Shadow Valley (21 page)

“Like all others.” Gazelle Tears smiled. “Wrinkled and ugly and beautiful.”

“What do you best remember about me?”

She hesitated, searching her memory. “You’d had five summers,” she said. “It was a cool evening. The east wind rattled the walls. We built the fires high that night. You were asleep when I laid my head down, but I awoke to find you gone.” Her eyes widened. “So frightened I was! I thought that perhaps a jackal had wiggled under the wall and clamped his stinking teeth onto my son. I went out looking, and found you by the fire.”

“What was I doing?”

“‘Making friends with the fire people.’” She cackled. “That is what you said. You said that you could talk to them.”

Frog pressed his lips against his son’s warm, smooth skin. His boy-child. His son. A boy to teach to walk. To talk. Perhaps to see faces in the fire.
Please, if there is anything out there to hear, let my son see the faces.

For now there were two, Frog Hopping and Bat Wing. Let there be one more. Perhaps this thing, this strange sight, was like a fire. If only one man possessed it, it was a spark. Two, a flame flickering in the wind.

But three …

Three might grow into a blaze.

Curls of peppery steam wafted from the fist-sized chunk of giraffe meat T’Cori carried to Stillshadow. When she carried the mat of folded leaves into the lean-to, the old woman was curled on her side beneath a straw roof, muttering to
the jowk
, her gnarled face shrunken and withdrawn.

If she knelt, her head brushed the lean-to’s straw roof. Still, it was wider than most, the ground draped with skins and scattered with Stillshadow’s possessions: medicine bags, her ritual drum, a walking stick, bones for casting.

Sing Sun sat beside Stillshadow, busy scraping white fibrous fatty tissue from an ibyx hide with a flat rock. Beside her was a chunk of a young palm trunk the length of her forearm, already mostly hollowed.

A new drum?

T’Cori passed the meat beneath Stillshadow’s nose, and after a few such passes her mentor took it.

She gnawed on it a bit, and then handed it back. “It hurts my teeth,” Stillshadow said. “I did not want the others to see, but it is hard for me to chew now.”

T’Cori understood. Without a word, she chewed the meat thoroughly, and then spit the gob into Stillshadow’s palm, and repeated this process until Stillshadow emitted a low, contented belch.

T’Cori beamed with pride.

“Giraffe meat is good,” her teacher said. “Did I tell you of my dream?”

“You have shared many dreams, Mother,” T’Cori said.

“This one was of women with long, spotted necks.”

“Did you see the valley?”

Stillshadow frowned. “I do not remember. But I saw a wall of fire.”

“Ah,” T’Cori said, brightening. “Frog was almost burned. That may be what you saw. But the long-necked women …” She chewed at the inside of her mouth. “Women … giraffes …” She shook her head. “Are we to be eaten?”

“If your men are good lovers, yes.” Sing Sun cackled, and the three women dissolved into mirth.

It felt good, better than T’Cori had felt in many days, or even moons. “I need your help,” she said to the old woman. “I need to know what to do now, to make this place our home.”

For a time T’Cori thought that Stillshadow had wandered too far into the dream world, but then the old woman spoke. “The drum,” she said. “We need to bless Sing Sun’s drum.”

“A drum,” T’Cori said. “What songs would this drum need?”

“We will need to be wise and clever and swift in this new place. Here, we will need the rabbit song.”

“Why that?”

“To be careful in a new place. Quick and clever—but not too brave,” the old woman whispered. “Sometimes, caution is more important than courage. When the mountain died, we struggled to heal our people. I have thought of many things we did not try. And one of them is the rabbit song.”

“You fear the gods have died?”

Stillshadow ignored the question. “I fear that we have traveled so far, and for so long, that we have broken our soul vines, that which connects us to the
jowk.
When I drum, my vine grows strong.

“The drumming is a way to find Great Mother within me. A way to speaking with Her. I must honor the
tree jowk
and the animal who gave her skin. The drum will teach us from the moment we sit down and touch it, speak to it, dance with it. My eggshell thickens and all my demons rise: I forget that tomorrow comes and want everything today. I want to believe that all that is wrong in the world is caused by others, not me. Never me. I am the great Stillshadow.” Her mouth twisted in grim humor. “As a girl, I believed I could make something that could not be improved. But in my heart I feared that I could not be what my people needed me to be, that I could not fulfill my dream self. I feared that others might be better than me, and I hated them for it.”

“Hate?” T’Cori asked, startled. “Mother, you feel such things?”

The old woman gave a brief, humorless bark of laughter. “Do you think that I did not hate when I heard what the Mk*tk did to you? That I did not fear, knowing that I must have been a very bad teacher?”

To that, T’Cori had no answer.

“I had every eye upon me. I could not be tired or angry or less than perfect. I could not be afraid. But all of us fear, my daughter. All creatures of flesh feel fear. But the children need to feel that there is someone too strong for fear to control.”

T’Cori sat beside Sing Sun and ran her fingers along the palm trunk’s grooved bark. Looked inside. The work of hollowing it out was half done, and she set herself to scraping out more of the wood pulp with a flat, sharp-edged rock. Time passed, and she lost herself in the light, pleasant trance induced by sacred work.

Sing Sun broke her trance. “Mother, are you sure this is the skin you wish?” She seemed to choose her next words carefully. “Did you … know it has a hole in it?”

“And you do not?” The old woman cackled. “Our holes make us what we are. Holes help you remember that only Great Mother can make a perfect thing. It keeps us from becoming proud.

“You will never find the perfect tree. And yet, all trees are perfect.”

“How—” T’Cori caught herself and shook her head. “There is so much to learn. I will try to understand.”

