Shadow Valley (2 page)

In the eyes of the Ibandi, Stillshadow was Great Mother incarnate. The old woman’s voice held the songs, her feet taught the dances. In former days she had walked the Circle once a year, bringing medicines and knowledge, knitting Earth, Wind, Fire and Water bomas together. She healed, dreamed names for their children and in the ripeness of time brought talented girl children into the ranks of the dream dancers.

Hot Tree cupped a handful of soil in her hands. “Things are not as they were before Great Sky died.” The earth trickled out between her fingers. “Heaven and earth are far apart. It is said that in the last days, old bones will dance again. Boar Tracks says the hunters have seen
… things
on Great Sky.”

Night Song asked, “What manner of things?”

“Thorn Cloud told me that a ghost roams the slopes.” Once, such a thing would have been unthinkable. But that was another time, before so much death and fear. Before the shape of the world had changed. Surely, power great enough to reshape a mountain could split the thorn walls separating life and death. “Perhaps it is a hunt chief’s spirit.”

“Then heaven’s gates have opened,” Night Song said.

The air seemed to take on a deeper chill. If heaven’s walls were breeched, might not hell’s gape as well? Good men went to Great Sky. But beneath the earth, locked behind Great Mother’s protective arms, demons raged, devouring the souls of evil men.

Through tufted grass, across soil not much richer than sand, a hand of Ibandi walked single file toward the horizon. Far to their left, the sun was dying.

Three walked with the grace and confidence of hunters. Leopard Eye and Leopard Paw were tall, lean young men who shared the same face, twins who had been raised together in Water boma. The third, Rock Knife, had come to manhood in Earth boma. The Leopard twins were the only surviving sons of Stillshadow, the head dream dancer. For two moons they had been their mother’s primary guardians. Walking by her side was Sky Woman, the girl some still called T’Cori—a name that was actually no name at all. The root word,
Kori
, meant a void, an empty space.

The old woman called Stillshadow leaned upon a bamboo spear haft and stepped as if her hips were as fragile as eggshells. She raised her withered hand, a sign for stillness and silence. She squatted, her dusty heels raised high. Stillshadow stirred around in the dirt with her fingertips, and closed her eyes.

For many breaths the three hunters watched the dream dancer. They slowed their breathing, pulling it down to their stones to cool their impatient blood. At long last, the gray-hair stirred from her trance.

“What did you see?” Leopard Eye asked. His hands were knobby, his mouth broad and smiling even in repose. Quick to laughter and slow to rage, he was generally thought the best hunter of the men who had followed Frog Hopping and Great Sky Woman on their trek north. Most of them were now to the northeast, traveling toward their next resting place.

Stillshadow, Sky Woman and their escorts had gone to the west, seeking visions. They would catch up with their people tomorrow night perhaps. Or the day after. The walking families would find a camping ground, then wait for them. Two tens of tens of families left a very clear trail.

Neither brother had been raised by their flesh mother or father. As with all dancers’ male offspring, they had been raised by Stillshadow’s cousins and siblings.

“What do you see?” echoed Rock Knife, shortest of the three.

“Thirst,” Stillshadow groaned, eyes still closed tightly.

“You see what I feel.” Leopard Paw scratched his side, plucking out a little purple itch-thorn between the thick nails of his thumb and first finger. “Is there water? Plants to draw the leaf-eaters? My belly wants meat.” He slapped his stomach. For the last two moons they had traveled endlessly, never spending more than a few days in any one place. Stillshadow said the ancestors demanded this sacrifice in exchange for future happiness.

“Quiet, now.” T’Cori sniffed the air. She stood, spread her arms wide and turned in a slow circle. Her eyes, ears and nose absorbed hands of hands of scents and sights and sounds. The breeze swam with mint and fire cactus. Click beetles mated in the tall grass, burring with pleasure as their love made new life. The air chilled as clouds shaded the sun.

T’Cori crouched on her hands and knees, hovering in trance, a gift of the plant children and her endless years of breath control, prayer and sacred dance. With their help, she could see through the world of men into that of dream, and perhaps even into the
jowk
itself.

Her gaze shifted to her mentor, lost in her own visions. Her
num.
, the field of living light surrounding Stillshadow’s body, flared. For one brief moment it seemed bright and clear enough to transform night into day.

“There,” the old woman said at last, pointing to the east. “I will find my answer there.”

They walked a time, until after a quarter-day they heard hiccoughs of baboon laughter floating through the yellow grass. Stillshadow stood, one hand pressed to the small of her back. Her face flattened with pain but then regained a dignified calm as she walked toward the chuckles.

“Careful!” Leopard Eye called. “There is much danger.”

“For you, my son. But then,” she reminded him, “baboons do not like leopards.”

T’Cori shook her head. “Mother …”

The great dreamer grinned. “It will be good. Look.” Stillshadow knelt and brushed the earth with her fingertips. The soil was torn, speckled with
blood and bits of bone. “Something bad happened here. What do you see?”

“I don’t know. …”

“This is not a
knowing
thing,” the old woman replied. “It is a thing to
see.
”

T’Cori closed her eyes. Freed from vision, her mind caught memories like fish in a net. At such times it seemed that she could touch yesterday, and the yesterdays before that.

And then she saw.

