The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [206]
“She was my responsibility to train. I must take the blame for her faults. It was I who overlooked her minor deviations from Clan ways. I even convinced you to accept them, Brun. I am Mog-ur. You rely on me to interpret the wishes of the spirits, and you have come to rely on my judgment in other ways. I did not think we were so wrong. Sometimes it was difficult for her, but I thought she had become a good Clan woman. I think now I was too lenient with her. I did not make her responsibilities clear. I seldom reprimanded her and I never cuffed her, I often let her go her own way. Now she must pay for my lack. But Brun, I could not be harsher with her.
“I never took a mate. I could have chosen a woman and she would have had to live with me, but I did not. Do you know why? Brun, do you know how women look at me? Do you know how women avoid me? I had the same need to relieve myself as any other man when I was young, but I learned to control it when women turned their back so they would not see me make the signal. I would not force myself, my crippled, deformed body, on a woman who shrunk from me, who turned away with disgust at the sight of me.
“But Ayla never turned from me. From the first, she reached out to touch me. She had no fear of me, no revulsion. She gave me her affection freely, she hugged me. Brun, how could I scold her?
“I have lived with this clan since my birth, but I never learned how to hunt. How can a one-armed cripple hunt? I was a burden, I was taunted, I was called woman. Now I am Mog-ur and no one ridicules, but no manhood ceremony was ever held for me. Brun, I am not half a man, I am no man at all. Only Ayla respected me, loved me—not as a magician, but as a man, as a whole man. And I love her as the child of the mate I never had.”
Creb shrugged off the cloak he wore to cover his lopsided, malformed, wasted body and held out the stump of an arm he always hid.
“Brun, this is the man Ayla saw as whole. This is the man who set her standard. This is the man she loves and compares with her son. Look at me, my brother! Did I deserve to live? Does Ayla’s son deserve to live less?”
The clan started gathering outside the cave in the dim half-light of predawn. A fine misty drizzle cast a glistening sheen on rocks and trees and collected in tiny droplets in the hair and beards of the people. Thin wispy tendrils snaking down from fog-shrouded mountains clung to hollows, and thicker masses of the ethereal vapor obscured all but the nearest objects. The ridge to the east rose indistinctly from a nebulous sea of mist in the fading darkness, wavering vaguely just on the edge of visibility.
Ayla lay awake on her furs in the darkened cave, watching Iza and Uba moving silently about the hearth stoking coals in the fireplace and putting water on to boil for a morning tea. Her baby was beside her making sucking noises in his sleep. She hadn’t slept all night. Her first joy at seeing Iza had quickly given way to a desolate anxiety. Initial attempts at conversation broke down early and the three females of Creb’s hearth spent the entire long day after Ayla’s return within its boundary stones communicating their despair with anguished looks.
Creb had not set foot inside his domain, but Ayla caught his eye once as he left the small adjoining cave to join the men in the meeting Brun had called. He looked away quickly from her silent appeal, but not before she had seen the look of love and pity in his soft liquid eye. She and Iza exchanged a tremulous, knowing glance when they saw Creb hurry into the place of the spirits after a talk with Brun held in a remote section of the cave in guarded gestures. Brun had made his decision and Creb went