The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [73]
“It won’t be any more dangerous than it was last night,” Ayla said. “Will it?”
“Last night it was raining, so people might expect something like a flood, but if this breaks through, without the warning of a rainstorm, it would catch people by surprise, and that would be devastating,” he explained.
Ayla nodded, then said, “But if people are using this river, wouldn’t they notice that it had stopped flowing and try to find out why?”
He turned to face her. “But what about us, Ayla? We’re traveling, and we wouldn’t have any way of knowing that a river had stopped running. We could be downstream of something like this sometime, and we wouldn’t have any warning.”
Ayla turned back to look at the water in the valley and didn’t answer immediately. “You’re right, Jondalar,” she said then. “We could get caught in another flash flood without warning. Or the lightning could have hit us instead of that tree. Or an earthquake could open up a crack in the ground and take everyone except a little girl, leaving her alone in the world. Or someone could get sick, or be born with a weakness or a deformity. The Mamut said no one can know when the Mother will decide to call one of Her children back to Her. There’s nothing to be gained by worrying about things like that. We can’t do anything about them. That’s for Her to decide.”
Jondalar listened, still frowning with worry; then he relaxed and put his arms around her. “I worry too much. Thonolan used to tell me that. I just started thinking about what would happen if we were downstream of that valley, and remembered last night. And then I thought about losing you, and…” He tightened his arms around her. “Ayla, I don’t know what I would do if I ever lost you,” he said, with sudden fervor, holding her to him. “I’m not sure I’d want to go on living.”
She felt a tinge of worry at his strong reaction. “I hope you would go on living, Jondalar, and find someone else to love. If anything ever happened to you, a piece of me, of my spirit, would be gone with you, because I love you, but I would go on living, and a piece of your spirit would always be living with me.”
“It wouldn’t be easy to find someone else to love. I didn’t think I’d ever find you. I don’t know if I’d even want to look,” Jondalar said.
They started back, walking together. Ayla was quiet for a while, thinking, then said, “I wonder if that’s what happens when you love someone, and that person loves you back? I wonder if you exchange pieces of each other’s spirit. Maybe that’s why it hurts so much to lose someone you love.” She paused, then continued. “It’s like the men of the Clan. They are hunting brothers, and they exchange a piece of each other’s spirit, particularly when one saves the other’s life. It’s not easy to go on living when a piece of your spirit is missing, and each hunter knows a piece of himself will go to the next world if the other goes, so he will watch and protect his brother, do almost anything to save his life.” She stopped and looked up at him. “Do you think we have exchanged pieces of our spirits, Jondalar? We are hunting partners, aren’t we?”
“And you once saved my life, but you are much more than a hunting brother,” he said, smiling at the idea. “I love you. I understand now why Thonolan didn’t want to go on living when Jetamio died. Sometimes I think he was searching for a way into the next world, so he could find them, Jetamio and the baby who was never born.”
“But if anything ever happened to me, I wouldn’t want you to follow me to any spirit world. I’d want you to stay right here, and find someone else,” Ayla said, with conviction. She didn’t like all his talk about next worlds. She wasn’t sure what some other world after this one would be like, or even, deep in her heart, if one really existed. What she did know was that to get to any next world, you had to die in this one, and she didn’t want to hear about Jondalar dying, either before or after she did.
Thinking about worlds of the spirit led to other random thoughts. “Maybe that’s