Shadow Valley

by Steven Barnes

  The male clamped hold of poor Leopard’s leg and began to tear.

  T’Cori closed her eyes, both to shield herself from the fearsome sight and to connect more deeply with the divine. “Great Mother,” she whispered, “guide your son to the Mountain.” How strange and precious those words, especially considering that one misstep or misplaced hand … a single error … and her next prayer would be for a swift death.

  T’Cori gripped the rocks carefully, and then reached out with her right foot to find purchase. She had to seal her mind away, not frighten herself by looking below. There might be three lions, or hands of hands of lions. It didn’t make any difference: either way, if she fell, she was meat. Her unborn child was meat. All she could do was find one stone after another, try to reach what seemed to be a rock shelf, one just far enough away to tease her.

  Could she make it? She stretched her leg out as far as possible, clawing at the rock with one hand. But for her swollen womb, she could have found the balance, made her way to the shelf, and safety.

  A few handholds to the right, and there were different choices of grip. She could get up a bit, and then up again. Then she slipped, unable to muffle a scream as her fingernails splintered along the rock. As her face slid past a jutting root, she snapped at it with her teeth. The shock wrenched her head sideways. T’Cori scrabbled for new handholds, and to her amazement managed to work around the belly bulk and find purchase for her toes. For a few moments she dangled there, trying to slow her breathing, then chanced a glance downward.

  Four lions below her now: two eating, one dying, the last following her with its baleful yellow eyes.

  T’Cori managed to lever herself over to the rock shelf. There, she lay curled on her side, struggling not to panic. What now? She could not go down. Neither could she go up. The shelf grew narrower before it rounded the wall and perhaps terminated there. Could she wait here? How long would it be before anyone came looking for her? A day? And a night? A quarter-day’s run to cross the valley before anyone could even begin a search.

  How would it feel to lie up on this ledge, exposed to an alien sky? The ledge sloped steeply away beneath her. If she fell asleep, mightn’t she roll over and fall?

  The only thing to do was to keep moving. She could either find a way down, away from the lions, or a place secure enough that she could wait there, build a fire and sleep.

  The tribe’s hunters could track her. But when? Dream dancers and their guardians often spent days searching for herbs. If she did not take her fate into her own hands …

  T’Cori closed her eyes and prayed to Great Mother, seeking advice, permission, direction. Something. Anything.

  The encroaching darkness offered no answers, and that in and of itself grieved her. Had she sinned in taking personal pleasure from Leopard Eye? No, women gave pleasure by feeling it themselves. There was no sin….

  Was there? No. Not for a dream dancer. But what of one who had been unable to protect that great gift to which she had been entrusted?

  T’Cori shut her fears and guilt away, and continued to crawl.

  Throughout the day, she edged along the wall, moving up or down whenever she could. Twice she was forced to backtrack, move up, edge along an even narrower ledge, and then drop back down.

  An outcropping of brownish-white roots wormed half out of the rock, dangling downward from a tree growing from the cliff above her head.

  Had she any choice but to climb? Her left arm and shoulder ached. T’Cori found some purchase for her right foot, and shifted her weight, balancing the strain to allow her left side to rest.

  Looking back over her shoulder she tried to find her people’s camp. Across a forest of flat-topped trees and a scattering of glistening water holes, a winding snake of a stream and clustering herds of zebra and giraffe, she could see the opposite valley wall … but no human beings.

  She choked back a sob, furious that she had wasted energy on hope.

  When the right leg was beginning to throb, she looked back down below her. Three lions now watched her. Leopard’s body was no longer in view. Had they dragged it away? She didn’t know, knew only that she had to save herself. If she could not, then his sacrifice would have been for nothing.

  If she had been a weakling, if she was not vital to the tribe, would he have left her to die? Would Leopard have saved himself by making the climb that now challenged her?

  The very thought drained the power from her limbs. No. He had died because he believed Sky Woman to be his tribe’s salvation. She had no right to question that. To doubt herself was to steal the num from his sacrifice.

