The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [32]
“I don’t speak Mamutoi quite right, either. It’s not the language I grew up with. Frebec just likes to make trouble,” Jondalar said, helping her up. “Why does every Cave, every Camp, every group have to have a troublemaker? Don’t pay any attention to him, no one else does. You speak very well. I’m amazed at the way you pick up languages. You’ll be speaking Mamutoi better than I do before long.”
“I have to learn how to speak with words. I have nothing else now,” she said softly. “I don’t know anyone who speaks the language I grew up with, any more.” She closed her eyes for a moment as a feeling of bleak emptiness came over her.
She shook it off and started to put her legged garments back on, and then stopped. “Wait,” she said, taking them off again. “Long ago, when I first became a woman, Iza told me everything a woman of the Clan needed to know about men and women, even though she doubted that I’d ever find a mate and would need to know it. The Others may not believe the same way, even the signals between men and women are not the same, but the first night I sleep in a place of the Others, I think I should make a cleansing after our Pleasures.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to wash in the river.”
“Ayla! It’s cold. It’s dark. It could be dangerous.”
“I won’t go far. Just here at the edge,” she said, throwing down her parka and pulling her inner tunic up over her head.
The water was cold. Jondalar watched from the bank, and got himself just wet enough to know how cold it was. Her feeling for the ceremony of the occasion made him think of the purifying rituals of First Rites, and he decided a little cleansing wouldn’t hurt him either. She was shivering when she got out. He held her in his arms to warm her. The shaggy bison fur of his parka dried her, then he helped her get into her tunic and parka.
She felt alive, and tingly, and fresh as they walked back to the earthlodge. Most people were settling down for the night when they entered. Fires were banked low, and voices were softened. The first hearth was empty, though the mammoth roast was still in evidence. As they moved quietly along the passageway through the Lion Hearth, Nezzie got up and detained them.
“I just wanted to thank you, Ayla,” she said, glancing at one of the beds along the wall. Ayla followed her eyes and saw three small forms sprawled out on one large bed. Latie and Rugie shared it with Rydag. Danug, sprawled out in sleep, took up another bed, and Talut, stretched to his full length propped up on an elbow waiting for Nezzie, smiled at her from a third. She nodded and smiled back, not sure what the proper response was.
They moved to the next hearth as Nezzie crawled in beside the red-haired giant, and tried to pass through silently, so as not to disturb anyone: Ayla felt someone watching her and looked toward the wall. Two shining eyes and a smile were observing them from the dark recess. She sensed Jondalar’s shoulders stiffen and looked quickly away. She thought she heard a soft chuckle, then thought it must have been the snores coming from the bed along the opposite wall.
At the large fourth hearth, one of the beds was hung with a heavy leather drape, closing the space off from the passageway, though sounds and movement could be detected within. Ayla noticed that most of the other sleeping places in the longhouse had similar drapes tied up to mammoth bone rafters above or to posts alongside, though not all of them were closed. Mamut’s bed on the side wall opposite theirs was open. He was in it, but she knew he wasn’t asleep.
Jondalar lit a stick of wood on a hot coal in the fireplace, and shielding it with his hand, carried it to the wall near the head of their sleeping platform. There, in a niche, a thick, flattish stone in which a saucer-shaped depression had been pecked out, was half-filled with fat. He lit a wick of twisted cattail fuzz, lighting up a small Mother figure behind the stone lamp. Then he untied the thongs that held up the drape around their bed, and when it fell, motioned to her.
She slipped in and climbed up on the platform