Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

  For the first time in a moon, the pain in his heart lessened. Parting from them even for slumber seemed a sacrifice.

  Frog was still dreaming of Glimmer’s soft braided hair, the clasp of her smooth warm thighs, when the earth began to tremble.

  Shaking sleep from his eyes, he climbed out of his hut and gazed up at the mountain that had been a comfort all his life. The night was clear, and unspeakable horror seized him as a cloud larger than anything he had ever seen or imagined sprouted from Great Sky’s side. It writhed and coiled like a ball of snakes, flashing with lightning, although there was no rain. His cousins fled their huts, gazing up in slack-jawed disbelief.

  They dashed mindlessly to and fro, tore their hair out, clawed at the ground and howled. “Father Mountain is dying!”

  Hawk Shadow’s wife, Flamingo, appeared before him, naked and wild-eyed, a baby beneath each arm. She thrust his son at him. “The end of the world!” she screamed.

  Frog sank to his knees, clutching his unnamed infant son to his chest. Nothing that he had ever seen or imagined prepared him for such chaos. He felt beyond himself, outside himself, completely detached from his world. He no longer believed in gods, but at the moment there seemed no contradiction in his conviction that he was watching one die.

  The cloud swelled and billowed, and in it he saw Glimmer’s face, and Lizard’s, and trembled at the sight. The others saw fire and dust and smoke and stars disappearing from the sky. They dropped to their knees, gnashing their teeth, tearing their hair and wailing, begging forgiveness for sins real or imagined.

  Forgiveness, but not grace. They were witnessing the death of heaven, something no mortal eyes should ever see.

  For a day and a half T’Cori walked and ran and staggered without rest, until her head swam and her limbs were like stones. She had now gone almost three nights without sleep. All that kept her stumbling along was the fear that her mentor might already be dead.

  Ash rained from the sky, transforming the entire world into something alien and foreboding. She felt so numb, so shocked, that it was all she could do just to put one foot before another.

  Was this her doing? Had her transgressions caused this, the end of the world?

  Should she go back, return the fungus?

  The world swam around her as she reached the familiar trails and began to climb, ash coating her skin and the trail. It felt less like coming home than like presenting herself for judgment.

  But whatever might happen next, she would not quail. She had done what no one else could or would do.

  When Blossom and two other women blocked her path on the outskirts of camp, T’Cori finally stopped, heart thundering in her chest. The thick-bodied Blossom’s eyes were wide and wild. The bamboo cane in her right hand might have been intended as a weapon, but to T’Cori it looked as if her former wet nurse needed it to keep herself erect.

  “Wh-Where are you going?” Blossom stammered. There seemed no way to prevent a confrontation. Slovenly Blossom might have been, and slow of mind. But she was devoted to her mother and sister.

  T’Cori said nothing.

  “Where have you been?” she asked again, only then noticing the pouch on T’Cori’s belt. “Our mother is almost dead. You are too late. If you have something, give it to me. I will give it to her.”

  T’Cori’s stolen stone blade was in her hand almost before she knew what she had done. Exhausted and frightened she might be, but the blade reminded her of something: she was the girl who had escaped the Mk*tk. Who had slain an Other, and walked many days to rejoin her clan and bring them knowledge. She was not a mere girl to be intimidated by anyone, even Blossom.

  All her life she had feared her gigantic wet nurse. She remembered the boxed ears, the slaps and pinches when no one watched, the feeling of helplessness in the grip of the stronger, larger, older woman who had nurtured her body but starved her spirit. But her concern for Stillshadow and her own fatigue and guilt had accomplished something unexpected. It had driven her fear into the shadows.

  T’Cori no longer cared what Blossom thought or tried to do. The sense of freedom was extraordinary.

  “Touch it,” T’Cori said, brandishing her spar of leather-wrapped obsidian. “Touch it, and I will cut you. You think I am small? You think I will not fight? Small things have sharp teeth,” she said.

