Shadow Valley (5 page)

Curled onto her side, blood-slimed fingers clutching her belly, Hot Tree’s dying eyes reflected the flame from the huts and boma walls. She heard Snail Crawling Backward scream for his father. His mother. Anyone.

No one.

She closed her eyes, praying as her grandson’s howls dissolved into grunts of pain and terror.

Pleading for Father Mountain to take her, Hot Tree lived to hear her sisters, wrists lashed together, wail as the Mk*tk’s flaked rock knives stripped meat from their men’s bones.

She lived to see the Mk*tk leader, a blunt-faced giant with two finger stumps marring his left hand, raise his bloodstained arms to the moon. She lived to hear her people’s thick, wet sobs die to silence.

Only then, after everything she loved had turned to dust, did her broken heart end its dance.

The sky swam with stinking black smoke, Flat-Nose’s solemn tribute to God Blood. As leader of his clan it was his responsibility to see that his people’s every action, every deed was right in the eyes of He who had vomited forth the world.

Their deeds would be woven into Flat-Nose’s death song, the tale he had composed his entire life. It was a bleeding tattoo etched into his victims’ bruised skins, designed to carry their souls to God Blood. If the forces of night found a man’s story to be good, then the terrible one might choose Flat-Nose’s flesh as a special, succulent meal at the end of days.

Surely, God Blood would approve of this: slaughtered weaklings, sobbing females taken for pleasure and work. Young grubs peeled and staked for the vultures.

The hot air reeked of flesh and flies. Jackals and crows circled as the Mk*tk departed, driving the howling women before them. The Ibandi
women’s anguish was a beautiful thing, but he did not want them to lose all hope. A single woman might even be allowed to escape, to give the others spirit, spirit that Flat-Nose and his men might then relish shattering. Thin boned and small they were, but if they were like his third wife, Dove, they were ready and eager to learn what a true male demanded of a female. And, in time, their supple backs and buttocks would yield all that was required.
That
was the true nature of the female, something these weaklings seemed not to understand.

They would find Flat-Nose an excellent instructor.

Not one Mk*tk dared looked back. Although brave beyond the ability of an Ibandi to conceive, there were limits: it could blast the body and soul for mere mortals to watch God Blood at feast.

In T’Cori’s dream, a green creeper vine as long as the horizon stretched between the peaks of Great Earth and Great Sky. She was a ring-tailed monkey climbing hand over hand across that divide. But when only halfway across, arms rose up, like the arms of beast-men who had clutched at her in the sacred caves. They pulled her down, and as they pulled, she changed from a monkey to a woman once again, and the beast-men transformed into Mk*tk.

And they did to her what they had done in hands of hands of other dreams, on ten tens of other nights.

T’Cori blinked her eyes open and was born into darkness.

Medicine Mouse had rolled against her hard, restless in his sleeping space between her and Frog. His soft, warm mouth sought her nipple in vain. Her milk had not yet come down. Today she would have to take the boy to her adopted sister Ember, who produced milk enough for Fire Ant’s daughter and Mouse as well.

But for now, the tiny slack body, eyes closed, mouth open, smelled of last night’s liquid supper. And T’Cori reassured herself that the perils of the dream world did not always follow men and women into the world of flesh.

“
Whaaat?”
Frog’s voice was groggy as he pushed himself up.

“Dreams.”

Frog nodded. “I know. Every night I see death.”

“Mk*tk?”

He nodded.

“Every night,” she said, “I dream they push at my body They take what is not mine to give.”

He pressed his lips to her forehead. “What you have, no one can steal.” He rose, grasping his spear near the point.

She did not have the heart to protest his blasphemy or mourn his blindness. Whatever he was not, whoever he was not, she needed him and so did her people.

“Train hard,” she said. “When I close my eyes, I see blood.”

By the time most hunters crawled out of their lean-tos, Frog had already painted a human outline upon a tree trunk. Before others had wiped the sleep from their eyes, the calluses on his palms were already hot and raw.

He thrusted, changed positions and poked again with a twisting of wrist and arm, imagining the spear tip digging its way through muscle.

As the others prepared themselves for the day’s walk, they scratched their heads as he thrust and gouged his spear into the pitted wood until his hands bled and his strong young body gleamed with sweat. Frog shut the gawkers out of his mind. He did not see the surrounding termite mud hills, or a berry juice outline on the tree trunk. His eyes saw only snarling horror and the death of hope.

“What are you doing?” Leopard Paw asked from a few safe paces distance.

Frog’s tree was a spear’s throw away from where most Ibandi were encamped, near the forest of chest-tall, orange-brown termite mounds. When his foot brushed one of the insect trails, he paused to shake a few six-leggeds off his heel.

“Practicing,” Frog said.

“Why?”

“A dream.”

“Well,” Leopard said, “the tree looks very fierce.” The hunters laughed.

Frog did not let their mockery touch him. One day they would understand. That day of truth terrified him as no previous imagining ever had, but he could not shut the fear away. Not this time. That had been his tactic through much of his life. This time, he would turn fear into skill.

When the other hunters drifted away, Snake remained, watching, fingers twisting his thin beard. “I watch you train. You were not seeing boars or lions in your mind. You saw men.”

“If Mk*tk
are
men,” Frog replied. He stepped sideways, then stabbed and slashed the tree from a new angle as if it had threatened Medicine Mouse.
He dreamed of Mk*tk. T’Cori dreamed of Mk*tk. When two dreamed as one … only a fool could deny that tomorrow and today were bleeding into each other. “Are they?” he asked. “Are they men?”

“Whether or not they are men, they are horizons behind us.” Snake seemed genuinely confused. “We walk
away
from them!”

