“Wolf! Stay here!” Ayla commanded the young animal, who was inching forward with curiosity. She slid off Whinney’s back and moved to catch up with Jondalar, who had dismounted as well, and was cautiously moving through the thinning grass ahead toward the shrill screams and loud rumbles. She reached his side as he stopped, and they both parted the last tall stalks to see. Ayla bent down on one knee to hold Wolf as she looked, but she could not move her eyes away from the scene in the clearing.
An agitated herd of woolly mammoths was milling about—it had been their feeding that had created the clearing near the edge of the tallgrass region; a large mammoth required over six hundred pounds of feed every day, and a herd could strip a considerable area of vegetation quickly. The animals were all ages and sizes, including some that could not have been more than a few weeks old. That meant it was a herd of, primarily, related females: mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and their offspring; an extended family led by a wise and canny old matriarch, who was noticeably larger.
At a quick glance, the overall color of the woolly mammoths was a reddish brown, but a closer look revealed many variations of the basic shade. Some were more red, some more brown, some tended toward yellow or gold, and a few looked almost black from a distance. The thick, double-layered coats covered them entirely, from their broad trunks and exceptionally small ears, to their stubby tails ending in dark tufts, and their stumpy legs and broad feet. The two layers of fur contributed to the differences in color.
Though much of the warm, dense, amazingly silky-soft underwool had been shed earlier in the summer, the next year’s growth had already started, and was lighter in color than the fluffy, though coarser, wind-breaking overlayer, and gave it depth and highlights. The darker outer hairs, of varying lengths, some up to forty inches long, hung down like a skirt along the flanks, and quite thickly from the abdomen and dewlap—the loose skin of the neck and chest—creating a padding underneath them when they lay down on frozen ground.
Ayla was entranced by a pair of young twins with beautiful reddish golden fur accented by spiky black guard hairs, who peeked out from behind the huge legs and long ochre skirt of their hovering mother. The dark brown hair of the old matriarch was shot with gray. She noticed, as well, the white birds that were constant companions of the mammoths, tolerated or ignored whether they sat on the top of a shaggy head, or adroitly avoided a massive foot, while they feasted on the insects that the great beasts disturbed.
Wolf whined his eagerness to investigate the interesting animals more closely, but Ayla held him back, while Jondalar got the restraining rope from Whinney’s basket. The grizzled matriarch turned to look in their direction for a long moment—they noticed that one of her long tusks was broken off—then she turned her attention back to more important activity.
Only very young males stayed with the females, they usually left the natal herd sometime after they reached puberty at about twelve, but several young bachelors, and even a few older ones were included in this group. They had been drawn by a female with a deep chestnut-colored coat. She was in heat, and that was the cause of the commotion Ayla and Jondalar had heard. A female in heat, estrus, the reproductive period when females were able to conceive, was sexually attractive to all males, sometimes more than she liked.
The chestnut female had just rejoined her family group after outdistancing three young males in their twenties, who had been chasing her. The males, who had given up, but only temporarily, were standing away from the close-packed herd resting, while she sought respite from her exertions within the midst of the excited females. A two-year-old calf rushed up to the object of the male’s attention, was greeted by a gentle touch of a trunk, found one of the two breasts between her front legs and began to suckle, while the female reached for a trunkful of grass. She had been chased and harassed by the males all day, and had had little opportunity to feed her calf, or even to eat or drink herself. She was not to have much chance then.
A medium-size bull approached the herd and began touching the other females with his trunk, well down from the tail between their hind legs, smelling and tasting, to test their readiness. Since mammoths continued to grow all their lives, his size indicated he was older than the three who had been chasing the beleaguered female before, probably in his thirties. As he neared the chestnut-furred mammoth, she moved away at a fast walk. He immediately abandoned the others and started after her. Ayla gasped when he released his huge organ from its sheath and it started to swell into a long curving S-shape.
