Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

  Clearly, Father Mountain smiled upon young Frog. A young ostrich had succumbed to his spear, and his traps had caught two rabbits. With hunger and fear as instructors, he was learning. If you paid attention, life itself was the greatest mentor.

  No longer did he consider his walkabout to be torture. It had become a fierce, demanding and dangerous adventure.

  Visible first as a man’s skeleton with outstretched arms, a dead, hollow old baobab tree rose on the plain before him like the ghost of a slain giant. Its gnarled, ashy exterior said it was much older than the sacred tree at the grounds of Spring Gathering. The hollow was as tall as two men, and wider than Frog could spread his arms. The interior stank of bat scat, but he found bits of bone, scraps of carved wood, and the remnants of a fire as well. So. Someone had been here before. He looked at the tumble of burnt wood, and guessed that they were not Ibandi. It showed no deliberate banking of the fire. His entire body tingled, as if lightning had struck nearby.

  His first contact with the Others!

  There was no way to be certain of how long they’d been gone, but Frog knew that all hunters repeated successful behaviors and discarded unsuccessful ones. Anywhere a hunter found prey once, he was likely to return. When and if that happened, Frog did not want to be there.

  So instead of sleeping in the tree, Frog backtracked, being very very careful to wipe out his footprints. Then he burrowed into the grass.

  And he waited.

  A quarter of the night passed, during which it finally occurred to Frog that this might not be quite the splendid adventure he had hoped for. It occurred to him, in fact, that this might have been the single stupidest thing that he had ever done.

  In the distance, baboons hooted.

  Frog had very nearly decided that the smartest thing he could do was to run north as fast as he could, when there was a disturbance on the other side of the clearing.

  Out in the waving field of yellow-green grasses, something stirred. A baboon? Perhaps. He couldn’t make it out, but had seen the stalks rustle. It happened once, and then again, and both times the wind had been still. Then something…someone emerged from the grass. A great, hulking figure moving with unnatural lightness. To his considerable surprise, Frog was less terrified than fascinated.

  His Ibandi brothers moved with formidable ease and power. And of course the hunt chiefs ran and wrestled like gods. But this creature and those that followed it walked more like apes than either men or immortals. They loped, occasionally pausing to sniff the air. Instantly, Frog began circling downwind of them, knowing that if they smelled, saw, heard or sensed him in any way, they would kill him.

  Their backs, chests and shoulders were more tightly curled with hair than the smooth Ibandi torsos, and more thickly muscled as well. They entered the clearing, snuffling, and then approached the tree. He counted: two, three, four of them. One of them climbed into the baobab, so lightly that their arms must have been stronger than Frog’s legs. The others took up position outside, keeping guard.

  What were these strange creatures doing? He did not know, but they spent less than a quarter at it, and after they were finished they sniffed the air again, then trotted off to the south.

  After they were gone, Frog looked into the tree. A few things had changed: a small bleached dik-dik skull, an antelope skull, and a baboon skull with scraps of hairy flesh still attached had been placed in a circle. Something…mud? Ash mixed with water or urine, perhaps, had been used to scrawl a mark in the middle of the circle, something that looked vaguely like a half-moon.

  He stared at this. Hunting signs? Messages for others of their kind? Or communications to their god? Overcome with sudden chills, he backed away.

  As Frog stood staring into the tree, he realized that he was about to do something suicidally stupid. He was going to follow these creatures.

  “Uncle Snake said to bring back meat,” he whispered, so softly that he could not hear his own words. “But what if I bring back knowledge of the Others? And the hunt chiefs use that knowledge to defend us? Then I will be the greatest of hunters.”

  And that is how he came to follow the band of Others as they traveled south. They loped along at a brisk pace, still very alert to the grass and wind. Although the pace made Frog pant, it seemed entirely casual for the Others. They never seemed to tire, and if they hadn’t stopped from time to time to dig into the earth or scratch bugs from each other’s pelts, Frog might have become winded. By the time the day was half gone, he was praying to a Father Mountain he was no longer certain of that one of them might break a leg. He kept circling right and left to stay downwind, or too distant to alarm them…he hoped.

