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By Root 1401 0

was not familiar with, but the rest of the people were putting the skeletal remains of mammoths into pits that had been dug in the ground. Bones and ivory were scattered all over. She looked up as someone called out and saw Talut and Tulie coming toward the Camp bearing on their shoulders a large curved ivory tusk still attached to the skull of a mammoth. Most of the bones did not come from animals they had killed. Occasional finds on the steppes provided some, but the majority came from the piles of bones that accumulated at sharp turns in rivers, where raging waters had deposited the remains of animals.

Then Ayla noticed another person watching the Camp not far from her. She smiled as she went to join Rydag, but was startled to see him smile back. People of the Clan did not smile. An expression showing bared teeth usually denoted hostility on a face with Clan features, or extreme nervousness and fear. His grin seemed, for a moment, out of place. But the boy had not grown up with the Clan and had learned a friendlier meaning for the expression.

“Good morning, Rydag,” Ayla said, at the same time making the Clan greeting gesture with the slight variation that indicated a child was being addressed. Ayla noticed again the flicker of understanding at her hand signal. He remembers! she thought. He has the memories, I’m sure of it. He knows the signs, he would only have to be reminded. Not like me. I had to learn them.

She recalled Creb’s and Iza’s consternation when they discovered how difficult it was for her, compared with Clan youngsters, to remember anything. She had had to struggle to learn and memorize, while children of the Clan only had to be shown once. Some people had thought Ayla was rather stupid, but as she grew up she taught herself to memorize quickly so they wouldn’t lose patience with her.

But Jondalar had been astonished at her skill. Compared to others like herself, her trained memory was a wonder, and it enhanced her ability to learn. He was amazed at how easily she learned new languages, for example, almost without effort it seemed. But gaining that skill had not been easy, and though she had learned to memorize quickly, she never did fully comprehend what Clan memories were. None of the Others could; it was a basic difference between them.

With brains even larger than those who came after, the Clan had not so much less intelligence as a different kind of intelligence. They learned from memories that were in some ways similar to instinct but more conscious, and stored in the backs of their large brains at birth was everything their forebears knew. They didn’t need to learn the knowledge and skills necessary to live, they remembered them. As children, they needed only to be reminded of what they already knew to become accustomed to the process. As adults, they knew how to draw upon their stored memories.

They remembered easily, but anything new was grasped only with great effort. Once something new was learned—or a new concept understood, or a new belief accepted—they never forgot it and they passed it on to their progeny, but they learned, and changed, slowly. Iza had come to understand, if not comprehend, their difference when she was teaching Ayla the skills of a medicine woman. The strange girl child could not remember nearly as well as they, but she learned much more quickly.

Rydag said a word. Ayla did not understand him immediately. Then she recognized it. It was her name! Her name spoken in a way that had once been familiar, the way some people of the Clan had said it.

Like them, the child was not capable of a fully articulate speech; he could vocalize, but he could not make some of the important sounds that were necessary to reproduce the language of the people he lived with. They were the same sounds Ayla had difficulty with, from lack of practice. It was that limitation in the vocal apparatus of the Clan, and those that went before, that had led them to develop instead a rich and comprehensive language of hand signs and gestures to express the thoughts of their rich and comprehensive culture.