The Land of Painted Caves (Earth's Children 6)

“I’ll take her,” the large woman said, reaching for Jonayla. She watched the baby while Jondalar and Ayla raised their tent inside the stone shelter in front of one of the circles of ashes surrounded by stones and laid out fire-making and burning materials for a quick start whenever they wanted a fire. Then they spread out their sleeping rolls and other equipment inside; Wolf always stayed with them in the tent. Finally they put both pole-drags toward the back of the abri and arranged places for the horses under the shelter in front of them, moving Racer’s recent droppings out of the way.

Some children from the local Cave stood around watching them but didn’t venture too close, except for one girl, whose curiosity finally got the better of her. She approached the Zelandoni and the baby; the First thought the girl could probably count nine or ten years.

“I’d like to hold the baby.” she said. “Could I?”

“If she’ll let you. She has a mind of her own,” the woman said.

The girl held out her arms to her. Jonayla hesitated, but smiled shyly at her, when she moved closer and sat down. Finally Jonayla let go of Zelandoni and crawled to the stranger, who picked her up and put her on her lap.

“What’s her name?”

“Jonayla,” the woman said. “What’s yours?”

“Hollida,” the child replied.

“You seem to like babies,” Zelandoni said.

“My sister has a baby girl, but she went to visit her mate’s family. He comes from a different Cave. I haven’t seen her all summer,” Hollida said.

“And you miss her, don’t you?”

“Yes. I didn’t think I would, but I do.”

Ayla saw the girl as soon as she approached, and noticed the interaction. She smiled to herself, remembering how much she had wanted a baby when she was younger. It made her think about Durc and she realized that he could probably count about the same number of years now as the girl, but in the Clan he would be considered much closer to adulthood than the girl obviously was. He’s growing up, she thought. She knew she would never see her son again, but she couldn’t help thinking about him sometimes.

Jondalar noticed the wistful expression on her face while she was watching the girl play with Jonayla and wondered what was going through her mind. Then Ayla shook her head, smiled, called Wolf to her, and walked toward them. If the girl is going to spend time with Jonayla, Ayla thought, I’d better introduce her to Wolf so she won’t be afraid of him.

After all three adults had unpacked and were settled in, they walked back to the first stone shelter. Hollida was with them, walking with the First. The rest of the children, who had been watching, raced ahead. When the visitors neared the shelter of the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave, several people were in front of the large opening in the stone wall, waiting. Their coming had been announced by the children before they arrived. It also appeared a celebration was planned; several people were cooking at hearths in this one location. Ayla wondered if she should have changed out of her traveling clothes, and worn something more suitable, but neither Jondalar nor the First had changed. Some people emerged from the shelter to the north, and from the ones on the other side of the valley when they passed by. Ayla smiled to herself. It seemed obvious that the children had let the others know they were coming.

The area of the Fifth Cave suddenly made her think of the Third Cave at Two Rivers Rock and Reflection Rock of the Twenty-ninth Cave. Their living areas were spread out on residential terraces, one over another, in commanding walls of

cliffs, with protective overhangs to shelter the interior spaces from rain and snow. Here, instead, there were several shelters closer to ground level on both sides of the small stream. But it was the close proximity of the several locations where people lived that made them one Cave. Then it occurred to her that the entire Twenty-ninth Cave was attempting to do the same thing, except that their living places were more widely dispersed. It was their mutual hunting and foraging area that brought them together.

“Greetings!” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said when they neared. “I hope you find your place comfortable. We are going to have a community feast in your honor.”

“It isn’t necessary to go to so much trouble,” the One Who Was First said.

He looked at the First. “You know how it is; people love to have an excuse for a celebration. Your coming is a particularly good excuse. We don’t often have the Zelandoni of the Ninth Cave who is also the One Who Is First as a visitor. Come inside. You said you wanted to show your acolyte our Sacred Places.” He turned to address Ayla. “We live in ours,” he said, as he led them in.

The inside of the stone shelter made Ayla stop short with surprise. It was so colorful. Several of the walls were decorated with paintings of animals, which was not so unusual, but the background of many of them was painted a bright red shade with red ocher. And the renderings of the animals were more than outlines, or drawings; most of them were infilled with color, shaded to bring out the contours and shapes. One wall in particular caught Ayla’s attention. It was a painting of two exquisitely portrayed bison, one of them obviously pregnant.

“I know most people carve or paint the walls of their abris, and may consider the images sacred, but we think of this entire space as sacred,” the Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave said.

Jondalar had visited the Fifth Cave several times and had admired the wall paintings of their stone shelters, but he had never thought of them any differently than he did the paintings and engravings inside the shelter of the Ninth Cave, or any other cave or abri. He wasn’t sure if he understood why this shelter should be any more sacred than any other, though it was more highly colored and decorated than most. He just assumed that it was the style that the Fifth Cave preferred, like the ornate tattoos and hair arrangement of their Zelandoni.

The Zelandoni of the Fifth Cave looked at Ayla with the wolf standing alertly at her side, then at Jondalar and the baby, who was tucked contentedly into the crook of the man’s arm, looking around with interest, then at the First. “Since the feast is not yet ready, let me show you around,” he said.

“Yes, that would be nice,” the First said.

They walked out of the shelter and into another one that was immediately to the north. It was essentially a continuation of the first one. And it was also decorated, but in a very different way, which created the sense that they were two different shelters. There were paintings on the walls, like the mammoth that was painted in red and black, but some walls of this cave were deeply engraved and some were both engraved and painted. Other engravings intrigued Ayla. She wasn’t sure what they meant.

She approached a wall to look more closely. There were some cup-like holes, but other oval carvings with a second oval around them and a mark like a hole extended into a line in the middle. She saw a horn core on the ground nearby that had been carved into a shape that appeared to be a man’s organ. She shook her head and looked again, then almost smiled. That was exactly what it was, and when she looked at the oval shapes, it came to her that they might represent female organs.

She turned around and looked at Jondalar and the First, and then the Zelandoni of the Fifth. “Those look like man and woman parts,” she said. “Is that what they are?”

The Fifth smiled and nodded. “This is where our donii-women stay, and often where we have Mother Festivals, and sometimes where we have Rites of First Pleasures. It is also where I have meetings with my acolytes when I am training them, and where they sleep. This is a very Sacred Place,” the Fifth said. “That’s what I meant when I said we live in our Sacred Sites.”

“Do you sleep here, too?” Ayla asked.