Shadow Valley

by Steven Barnes

  So. Unlike Mk*tk these folk knew their women were human. Vokka and Ibandi were not so foreign after all.

  Since T’Cori had appeared, Stillshadow had held her hand in a death grip. Held her, perhaps fearing that without touch, she could never believe that her daughter had returned.

  Frog watched without speaking. He put fire to the herbs stuffed in his bone pipe, and took one deep, satisfied puff after another. The world, he decided, was a very good place.

  Stillshadow’s ancient cheeks tightened with a smile, and her blind eyes wept.

  “My daughter has returned,” she said. “Neither famine nor fire could take the joy from my heart.” She suddenly looked up at the sky. “Oh! I should not say such things. The gods love troubles. It is why they gave their children so many of them. Still, this is a happy day.”

  Another commotion at the fire’s edge, and suddenly six more Vokka appeared, including the girl-child they had sheltered mere nights ago. She was clean and washed, her pale eyes bright. Frog guessed that the woman walking behind her was a loving mother or perhaps an aunt. Their loincloths were rougher than those of the Ibandi, not of beaten deer leather but of lion hide.

  Beside them trotted another of the gray wolves. It was a bit smaller, paler than the wolves known to the Ibandi. Its snout was blunter as well. It watched them warily, remaining close to the Vokka.

  Uncle Snake appeared behind Frog. “What manner of two-legged are these?” he asked. “I do not understand them at all. We save their child, and they do not speak or come to make friends. Now, suddenly, they are everywhere and cannot get enough of us. And what of the wolves? In what world do two-and four-legged walk together?”

  “This world, it seems.” Frog and one of the wolves had locked eyes, and Frog refused to be the first one to turn away. Foolish, perhaps, to play such games with a four-legged, but then perhaps he was a fool. He would not lose a contest to a wolf. He was a man!

  He blinked, suddenly laughing at the oddness of the thought, and realized that he had lost. The wolf’s tongue lolled out, flickered back, and it turned away.

  “I think I know,” T’Cori said. “We saved their child, which put them in our debt. What they did was wait until they could do a service in return.”

  Still muttering to herself, Stillshadow hobbled forward, knelt and drew a crescent moon symbol on the ground with her finger. This was followed by a child symbol: an oval head, stick of a body, and short arms and legs. The Vokka woman commenced to do the same, and soon the ground was covered with scrawls. T’Cori and Stillshadow pointed and spoke. The Vokka jabbered in response.

  “What are you doing?” Frog asked.

  “It is our medicine,” T’Cori answered, new confidence lightening her voice. “Every year at Spring Gathering, bhan arrive from horizons away. Not all speak well. It is our place to learn their speech and teach them ours. The jowk tongue is beyond words: symbols for woman, man, life, death, moon, sun. They are shared by many, perhaps by all. This is what women do: when jowk wears a man’s skin, it loves to fight. In a woman’s, jowk craves a joining. It is up to women to find the symbols we share.”

  After a long day of dancing and scrawling and sharing, Frog and T’Cori reclined on zebra skins. Beneath a sky that seemed so clear it was almost as if he was seeing it for the first time, Frog’s mind could no longer restrain his heart. “When I thought I had lost you,” he said, “I died. My heart did not want to beat. T’Cori, kill me now.”

  “What?”

  Frog withdrew his knife from its sheath and placed its point against his breast. “Push it. End my pain. Or take me as your man.”

  Dry lightning ripped the sky above them, blistering the clouds. Holding his eyes without blinking she wrapped her hands around the knife and pushed until a trickle of blood flowed down over his nipple. Thunder rolled across the plain, and she smiled as if she welcomed it as a holy sign.

  She placed his hand on her swollen belly. “Fool. We are a family. But I cannot be your wife.” She turned away from him. “Leopard Eye washed my child, and now Leopard Eye is dead. I do not wish you to die.”

  “T’Cori,” Frog said, “I sexed with Fawn Blossom, and she was taken. She died. When we were together after you ran from the Mk*tk, you asked if I would sex with you, and I said no. That was why.”

