Flat-Nose plunged his spear into Fire Gut’s wound.
Fire Gut bit through his thick lower lip, struggling not to cry out. If Fire Gut’s screams were silent, God Blood might answer his prayers. Despite his wish to die with courage, at last both flesh and spirit failed. Fire Gut shrieked, his body curling back away from the shaft.
Flat-Nose wrenched the spear back and forth. As the light in Fire Gut’s eyes disappeared, Flat-Nose leaned over and whispered to him. “Your children will sing your death song. God Blood will savor your flesh.”
Then he wrenched the spear free.
Chapter Eight
Through a forest of dung-colored anthills, one slow, heavy step at a time, Leopard Eye and Leopard Paw dragged Stillshadow’s sled toward the horizon. They each had one leather strap hitched over their right shoulders. They relied upon elephant breathing’s slow, powerful strokes to postpone fatigue. “Huh! huh! huh!” they grunted, one exhalation timed to each drive of their right legs.
Stillshadow felt every season she had walked, which she now reckoned as six tens of winters. Perhaps more. Her memory was not what it once was, even if her old heart still felt strong.
It brought her pleasure to watch her boys pulling the sled. It was a shame that neither of them had been chosen for hunt chiefs, but that had been Cloud Stalker’s decision, and she had often wondered at it. Now she wondered if some part of her lover had known what would happen on Great Sky, known that Father Mountain would slaughter his sons in such a fashion. Could he possibly have denied Paw and Eye entrance into the brotherhood to spare their lives?
Thank Great Mother she had them now. Good boys. Good men. Either of them would have made a good husband for Sky Woman, were she not in love with Frog. She did not understand Frog, but the num-field about his head shimmered with a yellow-white radiance unlike that of any other man.
He was not something she understood. But she approved.
T’Cori walked at her side. As Stillshadow’s twin sons labored, the girl kept one hand on her swollen belly, striving to control the ebb and flow of her own breathing. A stew of emotions simmered on her apprentice’s face: fear, fatigue, despair. All fought for her heart, a fight she dared not allow them to win.
“I have tried,” T’Cori said, “in every way I know, doing everything that you have taught me to do.”
Stillshadow’s wizened hand slipped into the girl’s smooth strong one, a contact comforting to both.
“This last thing is not learning,” Stillshadow said. “It is the opposite. It is letting go of what you think you already know.”
“Of what?”
“Of life,” Stillshadow said. “Of life itself.”
T’Cori looked back over her shoulder, and Stillshadow glanced back as well. Behind them, tens of families followed. Most seemed merely struggling with the body strain. Some sang songs or made games to entertain their children. The young ones ran ahead of their parents or wandered behind. Stillshadow could not see Snake, but she knew he would be near the back of the line, ensuring that no stragglers were lost.
So many lives in their hands. Such gentle, loving trust. It was not enough to earn it. One had to feel worthy of it. And since the Mk*tk had taken Sky Woman, her greatest student had felt worthy of little save disdain. There had to be some gift to give the girl. Something. She could think of nothing.
But if Stillshadow’s mind was empty, her husk almost ready to return to the earth, she might still find one last miracle. “I know what must be done and how to do this thing that must be done. One closer to death than life sees these things more clearly. I go now.
“Paw. Eye. Stop,” Stillshadow said. Her order obeyed, the old woman levered herself up off the sled.
Stillshadow’s legs wobbled, and T’Cori caught her arm.
“Where do you go?” T’Cori asked.
“I need my vision,” Stillshadow said. “There is truth, and I cannot see it.”
“What will you do?”
“It is a secret thing,” the old woman said, “one that I may show you when I return. Perhaps.”
“And what will this thing help you to do?” T’Cori asked.
“I must dig deep,” Stillshadow said. “Find the heart of the world, its drumbeat. Do not fear.”
“Mother,” T’Cori said, “there is a thing that I have not spoken of before. I think that you already know what I must say.”
“Perhaps,” Stillshadow said. “Perhaps. Regardless, speak as you will.”
“There is so much you do for us, more than I think I even dream. Mother, if anything happens to you …” She dropped her eyes.
