“Yes, Brun will be forced to accept her son, Iza, and then he’ll curse her for deliberate disobedience, this time forever. Don’t you know if a woman forces a man against his will, he loses face? Brun can’t afford that, the men wouldn’t respect him anymore. Even if he curses her he’ll lose face, and the Clan Gathering is this summer. Do you think he can face the other clans now? The whole clan will lose face because of Ayla,” the magician gestured angrily. “What ever made her think of such a thing?”
“It was one of Aba’s stories, about the mother who put her deformed baby up in a tree,” Iza answered. The distraught
woman was beside herself. Why hadn’t she thought about it more?
“Old women’s tales!” Creb motioned with disgust. “Aba should know better than to fill a young woman’s head with such nonsense.”
“It wasn’t only Aba, Creb. It was you, too.”
“Me! When did I ever tell her such stories?”
“You didn’t have to tell her any stories. You were born deformed, but you were allowed to live. Now you’re Mog-ur.”
Iza’s statement jolted the lopsided, one-armed magician. He knew the series of fortuitous events that led to his acceptance. Only luck had preserved the highest holy man of the Clan. His mother’s mother once told him it was nothing short of a miracle. Was Ayla trying to make a miracle happen for her son because of him? It would never work. She’d never force Brun into accepting her son and live. It had to be his wish, his decision, entirely his.
“And you, Iza. Didn’t you tell her it was wrong?”
“I begged her not to go. I told her I’d get rid of the baby if she couldn’t. But she wouldn’t let me near him after that. Oh, Creb, she suffered so much to have him.”
“So you let her go, hoping her plan would work. Why didn’t you tell me, or Brun?”
Iza just shook her head. Creb is right, I should have told him. Now Ayla will die, too, not just her baby, she thought.
“Where did she go, Iza?” Creb’s eye had turned to stone.
“I don’t know. She said something about a small cave,” the woman replied with sinking heart. The magician turned abruptly and limped to the hearth of the leader.
The baby’s cries finally woke Ayla from her exhausted sleep. It was dark and the little cave was damp and chilly without a fire. She went to the back to relieve herself and winced as the warm, ammoniacal fluid stung her raw, torn flesh. She fumbled in the dark through her collecting basket for a clean strap and a fresh wrap for the wet and soiled infant, drank some water; then wrapping her fur around them, she lay back down to nurse her son. The next time she woke up, the wall of the cave was dappled with sunlight streaming through the tangled hazelnut branches that hid the entrance. She ate her food cold while the baby suckled.
The food and rest revived her, and she sat up holding her baby, musing dreamily. I’ll need to get some wood, she
thought, and my food won’t last too long, I should get some more. Alfalfa should be sprouting; it’ll strengthen my blood, too. New clover and vetch shoots must be ready, and bulbs. The sap is up, the inner bark will be sweet now, especially maple. No, maple doesn’t grow this high, but there’s birch, and fir. Let’s see, new burdock and coltsfoot and young dandelion leaves, and fern, most of it will still be curled. I remembered my sling—there’s lots of ground squirrels around here, and beaver, and rabbits.
Ayla daydreamed about the pleasures of the warming season, but when she stood up she felt a gush of blood and a wave of dizziness. Her legs were caked with dried blood that stained her foot coverings and her wraps, jolting her into a more realistic awareness of her desperate situation.
When the dizziness passed, she decided to clean herself and then get some wood, but she didn’t know what to do with the baby. She was torn between taking him with her or letting him sleep where he was. Women of the Clan never left babies untended, they were always within sight of some woman, and Ayla hated the thought of leaving him alone. But she had to clean herself and get more water, and she could carry more wood without him.
She peeked out through the bare-limbed bushes to make sure no one was near, then pushed the branches aside and left the cave. The ground was soggy; near the creek it was a slippery mire of mud. Patches of snow still lingered in shaded nooks. Shivering in the brisk wind that blew from the east pushing more rain clouds before it, Ayla stripped and stepped into the cold creek to rinse herself, then sponged her wraps. The clammy damp leather did little to warm her when she put them back on.
