The Valley of Horses Read online

  “Those clouds look full of snow,” Thonolan said when his brother came into sight and started walking beside the litter. “You can’t see the tops of the mountains; snow must be falling up north already. I’ll say one thing, you get a different view of the world from this position.”

  Jondalar looked up at the clouds rolling over the mountains, hiding the frozen peaks, tumbling over each other as they pushed and shoved in their hurry to fill the clear blue space above. Jondalar’s frown looked almost as threatening as the sky, and his brow clouded with concern, but he tried to mask his fears. “Is that your excuse for lying around?” he said, trying to smile.

  When they reached the log that was jutting out into the river, Jondalar fell back and watched the two river men balance themselves and their burden along the unsteady fallen tree and manhandle the stretcher up the even more precarious gangplank-ladder. He understood why Thonolan had been firmly lashed to the conveyance. He followed after, having trouble keeping his own balance, and looked at the men with even greater respect.

  A few white flakes were beginning to sift down from a gray overcast sky when Roshario and the Shamud gave tightly bound bundles of poles and hides—the large tent—to a couple of the Ramudoi to carry on board and started across the log themselves. The river, reflecting the mood of the sky, roiled and swirled violently—the increased moisture in the mountains making its presence felt downstream.

  The log was bobbing to a different motion than the boat, and Jondalar leaned over the side and reached a hand toward the woman. Roshario gave him a grateful look and took it, and was almost lifted up the last rung and into the boat. The Shamud had no qualms about accepting his assistance either, and the healer’s look of gratitude was as genuine as Roshario’s.

  One man was still on shore. He released one of the moorings, then raced up the log and clambered aboard. The gangplank was hauled in quickly. The heaving craft that was trying to pull away and join the current was restrained by only one line and long-handled paddles in the hands of the rowers. The line was slipped with a sharp jerk, and the craft jumped at its chance for freedom. Jondalar clung tightly to the side as the craft bobbed and bounced into the mainstream of the Sister.

  The storm was building rapidly and the swirling flakes reduced visibility. Floating objects and refuse traveled with them at varying speeds—heavy water-soaked logs, tangled brush, bloated carcasses, and an occasional small iceberg-making Jondalar fear a collision. He watched the shore slipping by, and his glance was held by the stand of alder on the high knoll. Something, attached to one of the trees, was flapping in the wind. A sudden gust broke its hold and carried it toward the river. As it dropped, Jondalar suddenly realized that the stiff, dark-stained leather was his summer tunic. Had it been flapping from that tree all this time? It floated for a moment before it became waterlogged and sank.

  Thonolan had been released from his stretcher and was propped up against the side of the boat, looking pale, in pain, and frightened, but he smiled gamely at Jetamio who was beside him. Jondalar settled near them, frowning as he remembered his fear and his panic. Then he recalled his incredulous joy when he first saw the boat approaching, and he wondered again how they had known he was there. A thought struck him: could it have been that bloody tunic flapping in the wind that told them where to look? But how had they known to come in the first place? And with the Shamud?

  The boat jounced over the rough water, and, taking a good look at its construction, Jondalar became intrigued by the sturdy craft. The bottom of the boat appeared to be made of a solid piece, a whole tree trunk hollowed out, wider at the midsection. The boat was made larger by rows of planks, overlapped and sewn together, extending up the sides and joined in front at the prow. Supports were spaced at intervals along the sides, and planks extended between them for seats for the rowers. The three of them were in front of the first seat.

  Jondalar’s eye followed the structure of the craft and skipped over a log that had been shoved against the prow. Then he looked back and felt his heart pound. Near the prow, caught in the tangled branches of the log in the bottom of the boat, was a leather summer tunic stained dark with blood.

  9

  “Don’t be so greedy, Whinney,” Ayla cautioned, watching the hay-colored horse lapping up the last drops of water from the bottom of a wooden bowl. “If you drink it all, I’ll have to melt more ice.” The filly snorted, shook her head, and put her nose back in the bowl. Ayla laughed. “If you’re that thirsty, I’ll get more ice. Are you coming with me?”

