Great Sky Woman (25 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

When she returned from the dream time, the violation had ceased. T’Cori gathered herself together and pulled her skins up, exiting the hut to rejoin the other women.

Dove looked at her, eyes heavy-lidded and dull. “They are rougher than our hunters,” she said. “Their roots are larger.”

T’Cori said nothing, wondering how many men Dove had sampled.

“We need not be strong, if we can yield,” Dove said.

“It is our fate to yield to powerful men,” said Quiet Water.

“We will make strong sons,” Dove said, as if her words made perfect sense. And T’Cori knew then that Dove’s mind was dying, even if her body still breathed.

Then at a grunted warning from two Mk*tk, they wandered off to cook and mend.

T’Cori closed her eyes and prayed. “Great Mother,” she said, “thank You for Your strength. Please, please give that strength to my sisters. They need it more than this daughter.”

Notch-Ear cuffed her hard, lighting her vision with fire, crashing her to the ground. He barked a string of gibberish, containing only one word that she now understood:
“kord,”
work.

The blow caught her by surprise, but another did not follow. She rubbed her ear, waves of pain making her nauseous. The Mk*tk bent and put his face close to hers, licking his teeth suggestively. With his fingertip he motioned toward the blazing orb now dropping to the horizon. Then he grinned.

He squeezed her breasts roughly. T’Cori squirmed, not daring to turn away or resist.

He spoke another word, this one, for the first time, in Ibandi. “Tonight.”

He brought his face close to her. His rank smell and overwhelming physicality numbed her mind, but she still managed to whisper, “No.”

Notch-Ear hurled her face-first to the ground. She tasted dirt, wheezed as the breath was slammed out of her, but to her surprise, felt no fear. He hunched down, flipped her over and snuffled between her legs. T’Cori tensed, suddenly flushed with an emotion: disgust. Something more than annoyance crossed his face: she detected hurt as well.

From a pile of discards he selected a stick as thick as her thumb. He whipped it across her back, each stroke like a flash of lightning in a night sky. The beating seemed to last forever, until she was reduced to a shuddering heap.

“Tonight,” Notch-Ear said again, his mouth shaping the Ibandi word so rudely that she hoped never to use or hear it again.

Her sisters gathered around and sought to comfort her as he stalked away. “Do not fight the Mk*tk,” Dove begged. “If you do, you die.”

“
We
help you,” said Quiet Water. “Forget Great Mother and Father Mountain. There are no mountains here.”

T’Cori curled herself knees to chest, biting her lip. She would say no more to her sisters. They were lost to her. But to herself, she repeated over and over again, until she thought she would go insane: “Great Mother, help me.” Her fingers scrabbled at the earth beneath her. “Forget Dove and Quiet Water, if they have forgotten You. But do not forget me.”

Notch-Ear returned and grabbed her arm, dragging her behind a bush. But now she knew how to crawl into the special place in her mind, and she did, closing her eyes. When her eyelids opened again, they exposed the whites of her eyes, and nothing more.

T’Cori lay curled in one filthy corner of the thorn-walled pen. Her single overwhelming sense was one of being soiled inside and out. Dried fluid scabbed on her thighs, sticky as raw egg. Despite that, she had a small feeling of triumph. They had raped her, yes, forced her to satisfy their appetites. But they had held her hands instead of tying her down, taking turns. And thisp, in the darkness of the hut, the Mk*tk had made a mistake.

So eager had they been to sex her that someone had dropped a partially completed knife in the dirt not far from her hands. How long had it been there? Which one of them? Could it even have been a trap? She didn’t know, but could not afford to miss the opportunity. So this time, she pretended not to struggle, even raising her hips to invite their penetration in a way that pleased them and made them hoot and jostle to be first.

In the midst of all of it, she managed to get hold of the knife, flattening it against her forearm. And when they were done with her and sent her off with her little bundle of skins, they didn’t see what she had, or know what she had done.

