Great Sky Woman (11 page)

Lizard shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Child of Great Sky? I could tell a better lie. That’s just a story they tell to babies whose parents throw them away.” Lizard laughed until he was about to fall over. Frog wasn’t sure why, but he fell into it and laughed along, fell into the rhythm of it even as he knew he was being as cruel as cousin Scorpion poisoning a trapped lizard. He watched her short, thin figure as she retreated behind the lean-tos toward the healing hut. Too late, he fully realized he was taking away something fragile and precious he had offered her: friendship.

Frog heard a voice whispering,
Go after her,
but his feet wouldn’t move. She had humiliated him on the tree not ten days before, and he was taking his revenge now.

He realized that in making her small he had somehow made himself larger. Frog was now safer and more secure, more closely held at the bosom of the tribe.

And Father Mountain help him, it felt good to be with the other boys, not different.

The nameless one hid behind a rock, watching as the others busied themselves. She observed the other children with their fathers and mothers. Their careless joy pricked her heart.
Butterfly Spring.
For one precious moment, she’d had both a name and a new friend. Then with a peal of boyish laughter, even that sliver of belonging had been wrenched away.

Tears streamed down her face. T’Cori knew she hated the boy as she had never hated anyone else, not even Blossom with her threats, switches, slapping palms and rough voice, or Raven with her sharp tongue and endless anger. She would show these boys, show them all. And one day, when she found the strength, she would join the gods atop Great Sky and leave all of this behind.

The young hunt chiefs, boys proven over time as fine hunters and wrestlers, and chosen in adolescence by the boma fathers to carry on the traditions of the great hunters, kept to themselves as much as the dream dancers did. The most splendid of them was a boy named Owl Hooting—tall, lean, with piercing black eyes and a lion’s stride, two perfect scars emblazoned on each cheek. T’Cori’s face burned whenever he was near.

As Owl passed, sharing easy laughter with his friends, a single bright idea pierced her darkness.

T’Cori sobbed aloud.

“Why are you crying?” he asked, only the second time he had ever spoken to her at all.

“That boy, Frog,” she lied, thrilled that Owl cared. “He said that the hunt chiefs are afraid of the beast-men, would not dare fight them. That they let the boma hunters do their work for them and just tell stories for their meat.”

His friends, strong young hunt chiefs all, stopped and stared. “What?” Their anger warmed her heart.

“And more—he came to me while I was alone in the healing hut. He tried to touch me.”

She could see their eyes grow hot, and almost changed her mind, retracted her words, but her tongue seemed to have developed an evil life of its own.

Owl and his friends stormed off. Frog was still with his companions but saw Owl coming from a distance. His eyes went wide, as if he knew that this was trouble coming but didn’t understand why or what to do.

T’Cori watched, delighted and a bit frightened by her own power.

Owl grabbed Frog’s shoulder. He told Frog the things that T’Cori had said, and then asked, “Did you do these things?”

Frog looked as if someone had dunked his head in Fire River. Frightened. Confused. Owl was a head taller than Frog, and in comparison the boy seemed a child. “No! I would never!”

“She said you did. Are you saying that a sacred dream dancer lied?”

Frog’s mouth opened and then closed like a beached fish. He searched for T’Cori and, finding her, seemed to silently beg her for mercy.

She wanted to laugh, but pinched her own arm to keep the tears flowing.

“Come to the wrestling circle,” Owl said. “Father Mountain will reward truth with strength.”

“I will wrestle the nameless one?” Frog asked, confused.

Owl growled contemptuously. “You would like to put hands on a dancer, wouldn’t you? No. I am her champion. You will wrestle with me.”

Once at the broad, dusty circle, the other boys gathered around, fascinated, their fear transformed into eagerness to watch the thrashing.

After all, any one of them might have been punished in such a fashion. There was endless speculation about the hunt chiefs, what they knew or did not know, what they were or were not.

The boys were eager to watch this, and perhaps learn a bit of the hunt chiefs’ magic. T’Cori had seen the young and elder men of Great Sky almost every day of her life, so this was no mystery. Many times had she watched the young men entertaining themselves and each other at wrestling. But she could not remember watching one of them competing against ordinary boma folk.

This was going to be fascinating.

But in the end, it was not.

Frog tried this and that hold, and nothing worked. Owl was too strong, too quick, too skilled. He chuckled with contempt at Frog’s greatest efforts. He threw Frog and ground his face into the dirt, and gave him a thrashing such as T’Cori had never seen.

“She is a dream dancer!” Owl said, his knee tight against the side of Frog’s neck. “She is not for one such as you. You angered Great Mother, and Great Mother sent me to punish you. You will never even speak to her again, do you understand?”

Frog screamed that he did.