Darling child. You think you are the only one who doubts? “And you fear you cannot?”
T’Cori turned her eyes away, but not before Stillshadow glimpsed the fear within.
“You climbed Great Sky!” the old woman said. Her deeply wrinkled hands cupped the girl’s chin. “Listen to me. When I think you are ready, you will be ready. Today is not the day. This is not the time. This is the time for me to go, alone, to do what must be done.”
“But you might die!” T’Cori protested.
Stillshadow smiled, her deepest, softest smile. “And you will not?”
As Father Mountain’s countless eyes emerged from a darkening sky, the people prepared evening meals, lashing branches and hides together to make their simple shelters.
As Frog’s sister, Little Brook, brought Mouse to him, Bat Wing wandered near. In better days Bat Wing would have spent more and more time with his father or uncles. They would have taken him away from the boma on their hunting trips, teaching him the twists of strange streams and the rise of untrod hillocks. Now, each day brought new horizons, new lessons, lessons passing too swiftly for even the keenest mind to absorb them all.
“This is your son?” the boy asked.
“Yes,” Frog said. “He is Medicine Mouse.”
“A fine boy.” Bat Wing prodded at the infant. Mouse clamped his tiny soft fingers over the tip of Bat’s finger as he waggled it gently. “He has strong hands and feet. He will walk far and kill many zebra.”
Bat Wing pulled back on his hand, teasing, and seemed genuinely delighted as Mouse gurgled and held on more tightly.
“Where is your father?” Frog asked.
Pain flashed across Bat’s face. “He died fighting the Mk*tk.”
A flash of shared pain, like dry lightning in a summer sky. The boy’s grief ripped open the memory of the war, of that terrible night of blood and blindness, when men struggled with monsters for the land they loved and the families they cherished.
So many had died that night. More Mk*tk than Ibandi had died, to be certain. Frog felt a fierce surge of pride: that night men had broken beasts! True, Ibandi had outnumbered the giants three to one, but they had triumphed. Didn’t that count? Didn’t that mean anything at all?
If the death of this young boy’s father could hold some small meaning, the world itself might not seem so empty and cold.
Frog clasped Bat’s shoulder. “Then he is atop Great Sky.” What harm in such a small lie?
Bat Wing scratched at the bald spot over his right ear, as if deciding whether or not to answer. “Yes. I know. Sometimes I see his face in the clouds.”
Frog’s ears tingled with disbelief. “What did you say?”
Bat Wing poked at the dust with his toes. “I am sorry.” He started to turn away. “I am a fool.”
“No!” Frog said. “Tell me what you said.”
The boy stared at the ground as if searching for a lost toy. “I should not have said it.”
“Listen to me,” Frog said. “I want to hear you. Your words were good.” He cupped the boy’s chin in his hand. “Never be ashamed of your thoughts. I spent too many winters fearing what I heard in my head—” he tapped his temple with a finger “—what I saw in my dreams. Tell me.”
Within a heartbeat, the boy’s face melted from doubt to cautious optimism. “I … it is just that when I look at the clouds in a certain
way …” He trailed off, perhaps still doubting Frog’s sincerity. “I can see an ear there—” he pointed at a rounded, fluffy edge “—and the shape of an eye.”
Of all the strange things that Frog might have seen or heard that day, this was the very last he might have expected. “Have you always seen this?”
Bat nodded and then drew back. “Am I bad?”
Frog seized Bat Wing under the armpits and lifted him up to the sky. For as long as he had drawn breath, he had been the only one who saw the faces in the clouds or heard songs in the wind. Frog felt as if a stone had been rolled from his heart. “No! This is very, very good. Now tell me … what else can you see?”
“There—” Bat Wing pointed at a cloud squatting near the horizon “—a mountain.” His finger shifted toward one that nearly eclipsed the sun. “A deer.”
“Yes,” Frog said, his heart full and warm. “Yes, I can see it.”
“You can?” The boy squinted doubtfully. “You’re laughing at me.”
