The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [212]
“Would you show me how to start a fire, Ayla?” Jondalar asked when she picked up the stones. This time she understood.
“Not hard,” she said, and brought the fire-making stones and burning materials closer to the bed. “Ayla show.” She demonstrated hitting the stones together, then piled shaggy bark fiber and fireweed fuzz together and gave him the flint and iron pyrite.
He recognized the flint immediately—and he thought he had seen stones like the other one, but he would never have attempted to use them together for anything, particularly not for making fire. He struck them together the way she had. It was only a glancing blow, but he thought he saw a tiny spark. He struck again, still not quite believing he could draw fire from stones, in spite of seeing Ayla do it. A large flash jumped from the cold stones. He was stunned and then excited. After a few more tries and a little assistance from Ayla, he had a small fire going beside the bed. He looked at the two stones again.
“Who taught you to make fire this way?”
She knew what he was asking, but she didn’t know how to tell him. “Ayla do,” she said.
“Yes, I know you do, but who showed you?”
“Ayla … show.” How could she tell him about that day when her fire went out, and her hand-axe broke, and she had discovered the firestone? She put her head in her hands for a moment, trying to find a way to explain, then looked at him and shook her head. “Ayla no talk good.”
He could see her sense of defeat. “You will, Ayla. You can tell me then. It won’t be long—you’re an amazing woman.” He smiled then. “Today I go outside, right?”
“Ayla see …” She pulled back his covers and checked the leg. The places where the knots had been had small scabs, and the leg was well on the way toward healing. It was time to get him up on the leg and try to assess the impairment. “Yes, Don-da-lah go out.”
The biggest grin she’d ever seen cracked his face. He felt like a boy setting out for the Summer Meeting after a long winter. “Well, let’s go, woman!” He pulled back the furs, eager to be up and out.
His boyish enthusiasm was infectious. She smiled back, but added a note of restraint. “Don-da-lah eat food.”
It didn’t take long to prepare a morning meal of food cooked the evening before, plus a morning tea. She brought grain to Whinney, and spent a few moments currying her with a teasel and scratching the little colt with it as well. Jondalar watched her. He’d watched her before, but this was the first time he noticed that she made a sound remarkably like that of a horse’s nicker, and some clipped, guttural syllables. Her hand motions and signs meant nothing to him—he didn’t see them, didn’t know they were an integral part of the language she spoke to the horse—but he knew that in some incomprehensible way, she was talking to the mare. He had an equally strong impression that the animal understood her.
As she fondled the mare and her foal, he wondered what magic she had used to captivate the animals. He was feeling a bit captivated himself, but he was surprised and delighted when she led the horse and her colt to him. He had never patted a living horse before, nor gotten so close to a fuzzy new foal, and he was slightly overwhelmed by their total lack of fear. The colt seemed particularly drawn to him after his first cautious pats led to strokes and scratches that unerringly found the right places.
He remembered he had not given her the name for the animal, and he pointed to the mare. “Horse,” he said.
But Whinney had a name, a name made with sounds, just like hers, and his. Ayla shook her head. “No,” she said, “Whinney.”
To him, the sound she made was not a name—it was a perfect imitation of a horse’s whinny. He was astonished. She couldn’t speak any human languages, but she could talk like a horse? Talk to a horse? He was