The Land of Painted Caves (33 page)

“That’s one of the more interesting ideas I’ve heard,” Zelandoni said.

“But we’ll never know for sure, will we?” Jondalar said.

“No, not likely,” the One Who Was First said. “But the guesses people make often tell us something about the one doing the guessing.”

They waited together in silence; then Ayla had an urge to touch the wall between the mammoths. She reached out with her right hand and placed it palm down on the stone, then closed her eyes and held it there. She felt the hardness of the rock, the cold, rather damp sensation of the limestone. And then she thought she felt something else, like an intensity, a concentration, heat—maybe it was her own body heat warming the stone. She took her hand down and looked at it, then shifted her baby into a slightly different position.

They went back to the main passageway and headed north, with lamps for light now instead of torches. Zelandoni continued using her voice, sometimes humming, sometimes expressing greater tonal qualities, stopping when she thought there was something she wanted them to see. Ayla was particularly fascinated by the mammoth that had lines indicating fur hanging below, but that also had marks, perhaps bear claw marks, scratching through it. She was intrigued by the rhinoceroses. When they got to a place where the song in the large cave grew more resonant, Zelandoni stopped again.

“We have a choice here of which way to go,” she said. “I think we should go straight first, then turn around and come back to here and take the left passage for a while. Then turn around and go back the way we’ve come, and out of the cave. Or we can just take the left way, and then return.”

“I think you should decide,” Ayla said.

“I think Ayla’s right. You have a better sense of the distance, and you know how tired you are,” Jondalar said.

“I am a little tired, but I may never come here again,” Zelandoni said, “and tomorrow I can rest, either in camp, or with a horse dragging me on that seat thing you made. We’ll go straight ahead until we find the next place that could lead us closer to the Mother’s Sacred Underworld.”

“I think this whole cave is close to Her Underworld,” Ayla said, feeling a tingling sensation in the hand that had touched stone.

“You are right, of course, which is why it’s more difficult to find the special places,” the First said.

“I think this cave could take us all the way to the Other World, even if it’s in the middle of the earth,” Jondalar said.

“It is true that this cave is much larger and there is much more to see than we will in this one day. We won’t go into the caves below at all,” Zelandoni said.

“Has anyone ever gotten lost in here?” Jondalar said. “I should think it would be easy enough.”

“I don’t know. Whenever we come here, we always make sure we have someone with us who is familiar with the cave and knows the way,” she said. “Speaking of familiar, I think this is where we usually replenish the fuel in the lamps.”

Jondalar got out the fat again and after the woman added some to the stone bowls, she checked the wicks and pulled them out of the oil and up a little higher, making them burn brighter. Before they started out again, she said, “It helps to find which way to go if you can make sounds that resonate, that make a sort of echo. Some people use flutes, so I think your bird whistling should work, Ayla. Why don’t you try it.”

Ayla felt a little shy about it and wasn’t sure which bird to choose. Finally she decided on a skylark and thought about the bird with its dark wings and long tail framed in white, with bold streaks on its breast and a small crest on its head. Skylarks walked rather than hopped and roosted on the ground in well-hidden nests made of grass. When flushed out, a skylark warbled a rather liquid
chirrup
, but its early morning song was sustained for a long time as it flew high up in the sky. That was the sound she produced.

In the absolute dark of the deep cave, her perfect rendering of the song of a skylark had an eerie incongruity, a strangely inappropriate haunting quality that caused Jondalar to jerk with a shudder. Zelandoni tried to hide it, but she also felt an unexpected quiver. Wolf felt it, too, and didn’t even try to hide it. His astonishing howl of wolfsong reverberated throughout the massive enclosed space, and that set Jonayla off. She began to cry, but Ayla soon understood it wasn’t so much a cry of fear or distress as a loud wail that sounded like an accompaniment to Wolf.

“I knew he belonged to the zelandonia,” the First said, then decided to join in with her rich operatic voice.

Jondalar just stood there, astonished. When the sounds ended, he laughed rather tentatively, but then Zelandoni also laughed, which brought out his hearty animated laughter that Ayla loved and caused her to join in.

“I don’t think this cave has heard so much noise in a long time,” said the One Who Was First. “It should please the Mother.”

As they started out again, Ayla displayed a virtuosity of bird calls, and before very long, she thought she detected a change in the resonance. She stopped to look at the walls, first right, then on the left, and saw a frieze of three rhinoceroses. The animals were only outlined in black, but the figures contained a sense of volume and an accuracy of contour that made them remarkably realistic. It was the same with the animals that were engraved. Some of the animals she had seen, especially the mammoths, were drawn with just an outline of the head and the distinctive shape of the back, some added two curved lines for tusks, and others were remarkably complete, showing eyes and a suggestion of their woolly coats. But even without the tusks and other additions, the outlines were sufficient to display the sense of the complete animal.

The drawings made her wonder if the quality of her whistles, and Zelandoni’s songs, had really changed in certain regions of the cave, and if some Ancestor had heard or felt the same qualities there, and marked them with mammoths and rhinos and other things. It was fascinating to imagine that the cave itself told people where it should be marked. Or was it the Mother Who was telling Her children through the medium of the cave where to look and where to mark? It made her wonder if the sounds they made really led them to places that were closer to the Mother’s Underworld. It seemed that they did, but in a small corner of her mind, she had reservations and only wondered.

