Even Whinney seemed excited, and without being urged, increased her pace. Ayla watched for another landmark, a
stone outcrop with a distinctive shape which reminded her of a lioness crouching. When she found it, they turned north until they came to the edge of a steep slope strewn with gravel and loose rocks. They stopped and looked over the edge. At the bottom, a small river, flowing east, glinted in the sun as it splashed over rocks. They dismounted and carefully picked their way down. The horses started across, then paused to drink. Ayla found the stepping-stones jutting out of the water, with only one wide space to jump, that she had always used. She took a drink, too, when they reached the other side.
“The water is sweeter here. Look how clear it is!” she exclaimed. “It’s not muddy at all. You can see the bottom. And look, Jondalar, the horses are here!”
Jondalar smiled affectionately at her exuberance, feeling a similar, if milder, sense of homecoming at the sight of the familiar long valley. The harsh winds and frost of the steppes brushed the protected pocket with a lighter touch, and even stripped of summer leaves, a richer, fuller growth was apparent. The steep slope, which they had just descended, rose precipitously to a sheer rock wall as it advanced down the valley on the left. A wide fringe of brush and trees bordered the opposite bank of the stream running along its base, then thinned out to a meadow of golden hay billowing in waves in the afternoon sun. The level field of waist-high grass sloped gradually up to the steppes on the right, but it narrowed and the incline steepened toward the far end of the valley until it became the other wall of a narrow gorge.
Halfway down, a small herd of steppe horses had stopped grazing and was looking their way. One of them neighed. Whinney tossed her head and answered. The herd watched them approach until they were quite close. Then, as the strange scent of humans continued to advance, they wheeled as one, and with pounding hooves and flying tails, galloped up the gentle slope to the open steppes above. The two humans on the back of one horse stopped to watch them go. So did the young horse attached by a rope.
Racer, with head high and ears pitched forward, followed them as far as his lead would allow, then stood with neck outstretched and nostrils wide, watching after them. Whinney nickered to him as they started down the valley again, and he came back and followed behind.
As they hurried upstream toward the narrow end of the
valley, they could see the small river swirling in a sharp turn around a jutting wall and a rocky beach on the right. On the other side of it was a large pile of rocks, driftwood, and bones, antlers, horns, and tusks of every variety. Some were skeletons from the steppes, others were the remains of animals caught in flash floods, carried downstream, and thrown against the wall.
Ayla could hardly wait. She slid off Whinney’s back and raced up a steep, narrow path alongside the bone pile to the top of the wall, which formed a ledge in front of a hole in the face of the rock cliff. She almost ran inside, but checked herself at the last minute. This was the place where she had lived alone, and she had survived because never for a moment did she forget to be alert to possible danger. Caves were used not only by people. Edging up along the outside wall, she unwound her sling from her head and stooped to pick up some chunks of rock.
Carefully, she looked inside. She saw only darkness, but her nose detected a faint smell of wood burned long ago, and a somewhat fresher musky scent of wolverine. But that, too, was old. She stepped inside the opening and let her eyes adjust to the dim light, and then looked around.
She felt the pressure of tears filling her eyes, and struggled to hold them back to no avail. There it was, her cave. She was home. Everything was so familiar, yet the place where she had lived for so long seemed deserted and forlorn. The light streaming in from the hole above the entrance showed her that her nose had been right, and closer inspection brought a gasp of dismay. The cave was in a shambles. Some animal, perhaps more than one, had indeed broken in, and had left the evidence scattered around. She wasn’t sure how much damage had been done.
Jondalar appeared at the entrance then. He came in, followed by Whinney and Racer. The cave had been home to the mare, too, and the only home Racer knew until they met the Lion Camp.
“It looks as if we’ve had a visitor,” he said when he became aware of the devastation. “This place is a mess!”
Ayla heaved a big sigh and wiped a tear away. “I’d better get a fire going and torches lit so we can see how much has been ruined. But first I’d better unpack Whinney so she can rest and graze.”
“Do you think we should just let them run free like that?
Racer looked like he was ready to follow those horses. Maybe we should tie them up.” Jondalar had some misgivings.
