Shadow Valley (9 page)

Her people pretended not to see her or to comprehend the risks entailed by such a brittle-bone traveling alone into the night. She did not need their doubts and fears added to the chorus echoing between her own ears.

Her old hips and knees were slow fires. The bamboo crutch beneath her right armpit carried enough of her weight to walk, but every halting step groaned of flesh’s frailty.

Certainly, some must have worried. Such an old woman alone? And at night—when human sight failed, and the powers of fang and claw were at their height?

But she was Stillshadow, and as such could not be questioned. Even to doubt her actions would be wrong. As it would be wrong to add their fears to her own.

She walked and hummed prayers to the
jowk
as the ground crunched beneath her sandaled feet. For a quarter of the night the old woman walked. Her senses were open, seeking a sign. In the whisper of flowing water or a
hyena’s distant call. Or a fruited scent, floating on the wind. There was no way for her waking mind to know where she might find a sign.

A plant. A berry. A mushroom. A venomous snake or scorpion. Any or all of these could be her doorway into the dream world. All she needed to do was be ready and watchful.

Before the moon had risen fully, she glimpsed a thing of interest and turned from her path to investigate.

There, revealed by the cloud-shrouded moonlight, sparkled a spiderweb’s jeweled rungs. She leaned down, close enough for her old eyes to detect the clustered knot of legs and swollen belly crouched in ambush at the web’s upper corner. This brown striped eight-legged was known to her: the black head was unmistakable. “Grass spider,” she whispered, drawing closer. “So long has it been since last we spoke. Within you dwells the spirit of all eight-legged. I ask that spirit to restrain her anger. I must kill this one sister. I need her blood in my veins.”

She reached down into the web. As she spoke, the brown and black spider crawled over and over her hand. As it crossed her palm she made a fist, then winced with the sharp, sudden pain.

Stillshadow lowered herself to her knees. She chanted, twitching and wincing.

A wall of poison fire, the spider venom leapfrogged toward her aged heart.

Frogs. A wall of fire. What?

Then conscious thought faded, and she slipped into the place behind her dreams.

A place of trees and shadows, of game and clouds and plants. An endless stream of human faces capered behind her eyes. She saw …

Mk*tk leeched of color. Men with the fangs and fur of wolves. Spotted yellow women with long necks. A great green circle …

Mortal terror hammered at the walls of discipline. She shuddered, trembled. Stillshadow tried to walk and could not. Tried to crawl and toppled onto her side.

“Great Mother, help me,” Stillshadow whispered. “I have the sight but not the strength. Give me your power. …”

Her muscles knotted. Her breath contracted to a low rattle in her aged throat. “Help me, Great Mother,” she said softly. “All my days, I have served you. I thought my flesh would follow me, but Small Raven fell. So it seems the foundling was your chosen. Did I somehow fail you?”

Now the tears flowed without end. All questions vanished, like winter leaves drifting into a pond. The world flew apart, and the emptiness behind it crawled out to engulf her.

Stillshadow turned to face the dark eastern horizon. For the very last time in her long and honored life, she sang to the sun.

“Great Mother,” she whispered against the wind. “All my days, I have breathed for no one but you. And yet, we lost our land. The ground wept with our blood. And now, when my people need me most, my inner eye sees nothing. Is this right? Have I not served you?” She listened for an answer that did not come. “I beg you to tell me: Is this right?”

In the wind’s cold cry there were no words, no answer. Her fingers gouged grooves in the rough, sandy soil. “Help me.”

Stillshadow stared and wept and sang. And in answer to her final call the sun struggled to be born, wet and red from its celestial womb.

Before she reached the edge of the camp, T’Cori heard Frog’s
“Huh! Huh!”
exhalations from around the cairn of weathered, sand-colored rocks marking his practice site.

She watched as he turned this way and that, jabbing and cutting. It was almost like a dance, really. The body flow was the same, but Frog was concentrating on something outside himself, a target. Dream dancers focused within.