“No,” Frog said. “I laugh because my heart is happy. You have no father. Do you have an uncle?”
“Two. But both remained in the shadow. Only my mother walks with me,” Bat said.
Frog hugged the boy, felt Bat Wing’s strong young heart dancing against his own. “Then if you will have me, you are now my nephew.” He rubbed the tips of their noses together. “Those who see strange things should be family together. From now on, you will walk with me, if you wish. Would you have me?”
The boy’s eyes gleamed. “Uncle” was the only word he could say.
Chapter Nine
The evening shadows had merged into a dusky mask. The air had cooled, and the dry, sharp tang of hot sand yielded to the whispered perfume of night-blooming cactus. Quietly, without drawing any attention to herself, Stillshadow hobbled out to the camp’s edge and then beyond. She did not seek to meet or hold the eyes of any that she passed, nor did they seek to meet or hold hers.
Her people pretended not to see her or to comprehend the risks entailed by such a brittle-bone traveling alone into the night. She did not need their doubts and fears added to the chorus echoing between her own ears.
Her old hips and knees were slow fires. The bamboo crutch beneath her right armpit carried enough of her weight to walk, but every halting step groaned of flesh’s frailty.
Certainly, some must have worried. Such an old woman alone? And at night—when human sight failed, and the powers of fang and claw were at their height?
But she was Stillshadow, and as such could not be questioned. Even to doubt her actions would be wrong. As it would be wrong to add their fears to her own.
She walked and hummed prayers to the jowk as the ground crunched beneath her sandaled feet. For a quarter of the night the old woman walked. Her senses were open, seeking a sign. In the whisper of flowing water or a hyena’s distant call. Or a fruited scent, floating on the wind. There was no way for her waking mind to know where she might find a sign.
A plant. A berry. A mushroom. A venomous snake or scorpion. Any or all of these could be her doorway into the dream world. All she needed to do was be ready and watchful.
Before the moon had risen fully, she glimpsed a thing of interest and turned from her path to investigate.
There, revealed by the cloud-shrouded moonlight, sparkled a spiderweb’s jeweled rungs. She leaned down, close enough for her old eyes to detect the clustered knot of legs and swollen belly crouched in ambush at the web’s upper corner. This brown striped eight-legged was known to her: the black head was unmistakable. “Grass spider,” she whispered, drawing closer. “So long has it been since last we spoke. Within you dwells the spirit of all eight-legged. I ask that spirit to restrain her anger. I must kill this one sister. I need her blood in my veins.”
She reached down into the web. As she spoke, the brown and black spider crawled over and over her hand. As it crossed her palm she made a fist, then winced with the sharp, sudden pain.
Stillshadow lowered herself to her knees. She chanted, twitching and wincing.
A wall of poison fire, the spider venom leapfrogged toward her aged heart.
Frogs. A wall of fire. What?
Then conscious thought faded, and she slipped into the place behind her dreams.
A place of trees and shadows, of game and clouds and plants. An endless stream of human faces capered behind her eyes. She saw …
Mk*tk leeched of color. Men with the fangs and fur of wolves. Spotted yellow women with long necks. A great green circle …
Mortal terror hammered at the walls of discipline. She shuddered, trembled. Stillshadow tried to walk and could not. Tried to crawl and toppled onto her side.
“Great Mother, help me,” Stillshadow whispered. “I have the sight but not the strength. Give me your power. …”
Her muscles knotted. Her breath contracted to a low rattle in her aged throat. “Help me, Great Mother,” she said softly. “All my days, I have served you. I thought my flesh would follow me, but Small Raven fell. So it seems the foundling was your chosen. Did I somehow fail you?”
Now the tears flowed without end. All questions vanished, like winter leaves drifting into a pond. The world flew apart, and the emptiness behind it crawled out to engulf her.
Stillshadow turned to face the dark eastern horizon. For the very last time in her long and honored life, she sang to the sun.
“Great Mother,” she whispered against the wind. “All my days, I have breathed for no one but you. And yet, we lost our land. The ground wept with our blood. And now, when my people need me most, my inner eye sees nothing. Is this right? Have I not served you?” She listened for an answer that did not come. “I beg you to tell me: Is this right?”
