A terrible thought occurred to T’Cori: perhaps the Others had gods who were greater than Father Mountain. In her present despairing state, it seemed possible.
As they came closer to the camp she saw more Others, males and females. These males were as large as any of her captors, with the exception of Flat-Nose. But the females were no larger than she, and in many cases smaller. The males averaged a full head taller than their females. With relief, and disgust at her relief, she noticed that they were well fed.
They are great hunters, she heard a voice in her head say cajolingly, as if seeking a rationale for surrender.
What could she do? If she ran away, was she even strong enough to reach Great Earth? She knew the direction, yes. From time to time when the light was just so, she saw Great Earth’s shadowy outline, floating in the air like a leaf floating in a lake. But could she cover the distance by herself?
T’Cori was herded into a thorn-walled pen. Seven other females cowered there in the fold, and they did not have the look of Others, more nearly resembling bhan. Was this how the Others increased their numbers, by killing males and capturing females? Were they expanding north into Ibandi lands?
Flat-Nose gave a sharp, nasty laugh as the thorn gate scraped closed behind them. His companions yipped back in response.
The Others built up the fire carefully, and through the thorn brush T’Cori watched them spit the back half of a bongo and set it to roasting. The females served the males with downcast eyes, never meeting a man’s gaze directly.
Fawn, Dove, and Quiet Water squatted sobbing in the dust, clutching one another. T’Cori held them too, but there was one part of the nameless girl that floated above all of this, and in separating from her body was not clutched by the same terror that crippled her sisters, who wailed until the Others beat them with sticks.
One of the other women approached them, scuttling like a spider. T’Cori recognized her from Spring Gathering. Rings of ritual scars around her eyes, hair straggly and unbraided, small pretty shoulders with strong arms. Willow, she thought the short woman called herself. She’d seen Willow trading with the women’s circle, exchanging eastern black glass for herbs and potions. Burning Willow. Willow was not of the Circle, but of eastern bhan, with whom the Ibandi traded.
Willow no longer burned.
“Stop,” Willow said. “No yell. He hurt you bad.” The words seemed to penetrate, because Quiet Water suited her actions to her name and fell silent.
“Who are they?” T’Cori whispered.
“They Mk*tk,” Willow replied, her tongue making a soft clicking/ popping sound between two harsher syllables.
“Mk*tk…?” T’Cori said, trying to fit her mouth to the sounds.
The gate scraped open, and the Mk*tk males threw chunks of sizzling, smoking meat into the pen. Her sisters fell upon it like hyenas. T’Cori scrabbled as quickly as any, although she never quite lost that sense of being separated from herself. She watched herself doing it, calm even as her hands dug frantically into the dirt for scraps of meat while the males watched and laughed.
Her fingers curled around a splintered leg bone with flecks of pink flesh clinging to it. She gnawed the meat off like the famished animal she was. When the bone was clean she sucked frantically at the marrow. Her body was so moisture-starved that the slightest drop of juice flowed like nectar down her parched and dusty throat. As she ate the males entered and examined the women one at a time. The other women shrank back from them. When it was T’Cori’s turn she continued to gnaw, as if she couldn’t see them at all.
She knew, floating there above herself, that she should beg, plead, abase herself, but it was all she could do not to spit in Flat-Nose’s eye.
You killed our men, she thought, wishing that she could say it to him. You killed Owl Hooting, who was to be my first.
I swear one day I will watch you die.
His wet fleshy nostrils flared, and he bent closer to look at her. His breath was heavy, hot and pungent, as she imagined a lion’s meaty breath might be.
Next to T’Cori, Fawn stared down at the dirt, whimpering. Flat-Nose leaned close to T’Cori, grinning…then grabbed Fawn’s arm and dragged her out of the pen.
With sickening clarity, T’Cori understood. Always she had thought Fawn to be the least attractive of the dream dancers. But in a way that was completely unanticipated, Fawn was the most appealing to these creatures.
