In the midst of all of it, she managed to get hold of the knife, flattening it against her forearm. And when they were done with her and sent her off with her little bundle of skins, they didn’t see what she had, or know what she had done.
She hid the blade in a corner of the pen, covering it with dirt. She dared not tell her sisters of her small triumph. In little more than a moon, the other girls had begun to creep closer to the fire. No longer was there much difference between them and the Mk*tk females. Even as T’Cori watched, Dove displayed one of her legs, postured so that the long muscle on the inside of her thigh glowed in the firelight. One of the hunters nodded appreciatively and threw her a piece of meat.
T’Cori did not react. She fought to keep her balance, but the world began to swirl and she shook almost uncontrollably.
Flat-Nose appeared above her. He reached down.
In her eyes she was suspended in a blackness filled with stars and moons. She floated there, away from everything and everyone.
“Great Mother,” she sobbed, “send me a sign. Help me, or I die. If You will, save me. If You can save me, I will be yours always, until the end of my life. Send me…something. They’ve taken my sight.”
Silently, falling one precious droplet at a time, her tears puddled into the dust. It was at that moment that she knew the path ahead.
She would have freedom or death. And what greater freedom than death could one like T’Cori hope for in a world such as this?
Chapter Thirty-two
Five days later, T’Cori and the other women were at the river again, washing dirt from the roots and the stink from their own bodies, busy scrubbing the soil away from their rudely crafted baskets of tubers. She studied the rushing waters, troubled that she did not know where and how the waters terminated. But she had seen Fawn’s bundle of roots washed down the river, and that was when T’Cori got the idea.
Was anyone watching? The other women worked, but also flirted with their guards, waiting until one of them was watching to slowly roll her hips, flexing and relaxing to draw his eye. Thinking, no doubt, of extra food or lighter duties.
This was her time. Three Mk*tk guarded, but only Notch-Ear was watching them closely. Such an opportunity might never come again. She checked to see that she had her little knife, the sliver of black rock wrapped in leather. She had thought perhaps to use the knife to open her veins, but now that there was the slightest chance of escape, that idea died like a coal in water.
T’Cori unwrapped part of the leather thong and jammed her fingers through the loop.
She turned and smiled at Notch-Ear, wriggling her hips at him seductively. A wide grin split his face, and he grabbed her, pulling her back behind a bush next to the river, out of sight of the others. T’Cori dropped to all fours, raising her hips in invitation. Notch-Ear fumbled with his loincloth, seeking to free his root. Still smiling, she helped him, and felt his body stiffen in pleasure as her hands found his rigid organ, its repulsive warmth pulsing against her palm.
And the smile never left her face as the knife dropped into her hand, and she slashed. Notch-Ear’s eyes and mouth opened in astonishment, but before he could scream she stabbed him in the throat with every bit of strength and speed in her tiny body, so that the scream was drowned in blood. Blinking rapidly, seemingly unable to comprehend what had happened to him, Notch Ear sank to his knees, fingers pressed futilely against the gushing wound.
T’Cori paused just long enough to spit in his dying face, then ripped the blade out, turned and leapt into the torrent, and was washed away.
Only an instant after the waters closed over her head, the first moment at which she could not draw breath, T’Cori regretted her action. The current was rough and stinging cold, filling her mouth and nose. She swallowed foam, and fought blackness, squeezing her hands tightly so that she would not drop the knife. The current wrenched her this way and that as if with vines attached to her arms and legs. She tried to cry out as her hip banged into a rock, and merely swallowed more water. The shock almost made her lose her grip on the blade, but the fear of being utterly weaponless tightened her hand again. When her head surfaced, she flailed toward the shore. Panic took her as soon as she began to choke. She could barely swim! The rivers and lakes around Great Sky had never attracted her as had Great Earth’s heights. While some of the other children had learned to splash and swim, she could barely paddle her legs in still water, let alone in this maelstrom! Madness! What had she been thinking of? Surely it was better to live under any conditions than to die….
