The Valley of Horses (65 page)

It was late when she finally returned. He heard Whinney and started down the path to meet them, but the colt was ahead of him. Ayla dismounted on the beach, dragged a carcass off the travois, adjusted the poles to accommodate the
narrow trail, and led the mare up as Jondalar reached the bottom and stepped aside. She came back with a stick from the fire for a torch. Jondalar took it while Ayla loaded a second carcass back on the travois. He hobbled over to help, but she had moved it already. Watching her handle the dead weight of the deer gave him an appreciation of her strength, and an insight into how she had acquired it. The horse and travois were useful, perhaps even indispensable, but she was still only one person.

The colt was eagerly searching for his dam’s teat, but Ayla pushed him aside until they reached the cave.

“You right, Jondalar,” she said as he reached the ledge. “Big, big fire. I not see before so big fire. Far away. Many, many animals.”

Something in her voice made him look closer. She was exhausted, and the carnage she had seen had left its imprint in the strained hollowness of her eyes. Her hands were black, her face and wrap were smudged with soot and blood. She unfastened the harness and travois, then put an arm around Whinney’s neck and leaned her forehead against the mare in weariness. The horse was standing with her head down and front legs spraddled while her colt eased the fullness of her udders. She looked as tired.

“That fire must have been far away. It’s late. Have you been riding all day?” Jondalar asked.

She pulled her head up and turned to him. For a moment, she had forgotten he was there. “Yes, all day,” she said, then took a deep breath. She couldn’t give in to her fatigue yet, she had too much to do. “Many animal die. Many come take meat. Wolf. Hyena. Lion. Other I not see before. Big teeth.” She demonstrated an open mouth and her two index fingers hanging down like elongated canines.

“You saw a dirk-toothed tiger! I didn’t know they were real! One old man used to tell stories to the youngsters at Summer Meetings about seeing one when he was young, but not everyone believed him. You really saw one?” He was wishing he could have been with her.

She nodded and shivered, tightening her shoulders and shutting her eyes. “Make Whinney fright. Stalk. Sling make go. Whinney, I run.”

Jondalar’s eyes opened wide at her halting recitation of the incident. “You drove off a dirk-toothed tiger with your sling? Good Mother, Ayla!”

“Much meat. Tiger … not need Whinney. Sling make
go.” She wanted to say more, to describe the incident, to express her fear, to share it with him, but she didn’t have the means. She was too tired to visualize the motions and then try to think how the words fit in.

No wonder she’s exhausted, Jondalar thought. Maybe I shouldn’t have suggested checking the fire, but she did get two deer. That took nerve, though, facing down a dirk-toothed tiger. She is quite a woman.

Ayla looked at her hands, then headed down the path to the beach again. She took the torch which Jondalar had left stuck in the ground, carried it to the stream, and held it up to look around. Pulling up a stalk of pigweed, she crushed the leaves and roots in her hand, wet the mixture, and added a bit of sand. Then she scoured her hands, cleaned the travel grime off her face, and went back up.

Jondalar had started cooking rocks heating, and she was grateful. A cup of hot tea was just what she wanted. She had left food behind for him and hoped he wasn’t expecting her to cook. She couldn’t worry about meals now. She had two deer to skin and cut up into pieces for drying.

She had searched for animals that were not scorched, since she wanted the hides. But when she started to work, she remembered that she had planned to make some new sharp knives. Knives dulled with use—tiny spalls breaking off along the cutting edge. It was usually easier to make new ones and then turn the old into some other tool, such as a scraper.

The dull knife pushed her beyond her limit. She hacked at the hide while tears of weariness and defeat filled her eyes and spilled over.

“Ayla, what’s wrong?” Jondalar asked.

She only hacked more violently at the deer. She couldn’t explain. He took the dull knife out of her hand and pulled her up. “You’re tired. Why don’t you go lie down and rest for a while?”

She shook her head, though she desperately wanted to do as he said. “Skin deer, dry meat. No wait, hyena come.”

He didn’t bother to suggest they bring the deer in; she wasn’t thinking clearly. “I’ll watch it,” he said. “You need some rest. Go in and lie down, Ayla.”

