The Land of Painted Caves (39 page)

“If she’ll let you. She has a mind of her own,” the woman said.

The girl held out her arms to her. Jonayla hesitated, but smiled shyly at her, when she moved closer and sat down. Finally Jonayla let go of Zelandoni and crawled to the stranger, who picked her up and put her on her lap.

“What’s her name?”

“Jonayla,” the woman said. “What’s yours?”

“Hollida,” the child replied.

“You seem to like babies,” Zelandoni said.

“My sister has a baby girl, but she went to visit her mate’s family. He comes from a different Cave. I haven’t seen her all summer,” Hollida said.

“And you miss her, don’t you?”

“Yes. I didn’t think I would, but I do.”

Ayla saw the girl as soon as she approached, and noticed the interaction. She smiled to herself, remembering how much she had wanted a baby when she was younger. It made her think about Durc and she realized that he could probably count about the same number of years now as the girl, but in the Clan he would be considered much closer to adulthood than the girl obviously was. He’s growing up, she thought. She knew she would never see her son again, but she couldn’t help thinking about him sometimes.

Jondalar noticed the wistful expression on her face while she was watching the girl play with Jonayla and wondered what was going through her mind. Then Ayla shook her head, smiled, called Wolf to her, and walked toward them. If the girl is going to spend time with Jonayla, Ayla thought, I’d better introduce her to Wolf so she won’t be afraid of him.

After all three adults had unpacked and were settled in, they walked back to the first stone shelter. Hollida was with them, walking with the First. The rest of the children, who had been watching, raced ahead. When the visitors neared the shelter of the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave, several people were in front of the large opening in the stone wall, waiting. Their coming had been announced by the children before they arrived. It also appeared a celebration was planned; several people were cooking at hearths in this one location. Ayla wondered if she should have changed out of her traveling clothes, and worn something more suitable, but neither Jondalar nor the First had changed. Some people emerged from the shelter to the north, and from the ones on the other side of the valley when they passed by. Ayla smiled to herself. It seemed obvious that the children had let the others know they were coming.

The area of the Fifth Cave suddenly made her think of the Third Cave at Two Rivers Rock and Reflection Rock of the Twenty-ninth Cave. Their living areas were spread out on residential terraces, one over another, in commanding walls of cliffs, with protective overhangs to shelter the interior spaces from rain and snow. Here, instead, there were several shelters closer to ground level on both sides of the small stream. But it was the close proximity of the several locations where people lived that made them one Cave. Then it occurred to her that the entire Twenty-ninth Cave was attempting to do the same thing, except that their living places were more widely dispersed. It was their mutual hunting and foraging area that brought them together.

“Greetings!” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said when they neared. “I hope you find your place comfortable. We are going to have a community feast in your honor.”

“It isn’t necessary to go to so much trouble,” the One Who Was First said.

He looked at the First. “You know how it is; people love to have an excuse for a celebration. Your coming is a particularly good excuse. We don’t often have the Zelandoni of the Ninth Cave who is also the One Who Is First as a visitor. Come inside. You said you wanted to show your acolyte our Sacred Places.” He turned to address Ayla. “We live in ours,” he said, as he led them in.

The inside of the stone shelter made Ayla stop short with surprise. It was so colorful. Several of the walls were decorated with paintings of animals, which was not so unusual, but the background of many of them was painted a bright red shade with red ocher. And the renderings of the animals were more than outlines, or drawings; most of them were infilled with color, shaded to bring out the contours and shapes. One wall in particular caught Ayla’s attention. It was a painting of two exquisitely portrayed bison, one of them obviously pregnant.

“I know most people carve or paint the walls of their abris, and may consider the images sacred, but we think of this entire space as sacred,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said.

Jondalar had visited the Fifth Cave several times and had admired the wall paintings of their stone shelters, but he had never thought of them any differently than he did the paintings and engravings inside the shelter of the Ninth Cave, or any other cave or abri. He wasn’t sure if he understood why this shelter should be any more sacred than any other, though it was more highly colored and decorated than most. He just assumed that it was the style that the Fifth Cave preferred, like the ornate tattoos and hair arrangement of their Zelandoni.

The Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave looked at Ayla with the wolf standing alertly at her side, then at Jondalar and the baby, who was tucked contentedly into the crook of the man’s arm, looking around with interest, then at the First. “Since the feast is not yet ready, let me show you around,” he said.

“Yes, that would be nice,” the First said.

They walked out of the shelter and into another one that was immediately to the north. It was essentially a continuation of the first one. And it was also decorated, but in a very different way, which created the sense that they were two different shelters. There were paintings on the walls, like the mammoth that was painted in red and black, but some walls of this cave were deeply engraved and some were both engraved and painted. Other engravings intrigued Ayla. She wasn’t sure what they meant.

She approached a wall to look more closely. There were some cup-like holes, but other oval carvings with a second oval around them and a mark like a hole extended into a line in the middle. She saw a horn core on the ground nearby that had been carved into a shape that appeared to be a man’s organ. She shook her head and looked again, then almost smiled. That was exactly what it was, and when she looked at the oval shapes, it came to her that they might represent female organs.

She turned around and looked at Jondalar and the First, and then the Zelandoni of the Fifth. “Those look like man and woman parts,” she said. “Is that what they are?”

The Fifth smiled and nodded. “This is where our donii-women stay, and often where we have Mother Festivals, and sometimes where we have Rites of First Pleasures. It is also where I have meetings with my acolytes when I am training them, and where they sleep. This is a very Sacred Place,” the Fifth said. “That’s what I meant when I said we live in our Sacred Sites.”

“Do you sleep here, too?” Ayla asked.

“No, I sleep in the first shelter, the other side of this one, near the bison,” he said. “I don’t think it is good for a Zelandoni to spend all his time with his acolytes. They need to be able to relax, away from the restraining eye of their mentor, and I have other things to do and people to see.”

As they walked back to the first part of the shelter, Ayla asked, “Do you know who made your images?”

The question caught him a little off guard. It was not a question usually asked by Zelandonii. The people were accustomed to their art; it had always been there, or they knew the ones who were currently making it, and no one had to ask.

“Not the engravings,” he said after pausing to think for a moment. “They were made by the Ancient Ones, but several of our paintings were made by the woman who first taught Jonokol, when she was younger. The one who was Zelandoni of the Second Cave before the one who is now. She was acknowledged as the finest artist of her time, and she was the one who saw the potential in Jonokol even when he was just a boy. She saw potential in one of our young artists too. She now walks the next world, I am sorry to say.”

“What about the carved horn?” Jondalar queried, indicating the phallus-shaped object, which he had also seen. “Who made that?”

“That was given to the Zelandoni before me, or perhaps the one before him,” the Fifth said. “Some like to have it around during Mother Festivals. I’m not sure, it may have been used as a way to explain the changes in a man’s organ. Or it may have been a part of First Rites, especially for girls who didn’t like men, or were afraid of them.”

Ayla tried not to show it in her expression, it wasn’t for her to say, but she thought it would be uncomfortable, perhaps even painful, to use a hard carved object rather than the warm manhood of a caring man, but then she was used to the tenderness of Jondalar. She glanced at him.

He caught her eye and the facial expression she tried to hide, and smiled reassuringly. He wondered if the Fifth was making up a story because he didn’t really know what the image meant. Jondalar was sure it had been symbolic of something at one time, probably having to do with a Mother Festival since it was an erect male organ, but that its exact meaning probably had been forgotten.

“We can go across the stream and visit our other Sacred Places. Some of us also live in them. I think you may find them interesting, as well,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said.

They walked toward the small stream that divided the valley, and then upstream to where they had crossed before. There were two solid stepping-stones in the middle of the waterway, which they used to get to the other side; then they went back downstream toward the shelter in which they were staying. There were several abris on this side of the stream nestled into the slope of the valley that continued up to a high promontory that dominated the whole region, and served as a good lookout point. They walked to one that was about six hundred feet from where the spring-fed stream flowed into The River.

