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Mog-ur picked up his staff and limped toward the back of the cave. Rocks had been brought in and piled in a heap in an unused corner of the large cavern, and a shallow trench scooped out of the dirt floor. Iza had been a first-ranked medicine woman. Not only her position in the clan hierarchy, but her intimacy with the spirits dictated a burial place within the cave. It guaranteed that the protective spirits that watched over her would linger near her clan, and she herself could look in on them from her home in the next world. And it assured that no scavenger would scatter her bones.
The magician sprinkled red ochre dust inside the oval of the trench, then made his one-handed gestures. After he consecrated the ground where Iza would be buried, he hobbled over to a lumpy shape draped loosely with a soft leather hide. He pulled the cover back to reveal the gray naked body of the medicine woman. Her arms and legs had been flexed and tied into a fetal position with red-dyed sinew. The magician made a protective gesture, then lowered himself down and began to rub the cold flesh with a salve of red ochre and cave bear fat. Bent into a fetal position and covered with the red that resembled the blood of birth, Iza would be delivered into the next world the same way she had arrived in this one.
Never had it been more difficult for him to perform this task. Iza had been more than sibling to Creb. She knew him better than anyone. She knew the pain he had endured without complaint, the shame he had suffered because of his affliction. She understood his gentleness, his sensitivity, and she rejoiced for his greatness, his power, and his will to overcome. She had cooked for him, cared for him, soothed his aches. With her he had known the joys of family life almost like an ordinary man. Though he had never touched her as intimately as he did then, rubbing her cold body with salve, she had been more “mate” to him than many men had. Her death devastated him.
When he returned to his hearth, Creb’s face was as gray as the body had been. Ayla still sat next to Iza’s bed staring blankly into space, but she stirred when Creb began to rummage through Iza’s belongings.
“What are you doing?” she motioned, protective of anything that was Iza’s.
“I’m looking for Iza’s bowls and things. The tools she used in this life should be buried with her so she has the spirit of them in the next world,” Creb explained.
“I’ll get them,” Ayla said, pushing Creb aside. She gathered together the wooden bowls and bone cups Iza had used to make her medicines and measure dosage, the round hand stone and flat stone base used for crushing and grinding, her personal eating dishes, a few implements, and her medicine bag, and put them on Iza’s bed. Then she stared at the meager pile that represented Iza’s life and work.
“Those are not Iza’s tools!” Ayla gestured angrily, then jumped up and ran out of the cave. Creb watched her go, then shook his head and began to gather up Iza’s tools.
Ayla crossed the stream and ran to a meadow where she and Iza had gone before. She stopped at a stand of colorful hollyhocks on long graceful stems and gathered an armful of different hues. Then she picked the many-petaled, daisylike yarrow used for poultices and pain. She ran through the meadows and woods collecting more plants Iza had used in making her healing magic: white-leafed thistle with round, pale yellow flowers and yellow spikes; large, brilliant yellow groundsels; grape hyacinths, so blue they were almost black.
Every one of the plants she picked had found their way into Iza’s pharmacopoeia at some time, but she selected only those that were also beautiful, with colorful, sweet-smelling flowers. Ayla was crying again as she stopped on the edge of a meadow with her flowers, remembering the times she and Iza had walked together gathering plants. Her arms were so full, she had trouble carrying them without her collecting basket. Several blossoms dropped and she knelt down to pick them up again and saw the tangled branches of a woody horsetail with its small flowers, and almost smiled at the idea that occurred to her.
She searched in a fold, pulled out a knife, and cut a branch of the plant. In the warm sun of early fall, Ayla sat at the edge of the meadow twining the stems of the beautiful blossoms in between and around the supporting network until the entire branch was a riot of color.
The whole clan was astonished when Ayla marched into the cave with her floral wreath. She went straight to the back of the cave and laid it beside the body of the medicine woman resting on its side in the shallow trench within an oval of stones.
“These were Iza’s tools!” Ayla gestured defiantly, daring anyone to dispute her.
