The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [14]
Ayla wasn’t sure if it was spirits that caused babies. She thought a man had more to do with it, but the secret plants worked anyway. No new life had started in her when she drank the special teas, whether she was near a man or not. Not that she would have minded, if they were settled in one place. But Jondalar had made it clear to her that with such a long Journey ahead of them, it would be a risk to get pregnant along the way.
As she pulled out the root of the antelope sage and shook the dirt off, she saw the heart-shaped leaves and long yellow tubular flowers of snakeroot, good for preventing miscarriage. With a twinge of sorrow, she remembered when Iza had gone to get that plant for her. When she stood up and went to put the fresh roots she had collected into a special basket that was attached near the top of one of the pack baskets, she saw Whinney selectively biting off the tops of wild oats. She liked the seeds, too, she thought, when they were cooked, and her mind, continuing its automatic medicinal cataloguing, added the information that the flowers and stalks aided digestion.
The horse had dropped dung, and she noticed flies buzzing around it. In certain seasons insects could be terrible, she thought, and decided she would watch for insect repellent plants. Who knew what kind of territory they would have to travel through?
In her offhand perusal of the local vegetation she noted a spiny bush that she knew was the variety of wormwood with the bitter taste and strong camphor smell, not an insect repellent, she thought, but it had its uses. Nearby were cranesbills, wild geraniums with leaves of many teeth and five-petaled reddish-pink flowers, that grew into fruits that resembled the bills of cranes. The dried and powdered leaves helped stop bleeding and heal wounds; made into a tea it healed mouth sores and rashes; and the roots were good for runny stools and other stomach problems. It tasted bitter and sharp, but was gentle enough for children and old people.
Glancing around toward Jondalar, she noticed Wolf again, still chewing on her shoe. Suddenly she stopped her mental ruminations and focused again on the last plants she had noted. Why had they caught her attention? Something about them seemed important. Then it came to her. She quickly reached for her digging stick and started breaking up the ground around the bitter-tasting wormwood with the strong smell of camphor, and then the sharp, astringent, but relatively harmless geranium.
Jondalar had mounted and was ready to go when he turned to her. “Ayla, why are you collecting plants? We should be leaving. Do you really need those now?”
“Yes,” she said, “I won’t be long,” going next after the long, thick horseradish root with the burning hot taste. “I think I know a way to keep him away from our things,” Ayla said, pointing at the young ca nine playfully gnawing on what was left of her leather camp shoe. “I’m going to make Wolf repellent.’ ”
They headed southeast from their camping place to get back to the river they had been following. The windswept dust had settled overnight, and in the stark, clear air the boundless sky revealed the distant reach of the horizon that had been obscured before. As they rode across country their entire view, from one edge of the earth to the other, north to south, east to west, undulating, billowing, constantly in motion, was grass; one vast, encompassing grassland. The few trees that existed near waterways only accentuated the dominant vegetation. But the magnitude of the grassy plains was more extensive than they knew.
Massive sheets of ice, two, three, up to five miles thick, smothered the ends of the earth and sprawled over the northern lands, crushing the stony crust of the continent and depressing