  The other girls were speechless, shocked by the sudden change in T’Cori’s demeanor. Blossom’s heavy jaw worked side to side, and then she nodded. “Raven will deal with you,” she said, and sent a runner off to find her sister as T’Cori pushed her aside.

  Stillshadow lay collapsed on her zebra skin amid the shadows. The air reeked with a sour, damp aroma. T’Cori could just barely make out Stillshadow’s shrunken silhouette. She seemed dead already.

  T’Cori came closer. Although her teacher’s breathing was slight, the withered breasts still moved up and down with each exhalation.

  Most of Stillshadow’s preparations were made fresh, but a few, like godweed and other healing or ritual herbs, were made in batches. T’Cori searched among her teacher’s pouches, sniffing and judging textures until she found the right mixture, recognizable by a sharp, stinging scent. Now she needed to add the glow mushroom, the most powerful component of godweed. How much? She had never learned, and unfortunately, now it was too late to ask. She knew only that she had to do what she could.

  For a moment the mixture glowed slightly in the lean-to’s darkness, and then the glow died. Half-dead from lack of sleep, fatigue and injury, T’Cori propped Stillshadow’s head on the crook of her arm, and tried to feed her a bit of the mash. The old woman’s jaws did not move.

  What to do? She suddenly remembered something she had seen Stillshadow do. The young woman took the medicine and slipped it into her own mouth, chewed until the sour, tingling mash was all one texture, then pressed her lips against Stillshadow’s. T’Cori pushed the wet pulp into Stillshadow’s mouth with her own tongue.

  Very slowly, the old woman’s mouth began to work, taking the mash, and then chewing at it. Swallowing.

  “Mother,” the girl whispered. “I am here. I am here. I got it. Please. Please take this from me.”

  Stillshadow finally began to eat a bit, managing to consume two mouthfuls.

  The old woman’s hand rose, as if to say, Enough. Her withered lips curled in what might have been a smile, and the eyes fluttered open just long enough to fix on T’Cori and then close again.

  T’Cori waited at her side for a few moments, then slipped out of the hut.

  Raven stood just outside the doorway, face strained. “You disobeyed Father Mountain,” she said, and pointed toward the northern sky. The ground still shook. Clouds still fountained from the mountainside. The sky rained ash, not water. “Look at what you have done.”

  The lining of T’Cori’s mouth tingled. When she looked at Raven she saw not a girl but a shimmering shadow. How strange! Was her vision returning? No…the edges of everything in sight began to blur. The world swirled painfully. She could barely stand, but she knew a truth, as surely as if she could still read the num-fire.

  Raven was afraid of her.

  A nameless child will be born. And that child will end the world and cause the death of gods.

  A power shift had just occurred, like a stream changing level at a waterfall. The chosen one was not happy. There was ritual, there was tradition, and then there was the holy woman they all loved. Every dream dancer in the camp knew that she should have been willing to do anything to protect Stillshadow, who had raised and protected them all.

  “I did what I had to do,” T’Cori said. Her tongue felt swollen enough to block her throat. In that moment, T’Cori ceased to hate Raven. The girl was a bully, but not evil. Fear was the destroyer. Raven didn’t know where she fit in the world any more than T’Cori did. All she knew was the rules, and how to keep them.

  “We must follow Father Mountain’s will,” Raven said. “You will see, stupid one. You will see.”

  Sk
y, mountain and grass swirled, changing places. She staggered, but no one helped her. T’Cori tripped, pulled herself to her feet again, then managed to wobble as far as her hut before collapsing again.

  She lay there in the dirt and looked back over her shoulder. Her sisters, young and old, watched without moving. They spoke among themselves, but she could not hear a word.

  A row of white-haired old women came and stood in front of her. The sun-singers held hands and stood with spines straight as bamboo. Then they dropped their hands and gave their judgment. She has the godweed in her, they danced. Foolish girl! The nameless one has not the strength or knowledge, has not undergone the rituals, to stop godweed from draining her num. It is between the nameless one and the immortals.