But then T’Cori felt a calm, warm place within her, a place that said no, it was better to die and remain who she was than to change and live on as some shrunken, sallow creature neither Ibandi nor Other.
Resigning her soul to the gods she had served since childhood, T’Cori surrendered to the current.
Twisting, gasping, she glimpsed the Mk*tk leaping from rock to rock, attempting to grab her arms. They called to her, brutish faces twisted with confusion that she would decline to take their hairy hands, unable to comprehend that she might prefer death to being a receptacle for their seed.
Into the central channel T’Cori tumbled. Here the rocks were less plentiful, but the current ripped along at a faster pace. She was out of the reach of the Mk*tk, but still they called out to her.
Here there was peace, to which she surrendered at last.
Peace.
This was, no doubt, a calm before the storm of her passage to the shadow realm, but she kept her head above the water and floated with the current. So peaceful. What had there ever been to fear? Her ears filled with a sudden churning sound, and for the first few moments she didn’t recognize it. Then the water’s roar was closer, the torrent itself rougher and more violent. Suddenly T’Cori was in midair, swept over a waterfall, falling weightlessly in a world of wet sound. Great Mother, Your arms…, she thought, and then was gone.
The fall seemed to take forever. She was weightless, suspended in a roaring so immense and enveloping it resembled silence. Then came a sensation like being smashed with a great flat hand as she thundered down into the pool at the base of the waterfall. She plunged deep, but then thrashed her way back up, vomiting water as she broke the surface.
Shock, relief, fear and excitement all mingled in her heart.
Alive! She was alive!
Knife still in hand, she spit water, oriented herself and struck out toward the shore, suddenly panicked from that placid, accepting place by the reality of a violent whirlpool formed by the current and the falls. T’Cori swallowed more water than she thought she had ever drunk. She struggled to keep her head above its surface and thrashed her arms and legs frantically. A final wrenching effort extracted her from the whirlpool’s grip. A few more moments in which it felt that her lungs would burst in her chest, and then she was free and crawling into the shallows.
Utterly exhausted, T’Cori pulled herself out onto the riverbank.
She was destroyed, nude of flesh and spirit. Her skirt of twisted leather had been washed away, along with every bit of strength that remained. She heard approaching footsteps, and knew only that she would never allow herself to be taken back, that she was very close to losing her mind.
No strength remained. Now, there was only shame. Shaking, she exhausted herself raising her arm. She needed both hands to point it at her enemy, her teeth bared.
Then she saw his face. The single unhealed scar on each cheek. The gentle brown oval, the mouth set in a quizzical, concerned curve, the gap between his gleaming front teeth.
Great Mother be praised, she knew him.
Small, thin, but with a gentle Ibandi face and those bright, bright eyes, that thin, smiling mouth now turned down in a frown.
Her dizzied mind raced, searching for a name. Frog. It was Frog.
Was he a phantom, and this some cruel mirage? Had she perished in the plunge? If so, perhaps she had finally found the path to the mountaintop, and she would gladly travel it. She pulled herself onto
her knees. “Ibandi boy,” she said, “please. Help me.”
He hunkered down at her side, studying her with curiosity mingled with awe. “You are the nameless one. One of Stillshadow’s dream dancers.”
T’Cori’s vision began to fade, and it took everything she had merely to plead: “Help me.”
“What are you doing out here?” he asked, looking nervously to right and left and then behind him, as if worried that someone or something might have been playing a trick on him.
“The Others,” she said. “They took me.” She bowed her head, made the posture of submission. “Shamed me.”
Instantly, Frog became more alert. He squared his shoulders, straightened his back, seemed no longer the gangling boy she had bested on the tree, or caused to be beaten by poor dead Owl. This was a young Ibandi hunter, brave and true. By custom and breeding, he would die to protect her. That thought both comforted and frightened her.
Frog scanned the hillside for trouble. “Where are they?”
“Beyond the rise,” she said. “Hurry. If they find us, they will kill you.”