The young man beside her heard the sudden intake of breath and glanced at her. She turned to look at him, and their eyes, equally astonished and full of wonder, held for a moment. Although they had both hunted mammoths, neither of them had observed the great woolly beasts very often from so near, and neither had ever seen them mate. Jondalar felt a quickening in his own loins as he watched Ayla. She was excited, flushed, her mouth slightly open, taking quick breaths, and her eyes, opened wide, held a sparkle of curiosity. Fascinated by the awesome spectacle of the two massive creatures about to show honor to the Great Earth Mother, as She required of all Her children, they quickly turned back.
But the female ran in a large arc, keeping ahead of the larger bull, until she made it back to her family herd again, though it made little difference. In a short time she was being chased again. One male caught up to her and managed to mount, but she was uncooperative and got out from under him, though he sprayed her hind legs. Sometimes her calf tried to follow the chestnut as she sped away from the bachelors several more times, before it finally decided to stay with the other females. Jondalar wondered why she was trying so hard to avoid the interested males. Didn’t the Mother expect female mammoths to honor Her, too?
As though they had mutually decided to stop and eat, it was quiet for a while, with all the mammoths moving slowly south through the tail-grass tearing out trunkful after trunkful in a steady rhythm. In the rare moment of relief from the harassment of the males, the chestnut mammoth stood with her head low, looking very tired as she tried to feed.
Mammoths spent most of the day, and night, eating. Though it could be of the roughest, poorest quality—they could even eat shreds of bark torn off with tusks, though that was more often winter feed—mammoths needed huge quantities of the fibrous fare to sustain them. Included in the several hundred pounds of roughage consumed every day, which they passed through their bodies within twelve hours, was a small, though necessary, addition of succulent, broad-leaved, more nutritious plants, or occasionally a few choice leaves of willow, birch, or alder trees, higher in food value than the coarse tallgrass and sedge, but toxic to mammoths in large quantities.
When the great woolly beasts had moved some distance away, Ayla tied the restraining rope on the young wolf, who was if anything even more interested than they were. He kept wanting to get closer, but she didn’t want him to disturb the herd or annoy them. Ayla felt the matriarch had given them leave to stay, but only if they kept their distance. Leading the horses, who were exhibiting some nervousness and excitement as well, they circled around through the tallgrass and followed the herd. Though they had been watching for some time, neither Ayla nor Jondalar was inclined to leave yet. There was still a sense of anticipation lingering around the mammoths. Something was coming. Perhaps it was just that the mating they felt privileged, almost invited, to observe, was still incomplete, but it seemed more than that.
As they slowly followed after the herd, they both studied the huge animals closely, but each from a separate perspective. Ayla had been a hunter from an early age, and had observed animals often, but her prey was ordinarily much smaller. Mammoths weren’t usually hunted by individuals; they were hunted by large, organized, and coordinated groups. She had actually been closer to the great beasts before, when she had gone to hunt them with the Mamutoi. But while hunting there was little time to watch and learn, and she didn’t know when she would ever have the opportunity to get such a good look at them, both female and male, again.
Though she was aware of their distinctive shape in profile, this time she took particular note of it. The head of a mammoth was massive and high-domed—with large sinus cavities that helped to warm the searing cold winter air as it was breathed—accentuated by a hump of fat and a conspicuous topknot of stiff, dark hair. Just below the high head was the deep indentation of the nape of its short neck, leading to a second hump of fat high on the withers above the shoulders. From there, the back sloped steeply to the small pelvis and almost dainty hips. She knew from the experience of butchering and eating mammoth meat that the fat of the second hump had a different quality from that of the three-inch-thick layer of blubber that lay under the tough inch-thick skin. It was more delicate, tastier.
Woolly mammoths had relatively short legs for their size, making it somewhat easier for them to acquire their food, since they fed primarily on grass, not the high green leaves of trees as did their browsing warm-climate relatives; there were few trees on the steppes. But like them, the mammoth’s head was high up off the ground, and too big and heavy, especially with enormous tusks, to be supported by a long neck so that it could reach food or drink directly the way horses or deer did. The evolution of the trunk had solved the problem of bringing food and water to the mouth.