  Chapter Thirty

  T’Cori’s days had melted into a blur. First, the pain of the broken tooth had kept her from sleeping, sent her into a constant frenzy of weeping until Quiet Water, tapping some unknown well of strength, gathered the grasses and herbs necessary to compound a poultice for her to bite down on. Within a quarter the pain faded. She tried to thank the tall girl, but it almost seemed that Quiet Water was floating in a dream, had been able to help T’Cori only at the cost of emptying herself out. For after that one final act of kindness, Sister Quiet Water drifted away for the last time.

  Flat-Nose, Notch-Ear and several more of the Others attacked the dream dancers in their degrading nightly ritual. After a few rotations there was no more ceremony about it. If they wanted a woman, they took her, and seemed little concerned whether it was one of their own flat-faced, ugly women or one of the new acquisitions.

  Already the abuse had numbed her three sisters. In ways it seemed that T’Cori was in the same sort of daze, but she had finally found her way into a waking dream state. Stillshadow had often spoken of such a trance.

  It is not sleeping. It is not waking. You have had dreams where you were awake, yes?

  And you know of sisters who walk, but still sleep, yes?

  This is the place I speak of. This place where you feel no pain, where you see what others cannot. Where all the world is magical. It is sleeping, walking, awake. Do you understand?

  She never had. But now T’Cori did.

  The Mk*tk seemed to consider the four dream dancers new members of their tribe. As long as the girls did not try to escape, they were treated without undue cruelty. They were fed, allowed to bathe in the waters of a river just a short walk away from the cage. If they tried to run away they were beaten, but not badly enough to reduce their ability to perform their daily chores.

  T’Cori watched helplessly as her mind began to die. She heard voices within her head, dull, damning voices she had never heard before, speaking in a chorus. She yearned to summon her ability to see num-fire, and could not. The world spun until she teetered perpetually on the edge of nausea. Constantly weary, the girl just wanted to roll over and sleep, but she was afraid to close her eyes for fear of nightmares even worse than her waking terror.

  As she had many times before, T’Cori tried to speak to one of the Mk*tk women. The woman was heavy-lidded and stank of fear, and also possessed a deep feminine scent almost like moon-blood, although T’Cori did not think she was on her menses. “We have to escape,” she whispered. “Help me. Help me.”

  The woman’s eyes were dull and dead. T’Cori recognized this mind space, had seen it in the eyes of the poisoned deer.

  She gave up and crawled over to Dove and made the same plea. “We have to escape!”

  But Dove was no longer the same girl who had once laughed and sung and danced so joyously. Terror and shame had transformed her into a creature of small, startled movements, twitching at the slightest unexpected thing.

  Dove stared at T’Cori as if it took great effort merely to recognize her sister. Then she said, “There is no escape. We were wrong about Great Sky,” she said dully. “This is the land of the dead.”

  “We are alive!” T’Cori protested. “We feel, we dream. We will die if we don’t act.”

  “No. We will live if we please them. We must please t
hem.” Dove’s voice broke when she said this. Her eyes shifted to the side, as if wondering if a Mk*tk was coming. Then she scuttled away and would speak to T’Cori no more.

  On the tenth day after her first assault, T’Cori saw a terrible thing, a thing that never left her memory for the rest of her life. It happened like this:

  While their lives were confined to a narrow cycle of waking, eating, gathering, cooking, rape and sleeping, they were allowed to go to the river to wash themselves and the gathered food every few days. Fawn seemed to have regained just a bit of her strength. When Dove faltered, Fawn helped her twin carry her basket of tubers, whispering to her to keep strength.

  On this day, as the women washed, several new Mk*tk hunters had joined the group. T’Cori had the impression that their current habitat was some kind of temporary boma, that Flat-Nose was their chief, and that others of his people were gathering slowly, perhaps for a push northward.

