The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [303]
She made a sign to the boy, a simple greeting gesture, one of the first she had learned so long ago. There was a moment of excitement in his eyes, then he shook his head and looked puzzled. He had never learned the Clan way of speaking with gestures, she realized, but he must have retained some vestige of the Clan memories. He had recognized the signal for an instant, she was sure of it.
“Can Rydag touch the little horse?” Latie asked again.
“Yes,” Ayla said, taking his hand. He is so slight, so frail, she thought, and then understood the rest. He could not run, like other children. He could not play normal rough-and-tumble games. He could only watch—and wish.
With a tenderness of feeling Jondalar had never seen on her face before, Ayla picked the boy up and put him on Whinney’s back. Signaling the horse to follow, she walked them slowly around the Camp. There was a lull in conversation as everyone stopped to stare at Rydag sitting on the horse. Although they had been talking about it, except for Talut and the people who had met them by the river, no one had ever seen anyone ride a horse before. No one had ever thought of such a thing.
A large, motherly woman emerged from the strange dwelling, and seeing Rydag on the horse, which had kicked perilously close to her head, her first reaction was to rush to his aid. But as she neared, she became aware of the silent drama of the scene.
The child’s face was filled with wonder and delight. How many times had he watched with wishful eyes, prevented by his weakness, or his difference, from doing what other children did? How many times had he wished he could do something to be admired or envied for? Now, for the first time, as he sat on the back of a horse, all the children of the Camp, and all the adults, were watching him with wishful eyes.
The woman from the dwelling saw and wondered, Had this stranger truly understood the boy so quickly? Accepted him so easily? She saw the way Ayla was looking at Rydag, and knew it was so.
Ayla saw the woman studying her, then smile at her. She smiled back and stopped beside her.
“You have made Rydag very happy,” the woman said, holding out her arms to the youngster Ayla lifted off the horse.
“It is little,” Ayla said.
The woman nodded. “My name is Nezzie,” she said.
“I am named Ayla.”
The two women looked at each other, considered each other carefully, not with hostility, but testing the ground for a future relationship.
Questions she wanted to ask about Rydag spun through Ayla’s mind, but she hesitated, not sure if it was proper to ask. Was Nezzie the boy’s mother? If so, how had she come to give birth to a child of mixed spirits? Ayla was puzzled again about a question that had bothered her since Durc was born. How did life begin? A woman only knew it was there when her body changed as the baby grew. How did it get inside a woman?
Creb and Iza had believed that a new life began when women swallowed the totem spirits of men. Jondalar thought the Great Earth Mother mixed the spirits of a man and a woman together and put them inside the woman when she became pregnant. But Ayla had formed her own opinion. When she noticed that her son had some of her characteristics, and some of the Clan’s, she realized that no life started to grow inside her until after Broud forced his penetration into her.
She shuddered at the memory, but because it was so painful she couldn’t forget it, and she had come to believe it was something about a man putting his organ inside the place where babies were born from that caused life to start inside a woman. Jondalar thought