Glade and Ivory Ch. 30

And all, Red Squirrel believed, because of the slaughter of a pregnant mare.

The Cave Painters collected the skull and hide of the slaughtered horse. They were as offended by its death as they would have been if a person had been killed. They spat on the corpses of the dead, including the shaman, and left the village clearly in high spirits.

The survivors, meanwhile, were now to have a very bad time.

Cave Hyena, the actual perpetrator of this crime against the Cave Painters, was one of only two men to survive the massacre because they'd been hunting elsewhere at the time.

Winter passed, as did Spring and Summer. The survivors struggled through the seasons in which died many children and another of the warriors. The plains of the Great Tongue Glacier were more fruitful in the Spring and Summer, but this was only because there were so few to feed. They were constantly hungry, often cold and always miserable.

Finally, with Winter approaching and with only one surviving warrior, the same Cave Hyena who many still blamed for their misery, the village resolved to risk the long trek back to the Mountain Valley. Unfortunately, the journey took much longer than anticipated. After Cave Hyena was killed by a cave lion when he made a foolhardy and ill-advised attempt to settle in a cave, there were now no warriors. There were only women and children.

The nights were spent sheltered in woodlands, in caves designed for much smaller residents than the Mammoth Hunters, in the shelter of overhanging rocks, while every day was an ordeal of foraging in deep snow and snaring the occasional hare or sheep. They encountered the occasional Cave Painter on the way, but they were generally ignored. Even when a posse of warriors stopped them and asked questions in their unintelligible language, the resolution wasn't the fresh massacre or rape that Red Squirrel in particular feared but a rather more desultory warning that they still couldn't understand but to which they nodded in pretend agreement. It seemed that as long as the Mammoth Hunters didn't interfere with the taboos and land rights of the Cave Painters they weren't exactly welcomed but they were at least tolerated.

The trek back was much longer and more arduous than the outward journey led by Ochre. The Cave Painter had an intimate knowledge of the land that the Mammoth Hunters lacked. Their main guide was the direction of the Sun and the stars in the sky and on days when it was cloudy or the snow blew across the hills and valleys, they were essentially blind and made very little progress on their journey.

——————————

Ivory was overwhelmed by despair. She'd believed that she'd been inwardly prepared for the news of her lover's death but this wasn't so. The confirmation of and the brutal finality of the shaman's death was a blow to her for which only Ptarmigan could minister relief.

Ivory wasn't a young girl any more. She was the village shaman and wife to the woman who was now indisputably the chief. And the village for which she was shaman and her wife the chief was totally unlike any that had existed before. It was a village of women and children, with only a few adult men, drawn from three different tribes living in a part of the mountains where none of them had ever hunted before.

And now they were to leave the Mountain Valley where they had lived for one year and two winters to a new place that would hopefully provide for them better.

But it almost certainly couldn't be worse than the plains of the Great Tongue Glacier where Ivory now knew her first and still dearest lover's body lay buried.

——————————

Ivory's despair at the loss of her lover was ameliorated by Ptarmigan's love and affection, but Glade had no such compensation after she'd buried Demure's body. She now had the same duty to survive while still mourning her devastating loss. She might have thought that after all the trials of her life, this would be just one more, but her grief was so great that she barely wanted to eat the food she'd foraged.

She had no obvious place to go, so perversely she followed a route due north. It was a direction she and Demure had never considered before. They were women of the southern lands. Why would they ever wish to go further north? It was known that the further north one travelled the colder it became. The snows settled forever and it was rumoured that the world came to an end at an endless wall of ice

Glade's route took her along valleys of snow-covered hills, beside a river that was mostly unpopulated and towards the icy chill of the northern savannah. In the north, there were more woolly mammoths, more woolly rhinoceros and larger and fiercer bears and lions. Glade knew that such a northward trek was unwise. It was almost suicidal, especially as those tribes she passed on the way were travelling in the opposite direction away from the crippling cold and towards the relative sanctuary of the south. If there was ever a wise time to travel north, this wasn't it.

