The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children 4)

24

The woman and man looked toward the ground ahead and saw nothing. The land in front of them had ceased to be there. They had nearly stepped over the edge of a precipice. Jondalar felt the familiar tightening in his groin as he stared down at the steep drop-off, but he was surprised to see that far below was a long, flat green field, with a stream running through it.

The floors of big sinkholes were usually covered with a deep layer of soil, the insoluble residue of the limestone, and some of the deep sinkholes joined together and opened out into elongated depressions, creating large areas of land deep below the normal surface. With both soil and water, the vegetation below was rich and inviting. The problem was that neither of them could see any way to get down to the green meadow at the bottom of the steep-sided hole.

"Jondalar, there's something wrong about this place," Ayla said. "It's so dry and barren, hardly anything can live up here; down there is a beautiful meadow with a stream and trees, but nothing can reach it. Any animal that tried would die in the fall. It's all mixed up. It feels wrong."

"It does feel wrong. And maybe you're right, Ayla. Maybe this is what Jeren was trying to warn us about. There's not much here for hunters, and it's dangerous. I've never known of a place where you had to worry about falling over a cliff when you're just walking across the land."

Ayla bent down, grabbed Wolf's head with both her hands, and touched her forehead to his. "Thank you, Wolf, for warning us when we weren't paying attention," she said. He whined his affection and licked her face in response.

They backed up and led the horses around the deep hole, without saying much. Ayla couldn't even remember what was so important about the argument they almost had. She only thought that they should never have gotten so distracted that they didn't even see where they were going.

As they continued north, the river on their left began flowing through a gorge that was becoming deeper as the rocky cliffs got higher. Jondalar wondered whether they should try to follow close to the water or keep to the highland above, but he was glad they were following the river's course and not attempting to cross it. Rather than valleys with gr

assy slopes and broad floodplains, in karst regions the large rivers that could be seen from the surface tended to flow in steep-sided limestone gorges. As difficult as it was to use waterways as travel routes with no stream edge to walk along, it was even harder to get across them.

Remembering the great gorge farther south, with long stretches where there were no banks, Jondalar decided to stay on the highland. As they continued to climb, he was relieved to see a long thin stream of water falling down the face of the rock into the water of the river below. Although the waterfall was across the river, it meant some water was available on the higher ground, even though most of it quickly disappeared into the cracks of the karst.

But karst was also a landscape with many caves. They were so frequent that Ayla and Jondalar, and the horses, spent the next two nights protected from the weather by stone walls, without having to put up the tent. After examining several, they began to develop a sense about which openings in the rock were likely to be suitable for them.

Although water-filled caverns deep underground were continuing to increase in size, most enterable caves near the surface were no longer growing larger. Instead, the space inside was decreasing, sometimes rapidly when the general conditions were wet, though hardly changing at all during dry spells. Some caves could only be entered in dry weather; they would fill up during heavy rains. Some, though always open, had running streams covering the floors. The travelers looked for dry caves, usually somewhat higher up, but water, along with limestone, had been the instrument that had shaped and sculpted all of them.

Rainwater, slowly seeping through the rock of the roof, absorbed the dissolved limestone. Each drip of calcareous water, even the tiniest droplet of moisture in the air, was saturated with calcium carbonate in solution, which was redeposited inside the cave. Though usually pure white, the hardened mineral could be beautifully translucent, or mottled and shaded with gray, or faintly colored with tints of red or yellow. Pavements of travertine were created, and immovable draperies festooned the walls. Icicles of stone hanging from the ceiling strained with each wet drop to meet their counterparts growing slowly from the floor. Some were joined in thin-waisted columns, which grew thicker with time in the ever-changing cycle of the living earth.

The days were getting noticeably colder and windier, and Ayla and Jondalar were glad for the prevalence of caves to break the chill of the wind. They usually checked potential shelters to make sure they were not occupied by four-legged inhabitants before they moved in, but they found they could rely on the keener senses of their traveling companions to warn them of danger. Without saying so, or consciously considering it, they depended on the smell of smoke to tell them if there were human occupants—humans were the only animals that used fire—but they encountered no one, and even other animal species were rare.

Therefore, they were surprised when they came to a region that was unusually lavish in vegetation, at least compared with the rest of the barren, rocky landscape. Limestone was not all the same. It varied greatly in how easily it dissolved, and in the proportion that was insoluble. As a result, some areas of limestone karst were fertile, with meadows and trees growing beside normal streams that flowed on the surface. Sinking lands and caves and underground rivers did exist in those areas, but they were rarer.

