Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

  “Can’t we make it all the way to the…” T’Cori saw the expression on Snake’s face. “The camp of the hunt chiefs?”

  “I do not know what we will find,” Snake said. “But whatever it is, I wish to face it in daylight.”

  So they made lean-tos beneath sheltering branches, completing their work just as the clouds decided to rain. Swiftly, the thin layer of ash was transformed into a pale mush.

  The moist earth met the cool morning breezes, birthing a mat of clouds that hovered around the travelers as they continued on. It blanketed the forest for most of the day, muffling the very sound of their footsteps against the dank earth.

  The trees were taller than any T’Cori had seen with the single exception of the Life Tree, the great baobab. Their branches interlocked to form a canopy above the forest floor. All around them, ash-covered plants of endless variety were dying. They seemed cocooned in an uncanny silence, only an occasional bird call reverberating in the branches.

  And everywhere that layer of white. The forest should have been filled with blue monkeys, bushbuck, duikers, leopards and bush pigs. The few beasts they saw were smeared with ash and seemed haggard and frightened, too stunned even to flee.

  “The chamber,” Snake said, voice choked, standing at the mouth of a wide depression in the ground. Once, it must have been large enough for men to walk through. Now, it was clogged with mud and brush. T’Cori saw a tangle of legs and arms, as if the great hunt chiefs had been caught in the midst of some sacred ceremony. Snake wept openly.

  They discovered the most terrible thing in the very middle of the clearing: Cloud Stalker himself, buried to his chin in mud. The flesh had been chewed down to the bone. His empty eye sockets stared blindly. Only his flagging, bloody braids allowed T’Cori to recognize him.

  Raven turned away, gagging. She sank to her knees beside him, caressed Stalker’s ravaged face, his empty eyes. “Father,” she whispered.

  T’Cori touched Raven’s hair, and the dancer turned to look back up at her, face streaked with tears.

  “He was your father?” T’Cori asked. Of course he was, but T’Cori had never really thought about it. Stillshadow was mated to Cloud Stalker, but of course had had other lovers. But shouldn’t she have known that Raven had sprung from Stalker’s seed?

  Raven nodded. “I never really knew him,” she said. “Mother told me not to talk, not to brag, that the other girls become jealous.”

  “I am so sorry,” T’Cori said. “May I help you with the ceremony?”

  Together, they prayed over Cloud Stalker, Raven dancing as T’Cori gently heaped rocks over his head. Frog and the others helped, protecting the body of their grand hunt chief from further insult.

  When they were done, Raven wiped her tears away and squeezed T’Cori’s hand. “Thank you,” she said, and the nameless girl felt her own eyes moisten.

  So much destruction. So much loss. Any small gain seemed a miracle.

  “Father Mountain is gone,” Fire Ant growled.

  Snake dropped to his knees, digging with his hands in the white mud, and Frog and the others joined him. Beneath the surface, the soil was dark and still moist and unnaturally warm. T’Cori could barely imagine how hot it must have been when first it cascaded down the mountain, sweeping all in its way.

  Snake wept uncontrollably. “I am nothing,” he said to Raven. “I could not save your father.” He tore at his facial scars, wailing. “And I was not fit to be here, to die with my brothers.”

  The others looked at one another helplessly. T’Cori watched Frog place his hand on his uncle’s shoulder. “Because of your scar, you were not here,” he said. “Because you live, you are leading us in our time of need.”

  Snake looked up at him, perhaps searching for deceit or condescension. T’Cori saw only love in Frog’s face, and reckoned that Snake must have seen the same, because by the time he rose he was composed.

  “There are things we will need,” Snake said. He fought to keep his voice even, but it was clear that his mind had reached a brittle edge. “It is cold up there,” he said. “Cold such as you have never known. The hunt chiefs knew this, and they did things. Had things to try…to help them…help us deal with the cold.”

  A crazed smile burst forth on Snake’s face as he found the first of the items he sought. Hides cut with armholes. Hides cut to be strapped over the feet.

  “This is good,” Snake said. “There are…were caches of food and firewood up the mountain, marked with this symbol,” and here his fingertip traced the sign of fire and mountain in the white mud. “Look for them. They may save our lives.”

  They clawed their way into the mud, and before long they had unearthed more hides, and walking sticks, and spears, and arrows. A treasure trove.

  Snake showed them how to wear the furs, how to wrap their feet. The furs had already been shaped into things like sandals, only covering the ankles and even the calves. Other furs seemed much too hot and heavy to wear, but Snake assured them that in a few days they would be grateful for the warmth.

  They recovered what bodies they could, and buried or burned them. Those too deep in the muck they considered buried already.

  Raven and T’Cori led them in dance. There, in the muddy, ash-white clearing the Ibandi raised voices to the dead trees, black skin against white mud as they spun and called out to their ancient ancestors to receive the souls of the hunt chiefs.