And then Owl left Frog crying in the sand. The younger boy picked himself up and ran, embarrassed, from the sight of his brothers, to where he might be alone, howling his humiliation and pain.

T’Cori was happy, and ashamed of herself for being so.

Chapter Twelve

For a hand of days, the sky had opened the clouds, releasing a downpour that drove most Ibandi into their huts. Frog thought the rain a perfect match for the miserable mood following his beating. The sight of Wind and Water bomas’ folk dancing and cheering the downpour was wearying, and he was happy when, after three days, most of the others shared his opinion that the gods had offered them entirely too much of a good thing.

The dream dancers finally found the right song, sang it with enough heart and fervor to birth a sun strong enough to banish the water from the sky.

Then, under the critical eye of Uncle Snake and his hunt chief brothers, Frog practiced rolling and jumping in the mud, wincing at his sore back and shoulders. Still, he did the best he could and kept up with most of the others. There were many different types of play, all of them preparing the boys for wrestling: baboon jumping, snake crawling, elephant walking and more. They wrestled, practiced making their arrows and ran races.

But during this entire time the adult males were conferring in private, arguing and dancing their opinions beneath the Life Tree. No children were allowed near, but Frog knew from the location alone that something serious was in the offing. He could sense the fear in the camp as he had felt the weight of the sky before the rain drove them into their huts.

Something was wrong, and there was some momentum building, like a flow of rocks rolling down a mountainside.

The adult council was opened, so that all of the Ibandi, every adult and child who had come to Spring Gathering, was welcome to stand beneath the branches of the Life Tree and hear the words of their elders. Cloud Stalker himself, four scars on each cheek, wearing the skin of a lion and a mountain gorilla’s skull tied to the top of his head, appeared in all his fearsome glory.

“We are here,” he said, “to decide what is to be done about the beast-men. Shall there be peace between us, or shall we fight?”

Frog saw the men who nodded, and those who turned away, as if ashamed to admit their fear before their brothers.

Cloud Stalker danced, throwing powders that caused the fire to flare and smoke. He howled and mimed stalking lions and angry elephants, contorting his body so that the keloid scars etching his back seemed to come alive. Watching him, Frog forgot Stalker was a man, and instead saw far plains, strange beasts and deadly struggles beneath a pitiless sky.

But then he saw the chief’s hand steal to the belt at his waist and stealthily slip out a small object. Frog’s heart froze, a sudden understanding flashing into his mind. Hadn’t he seen Snake making just the same move, distracting the audience with a sweeping motion of his right hand, while his left extracted a white stone from his belt?

So when Cloud Stalker held his hand up, pinching a white rock between his fingers, all the tribe roared with approval and awe.

Except Frog, who stood, dazed, realizing that a sentence of death had been passed not by the omniscient Father Mountain, but by mortal men.

One term was repeated over and over again the next day as two tens of men prepared their weapons. All the next day as they chanted in the men’s hut he heard the sound coming from the walls. The term was “beast-men.”

Frog was not told what was happening, shared no words with the hunters who took their weapons, embraced their wives or lovers and walked west around Great Earth’s curve, murder in their minds.

Five of the men were from Fire boma. Snake and his closest friend, the short, thick-bodied Deep Dry Hole, split off, each seeking to bid farewell to his family.

Snake held Frog’s mother, Gazelle, tightly, whispering something into her ear that Frog could not hear. She seemed to shrink. Snake held Scorpion, Fire Ant and Hawk Shadow each in turn, then Little Brook and finally Frog. Frog could smell the fear on his uncle, but stronger than the fear was anger. His heart swelled with pride. The beast-men thought
they
were killers! Well, the men of the bomas would show them, would spill their blood and brains. Frog could not wait to be a hunter, could not wait to experience the glory of fighting to protect the bomas.

Surely on that great day he would be a man.

When the men had gone, Gazelle walked back to their lean-to as if all the bones had been removed from her legs. Fire Ant took her arm that she might lean against him, Hawk Shadow on the other side. Frog was close behind, wishing that he was large and strong enough to help his mother.

“What did Uncle say to you?” Hawk asked.

Her eyes were hollow. “He said, ‘It is time to wash the spears.’”

The men were gone a day and a night. Frog thought that they would return running and dancing, eyes bright, heads high. But the blood-spattered men who stumbled back to Spring Gathering seemed almost to be sleepwalking. Their words were loud and boastful, but their eyes…their eyes reminded Frog of Silent Warthog, the bhan hunter who had stopped breathing. Their eyes had lost life.

Snake would not speak fully of what had happened, but days later he took Hawk Shadow and Fire Ant out into the brush. They did not know, but Frog crept after them. He was very good at secret following. They did not see him as he overheard the things Snake said.

