Plains of Passage (69 page)

“It would be helpful, especially when you are on a Journey, but it’s hard for me to imagine a language that everyone would understand. Do you really think that people of the Clan everywhere can understand the same sign language?” Jondalar asked.

“It’s not like a language they have to learn. They are born with it, Jondalar. It is so ancient that it is in their memories, and their memories go back to the beginning. You can’t imagine how far back that is,” Ayla said.

She shivered with a chill of fear as she remembered the time that Creb, to save her life, had taken her back with them, against all tradition. By the unwritten law of the Clan, he should have let her die. But to the Clan, she was dead, now. It occurred to her how ironic that was. When Broud had cursed her with death, he shouldn’t have. He didn’t have a good reason. Creb did have a reason; she had broken the most powerful taboo of the Clan. Perhaps he should have made sure that she died, but he didn’t.

They began striking camp and stowing their tent, sleeping rolls, cooking utensils, ropes, and other equipment in the pack-saddle baskets, with the efficiency of unspoken routine. Ayla was filling waterbags at the river when Jeren and his hunters returned. With smiles and many words of what were obviously profuse thanks, the men presented Ayla with a package wrapped in a piece of fresh aurochs hide. She opened it to find the tender rump, butchered from a recent kill.

“I am grateful, Jeren,” Ayla said, and she gave him the beautiful smile that always made Jondalar melt with love. It seemed to have a similar affect on Jeren, and Jondalar smiled inwardly when he saw the dazed expression on the man’s face. It took Jeren a moment to collect himself; then he turned to Jondalar and began talking, trying very hard to communicate something. He stopped when he saw he was not being understood, and he talked to the other men. Then he turned back to Jondalar.

“Tamen,” he said, and began walking toward the south and motioning for them to follow. “Tamen,” he repeated, beckoning and adding some other words.

“I think he wants you to go with him,” Ayla said, “to see that man you know. The one who speaks Zelandonii.”

“Tamen, Zel-an-don-yee. Hadumai,” Jeren said, beckoning both of them.

“He must want us to visit. What do you think?” Jondalar said.

“Yes, I think you’re right,” Ayla said. “Do you want to stop and visit?”

“It would mean going back,” Jondalar said, “and I don’t know how far. If we had met them farther south, I wouldn’t have minded stopping for a little while on the way, but I hate to go back now that we’ve come this far.”

Ayla nodded. “You’ll have to tell him, somehow.”

Jondalar smiled at Jeren, then shook his head. “I’m sorry” he said, “but we need to go north. North,” he repeated, pointing in that direction.

Jeren looked distressed, shook his head, then closed his eyes as if trying to think. He walked toward them and took a short staff out of his belt. Jondalar noticed the top of it was carved. He knew he had seen one like it before, and he tried to remember where. Jeren cleared a space on the ground, then drew a line with the staff, and another crossing it. Below the first line, he drew a figure that vaguely resembled a horse. At the end of the second line pointing toward the channel of the Great Mother River, he drew a circle with a few lines radiating from it. Ayla looked more closely.

“Jondalar,” she said, with excitement in her voice, “when Mamut was showing me symbols and teaching me what they meant, that was a sign for ‘sun.’ ”

“And that line points in the direction of the setting sun,” Jondalar said, pointing west. “Where he drew the horse, that must be south.” He indicated the direction when he said it.

Jeren was nodding vigorously. Then he pointed north and frowned. He walked to the north end of the line he had drawn and stood facing them. He lifted his arms and crossed them in front of him, in the same way that Ayla had done when she was trying to tell Jeren not to hunt Whinney and Racer. Then he shook his head no. Ayla and Jondalar looked at each other and back at Jeren.

“Do you think he’s trying to tell us not to go north?” Ayla asked.

Jondalar felt a dawning recognition of what Jeren was trying to communicate. “Ayla, I don’t think he just wants us to go south with him and visit. I think he’s trying to tell us something more. I think he’s trying to warn us not to go north.”

“Warn us? What could be north that he would warn us against?” Ayla said.

“Could it be the great wall of ice?” Jondalar wondered.

