The Earth's Children Series 6-Book Bundle

by Jean M. Auel

  “We can go across the stream and visit our other Sacred Places. Some of us also live in them. I think you may find them interesting, as well,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said.

  They walked toward the small stream that divided the valley, and then upstream to where they had crossed before. There were two solid stepping-stones in the middle of the waterway, which they used to get to the other side; then they went back downstream toward the shelter in which they were staying. There were several abris on this side of the stream nestled into the slope of the valley that continued up to a high promontory that dominated the whole region, and served as a good lookout point. They walked to one that was about six hundred feet from where the spring-fed stream flowed into The River.

  When they walked under the overhanging stone of the shelter, they were struck immediately by a frieze of five animals: two horses and three bison all facing right. The third figure in particular was a bison about three feet long, deeply incised into the stone wall. Its voluminous body was carved in such strong relief, it was almost a sculpture. Black coloration was used to accentuate the outline. Several other engravings covered the walls: cupules, lines, and animals, most not as deeply carved.

  They were introduced to several of the people who were standing around watching them, looking rather proud. They were no doubt pleased to show off their stunning home, and Ayla didn’t blame them. It was very impressive. After she had carefully looked over the engravings, Ayla began to take in the rest of the shelter. It was obvious that quite a few people lived there, though there weren’t very many at the moment. Like all the rest of the Zelandonii, in summer people traveled; visiting, hunting, gathering, and collecting various other materials that they used to make things.

  Ayla noticed an area that had been left recently by someone who was working with ivory, judging from the material scattered around. She looked more closely. There were pieces in different stages of production. The tusks first had been scored over and over again to detach rod-shaped sections, and several small rods were stacked together. A couple of rods had been divided into sections of pairs, which were then worked into two round segments attached together. The flattened piece between was pierced just above each round, then scored and cut through to create two beads, which then had to be smoothed into the final form, a rounded basketshape.

  A man and a woman, both middle-aged, came and stood beside her as she was hunkered down to look closely; she wouldn’t dream of touching the beads. “These are remarkable—did you make them?” Ayla said.

  They both smiled. “Yes, bead-making is my craft,” they said together, then laughed at their inadvertent timing.

  Ayla asked how long it took to make the beads, and was told one person would be lucky to complete five or six beads from first light until the sun was high and they stopped for a midday meal. Enough beads for one necklace, depending upon how long it was, took anywhere from several days to a moon or two. They were extremely precious.

  “It looks like a difficult craft. Just looking at the various steps it takes makes me appreciate my Matrimonial outfit even more. There are many ivory beads sewn on it,” Ayla said.

  “We saw it!” the woman said. “It was beautiful. We went to see it afterward, when Marthona had laid it out on display. The ivory beads were expertly made, by a somewhat different process, I think. The hole seemed to go all the way through the bead, perhaps working from both sides. That is very difficult to do. If you don’t mind my asking, where did you get it?”

  “I was a Mamutoi—they live far to the east—and the mate of the leader gave it to me; her name was Nezzie of the Lion Camp. Of course, that was when she thought I was going to mate the son of her brother’s mate. When I changed my mind and decided to leave with Jondalar, she told me to keep it for my mating with him. She was very fond of him, too.” Ayla explained.

  “She must have been fond of him, and you,” the man said. He thought, but didn’t say, that the outfit was not only beautiful, it was extremely valuable. To give so much to someone who would take it away meant she must have cared a great deal for the young woman. It made him better understand the status the foreign woman had been accorded, though she was not born a Zelandonii, as her speech certainly attested. “It is without doubt one of the most stunning outfits I have ever seen.”

  The Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave added, “They also make beads and necklaces out of seashells from both the Great Western Waters and the Southern Sea, and they carve ivory pendants, and pierce teeth. People especially like to wear fox teeth and those special shiny eyeteeth of deer. Even people from other Caves want their work.”

  “I grew up near a sea, far to the east,” Ayla said. “I’d like to see some of your shells.”