The furry, sinuous snout of the woolly mammoth was strong enough to tear out a tree, or to pick up a heavy chunk of ice and send it crashing down to break into smaller, more usable pieces for water in winter, and dexterous enough to select and pluck a single leaf. It was also marvelously adapted to pulling grass. It had two projections on the end of it. A fingerlike appendage on the upper part, which it could delicately control, and a broader, flattened, very flexible structure on the lower part, almost like a hand, but without bones or separate fingers.
Jondalar was amazed at the dexterity and strength of the trunk as he watched a mammoth wrap the muscular lower projection around a bunch of closely growing tallgrass, then hold it together while the upper digit fingered more stems that were growing nearby into its clutch, until it had accumulated a good sheaf. Getting a grip by closing the upper finger around the bunch like an opposing thumb, the furry trunk yanked the grass out of the ground, roots and all. After shaking off some of the dirt, the mammoth stuffed it all in its mouth, and while it was chewing, reached for more.
The devastation that a herd left behind them as they made their long migrations across the steppes was considerable, or so it seemed. But for all the grass ripped out by its roots, and bark stripped from trees, their disturbance was beneficial to the steppes, and to other animals. By clearing away the woody-stemmed tallgrass and small trees, a place was made for richer forbs and new grass to grow, food that was essential to several of the other inhabitants of the steppes.
Ayla suddenly shivered and felt a strange sensation deep in her bones. Then she noticed the mammoths had stopped eating. Several raised their heads and faced the south with their furry ears extended, moving their heads back and forth. Jondalar noticed a change in the dark red female, who had been chased by all the males. Her tired look was gone; she seemed, instead, to be anticipating. Suddenly she roared a deep, vibrating rumble. Ayla sensed a head-filling resonance, then felt the chill of gooseflesh as an answer, like the low growl of distant thunder, came from the southwest.
“Jondalar,” Ayla said. “Look over there!”
He looked where she had pointed. Rushing toward them, amidst a cloud of dust rising as if flung up by a whirlwind, only his domed head and shoulders visible above the tallgrass, was a huge, pale russet mammoth with fantastic and immense, upward-curving tusks. Where they started, side by side in the upper jaw, they were huge. They flared out as they grew downward, then they curved upward and spiraled inward, slowly tapering to worn tips. Eventually, if he didn’t break them, they would form a great circle with their tapered ends crossing in front.
The thick-furred Ice Age elephants were rather compact, seldom exceeding eleven feet at the shoulder, but their tusks grew to enormous size, the most spectacular of any of their kind. By the time a prime male mammoth reached the end of his seventy years, his great curved shafts of ivory could be a full sixteen feet in length, weighing two hundred sixty pounds each.
A strong, acrid, musky odor arrived long before the russet bull did, sending a wave of frenzied excitement through the females. When he reached the clearing, they ran toward him, giving him their scent with great splashes of urine, squealing, trumpeting, and rumbling their greetings. They surrounded him, turning and backing up to him, or trying to touch him with their trunks. They were attracted, but also overwhelmed. The males, however, retreated to the edge of the group.
When he was close enough for Ayla and Jondalar to get a good look at him, they, too, were awed. He held his great domed head high, displaying his proud coils of ivory to best advantage. Far exceeding in length and diameter the smaller and straighter tusks of the females, his impressive tusks made even the more than respectable ivory of the large bulls seem puny. His small, thickly furred ears that were extended, his dark, stiff, erect topknot, and his light reddish-brown coat, long hairs loose and flying in the wind, added fullness to his already massive size. Towering nearly two feet above the largest bulls, and twice the weight of the females, he was by far the most gigantic animal either of them had ever seen. After surviving through hard times and good for more than forty-five years, he was in peak condition, a dominant bull mammoth in his prime, and he was magnificent.
