Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

  “What…what do you want?” Scorpion asked.

  Cloud Stalker’s head snapped around. “You will not speak unless spoken to!” he said sharply. Frog could do little save quake. But then, unexpectedly, Stalker answered the question. “You will run the gauntlet. You will show us how brave and strong you are,” he said.

  Scorpion asked the question in Frog’s mind. “Will you kill us?”

  Stalker came closer, looked at each of them in turn, so closely that Frog could not hold his gaze through the eyeholes and had to look away. “Perhaps. You do not have to do this. Perhaps all you need do is choose one of your brothers for the men to take away and use like a woman. Choose one of you. Just one! And the others will not have to fight. To run. Perhaps…die.”

  The boys stared at one another. Scorpion cast a stealthy glance at Frog, making the skin on his neck burn. Ridiculous! His fellows would never abandon him in such a way! It was not done!

  Would they?

  “Choose!” Stalker said. “Who sacrifices a brother to keep his own skin safe? Choose!”

  “Frog…?” Scorpion began weakly, and then hung his head in shame.

  The boys shifted restlessly, glancing at one another and blinking back tears. Frog felt hands thrusting against his back and was disheartened to realize that some of his cousins might indeed have considered giving him up.

  As Lizard had almost been sacrificed?

  A bubble of protest welled up inside him. No! No! Not me! Not any of us. Can’t you see what they really want?

  The mighty Stalker examined their faces as if he could see beneath their skin, then turned and walked away.

  Stooped with seasons, a gray old hunter spoke to the boys in a voice that burned. “Yes. Who is it that you reject? Who will you abandon? Who will speak his heart? Who will say: ‘This one is not of the tribe. This one does not deserve the protection of the thorn walls! This one can have his manhood torn away!’”

  Frog heard those words more with his heart than his ears.

  The sharp pressure at his back had decreased. Frog was right: that was what the others had been thinking, and they were now ashamed of that stark truth.

  They cast their eyes about, terrified and humiliated…. but also determined. Ibandi boys would not betray one of their own!

  The animals with old men’s eyes glared at them. “Remember!” one of them said. “What is done to others may be done to you. What is a tribe? Do we turn against one another in times of hunger or drought or disease? Do we?”

  They glanced about wildly, seeking answers in one another’s tear-filled eyes. Frog’s nose wrinkled: the air stank of urine. Someone—Scorpion, he thought—had pissed himself.

  “N-no,” his stepbrother stammered.

  “Do we desert one another to save ourselves?” Stalker asked. “Is this how you wish to be treated? Choose! Choose one of your fellows now to be taken and his ass set afire.” Frog’s anus clenched sympathetically, horrified by the implications. “Or you can stand together as men, and face your futures. Choose! Our women wish to know how many of you are men, and how many are little girls or Betweens. They await your decision.”

  Stalker’s eyes blazed like coals. “How many of you are men?” he asked.

  Here in this confined space, Frog was nearly overwhelmed with his brothers’ powerful scent. He smelled their excitation, fear and something else…strength in unity.

  “All!” they shouted, glancing nervously at one another, seeking support.

  “How many?” Stalker asked, and raised his arms. Frog remembered when those limbs had been tight, the arms like tree trunks. The ravages of time had reduced his muscles to thick, slack braided vines beneath loose skin.

  “All!” the young men called again.

  “Who are you?” he asked them, and there could only be one answer.

  “The sons of the shadow!” they said.

  “Do we stand together?” he asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Hunt together?”

  “Yes!”

  “Die together?”

  “Yes!” they called, shaking the mountain with their fervor.

  “We are the family!” Stalker roared. “We are Ibandi! Rise, and face your future. All!”

  A child had no scars. A man had at least two, one on each cheek. That first scar said that he was no longer a child, but not yet a man either. A hunter had two on each side, a hunt chief three. There were some who never won that second scar, and what happened to them was no fit fate for an Ibandi.

