CRO-MAGNON (44 page)

“
He does that well,” Alys said. “Better than the shaman in my home tribe.”

“
I’ve been studying nutrition and medicine since I was a little girl. I believe I know more than anyone but Sugn.” Leya took a bit of cattail root-and-acorn bread and chewed discreetly. She needed to maintain her milk, and strived to take in enough nourishment without appearing gluttonous.

“
You probably do,” Alys said. “But people don’t realize it. Nor will they ever, because they don’t want to.”

“
I hope to demonstrate it the next time someone gets injured or falls ill.” Leya touched the earth mother in her pocket. “May Ki prohibit
.
”

Alys gave her a disapproving look. “You know that Sugn frowns on people instilling Ki with mystical powers. He says true spirits are male.”

“
That is because he is a man.” Leya took out the carved figurine and rubbed the swollen belly.

“
Don’t let Sugn see you idolizing the
mator,
” Nola said. “He doesn’t like people putting their faith in idols.”

“
I regard Ki as
Mator
Nature,” Leya said. “Not as an ‘idol.
’
”

“
Be careful what you say,” Alys said. “Sugn would take that as blasphemy.”

“
If I acquit myself well as a healer, he might have to consider me.” Leya slipped the statuette back into her pocket. “Then Brann and I would be out of Mungo’s reach.”

“
There is more to being a shaman than healing,” Nola said. “You must be able to commune with the spirits.”

“
Seem
to commune, you mean. If I show Sugn and Ronan that I’m conversant with the cave rituals and imply that the knowledge was born in me . . .”

Alys looked alarmed. “How would you do that?”

Realizing that in her desperation she’d said too much, Leya fell silent. Searching for some way to change the subject, she lifted Brann and bared a breast.

“
He’s getting bigger,” she said. “Look how muscular he is.”

“
You’re not thinking of spying on Sugn’s secret rituals?” Alys looked askance. “He and Ronan would banish you from the tribe.”

Leya offered her nipple to Brann. “I can’t live under Mungo’s domination. Or any man’s.”

“
But what would you do, daughter, with a child and no man to hunt for you? Milk does not make itself, you know.”

Brann began to suck greedily, and Leya looked down and smiled. “See how big his bones are getting.”

#

Leya stooped to pick up a sliver of flint that had been left on the common-ground between the two longhouses. The boys of the tribe used the trampled space as a playground, their “play” consisting mostly of mock combat with imaginary animals or with each other. They would spend hours throwing blunt-ended javelins at a reed dummy and then rushing their “prey” with a cudgel. At the moment, the common was empty.

Leya was pretending to tidy the area, while actually surveilling the entrance to the sacred cave. Two days ago a late-winter storm had driven everyone inside the longhouses, and yesterday afternoon a scout had spotted a small herd of bison sheltering among a stand of poplar trees in a canyon to the west.

Though primarily creatures of the open, the big grass-eaters often retreated from sudden storms or deep snow into the valleys to the south of the tundra. Ronan had pointed out that this particular side canyon had been used by them a few winters ago after a blizzard.

At that time, the women and children had constructed a brush trap across the upper end. Beaters had driven the animals into the trap, and for the remainder of the winter the tribe had eaten bison meat—baked, roasted, grilled, and boiled. The hunting parties had eaten smoked bison, and many robes had been fashioned.

Now the big grass-eaters had forgotten the slaughter and had returned. Tomorrow, most of the tribe would participate in the hunt. It was too late in the winter for the tribe to eat all the meat before spring, when new game would be available, but the excess could be dried and smoked, or stored in deep frost pits.

As always before a big hunt, Sugn would perform his rites in the cave, and the two boys who had been chosen as acolytes would attend him. Leya knew the ritual involved a token embellishment of an appropriate painting on the cave walls, because subsequent to the secret part of the ceremony tribal members would file through the cave by torchlight. She remembered that the hunters and their spears were represented by stick figures on the cave walls but the animals were presented on various levels of realism. For years, she had secretly practiced painting animals until she became skilled, perhaps more so than Sugn.

