Plains of Passage (138 page)

She put her fur leggings and hand coverings in the bottom of the basket along with the fur-lined wrap now that she wore her summer wrap; she wouldn’t need them until next winter. She paused for a moment wondering where she would be next winter, but she did not care to dwell on that. She paused again when she picked up the soft supple leather cloak she had used to help support Durc on her hip when she carried him.

She didn’t need it; it was not necessary for her survival. She had only brought it with her because it was something that had been close to him. She held it to her cheek, then carefully folded it and put it in the basket. On top of it she put the soft, absorbent leather straps she took along to use during her menstrual flow. Next her extra pair of foot coverings went in. She went barefoot now, but still wore a pair when it was wet or cold, and they were wearing out. She was glad she had brought a second pair.

She checked her food next. There was one birchbark packet of maple sugar left. Ayla opened it, broke off a piece, and put it in her mouth, wondering if she’d ever taste maple sugar again after this was gone.

She still had several cakes of traveling food, the kind the men took when they went hunting, made of rendered fat, ground-up dried meat, and dried fruit. Thoughts of the rich fat made her mouth water. The small animals she killed with her sling were lean, for the most part. Without the vegetable food she collected, she would slowly starve on a diet of pure protein. Fats or carbohydrates in some form were necessary.

She put the traveling cakes in the basket without indulging her taste, saving them for emergencies. She added some strips of dried meat—tough as leather but nourishing—a few dried apples, some hazelnuts, a few pouches of grain plucked from the grasses of the steppes near the cave, and threw away a rotten root. On top of the food she put her cup and bowl, her wolverine hood, and the worn foot coverings.

She untied her medicine bag from her waist thong and rubbed her hand over the sleek waterproof fur of the otter skin, feeling the hard bones of the feet and tail. The thong that pulled the pouch closed was threaded around the neck opening, and the oddly flattened head, still attached at the back of the neck, served as a cover flap. Iza had made it for her, passing the legacy from mother to daughter when she became the clan’s medicine woman.

Then, for the first time in many years, Ayla thought of the first medicine bag Iza had made for her, the one Creb had burned the first time she was cursed. Brun had to do it. Women were not allowed to touch weapons, and Ayla had been using her sling for several years. But he had given her a chance to return—if she could survive.

Maybe he gave me more of a chance than he knew, she thought. I wonder if I’d be alive now if I hadn’t learned how a death curse makes you want to die. Except for leaving Durc, I think it was harder the first time. When Creb burned all my things, I wanted to die.

She hadn’t been able to think about Creb; the grief was too new, the pain too raw. She had loved the old magician as much as she loved Iza. He had been Iza’s sibling, and Brun’s too. Missing an eye and part of an arm, Creb had never hunted, but he was the greatest holy man of all the clans. Mog-ur, feared and respected—his scarred, one-eyed old visage could inspire dread in the bravest hunter, but Ayla knew his gentle side.

He had protected her, cared for her, loved her as the child of the mate he never had. She’d had time to adjust to Iza’s death three years before, and though she grieved for the separation, she knew Durc was still alive. She hadn’t grieved for Creb. Suddenly, the pain she had kept inside since the earthquake that killed him would stay inside no more. She cried out his name.

“Creb … Oh, Creb …” Why did you go back in the cave? Why did you have to die?

She heaved great sobs into the waterproof fur of the otter-skin pouch. Then, from deep within, a high-pitched wail rose to her throat. She rocked back and forth keening her anguish, her sorrow, her despair. But there was no loving clan to join their wails with hers and share her misery. She grieved alone, and she grieved for her loneliness.

When her wails subsided, she felt drained, but a terrible ache was relieved. After a while she went to the river and washed her face, then put her medicine bag inside the basket. She didn’t need to check the contents. She knew exactly what it contained.

She snatched up the digging stick, then threw it aside as anger welled up to replace the grief and added fire to her determination. Broud will not make me die!

She took a deep breath and willed herself to continue packing the basket. She put the fire-making materials and aurochs horn into it, then took several flint tools out of the folds of her wrap. From another fold she took a round pebble, tossed it in the air, and caught it again. Any stone of the right size could be hurled with a sling, but accuracy was better with smooth round missiles. She kept the few she had.