“They will kill us,” he said.
“No,” she said. “They want my sex. You they will kill.”
“Not easy to do,” he said, puffing his chest out. “I am Ibandi!”
She thought of Notch-Ear, so horribly strong and agile, and found hysterical laughter bubbling up from her gut, felt her mind bending, twisting. Floating away.
“What happened?” he asked.
“They killed Owl and Leopard. Took us. They…” She tried to tell him more, and could not force her mouth to repeat such wickedness. T’Cori crouched, her hand outstretched palm up, making obeisance as she never had to the Mk*tk. “Help me, Ibandi man.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Even a skilled and observant hunter might have walked past their little shelter and never seen it at all. Which was, of course, Frog Hopping’s entire intention. His makeshift boma was snuggled into a cluster of wait-a-bit thornbushes, their spiky brown branches cut away and then vined back into place as doorway and camouflage once Frog had hacked out a central chamber large enough for himself and the nameless girl.
Frog had worked with feverish speed and limited options to complete the boma by nightfall. Predators of two legs, four legs and no legs haunted the darkness.
If necessary he would cheat sleep all night, watching for human foes. On the other hand, if he and the girl were discovered, it might not matter whether he was awake or asleep. The enemy had slain Owl and Leopard, hunt chiefs. Poor Frog would stand no chance at all. When the Mk*tk ran, they ran like the hyena, with endless endurance. Or as the cheetah, with irresistible speed and power. He could barely imagine how it would feel to face one in the wrestling circle.
Or in the brush, where there were no rules at all.
For days before finding the nameless girl, Frog had trailed his enemies at a distance. Not by preference, but because that was the only way he could. He could not have kept pace with them even if he’d possessed their skills and strength. Not even a hunt chief could have done so while remaining hidden.
Frog dared not follow at night, worried that the Mk*tk—as the nameless girl called them, with a glottal click between harsh syllables—were nocturnal hunters, or that he might stumble across their encampment. And Frog further swore to himself that if footprints indicated that they had been joined by others of their kind, he would make a retreat. He had no great suicidal urge to be trapped in enemy territory.
So after rescuing the girl, Frog knew he that if he did not control the fear-flame, it would burn a hole in his belly. How best might he return her to Great Earth? Where exactly had she camped when the Mk*tk killed the hunt chiefs and stole the dancers away? He did not know, but guessed that if he headed directly back for Fire boma, they might be safe: the Others might move to intercept them based on where they had originally captured the nameless one. Even if they tracked him, found his footprints with hers, they would not know which Ibandi group he belonged to, and would have little hope of anticipating and intercepting him.
Or so he told himself.
On the other hand, they might be hunters with skills beyond those of even Cloud Stalker. Perhaps they could merely glance at his footprints and know his origins. Then his foes might circle around to intercept him, lying in wait with spears and arrows and slings….
But there were other problems: after pleading for his assistance, the girl had collapsed, swooning with some weakness.
When he found the nameless one on the riverbank she had been naked, the leather waistlet gone, the zebra-skin flap that normally covered a dream dancer’s breasts nowhere to be seen. He had fashioned a covering for her from one of his pouches and a bit of warthog skin, tying it around her so that his eyes would not take that which was hers alone to give.
She lay sprawled on her back beneath the sheltering thorn branches, a small, firm-bodied girl of ten and five years. Her braids remained, but he remembered also tight coils held in place with beautiful shells and bones. They were gone, and in their absence she seemed frayed and disarrayed.
Her eyes were open and staring at nothing. She crawled blindly, mewling.
“What do I do?” he asked her.
She seemed blind, unable to see or even hear him, and spoke words that were no answer to his question. “I see fire,” she said. “Fire and blood…”
Was she dying? Or perhaps filled with some evil spirit? Or could this be a sign that Great Mother was reaching through her child and trying to speak to him? Both terror and awe burned his veins.
