THE SHELTERS OF STONE

As she approached the small hill that held the cave, she could see the mouth clearly and noticed that the obstructing brush had been cleared away. Dirt and stones around the opening had also been removed, which enlarged the entrance. It was likely that nearly every one of the people at the Summer Meeting of Zelandonii had been inside the new cave at least once by now, but there was little evidence to show for the visits. Because it was so beautiful, and so unusual with its nearly white stone walls, it was considered a very sacred place and rather inviolable. The zelandonia and Cave leaders were still getting accustomed to it, working out the appropriate times and ways to use it. Traditions hadn't been developed yet, it was too new.

The spot where she had made a small fire to light torches and left charcoal remains had become a fireplace with stones encircling it and a few partially burned torches nearby. She removed her fire-making kit from her pack, quickly kindled a fire and lit one of the torches, then walked to the entrance of the cave.

Holding the torch high, she stepped inside the dark space. The sunlight coming in through the entrance lit the soft dirt floor of the sloping entry corridor, which had acquired an accumulation of footprints of all sizes, both bare and in footwear. She saw an imprint of a long, narrow bare foot, probably of a tall man, another of average size and slightly wider, the foot of either a grown woman or a growing boy. There was the sole of a sandal woven of grass or reeds, near it the blurred outline of a leather moccasin, then a line of the widely spaced, rather unsteady, tiny footprints of a toddler just learning to walk. On top of them was the pawprint of a wolf. Ayla wondered what a tracker, unaware of the animal that walked ahead of her into the cave, would make of that.

She felt the air become cool and damp and the space darken as she proceeded underground. The cave did not require feats of agility to get into, at least to the large main room. This was a cave that whole families would use, but not as a living space. Underground caves were too dark and damp to live in, especially when the region was full of shelters open to daylight with level floors and overhanging stone ledges above to protect them from rain and snow. And this cave was so beautiful, it felt like a special sanctuary, an extraordinary entrance to the womb of the Mother.

She and Wolf walked along the left side of the large room with the white walls, then she went into the narrow gallery at the back with the walls that widened out as they rose and came together in the curved white ceiling. She stepped down into the widened area around the round column, which came down from the roof but didn't reach the floor. She was beginning to feel cold and reached into her pack to take out the soft leather hide of a giant deer and put it around her shoulders. It was from the deer that she had brought down with her spear-thrower before the bison hunt that killed Shevonar. So much had happened since then, it felt as though it was long ago. But it wasn't, she thought.

She walked to the end of the narrow corridor after it turned around the hanging pier, then came back and sat down. She liked the roominess of the space. Wolf came and rubbed his head against her free hand. "I think you want some attention," she said, shifting her torch to her left hand and scratching behind his ears. When he left to explore again, her mind wandered back to the meeting earlier with the other women who were going to be mated and the zelandonia, and the discussions after most of the other women left.

She thought about kinship signs and remembered that Marthona's was the horse and wondered what hers was. She found it interesting that in the spirit world horses and aurochs and bison were power animals that were more important than wolves or cave lions, or probably cave bears. It was a place where things were reversed, backward, maybe inside out, or upside down. As she sat there a feeling started to come over her, a feeling that she'd had before. She didn't like it and tried to fight it, but she had no control over it. She seemed to be remembering something, remembering her dreams, but it was more than memory and more than dreamlike, it was as though she were reliving her dreams and memories, with a vague sense of remembering things that hadn't happened.

She felt an anxious worry, she had done something wrong, and drained the liquid left in the bowl. She followed flickering lights through a long endless cave, then bathed in firelight she saw the mog-urs. She felt sickened and petrified with fear, she was falling into a black abyss. Suddenly Creb was helping her, supporting her, easing her fears. Creb was wise and kind. He understood the spirit world.