  She was as rested as she was going to be. It was time to climb again.

  Not too many moons ago, she could have done this with ease. The girl she had been had felt so little fear. That younger girl had been so strong and confident. Did that youngster still live anywhere within the woman?

  Her heavy belly dragged at her, fatigued her arms, but could it lift her spirit? Was there fire within her body that called out for protection, that reminded her that her life no longer belonged to her, if ever it truly had?

  She traced her fingers along a root’s gnarled surface, then tensed her fingers and pulled. T’Cori wormed her toes into a crevice, and pushed.

  The root tore into her hands as the rock bit at her feet, but she found that it could hold her weight.

  As a younger girl, she had been able to visualize her belly fibers knotting into a rope stronger than her bones. But she no longer seemed able to find that same tenseness, felt that even if she had been able to achieve it, it might not be healthy for the child slumbering within her.

  So she had to use her arms and her legs. Her belly, the center of her body, was just being hauled along like a soft, giant water gourd.

  A pull with the arms, then a push with the legs. Then rest, followed by another effort. If she needed strength or motivation all she needed to do was look down. The lions gazed up with those same famished expressions, as if the splendid muscle gracing Leopard Eye’s beautiful body had been insufficient to satisfy them.

  She grimaced. Even thinking about the hunter who had sacrificed his life for her brought weakness to limbs that desperately needed strength.

  T’Cori stopped looking down.

  A step. Another step. And then one more. Pulling with arms and back, pushing with legs. She fought to breathe without tensing or cramping her stomach. Blood oozed from her torn fingernails. With the back of one grimy hand she wiped the tears from her face and went on. There was only this choice: climb, or find her dying place.

  T’Cori didn’t know how long she struggled upward, but as she did she found that she was touching the same current of jowk she had discovered when climbing Great Sky. It was a place that could accept pain, even death, but not failure.

  This time there were no sacred visions to sustain her, no hope of meeting her gods at the end of the trail. There was only an edge, visible far above her, and hope that if she reached it there might be a resting place. Hand over hand and feet scrabbling for a hold she pulled herself up the root. T’Cori had to focus as if performing a ceremony. For her, now, there was no previous action. And nothing in the world to do afterward.

  But somehow, one step at a time, she kept going. Finally T’Cori realized that she was pulling against the tree itself, and she managed to heave her legs up over the edge, panting as the dizziness and fatigue she had so long suppressed finally landed upon her with all the weight of Great Earth itself.

  Once she had recovered her senses, T’Cori explored the little wide space to which she had ascended. The ground was sparsely grassed, very rocky and thorny. The bluff was more than a ledge, tens of paces wide.

  The sun had begun to sink toward the horizon. Soon it would die. In the morning, its sun would be sung to new life by the dream dancers.

  Had time passed so swiftly? There might be a way down or away from her spot here, high above the ground, but while she thought she could see across the valley’s bowl to th
e Ibandi camp, they might as well have been in another world altogether.

  That was not her greatest concern. Right now, she had to make herself shelter. On their first night on the valley rim, the breezes might as well have swept down from Great Sky. Cold. Unless she made shelter, this would be a brutal, unforgiving night.

  T’Cori searched until she found a nook in the rock wall behind her that looked as if it might provide cover for the night.

  Excused from many tasks normally performed by Ibandi women, dream dancers were taught to make minor repairs on their huts but not to construct them.

  During her time among the Mk*tk she had learned many things. And during the days she and Frog had fled from Mk*tk lands toward Great Sky she had learned more.

  Never again, she had sworn to herself, would she be at a loss to provide for her body’s needs. Among the other things she had taught herself was the making of a simple lean-to: just bare branches draped with leafier ones, slanted against the rock.

  Using branches and vines as her basic frame, she jammed the branches into the rocks and bent them to create a little place for herself. Next came vines to hold them into place. A trickle of water ran along the rocks to the right of her nest, and she moistened clay to patch the gaps.

