Earth's Children [02] The Valley of Horses
Page 56
Ayla did not understand what had hurt Creb so deeply, she only knew it had changed him, and their relationship. Nor did she understand the changes he had wrought, but for an instant she felt with utter certainty that she had been sent to the valley for a purpose that included the tall blond man.
As she saw herself and Jondalar on the rocky beach of the remote valley, aberrant currents of light and motion, forming out of a numinous thickening of the air and disappearing into emptiness, surrounded them, joining them. She felt a vague sense of her own destiny as a pivotal nexus of many strands linking past, present, and future through a crucial transition. A deep cold swept over her, she gasped, and, with a startled jerk, she was looking at a furrowed brow and a concerned face. She shuddered to dispel an eerie sense of unreality.
“Are you all right, Ayla?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”
An unaccountable chill had raised gooseflesh and the hair on the back of his neck. He felt a strong urge to protect her, but he didn’t know what threatened. It lasted only an instant, and he tried to shrug it off, but uneasiness lingered.
“I think the weather is about to change,” he said. “I felt a cold wind.” They both looked up at the clear blue sky unmarked by clouds.
“It’s the season for thunderstorms—they can blow up fast.”
He nodded, and then, to grasp at substance, he turned the subject back to the hard practicalities of toolmaking.
“What is your next step, Ayla?”
The woman bent back to her task. With careful concentration, she flaked off five more sharp-edged ovals of flint, and after a final examination of the butt of stone to see if one more usable flake might be detached, she threw it aside.
She turned then to the six flakes of gray flint and picked up the thinnest of them. With a smooth, flattened round stone, she retouched one long sharp edge, blunting it for a back and shaping a point at the narrow end opposite the bulge made by the impact of percussion. When she was satisfied, she held it out to Jondalar in the flat of her palm.
He took it and inspected it carefully. In cross section it was rather thick, but tapered to a thin, sharp cutting edge along its length. It was wide enough to be held in the hand comfortably, and the back was dulled so it would not cut the user. In some ways it resembled a Mamutoi spear point, he thought, but it was never intended to be hafted to shaft or handle. It was a handheld knife, and from observing her using a similar one, he knew it was surprisingly efficient.
Jondalar put it down and nodded to her to continue. She picked up another thick stone flake, and, using the canine tooth of an animal, she chipped off fine splinters from the end of the oval. The process dulled it only slightly, enough to strengthen the edge so the sharp rounded end would not crush when used to scrape hair and grain from hides. Ayla put it down and picked up another piece.
She put a large smooth beach stone on the mammoth-foot-bone anvil. Then, using pressure with the pointed-tooth retoucher against the stone, she made a V-shaped notch in the middle of one long sharp edge, large enough to shave the end of a spear shaft to a point. On a longer oval flake, using a similar technique, she made a tool which could be used to pierce holes in leather, or bore holes in wood, antler, or bone.
Ayla didn’t know what other kinds of tools she might need, and she decided to leave the last two stone flakes as blanks for later. Pushing the mammoth bone out of the way, she gathered up the ends of the hide and carried it to the midden around the wall to shake it out. Splinters of flint were sharp enough to cut even the toughest of bare feet. He hadn’t said anything about her tools, but she noticed Jondalar turning them over and holding them in his hand as though to try them.
“I’d like to use your lap cover,” he said.
She gave it to him, glad her demonstration was over and anticipating his. He spread the leather hide over his lap, then closed his eyes and thought about the stone, and what he would do with it. Then he picked up one of the flint nodules he had brought to the site and inspected it.
The hard siliceous mineral had been torn loose from chalk deposits laid down during the cretaceous period. It still bore traces of its origin in the chalky outer covering, though it had been disgorged with the raging flood through the narrow canyon upstream and flung onto the rocky beach. Flint was the most effective material, occurring naturally, for making tools. It was hard, and yet, due to its minute crystal structure, it could be worked; its shape was limited only by the skill of the knapper.
Jondalar was looking for the distinctive characteristics of chalcedony flint, the purest and clearest. Any stones with cracks or fissures he discarded, as well as those that made a sound when tapped with another stone—indicating, to his ear, flaws or inclusions. He finally selected one.
Supporting it with his thigh, he held it with his left hand, and, with his right, he reached for the hammerstone and juggled it to get the right feel. It was new, still unfamiliar, and each hammerstone had its own individuality. When it felt right, he held the flint firmly, and struck. A large piece of the gray-white cortex fell away. Inside, the flint was a paler shade of gray than the one Ayla had worked, with a bluish sheen. Fine-grained. A good stone. A good sign.
He struck again, and again. Ayla was familiar enough with the process to recognize his expertise immediately. He far surpassed any skill she had. The only one she’d ever seen who could shape the stone with such certain confidence was Droog. But the shape Jondalar was giving to his stone was not like any made by the Clan toolmaker. She bent closer to watch.
Rather than egg-shaped, Jondalar’s core was becoming more cylindrical, but not exactly circular. By flaking pieces from both sides, he was creating a ridge which ran the length of the cylinder. The ridge was still rough and wavy when the cortex was removed, and he put the hammerstone down to pick up a solid length of antler that had been cut off below the first fork to eliminate all branches.
