The Valley Of Horses_ A Novel Part 8

Carrion birds were picking shreds of meat off discarded bones when she had piled up as much meat on the tent hide as she thought she could haul. She dragged it to the beach, added fuel to the fire, and dumped her load as close as she could. She ran back dragging the empty hide, but had her sling out and stones flying before she reached the pit. She heard the yip of a fox and saw it limp away. She would have killed one if she hadn't run out of stones. She picked up more stones from the riverbed and took a drink before she started back to work.

The stone was sure and fatal to the wolverine that had braved the heat of the fire and was trying to drag a large hunk of meat away when Ayla returned with a second load. She dragged her meat to the fire, then went back to get the glutton, hoping she'd have time to skin it, too. Wolverine fur was particularly useful for winter wear. She added more wood to the fire and eyed the driftwood pile.

She wasn't as lucky with the hyena when she returned to the pit. It managed to make off with a whole shank She hadn't seen so many carnivores in the valley since she arrived. Foxes, hyenas, wolverines had all gotten a taste of her kill. Wolves, and their fiercer, doglike relatives, dholes, paced just beyond the range of her sling. Hawks and kites were braver, only flapping wings and backing off slightly as she approached. She expected to see a lynx, or a leopard, or even a cave lion anytime.

By the time she hauled the filthy hide out of the hole, the sun had pa.s.sed its zenith and was starting down, but not until she had dragged her last load to the beach did she give in to her fatigue and sink to the ground. She hadn't slept all night; she hadn't eaten all day; and she didn't want to move. But the smallest of the creatures after their share of her kill finally made her get up again. The buzzing flies caused her to notice how filthy she was, and they bit. She forced herself up and walked into the stream without bothering to remove her clothes, gratefully letting the water wash over her.

The river was refreshing. Afterward, she went up to her cave, spread her summer wraps out to dry, and wished she had remembered to take her sling out of her waist thong before she went into the water. She was afraid it would dry stiff. She didn't have time to work it soft and flexible. She put on her full wrap and got her sleeping fur from the cave. Before she went down to the beach, she looked across the meadow from the edge of her stone porch. There were scufflings and movements near the pit, but the horses were gone from the valley.

Suddenly she remembered her spears. They were still on the ground where she had left them after pulling them out of the mare. She debated with herself about going after them, almost talked herself out of it, then admitted it was better to keep two perfectly good spears than go to the work of making new ones later. She picked up her damp sling and dropped her fur on the beach as she stopped for a pouchful of stones.

Drawing near the pit trap, she saw the carnage as though for the first time. The brush fence had fallen over in places. The pit was a raw wound in the earth and the gra.s.s trampled. Blood, sc.r.a.ps of meat, and bones were scattered around. Two wolves were snarling over the remains of the mare's head. Kit foxes were yipping around a s.h.a.ggy foreleg with a hoof still attached, and a hyena was eying her warily. A flock of kites took wing as she approached, but a wolverine stood its ground beside the pit. Only the cats were still conspicuously absent.

I'd better hurry, she was thinking as she cast a stone to make the glutton give way. I've got to get fires going around my meat. The hyena made a whooping cackle as it backed off, staying just out of range. Get out of here, you ugly thing! she thought. Ayla hated hyenas. Every time she saw one, she remembered the time a hyena had s.n.a.t.c.hed Oga's baby. She hadn't stopped to think about the consequences; she had killed it. She just couldn't let the baby die that way.

As she bent to pick up her spears, her attention was caught by movement seen through the gap in the brush barrier. Several hyenas were stalking a spindly legged, hay-colored foal.

I'm sorry for you, Ayla thought. I didn't want to kill your dam, she just happened to be the one who got caught. Ayla had no feelings of guilt. There were hunters, and there were the hunted, and sometimes the hunters were hunted. She could as easily fall prey, in spite of her weapons and her fire. Hunting was a way of life.

But she knew the little horse was doomed without its mother, and she felt sorry for a small and helpless animal. Ever since the first rabbit she had brought to Iza to heal, she had brought a succession of small wounded animals to the cave, much to Brun's dismay. He had drawn the line at carnivores, though.

She watched the hyenas circle the little filly, who was skittishly trying to stay out of their way, looking wild-eyed and scared. With no one to take care of you, maybe it's better to get it over with, Ayla reasoned. But when one hyena made a rush for the foal, slashing its flank, she didn't think. She tore through the brush, slinging stones. One hyena dropped, the others dashed away. She wasn't trying to kill them; she wasn't interested in the scruffy-looking spotted fur of hyenas; she wanted them to leave the little horse alone. The foal ran away too, but not as far. It was afraid of Ayla, but more fearful of hyenas.

