Plains of Passage (5 page)

“We’d better get packed up,” he said, recalling that they hadn’t traveled very far south the day before.

Ayla looked around, screening her eyes from the bright sun just beginning to climb the sky toward the east. Seeing Whinney and Racer in the grassy meadow beyond the brushy wooded lobe of land that the
river curved around, she whistled a distinctive call, similar to the whistle she used to signal Wolf, but not the same. The dark yellow mare raised her head, whinnied, then galloped toward the woman. The young stallion followed her.

They broke camp, packed the horses, and were nearly ready to start out when Jondalar decided to rearrange the tent poles in one basket and his spears in another to balance out his load. Ayla was leaning against Whinney while she waited. It was a comfortable and familiar posture for both of them, a way of touching that had developed when the young filly was her only companion in the rich but lonely valley.

She had killed Whinney’s mother, too. By then she had been hunting for years, but only with her sling. Ayla had taught herself to use the easily concealed hunting weapon, and she rationalized her breaking of Clan taboos by hunting primarily predators, who competed for the same food and sometimes stole meat from them. But the horse was the first large, meat-providing animal she had killed, and the first time she had used a spear to accomplish the deed.

In the Clan, it would have been counted as her first kill, if she had been a boy and allowed to hunt with a spear; as a female, if she used a spear, she would not have been allowed to live. But killing the horse had been necessary for her survival, though she did not select a nursing dam to be the one to fall into her pit-trap. When she first noticed the foal, she felt sorry for it, knowing it would die without its mother, yet the thought of raising it herself didn’t occur to her. There was no reason why it should; no one had done it before.

But when hyenas went after the frightened baby horse, she remembered the hyena that had tried to drag off Oga’s baby son. Ayla hated hyenas, perhaps because of the ordeal she’d had to face when she killed that one and exposed her secret. They were no worse than any other natural predator and scavenger, but to Ayla they had come to represent everything that was cruel, vicious, or wrong. Her reaction then was just as spontaneous as it had been the other time, and the swift stones hurled with a sling were just as effective. She killed one, drove the others off, and rescued the helpless young animal, but this time, instead of an ordeal, she found company to relieve her loneliness, and joy in the extraordinary relationship that developed.

Ayla loved the young wolf as she would a bright and delightful child, but her feeling for the horse was of a different nature. Whinney had shared her isolation; they had grown as close as any two such dissimilar creatures could. They knew each other, understood each other, trusted each other. The yellow mare was not merely a helpful animal companion, or a pet, or even a well-loved child. Whinney had been her only companion for several years and was her friend.

But it had been a spontaneous, even irrational, act the first time Ayla climbed on her back and rode like the wind. The sheer excitement of it brought her back. In the beginning she did not purposely try to direct the horse, but they were so close that their understanding of each other grew with each ride.

While she waited for Jondalar to finish, Ayla watched Wolf playfully chewing on her camp shoe and wished she could think of a way to control his destructive habit. Her eye casually noted the vegetation on the spit of land where they had camped. Caught between the high banks on the other side of the river as it curved around the sharp bend, the low land on this side flooded every year, leaving fertile loam to nourish a rich variety of brush, herbs, even small trees, and the rich pasture beyond. She always noticed the plants in her vicinity. It was second nature for her to be aware of everything that grew and, with a knowledge that was so ingrained it was almost instinctive, to catalogue and interpret it.

She saw a bearberry shrub, a dwarf evergreen heath plant with small, dark green, leathery leaves, and an abundance of small, round, pink-tinged white flowers that promised a rich crop of red berries. Though sour and rather astringent, they tasted fine when they were cooked with other food, but more than food, Ayla knew the juice of the berry was good for relieving the burning sensation that could occur when passing water, especially if it was pinkish with blood.

Nearby was a horseradish plant with small white flowers clustered in a bunch on stems with small narrow leaves, and lower down, long, pointed, shiny dark green leaves, growing up from the ground. The root would be stout and rather long with a pungent aroma and a burning hot taste. In very small quantities, it was an interesting flavor with meats, but Ayla was more intrigued with its medicinal use as a stimulant for the stomach, and for passing water, and as an application to sore and swollen joints. She wondered if she should stop to collect some, and then decided that she probably shouldn’t take the time.

