The Valley of Horses (Earth's Children 2)

As she saw herself and Jondalar on the rocky beach of the remote valley, aberrant currents of light and motion, forming out of a numinous thickening of the air and disappearing into emptiness, surrounded them, joining them. She felt a vague sense of her own destiny as a pivotal nexus of many strands linking past, present, and future through a crucial transition. A deep cold swept over her, she gasped, and, with a startled jerk, she was looking at a furrowed brow and a concerned face. She shuddered to dispel an eerie sense of unreality.

“Are you all right, Ayla?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”

An unaccountable chill had raised gooseflesh and the hair on the back of his neck. He felt a strong urge to protect her, but he didn’t know what threatened. It lasted only an instant, and he tried to shrug it off, but uneasiness lingered.

“I think the weather is about to change,” he said. “I felt a cold wind.” They both looked up at the clear blue sky unmarked by clouds.

“It’s the season for thunderstorms—they can blow up fast.”

He nodded, and then, to grasp at substance, he turned the subject back to the hard practicalities of toolmaking.

“What is your next step, Ayla?”

The woman bent back to her task. With careful concentration, she flaked off five more sharp-edged ovals of flint, and after a final examination of the butt of stone to see if one more usable flake might be detached, she threw it aside.

She turned then to the six flakes of gray flint and picked up the thinnest of them. With a smooth, flattened round stone, she retouched one long sharp edge, blunting it for a back and shaping a point at the narrow end opposite the bulge made by the impact of percussion. When she was satisfied, she held it out to Jondalar in the flat of her palm.

He took it and inspected it carefully. In cross section it was rather thick, but tapered to a thin, sharp cutting edge along its length. It was wide enough to be held in the hand comfortably, and the back was dulled so it would not cut the user. In some ways it resembled a Mamutoi spear point, he thought, but it was never intended to be hafted to shaft or handle. It was a handheld knife, and from observing her using a similar one, he knew it was surprisingly efficient.

Jondalar put it down and nodded to her to continue. She picked up another thick stone flake, and, using the canine tooth of an animal, she chipped off fine splinters from the end of the oval. The process dulled it only slightly, enough to strengthen the edge so the sharp rounded end would not crush when used to scrape hair and grain from hides. Ayla put it down and picked up another piece.

She put a large smooth beach stone on the mammoth-foot-bone anvil. Then, using pressure with the pointed-tooth retoucher against the stone, she made a V-shaped notch in the middle of one long sharp edge, large enough to shave the end of a spear shaft to a point. On a longer oval flake, using a similar technique, she made a tool which could be used to pierce holes in leather, or bore holes in wood, antler, or bone.

Ayla didn’t know what other kinds of tools she might need, and she decided to leave the last two stone flakes as blanks for later. Pushing the mammoth bone out of the way, she gathered up the ends of the hide and carried it to the midden around the wall to shake it out. Splinters of flint were sharp enough to cut even the toughest of bare feet. He hadn’t said anything about her tools, but she noticed Jondalar turning them over and holding them in his hand as though to try them.

“I’d like to use your lap cover,” he said.

She gave it to him, glad her demonstration was over and anticipating his. He spread the leather hide over his lap, then closed his eyes and thought about the stone, and what he would do with it. Then he picked up one of the flint nodules he had brought to the site and inspected it.

The hard siliceous mineral had been torn loose from chalk deposits laid down during the cretaceous period. It still bore traces of its origin in the chalky outer covering, though it had been disgorged with the raging flood through the narrow canyon upstream and flung onto the rocky beach. Flint was the most effective material, occurring naturally, for making tools. It was hard, and yet, due to its minute crystal structure, it could be worked; its shape was limited only by the skill of the knapper.

Jondalar was looking for the distinctive characteristics of chalcedony flint, the purest and clearest. Any stones with cracks or fissures he discarded, as well as those that made a sound when tapped with another stone—indicating, to his ear, flaws or inclusions. He finally selected one.

Supporting it with his thigh, he held it with his left hand, and, with his right, he reached for the hammerstone and juggled it to get the right feel. It was new, still unfamiliar, and each hammerstone had its own individuality. When it felt right, he held the flint firmly, and struck. A large piece of the gray-white cortex fell away. Inside, the flint was a paler shade of gray than the one Ayla had worked, with a bluish sheen. Fine-grained. A good stone. A good sign.

