The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [377]
Nezzie glanced at the boy. He seemed more relaxed now. No, she decided. At peace. The strain, the tension, he had been showing was gone. He touched Ayla’s arm.
“I am not animal,” he signed.
He seemed about to say something else. Ayla waited. Then suddenly she realized there was no sound, no struggle to take one more tortured breath. He was not in pain any more.
But Ayla was. She looked up and saw Jondalar. He had been there all along, and his face was as racked with grief as hers, or Nezzie’s. Suddenly all three of them were clinging together, trying to find solace in each other.
Then another showed his grief. From the floor beneath Rydag’s bed, a low whine rose in a furry throat, then yips that extended and deepened and soared into Wolf’s first full, ringing howl. When his breath ran out, he began again, crying out his loss in the sonorous, eerie, spine-tingling, unmistakable tones of wolfsong. People gathered at the entrance of the tent to look, but were hesitant to enter. Even the three who were awash in their own sorrow paused to listen and wonder. Jondalar thought to himself that animal or human, no one could ask for a more poignant or awesome elegy.
After the first racking tears of grief were spent, Ayla sat beside the small thin body, unmoving, but her tears had not stopped. She stared into space, silently remembering her life with the Clan, and her son, and the first time she saw Rydag. She loved Rydag. He had come to mean as much to her as Durc and, in a certain way, stood in for him. Even though her son had been taken from her, Rydag had given her an opportunity to know more about him, to learn how he might be growing and maturing, how he might look, how he might think. When she smiled at Rydag’s gentle humor, or was pleased at his perceptiveness and intelligence, she could imagine that Durc had the same kind of understanding. Now Rydag was gone, and her tenuous link to Durc was gone. Her grief was for both.
Nezzie’s grief was not less, but the needs of the living were important, too. Rugie climbed up on her lap, hurt and confused that her playmate, and friend, and brother, couldn’t play any more, couldn’t even make words with his hands. Danug was stretched out full-length on his bed, his head buried under a cover, sobbing, and someone had to go and tell Latie.
“Ayla? Ayla,” Nezzie finally said. “What do we have to do to bury him in the Clan way? We need to start getting him ready.”
It took Ayla a moment to comprehend that someone was talking to her. She frowned, and focused on Nezzie. “What?”
“We have to get him ready for burial. What do we have to do? I don’t know anything about Clan burials.”
No, none of the Mamutoi did, she thought. Especially the Mammoth Hearth. But she did. She thought about the Clan burials she had seen and considered what should be done for Rydag. Before he can be buried in the Clan way, he has to be Clan. That means he has to be named, and he needs an amulet with a piece of red ochre in it. Suddenly, Ayla got up and rushed out.
Jondalar went after her. “Where are you going?”
“If Rydag is going to be Clan, I have to make him an amulet,” she said.
Ayla stalked through the encampment, obviously angry, marching past the Camp of the Mammoth Hearth without even a glance, and straight to the flint-workers’ area. Jondalar followed behind. He had some idea what she was up to. She asked for a flint nodule, which no one was ready to refuse her. Then she looked around and found a hammerstone, and cleared herself a place to work.
As she began to preshape the flint in the Clan way, and the Mamutoi flint knappers realized what she was doing, they were eager to watch, and crowded as close as they dared. No one wanted to raise her