by Jean M. Auel
She stirred it until the fluid in the ancient, sacred bowl turned a watery white, then she passed it to Goov.
The acolytes had waited while she worked at the roots, each holding a bowl of long-steeped datura tea. Goov handed the bowl of white liquid Ayla gave him to Mog-ur, then picked up his bowl and gave it to Ayla as the other apprentice magicians gave theirs to the medicine women of their clans. An exchange in kind and value. The Mog-ur took a sip of the liquid.
«It's strong,» the holy man motioned in guarded gestures to Goov. «Give less.»
Goov nodded and took the bowl, then walked to the mog-ur who was second.
Ayla and the medicine women carried their bowls to the waiting women and gave controlled amounts of the liquid to them and the older girls. Ayla drained the last dregs from her bowl, but she was already feeling a strange sense of distance, as though a part of her was detached and watching from some other place. Several of the older medicine women took up the wooden drums and began to beat out the rhythms of the women's dance. Ayla watched the moving sticks with intense fascination, each beat sounding precise and clear. The medicine woman of Norg's clan offered a bowl drum to her. She listened to the rhythm, tapping lightly, then found herself playing along.
Time lost all meaning. When she looked up, the men were gone and the women gyrating with a wildly free, erotic frenzy. She felt an urge to join them, put the drum down, and watched it fall over and spin a few times before it stopped. Her attention was diverted by the bowl shape of the instrument. It reminded her of. Iza's bowl, the precious ancient relic entrusted to her care. She remembered staring into the white, watery liquid, her finger stirring it round and round. Where is Iza's bowl? she thought. What happened to it? She dwelled on the bowl, worried over it, became obsessed with it.
She had an image of Iza and tears came to her eyes. Iza's bowl. I've lost Iza's bowl. Her beautiful ancient bowl. Passed on by her mother, and her mother's mother, and her mother's mother's mother. In her mind she saw Iza, and another Iza behind her, and another and another; medicine woman after medicine woman lined up behind Iza into an ancient misty past, each holding a venerable, white-stained bowl. The women faded, and her mind's eye zoomed in on the bowl. Then, suddenly, the bowl cracked, fell away in two parts, broken down the center. No! No! The scream was inside her mind. She was frantic. Iza's bowl, I've got to find Iza's bowl.
She stumbled away from the women and staggered toward the cave. It took forever. She scrambled through bone platters and wooden bowls holding the remains of the feast congealed in them, searching for the treasured container. The cave entrance drew her, dimly outlined by torches within, and she stumbled toward it. Suddenly her way was blocked. She was trapped, caught in the meshes of some coarse, hairy creature.
She looked up and gasped. A monstrous face with a huge, open mouth stared down at her. Ayla backed away, then ran toward the beckoning cave.
As she passed through the entrance, her eye was caught by something white near the place where she had waited for Mog-ur's signal. She fell to her knees and carefully picked up Iza's bowl, cradling it in her arms. Milky fluid still sloshed around the softened root pulp in the bottom. They didn't drink it all, she thought. I made too much: I must have made too much. What will I do with it? I can't throw it away, Iza said it can't be thrown away. That's why she couldn't show me, that's why I made too much, because she couldn't show me. I made it wrong. What if someone finds out? They might think I'm not a real medicine woman. Not a woman of the Clan. They might make us leave. What should I do? What should I do?
I'll drink it! That's what I'll do. If I drink it, no one will know. Ayla held the bowl to her lips and drained it. The mysterious drink was strong to begin with, but the roots soaking in the small amount of liquid made it far more potent. She started into the second cave with the vague idea of putting the bowl in a safe place, but before she reached her hearth, she began to feel the effects.
Ayla was so disoriented, she didn't notice dropping the bowl on the ground just within the hearth's boundary stones. There was a taste in her mouth of ancient, primordial forest: rich damp loam, musty rotted wood, towering large-leafed trees wet with rain, huge fleshy mushrooms. The walls of the cave expanded, receding farther and farther away. She felt like an insect crawling along the ground. Minute details sprang into sharp focus. Her eyes traced the outline of a footprint, saw every small pebble, each grain of dust. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and watched a spider climbing a shining cable of silk glistening in the light of a torch.