  Ayla’s steady flow of thought directed at the young horse had become a habit. Sometimes it was no more than mental pictures, and often the expressive language of gestures, postures, and facial expressions with which she was most familiar, but since the young animal tended to respond to the sound of her voice, it encouraged Ayla to vocalize more. Unlike the rest of the Clan, a variety of sounds and tonal inflections had always been easy for her; only her son had been able to match her facility. It had been a game for both of them to mimic each other’s nonsense syllables, but some of them had begun to take on meanings. In her streams of conversation to the horse, the tendency extended into more complex verbalizations. She mimicked the sounds of animals, invented new words out of combinations of sounds she knew, even incorporated some of the nonsense syllables from her games with her son. With no one to glare disapprovingly at her for making unnecessary sounds, her oral vocabulary expanded, but it was a language comprehensible only to her—and in a unique sense, to her horse.

  Ayla wrapped on fur leggings, a wrap of shaggy horsehair, and a wolverine hood, then tied on hand coverings. She put a hand through the slit in the palm to tuck her sling in her waist thong and tie on her carrying basket. Then she picked up an icepick—the long bone from a horse’s foreleg cracked with a spiral break to get out the marrow and then sharpened by splintering and grinding against a stone—and started out.

  “Well, come on, Whinney,” she beckoned. She held aside the heavy aurochs hide, once her tent, attached to poles sunk into the earth floor of the cave as a windbreak at the mouth. The horse trotted out and behind her down the steep path. Wind whipping around the bend buffeted her as she walked out on the frozen watercourse. She found a place that looked as if the crumbled crystal of the ice-locked stream could be broken, and hacked off shards and blocks.

  “It’s much easier to scoop up a bowl of snow than chop ice for water, Whinney,” she said, loading the ice into her basket. She stopped to add some driftwood from the pile at the foot of the wall, thinking how grateful she was for the wood, for melting the ice as much as for warmth. “The winters are dry here, colder, too. I miss the snow, Whinney. The little bit that blows around here doesn’t feel like snow, it just feels cold.”

  She piled the wood near the fireplace and dumped the ice into a bowl. She moved it near the fire to let the warmth begin to melt the ice before she put it into her skin pot, which needed some liquid so it wouldn’t burn when she placed it over the fire. Then she looked around her snug cave at several projects in various stages of completion, trying to decide which one to work on that day. But she was restless. Nothing appealed to her until she noticed several new spears completed not long before.

  Maybe I’ll go hunting, she thought. I haven’t been up on the steppes for a while. I can’t take those, though. She frowned. It wouldn’t do any good, I’d never get close enough to use them. I’ll just take my sling and go for a walk. She filled a fold in her wrap with round stones from a pile she had brought up to the cave, just in case the hyenas returned. Then she added wood to the fire and left the cave.

  Whinney tried to follow when Ayla hiked the steep slope up from her cave to the steppes above, then neighed after her nervously. “Don’t worry, Whinney. I won’t be gone long. You’ll be all right.”

  When she reached the top, the wind grabbed her hood and threatened to make off with it. She pulled it back on and tightened the cord, then stepped back from the edge and paused to look around. The parched a
nd withered summer landscape had bloomed with life compared to the sere frozen emptiness of the winter steppes. The harsh wind gusted a dissonant dirge, ululating a thin penetrating whine that swelled to a wailing shriek and diminished to a hollow muffled groan. It whipped the dun earth bare, swirling the dry grainy snow out of whitened hollows and, captive of the wind’s lament, flung the frozen flakes into the air again.

  The driven snow felt like gritty sand that burned her face raw with its absolute cold. Ayla pulled her hood closer, bowed her head, and walked into the sharp northeast wind through dry brittle grass bent to the ground. Her nose pinched together and her throat ached as moisture was snatched away by the bitter air. A violent blast of wind caught her by surprise. She lost her breath, gulped for air, coughing and wheezing, and brought up phlegm. She spit it out and watched it freeze solid before it hit the rock-hard ground and bounced.

  What am I doing up here? she thought. I didn’t know it could be so cold. I’m going back.