Ayla approached the baby slowly, holding out her hand and crooning softly in a way that had calmed other frightened animals before. She had a natural way with animals, a sensitivity, that extended to all living creatures, developed along with her medical skills. Iza had fostered it, seen it as an extension of her own compa.s.sion that had impelled her to pick up a strange-looking girlchild because she was hurt and hungry.

The little filly reached out to sniff Ayla's outstretched fingers. The young woman moved closer, then patted, and rubbed, and scratched the foal. When the little horse noticed something familiar about Ayla's fingers and began sucking on them noisily, it woke an old aching hunger in Ayla.

Poor baby, she thought, so hungry and no mother to give you milk. I don't have any milk for you; I didn't even have enough for Durc. She felt tears threaten and shook her head. Well, he grew strong anyway. Maybe I can think of something else to feed you. You'll have to be weaned young, too. Come on, baby. She led the young filly toward the beach with her fingers.

Just as she approached, she saw a lynx about to make off with a hunk of her hard-won meat. A cat had finally made an appearance. She reached for two stones and her sling as the skittish foal backed away, and, as the lynx looked up, she hurled the stones with force.

"You can kill a lynx with a sling," Zoug had stoutly maintained once long ago. "Don't try anything bigger, but you can kill a lynx."

It wasn't the first time Ayla had proved him right. She retrieved her meat and dragged the tufted-eared cat back, too. Then she looked at the pile of meat, the mud-encrusted horsehide, the dead wolverine, and the dead lynx. Suddenly she laughed out loud. I needed meat. I needed furs. Now all I need is a few more hands, she thought.

The little filly had shied away from her burst of laughter and the smell of fire. Ayla got a thong, approached the young horse carefully again, then tied the thong around her neck and led her to the beach. She tied the other end to a bush, remembered she had forgotten her spears again, ran to get them, then went to soothe the little horse who had tried to follow her. What am I going to feed you? she thought when the baby tried to suck her fingers again. It's not as if I don't have enough to do right now.

She tried some gra.s.s, but the little horse didn't seem to know quite what to do with it. Then she noticed her cooking bowl with the cold cooked grain in the bottom. Babies can eat the same kind of food as their mothers, she remembered, but it has to be softer. She added water to the bowl, mashed the grain to a fine gruel, and brought it to the foal, who only snorted and backed off when the woman put her muzzle in it. But then she licked her face and seemed to like the taste. She was hungry and went after Ayla's fingers again.

Ayla thought for a moment; then, with the filly still sucking, she lowered her hand into the bowl. The horse sucked in a little gruel and tossed her head, but after a few more attempts the hungry baby seemed to get the idea. When she was through, Ayla went up to the cave, brought down more grain, and started it cooking for later.

I think I'm going to be gathering a lot more grain than I first planned. But maybe I'll have time-if I can get all this dried. She paused for a moment and thought how strange the Clan would think she was, to kill a horse for food and then gather food for its baby. I can be as strange as I want...here, she said to herself, as she jabbed a piece of horse-meat with a sharpened stick and skewered it to cook for herself. Then she looked at the task ahead of her and set to work.

She was still cutting meat into thin strips when the full moon rose and the stars winked on again. A ring of fires circled the beach, and she was grateful for the large pile of driftwood nearby. Within the circle, line after line of drying meat was stretched out. A tawny lynx fur was rolled up beside a smaller roll of coa.r.s.e brown wolverine, both waiting to be sc.r.a.ped and cured. The freshly washed gray coat of the mare was laid out on the stones, drying alongside the horse's stomach, which was cleaned and filled with water to keep it soft. There were strips of drying tendon for sinew, lengths of washed intestine, a pile of hooves and bones and another of lumps of fat waiting to be rendered and poured into the intestines for storage. She had even managed to salvage a little fat from the lynx and wolverine-for lamps and waterproofing-though she discarded the meat. She didn't much care for the taste of carnivores.

Ayla looked at the last two hunks of meat, washed of mud in the stream, and reached for one. Then she changed her mind. They could wait. She couldn't ever remember being so tired. She checked her fires, piled more wood on each, then spread out her bearskin fur and rolled up in it.

The little horse was no longer tied to the bush. After a second feeding, she seemed to have no desire to wander off. Ayla was almost asleep when the filly sniffed her and then lay down beside her. She didn't think at the time that the foal's responses would wake her if any predator came too close to dying fires, though it was so. Half asleep, the young woman put her arm around the warm little animal, felt her heartbeat, heard her breath, and cuddled closer.

