Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

  For the first time, T’Cori openly defied her. “No,” she said.

  Stillshadow grew stern. “You will be cast out.”

  “I don’t care,” T’Cori said.

  Stillshadow’s next words were whispered. “I cannot help you.”

  “Tell me a story, as you did in the old days.”

  For a hand of breaths they shared the darkness, and then Stillshadow’s withered fingers stroked T’Cori’s cheek. “Yes. A last story. These old bones are too weak to dance. I must talk this one.” Stillshadow sighed deeply, then seemed to quiet herself. “In the beginning the universe was whole, and all things were good to eat. But the sins of man and animal threw this world out of balance. When the body loses balance, it dies.”

  This was rambling, as random as a cluster of berries. Somehow she had to squeeze the precious juice, find the essence of the message. “Is this what poison is?” T’Cori asked.

  “Man and woman. Human and animal. Animal and plant. Sky and earth. All in balance. Things of sky and earth. Beneath the sky. Beneath the earth. Life is heat. Death is cold.”

  Suddenly T’Cori glimpsed a deeper meaning. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  Stillshadow gave a painful smile. “Use your num,” she said.

  T’Cori peered deep into her mentor’s exhausted face. “Tell me how to save you, Mother.”

  The crone closed her eyes, too weak to chastise her. “Use your num,” she said again.

  “All things in balance,” T’Cori whispered. “Sky and earth. The things under the sky…”

  “And beneath the earth,” Stillshadow said, repeating what she had said before.

  “Is there something beneath the earth that can save you?”

  Stillshadow turned away, tears welling in her eyes. For the first time T’Cori saw that the old woman, too, craved life and feared death…but could not say the words. It was not done. She could not encourage T’Cori to disobey Raven. And worse—to disobey Cloud Stalker and perhaps Father Mountain Himself.

  “Beneath. Within.”

  Understanding dawned. “Something…in the caves?”

  Stillshadow was talking about godweed, the most precious of her herbal mixtures. One vital component was the sacred mushrooms found in caves on Great Earth’s western face.

  But Boar Tracks had told T’Cori that beast-men hid in the caves. Father Mountain had forbade them from interacting with the creatures. What was she to do?

  Again, Stillshadow turned away. “Use your mind, child. I cannot tell you how to destroy yourself.” Her cheeks slicked with tears. “I am ashamed,” she whispered.

  “Do not be,” T’Cori said, and stood, wiping the tears away from her own cheeks. “You gave me life. Saved my heart and num. If I do not try to save you, I am no Ibandi woman.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  Night had fallen across the bomas, the mountains and the teeming savannahs. While some Ibandi slept, others made ceremony, watching the moon or the mountain. The hunt chiefs kept guard, sang, danced and taught, as they always had…except now they found it hard to take their eyes off the strange clouds wreathing Great Sky’s peak. From time to time the ground trembled, and there was not one of them who did not wonder if their god was awakening from some long slumber, that perhaps soon they would see the face of Father Mountain Himself.

  But while they fought to understand, the nameless one crept out of the dream dancer boma, slithered beneath the ring of thorns, and made her way out of camp.

  For the rest of the night T’Cori walked, and the next day, picking her way west around Great Earth’s lower slopes, until she reached the narrow, rock-strewn trail leading to the sacred caves.

  Gigantic and implacable, Father Mountain rumbled, an angry witness to her sin.

  From time to time over the years T’Cori had glimpsed the beast-men. They were hairier than Ibandi but less so than monkey-people. Taller than the average Ibandi and with longer arms, they loped in an ungainly fashion rather than sprinting with a hunter’s speed and grace. She was certain the beast-men caught sight of the Ibandi as well, but ran or concealed themselves in fear.

  Could it have been fear of a greater threat, perhaps the Mk*tk, that kept the beast-men within Ibandi territory despite the terrible price they had already paid?

  She could only believe that if they caught her alone in their territory, they would kill her. She had to be very cautious now. The footpath ended in a cliff wall festooned with morning glories and creepers. The cave mouth would have been easy to miss if she hadn’t heard it described countless times. Chewed and broken bones were scattered about the entrance. T’Cori paused there, making herself very still and small, until she could barely hear her own breathing.

