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By Root 2326 0

—Ayla couldn’t decide if they were mates or sister and brother—brought out bags and containers from where they were stored, and poured them out for display, eager to show their riches. There were hundreds of shells, mostly small, globular mollusks like periwinkles or long shapes such as dentalia that could be sewn onto clothes or strung into necklaces. There were also some scallop shells, but for the most part, the shells were from creatures that were essentially inedible, which meant they had been collected for their decorative value alone, not as food, and from a great distance away. They had either traveled to both seashores themselves, or traded for them from someone who had. The amount of time invested in acquiring items solely for display meant that as a society, the Zelandonii were not living on the edge of survival; they had abundance. According to the customs and practices of their time, they were wealthy.

Both Jondalar and the First had come to see what had been brought out and displayed for Ayla. Though they had both been aware of the Fifth Cave’s status, partly because of their jewelry-makers, seeing so much at once was almost overwhelming. They couldn’t help but make comparisons in their minds to the Ninth Cave, but when they thought about it, they knew that their Cave was equally wealthy, in a slightly different way. In fact, most of the Zelandonii Caves were.

The Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave took them into another shelter nearby, and again it was well decorated, primarily with engravings of horses, bison, deer, even a partial mammoth, often accented with both red ocher and black manganese paint. The antlers of an engraved deer, for example, had been outlined in black, while a bison had been painted mostly red. Again they were introduced to the people who were there. Ayla noticed that the children who had been around their shelter, which was on the same side of the small stream, had gathered around again; she recognized several of them.

Suddenly Ayla felt dizzy and nauseous, and had a very strong need to get out of the shelter. She couldn’t explain her intense urge to leave, but she had to get outside.

“I’m thirsty, I want to get some water,” she said, walking out quickly, and heading toward the stream.

“You don’t have to go out,” a woman said, following behind her. “We have a spring inside.”

“I think we all need to go anyway. The feast must be ready, and I’m hungry,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said. “I should think you must be, too.”

They returned to the main shelter, or what Ayla had come to think of as the main shelter, and found everything for the feast set up and waiting for them. Although extra dishes were stacked up for the visitors, Ayla and Jondalar got their personal eating cups, bowls, and knives out of their pouches. The First carried her own dishes as well. Ayla took out Wolf’s water bowl, which also served as an eating dish if one was needed, and thought that she should start making eating dishes for Jonayla soon. Though she planned to nurse her until she could count at least three years, she would be giving her tastes of other food long before that.

Someone had recently hunted an aurochs; a roast haunch, turned on a spit over coals, was the main dish. Lately, they only saw the wild cattle in summer, but it was one of Ayla’s favorite foods. The taste was similar to bison, except richer, but then they were similar animals, with hard, round, curving horns that grew to a point and were permanent, not shed every year like deer antlers.

There were summer vegetables, too: sow-thistle stems, cooked pigweed, coltsfoot, and nettle leaves flavored with sorrel, and cowslips and wild rose petals in a salad of young dandelion leaves and clover. Fragrant meadowsweet flowers gave a honey-like sweetness to a sauce of crabapples and rhubarb served with the meat. A mixture of summer berries required no sweetening. They had raspberries, an early-ripening variety of blackberries, cherries, blackcurrants, elderberries, and pitted blackthorn plums, though pitting the small sloes was a time-consuming job.