  “Because you thought that sexing Fawn might have caused her death?”

  “Why not? You say that because you and Leopard Eye sexed, he died.”

  He pulled her more tightly to him. “There was no sin. That is my child inside you. I can smell it. My child. And I would wish no man dead for washing my child.”

  She gazed down into the valley’s bowl. He could taste the teeming gazelle and giraffe and zebra … the smell and feel of it all dizzied him.

  “It is like a dream,” she said.

  “You hold my child in your belly. My child. Not Father Mountain’s. It is time I claimed you. Is it not best for a child to know his father?”

  “His father might be a god.”

  “No!” Frog crushed her painfully tight. “I gave you that seed. My seed. My son. And no one, man or god, will stand between me and my son.”

  Her eyes flew wide. “You speak sin!”

  He was prepared to do far more than that. All the terror he had controlled for the entire day suddenly exploded into rage against the gods she believed in, gods that had been willing to have their priestess devoured alive.

  How could he make her understand? It was men who had saved her, not gods. “Sin?” he said. “Then let the wind whistle in my hollow bones. For you I climbed to the top of the world. I stood with you against my brother, and so he died. For you, I walked ten tens of horizons. You are my woman, and you will make me your man.”

  She tried to match his stare, and finally quailed, leaning the top of her head against his chest. “Frog,” she said. “Frog. Once, I wanted nothing in the world more than to be yours. I wanted to taste your breath in my mouth, feel your skin so close I knew not where mine stopped and yours began. I was shown that those dreams were wrong.”

  “They were never wrong.”

  “They were never right,” she replied.

  “We can make them right. You and I. In this new world, where men walk with wolves, we say what is right and what is not. These are all our children, even the graybeards. You and I climbed the mountain.” He spoke as if the idea amazed him still.

  T’Cori shook her head. “Frog, Great Sky let us climb Him. And then allowed us to return to our people. For our own purposes? No. For His.”

  “I don’t understand,” Frog said.

  “No, you don’t. Once I hoped that you would see the world I see, but you do not. Perhaps cannot. As I do not see the faces in the clouds. We were given different eyes. Trust me,” she said. “I see what He wants.”

  And this thought, at last, made him pause. “What does He want?”

  “He wants His children to live,” she said. “And grow. To find new places. To love and have children.”

  “Does He want us to be together?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think He does.”

  Frog grinned. Gazelle Tears, Flamingo and Ember would dance to hear the words he now wished to speak, to know the emotions bursting in his heart. “Then He is a good god.” Frog grinned. “And I will love Him again.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  A moon northeast …

  For many days, Fire Ant and his men had run north seeking signs of Frog. Now, at last, the signs had grown clearer.

  Here at the riverbank the ground was cracked and dry, the easier for Fire Ant to read the footprints and the double tracks of Stillshadow’s sled. This was a very good thing: if they were still carrying the head dream dancer, then it stood to reason that she was still alive.

  His people had crossed here, and from the growth of brush he reckoned no more than two moons before. He and his men were closer. The hunters were closing the gap on the prey

  Ten men could travel faster than tens o
f families, with their old women and children to slow them down. That knowledge gave him confidence, and he pushed onward.

  Ten days south …

  Flat-Nose sheltered himself in the shade of a bushy-topped live-long tree, relishing the smell of blood and shit from the Ibandi hunter they had nailed to its trunk.

  They would get no answers from the dying man. He had been gutting a freshly killed zebra when they had come upon him. The weakling had run like a woman and then fought like a girl.

  Dove was not with them, so there had been no way to translate his groveling answers. Flat-Nose needed none, merely anticipated the pleasure of cooking and eating the striped kill before the Ibandi’s bleeding, dying eyes.

  Flat-Nose had the tracks of his true prey, could pick them out of countless others. He would find the man who had ended his brother’s line. Soon, Flat-Nose would find the monkey and peel him.

