a friend.”

  The women, at least, could understand being drawn to a helpless baby, even if it was a baby horse. The way Ayla explained it made it seem perfectly reasonable, even if no one had ever heard of adopting an animal before. But it wasn’t only the women who were captivated. Jondalar was watching the people. Women and men were equally enthralled, and he realized that Ayla had become a good storyteller. Even he was caught up, and he knew the story. He watched her closely, trying to see what made her so compelling, and he noticed that she used subtle but evocative gestures as well as words.

  It wasn’t a conscious effort or done for any particular effect. Ayla grew up communicating in the Clan way, and it was natural for her to describe with motions as well as with words, but when she first used birdcalls and the nickers and neighs of horses, it surprised her listeners. Living alone in her valley, hearing only the animal life in the vicinity, she began to mimic them, and she learned to reproduce their sounds with uncanny fidelity. After the first shock, her amazingly realistic animal sounds added a fascinating dimension.

  As her story unfolded, especially when she told how she began riding and training the horse, even Tholie could hardly wait to finish translating Ayla’s words so she could hear the rest. The young Mamutoi woman spoke both languages very well, though she could not begin to reproduce the whinny of a horse, or the birdcalls made with unnerving accuracy, but it wasn’t necessary. People were getting a sense of what Ayla said, in part because the languages were similar, but also because of her expressive delivery. They understood the sounds when it was appropriate, but they waited for Tholie’s translation to catch what they missed.

  Ayla anticipated Tholie’s words as much as everyone else, but for an entirely different reason. Jondalar had observed with awe her ability to learn new languages quickly when he first started teaching her to speak his, and he wondered how she did it. He didn’t know her skill with language was derived from a unique set of circumstances. In order to exist among people who learned from the memories of their ancestors, that were stored from birth in their huge brains as a kind of evolved and conscious form of instinct, the girl of the Others had been forced to develop her own memorizing abilities. She had trained herself to remember quickly so she would not be considered so stupid by the rest of her clan.

  She had been a normal, talkative little girl before she was adopted, and though she had lost most of her vocal language when she began to speak as the Clan did, the patterns were set. Her driving need to relearn verbal speech so she could communicate with Jondalar had added impetus to a natural ability. Once begun, the process she had unconsciously used was further developed when she went to live with the Lion Camp and had to learn yet another language. She could memorize vocabulary after one hearing, though syntax and structure
took a little longer. But the language of the Sharamudoi was close to Mamutoi in structure, and many words were similar. Ayla listened carefully to Tholie’s translation of her words, because as she was relating her story, she was learning their language.

  As fascinating as her story of adopting a baby horse was, even Tholie had to stop and ask her to repeat herself when Ayla talked about finding the injured cave lion cub. Perhaps loneliness might drive someone to live with a grass-eating horse, but a gigantic carnivore? A full-grown male cave lion, walking on all fours, could nearly reach the height of the smallish steppe horses, and was more massive. Tholie wanted to know how she could even consider taking in a lion cub.

  “He wasn’t so big then, not even the size of a small wolf, and he was a baby … and he was hurt.”

  Though Ayla had meant to describe a smaller animal, people glanced toward the canine beside Roshario. Wolf was of northern stock, and big even for that large breed. He was the biggest wolf any of them had ever seen. The idea of taking in a lion that size did not appeal to many.

  “The word she named him meant ‘baby,’ and she called him that even after he was full grown. He was the biggest Baby I ever saw,” Jondalar added, which brought chuckles.

  Jondalar smiled, too, but then told a more sobering fact. “I thought that was humorous, too, later, but there was nothing funny about the first time I saw him. Baby was the lion that killed Thonolan, and almost killed me.” Dolando looked apprehensively at the wolf beside his woman again. “But what else can you expect when you walk into a lion’s den? Though we had watched his mate leave and didn’t know Baby was in there, it was a stupid thing to do. As it turned out, I was lucky that it happened to be that particular lion.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lucky’?” Markeno asked.

  “I was badly mauled and unconscious, but Ayla was able to stop him before he killed me,” Jondalar said.