The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children 4)

30

As Ayla and Jondalar settled down for the night, both were wary of every sound they heard. The horses were staked nearby, and Ayla kept Wolf beside her bedroll, knowing he would warn her of anything unusual that he sensed, but she still slept poorly. Her dreams felt threatening, but amorphous and disorganized, with no messages or warnings that she could define, except that Wolf kept appearing in them.

She awoke as the first glimmerings of day broke through the bare branches of willow and birch to the east, near the stream. It was still dark in the rest of their secluded glen, but as she watched, she began to see thick-needled spruce and the longer needle-shafts of stone pine def

ined in the growing light. A fine powdering of dry snow had sprinkled down during the night, dusting evergreens, tangled brush, dry grass, and bedrolls with white, but Ayla was cozily warm.

She had almost forgotten how good it felt to have Jondalar sleeping beside her, and she stayed still for a while, just enjoying his nearness. But her mind would not stay still. She kept worrying about the day ahead and thinking over what she was going to make for the feast. She finally decided to get up, but when she tried to slip out of the furs, she felt Jondalar's arm tightening around her, holding her back.

"Do you have to get up? It's been so long since I've felt you beside me, I hate to let you go," Jondalar said, nuzzling her neck.

She settled back into his warmth. "I don't want to get up either. It's cold, and I'd like to stay here in the furs with you, but I need to start cooking something for Attaroa's 'feast,' and make your morning meal. Aren't you hungry?"

"Now that you mention it, I think I could eat a horse!" Jondalar said, eying the two nearby exaggeratedly.

"Jondalar!" Ayla said, looking shocked.

He grinned at her. "Not one of ours, but that is what I've been eating lately—when I've had anything at all. If I hadn't been so hungry, I don't think I would have eaten horsemeat, but when there is nothing else, you eat what you can get. And there's nothing wrong with it."

"I know, but you don't have to eat it any more. We have other food," she said. They snuggled together for a moment longer, then Ayla pulled back the fur. "The fire has gone out. If you start a new one, I'll make our morning tea. We'll need a hot fire today, and a lot of wood."

For their meal the evening before, Ayla had prepared a larger than usual amount of a hearty soup from dried bison meat and dried roots, adding a few pine nuts from the cones of the stone pines, but Jondalar had not been able to eat as much as he thought. After she put the rest aside, she had taken out a basket of small whole apples, hardly bigger than cherries, which she had found while trailing Jondalar. They had frozen but were still clinging to a dwarfed clump of leafless trees on the south face of a hillside. She had cut the hard little apples in half, seeded them, then boiled them for a while with dried rose hips. She left the result overnight near the fire. By morning it had cooled and thickened from the natural pectin to a sauce of a jellylike consistency with bits of chewy apple skin.

Before she made their morning tea, Ayla added a little water to the soup that was left and put extra cooking stones in the fire to heat it for their breakfast. She also tasted the thickened apple mixture. Freezing had moderated the usual tart sourness of the hard apples and adding rose hips had imparted a reddish tinge and a tangy sweet flavor. She served a bowl to Jondalar along with his soup.

"This is the best food I've ever eaten!" Jondalar said after the first few bites. "What did you put in it to make it taste so good?"

Ayla smiled. "It's flavored with hunger."

Jondalar nodded, and between mouthfuls he said, "I suppose you're right. It makes me feel sorry for the ones still in the Holding."

"No one should have to go hungry when there is food available," Ayla said, her anger flaring for a moment. "It's another thing when everyone is starving."

"Sometimes, near the end of a bad winter, that can happen," Jondalar said. "Have you ever gone hungry?"

"I've missed a few meals, and favorite foods always seem to go first, but if you know where to look, you can usually find something to eat —if you are free to go looking!"

"I've known of people who starved because they ran out of food and didn't know where to find more, but you always seem to find some-tiling to eat, Ayla. How do you know so much?"

"Iza taught me. I think I've always been interested in food and things that grow," Ayla said, then paused. "I guess there was a time when I nearly starved, just before Iza found me. I was young, and I don't remember much about it." A fond smile of remembrance flitted across her face. "Iza said that she never knew anyone who learned to find food as fast as I did, especially since I was not born with the memories of where or how to look for it. She told me that hunger taught me."

After he finished devouring a second large serving, Jondalar watched Ayla sort through her carefully hoarded preserved food supplies and begin preparations for the dish she wanted to make for the feast. She had been thinking about what container she could cook in that would be large enough to make the amount she would need for the entire S'Armunai Camp, since they had cached most of their equipment and brought only bare essentials with them.

She took down their largest waterbag and emptied it into smaller bowls and cooking utensils, then separated the lining from the hide covering, which had been sewn together with the fur side out. The lining had been made from the stomach of an aurochs, which was not exactly waterproof, but seeped very slowly. The moisture was absorbed by the soft leather of the covering and wicked away by the hair, which kept the outside essentially dry. She cut open the top of the lining, tied it to a frame of wood with sinew from her sewing kit, then refilled it with water and waited until a thin film of moisture had seeped through.

By then the hot fire they had started earlier had burned down to searing coals, and she placed the mounted waterbag directly over them, making sure she had additional water close at hand to keep the skin pot filled. While she waited for it to boil, she started weaving a tight basket out of willow withes and yellowed grasses made flexible by moisture from the snow.

When bubbles appeared, she broke strips of lean dried meat and some fatty cakes of traveling food into the water to make a rich, meaty broth. Then she added a mixture of various grains. Later she planned to mix in some dry roots—wild carrots and starchy groundnuts—plus other pod and stem vegetables, and dried currants and blueberries. She flavored it all with a choice selection of herbs including coltsfoot, ramsons, sorrel, basil, and meadowsweet, and a bit of salt saved since they left the Mamutoi Summer Meeting, which Jondalar didn't even know she still had.

He had no desire to go very far, and he stayed nearby gathering wood, getting more water, picking grasses, and cutting willow withes for the baskets she was weaving. He was so happy to be with her that he didn't want to let her out of his sight. She was just as happy to be in his company again. But when the man noticed the large quantity of their food supplies she was using, he became concerned. He had just been through a very hungry time and was unusually aware of food.

"Ayla, a lot of our emergency food stores are in that dish. If you use up too much, it could leave us short."

"I want to make enough for all of them, the women and the men of Attaroa's Camp, to show them what they could have in their own storage if they work together," Ayla explained.

"Maybe I should take my spear-thrower and see if I can find fresh meat," he said with a worried frown.

She glanced up at him, surprised at his concern. By far, the majority of the food they had eaten on their Journey had been gleaned from the land they passed through, and most of the time, when they did dip into their stores, it was more for convenience than necessity. Besides, they had more food supplies stashed away with the rest of their things near the river. She looked at him closely. For the first time, she noticed that he was thinner, and she began to understand his uncharacteristic misgivings.