“Perhaps,” Frog said, “they run to meet us. What then?”

“I don’t know,” Snake said.

“I do,” Frog said. “And I have thought about this.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Snake, in your days with the hunt chiefs, what secrets did you learn?”

“Many dances,” he said, “and ceremonies. I remember so little.”

“Try harder.” Frog leaned on his spear. Sweat dripped from his forehead and in the dirt like summer’s first raindrops. “I say we talk to Still-shadow, ask if she remembers the hunt chief’s dances. Or anything we might use against the Mk*tk. If we don’t know more than we did, and we meet them in years to come …”

Snake shook his head. “But they are
behind
us!”

Frog gazed up at the clouds. Shapes. Faces. Still. Moving. At one time or another, he had seen everything he had ever known in the sky … and some sky forms he had never seen in the real world at all. For instance, the face of his father—said to be broad and strong like Fire Ant’s but with wider eyes. Frog wished he could have seen his father’s face, felt his kiss, just once.

Snake had tried to fill that void, and could not. Perhaps his flesh father would not have been able to see the faces and creatures in the clouds, either, or known the voices of the fire people.

In Frog’s dreams, his lost father could do those things and more.

This was not fair. Snake was all he had, and Snake wanted to follow Frog. Snake, his elder, should have dispensed wisdom. Frog had never wanted any of this.

All he had wanted was family, water, a warm fire, a good hunt and a safe night’s sleep.

Frustrated, Frog screamed his reply. “How can we know what is out there, waiting for us? We cannot. And so we must be ready, or they will eat our children.”

Snake’s single good eye squinted. “You really believe this?”

“Yes,” Frog said, “I do. Sky Woman says that there will be blood.”

Snake bowed his head. Then he lifted his chin, opened his eyes and looked up. “I think the Mk*tk are far behind us, but I trust you, my son, and will prepare for what lies ahead.”

From day to day, no one knew what meat the hunters might bring. The women had to be prepared for anything. Today, gathering was more successful than hunting: finding a trove of yams and tubers with a thick, fine yellow flesh.

Using a flattened rock, T’Cori scraped out a hole as deep as her forearm. She crosshatched brush carefully, struck sparks into kindling and nursed her fire to life, rolling stones into the pit while the flames still crackled. After they died down she laid leaves and grass on the stones, sprinkled some water, then laid down the yams. On top of them she lay more grass, sprinkled more water, then more grass and a thick coating of earth, leaving the yams to cook.

As a dream dancer, she was more familiar with the medicinal qualities of plants and animals than their value as food. But all Ibandi women knew how to convert any edible living thing into a nourishing meal, if not a feast. She missed the easy comfort of her days walking Great Earths slopes, plucking thistle top, boar weed, and crowfoot. Those spices were good to chew raw or add twisty flavor to a stew.

Blossom had taught her the best way to prepare wildebeest: singe them, gut and scrape them, then stuff the carcass with hot stones. The carcasses would then be rolled atop a burnt-down fire and sizzling ashes heaped on top.
Great Mother! Her
mouth watered at the memory.

Dear lost Small Raven had loved ostrich. They had been in conflict over many things but had shared happy days preparing the great birds for feast— plucking and filling them with smoking stones, leaves and even their own feathers—laughing and singing as they alternated layers of leaves and feathers and ashes atop a stuffed bird so that it roasted from within and without. The aromatic smoke rose all the way to Great Mother’s peak, carrying their spirits.

Creatures eaten with love surely rose to the top of the mountain, to play the games of love and hunt again and again through all the seasons to come.

These days, T’Cori usually made do with a few yams and an occasional bird. Her hands shook as she prepared a scanty meal, and it was impossible for her not to think of smoked porcupines and opossums, ducks roasted in mud balls, strips of iguana meat roasted or stretched in the sun, mussels and crayfish and ostrich eggs cooked in glowing coals or hot ashes.

T’Cori remembered the splash of cold stream water against her thighs as she and her sisters beat the river with hides, driving fish toward the nets. Hearing the water-children squeal and cry with fear like scaly birds.

What wonderful times those had been!

She smeared tears away with the back of her hand.
No.
Such memories would break her, and she had no right to break. She must be strong. More than strong. To be anything less than Great Sky Woman, the hope of her people, would be a complete betrayal.

T’Cori was so absorbed in her work that when a gray-haired man touched her shoulder, she hadn’t even realized he had been waiting behind her. Her visitor was stooped now. Her medicine woman’s eyes told her his bones ached, but she knew he never complained, and he never walked in the rear.

He was Water Chant, her father, the man who had abandoned her as a child. The coarsely knotted hair above his narrow face had faded to white. She had heard that he had once been the strongest, fastest hunter in Water boma. She had never known him, had not even suspected that he still lived, until he came to her just before the Ibandi left the shadow of Great Sky, pleading for her forgiveness.

Forgiveness she had given happily.

“I would have words,” he said.

“Of course,” T’Cori answered. For a moment she considered adding
father
, but in the time it took for the thought to form, the moment flew.

“In days past,” Water Chant said, “our speaking shamed my heart. Once upon a time I feared my daughter’s blindness, blindness I now know was a sight beyond my own. I know my sin cost your mother her life in childbirth. Great Mother has never let me love again.”

T’Cori did not want him to say these things, did not want to open that pathway. She knew that lurking at its end was the lonely girl she had once been. Like the kernel of an ancient baobab, that child would always live within her. That girl had often dreamed that somewhere, someone loved her as a father or mother loved a child, and would hold her close and call her precious.

With nothing and no one to fill that void in her life, only Great Mother and Father Mountain offered solace.

She honored Water Chant but could not love him, and she hoped he would never ask if she did.