Great Sky Woman (36 page)

Chapter Forty-nine

“War comes?” T’Cori asked after the hunters retreated.

“Yes,” Stillshadow said.

“What if our men die?” asked Raven. T’Cori watched her rival from the corner of her eye, careful not to show that she was watching. Did Raven’s hand tremble? Was she afraid? Yes. So she and Raven were sisters in fear, if nothing else.

“Then,” said Stillshadow, “all of you will bear children for the Others.”

“I wish I was a man,” Blossom moaned.

Stillshadow shook her head sadly. “And many of them wish that they were women, that they would not have spears twisted into their guts.” She leaned so hard upon her staff that T’Cori thought it would splinter. She knew that the old woman was still burning with fever, the spirits of life and death warring in her veins. She should have been lying in her hut, to await the outcome of that battle. Instead, Stillshadow had dragged herself forth to meet with the hunters. Soon, she would perform ceremony, draining herself of the precious
num
all men and women needed to heal.

“We are afraid,” Raven said.

“You think they are not?” Stillshadow pounded her walking stick against the ground. “They piss themselves with fear. They fight for you! For your smiles, hoping you will think them brave. And what would you have them see in your faces? Fear? If so, they will know you think them too weak to win, too weak to protect you.”

Stillshadow’s daughter shivered. “I cannot help it. I know what they did to T’Cori.”

“You do not hear me!” Stillshadow’s eyes narrowed. “Women put the strength into men or rip it out of them. Any one of you who cannot be strong, tell me now! I will not have even
one
of our men go to battle without knowing their women’s hearts are with them.”

The young women exchanged sick, worried glances. Raven trembled. T’Cori saw her moment and pushed herself up to full height.

“I will stand with you,” T’Cori said. “I will be strong for our men.”

Raven glared at T’Cori, furious that she had spoken first. Finally she nodded. “I will as well. It is my place.” She whispered to T’Cori: “Sit down,
ugly.
”

T’Cori’s hands crooked into claws. “Sit me down,” she said.

Raven was larger, stronger, but her eyes only narrowed. “In time,” she said.

“Now,”
T’Cori said. “For years you have ruled me. If you have something to say to me, make it now, in front of our sisters.”

“You are not sister,” Raven snarled. “You are bhan. Mother found you where your own parents had thrown you away.”

T’Cori’s face burned, but she refused to back down. “Perhaps we die soon. Today is as good a day as any. If so, I am ready. I will not lie awake nights waiting for you to find my back.”

“Silence, both of you!” Stillshadow hissed, as if emptying herself. “Is this what you wish the men to see? The women they love, the women they dream of, fighting among themselves like monkeys?
You
are why they are willing to die! Be prizes worthy of that sacrifice, or we have nothing.”

The two girls fell silent.

“As you say, Mother,” said Raven, lowering her head.

“Yes, wise one,” T’Cori agreed, angry and ashamed, and angry for feeling ashamed.

“Go and prepare yourselves,” the crone said.

Together in single file, those fertile dancers currently not with child walked to North Stream, the largest body of running water within a day’s travel. North Stream flowed from the heights of Great Earth in the wet months, slumbering in the dry.

T’Cori and Raven strode in the lead, and the others followed them as they doffed their leather waistlets and breast flaps and bathed themselves in the cool waters.

The other dancers looked at T’Cori. Once she had been special because of her sight. Now she was special because of the way she had lost that sacred gift. She had, after all, been a Mk*tk captive, raped by beasts. She had killed one with her own hands. She was the only one who knew what their men would face.

“Tell me of the Mk*tk,” one girl requested.

“Were they fierce?” asked another.

“Like two-legged lions,” T’Cori answered. When she said that, she thought what she did not say: that her body remembered their smell, and the taste of their blood.

Her sisters whispered and murmured among themselves, frightened.

“I knew it,” the first said.

“But I killed one, and I am only a woman!” she said. “Do you understand? Ibandi women kill Mk*tk men!” They cheered her, lifted her up on their shoulders and carried her around in the river.