With the antler hammer, he chipped off smaller pieces to make the ridge straight. He was preparing his core also, but he was not planning to remove thick flakes with a predetermined shape—that much was obvious to Ayla. When he was finally satisfied with the ridge, he picked up another implement, one she had been curious about. This was also made from a section of a big antler, longer than the first, and, rather than being cut off below the fork, two branches projected from the central stem, and the bottom of it had been shaped into a point.
Jondalar got up and held the flint core with his foot. Then he placed the point of the forked antler just above the ridge he had so carefully shaped. He held the upper protruding branch so that the lower one faced front and jutted out. Then, with a heavy length of a long bone, he tapped the jutting tine.
A thin blade fell away. It was as long as the cylinder of stone, but only about a sixth as wide as the length. He held it up to the sun and showed it to Ayla. Translucent light filtered through. The ridge he had so carefully shaped ran down the center of the outside face for the full length, and it had two very sharp cutting edges.
With the point of the antler punch placed directly on the flint, he had not had to aim as carefully or gauge distance as closely. The force of the percussion was directed exactly where he wanted it, and with the force of the blow dispersed between two intermediate resilient objects—the bone hammer and the antler punch—there was almost no percussion bulge. The blade was long and narrow, and uniformly thin. Without having to judge the strength of his strike as carefully, he had far more control over the results.
Jondalar’s stone-working technique was a revolutionary improvement, but as important as the blade it produced was the scar it left behind on the core. The ridge he had made was gone. In its place was a long trough with two ridges on either side. That had been the purpose of the careful pre-working. He moved the tip of the punch over so that it was above one of the new ridges, then tapped again with the bone hammer. Another long narrow blade fell off, leaving two more ridges behind. He moved the punch again, above another of the ridges, detached another blade
, and created more ridges.
When he finally ran out of usable material, not six, but twenty-five blades were lined up in a row—more than four times the useful cutting edge from the same amount of stone: more than four times the number of blanks. Long and thin, with surgically sharp edges, the blades were usable as cutting implements as they were, but they were not his finished product. They would be further shaped for a multitude of uses, primarily to make other tools. Depending on the shape and quality of the flint nodule, not four, but up to six or seven times the usable number of blanks for tools could be made from stones of the same size with the more advanced technique. The new method not only gave the toolmaker more control, it gave his people an unparalleled advantage.
Jondalar picked up one of the blades and gave it to Ayla. She checked the sharpness of the edge lightly with her thumb, exerted some pressure to test its strength, and turned it over in her hand. It curved up at the ends; it was the nature of the material, but more noticeable in the long thin blade. She held her palm out flat and watched it rock on its bowed back. The shape did not, however, limit its function.
“Jondalar, this is … I don’t know the word. It’s wonderful … important. You made so many … You are not through with these, are you?”
He smiled. “No, I’m not through.”
“They are so thin and fine—they are beautiful. They might break more easily, but I think with the ends retouched, they’d be strong scrapers.” Her practical side was already imagining the blanks into tools.
“Yes, and like yours, good knives—though I’d want to put a tang on it for a handle.”
“I don’t know what ‘tang’ is.”
He picked up a blade to explain. “I can blunt the back of this and shape a point, and I would have a knife. If I pressure off a few flakes on the inner face, I can even straighten out the curve somewhat. Now, about halfway down the blade, if I use pressure to break off the edge and make a shoulder, and leave just a prong on the lower end, that is a tang.”
He picked up a small segment of antler. “If I fit the tang into a piece of bone, or wood, or antler like this, the knife will have a handle. It’s easier to use with a handle. If you boil antler for a while, it will swell and soften, and then you can force the tang into the middle where it’s softer. When the antler dries, it shrinks and tightens around the tang. Often it will hold without binding or glue for a long time.”
Ayla was excited about the new method, and wanted to practice it as she had always done after watching Droog, but she wasn’t sure if it would violate Jondalar’s customs or traditions. The more she learned about the ways of his people, the less sense they made. He didn’t seem to mind her hunting, but he might not want her to make his kind of tools.
“I would like to try.… Is there … objection to women making tools?”
Her question pleased him. It took skill to make her kind of tools. He was sure even the best toolmaker had inconsistent results, though the worst could probably turn out some that were usable—even smashing a flint boulder by accident usually produced a few pieces that were usable. But he would have understood if she had tried to justify her method. Instead, she seemed to recognize his technique for what it was—a vast improvement—and wanted to try it. He wondered how he would feel if someone showed him as radical an improvement.
I’d want to learn it, he said to himself with a wry grin.
“Women can be good flint knappers. Joplaya, my cousin, is one of the best. But she’s a terrible tease—so I would never tell her that. She’d never let me forget it.” He smiled at the memory.
“In the Clan, women can make tools, but not weapons.”
