Frog thought on this. It seemed very different to him. “Yes, strange. You risk soul more than flesh. It is not right. I was always taught that men risked their lives so that women would be safe.”
“You think women do not risk their lives bringing new hunters, new mothers into the people?” she asked.
“Yes,” Frog said. “But that is different.”
She slid her small, warm hands over his. He wanted to take her away now, and love her, but did not ask. He could feel that she was sharing something of great importance to her, something she had never said before. “No, my love. It is not. We all die for what we love. A man’s enemies attack from without. A woman’s from within.”
“From within?”
She turned her face away, momentarily unable to respond. Then she whispered her reply. “The Mk*tk were inside me, again and again.” Her haunted voice broke. “They hurt me, do you understand? A man’s seed dies if it does not take root. Does Mk*tk seed die?”
Frog felt numb, unable to absorb the words just spoken. “Do you know? Does anyone?” Her words confused him. “What are you saying?”
“Perhaps it lives within me, like a worm. Perhaps it waits. Perhaps this is not your child growing within me. In my dreams, I see it. It frightens me.”
When he pressed his hand against her belly, she flinched away. “It is my child,” he said.
“Would you swear by Father Mountain?” Her smile soured. “How could you? You don’t even believe.”
For a time they merely faced each other, neither finding the right words.
“I do not believe that your body, which has clasped me so many times, holds anything but love for our people. If there was anything in you that hated us, I would know.”
“Can you be so certain?”
“Yes,” he said. “I can.”
Chapter Fifteen
After the dream dancers sang the new sun to life, after a mushy, flavorless breakfast of yam and crushed nuts, Frog was ready to lead the Ibandi farther north. They would cross the river and try to reach the wavering nut-colored foothills on the horizon. He had raised his hand to call Snake, when the straggly brush at the far side of the camp exploded. A lean-ribbed black boar burst through, an arrow flagging from its side. God Mountain! Meat! Uncle Snake and Leopard Eye galloped in after it.
The hog veered away from them, scampering through the camp, its stubby brown legs knocking up pockets of dust. Children were swept out of the way by their mothers and fathers and siblings. “Watch the tusks!” Leopard Eye screamed.
Foam flecked its jowls. Its ribs jutted from its muscular sides as it tossed this way and that, seeking escape. At every turn, a spear point threatened.
The people cheered as it headed into the river. “It’s ours!” Leopard Paw said.
But then, at the very moment it reached the river, the water’s surface burst. A black shadow lunged out of the depths, all teeth and scales and sudden death.
Snake screamed in sudden panic as the crocodile’s jaws clamped onto the hog’s front leg. Squealing, the boar tried to pull back. The reptile’s tail lashed, dragging the boar into the river.
“No!” Frog screamed. They could not lose the meat like this! While the crocodile waddled backward, dragging its prey into the shallows, the Leopard twins stabbed and hacked and speared the crocodile. Its tail thrashed, and Leopard Paw flew through the air, thumping into the mud paces away. But in that instant, Leopard Eye drove his spear directly into its eye. In an instant the reptile lashed itself into an agonized knot. Its teeth unhooked from the boar’s bleeding leg, and the crocodile tried to flee. But within moments three and then five more hunters plunged into the water, foaming it red as they stabbed both crocodile and pig.
The hunters splashed and stabbed and clubbed, knee-deep in foaming red water. Ribs were broken and skin scraped, but—thank Father Mountain! … none were bitten and none killed.
The hunters hauled the gashed, twitching carcasses from the water. They slapped one another on the back and strutted, each bragging that he had come closest to the fearsome claws and jaws and tusks.
In the end it was a good day: both predator and prey contributed to the Ibandi cook fires. The crocodile was a great find. Everything about it would be used: teeth and claws and durable skin, as well as good stringy meat and a tasty liver.
Frog had had crocodile liver once before. The memory made his mouth water.
“It is a sign,” Snake said, and sighed with pleasure. “We have not been forgotten.”
“It is terrible,” T’Cori said.