But it was more than the natural dominance of his size that had made the other males back off. Ayla noticed that his temples were greatly swollen and from midway between his eyes and ears, the rich russet fur of his cheeks was stained with black streaks by a musky, viscous fluid that was constantly draining. He was also continuously dribbling and occasionally gushing an acrid, strong-smelling urine, which coated the fur on his legs and the sheath of his organ with a greenish scum. She wondered if he was sick.
But the swollen temporal glands and other symptoms were not a sickness. Among woolly mammoths, not only did females come into heat, estrus, each year fully adult males went into lust, a period of heightened sexual readiness, called musth. Although a male mammoth reached puberty around twelve, he did not begin musth until he was close to thirty, and then only for a week or so. But, by the time he reached his late forties, and was in his prime, if he was in top condition, he could be in musth for three or four months each year. Though any male past puberty could mate with a receptive estrus female, bulls were far more successful when they were in musth.
The big russet bull was not only dominant, he was in full rut and he had come, in answer to her call, to mate with the female in heat.
At close range, male mammoths knew when females were ready to conceive by their scent, just as most four-legged male animals did. But mammoths ranged over such large territories that they had evolved an additional way to communicate that they were ready for mating. When a female was in estrus, or a male was in musth, the pitch of their voices lowered. Very low-pitched sounds do not die out across long distances the way higher tones do, and the deep rumbling calls that were made only then, carried for miles across the vast plains.
Jondalar and Ayla could hear the low rumbles of the estrus female clearly enough, but the male in musth had such quiet-seeming deep tones that they barely heard him. Even in ordinary circumstances, mammoths often communicated across distances with deep rumbles and calls that most people were not aware of. Yet the bull mammoth’s musth calls were actually extremely loud, deep-voiced roars; the female estrus call was even louder. Though a few people could detect the sonic vibrations of the deep tones, most elements of the sounds were so low-pitched that they were below the range of human hearing.
The chestnut female had been holding off the bevy of younger bachelors, who had also been drawn by her attractive odors and by the sonorous rumbling of her low-pitched calls, which could be heard at a great distance by other mammoths, if not people. But she wanted an older, dominant male to sire her potential young, one whose years of living had already proved his health and survival instincts, and one she knew was virile enough to be a sire; in other words, one in musth. She didn’t think about it in quite that way, but her body knew.
Now that he was here, she was ready. Her long fringe of hair swaying with each step, the chestnut female ran toward the great bull, bellowing her sonorous rumbles and waving her furry little ears. She passed her water in a great splash, then, stretching her trunk toward his long, S-shaped organ, she sniffed and tasted his urine. Groaning thunderously, she pivoted around and backed into him, her head high.
The huge bull laid his trunk across her back, caressing and calming her; his huge organ nearly touched the ground. Then he reared up and mounted, placing his two front legs far forward on her back. He was nearly twice her size, so much larger that it seemed he would crush her, but most of his weight was carried on his hind legs. With the hooked end of his double-curved, marvelously mobile organ, he found her low-slung opening, then lifted up and penetrated deeply. He opened his mouth to bellow a roar.
The deep rumble that Jondalar heard sounded muted and far away, though he felt a throbbing sensation. Ayla heard the roar only slightly louder, but she shuddered violently as a shivering vibration tore through her. The chestnut mammoth and the russet bull held the position for a long moment. The long reddish strands of his full coat of hair shimmied over his whole body with the intensity and strain, though the movement was slight. Then he dismounted, gushing as he withdrew. She moved forward and uttered a low-toned and prolonged, pulsating bellow, which sent a powerful chill down Ayla’s spine and raised gooseflesh.
The whole herd ran to the dark red female, trumpeting and rumbling, touching her mouth and her wet opening with their trunks, defecating and splashing their water in an outburst of excitement. The russet bull seemed unaware of the joyful pandemonium as he stood resting with his head down. Finally they calmed down and began wandering away to feed. Only her calf stayed nearby. The chestnut female rumbled deeply again, then rubbed her head against a russet shoulder.
