Great Sky Woman (9 page)

“Practice,” Uncle Snake said. The right side of his mouth curled up in a smile. “Good, but no song.”

After they had finished, Snake gathered the boys around. In the dust they drew images of buffalo and antelope, simplified so that they looked little like Father Mountain’s four-legged except perhaps for the horns.

“I will show you special signs, signs you must know,” said Snake.

“Why?” asked Lion Tooth, a boy from Wind boma. Lion Tooth wore a necklace of gleaming cat fangs, and chopped his hair so that it was short on the sides and high along the back of his head, like a lion’s mane. Five years older than Frog, he had accompanied Uncle Snake on his outing as an assistant.

“Because tongues change, but the signs are more constant,” Snake answered. “You can go horizon to horizon and farther still, meet bhan and other men. Those you meet may not speak as we do, but they will understand the signs.”

The other boys nodded, but Frog repeated Lion’s question. “Why?”

“Because all men live the same life,” he said. “We are born. We grow. We mate, father children.” With each of these words, his fingers traced lines in the dust, images representing these states of life. “We grow old and die.”

“All men do these things?” Frog asked.

“All men.”

Frog thought carefully. “Why do we have to die?” he asked.

With a hint of exasperation, Uncle Snake drew them around him in a circle, and beneath the full moon, he danced them a story.

Once, a long long time ago, there was a tribe who lived beside a lake. They were much beloved by the sun and the moon, and by Great Mother and Father Mountain. One day after they had placed a beloved medicine woman in the ground they asked: “Why must we die?”

Father and Mother had pity on them and gave them the gift of eternal life. So they lived and they loved, and nothing could kill them, and they lost fear. When they lost fear they made mistakes while hunting, and often slept holding starving children, their swollen bellies protesting the lack of food.

Next, they lost love. When no one died, they lost the joy of new life, for the children. Husbands and wives no longer made love to each other, because they were busy exploring and playing games.

But as time went on, all that could be learned in life had been learned. There was nothing to do, no adventures to have. They cared not about one another, and they forgot their hunting, so that much of the time they were cold, and hungry, and alone.

They lived on, and with no fear of death their days at length lost their spice, and life lost its color.

One at a time they went to Mother and Father. They prayed in the shadow of Great Sky, asking Great Mother to give them any gift that would make them love and learn and taste life once again.

She gave them Death.

And this time, they understood, and were grateful.

“Signs,” Snake spoke in conclusion. “We hunt. We build fire. We fight against animals and men. We walk far. Each of these things we do, and all men do. If you know these signs, you can speak to others who have the knowledge.”

“I will study,” Frog said. “Who makes the signs?”

“They have always been.”

“Could one make new signs?’

Uncle Snake looked at Frog with something close to suspicion. “Why? There are no new things. All that is has always been.”

“Always?”

“Always.” He stopped, and seemed to take Frog’s question more seriously. “I tell you what. Find one of these ‘new things’ and bring it to me. Then we will speak.”

Chapter Ten

As the group turned northward, they retraced their steps such that Frog knew they would eventually pass the bhan boma a second time. Regretting his earlier, unkind thoughts, Frog promised himself to leave some bit of food behind, as had Uncle Snake.

Suddenly, without consciously understanding how he knew, Frog became aware that something was wrong. He sniffed the air, catching the scent of burnt wood and something else, something that churned his stomach. The wind shifted, and the smell came to him more clearly: burnt flesh.

It was only later that his eyes detected the first plume of smoke.

Frog’s fists tightened as he glimpsed the first burned hut. Holes and gaps were torn in the thorn walls, as if some kind of desperate fight had raged within. He could almost hear the screams drifting in the wind. The stink of their terror drowned out that of their scat and piss. The burned and mutilated bodies of the small, strange, sickly people were sprawled around the sand as if life had never burned in their eyes at all. Men, women, children. All dead. Snake and the hunters entered so carefully they might have been stalking leopards. Only after they searched carefully did they allow the boys to enter.