“We survive another day,” Frog said, watching as the men chopped crocodile and boar into pieces, hacking at the joints with their stone knives.
“Not that,” T’Cori said. “It is the ending itself that seems terrible.” She shuddered and turned away from him.
“What is it?” Frog asked.
“I remember,” T’Cori said. “Things I haven’t thought of in moons.”
“What things?”
“I was thinking of my sister Fawn,” T’Cori said. “I told you she was taken by a crocodile. I saw it happen.”
He watched her face. Right before his eyes she seemed to become younger and more vulnerable. “It must have burnt your eyes,” Frog said.
“Yes. There was something oddly beautiful, as well. It freed my num. Made my mind work better and gave me the idea of running away. That I could go in the river. That either I would escape or drown or be eaten … and it would be over.”
“You no longer cared to live?” Frog said.
She came closer and whispered. I felt that my seventh eye, the one thing I was given to protect …” Her voice had grown shrill, and she calmed herself with a palpable effort. “I felt it had been stolen from me,” she said. “Every night this happened. I prayed that if I was pregnant, it would not be a monster. And if it was, I prayed I would die before it could crawl out of my womb.”
Her hands caressed her swollen belly. Perhaps two moons until she gave birth now. Not long. “I always thought that when it was Stillshadow’s time, I would feel strong,” she said. “When I thought of having my children, I thought I would feel stronger. That my baby’s num would feed my jowk. But these things did not happen.”
He folded T’Cori into his arms and searched his mind for words. There was nothing he could find that was strong enough, deep enough, healing enough. So he merely held her, as their people butchered their kills, and the blood flowed into the river where, so recently, their children had splashed in play.
Chapter Sixteen
The Ibandi had walked north for moons, farther than any kinsman had ever traveled.
When at last they turned westward, for days they saw no animal tracks at all, and then, turning back south, found themselves following the herds once again. Heading back toward the mountains of their birth. Sky Woman had spoken of a new home, so they did not dream of returning to their bomas but to the west of Great Sky and Great Earth, there were said to be fine hunting grounds. If only those stories were true.
So the same great migration of the teeming herds called to them. Moons and moons they traveled, to the brink of exhaustion and despair—but not over that brink.
Not yet.
Three moons south of Frog and T’Cori, and three
days south of Great Sky …
Sparks fled into the night sky, dying in the darkness. Four hulking figures crouched around a crackling, ragged fire, staring into its dancing light.
“God Blood watches us,” said Flat-Nose. “He knows our strength and courage and smells shit in the guts we spilled. Know that he is pleased.”
Bone Knife grinned. “What we did to those few weaklings, we could do to all their bomas.”
“We do not know how many there are. We must learn.” Flat-Nose said.
“But they killed so many of us before,” Broken Sharp Tooth said.
“Did you not see that their men were gone?” Flat-Nose snarled, angered by his hunter’s weakness. “That we k
illed them at will and took their women?” He slammed his fist upon the ground. “God Blood screams for vengeance. He says our time is coming.” His eyes blazed. “No. I lie. He says our time has come.”
All the rest of the night they sang their death songs. They had been good sons and brothers and fathers. If they could live the rest of their days from their balls, at the moment of death they would feel in their flesh not the fangs of wolves or jackals but those of God Blood Himself.
Then they would be part of His flesh. His teeth would be theirs, for all time, ravaging all of creation.
After the pain came the power.
Chapter Seventeen
Great Sky’s slopes were choked with thornbushes and vine-thronged trees, and rich with four-legged game. Only as the slopes steepened did the vegetation thin, and only as the mountain rose so high that the land below seem peopled by ants did the mountain breezes cool. Finally, the thickly seeded slopes yielded to desert and from there to the only snows to be found anywhere in their world.
At the very top, the eruption had torn chunks away, melting the white cap and flattening the peak.
But before one reached such rarefied heights, in Great Sky’s forests could be found the finest hunting beneath Father Mountain’s sky.