Then she reached for her sling, a deerskin strap with a bulge in the middle for holding stones, and long tapered ends twisted from use. No question about keeping it. She untied a long lace of leather that was wound around her soft chamois-skin wrap in such a way as to create the folds in which she carried things. The wrap came off. She stood naked except for the small leather pouch fastened to a cord around her neck—her amulet. She slipped it over her head and shivered, feeling more naked without her amulet than she did without her wrap, but the small hard objects within it were reassuring.

That was it, the sum total of her possessions, all she needed to survive—that and knowledge, skill, experience, intelligence, determination, and courage.

Quickly, she rolled up her amulet, tools, and sling in her wrap and put them in the basket, then wrapped the bearskin around it and tied it with the long thong. She enfolded the bundle with the aurochs-hide tent and tied it behind the fork of the log with the vine.

She stared at the wide river and the far shore for a while, and thought of her totem, then kicked sand on the fire and shoved the log with all her precious possessions into the river downstream of the entangling tree. Lodging herself at the forked end, Ayla grabbed the protruding stubs of former branches and launched her raft with a push.

Still chilled by melt from the glacier, the icy water enveloped her naked body. She gasped, hardly able to breathe, but a numbness set in as she became inured to her frigid element. The powerful current grabbed the log, trying to finish its job of transporting it to the sea, and tossed it between swells, but the forked branches kept it from rolling. Kicking hard, she struggled to force her way across the surging flow, and veered at an angle toward the opposite shore.

But progress was agonizingly slow. Every time she looked, the other side of the river was farther than she expected. She was moving much faster downstream than across. By the time the river swept her past the place she had thought to land, she was tired, and the cold was lowering her body temperature. She was shivering. Her muscles ached. It felt as though she had been kicking forever with rocks tied to her feet, but she forced herself to keep on.

Finally, exhausted, she surrendered to the inexorable force of the tide. The river, taking its advantage, swept the makeshift raft back in the direction of the stream, with Ayla clinging on desperately as the log now controlled her.

But ahead, the river’s course was changing, its southerly direction swerving sharply west as it curved around a jutting spit of land. Ayla had traversed more than three-quarters of the way across the racing torrent before giving in to her fatigue, and when she saw the rocky shore, with a resolute effort, she took control.

She forced her legs to kick, pushing to reach the land before the river carried her around the point. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on keeping her legs moving. Suddenly, with a jolt, she felt the log grate against the bottom and come to a stop.

Ayla couldn’t move. Half submerged, she lay in the water still clinging to the branch stubs. A swell in the turbulent stream lifted the log free of the sharp rocks, filling the young woman with panic. She forced herself to her knees and shoved the battered tree trunk forward, anchoring it to the beach, then fell back into the water.

But she couldn’t rest long. Shivering violently in the cold water, she made herself crawl onto the rocky spit. She fumbled with the knots in the vine, and, with that loosened, she hauled the bundle to the beach. The thong was even more difficult to untie with her trembling fingers.

Providence helped. The thong broke at a weak spot. She clawed the long leather strap away, pushed the basket aside, and crawled on the bearskin and wrapped it around her. By the time her shivering stopped, the young woman was asleep.

   Ayla headed north and slightly west after her perilous river crossing. The summer days warmed as she searched the open steppeland for some sign of humanity. The herbal blossoms that had brightened the brief spring faded, and the grass neared waist high.

She added alfalfa and clover to her diet, and welcomed the starchy, slightly sweet groundnuts, finding the roots by tracing rambling surface vines. Milk-vetch pods were swelling with rows of oval green vegetables in addition to edible roots, and she had no trouble distinguishing between them and their poisonous cousins. When the season for the buds of day lilies passed, the roots were still tender. A few early-ripening varieties of low-crawling currants had begun to turn color, and there were always a few new leaves of pigweed, mustard, or nettles for greens.