The old magician nodded. She’s right, he thought. Those were Iza’s tools, those were what she knew, what she worked with all her life. She might be happy to have them in the world of the spirits. I wonder, do flowers grow there?
Iza’s tools, the implements and the flowers, were put in the grave with the woman, and the clan began to pile the stones around and on top of her body while Mog-ur made motions that asked the Spirit of Great Ursus and her Saiga Antelope totem to guide Iza’s spirit safely to the next world.
“Wait!” Ayla suddenly interrupted. “I forgot something.” She ran back to the hearth and searched for her medicine bag, and carefully withdrew the two halves of the ancient medicine bowl. She rushed back, then laid the pieces in the grave beside Iza’s body.
“I thought she might want to take it with her, now that it can’t be used anymore.”
Mog-ur nodded approval. It was fitting, more fitting than anyone knew; then he resumed his formal gestures. After the last stone had been piled on, the women of the clan began to lay wood around and on top of the stone cairn. An ember from the cave fire was used to start the cooking fire for Iza’s burial feast. The food was cooked on top of her grave, and the fire would be kept burning for seven days. The heat from the bonfire would drive all the moisture from the body, desiccating it, mummifying it, and rendering it odorless.
As the flames took hold, Mog-ur began a last, eloquent lament in motions that stirred the soul of every member of the clan. He spoke to the world of the spirits of their love for the medicine woman who had cared for them, watched over them, helped them through sickness and pain as mysterious to them as death. They were ritual gestures, repeated in essentially the same form for every funeral, and some of the motions were used primarily during the men’s ceremonies and were unfamiliar to the women, yet the meaning was conveyed. Though the outward form was conventional, the fervor and conviction and ineffable sorrow of the great holy man imbued the formalized gestures with significance far beyond mere form.
Dry-eyed, Ayla gazed over the dancing fire at the flowing graceful movements of the crippled, one-armed man, feeling the intensity of his emotions as if they were her own. Mog-ur was expressing her pain and she identified with him entirely, as though he had reached inside her and spoke with her brain, felt with her heart. She was not the only one who felt his sorrow as her own. Ebra began to keen her grief, then the other women. Uba, holding Durc in her arms, felt a high-pitched, wordless wail rise in her throat and with a burst of relief joined in the sympathetic lament. Ayla stared vacantly ahead, sunk too far into the depths of her misery to express it. She couldn’t even find the release of tears.
She didn’t know how long she stared into the mesmerizing flames with unseeing eyes. Ebra had to shake her before Ayla responded, then she turned blank eyes toward the leader’s mate.
“Ayla, have something to eat. This is the last feast we will ever share with Iza.”
Ayla took the wooden plate of food, automatically put a piece of meat in her mouth, and almost gagged when she tried to swallow it. Suddenly she jumped up and ran from the cave. Blindly, she stumbled through brush and over rocks. At first her feet started to take her along a familiar route to a high mountain meadow and a small cave that had offered shelter and security before. But she veered away. Ever since she had shown the place to Brun, it didn’t seem to be hers anymore, and her last stay held too many painful memories. She climbed instead to the top of the bluff that protected their cave from the north winds screaming down the mountain in wint
er, and deflected the strong winds of fall.
Buffeted by gusts, Ayla fell to her knees at the top, and there, alone with her unbearable grief, she yielded to her anguish in a plaintive chanting wail as she rocked and rocked to the rhythm of her aching heart. Creb hobbled out of the cave after her, saw her silhouetted against the sunset-painted clouds, and heard the thin, distant moan. As deep as his own grief was, he couldn’t understand her rejection of the solace of company in her misery, her withdrawal into herself. His usual perceptiveness was dulled by his own sorrow; he didn’t realize she was suffering from more than grief.
Guilt racked her soul. She blamed herself for Iza’s death. She had left a sick woman to go to a Clan Gathering; she was a medicine woman who had deserted someone in time of need, someone she loved. She blamed herself for Iza’s trek up the mountain to find a root to help her keep the baby she wanted so desperately, resulting in the near-fatal illness that weakened the woman. She felt guilty about the pain she had caused Creb when she unwittingly followed the lights to the small chamber deep in the cave of the mountains far to the east. More than grief and guilt, she was weak from lack of food and suffering from milk fever from her swollen, aching, unsuckled breasts. But even more than that, she was suffering from a depression Iza could have helped her with, if she had been there. For Ayla was a medicine woman, dedicated to easing pain and saving life, and Iza was her first patient who had died.
