The Valley of Horses (Earth's Children 2)

He picked up a small segment of antler. “If I fit the tang into a piece of bone, or wood, or antler like this, the knife will have a handle. It’s easier to use with a handle. If you boil antler for a while, it will swell and soften, and then you can force the tang into the middle where it’s softer. When the antler dries, it shrinks and tightens around the tang. Often it will hold without binding or glue for a long time.”

Ayla was excited about the new method, and wanted to practice it as she had always done after watching Droog, but she wasn’t sure if it would violate Jondalar’s customs or traditions. The more she learned about the ways of his people, the less sense they made. He didn’t seem to mind her hunting, but he might not want her to make his kind of tools.

“I would like to try.… Is there … objection to women making tools?”

Her question pleased him. It took skill to make her kind of tools. He was sure even the best toolmaker had inconsistent results, though the worst could probably turn out some that were usable—even smashing a flint boulder by accident usually produced a few pieces that were usable. But he would have understood if she had tried to justify her method. Instead, she seemed to recognize his technique for what it was—a vast improvement—and wanted to try it. He wondered how he would feel if someone showed him as radical an improvement.

I’d want to learn it, he said to himself with a wry grin.

“Women can be good flint knappers. Joplaya, my cousin, is one of the best. But she’s a terrible tease—so I would never tell her that. She’d never let me forget it.” He smiled at the memory.

“In the Clan, women can make tools, but not weapons.”

“Women make weapons. After they have children, Zelandonii women seldom hunt, but if they learned when they were young, they understand how weapons are used. Many tools and weapons are lost or broken on a hunt. A man whose mate knows how to make new ones always has a fresh supply. And women are closer to the Mother. Some men think women-made weapons are luckier. But if a man has bad luck—or lacks skill—he’ll always blame the toolmaker, especially if it’s a woman.”

“Could I learn?”

“Anyone who can make tools the way you did can certainly learn to make them this way.”

He answered her question in a slightly different sense than she meant it. She knew she was capable of learning—she had been trying to assure herself that it was allowable. But his answer made her stop and think.

“No … I don’t think so.”

“Of course you can learn.”

“I know I can learn, Jondalar, but not anyone who makes tools the Clan way can learn to make them your way. Some could, I think Droog could, but anything new is difficult for them. They learn from their memories.”

He thought at first she was joking, but she was serious. Could she be right? Given the opportunity, would fla … Clan toolmakers be, not unwilling, but unable to learn?

Then it occurred to him that he would not have thought them capable of making tools at all not so long ago. They made tools, they communicated, and they took in a strange orphan child. He had learned more about flatheads in the past few days than anyone knew, except Ayla. It could be useful to know more about them, perhaps. There seemed to be more to them than anyone realized.

Thinking about flatheads suddenly made him recall the day before, and an unexpected flush of embarrassment rushed him. With their concentration on toolmaking, he had forgotten. He had been looking at the woman, but not really seeing her golden braids shining in the sunlight, offering marked contrast to her deep rich tan; or her eyes, blue gray and clear, like the translucent color of fine flint.

O Mother, she was beautiful! He became acutely conscious of her sitting so close to him and felt a movement in his groin. He could not have kept his sudden shift of interest out of his eyes if he’d tried. And he didn’t try.

Ayla felt his change in mood; it washed over her, caught her unprepared. How could anyone’s eyes be so blue? Not the sky, not the blue gentians growing in the mountain meadows near the clan’s cave were so deeply, vibrantly hued. She could feel that … that feeling starting. Her body tingled, ached for him to touch her. She was leaning forward, pulled, drawn to him, and only with supreme effort of will did she close her eyes and pull away.

Why does he look at me that way when I’m … abomination? When he can’t touch me without jerking away as if he were burned? Her heart was pounding; she was panting as though she had been running, and she tried to slow her breaths.

She heard him get up before she opened her eyes. The leather lap cover had been flung aside and his carefully wrought blades were scattered. She watched him walking away with stiff movements, his shoulders hunched, until he was around the wall. He seemed miserable, as miserable as she was.

Once he cleared the wall, Jondalar broke into a run. He raced down the field until his pumping legs ached and his breath raled in ragged sobs; then he slowed and jogged to a halt, heaving great gasps.

You stupid fool, what does it take to convince you? Just because she’s decent enough to let you get some supplies together doesn’t mean she wants any part of you … particularly that part! Yesterday, she was hurt and offended because you didn’t … That was before you ruined it for yourself!

He didn’t like to think about it. He knew what he had felt, what she must have seen, the revulsion, the disgust. So, what is different now? She lived with flatheads, remember? For years. She became one of them. One of their males …

He was purposely bringing out everything loathsome, defiled, unclean that was part of his way of life. Ayla was all of them! When he was a young boy hiding with the other young boys behind bushes, telling each other the foulest words they knew, “flathead female” was among them. When he was older—not much older, but enough to know what “woman-maker” meant—the same boys gathered in dark corners of the cave to talk in hushed voices about girls, and to plot with sneering laughter to get a flathead female, and to scare each other about the consequences.

Even then the thought of a flathead male and a woman was unthinkable. Only when he was a young man was it mentioned, and then not so any elder might hear. When young men wanted to be snickering boys again and told each other the coarsest, filthiest stories they could think of, it was of flathead males a

nd women, and what would happen to a man who shared Pleasures with such a woman afterward, even unknowingly—especially unknowingly. That was the joke.

But they did not joke about abominations—or the women who bore them. They were polluted mixtures of spirits, an evil let loose upon the land that even the Mother, the creator of all life, abhorred. And the women who bore them, untouchable.

Could Ayla be that? Could she be defiled? Unclean? Filth? Evil? Honest, straightforward Ayla? With her Gift of healing? So wise, and fearless, and gentle, and beautiful. Could anyone that beautiful be unclean?

I don’t think she would even understand the meaning! But what would someone think who didn’t know her? What if they met her and she just told them who raised her? Told them about the … child? What would Zelandoni think? Or Marthona? And she would tell them, too. She’d tell them about her son and stand up to them. I think Ayla could stand up to anyone, even Zelandoni. She could almost be a zelandoni herself, with her skill in healing and her way with animals.

But if Ayla is not evil, then everything about flatheads is not true! No one will believe that.

Jondalar had not been paying attention to where he was going and was startled when he felt a soft muzzle in his hand. He hadn’t seen the horses. He stopped to scratch and stroke the young colt. Whinney gradually moved toward the cave, grazing as she went. The colt bounded ahead to her when the man gave him a final pat. Jondalar was not in a hurry to face Ayla again.

But Ayla was not at the cave. She had followed him around the wall and watched him run down the length of the valley. She felt like running sometimes, but she wondered what made him suddenly need to run so hard. Was it she? She put a hand on the warm dirt over the roasting pit, and then she walked to the large rock. Jondalar, distracted again by his thoughts, was surprised when he looked up to see both animals clustered around her.