6.

Jondalar rubbed the stubble on his chin and reached for his pack that was propped against a stunted pine. He withdrew a small packet of soft leather, untied the cords and opened the folds, and carefully examined a thin flint blade. It had a slight curvature along its length-all blades cleaved from flint were bowed a little, it was a characteristic of the stone-but the edge was even and sharp. The blade was one of several especially fine tools he had put aside.

A sudden wind rattled the dry limbs of the lichen-scabbed old pine. The gust whipped the tent flap open, billowed through, straining the guy lines and tugging at the stakes, and slapped it shut again. Jondalar looked at the blade, then shook his head and wrapped it up again.

"Time to let the beard grow?" Thonolan said.

Jondalar hadn't noticed his brother's approach. "One thing about a beard," he said. "In summer it may be a bother. Itches when you sweat-more comfortable to shave it off. But it sure helps keep your face warm in winter, and winter is coming."

Thonolan blew on his hands, rubbing them, then squatted down by the small fire in front of the tent and held them over the flames. "I miss the color," he said.

"The color?"

"Red. There's no red. A bush here and there, but everything else just turned yellow and then brown. Gra.s.s, leaves." He nodded in the general direction of the open gra.s.sland behind him, then looked toward Jondalar standing near the tree. "Even the pines look drab. There's ice on puddles and the edges of streams already, and I'm still waiting for fall."

"Don't wait too long," Jondalar said, moving over and hunkering down in front of the fire opposite his brother. "I saw a rhino earlier this morning. Going north."

"I thought it smelled like snow."

"Won't be much yet, not if rhinos and mammoths are still around. They like it cold, but they don't like much snow. They always seem to know when a big storm is coming and head back toward the glacier in a hurry. People say, 'Never go forth when mammoths go north.' It's true for rhinos, too, but this one wasn't hurrying."

"I've seen whole hunting parties turn back without throwing a single spear, just because the woollies were moving north. I wonder how much it snows around here?"

"The summer was dry. If the winter is too, mammoths and rhinos may stay all season. But we're farther south now, and that usually means more snow. If there are people in those mountains to the east, they should know. Maybe we should have stayed with the people who rafted us across the river. We need a place to stay for the winter, and soon."

"I wouldn't mind a nice friendly cave full of beautiful women right now," Thonolan said with a grin.

"I'd settle for a nice friendly Cave."

"Big Brother, you wouldn't want to spend a winter without women any more than I would."

The bigger man smiled. "Well, the winter would be a lot colder without a woman, beautiful or not."

Thonolan looked at his brother speculatively. "I've often wondered about that," he said.

"What?"

"Sometimes there's a real beauty with half the men trying for her, but she looks only at you. I know you aren't stupid; you know it-yet you pa.s.s her by and go pick out some little mouse sitting in a corner. Why?"

"I don't know. Sometimes the 'mouse' just thinks she's not beautiful, because she has a mole on her cheek or thinks her nose is too long. When you talk to her, there's often more to her than the one everybody is after. Sometimes women who aren't perfect are more interesting; they've done more, or learned something."

"Maybe you're right. Some of those shy ones blossom out, after you've paid attention to them."

Jondalar shrugged and stood up. "We're not going to find women, or a Cave, this way. Let's break camp."

"Right!" Thonolan said eagerly, then turned his back to the fire-and froze! "Jondalar!" he gasped, then strained to sound casual. "Don't do anything to attract his attention, but if you look over the tent, you'll see your friend from this morning, or one just like him."

Jondalar peered over the top of the tent. Just on the other side, swaying from side to side as he shifted his ma.s.sive tonnage from one foot to the other, was a huge, double-horned, woolly rhinoceros. With his head turned to the side, he was eying Thonolan. He was nearly blind directly ahead; his small eyes were set far back and his vision was poor to begin with. Acute hearing and a sharp sense of smell more than made up for his eyesight.

He was obviously a creature of the cold. He had two coats, a soft undercoat of thick downy fur and a s.h.a.ggy outer one of reddish brown hair, and beneath his tough hide was a three-inch layer of fat. He carried his head low, downward from his shoulders, and his long front horn sloped forward at an angle that barely cleared the ground as he swayed. He used it for sweeping snow away from pasturage-if it wasn't too deep. And his short thick legs were easily mired in deep snow. He visited the gra.s.slands of the south only briefly-to graze on their richer harvest and store additional fat-in late fall and early winter after it became cold enough for him, but before the heavy snows. He could not stand heat, with his heavy coats, any more than he could survive in deep snow. His home was the bitter-cold, crackling dry tundra and steppes near the glacier.

