When the dizziness passed, she decided to clean herself and then get some wood, but she didn’t know what to do with the baby. She was torn between taking him with her or letting him sleep where he was. Women of the Clan never left babies untended, they were always within sight of some woman, and Ayla hated the thought of leaving him alone. But she had to clean herself and get more water, and she could carry more wood without him.
She peeked out through the bare-limbed bushes to make sure no one was near, then pushed the branches aside and left the cave. The ground was soggy; near the creek it was a slippery mire of mud. Patches of snow still lingered in shaded nooks. Shivering in the brisk wind that blew from the east pushing more rain clouds before it, Ayla stripped and stepped into the cold creek to rinse herself, then sponged her wraps. The clammy damp leather did little to warm her when she put them back on.
She walked to the woods that surrounded the high pasture and tugged at some of the lower dried branches of a fir tree. A whirling vertigo overwhelmed her, her knees buckled, and she reached for a tree to steady herself. Her head was pounding; she swallowed hard to keep from retching as her weakness engulfed her. All thoughts of hunting or gathering food left her. The depleting pregnancy, the ravaging delivery, and the grueling climb all had taken their toll—she had little strength left.
The baby was crying when she got back to the cave. It was cool and damp and he missed her warm closeness. She picked him up and held him, then remembered the waterbag she had left by the creek. She had to have water. She put her son down and dragged herself out of the cave again. It was starting to rain. When she returned, she sunk down, exhausted, and pulled the damp heavy fur over them. She was too tired to notice the sharp edges of fear nicking away at the corners of her mind as sleep overwhelmed her.
“Didn’t I tell you she was insolent and willful?” Broud gestured self-righteously. “Did anyone believe me? No. They took her side, made excuses, let her have her way, even let her hunt. I don’t care how strong her totem is, women are not supposed to hunt. The Cave Lion didn’t lead her to it, it was just defiance. See what happens when you give a woman too much freedom? See what happens when you’re too lenient? Now she thinks she can force her deformed son into the clan. No one can make excuses for her this time. She deliberately disobeyed the customs of the Clan. It’s inexcusable.”
At last Broud had been vindicated and he gloried in his chance to say “I told you so.” He rubbed it in with a vengeance that made the leader wince. Brun didn’t like losing face and the son of his mate didn’t make it any easier.
“You’ve made your point, Broud,” he signaled. “There’s no need to keep on about it. I’ll take care of her when she comes back. No woman has ever forced me to do anything against my will and gotten away with it, and no woman will start now.
“When we search again tomorrow morning,” Brun said, going on to the reason he called the meeting, “I think we should look at places we seldom go. Iza said Ayla knew of a small cave. Has anyone ever seen a small cave nearby? It can’t be too far, she was too weak to get very far. Let’s forget about the steppes or the forest and search where caves are likely to be. With this rain her trail has been washed away, but there might be a footprint left. Whatever it takes, I want her found.”
Iza waited anxiously for Brun’s meeting to end. She had been trying to work up courage to speak to him and decided the time was now. When she saw the men leave, she walked to his hearth with bowed head and sat at his feet.
“What do you want, Iza?” Brun asked after tapping her shoulder.
“This unworthy woman would speak to the leader,” Iza began.
“You may speak.”
“This woman was wrong not to come to the leader when she learned what the young woman planned to do.” Iza forgot to use the formal form of address as her emotions overcame her: “But Brun, she wanted a baby so much. No one thought she would ever conceive life, least of all her. How could the Spirit of the Cave Lion be overcome? She was so happy about it. Even though she suffered, she never complained. She almost died giving birth, Brun. Only the thought that her baby would die gave her strength at the end. She just couldn’t bear to give him up, even if he was deformed. She was sure it was the only baby she would ever have. She was out of her head from the shock and the pain, she wasn’t thinking straight. I know I have no right to ask, Brun, but I beg you to let her live.”
