Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Inner Bomas

  Dramatis Personae

  In the beginning…

  Nameless

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Butterfly Spring

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Walkabout

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Great Sky Woman

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Steven Barnes

  Copyright Page

  For my own Great Circle:

  Joyce, who taught me to read.

  Nicki, who taught me to love.

  Jason, my living example of how life and learning begins.

  Tananarive, a daily reminder that miracles exist.

  Bless you all.

  Dramatis Personae

  THE INNER BOMAS

  Frog Hopping

  Fire Ant (Frog’s brother)

  Hawk Shadow (Frog’s eldest brother)

  Scorpion (Frog’s stepbrother)

  Uncle Snake

  Lizard Tongue (an older friend)

  Break Spear (boma father)

  Little Brook (Frog’s sister)

  Gazelle Tears (Frog’s mother)

  Wasp (little brother)

  Hot Tree (boma mother)

  Zebra Moon (T’Cori’s mother)

  Water Chant (T’Cori’s father)

  Lion Tooth

  THE DREAM DANCERS

  Stillshadow (chief dream dancer)

  T’Cori

  Small Raven (Stillshadow’s daughter)

  Blossom (Raven’s older sister)

  Dove

  Fawn Blossom (Dove’s twin sister)

  Sister Quiet Water

  THE HUNT CHIEFS

  Cloud Stalker (grand hunt chief)

  Owl Hooting (son of Cloud Stalker)

  THE MK*TK

  Flat-Nose

  Notch-Ear

  In the beginning…

  A hundred and seventy-five million years before the first men raised their faces to the sun, the lands of Earth were grouped together in a titanic sprawl now referred to as Pangaea. Africa, mother to all mankind, lay nestled in its midst. When Pangaea began to fragment, the first to break away were Antarctica and Australia.

  Three gigantic cracks appeared on the eastern side of this fractured supercontinent. Arabia broke free, creating the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. The two other cracks created rift valleys, straight-sided trenches averaging thirty miles across, running south from the Gulf of Aden thirty-five hundred miles to Mozambique.

  A hundred and seventy million years later, a desert wasteland that would one day be called the Sahara expanded, creating a barrier virtually impassable to land animals. South of it, the once endless forests contracted, spawning vast grasslands: the savannahs.

  One class of monkeys and one of apes moved into these lush green fields. The monkeys were the baboons.

  The apes were the earliest ancestors of men.

  Here in this new environment, the baboons descended onto all fours, but our ancestors discovered the art of walking erect. In doing so, they freed their hands to create artifacts of wood and stone and shell, to craft tools and weapons.

  Biologists and anthropologists have debated for centuries, asking what unique quality separates human beings from other animals. It is possible that only one observable, incontrovertible behavior separates human beings from any other creature: humans are the animals that create and use fire as a tool.

  How humans discovered fire, whether through volcanic activity or perhaps lightning strike, no one knows. That we learned to duplicate it with our own tools is a major miracle, dwarfing any other discovery in human history. However it happened, fire changed everything. With the conquest of flame, spear tips could be hardened, animals frightened away from campsites or driven into killing grounds. But not only was meat more readily obtained, cooking also made complex animal proteins more digestible, leading to taller, stronger humans with larger brains, brains that in turn devised more complex and efficient hunting strategies.

  This positive spiral was one of the forces driving human evolution.

  There was another, less tangible benefit.

  For the first time in the history of life on Earth, a creature could create and control shadows. In observing the relationships between living things and their two-dimensional representations, these fire users quite possibly began the process of abstract thought itself, as demonstrated in cave paintings dating to thirty thousand years before the birth of Christ. It is very nearly as if the ego awoke and said, “I am.” In addition, as firelight pushed back the night, human beings, poorly adapted for the darkness, had more time in which to interact, to communicate, to dance and speak of the day’s events. These early pantomimes allowed the old hunters to teach young ones the methods of avoiding predators and obtaining prey. Storytelling allowed human beings to create their identities, to ask questions about their world only later generations could answer.

  Humans created story, but in another, perhaps deeper sense, story created humanity.

  Seven hundred thousand years earlier, the ancestors of these first modern humans witnessed the birth of the mountains called Kilimanjaro and Meru.

  By far the larger of the two, Kilimanjaro was born when an ocean of magma burned its way through the earth and broke free to the surface. Liquid rock gushed and then cooled. Every few years or centuries this blazing, viscous fluid deposited layer upon smoldering layer. Eventually the volcanic spire would dominate the equatorial horizon, a beacon to the adventurous long before the first Arab ship logs described it in 200 AD.