The flame hypnotized her. She stared at the flickering, dancing light and watched black smoke curling up to the dark ceiling. She moved closer to the torch, then saw another one. She followed its beckoning flame, but when she reached it, another torch beckoned, and then another, drawing her ever deeper into the cave. She didn't notice when the fires of torches became the fires of small stone lamps spaced far apart, and she wasn't noticed when she passed by a large interior room full of men lost in a deep trance or the smaller room that held adolescent boys led by older acolytes in a ceremony that gave them a taste of the adult male experience.
With single-minded purpose, she walked toward each tiny flame, only to be drawn to the next one. The lights led her through narrow passages that opened into larger rooms, then narrowed again. She stumbled on the uneven floor, groping for the damp rocky wall spinning around her. She turned into a passage and at the far end saw a large, rosy glow. It was incredibly long; it went on and on forever. Often, she seemed to see herself from a great distance staggering along the dimly lit tunnel. She felt her mind drawn farther into the distance, into a deep black void, but she quailed before the immensity of nothingness and struggled to retreat from it.
Finally, she neared the light at the end of the tunnel and saw several figures seated in a circle. From some well of caution buried deep in her drug-clouded mind, she stopped short of the last mesmerizing flames and hid behind a stone pillar. In their lighted chamber, the ten mog-urs were deeply involved in a ritual. They had begun the ceremony that included all the men of the Clan, but left their acolytes to conclude it and retreated to the inner sanctum alone to conduct rites too secret even for acolytes.
Each man, cloaked in his bearskin, sat behind the skull of a cave bear. Other skulls adorned niches in the walls. In the middle of their circle was a hairy object Ayla couldn't identify at first. But when she did, only her drug-induced stupor kept her from crying out. It was the severed head of Gorn.
She watched with fascinated horror as the mog-ur of Norg's clan reached for the head, turned it over, and with a stone enlarged the foramen magnum, the great opening of the spinal column. The pink-gray jellied mass of Gorn's brain lay exposed. The magician made silent gestures over the head, then reached into the opening with his hand and tore out a piece of the soft tissue. He held the quivering mass in his hand while the next mogur reached for the head. Even in her stupor, Ayla felt a deep revulsion, but she was held spellbound as each magician dipped into the grisly head and withdrew a portion of the brain of the man who had been killed by the cave bear.
A whirling, spinning vertigo brought Ayla to the brink of the deep emptiness. She swallowed to keep from being sick. Desperately, she clung to the edge of the void, but when she saw the great holy men of the Clan move their hands to their mouths and eat Gorn's brain, she let go. The act of cannibalism drove her into an abyss of black space.
She screamed soundlessly, unable to hear herself. She was unable to see, unable to feel, devoid of any sensations, but she knew it. She hadn't escaped into a mindblanking sleep. The void had another quality, a terrifying, empty quality. Fear, allencompassing fear, gripped her. She struggled to return, screamed silently for help, but was only drawn deeper. She sensed movement she could not sense as, faster and faster, she fell into the deep black infinity, into the endless cold void.
Suddenly, her motionless motion slowed. She felt a tickling sensation inside her brain, inside her mind, and a counterpull that s
lowly drew her back over the edge, out of the infinite hole. She sensed emotions alien to her, emotions not her own. Strongest was love, but mixed in was deep anger and great fear, and then, a hint of curiosity. With a shock, she realized Mog-ur was inside her head. In her mind, she felt his thoughts, with her emotions, his feelings. There was a distinctly physical quality to it, a sense of crowding without its unpleasantness, more like a touching that was closer than physical touching.
