The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [29]
After Ayla assured herself that the horses were fine, she walked down to the edge of the river. It felt good to be out of the lodge, away from people. She took a deep breath. The night air was cold and dry. Sparks of static crackled through her hair as she pushed back her fur-lined hood, stretched her neck and looked up.
The new moon, avoiding the great companion that held it tethered, had turned its shining eye out upon the distant depths whose whirling lights tantalized with promises of boundless freedom, but offered only cosmic emptiness. High thin clouds cloaked the fainter stars, but only veiled the more determined with shimmering halos, and made the sooty black sky feel close and soft.
Ayla was in a turmoil, conflicting emotions pulling at her. These were the Others she had looked for. The kind she had been born to. She would have grown up with people like them, comfortable, at home, if it hadn’t been for the earthquake. Instead she had been raised by the Clan. She knew Clan customs, but the ways of her own people were strange. Yet if it hadn’t been for the Clan, she wouldn’t have grown up at all. She couldn’t go back to them, but she didn’t feel that she belonged here, either.
These people were so noisy, and disorderly. Iza would have said they had no manners. Like that Frebec man, speaking out of turn, without asking permission, and then everyone yelling and talking at once. She thought Talut was a leader, but even he had to shout to make himself heard. Brun would never have had to shout. The only time she ever heard him shout was to warn someone of impending danger. Everyone in the clan kept the leader at a certain level of awareness; Brun had only to signal, and within heartbeats, he would have had everyone’s attention.
She didn’t like the way these people talked about the Clan, either, calling them flatheads and animals. Couldn’t anyone see they were people, too? A little different, maybe, but people just the same. Nezzie knew it. In spite of what the rest said, she knew Rydag’s mother was a woman, and the child to whom she gave birth only a baby. He’s mixed, though, like my son, Ayla thought, and like Oda’s little girl at the Clan Gathering. How could Rydag’s mother have had a child of mixed spirits like that?
Spirits! Is it really spirits that makes babies? Does a man’s totem spirit overcome a woman’s and make a baby grow inside her, the way the Clan thinks? Does the Great Mother choose and combine the spirits of a man and a woman and then put them inside a woman, the way Jondalar and these people believe?
Why am I the only one who thinks it’s a man, not a spirit, that starts a baby growing inside a woman? A man, who does it with his organ … his manhood, Jondalar calls it. Why else would men and women come together like they do?
When Iza told me about the medicine, she said that it strengthened her totem and that’s what kept her from having a baby for so many years. Maybe it did, but I didn’t take it when I was living alone and no babies got started by themselves. It was only after Jondalar came that I even thought about looking for that golden thread plant and the antelope sage root again.…
After Jondalar showed me it didn’t have to hurt … after he showed me how wonderful it could be for a man and woman together …
I wonder what would happen if I stopped taking Iza’s secret medicine? Would I have a baby? Would I have Jondalar’s baby? If he put his manhood there, where babies come from?
The thought brought a flush of warmth to her face, and a tingling to her nipples. It’s too late today, she thought, I already took the medicine this morning, but what if I just made an ordinary tea tomorrow? Could I start Jondalar’s baby growing? We wouldn’t have to wait, though. We could try tonight.…
She smiled to herself. You just want him to touch