  If the gods still live. That last was both question and prayer, a plea for Father Mountain and Great Mother to heal sky and earth, once again revealing Their bounty to faithful children.

  T’Cori managed to crawl into her hut, but then darkness claimed her.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  White was the color of death, and all about them was white. The people of the inner and outer bomas held one another and shivered as smoke and ash spewed into the sky above them. White, all of them. Corpses, all. Before their eyes, the land itself had died.

  The land, the animals, the trees, the rocks and the dirt.

  All about them, the balance between life and death had sickened.

  A hand of days later another eruption darkened the sky. This time they watched fire dance around the mountain’s peak, smelled smoke from burning trees, covered their ears to protect themselves from the peals of thunder. Only after another hand of days did the sky begin to clear.

  On Great Earth, the three hunt chiefs who had protected the women surveyed their home and trembled. They dared not go to see what had happened to Cloud Stalker and the others.

  They knew in their marrow already. Their num told them what their eyes could not yet see, and their hearts feared to confess.

  So instead of going up to Great Sky, they danced in the ash, praying and singing all of the songs they knew or could devise, hoping that one of them might heal the mountain or please their gods.

  Or perhaps simply spare their lives.

  When T’Cori first clawed her way back to consciousness, Stillshadow knelt beside her. The old woman was drawn and thin, but her eyes burned bright. She dipped leaves in water from a gourd and wiped them slowly and smoothly across T’Cori’s brow.

  Raven sat cross-legged in her hut’s doorway. T’Cori’s eyes refused to focus, but she would have recognized that disapproving form and posture in the midst of the wildest hallucination.

  “It was wrong for her to help you,” Raven said. “This is why the gods are angry. Why They abandon us.”

  “We do not know this,” the old woman said, her forehead slick with sweat. Only then did T’Cori’s fevered mind comprehend that the woman tending her was still sick and weak.

  “No,” the nameless one said, slipping her feverish hand into Stillshadow’s. “Save your strength.”

  She heard herself say that. Try to say that. But from Stillshadow’s puzzled expression, T’Cori realized that she had only mumbled.

  “Rest,” Stillshadow said.

  “Mother,” Raven said, “you need to save your strength, to heal.” What was that in Raven’s face? It was too dark. T’Cori could not see, but she could hear her sister dancer’s voice. Was that anger? Shame that she had not had the courage to do what T’Cori had done?

  “I will care for her until she is well,” Stillshadow said, and dipped the leaves again.

  With the passage of days T’Cori did grow strong enough to crawl away from her straw to empty her bladder. She ate nothing and thus produced no solid waste, for which she was grateful.

  In between these brief bouts of strength she collapsed back on her straw, dampening it with sweat and vomit. Amid the agony and filth, the plant children gifted her with visions.

  It seemed to T’Cori that she walked a path of light, a path like a log fallen across a yawning crevasse. It grew thinner as she walked. The nameless one fought to stay balanced, to not fall off to either side. It felt as if she was taking forever. Then she reached a wall and began to climb.

  Along the way up the rock face she came to a place where a woman sat cross-legged. And now it was strange because for a moment T’Cori was not in the dream place. Rather, she was in her hut, and it was Stillshadow who came to her, hushed her, gave her grasses and herbs to eat. Was it real? Had Stillshadow come to her hut, helped her? She could not say. All she knew was that those few moments of grace saved her mind, if not her soul.

  In time, T’Cori’s eyes began to focus on things of this world, and she returned to her senses. No one could say why this happened or what it meant. Perhaps because she was righteous in the eyes of Great Mother. Perhaps because she was young and strong.

  And perhaps because Stillshadow and the mighty One she served loved her.

  T’Cori lived.

  And miracle of miracles, the eruptions had ceased.

  Weak and wobbly, T’Cori emerged from the hut. Some of the other women seemed a bit afraid of her, as they had not been after her previous adventures.

  Was it possible that her sight had returned? She looked at her sisters, hoping. Nothing. Slanting her eyes sideways, she could detect a bit of glow around them, but less than the average dream dancer saw. She was alive, but the thing that had once made her special was still gone.

