The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children 4)

On her left bank, between the river and the sharply folded glistening crests of granite and slate to the north, lay a platform, a foreland of limestone, primarily, covered with a mantle of loess. It was a rough and rugged land subject to violent extremes. Harsh black winds from the south desiccated the land in summer; high pressure over the northern glacier hurled frigid blasts of freezing air across the open space in winter; fierce gale storms rising in the sea frequently bore down from the east. The occasional soaking rains and the fast drying winds, along with the temperature extremes, caused the limestone underlying the porous loess soil to fracture, which created steeply scarped faces on flat open plateaus.

Tough grasses survived on the dry windy landscape, but trees were almost entirely absent. The only woody vegetation were certain kinds of brush that could withstand both arid heat and searing cold. An occasional thin-branched tamarisk bush, with its feathery foliage and spikes of tiny pink flowers, or a buckthorn, with black round berries and sharp thorns, dotted the landscape, and even a few small, bushy, black currant shrubs could be seen. Most prevalent were several varieties of artemisia, including a wormwood unknown to Ayla.

Its black stalks looked bare and dead, but when she picked some, thinking it would make fuel for a fire, she discovered it was not dry and brittle but green and living. After a brief wet squall, loose-toothed leaves with a silvery down on the underside uncurled and grew out from the stalks and numerous small yellowish flowers, like tightly cupped centers of daisies, appeared on branching spikes. Except for its darker stems, it resembled the more familiar, lighter-colored species that often grew alongside fescue and crested hair grass, until the wind and sun dried the plains. Then it once again appeared lifeless and dead. With its variety of grasses and brush, the southern plains supported hosts of animals. None they hadn't seen on the steppes farther north, but in different proportions, and some of the more cold-loving species, such as the musk-ox, never ventured so far south. On the other hand, Ayla had never seen so many saiga antelope in one place before. They were a widespread animal, seen almost everywhere on the open plains, but were not usually very numerous.

Ayla stopped and was watching a herd of the strange, clumsy-looking animals. Jondalar had gone to investigate an inlet in the river with some slender tree trunks stuck into the bank that looked out of place. There were no trees on this side of the river, and the arrangement seemed purposeful. When he caught up, she seemed to be looking off in the distance.

"I couldn't tell for sure," he said. "Those logs might have been put there by some River People; someone could tie a boat there. But it could be driftwood from upstream, too."

Ayla nodded, then pointed toward the dry steppes. "Look at all those saigas."

Jondalar didn't see them at first. They were the color of the dust. Then he saw the outline of their straight horns with coiled ridges, tipped slightly forward at the ends.

"They remind me of Iza. The spirit of the Saiga was her totem," the woman said, smiling.

The saiga antelopes always made Ayla smile, with their long overhanging noses and peculiar gait, which did not hinder their speed, she noted. Wolf liked to chase them, but they were so fast that he seldom got very close to them, at least not for long.

These saiga seemed to favor the black-stemmed wormwood in particular, and they banded together in much larger than usual herds. A small herd of ten or fifteen animals was common, usually females, with one and often two young; some mothers were not much more than a year old themselves. But in this region the herds were numbering more than fifty. Ayla wondered about the males. The only time she saw them in any abundance was during their rutting season, when each tried to Pleasure as many females as he could, as many times as he could. Afterward there were always carcasses of male saigas to be found. It was almost as though the males wore themselves out with Pleasures, and for the rest of the year left the sparse feed they commonly ate for the females and the young.

There were also a few ibex and mouflon on the plains, often preferring to stay near the steep scarped faces, which the wild goats and sheep could climb with ease. Huge herds of aurochs were scattered over the land, most of them with solid-color coats of a deep reddish black, but a surprising number of individuals had white spots, some quite large. They saw faintly spotted fallow deer, red deer, and bison, and many onagers. Whinney and Racer were aware of most of the four-legged grazers, but the onagers, in particular, caught their attention. They watched the herds of horselike asses and sniffed long at their similar piles of dung.

There was the usual complement of small grassland animals: susliks, marmots, jerboas, hamsters, hares, and a crested porcupine species that was new to the woman. Keeping their numbers in check were the animals that preyed on the rest. They saw small wildcats, larger lynxes, and huge cave lions, and they heard the laughing cackle of hyenas.

