Shadow Valley (22 page)

A place where men and wolves walked side by side.

The
jowk
called to her, promising rest after a lifetime of service. Cloud Stalker was there as well, or whatever
the jowk
might remember of her lover. She remembered him: his strength, his laughter, his moonlight caress. In her bones, she was his woman, his wife, even though he was dead. And she would continue so after her bones were in the ground.

But she could not go home to him until she knew her people were safe. Could not, and would not.

What to do? What to do?

She reached out across the web of soul vines connecting all sleeping two-legged … and came upon a knot of her children, the children of… Fire boma. Something had happened, and they had fled. She was not certain where they were. The dream world was a world of sensation, of emotion, not geography. But for the moment they seemed safe.

To her surprise, among them was Sister Quiet Water.

Ah.
A deep well of pleasure rose in Stillshadow. A lost daughter whose
num-
field felt calm and content, with no shadow of violation or captivity.

This was a good thing, a great thing, a thing to gladden her old heart. And for the rest of the night, they danced the dream together.

Halfway up Great Earth’s tangled slopes, three hands of well-tended huts clustered on a series of flattened terraces. Before the new sun rose above the huts, Sister Quiet Water had already bundled her grass song mat on which she would kneel to sing the sun to life. Her medicine bag held her pellets of herbs and plant extracts.

So many strange turns her life had taken. Mother Stillshadow had taken her into the dream dancers when she had seen eight summers, and there she had thrived. Along with her sisters she had been captured by Mk*tk and endured horror and shame. But Ibandi hunters had rescued her and brought her home.

And now … Mother called to her.

She did not know where she was going, only that she had to walk. And that it would be far, farther than any dream dancer had ever traveled alone.

In most previous times, a hunt chief had accompanied a traveling dancer. But there were no more hunt chiefs. These were different days, a time to change the roles Great Mother and Father Mountain had established for men and women.

And despite whatever unknown dangers lay ahead, joy danced in her heart like sparks in a whirlwind.

Cross-legged and content, Bat Wing sat between the evening fires, enjoying the easy company of his mother and her friends as they laughed and gossiped. The night was crisp and clear, his chin tingled with the sticky juice of roasted gazelle haunch, and all was right with the world.

Then he caught a glimmer of something out of the corner of his eye, and turned to look beyond the shadows. At first the darkness yielded nothing, but he had a slow and growing certainty that he was being
watched.
He experienced the sensation as a creeping of the skin along his neck, an awareness that was like the
num
tremors that Great Sky Woman sometimes spoke of.

To the boy’s shock, Uncle Frog had said he did not believe in such things. That he trusted only what he could touch and taste, see in the sky above him, feel in the earth below.

But what, then, was this strange certainty?

Might the fire children have something to say to him? Listening, he heard only the crackle of the branches.

No. Nothing.

“There is something in the shadows,” Bat Wing said, and his mother, Butterfly, laughed.

“There is nothing in the shadows,” she said. “This is another of your strange dreams.”

“I am awake, Mother,” the boy replied. “And there is something.”

The boy walked away from the firelight. Yes, something lurked out here. The prickle at the base of his neck began to spread, as if he had rolled in poison
vines. What was he doing? This was not his world. He barely knew this world at all. Back at Wind boma north of Great Sky, every stone had been his friend. He knew every lizard, every beetle and its kin, every cactus and sweet bush from root to leaf. But here?

“Hello?” Ten paces away, close to the ground, at first barely distinguishable from the play of light and shadow, was a pale, grublike hand, the shadowy suggestion of a human head. A spill of loose straggly hair, like dead grass, fell across its face.

Bat Wing ran for Frog and the men.

Frog had been smoking a pinch of sleep herb in his bone pipe, its pleasant trill intensifying the warmth radiating from Sky Woman’s thigh, the satisfaction of a full belly and the companionship of fellow hunters. He felt more relaxed than in many, many moons.

Young Bat Wing came running to them with an expression of mingled excitement and anxiety.

He told them what he had seen. Curious but not alarmed, the five men, spears carried erect, ventured to the camp’s edge.

“Come out,” Leopard Paw said.

“Wait,” Frog said. “There is a strangeness here.” In all their years of trading and meeting with other tribes, only the Mk*tk had been disastrous. Even the Spider Face’s people had simply warned them away. As a result, these strangers triggered caution but not panic.

T’Cori stepped forward. “What are you?” she said.

“Sky Woman says there are all kinds of
jowk
alive in the world,” Bat Wing whispered. “Beneath rocks. Behind trees. Lurking in shadows. Perhaps this is one of those?”

Frog chuffed. No. No
jowk.
But was it a threat? That creeping of his skin indicated curiosity more than fear.

T’Cori held out a piece of yam the size of her palm.

A whimpering from behind the rock, and Frog lifted his torch. Then slowly, one chubby limb at a time emerged.

A child, perhaps eight summers in age. The first and most startling thing was that the child’s skin was the color of a fish belly, sickly white. Had the child rolled in chalk?

“So ugly,” Leopard Paw said.

Facial bones were broader and heavier than an Ibandi’s child’s face. Her hair hung limp as clusters of dead vine. Leopard Eye gripped his spear hard. “Mk*tk?”

“No,” T’Cori said. “I knew Mk*tk children … they were not like her. She is much too pale. Paler even than beast-men.”

The firelight reflected from her eyes as they might a cat’s. She even made a mewling sound.

“She is hungry,” T’Cori said.

“How do you know it is a girl?” Bat Wing asked. He himself was not even certain it was human. If it was a
jowk
, and he stared at it too long, mightn’t it slip into his dreams tonight, eat his flesh and steal his skin? But Sky Woman surely knew more than he of such things, and she did not seem afraid.