Five Ibandi stalked Great Sky’s lower slopes. Three were from the cardinal bomas: Moon Runner and Sun Runner from Earth, Fast Tortoise from Wind. The fourth was Boar Tracks, the last surviving hunt chief. The fifth was Rock Climber, his brother.
“How goes the hunt?” Fast Tortoise asked.
“I will not climb these slopes again,” muttered Sun Runner.
“You saw the ghost?”
Sun Runner nodded fervently. “Yes, just for a moment. I am sure it was one of the dead hunt chiefs. I tell you, they return from heaven!”
Boar Tracks bristled. He was a tall, handsome hunter who had lived five hands of summers. He was the last of the chiefs, alive only because he had not been on Great Sky the night the mountain died.
Did the death of the mountain mean the death of their god? There was no one left to answer. Boar Tracks wished he could still consult with the elder hunt chiefs. With any hunt chiefs at all. He had never felt so alone.
Now he’d had word that Rock boma had been destroyed. Signs of Mk*tk raiders—so their loss in the Mk*tk wars had not been a permanent wall, merely slowing their progress. What now? If the dead had been seen on Great Sky, might it mean that the hunt chiefs would return to them?
“Why can he not come to us? Why would he hide in the shadows if he is one of ours? I say he is beast-man.” The beast-men were people, he supposed. Not Ibandi, not Mk*tk, not even bhan. Barely more than monkeys, in his thinking, they lived in the sacred caves on Great Earth. Surely, the “ghost” was nothing more than such a wretched creature, far from home.
Sun Runner and his son Moon Runner were both fleshy men of great strength and skill. Scarred in battle and the hunt, their support of Boar Tracks would be critical to his future plans. There was no one left to lead the Ibandi. Surely, they needed Boar Tracks. Sun Runner tended to agree with him but was not yet convinced of his right to leadership. Well, a brisk session in the wrestling circle would cure that. “Perhaps the dead lose their way?”
“We hunt,” Moon Hunter said. “I would meet this ghost for myself.”
“Where did you see him?” Boar asked.
“It was near the big rock, where the water runs,” Sun Runner said.
“Then that is where we will go.”
Timing breathing to footsteps, the men hiked up the mountain. Green sprouts on every trough of the avalanche-plowed earth proclaimed that the eruption’s damage had begun to heal. Blasted trees still lay scattered like toys discarded by an angry, infant god.
Boar Tracks lowered his cupped hands into the stream. He set one foot against a mossy log and splashed his face, wiping down the salt to discourage mosquitoes. He’d searched all morning and had yet to see anything remotely resembling a ghost. What would a ghost track look like? Until he knew, he would look for footprints, bruised leaves, broken twigs, scat … anything that might assist in his search.
Everywhere, the mountain’s death throes burned his eyes: frozen rivers of mud, splintered trees, boulders and crushed brush funneled into a tumbled confusion. Frog and Sky Woman had seen all this while the mud still steamed and the demons roamed freely. Boar Tracks had not made that climb. Every night, before he slept, he asked himself if he had been a coward not to.
No. He had been right. Frog had returned from the mountain babbling that the gods wished the Ibandi to abandon their home. Someone needed to lead the Ibandi to their future. Frog and Sky Woman had fled. Boar Tracks would stand.
“What happened here?” Boar asked.
Moon Runner shrugged. “Is this where the gods died?”
“Died?” Boar asked.
“I do not know much, but it looks like death to me.”
“Look,” Rock Climber said.
There, partially hidden beneath a slurry of dried mud and a covering of morning frost, gaped a cave mouth as high as a man’s waist. It looked as if an enormous rodent had dug away at the left corner, so that a tunnel led down through the debris.
Single file, they crawled through the narrow hole into the darkness and damp.
Boar Tracks wrapped moss around a dry stick and struck fire, fanning it into full flame. When he stood, a pale red tide washed the adobe walls. “The kiva,” Boar Tracks murmured. “I was just a boy when first I came here. And after that there were many, many ceremonies….”
“I lost my foreskin here.” Moon Runner held up his torch. “But I never came again. There was nothing in all the world I wanted so much as to be a hunt chief. I was not chosen.”
