Shadow Valley (19 page)

T’Cori walked at Frog’s left as they followed the banks of a wide, rippling stream deep enough to hold crocodiles and muddy enough to conceal them. They were careful that the children didn’t play too close.

He knew T’Cori was weary, but he was proud of the fact that she rarely showed it. The Leopard twins pulled their sled-bound mother, Stillshadow, behind them. Ten and five tens of Ibandi straggled along behind, low in spirits.

In former days, old Stillshadow could be counted upon to cajole or inspire. Now she barely seemed aware of where they were, or perhaps even of who she was. She could not see, but she cocked her head sideways as if to catch the stream’s rushing voice.

Frog called for rest, then took the twins aside. “We must be careful,” Frog said. “Spearmen! Hold your places.”

“So,” Leopard Eye asked, “this place is shallow enough for us to cross?”

“Yes,” Frog said, “but I think the river has teeth. Be careful.”

T’Cori stared. “You remember what I said happened to Fawn?”

“The crocodile. I remember,” he said. “We will take care.”

They decided not to ford the river there, and traveled on some time, pushing through fear and fatigue, until clearer waters promised safety. A quarter farther along, the stream joined its source river, and here the waters were not muddy. The hunters took their positions at the riverside. Frog watched carefully as his people sloshed to the opposite bank. He noted every shadow, every eddy. The fan of branches floating past… were those merely wood? Or did something with fangs and claws live within or beneath?

Either the predators were absent, or Father Mountain was kind enough to keep them sleeping. No children were lost that day.

Together the Ibandi crossed the plains, the grasslands. Up ridges and through mountain passes T’Cori marched, wheezing with each breath of thinning air.

Each new dawn, T’Cori felt the life within her stir more vigorously. On days when they struggled through the higher passes, between stands of yellow-green brush and fields of grass so spiky it cut through her leathered soles, every step seemed to leech more of her remaining strength … but thinking of the life within drove her on.

“I breathe and breathe,” she groaned, “and still I taste no air.”

“You are strong,” Frog said.

“It feels as if we are on Great Sky again,” T’Cori said. “Remember when even the fire did not warm us?”

“That was a bad time, but Great Sky is far away. We’ll make it. Always.”

Despite the depths of her fatigue, his faith wrung a smile from her. “Because of Frog?”

“No,” he replied. “No. Because of Great Sky Woman. Look at their faces. They believe in
you
, not me. They follow
you
, not me.”

T’Cori turned her head. Behind them, their people were tired and discouraged but still trudged onward toward an uncertain future. If possible
they were even more fatigued and discouraged than she. “They … believe in me?”

“Yes, every one. I more than any other.”

“Without you,” she said, “I could never have climbed the mountain.”

“Listen to me.” His fingers gripped her shoulders. “It was not me. It was not ‘us.’ It
was you.
You asked me to climb with you. I believed in you and did a thing that I could not do. You say that we must travel north, and I believe you. Stillshadow says we should turn west and south, and every person here looks at you to see if we should believe. You are our strength, don’t you see?”

He placed his hand on the curve of her belly. “You are
his
strength as well.”

“Hers.”
She smiled. “And you are wrong. I am not my daughter’s strength. She is mine.”

Placing one foot before the other and then pushing as hard as he could, Frog hiked up the rise, refusing to listen to his aching legs. Young Bat Wing climbed on ahead, up a wall of hills that ran from east to west almost as far as the eye could see.

Perhaps they could go around this barrier, but Frog was too tired to think, too tired to do anything but keep going and hope that somewhere amid the twisted trees and thornbush there might be something to keep them going.

Around them, some of the more energetic boys and girls ran and laughed, somehow making a game of it all.

Bless them. Had he suddenly become old? Where had his youthful
num
gone? His legs were straw. As the way steepened the vegetation grew sparser still, rocks poking through the earth to form ridges almost like gray flower petals.

Gray, like his people’s increasingly dusty faces. Like his hopes for the future.

As they crested the hill, the last light of day shone down upon them from the west. The sun was dying, taking with it his dreams. They needed a place to rest, hoped for flat ground to camp upon.

That last dying sunlight shone down upon a darkened valley. The ridge of mountains on the other side was, what? Half a day distant?

Within that shadowed half-day’s circle moved clumps of greater darkness. To eyes rapidly adjusting to the night, those clumps separated like a
dark fluid running down over a rock, revealing themselves to be … living things.
Herds.
Was he dreaming?

“Where are we?” Stillshadow mumbled thickly, stirring from her trance.

“I don’t know, Old Mother,” T’Cori said, “but I have never seen a place like this.”

“I think …” Snake said, “I think I have heard of this place. We are only five days from Great Sky, but our hunters never come here.”

“Shadow Valley,” Stillshadow whispered. Frog’s heart jumped. “Be very careful. It is said that
jowk
walk here. The legend is of wolves who walk like men.” It was more words than the old woman had strung together in many days.

As they descended the northern wall, the dying sun set fire to a lake in the valley’s southwest quadrant. Water aplenty! Wobble legged with awe, they picked their way down the slope. At first Frog thought his eyes had deceived him.

Tens of tens of tens of four-legged. Striped zebra eating side by side with wildebeest. Buffalo? Yes, a spear’s throw from the zebra, a wide-horned black buffalo grazed, gazing almost directly at him.

“My belly thought never to see such herds again,” Frog whispered.

“Has any man counted so high?” Bat Wing asked.

There was a strangeness here. The hills that had grown to block the horizon from east to west ringed this entire valley, a rise of steep mud-colored swellings dotted with small flat-topped trees and grasses so green Frog wondered if this place had its own clouds and rain, different from that on the outside.