Frog seemed to take his lead from her, so he did not show nervousness either.

Very well. He, Bat Wing, would not show fear either.

“I know,” she replied.

“Where are her people?” Frog asked.

“I cannot say, but I know she is hungry.” T’Cori took the chunk of yam to the edge of camp, to the firelight’s wavering edge.

“Be careful,” Frog cautioned.

She clucked at him. “You stay back, great hairy beast. Stay back.”

“Nothing to fear,” Snake said. “No one baits a snare with a child.”

The pregnant Sky Woman knelt down, the piece of potato in her hand. In the wavering light of the twin fires, it seemed to Frog that the child’s eyes were almost as pale as her skin.

“She cannot speak,” Leopard Eye said. “She is not even bhan.”

“She is a child,” Sky Woman said, “and alone.”

Frog glared at her.

“Well,” Frog said, “if you’re going to feed her, at least give her something she cannot find for herself.”

He retreated to the men’s fire and returned carrying a chunk of giraffe meat. With the edge of his glassy black knife he cut away a juicy strip and slid it onto a broad green leaf. The other men grinned at him. The Ibandi had traded with bhan and others for generations. The rules of hospitality were clear: a stranger was to be sheltered.

Any other rule would be death for all in an environment as unforgiving as the savannah.

Monsters such as the Mk*tk were the exception, not the rule.

Sky Woman’s eyes closed. Her voice was as soothing as a sleep song. “I know what it is to be alone. If you cannot understand my words, hear my voice.” She spoke as sweetly as if singing to Medicine Mouse.

“I am not your mother,” Sky Woman whispered, “but I am all mothers.
You are not my child, but you are all children. Accept this food and fire, and I will stand between you and harm, as if you were my own. Hear my voice.”

For an instant, their shared gaze wound together as tightly as strangler vines. Then Sky Woman put the food down and backed away.

After the child ate, she made a heap of grasses and vines, and curled up at the campfire’s edge. The child stared at the little hutch where slept the blind but mighty Stillshadow.

There was no sound, no motion, no clue of her presence. Regardless, Stillshadow’s voice rang out strongly. “Who is looking at me?” she called. “What is this child?”

“Sleep, Old Mother,” Sky Woman replied.

“How does she
do
that?” Frog asked.

Sky Woman shook her head. “The
jowk
sees everything. She speaks to
the jowk.”

Sky Woman watched the child, her thoughts unknown even to herself. “We must protect her.”

“It is not ours,” Leopard Eye said.

Stillshadow spoke. “The wind blows, a leaf moves. Things happen, and things change. Light and shadow, sound and echo.”

“What is this?” Frog asked.

Sky Woman raised her hand. “She says that we must treat this child as one of our own.”

Leopard Eye remained unconvinced. “But who can say how her people would treat one of ours?”

“Yes. Who can say? Let us show the way. I say this child is bhan … but human. And that she is under our protection, as long as we have shelter to give.”

Frog and T’Cori did not retire to their lean-to that night. Although it was cooler on the valley’s rim than on the floor, their shared body heat and proximity to the twin fires kept them warm.

She had been unable to stem the excitement she felt building up inside her while watching the sleeping child.

“What is it?” Frog asked.

“I look at her, but see myself,” she said. “Alone. Always I was alone, even surrounded by my sisters.”

Frog scoffed as he carved bamboo slivers from the point of his spear. “Surely not true. None of us can live alone. It is not our nature.” Earlier he had made a small fire, and let it burn out. The glowing coals were perfect,
turning the spear point into a solid mass, more effective in the kill. He toasted it over the coals, watching for the tip to brown and little curls of pungent smoke to rise.

“Still.” The night wind was warm, but T’Cori shivered as she considered the sleeping child. “That is the way it felt.”

“I think her people are kind,” he said. The spear was smoking a bit. He pulled it back, blew on it, and then began heating it again.

“How can you know this?”

“Because Great Mother makes most humans kind. And because she trusted us,” he said. “Trust is learned, and easily broken. If her people had beaten or raped her, she would not have come to us so easily. Or if her people told her strangers are evil. Look how she rests. She smiles as she dreams.”

“All children should sleep so,” she said.

“We will protect her,” Frog said.

“Yes,” T’Cori said, “we will.”

“Because you say so?”

“Yes. Because I say so.” She laughed. But there was something there, a truth considered but unsaid, a new Life Tree’s first green sprout.

They did not have long to wait for the next startling thing. The next morning, before the camp was fully awakened, before the child had stirred, three very strange males appeared at the camp’s edge, accompanied by two equally strange females. They were pale as grubs, shorter and wider than Ibandi. When their lips pulled back, their teeth were square and blunt and impressively gapped. They wore loincloths and leather sandals with leather straps laced up their calves and thighs, and a sort of chest covering made of a zebra or deer skin with a hole for their heads. They carried spears at their sides, but upright, as hunters meeting hunters, not with tips low, as if confronting enemies.

They halted ten paces away, as if waiting for the Ibandi to say or do something.

All that made sense to Frog. The child’s weak skin had prepared the Ibandi for such strangeness. What made him slap his own face was the impossible vision of three shaggy black wolves walking at their sides.

He remembered the odd footprints, the mingled imprints of men and animals. Those tracks had been the same depth in the same dried mud, suggesting that they had been made at the same time. But men might have been hunting wolves, mightn’t they?

He knew now that all his clever reckoning had been in vain.

Male or female, two-or four-legged, all were silent. The child ran to them, braying in words he did not understand.

“What are they?” T’Cori asked.

Frog shrugged. “Never have I seen the like. Ugly. No color, like a cobra’s belly. Surely they are the child’s people.”