  Her eyes, adjusted to the darkness, detected slight motion. There was something alive and man-shaped in the cave. She heard snoring, but knew that that did not necessarily mean that all were asleep.

  If they catch you, they kill you, she reminded herself.

  Even just breathing, she smelled and tasted them, and felt as if she had slipped into a waking nightmare.

  Perhaps these people were not murdering beasts like the Mk*tk, but they were filthy. They slept here near their own scat. This alone would have been sufficient reason for the Ibandi to avoid them.

  All night and day, circling Great Earth, she had felt her anxiety threaten to swirl out of control. Once, she might have run back to the dancers, screaming. But many things had happened to her in the last years. T’Cori was no longer a mere girl—the Mk*tk had stolen that from her forever.

  But now, if things went wrong, she might be driven from Great Earth. By this time, certainly her sisters knew that she had gone. If Stillshadow died and Raven learned T’Cori had disobeyed orders, she could be cast out. And then what would she do? She supposed that some bhan hunter might want her as second wife, but such a life might be worse than no life at all. Might as well simply wander out into the tall grass and call a leopard.

  On hands and knees, T’Cori felt her way around the cave’s edge. Things lurked in the darkness. What kind of things? She wasn’t certain, but decided that this was not the time to learn. She willed herself to be a part of the night. One with the night.

  “Be as rock,” she whispered, so quietly that she herself could not hear the words. “Your ally is stillness. Know what the hunter knows.” Hadn’t Frog Hopping said that? Hadn’t he said that it was difficult to remain fearful, and that we try to believe that all is well? If so, couldn’t she use this truth to her advantage? Be harmless, and pass at peace.

  Something stirred in the shadows, and she fought an almost irresistible urge to scream and flee. Just before her nerve broke, T’Cori glimpsed some faint light farther on, perhaps a hole in the ceiling through which moonlight glimmered. The glow revealed a silhouette.

  Man? Ape? The trees around Great Earth were alive with red, black and brown monkeys. Baboons seemed aware that they were unfortunate enough to be tasty, and usually gave the human encampments a wide berth. During her life she had even glimpsed one or two of the much larger apes, creatures often considered mere phantoms in tales told to frighten children into obedience.

  But what was this? She wasn’t sure, and was afraid that her eyes might become clear. If her eyes could work here, then certainly theirs could as well. The figure stood and made wet, snuffling sounds. A second reclining shadow grasped at the first and pulled it down. The two merged, and dull wet, smacking flesh sounds echoed between the walls.

  The smell of sex, combined with the beast-folk’s stench, was enough to turn her stomach. She fought nausea and vowed to move on.

  The light beckoned ahead. She moved around the edge, careful not to step on any of the sleepers. Great Mother! Was Raven right to think her crazed? Then T’Cori thought of Stillshadow’s kind face and infinite wisdom, and knew that she had no other choice.

  She reached the glow by hugging the wall, trying not to let herself be outlined against the light. Could this outcropping of pale, shin
ing fungus be the same plant used in the godweed mixture? She’d never seen it growing before, and had to rely on description, hope and instinct.

  Fingers shaking, she tore a chunk of fungus off the wall, and stuffed it into her waist pouch.

  At the very instant she closed the pouch, the ground rolled beneath her feet. The rumble stirred her bones, like a deep voice in the earth calling her secret name. It was like nothing she had ever experienced, save only the earlier, weaker trembling from a few days before.

  And she was not the only one who heard it.

  The mountain folk were awakening. She could not go back the way she had come, and only one other option remained. She could retreat more deeply into the cave. Was there another way out? Or a place she might hide until night enfolded them once again?

  But as she moved deeper into the darkness, her keen eyes caught a glimmer above her, a pale blue, a promise of dawn’s first flush.

  The sky. Morning. There was an opening above her.

