The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [210]
“I don’t know,” Ayla said. “So far, he’s come back every time, and he seems happy to be traveling with us. He greets me like he thinks we are his pack, but you know how it is with Pleasures. It is a powerful Gift. The need can be very strong.”
“That’s true. Well, I don’t know if there is anything you can do about it, but I’m glad you told me.”
They rode together in silence for a while, up another high meadow, but it was a companionable silence. He was glad she had told him. At least he understood her strange behavior a little better. She had been acting like an overly concerned mother, though he was glad she didn’t normally. He’d always felt sorry for the boys whose mothers didn’t want them to do things that might be a little dangerous, like going deep in a cave, or climbing high places.
“Look, Ayla. There’s an ibex,” Jondalar said, pointing to a nimble and beautiful goatlike animal with long curved horns. It was perched on a precipitous ledge high up on the mountain. “I have hunted those before. And look over there. Those are chamois!”
“Are those really the animal the Shamudoi hunt?” Ayla asked as she watched the antelope relative of the wild mountain goat, with smaller upright horns, gamboling across inaccessible peaks and scarp faces of rock.
“Yes. I’ve gone with them.”
“How can anybody hunt animals like that? How do you reach them?”
“It’s a matter of climbing up behind them. They tend to look down all the time for danger, so if you can get above them, you can usually get close enough for a kill. You can see why the spear-thrower would be a great advantage,” Jondalar explained.
“It makes me appreciate that outfit Roshario gave me even more,” Ayla said.
They continued their climb and by afternoon were just below the snow line. Sheer walls reared up on both sides of them with patches of ice and snow not far above. The top of the slope ahead was outlined with blue sky and seemed to lead to the very edge of the world. As they topped the rise, they halted and looked. The view was spectacular.
Behind them was a clear vista of their climb up the mountain from the tree line. Below that the evergreen-carpeted slopes cushioned the hard rock and disguised the rough terrain they had struggled over. To the east they could even see the plain below with its braided ribbons of water flowing sluggishly across it, which surprised Ayla. The Great Mother River seemed hardly more than a few trickles from their vantage point on the frigid mountaintop, and she couldn’t quite believe that ages ago they had sweltered in the heat traveling beside her. In front of them was a view of the next mountain ridge somewhat below and the deep valley of feathery green spires that separated them. Looming close above were the glimmering icebound peaks.
Ayla looked around in awe, her eyes glistening with wonder, moved by the grandeur and beauty of the sight. In the chill, sharp air, puffs of steam escaping her mouth made every excited breath perceptible.
“Oh, Jondalar, we are higher than everything. I have never been so high. I feel like we’re on the very top of the world!” she said. “And it’s so … so beautiful, so exciting.”
As the man watched her expressions of wonder, her sparkling eyes, her beautiful smile, his own enthusiasm for the dramatic panorama was fired by her sheer excitement, and he was moved with immediate desire for her.
“Yes, so beautiful, so exciting,” he said. Something in his voice sent a shiver through her and made her turn away from the extraordinary view to look at him.
His eyes were such an impossibly rich shade of blue, it seemed for a moment that he had stolen two small pieces of the deep, luminous blue sky, and filled them with his love and wanting. She was caught by them, captured by his ineffable charm, whose source was as unknowable to her as the magic of his love, but which she could not—and did not want to—deny. Just his desire for her had always been his “signal.” For Ayla, it was not an act of will but a physical