CRO-MAGNON (19 page)

There was nothing to say. Leya kept her head down. She knew that Ronan had accepted his position reluctantly upon consensus of the men and that he disliked confrontation. Better for both their sakes to get this over.

“
Yesterday I gave Mungo permission to seek your hand.”

“
He forced himself on me.”

“
He was supposed to wait until the ceremony. I have reprimanded him.”

Leya glanced at Mungo. He didn’t look very contrite.

“
He hurt me. Only the tiger—”

Ronan lifted his hand. “Mungo has developed into the tribe’s best hunter. Most young women would be thrilled to mate with him.”

Leya waited, dreading what was coming.

“
The ceremony will take place at noon tomorrow. If you do not make yourself available, Mungo is authorized to take you without Sugn’s sanction.”

Leya kept silent.

“
Do you understand, child?”

“
Yes, Chief.”

“
Go now, and prepare your body and mind.”

As Leya turned, she looked up and met Mungo’s eyes. Perhaps it was an effect of his tender-looking wound, but his faint smile looked suspiciously like a smirk.

#

“
You are ready,” Nola said, holding up a sliver of obsidian.

“
No, I’m not.” Leya, sitting cross-legged, glanced in the mirror. The black surface made her dark hair look black. She surveyed the circle of white holly oak and red-and-yellow roses—white for purity as she entered the union, red to ensure fertility, and yellow for happiness—that Alys had fixed on her head.

But Leya didn’t feel happy. And after Mungo’s successful attempt to enter her yesterday, she didn’t feel especially pure. She certainly didn’t want his
baban.
To her, the traditional “garland of grace” seemed more like a crown of thorns.

Alys brushed a fragment of leaf from her daughter’s neck. Earlier she had rubbed her body with fragrant yellow jasmine from the river bottom, prized because of its rarity this far north, and perfumed her hair with grated root of spikenard.

“
Try to compose your mind, daughter. All women must take a mate.”

“
They’re not getting Mungo.”

“
He is the tribe’s best hunter.”

“
Then let him mate with someone who’s not capable of providing her own food. I can hunt as well as most men.”

“
Men hunt and fight, Leya. Women bear children and gather food.”

“
We don’t need more children. Some are disappeared at birth.”

“
Only the defective ones. Women of superior body and mind are expected to bear superior children. Particularly those who bring new blood. It is not surprising that Ronan wants you to mate with Mungo, the best of the men.”

“
Best to him, maybe.” Leya glanced out the entrance of the hut, and froze in place.

Alys, facing away from the entrance said, “What?”

“
Mungo is coming for Leya,” Nola said. “Drem and Hodr are attending.”

“
I can’t do this,” Leya said.

She stood and squirmed into her parka, her gaze darting around the tent and coming to rest on her sleeping-fur.

She snatched it up.

“
You must abide tribal law, child,” Alys said.

“
I can’t. Not with Mungo.” Leya was already at the back of tent, untying the escape flap.

“
Wait,” Nola cried.

“
Where would you go?” Alys said. “How would you live?”

“
I’m sorry,
Ma.
”

Leya ducked through the small opening. Crouching, she tried to keep the tent between her and the three men, which forced her to run downhill toward the river.

Probably best, anyway.

Hearing a shout, she glanced over her shoulder. The three men were separating, Mungo’s rangy form in the center. She straightened and sprinted toward the bluff above the river. She had never ranged east of the camp. But beyond the gorge, the Desha was said to swing south and run through shallows as it flowed into the Arya, the big river that emerged from the mountains to the east, and that her tribe summered along, farther west. There would be edible plants in the swampy river bottom, if she could elude the two kinds of viper and one cobra that would be out from hibernation and the brown bears that prowled the shallows for fish.

And even if she avoided getting bitten or mauled, the confluence of the two rivers was said to border Flathead country, and she’d heard stories of cannibalism in winter. Of course, this was spring. But to be captured by those mindless brutes would be a fate much worse than being forced to mate Mungo.

But how far was their home camp? She knew they’d been retreating in the face of the more numerous People. Maybe she could stop short of them.

How would she even get down to the river? She threw a glance over her shoulder. The three men were spread out now, cutting off any chance of her running upriver or down. The lanky Drem was in the lead on the right, with Mungo a few lengths back in the center and the stocky Hodr trailing on the left. Could she cut left, skirt the bluff and beat Hodr to the river? She doubted it. In any case she’d never outdistance Drem, the tribe’s best runner.

That left only the bluff, and the rapids below.

She thought about Alys’s suggestion yesterday that she approach some of the other young men. But who would stand up to Mungo? The quiet Drem might, she thought. She wished he weren’t already spoken for, but she knew that Cara intended to mate with him as soon as she got her bleeding.

Her breath rasped in her throat and spiky sedge slashed her soles. But Drem was closing the gap and she dare not slacken pace. Her sleeping fur was weighing her down. She let it drop. She’d just have to shiver. She heard Mungo’s angry voice shout her name. There was no going back now. He would beat her into submission, and the tribe would think he was justified.

Two-score lengths from the bluff, Drem angled toward her. She would never make the edge. She glanced over her shoulder.

“
Please, Drem!”

His dark eyes met hers, and she saw some emotion cross his bony face. She thought it might be pity. He glanced down, seemed to experience a hitch in his stride, and tumbled to the ground as if he’d turned his ankle. But she knew he hadn’t.

Her lungs burning, she ran on, ignoring another shout from the fast-closing Mungo. The bluff drew closer. She angled toward the rocky prominence that she knew overhung the fast-flowing water a half-score of body lengths below. She glimpsed the river. Greenish-brown water, swollen with the spring melt, raged between rocky cliffs, huge waves traveling faster than a charging tiger.

