The Shelters of Stone by Jean M. Auel Read Free Book Online

must be hungry,” Marthona said, including both of them in her glance.
    Jondalar smiled. “Yes, I am hungry! We haven’t eaten since early this morning. I was in such a hurry to get here, and we were so close, I didn’t want to stop.”
    “If you’ve brought all your things in, sit and rest while I prepare some food for you.” Marthona led them to a low table, indicated cushions for them to sit on, and poured some of the deep red liquid into cups for each of them. She looked around. “I don’t see your wolf-animal, Ayla. I know you brought him in. Does he also need food? What does he eat?”
    “I usually feed him whatever we eat, but he also hunts for himself. I brought him in so he would know where his place is, but he came with me the first time I went back down to the valley where the horses are, and decided to stay. He comes and goes on his own, unless I want him,” Ayla said.
    “How does he know when you want him?”
    “She has a special whistle to call him,” Jondalar said. “We call the horses with whistles, too.” He picked up his cup, tasted, then smiled and sighed with appreciation. “Now I know I’m home.” He tasted again, then closed his eyes and savored. “What fruit is this made from, mother?”
    “Mostly from those round berries that grow in clusters on long vines only on protected south-facing slopes,” Marthona explained for Ayla’s benefit. “There’s an area several miles southeast of here that I always check. Some years it doesn’t grow well at all, but we had a fairly warm winter a few years back, and the following autumn the clusters were huge, very fruity, sweet but not too sweet. I added a little elderberry, and some blackberry juice, but not much. This wine was a favorite. It’s a little stronger than usual. I don’t have much left.”
    Ayla sniffed the aroma of fruit as she held the cup to her lips to taste. The liquid was tart and tangy, dry, not the sweet taste she had expected from the fruity smell. She sensed the alcoholic character she had first tasted in the birch beer made by Talut, the Lion Camp’s headman, but this was more like the fermented bilberry juice made by the Sharamudoi, except that that had been sweeter, as she recalled.
    She hadn’t liked the harsh bite of alcohol when she first experienced it, but the rest of the Lion Camp seemed to enjoy the birch beer so much, and she wanted to fit in and be like them, so she made herself drink it. After a time, she got moreused to it, though she suspected that the reason people liked it was not as much for its taste as for the heady, if disorienting, feeling it caused. Too much usually made her feel giddy and too friendly, but some people became sad, or angry, or even violent.
    This beverage had something more, however. Elusive complexities altered the simple character of the fruit juice in an extraordinary way. It was a drink she could learn to enjoy.
    “This is very good,” Ayla said. “I not ever tasted anything … I never tasted anything quite like it,” she corrected herself, feeling slightly embarrassed. She was completely comfortable in Zelandonii; it was the first spoken language she had learned after living with the Clan. Jondalar had taught her while he was recovering from the wounds of the lion mauling. Though she did have difficulty with certain sounds—no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get them quite right—she seldom made mistakes in phrasing like that anymore. She glanced at Jondalar and Marthona, but they hadn’t seemed to notice. She relaxed and looked around.
    Though she had been in and out of Marthona’s dwelling several times, she had not really looked at it closely. She took the time to observe more carefully, and was surprised and delighted at every turn. The construction was interesting, similar but not the same as the dwellings inside the Losadunai cave, where they had stopped to visit before crossing the glacier on the high plateau.
    The first two or three feet of