And he also felt the stirrings of something else, an attraction to this strange girl, sensations troubling in the extreme. He tried again. “Tell me what to do.” No response. He took a desperate gamble. “Tell me, Butterfly Spring.”
At that name, given to her in jest so many moons before, her eyes fluttered, focused. Her hand snapped out and gripped his wrist with surprising strength.
“Don’t leave me.” Her voice cracked with desperation.
Uncertain what to do, he enfolded her in his arms as he might have sheltered a child, somewhat discomfited both by his compassion and his stirrings. This was the strange, wild one who had followed at Stillshadow’s ankles. Frog didn’t know what to do with her. She wasn’t a child, and he couldn’t really look at her as a woman, so what was she?
“I see things,” the girl he called Butterfly Spring whispered.
“What do you see?”
“Days to come,” she said.
This was all entirely too strange for a simple hunter like Frog. Perhaps the wisest thing he could do was to leave her here. True, this mad girl would die, but no one would ever know he had found her. And even if they learned the truth, who could blame him? If he tried to take her with him, they would probably be caught and killed. Better one live than both climb the mountain.
Wasn’t it?
But even as he thought those things, he knew that she sensed his ambivalence. “I go, but I will return.”
“Go…?” She clutched at him. “Where do you go? Why do you go?”
“I…I must hunt,” he said. “For both of us.” The lie twisted his tongue.
The girl gazed at him, finally managing to focus her eyes. “I see things,” she said.
Curiosity halted him where compassion had failed. “What? What do you see?”
“That if you save me, you will be a great hunter.”
Several long breaths passed. Frog felt as if someone had brushed his scalp with a burning coal. “Great?”
“I see that if you stay with me, one day you will be grand hunt chief.”
He paused. “Grand chief?” Beyond the cave mouth, the wind whistled: She lies.
She held his eyes, unblinking. “In the shadow of Father Mountain,” she said, “I cannot lie.”
Could she read his mind? “We are not in the mountain’s shadow.”
“The night is the mountain’s shadow,” she replied.
He listened w
ith his heart. Yes, desperation weighed her words. But did that mean she lied? He leaned closer. “We will both die,” he said.
“Not if you are a true Ibandi.” She tried to smile, and failed. The effort exposed a cracked, broken front upper tooth. Her lip above it was swollen. Oddly, like Uncle Snake’s wounds, the scar did not diminish her allure. Swiftly and clearly he envisioned her fighting for her honor, struggling to escape her brutish captors, and his respect for this nameless girl soared.
There was no doubt: she was Ibandi, blood and bone.
Her words seemed heartfelt, but…could he believe this girl? She would say or do anything to keep him with her. She was helpless on her own, as were all the dream dancers. “What happened to your sisters?” he asked.
“Fawn is dead.”
He shook his head, disbelieving. Fawn! The smiling, round-bottomed, sensual Fawn, who had been his first lover. The name brought back memories of that time by the river, with the grass pressed against his back, Fawn showing him the way to pleasure a woman. “What else?” he asked.
“Sister Quiet Water, and Fawn’s twin.”
“Dead?”
She shook her head. “Worse. The Mk*tk made them their women. Help me. I beg you.”
From birth, she had been raised to consider her own flesh above his own, that it was natural for him to risk, or give his life to preserve a dream dancer. And yet…
Was she wrong? Were her gifts not more vital to the Circle than his own?
Grand chief? Absurd. He was not even a hunt chief. Could not run or jump or fight as should a hunt chief. Many boys were better, stronger, faster than he. And yet…
And yet those boys were not here. They had not followed the Mk*tk. They were not the ones with whom a dream dancer pled for her life.
Frog Hopping squatted beneath the thorn branches, brooding. “You can see the future?” he asked.
“Yes.” Her eyes shifted to the side.
Liar. He was sure she lied. If she had told the truth, perhaps he would have remained. Instead, Frog decided to abandon her to her fate. The relief of that decision flooded him like a warm, clean tide, sweeping away doubt. His smile was not kind. “If you can see the future, you should be able to tell me: will I return?”
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