“I was chosen,” Boar said. “At the time, I thought it a great thing.” No regret or resentment tainted his voice. Sadness, perhaps. “Now, they are all dead.”
Boar held a torch up to the walls. “It looks as if someone clawed this out with his hands.” The flickering light revealed scraps of fruit, a gnawed skunk hide, some rat tails, a handful of charred sticks. “Someone has eaten, slept here.”
“Who?” Moon Runner asked. “Beast-men?”
Boar shrugged, trying to act unconcerned, but the back of his neck burned.
They crawled back out and spent a quarter examining the rest of the site. Most hunt chiefs’ corpses had been unearthed by now, but from time to time hunters discovered another screaming skeleton.
No bones this time, but Moon Runner dropped and traced his finger in a heel-shaped imprint. “A man.”
“Ibandi?” Rock Climber asked.
Sun Runner knelt beside his son. Half a heel mark and three shallow toe indentions. “Who can say?”
Mk*tk? No, too small. But Boar Tracks knew he was looking at the print of an adult male. This much he could say but, like Sun Runner, could not go further to say if it was Ibandi, bhan or one of the outlying tribes. Why couldn’t he tell? He was certain his dead brothers would have known at once.
But then, he had never been the best of them. Since the mountain died, he seemed to have lost whatever special num he might have once possessed.
Beside him, Rock Climber gasped. Boar Tracks spun to see a bone-thin figure approaching through a stand of young bamboo. From head to toe, his brown skin was smeared white with ash.
“A ghost?” the hunt chief asked. The ash-covered man stared at them.
Fear. Boar Tracks clenched his belly, seized control of his breathing. Breathe like a brave man, feel like a brave man, Cloud Stalker had sworn. “Do I know you?” Boar Tracks asked, and gave his name.
“And I am Sun Runner,” the gray-hair beside him said.
The ash-covered figure seemed dazed. “I …” He shook his head.
With every breath, the ghost’s ribs poked through his skin, so that he resembled nothing so much as a mud-covered skeleton. He held out one scalded, trembling hand. “Food,” he said.
They offered the ghost a h
andful of dried antelope. He ate ravenously, then emptied their water gourds. Moon Runner handed him a piece of dried yam. As the others gathered around him, mystified, the stranger satisfied his appetite.
“Are you a hunt chief?” Moon Runner ventured.
Boar Tracks tensed. The hunt chiefs were dead. He was the last. What was this creature?
The ash man shrugged. “I do not know.”
“Did you battle with demons? Did the dead water rise and suck your strength?”
The ash man’s eyes glittered. “Yes,” he mumbled. “I think I did.”
“This is a great day,” Rock Climber said, “a great, great day. A master hunter has returned from the dead!”
The ash man squatted, face buried in his hands, as if desperately pondering their words. Then he looked up. “I was!” he screamed. “I was in hell! I saw the dead animals dancing in their bones. They tried to catch me, but I was too fast!” Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, he began to speak.
“Father Mountain told me to fight the demons,” the ash man said. “I am a son of the mountain. When asked, I fought!” He danced and whirled and mimed hunting and fighting. Stiffly at first and then with growing fluidity he crouched and pounced and thrust.
“And what happened then?” Sun Runner asked.
“And when I won,” the ash man said, “our mighty god brought me back to the world, back so I might speak His words.”
Moon Runner jumped to his feet and raised his arms to the sky. “Behold the miracle!” he crowed. “He has come to lead us.”
The ash man’s eyes glittered. “Say this again.”
“I said that you were sent by Father Mountain to lead us.”
The ash man’s stained teeth gleamed.
On the mountain that night, swaddled in skins and with a full belly for the first time in his strange and splintered memory, the ash man dreamed:
He saw his people frightened, scattered, crying for answers no man could offer. So seven were chosen to ask questions of Father Mountain Himself. The climb was an endless nightmare of fatigue and terror. Two had perished, a medicine girl and a hunter. Another hunter had gone lame and been left behind.
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