Plains of Passage (75 page)

“Someone hurt Jondalar and carried him away. We need to find him.” The wolf sniffed the blood, then wagged his tail and yipped. “That’s Jondalar’s footprint,” she said, pointing to the distinctive large impression among the smaller ones. Wolf again sniffed where she pointed, then looked at her, as if waiting for her next move. “They took him away,” she said, indicating the other imprints of human feet.

Suddenly she stood up and walked over to Racer. She took Jondalar’s spear-thrower out of the pack on Racer’s back and knelt to let the wolf sniff it. “We have to find Jondalar, Wolf! Someone took him away, and we’re going to get him back!”

J
ondalar slowly became aware that he was awake, but caution made him lie still until he could sort out what was wrong, because something most certainly was. For one thing, his head was throbbing. He opened his eyes a crack. There was only dim light, but enough to see the cold, hard-packed dirt he was lying on. Something felt dry and caked on the side of his face, but when he attempted to reach up and find out what it was, he discovered that his hands were tied together behind his back. His feet were tied together, too.

He rolled to his side and looked around. He was inside a small round structure, a kind of wooden frame covered with skins, which he sensed was inside a larger enclosure. There were no sounds of wind, no drafts, no billowing of the hides as there would have been if he had been outside, and though it was cool, it wasn’t freezing. And he suddenly realized that he was no longer wearing his fur parka.

Jondalar struggled to sit up, and a wave of dizziness washed over him. The throbbing in his head localized to a sharp pain above his left temple, near the dry, caked residue. He stopped when he heard the sound of voices drawing near. Two women were speaking an unfamiliar language, though he thought he detected a few words that sounded vaguely Mamutoi.

“Hello out there. I’m awake,” he called out, in the language of the Mammoth Hunters. “Will someone come and untie me? These ropes aren’t necessary. I’m sure there has been a misunderstanding. I mean no harm.” The voices stopped for a moment, then continued, but no one either answered or came.

Jondalar, lying facedown on the dirt, tried to remember how he had gotten there, and what he might have done that would have prompted someone to tie him up. In his experience, the only time people were tied up was when they behaved wildly and tried to hurt someone. He recalled a wall of fire—and horses racing toward the drop-off at the edge of the field. People must have been hunting the horses, and he’d been caught up in the middle of it.

Then he remembered seeing Ayla riding Racer, but having trouble
controlling him. He wondered how the stallion had ended up in the middle of the stampeding herd when he had left him tied to a bush.

Jondalar had almost panicked then, afraid the horse would respond to his herding instinct and follow the others over the edge, taking Ayla with him. He remembered running toward them with his spear ready in his spear-thrower. As much as he loved that brown stallion, he would have killed Racer before allowing him to carry Ayla over the cliff. That was the last thing he remembered, except for a fleeting recollection of a sharp pain before everything went dark.

Someone must have hit me with something, Jondalar thought. It was a hard blow, too, because I don’t remember anything about being brought here, and my head still hurts. Did they think I was spoiling their hunting strategy? The first time he’d met Jeren and his hunters, it had been under similar circumstances. He and Thonolan had inadvertently run off a herd of horses the hunters had been driving toward a trap. But Jeren had understood, once he got over his anger, that it wasn’t intentional, and they had become friends. I didn’t spoil the hunt of these people, did I?

He tried again to sit up. Bracing himself on his side, he pulled his knees up, then strained to roll and bob up into a sitting position. It took a few tries and left his head throbbing from the effort, but he finally succeeded. He sat with his eyes closed, hoping the pain would soon subside. But as it eased off, his concern for Ayla and the animals grew. Had Whinney and Racer been swept over the edge with the herd, and had Racer taken Ayla with him?

Was she dead? He felt his heart beat with fear just thinking about it. Were they all gone, Ayla and the horses? What about Wolf? When the injured animal finally reached the field, he would find no one. Jondalar imagined him sniffing around, trying to follow a trail that went nowhere. What would he do? Wolf was a good hunter, but he was hurt. How well could he hunt for himself with his injury? He would miss Ayla and the rest of his “pack.” He wasn’t used to living alone. How would he get along? What would happen when he came up against a pack of wild wolves? Would he be able to defend himself?