None of the other males approached the herd with the big bull nearby, though the chestnut was no less tempting. Besides lending male mammoths irresistible charm, to females, musth also conferred dominance over males, making them very aggressive even toward those who were larger, unless they were also in that excited state. The other bulls shied away, knowing the russet would be easily irritated. Only another musth bull would try to face him, and only if he was close to the same size. Then, if they were both attracted by the same female, and found themselves in the vicinity of each other, they would invariably fight, with severe injury or death a possible result.
Almost as though they knew the consequences, they took great pains to avoid each other and thus avoid fights. The deep-toned calls and the pungent urine trails of the musth male did more than announce his presence to eager females, they also announced his location to other males. Only three or four other bulls were in musth at the same time, during the six- or seven-month period that females might come into estrus, but it was unlikely that any of those who were also in lust would challenge the big russet for the female who was in heat. He was the dominant bull of the population, whether in musth or not, and they knew where he was.
As they continued to watch, Ayla noticed that even when the dark red female and lighter-colored male began to feed, they stayed close together. At one point the female strayed a few feet away, reaching for a particularly succulent trunkful of herbs. One young bull, hardly more than an adolescent, tried to inch toward her, but as she ran back to her consort, the russet bull lunged at him, voicing his rumbling growl. The sharp, pungent scent and distinctive deep roar made their impression on the young male. He quickly ran away, then lowered his head in deference and kept his distance. Finally, as long as she stayed near the musth bull, the chestnut female could rest and feed without being chased.
The woman and man could not quite bring themselves to leave immediately, though they knew it was over, and Jondalar was again beginning to feel the pressure of getting on their way. They felt awed, and honored, to have been included in witnessing the mating of the mammoths. More than merely having been allowed to observe, they felt a part of it, as though they had joined in on a moving and important ceremony. Ayla wished she could run up and touch them, too, to express her appreciation and share their joy.
Before they left, Ayla noticed that many of the plant foods she had seen all along the way were growing nearby, and she decided to gather some, using her digging stick for roots and a special knife, rather thick but strong, to cut stems and leaves. Jondalar got down beside her to help, though he had to ask her to point out exactly what she wanted.
It still surprised her. During the time they lived with the Lion Camp, she had learned the customs and patterns of work of the Mamutoi, which were different from the ways of the Clan. But even there, she often worked with Deegie or Nezzie, or many people worked together, and she had forgotten his willingness to do work that the men of the Clan would have considered the job of women. Yet, since the early days in her valley, Jondalar had never hesitated to do anything that she did, and he was surprised that she didn’t expect him to share in the work that needed to be done. With just the two of them, she became aware of that side of him again.
When they finally did leave, they rode in silence for some time. Ayla kept thinking about the mammoths; could not get them out of her mind. She thought, too, about the Mamutoi, who had given her a home and a place to belong when she had no one. They called themselves the Mammoth Hunters, though they hunted many other kinds of animals, and gave the huge woolly beasts a unique place of honor, even while hunting them. Besides providing them with so much of what was necessary for existence—meat, fat, hides, wool for fibers and cordage, ivory for tools and carvings, bones for dwellings and even fuel—mammoth hunts had deep spiritual meaning to them.
She felt even more Mamutoi now, though she was leaving. It was not by chance, she felt, that they had come upon the herd when they did. She was sure there was a reason for it, and wondered if Mut, the Earth Mother, or maybe her totem, was trying to tell her something. She had found herself thinking often, lately, about the Great Cave Lion spirit that was the totem Creb had given her, wondering if he still protected her though she was no longer Clan, and where a Clan totem spirit would fit into her new life with Jondalar.
The tallgrass finally began thinning out, and they moved closer to the river looking for a place to camp. Jondalar glanced toward the sun descending in the west and decided it was too late to try to hunt that evening. He wasn’t sorry they had stayed to watch the mammoths, but he had hoped to hunt for meat, not only for their meal that night, but to last for the next few days. He didn’t want to have to use the dried traveling food they had with them unless they really needed it. Now they’d have to take the time in the morning.
