Shadow Valley (20 page)

In the day’s new light, it was easier to make a complete picture of their surroundings. The ridge of hills stretched off into the distance, arching around to make a bowl. The walls were rock tumbled but crowded with trees, more than they would have dreamed from the growth upon the outer wall.

The Ibandi had camped on a shelf of rock less than a quarter-way down the ridgetop. There, the families were crowded but not cramped.

As they ate their morning mush balls and jerky, the people gathered at the edge of the shelf and gazed down into the valley. Their stomachs rumbled and their mouths watered. Could anyone predict how long this bounty would last? Although the game below them seemed without end, this entire place was a miracle such as only existed in dreams. Mightn’t the animals simply melt into the grass at any moment?

Mightn’t Father Mountain be preparing the cruelest joke of all?

When Frog retreated from his thoughts, Snake was standing at the edge of the shelf, arms raised. When he saw Frog, Snake spoke with the strongest voice Frog had heard his uncle use for moons.

“When we hunt,” Snake said, “we hunt as of old. We kill enough for all our people. Enough to dry the meat for hard times. Only then can we believe that what is here will last.” Despite his words, the dead skin on the left side of his face crinkled as he smiled.

So they went down from the ridge and marched west, marveling at the kudu and fringe-eared oryx and impala. There, hiding just beneath the surface of a water hole, a hippopotamus twitched its ears, then sneezed a flume of water into the air.

“Could Stillshadow be right?” Frog asked. “Could her blind eyes see more than ours?”

“Shadow Valley,” Snake said. “My father once told me that monsters dwelled here. Something more than beast-men. He said that my uncles fought great pale things, wolves that walked on two legs. And that we did not need this place: there was hunting elsewhere.”

“Things have changed,” Frog said. “Now we need it. We both know how stories grow,” he said, and Snake winced. “I see no monsters,” Frog said, “only the fattest, slowest giraffes.”

“The unseen snake bites the deepest,” Snake muttered.

And they looked. Monkeys swarmed up the trees, uncounted tens of flamingos stood on single legs, reflecting the newborn sunlight back in shimmering pink waves. The hunt chiefs may have told stories about Shadow Valley, but Snake knew better than most that legends and reality were not always the same.

They walked the grasslands at the foot of the hills, marveling at the streams and berry bushes and trees whose branches were laden with succulent fruit.

After a quarter day of walking they reached a cleft ten paces across, deep enough to walk into many tens of paces before narrowing. All agreed that this place would make a splendid trap. The fissure walls extended some hands of men high, but looked accessible from the top.

“Your eyes are open wide, Frog,” said Uncle Snake, grinning. “Will this place be good?”

“I think so,” he said. “I call this place Giraffe Kill, for the meat to come.” They backed out of the fissure and looked back across the plain.

What had made this place? Surely, Father Mountain’s mighty hands and no other’s. It seemed to Frog that the grass was greener, lusher here than in the outer world. The sky above them was brighter, the clouds more crisply edged.

What was reality and what a dream?

Frog closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose. The air even
smelled
better. Greener, crisper, cleaner.

He opened his eyes again. There, five spear throws distant, as placid as if they had never seen a lion or a man, grazed a hand of spotted long necks.

“It is too wonderful,” said Leopard Eye. “What if there really are
jowk?
What if Mk*tk are here?”

“That is not the legend,” Snake said. “My father said that the creatures were pale as grubs. The Mk*tk are as dark as we.”

Frog’s belly twisted. He had expected this question to arise, another reason he had spent so much time jabbing at shadows with his spear.

“There is more than enough for all here,” he said. “If there are monsters here, and they try to drive us away, then we will see. There is enough here for many peoples.”

“What if they are not people at all?”

“Then we will see.”

They crept into position, then waited for the wind to shift. As it often did, in the morning hours the wind blew mostly from the north. By the time the sun died on the western horizon, the breeze came mostly from the east.

