Plains of Passage (125 page)

She lay still with her eyes closed, feeling his weight on her, and feeling wonderful. She didn’t want to move. When he finally got up and looked down at her, he had to kiss her. She opened her eyes and looked up at him.

“That was wonderful, Jondalar,” she said, feeling languid and satisfied.

“It was fast. You were ready; we were both ready. And you had the strangest smile on your face just now.”

“That’s because I’m so happy.”

“I am, too,” he said, kissing her again, then rolling onto his side.

They lay together quietly and dozed off again. Jondalar woke before Ayla did, and he watched her while she slept. The strange little smile appeared again and made him wonder what she was dreaming of. He couldn’t resist. He kissed her softly and caressed her breast. She opened her eyes. They were dilated, dark and liquid, and full of deep secrets.

He kissed each eyelid, then nibbled playfully at an earlobe and then a nipple. She smiled at him when he reached for her mound and felt her soft hair, receptive, if not quite ready again, making him wish they were just beginning instead of just through. Suddenly he held her tight, kissed her fiercely, stroked her body, her breasts and hips and thighs. He could hardly keep his hands away from her, as though coming so close to losing her had created a need as deep as the crevasse that almost took her. He couldn’t touch her enough, hold her enough, love her enough.

“I never thought I’d fall in love,” he said, relaxing again and idly caressing the dip at the small of her back and the smooth mound beyond. “Why did I have to travel beyond the end of the Great Mother River to find a woman I could love?”

He had been thinking about that ever since he woke up and realized they were almost home. It was good to be on this side of the glacier, but he was full of anticipation, wondering about everyone, and eager to see them.

“Because my totem meant you for me. The Cave Lion guided you.”

“Then why did the Mother cause us to be born so far apart?”

Ayla lifted her head and looked at him. “I’ve been learning, but I still know very little about the ways of the Great Earth Mother, and not much more about the protective spirits of the Clan totems, but I know this: you found me.”

“And then I almost lost you.” A sudden rush of cold fear clutched at him. “Ayla, what would I do if I lost you?” he said, his voice hoarse with the emotion he seldom showed openly. He rolled over, covering her body with his, and buried his head in her neck, holding her so tightly she could hardly breathe. “What would I do?”

She clung to him, wishing there was some way she could become a part of him, and she gratefully opened herself to him when she felt his need swell again. With an urgency as demanding as his love, he took her as she came to him with a need as driving.

It was over even more quickly, and with the release, the tension of their fierce emotion melted into a warm afterglow. When he started to move aside, she held him, wanting to cling to the intensity of the moment.

“I wouldn’t want to live without you, Jondalar,” Ayla said, picking up the conversation begun before their lovemaking. “A piece of me would go with you to the spirit world, I’d never be whole again. But we’re lucky. Think of all the people who never find love, and those who love someone who cannot love them back.”

“Like Ranec?”

“Yes, like Ranec. I still hurt inside when I think of him.”

Jondalar rolled over and sat up. “I feel sorry for him. I liked Ranec—or I could have.” Suddenly he was eager to be moving. “We’ll never get to Dalanar’s this way,” he said, starting to roll up sleeping furs. “I can’t wait to see him again.”

“But first, we have to find the horses,” Ayla said.

A
yla got up and went outside the tent. A mist hovered close to the ground and the air felt cold and damp on her bare skin. She could hear the roar of the waterfall in the distance, but the vapor thickened into a dense fog near the back end of the lake, a long narrow body of greenish water, so cloudy it was nearly opaque.

No fish lived in such a place, she was sure, just as no vegetation grew along the edge; it was too new for life, too raw. There was only water and stone, and a quality of time before time, of ancient beginnings before life began. Ayla shivered and felt a stark taste of Her terrible loneliness before the Great Mother Earth gave birth to all living things.

She stopped to pass her water, then hurried across the sharp-edged gravel shore, waded in, then ducked down. It was icy cold and gritty with silt. She wanted to bathe—it hadn’t been possible while they were crossing the ice—but not in this water. She didn’t mind the cold so much, but she wanted clear, fresh water.

She started back to the tent to dress and help Jondalar pack up. On the way, she looked through the mist across the lifeless landscape to a hint of trees below. Suddenly she smiled.

