The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [253]
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