“It makes no difference if he is mean or not, Ayla. He can be as mean as he wants; it’s his right, he’s a man. He can beat you anytime he wants, as hard as he wants. He will be leader someday, Ayla, you must obey him, you must do just as he says, when he says it. You have no choice,” Iza explained. She looked at the stricken face of the child. Why is it so hard for her? she wondered. Iza felt a sadness and sympathy for the girl who had such difficulty accepting the facts of life. “It’s late, Ayla, go to bed.”
Ayla went to her sleeping place, but it was a long time before she went to sleep. She tossed and turned and slept badly when sleep did finally overcome her. She was awake early, took her basket and digging stick, and was gone before breakfast. She wanted to be alone, to think. She climbed to her secret meadow and got her sling, but she didn’t feel much like practicing.
It’s all Broud’s fault, she thought. Why does he always pick on me? What did I ever do to him? He never has liked me. So what if he’s a man, what makes men better? I don’t care if he is going to be leader, he’s not so great. He’s not even as good as Zoug with the sling. I could be as good as he is, I’m already better than Vorn. He misses a lot more than I do; Broud probably does, too. He missed when he was showing off for Vorn.
Angrily, she started slinging stones. One bounced into a copse of bushes and flushed a sleepy porcupine from his hole. The small nocturnal animals were seldom hunted. Everyone made a big thing about Vorn killing a porcupine, she thought. I could, too, if I wanted to. The animal was ambling up a sandy hill near the creek, quills extended. Ayla fitted a stone into the bulge of her leather sling, took aim, and fired the stone. The slow-moving porcupine was an easy target; it dropped to the ground.
Ayla ran toward the creature, pleased with herself. But when she touched it, she realized the porcupine wasn’t dead, only stunned. She felt his beating heart and saw the blood trickling from the wound on his head and had a sudden impulse to bring the small animal back to the cave to heal him as she had done with so many wounded creatures. She wasn’t pleased anymore; she felt terrible. Why did I hurt him? I didn’t want to hurt him, she thought. I can’t bring him back to the cave. Iza would know right away he was hit with a stone; she’s seen too many animals killed with a sling.
The child stared at the wounded animal. I can’t ever hunt, she realized. Even if I killed an animal, I could never bring it back to the cave. What good is all this practicing with a sling? If Creb is mad at me now, what would he do if he knew? What would Brun do? I’m not even supposed to touch a weapon, much less use one. Would Brun make me go away? Ayla was overcome with guilt and fear. Where would I go? I can’t leave Iza and Creb and Uba. Who would take care of me? I don’t want to leave, she thought, bursting into tears.
I’ve been bad. I’ve been so bad, and Creb is so mad at me. I love him, I don’t want him to hate me. Oh, why is he so mad at me? Tears streamed down the unhappy girl’s face. She lay down on the ground, sobbing her misery. When she had cried herself out, she sat up and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, her shoulders shaking with renewed sobs every now and then. I won’t be bad anymore, ever. Oh, I’ll be so good. I’ll do whatever Broud wants, no matter what. And I won’t ever touch a sling again. To emphasize her conviction, she threw the sling under a bush, raced to get her basket, and started down to the cave. Iza had been looking for her and saw her returning.
“Where have you been? You’ve been gone all morning and your basket is empty.”
“I’ve been thinking, mother,” Ayla motioned, looking at Iza with earnest seriousness. “You were right, I’ve been bad. I won’t be bad anymore. I will do everything Broud wants me to. And I will behave the way I should, I won’t run or anything. Do you think Creb will ever love me again, if I’m very, very good?”
“I’m sure he will, Ayla,” Iza replied, patting her gently. She’s had that sickness again, the one that makes her eyes water when she thinks Creb doesn’t love her, the woman thought, looking at Ayla’s tear-streaked face and red swollen eyes. Her heart ached for the girl. It’s just harder for her, her kind are different. But perhaps it will be better now.