The valley with its luxuriant bottomland near the river had been changing, and the vegetation altered with it. As the banks of the swift waterway were rising in elevation, the character of the grass changed and, to Jondalar’s relief, became shorter. It barely reached the bellies of the horses. He preferred being able to see where they were going. Where the ground began to level out near the top of a slope, the landscape took on a familiar feel. It wasn’t that they had ever been in that particular locality before, but that it was similar to the region around the Lion Camp, with high banks and eroded gullies leading to the river.
They climbed a slight rise and Jondalar noticed that the course of the river was veering to the left, toward the east. It was time to leave this watery vein of life-supporting liquid meandering slowly toward the south and angle westward across country. He stopped to consult the map Talut had carved on the slab of ivory for him. When he looked up, he noticed Ayla had dismounted and was standing on the edge of the bank looking across the river. Something about the way she stood made him think she was upset or unhappy.
He shifted his leg over, got down from his mount, and joined her on the bank. Across the river he saw what had drawn her to the edge. Tucked into the slope on a terrace halfway up the opposite side was a large, long mound with tufts of grass growing up the sides. It seemed to be a part of the riverbank itself, but the arched entrance closed by a heavy mammoth-hide drape revealed its actual nature. It was an earth-lodge like the one the Lion Camp called home, where they had lived during the previous winter.
As Ayla stared at the familiar-looking structure, she remembered vividly the inside of the Lion Camp’s earthlodge. The roomy semisubterranean dwelling was strong and built to last many years. The floor had been carved out of the fine loess soil of the riverbank and was below ground level. Its walls and rounded roof of sod covered with river clay were firmly supported by a structure of more than a ton of large mammoth bones, with deer antlers entwined and lashed together at the ceiling, and a thick thatch of grass and reeds between the bone and the sod. Benches of earth along the sides were made into warm beds, and storage areas were dug down to the cold permafrost level. The archway was two large curved mammoth tusks, with the butt ends in the ground and the tips facing each other and joined. It was by no means a temporary construction, but a permanent settlement under one roof, large enough to support several large families. She was sure the makers of this earthlodge had every intention of returning, just as the Lion Camp did every winter.
“They must be at the Summer Meeting,” Ayla said. “I wonder which Camp’s home that is?”
“Maybe it belongs to Feather Grass Camp,” Jondalar suggested.
“Maybe,” Ayla said, then stared in silence across the rushing stream. “It looks so empty,” she added after a while. “I didn’t think when we left that I would never see Lion Camp again. I remember when I was sorting through things to take to the Meeting, I left some behind. If I’d known I wasn’t going back, I might have taken them with me.”
“Are you sorry you left, Ayla?” Jondalar’s concern showed, as always, in the worry wrinkles on his forehead. “I told you I would stay and become a Mamutoi, too, if you wanted me to. I know you found a home with them and were happy. It’s not too late. We can still turn back.”
“No, I’m sad to be leaving, but I’m not sorry. I want to be with you. That’s what I’ve wanted from the beginning. And I know you want to go home, Jondalar. You have wanted to go back ever since I’ve known you. You might get used to living here, but you would never really be happy. You would always miss your people, your family, the ones you were born to. It’s not as important to me. I will never know who I was born to. The Clan were my people.”
Ayla’s thoughts turned inward, and Jondalar watched a gentle smile soften her face. “Iza would have been so happy for me if she could have known I was going with you. She would have liked you. She told me long before I left that I wasn’t Clan, though I couldn’t remember anyone or anything except living with them. Iza was my mother, the only one I knew, but she wanted me to leave the Clan. She was afraid for me. Before she died, she told me, ‘Find your own people, find your own mate.’ Not a man of the Clan, a man like me; someone I could love, who would care for me. But I was alone so long in the valley, I didn’t think I ever would find anyone. And then you came. Iza was right. As hard as it was to leave, I needed to find my own people. Except for Durc, I could almost thank Broud for forcing me to go. I would never have found a man to love me, if I hadn’t left the Clan, or one that I cared about so much.”
