The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [333]
“How do you do that? It was wonderful! Everything. The sounds, the movements. I have never seen anything like it,” Ayla said. The smiles of appreciation showed her comments were well received.
Deegie sensed that the musicians felt satisfied and their need for intense concentration had passed. They were more relaxed now, ready for a rest, and ready to satisfy their curiosity about the mysterious woman who had apparently come out of nowhere and was now a Mamutoi. The coals in the fireplace were stirred, wood added, and cooking rocks, and water for tea poured into a wooden cooking bowl.
“Certainly you’ve seen something like it, Ayla,” Kylie said.
“No, not at all,” Ayla protested.
“What about the rhythms you were showing me?” Deegie said.
“That’s not the same at all. Those are just simple Clan rhythms.”
“Clan rhythms?” Tharie asked. “What are Clan rhythms?”
“The Clan are the people I grew up with,” Ayla started to explain.
“They are deceptively simple,” Deegie interrupted, “but they evoke strong feelings.”
“Can you show us?” the young man who played the skull drum asked.
Deegie looked at Ayla. “Shall we, Ayla?” she asked, then went on to explain to the others. “We’ve been playing around with them a little.”
“I guess we could,” Ayla said.
“Let’s do it,” Deegie said. “We need something to make a deep steady beat, muffled, no resonance, like something striking the ground, if Ayla can use your drum, Marut.”
“I think wrapping a piece of leather around this striker might work,” Tharie said, volunteering her leg-bone instrument.
The musicians were intrigued. The promise of something new was always interesting. Deegie kneeled on the mat in Tharie’s place, and Ayla sat cross-legged close to the drum and tapped it to get the feel. Then Deegie hit the leg-bone instrument in a few places until Ayla indicated the sound was right.
When they were ready, Deegie began beating a slow steady pace, changing the tempo slightly until she saw Ayla nod, but not changing the tone at all. Ayla closed her eyes, and when she felt herself moving to Deegie’s steady beat, she joined in. The timbre of the skull drum was too resonant to replicate exactly the sounds Ayla remembered. It was difficult to create the sense of a sharp crack of thunder, for example; the sharp staccato beats came out more like a sustained rumbling, but she had been practicing with a drum like it. Soon she was weaving an unusual contrapuntal rhythm around the strong, steady beat, a seemingly random pattern of staccato sounds that varied in tempo. The two sets of rhythms were so distinct they bore no relationship to each other, yet a stressed beat of Ayla’s rhythms coincided with every fifth beat of Deegie’s steady sound, almost as if by accident.
The two rhythms had the effect of producing an increasing sense of expectation, and after a while, a slight feeling of anxiety until the two beats, though it seemed impossible that they ever would, came together. With each release, another surge of tension mounted. At the moment when it seemed no one could stand it any more, Ayla and Deegie stopped before a concluding beat, and left a heightened expectation hanging in the air. Then, to Deegie’s surprise as much as anyone, a windy, reedy, flutelike whistle was heard, with a haunting, eerie Dot-quite melody, that sent a shiver through the listeners. It ended on a note of closure, but a sense of otherworldliness still lingered.
No one said a word for some moments. Finally Tharie said, “What strange, asymmetrical, compelling music.” Then several people wanted Ayla to show them the rhythms, eager to try them out.
“Who played the wind reed?” Tharie asked, knowing it wasn’t Manen, who had been standing beside her.
“No one did,” Deegie said. “It wasn’t an instrument. Ayla was whistling.”
“Whistling? How does anyone whistle like that?”
“Ayla can imitate any whistling sound,” Deegie said. “You ought to hear