Mammoth Hunters (43 page)

Jondalar stood at the foot of the slope wishing there was something he could do to acknowledge this burial place of his brother. Perhaps Doni had already found him, since She called him back to Her so soon, but he knew Zelandoni would try to find this resting place of Thonolan’s spirit and guide him if she could. But how could he tell her where this place was? He couldn’t even have found it himself.

“Jondalar?” Ayla said. He looked at her and noticed she had a small leather pouch in her hand. “You have told me his spirit should return to Doni. I don’t know the ways of the Great Earth Mother, I only know of the spirit world of the Clan totems. I asked my Cave Lion to guide him there.
Maybe it is the same place, or maybe your Great Mother knows of that place, but the Cave Lion is a powerful totem and your brother is not without protection.”

“Thank you, Ayla. I know you did the best you could.”

“Maybe you don’t understand, just as I don’t understand Doni, but the Cave Lion is your totem, too, now. He chose you, as he chose me, and marked you, as he marked me.”

“You told me that before. I’m not sure what it means.”

“He had to choose you, when he chose you for me. Only a man with a Cave Lion totem is strong enough for a woman with a Cave Lion totem, but there is something you must know. Creb always told me, it is not easy living with a powerful totem. His Spirit will test you, to know you are worthy. It will be very hard, but you will gain more than you know.” She held up the small pouch. “I made an amulet for you. You don’t have to wear it around your neck, as I do, but you should keep it with you. I put a piece of red ochre in it, so it can hold a piece of your spirit and a piece of your totem’s, but I think your amulet should hold one more thing.”

Jondalar was frowning. He didn’t want to offend her, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted this Clan totem amulet.

“I think you should take a piece of stone from your brother’s grave. A piece of his spirit will stay with it, and you can carry it back with yours to your people.”

The knots of consternation on his forehead deepened, then suddenly cleared. Of course! That might help Zelandoni find
this
place in a spirit trance. Maybe there was more to Clan totems than he realized. After all, didn’t Doni create the spirits of all the animals?

“Ayla, how do you know exactly what to do? How could you learn so much, where you grew up? Yes, I’ll keep this and put a stone from Thonolan’s grave in it,” he said.

He looked at the loose, sharp-edged gravel sloping against the wall in a tenuous equilibrium, created by the same forces that had split the stone slabs and blocks from the steep canyon sides. Suddenly a stone, giving way to the cosmic force of gravity, rolled down amid a spattering of other rocks and landed at Jondalar’s feet. He picked it up. At first glance, it appeared to be the same as all the other innocuous little pieces of broken granite and sedimentary rock. But when he turned it over, he was surprised to see a shining opalescence where the stone had broken. Fiery red lights gleamed from the heart of the milky white stone, and shimmering streaks of
blues and greens danced and sparkled in the sun as he turned it this way and that.

“Ayla, look at this,” he said, showing her the small piece of opal. “You’d never guess it from the back. You’d think it was just an ordinary stone, but look here, where it broke off. The colors seem to come from deep inside, and they’re so bright. It almost seems alive.”

“Maybe it is, or maybe it is a piece of the spirit of your brother,” she replied.

A cold eddy of air curled beneath the edge of the low tent; an exposed arm was quickly brought under a fur. A stiff breeze whistled through the flap across the opening; a frown of worry creased a sleeping brow. A gust caught the flap with a sharp crack and snapped it back and forth, opening the way for bellowing drafts, which brought both Ayla and Jondalar fully awake in an instant. Jondalar tied the loose end down, but the wind, increasing steadily through the night, made sleep fitful and uneasy as it gasped and groaned, heaved and howled around the small hide shelter.

In the morning, they struggled to fold the tent hide between them in the blustery wind and packed quickly, not bothering to make a fire. Instead they drank cold water from the icy stream nearby and ate traveling food. The wind abated around midmorning, but there was a tension in the atmosphere which made them doubt that the worst was over.

When the wind picked up again around noon, Ayla noticed a fresh, almost metallic scent to the air, more like an absence of smell than an actual odor. She sniffed, turning her head, testing, evaluating.

“There’s snow on this wind.” Ayla shouted to be heard above the roar. “I can smell it.”

