THE PLAINS OF PASSAGE ec-4 Read online

  They climbed a slight rise and Jondalar noticed that the course of the river was veering to the left, toward the east. It was time to leave this watery vein of life-supporting liquid meandering slowly toward the south and angle westward across country. He stopped to consult the map Talut had carved on the slab of ivory for him. When he looked up, he noticed Ayla had dismounted and was standing on the edge of the bank looking across the river. Something about the way she stood made him think she was upset or unhappy.

  He shifted his leg over, got down from his mount, and joined her on the bank. Across the river he saw what had drawn her to the edge. Tucked into the slope on a terrace halfway up the opposite side was a large, long mound with tufts of grass growing up the sides. It seemed to be a part of the riverbank itself, but the arched entrance closed by a heavy mammoth-hide drape revealed its actual nature. It was an earth-lodge like the one the Lion Camp called home, where they had lived during the previous winter.

  As Ayla stared at the familiar-looking structure, she remembered vividly the inside of the Lion Camp's earthlodge. The roomy semisubterranean dwelling was strong and built to last many years. The floor had been carved out of the fine loess soil of the riverbank and was below ground level. Its walls and rounded roof of sod covered with river clay were firmly supported by a structure of more than a ton of large mammoth bones, with deer antlers entwined and lashed together at the ceiling, and a thick thatch of grass and reeds between the bone and the sod. Benches of earth along the sides were made into warm beds, and storage areas were dug down to the cold permafrost level. The archway was two large curved mammoth tusks, with the butt ends in the ground and the tips facing each other and joined. It was by no means a temporary construction, but a permanent settlement under one roof, large enough to support several large families. She was sure the makers of this earthlodge had every intention of returning, just as the Lion Camp did every winter.

  "They must be at the Summer Meeting," Ayla said. "I wonder which Camp's home that is?"

  "Maybe it belongs to Feather Grass Camp," Jondalar suggested.

  "Maybe," Ayla said, then stared in silence across the rushing stream. "It looks so empty," she added after a while. "I didn't think when we left that I would never see Lion Camp again. I remember when I was sorting through things to take to the Meeting, I left some behind. If I'd known I wasn't going back, I might have taken them with me."

  "Are you sorry you left, Ayla?" Jondalar's concern showed, as always, in the worry wrinkles on his forehead. "I told you I would stay and become a Mamutoi, too, if you wanted me to. I know you found a home with them and were happy. It's not too late. We can still turn back."

  "No, I'm sad to be leaving, but I'm not sorry. I want to be with you. That's what I've wanted from the beginning. And I know you want to go home, Jondalar. You have wanted to go back ever since I've known you. You might get used to living here, but you would never really be happy. You would always miss your people, your family, the ones you were born to. It's not as important to me. I will never know who I was born to. The Clan were my people."

  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 any more, 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 any more. That's the other thing I learned. 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 any more. 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. Onc
e, 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.