“There you are!” she said, sounding a loud whistle.

Jondalar was out of the tent in an instant. He smiled as broadly as Ayla to see the two horses galloping toward them. Wolf followed along behind, and Ayla thought he looked pleased with himself. He hadn’t been around that morning, and she wondered if he had played any part in the horses’ return. She shook her head, realizing she would probably never know.

They greeted each horse with hugs, caressing strokes, friendly scratches, and words of affection. Ayla checked them over carefully at the same time, wanting to be sure they had not injured themselves. The horse boot on Whinney’s right rear foot was missing and the mare seemed to flinch when Ayla examined her leg. Could she have broken through the ice at the edge of the glacier and, in pulling free, torn off the boot and bruised her leg? It was the only thing she could think of.

Ayla removed the rest of the mare’s boots, lifting each leg to untie them while Jondalar stood close to steady the animal. Racer still had all
his horse boots, although Jondalar noticed they were wearing thin over the sharp hooves; even mammoth hide would not last long worn over hooves.

When they had gathered all their things together and gone to drag the bowl boat closer, they discovered the bottom was wet and soggy. It had developed a leak.

“I don’t think I’d want to try getting across a river in this, any more,” Jondalar said. “Do you think we should leave it?”

“We have to, unless we want to drag it ourselves. We don’t have the poles for the travois. We left them behind when we came flying down that ice, and there are no trees around here for new ones,” Ayla said.

“Well, that settles it!” Jondalar said. “It’s a good thing we don’t need to haul rocks any more, and we’ve lightened our load so much that I think we could carry everything ourselves, even without the horses.”

“If they hadn’t come back, that’s what we’d be doing while we were looking for them,” Ayla said, “but I am so glad they found us.”

“I was worried about them, too,” Jondalar said.

   As they descended the steep southwestern face of the ancient massif that supported the harrowing ice field on its worn summit, a light rain fell, flushing out pockets of dirty snow that filled shaded hollows in the open spruce forest they passed through. But a watercolor wash of green tinged the brown earth of a sloping meadow and brushed the tips of shrubs nearby. Below, through openings in the misty fog, they caught glimpses of a river curling from west to north, forced by the surrounding highlands to follow a deep rift valley. Across the river to the south, the rugged alpine foreland faded into a purple haze, but rising wraithlike out of the haze was the high mountain range with ice halfway down its slopes.

“You’re going to like Dalanar,” Jondalar was saying as they rode comfortably side by side. “You’ll like all the Lanzadonii. Most of them used to be Zelandonii, like me.”

“What made him decide to start a new Cave?”

“I’m not sure. I was so young when he and my mother parted, I didn’t really get to know him until I went to live with him, and he taught Joplaya and me how to work the stone. I don’t think he decided to settle and start a new Cave until he met Jerika, but he chose this place because he found the flint mine. People were already talking about Lanzadonii stone when I was a boy,” Jondalar explained.

“Jerika is his mate, and. Joplaya … is your cousin, right?”

“Yes. Close-cousin. Jerika’s daughter, born to Dalanar’s hearth. She’s a good flint knapper, too, but don’t ever tell her I said so. She’s a great
tease, always joking. I wonder if she’s found a mate. Great Mother! It’s been so long. They are going to be so surprised to see us!”

“Jondalar!” Ayla said in a loud, urgent whisper. He pulled up short. “Look over there, near those trees. There’s a deer!”

The man smiled. “Let’s get it!” he said, reaching for a spear as he pulled out his spear-thrower and signaled Racer with his knees. Although his method of guiding his mount was not quite the same as hers, after nearly a year of traveling, he was as good a rider as Ayla.

She turned Whinney almost in tandem—she enjoyed being free and unencumbered by the travois for a change—and set her spear in her spear-thrower. Startled by the quick movement, the deer bounded off with high leaps, but they raced after it, coming up on either side and, with the help of the spear-throwers, dispatched the young, inexperienced buck easily. They butchered out their favorite parts and selected other choice cuts to bring as a gift to Dalanar’s people, then let Wolf have his pick of what was left.

Toward evening, they found a racing, bubbling, healthy-looking stream and followed it until they came to a large open field with a few trees and some brush beside the water. They decided to make camp early and cook some of their deer meat. The rain had let up and there wasn’t any hurry any more, though they had to keep reminding themselves of that.

