Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

  But that was not her path. So with the other girls she sorted her herbs, tended the fire, and made their meals.

  On this night, they had finished a meal of fish and berries when a wavering call went up from the brush beyond their firelight’s liquid limits. It was a high, ululating cry that rose and fell and rose again before dying away. The girls glanced at one another soberly.

  “A soul returns to the mountain,” Dove said.

  They stood and left the cave. Their guides outside had set up a thorn barricade, one by no means as extensive as a boma wall, but enough to give a leopard pause, or force it to make noise as it crept through.

  “Did you hear that?” T’Cori asked.

  Owl Hooting nodded and pointed toward the southern horizon. “A lion kills a baboon,” he said. “One dies. One eats.” He shrugged.

  She longed to extend the conversation, but a sudden wave of shyness shushed her. T’Cori stood on a log until her head was above the thornbushes, and peered out to the south. Certainly she had heard such cries before. Never had they frightened her as this one had. Never had it been so easy to imagine that she herself might have been that baboon, howling beneath bloody claws.

  The shadows were deeply purple, dark enough to steal all of the light. She could see nothing.

  She turned slowly, searching in the other directions as well. She was about to step down when her eyes focused on something flickering just at the edge of her vision, almost beyond her ability to resolve the image.

  “A fire,” she said, and pointed.

  One at a time the other girls and then their male guards peered out toward the distant light. At times it seemed to die completely, but then it happened again, twinkling like a star at twilight. “A campfire,” Leopard Claw said.

  “Who is that?” Sister Quiet Water asked.

  “I wonder if it is a brother,” T’Cori said.

  “Perhaps it is one of them,” Quiet Water said. The emphasis made it clear she meant one of the murderous beast-men, or whatever creatures might be even worse.

  “I think it a brother,” T’Cori said hopefully. “An Ibandi brother. If it is, that is our fire, and it warms us too.” The other girls glanced at her as if they thought that a strange comment, and the men did as well. “Now I will sleep better.”

  They returned to their cave and its own small fire, adding a few pieces of wood to grow it, to increase the warmth, and perhaps the light as well.

  T’Cori slept curled on her side, mind racing. A lone hunter sought prey in the night. An Ibandi? Probably. Who would dare challenge the Ibandi within the mountain’s shadow? A beast-man? Possibly. Certainly something new and terrible had been happening in the last years. T’Cori could feel it in her blood, see it in the num-flames surrounding Stillshadow, in the voices of the old women as they sang the sun to life.

  So…it could be a member of another people, but her heart said it was one of their own. What did she know about the men of her tribe? Usually, unless they were close to home, they hunted in groups. Were her kinsmen hiding and hunting out there?

  But if it was only one, and that fire was far from any of the outer bomas, then she thought that it might be one of the young men out on his solitary journey, proving himself worthy of his second scar. What could he be feeling? Never in her life had she been alone. Journeying away from Stillshadow and Great Earth, even with two strong hunters, still plunged her into a darkness beyond her powers of description. Fear haunted her as it rarely had.

  In that darkness dwelled her own inevitable journey to the mountaintop. Was this where she might begin it? Was this the place where she would find Great Mother and be lifted up to Her mighty bosom?

  Oddly, the thought of death triggered warm, moist thoughts of Owl Hooting. Perhaps she and Owl were intended for each other. Perhaps this was the time that they would become lovers. Small tongues of heat licked at T’Cori as she envisioned their entwined limbs.

  He behind her, his hip bones nestled against her naked buttocks. She above him, dancing a sex-song, making the baby-rhythm to draw forth his seed.

  True, he could never be hers. But they might still share the things that other couples shared, do what others did, for at least a little while.

  As she lay there in the darkness, her hands crept between her legs. Once the touching began, she slipped a finger into her wetness, seeking the places that created the greatest pleasure, concentrated the greatest heat. Owl’s face appeared. She tried to change the face she saw above her, behind her, beneath her into one of the clean-limbed younger hunters Stillshadow might choose for her.