11
The change in Ayla was unbelievable. She was a different person. She was contrite, she was docile, she raced to do Broud’s bidding. The men were convinced it was brought about by his tightened discipline. They nodded their heads knowingly. She was living proof of what they had always maintained: if men were too lenient, women became lazy and insolent. Women needed the firm guidance of a strong hand. They were weak, willful creatures, unable to exert the self-control of men. They wanted men to command them, to keep them under control, so they would be productive members of the clan and contribute to its survival.
It didn’t matter that Ayla was only a girl or that she was not truly Clan. She was nearly old enough to be a woman, already taller than most, and she was female. The women felt the effects as the men took their own ideas to heart. The men of the clan didn’t want to be guilty of leniency.
But Broud took the male philosophy to heart with a vengeance. Though he clamped down harder on Oga, it was nothing to the assault he launched on Ayla. If he had been hard on her before, he was doubly hard on her now. He kept after her constantly, hounded her, harassed her, sought her out with every kind of insignificant task to make her jump to his demands, cuffed her at the least infraction, or at no infraction—and he enjoyed it. She had threatened his manhood and now she was going to pay. Too often had she resisted him; too often had she defied him; too often had he fought to keep from hitting her. Now it was his turn. He had bent her to his will and he was going to keep her there.
Ayla did everything she could to please him. She even tried to anticipate his wants, but that backfired when he reprimanded her for assuming she could know what he wanted. The moment she stepped outside the boundaries of Creb’s hearth, he was ready, and she could not stay within the stones that marked off the magician’s private domain without reason. It was the last busy time of the season, with the final preparations for winter; there were just too many things that needed to be done to secure the clan from the fast-approaching cold. Iza’s stock of medicine was essentially complete, so there was little excuse for Ayla to leave the environs of the cave. Broud ran her ragged all day, and at night she collapsed in bed exhausted.
Iza was sure Ayla’s change of heart had less to do with Broud than he imagined. It was her love for Creb more than her fear of Broud. Iza told the old man Ayla had suffered from her unique sickness again when she thought he didn’t love her.
“You know she went too far, Iza. I had to do something. If Broud hadn’t begun disciplining her again, Brun would have. That could have been worse. Broud can only make her life miserable; Brun can make her leave,” he replied, but it gave the magician cause to wonder about the power of love having more force than the power of fear, and the theme occupied his thoughts during his meditations for days. Creb softened toward her almost immediately. It had been all he could do to maintain his indifferent aloofness from the beginning.
The first light siftings of snow were washed away by frigid downpours that changed to sleet or freezing rain with the cooling temperatures of evening. Morning found puddles crusted with thin shattery ice, portending a deeper cold, only to melt again when the capricious wind blew from the south and an irresolute sun decided to press its authority. All during the indecisive transition from late fall to early winter, Ayla never faltered in her proper feminine obedience. She acquiesced to Broud’s every whim, jumped at his every demand, bowed her head submissively, controlled the way she walked, never laughed or even smiled, and was totally unresisting—but it wasn’t easy. And though she struggled against it, tried to convince herself she was wrong, forced herself to be even more docile, she began to chafe under the yoke.
She lost weight, lost her appetite, was quiet and subdued even within Creb’s hearth. Not even Uba could make her smile, though she often picked the baby up the moment she returned to the hearth at night and hel
d her until they both fell asleep. Iza worried about her, and when a day of bright sunshine followed one of freezing rain, she decided it was time to give Ayla a little respite before the winter closed in on them completely.
“Ayla,” Iza said loudly as they stepped outside the cave before Broud could make his first demand. “I was checking my medicines and I don’t have any snowberry stems for stomachaches. It’s easy to identify. It’s a bush covered with white berries that stay on after the leaves have fallen.”
Iza neglected to mention that she had many other remedies in stock for stomachaches. Broud frowned as Ayla raced into the cave for her collecting basket. But he knew that gathering Iza’s magic plants was more important than getting him a drink of water, or tea, or a piece of meat, or the fur skins he purposely forgot to wrap around his legs as leggings, or his hood, or an apple, or two stones from the stream to crack nuts because he didn’t like the stones near the cave, or any of the other inconsequential tasks he might think of for her to do. He stalked away when Ayla emerged from the cave with her basket and digging stick.