“We aren’t so different, Ayla. I didn’t think I’d ever find anyone to love, either, even though I knew many women among the Zelandonii, and we met many more on our Journey. Thonolan made friends easily, even among strangers, and he made it easy for me.” He closed his eyes for an anguished moment, flinching from the memory, as a deep sorrow touched his face. The pain was still sharp. Ayla could see it whenever he talked about his brother.
She looked at Jondalar, at his exceptionally tall, muscular body, at his long, straight, yellow hair tied back with a thong at the nape of his neck, at his fine, well-made features. After watching him at the Summer Meeting, she doubted that he needed his brother’s help to make friends, especially with women, and she knew why. Even more than his build or his handsome face, it was his eyes, his startlingly vibrant and expressive eyes, which seemed to reveal the inner core of this very private man, that gave him a magnetic appeal and a presence so compelling that he was nearly irresistible.
Just the way he was looking at her that moment, his eyes filled with warmth and desire. She could feel her body respond to the mere touch of his eyes. She thought of the chestnut mammoth, who kept refusing all the other males, waiting for the big russet bull to come, and then not wanting to wait anymore, but there was pleasure in prolonging the anticipation, too.
She loved looking at him, filling herself with him. She thought he was beautiful the first time she saw him, though she had no one to compare him with. She had since learned that other women loved looking at him, too; considered him remarkably, even overwhelmingly attractive; and that it embarrassed him to be told about it. His outstanding good looks had brought him at least as much pain as pleasure, and to stand out for qualities that he had nothing to do with, did not bring him the satisfaction of accomplishment. They were gifts of the Mother, not the result of his own efforts.
But the Great Earth Mother had not stopped with mere outward appearances. She had endowed him with a rich and lively intelligence, that tended more toward a sensitivity and understanding of the physical aspects of his world, and a natural dexterity. Abetted by training from the man to whom his mother had been mated when he was born, who was acknowledged as the best in his field, Jondalar was a skilled maker of stone tools who had honed his craft on his Journey by learning the techniques of other flint knappers.
For Ayla, though, he was beautiful not merely because he was exceptionally attractive by the standards of his people, but because he was the first person she could remember seeing who resembled her. He was a man of the Others, not of the Clan. When he first came to her valley, she had studied his face minutely, if not obviously, even in his sleep. It was such a wonder to see a face with the familiar look of her own after so many years of being the only one who was different, who did not have heavy brow ridges and a sloped-back forehead, or a large, high-bridged, sharp nose, in a face that jutted out, and a jaw with no chin.
Like hers, Jondalar’s forehead rose up steeply and smoothly, without heavy brow ridges. His nose, and even his teeth, were small by comparison, and he had a bony protuberance below his mouth, a chin, just as she did. After seeing him, she could understand why the Clan thought of her as having a flat face and bulging forehead. She had seen her own reflection in still water, and she believed what they had told her. In spite of the fact that Jondalar towered over her as much as she had towered over them, and that she had since been told by more than one man that she was beautiful, deep inside she still thought of herself as big and ugly.
But because Jondalar was male, with stronger features and angles more pronounced, to Ayla, he resembled the Clan more than she did. They were the people she grew up with, they were her standard of measure, and unlike the rest of her kind, she thought they were quite handsome. Jondalar, with a face that was like hers, and yet more like a Clan face than hers, was beautiful.
Jondalar’s high forehead smoothed as he smiled. “I’m glad you think she would have approved of me. I wish I could have met your Iza,” he said, “and the rest of your Clan. But I had to meet you first or I would never have understood that they were people, and that I could meet them. The way you talk about the Clan, they must be good people. I’d like to meet one some time.”
