Shadow Valley (6 page)

T’Cori took his hand. “I believe you are my father. If that is true, and you are a good man, then I am sure that you did only what Great Mother told your heart to do. Because of you, Stillshadow found and taught me—”

He blinked, holding back tears. “I don’t know why Father Mountain or Great Mother gave you to me. But even if you could not call me father, I think you should know your sisters.”

“Sisters?” She blinked in shock. In all these moons, she had not gone to him and asked if there were brothers or sisters who might have accompanied him. Had she been afraid to ask? To
hope?
Had that been another piece of herself she had abandoned to be Sky Woman?

Just twice ten tens of Ibandi, walking for moons now, and she had not known that her sisters walked among them. What mists had wreathed her mind? What manner of leader was she?

She turned just in time to see two girls approaching along the shallow streambed leading from the camp. From glimpses of her own reflection, she knew they resembled her. Two or three years older, perhaps, with the same high cheekbones, beautiful dark-clay skin. Their hair hung in ringlets instead of braids, but was the same brown as hers, a few shades darker than their eyes. They had slender bodies, with full breasts. Unlike T’Cori, those breasts were exposed: a dream dancer’s sexuality was reserved for Father Mountain’s chosen hunters.

Her sisters could have been her, living different but very familiar lives. Strange. She knew them to be lovely but had never thought of herself in such a way. A clutch of children dangled from their arms and followed at their backs.

Both women noticed her swollen belly, touching it and clucking approval.

“Sisters?” T’Cori repeated, stunned.

Water Chant pointed. “This is Flower, and this—” he said, pointing to the shorter of the two “—is Morning Thunder.”

“Such a strong name,” T’Cori said.

Flower smiled. “She was a very loud baby.”

“Louder than me?” T’Cori asked.

“I think so, yes,” her father said.

The two girls were her people’s future. Great Mother … if her people had any future at all. She could not allow her private terrors to intrude. Had Water Chant waited for her to come to him? She had never done it, nor reached out. Now, Chant had risked his heart to present his daughters, her
sisters
, whom she had never known.

Their eyes welled with wonder and with hope.

Morning Thunder was the first to lose her shyness. “Is it true you are our sister? Could our greatest dancer share our blood?”

Be what they need.
“We all share blood,” T’Cori said.

Disappointment clouded their faces. Swiftly, T’Cori added, “but I think
that we three may be closer than any. We can make our own small circle within the greater one. Bring your food to my fire tonight. We will eat and then walk together.”

And for those words, they gifted her with eager smiles.

By the time Frog returned from his morning exercises, T’Cori and her sisters were laughing and talking like childhood friends.

She met him before he reached their fire, taking his warm, strong hand in hers. “Come,” T’Cori said. “Meet my other family.”

“Family?” Frog protested. “What is this?
I
am your family. The dreamers are your family.” At first she feared he was serious, then saw the mischief a-dance in his eyes.

Ah.
That was
her dear Frog.

“There is more.” She smiled.

“Then let us celebrate more fully,” he said and thumped his spear butt against the ground. “Another miracle!” he called. “Let me bring Little Brook and Wasp and Mouse and call my mother and Ember and Flamingo. It is a good night: our circle has grown again.”

Frog, Uncle Snake and Leopard Eye crouched at the watering hole’s edge. The afternoon sun peeled Frog’s back, the sharp, spiky grass cut his skin and tiny, black gnats sipped the tears from his eyes. Half a moon had passed since T’Cori’s father had revealed her sisters and Stillshadow had declared the reunion a good omen, one promising happy days to come.

In truth, it seemed to Frog that the old woman used
any
opportunity to tell them good days were soon to come. But for once, he wondered if she might be right.

Because here, right before his eyes, was a miracle.

Hands of hands of leopards, lions, ibyx and warthogs lazed sleepily as if all one happy winged, hooved and clawed family. With glazed and groggy eyes they stared at one another, as if barely aware that some were fang and the others flesh.