Stillshadow took the drum from T’Cori’s hands. “We must open ourselves to the drum’s spirit. Its spirit is the spirit of the deer or oryx or the tree, whatever flesh and bone the drum is made of.” She set it between her knees, and began to slap. Her hands were a dancing blur. “When the drum moves your hands, you forget everything except the music and the sound. Great Mother’s children are not spirits. Not gods. There are things we cannot do, must not even try.

“But to change anything, to do anything, to teach anything, I must go deeply inside myself. In the womb we hear the beat of our mother’s heart. It is where we … and all rhythm … begin.”

Although blind and seemingly near death, Stillshadow tapped and slapped a rhythm so rich and alive that the three of them swayed where they were seated. Magic! T’Cori watched the blinding-fast play of her hands, switching from flat to fingertips in a twinkling.

Now slow. Now quick. Now like water, and then fire and then the steady beat of the earth. With a flicker, it elevated into wind.

Stillshadow might have barely enough strength to walk, but her drumming humbled them all.

Now each hand moved at a different tempo.
Bah-bah-ba-bah!
“It was Cloud Stalker who mastered this,” she said. “He taught me a bit, but there is a way of drumming that is a men’s thing. I could never have drummed as he did. All the leaping and tumbling about! Hah!” She chuckled to herself, warmed by the memory.

“Great Mother gave us the drum. When men drum, they are rooting themselves, bringing the energy from their heads down into the earth. Drumming opens the feminine. When I drum, my soul vine roots into the
ground. Drumming creates balance, and I am both grounded in Great Mother and connected to Father Mountain.

“The drum connects us to the truth
of the jowk
, the faceless face of all living things. We are one voice and we are all one. Fear disconnects us; drumming dissolves the fear.”

Her hands fluttered. Now T’Cori no longer saw her wrinkled flesh, the wizened body ready to return to the earth. Stillshadow seemed wind, water,
fire, jowk
unfettered by flesh.

“A drum is passion. It burns at your touch. The drum seeks you, every bit as much as you seek the drum. If you make the drum with your whole
num
, the connection is there. Feel it tremble like the heart of a deer; hold the drum over your heart and direct the healing
num
toward the muscle that protects and holds your love.

“Each animal that gives its skin to the drum has its own medicine,” she said. “Oryx medicine comes from the west. They are the thunder beings, wind
jowk
, water
jowk
and fire
jowk
dancing together. Oryx gives the stamina to stay the course and heal our hearts. It goes deep to our core, our guts, where we remember all we learned as children.

“Oryx helps us release tears, which heal and let us grieve our losses. Oryx helps us release to the world above Father Mountain.”

Her words wove a trance. T’Cori felt her sense of time slipping away, the dream world slipping closer by the moment.

“But that would mean the void is closer to the hunt chiefs,” her mentor’s liquid voice continued. “Our hunters tear their flesh while hunting. How can you ask an animal to die for you if you are not willing to lay down your own life? The hunter hunts not only giraffe and antelope and pig.” Her voice dropped to a rumble. “He hunts
death itself.
Not as an ending but as a new beginning. Drumming with oryx keeps us grounded in our
num—
our center, our power.”

“And what of the deer?” Sing Sun asked. “My drum uses the skin of a deer.”

“Deer medicine touches and heals our hearts—the medicine of the north: the red road and the path of the heart. When we are healing our heartbreaks, or opening the heart and learning to speak from the heart, drumming with deer is powerful medicine. Deer will open you to your heart’s true dream.

“We make each drum with love, respect and prayer. We offer smoking herbs to the
jowk.
Our hunters bring us their kills. We strip the skins and scrape them. Then we look through all the hides and select only the finest for our drums.”

“How do we make this special thing?” Sing Sun asked. “I never learned such wonder.”

“All dream dancers and hunt chiefs make drums, and then the drums go out to the bomas. Each boma made its own drums, and some were wonderful, but always, those made by the dancers and chiefs were the best.

“I think this is a new time,” Stillshadow said. “Call your sisters Flower and Morning Thunder. Call all who have will and heart. Now, from this day forward, every Ibandi woman must learn to dance.”

On their third day, Frog and his uncle Snake went exploring along the valley floor, seeking better camping space. And a quarter-day’s walk from their old site, Frog saw something that made him stop and stare.

Human tracks. Not Ibandi, though. The thick toes and broad forefoot were strange enough, but even more oddly,
wolf
tracks mingled with the human.

He knelt beside them. Sniffed them. Ran his fingers around the rim. His narrowed eyes scanned the trees and grass. Old hunters said their grandfathers had told tales of spirits in Shadow Valley.

He did not believe such stories, but what to make of this? Wolves that walked like men? Men that became wolves? “It is a new thing,” he said.

“You and your ‘new things,’” Snake said. But despite his mockery, his single good eye glittered. He crumbled a bit of mud from the man’s tracks between his fingers. And then a bit from the wolf’s. “I would say they were made the same day. But that doesn’t mean they were made at the same
time.”

“No,” Frog admitted, “it does not.”

But his mind saw men with wolf legs, and wolves with men’s feet. And his heart doubted what his mind thought it knew of the world.

Stillshadow dreamed. In that dream she hovered above the lake of living fire, the
jowk.
And that fire consumed the things and people she loved. They cried out to her as they were melted and created and melted again and again.

However many years the most benevolent gods might grant one of their human children, not enough time remained for her, or anyone, to fix the world. Because the Mk*tk had taken her, T’Cori now doubted her own magic. Sing Sun had never had much sight, and Blossom … poor Blossom had had none. The sisters she had traveled to join had little more.

The old ways were dying, the new ones not yet born.

What else was there? What could she do? This was a new place, where food was so plentiful their prey almost walked up to them and begged for death. What new rituals might it call forth?

A rounded valley, green when the grass outside its walls were said to be brown. Where water sparkled, while outside the streams ran muddy.