  One after another the hunt chiefs had doffed their animal masks. Now each stood before one of the boys holding a wooden bowl filled with bloodred paste the consistency of mud. Frog smelled cayenne and something acid. Uncle Snake went last, and the web of scars etching the left side of his face made the boys gasp, although all of them had seen the wounds many times. Everything seemed more real here, of deeper significance.

  Snake rubbed a bit of paste onto Rat’s cheek. In the torchlight, it seemed that Rat bled already. The boy groaned, biting into his lip as the first incision was made, so deeply that a blood-vine crept down from the wound. Frog winced, suddenly fighting the urge to cry out in sympathetic pain. He would have sworn his cheek was already on fire.

  Rat made no sound beyond the first groan, and Frog was proud. Other men worked with other boys, dividing the ten and two youths into three groups, two men tending to each.

  When at last Frog’s turn came, his heart drummed strongly enough to steal the strength from his legs. Uncle Snake somehow seemed to hold both of Frog’s eyes with only one of his. “Breathe,” Snake said so softly that Frog could barely hear it. “Run while standing still.”

  The first pulp Uncle Snake smeared on his cheeks felt like fire. That sensation faded swiftly, leaving numbed flesh in its wake.

  Snake pulled a sliver of black rock from his pouch, its hilt wrapped in leather. Was this the blade Deep Dry Hole had given him? Frog could not tear his eyes away from it.

  The surface of Frog’s cheek felt thick and unresponsive when he probed at it with his fingers, but when the edge of the knife tore into his flesh, he was shocked at how much it hurt. He did not, would not cry out. Frog knew that eyes were upon him, judging and measuring him, and he refused to fail in this critical test.

  When the rock sliver sliced his other cheek, Frog squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could. When he opened them again, tears stained his vision. They spilled down his numbed cheeks, and there the cool, wet sensation disappeared. Snake’s ravaged face nodded approval as he moved on to the next boy.

  This was Scorpion, who only breaths ago had called for Frog to be driven out. He was shaking, and to Frog’s great satisfaction, when the first cut was made his stepbrother cried out like a scat-smeared baby. “Please!” Scorpion said. “Don’t cut me again. Not again.”

  “Be still and silent!” Stalker called, but Scorpion trembled as hard as ever. Blood flowed down his cheek, as did the water from his eyes.

  “Don’t cut me!” Scorpion pled.

  Stalker glared. “Your father, and his father, and his grandfather back to the beginning all wore these scars. Do not shame us!”

  Snake said nothing. Scorpion was the son of his flesh, but in this sacred space within Great Sky itself, no favoritism could be shown.

  But something inside Scorpion had broken. He had lost his num.

  Uncle Snake turned away from his son. If Scorpion could not do this, he would return to the boma. Frog had seen that, and now understood more clearly what he had seen all his life: boys disappearing, then returning, with cheek scars. Thorn Summer was one such. A Between. Such men would never hunt, never lead. They might not even mate. Life for such as these was pitiable. For the rest of their lives they were children who could sit with the old men or the women.

  So many things about the previous moon were clear now! Whispers that had ceased when he approached, guarded comments and actions that had made no sense at the time, suddenly became clear in his eyes. Next yea
r Scorpion would have one more chance to become a man. After that, he would either become a Between or be driven from Fire’s protective thorn walls.

  Frog promised himself that whatever came next, whatever might happen, that would not be his fate. The eyes of the other boys said that, terrified or not, all had made similar decisions.

  “Will you stand?” Stalker’s voice was a knife.

  “I will stand,” Scorpion said, but leaned back against the others, a hunt chief at either elbow.

  The sliver of black rock went to work again, and the first scars were finished. The men rubbed berry pulp into the wound, as they had with Frog and the others, and then turned him to work on the other cheek. It seemed to him that the men were a bit more gentle with them now, less intimidating. Frog knew then that regardless of appearances they did not want the boys to fail.

  But what of the threat of rape, so recently given? Despite the pain in his cheek, he knew that it couldn’t have been real. It was another lie, a lie told…

  To help them be strong, yes.