What Ayla needed most was her baby. She not only needed to nurse him, she needed the demands of caring for him to bring her back to reality, to make her understand that life goes on. But when she returned to the cave, Durc was asleep beside Uba. Creb had taken him to Oga to feed again. Ayla tossed and turned, unable to sleep, not even realizing that it was fever and pain that kept her awake. Her mind was turned too deeply inward, dwelling on her sorrow and guilt.
She was gone when Creb woke up. She had wandered out of the cave and climbed the bluff again. Creb could see her from a distance and watched her anxiously, but he couldn’t see her weakness, or her fever.
“Should I go after her?” Brun asked, as baffled as Creb by Ayla’s reaction.
“She seems to want to be alone. Maybe we should let her,” Creb answered.
He worried about her when he could no longer see her, and when she still hadn’t returned by evening, he asked Brun to look for her. Creb was sorry he hadn’t let Brun go after her sooner when he saw the leader carrying her back to the cave. Grief and depression had taken their toll, weakness and fever had done the rest. Uba and Ebra cared for the clan’s medicine woman. She was delirious, alternately shaking with chills and burning with fever. She cried out if her breasts were barely touched.
“She’s going to lose her milk,” Ebra said to the girl. “It’s too late for Durc to do any good now. The milk is caked, he can’t draw it out.”
“But Durc is too young to be weaned. What will happen to him? What will happen to her?”
It might not have been too late if Iza had been alive or if Ayla had been coherent. Even Uba knew there were poultices that might have helped, medicines that might have worked, but she was young and unsure of herself, and Ebra seemed so positive. By the time the fever passed, Ayla’s milk had dried up. She could no longer feed her own son.
“I will not have that deformed brat at my hearth, Oga! I will not have him brother to your sons!”
Broud was furious, shaking his fists, and Oga was cowering at his feet.
“But Broud, he’s just a baby. He’s got to nurse. Aga and Ika don’t have enough milk, it wouldn’t do any good for them to keep him. I have enough, I’ve always had too much milk. If he doesn’t eat, he’ll starve, Broud, he’ll die.”
“I don’t care if he dies. He should never have been allowed to live in the first place. He will not live at this hearth.”
Oga stopped shaking and stared at the man who was her mate. She didn’t really believe he would refuse to let her keep Ayla’s baby. She knew he would rant and rave and storm about it, but in the end, she was sure he would allow it. He couldn’t be that cruel, he couldn’t let a baby starve to death, no matter how much he hated Durc’s mother.
“Broud, Ayla saved Brac’s life, how can you let her son die?”
“Hasn’t she gotten enough for saving his life? She was allowed to live, she was even allowed to hunt. I don’t owe her anything.”
“She wasn’t allowed to live, she was cursed with death. She returned from the world of the spirits because her totem wanted her to, he protected her,” Oga protested.
“If she had been cursed properly, she wouldn’t have returned, and she would never have given birth to that brat. If her totem is so strong, why did she lose her milk? Everyone said her baby would be unlucky. What could be more unlucky than losing his mother’s milk? Now you want to bring his bad luck to this hearth. I will not allow it, Oga. That’s final!”
Oga sat back and looked up at Broud with calm deliberation.
“No, Broud,” she motioned. “It’s not final.” She was no longer timorous. Broud’s expression turned to shocked surprise. “You can keep Durc from living at your hearth; that is your right and I can’t do anything about it. But you can’t keep me from nursing him. That is a woman’s right. A woman may nurse any baby she wants, and no man can keep her from it. Ayla saved my son’s life, and I will not let hers die. Durc will be brother to my sons whether you like it or not.”
Broud was stunned. His mate’s refusal to abide by his wishes was totally unexpected. Oga had never been insolent, never been disrespectful, never shown the least sign of disobedience. He could hardly believe it. Shock turned to fury.