The following morning, when Ayla stepped out of the tent, she stopped and gaped in amazement, stunned by the sight. The landscape seemed unreal, with the quality of an especially vivid dream. It seemed impossible that they could have endured the most harshly bitter intensity of extreme winter conditions only days ago and, suddenly, it was spring!

“Jondalar! Oh, Jondalar. Come and see!”

The man put his sleepy head out of the opening, and she watched his smile grow.

They were at a lower elevation, and the rainy drizzle and fog of the day before had given way to a bright new sun. The sky was a rich azure blue decorated with mounds of white. Trees and brush were flocked with the fresh bright green of new leaves and the grass in the field looked good enough to eat. Flowers—jonquils, lilies, columbines, irises, and more—bloomed in profusion. Birds of every color and many varieties darted and wheeled through the air, chirping and singing.

Ayla recognized most of them—thrushes, nightingales, bluethroats, nutcrackers, black-headed woodpeckers, and river warblers—and whistled their song back to them. Jondalar got up and came out of the tent
in time to watch with admiration while she patiently coaxed a gray shrike to her hand.

“I don’t know how you do that,” he said, as the bird flew away.

Ayla smiled. “I’m going to look for something fresh and delicious to eat this morning,” she said.

Wolf was gone again, and Ayla was sure he was exploring or hunting; spring brought adventures for him, too. She headed toward the horses, who were in the middle of the spring meadow grazing on the fine short blades of sweet grass. It was the rich season, the time of growth throughout the land.

For most of the year the broad plains surrounding the miles-thick sheets of ice, and the high mountain meadows, were dry and cold. Only scant rain or snow managed to fall on the land; the glaciers usually captured most of the moisture circulating in the air for themselves. Though permafrost was as pervasive on the ancient steppes as in the wetter northern tundras of later times, the glacier-driven winds kept the summers arid, and the land dry and firm, with few bogs. In winter, the winds kept the light snows blown into drifts, leaving large sections of the frozen ground bare of snow, but covered with grass that had dried into hay; feed that maintained the uncountable numbers of huge grazing animals.

But not all grasslands are the same. To create the rich abundance of the Ice Age plains, it wasn’t so much the amount of precipitation—so long as it was sufficient—as when it fell; a combination of moisture and drying winds in the right proportions and at the right times made the difference.

Because of the angle of incoming sunlight, in lower latitudes the sun begins to warm the earth not long after the winter solstice. Where snow or ice have accumulated, most of the early spring sunlight is reflected back into space, and the little that is absorbed and converted to heat must be used to melt the snow cover before plants can grow.

But on the ancient grasslands, where winds had laid the plains bare, the sun poured its energy onto the dark soil, and received a warm welcome. The dry, frozen top layers of permafrost began to warm and thaw, and though it was still cold, the wealth of solar energy impelled seeds and extensive roots to prepare to send up shoots. But water in usable form was necessary if they were to flourish.

The glistening ice resisted the warming rays of spring, reflecting back the sunlight. But with so much moisture stored in the mountain-high icy sheets, it could not entirely reject the sun’s advances or its caress of warming winds. The tops of the glaciers began to melt, and some water trickled down through the fissures and slowly began to fill
streams, and then rivers, which would bring the precious liquid to the parched land later in summer. But even more important were the fogs and the mists evaporating off the glacial masses of frozen water, because they filled the skies with rain clouds.

In spring, the warm sunlight caused the great mass of ice to give off moisture rather than to take it. For almost the only time during the entire year, rain fell, not on the glacier, but on the thirsty and fertile land that bounded it. An Ice Age summer could be hot, but it was brief; the primeval spring was long and wet, and plant growth was explosive and profuse.

Ice Age animals also did their growing in spring when everything was fresh and green, and rich in the nutrients they needed, at just the time they needed them. By nature, whether the season is lush or dry, spring is the time of the year when animals add size to young bones or to old tusks and horns, or grow new and bigger antlers, or shed thick winter coats and begin new ones. Because spring started early and lasted long, the growing season for animals was long as well, which encouraged their lavish size, and the impressive horny adornments.