  Taking a deep breath, T’Cori began to climb toward the opening. She was only halfway up when an even more violent rumble shook the stone, dislodging a rock that fell spiraling into the darkness. An ugly babble wound up from beneath her. There was little she could see down below, but she was able to make out dim shapes shambling about.

  Had they arrows? Spears? Might her first clue be a grip on her ankle and a crippling bite?

  The opening narrowed to the point where she could brace her back against one side and scramble up with her arms and legs braced at spiderish width. The sound of something coming up from beneath her made acid splash into her throat. Her grip failed and she slid back down, ripping skin from her back and hands as she did.

  T’Cori choked back a sob. Was Great Mother so furious with her?

  Then a thin wind drifted down from above, carrying a sour, burnt aroma.

  Her hand grasped a loose stone, and she pulled at it until it wobbled. Then, once she had climbed above it, she stomped with her heel, bruising her foot but sending a chunk of rock tumbling down into the darkness. She heard the thump as it struck meat, a howl and the sound of someone…something…falling, and far beneath, a sound of breaking bone as the body smacked against the cave floor.

  Her sin was complete. She had caused harm to these people, against whom the Ibandi had committed murder. She would pay for this. What that price might be, she could not begin to say.

  T’Cori was blowing hard now, sweat burning her eyes, dripping from her nose, matting her hair. The muscles in her arms and legs were cramping into knots, but she closed her mind to the pain and kept going.

  Something was coming up from beneath her.

  She was so close…almost close enough to touch the sky above her. Something brushed her ankle. A furred hand? She remembered Notch-Ear’s hand, his hot wet breath against the back of her neck, and she screamed. T’Cori climbed more rapidly, splintering fingernails against the rock as she scrambled toward the stinking sky.

  T’Cori was panting now, near exhaustion. A snarl just below her made her bite her own tongue. Close. Too close. Then she slid down again. Her rump struck something solid. Her ears rang with squeals as another pursuer tore free from the wall and plunged down. Teeth gnawed at her leg, tearing. She wrenched it away, sobbing, and continued her climb as her third victim fell howling down into the darkness. She could not see beneath her, and considered that blindness a blessing. If she knew what followed her from the underworld her heart might fail, her hands slip.

  She was bleeding, exhausted and terrified, but there was something else too. Deep in her heart, T’Cori imagined herself to be her tribe’s great hero. She would bring back the medicine, and she would be called the greatest of them all, and at long last be loved….

  That dream crowded out the ugly thoughts, kept her going. Panting and wheezing, she clawed her way out onto the cave’s roof. It was a small opening, just large enough for one of T’Cori’s size, not large enough for the beast-men, and she squeezed through.

  Dawn splashed blood on the horizon. She looked back. Something else reached the top. A hairy arm stretched out, bent at the elbow, reaching around, clawing at the ground, howling and grunting in frustration.

  The ground was shaking more severely now. The sky above was filled with billowing white clouds, casting down a dry, powdery rain, an acid, ashen substance that burned her eyes and skin.

  She watched, her eyes wide, and then picked herself up and ran as fast as she could, through the forest, down Great Earth’s haunted slope, hoping that she would be forgiven. But if the cost of saving the only mother she had known was the loss of her own place atop Great Sky, then that was a price she was prepared to pay.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Once upon a time, sleep had fallen from Cloud Stalker as rapidly as a snake-eagle taking flight. Now the hunt chief’s dreams were sticky, clinging things, and his limbs felt like stones for almost a quarter after awakening. On this early morning, however, he shed sleep as swiftly as a young man.

  At first, he wasn’t certain why he had awakened at all. Then he felt Father Mountain’s growls and rolled up to sitting.

  Emerging from his hut, he stared up at Great Sky’s mist-shrouded peak. His toes curled into the dirt as it shuddered against his bare feet.

  Since boyhood he had lived here, given over by parents convinced of his gifts by the former grand hunt chief, Leopard Eye. Since those early days he had explored its slopes, hunted in its ravines, climbed the great strange cliffs of cold dead water they called ice.

  His gut told him that something terrible was happening to his home, but his wildest imaginings could not have anticipated just how terrible it would be.

