Read Online The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel - Free Book Online

place to sit near the welcoming hearth. A heightened feeling of anticipation and delight permeated the group. Visitors always brought a bit of excitement, but the foreign woman with her animals and exotic stories promised to be more stimulating than usual.
    Ayla and Jondalar were in the midst of a group that included Joharran and Proleva, Sergenor and Jayvena, and Kimeran and Beladora, the leaders of the Ninth, Seventh and Second Caves, and several others, including Levela and Janida and their mates, Jondecam and Peridal. The leaders were discussing with the people of the Seventh Cave when the visitors should leave Horsehead Rock and go to Elder Hearth, with jocular asides, in a friendly rivalry with the Second Cave about where the visitors should stay the longest.
    “Elder Hearth is senior and should be higher ranking and accorded more prestige,” Kimeran said with a teasing grin. “So we should have them longer.”
    “Does that mean because I’m older than you, I should be accorded more prestige?” Sergenor countered with a telling smile. “I’ll remember that.”
    Ayla had been listening and smiling with the rest, but she had been wanting to ask a question. At a break in the conversation, she finally said, “Now that you have brought up the ages of the Caves, there is something I would like to know.” They all turned to look at her.
    “You have only to ask,” Kimeran said with exaggerated courtesy and friendliness that intimated the suggestion of more. He had drunk a few cups of barma and was noticing how attractive his tall friend’s mate was.
    “Last summer Manvelar was telling me a little about the counting-word names of each Cave, but I’m still confused,” Ayla said. “When we went to the Summer Meeting last year, we stopped overnight at the Twenty-ninth Cave. They live at three separate shelters around a big valley, each with a leader and a zelandoni, but they are all called by the same counting word, the Twenty-ninth. The Second Cave is closely related to the Seventh Cave, and you live just across a valley, so why do you have a Cave with a different counting word? Why aren’t you part of the Second Cave?”
    “That’s one I can’t answer. I don’t know,” Kimeran said, then gestured toward the older man. “You’ll have to ask the more senior leader. Sergenor?”
    Sergenor smiled, but pondered the question for a moment. “To be honest, I don’t know, either. It never occurred to me before. And I don’t know of any Histories or Elder Legends that tell about it. There are some that tell stories of the original inhabitants of the region, the First Cave of the Zelandonii, but they have long since disappeared. No one even knows for sure where their shelter was.”
    “You do know that the Second Cave of the Zelandonii is the oldest settlement of Zelandonii still in existence?” Kimeran said, his voice slightly slurred. “That’s why it’s called Elder Hearth.”
    “Yes, I knew that,” she said, wondering if he would need the “morning after” drink she had concocted for Talut, the Mamutoi leader of the Lion Camp.
    “I’ll tell you what I think,” Sergenor said. “As the families of the First and Second Caves grew too large for their shelters, some of them, offshoots of both Caves as well as new people who had come into the region, moved farther away, taking the next counting words when they established a new Cave. By the time the group of people from the Second Cave who founded our Cave decided to move, the next unused counting word was ‘seven.’ They were mostly young families—some newly mated couples, the children of the Second Cave—and they wanted to stay close to their relatives, so they moved here, just across Sweet Valley, to make their new home. Even though the two Caves were so closely related, they were the same as one Cave, I think they chose a new number because that’s the way it was done. So we became two separate Caves: Elder Hearth, the Second Cave of the