When they walked under the overhanging stone of the shelter, they were struck immediately by a frieze of five animals: two horses and three bison all facing right. The third figure in particular was a bison about three feet long, deeply incised into the stone wall. Its voluminous body was carved in such strong relief, it was almost a sculpture. Black coloration was used to accentuate the outline. Several other engravings covered the walls: cupules, lines, and animals, most not as deeply carved.

They were introduced to several of the people who were standing around watching them, looking rather proud. They were no doubt pleased to show off their stunning home, and Ayla didn’t blame them. It was very impressive. After she had carefully looked over the engravings, Ayla began to take in the rest of the shelter. It was obvious that quite a few people lived there, though there weren’t very many at the moment. Like all the rest of the Zelandonii, in summer people traveled; visiting, hunting, gathering, and collecting various other materials that they used to make things.

Ayla noticed an area that had been left recently by someone who was working with ivory, judging from the material scattered around. She looked more closely. There were pieces in different stages of production. The tusks first had been scored over and over again to detach rod-shaped sections, and several small rods were stacked together. A couple of rods had been divided into sections of pairs, which were then worked into two round segments attached together. The flattened piece between was pierced just above each round, then scored and cut through to create two beads, which then had to be smoothed into the final form, a rounded basket-shape.

A man and a woman, both middle aged, came and stood beside her as she was hunkered down to look closely; she wouldn’t dream of touching the beads. “These are remarkable—did you make them?” Ayla said.

They both smiled. “Yes, bead-making is my craft,” they said together, then laughed at their inadvertent timing.

Ayla asked how long it took to make the beads, and was told one person would be lucky to complete five or six beads from first light until the sun was high and they stopped for a midday meal. Enough beads for one necklace, depending upon how long it was, took anywhere from several days to a moon or two. They were extremely precious.

“It looks like a difficult craft. Just looking at the various steps it takes makes me appreciate my Matrimonial outfit even more. There are many ivory beads sewn on it,” Ayla said.

“We saw it!” the woman said. “It was beautiful. We went to see it afterward, when Marthona had laid it out on display. The ivory beads were expertly made, by a somewhat different process, I think. The hole seemed to go all the way through the bead, perhaps working from both sides. That is very difficult to do. If you don’t mind my asking, where did you get it?”

“I was a Mamutoi—they live far to the east—and the mate of the leader gave it to me; her name was Nezzie of the Lion Camp. Of course, that was when she thought I was going to mate the son of her brother’s mate. When I changed my mind and decided to leave with Jondalar, she told me to keep it for my mating with him. She was very fond of him, too.” Ayla explained.

“She must have been fond of him, and you,” the man said. He thought, but didn’t say, that the outfit was not only beautiful, it was extremely valuable. To give so much to someone who would take it away meant she must have cared a great deal for the young woman. It made him better understand the status the foreign woman had been accorded, though she was not born a Zelandonii, as her speech certainly attested. “It is without doubt one of the most stunning outfits I have ever seen.”

The Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave added, “They also make beads and necklaces out of seashells from both the Great Western Waters and the Southern Sea, and they carve ivory pendants, and pierce teeth. People especially like to wear fox teeth and those special shiny eye-teeth of deer. Even people from other Caves want their work.”

“I grew up near a sea, far to the east,” Ayla said. “I’d like to see some of your shells.”

The couple—Ayla couldn’t decide if they were mates or sister and brother—brought out bags and containers from where they were stored, and poured them out for display, eager to show their riches. There were hundreds of shells, mostly small, globular mollusks like periwinkles or long shapes such as dentalia that could be sewn onto clothes or strung into necklaces. There were also some scallop shells, but for the most part, the shells were from creatures that were essentially inedible, which meant they had been collected for their decorative value alone, not as food, and from a great distance away. They had either traveled to both seashores themselves, or traded for them from someone who had. The amount of time invested in acquiring items solely for display meant that as a society, the Zelandonii were not living on the edge of survival; they had abundance. According to the customs and practices of their time, they were wealthy.