  To her wan delight, the work went more swiftly than she had initially feared. In the end, the fruit of her labors resembled a wasp’s nest.

  When she crawled inside her little home, her stomach might have been empty, but her heart was full.

  She opened her pouch and extracted the limp body of the gray hare Leopard had slain. Her protector had given it to her to keep. She slipped it back into the pouch, thinking that she would eat it … tomorrow. She was not hungry now, even though she knew she should be.

  Odd how something as simple as creating a bit of shelter helped to balance her grief. It made no sense: every four-legged was born knowing how to shelter itself. Why her pride? Why could that selfish sensation in any way compensate for the loss of Leopard Eye?

  What do I do now? T’Cori asked herself. Where do I go? How do I get home?

  Frog… come for me.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Only after the last strains of morning prayers faded and Sing Sun and her trainees returned to their hutches, did Frog Hopping approach Still-shadow. One never interrupted the birthing of a new sun. Why upset his people, many of whom believed a terrible catastrophe would result? Frog personally suspected that nothing at all would happen if the dream dancers were disrupted in their morning prayers. He suspected that the same ball of fire was not reborn but rather circled the sky every day. Heresy, perhaps, but possibly a larger truth.

  More from respect than fear, he waited until the songs were complete, then went to T’Cori’s mentor.

  “I am worried,” Frog said. “Sky Woman should have returned by now.”

  The old blind woman nodded her head. “I had a dream last night, and it told me bad news would come.” She extended her hand. He pulled her upright as gently as he could, alarmed at the weight she had lost in the last moon. She seemed little more than a breath of wind. “We will gather hunters and find my daughter and my son.”

  T’Cori’s father, Water Chant; Leopard Eye’s twin, Paw, and the boy Bat Wing immediately volunteered to go. Uncle Snake joined them as well, and together with Stillshadow they set off across the valley.

  All they had to do was pick out the right set of footprints … and barely a quarter later, they found the marks of a sandaled man and a barefooted woman. Their quarry had paused near a poison-grub plant.

  Even among the small group he had put together, Frog was not the greatest tracker. That honor belonged to Uncle Snake, who sank to one knee and studied the depressions. “They paused here,” he said. “Picked berries. See this.” He pointed out the very recent bendings and breakings of the branches. Sap had oozed and sealed the twigs, but frayed ends remained just a little damp to the touch.

  “And then … they headed farther west.” Pointing. “Southwest.”

  Now, the trail was not difficult to follow. It seemed that Leopard Eye and T’Cori had paused many times to pick or study. A blood-smeared rock suggested that they had killed something. A single brown hair wedged into a crack suggested a rabbit. Along the way they had evidently found berries and grub nests, and dug roots. It seemed to Frog that T’Cori and Leopard Eye had done well.

  As they approached a stream, though, a lump rose in his throat. Where the tracks stopped, the bent and broken grass told its own story. His mind saw every painful detail, including the place where T’Cori and Leopard Eye had lain down together.

  Clearly, T’Cori had been on her hands and knees, with a man— presumably Leopard Eye—kneeling behind her.

  Leopard Paw and Uncle Snake grinned at each other, trying not to reveal their amusement. He knew what they were thinking: that T’Cori and Leopard Eye had not returned because they were pleasurably occupied, and come sundown or dawn tomorrow, would return to the camp concealing secret smiles.

  Frog bore down hard on his emotions. Was his unease mere jealousy? If so, that was wrongheaded, unworthy for one bonded to a medicine woman. A dream dancer’s sexuality was a gift to the tribe’s worthy hunters, to be shared at her discretion. No man owned her.

  “No,” Stillshadow said, levering herself up off the sled. She bent to smell the soil, then brushed her fingers against reeds, her blind eyes blinking rapidly without producing tears.

  “Something happened here,” she said. “You were not wrong to come.” The old woman knelt at the water’s edge, scooped up and tasted a palmful of water.

  She sniffed the air. “Lion.”

