The Land of Painted Caves (69 page)

She was the one who found the white cave, and he was the first one she showed it to. She knew he was going to paint on those beautiful walls, although he might want some helpers. The three of them went back into the second room of the Bear Cave while the rest went out. The Watcher took them in a shorter way, and she knew where to take him, to the place where he had looked when they first went into this part of the cave. He found the secluded recess, and the ancient concretion he had seen before.

Taking out a flint knife, he went to the basin-topped stalagmite and in its base, in one accomplished movement, he carved the forehead, nose, mouth, jaw, and cheek, then two stronger lines for the mane and back of a horse. He looked at it a moment, then engraved the head of a second horse facing the opposite way on top of the first one. The stone of this one was a little harder to cut through, and the forehead line was not as precise, but he went back and cut individual hairs of a stand-up mane spaced at consistent intervals. Then he stepped back and looked.

“I wanted to add to this cave, but I wasn’t sure if I should until after the First sang the Mother’s Song deep in this cave,” the Zelandoni of the Nineteenth Cave of the Zelandonii said.

“I told you it was the Mother’s choice, and you would know. Now I know. It was appropriate,” the Watcher said.

“It was the right thing to do,” Ayla said. “Perhaps it is time for me to stop calling you Jonokol and start referring to you as the Zelandoni of the Nineteenth.”

“Perhaps in public, but between us I hope I will always be Jonokol and you will be Ayla,” he said.

“I would like that,” Ayla said; then she turned to the Watcher. “In my mind I think of your name as the Watcher, as the one who watches over, but if you don’t mind, I would like to know the name you were born with.”

“I was called Dominica,” she said, “and I will always think of you as Ayla no matter what happens, even if you become the First.”

Ayla shook her head. “That is not likely. I am a foreigner with a strange accent.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dominica said. “We acknowledge the First, even if we don’t know her or him. And I like your accent. I think it makes you stand out, as the One Who Is First should.” Then she led them back out of the cave.

   All that evening Ayla thought about the remarkable cave. There had been so much to see, to take in, it made her wish she could see it again. People were talking that evening about what to do with Gahaynar, and she kept finding her mind straying back to the cave. He appeared to be recovering from the severe beating he had received. Though he would carry the scars for the rest of his life, he seemed to hold no ill feelings toward the people who had done it. If anything, he seemed grateful not only to be alive, but that the zelandonia were taking care of him.

He knew what he had done, even if no one else did; Balderan and the others had died for not much worse. He didn’t know why he had been spared, except that silently, while Balderan was planning how to kill the foreign woman, he had begged the Mother to save him. He knew they would never get away and he didn’t want to die.

“He seems sincere in his wish to make reparations,” Zelandoni First said. “Perhaps because he knows now that he can be made to pay for his actions, but it appears that the Mother has decided to spare him.”

“Does anyone know to which Cave he was born?” the First asked. “Does he have relatives?”

“Yes, he has a mother,” said one of the other Zelandonia. “I don’t know of any other kin, but I think she’s quite old and is losing her memories.”

“That’s the answer then,” said the First. “He should be sent back to his Cave to care for his mother.”

“But how is that reparations? It’s his own mother,” said another Zelandoni.

“It won’t necessarily be easy if she continues to deteriorate, but it will relieve the Cave of having to look after her, and it will give him something worthwhile to do. I don’t think it was something he planned to do as long as he was with Balderan, taking whatever he wanted without having to work for it. He should be made to work, to hunt for himself, or at least assist in communal hunts with his Cave, and to personally help his mother with whatever she needs.”

“I guess that’s not something a man necessarily likes to do, to take care of an old woman,” the other Zelandoni said, “even his own mother.”

Ayla had only been half listening, but she understood the gist of it and thought it was a good plan, and then went back to thinking about the Most Ancient Sacred Site. She finally decided that sometime in the next day or two, she would go back into the cave, alone, or perhaps with Wolf.