“Whinney has always run free,” Ayla said, feeling a little shocked. “I can’t tie her up. She’s my friend. She stays with me because she wants to. She went to live with a herd once, when she wanted a stallion, and I missed her so much, I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had Baby. But she came back. She will stay, and, as long as she does, so will Racer, at least until he grows up. Baby left me. Racer might, too, just like children leave their mothers’ hearths when they grow up. But horses are different from lions. I think if he becomes a friend, like Whinney, he might stay.”
Jondalar nodded. “All right, you know them better than I do.” Ayla was, after all, the expert. The only expert when it came to horses. “Why don’t I make the fire while you unpack her, then?”
As he went to the places where Ayla had always kept the fire-starting materials and wood, not realizing how familiar her cave had become to him in the short summer he had lived there with her, Jondalar wondered how he could make Racer a good friend. He still didn’t understand completely how Ayla communicated with Whinney so that she went where the woman wanted her to when they were riding, and staved nearby though she had the freedom to leave. Maybe he’d never learn, but he would like to try. Still, until he learned, it wouldn’t hurt to keep Racer on a rope, at least when they traveled where there might be other horses.
A check of the cave and its contents told its story. A wolverine or a hyena, Ayla couldn’t tell which since both had been in the cave at different times and their tracks were intermixed, had broken into one of the caches of dried meat. It was cleaned out. One basket of grain they had picked for Whinney and Racer, which had been left fairly exposed, had been chewed into in several places. A variety of small rodents judging by the tracks—voles, pikas, ground squirrels, jerboas, and giant hamsters—had made off with the bonanza and hardly a seed was left. They found one nest stuffed with the plunder beneath a pile of hay nearby. But most of the baskets of grains and roots and dried fruits, which had either been set into holes dug into the dirt floor of the cave, or protected by rocks piled on them, suffered far less damage.
Ayla was glad they had decided to put the soft leather hides and furs she had made over the years in a sturdy basket
and stash it in a cairn. The large pile of rocks had proved too much for the marauding beasts, but the leather left over from the clothes Ayla had made for Jondalar and herself before they left, which had not been put away, was chewed to shreds. Another cairn which held, among other things, a rawhide container filled with carefully rendered fat stored in small sausagelike sections of deer intestines, had been the object of repeated assaults. One corner of the parfleche had been torn out by teeth and claws, one sausage broken into, but the cairn had stood.
In addition to getting into the stored food, the animals had prowled through other storage areas, knocked over stacks of handcrafted and smoothed wooden bowls and cups, dragged around baskets and mats twined and woven in subtle patterns and designs, defecated in several places, and in general created havoc with whatever they could find. But the actual damage was much less than it first appeared, and they had essentially ignored her large pharmacopoeia of dried and preserved herbal medicines.
By evening, Ayla was feeling much better. They had cleaned and restored order to the cave, determined that the loss was not too great, cooked and eaten a meal, and even explored the valley to see what changes had taken place. With a fire in the hearth, sleeping furs spread out over clean hay in the shallow trench which Ayla had used as a bed, and Whinney and Racer comfortably settled in their place on the other side of the entrance, Ayla finally felt at home.
“It’s hard to believe I’m back,” Ayla said, sitting on a mat in front of the fire beside Jondalar. “I feel as though I’ve been gone a lifetime, but it hasn’t been long at all.”
“No, it hasn’t been long.”
“I’ve learned so much, maybe that’s why it seems long. It was good that you convinced me to go with you, Jondalar, and I’m glad we met Talut and the Mamutoi. Do you know how afraid I was to meet the Others?”
“I knew you were worried about it, but I was sure once you got to know some people, you’d like them.”
“It wasn’t just meeting people. It was meeting the
Others.
To the Clan, that’s what they were, and though I’d been told all my life I was born to the Others, I still thought of myself as Clan. Even when I was cursed and knew I couldn’t go back, I was afraid of the Others. After Whinney came to live with me, it was worse. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid
they wouldn’t let me keep her, or would kill her for food. And I was afraid they wouldn’t allow me to hunt. I didn’t want to live with people who wouldn’t let me hunt if I wanted to, or who might make me do something I didn’t want to do,” Ayla said.