“Women make weapons. After they have children, Zelandonii women seldom hunt, but if they learned when they were young, they understand how weapons are used. Many tools and weapons are lost or broken on a hunt. A man whose mate knows how to make new ones always has a fresh supply. And women are closer to the Mother. Some men think women-made weapons are luckier. But if a man has bad luck—or lacks skill—he’ll always blame the toolmaker, especially if it’s a woman.”
“Could I learn?”
“Anyone who can make tools the way you did can certainly learn to make them this way.”
He answered her question in a slightly different sense than she meant it. She knew she was capable of learning—she had been trying to assure herself that it was allowable. But his answer made her stop and think.
“No … I don’t think so.”
“Of course you can learn.”
“I know I can learn, Jondalar, but not anyone who makes tools the Clan way can learn to make them your way. Some could, I think Droog could, but anything new is difficult for them. They learn from their memories.”
He thought at first she was joking, but she was serious. Could she be right? Given the opportunity, would fla … Clan toolmakers be, not unwilling, but unable to learn?
Then it occurred to him that he would not have thought them capable of making tools at all not so long ago. They made tools, they communicated, and they took in a strange orphan child. He had learned more about flatheads in the past few days than anyone knew, except Ayla. It could be useful to know more about them, perhaps. There seemed to be more to them than anyone realized.
Thinking about flatheads suddenly made him recall the day before, and an unexpected flush of embarrassment rushed him. With their concentration on toolmaking, he had forgotten. He had been looking at the woman, but not really seeing her golden braids shining in the sunlight, offering marked contrast to her deep rich tan; or her eyes, blue gray and clear, like the translucent color of fine flint.
O Mother, she was beautiful! He became acutely conscious of her sitting so close to him and felt a movement in his groin. He could not have kept his sudden shift of interest out of his eyes if he’d tried. And he didn’t try.
Ayla felt his change in mood; it washed over her, caught her unprepared. How could anyone’s eyes be so blue? Not the sky, not the blue gentians growing in the mountain meadows near the clan’s cave were so deeply, vibrantly hued. She could feel that … that feeling starting. Her body tingled, ached for him to touch her. She was leaning forward, pulled, drawn to him, and only with supreme effort of will did she close her eyes and pull away.
Why does he look at me that way when I’m … abomination? When he can’t touch me without jerking away as if he were burned? Her heart was pounding; she was panting as though she had been running, and she tried to slow her breaths.
She heard him get up before she opened her eyes. The leather lap cover had been flung aside and his carefully wrought blades were scattered. She watched him walking away with stiff movements, his shoulders hunched, until he was around the wall. He seemed miserable, as miserable as she was.
Once he cleared the wall, Jondalar broke into a run. He raced down the field until his pumping legs ached and his breath raled in ragged sobs; then he slowed and jogged to a halt, heaving great gasps.
You stupid fool, what does it take to convince you? Just because she’s decent enough to let you get some supplies together doesn’t mean she wants any part of you … particularly that part! Yesterday, she was hurt and offended because you didn’t … That was before you ruined it for yourself!
He didn’t like to think about it. He knew what he had felt, what she must have seen, the revulsion, the disgust. So, what is different now? She lived with flatheads, remember? For years. She became one of them. One of their males …
He was purposely bringing out everything loathsome, defiled, unclean that was part of his way of life. Ayla was all of them! When he was a young boy hiding with the other young boys behind bushes, telling each other the foulest words they knew, “flathead female” was among them. When he was older—not much older, but enough to know what “woman-maker” meant—the same boys gathered in dark corners of the cave to talk in hushed voices about girls, and to plot with sneering laughter to get a flathead female, and to scare each other about the consequences.
But they did not joke about abominations—or the women who bore them. They were polluted mixtures of spirits, an evil let loose upon the land that even the Mother, the creator of all life, abhorred. And the women who bore them, untouchable.
Could Ayla be that? Could she be defiled? Unclean? Filth? Evil? Honest, straightforward Ayla? With her Gift of healing? So wise, and fearless, and gentle, and beautiful. Could anyone that beautiful be unclean?
I don’t think she would even understand the meaning! But what would someone think who didn’t know her? What if they met her and she just told them who raised her? Told them about the … child? What would Zelandoni think? Or Marthona? And she would tell them, too. She’d tell them about her son and stand up to them. I think Ayla could stand up to anyone, even Zelandoni. She could almost be a zelandoni herself, with her skill in healing and her way with animals.
But if Ayla is not evil, then everything about flatheads is not true! No one will believe that.
Jondalar had not been paying attention to where he was going and was startled when he felt a soft muzzle in his hand. He hadn’t seen the horses. He stopped to scratch and stroke the young colt. Whinney gradually moved toward the cave, grazing as she went. The colt bounded ahead to her when the man gave him a final pat. Jondalar was not in a hurry to face Ayla again.
But Ayla was not at the cave. She had followed him around the wall and watched him run down the length of the valley. She felt like running sometimes, but she wondered what made him suddenly need to run so hard. Was it she? She put a hand on the warm dirt over the roasting pit, and then she walked to the large rock. Jondalar, distracted again by his thoughts, was surprised when he looked up to see both animals clustered around her.