THE VISION

She was looking at herself, crouched in the cave where she had seen Creb and the other mog-urs perform their terrifying ritual, where they had ingested the brain of the man whom Ursus had chosen. She could see herself watching them, and at the same time she was down there watching them, feeling the tendrils of their thoughts brushing against her own mind. At once part of it and separate from it, she was helpless to control herself as she felt herself be drawn deeper and deeper, following the mog-urs on a journey into the far past she could not even begin to understand.

And then the reverse, the sudden shock of realisation and then the aching empty loneliness as she felt herself abandoned, wheeling in a void filled with strange and terrifying imagery: great rectangular shapes thrusting up from the dark, covered in a thousand tiny fires, while rivers of light flowed between them; a consciousness of vast, uncountable numbers of people, seething and marching ever on. The vision dimmed, and shattered, and for one brief moment her brain was filled with a thousand screams as a great pillar of smoke rose up from a fire the likes of which she had never seen, while three great black birds circled high in the sky above.

She cried out in fear and despair, but this time Creb, the powerful and wise Mog-Ur of the Clan, the only father she could remember, was no longer there to catch her as she fell. She fell away from everything she knew, faster and faster, until she hit the ground, which trembled and shook at her impact, shuddering like the earthquakes she feared so much.

She was alone on the treeless hillside, naked in her dream. She moved up the slope, the tall grasses brushing against her bare legs. The air was still and hot, the sun's rays oppressive. Sweat trickled down her forehead and chest, and her legs felt numb. Something was drawing her up, some premonition, something calling to her. She could sense Creb was far behind her, at the foot of the hill, but he would not climb it with her, and she could not turn to look back at him. She knew that she had to climb the hill, had to see what lay on the other side.

Suddenly she was on top of the crest, a vast panorama stretching out in front of her. A great wide plain, rich and fertile, lay before her. Birds wheeled in the sky, and a gentle breeze blew. A short distance off, she could see horses, but larger and more graceful than her loyal Whinney. Filled with a sudden joy, she ran down the gentle slope towards them, wanting nothing more than to ride, ride far and fast, the wind in her hair, the sun on her back.

Something hit her, hard, causing her to fall down. Sitting up, she could see nothing at first, but then her eye was caught by sparkles of light dancing in the air. Curious, she ventured closer. In front of her were a number of long thin sinews, strung in a net between a series of tall posts set in the ground. But these sinews were unlike any she had seen before. They were a pale grey colour, and shiny. Gingerly, she reached out to touch one. It gave slightly under her push, and she gasped. It was cold and hard, like stone, but no stone she knew of could be turned into nets like this.

Ayla walked alongside the barricade in fear, unable to understand what was happening. She could still see the horses, behind the barricade, and she wanted to get to them, but she was unable to reach them: the sinews were too high to climb, and too tightly meshed to crawl through. The horses stared haughtily at her, unafraid, as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing.

Then she found herself in front of a large square board, painted white, but cracked and stained by time. On it were painted strange symbols, neither animal nor man, but a mixture of simple lines and curves arranged in a complex pattern. She stared at the board, knowing somehow that here, in these simple symbols, was the clue to her future and that of her kind, the future that Creb and Iza and and Uba and the rest of the Clan could never know. The symbols burned themselves into her brain as she stood there, rooted to the spot.

A chill wind blew against her naked body, and she shivered, cold and unprotected in this strange environment. Lifting her eyes up, she now saw that the plain was full of these mysterious sinews, extending on for mile after mile, dividing the great grassland up into innumerable smaller sections. And even as she watched they seemed to multiply, cutting up the world into smaller and smaller pieces, and as they did the animals vanished from view, the green grass withered and died, and a foul choking cloud began to descend, blotting out the sun. She tried to run, but everywhere there were the barriers, trapping her, holding her, imprisoning her in their nets. She screamed.

"Ayla! Ayla! For the Mother's sake, Ayla, wake up!"

She blinked, and gasped as her eyes focussed on the tall blond man stooped over her, his eyes searching her face anxiously.

"Jondalar," she said weakly, reaching out to him. "I… I had a dream, a...a vision."

A shadow of pain flitted briefly across his face. Ayla was often plagued with nightmares, he knew, and she had always been sure that they were more than just dreams. Ever since she had shared in the Root Ceremony with the people she called the Clan, she had been connected, on some level he could not even begin to understand, with the world of the spirits. Her dreams were not to be taken lightly – they had only just escaped a flash flood thanks to the warning she had been granted through them.

"What was it?" he said softly, holding her close as they sat on the edge of the sleeping furs. "Are we in danger again?"

Ayla was silent for a moment. "No," she said eventually, shaking her head gently. "At least, not yet, not us. I think… I think it was something to do with the Mother, leaving us. I don't understand. There were horses, and fields, and a great black cloud, and I couldn't go anywhere – everywhere I turned there were nets of stone. And Jondalar, there was something else. Something…important, I know."

"What? What was there?" He stroked her long blonde hair, and brushed a tear from her cheek. "Was it dangerous? Evil?"

She started to shake her head again, then stopped. "I don't know, Jondalar," she whispered. "I just know that they were symbols, powerful symbols, more powerful even than the paintings your people make."

"What did they mean? What did they look like?"

"I don't know what they mean," Ayla said. "I don't understand them. But…."

She took a stick from the supply of firewood, and smoothed out a patch of dry dirt. The lines and curves painted on the board in her dream took shape under the stick as she slowly drew them in the ground. Finally she was finished.

"What does it mean?" the tall man said softly, looking down at the lines in the dirt. They were like nothing he had ever seen in his life. Just simple lines and curves, with no power or spiritual meaning at all that he could see. How could these have scared Ayla so much? He looked at them closer, frowning. They were arranged on two lines, grouped into four clumps, but their purpose was utterly meaningless.

"I don't understand them either, Jondalar," Ayla said, sitting beside him. "I just know they have something to do with us, with the Others, and with the Mother and the future. I just don't know what…."

Jondalar looked at the beautiful girl beside him, and smiled. "Well, whatever they mean, we're not in any danger, right? It's almost dawn now. Shall we get an early start today?"

Ayla looked up at him, retuning his smile, pushing her vision out of her mind for the moment. "Good idea. I'll get the tea ready. Is there any food left over?"

"Lots," Jondalar grinned. "Don't worry about a thing. We'll be fine."

Their breakfast over, the two of them mounted their horses and left the small cave where they had spent the night, heading south to the Great Mother River and then west along it, beyond the great glacier, on their long journey to the land that one day men would call France.

Behind them, on the floor of the cave, the symbols Ayla had scratched into the dirt remained there, their deceptively simple shapes hiding a power for good and evil that Ayla could not even begin to imagine. Thirty millennia would pass before that power was harnessed, before the simple message of the future they spelled out would be understood:

PRIVATE PROPERTY

KEEP OUT

NOTE: This was originally published on another site, but now that I have started writing FF here I decided I would like to collect my other stories as well. I like to use Author's Notes as a place to talk about the facts behind the fiction (I very much appreciated the use of endnotes in "The Far Pavilions," for example) but there aren't really any here.