The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children 4)

"Because I think he must have lived with, perhaps grown up with, the ones you call flatheads," Ayla replied.

"What makes you think so?" the shaman asked.

"Because the things you describe are Clan ways."

"Clan?"

"That's what 'flatheads' call themselves," Ayla explained, then began to speculate. "But if he could speak so well that he was charming, he could not have lived with them always. He probably was not born to them, but went to live with them later and, as a mixture, he would have been barely tolerated, and perhaps considered deformed. I doubt if he really understood their ways, so he would have been an outsider. His life was probably miserable."

S'Armuna was surprised. She wondered how Ayla, a complete stranger, could know so much. "For someone you never met, you seem to know a great deal about Brugar."

"Then he was born of mixed spirits?" Jondalar said.

"Yes. Attaroa told me about his background, what she knew of it. Apparently his mother was a full mixture, half-human, half-flathead; she had been born to a full flathead mother," S'Armuna began.

Probably a child caused by some man of the Others who forced her, Ayla thought, like the baby girl at the Clan Meeting who was promised to Durc.

"Her childhood must have been unhappy. She left her people when she was barely a woman, with a man from a Cave of the people who live to the west of here."

"The Losadunai?" Jondalar asked.

"Yes, I think that's what they are called. Anyway, not long after she ran away, she had a baby boy. That was Brugar," S'Armuna continued.

"Brugar, but sometimes called Brug?" Ayla interjected.

"How did you know?"

"Brug could have been his Clan name."

"I guess the man his mother ran away with used to beat her. Who knows why? Some men are like that."

"Women of the Clan are raised to accept that," Ayla said. "The men are not allowed to strike each other, but they can hit a woman to reprimand her. They are not supposed to beat them, but some men do."

S'Armuna nodded with understanding. "So perhaps in the beginning Brugar's mother took it for granted when the man she lived with hit her, but it must have gotten worse. Men like that usually do, and he started beating on the boy, too. That may have been what finally prompted her to leave. Anyway, she took him and ran away from her mate, back to her people," S'Armuna said.

"And if it was hard on her to grow up with the Clan, it must have been worse for her son, who was not even a full mixture," Ayla said.

"If the spirits mixed as expected, he would have been three parts human, and only one part flathead," S'Armuna said.

Ayla suddenly thought of her son, Durc. Broud is bound to make his life difficult. What if he turns out like Brugar? But Durc is a full mixture, and he has Uba to love him, and Brun to train him. Brun accepted him into the Clan when he was leader and Durc was a baby. He will make sure Durc knows the ways of the Clan. I know he would be capable of talking, if there was someone to teach him, but he may also have the memories. If he does, he could be full Clan, with Brun's help.

S'Armuna had a sudden inkling about the mysterious young woman. "How do you know so much about flatheads, Ayla?" she asked.

The question caught Ayla by surprise. She wasn't on her guard, as she would have been with Attaroa, and she wasn't prepared to evade it. Instead she blurted out the truth. "I was raised by them," she said. "My people died in an earthquake and they took me in."

"Your childhood must have been even more difficult than Brugar's," S'Armuna said.

"No. I think in a way it was easier. I wasn't considered a deformed child of the Clan; I was just different. One of the Others—which is what they call us. They didn't have expectations of me. Some of the things I did were so strange to them that they didn't know what to think of me. Except I'm sure some of them did think I was rather slow because I had such a hard time remembering things. I'm not saying it was easy growing up with them. I had to learn to speak their way, and I had to learn to live according to their ways, learn their traditions. It was hard to fit in, but I was lucky. Iza and Creb, the people who raised me, loved me, and I know that without them I would not have lived at all."

Nearly all of her statements raised questions in S'Armuna's mind, but the time was not appropriate to ask them. "It is a good thing that you have no mixture in you," she said, giving Jondalar a significant look, "especially since you are going to meet the Zelandonii."

Ayla caught the look, and she had an idea what the woman meant. She recalled the way Jondalar had first reacted when he discovered who had raised her, and it was even worse when he found out about her son of mixed spirits.

"How do you know she hasn't met them already?" Jondalar asked.

S'Armuna paused to consider the question. How had she known? She smiled at the man. "You said you were going home, and she said, 'his language' not hers." Suddenly a thought came to her, a revelation. "The language! The accent! Now I know where I've heard it before. Brugar had an accent like that! Not quite as much as yours, Ayla, though he didn't speak his own language as well as you speak Jondalar's. But he must have developed that speech ... mannerism—it isn't quite an accent—when he lived with the flatheads. There is something about the sound of your speech, and now that I hear it, I don't think I'll ever forget again."

Ayla felt embarrassed. She had worked so hard to speak correctly, but she had never been quite able to make some sounds. For the most part, it had ceased to bother her when people mentioned it, but S'Armuna was making such an issue of it.