The horror of it gripped Dove’s sister until she shivered like an antelope in a leopard’s jaws. She clawed at the ground and screamed plaintively, hopelessly, her sister pulling at her arm, pleading, begging.
Throughout that long, terrible night laughter and screams mingled with obscene intimacy, even when those shrieks died into exhausted whimpers.
With every cry, each ragged plea for mercy, new tears burst from Dove’s eyes.
One of the giants lumbered into the corral, burning them with his heavy, dull eyes. As his gaze slid up T’Cori’s limbs she spit into the dust at his feet. They might take her body, but she would show them an Ibandi woman’s spirit was not so easily stolen.
Without reacting, making a sound or taking another of her sisters, he closed the gate again.
Sister Quiet Water whispered to her: “What do they do to her?”
“You know,” T’Cori said, appalled by the flatness of her own voice. “We all know.”
But Dove could not believe the evidence of her senses. “But she is a mountain daughter. How can they?”
T’Cori had no answer, but Quiet Water did. “Because we have displeased Father Mountain, and he has forgotten us.”
In the last quarter of night, Fawn was thrown back into the pen. Stinking of blood and sweat and other fluids, she curled shaking, naked in the dirt. She turned away from them, too filled with shame to meet their eyes.
“Do not look at me,” she sobbed. “I am no longer Ibandi.”
Then Fawn wept, great gobbling gouts that seemed to surge from an infinite well of grief within her. She slipped her thumb in her mouth and sucked, squeezing her eyelids tightly shut.
Dove and Quiet Water huddled around the shrunken girl, seeking to comfort. Despite her lack of traditional Ibandi beauty, and her occasional awkwardness, she had been so clever and quick to learn dances, beautiful when lost in the play of the drums. T’Cori touched her arm. The small, quick, grasping fingers clamped hold of her, but Fawn was still lost in her own private world of pain and shame.
T’Cori crawled away into her own corner, watching the futile efforts to comfort, and then whispered to herself. “Father Mountain, why do you not hear us? We have been faithful daughters, always. But you do not hear us. Are we so distant from you? Do you care so little? Tell me. Show me. Please, before we lose hope.”
Was this Great Mother’s punishment? Was she angry with the girls for choosing their own first time for sex? Because T’Cori had entertained her own sinful, shameful thoughts and plans? Could their beloved gods be so petty and cruel? She thought not, prayed not. But it was possible.
The next night the giants came for Dove. Her cries, resounding through the thorn wall, made Fawn’s seem like girlish laughter in comparison.
“Dove!” Sister Quiet Water cried, but she was not really speaking to her friend. Quiet Water was speaking to herself, knowing that she would share the same fate tomorrow, or the next day, or tonight.
Or it could be T’Cori’s time. She prayed it would be one of the others, and was ashamed of that prayer.
Halfway through the night Dove was cast carelessly back into the pen. She would not meet their eyes, even those of her own twin. Finally Fawn went to her. The two wrapped their arms around each other, whispering, crying, two bodies sharing a single lost and tattered soul.
The Mk*tk males worked T’Cori’s bones to dust the next day. Miraculously, she considered the fatigue a gift. Mind focused solely on her aching body, it was easier to forget what might lay ahead of her that night. She and the other girls were forced to scrape fat from hid
es with rocks, to scrub dirt from roots at the side of a nearby river. To work their hands raw pounding tubers, berries and strange small orange fruits into a mash. As they worked, the men poked and prodded at them. Without effort, from time to time her fire-vision blossomed, and she saw the life-flames of the girls cooling beneath the attention, watched the fire surrounding the Mk*tk’s seventh eyes flaring dreadfully.
Several of them watched T’Cori. She tried to float away to that place in her head, but realized that she was babbling to herself: “Not me, not me, anyone but me…”
In despair she realized that she had failed in her attempt to retreat to that odd place within her. The Mk*tk saw her. Knew her.
And laughed.
Tonight, she knew, would be the night.