In the wind’s cold cry there were no words, no answer. Her fingers gouged grooves in the rough, sandy soil. “Help me.”
Stillshadow stared and wept and sang. And in answer to her final call the sun struggled to be born, wet and red from its celestial womb.
Before she reached the edge of the camp, T’Cori heard Frog’s “Huh! Huh!” exhalations from around the cairn of weathered, sand-colored rocks marking his practice site.
She watched as he turned this way and that, jabbing and cutting. It was almost like a dance, really. The body flow was the same, but Frog was concentrating on something outside himself, a target. Dream dancers focused within.
When Frog paused to hawk out some of the dust gumming his throat, she went to him. “I was told to be silent, but I worry.”
He wiped away a thread of sweat dripping from his lashes. “What is this worry?”
“Mother Stillshadow went out last night,” she said. “She did not return.”
His hand froze. “Where did she go?”
“She said she needed to find our dream.”
He stuck the tip of his spear into the ground. The gesture was so familiar to her now, and so dear. He reminded her of a brown flamingo. “We will find her,” he said, “or leave our bones in the sand.”
For half a quarter, Frog, Uncle Snake, and the Leopard twins had tracked Stillshadow through the mud flats and brittle grass. If Frog had believed in gods, he might have offered a prayer for her delivery. Any other Ibandi might have made such a prayer, but other Ibandi had not climbed Great Sky or gazed into the icy silence at its peak. This knowledge, more than his worries for Stillshadow, dogged his every step.
“This is good,” Snake said.
“Wait,” Frog said. He dropped to one knee and turned an ear into the wind. He heard a single distant howl, followed a few breaths later by two more. “Do you hear?”
“Baboons,” Leopard Eye said.
“Hyenas, also,” Frog said. “Come.”
As morning shadows drifted across a wide and fire-scarred plain they ran. Across grass and through scrub they ran, across tumbled rocks and through scratching stands of cactus. Their sprint slowed to a trot and then to a halt. There just beyond the parted grass crouched four of the spotted, heavy-jawed scavengers.
Beyond the hyenas clustered a troop of baboons.
They were big ones, half the size of men, covered with bone-white fur. Their jaws were longer than the width of their narrow shoulders. Black lips peeled away from gleaming fangs. Their eyes, far back up on their heads beneath a sheltering shelf of brow, burned like tiny yellow fires.
Five hands of the manlike creatures were circled, the young and the old hidden behind a line of aggressively postured males.
At first Frog doubted his eyes, but there in the center of the circle, with the elders and the young, kneeling just beyond the hyena males, an ancient woman stared out into the western horizon.
“Father Mountain” Snake whispered.
As the Ibandi approached, the hyenas barked and fled. But the baboons merely parted their ranks, almost as if they had awaited the humans’ arrival. For all the notice she gave to the scramble of furred limbs, Stillshadow might have been made of stone or wood or even been a woman of chalk, a mere silhouette scratched beneath her own sitting stone.
“Old Mother?” Frog said.
“Great Dancer?” Snake dropped to one knee. “Speak to us.”
Frog came closer. “Stillshadow?”
No response. For a moment he wondered: Could she be dead? Panic fluttered in his chest, but then he realized: No. There. His newly sharpened eyes detected the rise and fall of her withered shoulders.
Stillshadow tumbled sideways into their arms, as all about them her hairy guardians danced and howled their fierce delight to the morning sun.
Beneath the slanted roof of sticks and leaves, Stillshadow lay curled on her side, muttering aloud to gods or jowk unknown. T’Cori had packed the old woman’s eyes with mud and cactus pulp, then covered them with wet leaves.
Despite her own growing fear, T’Cori struggled to find some part of her still unshaken, unafraid, able to offer visions or leadership. As a consequence, she barely noticed when Frog approached from behind her.
“How is she?” he asked.
“I am not sure,” the young medicine woman said. “Her num and jowk are weak, but her face-eyes … they are dead.”
Shadow Valley Page 6