The mind-altering roots from Iza's red bag accentuated a natural tendency of the Clan. Instinct had evolved, in Clan people, into memory. But memory, taken far enough back, became identical, became racial memory. The racial memories of the Clan were the same; and with perceptions sensitized, they could share their identical memories. The trained mog-urs had developed their natural tendency with conscious effort. They were all capable of some control over the shared memories, but The Mog-ur was born with a unique ability.
Not only could he share the memories, and control them, he could keep the link intact as their thoughts moved through time from the past to the present. The men of his clan enjoyed a richer, fuller ceremonial interrelationship than any other clan. But with the trained minds of the mog-urs, he could make the telepathic link from the beginning.
Through him, all the mog-urs shared a union far closer and more satisfying than any physical one-it was a touching of spirits. The white liquid from Iza's bowl that had heightened the perceptions and opened the minds of the magicians to The Mog-ur, had allowed his special ability to create a symbiosis with Ayla's mind as well.
The traumatic birth that damaged the brain of the disfigured man had impaired only a portion of his physical abilities, not the sensitive psychic overdevelopment that enabled his great power. But the crippled man was the ultimate end-product of his kind.
Only in him had nature taken the course set for the Clan to its fullest extreme. There could be no further development without radical change, and their characteristics were no longer adaptable. Like the huge creature they venerated, and many others that shared their environment, they were incapable of surviving radical change.
The race of men with social conscience enough to care for their weak and wounded, with spiritual awareness enough to bury their dead and venerate their great totem, the race of men with great brains but no frontal lobes, who made no great strides forward, who made almost no progress in nearly a hundred thousand years, was doomed to go the way of the woolly mammoth and the great cave bear. They didn't know it, but their days on earth were numbered, they were doomed to extinction. In Creb, they had reached the end of their line.
Ayla felt a sensation akin to the deep pulsing of a foreign bloodstream superimposed on her own. The powerful mind of the great magician was exploring her alien convolutions, trying to find a way to mesh. The fit was imperfect, but he found channels of similarity, and where none existed, he groped for alternatives and made connections where there were only tendencies. With startling clarity, she suddenly comprehended that it was he who had brought her out of the void; but more, he was keeping the other mog-urs, also linked with him, from knowing she was there. She could just barely sense his connection with them, but she could not sense them at all. They, too, knew he had made a connection with someone-or something-else, but never dreamed it was Ayla.
And just as she understood Mog-ur had saved her and was still protecting her, she knew the profound sense of reverence with which the magicians had indulged in the cannibalistic act that had so revolted her. She hadn't realized, she had no way of knowing, that it was a communion. The reason for the Gathering of the clans was to bind them together, to make them Clan. But Clan was more than the ten clans here. They all knew of clans that lived too far away to travel to this meeting; they went to Clan Gatherings closer to their own caves. They were still Clan. All Clan people shared a common heritage, and remembered it, and any ritual performed at any one Gathering had the same significance for all. The magicians believed they were making a beneficial contribution to the Clan. They were absorbing the courage of the young man who was journeying with the Spirit of Ursus. And since they were mog-urs, with special abilities within their brains, it was they who were capable of dispersing the courage to all.
That was the reason for Mog-ur's anger, and his fear. By long tradition, only men were allowed to share in the ceremonies of the Clan. The consequences of a woman viewing even an ordinary ceremony held by a single clan meant that the clan was doomed. This was no ordinary ceremony. This was a ceremony of great significance for the whole Clan. Ayla was a woman; her presence could mean only one thing- irreversible, irredeemable misfortune and calamity to them all.
And she was not even a woman of the Clan. Mog-ur knew that now with a surety he could no longer deny. From the moment he became aware of her presence, he knew she was not Clan. He understood, as quickly, the consequences of her presence, but it was already too late. They were implacable and he knew that, too. But her crime was so great, he wasn't sure what to do about her; even a death curse was not enough. Before he decided, he wanted to know more about her, and through her, more about the Others.
He was surprised he felt her cry for help. The Others were different, but there had to be similarities, too. He felt he needed to know for the sake of the Clan, and he had a curiosity greater than normal for his kind. She had always intrigued him; he wanted to know what made her different. He decided to try an experiment.
