The Land of Painted Caves - Jean M. Auel [24]
“Thank you, Levela,” Ayla said, then smiled at her and the woman beside her. “You really are Proleva’s sister. Do you know how much you are like her?”
“I know I’ve missed her since she mated Joharran,” Levela said, looking at her sister. “We were always close. Proleva was almost a second mother to me.”
Ayla followed the One Who Was First back to the group of Those Who Served The Mother. She noticed that most of the local zelandonia were there. In addition to the First, who was the Zelandoni of the Ninth Cave, and of course the Zelandonia of the Second and Seventh Caves, there were also the Zelandonia of the Third and Eleventh Caves. The Zelandoni of the Fourteenth had not come, but she had sent her first acolyte. There were several other acolytes. Ayla recognized the two younger women and a young man, from the Second and Seventh Caves. She smiled at Mejera from the Third Cave and greeted the elderly man who was the Zelandoni of the Seventh, and then the woman who was the daughter of his hearth, the Zelandoni of the Second, who was also the mother of Jondecam. Ayla had been wanting to get to know the Second better. Not many of the Zelandoni had children, but she was a woman who had been mated and had raised two children—and her brother Kimeran after their mother died—and now was a Zelandoni.
“Ayla has had more experience than most in setting bones, Zelandoni of the Seventh. You should ask her your question,” the First said, settling back down and indicating a mat next to her for Ayla.
“I know if a fresh break is set straight, it will heal straight—I’ve done it many times—but someone was asking me if anything could be done if a break was not set straight and it healed crooked,” the older man asked immediately. He was not only interested in her response, he had heard so much about her skill from the One Who Was First, he wanted to see if she would be flustered by a direct question from someone of his age and experience.
Ayla had just dropped down to the mat and turned to face him. She had a way of lowering herself that was particularly fluid and graceful, he noticed, and a way of looking at him that was direct yet not quite, that somehow conveyed a sense of respect. Though she had expected to be formally introduced to the other acolytes, and was surprised to be questioned so quickly, she responded without hesitation.
“It depends on the break and how long it has been healing,” Ayla said. “If it’s an old break, it’s hard to do much. Healed bone, even if it healed wrong, is often stronger than bone that was not injured. If you try to rebreak it to set it right, the uninjured bone is likely to break instead. But if the break has just started to mend, sometimes it can be broken again and set straight.”
“Have you ever done it?” the Seventh asked, a bit put off by the way she spoke; it was odd, not like the way Kimeran’s pretty mate spoke, with a rather pleasant shift in certain sounds. When Jondalar’s foreign woman spoke, it was almost as though she swallowed certain sounds.
“Yes,” Ayla said. She had the feeling she was being tested, something like the way Iza used to ask her questions about healing practices and plant uses. “On our Journey here, we stopped to visit some people that Jondalar had met earlier, the Sharamudoi. Nearly a moon before we arrived, a woman he knew had taken a bad fall and had broken her arm. It was healing wrong, bent in such a way that she couldn’t use it, and it was very painful. Their healer had died earlier that winter, and they did not have a new one yet, and no one else knew how to set an arm. I managed to rebreak her arm and reset it. It was not perfect, but it was better. She would not have full use, but she would be able to use it, and by the time we left, it was healing well and not causing her pain anymore,” Ayla explained.
“Didn’t breaking her arm cause her pain?”