Shadow Valley (12 page)

Frog and T’Cori sat between the twin fires, watching the play with a shared wistfulness. Not so long ago, they were still children, surrounded by a world that could be brightened by a few moment’s play

Now, they knew that tomorrow would come and might not bring happiness with it.

T’Cori’s face was long. “I fear it did not work the way it should have. My magic was not strong enough.”

“We will hunt,” Frog said. “It is not for you to say if you are strong enough. That is for Great Mother. For Father Mountain.”

“I must raise my
num”
she insisted. “Weave it into a soul vine. Still-shadow was our strength, but now she is blind. There are so many things that we relied on her to do in the dream world.”

“What things?” Frog asked in a quiet voice. She rarely revealed dream dancer mysteries, and he never pressed her.

“She walked the second path,” T’Cori said. “She awakened within the dream. To awaken within the dream gives one the ability to awaken in this world as well.”

“We are not awake …?”

Her eyes went very wide. “I should not have said that. It is a great secret.”

Frog’s teeth toyed with his upper lip. “What manner of worlds do you see? I see this one, and it is all I know.”

“As you have told me, many times.”

“What is it that Stillshadow once did that she can no longer do?” he asked.

“She knows every berry, lizard or fruit. Knows every four-, six-or eight-legged.” T’Cori’s head swam with the memories. She remembered her first climb up the slopes of Great Earth, picking the delicate purple, black-edged morning glories. Only Stillshadow knew where the first would open, its nectar a rare medicine. Stillshadow knew the very day the green berries would turn red. She knew by touch and sight and smell when a blister or boil was ready for cutting.

“All of them have uses,” she said. “Many times we would be walking, and she would suddenly find a new plant with a purple berry to our right. And then a quarter later, a dung beetle rolled away buffalo scat to our left. She knew how to mix berry and crushed beetle to heal fever.”

That comment caught Frog by surprise. “The world is so large … how can you know enough?”

“Not knowing,” T’Cori said.
“Feeling.
Her egg and its fibers embraced the
num
of things, knew how the
jowk
combined to make things useful to men. The butterfly whispers in her ear—”

“Butterfly?”

T’Cori flushed. “Oh! I keep forgetting that you do not know these things.” She looked swiftly to either side, to see if they were being overheard. No one near the trees, no one near the tumbled tan rocks. Then she whispered, “Great Mother was a butterfly.”

Frog sighed. “And Father Mountain is … what? An elephant shrew?”

“A spider.” She poked him with her elbow. “The father of all spiders. Do not jest.”

“I try,” he said. “You do not make it easy.”

She glared at him. “The butterfly teaches her to do these things. She does not speak to me as often or as clearly.”

A pause, and then she added, “And when they do speak to me, they don’t tell me things I want to hear.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Thank you. I have been alone all my life, except Stillshadow. And now … she abandons me.”

“I will not leave,” he said. “T’Cori … forgive yourself. We cannot make the rain fall or the wind blow. Be happy with what we can do.” He brightened.
“See? I begin to sound like you. Does that mean that if we are together long enough, you will begin to sound like me?”

“As long as I do not
look
like you, pig face—” she rubbed her nose against his “—or
think
like you! Look!” She tucked her hands into her armpits, flapped her elbows and cawed like a crow, pointing at the sky “I see cloud people!”

“Where?” Frog said, squinting up into the afternoon sky.

“There! Hawk and Scorpion are wrestling.”

His expression flattened. “You laugh at me.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “laughter is all that stops the tears.”

She pressed against him, tangling their arms and legs together. “You do not see what I see,” T’Cori said. “The world is not rock and wood.”

“What is it, then?”

She sighed. “Wind and fire and sensation. We leave scat, Frog. All men leave sign, wherever we go. All the world’s creatures do this. We are netted in all our yesterdays.”

“There is always tomorrow,” Frog said. “Perhaps you and I will not be there, but the new sun is always born.”

A pause. Over a whistling wind, a hyena’s distant cough. Then: “Will I be ready?”

“Yes,” Frog said.

“You are wise. It must be true.”

“If Stillshadow dies?” Frog asked.

“Then I become chief dancer. It will be my place to go into the cold spaces, to speak to the
jowk.”

“It seems … so dangerous.” He turned his head away. “You may die.”

“And you will not?”

It felt good to laugh at the old, familiar joke. In times like this they were more than a man and woman bonded by family. More than the leaders of a people. They were friends, something unutterably precious. He had family, but aside from T’Cori, no friends at all. “There have not been many smiles of late.” He paused. “I must speak my heart. I do not want my woman to risk herself.”

“Of course not. And that is probably why dream dancers do not marry.”

“Women are to be protected,” Frog insisted. Why did women, the beneficiaries of this principle, so often misunderstand it?

She made a clicking sound at him. “Hunters risk their lives to bring us fresh meat. Is it so strange that your women risk theirs?”

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.”

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.

Sparks fled into the night sky, dying in the darkness. Four hulking figures crouched around a crackling, ragged fire, staring into its dancing light.