Great Sky Woman (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-three

Even a skilled and observant hunter might have walked past their little shelter and never seen it at all. Which was, of course, Frog Hopping’s entire intention. His makeshift boma was snuggled into a cluster of wait-a-bit thornbushes, their spiky brown branches cut away and then vined back into place as doorway and camouflage once Frog had hacked out a central chamber large enough for himself and the nameless girl.

Frog had worked with feverish speed and limited options to complete the boma by nightfall. Predators of two legs, four legs and no legs haunted the darkness.

If necessary he would cheat sleep all night, watching for human foes. On the other hand, if he and the girl were discovered, it might not matter whether he was awake or asleep. The enemy had slain Owl and Leopard, hunt chiefs. Poor Frog would stand no chance at all. When the Mk*tk ran, they ran like the hyena, with endless endurance. Or as the cheetah, with irresistible speed and power. He could barely imagine how it would feel to face one in the wrestling circle.

Or in the brush, where there were no rules at all.

For days before finding the nameless girl, Frog had trailed his enemies at a distance. Not by preference, but because that was the only way he could. He could not have kept pace with them even if he’d possessed their skills and strength. Not even a hunt chief could have done so while remaining hidden.

Frog dared not follow at night, worried that the Mk*tk—as the nameless girl called them, with a glottal click between harsh syllables—were nocturnal hunters, or that he might stumble across their encampment. And Frog further swore to himself that if footprints indicated that they had been joined by others of their kind, he would make a retreat. He had no great suicidal urge to be trapped in enemy territory.

So after rescuing the girl, Frog knew he that if he did not control the fear-flame, it would burn a hole in his belly. How best might he return her to Great Earth? Where exactly had she camped when the Mk*tk killed the hunt chiefs and stole the dancers away? He did not know, but guessed that if he headed directly back for Fire boma, they might be safe: the Others might move to intercept them based on where they had originally captured the nameless one. Even if they tracked him, found his footprints with hers, they would not know which Ibandi group he belonged to, and would have little hope of anticipating and intercepting him.

Or so he told himself.

On the other hand, they might be hunters with skills beyond those of even Cloud Stalker. Perhaps they could merely glance at his footprints and know his origins. Then his foes might circle around to intercept him, lying in wait with spears and arrows and slings….

But there were other problems: after pleading for his assistance, the girl had collapsed, swooning with some weakness.

When he found the nameless one on the riverbank she had been naked, the leather waistlet gone, the zebra-skin flap that normally covered a dream dancer’s breasts nowhere to be seen. He had fashioned a covering for her from one of his pouches and a bit of warthog skin, tying it around her so that his eyes would not take that which was hers alone to give.

She lay sprawled on her back beneath the sheltering thorn branches, a small, firm-bodied girl of ten and five years. Her braids remained, but he remembered also tight coils held in place with beautiful shells and bones. They were gone, and in their absence she seemed frayed and disarrayed.

Her eyes were open and staring at nothing. She crawled blindly, mewling.

“What do I do?” he asked her.

She seemed blind, unable to see or even hear him, and spoke words that were no answer to his question. “I see fire,” she said. “Fire and blood…”

Was she dying? Or perhaps filled with some evil spirit? Or could this be a sign that Great Mother was reaching through her child and trying to speak to him? Both terror and awe burned his veins.

And he also felt the stirrings of something else, an attraction to this strange girl, sensations troubling in the extreme. He tried again. “Tell me what to do.” No response. He took a desperate gamble. “Tell me, Butterfly Spring.”

At that name, given to her in jest so many moons before, her eyes fluttered, focused. Her hand snapped out and gripped his wrist with surprising strength.

“Don’t leave me.” Her voice cracked with desperation.

Uncertain what to do, he enfolded her in his arms as he might have sheltered a child, somewhat discomfited both by his compassion and his stirrings. This was the strange, wild one who had followed at Stillshadow’s ankles. Frog didn’t know what to do with her. She wasn’t a child, and he couldn’t really look at her as a woman, so what was she?

“I see things,” the girl he called Butterfly Spring whispered.

“What do you see?”

“Days to come,” she said.

This was all entirely too strange for a simple hunter like Frog. Perhaps the wisest thing he could do was to leave her here. True, this mad girl would die, but no one would ever know he had found her. And even if they learned the truth, who could blame him? If he tried to take her with him, they would probably be caught and killed. Better one live than both climb the mountain.

Wasn’t it?

But even as he thought those things, he knew that she sensed his ambivalence. “I go, but I will return.”

“Go…?” She clutched at him. “Where do you go?
Why
do you go?”

“I…I must hunt,” he said. “For both of us.” The lie twisted his tongue.

The girl gazed at him, finally managing to focus her eyes. “I see things,” she said.

Curiosity halted him where compassion had failed. “What? What do you see?”

“That if you save me, you will be a great hunter.”

Several long breaths passed. Frog felt as if someone had brushed his scalp with a burning coal. “Great?”

“I see that if you stay with me, one day you will be grand hunt chief.”

He paused. “Grand chief?” Beyond the cave mouth, the wind whistled:
She lies.

She held his eyes, unblinking. “In the shadow of Father Mountain,” she said, “I cannot lie.”

Could she read his mind? “We are not in the mountain’s shadow.”

“The night is the mountain’s shadow,” she replied.

He listened with his heart. Yes, desperation weighed her words. But did that mean she lied? He leaned closer. “We will both die,” he said.

“Not if you are a true Ibandi.” She tried to smile, and failed. The effort exposed a cracked, broken front upper tooth. Her lip above it was swollen. Oddly, like Uncle Snake’s wounds, the scar did not diminish her allure. Swiftly and clearly he envisioned her fighting for her honor, struggling to escape her brutish captors, and his respect for this nameless girl soared.