  Over hands of hands of hands of years Great Sky’s ice pack had grown thicker than two tens of men standing on one another’s shoulders. The volcanic gases and steam blew chunks larger than whole bomas into the clouds above. Magma gushed from the earth. In an instant, the searing heat converted a mountain of ice into boiling water.

  The seething mass mixed into a slurry of ash and pumice and dirt. It tumbled down the mountain slopes, reaching a speed far faster than even the fastest hunt chief.

  Within half a quarter, the landlocked tidal wave swept down the slopes, crushing trees, slaughtering mountain goats, lemurs, zorillas, antelopes, leopards and baboons in numbers beyond counting, plowing up enough ground to fill a valley, gaining heat from new fissures in the ruptured and rupturing earth.

  The fiery cloud gushed from the mountainside, wrenching trees up by the roots and tumbling them like straws in a cyclone. A blistering flood of water and rock carried with it everything from sand and gravel to boulders taller than two men.

  As it rushed down, its size, speed and volume constantly changed, tearing rock and brush from the sides and along the river valleys it entered, creating a cascade of boiling water mixed with mud and rubble, devastating anything in its path.

  Debris flows cut across streams, damming them. The water continued to rise until the dam was breached.

  As the flow dissipated, the action of the wave reversed as it redeposited the debris. The heaviest objects dropped out first. As the flow continued to lose energy, progressively smaller and smaller fragments dropped out until the wave faded out of existence.

  But by that time, the damage had been done.

  River Song, Laughing Buzzard, High Tree, and the other hunt chiefs emerged groggily from their huts, witnessed the approaching devastation and tried to flee. They ran the race of their lives, as swiftly as any human beings had ever moved, but the mass of searing water and tumbling logs caught up with them in moments.

  Some hunt chiefs were killed by collapsing huts or flying debris. The rest were engulfed, the bodies of some contorted and crushed against trees, other suffocated by mud as it forced its way into eyes, mouths, ears and open wounds. The pressure of the mud against their chests slowly choked those buried to the neck. Some were burned, some drowned.

  There was only one thing in common: all di
ed.

  Men, animals, hunters, prey, all a divine unity there in the holy place. All at terrible peace in a white hell on earth.

  They died in their hands of hands, knowing that their god had not only deserted them but singled them out for destruction. Or perhaps their god, the very force that had created the world itself, was dying.

  They died, but not one of them cursed the mountain. And of that, at least, Stalker would have been proud.

  A tower of ash blotted out the dawn. The mountain’s death cry was heard where the land met the sea, farther than a man could run in ten days, where bhan ceased their fishing to look back west at the clouds darkening the morning sky. Ash fell over mountains so distant the Ibandi had never dreamed of their existence.

  Despite the dream dancers’ desperate singing, the blessed morning sun was never born that day.

  Everything exposed to air was covered with a pall of white. Everything, as far as the eye could see and even where it could not, was transformed.

  Heaven was gone.

  In the face of such a catastrophe, it seemed even death itself might die.

  Cloud Stalker, mate of Stillshadow, leader of the mighty hunt chiefs, opened his eyes a final time. The tumbling wall of mud had somersaulted him over and over again, stones suspended in the mass grinding his bones to splinters. His head remained aboveground, but jagged, broken ribs pierced his lungs, so that with every passing moment they filled more deeply with blood.

  In his last moments, gazing up into the sky, in the billowing, swelling cloud above him, Cloud Stalker finally saw the mighty visage of Father Mountain.

  He tried to move his lips, to whisper a prayer-song, but could not. But by then he was too weak for even that frustration to upset him.

  With the face of his god burned into his brain, Cloud Stalker closed his eyes and died.

  Chapter Forty-six

  For most of the last night of his old life, a morose Frog Hopping had enjoyed the company of Little Brook and her husband, Lion Tooth. The pair had made the four-day walk from Wind boma in the north to comfort him in his loss. They had prayed and danced and eaten with him. Little Brook finally scolded him enough to coax out a reluctant smile, then convinced him to tell them stories of his time with Glimmer.