  Three double hands of his clan traveled with him, battle scarred and ready to sing their death songs. None had a goal greater than spilling their enemies’ guts. Then they would probe the steaming mass of their innards for answers. The greater the foe, the more powerful the magic.

  These Ibandi were powerful enemies. The men seemed almost like women, but they had had enough fire in their blood to enter Mk*tk territory and kill their children. There was something pure in that, and their response was just as pure.

  Flat-Nose stood in the shade of the man they had spiked to the tree. Their enemy was traveling north, or had been, moons ago. But Flat-Nose smelled the wind and caught a whiff of something blowing from the west. A stench of weaklings. Flat-Nose thought his enemy was following the herds. According to his people’s stories, the herds traveled north and then swept back south.

  That meant that if he went toward the setting sun, he could cut moons off their pursuit. Catch the Ibandi.

  Kill them.

  All.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Most of their shared campground was quiet now, but Frog sat by the fire, watching the camp’s outer edge, where a few Vokka lay curled on their sides, sleeping. As he watched, a wolf padded in from the darkness to sleep next to the tall gap-toothed man named Thal.

  “Look. Another wolf,” Snake whispered as a gray-muzzled beast padded in from the shadows. “Let’s watch, and see if it melts into a man.”

  Frog said nothing. If he remained awake and alert, would he be rewarded with such a miraculous sight?

  “Wolves,” Snake whispered in Frog’s ear. “How can you stand to rest so close to them? With their fangs so close to your only child? Wolves killed your brother.”

  “Time kills us all. I do not hate time.”

  “You are the strangest man in the world,” Snake said.

  “Are they really wolves?” Frog asked. “Are the Vokka really men?”

  “Yes, I think them men.”

  “See that the Vokka trust them with their children.”

  “Then,” Snake whispered, “the Vokka are ugly fools.”

  Uncle Snake rolled over to his own space, and was soon snoring. Frog lay down, and kept one eye open as long as he could. He did not know when he fell asleep, but he did know that, so far as he could see that night, no wolves transformed into men.

  • • •

  Clumsily at first, but gaining grace with every passing day, Ibandi and Vokka began a dance older than either people. They shared tubers and nuts and ways of constructing huts. They compared ways of dancing, sharpening knives and splinting broken bones. T’Cori found the Vokka hard on the eyes but human, kind and, she thought, good.

  Ibandi and Vokka men fell at once into competition with one another. Who could jump highest? Run fastest or longest? The Vokka had the edge in raw physical power, but T’Cori found them a little slow to grasp nuance.

  But if males came to know each other by test, women accomplished the same thing by sharing.

  The leader’s soft-eyed woman was called Kiya. Kiya was apparently the aunt—or older sister—of the rescued child, whose name was Rushing River. Thal, whose name meant “Tall One,” was either father or uncle.

  Kiya was heavy with child, but still spry and strong enough to caper with the others, and encouraged T’Cori to join them.

  For a moon following T’Cori’s flight from the lions the two expectant mothers had shared a nightly dance, the others clapping and cheering to their odd meld of skill and clumsiness. Then one night, their good fortune ended.

  The drums had pounded, the twin fires leaped and roared. The very stars above shimmered in time with their calls. Suddenly, Kiya clutched her belly and fell to the side, her legs glistening wet in the firelight. T’Cori caught her before her head struck the ground, both crying out as if they shared a single heart.

  Kiya’s kin helped her onto a grass mat and began the business of bringing a new child into the world. T’Cori sat with her, holding Kiya’s thick strong hand, rocking back and forth and saying what few words of comfort and reassurance she knew in Vokka.

  Their efforts were of no use. The baby was born backward and bluish, the cord wrapped around her neck. Dead.

  Blood smeared Kiya’s legs, muddied the mat beneath her.

  T’Cori watched, forgotten, as the dead child was bundled and put to the side, and the Vokka women fussed over their sister.

  From their efforts T’Cori realized that the Vokka knew nothing of stop-bleed, the flowers that could slow the seepage. She still had a handful of the crumbly dried purple blossoms in the medicine bag slung around her shoulders. Within a quarter she had brewed the potion, adding other herbs to make it stronger.