  The other boys looked at one another as the men worked. Frog turned to Rat and whispered: “I thought Scorpion would be the bravest.”

  Rat nodded “If he is not the greatest of us…then, who?”

  Frog smiled to himself. Still in pain, dazed with the cuts and the stinging, but the question still stood: if Scorpion was not the bravest and best of them, then, who?

  Yes. Who?

  When they were led up out of the kiva, a row of torches had been planted in the ground. More hunt chiefs stood in array, wearing their animal masks, their bodies festooned with feathers and leathers, torsos smeared with paint, singing and driving the butts of their spears against the ground.

  Frog had his first view of the hunt chiefs’ camp. There was no thorn perimeter, almost as if they dared predators to challenge them. Two hands of huts scattered around a clearing, each the same distance from a central fire. Trees had been hewn down for paces in all directions, but not quite in the shape of a circle. No. It took Frog a moment to realize it, but imagining he was an eagle, viewing from above he realized that the clearing was shaped like a man’s eye, the kiva at the tear duct.

  Frog and the others were escorted to a flat area between the trees. They clustered the boys together, then linked their own ranks into two rows. They held bamboo staves in their hands, and the nature of their intent was clear to Frog at once.

  Only Cloud Stalker had not lined up with the others. He stood behind them. “Run!” he said, and struck them with his own stick.

  One at a time the boys were forced to run. The lines of hunters struck at them, tripped them, beat them with sticks and kicked at them with callused, knobby feet.

  Frog winced away from a blow, stumbled, fell and gasped as stroke after stroke bruised his shoulders, sides and belly.

  Ahead of him, Rat fell. As the men beat him without mercy, Frog had to choose: did he run on or help his cousin? Ignoring his own peril, he bent, grabbed Rat’s arm and hefted. Together, they ran on, although Frog was smote again and yet again, and his vision furred with sweat.

  Frog was shocked at the speed with which he lost his wind. His chest heaved, despite the fact like all Ibandi men, he could run all day using the huh-huh-huh hyena breathing. He’d never experienced anything like this, all of the chaos and the screaming and shaking of spears, and the hideous painted faces and the torches.

  Once through the gauntlet, they ran for the river, the hunt chiefs whooping close behind.

  Frog fell, and immediately a spear haft struck his legs. He groaned, but no one helped him rise.

  So be it. Frog helped himself up and hobbled on, and was one of the last to the stream.

  They had survived, every one of them.

  That was also the day Frog’s eyes were fully opened to the death lurking within the game of wrestling. In pairs they grappled and threw each other, but now when one was down, instead of allowing him up so that the game could continue, the hunt chiefs stopped them and taught lessons. And the lessons were those Frog had heard only rumors of: How to cripple. How to kill. How to use rocks and sticks to thrust, to strike, to crush. How to smash knees and break throats. How to bite and tear and gouge.

  Something hot and sharp flared within Frog’s chest and at the back of his head.

  “This is a terrible thing that we teach you,” Stalker said. “But we may have to fight for our land. There are others coming. Perhaps they are beast-men. Perhaps something else. We know they have killed bhan, and even Ibandi. They dare enter Great Sky’s shadow, and we must prepare.”

  The boys’ eyes widened when they heard these words. The adults had never spoken to them so directly about the threat ahead. Both pride and fear flooded Frog’s heart. Children did not hear such words. Only hunters, those who stood between the boma and the lion.

  Or boys who, with the grace of Father Mountain, would one day wear a hunter’s scars.

  After three bruising days of wrestling came the most frightening ceremony of all.

  Frog and the others were told to slip off their waistlets and present their roots. River Song, one of the oldest hunt chiefs, a man of calm, sober aspect, took Frog’s root in hand and, as Frog fought the temptation to swoon, went to work.

  The old one inserted a hardwood stick between the foreskin and the upper side of Frog’s glans. Carefully, he rolled the tender foreskin back. With a sliver of glassy black rock he sliced the flesh along either side, creating wings. Frog bit back his cries of pain as River wiped away blood with a bit of moss.

