The Valley of Horses (55 page)

She hadn’t fully realized how constrained her life had been until she tasted freedom. She liked making her own decisions, and she knew nothing of the people she had been born to, nothing before she was adopted by the Clan. She didn’t know how much the Others would want; she only knew there were some things she was not willing to give. Whinney was one of them. She was not going to give up the horse again. She didn’t know if she would be willing to give up hunting, but what if they wouldn’t let her laugh?

There was a bigger question, and though she tried not to recognize it, it made all the others insignificant. What if she did find some Others, and they didn’t want her at all? A clan of Others might not be willing to take in a woman who
insisted upon a horse for companionship, or who wanted to hunt, or to laugh, but what if they rejected her even if she was willing to give up everything? Until she found them, she could hope. But what if she had to live alone all her life?

Such thoughts preyed on her mind from the time the first snows started to melt, and she was relieved that circumstances delayed a decision. She would not take Whinney away from the familiar valley until after she gave birth. She knew horses usually gave birth sometime in spring. The medicine woman in her, who had assisted with enough human deliveries to know it could be anytime, kept a watchful eye on the mare. She didn’t attempt any hunting forays, but she went riding frequently for exercise.

“I think we’ve missed that Mamutoi Camp, Thonolan. We seem to be too far east,” Jondalar said. They were following the trail of a herd of giant deer to replenish supplies that were running low.

“I don’t … Look!” They had suddenly come upon a stag with an eleven-foot rack of palmate antlers. Thonolan pointed to the skittish animal. Wondering if the stag sensed danger, Jondalar expected to hear the deep belling of an alarm, but before the buck could sound a warning, a doe broke and ran right to them. Thonolan hurled the flint-tipped spear, the way he had learned from the Mamutoi, so the wide flat blade would slide in between the ribs. His aim was true; the doe fell almost at their feet.

But before they could claim their kill, they discovered why the buck had been so nervous, and why the doe had all but run into the spear. Tensing, they watched a cave lioness loping toward them. The predator seemed confused by the fallen doe for a moment. She wasn’t accustomed to her prey dropping dead before she attacked. She didn’t hesitate for long. Nosing the deer to make sure it was dead, the lioness got a good hold of the neck with her teeth, and, trailing the doe underneath her body, she started dragging it away.

Thonolan was indignant. “That lioness stole our kill!”

“That lioness was stalking the deer, too, and if she thinks it’s her kill, I’m not going to argue with her.”

“Well, I am.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jondalar snorted. “You’re not going to take a deer away from a cave lioness.”

“I’m not going to give up without trying.”

“Let her have it, Thonolan. We can find another deer,”
Jondalar said, following his brother who had started after the lioness.

“I just want to see where she takes it, I don’t think she’s a pride lioness—the rest would be here on top of that deer by now. I think she’s a nomad, and she’s hauling it off to hide it from other lions. We can see where she takes it. She’ll leave sooner or later, and then we can get some fresh meat for ourselves.”

“I don’t want fresh meat from a cave lion’s kill.”

“It’s not her kill. It’s my kill. That doe still has my spear in her.”

It was useless to argue. They followed the lioness to a blind canyon, littered with rock from the walls. They waited and watched, and, as Thonolan predicted, the lioness left shortly after. He started for the canyon.

“Thonolan, don’t go down there! You don’t know when that lioness will come back.”

“I just want to get my spear, and maybe a little of the meat.” Thonolan made his way over the edge and scrambled down loose rubble into the canyon. Jondalar followed him, reluctantly.

Ayla had become so familiar with the territory east of the valley that she was bored with it, particularly since she wasn’t hunting. It had been gray and rainy for days, and, when a warm sun burned off morning clouds by the time she was ready to ride, she couldn’t stand the thought of covering the same ground again.

After she fastened on traveling baskets and travois poles, she led the horse down the steep path and around the shorter wall. She decided to head down the long valley rather than out on the steppes. At the end, where the stream turned south, she noticed the steep gravelly slope she had climbed before to look toward the west, but she thought the footing was too unsure for the horse. It did encourage her, however, to ride farther to see if she could find a more accessible exit to the west. As she continued south, she looked around with eager curiosity. She was in new territory, and she wondered why she hadn’t ridden this way before. The high wall was easing into a gentler slope. When she saw a shallow crossing, she turned Whinney and urged her across.