There was no doubt: she was Ibandi, blood and bone.

Her words seemed heartfelt, but…could he believe this girl? She would say or do anything to keep him with her. She was helpless on her own, as were all the dream dancers. “What happened to your sisters?” he asked.

“Fawn is dead.”

He shook his head, disbelieving. Fawn! The smiling, round-bottomed, sensual Fawn, who had been his first lover. The name brought back memories of that time by the river, with the grass pressed against his back, Fawn showing him the way to pleasure a woman. “What else?” he asked.

“Sister Quiet Water, and Fawn’s twin.”

“Dead?”

She shook her head. “Worse. The Mk*tk made them their women. Help me. I beg you.”

From birth, she had been raised to consider her own flesh above his own, that it was natural for him to risk, or give his life to preserve a dream dancer. And yet…

Was she wrong? Were her gifts not more vital to the Circle than his own?

Grand chief?
Absurd. He was not even a hunt chief. Could not run or jump or fight as should a hunt chief. Many boys were better, stronger, faster than he. And yet…

And yet
those
boys were not here.
They
had not followed the Mk*tk. They were not the ones with whom a dream dancer pled for her life.

Frog Hopping squatted beneath the thorn branches, brooding. “You can see the future?” he asked.

“Yes.” Her eyes shifted to the side.

Liar
. He was sure she lied. If she had told the truth, perhaps he would have remained. Instead, Frog decided to abandon her to her fate. The relief of that decision flooded him like a warm, clean tide, sweeping away doubt. His smile was not kind. “If you can see the future, you should be able to tell me: will I return?”

She looked at him, and to his shock he felt himself losing balance, felt himself falling into the infinite brown depths of her eyes. In that instant he felt that she
saw
him. Knew him as perhaps no one else ever had.

“Yes.” Her voice trembled, but she did not blink. Her eyes did not shift, and Frog wondered.

Grand chief.

Then without another word, he left.

Frog the hunter skulked upon the plain, stealthy as a spider monkey as he scrambled to a ridgetop. From this concealed vantage he could peer down on the bouldered plateau. There was little to be seen save acacias and wild fig, candelabra and a fever tree or two. The moon squatted low and swollen on the horizon. The night was very clear.

There within the darkness…was that a greater, deeper shade? Was that the shadow of the mountain? A moon shadow? It seemed almost to point at the very clump of wait-a-bits where lay the terrified, exhausted Butterfly. From time to time out on the heated sands, he dreamed dreams of floating phantom mountains, shining, vanishing, reappearing at the whim of the moonlit clouds.

He should run. He should leave the husk of a girl in the boma and go home. No one would ever know he had even seen her. In that way, at least he would live, and one day marry, and have children….

“Chief,” he whispered.

The nameless one tossed and turned beneath the lashed branches, lost in nightmare, her eyes clouded with bloody visions.

Again she stood on the cliff above a distant, raging river. Afraid to die, shamed by the inability to simply release her grip and fall into Great Mother’s arms.

Gigantic, implacable, motivated by hungers beyond her ken, the Mk*tk crept toward her, hand over hand along the rocks. Their alien smell drove thought from her mind, so that she slipped and tumbled….

Gasping, she sat up, raking her cheek against the thorns. For a few breaths she was disoriented, unable to remember where or even who she was. Then a primal wave of hunger banished the confusion. The glorious aroma of roasting animal flesh filled her nose.

Frog squatted in the boma’s entrance, turning a spitted, skinned hedgehog over a bed of coals.

He was still with her? Had not fled? She was so astonished she could not speak.

“Eat,” he said. He wrapped a steaming half carcass with a banana leaf, and tossed it to her. She caught it, passed the steaming meat hand to hand until it cooled, and then put her teeth to work.

“I wish to see if your dreams are real,” he said. “Or if you are the crazy girl everyone says.”

So immersed was she in gnawing the flesh from the small bones that she could not even think of words to answer.

He gazed at her soberly. “If we both die, I will know you were wrong.”

At that, she felt the corners of her lips turn up. It was the first glimmer of happiness she had felt in a very long time.

Frog and T’Cori lay in shadow, looking down the hill at a group of three Mk*tk below them. They were larger than Ibandi, muscled much more heavily, with more body hair and flatter jaws, broader noses beneath shorter foreheads. The three looked in all directions and at least once appeared to look directly at the two Ibandi.

Beside him, T’Cori stiffened and started to crawl back, but he gripped her arm. He himself might have bolted, if not for the memory of the lioness:
The predator can look directly at you and not see you. He is not Father Mountain or some all-powerful demon.

The Mk*tk sniffed the air, scratched at the dirt in search of sign and then trotted away.

The girl had described the place where she and her sisters had been captured. It dried Frog’s throat to realize he had been just across the valley from his people’s desperate struggle.

Could he have helped? No. If Owl Hooting and his brother had been killed, poor Frog would have been squashed like a melon.

In the easiest decision of his life, Frog decided to stay far away from them. It was possible that these creatures would anticipate his actions, but he was following his own, lesser
num,
which told him to trust the girl. Every evidence suggested that the Mk*tk were stronger and faster and more aggressive than he. He could only hope that he was smarter. If he had not even that advantage, then the two Ibandi had no hope at all. Better to simply lie down and die.

After the Mk*tk below them moved off to the east, Frog and the girl continued west.

Every shift of wind increased the risk of discovery. Every strange smell or echo promised disaster. Despite her small stature and mannered ways the girl seemed sturdy enough, and surprisingly nimble. She knew nothing of hunting or trapping, but from time to time she would stop and point out a plant or animal, and tell him of some function of which he had never dreamed. She pointed to a cairn of rocks and dung perched on a cave shelf above them. “Hyrax,” she said.