  Scaling Kilimanjaro is like walking from the equator to the Arctic in a single week. For the first six thousand to nine thousand feet, its vegetation is a virtually impassible tropical rain forest, an eternal dank green canopy thick enough to blot out the sun. From nine thousand to thir
teen thousand feet this transforms into equally dense heath and moorland. From thirteen thousand to seventeen thousand feet, all of this changes: vegetation recedes and alpine desert dominates. It is a world of cactus and harsh gravel, of piercing sun and thinning air, a change often disorienting in its abruptness.

  Above seventeen thousand feet exists an alien winter world, the only snow to be found in equatorial Africa. Here, where the air pressure is less than half that at sea level, no animals can live. No plant life is to be found save lichens. Europeans say the mountain went unclimbed until 1887, when a German named Hans Meyer found a way through the rock and ice.

  If one believes the old stories, the Europeans are wrong.

  The Chagga, folk who have lived at Kilimanjaro’s feet for thousands of years, have ancient legends of princes whose courtiers died carrying them to the top, that they might see the sunrise before any of their subjects. The detail in these legends is consistent with the reality of the climb.

  This is the story of the first courageous souls to scale this, the tallest freestanding mountain in all the world, folk who lived in the shadow of Kilimanjaro and its nearby, smaller mate, Mt. Meru. It tells of our distant ancestors, the first animals with more information in their brains than in their genes.

  This is the tale of the first to look down from this great peak’s impossible heights: a boy who discovered a new world, and a girl who ended the old one.

  Nameless

  Chapter One

  Stillshadow was ancient now, what her people called a “woman of dust.” Four tens of warm rains had moistened her deeply weathered face. Daily walking on plains and hills, hot tea brewed from the poison-grub plant’s spiky leaves and milky roots, and the grace of Great Mother Herself kept the old medicine woman’s back straight and her tread light. Stillshadow was thought tall, standing a handsbreadth higher than the average Ibandi woman, the height of a typical male. Her skin was the color of dark clay, her black hair tightly coiled, her wise old eyes black and flecked with gray. Like other medicine women, other dream dancers, she covered her breasts and genitals with beaten and softened deerskin flaps, partially for protection from the cooler air atop Great Earth, but also in recognition that her seventh eye belonged to Father Mountain and His sons the hunt chiefs.

  She clicked and clucked to herself, and slipped a wrinkled hand into the speckled brown deerhide pouch dangling at her waist. From it she extracted a fibrous pellet of crushed insects, ground leaves and herbs, bound with fresh moist fungus from sacred caves on Great Earth’s western face, the powerful hallucinogenic mixture medicine women called godweed. The crone tucked it between her gum and lip, savoring the chewy texture with anticipation. Her cheek tingled as the extracts of nettle-berry, thistleroot and poison-grub leaves filtered their way into her blood.

  Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, exposing the whites. Stillshadow surrendered to the divine connection, sinking back against the broad flat rock she and the mothers before her had called their sitting stone. From there, she gazed down from Great Earth’s heights to the valley floor, the rock-tumbled, bamboo-and grass-filled plain, familiar slopes she had walked and climbed since childhood. Two days’ walk to the north, filling the horizon, stood Great Sky, the tallest mountain in all the world, in whose misty heights the Creators themselves lived their fierce, jealous, eternal love.

  Squatting, eyes tilted to the clouds, Stillshadow hummed a trance song to herself, idly scraping lines and curves in the loose black soil with the tip of her walking stick. Her eyelids slid closed, newborn stars scintillating in the pulsing blackness. Once immersed in this state of waking dream, the old woman’s scrawling intensified. After a time she opened her eyes to examine what she had created. Most days, little met her eyes save an overlapping tangle of meaningless doodles. From time to time her mystical state produced something of unusual symmetry, truth or beauty. Those few drawings she etched again upon her sitting stone, carved into a tree trunk or painted upon one of the countless rock walls and shelves jutting from Great Earth herself.

  Four hands of small huts were arranged like mushroom rings on the slope behind her. Constructed of wood and patched with mud, most were lashed firmly together with vines and green branches, but one central hut was sturdier, a wasp’s nest of sticks and clay. Come rainy season, the unfired clay would dissolve, the sticks separate, the roof and walls collapse upon themselves. The drawings sheltered beneath it would fade like last moon’s dreams. This, however, was considered no tragedy. Indeed, this was the way it had always been. Come the dry season Stillshadow would begin anew, as had the grandmothers before her. In hands of pictographs she would recount the previous year’s events, adding memories of the deeper past, as well as inscribing visions from the future. Until, of course, the rains erased those as well.