Not like this. Not like this. For all her life, T’Cori had dreamed of becoming a woman, wondered what it might be like to join bodies with a strong young hunter, to suck his root into her body and milk him dry. To open her seventh eye. To have a man who would be hers to use, their seed, and progeny, belonging to the tribe.
But the coming violation was something she had never dreamed of. Never had she imagined that her seventh eye might be savaged in such a horrific fashion. As she thought about it, and desperately tried to find the part of herself that could float away, panic swarmed her senses.
All her life, T’Cori had felt suspended between this world and the next. Since childhood she had fought to increase her sense of rooting in the world of two-and four-legged. But now this world had become her vilest nightmare, and she wished for nothing so much as release.
So as the day went on and they were walked back to the pen from the river, T’Cori took her chance and fled.
Here along the trail the ground was pebbles and sand, the grass high and dry and brown and spiky. Her vision collapsed into a tiny bright spot in the midst of a dark field, so that she saw nothing except the light directly ahead. In that state she couldn’t see her guards but could hear them, yelling at her, hooting like baboons and roaring like lions and laughing like hyenas.
No matter which way she turned, there they were. Their cries and motions herded her so that she lost hope and fell. She forced herself up but could no longer pretend that she was not near swooning with terror.
The grasses came to an end. Ahead of her stretched only rocks and dirt and then open air: a cliff. At the bottom of the cliff, she thought, would be rocks. Certainly if she reached it, she could throw herself over, and if Great Mother’s sheltering hands caught her, then this was good. And if they didn’t…
Then wasn’t death deliverance of a kind?
She reached the edge and teetered there, gazing down, overwhelmed by fear and shame.
Didn’t she want to die? How many times had she asked Great Mother to take her, had she longed to fly to the arms of the only one who loved her? And now, in this terrible nightmare, didn’t she have even more reason to release life?
Where was her faith?
At that moment, T’Cori knew herself fully. Knew that she lacked the courage to end her life, to throw herself off. With all the desperate skill and strength in her arms and legs and hands and feet, she began to climb down. The Mk*tk pointed down, jabbering in their odd tongue. Good. They didn’t know what to do. Just perhaps, those huge bodies were useless for climbing.
But in the next instant even that hope left her as they clambered down after her, agile as apes. She commanded her hands to release their grip, to just surrender and allow her body to drift down to a certain death in the ravine, but they would not obey. The urge for life was too strong.
T’Cori cowered as they descended like spiders around her. She couldn’t even look at them as they wrapped her arms around Notch-Ear’s neck, then lashed her wrists with a leather thong. Trussed like a freshly slain deer, T’Cori was lugged back to the top.
At this range she could not only see his num-flame, but feel and almost taste it.
T’Cori was beyond shock, spiraling into a territory where her mind was losing its ability to function. These men—if men they were—were simply stronger and more nimble than Ibandi. If they were expanding into the north, she feared her people were already lost.
All the way back to the camp, she screamed. As they untied her hands she sank her teeth into Notch-Ear’s meaty shoulder. That, at last, evoked a response. Notch-Ear pulled her around and hit her in the mouth, just once, quite hard.
The world went white and then black, then slowly spun back into focus. T’Cori staggered back and blood gushed from her mouth, and she stared at the ground, unable even to move. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, spit out the fragment of a tooth. Her world was pain and fear.
That night they came for T’Cori. As their hands closed upon her, she tried desperately to find that secret place outside herself, a place where she might be able to elude the horror. She tried to dissolve the world, to escape into the realm of light and fire.
And failed.
They dragged her into a hut made of lashed, straw-covered willow branches. A low fire cast only a dying glow before Notch-Ear threw an armful of branches on it, coaxing it to crackling life. They pulled her over a log in the middle of the hut, tying her hands to stumps. She pulled and twisted but could not free herself. T’Cori craned her neck to look back over her shoulder and watched Notch-Ear approach her. His shadow was a man’s, but the num-fire glimpsed from the corner of her eye was monstrous. His seventh eye was like a burning brand, flaming with purples and harsh, muddy green.
