by Jean M. Auel
Ayla worked constantly over Iza, trying every medicine and treatment she could think of. She hovered over her, afraid to leave her side, afraid the woman would slip away while she was gone. She was not the only one who maintained a vigil that night.
Only the young children slept. At every hearth in the darkened cave, men and women stared at the red coals of banked fires, or lay on furs with open eyes.
The sky outside was overcast, blotting out the stars. The darkness inside the cave faded into a deeper black at the wide entrance, shrouding any hint of life beyond the dying embers of the cave fire. In the still of early morning, when the night was full into its somber depths, Ayla jerked her head up from a momentary doze.
«Ayla,» Iza said again in a hoarse whisper.
«What is it, Iza?» she motioned. The medicine woman's eyes reflected the dim light of the ruddy charcoal in the fireplace.
«I want to say something before I go,» Iza gestured, then dropped her hands. It was an effort for her to move them.
«Don't try to talk, mother. Just rest. You'll be stronger in the morning.»
«No, child, I must say it now. I won't last until morning.»
«Yes, you will. You have to. You can't go,» Ayla signaled.
«Ayla, I'm going, you have to accept it. Let me finish, I don't have much longer.»
Iza rested again, while Ayla waited in mute hopelessness.
«Ayla, I always loved you best. I don't know why, but it's true. I wanted to keep you with me, wanted you to stay with the clan. But soon I'll be gone. Creb will find his way to the spirit world before long, and Brun is getting old, too. Then Broud will be leader. Ayla, you cannot stay here when Broud is the leader. He will find a way to hurt you.» Iza rested again, closing her eyes and fighting for breath and strength to continue.
«Ayla, my daughter, my strange willful child who always tried so hard, I trained you to be a medicine woman so you would have enough status to stay with the clan, even if you never found a mate. But you are a woman, you need a mate, a man of your own.
You are not Clan, Ayla. You were born to the Others, you belong with them. You must leave, child, find your own kind.»
«Leave?» she motioned, confused. «Where would I go, Iza? I don't know any Others, I wouldn't even know where to look for them.»
«There are many to the north of here, Ayla, on the mainland beyond the peninsula.
My mother told me the man her mother healed came from the north.» Iza stopped again, then forced herself to go on. «You cannot stay here, Ayla. Go and find them, my child.
Find your own people, find your own mate.»
Iza's hands dropped suddenly and her eyes closed. Her breathing was shallow.
She strained to take a deep breath and opened her eyes again.
«Tell Uba I love her, Ayla. But you were my first child, the daughter of my heart.
Always loved you…loved you best…» Iza's breath expired with a bubbling sigh. She did not take another.
«Iza! Iza!» Ayla screamed. «Mother, don't go, don't leave me! Oh, mother, don't go.»
Uba woke at Ayla's wail and ran to them. «Mother! Oh, no! My mother is gone! My mother is gone.»
The girl and the young woman stared at each other.
«She told me to tell you she loved you, Uba,» Ayla said. Her eyes were dry, the shock still hadn't fully registered in her brain. Creb shuffled toward them. He was already out of his cave before Ayla screamed. With a heaving sob, Ayla groped for them both, and they all found themselves clasped in a grieving embrace of mutual despair. Ayla's tears wet them all. Uba and Creb had no tears, but their pain was not less.
26
«Oga, will you feed Durc again?»
The one-armed man's gesture was plain to the young woman despite the squirming baby he held. Ayla should feed him, she thought. It's not good for her to go so long without nursing him. The tragedy of Iza's death and his confusion over Ayla's reaction were both apparent in Mog-ur's expression. She could not refuse the pleading magician.