“We know about the ice. We hunted mammoth near it with the Mamutoi. It’s cold, but not really dangerous, is it?”

“It does move,” Jondalar said, “over many years, and sometimes it even uproots trees with the changing seasons, but it doesn’t move so fast that you can’t get out of its way.”

“I don’t think it’s the ice,” Ayla said. “But he’s telling us not to go north, and he seems very concerned.”

“I think you’re right, but I can’t imagine what could be so dangerous,” Jondalar said. “Sometimes people who don’t travel much beyond their own range imagine that the world outside their territory is dangerous, because it’s different.”

“I don’t think Jeren is a man who fears very much,” Ayla said.

“I have to agree,” Jondalar said, then faced the man. “Jeren, I wish I could understand you.”

Jeren had been watching them. He guessed from their expressions that they had understood his warning, and he was waiting for their response.

“Do you think we should go with him and talk to Tamen?” Ayla asked.

“I hate to turn back and lose time now. We still have to reach that glacier before the end of winter. If we keep going, we should make it easily, with time to spare, but if anything happens to delay us, it could be spring and melting, and too dangerous to cross,” Jondalar said.

“So we’ll keep going north,” Ayla said.

“I think we should, but we will be watchful. I just wish I knew what I should be watching for.” He looked at the man again. “Jeren, my friend, I thank you for your warning,” he said. “We will be careful, but I think we should keep on going.” He pointed south, then shook his head and pointed north.

Jeren, trying to protest, shook his head again, but he finally gave up and nodded acceptance. He had done what he could. He went to talk to the other man in the horse-head cape, spoke for a moment, then returned and indicated they were going.

Ayla and Jondalar waved as Jeren and his hunters left. Then they finished up their packing and, with some reservations, started out toward the north.

   As the Journeyers traveled across the northern end of the vast central grassland, they could see the terrain ahead was changing; the flat lowlands were giving way to rugged hills. The occasional highlands that had interrupted the central plain were connected, though partly submerged beneath the soil in the midland basin, to great broken blocks of
faulted sedimentary rock running in an irregular backbone from northeast to southwest through the plain. Relatively recent volcanic eruptions had covered the highlands with fertile soils that nurtured forests of pine, spruce, and larch on the upper reaches, with birch and willows on the lower slopes, while brush and steppe grass grew on the dry lee sides.

As they started up into the rugged hills, they found themselves having to backtrack and work their way around deep holes and broken formations that blocked their way. Ayla thought the land seemed more barren, though with the deepening cold she wondered if it might be the changing season that gave that impression. Looking back from the heightened elevation, they gained a new perspective of the land they had crossed. The few deciduous trees and brush were bare of leaves, but the central plain was covered with the dusty gold of dry standing hay that would feed multitudes through the winter.

They sighted many large grazing animals, in herds and individually. Horses seemed most prevalent to Ayla, perhaps because she was especially conscious of them, but giant deer, red deer, and, particularly as they reached the northern steppes, reindeer were also abundant. The bison were gathering into large migratory herds and heading south. During one whole day, the great humpy beasts with huge black horns moved over the rolling hills of the northern grassland in a thick, undulating carpet, and Ayla and Jondalar stopped often to watch. The dust rose to cast an obscuring pall over the great moving mass, the earth shook with the pounding hooves of their passage, and the combined roar of the multitude of deep rolling grunts and bawls growled like thunder.

They saw mammoths less often, usually traveling north, but even from a distance the giant woolly beasts commanded attention. When not driven by the demands of reproduction, male mammoths tended to form small herds with loose ties for companionship. Occasionally one would join a female herd and travel with it for a while, but whenever the Journeyers noticed a lone mammoth, it was invariably male. The larger permanent herds were of closely related females; a grandmother, the old and wily matriarch who was their leader, and sometimes a sister or two, with their daughters and grandchildren. The female herds were easy to identify because their tusks tended to be somewhat smaller and less curved, and there were always young ones with them.