“What did you say?” Jondalar said, but the wind whipped his words away and Ayla understood his meaning more from the shapes his mouth took as he spoke than from hearing him. She stopped to let him come abreast.

“I can smell snow on the way. We’ve got to find a place to shelter before it comes,” Ayla said, searching the broad, flat expanse with troubled eyes. “But where can we find shelter out here?”

Jondalar was equally worried as he scanned the empty steppes. Then he recalled the nearly frozen stream they had
camped near the night before. They hadn’t crossed over, it would still be on their left no matter how much it meandered. He strained to see through blowing dust, but nothing was clear. He turned left anyway.

“Let’s try to find that little river,” he said. “There may be trees or high banks along it that will give us some protection.” Ayla nodded, following his lead. Whinney did not object either.

The subtle quality to the air that the woman had detected, and thought of as the smell of snow, had been an accurate warning. Before long, a light powdery sifting whirled and blew in an erratic pattern, defining and giving shape to the wind. It soon gave way to larger flakes that made it more difficult to see.

But when Jondalar thought he saw the outline of vague shapes looming ahead, and stopped to try to make them out, Whinney pushed on and they all followed her lead. Low-bent trees and a screen of brush marked the edge of a watercourse. The man and woman could have crouched behind it, but the mare kept going downstream until they reached a turn where the water had cut deep into a bank of hard-packed soil. There, next to the low bluff, out of the full force of the wind, Whinney urged the young horse, and stood on the outside to protect him.

Ayla and Jondalar quickly removed the horses’ loads and set up their small tent almost under the mare’s feet, then crawled inside to wait out the storm.

Even in the lee of the bank, out of the direct force of the wind, the storm threatened their simple shelter. The roaring gale blew from all directions at once, and seemed determined to find a way inside. It succeeded often. Drafts and gusts stole under the edges or in through cracks where the skin across the opening overlapped or the smoke-hole cover was fastened, often bringing a dusting of snow. The woman and the man crawled under their furs to keep warm, and talked. Incidents of their childhood, stories, legends, people they’d known, customs, ideas, dreams, hopes; they never seemed to run out of things to talk about. As night came on, they shared Pleasures, and then slept. Sometime in the middle of the night, the wind stopped its assault on their tent.

Ayla awoke and lay with her eyes open, looking around the dim interior, fighting down a growing panic. She didn’t feel
well, she had a headache, and the muffled stillness felt heavy in the stale air of the tent. Something was wrong, but she didn’t know what. She sensed a familiarity about the situation, or a memory, as though she’d been there before, but not quite. It was more like a danger she ought to recognize, but what? Suddenly she couldn’t bear it and sat up, pushing the warm covers off the man lying beside her.

“Jondalar! Jondalar!” She shook him, but she didn’t need to. He was awake the moment she bolted up.

“Ayla! What is it?”

“I don’t know. Something is wrong!”

“I don’t see anything wrong,” he said. He didn’t, but something was obviously bothering Ayla. He wasn’t used to seeing her so close to panic. She was usually so calm, so completely in control even when she was in imminent danger. No four-legged predator could bring such abject terror to her eyes. “Why do you think something is wrong?”

“I had a dream. I was in a dark place, darker than night, and I was suffocating, Jondalar. I couldn’t breathe!”

A familiar look of concern spread across his face as he looked around the tent once more. It just wasn’t like Ayla to be so frightened; perhaps something was wrong. It was dark in the tent, but not completely dark. A faint light filtered through. Nothing seemed out of place, the wind hadn’t torn anything or snapped any cords. In fact, it wasn’t even blowing. There was no movement at all. It was absolutely still.…

Jondalar threw back the furs, scrambled to the entrance. He unfastened the tent flap, exposing a wall of soft white, which collapsed into the tent, but showed only more of the same beyond.

“We’re buried, Jondalar! We’re buried in snow!” Ayla’s eyes were wide with terror and her voice cracked with the strain of trying to keep it under control.

Jondalar reached for her and held her. “It’s all right, Ayla. It’s all right,” he murmured, not at all sure that it was.

“It’s so dark and I can’t breathe!”