Isn’t anyone going to come? I’d like a drink of water, Jondalar thought. They must have heard me. I’m hungry, too, but mostly thirsty. His mouth felt drier and drier, and his craving for water grew stronger. “Hey, out there! I’m thirsty! Can’t someone bring a man a drink of water?” he shouted. “What kind of people are you? Tying a man up and not even giving him a drink of water!”

No one answered. After shouting a few more times, he decided to save his breath. It was only making him more thirsty, and his head still
hurt. He considered lying down, but it had taken so much effort to get up that he wasn’t sure if he could do it again.

As more time passed, he began to feel morose. He was weak, bordering on delirious, and he imagined the worst, vividly. He convinced himself that Ayla was dead, and both the horses as well. When he thought of Wolf, he pictured the poor beast wandering alone, injured and unable to hunt, looking for Ayla and open to attack by local wolves or hyenas or some other animal … better, perhaps, than dying of starvation. He wondered if he was going to be left to die of thirst, and then almost hoped he would, if Ayla was gone. Identifying with the plight he envisioned for the wolf, the man decided that he and Wolf must be the last surviving members of their unusual band of travelers, and that they would soon be gone.

He was pulled out of his despair by the sound of people approaching. The entrance flap of the small structure was thrown back, and through the opening he saw a figure standing, feet apart and hands on hips, silhouetted by torchlight. She issued a sharp command. Two women entered the enclosed space, walked to either side of him, lifted him up, and dragged him out. They propped him up on his knees in front of her, his hands and feet still bound. His head was throbbing again, and he leaned unsteadily against one of the women. She pushed him away.

The woman who had ordered him to be brought forward looked down at him for a moment or two and then she laughed. It was harsh and dissonant, a demented, jarring curse of a sound. Jondalar recoiled involuntarily and felt a shudder of fear. She spoke a few sharp words at him. He didn’t understand, but he tried to straighten up and look at her. His vision blurred, and he weaved unsteadily. The woman scowled, barked more orders, then turned on her heel and stalked out. The women who were holding him up dropped him and followed her, along with several others. Jondalar toppled over on his side, dizzy and weak.

He felt the bindings on his feet being cut, and then water was poured on his mouth. It almost choked him, but he tried eagerly to swallow some. The woman who was holding the waterbag spoke a few words in tones of disgust, and then she thrust the bladder of liquid at an older man. He came forward and held the waterbag to Jondalar’s mouth, then tipped it up, not more gently, exactly, but with more patience, so that Jondalar could swallow and finally slake his ravenous thirst.

Before he was fully satisfied, the woman impatiently spat out a word, and the man took the water away. Then she pulled Jondalar to his feet. He staggered with dizziness as she pushed him ahead, out of the shelter, and in with a group of other men. It was cold, but no one offered
him his fur parka or even untied his hands so he could rub them together.

But the cool air revived him, and he noticed that some of the other men had their hands tied behind their backs, too. He looked more closely at the people among whom he had been thrust. They were all ages, from young men—more like boys actually—to oldsters. All of them looked thin, weak, and dirty, with tattered, inadequate clothes and matted hair. A few had untended wounds, full of dried blood and dirt.

Jondalar tried to speak to the man standing next to him in Mamutoi, but he just shook his head. Jondalar thought he didn’t understand, so he tried Sharamudoi. The man looked away just as a woman holding a spear came and threatened Jondalar with it, barking a sharp command. He didn’t know her words, but her actions were plain enough, and he wondered if the reason the man had not spoken was that he didn’t understand him, or if he had, had not wanted to speak.

Several women with spears spaced themselves around the group of men. One of them shouted some words and the men started walking. Jondalar used the opportunity to look around and try to get a sense of where he was. The settlement, consisting of several rounded dwellings, felt vaguely familiar, which was strange because the countryside was totally unknown to him. Then he realized it was the dwellings. They resembled Mamutoi earthlodges. Though they were not exactly the same, they appeared to be constructed in a similar fashion, probably using the bones of mammoths as structural supports that were covered with thatch, then sod and clay.