“We found their camp,” he said. “We burned their huts to drive them out. Our arrows and spears were hungry.”

“Are they large and strong?” Fire Ant asked.

“Yes,” Deep Dry Hole said. An unhealed crescent bite mark scarred his right thigh. A bite mark? No arrow or spear wounds? “But they were cowards when faced by men. We are Ibandi!”

And then he would say no more.

The next day, the gathered clans prepared to return to their homes, to go their separate ways. In previous years this had been a happy time, a time to return to their lives having renewed acquaintances and made good trades for medicines and knives, and even marriage contracts.

But the Ibandi were quiet this year, faces long, as if some of the joy had been sucked from their lives like moisture drying in sun-bleached bones.

Fortunately, the marriages arranged during Spring Gathering were still joyous occasions. Marriages meant children, and the safety of increase. And this year it was Frog’s own sister, Little Brook, who brought home a husband. To Frog’s pleasure, that husband was the playful, courageous Lion Tooth.

Lion Tooth had seen seventeen rains, the same as Hawk Shadow. Frog thought him more than a match for the sharp-tongued Brook, and could hardly wait to watch them squabble.

That would be in the future: before they could be married, Tooth would spend at least a year in service to Snake and Gazelle Tears in Fire boma.

“Farewell,” Tooth’s father said to Uncle Snake. Tooth’s father was a scarred and grizzled hunter from Wind boma to the north, and there was every reason to think that his son would prove as reliable a provider. “Watch my son, teach him, help him grow.”

“I will hold him as my own,” Uncle Snake said, and they clasped hands. It was a hunter’s grip, strong, the free left hand forming into a fist to strike at the back of the other hunter’s hand, hard, both at the same time. It was a show of strength, a thing done only between men.

Then the people went about their lives, and Frog returned to his own fire with his family and the new brother, Lion Tooth, with his happy songs and gymnastic dances.

Tooth’s unfailing good humor swiftly made him a favorite. Tooth was folded into the games and life of Fire boma: the running and chasing and throwing and wrestling. Boys of all bomas played the same games, but Fire Ant, Lion Tooth and Hawk Shadow were usually the best. Ant and Tooth became almost inseparable, and Frog quickly found that Tooth was easy to talk to and good at keeping secrets.

Frog watched as the new husband-to-be worked with Uncle Snake, patching, hunting, carrying. Little Brook did not live with her man yet, could not even speak to him, but the air vibrated with a tension Frog’s ten-and-two-spring-old body did not yet comprehend. Little Brook no longer seemed a miniature version of Gazelle, but more playful and eager, and in an endearing way nervous.

One day, Frog followed Lion Tooth down to Fire River’s reeded banks, and as he suspected, Little Brook met him there in forbidden seclusion. “Hello, husband,” Little Brook said shyly. At ten and five rains, both her body and mind were ready for marriage, but by custom they were compelled to wait a bit longer.

“Hello, wife,” he replied.

She came closer to him and touched his arm. “You are very strong.”

He rubbed his cheek against hers. “Strong enough to carry you and all our children.”

Frog grinned, imagining Little Brook heavy with child. She wouldn’t be quite so nimble with a switch then, would she?

“We will have many?” Her hand touched his rump, rubbing him.

He grinned. “If Great Mother blesses us.”

She looked to see if anyone was watching. Frog ducked down, but snuck his head back up to see her press her mouth against the corner of Tooth’s, a clumsy openmouthed smack. Then she dashed away. Tooth grinned, flustered. He heard hooting and turned to see Frog, rolling around on the ground, laughing helplessly.

He waved. “You wait! Your turn will come.”

Frog scratched his head, doubting very much that such a day would ever arrive, and returned to the soft work of hard play. It was good to see his sister happy. She had ceased being such a nag, as if her coming wifedom had sweetened the sourness in her heart.

It was good to see and hear happiness in the camp. There had been far too little of that since the night of the thirsty spears.

Days rolled like the currents of Fire River. But despite the endless chores, joys and sorrows, the killing of the beast-men seemed to weigh on his people. Every day, there were times when Gazelle or Deep Dry Hole or Snake looked to Great Sky, and Frog thought he saw doubt in their eyes. Why? Not one of them seemed to have noticed that Cloud Stalker had pulled the white death stone from his belt.

It had been said that the tracks at the bhan boma were those of beast-men. Still, they were not sure. They were not certain. They had done all that could be done to protect their families, the ones they loved. But in truth,
they did not know.

It hit him like a thunderbolt. Ibandi did not kill Ibandi. They did not kill bhan. Even to kill a beast-man was something that troubled their dreams. It was forbidden, but they had done it, and although their cause had been just, killing the beast-men had been like killing a part of themselves. Frog did not fully understand it, but there it was, a fact for all to see.