Her voice sounded so strange, so remote, as though it came from afar, and she had become limp in his arms. He laid her down on her furs, and noticed her eyes were closed, but she still kept crying out in that eerie, distant voice that it was dark, and she couldn’t breathe. Jondalar was at a loss, frightened for her, and of her, a little. Something strange was
going on, something more than their snowy entombment, as frightening as that was.

He noticed his pack near the opening, partly covered with snow, and stared at it for a moment. Suddenly he crawled over to it. Brushing off the snow, he felt for the side holder and found a spear. Rising to his knees, he unfastened the smoke-hole cover that was near the middle. With the butt end of the spear he poked up through the snow. A pile plopped down on their sleeping furs, and then sunlight and a gust of fresh air swept through the small tent.

The change in Ayla was immediate. She visibly relaxed and soon opened her eyes. “What did you do?” she asked.

“I poked a spear through the smoke hole and broke through the snow. We’ll have to dig our way out, but the snow may not be as deep as it seems.” He looked at her closely with concern. “What happened to you, Ayla? You had me worried. You kept saying you couldn’t breathe. I think you fainted.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was the lack of fresh air.”

“It didn’t seem that bad. I wasn’t having much trouble breathing. And you were really afraid. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so scared.”

Ayla was uncomfortable under his questioning. She did feel strange, a little light-headed still, and seemed to recall unpleasant dreams, but she couldn’t explain it.

“I remember once that snow covered up the opening of the small cave I stayed in when I had to leave Bruns clan. I woke up in the dark and the air was bad. That must have been it.”

“I suppose that could make you afraid if it happened again,” Jondalar said, but somehow he didn’t quite believe it, and neither did Ayla.

The big red-bearded man was still outside working, though the twilight was fast fading into dark. He was the first to see the strange procession round the crest at the top of the slope and start down. First came the woman, plodding wearily through the deep snow, followed by a horse whose head was hanging with exhaustion, with a load on her back and dragging the travois behind her. The young horse, also carrying a load, was led by a rope held by the man following the mare. His way was easier going since the snow had already been trampled down by those in the lead, though Jondalar and Ayla had traded places on the way to give each other a rest.

“Nezzie! They’re back!” Talut shouted as he started up to
meet them, and tramped the snow down for Ayla for the last few steps of the way. He led them, not to the familiar arched entrance at the front end, but to the middle of the longhouse. To their surprise a new addition to the structure had been built in their absence. It was similar to the entrance foyer, but larger. From it, a new entrance opened directly to the Hearth of the Mammoth.

“This is for the horses, Ayla,” Talut announced once they were inside, with a huge, self-satisfied grin at her expression of stunned disbelief. “I knew after that last windstorm that a lean-to would never be enough. If you, and your horses, are going to live with us, we needed to make something more substantial. I think we should call it the ‘hearth of the horses’!”

Tears filled Ayla’s eyes. She was tired to the bone, grateful to have finally made their way back, and she was overwhelmed. No one had ever gone to so much trouble because they wanted her. As long as she lived with the Clan, she had never felt fully accepted, never quite belonged. She was sure they would never have allowed her to keep horses, much less build a place for them.

“Oh, Talut,” she said, a catch in her voice, then she reached up and put her arms around his neck and pressed her cold cheek to his. Ayla had always seemed so reserved to him, her spontaneous expression of affection was a delightful surprise. Talut hugged her and patted her back, smiling with obvious pleasure and feeling very smug.

Most of the Lion Camp crowded around them in the new annex, welcoming the woman and man as though they were both full-fledged members of the group.

“We were getting worried about you,” Deegie said, “especially after it snowed.”

“We’d have been back sooner if Ayla hadn’t wanted to bring so much with her,” Jondalar said. “The last couple of days, I wasn’t sure we would make it back.”

Ayla had already begun to unload the horses, for the last time, and as Jondalar went to help her the mysterious bundles aroused great curiosity.

“Did you bring anything for me?” Rugie finally asked, speaking the question that everyone was wondering.

Ayla smiled at the little girl. “Yes, I brought something for you. I brought something for everyone,” she answered, making them all wonder what gift she had brought for each.