Though also impressive when they were sighted, woolly rhinoceroses were most rare and least social. They didn’t, as a rule, herd together. Females kept to small family groups and, except during mating, males were solitary. Neither mammoths nor rhinoceroses, except for
the young and the very old, had much to fear from four-legged hunters, not even the huge cave lion. The males in particular could afford to be solitary; the females needed the herds to help protect their young.

The smaller woolly musk-oxen, however, who were goatlike creatures, all banded together for protection. When they were under attack, the adults usually packed themselves into a circular phalanx facing outward, with the young ones in the middle. A few chamois and ibex made an appearance as Ayla and Jondalar climbed higher in the hills; they often dropped down to lower ground with the approach of winter.

Many of the small animals were secure for the winter in their nests burrowed deep in the ground, surrounded by stores of seeds, nuts, bulbs, roots, and, in the case of pikas, piles of hay that they had cut and dried. The rabbits and hares were changing color, not to white, but to a lighter mottled shade, and on a wooded knoll they saw a beaver and a tree squirrel. Jondalar used his spear-thrower to get the beaver. Besides the meat, the fatty beaver tail was a rare and rich delicacy, roasted by itself on a spit over the fireplace.

They usually used the spear-throwers for the larger game they hunted. They were both quite accurate with the weapons, but Jondalar had more power, could throw farther. Ayla often brought down the smaller animals with her sling.

Though they didn’t hunt them, they noticed that otter, badger, polecat, marten, and mink were also numerous. The carnivores—foxes, wolves, lynxes, and larger cats—found sustenance in small game or the other herbivores. And though they seldom fished on this leg of their Journey, Jondalar knew there were sizable fish in the river, including perch, pike, and very big carp.

   Toward evening they saw a cave with a large opening and decided to investigate it. As they approached, the horses did not show any nervousness, which the humans took to be a good sign. Wolf sniffed around with interest when they entered the cave, obviously curious, but no hackles were raised. Seeing the unconcerned behavior of the animals, Ayla felt confident that the cave was empty, and they decided to camp for the night.

After building a fire, they made a torch to explore a little deeper. Near the front were many signs that the cave had been used before. Jondalar thought the scrapes on the walls were either from a bear or a cave lion. Wolf smelled out droppings nearby but they were so dry and old that it was hard to tell what animal had made them. They found large, dry leg bones that had been partly eaten. The way they were broken and the teeth marks made Ayla think cave hyenas had cracked them
with their extremely powerful jaws. She shuddered with repugnance at the thought.

Hyenas were no worse an animal than any other. They scavenged the carcasses that had died naturally and the kills of others, but so did other predators, including wolves, lions, and humans, and hyenas were also effective pack hunters. That didn’t matter, Ayla’s hatred of them was irrational. To her they represented the worst of all that was bad.

But the cave had not been used recently. All the signs were old, including the charcoal in a shallow pit from the fire of some other human visitor. Ayla and Jondalar went into the cave for some distance, but it seemed to go on forever, and beyond the dry front opening there were no signs of use. Stone columns, seeming to grow up from the floor or down from the ceiling and sometimes meeting in the middle, were the only inhabitants of the cool damp interior.

When they came to a bend, they thought they heard running water from deep within, and they decided to turn back. They knew the makeshift torch would not last long, and neither of them wanted to go beyond sight of the fading light from the entrance. They walked back touching the limestone walls and were glad to see the drab gold of dry grass and brilliant golden light outlining clouds in the west.

   As they rode deeper into the highlands north of the great central plain, Ayla and Jondalar noticed more changes. The terrain was becoming pocked with caves, caverns, and sinkholes that ranged from bowl-shaped dips covered with grass, to inaccessible drop-offs that fell to great depths. It was a peculiar landscape that made them feel vaguely uneasy. While surface streams and lakes were rare, they sometimes heard the eerie sound of rivers running underground.

Unknown creatures of warm ancient seas were the cause of that strange and unpredictable land. Over untold millennia, the seafloors grew thick with their settling shells and skeletons. After even longer eons, the sediment of calcium hardened, was lifted high by conflicting movements of the earth, and became rocks of calcium carbonate, limestone. Underlying great stretches of land, most of the earth’s caves were formed out of limestone because, given the right conditions, the hard sedimentary rock will dissolve.