“Why didn’t you come to me before, Iza? If you thought begging for her life would do any good now, why didn’t you come to me then? Have I been so unkind to her? I was not blind to her suffering. A man can avert his eyes to avoid looking into another man’s hearth, but he cannot close his ears. There is not a person in this clan who does not know the pain Ayla suffered to give birth to her son. Do you think me so hardhearted, Iza? If you had come to me, told me how she felt, what she planned to do, don’t you think I would have considered allowing her baby to live? I could have overlooked her threat to run and hide as the ravings of a woman out of her head. I would have examined the child. Even without a mate, if the deformity is not too gross, I might have allowed it. But you gave me no opportunity. You assumed to know what I would do. That’s not like you, Iza.
“I have never known you to be derelict in your duty. You have always been an example for the other women. I can only blame your behavior on your illness. I know how sick you are, though you try to hide it. I respected your wishes and made no mention of it, but I was sure you were ready to walk in the world of the spirits last autumn. I was well aware Ayla believed this was her one chance to have a child. I suspect she is right. Yet, I saw her put all thoughts of herself aside when you were ill, Iza, and she pulled you through. I don’t know how she did it. Maybe it was Mog-ur who placated the spirits that wanted you to join them and convinced them to allow you to stay, but it wasn’t Mog-ur alone.
“I was ready to grant his request and allow her to become medicine woman. I had come to respect her as much as I once respected you. She has been an admirable woman, a model of dutiful obedience, in spite of the son of my mate. Yes, Iza, I am aware of Broud’s harsh treatment of her. Even her one lapse early last summer was provoked by him in some way, though I don’t fully understand how. It is unworthy of him to pit himself against a woman the way he does; Broud is a very brave and strong hunter and has no reason to feel his manhood is threatened by any female. But perhaps he did see something I overlooked. Perhaps he’s right, I have been blind to her. Iza, if you had come to me before, I might have considered your request, I might have let her son live. It is too late now. When she returns on her child’s naming day, both Ayla and her son will die.”
The next day Ayla tried to make a fire. There were still a few sticks of dry wood left from her previous stay. She twirled a stick between her palms against another piece of wood, but she didn’t have the endurance to maintain the sustained effort required to make it smolder, and it was fortunate for her that she couldn’t. Droog and Crug found their way to the mountain meadow while she and the baby slept. They would have smelled a fire or the remains of one and found her. As it was, they walked so close to the cave that if the baby had whimpered in his sleep, they would have heard. But the entrance to the small hole in the rock wall was so well hidden by the thick old stand of hazelnut bushes, they didn’t notice it.
But fortune smiled on her even more. The spring rains dripping sullenly from a leaden sky, turning the bank of the small creek into a sink of mud, and the ground of the meadow into a sodden marsh, and casting a pall over her spirits, washed away all traces of her. So expert were the hunters at tracking, they could identify the individual footprints of each member of the clan, and their sharp eyes would easily have seen broken-off shoots or disturbed earth from dug-up bulbs or roots if she had gathered any food. Her very weakness saved her from discovery.
When Ayla went out later and saw the men’s footprints in the mud near the spring that gave rise to the creek, where they had stopped for a drink of water, her heart nearly stopp
ed. It made her afraid to go outside. She started at every gust that shook the brush fronting her cave, and strained to hear imagined sounds.
The food she had brought with her was nearly gone. She searched through the baskets she had made to store food during the long, lonely stay of her temporary death curse. All she found were some dried nuts, rotten, and the droppings of small rodents, evidence that her store had been found and long since eaten. She found the rotten, dried remains of the surplus of food Iza had given her when she used the cave as shelter during her woman’s curse—totally inedible.
Then she remembered the cache of dried deer meat in the stone pit at the back of the cave, from the deer she killed for a warm wrap. Ayla found the small mound of rocks and moved them. The preserved meat in the cache was undisturbed, but the easing of her tensions was shortlived. The branches at the mouth of the cave moved, and Ayla’s heart raced.
“Uba!” she gestured with shocked surprise as the girl entered the cave. “How did you find me?”