“Look at the mountains. They are a great circle,” Snake said, voice soft with wonder.

“We rest. Our people are exhausted. Serve the last of the meat,” Frog said, feeling new
num
flowing up his spine. His fingers tingled. “And then …”

“Then what?” Excitement boiled Bat Wing’s voice.

“Tomorrow we hunt!”

The children had journeyed far, but despite their fatigue, they were eager and excited to explore the valley’s sloping wall. They could not sleep, and their twittering noise kept the hunters awake. “Dance them a story,” Stillshadow commanded of T’Cori, and she thought awhile.

At first she thought to protest: she felt too tired to do anything but sleep.

But she was happy that Stillshadow was still rooted in this world enough to care. Her mentor was probably correct: a well-told tale would calm them.

T’Cori began to sway, and the people put down their burdens and came to watch as her voice and body wove scene and story together into a waking dream.

“A long time ago,” she said, “there was another hill, and another hard climb …”

A young hunter had been climbing all day, and at last became tired and sleepy. He thought he would lie down for a while, having drained himself searching for game.

While he slept, a lion came seeking water in the midday heat. It saw the young man and thought to drag this nice piece of meat to the shade for a leisurely meal.

It grabbed the hunter’s leg, and the pain awakened him. The hunter was very frightened! He knew that if he made a sound the lion would know he lived and would kill him at once.

The lion dragged the man over to a tree and thought to have a nice drink of water before its meal. It jammed the hunter’s head between two roots and turned to go down to the lake.

At first the man tried to struggle, then went limp as the lion turned around. The lion had seen the movement from the corner of its eye, and suspected that the hunter still lived. It returned before the man could escape. It sniffed and growled, but the hunter didn’t move. The lion licked the tears running down the man’s cheeks, enjoying the salt.

A stick pricked the man’s back, but he couldn’t move.

Convinced that the man was dead, the lion went down to the lake. When it did, the man sprang up and made his escape, twisting this way and that to confuse the trail.

When he returned to his village he told them that he had been almost killed and that they must wrap him in hartebeest skins so that when the lion came to seek him, he would not be found.

Because they loved him, they did this thing for him, wrapping him in hartebeest skins so that the lion would not find him.

Then the people went about their tasks, as if nothing had happened. The lion came and demanded that they give him the hunter. They refused, and it bit the throat of the closest hunter. They shot it with poisoned arrows, but although it screamed with pain, it would not die.

The village elders cried out that they must give the lion the young hunter
that if they did this it would leave them alone. The people would not do this, for they loved the hunter, who was their son. Many died as the lion raged among them, seeking the hunter. They shot it with arrows and stabbed it, and still it lived. It broke the huts to pieces, and they knew that it was no ordinary lion. It was a
jowk
wearing a lion’s skin.

And the young man knew that he could not let this thing happen any more. He came out from under the hartebeest skin and went to the lion. The lion bit the young man to death, even while the villagers were stabbing and shooting it.

And only then did the lion die.

Frog did not watch the story: he had seen it hands of times before. Leopard Eye was entranced, but Frog was watching the shadows.

For all his days, fire had fascinated Frog, and that interest had not decreased with time. After the others had wandered off to their sleeping places, he placed more wood on the fire, and as it roared he took his spear and fought the shadows. When they moved, he moved, thrusting and parrying until he lost the sense of being a two-legged, until his human mind peeled away to reveal a beast of reflex and instinct.

Then, inspired, he pulled a piece of soft chalk from his pouch and drew a Mk*tk outline on a slab of rock. He attacked the outline, watching the shadow-play as he did. Again and again, tens of tens of strikes, each faster than the one before.

Is this what the hunt chiefs had done? Was this how they had become great? Was there any chance at all that if he wore his flesh to the bone, he might discover some tiny fragment of their wisdom?

His fear mocked him.
It is not enough.
You
are not enough.

But it would have to be enough. Stillshadow had called this placid valley a place
of jowk.
By this she meant spirits who walked the earth. He did not believe in spirits.

But monsters lived. There were monsters behind them. Monsters before them. What choice to make? There was food here and water. Eventually, hunters could not merely hunt. Certainly, the great hunt chiefs had understood this. The last year had taught Frog a frightful lesson:
Eventually, hunters had to fight.

He did not believe in spirits, but fire seemed to him a living thing. The fire folk ate, they slept, they lived and died. Their sparks flew up to the clouds. If there was magic in the world, it would be found in fire.

He fed the fire until it leapt up to lick at him. “Help me,” he asked the fire. “I want what you want: food and shelter and family. Help me.”

The fire folk answered him with their dancing. Their shadows birthed enemies to pit against his speed and skill. And until his strong young body was slack with fatigue, he killed them again and again.

Frog awakened to see T’Cori sitting at the edge of their skins, gazing out across the valley.

“What is it, my love?”

“I was in the dream world,” she said.

“What dream?”

“That I was you. And that I dreamed.”

“You dreamed you were dreaming?” He scratched his head. “That is a strangeness.”

“So many odd things,” she said and nuzzled against him. They passed the night holding each other. Her scent was more dizzying than the magic water had been, and the living warmth of her belly pillowed his weary head.

Despite their lack of sleep, when the sun was finally born along the eastern mountains, neither was tired at all.

Good hunting depended upon fortune, upon the elements of wind and fire serving them. For this, Frog trusted in luck. The others trusted in Great Sky’s goodwill, in the songs and dances of the holy dreamers.