“There are terrible things in the world,” Uncle Snake said. The death on the left side of his face seemed to have distorted the right. “I am sorry that you must learn of them so young, but the time has come. Come, see.” Frog retched, his mind and stomach overwhelmed. Some of the other boys also lost their food, and no one shamed them.

Frog walked so softly he barely left footprints, looking at everything, eyes wide as he passed the bloodied corpses. He had never seen violent death before, although he had seen dead babies, and Hot Tree’s eldest daughter had succumbed to fever two summers past.

He gasped as he approached their hearth: someone had emptied his bowels atop the stones. No question: that was
human
scat lumped in the ashes. The insult was almost beyond imagining.

Frog poked at the dark lump with a dried willow stick. These invaders were human—judging by the size and texture of their scat, large men who ate generous portions of meat. His attention was drawn to a few interesting flecks of vegetable matter, which he probed with the tip of his stick.
There…
little white seeds speckled within. He didn’t recognize them at all.

Frog examined the feces, their thickness, the dryness at the surface and the moistness within. Remembering the previous day’s blazing heat, he decided that this violation had happened yesterday.

Then Scorpion yelled, “What are you doing, staring at shit! Come! Wounded man!” and Frog sprinted to the boma’s torn gate in time to see one of the hunters dragging in a wounded bhan on a bloody zebra skin.

It was Silent Warthog, who just days ago had held a sick, flyblown baby in his arms and offered them shelter, however poor.

Scorpion was shaking. Frog had never seen his stepbrother like this, shivering and weak. Frog touched his shoulder in sympathy, and Scorpion took his hand, held it tightly.

The bhan’s face was smeared crimson, masked in blood. Even in the fading light, the left side of his head seemed unnaturally flat. “Where did you find him?” Snake asked.

The hunter gestured toward the south.

Lion Tooth twisted his necklace nervously. “If this man’s family is dead, he should be dead as well, protecting them.”

Hawk Shadow shrugged. “Look at his wounds. He did his part. Perhaps they thought him dead.”

“Run and tell the healers to prepare. We must take him to the dream dancers,” Uncle Snake said at last. “We must know what happened to him.”

Frog ran with Lion Tooth, struggling to match the older boy’s effortless stride with his own shorter, weaker legs. By the time the sun had shifted a quarter in the sky, he thought he would die. Lion Tooth reminded him to exhale continuously, using hyena breathing’s relentless
huh-huh-huh
to drive himself onward.

His eyes scanned the brush wildly as they passed. He could smell death all around them. Here? There? Where were the slayers? Behind them even now? Watching from concealment?

“Run,” Lion Tooth said. “Breathe. You think too much, Frog. Thought steals your
num.
”

So Frog ran until he hurt, and the pain drove the fear away.

They encountered a group of hunters from Wind and Water bomas, out on a friendly running game. Relaying their message, Frog and Lion could finally stop, heaving for breath as their cousins turned and ran back toward Spring Gathering, carrying the message to Great Earth.

Returning, Frog found that the others had already built a sled on which to carry the wounded Warthog, and begin moving him west toward Great Earth.

A mature dream dancer named Bamboo Flower intercepted them before the next morning’s sun was fully born.

They took Warthog into Spring Gathering’s healing hut, and while preparations were being made, the boys who had been on walkabout were allowed to observe.

Silent Warthog thrashed in slow agony. He bucked, body arching, every muscle pulled taut. Frog guessed that the bhan was dying, despite the herbs the dancers fed him and the liquid, red and thicker than blood, that he drank from a pouch made of eland skin.

After that last drink Warthog did seem to calm a bit. Then, with effort, he drew a symbol on the ground with his fingertip.

It looked like a stick-figure of a man, with a buffalo’s horns. Then red drooled from the bhan’s mouth, and he howled.

Hawk Shadow crouched to crawl through the door, coming to stand beside Frog. Hawk had grown into a proud, tall young hunter, his two parallel manhood scars newly scabbed upon his cheeks. Round-faced and more muscular even than Fire Ant, Hawk moved as silently as his namesake, and had a physical confidence that Frog could only dream of.