She hid the blade in a corner of the pen, covering it with dirt. She dared not tell her sisters of her small triumph. In little more than a moon, the other girls had begun to creep closer to the fire. No longer was there much difference between them and the Mk*tk females. Even as T’Cori watched, Dove displayed one of her legs, postured so that the long muscle on the inside of her thigh glowed in the firelight. One of the hunters nodded appreciatively and threw her a piece of meat.

T’Cori did not react. She fought to keep her balance, but the world began to swirl and she shook almost uncontrollably.

Flat-Nose appeared above her. He reached down.

In her eyes she was suspended in a blackness filled with stars and moons. She floated there, away from everything and everyone.

“Great Mother,” she sobbed, “send me a sign. Help me, or I die. If You will, save me. If You can save me, I will be yours always, until the end of my life. Send me…something. They’ve taken my sight.”

Silently, falling one precious droplet at a time, her tears puddled into the dust. It was at that moment that she knew the path ahead.

She would have freedom or death. And what greater freedom than death could one like T’Cori hope for in a world such as this?

Chapter Thirty-two

Five days later, T’Cori and the other women were at the river again, washing dirt from the roots and the stink from their own bodies, busy scrubbing the soil away from their rudely crafted baskets of tubers. She studied the rushing waters, troubled that she did not know where and how the waters terminated. But she had seen Fawn’s bundle of roots washed down the river, and that was when T’Cori got the idea.

Was anyone watching? The other women worked, but also flirted with their guards, waiting until one of them was watching to slowly roll her hips, flexing and relaxing to draw his eye. Thinking, no doubt, of extra food or lighter duties.

This was her time. Three Mk*tk guarded, but only Notch-Ear was watching them closely. Such an opportunity might never come again. She checked to see that she had her little knife, the sliver of black rock wrapped in leather. She had thought perhaps to use the knife to open her veins, but now that there was the slightest chance of escape, that idea died like a coal in water.

T’Cori unwrapped part of the leather thong and jammed her fingers through the loop.

She turned and smiled at Notch-Ear, wriggling her hips at him seductively. A wide grin split his face, and he grabbed her, pulling her back behind a bush next to the river, out of sight of the others. T’Cori dropped to all fours, raising her hips in invitation. Notch-Ear fumbled with his loincloth, seeking to free his root. Still smiling, she helped him, and felt his body stiffen in pleasure as her hands found his rigid organ, its repulsive warmth pulsing against her palm.

And the smile never left her face as the knife dropped into her hand, and she slashed. Notch-Ear’s eyes and mouth opened in astonishment, but before he could scream she stabbed him in the throat with every bit of strength and speed in her tiny body, so that the scream was drowned in blood. Blinking rapidly, seemingly unable to comprehend what had happened to him, Notch Ear sank to his knees, fingers pressed futilely against the gushing wound.

T’Cori paused just long enough to spit in his dying face, then ripped the blade out, turned and leapt into the torrent, and was washed away.

Only an instant after the waters closed over her head, the first moment at which she could not draw breath, T’Cori regretted her action. The current was rough and stinging cold, filling her mouth and nose. She swallowed foam, and fought blackness, squeezing her hands tightly so that she would not drop the knife. The current wrenched her this way and that as if with vines attached to her arms and legs. She tried to cry out as her hip banged into a rock, and merely swallowed more water. The shock almost made her lose her grip on the blade, but the fear of being utterly weaponless tightened her hand again. When her head surfaced, she flailed toward the shore. Panic took her as soon as she began to choke. She could barely swim! The rivers and lakes around Great Sky had never attracted her as had Great Earth’s heights. While some of the other children had learned to splash and swim, she could barely paddle her legs in still water, let alone in this maelstrom! Madness! What had she been thinking of? Surely it was better to live under any conditions than to die….

But then T’Cori felt a calm, warm place within her, a place that said no, it was better to die and remain who she was than to change and live on as some shrunken, sallow creature neither Ibandi nor Other.

Resigning her soul to the gods she had served since childhood, T’Cori surrendered to the current.

Twisting, gasping, she glimpsed the Mk*tk leaping from rock to rock, attempting to grab her arms. They called to her, brutish faces twisted with confusion that she would decline to take their hairy hands, unable to comprehend that she might prefer death to being a receptacle for their seed.