“I followed you the day you left. I was so afraid something would happen to you. I brought you some food and some tea to make your milk flow. Mother made it.”
“Does Iza know where I am?”
“No. She knows I do, though. I don’t think she wants to know or she’ll have to tell Brun. Oh, Ayla, Brun is so mad at you. The men have been searching for you every day.”
“I saw their footprints by the spring, but they didn’t see the cave.”
“Broud is bragging about how he knew all along how bad you were. I’ve hardly seen Creb at all since you left. He spends all day in the place of the spirits, and mother is so upset. She wants me to tell you not to come back,” Uba said, her eyes wide with fear for the young woman.
“If she hasn’t talked to you about me, how could Iza give you a message for me?” Ayla asked.
“She cooked extra last night and this morning, too. Not too much—I think she was afraid Creb would guess it was for you—but she didn’t eat her share. Later she made the tea, then she started moaning and talking to herself like she was grieving for you, she’s been grieving for you ever since you left, but she was looking right at me. She kept saying, ‘If only someone could tell Ayla not to come back. My poor child, my poor daughter, she has no food, she’s weak. She needs to make milk for her baby,’ and things like that. Then she left the hearth. This waterbag was right next to the tea and the food was all wrapped.
“She must have seen me go when I followed you,” Uba continued. “I wondered why she didn’t scold me for being gone so long. Brun and Creb are both mad at her for not telling that you were going to hide. If they knew she had some idea how to find you and didn’t tell them, I don’t know what they’d do to her. But no one has asked me. No one pays much attention to children anyway, especially girls. Ayla, I know I should tell Creb where you are, but I don’t want Brun to curse you, I don’t want you to die.”
Ayla could feel her heart beating in her ears. What have I done? She hadn’t realized the extent of her weakness or how difficult it would be to survive alone with a small baby when she threatened to leave the clan. She had counted on going back on her baby’s naming day. What am I going to do now? She picked up her baby and held him close. But I couldn’t let you die, could I?
Uba looked sympathetically at the young mother who seemed to have forgotten she was there. “Ayla,” she said tentatively. “Could I see him? I never did get a chance to see your baby.
“Oh, Uba, of course you can see him,” she motioned, feeling bad that she had been ignoring the girl after she came all the way to bring Iza’s message. She could get into trouble for it, too. If it was ever found out that Uba knew how to find Ayla and didn’t tell, her punishment would be severe. It could ruin her life.
“Would you like to hold him?”
“Could I?”
Ayla put the baby in her lap. Uba started to move aside his swaddling, then looked up at Ayla for permission. The mother nodded.
“He doesn’t look so bad, Ayla. He’s not crippled like Creb. He’s kind of skinny, but it’s mostly his head that looks different. Not as different as you, though. You don’t look like anyone else in the clan.”
“That’s because I wasn’t born to the Clan. Iza found me when I was a little girl. She says I was born to the Others. I’m Clan now, though,” Ayla said proudly, then her face dropped. “But not for long.”
“Do you ever miss your mother? I mean your real mother, not Iza?” the girl asked.
“I don’t remember any mother except Iza. I don’t remember anything before I came to live with the clan.” She suddenly blanched. “Uba, where will I go if I can’t go back? Who will I live with? I’ll never see Iza again, or Creb either. This is the last time I’ll ever see you. But I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t let my baby die.”
“I don’t know, Ayla. Mother says Brun will lose face if you make him accept your son, that’s why he’s so mad. She says if a woman makes a man do something, the other men won’t respect him anymore. Even if he curses you afterward, he’ll lose face, just because you forced him to do something against his will. I don’t want you to go away, Ayla, but you’ll die if you come back.”
The young woman looked at the stricken face of the girl, not realizing her own tear-streaked face held a similar expression. They both reached out to each other simultaneously.
“You’d better go, Uba, before you get in trouble,” Ayla said. The girl gave the baby back to his mother and got up to leave. “Uba,” Ayla called as the girl started to move the branches aside. “I’m glad you came to see me, just so I could talk to you once more. And tell Iza … tell my mother I love her.” Tears were flowing again. “Tell Creb, too.”
