Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

  Sometimes Stillshadow wondered if those were merely the hopes of an old woman with more sunrises behind than before her. She could not serve her people forever, and hoped it would be one of her fleshly daughters who carried on. Certainly, she had not kept all of her children. Those unsuited to this severe life were raised in the bomas below. One of Raven’s brothers as well as two older sisters had been raised in Water and Wind bomas, the villages to the south and north. But one sister, Blossom, lived the dream, and one brother ran with the hunt chiefs, so the flesh continued.

  But was Raven destined to lead the dream dancers? To lead their people in concert with a boy, perhaps already a man, who would one day join the hunt chiefs on Father Mountain?

  Stillshadow did not know. In time, Great Mother shared all knowledge. That time was yet to come.

  Raven lowered her eyes, steadied her breathing so that her mother could not read her fire. It would not do to have Stillshadow see her fear, know how terrified she was that another girl might come to the mountain, a girl wise enough to save them from some unimaginable future horror, mighty enough to destroy Small Raven’s destiny. She peered down at the images Stillshadow had scrawled. Future. Birth.

  A child will be born….

  The hope of their people? The thief of Raven’s rightful heritage? There was another prophecy as well, one Stillshadow had not mentioned in several moons. This one claimed that one day, a nameless girl-child would herald the fall of gods, of their land and way of life, would bring death to all within the shadow.

  Her mother should have mentioned it. Why hadn’t she? Could Stillshadow herself be afraid of one so low as to be unworthy of a name?

  Raven did not know, and shuddered to learn. She had never seen the child, and already both loved and hated her.

  Chapter Two

  The girl was born to Zebra Moon and her husband, Water Chant, in Water boma, the cluster of huts a day’s walk south of Great Earth. There, hands of hands of folk lived in the shadow of a single thorn ring-wall higher than any man or lion could leap. Most within were blood kin—brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins—or married into the clan. They hunted eland and warthog and ostrich, and gathered berries and tubers, melons and beans. The dusty-skinned, gray old hunters crouched around the men’s fire sharpening their spears and pit stakes and arrows, laughing and joking and recounting tales of their youth as they worked. The young hunters spent half their days in this fashion, singing and learning wisdom from the old ones. The gray-hairs smoked their pipes and leaf-rolls, sang of tracking and trapping and killing leopards in the manner taught by the hunt chiefs. Several paces away was the women’s fire, always protected by a semicircle of stones, not an intact ring like that protecting the men’s fire. Here the old women prepared skins: curing, chewing hides, scraping fat, pounding and softening the deer and giraffe skins with ground plant gums, then stitching them into pouches and loincloths. With brittle bones they danced last night’s dreams, sharing their own secret knowings.

  The boma’s women and their daughters were primarily responsible for child care, remembrance of family songs, and the interpretation of dream memories. What had occurred in the dream world? Who could show a dance step learned in that shadowy realm? The best steps were repeated for the dream dancers when they visited. Sometimes a visiting wise woman marveled, agreeing that boma folk had joined them in the dream dance. On such happy occasions, their songs warmed the clouds above.

  Men rarely visited the women’s fire, and women rarely sat beside the men’s. Only the youngest children moved easily between the fires as they teased and raced and made games, dancing and singing their days. Men and women alike tolerated them with great good humor and little harsh discipline, knowing that the years ahead would be challenging enough to provide all the rigor a child could ever need.

  The older children traversed the worlds of male and female with greater difficulty, and as they neared the age for marriage, the nudges and disapproving comments toward those who strayed across the invisible line intensified, until there was little communication between the two genders.

  There was currently one exception in Water boma, the man called Thorn Summer. Thorn lived in Fire boma, to the northeast, but was visiting Water because it was his sister whom the gods had blessed with child.

  Thorn was thick-bodied and slow of temperament, soft-muscled but of good spirits, one of those rare men with but a single scar on each cheek. He had chosen not to complete his manhood ceremony, not to become a hunter. Thorn would never be offered a worthy bride. No father would give a beautiful, strong daughter to such a man. Thorn Summer was considered not male, and not female either. He was a “Between,” of low status, but still of the Circle.

