The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [239]
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