CRO-MAGNON (17 page)

Blaine’s eyelids closed. The first painting seemed to project from the rock wall of the cave, filling her consciousness. A lilting voice echoed in her mind . . .

Chapter 8

“
Mungo won’t leave me alone,” Leya said, maneuvering the ivory thimble to push the bone needle through the moccasin she was fashioning for the coming summer.

“
I’m not surprised,” Nola said. Shifting Vonn to her other arm, she discarded her flint end-scraper and picked up a side-scraper from the tent floor. Vonn had soiled his sleeping-skin past redemption, even with the moss insets, and she was making him a new one.

Leya grunted as she pulled a length of dried sinew through the doubled central seam of the moccasin. Although she had brain-tanned the reindeer hide to make it pliable, it was still thick and tough.

“
He wants to plant his seed,” she said.

“
You have turned down so many men, daughter, that you are practically an old maid,” Alys said, glancing up from the bone flute she was making for Nola’s stepdaughter, Yali.

Leya put down the needle and picked up the awl. “Being some man’s possession is not for me.”

“
To be a mate is not to be a chattl,” Alys said, the little-used word rolling off her tongue so naturally that it lost its outlander cast.
Mator,
who spoke in the slightly antiquated manner of her home tribe, had always been something of a word-lover, Leya knew.

“
I wouldn’t be happy,” she said.

“
I was happy with Perth, not so much with Lunn. It is a matter of choosing well.”

“
Mungo has driven off the other young men.”

“
No, it was your dallying that discouraged them. You must take a mate soon, Leya, or Ronan will force one on you. You should try to be more like Nola, here.”

Leya shifted her rawhide thong to hang down her back. Sometimes the necklace got in the way of her chores, but she never took it off. The shells had come all the way from the shore of the inland sea to the west, the place that received the waters of the Arya River, the larger of the two rivers the tribe took its name from. Her
fator,
Perth, had presented them to her after returning from the six-tribe convocation when she was seven. Now, the ornament was her only link to his departed spirit.

Her
mator
spoke the truth, she thought. As chief, Ronan would not allow her to remain single much longer.

Alys, like other women from neighboring tribes, had been brought in to provide new blood, which was necessary to the tribe’s health. Leya of course had some of that blood, making her taller than Nola and the other women. She glanced at her friend, who had begun to nurse Vonn.

Nola was only four summers older than she and was already on her second man. At fifteen she had mated Zaer, the tribe’s most skilled hunter. But two summers ago both Zaer and Nola’s little one, Ide, had died of the pox that had swept the Tribe of the Twin Rivers.

When she was barely out of mourning three men had approached her, one after the other. She accepted Jarv, at one-score-and-two-hands years an “older” man, who had lost his wife Hali in the same pox. Though stolid and dour, he was gentle and a good hunter.

Now Nola cared for Yali, Jarv’s seven-year-old daughter. Beneath her laced leather vest her breasts were still swollen with milk for Vonn, though he was already a toddler.

At least that should keep her friend from birthing another child too soon, Leya thought. She knew that Alys and Nola had her best interest at heart. At sixteen summers she was past the customary mating age, which began as soon as a young woman’s breasts were ready. For her, the accompanying bleeding had begun two summers ago. She glanced down at the cleavage beneath the laces of her vest. Not for the first time, she wished she were not so full-breasted.

Alys put down the flint burin she was using on the bear’s bone and picked up a drill. “Perhaps you could entice one of the other men to propose again. You are the best-looking single woman in the tribe, if I do say so.”

Leya grimaced. “I’m funny-looking.”

“
You have the pert nose and large breasts of my people, which makes you attractive to the Twin River men. And you are not too tall like me.”

Alys spoke with an accent, having come to the tribe in an exchange with the Tribe of the Great Plain to the north. Leya guessed the tall stature of her
mator
had rendered her undesirable to most men in her home tribe, who tended to be short and stocky. Alys had taken Perth, who was tall himself, for her mate. Leya knew several summers had passed before she was born. When she had eight seasons, Perth had been killed in a territorial skirmish with the Flatheads to the east.

Alys had then mated with Lunn. A defective female had been born, and while it was tribal custom that Lunn disappear it, the act had not endeared him to Leya. Having eleven summers at the time, she had long known that “disappear” was another word for “kill.” She had felt no grief when Lunn had succumbed to the lung fever that swept the tribe that same winter.

Leya was dismayed at how weathered her mother’s face looked in the soft spring sunlight. Her once shapely breasts sagged, and her brown hair had started to gray during the harsh winter. Her
mator
would not mate again, Leya knew. Even the old men favored women who could father a healthy
baban,
preferably a male. Alys had been slow to bear, even when young, and then had born two daughters, one of them defective. Of course, Leya thought, that could have been Lunn’s fault. But few men, she realized, would acknowledge that fact.

“
The other young men are leery of Mungo’s wrath,” Nola said. “Though they would not admit it.”

Leya pricked her finger on the needle, winced and laid down the half-completed moccasin. “You know that I want to be a shaman,
Ma,
” she said, using the intimate title that was universal among the tribes of the People and even, she had heard, among the brutish Flatheads to the north and east, in slightly altered form.

Alys frowned. “You know that is not possible. Only males can become a shaman. So it has been since the time of my grandmother, praise her spirit, and probably long before. Thus it will always be.”

“
But I can paint game animals better than any man.” Leya glanced at the flute Alys was making. “And I can chant, and play the flute or beat the drum. And I already know medicines.”