The long, tapering, anterior horn could be put to a far more dangerous use than sweeping snow, however, and there was nothing between the rhino and Thonolan but a short distance.

"Don't move!" Jondalar hissed. He ducked down behind the tent and reached for his pack with the spears.

"Those light spears won't do much good," Thonolan said, though his back was toward him. The comment stayed Jondalar's hand for a moment; he wondered how Thonolan knew. "You'd have to hit him in a vulnerable place like an eye, and that's too small a target. You need a heavy lance for rhino," Thonolan continued, and his brother realized he was guessing.

"Don't talk so much, you'll draw his attention," Jondalar cautioned. "I may not have a lance, but you don't have a weapon at all. I'm going around the back of the tent and try for him."

"Wait, Jondalar! Don't! You'll just make him angry with that spear; you won't even hurt him. Remember when we were boys, how we used to bait rhinos? Someone would run, get the rhino chasing him, then dodge away while someone else got his attention. Keep him running until he was too tired to move. You get ready to draw his attention-I'm going to run and try to make him charge."

"No! Thonolan," Jondalar yelled, but it was too late. Thonolan was sprinting.

It was always impossible to outguess the unpredictable beast. Rather than charging after the man, the rhino made a rush for the tent billowing in the wind. He rammed it, gouged a hole in it, snapped thongs and got snared in them. When he disentangled himself, he decided he didn't like the men or their camp and left, trotting off harmlessly. Thonolan, glancing over his shoulder, noticed the rhino was gone and came loping back.

"That was stupid!" Jondalar yelled, slamming his spear into the ground with a force that broke the wooden shaft just below the bone point. "Were you trying to get yourself killed? Great Doni, Thonolan! Two people can't bait a rhino. You have to surround him. What if he had gone after, you? What in Great Mother's underworld am I supposed to do if you get hurt?"

Surprise, then anger flashed across Thonolan's face. Then he broke into a grin. "You were really worried about me! Yell all you want, you can't bluff me. Maybe I shouldn't have tried it, but I wasn't going to let you make some stupid move, like going for a rhino with such a light spear. What in Great Mother's underworld am I supposed to do if you get hurt?" His smile grew, and his eyes lit up with the delight of a small boy who had succeeded in pulling off a trick. "Besides, he didn't come after me."

Jondalar looked blank in the face of his brother's grin. His outburst had been more relief than anger, but it took him a while to grasp that Thonolan was safe.

"You were lucky. I guess we both were," he said, expelling a long breath. "But we'd better make a couple of lances, even if we just sharpen points for now."

"I haven't seen any yew, but we can watch for ash or alder on the way," Thonolan remarked as he began to take down the tent. "They should work."

"Anything will work, even willow. We should make them before we go."

"Jondalar, let's get away from this place. We need to reach those mountains, don't we?"

"I don't like traveling without lances, not with rhinos around."

"We can stop early. We need to fix the tent anyway. If we go, we can look for some good wood, find a better place to camp. That rhino might come back."

"And he might follow us, too." Thonolan was always eager to start in the morning, and restless about delays, Jondalar knew. "Maybe we should try to reach those mountains. All right, Thonolan, but we stop early, right?"

"Right, Big Brother."

The two brothers strode along the edge of the river at a steady, ground-covering pace, long since adjusted to each other's step and comfortable with each other's silences. They had grown closer, talked out each other's heart and mind, tested each other's strengths and weaknesses. Each a.s.sumed certain tasks by habit, and each depended on the other when danger threatened. They were young and strong and healthy, and unselfconsciously confident that they could face whatever lay ahead.

They were so attuned to their environment that perception was on a subliminal level. Any disturbance that posed a threat would have found them instantly on guard. But they were only vaguely aware of the warmth of the distant sun, challenged by the cold wind soughing through leafless limbs; black-bottomed clouds embracing the white-walled breastworks of the mountains before them; and the deep, swift river.

The mountain ranges of the ma.s.sive continent shaped the course of the Great Mother River. She rose out of the highland north of one glacier-covered range and flowed east. Beyond the first chain of mountains was a level plain-in an earlier age the basin of an inland sea-and, farther east, a second range curved around in a great arc. Where the easternmost alpine foreland of the first range met the flysch foothills at the northwestern end of the second, the river broke through a rocky barrier and turned abruptly south.

After dropping down karst highlands, she meandered across gra.s.sy steppes, winding into oxbows, breaking into separate channels and rejoining again as she wove her way south. The sluggish, braided river, flowing through flat land, gave the illusion of changelessness. It was only an illusion. By the time the Great Mother River reached the uplands at the southern end of the plain that swung her east again and gathered her channels together, she had received into herself the waters of the northern and eastern face of the first, ma.s.sive, ice-mantled range.