He struck again, and again. Ayla was familiar enough with the process to recognize his expertise immediately. He far surpassed any skill she had. The only one she’d ever seen who could shape the stone with such certain confidence was Droog. But the shape Jondalar was giving to his stone was not like any made by the Clan toolmaker. She bent closer to watch.

Rather than egg-shaped, Jondalar’s core was becoming more cylindrical, but not exactly circular. By flaking pieces from both sides, he was creating a ridge which ran the length of the cylinder. The ridge was still rough and wavy when the cortex was removed, and he put the hammerstone down to pick up a solid length of antler that had been cut off below the first fork to eliminate all branches.

With the antler hammer, he chipped off smaller pieces to make the ridge straight. He was preparing his core also, but he was not planning to remove thick flakes with a predetermined shape—that much was obvious to Ayla. When he was finally satisfied with the ridge, he picked up another implement, one she had been curious about. This was also made from a section of a big antler, longer than the first, and, rather than being cut off below the fork, two branches projected from the central stem, and the bottom of it had been shaped into a point.

Jondalar got up and held the flint core with his foot. Then he placed the point of the forked antler just above the ridge he had so carefully shaped. He held the upper protruding branch so that the lower one faced front and jutted out. Then, with a heavy length of a long bone, he tapped the jutting tine.

A thin blade fell away. It was as long as the cylinder of stone, but only about a sixth as wide as the length. He held it up to the sun and showed it to Ayla. Translucent light filtered through. The ridge he had so carefully shaped ran down the center of the outside face for the full length, and it had two very sharp cutting edges.

With the point of the antler punch placed directly on the flint, he had not had to aim as carefully or gauge distance as closely. The force of the percussion was directed exactly where he wanted it, and with the force of the blow dispersed between two intermediate resilient objects—the bone hammer and the antler punch—there was almost no percussion bulge. The blade was long and narrow, and uniformly thin. Without having to judge the strength of his strike as carefully, he had far more control over the results.

Jondalar’s stone-working technique was a revolutionary improvement, but as important as the blade it produced was the scar it left behind on the core. The ridge he had made was gone. In its place was a long trough with two ridges on either side. That had been the purpose of the careful pre-working. He moved the tip of the punch over so that it was above one of the new ridges, then tapped again with the bone hammer. Another long narrow blade fell off, leaving two more ridges behind. He moved the punch again, above another of the ridges, detached another blade, and created more ridges.

When he finally ran out of usable material, not six, but twenty-five blades were lined up in a row—more than four times the useful cutting edge from the same amount of stone: more than four times the number of blanks. Long and thin, with surgically sharp edges, the bl

ades were usable as cutting implements as they were, but they were not his finished product. They would be further shaped for a multitude of uses, primarily to make other tools. Depending on the shape and quality of the flint nodule, not four, but up to six or seven times the usable number of blanks for tools could be made from stones of the same size with the more advanced technique. The new method not only gave the toolmaker more control, it gave his people an unparalleled advantage.

Jondalar picked up one of the blades and gave it to Ayla. She checked the sharpness of the edge lightly with her thumb, exerted some pressure to test its strength, and turned it over in her hand. It curved up at the ends; it was the nature of the material, but more noticeable in the long thin blade. She held her palm out flat and watched it rock on its bowed back. The shape did not, however, limit its function.

“Jondalar, this is … I don’t know the word. It’s wonderful … important. You made so many … You are not through with these, are you?”

He smiled. “No, I’m not through.”

“They are so thin and fine—they are beautiful. They might break more easily, but I think with the ends retouched, they’d be strong scrapers.” Her practical side was already imagining the blanks into tools.

“Yes, and like yours, good knives—though I’d want to put a tang on it for a handle.”

“I don’t know what ‘tang’ is.”

He picked up a blade to explain. “I can blunt the back of this and shape a point, and I would have a knife. If I pressure off a few flakes on the inner face, I can even straighten out the curve somewhat. Now, about halfway down the blade, if I use pressure to break off the edge and make a shoulder, and leave just a prong on the lower end, that is a tang.”