   In the late morning the next day Ayla asked Levela if she would watch Jonayla again, and check to see how her meat was drying. She had put out another load of bison meat on the cords and thought this might be a good time to satisfy her desire to see the Most Ancient Sacred Site once more.

“I’m going to take Wolf and go back to the cave. I just want to see it again before we leave. Who knows how soon, if ever, we’ll be back here again.”

She packed several torches and a couple of stone lamps, along with some lichen wicks and some tied-off sections of intestine filled with fat that she put in a double-layered leather pouch. She checked her fire-making kit to make sure she had adequate materials—a firestone and flint, tinder, kindling, and some larger pieces of wood. She filled her waterbag and packed a cup for herself and a bowl for Wolf to drink from. She took her medicine bag with some extra packets of tea, although she doubted that she would make tea inside the cave, her good knife, and some warm clothes for wearing inside the cave, but she didn’t bother with foot coverings. She was used to going barefoot and the soles of her feet were nearly as hard as hooves.

She whistled for Wolf and started walking up the path to the cave. When she reached the large entrance, she glanced at the sheltered corner. There was no fire burning in the fireplace and when she peeked into the sleeping structure, she saw that it was empty. The Watcher wasn’t there this day. Usually she was told when people would be coming to visit the Most Ancient Sacred Site, and Ayla just decided to go without making prior arrangements.

She started a small fire in the fireplace and lit a torch, then holding it high, she started in, signaling Wolf to follow. She was aware again of how large the cave was, and of the disordered nature of the first rooms. Columns detached from the ceiling and tipped over, and huge blocks and fallen rock and rubble were scattered around the floor. The light penetrated into the cave quite a distance and she went in the way they originally had, to the left and straight ahead into the huge room with the bear wallows. Wolf stayed close to her side.

She kept to the right side of the passage, knowing that except for the large right-hand room, which she planned to visit on her way out, there would not be much to see until she was halfway into the cave. She did not plan to stay in the cave too long or to try to see everything again, just certain things. She proceeded into the chamber with the bear hollows and followed the right wall around until she came to the next room at the end of it, then looked for the thick blade-shaped rock that descended from the ceiling.

There it was as she remembered, painted in red, the leopard with the long tail and the hyena-bear. Was it a hyena or was it a bear? Yes, the shape of the head gave it the look of a cave bear, but the muzzle was longer and the tuft on the top of the head along with a bit of a mane looked like the stiff hair of a hyena. None of the other bears in this cave had that slender, long-legged shape—look at the second bear painted above it! I don’t know what the artist was trying to say with this painting, she thought, but it looks to me like it is a painting of a hyena, even though it is the only hyena I have ever seen painted in any cave. But I’ve never seen a leopard, either. There are a bear, a hyena, and a leopard painted in this place, all strong, dangerous animals. I wonder what the Traveling Storytellers would say about this scene?

Ayla passed by the next series of images, looking but not lingering—possible insects, a line of rhinoceroses, lions, horses, mammoths, signs, dots, handprints; she smiled at the red drawing of the little bear, so like the other bears in this cave, but smaller. She recalled that at this point in the cave the Watcher had turned left, then continued to follow the right wall. The next space had evidence of cave bears, and the floor was about five feet lower, which led to the next room, the one with the deep hole in the middle.

This was the room where all the drawings, or engravings, were white because the white surfaces were covered with vermiculite. Of all the white engravings, she particularly noticed the rhinoceros emerging from a crack in the wall and stayed to look at it. Why did the Ancients paint these animals on the walls inside caves? she wondered. Why did Jonokol want to carve a drawing of two horses in that room near the entrance to this cave? His mind wasn’t in any other place when he did it, like all the zelandonia who drank the tea in that Sacred Site of the Seventh Cave of the South Land Zelandonii. The artists probably wouldn’t be capable of creating such remarkable images if they were. They had to think about what they were doing.