When Frog paused to hawk out some of the dust gumming his throat, she went to him. “I was told to be silent, but I worry.”

He wiped away a thread of sweat dripping from his lashes. “What is this worry?”

“Mother Stillshadow went out last night,” she said. “She did not return.”

His hand froze. “Where did she go?”

“She said she needed to find our dream.”

He stuck the tip of his spear into the ground. The gesture was so familiar to her now, and so dear. He reminded her of a brown flamingo. “We will find her,” he said, “or leave our bones in the sand.”

For half a quarter, Frog, Uncle Snake, and the Leopard twins had tracked Stillshadow through the mud flats and brittle grass. If Frog had believed in gods, he might have offered a prayer for her delivery. Any other Ibandi might have made such a prayer, but other Ibandi had not climbed Great Sky or gazed into the icy silence at its peak. This knowledge, more than his worries for Stillshadow, dogged his every step.

“This is good,” Snake said.

“Wait,” Frog said. He dropped to one knee and turned an ear into the
wind. He heard a single distant howl, followed a few breaths later by two more. “Do you hear?”

“Baboons,” Leopard Eye said.

“Hyenas, also,” Frog said. “Come.”

As morning shadows drifted across a wide and fire-scarred plain they ran. Across grass and through scrub they ran, across tumbled rocks and through scratching stands of cactus. Their sprint slowed to a trot and then to a halt. There just beyond the parted grass crouched four of the spotted, heavy-jawed scavengers. Beyond the hyenas clustered a troop of baboons.

They were big ones, half the size of men, covered with bone-white fur. Their jaws were longer than the width of their narrow shoulders. Black lips peeled away from gleaming fangs. Their eyes, far back up on their heads beneath a sheltering shelf of brow, burned like tiny yellow fires.

Five hands of the manlike creatures were circled, the young and the old hidden behind a line of aggressively postured males.

At first Frog doubted his eyes, but there in the center of the circle, with the elders and the young, kneeling just beyond the hyena males, an ancient woman stared out into the western horizon.

“Father Mountain”
Snake whispered.

As the Ibandi approached, the hyenas barked and fled. But the baboons merely parted their ranks, almost as if they had awaited the humans’ arrival. For all the notice she gave to the scramble of furred limbs, Stillshadow might have been made of stone or wood or even been a woman of chalk, a mere silhouette scratched beneath her own sitting stone.

“Old Mother?” Frog said.

“Great Dancer?” Snake dropped to one knee. “Speak to us.”

Frog came closer. “Stillshadow?”

No response. For a moment he wondered:
Could she be dead?
Panic fluttered in his chest, but then he realized:
No. There.
His newly sharpened eyes detected the rise and fall of her withered shoulders.

Stillshadow tumbled sideways into their arms, as all about them her hairy guardians danced and howled their fierce delight to the morning sun.

Beneath the slanted roof of sticks and leaves, Stillshadow lay curled on her side, muttering aloud to gods
or jowk
unknown. T’Cori had packed the old woman’s eyes with mud and cactus pulp, then covered them with wet leaves.

Despite her own growing fear, T’Cori struggled to find some part of her still unshaken, unafraid, able to offer visions or leadership. As a consequence, she barely noticed when Frog approached from behind her.

“How is she?” he asked.

“I am not sure,” the young medicine woman said. “Her
num
and
jowk
are weak, but her face-eyes … they are dead.”

He shuddered. “When we found her, she was staring at the sun. She did not move. Did not even blink.”

T’Cori nodded. “Why would she do such a thing?”

Frog had no answer, and closed his eyes.

T’Cori tried to imagine what he was feeling. Frog already felt unable to act or decide or do anything other than follow her lead.

Was he now imagining himself sightless? Wondering what use a blind hunter would be to his people? Did he think that if he lost his eyes it would be best for him, for her, for all of them if he walked out into the brush and kept walking until Father Mountain took his bones?

Yet somehow, Stillshadow seemed undiminished. In fact, there were ways in which the old woman now whispering to the spirits seemed more alive than she had even a moon ago.