  No sooner had she said this than Leopard Paw called out. “Tracks!” he said, examining a heel print crested by four short, splayed toes.

  Stillshadow sniffed the wind. “Help me up.”

  Together they walked through the reeds and rushes, coming to the place the hunters had discovered additional tracks. Near the rock wall Frog found a tangled mass of feline and human footprints. Near them lay an abandoned, gore-smeared spear. The soil was thick with blood and grooved with drag marks.

  Smirks disappeared. Uncle Snake knelt and examined the footprints more carefully.

  “Leopard Eye,” Snake said. “And Sky Woman.” He hung his head. “They died here.”

  Leopard Paw bristled, gripping his spear as if he would crush it with his hands. His gaze burned into the grass, seeking a target for his rage.

  Frog could not speak. Could not even breathe. Those simple words had dropped him down a crevasse and stolen his num. T’Cori dead? Their unborn child in a lion’s belly? No. No.

  Tears flooding his eyes, Frog dropped to his knees and began to wail.

  Stillshadow hobbled up beside him, as slowly as if her bones were rotted bamboo. She crouched and stirred around in the dirt until she found something thick and gummy. She smeared it between her fingers, then lifted it to her nose and smelled it …

  And then touched it to the tip of her tongue.

  Ten paces away, half concealed in grass, sprawled a lion’s disemboweled corpse. The hunters probed and prodded the body, lifted its head and haunches to peer beneath. “Leopard’s spear,” Water Chant said soberly, striding in from the brush, holding the bloodied stalk. “Truly, he was a great hunter.”

  “This is his blood,” Stillshadow said, hands stirring around in the grass. “My son is dead.” Leopard Paw helped her up and over to the new site. She went on hands and knees again, rubbed the gummy wet soil between her fingers. She sniffed. “The lion’s,” she said. “Sky Woman’s blood did not spill here.”

  The hunters looked at one another, unable to conceal their skepticism. “Old Mother … you have no eyes. We know your heart is broken, but—”

  “No!” she said, voice fiercely urgent. “My daughter is not here. Her blood is not here.”

  The world swam in tears. “What then?” Frog asked.

  “It was true. It was strange. Her footprints led to the
rock wall … and then nowhere.” Uncle Snake scratched his thin beard and studied the wall. “A pregnant woman could not climb this,” he said.

  “You do not know my daughter,” Stillshadow said. “We will continue to search.” She gripped Frog’s hand, nails piercing his flesh. “Yes? You will search for her?”

  The rock wall was broken by ledges and vines and small, tough trees struggling to root into rock. Where in the world could she have gone? Unless Father Mountain had lifted her up unto his bosom, nowhere at all.

  But Stillshadow said …

  The old woman was blind now, maddened, almost crippled. She was no longer the fleshly spirit who had led her people though so many dark days….

  Or was she? If Frog quieted the voices of fear within him, he had to admit that Stillshadow radiated a strange and soothing calm. Certainty, perhaps. It was seductive: he wanted so much to believe that his dearest love and unborn child had not died in such horror.

  “My brother could still live,” Leopard Paw said. Hope was alive in his eyes, if not his heart.

  Stillshadow shook her head. “His heart is still,” she said. “Father Mountain has taken another hunter.”

  Leopard Paw turned his head away from them and said nothing.

  Frog’s inner eye saw the struggle itself, could see it as clearly as he could see T’Cori and Leopard sexing by the stream. He sighed. What was he to think? T’Cori had given herself to Leopard Eye, as was her right and perhaps even responsibility. What had happened later was simple tragedy.

  “Come,” he said. “Let us search.”

  As sure-footed as a lizard, Bat Wing wiggled up the rock wall, shouting back down to them “Broken roots!”

  “What else?” Frog called up.

  “It looks like someone crawled along the rock here. I think it was Sky Woman!” He seemed so excited that Frog allowed himself to hope.

  It took awhile to find another way up the mountainside, but Frog remained with Stillshadow as Leopard Paw and Snake climbed, and then shouted instructions back down.