The baboon troop had spent a long, lazy day eating dates and lean dry-season grasshoppers. As the wind shifted, three brown-backed males at the outskirts caught a strong sour meat-eater scent. They growled and barked. The rest of the troop crouched low, submitting to them completely. The females grabbed their young and fled to the circle’s center. The younger bucks gathered around the females and their pups and bared their teeth, snarling.

The leopard’s belly had sharp teeth. The rains had not fallen in moons, and as the water holes dried, the flesh she so desperately needed had wandered far.

The two or three big bucks moved around the outer edge of the troop, pacing back and forth, eyes fixed on the starving cat. The troop did not panic or run away. In other days, the leopard might have avoided baboons, but this was not one of those days. Baboon was juicy and delicious. Emboldened by hunger the leopard was at the height of her strength and power and aggression.

She advanced. The three big bucks, followed by several younger shaggy brown males, scrambled to meet her.

T’Cori blinked as she finished her dream of torn branches, footprints, and bloody soil. “I have seen this before,” she said. “Baboons are smaller than leopards, but … they are many and the leopard is only one. They come from all directions. Look! Only scratched earth and blood remain. Just scraps of bone and fur, flung in all directions. Baboons frighten me. No other monkey acts so.”

Stillshadow stood ten paces from the troop’s edge, not close enough to alarm them. Three males shambled toward her. The old woman stood as motionless as a tree, even when the apes bared their fangs and barked in chorus. She closed her eyes.

The baboons circled her, barked a few more times and then retreated. The troop watched her as she opened her eyes and backed away, watching them the entire time.

“Mother,” T’Cori said when the old woman returned. “Did they … speak to you?” The four-legged made signs any hunter could read. But speech? This would be marvelous beyond even Frog’s imagination.

“I heard them,” Stillshadow replied. “There is game and water—” she pointed north “—beyond the horizon. There. Now come. We will find our people.”

Northeast …

Beneath a swollen skin of deep blue clouds, two tens of tens of Ibandi wandered north. For two moons now, most had looked to their trek father, Frog Hopping, for wisdom. Although he had lived only two tens of summers, they believed his climb up Great Father’s treacherous south face had conferred wisdom beyond mortal years.

Frog was the height of the average Ibandi male but a bit thinner. His head sometimes balanced uneasily on his slender neck. His eyes were exceedingly bright, his hands nimble. Despite his slightness he was an expert climber and hunter. His hair was a mass of tight black coils and a thin thorny beard speckled his narrow cheeks.

Only he and Sky Woman had survived the climb of Great Sky—although to save his honor they had lied and said Uncle Snake had completed it as well. Now Sky Woman shared his hut, and together they led twice ten tens of Ibandi northward to a new life in new lands.

By twos and fives the Ibandi walked behind them, through drought-stunted acacia trees and across cracked riverbeds littered with dead branches and bleached bones.

Once those bones had held flesh, enough flesh to feed their grumbling stomachs.

Bones that had once been living creatures, and that now pointed the way to the death awaiting all men.

“Come!” Frog called over his shoulder. “We shelter before the sun dies.”

A small boy walked near him. The boy was thin, with a bald spot on the right side of his head and bright, questing eyes. Frog knew him as Bat Wing.
The boy and his mother were from the Wind boma. As they walked, the boy studied every bush, every stone, every dung beetle and mantis, his moon face seldom less than merry and inquisitive.

Frog had rarely seen the boy without a smile of welcome or curiosity. Had he himself ever been so light of spirit? Could he ever be again?

Bat Wing glanced back over his shoulder at the ten or so family groups in easy sight. Others were straggling along farther back. “Will we wait for Sky Woman?”

Frog forced himself to shrug. “She will find us.”

Before the sun had moved a finger toward the horizon, they came upon the sparsely grassed banks of a trickling stream. A weeping wattle tree’s spreading branches webbed the ground with shade. Careful to avoid ant nests and sharp rocks, they set their lean-toms and skin rolls for the night.

During rest times, food was shared within and between families. Whether the wanderers originated in Fire or Earth or Wind bomas, all now stood within the same circle, walking toward unknown horizons.

Just before the sun touched the western horizon, Frog went to find his mother, Gazelle Tears. She and his younger brother were on the far side of the shallow bowl chosen for the night’s camping, near a tumble of fallen trees. He had just greeted her when a boisterous shout reverberated through the hills.
“Stillshado w!”
came the cry. “They are back! The dream dancers have returned!”

Worry flew from his heart. “At last.”

His mother squatted at the side of their new fire, feeding it twigs. “You were afraid?” she asked. Time had sharpened his mother’s shoulders and cheekbones. Her hair was streaked with gray but not yet white. Nor had she clipped that hair short as many other Ibandi women do when the loss of their moon-blood signaled entrance to the elders’ circle.

“Of course not.” The lie slipped from his tongue so quickly that he barely tasted it. It would not do to have his people know how heavy his heart grew whenever his love left his sight.

He was soon directed to the stream just south of the camp, where it burbled across mossy green rocks. There he found T’Cori and Stillshadow, filling gourds with fresh water. Game tracks dappled the ground around them. Perhaps this was the place they had sought?

T’Cori smiled up at him, but continued to busy herself with some little game that she and her teacher had been playing. To Frog, that smile had always been like the birth of a new sun.

To some, T’Cori seemed a sparrow. But Frog was not deceived by the long fine bones in her forearms and thighs. She was stronger than any
hunter, any champion of the wrestling circle. Her strength, not his, had carried them to the top of Great Sky.