The pond was the largest they had seen since leaving Great Sky. It might have been fed by rains or perhaps an underground spring. Although there was no sign of a stream leading into it, the waters were deep and clear. Slender trees with broad-leaved branches lined its banks, offering shade. But the water’s source was not what puzzled Frog.

The meat-eaters and the leaf-eaters barely noticed one another, too fascinated by the flies buzzing around their snouts. What matter of dream was
this?
“They lay side by side,” he said. “I do not understand why the lion does not kill the antelope. Are they too tired even to eat?”

Beside him, Uncle Snake had ceased peering stealthily through the grass and was sitting cross-legged in plain sight, scratching the dead skin on the
left side of his face. “I have heard,” Snake said, “that only the hungry lion frightens the antelope.”

“And how does the antelope know the difference?”

“For that—” Snake grinned “—we must ask an old antelope.”

They crept closer. Frog’s belly gnawed at him. For far too long, he had eaten little, save tubers and jerky. Slings had killed birds, and traps had netted moles and monkeys, but it had been moons since a real meat gorging, when sated hunters and their families groaned with bursting bellies, rolling onto their backs to belch and fart thanks to Father Mountain.

And now, as in a starving man’s final dream, meat beyond reason lay within arm’s reach. “What are they doing?”

“Drinking,” Frog said, “and sleeping. Strange, but they seem
happy.”

“Happy?” Snake was dubious. “Perhaps it is not water for men or animals. Perhaps it belongs to the gods, and they will be angry with us.”

Magic.
There, that word. Frog had stood atop Great Sky and had seen nothing. The world he knew contained many things, things that he could not explain, but no gods. And he had been to their home.

Even if he was the only one who knew it, who could or would speak such truth, truth it remained. “We should be careful, I think. Perhaps it takes away the hunger. I have never seen this. It is … a new thing.”

“Like fill grass?” Snake asked. “Is this what you think?”

Frog felt certain. Dark fruit twice as thick as his thumb clustered on the branches and scattered on the ground near the water. “Perhaps. I have never seen that fruit. Perhaps it is like fill grass. It falls in the water, they drink … and their hunger goes.” Hunters used fill grass to kill hunger pangs on long hunts. Not magic, just a gift of the plant people. If this oasis was such a gift, his mind could grasp it eagerly.

The water flowed from his mouth.
Father Mountain
, if this was not a wondrous feast, such a thing had never existed at all!

They crept closer to the tree, spears tilted at the ready. He had never been so close to a lion before, barely three paces from the tip of the killer’s languidly lashing tail. Its sleepy yellow-green eyes blinked at him, but it didn’t move. Hunger, fear and curiosity all battled in Frog’s mind, and curiosity won.

The greenish brown fruit was clustered in bunches along the branches. They plucked several up from the ground, then crept back away while keeping an eye on the drowsy cats.

Once he and his men had retreated to safety, Frog bit through the skin, exposing sweet, pulpy flesh. He nibbled, then gobbled.

“Are you still hungry?” Snake asked after they had waited awhile.

The very word turned his belly into a fist. A sour belch affirmed its emptiness.

“I smelled that,” Snake said. “A good answer. But very bad fill grass.”

“Maybe it is the water.”

Again, they crept up to the pond’s edge and sipped. The taste was a blend of sweet and spoiled, a bit like figs rotting on the ground. Frog wrinkled his nose.

Beside him, Leopard Eye sipped. “It is not good,” he said. Another sip. “But not bad either.”

He lapped some more. Two other hunters crept up next to him and sipped, keeping their eyes on the lions, who merely watched them woozily

Frog’s head felt hollow, his belly snarled and sour. He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes. In the darkness, his heartbeat seemed to slow and deepen. Around him, sounds seemed both muffled and intensified.