“How dare you defy your mate, woman. I’ll make you leave this hearth!” he stormed.
“Then I will take my sons and leave, Broud. I will beg another man to take me. Maybe Mog-ur will allow me to live with him if no other man will have me. But I will nurse Ayla’s baby.”
His only answer was a sharp blow with a hard fist that knocked her flat. He was too filled with rage for any other reply. He started after her again, then turned on his heel. I will see about such blatant disrespect, he thought, as he stalked to Brun’s hearth.
“First she contaminates Iza, now her willfulness has spread to my mate!” Broud gesticulated the moment he stepped beyond the boundary stones. “I told Oga I would not have Ayla’s son, I told her I did not want that deformed boy as brother to her sons. Do you know what she said? She said she would nurse him anyway! She said I couldn’t stop her. She said he would be brother to her sons whether I liked it or not! Can you believe it? From Oga? From my mate?”
“She’s right, Broud,” Brun said with controlled calm. “You can’t stop her from nursing him. What baby a woman suckles is not a man’s concern, it has never been a man’s concern. He has more important things to worry about.”
Brun was not at all pleased at Broud’s violent objection. It was degrading for Broud to be so emotionally concerned in matters that were in a woman’s domain. And who else could do it? Durc was Clan, especially after the Bear Festival. And Clan always took care of their own. Even the woman who had come from another clan and never produced a single child was not left to starve after her mate died. She may have had no value, she may have been a burden, but as long as the clan had food, she was given enough to eat.
Broud could refuse to take Durc into his hearth. That imposed the responsibility of providing for him and training him along with Oga’s sons. Brun wasn’t happy about it, but it wasn’t unexpected. Everyone knew how he felt about Ayla and her son. But why should he object if his mate nursed the boy, they were all the same clan?
“Do you mean to tell me that Oga can be willfully disobedient and get away with it?” Broud raged.
“Why should you care, Broud? Do you want the child to die?” Brun asked. Broud flushed at the pointed question. “He is Clan, Broud. For all that his head is misshapen, he does not appear to be retarded. He will grow up to be a hunter. This is his clan. A mate has even been arranged
for him, and you agreed. Why are you so emotional about your mate feeding someone else’s baby? Is it still Ayla that you’re emotional about? You are a man, Broud, whatever you command of her, she must obey. And she does obey you. Why do you compete with a woman? You belittle yourself. Or am I wrong? Are you a man, Broud? Are you man enough to lead this clan?”
“It’s just that I don’t want a deformed child to be brother to the sons of my mate,” Broud gestured lamely. It was a weak excuse, but he hadn’t missed the threat.
“Broud, what hunter has not saved the life of another? What man does not carry a piece of every other man’s spirit? What man is not brother to the rest? Does it matter if Durc is brother to your mate’s sons now, or after they all grow up? Why do you object?”
Broud had no answer, none that would be acceptable to the leader. He could not admit to his all-consuming hatred of Ayla. That would be admitting he wasn’t in control of his emotions, admitting he wasn’t man enough to be leader. He was sorry he had come to Brun. I should have remembered, he thought. He always takes her side. He was so proud of me at the Clan Gathering. Now, all because of her, he’s doubting me again.
“Well, I don’t care if Oga nurses him,” Broud motioned, “but I don’t want him at my hearth.” On that point he knew he was within his rights and would not give. “You may think he’s not retarded, but I’m not so sure. I don’t want to be responsible for his training. I still doubt that he’ll ever be a hunter.”
“That’s your choice, Broud. I assumed the responsibility for training him; I made that decision before I ever accepted him. But I did accept him. Durc is a member of this clan and he will be a hunter. I’ll make sure of it.”
Broud turned back toward his own hearth but saw Creb bringing Durc to Oga again and walked out of the cave instead. He did not give vent to his fury until he was sure he was well out of Brun’s sight. It’s all that old cripple’s fault, he said to himself, then tried to erase the thought from his mind, afraid that somehow the magician would know what he was thinking.