As they set out again, Ayla continued her bird whistles. Somewhat farther along, she wasn’t sure, but felt almost compelled to stop. She didn’t see anything at first, but after taking a few more steps she looked on the left side of the broad cave. There she saw a rather remarkable engraved mammoth. It must have been in its full shaggy winter coat. It showed the hair on its forehead, around the eyes and on the face, and down the trunk.

“He looks like a wise old man,” Ayla said.

“He’s called the ‘Old One,’ ” Zelandoni said, “or sometimes the ‘Wise Old One.’ ”

“He does make me think of an old man who can claim many children to his hearth, and their children, and perhaps theirs,” Jondalar said.

Zelandoni started singing again, returning to the opposite wall, and came to more mammoths, many of them, painted in black. “Can you use the counting words and tell me how many mammoths you see?” she said to both Jondalar and Ayla.

They both walked close to the cave wall, holding out their lamps to see better, and made a game of counting out the number word for each one they saw. “There are some facing left, and others facing right,” Jondalar said, “and there are two in the middle facing each other again.”

“It looks like those two leaders that we saw before have met again and brought some of their herd with them,” Ayla said. “I count eleven of them.”

“That’s what I got, too,” Jondalar said.

“That’s what most people count,” Zelandoni said. “There are a few more animals to see if we continue this way, but they are much farther on, and I don’t think we need to visit them this time. Let’s go back and take that other passage. I think you’ll be quite surprised.”

They returned to the place where the two tunnels diverged, and Zelandoni led them into the other one. She hummed or sang softly as they went. They passed by more animals, mostly mammoths, but also a bison, perhaps a lion, Ayla thought, and she noticed more finger markings, some in distinctive shapes; others seemed more random. Suddenly the First raised the tone and timbre of her voice, and slowed her steps. Then she began the familiar words of the Mother’s Song.

Out of the darkness, the chaos of time
,

The whirlwind gave birth to the Mother sublime
.

She woke to Herself knowing life had great worth
,

The dark empty void grieved the Great Mother Earth
.

The Mother was lonely. She was the only
.

From the dust of Her birth She created the other
,

A pale shining friend, a companion, a brother
.

They grew up together, learned to love and to care
,

And when She was ready, they decided to pair
.

Around Her he’d hover. Her pale shining lover
.

Her full, rich voice seemed to fill the entire space and depth of the great cave. Ayla was so moved, she not only felt shivers, she felt her throat constricting and tears forming.

The dark empty void and the vast barren Earth
,

With anticipation, awaited the birth
.

Life drank from Her blood, it breathed from Her bones
.

It split Her skin open and sundered Her stones
.

The Mother was giving. Another was living
.

Her gushing birth waters filled rivers and seas
,

And flooded the land, giving rise to the trees
.

From each precious drop new grass and leaves grew
,

And lush verdant plants made all the Earth new
.

Her waters were flowing. New green was growing
.

In violent labor spewing fire and strife
,

She struggled in pain to give birth to new life
.

Her dried clotted blood turned to red-ochered soil
,

But the radiant child made it all worth the toil
.

The Mother’s great joy. A bright shining boy
.

Mountains rose up spouting flames from their crests
,

She nurtured Her son from Her mountainous breasts
.

He suckled so hard, the sparks flew so high
,

The Mother’s hot milk laid a path through the sky
.

His life had begun. She nourished Her son
.

He laughed and he played, and he grew big and bright
.

He lit up the darkness, the Mother’s delight
.

She lavished Her love, he grew bright and strong
,

But soon he matured, not a child for long
.

Her son was near grown. His mind was his own
.

The deep cave seemed to be singing back to the One Who Was First, the rounded shapes and sharp angles of the stone causing slight delays and altering tones so that the sound coming back to their ears was a fugue of strangely beautiful harmony.

For all that her full-bodied voice filled the space with sound, there was something comforting about it to Ayla. She didn’t hear every word, every sound—some verses just made her think more deeply about the meaning—but she had the feeling that if she were ever lost, she could hear that voice from almost anywhere. She watched Jonayla, who seemed to be listening hard too. Jondalar and Wolf both seemed to be as enraptured by the sound as she was. As the singing continued, Ayla was lulled into feeling the story but not really hearing every word, until Zelandoni came to the verse that Ayla loved best.

The Great Mother lived with the pain in Her heart
,

That She and Her son were forever apart
.

She ached for the child that had been denied
,

So She quickened once more from the life force inside
.

She was not reconciled. To the loss of Her child
.

Ayla always cried at this part. She knew what it was like to lose a son and felt as one with the Great Mother. Like Doni, she also had a son who still lived, but from whom she would be forever apart. She hugged Jonayla to her. She was grateful for her new child, but she would always miss her first one.

With a thunderous roar Her stones split asunder
,

And from the great cave that opened deep under
,

She birthed once again from Her cavernous room
,

And brought forth the Children of Earth from Her womb
.

From the Mother forlorn, more children were born
.

Each child was different, some were large and some small
,

Some could walk and some fly, some could swim and some crawl
.