She held herself still, resisting the tickling sensation and letting it become internal spasms of expectation. He kissed the hollow of her throat and detoured to one side toward an erect nipple, circling it, nibbling it. Her anticipation was so intense, she almost felt a sense of relief when he finally took it in his mouth and suckled. She felt the jolt of excitement in the depths of her being, and at the place of her Pleasures.
He was ready, he was so ready, but he felt himself fill even more when he heard her soft moan as he suckled and gently bit first one nipple and then the other. The urge suddenly came upon him so strongly, he wanted her that instant, but he wanted her to be as ready as he was. He knew how to bring her there.
She could feel his eager desire, and it fired her own. She would have been happy to open herself to him at that moment, but when he pushed down the top cover of their sleeping roll and moved lower, she held her breath, knowing what was coming and wanting it.
His tongue circled her navel for only a moment; he didn't want to wait, and neither did she. As she kicked off the top cover, she felt a moment's hesitation at the thought of the others in their sleeping places nearby. Ayla wasn't used to being in a dwelling with other people and felt a little constrained. Jondalar seemed to have no such compunctions.
The unease slipped from her mind as she felt him kiss her thigh, press her legs apart and kiss the other, and then kiss the soft folds of her womanhood. He savored her familiar taste, licked slowly, and then found her small, hard nodule.
Her moan was louder. She felt flashes of Pleasure like lightning blaze through her as he sucked and massaged her with his tongue. She didn't know she was so ready. It came on her quicker than she expected. Almost without warning, she was there, feeling peaks of Pleasure and a overwhelming desire for him, for his manhood.
She reached for him, pulled him up to her, and helped him to enter. He penetrated deeply. With the first stroke, he struggled to hold back, to wait a little, but she was ready, urging him, and he gave himself up to it. With joyous abandon, he plunged, fully, once more, and then again, and then he was there, as she was, feeling the waves of Pleasure mount up and spill over, again and again and again.
Jondalar rested on top of her, a moment she had always savored, but then he remembered that she was pregnant and he worried that his weight was too much. She felt an instant of disappointment when he moved away so soon.
As he rolled off to the side, he wondered again if she could be right. Was this how that baby had started inside her? Was it his baby, too, as Ayla always insisted? Had the Mother given her children not only this wondrous Gift of Pleasure, but was it Her way of Blessing a woman with new life? Could that be why men were created, to start the new life inside a woman? He wanted Ayla to be right, he wanted it to be true, but how would he ever know?
After a while, Ayla got up. From a travel pack she took a small wooden bowl and poured some water into it from the waterbag. Wolf had retreated to his chosen corner near the entrance and greeted her with his usual tentative approach after their Pleasures. She smiled at him and gave him the signal that he had done well; then, standing over the night basket, she cleaned herself as Iza had taught her when she first became a woman. Iza, I know you doubted that I would have need of the training, she thought, but you were right to teach me the cleansing rituals then.
Jondalar was half-asleep when she went back to bed. He'd been too tired to get up, but she'd air out and brush off their sleeping roll to clean it in the morning. Now that they were going to stay in one place for a while, she would even have time to wash their furs, she thought. Nezzie had shown her how to do it, but it took time and care.
Ayla rolled over on her side and Jondalar cuddled up behind her, resting on his side. They were nestled together like two spoons on edge, and he fell asleep holding her, but she was unable to nod off, although she was comfortable and satisfied. She had slept much later than usual that morning, and as she lay awake, she began thinking about the Clan and the Others again. Recollections of her life with them and her stays with various groups of Others kept coming to her mind, and she found herself making comparisons.
The same kinds of materials were at hand for both peoples, but the uses to which they had been put were not quite the same. Both hunted animals, both gathered foods that grew, and both used hides, bones, vegetal materials, and stones for clothing, shelter, implements, and weapons, but there were differences.
Perhaps the most noticeable was that while Jondalar's people decorated their environment with paintings and carvings of animals and designs, the people of the Clan did not. Though she didn't quite know how to explain it, even to herself, she did perceive that people of the Clan expressed the beginnings of such decoration. Red ochre in a burial, for example, that imparted color to the body. Their interest in unusual objects that they collected to put in their amulets. Totem scars and color markings made on the body for special purposes. But the primeval people of the Clan created no legacy of art.
Only Ayla's kind of people did; only people like the Mamutoi and the Zelandonii, and the rest of the Others they had met on their Journey. She wondered if the unknown people to whom she had been born decorated the material objects in their world, and she believed they did. It was the ones who came later, the ones who shared that cold ancient world with the Clan for a time, the ones they called the Others, who were the first to see an animal in a moving, living, breathing form and reproduce it as a drawing or a carving. It was a profound distinction.
The creation of art, the delineation of animals or purposeful markings, was an expression of the ability to make abstractions-the ability to take the essence of a thing and make of it a symbol that stands for the thing itself. The symbol for a thing has another form as well: a sound, a word. A brain that could think in terms of art was a brain capable of developing to its fullest potential another abstraction of great significance: language. And the same brain that was capable of creating a synthesis of the abstraction of art and the abstraction of language would someday form a synergism of both symbols, in effect, a memory of the words: writing.
Unlike the day before, Ayla opened her eyes very early the next morning. No red coals glowed in the fireplace and all the lamps were out, but she could discern the contours of the limestone shelf high overhead, above the dark wall panels of Marthona's dwelling, in the faint reflection of first light, the initial lightening of the sky that heralded the coming of the sun. No one else was stirring when she quietly slipped out of the furs and made her way in the not quite pitch-dark to use the night basket. Wolf lifted his head the moment she got up, whined a greeting of happiness, and followed her.
She felt a little nauseated, but not quite enough to vomit, and had an urge for something solid to calm her unsettled stomach. She went to the cooking room and started a small fire, then took a few bites of the bison meat that was left on the pelvic bone serving platter from the night before, and a few soggy vegetables from the bottom of the cooking-storage basket. She wasn't sure if she felt better or not, but she decided to see if she could make a stomach-settling tea for herself. She didn't know who had made the tea for her the day before, but wondered if it was Jondalar and thought she'd make one of his favorite morning teas as well.
She got her medicine bag from her traveling pack. Now that we're finally here, I can replenish my supply of herbs and medicines, she thought as she looked at each package and thought about its uses. Sweet rush can help an upset stomach, but no, Iza told me it could cause a miscarriage, and I don't want to do that. While she was considering the possible side effects, her mind supplied another bit from her extensive store of medicinal knowledge. Black birch bark can help prevent a miscarriage, but I don't have any. Well, I don't think I'm in danger of losing this one.