Almost as if she heard the blasphemous thoughts, Stillshadow pushed her way up to a seated position. From behind her herbal wraps, she seemed to be gazing
through
T’Cori’s flesh. The ancient eyes saw bone.

Her dust-parched throat was capable of little more than gravelly whispers. T’Cori offered her a water gourd. The medicine woman sipped and swallowed.

“Bring ten pebbles,” Stillshadow said finally.

“Pebbles?” Frog asked.

“At once!” she snapped. Then Stillshadow lay back again, seemed to shrink to the size of a child.

Frog retreated from the lean-to and ran off to do as she had asked, returning swiftly with two handfuls of stones.

When he had placed them on the ground before her, Stillshadow smoothed her hands over them. She plucked up a purplish one and rolled it between her palms. Then, one stone at a time, she laid out a circle, only deigning to speak when the circle was complete. “Every year,” she said, “the herds go north in spring and return in fall. They travel to Father Mountain’s favorite grounds, to amuse him with their feeding and fleeing and rutting. They grow fat on Great Mother’s sacred grasses, on the four-legged flesh. They go out—” her hand traced up and then cut across to the left “—and they return. To find them we must travel
west.
There, we will find hunting lands as fine as our own, where the herds travel as they return home.”

“Always,” Frog said, “we thought that the animals went out, and returned the way they went, in a line. You say they travel in a great circle?”

Stillshadow ran her fingers along the earth, fingers brushing the freshly grooved soil.

“What would that mean?” Leopard Paw asked.

Stillshadow tried to push herself up to her elbows. “What serves the four-legged serves the two-legged as well. Find them, and we find our way.”

“It will be done,” Frog said.

Bracketed between her brothers Leopard Eye and Leopard Paw, Blossom escorted their mother back to her lean-to.

Blossom’s heart beat like a hummingbird’s wings. She craved and cherished any moment spent with Stillshadow, struggled not to resent the fact, obvious to all, that the chief dream dancer preferred Sky Woman to her own flesh and blood.

Blossom was four hands older than the girl now called Sky Woman, and in fact had been the foundling’s wet nurse. But despite her purity of heart and strength of blood, Blossom had never risen high among the dancers.

Blossom had helped her brothers build their mother’s shelter, wedging it between a dead ant nest and a cactus tree. Twice the size of most Ibandi hutches, it was lined with zebra skin and roofed with branches and leaves, large enough for an audience of three or four. Rude it might have been, but Blossom was proud.

“Mother,” asked Leopard Eye after they had set her comfortably on a bed of grass, “is there more we can do for you?”

“Not now,” Stillshadow said. “Please go. But, Blossom, please remain with me.”

As the twins left, Blossom crawled into the shadows with her mother.

The old woman stretched out her arm until Blossom reciprocated. They linked hands.

“I am happy with the others,” Stillshadow said. “But I see my womb daughter is sad.”

Blossom sighed, struggling to keep the fear from her voice and failing. “How can you see anything?” she asked.

“Only my face-eyes have closed. I have five more, and all speak your sadness.” Stillshadow smiled. “Then again, perhaps it is Cloud Stalker who tells me your mood.”

“You speak to my father?” Blossom asked. Stillshadow
umm-hmmed
, the corners of her mouth turning slightly upward. “In the dream world?”

“He says that he loves you.”

“I wish,” Blossom said wistfully, “to see the world you see. I will never be so strong, and I know it. And I know that as long as I help my people survive, I have purpose. All that you ask, I have done.” She wiped at the corner of her eye. “You asked me to nurture Sky Woman, and I did, before she ever had a name. You asked me to step aside for her. I did. To leave the only home I have ever known and come with you.” Here Blossom paused. “How could I not? You are all I know and love in this world.” Tears blurred her vision as she squeezed her mother’s hand. “Perhaps I am not the dancer Sky Woman has become, but I love our people and our path. When I thought we had lost you, I died.”