«Of course I will,» Oga said, and took Durc in her arms. Creb hobbled back to his hearth. He saw Ayla still had not moved, though Ebra and Uka had taken Iza's body away to prepare it for burial. Her hair was disheveled and her face still smudged with travel grime and tears. She wore the same stained and dirty wrap she had worn during their long trek back from the Clan Gathering. Creb had put her son in her lap when he cried to be fed, but she was blind and deaf to his needs. Another woman would have understood that even deep grief could, eventually, be penetrated by a baby's cries. But Creb had little experience with mothers and babies. He knew women often fed each other's children, and he couldn't let the baby go hungry as long as there were other women who could nurse him. He had taken Durc to Aga and Ika, but their youngest were close to being weaned and they had only a limited supply of milk. Grev was only a little more than a year old and Oga always seemed to have plenty, so Creb had brought Durc to her several times.
Ayla didn't feel the ache of her hard and caking unsuckled breasts; the ache in her heart was greater.
Mog-ur picked up his staff and limped toward the back of the cave. Rocks had been brought in and piled in a heap in an unused corner of the large cavern, and a shallow trench scooped out of the dirt floor. Iza had been a first-ranked medicine woman. Not only her position in the clan hierarchy, but her intimacy with the spirits dictated a burial place within the cave. It guaranteed that the protective spirits that watched over her would linger near her clan, and she herself could look in on them from her home in the next world. And it assured that no scavenger would scatter her bones.
The magician sprinkled red ochre dust inside the oval of the trench, then made his one-handed gestures. After he consecrated the ground where Iza would be buried, he hobbled over to a lumpy shape draped loosely with a soft leather hide. He pulled the cover back to reveal the gray naked body of the medicine woman. Her arms and legs had been flexed and tied into a fetal position with red-dyed sinew. The magician made a protective gesture, then lowered himself down and began to rub the cold flesh with a salve of red ochre and cave bear fat. Bent into a fetal position and covered with the red that resembled the blood of birth, Iza would be delivered into the next world the same way she had arrived in this one.
Never had it been more difficult for him to perform this task. Iza had been more than sibling to Creb. She knew him better than anyone. She knew the pain he had endured without complaint, the shame he had suffered because of his affliction. She understood his gentleness, his sensitivity, and she rejoiced for his greatness, his power, and his will to overcome. She had cooked for him, cared for him, soothed his aches. With her he had known the joys of family life almost like an ordinary man. Though he had never touched her as intimately as he did then, rubbing her cold body with salve, she had been more «mate» to him than many men had. Her death devastated him.
When he returned to his hearth, Creb's face was as gray as the body had been.
Ayla still sat next to Iza's bed staring blankly into space, but she stirred when Creb began to rummage through Iza's belongings.
«What are you doing?» she motioned, protective of anything that was Iza's.
«I'm looking for Iza's bowls and things. The tools she used in this life should be buried with her so she has the spirit of them in the next world,» Creb explained.
«I'll get them,» Ayla said, pushing Creb aside. She gathered together the wooden bowls and bone cups Iza had used to make her medicines and measure dosage, the round hand stone and flat stone base used for crushing and grinding, her personal eating dishes, a few implements, and her medicine bag, and put them on Iza's bed. Then she stared at the meager pile that represented Iza's life and work.
«Those are not Iza's tools!» Ayla gestured angrily, then jumped up and ran out of the cave. Creb watched her go, then shook his head and began to gather up Iza's tools.
Ayla crossed the stream and ran to a meadow where she and Iza had gone before.
She s
topped at a stand of colorful hollyhocks on long graceful stems and gathered an armful of different hues. Then she picked the many-petaled, daisy-like yarrow used for poultices and pain. She ran through the meadows and woods collecting more plants Iza had used in making her healing magic: white-leafed thistle with round, pale yellow flowers and yellow spikes; large, brilliant yellow groundsels; grape hyacinths, so blue they were almost black.
Every one of the plants she picked had found their way into Iza's pharmacopoeia at some time, but she selected only those that were also beautiful, with colorful, sweetsmelling flowers. Ayla was crying again as she stopped on the edge of a meadow with her flowers, remembering the times she and Iza had walked together gathering plants.
Her arms were so full, she had trouble carrying them without her collecting basket.
Several blossoms dropped and she knelt down to pick them up again and saw the tangled branches of a woody horsetail with its small flowers, and almost smiled at the idea that occurred to her.