Into the central channel T’Cori tumbled. Here the rocks were less plentiful, but the current ripped along at a faster pace. She was out of the reach of the Mk*tk, but still they called out to her.

Here there was peace, to which she surrendered at last.

Peace.

This was, no doubt, a calm before the storm of her passage to the shadow realm, but she kept her head above the water and floated with the current. So peaceful. What had there ever been to fear? Her ears filled with a sudden churning sound, and for the first few moments she didn’t recognize it. Then the water’s roar was closer, the torrent itself rougher and more violent. Suddenly T’Cori was in midair, swept over a waterfall, falling weightlessly in a world of wet sound.
Great Mother, Your arms…,
she thought, and then was gone.

The fall seemed to take forever. She was weightless, suspended in a roaring so immense and enveloping it resembled silence. Then came a sensation like being smashed with a great flat hand as she thundered down into the pool at the base of the waterfall. She plunged deep, but then thrashed her way back up, vomiting water as she broke the surface.

Shock, relief, fear and excitement all mingled in her heart.

Alive! She was alive!

Knife still in hand, she spit water, oriented herself and struck out toward the shore, suddenly panicked from that placid, accepting place by the reality of a violent whirlpool formed by the current and the falls. T’Cori swallowed more water than she thought she had ever drunk. She struggled to keep her head above its surface and thrashed her arms and legs frantically. A final wrenching effort extracted her from the whirlpool’s grip. A few more moments in which it felt that her lungs would burst in her chest, and then she was free and crawling into the shallows.

Utterly exhausted, T’Cori pulled herself out onto the riverbank.

She was destroyed, nude of flesh and spirit. Her skirt of twisted leather had been washed away, along with every bit of strength that remained. She heard approaching footsteps, and knew only that she would never allow herself to be taken back, that she was very close to losing her mind.

No strength remained. Now, there was only shame. Shaking, she exhausted herself raising her arm. She needed both hands to point it at her enemy, her teeth bared.

Then she saw his face. The single unhealed scar on each cheek. The gentle brown oval, the mouth set in a quizzical, concerned curve, the gap between his gleaming front teeth.

Great Mother be praised,
she knew him.

Small, thin, but with a gentle Ibandi face and those bright, bright eyes, that thin, smiling mouth now turned down in a frown.

Her dizzied mind raced, searching for a name.
Frog.
It was Frog.

Was he a phantom, and this some cruel mirage? Had she perished in the plunge? If so, perhaps she had finally found the path to the mountaintop, and she would gladly travel it. She pulled herself onto her knees. “Ibandi boy,” she said, “please. Help me.”

He hunkered down at her side, studying her with curiosity mingled with awe. “You are the nameless one. One of Stillshadow’s dream dancers.”

T’Cori’s vision began to fade, and it took everything she had merely to plead: “Help me.”

“What are you doing out here?” he asked, looking nervously to right and left and then behind him, as if worried that someone or something might have been playing a trick on him.

“The Others,” she said. “They took me.” She bowed her head, made the posture of submission. “Shamed me.”

Instantly, Frog became more alert. He squared his shoulders, straightened his back, seemed no longer the gangling boy she had bested on the tree, or caused to be beaten by poor dead Owl. This was a young Ibandi hunter, brave and true. By custom and breeding, he would die to protect her. That thought both comforted and frightened her.

Frog scanned the hillside for trouble. “Where are they?”

“Beyond the rise,” she said. “Hurry. If they find us, they will kill you.”

“They will kill
us,
” he said.

“No,” she said. “They want my sex. You they will kill.”

“Not easy to do,” he said, puffing his chest out. “I am Ibandi!”

She thought of Notch-Ear, so horribly strong and agile, and found hysterical laughter bubbling up from her gut, felt her mind bending, twisting. Floating away.

“What happened?” he asked.

“They killed Owl and Leopard. Took us. They…” She tried to tell him more, and could not force her mouth to repeat such wickedness. T’Cori crouched, her hand outstretched palm up, making obeisance as she never had to the Mk*tk. “Help me, Ibandi man.”