Plains of Passage (88 page)

“Your childhood must have been even more difficult than Brugar’s,” S’Armuna said.

“No. I think in a way it was easier. I wasn’t considered a deformed child of the Clan; I was just different. One of the Others—which is what they call us. They didn’t have expectations of me. Some of the things I did were so strange to them that they didn’t know what to think of me. Except I’m sure some of them did think I was rather slow because I had such a hard time remembering things. I’m not saying it was easy growing up with them. I had to learn to speak their way, and I had to learn to live according to their ways, learn their traditions. It was hard to fit in, but I was lucky. Iza and Creb, the people who raised me, loved me, and I know that without them I would not have lived at all.”

Nearly all of her statements raised questions in S’Armuna’s mind, but the time was not appropriate to ask them. “It is a good thing that you have no mixture in you,” she said, giving Jondalar a significant look, “especially since you are going to meet the Zelandonii.”

Ayla caught the look, and she had an idea what the woman meant. She recalled the way Jondalar had first reacted when he discovered who had raised her, and it was even worse when he found out about her son of mixed spirits.

“How do you know she hasn’t met them already?” Jondalar asked.

S’Armuna paused to consider the question. How had she known? She smiled at the man. “You said you were going home, and she said, ‘his language’ not hers.” Suddenly a thought came to her, a revelation. “The language! The accent! Now I know where I’ve heard it before. Brugar had an accent like that! Not quite as much as yours, Ayla, though he didn’t speak his own language as well as you speak Jondalar’s. But he must have developed that speech … mannerism—it isn’t quite an accent—when he lived with the flatheads. There is something about the sound of your speech, and now that I hear it, I don’t think I’ll ever forget again.”

Ayla felt embarrassed. She had worked so hard to speak correctly, but she had never been quite able to make some sounds. For the most part, it had ceased to bother her when people mentioned it, but S’Armuna was making such an issue of it.

The shaman noticed her discomfiture. “I’m sorry, Ayla. I don’t mean to embarrass you. You really do speak Zelandonii very well, probably better than I do, since I’ve forgotten so much. And it isn’t really an accent you have. It’s something else. I’m sure most people don’t even notice. It’s just that you have given me such an insight into Brugar, and that helps me to understand Attaroa.”

“Helps you to understand Attaroa?” Jondalar asked. “I wish I could understand how someone could be so cruel.”

“She wasn’t always so bad. I really grew to admire her when I first came back, although I felt very sorry for her, too. But in a way, she was prepared for Brugar as few women could have been.”

“Prepared? That’s a strange thing to say. Prepared for what?”

“Prepared for his cruelty,” S’Armuna explained. “Attaroa was used badly when she was a girl. She never said much about it, but I know she felt her own mother hated her. I learned from someone else that her mother did abandon her, or so it was thought. She left and nothing was heard from her again. Attaroa was finally taken in by a man whose mate had died in childbirth, under very suspicious circumstances, the baby with her. The suspicions were borne out when it was discovered that he
beat Attaroa and took her before she was even a woman, but no one else wanted responsibility for her. It was something about her mother, some question about her background, but it left Attaroa to be raised with and warped by his cruelty. Finally the man died, and some people of her Camp arranged for her to be mated to the new leader of this Camp.”

“Arranged without her consent?” Jondalar asked.

“They ‘encouraged’ her to agree, and they brought her to meet Brugar. As I said, he could be very charming, and I’m sure he found her attractive.”

Jondalar nodded agreement. He had noticed that she could have been quite attractive.

“I think she looked forward to the mating,” S’Armuna continued. “She felt it would be a chance for a new beginning. Then she discovered the man with whom she had joined was even worse than the one she had known before. Brugar’s Pleasures were always done with beatings, and humiliation, and worse. In his way, he did … I hesitate to say he loved her, but I think he did have feeling for her. He was just so … twisted. Yet she was the only one who dared to defy him, in spite of everything he did to her.”

S’Armuna paused, shook her head, and then continued. “Brugar was a strong man, very strong, and he liked to hurt people, especially women. I really think he enjoyed causing women pain. You said the flatheads don’t allow men to hit other men, though they can hit women. That might have something to do with it. But Brugar liked Attaroa’s defiance. She was a good deal taller than he was, and she is very strong herself. He liked the challenge of breaking down her resistance, and he was delighted when she fought him. It gave him an excuse to hurt her, which seemed to make him feel powerful.”