  She turned around and stopped still, for the moment forgetting the intense cold. Across the ravine a small herd of woolly mammoths was lumbering past; huge moving hummocks of dark reddish brown fur with long curving tusks. This stark, seemingly barren land was their home; the rough grass burned crisp with cold was life-sustaining nourishment for them. But in adapting to such an environment, they had forfeited their ability to live in any other. Their days were numbered; they would last only as long as the glacier.

  Ayla watched, spellbound, until the indistinct shapes disappeared into the swirling snow, then hurried on and was only too glad to drop over the edge and out of the wind. She remembered feeling the same way when she first found her sanctuary. What would I ever have done if I hadn’t found this valley? She hugged the filly when she reached the ledge in front of her cave, then walked to the edge and looked out over the valley. The snow was slightly deeper there, especially where it had blown into drifts, but just as dry, and just as cold.

  But the valley did offer protection from the wind, and a cave. Without it, and fur and fire, she could not have survived; she was not a woolly creature. Standing on the ledge, the wind brought the howl of a wolf to her ears, and the yipping bark of a dhole. Below, an arctic fox walked across the ice of the frozen stream, its white fur almost hiding it from view when it stopped and held a stiff pose. She noticed movement down the valley and made out the shape of a cave lion; its tawny coat, lightened to almost white, was thick and full. Four-legged predators adapted to the environment of their prey. Ayla, and her kind, adapted the environment to themselves.

  Ayla started when she heard a whooping cackle close by, and looked up to see a hyena above her at the rim of the gorge. She shivered and reached for her sling, but the scavenger moved off with its distinctive shuffling lope along the edge of the ravine, then turned back to the open plains. Whinney moved up beside her, nickered softly, and nudged her gently. Ayla pulled her dun-colored wrap of horse fur closer around her, put her arm around Whinney’s neck, and walked back to her cave.

  Ayla lay on her bed of furs, staring at a familiar formation of rock over her head, wondering why she was suddenly wide awake. She lifted her head and looked in Whinney’s direction. Her eyes were open too, and looking toward the woman, but she displayed no anxiety. Yet, Ayla was sure something was different.

  She snuggled back down in her furs, not wanting to leave their warmth, and looked around the home she had made for herself by the light shining in the hole above the mouth of the cave. Her projects were scattered around, but there was a growing stack of completed utensils and implements along the wall on the other side of the drying rack. She was hungry, and her eye was drawn back to the rack. She had poured the fat she had rendered from the horse into the cleaned intestines, giving it a pinch and a twist at intervals, and the little white sausages were dangling near a variety of dried herbs and seasonings hanging by their roots.

  It made her think of breakfast. Dried meat made into a broth, a little fat added for richness, seasonings, maybe some grain, dried currants. She was too wide awake to stay in bed, and threw back the covers. She quickly tied on her wrap and foot coverings, then reached for the lynx fur from her bed, still warm from body heat, and hurried to go out and pass her urine off the far corner of the ledge. She pushed aside the windbreak and caught her breath.

  The sharp angular contours of the rock ledge had been softened during the night by a thick blanket of white. It glistened in uniform brilliance, reflecting a transparent blue sky hung with mounded fluff. It took a moment longer to comprehend a more astounding change. The air was still. There was no wind.

  The valley, nestled in the region where the wetter continental steppes were giving way to the dry loess steppes, partook of both climates, the south holding sway for the moment. The heavy snow resembled the winter conditions that usually prevailed around the cave of the clan, and to Ayla it was a taste of home.

  “Whinney!” she called. “Come out! It snowed! It really snowed for a change.”

  She was suddenly reminded of the reason she had come out of the cave, and made virgin tracks in the pure white expanse rushing to the far edge. Returning, she watched the young horse step gingerly on the insubstantial stuff, lower her head to sniff, then snort at the strange cold surface. She looked at Ayla and nickered.

  “Come on, Whinney. It won’t hurt you.”