“I will, Ayla.” The girl lingered for a moment longer. “I am going now,” she said and quickly left the cave.
After Uba left, Ayla unwrapped the package of food she had brought. There wasn’t much, but with the dried venison, it would last a few days, but what then? She couldn’t think, her mind whirled in a maelstrom of confusion sucking her into a black hole of utter despair. Her plan had backfired. Not only her baby’s life, but her own was in jeopardy. She ate, without tasting, and drank some tea, then lay down with her infant again, and slipped into the oblivion of sleep. Her body had its own needs, it demanded rest.
It was night when she woke again and drank the last of the cold tea. She decided to get more water while it was dark and there was no chance of being seen by searching men. She fumbled in the dark for the waterbag, and in a moment of panic lost her sense of direction in the stark blackness of the cave. The branches camouflaging the entrance, outlined eerily by a darkness not quite as black, reoriented her, and she quickly scrambled out.
A crescent moon, playing tag with racing clouds, shed little light, but her eyes, fully dilated by the black inside the cave, could see ghostly trees vaguely silhouetted in the dim glow. The whispering water of the spring, splashing over rocks in a miniature waterfall, reflected the shining sliver with a faint iridescence. Ayla was still weak, but she didn’t get dizzy when she stood up anymore and walking was easier.
No men of the clan saw her as she bent near the spring under the concealing cover of darkness, but she was watched by other eyes more used to seeing by moonlight. Nocturnal prowlers and their night-feeding prey both drank from the same source as she. Ayla had never been so vulnerable since she wandered alone as a naked five-year-old child—not so much because of her weakness, but because she wasn’t thinking in terms of survival. She wasn’t on guard; her thoughts were turned inward. She would have been easy prey to any lurking predator drawn by the rich smells. But Ayla had made her presence felt before. Swift stones, not always lethal, but painful, had left their mark. Carnivores whose territory included the cave tended to shy away from it. It gave her an edge, a safety factor, a reserve of security from which she drew heavily now.
“There has to be some sign of her,” Brun gestured angrily. “If she took food, it can’t last forever;
she’s got to come out of hiding soon. I want every place that’s been searched, searched again. If she’s dead, I want to know it. Some scavenger would find her and there would be evidence of it. I want her found before the naming day. I will go to no Clan Gathering unless she’s found.”
“Now she’s going to keep us from going to the Clan Gathering,” Broud sneered. “Why was she ever accepted into the clan in the first place? She’s not even Clan. If I were leader, I would never have accepted her. If I were leader, I wouldn’t have let Iza keep her, I wouldn’t even have let Iza pick her up. Why couldn’t anyone else see her for what she is? This is not the first time she’s been disobedient, you know. She has always flaunted the ways of the Clan, and gotten away with it. Did anyone stop her from bringing animals into the cave? Did anyone stop her from going off alone like no good Clan woman would think of doing? No wonder she spied on us when we were practicing. And what happened when she got caught using a sling? A temporary death curse, and when she got back, she was allowed to hunt! Imagine, a woman of the Clan hunting. Do you know what the other clans would think of that? It’s not surprising we’re not going to the Clan Gathering. Is it any wonder she’d think she could force her son on us?”
“Broud, we’ve all heard that before,” Brun motioned wearily. “Her disobedience will not go unpunished, I promise you.”
Broud’s constant harping on the same theme was not only wearing on Brun’s nerves, it was making an impression. The leader was beginning to question his own judgment, judgment that had to be based on adherence to long-standing traditions and customs that allowed little room for deviation. Yet, as Broud kept reminding him, Ayla had gotten away with a gradually worsening list of transgressions that did seem to lead to this unforgivable, deliberate act of defiance. He had been too generous with the outsider not born with an inherent sense of Clan rightness, too lenient with her. She took advantage of him. Broud was right, he should have been more strict, he should have made her conform, perhaps he never should have allowed the medicine woman to pick her up, but did the son of his mate have to keep on about it?