There would also be a ceremony on the common-ground tonight. The shaman, wearing a bison skin with hollowed head, would prance around a bonfire while the hunters and female beaters chanted age-old invocations to the spirit world.

But Leya knew there was also a secret chant, performed deep in the cave. That part of the ceremony, without which the hunt was deemed unlikely to be successful, comprised the core of the pre-hunt ritual. When the cave had been spiritualized, hunters would enter and cavort before the altered painting, uttering battle cries and shaking their spears. Then the women would file through, mentally reaching out to the animal spirits. Afterward, they would all drink fermented honey-water, and later many children would be seeded.

It was this chant, supposedly a bridge to the spirit world that only a shaman could invoke, that Leya needed to learn. She might then convince Sugn and Ronan that the knowledge came to her in a dream and that she was destined to be the tribe’s first female shaman.

Now, sweeping frozen dust from the log seats that surrounded the common, she saw Sugn and two adolescents, Endr and Raful, enter the sacred cave. Sugn carried a torch of brown cattail heads dipped in bear fat, and each of the acolytes held two unlit replacements.

Discarding her broom, Leya skirted the larger longhouse and turned to survey the encampment. The day was unseasonably cold and no one else was about. Walking casually toward the cave, she looked around once more and slipped into the rocky opening.

Beyond Sugn’s tent, the entrance narrowed to one or two body-lengths. The passage zigzagged past three fractured bends, daylight dimming each time, then straightened for a stretch and turned again, leaving Leya in darkness. The air grew damper and less frigid, and the way slanted down. She put out a hand to trace the rough stone that formed the passage. Because of further turnings, she could see no glimmer of light from Sugn’s torch or even an afterglow.

But she could hear echoes of scuffs, which she hoped came from the three official spirit-people. The shuffling sound made her picture the white-mouthed vipers that were known to den here in fall, winter, and spring. She knew that the air, though warmer than that outside, was too cool for them to be very active, but her stomach still knotted.

She followed around to the right, trying to remember the turnings from the times she had been admitted by torchlight to profess commitment to the paintings. But the impressions were jumbled. The floor sloped further, and she stubbed a toe on a block that had fallen from the ceiling.

Stumbling, she blundered into a fracture-seam and barely choked back a cry. Recovering her balance, she padded forward as a stream of dank air, reeking of damp earth and ancient mold, wafted past her face from the bowels of the cave. She thought she saw a faint glow, and sensed the passage widening. It turned again, and opened into the dim cavern. She pulled up and put a hand to her mouth, her gaze fixed on the forbidden scene.

#

A half-score lengths away Sugn stood with the two boys, the flickering torchlight scarifying his ascetic features and reflecting off the spike of dried yellow mullen flowers and still-furry leaves that he’d affixed in his scraggly hair. He had planted the cattail torch in a pile of stones, and the smoky flame threw undulating shadows on the cave wall, illuming a phantasmagoric scene.

Aurochs seemed to lumber and horses prance. Farther along the broken surface a mammoth reared, its trunk flaring between tusks that had been greatly improved since the last time Leya had been here. They looked impossibly lifelike, and she thought Sugn must have retouched them with great skill. Then she realized they were real, having been fastened by wood pegs driven into cracks in the rock. She gasped at the idea that so much valuable ivory would be used in a hidden show. How many knife handles could have been carved from those tusks? How many fishhooks? How many score-by-scores of trade beads?

Sugn stood before a tableau depicting several bison being harried by stick-figure hunters. Some animals were presented only in outline, some as humped figures with foreshortened legs, and a few with more realism. Befitting a major food source, the centerpiece was a great bull embodied by a magnificent painting of red, yellow, brown, and black that took advantage of a bulge in the cave wall to render the alpha animal more lifelike.

