Most people could be quickly identified by the designs on their clothing, and the necklaces and other jewelry they wore, but over time the Story-Tellers had adopted a distinctive style of clothing and design that announced their profession. Even young children knew when they arrived, and almost all other activities stopped when one or more of the traveling entertainers made an appearance. Even planned hunting trips were often canceled. It would be a time for spontaneous feasts, and although many could, no Story-Teller ever had to hunt or forage to survive. They were always given gifts as an encouragement to return, and when they grew too old or tired of traveling, they could settle down with any Cave they chose.
Sometimes several Story-Tellers traveled together, often with their families. Particularly talented groups might include singing and dancing or the playing of instruments: various kinds of percussions, rattles, rasps, flutes, and occasionally tightened strings that were struck or plucked. A local Cave's musicians, singers, dancers, and those who had stories to tell and liked to tell them often participated as well. Stories were often dramatized as well as narrated, but no matter how it was expressed, the story and the teller were always the focal point.
Stories could be anything: myths, legends, histories, personal adventures, or descriptions of far-off or imaginary places, people, or animals. A part of every Story-Teller's repertoire, because it was always in demand, were the personal happenings of neighboring Caves, gossip, whether funny, serious, sad, real, or invented. Everything and anything was fair game, as long as it was well told. The traveling Story-Tellers also carried private messages, from a person to a friend or relative, from a leader to a leader, from one Zelandoni to another, although such private communication could be very sensitive. A Story-Teller had to prove very trustworthy before being entrusted with particularly confidential or esoteric messages between leaders or the zelandonia, and not all were.
Beyond the crest, which was a high point of the area for some distance around, the land dropped down, then leveled out. Ayla climbed over the top ridge and started down, traversing at an angle along a faint trail that had been recently cleared through the hillside of dense brambles and a few scraggly pines. She veered away from the path at the bottom of the hill where the sloping canebrake of berry vines gave way to sparse grass. At an ancient dry streambed, whose tightly packed stones gave little space to establish new growth, she turned and followed it uphill.
Wolf seemed especially curious. It was new territory to him, too, and he was diverted by every pile and pocket of earth that offered his nose a new smell. They started up the rocky riverbed that had cut through the limestone in the days when water rushed along it, then he bounded ahead and disappeared behind a hill of rubble. Ayla expected him to reappear any moment, but after what seemed to be an unusually long time, she became concerned. She stood near the mound of rocks, looked all around, and finally whistled the sharp, distinctive tones that she had specifically developed to call the wolf. Then she waited. It was some time before she saw the overgrown brambles behind the mound moving and heard him scrabbling out from under the thorny briar.
"Where have you been, Wolf?" she said as she bent down to look into his eyes. "What is under all these berry vines that it took you so long to get here?"
She decided to try to find out and took off her pack to get out the small axe Jondalar had made for her. She found it at the bottom of the pack. It was not the most effective tool for hacking through the long woody stems full of thorns, but she managed to create an opening that allowed her to see, not the ground, as she had expected, but a dark, empty space. Now, she was curious.
She worked at the vines some more and enlarged the opening enough for her to force her way through it with only a few scratches. The ground sloped down into what was obviously a cave with a comfortably wide entrance. With daylight coming through the hole she had made, she continued down, using the counting words to name her steps. When she reached thirty-one, she noticed that the slope leveled out and the corridor had widened. Faint daylight still filtered into the cave from the entrance, and with eyes adjusted to the near darkness, she saw that she had entered a much larger area. She looked around, then made a decision and headed back outside.
"I wonder how many people know about this cave, Wolf?"
She used her axe to widen the opening a little more, then went out and scanned the area. A short distance away, but surrounded by prickly briars, was a pine tree with needles that were brown. It appeared to be dead. With the small stone axe, she hacked her way through the tough woody vines a short distance, then tested a low branch to see if it was brittle enough to break. Though she'd had to hang on it with all her weight, she finally managed to snap off a section of a branch. Her hand felt sticky, and she smiled when she looked at the branch and saw some dark blobs of pitch. The pitchy branch would make a good enough torch without additional materials, once she got it lit.
She collected some dry twigs and bark from the dead pine, then walked to the middle of the rocky dry streambed. She got her fire kit out of her backpack and, using the crushed bark and twigs as tinder, and her firestone and a striking flint, she soon had a little fire started. From it, she lit the pine branch torch. Wolf watched her, and when he saw her heading back toward the cave, he raced ahead over the pile of rocks and wriggled his way in as he had the first time, under the hole Ayla had cut through the tangle of blackberry vines. Long before, when the dry bed was the river that had created the cave, the roof had extended farther out, but it had since collapsed, creating the pile of rubble that was in front of the present opening in the side of the hill.
She climbed the rocky mound and eased through the opening she had made. With the light from the flickering torch, she proceeded down the rather slick ramp of moist sandy-clay soil, again naming her steps with the counting words. This time it took only twenty-eight steps before the ground leveled out; with a torch to show the way, her stride was longer. The wide entry gallery opened onto a large, roundish, U-shaped room. She held the torch high, looked up, and caught her breath.
The walls, glinting with crystallized calcite, were nearly white, a pure, clean, resplendent surface. As she moved slowly into the cave, the light from the flickering torch sent animated shadows of the natural relief chasing each other over the walls as though they were alive and breathing. She walked closer to the white walls, which started a little below her chin-about five feet up from ground level-with a rounded ledge of brownish stone, and extended up in a curve that arced inward to the roof. She would not have thought of it before her visit to the deep cave of Fountain Rocks, but she could imagine what an artist like Jonokol might do in a cave like this.
Ayla walked around the room next to the wall, very carefully. The floor was muddy and uneven, and slippery. At the bottom of the U, where it curved around there was a narrow entrance to another gallery. She held the torch up and looked inside. The upper walls were white and curved, but the lower area was a narrow twisting corridor and she decided not to enter. She continued around, and to the right of the entrance to the gallery at the back there was another passageway, but she only looked inside. She had already decided that she would have to tell Jondalar and some others and bring them back to this cave.
Ayla had seen many caves, most filled with beautiful stone icicles suspended from ceilings or stalactite draperies hanging down the walls and corresponding deposits of stalagmites growing to meet them from the floors, but she had never seen a cave like this. Although it was a limestone cave, a layer of impermeable marl had formed that blocked the calcium carbonate-saturated drops of water and kept them from seeping through to form stalactites and stalagmites. Instead the walls were covered with calcite crystals, which grow very little, leaving large panels of white covering the bumps and dips of the natural relief of the stone. It was a rare and beautiful place, the most beautiful cave she had ever seen.