Hawk peered at the sign in the dirt with narrowed eyes. “What is this?”

Hearing him, the elders spoke. “Beast-men,” they said. Break Spear nodded sagely. “We know that for moons, a clan of beast-men have camped on Great Sky’s western slopes. We let them stay. Now, see what they do!”

Warthog’s eyes seemed to focus a bit. He shivered but seemed no longer in pain. Frog wondered what ground and fermented miracle the pouch had contained.

His wounds were packed with herbs and bound with sweet grass. Snake and the hunt chiefs prayed and sang over him.

“Do I die?” he asked finally, as if it had taken all his strength to form those three words.

The medicine man looked at the elders and then back again. “All men die,” he said.

Little comfort, thought Frog. Not all men would die before their next dawn.

Chapter Eleven

The healing hut was a temporary structure of bamboo and grasses built at the center of Spring Gathering. Within its cooling shadows, T’Cori knelt and watched as Stillshadow crouched over Deep Dry Hole’s thrashing body. The hunter from Fire boma trembled and gnashed at his lips, and a trace of white foam formed at the corners of his mouth. His
num
-fire was a riot of confused, jagged colors, like a fractured rainbow. T’Cori’s terrified sisters stood back, awed by the sight.

Stillshadow wiped the hunter’s forehead with wet leaves, then crushed herbs beneath Dry Hole’s bulbous nose. And at length, late in the night, the hunter emerged from his fit, exhausted. Stillshadow sat cross-legged at his side, watching with narrowed eyes.

“Sleep,” the old woman said, then motioned to T’Cori and Raven. “We must make medicine,” she said. “Raven, you must teach her.”

She said no more until they were outside the hut, where Dry Hole could not hear. “He has the holy disease,” she said. “And has had it since childhood. Without the medicine, he might die.”

“What shall I do, Mother?” T’Cori asked, holding her head high.

Raven’s eyes glittered.

“Do not call me that,” Stillshadow said sternly. “Go,” she said. “Find the elephant’s little brother, and bring his droppings.”

T’Cori felt weak, her head still spinning. It was taxing to be in the company of one as ill as Dry Hole had been. Still, she understood why she had to participate. It was vital that she learn to heal others, and a healer must also be capable of healing herself. So, weak or not, she had to do as asked.

She and Raven gathered water gourds and some dried meat and set off. A quarter day’s walk around Great Earth’s slope stood a cairn of rock, marking the spot where the trail split off.

“Here,” Raven said sharply, the first words she had spoken since they left the camp.

She is very angry,
T’Cori thought.
She does not like it when I call Stillshadow mother.

The two girls climbed until they were high above the ground. Raven was a good climber, as medicine women had to be in order to reach the rarest, most remote herbs. But as they moved upward, T’Cori saw that they were ascending to a dizzying height. High enough that the giant baobab tree was as small as her thumbnail. She smiled, but Raven was not so pleased. T’Cori could tell by the tightness in the way the girl moved that fear was in her body. She could see it in her limbs, their heaviness, that the fear was eating at the older girl.

T’Cori felt a certain lightness of heart at this. So! Great Raven was flawed after all!

The elder dancer ignored her fear, though, and led them onward until they had reached a flat place, a pile of rocks sheltered in shadow.

Little mouselike creatures skittered away from them as they approached. The rocks were covered in white droppings, and after Raven caught her breath, she motioned to T’Cori.

“Here,” she said. “This is what we need.”

“For Dry Hole’s sickness?”

Raven nodded.

“Raven?” T’Cori asked. “You do not love climbing as I do. And you do not like me, I think. But you agreed to show me where the medicine is found. Why?”

Raven stared at her. “You want truth?”

T’Cori nodded.

“Then, no, I do not like you.” She glowered down on the younger, smaller girl. “You want to take my mother. You want to take my position.” She came closer to T’Cori, so close that the nameless one could smell her anger. “You will never take either,” she said. “I will kill you if you try.”