Gratitude filled her. He would watch it! She hadn’t thought to ask him; she wasn’t used to having someone else to help. She stumbled into the cave, shaking with relief, and fell onto her furs. She wanted to tell Jondalar how grateful
she was, and she felt tears rise again, knowing that her attempt would be ineffectual. She couldn’t talk!

Jondalar came in and went out of the cave several times during the night, occasionally standing and watching the sleeping woman, his brow furrowed with concern. She was restless, flailing her arms and mumbling unintelligibly in her dreams.

Ayla was walking through fog, crying for help. A tall woman, shrouded in mist, her face indistinct, held out her arms. “I said I’d be careful, Mother, but where did you go?” Ayla muttered. “Why didn’t you come when I called you. I called and called, but you never came. Where have you been? Mother? Mother! Don’t go away again! Stay here! Mother, wait for me! Don’t leave me!”

The vision of the tall woman faded, and the mists cleared. In her place stood another woman, stocky and short. Her strong muscular legs were slightly bowed with an outward curvature, but she walked straight and upright. Her nose was large and aquiline, with a high prominent bridge, and her jaw, jutting forward, was chinless. Her forehead was low and sloped back, but her head was very large, her neck short and thick. Heavy brow ridges shaded large brown intelligent eyes that were filled with love and sorrow.

She beckoned. “Iza!” Ayla cried out to her. “Iza, help me! Please help me!” But Iza only looked at her quizzically. “Iza, don’t you hear me? Why can’t you understand?”

“No one can understand you if you don’t talk properly,” said another voice. She saw a man using a staff to help him walk. He was old and lame. One arm had been amputated at the elbow. The left side of his face was hideously scarred, and his left eye was missing, but his good right eye held strength, wisdom, and compassion. “You must learn to talk, Ayla,” Creb said with his one-handed gestures, but she could hear him. He spoke with Jondalar’s voice.

“How can I talk? I can’t remember! Help me, Creb!”

“Your totem is the Cave Lion, Ayla,” the old Mog-ur said.

With a tawny flash, the feline sprang for the aurochs and wrestled the huge reddish brown wild cow to the ground bawling in terror. Ayla gasped, and the dirk-toothed tiger snarled at her, fangs and muzzle dripping blood. He came for her, his long sharp fangs growing longer, and sharper. She was in a tiny cave trying to squeeze herself into the solid rock at her back. A cave lion roared.

“No! No!” she cried.

A gigantic paw with claws outstretched reached in and raked her left thigh with four parallel gashes.

“No! No!” she called out. “I can’t! I can’t!” The mist swirled around her. “I can’t remember!”

The tall woman held out her arms. “I’ll help you …”

For an instant the mist cleared, and Ayla saw a face not unlike her own. An aching nausea shook her, and a sour stench of wetness and rot issued from a crack opening in the ground.

“Mother!
Motherrr!”

“Ayla! Ayla! What’s wrong?” Jondalar shook her. He had been out on the ledge when he heard her scream in an unfamiliar language. He hobbled in faster than he thought he could move.

She sat up and he took her in his arms. “Oh, Jondalar! It was my dream, my nightmare,” she sobbed.

“It’s all right, Ayla. It’s all right now.”

“It was an earthquake. That’s what happened. She was killed in an earthquake.”

“Who was killed in an earthquake?”

“My mother. And Creb, too, later. Oh, Jondalar, I
hate
earthquakes!” She shuddered in his arms.

Jondalar took her by both shoulders and pushed her back so he could look at her. “Tell me about your dream, Ayla,” he said.

“I’ve had those dreams as long as I can remember—they always come back. In one, I am in a small cave, and a claw reaches in. I think that is how my totem marked me. The other I could never remember, but I always woke up shaking and sick. Except this time. I saw her, Jondalar. I saw my mother!”

“Ayla, do you hear yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re talking, Ayla. You’re talking!”

Ayla had known how to speak once, and, though the language was not the same, she had learned the feel, the rhythm, the sense of spoken language. She had forgotten how to speak verbally because her survival depended upon another mode of communication, and because she wanted to forget the tragedy that had left her alone. Though it wasn’t a conscious effort, she had been hearing and memorizing more than the vocabulary of Jondalar’s language. The syntax,
grammar, stress, were part of the sounds she heard when he spoke.

