THE SHELTERS OF STONE

Jondalar was half-asleep when she went back to bed. He'd been too tired to get up, but she'd air out and brush off their sleeping roll to clean it in the morning. Now that they were going to stay in one place for a while, she would even have time to wash their furs, she thought. Nezzie had shown her how to do it, but it took time and care.

Ayla rolled over on her side and Jondalar cuddled up behind her, resting on his side. They were nestled together like two spoons on edge, and he fell asleep holding her, but she was unable to nod off, although she was comfortable and satisfied. She had slept much later than usual that morning, and as she lay awake, she began thinking about the Clan and the Others again. Recollections of her life with them and her stays with various groups of Others kept coming to her mind, and she found herself making comparisons.

The same kinds of materials were at hand for both peoples, but the uses to which they had been put were not quite the same. Both hunted animals, both gathered foods that grew, and both used hides, bones, vegetal materials, and stones for clothing, shelter, implements, and weapons, but there were differences.

Perhaps the most noticeable was that while Jondalar's people decorated their environment with paintings and carvings of animals and designs, the people of the Clan did not. Though she didn't quite know how to explain it, even to herself, she did perceive that people of the Clan expressed the beginnings of such decoration. Red ochre in a burial, for example, that imparted color to the body. Their interest in unusual objects that they collected to put in their amulets. Totem scars and color markings made on the body for special purposes. But the primeval people of the Clan created no legacy of art.

Only Ayla's kind of people did; only people like the Mamutoi and the Zelandonii, and the rest of the Others they had met on their Journey. She wondered if the unknown people to whom she had been born decorated the material objects in their world, and she believed they did. It was the ones who came later, the ones who shared that cold ancient world with the Clan for a time, the ones they called the Others, who were the first to see an animal in a moving, living, breathing form and reproduce it as a drawing or a carving. It was a profound distinction.

The creation of art, the delineation of animals or purposeful markings, was an expression of the ability to make abstractions-the ability to take the essence of a thing and make of it a symbol that stands for the thing itself. The symbol for a thing has another form as well: a sound, a word. A brain that could think in terms of art was a brain capable of developing to its fullest potential another abstraction of great significance: language. And the same brain that was capable of creating a synthesis of the abstraction of art and the abstraction of language would someday form a synergism of both symbols, in effect, a memory of the words: writing.

Unlike the day before, Ayla opened her eyes very early the next morning. No red coals glowed in the fireplace and all the lamps were out, but she could discern the contours of the limestone shelf high overhead, above the dark wall panels of Marthona's dwelling, in the faint reflection of first light, the initial lightening of the sky that heralded the coming of the sun. No one else was stirring when she quietly slipped out of the furs and made her way in the not quite pitch-dark to use the night basket. Wolf lifted his head the moment she got up, whined a greeting of happiness, and followed her.

She felt a little nauseated, but not quite enough to vomit, and had an urge for something solid to calm her unsettled stomach. She went to the cooking room and started a small fire, then took a few bites of the bison meat that was left on the pelvic bone serving platter from the night before, and a few soggy vegetables from the bottom of the cooking-storage basket. She wasn't sure if she felt better or not, but she decided to see if she could make a stomach-settling tea for herself. She didn't know who had made the tea for her the day before, but wondered if it was Jondalar and thought she'd make one of his favorite morning teas as well.

She got her medicine bag from her traveling pack. Now that we're finally here, I can replenish my supply of herbs and medicines, she thought as she looked at each package and thought about its uses. Sweet rush can help an upset stomach, but no, Iza told me it could cause a miscarriage, and I don't want to do that. While she was considering the possible side effects, her mind supplied another bit from her extensive store of medicinal knowledge. Black birch bark can help prevent a miscarriage, but I don't have any. Well, I don't think I'm in danger of losing this one.