Suddenly the recollection of her fears and anxieties filled her with discomfort and nervous energy. She got up and walked to the mouth of the cave, then pushed aside the heavy windbreak and walked out onto the top of the jutting wall that formed a broad front porch to the cave. It was cold out and clear. The stars, hard and bright, glittered out of a deep black sky with an edge as sharp as the wind. She hugged herself, and rubbed her arms as she walked toward the end of the ledge.
She started to shiver, and felt a fur being wrapped around her shoulders, and turned to face Jondalar. He enfolded her in his arms and she snuggled up close to his warmth.
He bent to kiss her, then said, “It’s cold out here. Come back inside.”
Ayla let him lead her in, but stopped just past the heavy hide that she had used for a windbreak since her first winter.
“This was my tent … no, this was Creb’s tent,” she corrected herself. “He never used it, though. It was the tent I used when I was one of the women chosen to go along with the men when they hunted, to butcher the meat and help carry it back. But it didn’t belong to me. It belonged to Creb. I took it along with me when I left because I thought Creb wouldn’t have minded. I couldn’t ask him. He was dead, but he wouldn’t have seen me if he’d been alive. I had just been cursed.” Tears had begun to stream down her face, though she didn’t seem to notice. “I was dead. But Durc saw me. He was too young to know he wasn’t supposed to see me. Oh, Jondalar, I didn’t want to leave him.” She was sobbing now. “But I couldn’t take him with me. I didn’t know what might happen to me.”
He wasn’t sure what to say, or what to do, so he just held her and let her cry.
“I want to see him again. Every time I see Rydag, I think of Durc. I wish he was here with me now. I wish we both were being adopted by the Mamutoi.”
“Ayla, it’s late. You’re tired. Come to bed,” Jondalar said, leading her to the sleeping furs, but he was feeling uneasy.
Such thinking was unrealistic, and he didn’t want to encourage her.
She turned obediently and let him guide her. Silently, he helped her out of her clothes, then sat her down and pushed her gently back, and covered her with the furs. He added wood and banked the coals in the fireplace to last longer, then quickly undressed, and crawled into bed beside her. He put his arm around her and kissed her, gently, barely touching her lips with his.
The effect was tantalizing, and he felt her tingling response. With the same light, almost tickling touch, he began kissing her face; her cheeks, her closed eyes, and then her soft full lips again. He reached up and tilted her jaw back, and caressed her throat and her neck the same way. Ayla made herself lie still, and instead of feeling tickled, shivers of exquisite fire followed his lambent touch, and dispelled her sorrowful mood.
His fingertips traced the curve of her shoulder and brushed the length of her arm. Then, slowly, with a whisper of touch, he drew his hand back up the inside of her arm. She shook with a tingling spasm that sensitized every nerve with quickened expectation. As he followed the outline of her body down her side, his skillful hand glanced over her soft nipple. It rose up firm and ready as an intense shock of pleasure shot through her.
Jondalar couldn’t resist, and bent over to take it in his mouth. She pressed up to him as he suckled and pulled and nibbled, feeling a warm wetness between her thighs as the acute sensations sent corresponding twinges deep inside. He smelled the woman-scent of her skin, and felt a drawing fullness in his loins as he sensed her readiness. He never seemed able to get enough of her, and she was always ready for him. Not once, that he could remember, had she ever turned him away. No matter what the circumstances, indoors or out, in warm furs or on cold ground, however he wanted her, she was there for him, not just acquiescing, but an active, willing partner. Only during her moon time was she a little subdued, as though she felt shy about it, and respecting her wishes, he held back.
As he reached to caress her thigh and she opened to him, he felt so strong an urge he could have taken her that instant, but he wanted it to last. They were in a warm dry place, alone, for probably the last time all winter. Not that he
hesitated in the longhouse of the Mamutoi, but being alone together lent a special quality of freedom and intensity to their Pleasures. His hand encountered her moistness, then her small, erect center of Pleasure, and he heard her breath explode in gasps and cries as he rubbed and fondled it. He reached lower, and entered with two fingers and explored her depths and textures as she arched her back and moaned. Oh, how he wanted her, he thought, but not yet.