  Still, some whispered that T’Cori was Raven’s only competition for leader. None of the older women was strong enough to lead after Stillshadow went to the mountain, none would live long enough to raise a new generation of dream dancers. They could sing the sun to life and tend the eternal fire, but not lead.

  Only Raven could lead. Raven, or the nameless one.

  But the very idea caused other talk, for what was death itself now that heaven was gone? Now that, as some whispered, Great Mother and Father Mountain had died?

  And so it was that T’Cori went seeking Stillshadow and found her resting in her hut. “Teacher,” she said, “did I do wrong?”

  “Very wrong,” she said. “But if Father Mountain had wanted you to come to Him for judgment, He would have summoned you.”

  “Why?” the girl asked. “Why am I alive?”

  “Use your num,” the old woman said. Then T’Cori brushed her lips against Stillshadow’s brow, and left her to rest.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  A warm rain had washed the white death from the ground. Pygmy geese, kites and fish-eagles winged the sky again as life began to return. Still, the Ibandi spoke in hushed terms, as if speaking loudly might awaken whatever demon had smote their god. But people must eat, and hunt, and the Ibandi had returned to the process of living.

  Every day Break Spear performed ceremony and sacrifice, begging the ruined mountaintop to give signs. Every day someone suggested that they send a delegation up Great Sky to see what might be seen.

  The proud hunters of the Ibandi met one another’s eyes only with difficulty. Instead of climbing they sacrificed antelope, burned the flesh of their catches, begged Father Mountain to send the hunt chiefs back.

  But they did not return. And no one climbed the mountain to see.

  “Frog!” Gazelle called. In the last moon she seemed to have grown thinner, and it seemed to Frog that his mother gazed up at Great Sky almost wistfully, as if longing for the day when her time came to receive new bones. “Your mate is gone. You must find a new one. It is not good for your son to have no mother. Find a woman and take her to your hut.”

  Frog paused in the maintenance of his spears and sighed. “I do think about such things.”

  “This is good.” She nodded. Her hair was thin and almost completely white now. Her cheeks, once plump, were sunken. “I have spoken to the women,” she whispered to him. “This world ends soon, and we will be taken to the world beyond. There, we will be asked what we did, asked if w
e lost faith.” Panic dwelled behind her eyes, an emotion that had crept into all their lives, into every motion, every word. It was almost as if the Ibandi he had known were dead. “Your child needs a mother. You need a helper.”

  How could she think of such common things at such a time? Then he realized that it was by thinking of the continuance, the unbroken thread of their seed, that his mother managed to hold on to her sanity.

  “There is one in my heart.”

  “Good,” Gazelle said. “A widow, perhaps, with children. You will need one to nurse your boy. Or you will need to bring food to a woman who has milk, and ask her to feed him.” She spoke in a singsong, a tone he had heard from her only once before, when she was sick with fever.

  “This woman has no children,” Frog said, hoping that Gazelle would not ask more.

  “Has she been married?”

  After a pause, he said, “No.”

  Gazelle smiled. “Then go to her parents. You are a good hunter and will be a welcome son.”

  Frog avoided her eyes. There was no way around it now. “This is not needed. She has no parents.”

  “An orphan?” Gazelle brightened. “Better still. You can bring her home at once. Where do her people camp?”

  “On Great Earth.”

  A pause.

  Now Gazelle seemed to emerge more fully from her partial slumber. “She is a dream dancer?” Sudden comprehension blossomed. “She is this nameless one you saved?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Gazelle’s face hardened. “It cannot be. Wash it from your heart.”

  “Mother—” he began, his thoughts interrupted by a sudden screaming and shouting from the far side of the boma.

  Before they could continue, it seemed that half the boma was running toward the gate, hunters and women alike. Frog sprinted over to see a young boy from Water boma, his feet swollen and bloody. He was exhausted and ranting. Dried blood and sweat masked his face.