Small Raven watched as the others celebrated, nodding. Finally she slapped her hands together. “Enough! We must prepare!”

They cleaned and washed one another, scenting one another with juices and fixing one another’s hair. Then they walked in line from the river, each one passing Raven in turn. When T’Cori passed Raven, there was a moment when the older girl’s disdain wavered. She licked her lips and said in a low voice: “You really killed one? It is no tale?”

“Yes,” T’Cori said. “And Frog Hopping slew another. The Mk*tk hunted us. And then we hunted it.” Raven searched her face, seeking lies, finding none. “I believe Stillshadow. Our hunters will be as strong as we make them. As strong as
we
are.” She hesitated a moment, then spoke her truth. “And you are strong, Raven.”

Stillshadow’s daughter studied T’Cori, still seeking evidence of dissembling or mockery. Finally she nodded. “You are fit,” Raven said.

T’Cori walked on.
You are fit.
She savored those words, the first kind ones that had passed between them in many springs.

As the sun died in the west, the hunters from Earth, Wind, Fire and Water bomas hiked double file up the narrow trail on Great Earth’s north face. “Tell me of the dream dancers,” Fire Ant said to Boar Tracks.

The young hunt chief seemed shrunken. Once Frog had thought him a giant, one of those human gods who had thrashed him with such contemptuous ease. Now his eyes were hollow and weak, unable to long avoid the sight of the transformed Great Sky. This question changed his aspect, so that he suddenly seemed to remember who and what he was. “How do you mean?” he asked.

“As women,” Fire Ant said, and Hawk Shadow laughed. All found themselves listening to this conversation. “How are they as women? You have been with them.”

“Yes,” Boar Tracks said, suddenly seeming to remember who and what he was. “I have.”

“And?” Fire Ant asked.

“Worth dying for,” he said.

Hawk Shadow thumped the butt of his spear against the ground. “I will be a great hero,” Hawk Shadow said. “They will seek me out and give the gift of their fire.”

The other boys and men spoke in turn of the great deeds they would do, and for a time Frog’s heart was lifted. For a moment he thought he could see T’Cori’s face in the clouds surrounding Great Sky, there among the gods and ancestors. Was that sunbeam the slant of a broken tooth?

Then the faces began to drift and dissolve. The clouds roiling around Great Sky’s peak seemed dark and heavy, whipped by the wind, crawling even as he watched them.

His stepbrother Scorpion noted Frog’s expression and looked back over his shoulder. “Are our ancestors in those clouds?” he asked. “Do they speak to you?”

Frog shrugged. “They are just clouds,” he said.

Sometimes, when the sun was just right and the clouds had parted, Frog could see up to the very top of the mountain. The shape of the summit had changed, as if unimaginable quantities of the strange dead white stuff had been torn away.

“Father Mountain is angry,” Fire Ant said.

“He has much to be angry about,” Lion Tooth said. When Hawk looked at him sharply, he shrugged.

“He took our hunt chiefs,” said Hawk.

“No,” Snake said nervously. “I say the Others did this.”

“Then they are too powerful to fight!” Hawk said, and shuddered.

“Not so,” Snake replied, brushing a fern frond out of his way. The path to the dream dancers’ boma was well trod but still overgrown. “Magic is like water. You can sip or guzzle from a skin, but there comes a time when the skin is empty. If they did such a powerful thing, surely their water sack is now dry. After all, Frog killed one. The nameless girl killed one. They are men, not spirits.”

“They are beasts,” Lion Tooth said, glancing at Fire Ant, who knew.

They are beasts, and they are men,
Frog thought. One of them, just one Mk*tk, poisoned, stabbed and slashed, was still stronger than any hunter he had ever known. And now they faced an entire tribe?

In response, Fire Ant shook his head. “Father Mountain is enraged,” he grunted. “Angry with the Mk*tk. Angry that they would challenge us on our own ground.”