  The couple—Ayla couldn’t decide if they were mates or sister and brother—brought out bags and containers from where they were stored, and poured them out for display, eager to show their riches. There were hundreds of shells, mostly small, globular mollusks like periwinkles or long shapes such as dentalia that could be sewn onto clothes or strung into necklaces. There were also some scallop shells, but for the most part, the shells were from creatures that were essentially inedible, which meant they had been collected for their decorative value alone, not as food, and from a great distance away. They had either traveled to both seashores themselves, or traded for them from someone who had. The amount of time invested in acquiring items solely for display meant that as a society, the Zelandonii were not living on the edge of survival; they had abundance. According to the customs and practices of their time, they were wealthy.

  Both Jondalar and the First had come to see what had been brought out and displayed for Ayla. Though they had both been aware of the Fifth Cave’s status, partly because of their jewelry-makers, seeing so much at once was almost overwhelming. They couldn’t help but make comparisons in their minds to the Ninth Cave, but when they thought about it, they knew that their Cave was equally wealthy, in a slightly different way. In fact, most of the Zelandonii Caves were.

  The Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave took them into another shelter nearby, and again it was well decorated, primarily with engravings of horses, bison, deer, even a partial mammoth, often accented with both red ocher and black manganese paint. The antlers of an engraved deer, for example, had been outlined in black, while a bison had been painted mostly red. Again they were introduced to the people who were there. Ayla noticed that the children who had been around their shelter, which was on the same side of the small stream, had gathered around again; she recognized several of them.

  Suddenly Ayla felt dizzy and nauseous, and had a very strong need to get out of the shelter. She couldn’t explain her intense urge to leave, but she had to get outside.

  “I’m thirsty, I want to get some water,” she said, walking out quickly, and heading toward the stream.

  “You don’t have to go out,” a woman said, following behind her. “We have a spring inside.”

  “I think we all need to go anyway. The feast must be ready, and I’m hungry,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said. “I should think you must be, too.”

  They returned to the main shelter, or what Ayla had come to think of as the main shelter, and found everything for the feast set up and waiting for them. Although extra dishes were stacked up for the visitors, Ayla and Jondalar got their personal eating cups, bowls, and knives out of their pouches. The First carried her own dishes as well. Ayla took out Wolf’s water bowl, which also served as an eating dish if one was needed, and thought that she should start making eating dishes for Jonayla soon. Though she planned to nurse her until she could count at least three years, she would be giving her tastes of other food long before that.

  Someone had recently hunted an aurochs; a roast haunch, turned on a spit over coals, was the main dish. Lately, they only saw the wild cattle in summer, but it was one of Ayla’s favorite foods. The taste was similar to bison, except richer, but then they were similar animals, with hard, round, curving horns that grew to a po
int and were permanent, not shed every year like deer antlers.

  There were summer vegetables, too: sow-thistle stems, cooked pigweed, coltsfoot, and nettle leaves flavored with sorrel, and cowslips and wild rose petals in a salad of young dandelion leaves and clover. Fragrant meadowsweet flowers gave a honey-like sweetness to a sauce of crabapples and rhubarb served with the meat. A mixture of summer berries required no sweetening. They had raspberries, an early ripening variety of blackberries, cherries, blackcurrants, elderberries, and pitted blackthorn plums, though pitting the small sloes was a time-consuming job. Rose leaf tea finished off the delicious meal.

  When she took out Wolf’s bowl and gave him the bone she had chosen with a little meat left on, one of the women looked at the wolf with disapproval, and Ayla heard her say to another woman that she didn’t think it was right to feed a wolf food that was meant for people. The other woman nodded her head in agreement, but Ayla had noticed that both of them had looked at the four-legged hunter with trepidation earlier in the day. She had hoped to introduce Wolf to the women to perhaps reduce their fearfulness, but they made a point of avoiding both Ayla and the meat-eater.