The elderly shaman, holding a brush of animal hairs glued to a stick, was dabbing fat-mixed ochre on one of the lesser bison, depicting shaggy reddish hair on its withers. When he was nearly finished, he let each of the boys make a small daub.

Afterward, the three backed away and began to chant in low voices, Sugn’s baritone overlain by the uncertain tenors of Endr and Raful. Leya, crouching near the entrance to the chamber, cupped her ears. She realized that the verses were ones she had already heard around the bonfire and memorized. The chanting grew monotonous in its repetition of spirit-summoning themes, Sugn making stylized passes with the torch.

After a time, Leya became restless.

Nothing new here.

Her thighs ached from squatting against the rock wall and she shifted her feet, careful not to dislodge any pebbles. Sugn’s torch began to fail and another was lit from the guttering flame. The chanting went on. And on . . .

Leya grew jaded. Was this vacuous pomp what she had risked everything to observe?

Another torch sprang to life. Finally the three voices died away. Sugn made a two-handed pass and waved the boys away. One picked up another torch and lit it from the shaman’s, and the two backed away.

With a shock, Leya realized that the spiritual leader was dismissing his acolytes and she was in their path. Before the boys could start toward her, she scooted from the chamber entrance and searched for some place to hide. As Alys and Nola had cautioned, to be discovered here would be unthinkable. The advantage she had hoped for by spying on the secluded ritual would turn into a disaster.

The boys’ torch flared and in the burst of new light she saw a vertical crack. Hardly wider than her body, it began about three feet from the floor. A vision of vipers again invaded her consciousness, their fanged mouths gaping whitely. She knew they liked to form mounds in places where their combined warmth would be contained. Would they be in the crack? And if so, would they be aroused now, perhaps sensing that spring was around the corner?

No matter. To be caught here would mean banishment, and to be cast into the wilderness would bring death to her and Brann.

Lifting one leg, she placed her skin-clad foot in the crack and pushed with her other foot. Bracing her hands on the edges, she pulled herself inside, squirmed around, and wriggled back until the narrowing sides stopped her. She felt no mound of snakes, but to her dismay she realized she was almost level with the cavern wall. The two boys drew nearer. Shaking her dark tresses over her face, she took a breath and went motionless, watching with slitted eyes.

The two boys approached, the cattail torch held high, their gaze centered on the floor. Perhaps they, too, feared the hibernating snakes. Whispering, they passed within a length but did not look up.

As soon as they had left the sanctum, Leya descended to the floor. Sugn’s back was turned, the torch casting a flickering aura. She crept forward, searching for a closer vantage, and found a raised alcove where she could squat out of sight and peer around the corner. Again she worried about vipers. One bite might not be fatal, but she knew she would cry out. More than one strike would mean an agonizing death, much worse than that from a cobra bite. Carefully, she explored the space with her fur-wrapped foot and found nothing but splintered rock.

The shaman was busy packing a clay pipe. He plucked a fiber from the cattail stalk, lit the bowl and took a drag, a tendril of smoke drifting Leya’s way. Settling cross-legged before the paintings, he smoked and muttered.

In Leya’s cramped alcove, the smell of damp rock gave way to the scent of dream-flowers. The cavern went dark, and she realized the shaman had blown out his torch. She thrilled to the thought that now she would hear the most secret part of the chant.

Relieved to leave the creepy alcove, she climbed down to the open floor and settled in to listen and learn. Dream-flowers were the dried blooms of hemp, a plant the tribe harvested for the tough fibers of its inner bark. Ingestion of the flowers was a tribal taboo, as the plant’s spirit turned energetic hunters and gatherers into maundering sleepyheads. Leya recognized the smoke because flowers and leaves, inadvertently gathered with the stalks, were burned to remove temptation. The tribe lived well in this harsh land because they were industrious. They did not tolerate idleness or anything that promoted it.