In the days that followed, the great river changed her course and direction often. While the landscape on the left bank, through which they were traveling, remained much the same—grassy low rolling hills and flat plains with sharp-edged scarp faces and jagged mountains behind—they noticed that the opposite bank became more rugged and diverse. Tributary rivers cut deep valleys, and trees climbed the eroded mountains, occasionally covering an entire slope right down to the water's edge. The indented foothills and rough terrain, which defined the south bank, contributed to the broad curves swinging in every direction, even back on itself, but overall her course was eastward toward the sea.

Within the mighty turns and twists, the great body of water flowing toward them did spread out and break up into separate channels, but it did not develop into a marshland like the delta again. It was simply a huge river or, over more level ground, a meandering series of large parallel streams with richer brush and greener grass nearer the water.

Though it had sometimes seemed annoying, Ayla missed the chorus of marsh frogs, though the flutey trill of variegated toads was still a refrain in the aleatoric medley of night music. Lizards and steppe vipers took their place and along with them the distinctively beautiful demoiselle cranes, who thrived on the reptiles, as well as insects and snails. Ayla enjoyed watching a pair of the long-legged birds, bluish-gray with black heads and white tufts of feathers behind each eye, feeding their young.

She did not, however, miss the mosquitoes. Without their marshy breeding ground, those bothersome biting insects had largely disappeared. That was not true of the gnats. Clouds of them still plagued the wayfarers, particularly the furry ones.

"Ayla! Look!" Jondalar said, pointing out a simple construction of logs and planks at the edge of the river. "This is a boat landing. This was made by River People."

Though she did not know what a boat landing was, it was obviously not an accidental arrangement of materials. It had been purposely constructed for some human use. The woman felt a surge of excitement. "Does that mean there are people around here?"

"Probably not right now—there's no boat at the landing—but not far. This must be a place that is used frequently. They wouldn't go to the trouble of making a landing if they didn't use it a lot, and they wouldn't use a place that was far away very often."

Jondalar studied the landing for a moment, then looked upstream and across the river. "I'm not certain, but I'd say whoever built this lives on the other side of the river, and they land here when they cross. Maybe they come over to hunt, or collect roots, or something."

Proceeding upriver, they both kept looking across the wide stream. Except in general, they hadn't paid much attention to the territory on the other side until now, and it occurred to Ayla that there may have been people over there that they hadn't noticed before. They had not gone far when Jondalar caught a movement on the water, some distance upstream. He stopped to verify his sighting.

"Ayla, look over there," he said when she stopped beside him. "That could be a Ramudoi boat."

She looked and saw something, but she wasn't sure what she was seeing. They urged the horses on. When they got closer, Ayla saw a boat unlike anything she had ever seen before. She was only familiar with boats made in the Mamutoi style, hide-covered frames made in the shape of a bowl like the one that was mounted on the travois. The one she saw on the river was made of wood and came to a point in front. It held several people in a row. As they drew abreast, Ayla noticed more people on the opposite shore.

"Hola!" Jondalar called out, waving his arm in greeting. He shouted some other words in a language that was unfamiliar to her, though there seemed to be a vague similarity to Mamutoi.

The people in the boat did not respond, and Jondalar wondered if he had not been heard, though he thought they had seen him. He called out again, and this time he was sure they had heard him, but they did not wave back. Instead they began paddling for the other side as fast as they could.

Ayla noticed that one of the people on the opposite shore had seen them, too. He ran toward some other people and pointed across the river at them, then he and some of the others left in a hurry. A couple of people stayed until the boat reached shore; then they left.

"It's the horses, again, isn't it?" she said.

Jondalar thought he saw a tear glisten. "It wouldn't have been a good idea to cross the river here, anyway. The Cave of Sharamudoi that I know live on this side."

"I suppose so," she said, signaling Whinney to move on. "But they could have crossed in their boat. They could at least have answered your greeting."

"Ayla, think how strange we must look, sitting on these horses. We must seem like something from some spirit world with four legs, and two heads," he said. "You can't blame people for being afraid of something they don't know."