Two steps beyond T’Cori’s heels, the level ground declined in a bone-breaking dropoff. Raven backed T’Cori up close to the edge, grabbed her shoulder and shoved her backward so that the upper half of her body projected over empty space.

“Do you feel it?” she said. “One shove. You would fly like a bird.” She stared into the girl’s face, looking for fear.

An eternity passed. Then Raven pulled T’Cori back, chewing at her lip.

She changed the subject. “These are hyraxes,” she said, as if the previous moments had not occurred at all. “It is their scat that will make Dry Hole well.”

They spent a quarter day scraping some of the ankle-high, sticky mass of dung and urine into a pouch, then gathering the other herbs and barks that Stillshadow sought.

Then Raven led the way back down. Halfway down, Stillshadow’s daughter slipped, her arms spinning as she flailed for balance. Her foot could not find purchase, nor could her hands. Terror distending her face, Raven stared into the eyes of the girl she had so recently threatened.

She did not ask for help, even as the rock she clung to began to pull away from the wall. It was a very long way down.

“Give me your hand,” T’Cori said, and Raven hesitated, until the rock beneath her foot began to give way as well. Then and only then she reached out.

“You will drop me,” Raven said.

“Great Mother would see,” T’Cori said, and Raven stared up at her, at the small, calm girl clinging to the rock face, and knew her meaning.

“Yes,” she said, feigning calm. “Great Mother would see.”

She took T’Cori’s hand and with that purchase was able to find a safe place for her feet.

They made the rest of the descent safely, but when they reached the ground Raven was furious. “You will tell,” she said. “You will try to use what happened to take my place.”

T’Cori stared at her. “Is that what you would do?” she asked.

Raven ignored the question. “If you do, I will kill you.”

Then she walked away.

It was good that T’Cori had fetched the medicine. Stillshadow used this as an opportunity to teach, blending the herbs and the scat together to make a broth for Deep Dry Hole to drink. The hunter was recovering, but still weak, and made faces as he choked down the gourd’s contents.

“Finish,” Stillshadow urged, and at length he did, then laid back against his straw.

T’Cori crossed her eyes slightly, until her vision blurred. Dry Hole’s
num
-fire was still confused. How long would the healing take? Even as she asked herself that question, the outer layers began to slow, the smoky quality diminishing.

Powerful medicine, indeed.

The hunter seemed as if he had aged rains in a single night.

The other students were also staring at Dry Hole, and T’Cori saw that Stillshadow was studying them in turn. She watched T’Cori with special, approving interest.

Stillshadow whispered in T’Cori’s ear. “What do you see?”

“Black and red,” T’Cori said. “And…yellow…and white.”

“Where is the white?” Stillshadow asked, voice suddenly sharper.

“Out here,” she said. T’Cori’s palms wavered a handsbreadth from her body.

“What else?”

“Things floating in the flame,” she said. “Like moths hovering in the air. Some of them spin and some of them whine.”

She heard a girl’s voice behind her, murmuring agreement.

The old woman nodded gravely. “Very good,” she said. “The black means he is very sick. The gold that there is still life in him. Stay with him.” She addressed both T’Cori and the tall girl closest behind her, Sister Quiet Water. “Massage his hand- and foot-eyes.”

T’Cori nodded, dropping into a woozy sort of semitrance. All through the day and into the night the healing continued, but the girls immediately surrounding T’Cori found excuses to leave more quickly, and when they returned, found places away from their younger sister.

Later still, Stillshadow spoke to them again, and this time some of the girls did as T’Cori had done, turning their heads and squinting. The crone was generous with her praise to each of them when she asked what they saw and listened to their replies.

As the day waned, they left the healing hut and went out to the Gathering, to join the trading and matchmaking and feasting. Stillshadow turned to T’Cori.

“What do you see?”

T’Cori mumbled her reply, eyes half closed, rocking back and forth in her solitary darkness. “So much. So many. Look! She is sick!”

A gray-haired woman limped slowly by. The edges of her fire-cloud flickered dark red.

“Yes,” Stillshadow agreed. “She has been sick all wet season. She will heal now, or she will die.”

“I think she dies,” T’Cori said.