“
More than that,” Nola said, reaching around Vonn to work the side scraper. “You have a talent for healing. Last fall, you brought Vonn’s fever down after Sugn failed.”

Leya put down the moccasin, which required much arduous whip-stitching, and resumed sewing the man-sized trousers she was making for the spring hunt. Her refusal to mate did not exempt her from womanly chores.

“
Sugn’s infusion of aspen bark may have taken longer than usual to do its job,” she said. “My advising you to hold Vonn in the river was nothing more than common sense.”

“
Not really. Sugn said that Vonn was too weak, that the freezing water would cause him to decline and die.”

“
He could have been right,” Leya said. “Remember, I told you we were taking a chance.”

“
Life is one long chance,” Nola said. “Without you, Vonn would have gone to the Land of Shadows.”

She clamped the square of chamois in her teeth and put Vonn down. The toddler picked up a stick and began to dig in the rain-softened earth. Leya knew he was after grubs for Nola to roast, a delicacy he was fond of.

“
He looks healthy,” she said. “Your milk must be strong.”

Like most of the People, the women of the Tribe of the Twin Rivers nursed their babies for several summers. It seemed to protect them against sickness, Leya knew, as well as stretching the time before the mother once again became heavy with child.

Soon, she thought, she would be nursing a
baban,
herself. The idea was not unpleasant, but becoming some hunter’s
tegu
possession was not what she wanted.
How many more moons can I defy tribal custom?
Not many, she feared. And what would she do then?

#

Leya stood where the high bog blended into the fen at the lower end of the hanging valley. It had been a year since the tribe had last camped in the valley below, and after the harsh winter she was glad to be back here in the warm morning sunshine. Wagtails flitted above the spongy ground, the air above the brownish water flashed with snow cocks and golden orioles, and she could hear the songs of titmice and the cooing of turtledoves.

She spotted movement in a clump of lily pads floating on the fen. Probably a frog, she thought, her mouth watering at the thought of fresh-fried frog legs. The green pad trembled and a black snake slithered across the water. Leya peered. A harmless water snake. Still, she refrained from wading into the opaque water because white-mouths were known to lurk there in spring before moving down to the river bottoms when the fen began to dry, and they were known to bite while underwater.

Her gaze moved beyond the central marsh and came to rest on the upper valley, where red, yellow, and blue flowers swept upward to the fruit and nut forests. In summer the women of the tribe would go there to gather cherries, plums, pears, and berries, and in fall to collect almonds, walnuts, and apples.

Today they were here to gather the shoots of cattails that covered the high bog along with the sprouts of bulrushes and dogbane. Leya knew that the women would visit this wetland, or marshes along the river bottoms, many times in the coming year, for cattails were vital to the people of the Twin Rivers.

Soon, they would harvest young flower heads to be boiled and eaten as a delicacy, or consumed raw to cure the runs. Some flowers would be left to mature, for the fuzz provided a healing balm for burns and diaper rash and also served to soak up urine. The leaves were good for basket weaving. Boiled, they made fine soap. The fiber made excellent cordage, which was all-important to the tribe’s survival. Fresh roots were useful as a bracing tea, a cleansing toothpaste, and a healing poultice over wounds. The sticky substance at the base of the leaves could be smeared into infections.

In early summer, the women would collect the pollen, which in some mysterious way acted as a tonic, and could also be used to stop bleeding. In fall, the down made good kindling, and the dry flower heads could be dipped in animal fat to make long-lasting torches. In winter, the rootstocks would be mashed, dried, and ground into flour that Sugn had said contained more starch than any other plant food.

She looked around for her
mator
and spotted her near the center of the marsh, already at work while Leya had been daydreaming. Nola, saddled with Vonn, had stayed in camp to begin preparing side dishes for tonight’s meal.

Early this morning, the men had trapped an eight-foot sturgeon in a weir they had woven in the shallows of the river. One of the reasons Ronan was chief was that he knew all about how to survive. Yesterday he had supervised construction of the weir in order to trap some small flat-nose fish in the mud flats, but instead they ensnared the larger variety, a lighter-colored fish big enough to share with all two-score-and-one-hand members of the tribe.

Now the women were on a mission to gather enough succulent shoots to provide a base for a communal salad. Before returning to camp, they would move to higher ground and pick young mustard leaves to serve the roe on, for spring was the time of spawning and the eggs were delicious. Sugn, who served as the tribe’s nutrition expert as well as its medicine man, claimed that eating fish and their eggs helped people to think better. He said that was one reason the People were superior to the Flatheads, who had never mastered the science of fishing.

Leya also intended to pick some of the tiny red tulips that grew among the upland flowers, so that each female in the tribe could have one. Like other single young women, she would wear hers tucked into the hair above her right ear.

She glanced toward the high ground where Mungo and two others stood guard. The knife-toothed tigers would be hungry after the long winter, as would the brown bears that roamed the broad-leafed forests below the band of juniper trees.

She saw Mungo turn from inspecting the high forest and stare at her. Despite his exaggeratedly masculine features, he wasn’t a bad-looking man. Except for a chamois loincloth, he was open to the warm spring air. His body was rangy and relatively hairless, unlike the barrel-chested Flatheads who she knew sometimes went bare to the waist even in winter. She could do worse than mate with Mungo, she realized. But he still did not fit her picture of the ideal man.

What was that picture? She wondered if she even had one.

She sensed that Mungo was trying to make eye contact, perhaps to deliver a message she would not want. She guessed he would not wait much longer before taking her by force. She felt her groin contract. She had yet to take a man inside her. And while she was not exactly averse to the idea, she did not want Mungo for a
tegu
partner.