The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [65]
“It’s not difficult. You just think about someone. It was hot today, and I thought about making a head covering … making a sun hat … for myself, so I knew it must be hot for you, too,” she said, picking up another willow withe to add to the broadly conical hat that was beginning to take shape. “Men of the Clan don’t like to ask for anything, especially for their own comfort. It is not considered manly behavior for them to think about comfort, so a woman must anticipate a man’s needs. He protects her from danger; it’s her way of protecting him, to make sure he has the right clothing and eats well. She doesn’t want anything to happen to him. Who would protect her and her children then?”
“Is that what you are doing? Protecting me so I will protect you?” he asked, grinning. “And your children?” In the firelight, his blue eyes were a deep violet, and they sparkled with fun.
“Well, not exactly,” she said, looking down at her hands. “I think it’s really the way a Clan woman tells her mate how much she cares for him, whether she has children or not.” She watched her rapidly moving hands, though Jondalar had the feeling that she didn’t need to see what she was doing. She could have made the hat in the dark. She picked up another long twig, then looked directly at him. “But I do want to have another child before I get too old.”
“You have a long way to go for that,” he said, putting another piece of wood on the fire. “You’re still young.”
“No, I’m getting to be an old woman. I am already…” She closed her eyes to concentrate as she pressed her fingers against her leg, saying the number words he had taught her, to verify to herself the right word for the number of years she had lived. “ … Eighteen years.”
“That old!” Jondalar laughed. “I have seen twenty-two years. I’m the one who is old.”
“If it takes us a year to travel, I will be nineteen years when we reach your home. In the Clan, that would be almost too old for childbearing.”
“Many Zelandonii women have children at that age. Maybe not their first, but their second or third. You are strong and healthy. I don’t think you’re too old to have children, Ayla. But I will tell you this. There are times when your eyes seem ancient, as though you’ve lived many lifetimes in your eighteen years.”
It was an unusual thing for him to say, and she stopped her work to look at him. The feeling she evoked in him was almost frightening. She was so beautiful in the light of the fire, and he loved her so much, he didn’t know what he would do if anything ever happened to her. Overcome, he looked away. Then, to ease the moment, he tried to introduce a lighter subject.
“I’m the one who should worry about age. I’d be willing to wager that I will be the oldest man at the Matrimonial,” he said, then laughed. “Twenty-three is old for a man to be mated for the first time. Most men my age have several children at their hearths.”
He looked at her, and she saw again that look of overwhelming love and fear in his eyes. “Ayla, I want you to have a child, too, but not while we’re traveling. Not until we’re safely back. Not yet.”
“No, not yet,” she said.
She worked quietly for a while, thinking about the son she had left behind with Uba, and about Rydag, who had been like her son in many ways. Both of them lost to her. Even Baby, who was, in a strange way, like a son—at least, he was the first male animal she found and cared for—had left her. She would never see him again. She looked at Wolf, suddenly worried that she might lose him, too. I wonder, she thought, why is my totem taking all my sons away from me? I must be unlucky with sons.
“Jondalar, do your people have any special customs about wanting children?” Ayla asked. “Women of the Clan are always supposed to want sons.”
“No, not really. I think men want a woman to bring sons to his hearth, but I think women like to have daughters first.