by Jean M. Auel
“Greetings, Bologan,” she said. “Is Lanoga here?”
Though she had greeted him several times since their return to the Ninth Cave, he still seemed surprised when she did, and always seemed at a loss for words.
“Greetings, Ayla. She’s inside,” he said, then turned to go.
Probably because she had been putting away her clothes, Ayla suddenly remembered a promise she had made to him. “Did you have any luck this summer?” she asked.
“Luck? What do you mean, ‘luck’?” he asked, looking puzzled.
“Several young men your age made their first major kill at the Summer Meeting. I wondered if you had any luck hunting,” she said.
“Some. I killed two aurochs in the first hunt,” he said.
“Do you still have the hides?”
“I traded one for barma makings. Why?”
“I promised I’d make you some winter underclothing, if you would help me,” Ayla said. “I wonder if you would like to use your aurochs hide, though I think deer hides would be better. Maybe you could trade it.”
“I was going to trade it, for more barma makings. I thought you forgot about that,” Bologan said. “You said it a long time ago, when you first came here.”
“It was a long time ago, but I was thinking about some other things I wanted to make, and thought I’d make your outfit at the same time,” she said. “I have some extra deer hides, but you’d have to come over and let me take measurements.”
He looked at her for some time with a strange, almost speculative expression. “You have been helping Lorala a lot. Lanoga, too. Why?”
She thought for a moment. “At first, it was just that Lorala was a baby and she needed help. People want to help babies, that’s why the women started nursing her, once they found out her mother had no more milk. But I’ve grown fond of her, and Lanoga, too.”
Bologan was quiet for a while, then he looked at her. “All right,” he said. “If you really want to make something, I have a deer hide, too.”
Jondalar was on an extended hunting trip, along with Joharran, Solaban, Rushemar, and Jacsoman, who had recently moved to the Ninth Cave from the Seventh, along with his new mate, Dynoda. They were on a mission to find reindeer, not so much to hunt them just yet, but to find out where they were and when they might be migrating closer to their region, so they could arrange a major drive. Ayla was feeling restless. She had started out with the hunters early, then turned back. Wolf had scared up a couple of ptarmigan, not quite fully white yet, but getting close, and she dispatched them quickly.
Willamar was also gone, on what would likely be his last trading trip of the season. He had gone west, specifically to get salt from the people who lived near the Great Waters of the West. Ayla invited Marthona, Folara, and Zelandoni to share a meal and help her eat the ptarmigan. She told them she would cook it the way she used to for Creb when she lived with the Clan. She had dug a small pit in Wood River Valley at the foot of the sloping path to the ledge, lined it with rocks, and built up a good fire inside it. While it was burning down, she plucked the birds, including their snowshoe-feathered feet, then gathered an armload of hay to wrap them in.
If she had found eggs, she would have stuffed them in the cavities of the birds, but it was not the season for eggs. Birds didn’t try to raise chicks when they were heading into winter. Instead she picked a few handfuls of flavorful herbs, and Marthona had offered her some of the last of her salt, for which Ayla was grateful. The ptarmigan were cooking, along with some ground nuts, in the pit oven, and she had spent time grooming the horses, and now she was looking for something else to do while she waited for the birds to cook.
She decided to stop off and see if she could do anything for Zelandoni. The donier said she was in need of some ground red ochre, and Ayla said she would be happy to get some for her. She went back down to Wood River Valley, whistled for Wolf, whom she had left exploring interesting new mounds and holes, and walked toward The River. She dug up the red-colored iron ore and found a nice river-rounded stone that she could use as a pestle to grind the ochre with. Then she whistled for Wolf again as she headed up the slope, not really paying much attention to who else was on the path.