  But that was good, as appropriate as spring’s sky-spanning butterfly swarms, the golden clouds heralding the return of the vast and vital herds: gazelle, giraffe, deer, eland and countless others of Great Mother’s four-legged children in mouthwatering profusion. Ultimately the rains, however harsh, were merely another part of the cycle. They destroyed nothing.

  A short, slight girl with a deer’s wide-eyed grace approached from behind her. The child paused a respectful moment, then softly asked: “Mother? What do you see?”

  This was Stillshadow’s youngest daughter, Small Raven. Raven had lived just eight rains, but her exquisite shadow-dancing had already earned a place at the Spring Gathering’s central fire. Raven spent too much time twisting her hair into patterns, cared too much for the bits of shells she laced onto her necklaces, and for inventing meaningless little snatches of song she would caw in the voice of her namesake. But the girl had an undeniable talent for medicine as well. If she proved as powerful a dancer as Stillshadow hoped, and she stayed the course, her future held great promise.

  “Many things,” Stillshadow murmured. “Not for you. Not yet.”

  “When?” Raven asked.

  “One day. Or not.” She rose, walked two hands of paces and stooped to enter the central hut. Its entrance was low enough to force entrants to crawl humbly, a reminder of their status before the great mountains. Through strategically placed holes in the roof streamed yellowish light, illuminating the glyphs and grooves scrawled in the dirt below. The symbols represented moon and sun, birth and death, rain and wind. This was the history of the Ibandi, Great Mother’s first and favorite two-legged. The mural was recreated every year, beginning at the first full moon after the butterflies returned, to be completed before the orb melted and was reborn.

  Raven followed her mother at a respectful distance, again waiting as Stillshadow squatted, peering at the designs. “How can I help?” The child’s wide eyes sparkled.

  Stillshadow raised her palm in a clear message: By remaining silent. She scrawled in the dirt, muttering to herself in singsong. “Wolf’s woman Twilight bore two children. See how the line grows!” She pointed at an extension scratched in the dust a mere hand of days before. “More and more are born. Something new comes. Something new…”

  “New?” Small Raven asked.

  Too late: once again, Stillshadow had vanished into her waking dreams.

  “You scare me, Mother,” Raven whispered.

  When the crone finally emerged from her trance and regarded Raven, her dark, ancient eyes were webbed with blood, the pupils contracted tightly. The girl shrank back.

  “I am sorry,” the medicine woman said, her voice still thickly furred with godweed. “But Great Mother takes me to far places, and where she leads, I must follow.”

  Raven nodded, confusion sharpening her narrow little face. “What do you see?”

  Stillshadow paused before answering. “For lives beyond counting our people have ringed the mountains. Soon it may be time to go.”

  “Go?” Raven asked. “Leave Great Earth? Great Sky? What would we do? Where would we go?”

  “I can see it,” Stillshadow said. “But I know not when, or where. The world changes.�
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  Through narrowed eyes Stillshadow watched the horror dim her daughter’s fire, knew the strength required to control it, and felt great pride. She took her daughter’s hands. So smooth, where hers were rough and wrinkled with age. For a moment she remembered when Night Bird, her mother and mentor, had held her own small hands. How impossibly wise and beautiful and ancient Bird had seemed. How wondrous to know that Raven doubtless saw her the same way. “I hope one day my seat at the spring fire will be yours. But it may not be here, in this place.”

  “You hope?” Raven said, young voice plaintive. “You do not know?”

  “I do not know,” the old woman confessed.

  “Where do we go?” the child asked again.

  Raven’s num-fire wavered with confusion, and Stillshadow regretted her inability to assuage it. She shrugged. “I do not know. And I may not live to see it. But I feel one truth: a child will be born. She comes, and in her seven eyes lives our new home. We must search for her.”

  Raven peered more closely at Stillshadow’s symbols. Some resembled monkeys, or elephants, or sunrises. Stillshadow suspected that Raven thought some to be mere meaningless scrawls. That would be understandable: Small Raven’s training was far from complete. Stillshadow felt that the eyes of Raven’s face and hands and feet were wider and clearer than those of any child she had ever trained. When at last Raven’s seventh eye opened, she might be the greatest dreamer of all.