The landscape was the same kind of open grasslands. Only the detail was different, but that made it interesting. She rode until she found herself in somewhat rougher country,
with ragged canyons and abruptly sheared mesas. She was farther than she had planned to go, and, as she approached a canyon, she was thinking she ought to turn back. Then, she heard something that chilled her blood and set her heart racing: the thundering roar of a cave lion—and a human scream.

Ayla stopped, hearing her blood pounding in her ears. It had been so long since she had heard a human sound, yet she knew it was human, and something else. She knew it was her kind of human. She was so stunned that she couldn’t think. The scream pulled at her—it was a cry for help. But she couldn’t face a cave lion, nor expose Whinney to one.

The horse sensed her acute distress and turned toward the canyon, though Ayla’s body-contact signal had been tentative at best. Ayla approached the canyon slowly, then dismounted and looked in. It was blind, only a wall of rubble at the other end. She heard the growling of the cave lion and saw its reddish mane. Then she realized Whinney had not been nervous, and she knew why.

“That’s Baby! Whinney, that’s Baby!”

She ran into the canyon, forgetting there might be other cave lions around and not even considering that Baby was no longer her young companion but a full-grown lion. He was Baby—that was all that mattered. She had no fear of this cave lion. She climbed up some jagged rocks toward him. He turned and snarled at her.

“Stop it, Baby!” she commanded with signal and sound. He paused only a moment, but by then she was beside him and pushing him out of the way so she could see his prey. The woman was too familiar, her attitude too certain for him to resist. He moved aside, as he had always done before when she came upon him with a kill and wanted to save the skin or take a piece of meat for herself. And he wasn’t hungry. He had fed on the giant deer brought by his lioness. He had only attacked to defend his territory—and then he had hesitated. Humans were not prey to him. Their scent was too much like that of the woman who had raised him, a scent of both mother and hunting companion.

There were two of them, Ayla saw. She knelt to examine them. Her main concern was as a medicine woman, but she was astonished and curious as well. She knew they were men, though they were the first men of the Others she could remember seeing. She had not been able to visualize a man,
but the moment she saw these two, she recognized why Oda had said men of the Others looked like her.

She knew immediately that the man with the darker hair was beyond hope. He lay in an unnatural position, his neck broken. The toothmarks on his throat proclaimed the cause. Though she had never seen him before, his death upset her. Tears of grief welled in her eyes. It wasn’t that she loved him, but that she felt she had lost something beyond value before she ever had a chance to appreciate it. She was devastated that the first time she saw someone of her own kind, he was dead.

She wanted to acknowledge his humanity, to honor him with a burial, but a close look at the other man made her realize that it would be impossible. The man with the yellow hair still breathed, but his life was pumping out of him through a gash in his leg. His only hope was to get him back to the cave as quickly as possible so she could treat him. There was no time for a burial.

Baby sniffed the darker-haired man while she worked to staunch the flow of blood out of the other man’s leg with a tourniquet made of her sling and a smooth stone for pressure. She pushed the lion away from the body. I know he’s dead, Baby, but he’s not for you, she thought. The cave lion jumped down from the ledge and went to make sure his deer was still in the cleft in the rock where he had left it. Familiar growls told Ayla he was preparing to feed.

When the pumping blood slowed to a seepage, she whistled for Whinney and then jumped down to set up the travois. Whinney was more nervous now, and Ayla remembered that Baby had a mate. She patted and hugged the horse for reassurance. She examined the sturdy woven mat between the two poles that dragged the ground behind the horse and decided it would hold the man with the yellow hair, but she didn’t know what to do about the other one. She didn’t want to leave him there for the lions.