Ayla ran into the forest grateful to Iza for the chance to be alone. She glanced around her as she walked, but her mind wasn’t on snowberry bushes. She didn’t pay any attention to her direction and didn’t notice when her feet began to take her along a small creek to a mist-veiled mossy falls. Without thinking, she headed up the steep incline and found herself at her high mountain meadow above the cave. She had not been back since wounding the porcupine.
She sat on the bank near the creek, throwing stones into the water absentmindedly. It was cold. The previous day’s rain had been snow at the higher elevation. A thick blanket of white covered the open ground and patches between the snow-dusted trees. The still air glowed with a clarity that matched the sparkling snow reflecting, with untold millions of tiny crystals, the brilliant sun in a sky so blue it was almost purple. But Ayla couldn’t see the serene beauty of the early winter landscape. It only reminded her that soon the cold would force the clan into the cave and she would not be able to get away from Broud again until spring. As the sun rose higher in the sky, sudden showers of snow fell from branches and plopped to the ground beneath.
The long cold winter loomed bleakly ahead with Broud hounding her day in and day out. I just can’t satisfy him, she thought. It doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try, nothing helps. What else can I do? She happened to glance at a patch of bare ground and saw a partially rotted pelt and a few scattered quills, all that remained of the porcupine. A hyena probably found him, she thought—or a wolverine. With a twinge of guilt, she thought about the day she hit it. I should never have taught myself to use a sling, it was wrong. Creb would be angry, and Broud … Broud wouldn’t be angry, he’d be glad if he ever found out. It would really give him an excuse to beat me. Wouldn’t he just love to know. Well, he doesn’t and he won’t. It gave her a feeling of pleasure to know she had done something he didn’t know about that would give him a reason to get after her. She felt like doing something, like slinging a stone to work out her frustrated rebellion.
She remembered throwing her sling under a bush and looked for it. She spied the piece of leather under a nearby bush and picked it up. It was damp, but exposure to the weather hadn’t damaged it yet. She pulled the smooth supple deerskin through her hands, liking the way it felt. She recalled the first time she picked up a sling, and a smile crossed her face when she thought about Broud quailing before Brun’s anger for knocking Zoug down. She wasn’t the only one who had ever provoked Broud’s rage.
Only with me, he can get away with it, Ayla thought bitterly. Just because I’m female. Brun was really angry when he hit Zoug, but he can hit me anytime he feels like it and Brun wouldn’t care. No, that’s not really true, she admitted to herself. Iza said Brun dragged Broud away to make him stop beating me, and Broud doesn’t hit me as much when Brun’s around. I wouldn’t even care if he just hit me, if he would just leave me alone sometimes.
She had been picking up pebbles and throwing them into the creek and found she had fitted one into the sling without thinking. She smiled, sighted a last withered leaf dangling from the end of a small branch, aimed, and hurled. A warm feeling of satisfaction came over her as she saw the stone tear the leaf off the tree. She picked up a few more pebbles, got up and walked to the middle of the field, and hurled them. I can still hit what I want to, she thought, then frowned. What good does that do? I never even tried to hit anything that was moving; the porcupine doesn’t count, it had almost stopped. I don’t even know if I could, and if I did learn to hunt, really hunt, what good would it do? I couldn’t bring anything back; all I’d do is make it easy for some wolf or hyena or wolverine, and they steal enough from us as it is.
Hunting and the animals that were killed were so important to the clan they had to be constantly on their guard against competing predators. Not only did large cats or wolf packs or hyenas sometimes snatch an animal from the hunters, but skulking hyenas or sneaky wolverines were always around when meat was drying, or they were trying to break into caches. Ayla rejected the idea of helping the competitors to survive.