  Thorn ran toward Zebra’s hut, one water-filled ostrich shell in each hand. A small girl trotted at his side carrying water in a stitched eland skin. As they did, a woman’s shrill, anguished screams rent the air. Hunters squatting nearby glanced toward the hut and then pointedly turned away, trusting in their wives and sisters to deal with this strange and rather magical challenge. One small, dusty male child watched Summer and the girl as they ducked down into Zebra’s straw-roofed hut. When he took a halting, curious step in their direction, his father took his arm and gently but firmly pulled him back.

  Childbirthing was a thing only for women, and for those males who would never be men.

  The largest of the hunters at the fireside was Water Chant, boma father. The coarse knotted hair above his narrow face was chopped low to the scalp. His scarred hands were strong enough to break the strongest vines or tear a tortoise shell apart without a leverage stick. His hard black eyes could track a warthog across rocks on a moonless night, and his broad nose could smell zebra scat half a day distant. He squatted at the men’s fire, chipping away at a new blade, occasionally offering a knife prayer to Great Earth, the colossus of rock and forest swelling just north of the boma.

  Let the blade be strong. Let my arm be strong. Let the leopard tremble, and the gazelle offer her throat to my spear.

  As boma father, responsibility for the poor hunting might well be laid at his feet. So far, despite their occasional grumbling, he was still much honored by his fellows. That, of course, could change in a single moon or moment. Nervousness made his hands slip, tearing his own fingernail.

  “Father Mountain!” he growled, and thrust the injured finger into his mouth. The world of women was a mystery to him. Touching a woman in her moon-blood could drain a man’s strength. A hunter who witnessed a woman’s ceremony without permission might offend Great Mother Herself. Any self-respecting zebra or eland would be ashamed to die for such a weakling.

  Five rains ago Water Chant’s first wife had perished giving birth to a son who, in turn, ceased drawing breath before his second moon. Water did not want to lose another: his people might think him a man whose seed killed his own children. With such a reputation, fathers would be less likely to offer his sons their daughters…if sons he ever had.

  His gray-bearded cousin Leopard Paw crouched next to him, sensing his unease. “She screams,” Leopard said, scratching in the dirt with the blunt end of his spear. In a year, perhaps two, Leopard would no longer run with the hunters. “Big voice, that woman.”

  “Makes for a strong son.” Water Chant’s face was set strongly, revealing no concern. Father Mountain thought excessive emotion unseemly in a man. Who cared what the hunter next to you felt? When the lion charged, all that mattered was a strong arm, sure aim, a cool heart, and nimble feet. Any fool knew that much.

  The sun was dying when the midwife finally emerged, a big, dusty, bloodstained woman whose moon face was tired but satisfied. “The child is born,” she said.

  Water Chant’s lips pursed and he made a sound like a burbling brook, a way of asking fortune from the earth spirits for whom he was named. He stood, then crouched to pass the flaps of striped, gut-stitched zebra skin, chosen to complement his wife’s totem. Their hut, floored with packed earth and lined with sweet grasses
, was just large enough for a family of four to sleep side by side. The walls were of lashed sticks, the gaps between them packed with mud. The ceiling was multilayered, interwoven with sticks and vines in the Ibandi fashion, and covered with straw in such a way as to repel rain while admitting a cooling breeze.

  That ventilation was important: the air reeked of blood and sweat and woman fluids. There in the shadows Zebra Moon lay exhausted. Blood stained the woven reeds beneath her. A glistening wet child lay panting on her swollen breasts, emptied by the effort of clawing its way from the dream world. The umbilical cord had been cut and tied, but still dangled, as long as Water Chant’s thumb. In time it would wither to a nub.

  Zebra’s sister Meadow held the child out to him. The hunt chief gazed at it, studied the space between its legs. “Not a son,” he grunted.

  “A strong child,” Meadow insisted.

  He spread the girl’s legs more fully, checking to see if perhaps a penis might be concealed within the moist folds. With a resigned shrug he handed her back. The child thrashed and wailed now, her cries of distress filling the hut.