Her sling did not lack for targets. Steppe pikas, souslik marmots, great jerboas, varying hares—gray brown now instead of winter white—and an occasional, omnivorous, mouse-hunting giant hamster abounded on the plains. Low-flying willow grouse and ptarmigan were a special treat, though Ayla could never eat ptarmigan without remembering that the fat birds with the feathered feet had always been Creb’s favorite.

But those were only the smaller creatures feasting on the plain’s summer bounty. She saw herds of deer—reindeer, red deer, and enormous antlered giant deer; compact steppe horses, asses, and onagers, which resembled both; huge bison or a family of saiga antelope occasionally crossed her path. The herd of reddish brown wild cattle, with bulls six feet at the withers, had spring calves nursing at the ample udders of cows. Ayla’s mouth watered for the taste of milk-fed veal, but her sling was not an adequate weapon to hunt aurochs. She glimpsed migrating woolly mammoths, saw musk oxen in a phalanx with their young at their backs facing down a pack of wolves, and carefully avoided a family of evil-tempered woolly rhinoceroses. Broud’s totem, she recalled, and suitable, too.

As she continued northward, the young woman began to notice a change in the terrain. It was becoming drier and more desolate. She had reached the ill-defined northern limit of the wet, snowy continental steppes. Beyond, all the way to the sheer walls of the immense northern glacier, lay the arid loess steppes, an environment that existed only when glaciers were on the land, during the Ice Age.

Glaciers, massive frozen sheets of ice that spanned the continent, mantled the Northern Hemisphere. Nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface was buried under their unmeasurable crushing tons. The water locked within their confines caused the level of the oceans to drop, extending the coastlines and changing the shape of the land. No portion of the globe was exempt from their influence, rains flooded equatorial regions and deserts shrunk, but near the borders of the ice the effect was profound.

The vast ice field chilled the air above it, causing moisture in the atmosphere to condense and fall as snow. But nearer the center high pressure stabilized, creating extreme dry cold and pushing the snowfall out toward the edges. The huge glaciers grew at their margins; the ice was nearly uniform across its full sweeping dimensions, a sheet of ice more than a mile thick.

With most of the snow falling on the ice and nourishing the glacier, the land just south of it was dry—and frozen. The constant high pressure over the center caused an atmospheric chute funneling the cold dry air toward lower pressures; wind, blowing from the north, never stopped on the steppes. It only varied in intensity. Along the way it picked up rock that had been pulverized to flour at the shifting border of the grinding glacier. The airborne particles were sifted to a texture only slightly coarser than clay—loess—and deposited over hundreds of miles to depths of many feet, and became soil.

In winter, howling winds whipped the scant snowfall across the bleak frozen land. But the earth still spun on its tilted axis, and seasons still changed. Average yearly temperatures only a few degrees lower trigger the formation of a glacier; a few hot days have little effect if they don’t alter the average.

In spring the meager snow that fell on the land melted, and the crust of the glacier warmed, seeping down and out across the steppes. The meltwater softened the soil enough, above the permafrost, for shallow rooting grasses and herbs to sprout. The grass grew rapidly, knowing in the heart of its seed that life would be short. By the middle of summer, it was dry standing hay, an entire continent of grassland, with scattered pockets of boreal forest and tundra nearer the oceans.

In the regions near the borders of the ice, where the snow cover was light, the grass supplied fodder the year around for uncountable millions of grazing and seed-eating animals who had adapted to the glacial cold—and to predators who can adapt to any climate that supports their prey. A mammoth could graze at the foot of a gleaming, blue-white wall of ice soaring a mile or more above it.

The seasonal streams and rivers fed by glacial melt cut through the deep loess, and often through the sedimentary rock to the crystalline granite platform underlying the continent. Steep ravines and river gorges were common in the open landscape, but rivers provided moisture and gorges shelter from the wind. Even in the arid loess steppes, green valleys existed.

   The season warmed, and, as one day followed the next, Ayla grew tired of traveling, tired of the monotony of the steppes, tired of the unrelenting sun and incessant wind. Her skin roughened, cracked, and peeled. Her lips were chapped, her eyes sore, her throat always full of grit. She came across an occasional river valley, greener and more wooded than the steppes, but none tempted her to stay, and all were empty of human life.