The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [177]
“Where’s the cave lion now?” Dolando asked, looking at the wolf and wondering if the lion followed her, too. He was not particularly interested in being visited by a lion, no matter how well she might control him.
“He has made his own life,” Ayla said. “He stayed with me until he was grown. Then, like some children, he left to find a mate, and he probably has several by now. Whinney left me for a while, too, but she came back. She was pregnant when she returned.”
“What about the wolf? Do you think he will leave someday?” Tholie asked.
Ayla caught her breath. It was a question that she had refused to consider. It had come to her mind more than once, but she always pushed it aside, not even wanting to acknowledge it. Now it was said, out in the open, and waiting for an answer.
“Wolf was so young when I found him, I think he grew up believing that the people of Lion Camp were his pack,” she said. “Many wolves stay with their pack, but some wolves leave and become loners until they find another loner for a mate. Then a new pack starts. Wolf is still young, hardly more than a cub. He looks older because he’s so big. I don’t know what he will do, Tholie, but I worry about it sometimes. I don’t want him to leave.”
Tholie nodded. “Leaving is difficult, both for the one who leaves, and the ones that are left behind,” she said, thinking about her own difficult decision to leave her people to live with Markeno. “I know how I felt. Didn’t you say you left those people who raised you? What did you call them? Clan? I never heard of those people. Where do they live?”
Ayla glanced at Jondalar. He was sitting perfectly still, full of tension, with a strange expression on his face. He was very nervous about something, and suddenly she wondered if he was still ashamed of her background and the people who had raised her. She thought he was over those feelings now. She was not ashamed of the Clan. In spite of Broud and the anguish he had caused her, she had been cared for and loved even though she had been different, and she had loved in return. With a little feeling of anger, and a prickly touch of pride, she decided that she was not going to deny those people she had loved.
“They live on the peninsula in Beran Sea,” Ayla replied.
“The peninsula? I didn’t know there were people living on the peninsula. That’s flathead territory…” Tholie stopped. It couldn’t be, could it?
Tholie wasn’t the only one who had seen the implications. Roshario had gasped and was furtively watching Dolando, trying to see if he had made any connections, but not wanting it to seem that she had noticed anything out of the ordinary. The strange names she mentioned, the ones that were so hard to pronounce, could they be names she had given some other kind of animals? But she said the woman who raised her had taught her healing medicine. Could there have been some woman living with them? What woman would choose to live with them, especially if she knew healing? Would a shamud live with flat-heads?
Ayla was noticing the strange reactions of some of the people, but when she glanced at Dolando and saw him staring at her, she felt a shiver of dread. He did not seem to be the same man, the controlled leader who had cared for his woman with such tenderness. He was not looking at her with the grateful relief her healing skill had invoked, or even with the wary acceptance of their first meeting. Instead, she detected a deeply buried pain and saw a distancing; a menacing hard anger filled his eyes as though he could not see clearly, but only through the red haze of rage.
“Flatheads!” he exploded. “You lived with those filthy, murderous animals! I’d like to kill every one of them. And you lived with them. How could any decent woman live with them?”
His fists were clenched as he