She wanted desperately to faint, to die, but could not.
Shadows are part of the waking dream. So Stillshadow had said a lifetime ago. If she could bend his shadow, she might bend his body. She strove desperately to make the magic come, the magic she had been taught, the magic that had always been a part of her existence.
Sudden, vital pain ripped this final hopeful fantasy away. She bleated as he pushed his way into her, screamed as her flesh tore. T’Cori prayed to Father Mountain to spare her, to take her away, but her prayers were drowned out by her own groans.
This man, in this place, was T’Cori’s first. He howled and shuddered within her, and then withdrew, and was replaced by another.
But now, thankfully, Great Mother finally heard her prayer and accepted her, trembling, into darkness.
When T’Cori came fully back to consciousness, she was being dragged along the ground. The Mk*tk tossed her into the pen. She collapsed, feeling filthy inside, as if something precious had been stolen. Fluid built up over and over again in the back of her throat, and she hacked and spit, trying to breathe.
All the rest of that night, she sobbed. T’Cori closed her eyes, trying to visualize Great Earth, but could not. She felt that she had lost something she could never regain. Her seventh eye had been ripped open and then blinded.
“I am nothing,” she whispered. Her fingers grooved the dirt beneath her. Four small troughs, graves long and wide enough to bury the fragments of her shattered num.
And not all her sisters’ comforting touches could brighten her darkness, all that endless, lonely night.
Chapter Twenty-nine
As a ripple of faint echoes rang through the night, Frog awoke from sleep. Darkness still enshrouded the hills. Here, so far from the land he knew, he was very careful where he set spark to tinder. He did not want enemies to see it, and he had come far enough west and south to know he’d reached lands unknown to all but the bravest hunters.
There was danger about: that much he could sense. But on the other hand, risk would make whatever victories he had all the sweeter. What stories would be his to tell!
But…what was that sound he’d heard upon awakening? Faint, grief-stricken echoes of…what? He raised his head. Had it been merely a wisp of dream? Had it been something of this world?
Frog lay very still, ears straining to catch another wisp of sound. Nothing. Only the wind, he thought. Nothing but the wind.
The night seemed uncharacteristically cold. He fed a
bit of wood to the dying fire and pulled skins over himself more tightly.
Frog loved the grasslands. Most Ibandi had a name for everything. Frog Hopping had five. Not just dik-dik, “tiny antelope,” but spotted, close-eyed, quick-dik, tiny giant and sour. Not just grassland but sweet grassland, lion lair, soft-soil, water-rich and spiky. He knew that he should have felt more fear: there were so many ways to die. But when his eyes and ears were fully alive he felt as transparent as water, as if he could not be seen at all.
If he recognized a fruit and knew it to be good, Frog would stop to eat it. If he didn’t recognize it, but saw monkeys eating it, he took the risk. One greenish sweet fruit he munched through happily, and then stopped to examine with greater care. The seeds were small and white and three-cornered. Where had he seen such seeds before? It came to him with shocking suddenness. He had seen them in the scat he and Scorpion found in the shattered bhan boma.
That meant that whoever had killed the bhan folk had come from this direction. Could such fruit also be found in the north, where some thought the beast-men had originated?
It was wetter up in the north, and the green fruit plant’s deep roots and tough skin suggested a drier clime. That lent weight to the idea that whoever had destroyed that bhan boma had come from the south, eating this fruit along the way. Perhaps the killers had dried some for eating while on the move.
Fear and excitement mingled as Frog felt his senses opening more widely, the entire world becoming a stream of smells and sounds and sensations, his human mind sorting through them, comparing them with everything that he had ever known, and drawing conclusions about what might come next. It was a sense unlike any he had ever experienced. A hole opened in his mind, a portal to a world undreamt of.
He was no mere boy, to be protected by his relations. He was a man, a hunter, as his father and his father before him, and he swelled with the thought that this was his time.
This was what his people had sent him out to find. Himself.
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