“Many people are good people. The Clan took me in after the earthquake, when I was little. After Broud drove me away from the Clan, I had no one. I was Ayla of No People until the Lion Camp accepted me, gave me a place to belong, made me Ayla of the Mamutoi.”
“The Mamutoi and the Zelandonii are not so different. I think you will like my people, and they will like you.”
“You haven’t always been so sure of that,” Ayla said. “I remember when you were afraid they would not want me, because I grew up with the Clan, and because of Durc.”
Jondalar felt a flush of embarrassment.
“They would call my son an abomination, a child born of mixed spirits, half-animal—you called him that, once—and because I birthed him, they would think even worse of me.”
“Ayla, before we left the Summer Meeting, you made me promise to tell you the truth, and not to keep things to myself. The truth is that I was worried in the beginning. I wanted you to come with me, but I didn’t want you to tell people about yourself. I wanted you to hide your childhood, lie about it, even though I hate lies—and you never learned how. I was afraid they would reject you. I know how it feels, and I didn’t want you to be hurt that way. But I was afraid for myself, too. I was afraid they would reject me for bringing you, and I didn’t want to go through that kind of thing again. Yet I couldn’t bear to think of living without you. I didn’t know what to do.”
Ayla remembered only too well her confusion and despair over his agony of indecision. As happy as she had been with the Mamutoi, she had also been miserably unhappy because of Jondalar.
“Now I know, though it took almost losing you before I realized it,” Jondalar continued. “No one is more important to me than you, Ayla. I want you to be yourself, to say or do whatever you think you should, because that’s what I love about you, and I believe, now, that most people will welcome you. I’ve seen it happen. I learned something important from the Lion Camp and the Mamutoi. Not all people think alike and opinions can be changed. Some people will stand by you, sometimes those you least expect to, and some people have enough compassion to love and raise a child whom others call abomination.”
“I didn’t like the way they treated Rydag at the Summer Meeting,” Ayla said. “Some of them didn’t even want to give him a proper burial.” Jondalar heard the anger in her voice, but he could see tears threatening behind the anger.
“I didn’t like it either. Some people won’t change. They won’t open their eyes and look at what is plain to see. It took me a long time. I can’t promise you that the Zelandonii will accept you, Ayla, but if they don’t we’ll find some other place. Yes, I want to return. I want to go back to my people, I want to see my family, my friends. I want to tell my mother about Thonolan, and ask Zelandoni to look for his spirit in case he hasn’t found his way to the next world yet. I hope we will find a place there. But if not, it’s not so important to me anymore. That’s the other thing I learned. That’s why I told you I would be willing to stay here with you, if you wanted me to. I meant it.”
He was holding her with both his hands clasping her shoulders, looking into her eyes with fierce determination, wanting to be sure she understood him. She saw his conviction, and his love, but now she wondered if they should have left.
“If your people don’t want us, where will we go?”
He smiled at her. “We’ll find another place, Ayla, if we have to, but I don’t think we will. I told you, the Zelandonii are not so different from the Mamutoi. They will love you, just as I do. I’m not even worried about it anymore. I’m not sure why I ever was.”
Ayla smiled at him, pleased that he was so sure of his people’s acceptance of her. She only wished she could share his confidence. He might have forgotten, or perhaps not realized, what a strong and lasting impression his first reaction to learning about her son and her background had made on her. He had jerked away and looked upon her with such disgust that she would never forget it. It was just as though she were some dirty, filthy hyena.
As they got under way again, Ayla kept thinking about what might await her at the end of her Journey. It was true, people could change. Jondalar had changed completely. She knew there was not the least bit of that feeling of aversion left in him, but what about the people he had learned it from? If his response was so immediate, and so strong, his people must have taught it to him as he was growing up. Why should they react any differently to her than he had? As much as she wanted to be with Jondalar, and as glad as she was that he wanted to take her home with him, she was not altogether looking forward to meeting the Zelandonii.