Did they make them for themselves or to show others? And what others? The other people of their cave or for the other zelandonia? Some of the larger rooms in certain caves could accommodate many people, and sometimes ceremonies were held in them, but many of the images were made in small caves or very cramped spaces in larger caves. They must have been made for themselves, for their own reasons. Were they looking for something in the spirit world? Perhaps a spirit animal of their own, like her lion totem, or a spirit animal that would bring them closer to the Mother? Whenever she tried to ask Zelandoni, she never got a satisfactory answer. Was that something she was supposed to find out for herself?

Wolf had been staying close, hugging the wall that Ayla was following. She carried the only light in the entire pitch-black cave; although his other senses gave him more information about his surroundings than her single torch, he liked being able to see as well.

The way that she knew she had reached the next section of the cave was the noticeable reduction in the height of the ceiling. There were more mammoths and bison and deer on the walls and pendants, some in white engraving, some in one area drawn in black. This was the room with the cave bear skull on the flat-topped rock, and Ayla walked over to see it again. She stayed awhile, thinking again of Creb and the Clan, before she continued. Banks of gray clay seemed to surround this chamber, which she climbed up to reach the last room, the one the First did not visit. She noticed traces of bear prints on the clay, which she hadn’t seen the first time she was there. Two high steps brought her into the next space.

She found herself in the middle of the room; the ceiling was too low to walk along the sides. She decided it was time to light another torch, then wiped the remains of the first torch on the low ceiling to knock the fire off its small stub. Once she was certain the fire was out, she tucked what was left of the first torch into her backframe. She had to stoop in order to continue along the natural path, and at the base of a pendant she noticed a horizontal row of seven little red dots next to a series of black dots. Finally after another forty feet it was possible to stand erect again.

There were several more black torch marks; other people had evidently used this area to clean their torches. At the back the ceiling slanted down toward the floor. It was covered with a fine yellow coating of softened stone that had broken into vermiculations—little wormlike wavy lines. On this slanted surface the simple outline of a horse had been drawn primarily using two fingers. Because of the way the wall slanted, it was very difficult for the artist to draw, requiring that his or her head be bent backward the whole time, and never being able to get an overall view while the drawing was being worked on. It was slightly out of proportion, but it was the very last drawing in the cave. She noticed a couple of mammoths had also been outlined on the slanting ceiling.

Ayla detected an odor and looked around, then understood that Wolf had passed some solid waste. She smiled. It couldn’t be helped. As she turned around to go back, she wondered if there was a way out of the cave from here, but it was just a random thought. She wasn’t going to look for it. As she walked out closer to the wall, she felt her feet sink into the cold, soft clay floor; Wolf followed after her, walking in the same soft clay. After she climbed down out of this last room, the wall that had been on her right was now on her left. She passed the panel of scraped mammoths, then came to one of the sections she was looking forward to seeing again—the horses painted in black.

She studied the wall more carefully this time. She saw that the soft brown layer had been scraped off a large section of the wall to bring out the white limestone underneath, which included most of the previous engraving of a rhinoceros and a mammoth. The black coloring was charcoal, but because of the way the artist used it, some places were darker and and some lighter to make the horses and other animals look more lifelike. Although the horses were what drew her, they were not the first animals on the panel—aurochs were. And the lions inside the niche made her smile again. That female just wasn’t interested in that young male. She was sitting down and not budging.

Ayla slowly walked the length of the painted wall until she came to the entrance of the long gallery that led to the last room of paintings, and saw the giant deer painted high up on the right. This was also where the hearths to make charcoal were lined up along the wall. The walkway started dropping down. When she made the last big drop and came to the last room, she walked even more slowly. She loved the lions, perhaps because they were her totem, but they were so real. She reached the end and examined the final pendant, the one that looked like a male organ. It had a female vulva painted on it, with human legs, and was part bison and part lion. She felt sure someone had been telling a story there, too. Finally, she turned around and started back and when she reached the beginning of the chamber, she stopped and looked around.