  T’Cori’s mind was drifting away again when a sudden, panicked scream tethered her to earth. She twisted around in time to see a crocodile lunge up from the water. Almost as long as two of her, its pebbled moss-green flesh dripped water, rows of gleaming teeth flashing as it buried them in Fawn’s arm.

  Suddenly awakening from her trance, Fawn twisted, struggling desperately to tear herself away. Blood gouted over the crocodile’s snout as it dragged her into the water.

  With one great despairing wail, Fawn disappeared beneath the surface.

  Dove screamed, a sound like a throat being torn out with hooks.

  T’Cori heard herself scream, the shock rooting her in place.

  Fawn surfaced one more time, eyes impossibly wide, her distended face glistening with water. Her mouth jetted blood and a single wet scream, and then she was gone.

  Her basket of tubers floated away in the current.

  The Mk*tk ran about, jabbing ineffectually at the water with their spears, confused and perhaps even frightened. When they finally grasped that there was nothing to be done, they pulled the other women back from the banks and to the cave.

  T’Cori felt nothing. She struggled to find some shred of emotion, but it seemed that the pain of the last days had burned something out of her heart. She heard the screams, remembered her sister’s distended face, saw the blood slick on the muddied banks…and felt nothing.

  All she could think of was that a crocodile’s teeth were not the worst possible instruments of death.

  T’Cori had wound her way to the world of waking dream, a safe space, very different from the hellish state of Dove and Quiet Water, who had screamed and sobbed and then yielded into a dull, beaten, barely human state. She escaped into this distant world when Flat-Nose came to sex her.

  As terrible as it was, on some other level she began to grasp that Flat-Nose was not actually trying to hurt her. Rather, he was trying to make her a woman of the Others, pouring his seed into her that she might grow heavy with child.

  His child.

  She could only pray that his seed would fail to root.

  She looked down at her body, trying to see her num-fire. Should she have been able to see it? To sense whether or not she was pregnant? Perhaps once that ability had been hers, but not now.

  Slowly, the dream-world became a place of refuge to her. On successive nights she came to know it well. It was a world of feeling and symbol and memory, and it welcomed her into its depths.

  She dreamt of Mother and Father, She deep within the earth, He atop Great Sky, T’Cori’s imaginings of what such a being might be, and what might protect His kingdom. A fearsome dream.

  She did not see Great Sky as mountain or as not-mountain. This dream had come before, and never, upon awakening, could she be certain what she had seen or experienced. Never could she relate her knowledge to others. It seemed that there were no Ibandi words for the new perceptions, and without words, she could not hold on to the experience.

  She sensed more than saw Their mighty presence. In Their way, with dance and gesture of arm, leg and hand rather than words, Mother and Father spoke to her. “Who are you, my child?”

  “My name is T’Cori, of the Ibandi,” she said.

  “And why do you come to Us?”

  She spoke to Them with the yearnings of a child who has never had a father or mother, one who dreamt that perhaps the greatest of all parents would be those loving Ones. “I have been captured. Our hunters were killed, and I am badly used. Please help me.”

  The darkness roiled. For a moment she saw something resembling a nose and a face. Could this be truth? Could human eyes see Great Mother and Her mate? “Your fate is yours, and you must walk your path. But there will always be a safe place for you,” She danced. “Here, with Me.”

  “Can I please stay?” Even to herself, T’Cori’s voice sounded small and still.

  She looked down from the mountain’s mystic heights. She saw a small girl from Great Earth bent over a log. Her hands were lashed down. The giant Flat-Nose stood behind her, pushing rhythmically. His hands clutched her hips, his head thrown back as his thighs slapped against her buttocks. His fellows watched and laughed and clapped along in time with his thrusts as he rutted for his own pleasure and the entertainment of his brothers.

  Behind him were two other Mk*tk, impatiently awaiting their turn.

  “Please?” she begged.

  Her mighty voice was filled with regret. “It is not more than you can bear,” She said.

  “How can you know?” T’Cori whispered.

  No answer.

  Worse, she had begun to fragment. The single voice in her head was becoming a confused, frightened chorus. She was being pulled back into the world of pain and shame. “Help me!” she pled. “I don’t want them to take me again.”

