The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [498]
Ayla saw the woman studying her, then smile at her. She smiled back and stopped beside her.
“You have made Rydag very happy,” the woman said, holding out her arms to the youngster Ayla lifted off the horse.
“It is little,” Ayla said.
The woman nodded. “My name is Nezzie,” she said.
“I am named Ayla.”
The two women looked at each other, considered each other carefully, not with hostility, but testing the ground for a future relationship.
Questions she wanted to ask about Rydag spun through Ayla’s mind, but she hesitated, not sure if it was proper to ask. Was Nezzie the boy’s mother? If so, how had she come to give birth to a child of mixed spirits? Ayla was puzzled again about a question that had bothered her since Durc was born. How did life begin? A woman only knew it was there when her body changed as the baby grew. How did it get inside a woman?
Creb and Iza had believed that a new life began when women swallowed the totem spirits of men. Jondalar thought the Great Earth Mother mixed the spirits of a man and a woman together and put them inside the woman when she became pregnant. But Ayla had formed her own opinion. When she noticed that her son had some of her characteristics, and some of the Clan’s, she realized that no life started to grow inside her until after Broud forced his penetration into her.
She shuddered at the memory, but because it was so painful she couldn’t forget it, and she had come to believe it was something about a man putting his organ inside the place where babies were born from that caused life to start inside a woman. Jondalar thought it was a strange idea when she told him, and tried to convince her it was the Mother who created life. She didn’t quite believe him, now she wondered. Ayla had grown up with the Clan, she was one of them, for all that she looked different. Though she had hated it when he did it, Broud was only exercising his rights. But how could a man of the Clan have forced Nezzie?
Her thoughts were interrupted by the commotion of another small hunting band arriving. As one man approached, he pulled back his hood, and both Ayla and Jondalar gaped with surprise. The man was brown! The color of his skin was a rich deep brown. He was nearly the color of Racer, which was rare enough for a horse. Neither of them had ever seen a person with brown skin before.
His hair was black, tight wiry curls that formed a woolly cap like the fur of a black mouflon. His eyes were black, too, and they sparkled with delight as he smiled, showing gleaming white teeth and a pink tongue in contrast to his dark skin. He knew the stir he created when strangers first saw him, and rather enjoyed it.
He was a perfectly ordinary man in other respects, medium height, hardly more than an inch or so taller than Ayla, and medium build. But a compact vitality, an economy of movement, and an easy self-confidence created an impression of someone who knew what he wanted and wouldn’t waste any time going after it. His eyes took on an added gleam when he saw Ayla.
Jondalar recognized the look as attraction. His brow furrowed into a frown, but neither the blond woman nor the brown-skinned man noticed. She was captivated by the novelty of the man’s unusual coloring, and stared with the unabashed wonder of a child. He was attracted as much by the aura of naïve innocence her response projected as by her beauty.
Suddenly Ayla realized she had been staring, and blushed crimson as she looked down at the ground. From Jondalar she had learned that it was perfectly proper for men and women to look directly at each other, but to the people of the Clan it was not only discourteous, it was offensive to stare, particularly for a woman. It was her upbringing, the customs of the Clan, reinforced again and again by Creb and Iza so she would be more acceptable, that caused her such embarrassment.
But her obvious distress only fired the interest of the dark man. He was often the object of unusual attention by women. The initial surprise of his appearance