  After the meal, more wood was put on the fire to provide stronger light against the encroaching darkness. Ayla was nursing Jonayla and sipping a cup of hot tea with Wolf at her feet in the company of Jondalar, the First, and the Zelandoni of the Fifth. A group of people approached, including Madroman, though he stayed in the background. Ayla recognized others, and gathered that they were the acolytes of the Fifth, probably wanting to spend some time with the One Who Was First.

  “I have completed Marking the Suns and Moons,” said one of them. The young woman opened up her hand and revealed a small plaque of ivory covered with strange markings.

  The Fifth picked it out of her hand and examined it carefully, turning it over to see the back side and even checking around the edges. Then he smiled. “This is about a half year,” he said, then gave it to the First. “She is my Third Acolyte, and started the Marking this time last year. Her plaque for the first half is put away.”

  The large woman looked at the piece with the same careful scrutiny as the Zelandoni of the Fifth, but not as long. “This is an interesting method of marking,” she said. “You show the turns by position and the crescents with curved marks for two of the moons you’ve marked. The rest are around the edge and on the back. Very good.”

  The young woman beamed under the praise from the First.

  “Perhaps you could explain what you’ve done to my acolyte. Marking the Suns and Moons is something she has yet to do,” the First said.

  “I would have thought it was something she had already done. I’ve heard she is known for her medicinal knowledge, and she is mated. There are not many acolytes I know who are mated and have children, not even many Zelandonia,” the Third Acolyte of the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said.

  “Ayla’s training has been unconventional. As you know, she was not born to the Zelandonii, so the order in which she has gained her knowledge is not the same as ours. She is an exceptional healer. She started young, but she is just beginning her Donier Tour, and hasn’t yet learned to Mark the Suns and Moons,” the Zelandoni Who Was First carefully explained.

  “I’ll be happy to explain the way I Marked them to her,” the Third Acolyte of the Fifth said, and sat down next to Ayla.

  Ayla was more than interested. This was the first she had heard of Marking the Suns and Moons, and didn’t know it was another task she’d have to complete as part of her training. She wondered what else there was that she didn’t know she would have to do.

  “You see, I made one mark each night,” the young woman said, showing her the marks she had etched into the ivory with a pointed tool of sharp flint. “I’d already marked the first half year on another piece, so I was getting an idea of how to keep track of more than just the count of the days. I started this just before the moon was new and I was trying to show where the moon was in the sky, so I began here.” She indicated a mark that was in the middle of what seemed to be just random haphazard pitting. “The next few nights it snowed. It was a big storm and blocked out the moon and the stars, but I wouldn’t have been able to see the moon anyway. It was the time when Lumi was closing his great eye. The next time I saw him, he was a thin crescent, waking up again, so I made a curved mark here.”

  Ayla looked where the young woman indicated and was rather surprised to see that what had appeared at first to be a hole made by a sharp point was indeed a small curved line. She looked more closely at the group of markings and suddenly they didn’t look so random. There did seem to be a pattern to it, and she was interested in how the young woman would proceed.

  “Since the time of Lumi’s sleeping is the beginning of a Moon, that’s here on the right where I decided to turn back to mark the next set of nights,” the Third Acolyte continued. “Right about here was the first eye-half-closed; some people call it the first half-face. Then it keeps getting bigger until it’s full. It’s hard to tell when it’s exactly full—it looks full for a few days—so that’s here on the left where I turned back again. I made four curved marks, two below and two above. I kept marking until it was the second half-face, when Lumi starts to close his eye again, and you notice it’s just above the first half-face.

  “I kept marking until his eye was closed again—see here on the right, where I curved down? All the way around the line with the first right-end turn. You take it and see if you can follow it. I always make the turns when he’s full face, on the right, or when he’s sleeping, on the left. You’ll see that you can count two Moons, plus another half. I stopped at the first half-face after the second Moon. I was waiting for Bali to catch up. It was the time when the sun is as far south as it goes and stands still for a few days, then changes direction and goes north again. It’s the ending of First Winter and the beginning of Second Winter, when it’s colder but has the promise of Bali’s return.”

  “Thank you,” Ayla said. “That was fascinating! Did you work it all out yourself?”