Around him, his fellows were drinking the water, laughing, joking, as if casting aside moons of worry and woe. Laughter bubbled up from deep within him, and he could not stop it. The world behind his closed eyes began to whirl. He remembered being a boy, spreading his arms and spinning around and around until he tumbled to the ground, the world atilt, nothing in all creation save giggles and soft grass.

He was that child again. He felt
… good.

“I am a great hunter!” Leopard Eye called. Frog opened his eyes to see his friend slapping both broad hands on his muscular chest. “Yowwww!”

A spotted gazelle lurched clumsily to its feet, staggering a few steps before its front legs folded. It collapsed onto its side, thick saliva bubbles welling from the corner of its mouth.

The hunters roared with laughter and beat on their chests. They ran and fumbled and tumbled as if their legs had fallen asleep.

Leopard thumped down beside Frog, his face alight with a huge and foolish grin. “I must tell them!” Leopard Eye said, his voice slurred. “I will run and tell them all of this great thing. This great, sacred, wonderful thing.”

Leopard Eye pushed himself up and stumbled off toward the east. Frog smiled. A miracle indeed.

Now
this
was a new thing!

By the time that others arrived, dragging Stillshadow on her sled, T’Cori at her side, most of the animals had wobbled away, annoyed if not alarmed by the raucous humans.

Stillshadow sipped and wrinkled her nose. Then she drank more greedily. After a while, she was heel walking in slow circles, chanting and singing
to herself. She raised her wrinkled arms. “I foresaw this place,” she declared. “This is the place of my vision.”

“We have meat!” Snake crowed. An ibyx hung loosely across his shoulder, its slashed throat drooling blood onto the ground. “We have meat! It did not even try to run!”

Stillshadow raised her hands to the clouds, the loose flesh sagging from her arms’ undersides. Her eyes were as bright as a child’s. “Of all signs that you might have given us, this is the strangest and surest.”

The people ate and drank and danced, shouting up at the half-moon. Those with no partners pranced with their shadows. “This place could be our new home.” Frog said, watching as they hooted and pranced.

“Let us make camp,” Stillshadow said. “Perhaps Great Mother will give us signs.”

“There is meat here,” Frog said, “and the magical water. What greater sign could there be?”
Oh
, he thought,
why not call it magic?
If anything had ever deserved the name, this was it. And if it was not magic, if it was some wonderful gift of earth or sky, where was the harm in letting the others believe it divine?

T’Cori pointed northwest. “I saw that ridge in my vision. Beyond it grazed antelope and warthogs.”

Frog closed his eyes and whirled off into a private world. Three human figures congealed out of the chaos. His heart leaped and his eyes burned with tears. This day, this precise
moment
, was the very best of his life.

“Brothers,” Frog said, gazing out over the cactus trees, the sand and brush and heat shimmer from which the flesh of his flesh and heart had emerged.
Scorpion. Hawk Shadow.
“Fire Ant. Do you see me? Am I what our people need me to be?”

For a moment his brothers’ ghosts danced over the sand. That vision dissolved into heat mirage and then condensed into new dark forms as nine men approached in three lines of three.

Frog squinted. Who could these be? He could not trust his eyes but thought that it might be the dead hunters from the Mk*tk wars, from the time of Great Sky’s climbing. Perhaps the gates of heaven had opened. Perhaps their loved ones were returning from the place beyond death. Would not such a miracle signal that this was their promised land, a home in which their people would not merely rest but root, grow and bear new fruit?

What would he say to Hawk Shadow, who had been exhausted in the climb, remaining behind as others had scaled the peak? How could Frog
ever explain that they had tried to return in time, only to find Hawk’s wolf-ravaged body?

And what would he say to Fire Ant? Would words ever hold what his heart needed to say? Could Fire Ant forgive him for choosing Sky Woman over his own flesh? The tears flowed more rapidly now. Everything had seemed so clear on Great Sky. T’Cori had received her vision, a message that the Ibandi would have to leave the mountain’s shadow if they wished to survive.