Stillshadow looked closely at her charge. “We will see,” she said.

After night fell there was dancing and singing, but T’Cori stood to the side, as she often did, not part of the ancient patterns. Then, when no one was watching, she slipped away to be by herself, in the shadows between the huts. And there, where no one watched, she found her own dance, in her own way, and in her lonely world she spent the night.

In the morning, Stillshadow was awake before any of the others….

Except one. She found T’Cori behind the huts, dancing by herself, as she might have done all the night long. The small, thin girl spun in circles, eyes wide but unseeing. It took several gentle shakes to pull T’Cori back from the dream.

“Back to us,” Stillshadow said. “Back to the world of flesh.”

The girl stopped spinning, panting as she did. It took ten breaths before she could focus on Stillshadow, and when she did, she seemed almost resentful that the old woman had pulled her back.

“Are we flesh and shadow?” T’Cori asked.

“And fire,” Stillshadow whispered. “Every breath connects us to the flame that created all.” She gestured at the newborn sun. “The hunters have their ways of breathing, and we have ours. Every breath is a song. Sing with me,” she said, and began a tune.

The rendering was a sweetness. Although there had been no formal calling, the sisters crawled out of their huts, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. They gathered around at Stillshadow’s urging, although the sight of the haggard girl was frightening to them. The crone gestured silently for them to come, as if to say,
Your sister needs you.

They took up the song. It was an old and favored one. They easily remembered the calls and refrains, and yelled back to the crone as she raised and lowered her voice.

It was a song of dream, and of the thin walls between the dream world and this one, and of the dream dancers, those who risked their souls walking that narrow divide.

In transformations almost as magical as her healings, Stillshadow’s voice now sounded like the wind, now like a leopard’s call. She sang and sang.

At last a man appeared, and Cloud Stalker, grandfather of the hunt chiefs, joined her, accompanied by two of his sons—one of them the splendid Owl Hooting.

Stalker was a narrow man with hot eyes, his hair streaked with gray but knotted clublike so it lay against his neck. He was almost as old as Stillshadow, and although their stations in life prevented them from ever living together, it was said that they loved each other as much as two people could. They sat, legs crossed, and gazed into each other’s eyes and linked hands as they sang, their deeply wrinkled faces smiling broadly.

He was Raven’s father but not Blossom’s. Raven watched the two of them together, her mother and father, and even T’Cori could see the love the girl had, understood why it was so desperately important to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

Indeed, if Stillshadow had been her mother, she would have felt the same way. This was more than clan. More than family. This was an earthly reflection of Great Mother and Father Mountain, a bit of heaven here on earth.

They all sang, even T’Cori following along, although no one saw that as she sang the tears were streaking her face.

No mother. No father. And she would never have a husband.

That night it rained, and in that rain the thunder roared. Even if no one had ever told her, she would know that the thunder and lightning were Great Mother and Father Mountain, making love atop Great Sky, the eye-searing lightning their passion.

To have love like that, even for a moment—
that
would be worth dying for.

She hoped it would be worth living for as well. For if she could not hope one day to have such a thing, she was afraid that there would be nothing to live for at all.

It was early the next day that T’Cori first saw death.

Peering around Blossom, Stillshadow and three other gray old dream dancers, T’Cori the nameless watched as four hunters dragged a wounded man named Silent Warthog to the healing hut.

The old women had been called from their fire ceremonies to examine the wounded man. The eternal fire would be tended by apprentices. The bhan’s life-flame was far more fragile.

There beneath the healing hut’s shadowed walls Stillshadow and her apprentices spent much of the rest of the day around the dying hunter. His weakening moans clotted the air; his wounds oozed crimson ichor onto the sticky sand. The dream dancers did what they could to aid the spirits in facilitating Silent Warthog’s healing, or easing his way to Great Sky. The task seemed hopeless, but they struggled anyway, snuffling on all fours as they attempted to summon Silent Warthog’s totems, that they might aid their son. The dancers’ skills were mighty. If he recovered, he might tell them what had happened to his boma.