Jean Auel - The Clan of the Cave Bear

When he returned to his hearth, Creb's face was as gray as the body had been.

Ayla still sat next to Iza's bed staring blankly into space, but she stirred when Creb began to rummage through Iza's belongings.

«What are you doing?» she motioned, protective of anything that was Iza's.

«I'm looking for Iza's bowls and things. The tools she used in this life should be buried with her so she has the spirit of them in the next world,» Creb explained.

«I'll get them,» Ayla said, pushing Creb aside. She gathered together the wooden bowls and bone cups Iza had used to make her medicines and measure dosage, the round hand stone and flat stone base used for crushing and grinding, her personal eating dishes, a few implements, and her medicine bag, and put them on Iza's bed. Then she stared at the meager pile that represented Iza's life and work.

«Those are not Iza's tools!» Ayla gestured angrily, then jumped up and ran out of the cave. Creb watched her go, then shook his head and began to gather up Iza's tools.

Ayla crossed the stream and ran to a meadow where she and Iza had gone before.

She stopped at a stand of colorful hollyhocks on long graceful stems and gathered an armful of different hues. Then she picked the many-petaled, daisy-like yarrow used for poultices and pain. She ran through the meadows and woods collecting more plants Iza had used in making her healing magic: white-leafed thistle with round, pale yellow flowers and yellow spikes; large, brilliant yellow groundsels; grape hyacinths, so blue they were almost black.

Every one of the plants she picked had found their way into Iza's pharmacopoeia at some time, but she selected only those that were also beautiful, with colorful, sweetsmelling flowers. Ayla was crying again as she stopped on the edge of a meadow with her flowers, remembering the times she and Iza had walked together gathering plants.

Her arms were so full, she had trouble carrying them without her collecting basket.

Several blossoms dropped and she knelt down to pick them up again and saw the tangled branches of a woody horsetail with its small flowers, and almost smiled at the idea that occurred to her.

She searched in a fold, pulled out a knife, and cut a branch of the plant. In the warm sun of early fall, Ayla sat at the edge of the meadow twining the stems of the beautiful blossoms in between and around the supporting network until the entire branch was a riot of color. The whole clan was astonished when Ayla marched into the cave with her floral wreath. She went straight to the back of the cave and laid it beside the body of the medicine woman resting on its side in the shallow trench within an oval of stones.

«These were Iza's tools!» Ayla gestured defiantly, daring anyone to dispute her.

The old magician nodded. She's right, he thought. Those were Iza's tools, those were what she knew, what she worked with all her life. She might be happy to have them in the world of the spirits. I wonder, do flowers grow there?

Iza's tools, the implements and the flowers, were put in the grave with the woman, and the clan began to pile the stones around and on top of her body while Mog-ur made motions that asked the Spirit of Great Ursus and her Saiga Antelope totem to guide Iza's spirit safely to the next world.

«Wait!» Ayla suddenly interrupted. «I forgot something.» She ran back to the hearth and searched for her medicine bag, and carefully withdrew the two halves of the ancient medicine bowl. She rushed back, then laid the pieces in the grave beside Iza's body.

«I thought she might want to take it with her, now that it can't be used anymore.» Mog-ur nodded approval. It was fitting, more fitting than anyone knew; then he resumed his formal gestures. After the last stone had been piled on, the women of the clan began to lay wood around and on top of the stone cairn. An ember from the cave fire was used to start the cooking fire for Iza's burial feast. The food was cooked on top of her grave, and the fire would be kept burning for seven days. The heat from the bonfire would drive all the moisture from the body, desiccating it, mummifying it, and rendering it odorless.

As the flames took hold, Mog-ur began a last, eloquent lament in motions that stirred the soul of every member of the clan. He spoke to the world of the spirits of their love for the medicine woman who had cared for them, watched over them, helped them through sickness and pain as mysterious to them as death. They were ritual gestures, repeated in essentially the same form for every funeral, and some of the motions were used primarily during the men's ceremonies and were unfamiliar to the women, yet the meaning was conveyed. Though the outward form was conventional, the fervor and conviction and ineffable sorrow of the great holy man imbued the formalized gestures with significance far beyond mere form.

Dry-eyed, Ayla gazed over the dancing fire at the flowing graceful movements of the crippled, one-armed man, feeling the intensity of his emotions as if they were her own. Mog-ur was expressing her pain and she identified with him entirely, as though he had reached inside her and spoke with her brain, felt with her heart. She was not the only one who felt his sorrow as her own. Ebra began to keen her grief, then the other women.

Uba, holding Durc in her arms, felt a high-pitched, wordless wail rise in her throat and with a burst of relief joined in the sympathetic lament. Ayla stared vacantly ahead, sunk too far into the depths of her misery to express it. She couldn't even find the release of tears.

She didn't know how long she stared into the mesmerizing flames with unseeing eyes. Ebra had to shake her before Ayla responded, then she turned blank eyes toward the leader's mate.

«Ayla, have something to eat. This is the last feast we will ever share with Iza.» Ayla took the wooden plate of food, automatically put a piece of meat in her mouth, and almost gagged when she tried to swallow it. Suddenly she jumped up and ran from the cave. Blindly, she stumbled through brush and over rocks. At first her feet started to take her along a familiar route to a high mountain meadow and a small cave that had offered shelter and security before. But she veered away. Ever since she had shown the place to Brun, it didn't seem to be hers anymore, and her last stay held too many painful memories. She climbed instead to the top of the bluff that protected their cave from the north winds screaming down the mountain in winter, and deflected the strong winds of fall.

Buffeted by gusts, Ayla fell to her knees at the top, and there, alone with her unbearable grief, she yielded to her anguish in a plaintive chanting wail as she rocked and rocked to the rhythm of her aching heart. Creb hobbled out of the cave after her, saw her silhouetted against the sunset-painted clouds, and heard the thin, distant moan. As deep as his own grief was, he couldn't understand her rejection of the solace of company in her misery, her withdrawal into herself. His usual perceptiveness was dulled by his own sorrow; he didn't realize she was suffering from more than grief.

Guilt racked her soul. She blamed herself for Iza's death. She had left a sick woman to go to a Clan Gathering; she was a medicine woman who had deserted someone in time of need, someone she loved. She blamed herself for Iza's trek up the mountain to find a root to help her keep the baby she wanted so desperately, resulting in the near-fatal illness that weakened the woman. She felt guilty about the pain she had caused Creb when she unwittingly followed the lights to the small chamber deep in the cave of the mountains far to the east. More than grief and guilt, she was weak from lack of food and suffering from milk fever from her swollen, aching, unsuckled breasts. But even more than that, she was suffering from a depression Iza could have, helped her with, if she had been there. For Ayla was a medicine woman, dedicated to easing pain and saving life, and Iza was her first patient who had died.