Forcing his way into deeper recesses, the powerful holy man-controlling the nine brains that matched his and willingly acquiesced and, separately, another that was similar and yet different-took them all back to their beginnings.
Ayla tasted the primordial forest again, then felt it turn to warm salt. Her impressions were not as clear as the rest-it was new to her, this feeling of being and remembering the dawn of life, and her memories of it were subconscious and vague. But her innermost, earliest levels matched. The beginnings were the same, Mog-ur thought.
She felt the individuality of her own cells and knew when they split and differentiated in the warm, nurturing waters still carried within her. They grew and split and diverged, and motion had purpose. Again a divergence and soft pulsations of life became hard and gave shape and form.
Another divergence, and she knew the pain of the first explosion of air breathed by creatures in a new element. Diverge, and rich loamy earth and the green of a young verdancy and burrowing to escape crushing monsters. Diverge, and security in reaching a limb across a chasm, and suddenly heat and dryness, and drought driving her back to the edge of the sea. Diverge, and traces of a missing link lost in the sea that enlarged her form and stripped her fur and changed her contours-and left cousins behind to revert to an earlier, more streamlined shape, but still airbreathing and milk-nursing.
And now, she walked upright on two hind legs, leaving forelegs free to manipulate, and eyes to see a farther horizon, and the beginnings of a forebrain. She was veering away from Mog-ur, starting a different path, yet not so far apart that he couldn't track it with his own, almost parallel one. He broke contact with the others, but they were far enough along to continue their own way. It was nearly time to break it anyway.
Just the two of them remained linked, the old man of the Clan and the young woman of the Others. He was no longer guiding, but he still tracked, and not only did he track her course, she tracked his. She saw land change from warmth to ice, even deeper and more bone-chilling than the ice of their own times. It was a land far away in space as well as time, far to the west, she sensed, not far from a great sea many times larger than the sea that surrounded their peninsula.
She saw a cave, the home of some ancestor of the great magician, an ancestor who looked much like him. It was a hazy picture, seen across the chasm that separated their races. The cave was in a steep wall that faced a river and a flat plain. At the top of the cliff, a large boulder stood out distinctly. It was a long, slightly flattened column of rock that tilted over the edge, as though caught in the act of falling and f
rozen in place.
The stone was from a different location, of a different material, an erratic, moved by raging waters and shifting earth until it lodged at the edge of the cliff that housed the cave. The picture wavered, but the memory of it stayed with her.
For a moment she felt an overwhelming sorrow. Then she was alone. Mog-ur could follow no more. She found her own way back to herself, and then a little beyond.
She had a fleeting glimpse of the cave again, followed by a confusing kaleidoscope of landscapes, laid out not with the randomness of nature, but in regular patterns. Boxlike structures reared up from the earth and long ribbons of stone spread out, along which strange animals crawled at great speeds; huge birds flew without flapping their wings.
Then more scenes, so strange she couldn't comprehend them. It happened in an instant. In her rush to reach the present, there was a slight overshoot, a small spike beyond her time, just to where she might have diverged again. Then her mind was clear, and she looked out from behind a pillar at ten men seated in a circle.
The Mog-ur was looking at her, and she saw in his deep brown eye the sorrow she had felt. He had forged indelible new paths in her brain, paths that let her glimpse ahead, but he could not forge new paths in his own. While she looked beyond, he caught a glimpse, not of the future, but of a sense of future. A future that was hers, but not his. He grasped the concept imperfectly, but he understood the potential of it, and quailed before it.
Creb could make almost no abstractions. He could count, only with great effort, to just beyond twenty. He could make no quantum leaps, no intuitive strokes of genius. His mind, he knew, was more powerful than hers by far; more intelligent perhaps. But his genius was of a different nature. He could identify with his beginnings, and hers. He could remember more and better than any of his own ancient Clan. He could even force her to remember. But in her, he sensed the youth, the vitality of a newer form. She had diverged again, and he had not.
