Shadow Valley (37 page)

In a strange way, even the screams of the lashed Mk*tk captive blended into the same song, until the members of three tribes filled Shadow Valley’s bowl with their screams and calls and music.

And in the middle of it were the two dancing women. Exhausted, Frog and the other male dancers fell to the side, but T’Cori and Quiet Water danced on, as if guided by something beyond their own strength and will.

Dizzy and sick with fatigue, Frog feared for his mate.

Surely this, on top of everything else that had happened, was too much. Surely …

But as T’Cori staggered, and almost fell, something was happening. As her body grew weaker, Stillshadow, even without sight, seemed to sense every misstep. When T’Cori fell to her knees, dripping sweat into the sand, Still-shadow’s voice rose with scorn, driving her student upright once again.

When Quiet Water vomited in exhaustion, Stillshadow mocked her weakness, commanded her to stand once again.

As the sky darkened and the infinite eyes of Father Mountain and Great Mother opened in the sky above them, T’Cori seemed to molt, shedding her human aspect.

This was not the woman that he loved. Quiet Water was not the kind healer they had known. It was as if the two women were empty shells and now something very different was emerging from within.

If he believed in such things, Frog would have said he was peering
through
their flesh into the living fire within.

The Vokka wolves howled along to the drumbeats, as if recognizing T’Cori and Quiet Water as their own.

And all the time Flat-Nose watched them, his arms suspended above him. As T’Cori gained strength where there should have been none, as Quiet Water lost her air of injured desperation and became a woman of fire, something grew in Flat-Nose’s face, something that Frog had never seen before.

Could the wrinkle between the hooded eyes
be fear?

What did the old woman see? In her blindness, did her inner vision ignore the flesh? And if so, what did she see in T’Cori’s
num-
field? In Quiet Water’s?

In Flat-Nose’s?

Just past midnight, without any signal, the drummers ceased to play and the singers silenced their voices. The two women, eyes dilated and sweat dried, stood panting, staring blindly into the darkness. Their hands were crooked like claws.

“Cut him down,” Stillshadow said. “Give him his spear.”

“No!” Frog shook himself out of his own trance, unable to believe what he had just heard. He had supposed that T’Cori might stab a bound Mk*tk in some bloody ritual of vengeance. Freed, even an unarmed Mk*tk would be an insane risk. But
armed?
Before he could leap to her defense, three Ibandi jumped upon him, threw him to the ground and held him there.

T’Cori turned, and her eyes met his with an impact like a blow beneath his heart. For an instant, he saw something else in her … or she
was
something else. His eyes had betrayed him, were telling his mind something impossible. He could not see her body, just her head, her head grown as large as her body had been, almost as if it had been carved from a boulder.

He blinked, and she was once again the woman he loved.

“Give Flat-Nose his spear,” she said. The voice from his woman’s lips seemed not her own. It seemed …

It could not be, but it seemed …

He looked over at Stillshadow, who sat staring at T’Cori, lips curled into a small, dry smile as they moved continuously, saying things that no one in this world could hear.

Fire Ant sawed the leather thongs on Flat-Nose’s right arm. The Mk*tk snarled as his wrist came free, and Ant dared not loosen his left. Nor did he need to: Flat-Nose ripped the left thong free, and then those on his ankles. He flexed his left hand, pausing to stare at the stumps of his missing fingers.

Ant threw his spear into the soil at the Mk*tk’s feet. Flat-Nose stared at it, slow to comprehend. Then he wrenched it from the ground. Frog recoiled from the sound, struggled again against the hands pressing him into the ground.

Hot, stinging tears flowed into the soil beneath his face. He blinked until his vision cleared. If this was the death of love, he wished to burn the vision into his soul.

He longed to know what hell was, because when he rose, he was going to kill Stillshadow. If that was not enough to damn his soul, he could not imagine what was.

The air seemed to crackle, as if it was on fire.

The Mk*tk watched in confusion as T’Cori and Quiet Water grasped a spear, and advanced upon him. Incredulous, his mouth hanging half open dumbly, he watched. Not until Quiet Water drew blood from his ribs was he even able to move.

T’Cori watched her body without controlling it. She felt as if that physical shell was a child’s plaything, controlled by some force she had never really known. Something that had always known her.

Flat-Nose was stronger, faster, more skilled, more savage than any Ibandi male. And it did not matter.

She felt no fear, only a kind of hazed curiosity, as if she viewed everything through smoke, while her body went its own way.

How strange.

She saw Flat-Nose’s arm stab and sweep at Quiet Water in a blur that looked a bit like what happened if she stared at the sun and then closed her eyes, watching the orange disk against the blackness.

Real-unreal.

Blink.

The slashing swipe had not happened yet. She moved before he did, but her spear reached him as his motion commenced, exposing his armpit.

She saw him lash that spear back toward her, saw Quiet Water respond, dancing, dancing. Lunging.

She blinked.

No. It had not happened yet. Her body ducked as a slashing blow clef the air above her head. Flat-Nose roared with pain.

Quiet Water’s spear had struck home.

Flat-Nose stepped back, rubbed his left hand against his ribs, and then stared at it. His blood felt sticky as he smeared it between his fingers. He had seen his blood before, many times. Why was this time different?