  But it was to Owl’s face that she returned, again and again. Owl who smiled, who licked at the hollow of her neck and whispered love songs in her ear. So great was her yearning that when she found the rhythm that took her to that place of fire, it seemed like a trip to the summit of Great Earth. It was Owl who had guided her every bit of the way, Owl whose smiling face had taken her to the place where even the stars themselves shone less brightly than their passion.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The next morning T’Cori rose stretching and yawning, amused that the very first thing she did was peer out across the valley floor to where she had glimpsed firelight.

  Nothing to be seen now. Even the distant ribbon of mountain itself shimmered in the heat, like fragments of a dissolving dream.

  What of the connection she had felt? All in your mind, she told herself, however real it might have seemed in the moment.

  It took a few breaths for Fawn to fan the previous night’s coals into flame, and then she fed them until they could be certain that their campfire would be strong in the evening. Fawn stayed behind as the rest of them went out to perform the day’s scavenging. Blossom and Sister Quiet Water had found most of the herbs and plants needed to heal or bring painless death. Here, no more than three days’ walk from home, lay a hilly swatch of fertile ground that seemed ideal for their purposes.

  So T’Cori was able to spend the day gathering. A quarter day of searching yielded more banded ants. As she had been taught, she followed them to the nest, catching hands of hands and biting their heads off, tossing the bodies into the pouch. She could barely keep her mind upon her work. Tonight would be the night, she was determined. Her first night of love with Owl. Even without Stillshadow’s permission, tonight Owl would open her seventh eye, and she would be a woman at last. T’Cori could hardly keep her mind on the task before her. There was more than one way to make the medicine, but the ants were a blessing from Great Mother and would make the final result more powerful than ever.

  In fact, wasn’t there a love potion that used the banded ants? Mightn’t she coax the recipe from Quiet Water and slip it into Owl’s drinking gourd?

  It was with a sense of pride and expectation that at the end of the day they found their way back to the cave. And it was on the way back that Leopard Claw waved his hands, bidding them to crouch and stay down.

  For many breaths T’Cori remained so, and finally she saw the reason: a pair of deer approaching the water hole from uphill.

  The male watched as the female drank. After a while they seemed to exchange roles, she watching as he lapped from the pool. Yearning for fresh meat, T’Cori dared not even breathe. Leopard Claw crawled away from them, disappearing into the grass. Then, suddenly, he stood erect and threw his spear so straight and true it might have been an extension of his arm.

  It struck the male’s right flank, wounding but not killing it. The buck tried to escape, but the gash transformed the run into a wobbly limp. The doe gave a single plaintive backward glance at the male and then disappeared into the grass. Her mate limped no more than a dozen strides before Owl Hooting’s spear struck it in the throat.

  So intense was her excitement that T’Cori could barely breathe. If they had not been under strict orders, she had little doubt that her sisters would have rewarded their guards at once, in the most intimate manner possible.

  They ate well that night. Her sisters seeme
d flushed and cast frequent glances at Leopard Claw.

  “Tonight,” Dove whispered to Fawn, “let us both go to Leopard.”

  Her sister seemed shocked and delighted. “Both of us?”

  Dove nodded. “Yes. I have heard some of the old dreamers talk, and they say the hunt chiefs know how to pleasure two women at once.”

  Fawn looked as if she wanted to melt.

  And at that moment, T’Cori decided she could wait no longer, that she would give herself to Owl. Tonight, she would capture a man’s flesh with her own.

  Even the thought sent chills and heat through her body. The air felt thick in her lungs.

  After the meal, they talked and laughed by the fire a bit, and then as fatigue from the day’s gathering gnawed deeply into their bones, they curled up in the cave’s sheltering shadows for rest.

  T’Cori slept quickly and awakened sweating, her dreams of touching and being touched only grudgingly receding. At first she wondered if she had fallen asleep at all. She raised her head and looked around at her sisters. When she had last seen them, Fawn and Dove had not yet settled down. But now all three of her sisters lay without moving, making soft, burring sleep sounds.