Ayla shuddered, recalling a situation not too dissimilar, and she felt a moment of empathy and compassion for the headwoman.

“He bragged about it to the other men, and they encouraged him, or at least they went along with him,” the older woman said. “The more she resisted, the worse he made it for her, until she finally broke. Then he would want her. I used to wonder, if she had been complaisant in the beginning, would he have grown tired of her and stopped beating her?”

Ayla thought about that. Broud had grown tired of her when she stopped resisting.

“But somehow I doubt it,” S’Armuna continued. “Later, when she was blessed and did stop fighting him, he didn’t change. She was his mate, and as far as he was concerned, she belonged to him. He could do whatever he wanted to her.”

I was never Broud’s mate, Ayla thought, and Brun wouldn’t let him
beat me, not after the first time. Though it was his right, the rest of Bran’s clan thought his interest in me was strange. They discouraged his behavior.

“Brugar didn’t stop beating her, even when Attaroa became pregnant?” Jondalar asked, appalled.

“No, although he seemed pleased that she was going to have a baby,” the woman said.

I became pregnant, too, Ayla thought. Her life and Attaroa’s had many similarities.

“Attaroa came to me for healing,” S’Armuna was continuing, closing her eyes and shaking her head as if to dispel the memory. “It was horrible, the things he did to her, I cannot tell you. Braises from beatings were the least of it.”

“Why did she put up with it?” Jondalar asked.

“She had no other place to go. She had no kin, no friends. The people of her other Camp had made it clear to her that they didn’t want her, and at first she was too proud to go back and let them know that her mating to the new leader was so bad. In a way, I knew how she felt,” S’Armuna said. “No one beat me, although Brugar did try it once, but I believed there was no other place for me to go, even though I do have relatives. I was the One Who Served the Mother, and I couldn’t admit how bad things had become. It would have seemed that I had failed.”

Jondalar nodded his understanding. He, too, had once felt that he was a failure. He glanced at Ayla, and he felt his love for her warm him.

“Attaroa hated Brugar,” S’Armuna continued, “but, in a strange way, she may have loved him, too. Sometimes she provoked him on purpose, I think. I wondered if it was because when the pain was over, he would take her and, if not love her, or even Pleasure her, at least make her feel wanted. She may have learned to take a perverse kind of Pleasure from his cruelty. Now she wants no one. She Pleasures herself by causing men pain. If you watch her, you can see her excitement.”

“I almost pity her,” Jondalar said.

“Pity her, if you want, but do not trust her,” the shaman said. “She is insane, possessed by some great evil. I wonder if you can understand? Have you ever been filled with such rage that all reason leaves you?”

Jondalar’s eyes were huge as he felt compelled to nod his assent. He had felt such rage. He had beaten a man until he was unconscious, and still he had been unable to stop.

“With Attaroa, it is as though she is constantly filled by such a rage. She doesn’t always show it—in fact, she is very good at hiding it—but her thoughts and feelings are so full of this evil rage that she is no longer able to think or to feel the way ordinary people do. She is not human any more,” the shaman explained.

“Surely she must have some human feeling?” Jondalar said.

“Do you recall the funeral shortly after you came here?” S’Armuna asked.

“Yes, three young people. Two men and I wasn’t sure about the third, even though they were all dressed the same. I remember wondering what had caused their deaths. They were so young.”

“Attaroa caused their deaths,” S’Armuna said. “And the one you weren’t sure of? That was her own child.”

They heard a sound and turned as one toward the entrance of S’Armuna’s earthlodge.

A
young woman stood in the entrance passage of the earthlodge, looking nervously at the three people within. Jondalar noticed immediately that she was quite young, hardly more than a girl; Ayla noticed that she was quite pregnant.

“What is it, Cavoa?” S’Armuna said.

“Epadoa and her hunters just returned, and Attaroa is yelling at her.”