He had felt fear before. All men did. It was a natural thing. But what he felt now was very different. Fear and
shame.
He could not die like this. Not like
this.

These were
women.
Just women. This could not be happening. Their spears were not poisoned, but his limbs felt as if they were filled with stones.

Anger could kill fear. This he had always known. This he had learned from his father and grandfather, almost before he could walk.

He found the anger and let it consume him.

Screaming, he sprang at them.

It was a nightmare. No matter how swiftly he moved, he could not touch them. It was like trying to spear smoke. It was not that they were so fast … the women simply
were not there
when he struck. If he focused his attention upon one, the other stabbed. If he turned, in the moment his attention flickered, the other spear was in his thigh or ribs or gouging his neck.

He swung and kicked. The women were like willows, bending and twisting out of the way. They nicked his tendons.

His right heel bled. His shoulder was gashed almost to the bone.

Throwing caution to the winds he charged the smaller woman, the one who had killed his brother and jumped into the river. He would destroy her, even if the other one stabbed him in the back. He could survive a wound from one of these women. Then, with only one enemy to defeat, he could turn all his rage upon her.

Even if she killed him from behind, such a coward’s blow would not diminish him in the eyes of the mighty God Blood.

But the small one melted away in front of him. When he charged, she knelt, bracing the butt of her weapon upon the ground, the point threatened his groin.

Screaming frustration, he skidded on his heels and blocked it, but even before his arm swept down hers was rising, as if she had known what he was going to do even before he did it, stabbing him so deeply in the upper arm that as he reared back, it wrenched the spear from her hand.

Desperate now, Flat-Nose pulled her spear out of his flesh. Blood pulsed from the wound. His hand was numb. He opened and closed it, but it had no strength.

Pain!

The larger one had just smashed a stone into the back of his head, and was ducking even as he spun to strike.

Pain!

The small one had a new spear, and his right leg, speared three times now, was finally buckling.

Another stone, this one to the side of his head, and he staggered, the night exploding with stars that burned like suns.

He groaned, turning toward the larger woman, and the smaller one smashed the other side of his head. Suddenly, he no longer possessed the strength even to raise his arms.

No! This could not be happening! It could not. It—

Flat-Nose lay bleeding, exhausted, his scalp torn and matted with blood. He groaned, but could not rise.

Frog could not believe his eyes.

Fire Ant stood motionless beside him, staring at T’Cori as if she were the face of Great Mother.

And perhaps
, Frog told himself,
just perhaps she actually was.

Stillshadow reached out to the hunters at her sides. They pulled her erect. She hobbled to the prostrate Flat-Nose.

“Hold him,” she said. Despite his wounds and fatigue, as they laid hands upon the defeated Mk*tk his body convulsed violently. It took four of them to hold his limbs. Stillshadow pulled his loincloth aside and extended her other hand.

“Knife,” she said.

Without hesitation, Leopard Paw handed her his blade. Her arm swept down, and Flat-Nose screamed.

Frog turned his head.

When he looked back, Stillshadow was handing T’Cori a small chunk of bloody meat. T’Cori stood hugging her sister, both completely exhausted. “For your medicine bag,” she said. “Dry it. Keep it, always. His power is now yours.”

Then she handed another chunk to Quiet Water. “For yours.”

“Fire,” she said to Uncle Snake. He handed her a burning branch. She thrust it between Flat-Nose’s legs. As he writhed, in a cold flat voice she said, “so you will not bleed to death.”

He thrashed and snapped at her as she took his right eye, and the tendons of his right wrist, once again searing the flesh with fire.

“Translate for me,” she said to Quiet Water, after the shrieks had died to groans. “Tell him I do this not because it gives me pleasure, but because it is the only language the Mk*tk understand. Tell him to return to his people. Tell him that our women can now kill his men. Tell him that if they ever return to our lands, we will kill them all and burn their bones. Tell him!”

Although barely able to stand, Quiet Water spoke in a guttural, barking voice. Flat-Nose’s head lolled to the side, coughing blood. Frog wondered if he had bitten his tongue.

Then the four hunters released Flat-Nose, who crawled a hand of paces, then staggered to his feet. He looked back at them, his single eye vast and dark, then disappeared into the shadows.

When Frog turned to speak to Stillshadow, she had collapsed. The old woman’s blind eyes stared up into the night clouds, “Cloud Stalker …” she whispered. “I come.”

T’Cori and Sister Quiet Water knelt and cradled Stillshadow’s gray head between them. She said nothing more but smiled up at them. For a moment Frog swore that her dead eyes focused on the dream dancers.

Just for a moment …

Stillshadow balanced above the burning ocean, the
jowk.
It churned, containing all forms and no form. Within it, she saw everything she had ever known and loved that had passed on, as well as everything that would ever be born.

It gaped for her, and she felt a flash of fear, uncertainty. No. It was not her time….

Then, out of the chaos, a face she knew.

A face she loved.

“Cloud Stalker,” she whispered.

His arms opened for her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she returned the embrace.

The
jowk,
she thought, there being a final time for all things. The Kori. Nothing.

Everything.

Drifting fingers of acrid smoke clutched at Frog’s nose, at the valley walls. After the Mk*tk corpses were burned in bonfires, their bones would be scattered.
God Mountain would not want them
, he thought.