  Perhaps now was the time for her to awaken Owl.

  When she’d first closed her eyes, the fire was still licking up the sides of the logs. Now she could barely see a glow. What had awakened her from slumber? T’Cori could just make out Owl Hooting’s silhouette. He was lying on his side just outside the cave mouth, sleeping by the fire.

  No. Not sleeping.

  His num-fire was cold and slow, a thin wavering like a heat mirage, like a collapsed skin. No lights. Little motion. No warmth.

  Owl was not on guard. He was not sleeping. He was dead, killed mere moments ago.

  Something horrible had happened. The dread of it clawed at her like cold fingers at her throat.

  Sudden movement rustled out at the cave mouth. She glimpsed something man-shaped, but larger than a man. For a moment she felt relieved, and wondered if she was being foolish. Oh! This is a dream—

  She smelled something rank, and suddenly realized the air in dreams always smelled like the air around Great Earth. This was different. Strange. No dream. Then perhaps it was just sleep-fogged eyes blurring the image before them.

  No.

  Instinct burned, assuring her that the silhouette was not an Ibandi male’s. It was heavier, thicker through the upper body than the familiar, graceful lines of a male Ibandi body. She heard something as well. Grunts and pops, more like an animal’s growl than Ibandi speech.

  The light of a half-moon shone brightly into the cave, so as the shadow moved farther in, the light diminished.

  T’Cori was unable to move or close her eyes, or take her eyes away. The silhouette loomed in the cave mouth, staring at them. Staring at her. His eyes burned, blazed, shriveled her num. The cave’s darkness seemed so deep and oppressive she might have been trapped within Great Mother’s heart itself.

  Then torchlight flared. Two more figures appeared behind the first one.

  The thing in the cave mouth screamed at them. She finally grasped that they were words, not monkey babble. Words, even though she could not comprehend them. It did not matter. She felt them in her marrow, knew what they meant even as her sisters awakened with wails of distress such as she had never heard and hoped never to hear again.

  Wake up! Move. Or die.

  And then the Others were among them. These were not the less courageous beast-men. There were three intruders, each twice as thick through arms and chests as Ibandi males. Bhan were smaller, more slender, more timid than Ibandi. As bhan were to Ibandi, beast-men were to these giants.

  Fingers hard as stone seized her legs, dragged T’Cori out of the cave into the moonlight. Her head spun at the sight of Leopard Claw’s crumpled skull and Owl Hooting’s bloodied corpse. What had happened? This could not be!

  The largest of them had a face like a shelf of rock. His fat fleshy nose was broader than those of her own people. He was the largest male she had ever seen, immense across the shoulders and through the chest, with legs that looked as if they had been hewn from logs. And oh, the stink! Never had she smelled a man or a woman with such a stench. But it was not a stench of feces or putrefaction. This was a scent like a rutting beast, pungent and vital.

  What were these creatures?

  Quiet Water squared her shoulders. “You don’t dare touch us! We are mountain daughters!”

  Without changing expressions, Flat-Nose clubbed her with the back of his hand. Quiet Water fell to the ground as if the blow had removed her bones. She lay where she fell, making mewling mindless sounds, shuddering, blowing bloody bubbles between her bruised lips.

  That single violent act seemed to break the paralysis. T’Cori wobbled to her feet, running for the break she now saw in the thorn wall. The place where the Others had crawled through to do their murder. Her heart ached, but that ache only spurred her to action.

  Flat-Nose reached out almost languidly, and his forearm crashed across T’Cori’s chin so that her feet flew out from beneath her. She tumbled to the ground and lay dazed, listening to the screams and pleas as her sisters were forced onto their backs, their hands bound behind them with rawhide strips. When it was her turn, T’Cori struggled against their attackers to no effect. She might as well resist Father Mountain Himself.