Brun wouldn’t even let me bring a wolf cub into the cave when it was hurt, and lots of times hunters kill them even if we don’t need their pelts. The meat eaters are always giving us trouble. That thought stayed in her mind. Then another idea began to take shape. Meat eaters, she thought, meat eaters can be killed with a sling, except for the biggest ones. I remember Zoug telling Vorn. He said sometimes it’s better to use a sling, then you don’t have to get so close.
Ayla recalled the day Zoug was extolling the virtues of the weapon with which he was most proficient. It was true that with a sling a hunter didn’t have to get as close to sharp fangs or claws; but he didn’t mention that if the hunter missed, he could be subject to attack from a wolf or lynx without another weapon to back him up, though he did stress it would be unwise to attempt it on anything larger.
What if I hunted only meat eaters? We never eat them, so it wouldn’t be wasting, she thought, even if they would be left for carrion eaters to finish off. The hunters do it.
What am I thinking? Ayla shook her head to banish the shameful thought from her mind. I’m female, I’m not supposed to hunt, I’m not even supposed to touch a weapon. But I do know how to use a sling! Even if I’m not supposed to, she thought defiantly. It would help. If I killed a wolverine or a fox or anything, it couldn’t steal our meat anymore. And those ugly hyenas. I might even get one of those someday, think what a help that would be. Ayla imagined herself stalking the wily predators.
She had been practicing with the sling all summer, and though it was only a game, she understood and respected any weapon enough to know its real purpose was game—not target practice, but hunting. She sensed that the excitement of hitting posts or marks on rocks or branches would soon pall without further challenge. And even if it were possible, the challenge of competition for the sake of competition was a concept that would not take hold until the earth was tamed by civilizations that no longer needed to hunt for survival. Competition within the Clan was for the purpose of sharpening survival skills.
Though she couldn’t define it as such, part of her bitterness was caused by giving up the skill she had developed and was ready to expand. She had enjoyed stretching her capacities, training her coordination of hand and eye, and she was proud that she had taught herself. She was ready for the bigger challenge, the challenge of the hunt, but she needed a rationalization.
From the beginning, while she was just playing, she visualized herself hunting and the pleased and surprised looks of the clan when she brought home the meat she had killed. The porcupine made her realize how impossible such a daydream was. She could never bring back a kill and have her prowess recognized. She was female, and females of the Clan did not hunt. The idea of killing the clan’s competitors gave her a vague feeling that her skill would be appreciated, if not acknowledged. And it gave her a reason to hunt.
The more she thought about it, the more she convinced herself that hunting carnivores, even if secretly, was the answer, though she couldn’t quite overcome her feelings of guilt.
She struggled with her conscience. Creb and Iza had both told her how wrong it was for females to touch weapons. But I’ve already done more than touch a weapon, she thought. Can it be so much worse to hunt with it? She looked at the sling in her hand and suddenly made up her mind, fighting down her sense of wrongdoing.
“I will! I will do it! I will learn to hunt! But I will only kill meat eaters.” She said it emphatically, making the gestures to add finality to her decision. Flushed with excitement, she ran to the creek to look for more stones.
While searching for smooth round pebbles of just the right size, her eye was caught by a peculiar object. It looked like a stone, but it looked like the shell of a mollusc that might be found at the seashore, too. She picked it up and examined it carefully. It was a stone, a stone shaped like a shell.
What a strange stone, she thought. I’ve never seen a stone like this before. Then she remembered something Creb had told her and had a flash of insight so overwhelming, she felt her blood drain and a chill crawl down her spine. Her knees were so weak and she was shaking so hard, she had to sit down. Cupping the fossil cast of a gastropod in her hands, she stared at it intently.
Creb said, she remembered, when you have a decision to make your totem will help you. If it’s the right decision, he will give you a sign. Creb said it would be something very unusual, and no one else can tell you if it’s a sign. You have to learn to listen with your heart and your mind, and the spirit of your totem inside you will tell you.
“Great Cave Lion, is this a sign from you?” She used the formal silent language for addressing her totem. “Are you telling me I made the right decision? Are you telling me it’s all right for me to hunt, even if I am a girl?”