The hunters had surrounded a hand of giraffes, old gray furs and young colts. Frog and his people had busied themselves profitably, using bows and coals to create small fires in the dry grass.

Then, after a screaming, arm-waving signal from Uncle Snake, they fanned the fires.

While Bat Wing watched at his side, Frog set his ember to the dry grass. He blew and fanned and bent one stalk to the next. Bat Wing unrolled the zebra skin, and Frog shook it, making wind to drive the flame.

The fire folk roared to life, mating, bearing young, spreading rapidly.

By the time the first of the spotted long-necks smelled the smoke, they were half encircled.

Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, the herd stumbled into a run, fleeing the smoke with their stiff, awkward gait. When they tried to break through the fires, the long-necks found a pair of hunters shouting and waving spears, driving them in the opposite direction.

Do not surround them. Always give the prey a path to escape….

It was another thing he had learned from Uncle Snake. The panicky beasts galloped toward the little canyon. There they would be trapped, and the hunters, in pursuit, could pierce them with spears and arrows and rain rocks upon their heads from above. It was all to the good.

“Uncle,” Bat Wing said, voice shot through with nervousness, “the fire is spreading too fast.”

“Come quick!” Frog grabbed the boy’s wrist and pulled.

In his excitement, Frog had allowed the flames to encircle them. The smoke wreathed his nostrils and crawled down his throat.

He wiped his watering eyes and squinted through the smoke. Fire crawled along the grass, chewing at the blades and curling smoke as it spread. The wind shifted and
… there!

Not ten strides distant, a gap opened in the line of fire. Frog seized the boy and ran. Then as if the wind itself was an evil
jowk
it whipped into a frenzy, and the raging wall thickened. If he tried to leap it, he might stumble and perhaps be singed but survive.

But Bat Wing would never make it through at all.

His initial panic gave way, replaced by a cold, heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Heat.
Air that seared his lungs and blinded him.

Death.

His nose and throat burned as if he had inhaled fire. His heart drummed rabbit rhythm, speeding poison to every finger and toe.

Smoke, excitement, the clamor of the hunt … separately and together they had blinded him. So eager had he been to trap the giraffes that he had placed himself and the boy in peril.

So. You think you are smarter than other men? And that men are smarter than beasts?

Even giraffes know to run from fire
, he thought.
You fool: this place is haunted after all. And soon another ghost will walk the plain. Would his flesh find its way up Great Sky?

Up?

Smoke rises
, he thought.
Fire climbs
up
a vine.
If he could stay close to the ground, perhaps he could spare them both a roasting.

Frog knelt and began to dig. “Dig with me!” he called to Bat Wing. The boy knelt, and they scraped with their hands, scrabbling until they’d clawed a trench in the earth. Frog slid down into it and covered his legs and chest with dirt.

“Get down!” he yelled to the paralyzed boy. Bat Wing climbed down next to him, and Frog pulled the zebra skin over them both.

As the fire tightened its grip, his heart thundered loud enough to drown thought. For a moment he dared to hope that it might veer away. Then the wind shifted again, bringing the heat right to them. Raw panic seized thought and worried it like a weasel with a rat. Every bit of him yammered to rise and run, to risk anything to get away. He forced himself to stay down, gasping as the air thinned and his skin scorched.

“Uncle! Mother!” The boy beside him coughed. “Your son is afraid. Help me!”

Then the smoke flooded his mind, and thought died.

By the time he awakened and crawled out from under the blackened zebra skin, the sun had set. Was he dead? No, he was breathing. Even more tellingly, he ached from hair to heel. Frog imagined that whatever death actually was, it was not likely to hurt quite so badly. Frog sat up in a field of blackened grass.

He smacked his hands together, woozily watching a cloud of ash dust fuzzing the air. His head wasn’t working right. His eyes were blurry. Patches of skin on his face and shoulders and legs were singed, but he seemed as-toundingly undamaged.

Bat Wing lay limp at his side. He rolled the boy’s inert body over, and shook his shoulder. “Bat Wing!” he called. “Bat Wing! Wake up! You cannot be dead. It is Frog, your uncle, who calls you.”