She walked to the woods that surrounded the high pasture and tugged at some of the lower dried branches of a fir tree. A whirling vertigo overwhelmed her, her knees buckled, and she reached for a tree to steady herself. Her head was pounding; she swallowed hard to keep from retching as her weakness engulfed her. All thoughts of hunting or gathering food left her. The depleting pregnancy, the ravaging delivery, and the grueling climb all had taken their toll—she had little strength left.
The baby was crying when she got back to the cave. It was cool and damp and he missed her warm closeness. She picked him up and held him, then remembered the waterbag she had left by the creek. She had to have water. She
put her son down and dragged herself out of the cave again. It was starting to rain. When she returned, she sunk down, exhausted, and pulled the damp heavy fur over them. She was too tired to notice the sharp edges of fear nicking away at the corners of her mind as sleep overwhelmed her.
“Didn’t I tell you she was insolent and willful?” Broud gestured self-righteously. “Did anyone believe me? No. They took her side, made excuses, let her have her way, even let her hunt. I don’t care how strong her totem is, women are not supposed to hunt. The Cave Lion didn’t lead her to it, it was just defiance. See what happens when you give a woman too much freedom? See what happens when you’re too lenient? Now she thinks she can force her deformed son into the clan. No one can make excuses for her this time. She deliberately disobeyed the customs of the Clan. It’s inexcusable.”
At last Broud had been vindicated and he gloried in his chance to say “I told you so.” He rubbed it in with a vengeance that made the leader wince. Brun didn’t like losing face and the son of his mate didn’t make it any easier.
“You’ve made your point, Broud,” he signaled. “There’s no need to keep on about it. I’ll take care of her when she comes back. No woman has ever forced me to do anything against my will and gotten away with it, and no woman will start now.
“When we search again tomorrow morning,” Brun said, going on to the reason he called the meeting, “I think we should look at places we seldom go. Iza said Ayla knew of a small cave. Has anyone ever seen a small cave nearby? It can’t be too far, she was too weak to get very far. Let’s forget about the steppes or the forest and search where caves are likely to be. With this rain her trail has been washed away, but there might be a footprint left. Whatever it takes, I want her found.”
Iza waited anxiously for Brun’s meeting to end. She had been trying to work up courage to speak to him and decided the time was now. When she saw the men leave, she walked to his hearth with bowed head and sat at his feet.
“What do you want, Iza?” Brun asked after tapping her shoulder.
“This unworthy woman would speak to the leader,” Iza began.
“You may speak.”
“This woman was wrong not to come to the leader when she learned what the young woman planned to do.” Iza forgot to use the formal form of address as her emotions overcame her: “But Brun, she wanted a baby so much. No one thought she would ever conceive life, least of all her. How could the Spirit of the Cave Lion be overcome? She was so happy about it. Even though she suffered, she never complained. She almost died giving birth, Brun. Only the thought that her baby would die gave her strength at the end. She just couldn’t bear to give him up, even if he was deformed. She was sure it was the only baby she would ever have. She was out of her head from the shock and the pain, she wasn’t thinking straight. I know I have no right to ask, Brun, but I beg you to let her live.”
“Why didn’t you come to me before, Iza? If you thought begging for her life would do any good now, why didn’t you come to me then? Have I been so unkind to her? I was not blind to her suffering. A man can avert his eyes to avoid looking into another man’s hearth, but he cannot close his ears. There is not a person in this clan who does not know the pain Ayla suffered to give birth to her son. Do you think me so hardhearted, Iza? If you had come to me, told me how she felt, what she planned to do, don’t you think I would have considered allowing her baby to live? I could have overlooked her threat to run and hide as the ravings of a woman out of her head. I would have examined the child. Even without a mate, if the deformity is not too gross, I might have allowed it. But you gave me no opportunity. You assumed to know what I would do. That’s not like you, Iza.
“I have never known you to be derelict in your duty. You have always been an example for the other women. I can only blame your behavior on your illness. I know how sick you are, though you try to hide it. I respected your wishes and made no mention of it, but I was sure you were ready to walk in the world of the spirits last autumn. I was well aware Ayla believed this was her one chance to have a child. I suspect she is right. Yet, I saw her put all thoughts of herself aside when you were ill, Iza, and she pulled you through. I don’t know how she did it. Maybe it was Mog-ur who placated the spirits that wanted you to join them and convinced them to allow you to stay, but it wasn’t Mog-ur alone.
