The shelters of stone - Jean M. Auel [402]
“Well, I guess you couldn’t know,” he said, smiling.
She smiled back, feeling relieved, and tried to make her explanation more clear. “It’s just that you remind me of some people that I care about. That’s why I was drawn to you from the beginning. There was a little boy I knew, who I loved, and you remind me of him …”
“Wait! Are you still saying that you think they are a part of me? I thought you said that I was not a flathead,” Brukeval said.
“You aren’t. Not even Echozar is. Just because his mother was Clan doesn’t mean that he is. He wasn’t raised by them, and you weren’t, either…”
“But you still think my mother was an abomination. I told you, she was not! Neither my mother nor my grandmother had anything to do with them. None of those dirty animals had anything to do with me, do you hear me?” He was shouting and his face had turned an angry red. “I am not a flathead! Just because you were raised by those animals, don’t think you can drag me down.”
Wolf was growling at the excited man, ready to spring to Ayla’s defense. The man looked as if he might want to hurt her. “Wolf! No!” she commanded. She had done it again. Why couldn’t she have stopped when he was smiling? But he didn’t have to call her Clan “dirty animals,” because they weren’t.
“I suppose you think that wolf is human, too,” Brukeval sneered. “You don’t even know the difference between people and animals. It’s unnatural for a wolf to act the way he does around people.” He was unaware just how close he was to Wolf’s fangs with his shouting, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Brukeval was beside himself. “Let me tell you something, if it hadn’t been for those animals attacking my grandmother, she would not have been so frightened that she gave birth to a weak woman, and my mother would have lived to take care of me, love me. Those filthy flatheads killed my grandmother and my mother, too. As far as I’m concerned, they are no use to anyone. They should all be dead, like my mother. Don’t you dare tell me they have anything to do with me. If it were up to me, I’d kill them all myself.”
He was advancing on Ayla as he screamed, backing her down the path. She held Wolf by the fur on his neck to keep him from attacking the raging man. Finally he brushed past her, knocking her aside, and stormed down. He had never been so angry. Not only because she imputed flatheads to his lineage, but because in his rage, he had blurted out his innermost feelings. He had wanted more than anything else to have had a mother to run to when the others teased him. But the woman who inherited Brukeval along with his mother’s possessions had no love for the baby she reluctantly nursed. He was a burden on her, and she considered him repulsive. She had several children of her own, including Marona, making it even easier to ignore him. But she wasn’t much of a mother even to her own, and Marona had learned her callous, unfeeling ways from her mother.
Ayla was shaking. Now she had really done it. She tried to collect herself as she stumbled her way up the path and into Zelandoni’s dwelling. The woman looked up as Ayla came through the entrance and immediately recognized that something was gravely wrong.
“Ayla, what is it? You look as if you’ve just seen an evil spirit,” she said.
“Oh, Zelandoni, I think I have. I just saw Brukeval,” she cried. “I tried to tell him I didn’t mean to insult him at that meeting, but I always seem to say the wrong thing to him.”
“Sit down, tell me about it,” Zelandoni said.
She explained what had happened during her encounter on the path. Zelandoni was quiet after Ayla told her, then she fixed the young woman a cup of tea. Ayla settled down; talking about it had helped.
“I’ve watched Brukeval for a long time,” Zelandoni said after a while. “There’s a fury inside him. He wants to strike out at the world that has given him so much hurt. He has decided to lay the blame on the flatheads, the Clan. He sees them as the root of his pain. He hates everything