They started walking uphill, which afforded Jondalar a broader view. The countryside was mostly grassy steppeland or tundra—treeless plains on land with frozen subsoil that thawed to a black mucky surface in summer. Tundra was able to support only dwarfed herbs, but in spring their conspicuous blossoms added color and beauty, and they fed musk-oxen, reindeer, and other animals that could digest them. There were also stretches of taiga, low-growing evergreen trees so uniform in height that their tops could have been sheared off by some gigantic cutting tool, and in fact they were. Icy winds driving needles of sleet or sharp bits of gritty loess cut short any individual twig or tip that dared to strive above its brethren.

As they trudged higher, Jondalar saw a herd of mammoths grazing far to the north, and somewhat closer, reindeer. He knew horses roamed nearby—the people had been hunting them—and he guessed that bison and bear frequented the region in the warmer seasons. The land resembled his own country more than it did the dry grassy steppes to the east, at least in the types of plants that grew, although the dominant
vegetation was different, and probably the proportional mix of animals, too.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jondalar caught movement to the left. He turned in time to see a white hare dash across the hill chased by an arctic fox. As he watched, the large rabbit suddenly bounded in another direction, passing by the partially decomposed skull of a woolly rhinoceros, then scooted into its hole.

Where there are mammoths and rhinoceroses, Jondalar thought, there are cave lions, and with the other herding animals, probably hyenas, and certainly wolves. Plenty of meat and fur-bearing animals, and food that grows. This is a bountiful land. Making such an assessment was second nature to him, as it was to some degree to most people. They lived off the land, and careful observations about its resources were necessary.

When the group reached a high, level place on the side of the hill, they stopped. Jondalar looked down the hillside and saw that the hunters who lived in this area had a unique advantage. Not only could the animals be seen from a distance, the vast and various herds that roamed the land had to pass through a narrow corridor below that lay between steep walls of limestone and a river. They would be easy to hunt right here. It made him wonder why they had been hunting horses near the Great Mother River.

A keening wail brought Jondalar’s attention back to his immediate surroundings. A woman with long, stringy, disheveled gray hair was being supported by two somewhat younger women as she wailed and cried in obvious grief. Suddenly she broke free, fell on her knees, and draped herself over something on the ground. Jondalar edged forward to get a closer look. He was a good head taller than most of the other men, and with a few steps he understood the woman’s grief.

This was obviously a funeral. Stretched out on the ground were three people—young, probably late teens or early twenties, he guessed. Two of them were definitely male; they were bearded. The biggest one was probably the youngest. His light facial hair was still somewhat sparse. The gray-haired woman was sobbing over the body of the other male, whose brown hair and short beard were more apparent. The third one was fairly tall but thin, and something about the body and the way it lay made him wonder if that person had had some physical problem. He could see no facial hair, which made him think it was a woman at first, but it also could have been a rather tall young man who shaved, just as easily.

The details of clothing were not much help. They were all dressed in leg-coverings and loose tunics that disguised distinguishing characteristics.
The clothes appeared to be new, but lacked decoration. It was almost as though someone didn’t want them recognized in the next world and had attempted to make them anonymous.

The gray-haired woman was lifted, almost dragged—though not roughly—away from the body of the young man by the two women who had tried to support her. Then another woman stepped forward, and something about her made Jondalar look again. Her face was strangely skewed, oddly unsymmetrical, with one side seemingly pushed back and slightly smaller than the other. She made no attempt to hide it. Her hair was light-colored, perhaps gray, pulled back and piled up into a bun on top of her head.

Jondalar thought she was about his mother’s age, and she moved with the same grace and dignity, although there was no physical resemblance to Marthona. In spite of her slight deformity, the woman was not unattractive, and her face commanded attention. When she caught his eye, he realized he had been staring, but she looked away first, rather quickly, he thought. As she began to speak, he realized that she was conducting the funeral ceremony. She must be a mamut, he thought, a woman who communicates with the spirit world, a zelandonii for these people.