She searched in a fold, pulled out a knife, and cut a branch of the plant. In the warm sun of early fall, Ayla sat at the edge of the meadow twining the stems of the beautiful blossoms in between and around the supporting network until the entire branch was a riot of color. The whole clan was astonished when Ayla marched into the cave with her floral wreath. She went straight to the back of the cave and laid it beside the body of the medicine woman resting on its side in the shallow trench within an oval of stones.
«These were Iza's tools!» Ayla gestured defiantly, daring anyone to dispute her.
The old magician nodded. She's right, he thought. Those were Iza's tools, those were what she knew, what she worked with all her life. She might be happy to have them in the world of the spirits. I wonder, do flowers grow there?
Iza's tools, the implements and the flowers, were put in the grave with the woman, and the clan began to pile the stones around and on top of her body while Mog-ur made motions that asked the Spirit of Great Ursus and her Saiga Antelope totem to guide Iza's spirit safely to the next world.
«Wait!» Ayla suddenly interrupted. «I forgot something.» She ran back to the hearth and searched for her medicine bag, and carefully withdrew the two halves of the ancient medicine bowl. She rushed back, then laid the pieces in the grave beside Iza's body.
«I thought she might want to take it with her, now that it can't be used anymore.» Mog-ur nodded approval. It was fitting, more fitting than anyone knew; then he resumed his formal gestures. After the last stone had been piled on, the women of the clan began to lay wood around and on top of the stone cairn. An ember from the cave fire was used to start the cooking fire for Iza's burial feast. The food was cooked on top of her grave, and the fire would be kept burning for seven days. The heat from the bonfire would drive all the moisture from the body, desiccating it, mummifying it, and rendering it odorless.
As the flames took hold, Mog-ur began a last, eloquent lament in motions that stirred the soul of every member of the clan. He spoke to the world of the spirits of their love for the medicine woman who had cared for them, watched over them, helped them through sickness and pain as mysterious to them as death. They were ritual gestures, repeated in essentially the same form for every funeral, and some of the motions were used primarily during the men's ceremonies and were unfamiliar to the women, yet the meaning was conveyed. Though the outward form was conventional, the fervor and conviction and ineffable sorrow of the great holy man imbued the formalized gestures with significance far beyond mere form.
Dry-eyed, Ayla gazed over the dancing fire at the flowing graceful movements of the crippled, one-armed man, feeling the intensity of his emotions as if they were her own. Mog-ur was expressing her pain and she identified with him entirely, as though he had reached inside her and spoke with her brain, felt with her heart. She was not the only one who felt his sorrow as her own. Ebra began to keen her grief, then the other women.
Uba, holding Durc in her arms, felt a high-pitched, wordless wail rise in her throat and with a burst of relief joined in the sympathetic lament. Ayla stared vacantly ahead, sunk too far into the depths of her misery to express it. She couldn't even find the release of tears.
She didn't know how long she stared into the mesmerizing flames with unseeing eyes. Ebra had to shake her before Ayla responded, then she turned blank eyes toward the leader's mate.
«Ayla, have something to eat. This is the last feast we will ever share with Iza.» Ayla took the wooden plate of food, automatically put a piece of meat in her mouth, and almost gagged when she tried to swallow it. Suddenly she jumped up and ran from the cave. Blindly, she stumbled through brush and over rocks. At first her feet started to take her along a familiar route to a high mountain meadow and a small cave that had offered shelter and security before. But she veered away. Ever since she had shown the place to Brun, it didn't seem to be hers anymore, and her last stay held too many painful memories. She climbed instead to the top of the bluff that protected their cave from the north winds screaming down the mountain in winter, and deflected the strong winds of fall.
Buffeted by gusts, Ayla fell to her knees at the top, and there, alone with her unbearable grief, she yielded to her anguish in a plaintive chanting wail as she rocked and rocked to the rhythm of her aching heart. Creb hobbled out of the cave after her, saw her silhouetted against the sunset-painted clouds, and heard the thin, distant moan. As deep as his own grief was, he couldn't understand her rejection of the solace of company in her misery, her withdrawal into herself. His usual perceptiveness was dulled by his own sorrow; he didn't realize she was suffering from more than grief.