  “Not exactly. Other Zelandonia showed me their way of marking, but I saw a plaque at the Fourteenth Cave once that was quite old. It wasn’t marked in quite the same way, but it gave me the idea when it was my time to Mark the Moons.”

  “It’s a very good idea,” the First said.

  It was very dark when they started back to their sleeping place. Ayla was holding the baby, who was sound asleep wrapped up in her carrying blanket, so both Jondalar and the First each borrowed a torch to see their way.

  As they approached the visitors’ shelter, they passed by some of the other shelters they had seen earlier. When she came to the one where she had felt so uncomfortable, Ayla shuddered again and hurried past.

  “What’s wrong?” Jondalar asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ayla said. “I’ve been feeling strange all day. It’s probably nothing.”

  When they reached their shelter, the horses were milling around outside, rather than in the large roomy space she had made for them inside. “Why are they out here? The horses have been acting up all day; that may be what’s bothering me,” Ayla said. As they turned into the shelter toward their tent, Wolf hesitated, then sat down on his haunches and refused to enter. “Now, what’s wrong with Wolf?”

  17

  “Why don’t we take the horses for a run this morning?” Ayla said softly to the man who was lying beside her. “Yesterday they seemed restless and edgy. I am too. They don’t really get to go free and fast when they are pulling the pole-drags. It’s hard work, but not the kind of exercise they like.”

  Jondalar smiled. “That’s a good idea. I don’t get to exercise the way I’d like to either. What about Jonayla?”

  “Maybe Hollida would like to watch her, especially if Zelandoni will keep an eye on them,” Ayla said.

  Jondalar sat up. “Where is Zelandoni? She’s not here.”

  “I heard her get up earlier. I think she went to talk to the Fifth,” Ayla sai
d. “If we leave Jonayla, perhaps we should leave Wolf, too, though I’m not sure how the people of this Cave feel about him. They seemed a little nervous around him while we were eating last night. This is not the Ninth Cave.… Let’s take Jonayla with us. I can take her in her carrying blanket. She likes to ride.”

  Jondalar pulled the top of their sleeping roll back and got up. Ayla got up too, leaving the baby who had been sleeping at her side to wake up while she went to pass her water.

  “It rained last night,” Ayla said when she got back.

  “Now aren’t you glad you stayed inside, in the tent and under cover?” Jondalar said.

  Ayla didn’t answer. She hadn’t slept well. She just couldn’t get comfortable, but they did stay dry and the tent aired out.

  Jonayla had rolled over on her stomach and was kicking her legs and holding her head up. She had also rolled out of her swaddling, and the soiled absorbent wadding it held in place. Ayla collected the unpleasant material and dumped it in the night basket, rolled up the damp, softened-leather swaddling blanket, then picked up the baby and headed down to the small stream to clean the little one, herself, and the blanket. She rinsed herself and the baby in the running water, a procedure to which the baby was now so accustomed, she didn’t even fuss about it, though it was cold. Ayla hung the swaddling across some brush near the water, then got dressed and found a comfortable place to sit outside of the stone shelter to nurse her infant.

  In the meantime, Jondalar had found the horses not far up the valley, brought them back to the abri, and was tying riding blankets on the backs of both Whinney and Racer. At Ayla’s suggestion, he tied equally balanced pack baskets across the mare’s rump as well, but had some difficulty when Gray started nuzzling her dam, trying to nurse. About the time they were ready to go to what Ayla thought of as the main shelter in this place of many shelters, Wolf returned. She assumed he had gone off to hunt earlier, but he appeared so suddenly, he spooked Whinney, which surprised the woman. Whinney was normally a calm horse and the wolf didn’t usually alarm her; it was Racer who was more excitable, but all the horses seemed skittish, even the little filly. And Wolf, too, Ayla thought as he pressed against her as though looking for attention. She felt odd herself. Something seemed off, just not quite right. She looked at the sky to see if any storm threatened; a film of high clouds made the sky white with telltale traces of blue. They probably all needed a good run.