  She brought the brew to Kiya and her sisters, and made sign for her friend to taste it. The woman was feverish by now, too delirious to decide. But her sisters had danced with T’Cori. They looked at her belly and reckoned one mother unlikely to poison another.

  Kiya sipped the potion from its ostrich egg cup, and by nightfall, she bled no more. Kiya had lost her child, but Kiya’s husband, Thal, Tall One, had not lost his mate. And that was, at least, something good.

  T’Cori did not understand the Vokka, but friends need love more than understanding.

  As men stalked the valley for food, the women hunted for the things that would make this their new home, searched together for the wood to construct drums, for a great ceremony of beginnings.

  Night after night, T’Cori, Gazelle Tears and Stillshadow sat with the Vokka women, seeking the bits of the jowk tongue embedded in the human language. Through dance and drawing and hand symbol and sand painting, they sought the words and concepts both shared: “Food” and “water.” “Birth” and “death.”

  They drummed, danced and mimed their tales of hunting and fighting and traveling. The Vokka drum rhythms were primitive, bland, slow. Within their two beats the Ibandi found five.

  Uncle Snake and Leopard Paw tried to teach the Vokka their own rhythms, but found them slow in uptake, heavy footed and easily frustrated. These new bhan were good friends but hardly family.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  T’Cori had spent the early hours searing breakfast mush balls in last night’s coals. Each was the size of a child’s fist, crisp brown on the outside, grainy orange within. More important, they were delicious.

  As the morning shadows retreated, she glanced up at the eastern edge of the ridge and shaded her eyes and saw a single stick-thin figure staring down upon them all.

  It waved. T’Cori waved back as the stick figure clambered down toward them. At first T’Cori merely wondered who this person was. Then something in the walk, the angle of the head seemed … familiar.

  Impossible. It could not be.

  Could it?

  T’Cori pushed herself up and walked east. Disbelieving, she climbed up the slope, touching each rock and bush to assure herself that this was no dream.

  A miracle of miracles. Dehydrated, exhausted, half starved, the stick figure collapsed, then rose again.

  T’Cori climbed as quickly as she could and embraced Sist
er Quiet Water.

  “How did you find us?” she whispered into Quiet Water’s warm, braided, dusty hair.

  “How could I be anywhere else?” Her sister sobbed. “You filled my dreams.”

  For a long time they cried together. When T’Cori looked up, Frog and Leopard Paw were beside her. “Who?” Frog asked, confused.

  “It is Quiet Water.” T’Cori sobbed, wiping the tears from her eyes.

  They came down from the ridge, gathering tribesmen as they went, until they were flooded by children and fathers and mothers, all excited by the dancer’s arrival even if they had no idea exactly who she was.

  By the time Sister Quiet Water crawled into Stillshadow’s hut, the great one was already awake and sitting erect.

  For a time they did not speak, just sat opposite each other, breathing in rhythm. Then Quiet Water leaned forward and kissed the dry-leaf skin of Stillshadow’s forehead.

  “It is good to see my daughter,” the old woman said. A wan smile warmed her face. She turned to T’Cori. “You needn’t have gone so far, and through so much, to feed the strangleweed to a lion. You needn’t have feared I would kill myself. I think that Great Mother will take me when she is ready.”

  In every spare moment, from dawn till dusk and later by firelight, Frog practiced with his spear. But he was no longer alone. Now ten Ibandi lined up to practice with him. They thrust, twisted and danced bravely at the chalked Mk*tk silhouettes.

  “What are they doing?” Stillshadow asked.

  “What do you hear?”

  “Sticks clattering against stone. But it is not what I hear. It’s what I see.” Her blind eyes opened wider. “Their num flares. Threads form vines. The color is not green or blue but red, like fire blossoms. I see anger and fear.”

  “They’re practicing, Mother. I cannot see their num as clearly as you but think that you are right. I think Frog is afraid.”