It came as a shock when she almost bumped into Brukeval. He had actively avoided her since the meeting in the zelandonia lodge about Echozar and the Clan, though he constantly watched her from a distance. He observed her advancing pregnancy with pleasure, knowing she would soon be a mother, and actively imagined that the child she carried was of his spirit. Any man could fancy that any pregnant woman was carrying the child of his spirit, and most of them occasionally wondered if a particular woman might be, but Brukeval’s dream was an obsession. He would sometimes lie awake at night envisioning an entire life with Ayla, most of it mimicking what he surreptitiously saw her doing with Jondalar, but when confronted by her on the path, he didn’t know what to say. There was no way to avoid her now.
“Brukeval,” she said, attempting to smile. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
“Well, here we are,” he said.
She hurried ahead. “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t mean to insult you at that meeting. Jondalar told me that you were teased before about flatheads, until you made people stop. I admire the fact that you stood up for yourself and made people stop calling you that. You are not a flathead … one of the Clan. No one should ever have called you that. You couldn’t begin to live with them. You are one of the Others just like all the Zelandonii. That’s how they would see you.”
His expression seemed to soften. “I’m glad you recognize that,” he said.
“But you must realize, to me, they are people,” she hurried on. “They couldn’t be animals. I have never thought of them any other way. They found me alone and injured, and they took me in and cared for me, raised me. I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for them. I find them to be admirable people. I didn’t realize you would consider it an insult to suggest that your grandmother may have lived with them when she was lost and gone for so long, that they might have taken care of her, too.”
“Well, I guess you couldn’t know,” he said, smiling.
She smiled back, feeling relieved, and tried to make her explanation more clear. “It’s just that you remind me of some people that I care about. That’s why I was drawn to you from the beginning. There was a little boy I knew, who I loved, and you remind me of him …”
“Wait! Are you still saying that you think they are a part of me? I thought you said that I was not a flathead,” Brukeval said.
“You aren’t. Not even Echozar is. Just because his mother was Clan doesn’t mean that he is. He wasn’t raised by them, and you weren’t, either …”
“But you still think my mother was an abomination. I told you, she was not! Neither my mother nor my grandmother had anything to do with them. None of those dirty animals had anything to do with me, do you hear me?” He was shouting and his face had turned an angry red. “I am not a flathead! Just because you were raised by those animals, don’t think you can drag me down.”
Wolf was growling at the excited man, ready to spring to Ayla’s defense. The man looked as if he might want to hurt her. “Wolf! No!” she commanded. She had done it again. Why couldn’t she have stopped when he was smiling? But he didn’t have to call her Clan “dirty animals,” because they weren’t.
“I suppose you think that wolf is human, too,” Brukeval sneered. “You don’t even know the difference between people and animals. It’s unnatural for a wolf to act the way he does around people.” He was unaware just how close he was to Wolf’s fangs with his shouting, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Brukeval was beside himself. “Let me tell you something, if it hadn’t been for those animals attacking my grandmother, she would not have been so frightened that she gave birth to a weak woman, and my mother would have lived to take care of me, love me. Those filthy flatheads killed my grandmother and my mother, too. As far as I’m concerned, they are no use to
anyone. They should all be dead, like my mother. Don’t you dare tell me they have anything to do with me. If it were up to me, I’d kill them all myself.”
He was advancing on Ayla as he screamed, backing her down the path. She held Wolf by the fur on his neck to keep him from attacking the raging man. Finally he brushed past her, knocking her aside, and stormed down. He had never been so angry. Not only because she imputed flatheads to his lineage, but because in his rage, he had blurted out his innermost feelings. He had wanted more than anything else to have had a mother to run to when the others teased him. But the woman who inherited Brukeval along with his mother’s possessions had no love for the baby she reluctantly nursed. He was a burden on her, and she considered him repulsive. She had several children of her own, including Marona, making it even easier to ignore him. But she wasn’t much of a mother even to her own, and Marona had learned her callous, unfeeling ways from her mother.
Ayla was shaking. Now she had really done it. She tried to collect herself as she stumbled her way up the path and into Zelandoni’s dwelling. The woman looked up as Ayla came through the entrance and immediately recognized that something was gravely wrong.
