The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [360]
The waterlogged ground near the edge soon gave way to a quivering fen. Many of the hunters removed their footwear and plunged into the cold, muddy water barefoot. Ayla and Jondalar led the nervous horses in more carefully. Cold-loving vines and long beards of greenish-gray lichen hung from dwarf birch, willow, and alder growing so closely together they formed a miniature arctic jungle. Footing was treacherous. With no solid ground to bind the roots and give stability, the trees grew at unlikely angles and sprawled along the ground, and the hunters struggled to make their way across fallen trunks, twisted brush, and partially submerged roots and branches that snared unsuspecting feet. Tufts of reeds and sedge grass looked deceitfully more substantial than they were, and mosses and ferns camouflaged stinking stagnant pools.
Progress was slow and exhausting. By midmorning, when they stopped to rest, everyone was sweating and warm, even in the shade. Starting out again, Talut ran into a particularly tenacious branch of an alder, and exploding in a rare outburst of anger, chopped at the tree furiously with his massive axe. The bright orange liquid seeping out of gashes in the offending tree resembled blood, and gave Ayla an unpleasant feeling of foreboding.
Nothing was so welcome as firm ground. Tall ferns and even taller grasses, more than the height of a man, grew on the rich clearing near the bog. They turned east to avoid wetlands that extended toward the west, then climbed a rise out of the depression in the plains filled by the bogs, and sighted the joining of a large river and a tributary. Talut, Vincavec, and the leaders of some of the other Camps stopped to consult maps marked on ivory, and scratched more marks on the ground with knives.
As they approached the river, they passed through the middle of a birch forest. Not a forest of the tall sturdy trees of warmer climates, these birches were stunted and dwarfed by the harsh periglacial conditions, yet they were not without beauty. As though pruned and shaped on purpose into endlessly fascinating individual shapes, each tree had a distinctive, pale, delicate grace. But the thin, frail, pendulent branches were misleading. When Ayla tried to break one, it was tough as sinew, and in the wind, they flailed the competing vegetation into submission.
“They’re called the ‘Old Mothers.’ ”
Ayla spun around and saw Vincavec.
“An appropriate name, I think. They remind one never to misjudge the strength of an old woman. This is a sacred grove, and they are guardians of somuti,” he said, pointing toward the ground.
The small quivering light green birch leaves did not entirely block out the sun, and dappled patterns of shade danced lightly on the forest floor thick with leaf mold. Then Ayla noticed, sprouting from the moss under certain trees, the large, white-spotted, bright red mushrooms.
“Those mushrooms, is that what you call somuti? They are poisonous. They can kill you,” Ayla said.
“Yes, of course, unless you know the secrets of preparing them. That is so they will not be used inappropriately. Only those who are chosen may explore the world of somuti.”
“Do they have medicinal qualities? I know of none,” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not a Healer. You’d have to ask Lomie,” Vincavec said. Then, before she knew it, he had taken both her hands, and was looking at her, or rather, looking into her, she felt. “Why did you fight me at the Calling ceremony, Ayla? I had prepared the way to the underland for you, but you resisted me.”
Ayla felt a strange sense of internal conflict, pulled two ways. Vincavec’s voice was warm and compelling, and she felt a great desire to lose herself in the black depths of his eyes, to float in the cool dark pools, to give in to anything he wished. But she also felt an overpowering need