But she reached for her pointed digging stick with no hesitation when she saw the antelope sage plant. The root was one of the ingredients of her special morning tea, one she drank during her moon time when she bled. At other times she used different plants in her tea, particularly the golden thread that always grew on other plants and often killed them. Long ago Iza had told her about the magic plants that would make the spirit of her totem strong enough to defeat the spirit of any man’s totem, so no baby would start growing inside her. Iza had always warned her not to tell anyone, particularly a man.

Ayla wasn’t sure if it was spirits that caused babies. She thought a man had more to do with it, but the secret plants worked anyway. No new life had started in her when she drank the special teas, whether she
was near a man or not. Not that she would have minded, if they were settled in one place. But Jondalar had made it clear to her that with such a long Journey ahead of them, it would be a risk to get pregnant along the way.

As she pulled out the root of the antelope sage and shook the dirt off, she saw the heart-shaped leaves and long yellow tubular flowers of snakeroot, good for preventing miscarriage. With a twinge of sorrow, she remembered when Iza had gone to get that plant for her. When she stood up and went to put the fresh roots she had collected into a special basket that was attached near the top of one of the pack baskets, she saw Whinney selectively biting off the tops of wild oats. She liked the seeds, too, she thought, when they were cooked, and her mind, continuing its automatic medicinal cataloguing, added the information that the flowers and stalks aided digestion.

The horse had dropped dung, and she noticed flies buzzing around it. In certain seasons insects could be terrible, she thought, and decided she would watch for insect repellent plants. Who knew what kind of territory they would have to travel through?

In her offhand perusal of the local vegetation she noted a spiny bush that she knew was the variety of wormwood with the bitter taste and strong camphor smell, not an insect repellent, she thought, but it had its uses. Nearby were cranesbills, wild geraniums with leaves of many teeth and five-petaled reddish-pink flowers, that grew into fruits that resembled the bills of cranes. The dried and powdered leaves helped stop bleeding and heal wounds; made into a tea it healed mouth sores and rashes; and the roots were good for runny stools and other stomach problems. It tasted bitter and sharp, but was gentle enough for children and old people.

Glancing around toward Jondalar, she noticed Wolf again, still chewing on her shoe. Suddenly she stopped her mental ruminations and focused again on the last plants she had noted. Why had they caught her attention? Something about them seemed important. Then it came to her. She quickly reached for her digging stick and started breaking up the ground around the bitter-tasting wormwood with the strong smell of camphor, and then the sharp, astringent, but relatively harmless geranium.

Jondalar had mounted and was ready to go when he turned to her. “Ayla, why are you collecting plants? We should be leaving. Do you really need those now?”

“Yes,” she said, “I won’t be long,” going next after the long, thick horseradish root with the burning hot taste. “I think I know a way to keep him away from our things,” Ayla said, pointing at the young ca
nine playfully gnawing on what was left of her leather camp shoe. “I’m going to make Wolf repellent.’ ”

   They headed southeast from their camping place to get back to the river they had been following. The windswept dust had settled overnight, and in the stark, clear air the boundless sky revealed the distant reach of the horizon that had been obscured before. As they rode across country their entire view, from one edge of the earth to the other, north to south, east to west, undulating, billowing, constantly in motion, was grass; one vast, encompassing grassland. The few trees that existed near waterways only accentuated the dominant vegetation. But the magnitude of the grassy plains was more extensive than they knew.

Massive sheets of ice, two, three, up to five miles thick, smothered the ends of the earth and sprawled over the northern lands, crushing the stony crust of the continent and depressing the bedrock itself with its inconceivable weight. South of the ice were the steppes—cold, dry grassland as wide as the continent, marching from western ocean to eastern sea. All the land bordering the ice was an immense grassy plain. Everywhere, sweeping across the land, from lowland valley to windblown hill, there was grass. Mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas that provided enough moisture for trees were the only intrusions into the essential grassy character of the northern lands during the Ice Age.