“I was ready to grant his request and allow her to become
medicine woman. I had come to respect her as much as I once respected you. She has been an admirable woman, a model of dutiful obedience, in spite of the son of my mate. Yes, Iza, I am aware of Broud’s harsh treatment of her. Even her one lapse early last summer was provoked by him in some way, though I don’t fully understand how. It is unworthy of him to pit himself against a woman the way he does; Broud is a very brave and strong hunter and has no reason to feel his manhood is threatened by any female. But perhaps he did see something I overlooked. Perhaps he’s right, I have been blind to her. Iza, if you had come to me before, I might have considered your request, I might have let her son live. It is too late now. When she returns on her child’s naming day, both Ayla and her son will die.”
The next day Ayla tried to make a fire. There were still a few sticks of dry wood left from her previous stay. She twirled a stick between her palms against another piece of wood, but she didn’t have the endurance to maintain the sustained effort required to make it smolder, and it was fortunate for her that she couldn’t. Droog and Crug found their way to the mountain meadow while she and the baby slept. They would have smelled a fire or the remains of one and found her. As it was, they walked so close to the cave that if the baby had whimpered in his sleep, they would have heard. But the entrance to the small hole in the rock wall was so well hidden by the thick old stand of hazelnut bushes, they didn’t notice it.
But fortune smiled on her even more. The spring rains dripping sullenly from a leaden sky, turning the bank of the small creek into a sink of mud, and the ground of the meadow into a sodden marsh, and casting a pall over her spirits, washed away all traces of her. So expert were the hunters at tracking, they could identify the individual footprints of each member of the clan, and their sharp eyes would easily have seen broken-off shoots or disturbed earth from dug-up bulbs or roots if she had gathered any food. Her very weakness saved her from discovery.
When Ayla went out later and saw the men’s footprints in the mud near the spring that gave rise to the creek, where they had stopped for a drink of water, her heart nearly stopped. It made her afraid to go outside. She started at every gust that shook the brush fronting her cave, and strained to hear imagined sounds.
The food she had brought with her was nearly gone. She searched through the baskets she had made to store food during the long, lonely stay of her temporary death curse. All she found were some dried nuts, rotten, and the droppings of small rodents, evidence that her store had been found and long since eaten. She found the rotten, dried remains of the surplus of food Iza had given her when she used the cave as shelter during her woman’s curse—totally inedible.
Then she remembered the cache of dried deer meat in the stone pit at the back of the cave, from the deer she killed for a warm wrap. Ayla found the small mound of rocks and moved them. The preserved meat in the cache was undisturbed, but the easing of her tensions was shortlived. The branches at the mouth of the cave moved, and Ayla’s heart raced.
“Uba!” she gestured with shocked surprise as the girl entered the cave. “How did you find me?”
“I followed you the day you left. I was so afraid something would happen to you. I brought you some food and some tea to make your milk flow. Mother made it.”
“Does Iza know where I am?”
“No. She knows I do, though. I don’t think she wants to know or she’ll have to tell Brun. Oh, Ayla, Brun is so mad at you. The men have been searching for you every day.”
“I saw their footprints by the spring, but they didn’t see the cave.”
“Broud is bragging about how he knew all along how bad you were. I’ve hardly seen Creb at all since you left. He spends all day in the place of the spirits, and mother is so upset. She wants me to tell you not to come back,” Uba said, her eyes wide with fear for the young woman.
“If she hasn’t talked to you about me, how could Iza give you a message for me?” Ayla asked.
“She cooked extra last night and this morning, too. Not too much—I think she was afraid Creb would guess it was for you—but she didn’t eat her share. Later she made the tea, then she started moaning and talking to herself like she was grieving for you, she’s been grieving for you ever since you left, but she was looking right at me. She kept saying, ‘If only someone could tell Ayla not to come back. My poor child, my poor daughter, she has no food, she’s weak. She needs to make milk for her baby,’ and things like that.
Then she left the hearth. This waterbag was right next to the tea and the food was all wrapped.