Each donier chose a sound, a tone with a pitch and timbre each one was comfortable with on a sustained level. When they wanted to maintain a continuous chant, several of the Doniers would begin to make their tone. The combination might or might not be harmonic; it didn’t matter. Before the first one got out of breath, another voice would join in, and then another, and another at random intervals. The result was a droning interweaving fugue of tones that could go on indefinitely, if there were enough people to provide sufficient rest for those people who had to stop for a while.
For Ayla, it was a comforting sound that was there, but that tended to fade into the background as her mind observed scenes only she could see behind her closed eyelids, visions with the lucid incoherence of vivid dreams. It felt as though she were wide awake dreaming. At first, she kept gaining speed in the black space; she knew it though the void remained unchanged. She was terrified and alone. Achingly alone. There were no sensations, no taste, no smell, no sound, no sight, no touch, as though none ever existed or ever would, just her conscious, screaming mind.
An eternity passed. Then, at a great distance, barely discernible, a faint glimmer of light. She reached for it, strove for it. Anything, anything at all was better than nothing. Her striving pulled her faster, the light expanded into an amorphous, barely perceptible blur, and for a moment she wondered if her mind might have any other effects on the state she was in. The indistinct light thickened to a cloudiness and darkened with colors, alien colors with unknown names.
She was sinking into the cloud, falling through it, faster and faster, and then she fell out the bottom. A strangely familiar landscape opened up below her full of repetitive geometric shapes, squares and sharp angles, bright, shining, filled with light, repeating, climbing up. Nothing with such straight, sharp shapes existed in her familiar natural world. White ribbons seemed to flow along the ground in this strange place, reaching straight into the distance, with strange animals racing along it.
As she drew closer, she saw people, masses of squirming, wriggling people, all pointing their fingers at her. “Yoooou, yooou, yooou,” they were saying; it was almost a chant. She saw a figure standing alone. It was a man, a man of mixed spirits. As she got closer, she thought he looked familiar, but not quite. At first she thought it was Echozar, but then it seemed to be Brukeval, and the people were saying, “Yooou, yooou did it, yooou brought the Knowledge, you did it.”
“No!” her mind screamed. “It was the Mother. She gave me the Knowledge. Where’s the Mother?”
“The Mother is gone. Only the Son remains,” the people said. “You did it.” She looked at the man and suddenly knew who he was, though his face was in shadow and she couldn’t see him clearly.
“I couldn’t help it. I was cursed. I had to leave my son. Broud made me go,” her soundless voice cried out.
“The Mother is gone. Only the Son remains.”
In her thoughts, Ayla frowned. What did it mean? Suddenly the world below took on different dimension, but still ominous and other-worldly. The people were gone, and the strange geometric shapes. It was an empty, desolate, windblown prairie. Two men appeared, brothers whom no one would guess were brothers. One was tall and blond like Jondalar, the other, older one, she knew was Durc though his face was still shadowed. The two brothers approached each other from opposite directions, and she felt great anxiety as though something terrible was about to happen, something she had to prevent. With a shock of terror, she was sure one of her sons would kill the other. With arms raised as though to strike, they drew closer. She strained to reach them.
Suddenly Mamut was there, holding her back. “It is not what you think. It is a symbol, a message,” he said. “Watch and wait.”
A third man appeared on the windblown steppes. It was Broud, looking at her with a glare of pure hatred. The first two men reached each other, then both turned to face Broud.
“Curse him, curse him, curse him with death,” Durc motioned.
“But he is your father, Durc,” Ayla thought with silent apprehension. “You should not be the one to curse him.”
“He is cursed already,” her other son said. “You did it, you kept the black stone. They are all cursed.”
“No! No!” Ayla screamed. “I’ll give it back. I can still give it back.”
“There is nothing you can do, Ayla. It is your destiny,” Mamut said.
When she turned to face him, Creb was standing beside him. “You gave us Durc,” the old Mog-ur signed. “That was also your destiny. Durc is part of the Others, but he’s Clan, too. The Clan is doomed, it will be no more, only your kind will go on, and the ones like Durc, the children of mixed spirits. Not many, perhaps, but enough. It won’t be the same; he will become like the Others, but it is something. Durc is the son of the Clan, Ayla. He’s the only son of the Clan.”
Ayla heard a woman weeping, and when she looked, the scene had changed again. It was dark; they were deep in a cave. Then lamps were lit and she saw a woman holding a man in her arms. The man was her tall, blond son, and when the woman looked up, to her surprise Ayla saw herself, but she was not clear. It was as though she was seeing herself in a reflector. A man came and looked down at them. She looked up and saw Jondalar.
“Where is my son?” he asked her. “Where is my son?”
“I gave him to the Mother,” the reflected Ayla cried. “The Great Earth Mother wanted him. She is powerful. She took him from me.”
Suddenly, Ayla heard the crowd, and saw the strange geometric shapes. “The Earth Mother grows weak,” the voices chanted. “Her children ignore Her. When they no longer Honor Her, She will be ravished.”
“No,” the reflected Ayla wailed. “Who will feed us? Who will care for us? Who will provide for us, if we don’t Honor Her?”
“The Mother is gone. Only the Son remains. The Mother’s children are no longer children. They have left the Mother behind. They have the Knowledge; they have come of age, as she knew someday they would.” The woman still wept, but she wasn’t Ayla anymore. She was the Mother, weeping because her children were gone.
Ayla felt herself being pulled out of the cave; she was weeping, too. The voices became faint, as though they were chanting from a great distance away. She was moving again, high above a vast grassy plain, full of great herds. Aurochs were stampeding, and horses were racing to keep up with them. Bison and deer were running, and ibex. She drew closer, began to see individual animals, the ones she had seen when she was called to the zelandonia, and the disguises that they had worn during the ceremony when they had given the Mother’s new Gift to Her Children, when she recited the last verse of the Mother’s Song.
Two bison bulls running past each other, great aurochs bulls marching toward each other, a huge cow almost flying in the air, and another one giving birth, a horse at the end of a passage falling down a cliff, many horses, most in colors, browns and reds and blacks, and Whinney with the spotted hide over her back and across her face, and the two stick-like antlers.
40
Zelandoni was not with Ayla on her arcane inward Journey, but she sensed it, and felt herself pulled toward it. Perhaps if she had consumed more of the drink, she might have been drawn in with Ayla and become lost in the enigmatic landscape induced by the root. As it was, she did lose control of her faculties for a period
of time, and had her own difficulties.
The zelandonia weren’t quite sure what was going on. Ayla appeared to be unconscious, and the First seemed close to it. She wasn’t exactly dozing off, but she would slump down, and her eyes would glaze over as if she were gazing into some unseen distance. Then she would rouse herself and say things that didn’t always make sense. She did not appear to be in control of the experiment, which was unusual in itself, and she definitely was not in control of herself, which made them all nervous. Those who knew her best were most alarmed, but they did not want to spread their concern among the rest.