When she climbed back up, she noticed that the loose rock at the back of the blind canyon looked very unstable—much of it had piled up behind a larger boulder that was none too stable itself. Suddenly, she remembered Iza’s burial. The old medicine woman had been carefully laid in a shallow depression in the floor of the cave, then rocks and boulders had been piled over her. It gave Ayla an idea. She dragged the dead man to the back of the blind canyon near the slide of loose rock.

Baby came back to see what she was doing, his muzzle bloody from the deer. He followed her back to the other man and sniffed at him while Ayla dragged him to the edge of the rock, below which waited the skittish mare and the travois.

“Move out of the way now, Baby!”

As she tried to ease the man down to the travois, his eyelids fluttered and he moaned with pain, then closed his eyes again. She was just as glad he was unconscious. He was heavy, and the struggle to move him would be painful to him. When she finally got him wrapped into the travois, she returned to the stone ledge with a long sturdy spear and went to the rear. She looked down at the dead man and felt sorrow for the fact of his death. Then she leaned the spear against the rock and, with the formal silent motions of the Clan, addressed the world of the spirits.

She had watched Creb, the old Mog-ur, consign the spirits of Iza to the next world with his eloquent flowing movements. She had repeated the same gestures when she found Creb’s body in the cave after the earthquake, though she had never known the full meaning of the holy gestures. That wasn’t important—she knew the intent. Memories rushed back and tears came to her eyes as she moved through the beautiful silent ritual for the unknown stranger, and sent him on his way to the spirit world.

Then, using the spear as a lever, in much the same way as she would have used a digging stick to turn over a log or pry out a root, she prized free the large stone and jumped back out of the way as a cascade of loose rock covered the dead man.

Before the dust settled, she had led Whinney out of the canyon. Ayla got on the horse’s back and began the long return trip to the cave. She stopped a few times to tend to the man, and once to dig fresh comfrey roots, although she was torn between hurrying to get him back and taking it a little easy for Whinney’s sake. She breathed easier when she got the injured man across the stream and around the bend, and saw the jutting rock wall far ahead. But not until she stopped to change the position of the travois poles, just before starting up the narrow path, did she let herself believe she had reached the cave with the man still alive.

She led Whinney into the cave with the travois, then got a fire going to heat water before she untied the unconscious man and dragged him to her sleeping place. She unharnessed
the horse, hugged her with gratitude, then looked over her store of medicinal herbs and selected those she wanted. Before beginning the preparations, she took a deep breath and reached for her amulet.

She couldn’t clarify her thoughts enough to address her totem with a particular plea—she was too filled with inexplicable anxieties and confusing hopes—but she wanted help. She wanted to bring the force of her powerful totem to bear on her efforts to treat this man. She had to save him. She wasn’t exactly sure why, but nothing had ever been more important. Whatever she had to do, this man must not die.

She added wood and checked the temperature of the water in the leather pot which was slung directly over the fire. When she saw steam rise, she added marigold petals to the pot. Then finally she turned to the unconscious man. From the tears in the leather he wore, she knew he had other gashes besides the wound on his right thigh. She needed to take his clothes off, but he was not wearing a wrap tied on with thongs.

When she looked closely to find out how to remove them, she saw that leather and fur had been cut, shaped into pieces, and joined together with cords to encase his arms and legs and body. She examined the joinings carefully. She had cut through his trousers to treat his leg, and she decided that was still the best way. She was more surprised when she cut through his outer garment and found another unlike anything she had ever seen. Bits of shell, bone, animal teeth, and colorful bird feathers had been attached to it in some orderly fashion. Was it a kind of amulet? she wondered. She hated to cut it, but there was no other way to get it off. She did it carefully, trying to follow the pattern to disturb it as little as possible.

Under the decorated garment was another one that covered the lower part of his body. It wrapped around each leg individually and was joined with cord, then came together and tied around his waist like a drawstring pouch, overlapping in front. She cut that off as well, and noted in passing that he was most definitely male. She removed the tourniquet and gently eased the stiff, blood-soaked leather away from the lacerated leg. She had loosened the tourniquet a few times en route, while manually applying pressure to both control the bleeding and allow some circulation in the leg. The use of a tourniquet could mean the loss of the limb if proper measures were not understood and applied.