The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [230]
She sat up and he took her in his arms. “Oh, Jondalar! It was my dream, my nightmare,” she sobbed.
“It’s all right, Ayla. It’s all right now.”
“It was an earthquake. That’s what happened. She was killed in an earthquake.”
“Who was killed in an earthquake?”
“My mother. And Creb, too, later. Oh, Jondalar, I hate earthquakes!” She shuddered in his arms.
Jondalar took her by both shoulders and pushed her back so he could look at her. “Tell me about your dream, Ayla,” he said.
“I’ve had those dreams as long as I can remember—they always come back. In one, I am in a small cave, and a claw reaches in. I think that is how my totem marked me. The other I could never remember, but I always woke up shaking and sick Except this time. I saw her, Jondalar. I saw my mother!”
“Ayla, do you hear yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re talking, Ayla. You’re talking!”
Ayla had known how to speak once, and, though the language was not the same, she had learned the feel, the rhythm, the sense of spoken language. She had forgotten how to speak verbally because her survival depended upon another mode of communication, and because she wanted to forget the tragedy that had left her alone. Though it wasn’t a conscious effort, she had been hearing and memorizing more than the vocabulary of Jondalar’s language. The syntax, grammar, stress, were part of the sounds she heard when he spoke.
Like a child first learning to speak, she was born with the aptitude and the desire, and she needed only the constant exposure. But her motivation was stronger than a child’s, and her memory more developed. She learned faster. Though she could not reproduce some of his tones and inflections exactly, she had become a native speaker of his language.
“I am! I can! Jondalar, I can think in words!”
They both noticed then that he was holding her, and both became self-conscious about it. He let his arms drop.
“Is it morning already?” Ayla said, noticing the light streaming in through the cave opening and the smoke hole above it. She threw back the covers. “I didn’t know I would sleep so long. Great Mother! I’ve got to start that meat drying.” She had picked up his epithets as well. He smiled. It was rather awe-inspiring to hear her suddenly speaking, but hearing his phrases coming out of her mouth, spoken with her unique accent, was funny.
She hurried to the entrance, then stopped cold when she looked out. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Lines of meat cut in neat little tongue-shaped pieces were strung out from one end to the other of the stone porch, with several small fires spaced in the midst of them. Could she still be dreaming? Had all the women of the clan suddenly appeared to help her?
“There is some meat from a haunch I spitted at that fireplace, if you’re hungry,” Jondalar said, with assumed casualness, and a big smug smile.
“You? You did that?”
“Yes. I did it.” His grin was even wider. Her reaction to his little surprise was better than he’d hoped. Maybe he wasn’t quite up to hunting yet, but at least he could skin the animals she brought and start the meat drying, especially since he had just made new knives.
“But … you’re a man!” she said, stunned.
Jondalar’s little surprise was more staggering than he knew. It was only by drawing on their memories that members of the Clan acquired the knowledge and skills to survive. For them, instinct had evolved so that they could remember the skills of their forebears and pass them down to their progeny, stored in the backs of their brains. The tasks that men and women performed had been differentiated for so many generations that Clan members had sex-differentiated memories. One sex was unable to perform the functions of the other; they did not have the memories for it.
A man of the Clan could have hunted or found deer and brought them back. He could even have skinned them, though somewhat less efficiently than a woman. If pressed, he might have hacked out some hunks. But he would never