“Silence,” said Snake. “We are almost there.”

The narrow trail wound across a sharp rise, and then they arrived at the dream dancer camp.

Snake seemed to shake himself out of some kind of trance and began to speak. “When I was with the hunt chiefs, and we went to the mountaintop—”

Suddenly, Stillshadow was there, leaning heavily on her bamboo walking stick, flanked by her daughters Blossom and Raven. Blossom seemed to be carrying most of the old woman’s weight. The crone’s face was ashen, her eyes sunken in her skull. “Why come you to me?”

“You know why we come,” Snake said. Both hope and grief shimmered in the air between them.

Though she seemed unable even to stand without help, her eyes burned. “I see only dead men before me,” she said with satisfaction. “This is as it should be. Come,” Stillshadow said. “Present yourself to your tribe’s dream dancers.”

As they entered the clearing, Frog saw the boys and men from the other bomas who had arrived before them, rows of tens of tens of hunters: young, mature, and some gray and stooped, all prepared to die for their people. Some were painted, some plain. Some wore feathered headbands or had tied the tails of foxes to their spears.

The young hunt chiefs stood behind her, watching. Stillshadow and Morning Spring presided.

“These are the daughters of the mountain,” Stillshadow said. “They are for Father Mountain alone: Father Mountain, and those found worthy in His sight.”

Arrayed in their splendor, freshly washed and their hair braided in tight spirals, the ripe young dancers faced the tribe’s bravest hunters, their bright eyes and moist mouths an invitation to boil the blood.

One of the young hunters whimpered, and Stillshadow roared in response. “Our great god is not dead! You saw His anger, because He knew that this filth would come to our land, and that His children would feel fear instead of rage! He is disappointed with you, and you must now earn your place in His shadow.”

Snake turned to the boys, who shivered in their ranks. “Say the words!” he demanded.

“We are dead already,” they chanted, as they had been instructed by the hunt chiefs, by Snake and Boar Tracks.

“Let us see your bones,” said Stillshadow, the walking ghost. Frog could not meet her eyes, was happy when those burning hollows floated past him. He was filled with a sense that he, and all of them, stood in the presence of the living dead.

And with that the girls went out among them with bowls of white paint, smearing their ribs and legs with smooth stripes.

T’Cori slid her way in front of another dancer, standing just two hand lengths away. Her fingers dipped into the white paint, and with their tips she drew bones on his skin. The wetness felt to him like fire. “Frog,” she whispered. She did not look at him. Ordinarily, the nearness of her smooth body might have made his root stir, but there was something else happening here, something more than sexual. This was a flame he had never known.

If faith he needed, it was here that he found it.

“Come back,” she said, a tear glistening at the corner of her eye.

“I will return,” he assured her.

She nodded.

They finished the ritual, and Stillshadow stood. “You are our hunters! We, the Ibandi women, kneel before you.” Stillshadow suited her actions to her words, bracing herself with the bamboo staff as she lowered herself first to her left knee, and then her right. The sight of this phenomenal woman kneeling before him was hypnotic.

“You are strong, and we are weak.” Her voice, ragged and trembling, carried both a current of spiritual strength he
felt
rather than heard, and an aching need. “We beg you to protect us. Know that we are yours, and yours alone.” Gathering her strength, she called to them, “Gaze upon what the Mk*tk would ravage!”

As the older women stood in a half circle and sang to them, the young ones drew the hides from their breasts and waists, standing nude before the men, rolling their hips in invitation. The breath caught in Frog’s throat. Rarely did the dream dancers reveal their pubic hair or breasts in public, rarely did they behave in an overtly sexual fashion, and never, ever as a group.

It was almost more than his mind could comprehend. “Father Mountain,” Frog murmured, “save me.” Now he felt the physical response, as if his eggs nestled in a bed of coals.

“We await your return,” Stillshadow said.

The very moment that the last of the men was out of their sight, the crone collapsed to the ground, spent.