  They were pulled to their feet and prodded out of the thorn wall. T’Cori stole one last glimpse of the proud Ibandi hunters who had sworn to protect them. Had they awakened at all? Had she slept through some futile, silent struggle? Owl and his brother sprawled like tired children, lying there in the shadows of night, eyes open and glazed, fixed upon the world to come, the ancestors and gods who would call them to account and demand explanations for their catastrophic failure.

  In the chill of early morning’s darkness, the four girls limped along toward their unknown destination. By the time the sun’s glow appeared along the eastern horizon T’Cori’s legs burned and shook. She stumbled but did not fall. Her bound hands challenged her balance, and she struggled to stay erect.

  The three Others walked them at a pace just below a trot, alert as lions on the prowl. Despite their ferocious strength and power, their captors were wary. Not fearful—when she read their num-fire, the red was mixed with black: an awareness of death without terror of it. These creatures lived in the space of death. Knew it as no Ibandi hunter she had ever read. They simply were not like Ibandi men.

  Fear drove thought from T’Cori’s mind, leaving nothing but dread of their fate.

  What was to be their fate? Were they merely fresh meat, as some of the clansmen thought? Or were other, even more terrible hungers to be satisfied?

  On and on southward they walked, through most of the day. With every passing step the southern mountain ridges grew just a hair closer, and any remaining bits of hope drained away. Her sisters were all but dead. Their heads drooped, shoulders slumped in exhaustion and despair. They had had a few rest breaks, sufficient time to chew on scraps of dried deer meat thrust into their hands by their captors.

  Anytime one of them tried to speak, they were all cuffed. Only silence and sobbing were allowed.

  Twice that first day they had stopped to sip brackish water from stagnant pools. Flamingos bloomed like bamboo stalks on the far side of the pond, balancing upon their single sticklike legs. Shaded in pink and white, the birds watched them incuriously. A delicate gold-and-green butterfly landed on a flower not an arm’s reach from T’Cori as she drank, but for once its beauty failed to lighten her heart.

  Butterfly Spring. Yes. She was a butterfly who had seen her last spring. Tears streamed from her eyes.

  That night the girls were allowed to sleep, but T’Cori’s hands were tied to a flat-topped acacia tree. One of the Others—she called him Notch-Ear because of a jagged wound on the left lobe—remained awake all the night long. It was easy to understand why. Considering how they had so recently slaughtered two Iba
ndi, these hunters would have little taste for risking the same fate.

  And that, strangely, she found comforting. Despite their strangeness, these were men, not demons. Men who sought to avoid death.

  T’Cori opened her mouth to whisper. “Dove—” she began.

  The girl shivered, and kicked her leg with a thump. T’Cori could barely see Dove’s face, but her eyes shone with terror in the darkness.

  Do not speak.

  Dove closed her eyes tightly.

  The others were no better: T’Cori could see it in Quiet Water’s slumped shoulders, the way Fawn had curled into a ball at Dove’s side.

  Her sisters had already begun to abandon hope.

  She would not. Could not.

  And then, just before midnight, she was dreamlessly asleep.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The next day T’Cori was forced to walk until her legs ached and her head spun. Whenever she tried to stop she was prodded on with blows clearly intended to inflict pain but not injury. Her sisters dragged their feet, making what timid and pitiful resistance they could. With every passing quarter day, with every step they trudged south, their num-fields burned cooler and lower, drained of life.

  Near dusk on the second day, they entered another small valley, little more than a large defile. Climbing up the other side, they entered an arid, shallow basin, with a long low floor that stretched away into a horizon shrouded by heat mirages. The shimmer made some of the distant images vanish, ripple and then reappear. She shaded her eyes, trying to resolve the image more clearly, and could not. This was different from the land that she knew. If this terrible place was the womb of the Others, she feared for her people.

  Why hadn’t they realized the true threat? Why had they blamed the beast-men for what the Others had done? Had they not left tracks enough, sign enough? Why hadn’t Father Mountain warned His children?