By the time she met Ivory's tribe travelling south, the worst of Glade's depression and self-pity had faded. It was impossible for her to indulge in grief when the daily necessity of finding food and shelter was of such paramount importance, not to mention the need to avoid the lions and hyenas that were gathering along the valleys in anticipation of the migrating herds of deer, mammoth and antelope that were also coming south.

Glade knew the travellers weren't native to the south although they were making a home in the riverside valley where they had settled. Their weapons were far better suited for hunting big game rather than the light-footed animals of the valleys. They wore furs designed to seal every last piece of skin, including fingers, nose and ears, from the ruthless elements. Her first anxiety was whether she would even be able to communicate with the tribe. It was even possible that the villagers would be hostile, though it was very rare to be attacked without provocation.

Her usual tactic when she'd wandered with Demure was to approach an unfamiliar tribe with her palms outwards and her possessions laid on the ground so that the villagers could see that not only did she mean no harm but that she was a woman. There was the danger that the fact she was a defenceless woman would merely act as an invitation for rape and there were occasions in the many encounters she and Demure had negotiated where this was exactly what happened. But it wasn't possible for Glade to travel any distance without the help of other people, so it was a hazard she had to risk.

"Good morning," she called out in the Cave Painters' language, the most widely spoken throughout the northern lands. "I am a shaman. I come to bring succour to the living, the suffering and the dead. If you give me shelter for a few days then I will help you as best I can."

This formula normally worked when she encountered a new village. Most villages, in any case, had by now heard of the reputation of the travelling dark-skinned shaman women. This was a peculiarity that gave her a currency that spread far along the rivers and sea shores.

The three women and two men who stood by the side of an elk that they were skinning looked at Glade with incomprehension. This was a problem for her. They clearly didn't understand a word she'd said. Then one of the men spoke. It was brief and expressed more confusion and surprise than anything else. Glade couldn't quite understand what was said, but she recognised the vocal patterns. These were villagers from the tribe of the Mammoth Hunters with which she'd occasionally come into contact. They were a rough sort that in the south mostly lived a nomadic life on the huge plains where they were just as likely to hunt a tall straight-tusked elephant or Stephanorhinus as they were a woolly mammoth. The dialect they spoke was rougher still than that of their southern cousins, but Glade knew enough words of their language to repeat her formulaic greeting in their language even though she spoke slowly and precisely to facilitate understanding.

In fact, Glade couldn't be more welcome to the villagers. There had been a spate of sickness that had inflicted the Mammoth Hunters ever since they'd begun to follow the river to this part of the valley. It had claimed the life of their original shaman: an old man who had been blind for several years. It was clear that they believed that they'd somehow been destined to encounter her in their moment of need. And in this way, she was more than ready to help. Once she'd determined that she wasn't going to be raped or murdered, and that her services were required, she was escorted to the Chief. He was surrounded by other villagers including Ivory, who was then nothing more than a child, and her parents.

Glade explained what services she could provide the village and showed off the herbs, spices and other tools of her trade. Chief Cave Lion and his warriors studied the flint needles, the deer-hide bandages, the sinew thread and the carved wooden bowls with great interest. It was quite evident that they'd never seen anything like them before. The Chief also studied Glade's body with an eye that she knew from similar occasions in the past could only suggest lascivious intention.

"What do you want in exchange for the services you'll provide for the village's body and soul?" the Chief asked cautiously. It was obvious that encounters like this with people from another tribe was very rare.

"I want nothing more than food, shelter and respect, my lord," said Glade.

"In that case," said Chief Cave Lion with a relieved smile and a nod to his fur-clad followers, "you are welcome to share with us the meat of the elk and horse we have this day slaughtered."

It was at that point that Glade knew that she could very probably stay with this tribe of Mammoth Hunters for as long as she liked.

"It will be my privilege, my lord," she said.