Ayla and Jondalar felt the level ground begin sloping downhill toward the valley of the larger river, though they were still some distance from the water. Before long they found themselves surrounded by tall grass. Stretching to see over the eight-foot growth, even from Whinney’s back, Ayla could see little more than Jondalar’s head and shoulders between the feathery tops and the nodding stems of minuscule florets, turning gold with a faintly reddish tinge, atop the thin, blue-green stalks. She glimpsed his dark brown mount now and then, but recognized Racer only because she knew he was there. She was glad for the advantage of height the horses gave them. Had they been walking, she realized, it would have been like traveling through a dense forest of tall green grass waving in the wind.

The high grass was no barrier, parting easily in front of them as they rode, but they could see only a short distance past the nearest stalks, and behind them the grass sprang back, leaving little trace of the way they had come. Their view was limited to the area immediately around them, as though they took with them a pocket of their own space as they moved. With only the brilliant incandescence tracing its familiar path through the clear deep blue above, and the bending stalks to show
the direction of the prevailing wind, it would have been more difficult to find their way, and very easy to become separated.

As she rode, she heard the soughing wind and the high whine of mosquitoes zinging by her ear. It was hot and close in the middle of the dense growth. Though she could see the tallgrass swaying, she barely felt a breath of wind. The buzz of flies and a whiff of fresh dung told her that Racer had recently dropped scat. Even if he hadn’t been just a few paces ahead, she would have known it was the young stallion who had passed that way. His scent was as distinctively familiar to her as that of the horse she was riding—and her own. All around was the rich humus odor of the soil, and the green smell of burgeoning vegetation. She did not classify smells as bad or good; she used her nose as she did her eyes and ears, with knowledgeable discrimination to help her investigate and analyze the perceptible world.

After a time, the sameness of the scenery, of long green stalk after long green stalk, the rhythmic gait of the horse, and the hot sun almost directly above, made Ayla lethargic; awake, but not fully aware. The repetitive tall, thin, jointed grass stems became a blur she no longer saw. Instead, she began to notice all the other vegetation. Much more than grass grew there, and as usual, she took mental note of it, without consciously thinking about it. It was simply the way she saw her environment.

There, Ayla thought, in that open space—some animal must have made that by rolling in it—those are goosefoots, what Nezzie called goosefoots, like the pigweed near the clan’s cave. I should pick some, she mused, but made no effort to do so. That plant, with the yellow flowers and leaves wrapped around the stem, that’s wild cabbage. That would be good to have tonight, too. She passed it by as well. Those purple-blue flowers, with the small leaves, that’s milk vetch, and it has a lot of pods. I wonder if they’re ready? Probably not. Up ahead, that wide white flower, sort of rounded, pink in the middle, it’s wild carrot. It looks like Racer stepped on some of the leaves. I should get my digging stick, but there’s more over there. Seems to be a lot of it. I can wait, and it’s so hot. She tried to swat away a pair of flies that buzzed around her sweat-damp hair. I haven’t seen Wolf for a while. I wonder where he is?

She turned to look for the wolf and saw him following close behind the mare, sniffing the ground. He stopped, lifting his head to catch another scent, then disappeared into the grass on her left. She saw a large blue dragonfly with spotted wings, disturbed by the wolf’s passage through the dense living screen, hovering near the place he had been, as though marking it. A short time later, a squawk and a whir of wings preceded the sudden appearance of a great bustard taking to the air.
Ayla reached for her sling, wrapped around her head across her forehead. It was a handy place to keep it to get it quickly, and it kept her hair out of the way besides.

But the huge bustard—at twenty-five pounds the heaviest bird on the steppes—was a speedy flier for its size, and it was out of range before she got a stone out of her pouch. She watched the mottled bird with dark-tipped white wings building up speed, its head stretched forward, its legs backward, as it flew away, wishing she had known what Wolf had scented. The bustard would have made a wonderful meal for all three of them, with plenty left over.