The great swollen Mother swept out a depression as she curled east in a broad curve toward the southern end of the second chain of peaks. The two men had been following her left bank, crossing the occasional channels and streams still rushing to meet her as they came to them. Across the river to the south the land rose in steep craggy leaps; on their side rolling hills climbed more gradually from the river's edge.

"I don't think we'll find the end of Donau before winter," Jondalar remarked. "I'm beginning to wonder if there is one."

"There's an end, and I think we'll find it soon. Look how big she is." Thonolan waved an expansive arm toward the right, "Who would have thought she'd get that big? We have to be near the end."

"But we haven't reached the Sister yet, at least I don't think we have. Tamen said she is as big as the Mother."

"That must be one of those stories that get bigger with the telling. You don't really believe there's another river like that flowing south along this plain?"

"Well, Tamen didn't say he'd seen it himself, but he was right about the Mother turning east again, and about the people who took us across her main channel. He could be right about the Sister. I wish we'd known the language of that Cave with the rafts; they might have known about a tributary to the Mother as big as she is."

"You know how easy it is to exaggerate great wonders that are far away. I think Tamen's 'Sister' is just another channel of the Mother, farther east."

"I hope you're right, Little Brother. Because if there is a Sister, we're going to have to cross it before we reach those mountains. And I don't know where else we're likely to find a place to stay for the winter."

"I'll believe it when I see it."

A movement, apparently at odds with the natural way of things, which brought it to the level of consciousness, caught Jondalar's attention. By the sound, he identified the black cloud in the distance, moving with no regard for the prevailing wind, and he stopped to watch as the V-formation of honking geese approached. They swooped lower as a single ent.i.ty, darkening the sky with their numbers, then broke up into individuals as they neared the ground with lowered feet and flapping wings, braking to a rest. The river swerved around the steep rise ahead.

"Big Brother," Thonolan said, grinning with excitement, "those geese wouldn't have set down if there wasn't a marsh up ahead. Maybe it's a lake or a sea, and I'll wager the Mother empties into it. I think we've reached the end of the river!"

"If we climb that hill, we should get a better view." Jondalar's tone was carefully neutral, but Thonolan had the impression his brother didn't quite believe him.

They climbed quickly, breathing hard when they reached the top, then caught their breath in amazement. They were high enough to see for a considerable distance. Beyond the turn the Mother widened, and her waters became choppy, and, as she approached a vast expanse of water, she rolled and spumed. The larger body of water was cloudy with mud churned up from the bottom, and filled with debris. Broken limbs, dead animals, whole trees bobbed and spun around, caught by conflicting currents.

They had not reached the end of the Mother, They had met the Sister.

High in the mountains in front of them, the Sister had begun as rivulets and streams. The streams became rivers that raced down rapids, spilled over cataracts, and coursed straight down the western face of the second great mountain range. With no lakes or reservoirs to check the flow, the tumultuous waters gained force and momentum until they gathered together on the plain. The only check to the turbulent Sister was the glutted Mother herself.

The tributary, nearly equal in size, surged into the mother stream, fighting the controlling influence of swift current. She backed up and surged again, throwing a tantrum of crosscurrents and undertows; temporary maelstroms that sucked floating debris in a perilous spin to the bottom and spewed it up a moment later downstream. The engorged confluence expanded into a hazardous lake too large to see across.

Fall flooding had peaked and a marshland of mud sprawled over the banks where the waters had recently receded, leaving a mora.s.s of devastation: upturned trees with roots reaching for the sky, waterlogged trunks and broken branches; carca.s.ses and dying fish stranded in drying puddles. Water birds were feasting on the easy pickings; the near sh.o.r.e was alive with them. Nearby, a hyena was making short work of a stag, undisturbed by the flapping wings of black storks.

"Great Mother!" Thonolan breathed.

"It must be the Sister." Jondalar was too awed to ask his brother if he believed now.

"How are we going to get across?"

"I don't know. We'll have to go back upstream."

"How far? She's as big as the Mother."

Jondalar could only shake his head. His forehead knotted with concern. "We should have taken Tamen's advice. It could snow any day; we don't have time to backtrack very far. I don't want to be caught in the open when a big storm blows."

A sudden gust of wind caught Thonolan's hood and whisked it back, baring his head. He pulled it on again, closer to his face, and shivered. For the first time since they had set out, he had serious doubts about surviving the long winter ahead. "What do we do now, Jondalar?"