“Thank you for telling me,” the older woman said, then turned back to her guests. “The walls of this earthlodge are so thick that it is hard to hear anything beyond them. Perhaps we should go out there.”

They hurried out, past the pregnant young woman, who tried to pull back to let them by. Ayla smiled at her. “Not wait much more?” she said in S’Armunai.

Cavoa smiled nervously, then looked down.

Ayla thought she seemed frightened and unhappy, which was unusual for an expectant mother, but then, she reasoned, most women expecting their first were a little nervous. As soon as they stepped outside, they heard Attaroa.

“ … tell me you found where they camped. You missed your chance! You’re not much of a Wolf Woman if you can’t even track,” the head-woman railed in loud derision.

Epadoa stood tight-lipped, anger flaring from her eyes, but made no reply. A crowd had gathered, not too closely, but the young woman dressed in wolf skins noticed that most of them had turned to look in another direction. She glanced to see what had commanded their attention, and she was startled at the sight of the blond woman coming toward them, followed, even more surprisingly, by the tall man. She had never known a man to return once he got away.

“What are you doing here?” Epadoa blurted.

“I told you. You missed your chance,” Attaroa sneered. “They came back on their own.”

“Why shouldn’t we be here?” Ayla said. “Weren’t we invited to a feast?” S’Armuna translated.

“The feast is not ready yet. Tonight,” Attaroa said to the visitors, dismissing them curtly, then addressing her head Wolf Woman, “Come
inside, Epadoa. I want to talk to you.” She turned her back on all the watchers and entered her lodge. Epadoa stared at Ayla, a deep frown indenting her forehead; then she followed the headwoman.

After she was gone, Ayla looked out across the field a bit apprehensively. After all, Epadoa and the hunters were known to hunt horses. She felt relieved when she saw Whinney and Racer at the opposite end of the sloping field of dry brittle grass some distance away. She turned and studied the woods and brush on the uphill slope outside of the Camp, wishing she could see Wolf, yet glad that she could not. She wanted him to stay in hiding, but she did make a point of standing in plain sight looking in his direction, hoping that he could see her.

As the visitors walked back with S’Armuna toward her dwelling, Jondalar recalled a comment she had made earlier that had piqued his curiosity. “How did you keep Brugar away from you?” he asked. “You said he tried once to beat you like he did the other women; how did you stop him?”

The older woman halted and looked hard at the young man, then at the woman beside him. Ayla felt the shaman’s indecision and sensed she was evaluating them, trying to decide how much to tell them.

“He tolerated me because I am a healer—he always referred to me as a medicine woman,” S’Armuna said, “but more than anything, he feared the world of the spirits.”

Her comments brought a question to Ayla’s mind. “Medicine women have a unique status in the Clan,” she said, “but they are only healers. Mog-urs are the ones who communicate with the spirits.”

“The spirits known to the flatheads, perhaps, but Brugar feared the power of the Mother. I think he realized that She knew the harm he did, and the evil that corrupted his spirit. I think he feared Her retribution. When I showed him that I could draw on Her power, he didn’t bother me any more,” S’Armuna said.

“You can draw on Her power? How?” Jondalar asked.

S’Armuna reached inside her shirt and pulled out a small figure of a woman, perhaps four inches high. Both Ayla and Jondalar had seen many similar objects, usually carved out of ivory, bone, or wood. Jondalar had even seen a few that had been carefully and lovingly sculpted out of stone, using only stone tools. They were Mother figures and, except for the Clan, every group of people either of them had met, from the Mammoth Hunters in the east to Jondalar’s people to the west, depicted some version of Her.

Some of the figures were quite rough, some were exquisitely carved; some were highly abstract, some were perfectly proportional images of full-bodied mature women, except for certain abstract aspects. Most of the carvings emphasized the attributes of bountiful motherhood—large
breasts, full stomachs, wide hips—and purposely deemphasized other characteristics. Often the arms were only suggested, or the legs ended in a point, rather than feet, so the figure could be stuck in the ground. And invariably they lacked facial features. The figures were not meant to be a portrait of any particular woman, and certainly no artist could know the face of the Great Earth Mother. Sometimes the face was left blank, or was given enigmatic markings, sometimes the hair was elaborately styled and continued all around the head, covering the face.