Guilt racked her soul. She blamed herself for Iza's death. She had left a sick woman to go to a Clan Gathering; she was a medicine woman who had deserted someone in time of need, someone she loved. She blamed herself for Iza's trek up the mountain to find a root to help her keep the baby she wanted so desperately, resulting in the near-fatal illness that weakened the woman. She felt guilty about the pain she had caused Creb when she unwittingly followed the lights to the small chamber deep in the cave of the mountains far to the east. More than grief and guilt, she was weak from lack of food and suffering from milk fever from her swollen, aching, unsuckled breasts. But even more than that, she was suffering from a depression Iza could have, helped her with, if she had been there. For Ayla was a medicine woman, dedicated to easing pain and saving life, and Iza was her first patient who had died.
What Ayla needed most was her baby. She not only needed to nurse him, she needed the demands of caring for him to bring her back to reality, to make her understand that life goes on. But when she returned to the cave, Durc was asleep beside Uba. Creb had taken him to Oga to feed again. Ayla tossed and turned, unable to sleep, not even realizing that it was fever and pain that kept her awake. Her mind was turned too deeply inward, dwelling on her sorrow and guilt.
She was gone when Creb woke up. She had wandered out of the cave and climbed the bluff again. Creb could see her from a distance and watched her anxiously, but he couldn't see her weakness, or her fever.
«Should I go after her?» Brun asked, as baffled as Creb by Ayla's reaction.
«She seems to want to be alone. Maybe we should let her,» Creb answered.
He worried about her when he could no longer see her, and when she still hadn't returned by evening, he asked Brun to look for her. Creb was sorry he hadn't let Brun go after her sooner when he saw the leader carrying her back to the cave. Grief and depression had taken their toll, weakness and fever had done the rest. Uba and Ebra cared for the clan's medicine woman. She was delirious, alternately shaking with chills and burning with fever. She cried out if her breasts were barely touched.
«She's going to lose her milk,» Ebra said to the girl. «It's too late for Durc to do any good now. The milk is caked, he can't draw it out.»
«But Durc is too young to be weaned. What will happen to him? What will happen to her?» It might not have been too late if Iza had been alive
or if Ayla had been coherent. Even Uba knew there were poultices that might have helped, medicines that might have worked, but she was young and unsure of herself, and Ebra seemed so positive. By the time the fever passed, Ayla's milk had dried up. She could no longer feed her own son.
«I will not have that deformed brat at my hearth, Oga! I will not have him brother to your sons!»
Broud was furious, shaking his fists, and Oga was cowering at his feet.
«But Broud, he's just a baby. He's got to nurse. Aga and Ika don't have enough milk, it wouldn't do any good for them to keep him. I have enough, I've always had too much milk. If he doesn't eat, he'll starve, Broud, he'll die.»
«I don't care if he dies. He should never have been allowed to live in the first place. He will not live at this hearth.»
Oga stopped shaking and stared at the man who was her mate. She didn't really believe he would refuse to let her keep Ayla's baby. She knew he would rant and rave and storm about it, but in the end, she was sure he would allow it. He couldn't be that cruel, he couldn't let a baby starve to death, no matter how much he hated Durc's mother.
«Brood, Ayla saved Brac's life, how can you let her son die?» «Hasn't she gotten enough for saving his life? She was allowed to live, she was even allowed to hunt. I don't owe her anything.»
«She wasn't allowed to live, she was cursed with death. She returned from the world of the spirits because her totem wanted her to, he protected her,» Oga protested.
«If she had been cursed properly, she wouldn't have returned, and she would never have given birth to that brat. If her totem is so strong, why did she lose her milk?
Everyone said her baby would be unlucky. What could be more unlucky than losing his mother's milk? Now you want to bring his bad luck to this hearth. I will not allow it, Oga.