  Great Mother took her hand. “I won’t let you go. Stay with Me awhile.”

  She enfolded T’Cori in Her arms. And in that mighty embrace T’Cori slept, safe at last.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  When she returned from the dream time, the violation had ceased. T’Cori gathered herself together and pulled her skins up, exiting the hut to rejoin the other women.

  Dove looked at her, eyes heavy-lidded and dull. “They are rougher than our hunters,” she said. “Their roots are larger.”

  T’Cori said nothing, wondering how many men Dove had sampled.

  “We need not be strong, if we can yield,” Dove said.

  “It is our fate to yield to powerful men,” said Quiet Water.

  “We will make strong sons,” Dove said, as if her words made perfect sense. And T’Cori knew then that Dove’s mind was dying, even if her body still breathed.

  Then at a grunted warning from two Mk*tk, they wandered off to cook and mend.

  T’Cori closed her eyes and prayed. “Great Mother,” she said, “thank You for Your strength. Please, please give that strength to my sisters. They need it more than this daughter.”

  Notch-Ear cuffed her hard, lighting her vision with fire, crashing her to the ground. He barked a string of gibberish, containing only one word that she now understood: “kord,” work.

  The blow caught her by surprise, but another did not follow. She rubbed her ear, waves of pain making her nauseous. The Mk*tk bent and put his face close to hers, licking his teeth suggestively. With his fingertip he motioned toward the blazing orb now dropping to the horizon. Then he grinned.

  He squeezed her breasts roughly. T’Cori squirmed, not daring to turn away or resist.

  He spoke another word, this one, for the first time, in Ibandi. “Tonight.”

  He brought his face close to her. His rank smell and overwhelming physicality numbed her mind, but she still managed to whisper, “No.”

  Notch-Ear hurled her face-first to the ground. She tasted dirt, wheezed as the breath was slammed out of her, but to her surprise, felt no fear. He hunched down, flipped her over and snuffled between her legs. T’Cori tensed, suddenly flushed with an emotion: disgust. Something more than annoyance crossed his face: she detected
hurt as well.

  From a pile of discards he selected a stick as thick as her thumb. He whipped it across her back, each stroke like a flash of lightning in a night sky. The beating seemed to last forever, until she was reduced to a shuddering heap.

  “Tonight,” Notch-Ear said again, his mouth shaping the Ibandi word so rudely that she hoped never to use or hear it again.

  Her sisters gathered around and sought to comfort her as he stalked away. “Do not fight the Mk*tk,” Dove begged. “If you do, you die.”

  “We help you,” said Quiet Water. “Forget Great Mother and Father Mountain. There are no mountains here.”

  T’Cori curled herself knees to chest, biting her lip. She would say no more to her sisters. They were lost to her. But to herself, she repeated over and over again, until she thought she would go insane: “Great Mother, help me.” Her fingers scrabbled at the earth beneath her. “Forget Dove and Quiet Water, if they have forgotten You. But do not forget me.”

  Notch-Ear returned and grabbed her arm, dragging her behind a bush. But now she knew how to crawl into the special place in her mind, and she did, closing her eyes. When her eyelids opened again, they exposed the whites of her eyes, and nothing more.

  T’Cori lay curled in one filthy corner of the thorn-walled pen. Her single overwhelming sense was one of being soiled inside and out. Dried fluid scabbed on her thighs, sticky as raw egg. Despite that, she had a small feeling of triumph. They had raped her, yes, forced her to satisfy their appetites. But they had held her hands instead of tying her down, taking turns. And thisp, in the darkness of the hut, the Mk*tk had made a mistake.

  So eager had they been to sex her that someone had dropped a partially completed knife in the dirt not far from her hands. How long had it been there? Which one of them? Could it even have been a trap? She didn’t know, but could not afford to miss the opportunity. So this time, she pretended not to struggle, even raising her hips to invite their penetration in a way that pleased them and made them hoot and jostle to be first.