“Ayla, what is it? You look as if you’ve just seen an evil spirit,” she said.
“Oh, Zelandoni, I think I have. I just saw Brukeval,” she cried. “I tried to tell him I didn’t mean to insult him at that meeting, but I always seem to say the wrong thing to him.”
“Sit down, tell me about it,” Zelandoni said.
She explained what had happened during her encounter on the path. Zelandoni was quiet after Ayla told her, then she fixed the young woman a cup of tea. Ayla settled down; talking about it had helped.
“I’ve watched Brukeval for a long time,” Zelandoni said after a while. “There’s a fury inside him. He wants to strike out at the world that has given him so much hurt. He has decided to lay the blame on the flatheads, the Clan. He sees them as the root of his pain. He hates everything about them, and anyone associated with them. The worst thing you could have done was to imply that he himself might be related in some way to them. It’s unfortunate, Ayla, but I fear you have made an enemy. It can’t be helped, now.”
“I know it. I could tell. Why do people hate them so much? What’s so terrible about them?” Ayla asked.
The woman looked at her, considering, then made up her mind. “When I said at that meeting that I had gone into deep meditation to recall all the Histories and Elder Legends, that was entirely true. I used every prompt and memory aid I know to bring out everything I ever memorized. It is probably something that should be done more often, it’s enlightening. I think the problem, Ayla, is that we moved into their lands. In the beginning, it wasn’t so bad. There was a lot of room, many empty shelters. It wasn’t hard to share the land with them. They tended to keep to themselves, and we avoided them. We didn’t call them animals then, just flatheads. The term was more descriptive than derogatory,” she said.
“But as time went on, and more children were born, we needed more space. Some people began taking their shelters, sometimes fighting with them, sometimes killing them, sometimes being killed. By then, we had lived here for a long time, and this was our home, too. The flatheads may have been here first, but we needed places to live, so we took theirs.
“When people treat others badly, they have to rationalize it so they can go on living with themselves. We give ourselves excuses. The excuse we used was that the Great Mother gave us the earth for our home, ‘the water, the land, and all Her creation.’ That means all Her plants and animals are ours to use. Then we convinced ourselves that flatheads were animals, and if they were animals, we could take their shelters for ourselves,” Zelandoni said.
“But they are not animals, they are people,” Ayla said.
“Yes. You are right, but we conveniently forgot that. She also said the Earth is our ‘home to use, but not to abuse.’ The flatheads are also Earth’s Children. That was the other thing I learned from my meditation. If She mixes their spirits with ours, they must be people, too. But I don’t think it would have made much difference if we thought they were people or not. I think we would have done it anyway. Doni has made it easier for other living creatures that kill, so they can live. I don’t think your wolf there worries about the rabbits he kills to survive, or the deer that a pack of them may hunt down. He was born to kill them. Without them he would not live, and Doni has given every living thing the desire to continue living,” the donier said.
“But humans have been given the ability to think. That is what makes us learn and grow. It is also what gives us the knowledge that cooperation and understanding are necessary for our own survival, and that has led to empathy and compassion, but there’s another side to those kind of feelings. The empathy and compassion we feel for our own kind is sometimes extended to the rest of the living things on the earth. If we allowed it to keep us from killing a deer, or other animals, we would not live long. The desire to live is the stronger feeling, so we learn to be compassionate selectively. We find ways to close our minds. We limit our sense of empathy.” Ayla was listening closely, fascinated.
“The problem is knowing how much to stop those feelings without perverting them. In my opinion, I think that is really at the bottom of Joharran’s concern over the knowledge you have brought us, Ayla. As long as most people believed your Clan were only animals, we could kill them without thinking about it. It’s harder to kill people. The empathy is so much stronger that the mind must invent new reasons. But, if we can somehow link it to our own survival, the mind will make the devious twists and turns necessary to rationalize it. We’re very good at that. But it changes people. They learn to hate. Your wolf doesn’t need to hate what he kills. It would be easier if we could kill without compunction, like your wolf does, but then, we wouldn’t be human.”