  Frog experienced an entire cascade of emotions: fear, humiliation, pride, embarrassment. The facial wounds had hurt less, and these were also more…intimate.

  “It hurts,” River Song said, reading Frog’s mind. He touched the rolled flaps of flesh. “This will heal, and gather up under your root.” He grinned toothlessly. “Your wife will like it.”

  Frog winced, struggling to remember that the deeper the cuts, the more powerful the man-magic.

  Frog feared that his root would throb forever, or remain hideously deformed in such a way that no woman would want him to enter her body. Worse still, that he was so mangled he would never again be able to run and hunt. Despite those fears, after a hand of days of lying on his back, groaning in misery, he was able to walk without wincing and crying out.

  During these times he learned new songs, and watched dances he was far too sore to perform.

  If there was any solace to be found, it was in the fact that the other boys seemed even more deeply miserable than he, limping and crying out if their thighs rubbed against their wounded roots. What a fine flock of young hunters they were! Even rabbits would have little to fear from such a toothless pack.

  As the other boys sweltered in fever or washed the pus from their new wounds, the hunt chiefs recounted endless tales of their own youthful days, and how soon after becoming hunters they had been singled out for possessing unusually strong or fast limbs. Recognized, the boma fathers nominated them to be hunt chiefs.

  They also spoke of hunting secrets, and traveling far to acquire or practice them.

  And they danced, oh how they danced at night, their bodies making the most expressive gestures, forming the most awe-inspiring shadows, and Frog was entranced.

  “Small men are afraid of their brothers’ power,” Cloud Stalker said. “Big men raise their brothers up, that heroes may arise from our ranks. I tell you the story of a hero. It is also the story of the first bird on Great Sky.”

  And he began to dance.

  Once, a long time ago, there was a huge, shapeless monster, Kammapa, who spread terror through the land. He devoured every man and child on earth except one old woman. Without a man to give her seed, she birthed a child who was born wearing holy amulets. She named the child Mountain Walker, knowing that he would rise high and travel far.

  “Is there no one but you and I in the world?” Mountain Walker asked his mother.

  “My child,” his mother said, “once the
land was covered with people, but the monster who haunts the mountain has slain and eaten them all.”

  Hearing this, Mountain Walker knew that his name meant he would have to slay this beast. They fought, and Kammapa swallowed Mountain Walker whole, but with his knife Mountain Walker cut his way from inside the beast, releasing himself and all other people from its stomach.

  Mountain Walker became grand hunt chief, but people were not happy, for they feared his power. So they decided that Mountain Walker should be murdered, and tried to throw him into a deep pit lined with stakes. Walker was too clever, and escaped.

  Then his enemies built a fire in the center of the boma, and tried to throw him in. But in the frenzy, they threw in another man instead, and the screams were horrible, the smell driving the moon from the sky.

  They tried to push him over a cliff, and to smother him in a cave, and always he was too strong and smart. But their hatred took the heart from Mountain Walker, and he grew weary of fighting them. So he let them kill him, and when he died, his body went into the ground except for his heart, which became a hawk and rose up Great Sky, and sits still on the shoulder of Father Mountain.

  The hunt chiefs told them of the climb to the top of Great Sky, to the world of the dead. Some of the boys who had lost parents or beloved cousins wept to hear the words, see the songs the hunt chiefs had carried back from the forbidden land.

  They danced out tales of swirling, howling demons made of white powder, defending the passage to Father Mountain’s home, and of heroes who had called forth the courage to overcome them. Frog had never heard such things and was confused. What should he believe: his eyes and ears, or the words of these awesome men? He was uncertain, knew only that he would give anything and everything, even his life itself, to see such magic.

  He remembered the black and white stones in Cloud Stalker’s belt. Did that, and what Frog had done to save Lizard, prove that there was no magic? Or had magic merely failed at that moment? Or could it be that he was an instrument of Father Mountain, and that the nature of magic was different than he had ever thought?