Like a child first learning to speak, she was born with the aptitude and the desire, and she needed only the constant exposure. But her motivation was stronger than a child’s, and her memory more developed. She learned faster. Though she could not reproduce some of his tones and inflections exactly, she had become a native speaker of his language.

“I am! I can! Jondalar, I can think in words!”

They both noticed then that he was holding her, and both became self-conscious about it. He let his arms drop.

“Is it morning already?” Ayla said, noticing the light streaming in through the cave opening and the smoke hole above it. She threw back the covers. “I didn’t know I would sleep so long. Great Mother! I’ve got to start that meat drying.” She had picked up his epithets as well. He smiled. It was rather awe-inspiring to hear her suddenly speaking, but hearing his phrases coming out of her mouth, spoken with her unique accent, was funny.

She hurried to the entrance, then stopped cold when she looked out. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Lines of meat cut in neat little tongue-shaped pieces were strung out from one end to the other of the stone porch, with several small fires spaced in the midst of them. Could she still be dreaming? Had all the women of the clan suddenly appeared to help her?

“There is some meat from a haunch I spitted at that fireplace, if you’re hungry,” Jondalar said, with assumed casualness, and a big smug smile.

“You? You did that?”

“Yes. I did it.” His grin was even wider. Her reaction to his little surprise was better than he’d hoped. Maybe he wasn’t quite up to hunting yet, but at least he could skin the animals she brought and start the meat drying, especially since he had just made new knives.

“But … you’re a man!” she said, stunned.

Jondalar’s little surprise was more staggering than he knew. It was only by drawing on their memories that members of the Clan acquired the knowledge and skills to survive. For them, instinct had evolved so that they could remember the skills of their forebears and pass them down to their progeny, stored in the backs of their brains. The tasks that men and women performed had been differentiated for so many generations that Clan members had sex-differentiated
memories. One sex was unable to perform the functions of the other; they did not have the memories for it.

A man of the Clan could have hunted or found deer and brought them back. He could even have skinned them, though somewhat less efficiently than a woman. If pressed, he might have hacked out some hunks. But he would never have considered cutting up the meat to start it drying, and, even if he had, he wouldn’t have known how to begin. He could certainly not have produced the neat, properly shaped pieces that would dry uniformly that Ayla saw in front of her eyes.

“Isn’t a man allowed to cut up a little meat?” Jondalar asked. He knew some people had different customs concerning woman’s work and man’s work, but he had only meant to help her. He didn’t think she would be offended.

“In the Clan, woman cannot hunt, and men cannot … make food,” she tried to explain.

“But you hunt.”

His statement gave her an unexpected jolt. She had forgotten she shared with him the differences between the Clan and the Others.

“I … I am not a Clan woman,” she said, disconcerted. “I …” She didn’t know how to explain. “I’m like you, Jondalar. One of the Others.”

Ayla pulled up, slid off Whinney, and gave the dripping waterbag to Jondalar. He took it and drank in large thirsty gulps. They were far down the valley, almost on the steppes, and quite a distance from the stream.

The golden grass rippled in the wind around them. They had been collecting grains of broomcorn millet and wild rye
from a mixed stand that also included the nodding seed heads of unripe two-row barley, and both einkorn and emmer wheat. The tedious job of pulling the hand along each stalk to strip off the small hard seeds was hot work. The small round millet, put into one side of a divided basket which hung from a cord around the neck to free the hands, broke off easily, but it would need additional winnowing. The rye, which went into the other side of the basket, threshed free.

Ayla put the cord of her basket around her neck and went to work. Jondalar joined her shortly afterward. They plucked the grains side by side for a while, then he turned to her. “What is it like to ride a horse, Ayla?” he asked.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said, pausing to think. “When you go fast it’s exciting. But so is riding slow. It makes me feel good to ride Whinney.” She turned back to her task again, then stopped. “Would you like to try?”

“Try what?”

“Riding Whinney.”

He looked at her, trying to determine how she really felt about it. He had wanted to try riding the horse for some time, but she seemed to have such a personal relationship with the animal that he didn’t know how to ask tactfully. “Yes. I would. But will Whinney let me?”