  The horse had never experienced deep snow in such quiet abundance before; she was accustomed to it blowing in the wind or piled up in drifts. Her hoof sunk in when she took another tentative step, and she nickered at the woman again, as though asking for reassurance. Ayla led the young animal out until she felt more comfortable, then laughed at her antics when the filly’s natural curiosity and sense of fun took over. It wasn’t long before Ayla realized she wasn’t dressed for an extended stay outside of the cave. It was cold.

  “I’m going in to make some hot tea and something to eat. But I’m low on water, I’ll have to get some ice …” She laughed. “I don’t need to chip ice from the river. I can just get a bowlful of snow! How would you like a warm mash this morning, Whinney?”

  After they ate, Ayla dressed warmly and went back outside. Without the wind, it felt almost balmy, but it was the familiarity of ordinary snow on the ground that delighted her most. She brought bowls and baskets of it into the cave and set them near the fireplace to melt. It was so much easier than chipping ice for water that she decided to use some for washing. It had been her custom to wash herself with melted snow regularly in winter, but it had been difficult enough to chip sufficient ice for drinking water and cooking. Washing was a forgone luxury.

  She built up the fire with wood from the pile in the rear of the cave, then cleared the snow from the additional firewood stacked outside and brought more in.

  I wish I could stack water up like wood, she thought, looking at the containers of melting snow. I don’t know how long this will last once the wind starts blowing again. She went out for another load of wood, taking a bowl out with her to clear the snow away. As she scooped up a bowlful and dumped it beside the wood, she noticed that it held its shape when she lifted the bowl away. I wonder … Why couldn’t I stack snow like that? Like a pile of wood?

  The idea fired her with enthusiasm, and soon most of the untrodden snow from the ledge was piled against the wall near the cave entrance. Then she began on the pathway down to the beach. Whinney took advantage of the cleared trail to go down to the field. Ayla’s eyes were glistening and her cheeks were rosy when she stopped and smiled with satisfaction at the mound of snow just outside her cave. She saw a small section at the end of the ledge that hadn’t been entirely cleared, and she headed for it with determination. She looked out over the valley and laughed at Whinney picking her way through the unaccustomed drifts with high dainty steps.

  When she glanced back at the pile of snow, she paused and a quirky grin lifted one corner of her mouth as a peculiar idea overcame her. The large pile of snow was made up of many bowl-shaped bumps and from
her viewpoint suggested the contours of a face. She scooped up a bit more snow, then walked back, patted it in place, and stepped away to assess the effect.

  If the nose were a little bigger, it would look just like Brun, she thought and scooped up more snow. She packed it in place, scraped out a hollow, smoothed down a lump, and stepped back to survey her creation again.

  Her eyes twinkled with a mischievous grin. “Greetings, Brun,” she motioned, then felt a little chagrined. The real Brun would not appreciate her addressing a pile of snow with his name. Name-words were too important to assign them so indiscriminately. Well, it does look like him. She giggled at the thought. But maybe I should be more polite. It isn’t proper for a woman to greet the leader as though he were a sibling. I should ask permission, she thought, and, elaborating on her game, sat in front of the snowpile and looked down at the ground—the correct posture for a woman of the Clan to assume when she was requesting an audience with a man.

  Smiling inwardly with her playacting, Ayla sat quietly with her head bowed, just as though she really expected to feel a tap on her shoulder, the signal that she would be allowed to speak. The silence grew heavy, and the stone ledge was cold and hard. She began to think how ridiculous it was to be sitting there. The snow replica of Brun wouldn’t tap her on the shoulder, any more than Brun himself had the last time she sat in front of him. She had just been cursed, however unjustly, and she had wanted to beg the old leader to protect her son from Broud’s wrath. But Brun had turned away from her; it was too late—she was already dead. Suddenly her playful mood evaporated. She got up and stared at the snow sculpture she had made.

  “You’re not Brun!” she gestured angrily, knocking away the part she had shaped so carefully. Rage swelled up inside her. “You’re not Brun! You’re not Brun!” She pummeled the mound of snow, with fists and feet, destroying every semblance to the shape of a face. “I’ll never see Brun again. I’ll never see Durc. I’ll never see anyone again, ever! I’m all alone.” A keening wail escaped her lips, and a sob of despair. “Oh, why am I all alone?”