  Chant wished to wail his own disappointment. He needed a son, a boy to whom he could pass on his knowledge of the hunt, a son who might bring him meat in his old age, a new dancer for the men’s fire.

  “Let her mother take her,” he said, then turned his back and left.

  Night’s mantle settled about Water boma’s thorn walls, shrouding Great Earth’s misty peak. The family was settling into its nighttime routine: roasting meat around the hearths, singing, nursing sleepy children, laughing in a rapid succession of clicks. Throughout the day, each adult in the boma approached Water Chant with congratulations, many of them giving small gifts for the girl’s health.

  “A strong girl-child is good,” said Thorn, handing Chant a melon. “She will work hard. Her husband will be your son.”

  Chant grunted, respecting the Between, but not his opinion on such matters. Thorn had made an honorable choice: better for a man to admit he was no hunter than lie to himself and his brothers, only to fail in the tall grass. “For a few rains,” he said. “No. Sons are better. Three daughters she gives me. No sons.” He pushed past the well-wishers and entered his hut.

  There in the darkness he watched the infant as she nursed blindly. Zebra Moon smiled, still deeply drained.

  Chant’s thin, weathered face was impassive and observant. After a few breaths, he left again.

  As days passed the moon swelled, birthed stars, then swelled again.

  In the fashion of Ibandi women, Zebra kept her baby with her at all times, either held in her strong arms or suspended in a sling of brown eland skin. Most Ibandi mothers carried their children slung at back or hip, dangling low to the ground so that older children could entertain their younger siblings. These they stroked and taught and regaled with song, offering morsels of fruit and berries and urging them to speak.

  Today Zebra knelt by the streambed, pounding caked sweat and dirt from old hides on the smooth stones among the rushes, shoulder by shoulder with her sisters, singing as they hammered with rocks, softening the hides’ stiffness. She liked the work and had returned to it two days after her birthing, enjoying the sense of reclaiming her body after pregnancy.

  This was Zebra’s third child, and as with the others, the warmth of a sleeping infant, the sweet sensation of her nursing, even her occasional cries seemed to make the day and all about it a brighter, happier time.

  Then…Water Chant pushed his way through the reeds, and her belly soured. She glanced away, fearing to meet his eyes.

  “Give me the child,” he said.

  “She nurses,” Zebra protested.

  “Give me the child,” he said again.

  Zebra searched her sisters’ and cousins’ faces, seeking support and finding none. Reluctantly, she waved a swarm of little blue-black flies away from her daughter’s face and handed her up to her father.

  The baby’s eyes were dark brown with odd greenish tints. They stared sightlessly, lacking focus. Something like a spark of pale light swam within them, a glimmerance that tingled Water Chant’s skin.

  The child was staring through him, seeming to concentrate on Great Earth herself, instead of the fleshly father who held her.

  By this age, most children had begun to respond to light and shadow. True, their eyes followed only with difficulty, but follow they did, perhaps after a short lag. This girl saw nothing, reacted to nothing, save her mother’s nipple.

  Chant’s lips and tongue fluttered in a succession of pops and clicks. When she spoke, Zebra Moon responded in the same fashion. “Why can’t she see?” he asked.

  “Give her time,” the mother said. She continued rapidly, “Her inner eye will open. I thought to call her—”

  Water Chant threw up his hands in horror. “No!” he said. “No name. Not until she sees. No name.”

  Zebra continued in a coaxing voice. “Without a name, she has no totem. Great Mother will not know her. Father Mountain will not protect her.”

  He waved his hand in front of the girl’s face. No reaction at all.

  “If she cannot see the mountain,” he said, “the mountain cannot see her.”

  Zebra Moon seized her daughter from her husband, squeezing the child to her breast.

  “The girl is blind!” Water Chant said. “How can we feed her? Protect her? I have watched for days. Thought much, and listened to the wise men. You know what they say.”

  “She is my child!” Zebra Moon made a low, keening sound. Her grief sound. As a girl she had danced that sound before the tribe, telling a story of a lost zebra colt wandering beneath a full moon, terrified of lions. The dance had ended in triumph when the colt rejoined its mother and herd. She suspected that this, her new story, would not end so blissfully.

