The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [13]
The first area, in which the roast was cooking, was larger than the rest, and so was the fourth, where Talut led them. Several bare sleeping benches along the walls, apparently unused, showed how they were constructed.
When they had excavated the lower floor, wide platforms of dirt were left just below ground level along both sides and braced with strategically placed mammoth bones. More mammoth bones were placed across the top of the platforms, filled in with matted grass between the spaces, to raise and support pallets of soft leather stuffed with mammoth wool and other downy materials. With several layers of furs added, the dirt platforms became warm and comfortable beds or couches.
Jondalar wondered if the hearth to which they were led was unoccupied. It seemed bare, but for all its empty spaces, it had a lived-in feeling. Coals glowed in the fireplace, furs and skins were piled up on some of the benches, and dried herbs hung from racks.
“Visitors usually stay at the Mammoth Hearth,” Talut explained, “if Mamut doesn’t object. I will ask.”
“Of course they may stay, Talut.”
The voice came from an empty bench. Jondalar spun around and stared as one of the piles of furs moved. Then two eyes gleamed out of a face marked, high on the right cheek, with tattooed chevrons that fell into the seams and stitched across the wrinkles of incredible age. What he had thought was the fur of a winter animal turned out to be a white beard. Two long thin shanks unwound from a cross-legged position and dropped over the edge of the raised platform to the floor.
“Don’t look so surprised, man of the Zelandonii. The woman knew I was here,” the old man said in a strong voice that carried little hint of his advanced years.
“Did you, Ayla?” Jondalar asked, but she didn’t seem to hear him. Ayla and the old man were locked in the grip of each other’s eyes, staring as though they would see into each other’s soul. Then, the young woman dropped to the ground in front of the old Mamut, crossing her legs and bowing her head.
Jondalar was puzzled, and embarrassed. She was using the sign language which she had told him the people of the Clan used to communicate. That way of sitting was the posture of deference and respect a Clan woman assumed when she was asking permission to express herself. The only other time he’d seen her in that pose was when she was trying to tell him something very important, something she could not communicate in any other way; when the words he had taught her were not enough to tell him how she felt. He wondered how something could be expressed more clearly in a language in which gestures and actions were used more than words, but he had been more surprised to know those people communicated at all.
But he wished she hadn’t done that here. His face reddened at seeing her use flathead signals in public like that, and he wanted to rush to tell her to get up, before someone else saw her. The posture made him feel uncomfortable anyway, as though she were offering to him the reverence and homage that was due to Doni, the Great Earth Mother. He had thought of it as something private between them, personal, not something to show someone else. It was one thing to do that with him, when they were alone, but he wanted her to make a good impression on these people. He wanted them to like her. He didn’t want them to know her background.
The Mamut leveled a sharp look at him, then turned back to Ayla. He studied her for a moment, then leaned over and tapped her shoulder.
Ayla looked up and saw wise, gentle eyes in a face striated with fine creases and soft puckers. The tattoo under his right eye gave her a fleeting impression of a darkened eye socket and missing eye, and for a heartbeat she thought it was Creb. But the old holy man of the Clan who, with Iza, had raised her and cared for her, was dead, and so was Iza. Then who was this man that had evoked such strong feelings in her? Why was she sitting at his feet like a woman of the Clan? And how had he known the proper Clan