When they came upon a herd of reindeer grazing in a field of dry standing hay, Jondalar looked at Ayla with a smile, then pulled out his spear-thrower. Ayla nodded in agreement and urged Whinney to follow the man and the stallion. With nothing around but a few small animals, hunting had been poor, and as the river was by then far below in the gorge, they hadn't been able to fish. They had been subsisting essentially on dried food and emergency traveling rations, even sharing some with the wolf. The horses were hard pressed, too. The scraggly grass that managed to grow in the thin soil had been barely sufficient for them.

Jondalar slit the throat to bleed the small-antlered doe they killed. Then they lifted the carcass into the bowl boat attached to the travois and looked for a place to camp nearby. Ayla wanted to dry some of the meat and render the animal's winter fat, and Jondalar was looking forward to a good piece of roast haunch and some tender liver. They thought they'd stay a day or so, especially with the meadow nearby. The horses needed the feed. Wolf had discovered an abundance of small creatures, voles, lemmings, and pikas, and had gone off to hunt and explore.

When they noticed a cave tucked into a hillside, they headed for it. It was a little smaller than they would have liked, but it seemed sufficient. They dropped the pole drag and unloaded the horses to let them enjoy the meadow, put the packs beside the cave, and dragged the travois over themselves, then spread out to collect woody brush and dried dung.

Ayla was looking forward to making a meal with fresh meat and was thinking about what to cook with it. She gathered some dried seed heads and grains from the meadow grasses, and handfuls of the tiny black seeds from the pigweed that was growing beside a small stream somewhat north of the cave. When she returned, Jondalar had already started the fire, and she asked him to go to the stream and fill up the waterbags.

Wolf arrived before the man came back, but when the animal approached the cave, he bared his teeth and snarled menacingly. Ayla felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

"Wolf, what is it?" she said, unconsciously reaching for her sling and picking up a stone, although her spear-thrower was just as close. The wolf stalked slowly into the cave, his throat rumbling with a deep snarl. Ayla followed behind, ducking her head to enter the small dark opening in the rock, and she wished she had brought a torch. But her nose told her what her eyes could not see. It had been many years since she had smelled that odor, but she would never forget it. Suddenly her mind pictured that first time so long ago.

They were in the foothills of the mountains not far from the Clan Gathering. Her son was riding on her hip, supported by his carrying cloak, and though she was young and one of the Others, she was walking in the medicine woman's position. They had all stopped in their tracks and were staring at the monstrous cave bear, nonchalantly scratching his back against the bark of the tree.

Though the huge creature, twice the size of ordinary brown bears, was the most revered totem of all the Clan, the young people of Bran's clan had never seen a living one. There were none left in the mountains near their cave, though dry bones attested to the fact that there once had been. For the powerful magic they contained, Creb had retrieved the few tufts of hair that had been caught in the bark after the cave bear finally lumbered off, leaving only his distinctive smell behind.

Ayla signaled Wolf and backed out of the cave. She noticed the sling in her hand and tucked it in her waist tie with a wry face. What good was a sling against a cave bear? She was just grateful that the bear had begun his long sleep and hadn't been disturbed by her intrusion. She quickly threw dirt on the fire and stamped it out, then picked up her pack-saddle basket and moved it away from the cave. Fortunately they hadn't unpacked very much. She went back for Jondalar's pack and then dragged the travois by herself. She had just picked up her pack again to move it farther away when Jondalar appeared with the full waterbags.

"What are you doing, Ayla?" he asked.

"There's a cave bear in that cave," she said. At his look of apprehension, she added. "He's started his long sleep, I think, but they sometimes move if they are disturbed early in winter, at least that's what they said."

"Who said?"

"The hunters of Brun's clan. I used to watch them when they talked about hunting ... sometimes," Ayla explained. Then she grinned. "Not just sometimes. I watched as often as I could, especially after I started practicing with my sling. The men usually didn't pay attention to a girl busying herself nearby. I knew they would never teach me, and watching when they exchanged hunting stories was a way to learn. I thought they might be angry if they found out what I was doing, but I didn't know how severe the punishment would be ... until later."

"I guess if anyone would, the Clan would know about cave bears," Jondalar said. "Do you think it's safe to stay around here?"

"I don't know, but I don't think I want to," she said.