  “No man will want her,” Water said. “For all her miserable life, she will be a burden.”

  “She is my child.”

  “Yes,” Water conceded. Then his face hardened. “But is she mine?”

  Zebra forced her voice to soften. “Yes,” she said. “Your child. See her eyes. Ask your sisters if they are not like yours.”

  “Those eyes do not see me,” he said, unmoved. He leaned closer. “Let me take her, leave her out for the mountain to see. Let the mountain decide whether or not she is Ibandi.”

  “She is our child,” the mother insisted, desperation souring her voice. “Your child.” She dropped her eyes. “Do not shame me.”

  Water Chant stepped back, suddenly seeming to grasp the seriousness of his accusation. He had no reason to think her false. His own mother and aunts had watched Zebra carefully, and if she had crept into the brush with other hunters, trading her honor for a chunk of meat, their tongues would have wagged at once.

  “You have been true,” he conceded. “But the spirits are not to be trusted. Perhaps I made wrong sacrifice.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “She will grow strong. See her legs! She will be able to carry, and work….”

  “And stumble, and walk into trees,” said her husband. “Do not anger me, woman. Three daughters have crawled through your body, but no sons. Some whisper that witchery is at work here.”

  She dropped her head at this ultimate if implied threat. She held her tongue, perhaps praying that Great Mother or Father Mountain might warm her husband’s heart.

  The child was not blind. Indeed, she saw far too much, so much that she did not, could not react to light or shadow, to human hands and faces and tongues.

  She drifted like a bubble in a lake of sun-bleached whiteness. A fantasia of stars and moons hovered in that swirling cosmic shroud.

  She reached out to touch one of the glowing orbs. It popped like a bubble, exploded into light. The girl cooed, both startled and delighted.

  The barest outline of nose, a chin, and eyes appeared in the midst of the field, a face vague enough that it could have been almost anyone or anything. Gradually, wrinkled lines congealed, followed by wise, tire
d eyes, and an old woman’s braided gray hair. The sight of this woman gave the child the same feeling that she found from fumbling her lips around her mother’s nipple.

  Warmth. Comfort. Nourishment.

  The stars devolved into lightning, followed swiftly by a downpour. The sounds of thunder fractured into human voices.

  Angry voices echoing in her ears, the girl-child began to cry.

  Chapter Three

  A day’s run northeast of Water stood the thorn-ringed clutch of huts called Fire boma.

  A pair of healthy young boys, brothers of five and six rains, ran and played in the scorched-grass clearing around the camp, the area burned each moon to deny cover to the lions or leopards who might slink close enough to fang the unwary.

  While it was risky for them to play beyond the walls, Fire’s future welfare depended on its hunters’ ability to recognize and avoid danger. If they could not learn those skills now, in the shadow of safety, of what use would they be later, alone on the savannah? Not six months before, their own father, the great hunter Baobab, had been taken by lions. On that same bloody night their uncle Snake had lost his left eye and ear and his status as hunt chief. Life went on, but such disfiguring lessons were not easily forgotten.

  Their mother, Gazelle, had been renowned for her beauty, admired by young hunters at Spring Gathering for years before Baobab won her by climbing the sacred Life Tree for which he had been named. Father had been so great and powerful! Some said that he might have challenged Break Spear for boma father. Such a position might have set his own sons on the road to leadership. That was no more than last moon’s dream now, a barely remembered ache.

  The boys’ names were Fire Ant and Hawk Shadow. Hawk Shadow was a rain older, a finger’s width taller, but no stronger or faster than Ant. Both were thick of body but moved with formidable ease and lightness, so strong and coordinated it was almost as if they were half their true weight. Back to back atop a tree limb or rock, they could slap off a horde of other boys, but if there were no other ears to box Ant and Hawk competed with each other: wrestling, running, jumping, playing some game of hide-and-seek that sent their bodies flipping and plunging, raising dust clouds and scraping knees and elbows, testing the limits of their physical agility and appetite for pain. They loved play-fighting with stripped branches, jabbing each other as if the dull tips were spear points.