Ayla thought for a time about what Zelandoni said. “Now I know why you are First Among Those Who Serve The Mother. It is hard to kill. I know how hard it is. I remember the first animal I killed with my sling. It was a porcupine. I felt so bad, I didn’t hunt again for a long time, and then I had to find a reason. I decided to kill only carnivores because they sometimes stole the meat from the hunters, and because they killed the same animals the Clan needed for food.”
“That is truly the loss of innocence, Ayla, when we understand what we must do in order to live. That is why a young hunter’s kill is so important. It is not only changes in the physical body that make a person an adult. The first hunt is the most difficult, and it is more than overcoming fear. A man and a woman must show that they can survive, that they can do what must be done to live. That is also the reason we have certain ceremonies to honor the spirits of the animals we kill. It is one way we show honor to Doni. We need to remember and appreciate that their life is given so that we may live. If we don’t, humans can become too hardened, and that can turn against us.
“We must always show appreciation for what we take, we need to honor the spirits of the trees and grass and other foods that grow, too. We must treat all Her Gifts with respect. She can become angered if we ignore Her, and She can take back the life She has given us. If we ever forget our Great Earth Mother, She will no longer provide for us, and if the Great Mother should decide to turn Her back on Her children, we will no longer have a home.”
“Zelandoni, you remind me of Creb in many ways. He was kind and I loved him, but more than that, he understood people. I could always go to him. I hope that doesn’t insult you. It’s not meant to,” Ayla said.
Zelandoni smiled. “No, of course I’m not insulted. I would like to have known him. And, Ayla, I hope you know, you can always come to me.”
Ayla thought about her conversation with the First as she prepared to grind the red ore. But when she began the hard work of crushing the lumps of iron ore with the roundish rock against a flat, saucer-shaped stone, she tried to bury herself in the job to forget about the incident with Brukeval. The exertion did help to wear of
f tension, but the repetitive physical activity left her mind free to think, and Zelandoni had given her much to think about. She is right, Ayla thought. I think I have made an enemy of Brukeval. But what can I do about it now? It’s done. I don’t think there was ever anything I could have done about it. He will think what he wants to think, no matter what I do or say.
It didn’t occur to Ayla to lie and tell him that she didn’t really think he had the look of the Clan. It wasn’t true. She did think he was a mix. She began to wonder about his grandmother. The woman had been lost. When she was found again, she talked about being attacked by animals, but the animals she referred to must have been the ones she called flatheads. They must have found her, how else had she survived? But if they took her in, fed her, they would have expected her to work, like their own women. And any man of the Clan would then feel he could use her to relieve his needs. If she objected, someone may have forced her, the same way Broud had forced her. It was unthinkable for a woman of the Clan to resist. She would have been put in her place.
Ayla tried to imagine how a woman born a Zelandonii would respond in a situation like that. To the Zelandonii, it was the Gift of Pleasure from the Great Earth Mother, and it was never supposed to be forced. It was for sharing, but only when both the man and the woman wanted to share it. Without doubt, Brukeval’s grandmother would have considered it an attack. How would it feel to be assaulted by someone you thought of as an animal? To be forced to share the Gift of Pleasure with such a creature? Would it be enough to affect the mind? Perhaps. Zelandonii women were not used to being ordered around. They were independent, as independent as the men.
Ayla stopped grinding the red stone. It had to be true that a man of the Clan had forced Brukeval’s grandmother to couple with him, because she was pregnant, and that was what started the life growing inside her. And Brukeval’s mother was born as a result. She was weak, Jondalar said. Rydag was weak, too. Perhaps there is something about the mixture that sometimes produces weakness in the offspring.