Chapter 53 - Nyal's Story part 2

When she was young and of childbearing age, the people of her tribe called her Nyala.

She lived in the verdant river valley of a piney mountainous region that is now named the Swabian Alps, in a country that would come to be called Germany in some thirty thousand years. In her youth she had two husbands, one named Gon and the other named Brulde. She also had a subordinate wife named Eyya. Eyya was a Neanderthal. They had lived contentedly in a dome-shaped hut called a wetus for six years, and their successful group marriage—which was a common way to live in her culture—produced an equal number of beautiful children, three of which she had delivered from her own womb.

But her childbearing days were long past. Her youth, like her womb, had wizened with the passing of the seasons, shriveling like a bunyun fruit left too long in the sun.

Nyala, in the tongue of the River People, meant "a blooming flower", a name her father had given her when she was born, never considering that someday that flower would go to seed. As age seamed her face, as the inexorable march of the sun and moon across the sky bleached her blonde hair white and hunched her back, the People took to calling her Nyal, which meant simply "a plant", but the connotation of the word was a little less kind. It really meant "a useless old weed", but that suited her. That suited her just fine.

This Paleolithic crone, now named Nyal, was by our standard of measuring time only 59 years old, but that was ancient in those untamed days. She and her subordinate wife had been living in the Siede for more than twenty years, old widow women.

The Siede was the communal cave of the elders, where the River People retired to wile away their twilight years, performing menial tasks and teaching the young ones the skills they would need to survive while their parents were off hunting and gathering.

It was just the two of them now.

Brulde was dead, and Gon… Gon had vanished many years before, when they were all still young and had a hut full of babies to look after. Nyal and Eyya subsisted on the generosity of their four strapping sons now, and traded their skills at threadwork and medicine for the rest of the commodities they needed to survive.

"At least we're comfortable," Eyya sometimes said, sitting beside the fire.

Comfortable is a matter of opinion, Nyal thought, shifting irritably on a mat of woven reeds. Either her cushion was getting thinner or her bottom was getting bonier!

Probably a little of both.

"At least our children come to see us," Eyya sometimes said.

Well, Den was always busy, chasing after women who were far too young for him, but Hun and Gan and Gavid always brought a portion of their hunting to their mothers' apartment in the Siede. Lethe and Breyya visited daily. Then again, they had to. Nyal and Eyya looked after their children, as was their duty as elders of the tribe, but sometimes they would linger to gossip with their mothers around the hearth, and that was nice. Not everyone's children were so generous with their time.

Still, Eyya was an incurable optimist. It irritated Nyal to no end.

"It's a miracle that all our children still live," Eyya often observed, after their grandchildren had left for the evening. Life was hard. Death for the River People-- whether from accident, predation or disease-- was as certain as the passage of the moon and the sun through the heavens. Why, just two days ago, a young boy named Tiam had developed a fever and passed into the Ghost World, and he was only four years old!

"Vestra has truly blessed us, Nyala," Eyya invariably said.

"Is that right?" Nyal always replied, always with a neutral expression on her face.

Vestra was the moon goddess of the Neanderthal people, the celestial mother who had given birth to all living things. The River People had no gods—no gods save one. Some of the younger People had taken to calling her husband a god, but Gon was no god. She didn't really know what he was, but she knew he was no god. Nyal didn't believe in such things.

But she loved old Eyya, as fat and ugly as she'd become, so Nyal nodded as if she agreed with her.

Nyal wasn't inclined to feel so satisfied with her lot. She never had been. But Eyya's feelings were easily bruised, and Nyal hated to see that look of hurt flash in her big Fat Hand eyes. It made the old woman feel terribly guilty.

"I suppose that's true, my love," Nyal said, adjusting a pair of breeches in her lap. She wriggled her bone needle through the tough deerskin and pulled the flaxen thread taut. One of the young men in the tribe, whose wife had no skills at sewing, had promised her a fat hare in return for a new pair of pants.

As she sewed, Nyal pretended she did not notice how thin and wrinkled the flesh of her hands had become. When did her hands become an old crone's crinkled claws? She turned them this way and that when Eyya was not watching, scowling at the ropy veins and swollen knuckles.

Eyya often smiled-- like she was doing right this moment-- looking at the ceiling with a dreamy expression. Counting all her blessings, Nyal supposed. Nyal shook her head in exasperation. Eyya counted her blessings like a little girl counted pretty stones.

Ancestors love her!

She wished her heart could be so simple… so easily satisfied.