The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [255]
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