Bat Wing coughed. His eyes opened, crossed and then focused. Frog hugged the boy almost tight enough to choke him.

“Don’t crush me.” Bat Wing coughed, and they laughed together, rather shocked to find themselves alive.

At first so faint he doubted his ears, a chorus of human voices rippled through the night. Leaning upon each other, Frog and Bat Wing limped toward the canyon.

And there, they found the rest of their hunters. Despite the fact that two of the long-necks still thrashed their legs, the butchering had already begun. Some of the other Ibandi were already slicing away chunks of meat. To his weary amusement, Frog realized that the joy of the kill had been so great, no one had thought to look for him or Bat Wing.

And within moments, joining in the butchery, slippery with blood and intestines and breathing a cloud of hungry black gnats, he had almost forgotten his own toasting.

That night, the Ibandi camp was a feasting glory. T’Cori and Sing Sun chanted and stamped and sang, performing their blessing ceremonies. The gods, if gods there were, seemed receptive to their entreaties. Frog wondered if such a miracle could actually be. Might they have found a home?

He and Leopard Eye had gathered branches and vines, constructing the camp’s largest lean-to for Stillshadow, near an elephant-head-shaped rock half buried in the soil. T’Cori had led her mentor to the rock in the early morning hours. Blind and frail but blessedly agile, the old woman climbed up and sat cross-legged, staring out toward the camp as her people mended clothes, sharpened tools and prepared for their day. She had not yet called it her sitting stone, but that day could not be far off.

When Frog and the hunters returned from the valley floor, bowed beneath their bloody loads of giraffe ribs and legs, Stillshadow smiled even before the first glad cries of greeting rang in her ears.

While the meat sizzled on the twin campfires, she swayed back and forth to the rhythms of an invisible drummer. All in the camp felt their woes dissolving before the waves and eddies of that silent song.

T’Cori brought Stillshadow down from the rock and sat her near the fire to feed her. All were quiet and still until the chief dancer took the first bite. She set her teeth in it, and then pushed it away. “Later,” the old woman said to T’Cori. “Bring it to me later, in my hut.”

“The meat is good,” T’Cori said.

“I knew it would be strong and sweet,” Stillshadow said.

“It is right that we give thanks to Great Sky,” T’Cori said. “We cannot see Him, but He sees us, blesses us, keeps us strong.”

Frog laughed. “The night is His shadow.”

He looked up at the clouds. There amid the billowings and shadings, he saw Hawk Shadow drawing a bow, aiming at a … rabbit? Yes, he could just make out the ears and tail. And there … the shape of a spiked cactus. So sad almost no one else could see the cloud world.

“Frog,” Gazelle Tears said, “your son wants you.”

“That is good,” Frog said, “because I want my son.”

She handed him a warm brown bundle of deerskin and wriggling arms and legs. Medicine Mouse gurgled and reached a chubby hand out to Frog, a broad and contented smile on his face.

“Perhaps,” Frog’s mother said, “you can teach him to see the faces.”

Frog held his son. This was the only heaven he needed: his family, safe and near. T’Cori and Gazelle Tears. His sister, Little Brook, was on the far side of the women’s fire with her own family, and his younger brother, Wasp, would probably marry soon.

This might be the place
, he thought,
and this might be the time.
Shadow Valley had everything a man or an entire tribe could desire.

Gazelle Tears’s face was sharp now, all cheekbones and chin. She had clipped her hair down to gray stubble, as grandmothers often did. It was a strangeness to Frog. Men and women started life as squalling infants, almost exactly alike. They diverged into different lives and patterns of dress as they reached adolescence. Boys with their loincloths, girls with their leather skirts. In adulthood they lived nearly separate lives, different tasks, different fires, different lodges. Then as elders, the circle completed itself, and they once again seemed almost identical. There was a wisdom and a shape to all of it that warmed him. “Mother, what kind of baby was I?”