'When should we start to chant for you?' the First asked.
Ayla almost forgot about the chanting. 'Probably should have started already,' she said, a slight slur in her voice already.
The First was feeling the effects of her rather large taste as well, and struggled to keep her control as she signalled the zelandonia to begin chanting. That is a powerful root, she thought, and I only had one drink. What must Ayla be feeling now after all she drank, Zelandoni thought.
The ancient taste was familiar, and it brought on feelings Ayla would never forget, memories and associations of the other times she had tasted the drink, and of times long past. She felt the cool and damp of a deep forest, as though she were enveloped within it, with trees so huge it was difficult to find a way around and between them as she climbed up the steep side of a mountain followed by the horse. Lichen, damply soft and silvery greyish green, draped the trees, and moss covered the ground and rocks and logs of dead trees in a continuous carpet that ranged in shades from bright true green to deep pine green to rich earthy brownish green and all shades in between.
Ayla could smell fungus, mushrooms of every size and shape: fragile white wings sprouting from fallen trees, thick woody shelves attached to old stumps, large dense sponge-like brown capped, tiny delicate thin stemmed. There were honey-coloured tight clusters, compact round spheres, shiny red tops with white spots, tall smooth caps that melted to black ooze, ghostly white perfect caps of death, and many more. She knew them all, tasted them all, felt them all.
She was in a great delta of a huge river, carried by a stream of muddy brown water, breaking through thick stands of tall phragmite reeds and cattails, and floating islands with trees and wolves that climbed them, spinning round and round in a small leather-covered bowl boat, rising up and floating on a cushion of air.
Ayla didn't know her knees had buckled as she went limp and dropped to the ground. She was picked up by several zelandonia and carried to a resting place that Zelandoni had thought to have brought into the cave for her. The First almost wished she had one as well as she reached for her strong padded wicker stool. She struggled to stay aware, to watch Ayla, and felt a dark tinge of worry start to develop in the back of her mind.
Ayla was feeling peaceful, quiet, sinking into a soft mist that was drawing her deeper in, until she was surrounded. It thickened around her into a fog that obscured all vision, then became a heavy damp cloud. She felt swallowed by it. She was suffocating, struggled to breathe, gasped for air, then felt herself begin to move.
She began moving faster and faster, caught in the middle of the suffocating cloud, rushing so fast it took her breath away, left her with no air. The cloud wrapped itself around her, squeezed her, pushing in from all sides, contracting, expanding, contracting, like something alive. It forced her to move with accelerating velocity until she fell into a deep, black empty space, a place as black as the inside of a cave, mindless, terrifying.
It would have been less terrifying if she had simply dropped into sleep, become unconscious, as it appeared she had to those watching, but she was not. She couldn't move, didn't really have a desire to move, but when she tried to focus her will to move something, even just a finger, she could not. She couldn't even feel her finger, or any other part of herself. She couldn't open her eyes, or turn her head; she had no volition, no will, but she could hear. At some level, she was aware. As though from a distance and yet with great clarity, she could hear the chant of the zelandonia; she could hear the faint murmur of voices from one corner, though she couldn't make out what they were saying; she could even hear her own heart beating.
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 colours, alien colours 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 otherworldly. 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?'