Closer now, Mungo’s diatribe became continuous.

Her heart swelled. Even if she could stay afloat in the rapids, could she survive the freezing water? Could anyone?

There was an instant when she could have changed her mind, but it passed. She crossed the lip of the bluff, pushed off with her right leg, and took a giant leap. Mungo’s enraged screams were cut off by the wind whistling through the gorge.

Chapter 9

Blaine and Calder sat at the rough table, illumined by a beam of morning light from one of the hut’s small windows. Ayni, having returned from his patrol during the night, was at the wood stove stirring something in a cast iron bowl. A heady aroma of heated fat filled Blaine’s nostrils.

“
I experienced the entire episode as if I was present in the tent,” she said.

“
That’s understandable, Caitlin.” Calder spread his fingers. “You’d seen the setting, you knew what was happening, and your mind filled the blanks.”

“
But I even heard them talking. And I felt the woman’s desperation as she was being raped. And again as she fell toward the river.”

“
People’s instincts and emotions are no different now than they were thirty thousand years ago. It wasn’t difficult for your subconscious to interpolate.”

“
Actions, yes. But actual conversation?”

Calder smiled. “Pretty accurately, I imagine.”

Blaine raised her nose and sniffed. “Murzo, that smells out of this world.” She glanced at Calder. “Especially after the so-called supper that Ian foisted on me last night. She nodded at the pot. “What are you cooking?”

Ayni shrugged. “The usual.”

“
A pilaf of brown rice, with shredded turnip and mutton scraps,” Calder said. “
Plov
is a staple in this part of the world.”

“
Well, aren’t you the sophisticate,” Blaine said, affecting disdain.

“
Here, we refer to it as
oshi palov,
” Ayni said. “I will not burden you with the Wahki name, which has no written form.”

“
You have your own language?” she said.

He nodded, still stirring. “From before Silk Road times. Like many of us, I speak Wakhi among my people, Tajik with my colleagues, Russian to the officials, English to visitors, Tashkorghani when I journey east, Dari or Pashto across the border, and sometimes even a bit of Khowar or Burushashki.” He indicated the
oshi palov.
“Same dish, different names.”

Blaine sampled the aroma again. “Whatever you call it, it smells scrumptious. I can hardly wait.”

Calder said, “What’s your schedule today, Murzo?”

Ayni removed something from a small oven on the side of the stove. “I am making a patrol to the north. I will be back late tomorrow afternoon.”

He set bowls of pilaf and a flat wheel of unleavened bread on the table and poured three cups of green tea. “Meanwhile, please make yourselves to home.”

Blaine hadn’t realized how ravenous she was. The meal was spicy and delicious, the tea brisk and stimulating. Following Ayni’s lead, they ate in silence, using their right hands to pick up morsels of pilaf and shape them into a ball.

Popping one into her mouth, Blaine couldn’t help smacking her lips. “Is it just the spices, or does this mutton have a distinctive taste?”

“
It is what you call Marco Polo sheep,” Ayni said. “We do not kill animals in the Zapodevnik, but this one lost its footing and fell down a cliff.”

Just as Blaine was sopping up the remaining scraps with a piece of
non,
there was a low rumble and the little cabin juddered. By the time she hunched her shoulders the tremor had died.

She looked up. “Was that what I think?”

Ayni waggled his free hand.

Calder said, “As Mathiessen told us, the Pamir are prone to quakes.” He motioned out the window past a shoulder of rock, where a corner of Lake Achik sparkled in slanted sunlight. “That’s why they have so many lakes—the damming effect.”

“
Damming or damning?” Blaine said, stressing the
n.
“Salomon expects us to swim an underwater tunnel in an earthquake zone?” She rolled her eyes. “Hello-o.”

“
The cave has been there for thousands of years,” Calder said.

“
Yes, but has the tunnel been open all that time? Remember, it narrowed after the diver set off a little test charge.”

Calder waved his left hand. “We’ll be in and out.”

Annoyed by his condescending attitude, Blaine cast about for a way to prick his equanimity. “Is that a proposition? Salomon didn’t include that in the deal.”

After a slight pause, Calder smiled and said, “I’m glad you can joke, even over a little thing.”

Ayni, apparently unable to follow the innuendo, looked puzzled.

“
I hope I can still joke a few days from now,” Blaine said, to show that she did realize the danger.

“
Are you still intending to drag this out?” Calder said, sopping the last of his gravy.

“
Now who’s joking? The remains may contain genetic information we thought was lost forever.”

He looked down. “I’m having misgivings.”

“
Any backing out will be over your dead body,” she said.

“
That’s what I meant.”

She turned to Ayni. “Murzo, that was the best breakfast I ever ate.”

“
Noni sahar,”
the Tajik said. He smiled. “Or
taryaolitamuq,
a few valleys to the east.”

She sucked her fingertips. “I call it finger-lickin’ good.”

#

Blaine hung in the water below the first diagonal jog in the tunnel. The latest quake had narrowed it even further. She tried to eel into the vertical section, but it was too cramped. What would that mean for the second, tighter offset? What if the tunnel just ahead was too cramped for her to don the air tank again or to turn around?

But the thought of the cave’s contents being lost forever filled her with more dread than the possibility of becoming stuck in an underwater tomb. Hoping Calder would feel the same, she unhooked her harness strap and flipped the air tank over her head. Careful not to bash the regulator against the granite wall, she maneuvered the tank into the now vertical passage. Arching her back, she finned upward, pushing the tank ahead until she felt the butt nudge the lowered ceiling. Another maneuver, a few fin strokes, and she was past the structure with surprisingly little trouble, the passage now a good six feet high.