  Then, after prayers were danced, they walked a quarter to gain some distance from the place of so much death, and made their camp for the night.

  “What do we do? If Father Mountain is dead…,” Frog said.

  “He is not,” T’Cori said to him, taking his hand.

  “How can you be so certain?” he asked, looking up into the clouds.

  “I know,” she said.

  He sighed. “There is something different in the clouds,” he said. “Something strange. This was a place of power when I came for my manhood. Now it is dead ground.”

  Despite her faith and inner knowledge, she understood. The trees were clotted with ash. Many had been torn up by the roots and lay tumbled about like sick, broken old men.

  Never had T’Cori seen or dreamt of such devastation. And she knew in her heart that it would only be worse as they continued their struggle upward.

  T’Cori and Raven stood close together, almost touching, as if drawing a comfort from each other they could not consciously acknowledge.

  “We must have more ceremony,” T’Cori said. “To honor the great and brave men who died here.”

  “Who do we pray to?” Frog asked.

  “Father Mountain! Great Mother!” Raven screamed. “They are not dead! They are not!”

  To T’Cori’s surprise, it was Frog’s quiet stepbrother Scorpion who said, “Yes. They live still. We should dance.”

  And so that night they danced before the fire, and made shadows, and sang their love and defiance, and for a time kept the fear at bay.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  In the morning they left their camp and continued onward and upward. Looking down from that height, it seemed to T’Cori that the trees and streams on the plain were impossibly tiny. Truly, Great Sky was the largest cairn of rock and dirt in all the world, even after its top had thundered into the stars.

  They crossed a small valley and began their ascent.

  “Look,” Scorpion said, and pointed back downhill. Below them, barely within sight, padded three wolves, their white chests the color of ash. Their black tails wagged slowly as they panted, observing the humans from a safe distance. Then they disappeared into the trees. “They hunt us,” Scorpion said.

  “Let them come.” Hawk smiled. “I’ve never eaten wolf.”

  T’Cori doubted if the muscular young hunter was truly as confident as he sounded.

  These lands were littered with wild cactus plants in strange shapes. Raven touched one of them. “Groundsel,” she said wistfully, as if that was a bit of knowledge from another, distant life. “Good
if you shit worms.”

  Halfway up the trail they met a river gorge and continued to a plateau. T’Cori was beginning to have a bit of trouble breathing. Her legs felt as cold as the air around her, even with the skins that she draped around her shoulders.

  “Now,” Snake said, “it is time to put on the furs.” They stopped for half a quarter, and he helped them tie the odd sandals around their ankles. It took some practice to get used to walking in them, and the slipping and falling was cause for general hilarity, the first laughter they had heard since the beginning of the climb.

  Once they moved out of the path of the cascading mud, the seven reached a place where trees stood tall, but now there were fewer of them to stand. They were mostly broken and splintered, lay at angles, or leaned against each other, torn up by the roots.

  “The trees are dying,” Scorpion said, gripping his spear until his knuckles whitened.

  At this elevation, there was less vegetation of any kind. What they did see was more like a wide, rolling meadow and the wilted ruins of small wildflowers.

  Throughout the day the air warmed, but as Snake led them up the mountain the sun began to droop toward the horizon. When it did, the air cooled so quickly that it felt as if it was sucking the day’s heat into the grave with it.

  Snake and Scorpion circled stones as the brothers gathered firewood. When it roared, they slept close enough to it that one side of them was roasting as the other side grew numb with frost. Raven crept near T’Cori, turned her back and pressed it against T’Cori’s, seeking warmth and comfort. T’Cori awakened in the morning feeling half dead, but continued on.

  From time to time Raven or T’Cori called out the name of a tree or plant, entertaining themselves and the others with medicinal or ceremonial applications.

  Frog stared at a spiky plant as tall as two men. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said.

  “Lobelia,” Raven said.

  As the temperatures dropped, the lobelia closed their leaves around the central core. Frog thrust his finger under a leaf and came out with a slimy thick green fluid.

  He sniffed it. “Acid-sweet,” he said. “I wonder how it tastes.”

  T’Cori’s eyes widened in alarm. “Frog. Don’t!”

  He laughed, wiping his fingers on his thigh. “I’m not a monkey,” he said, and she realized he had been teasing her.

  “Yes, you are,” she said, jostling him with her elbow.

  T’Cori had not seen an animal all day—perhaps they were plagued by the thin air as much as the humans. But one ash-covered eland looked at them as if they were the last creatures to be found in all the world and then stumbled away, dazed.

  Scorpion raised his spear to cast it, but T’Cori touched his arm. “No. We have food enough,” she said softly. “Let it go.”

  He laughed derisively, but after one skillful feint lowered his spear. And wheezed.

  For the last quarter they had glimpsed a wall of rock through the trees and rises. It grew steadily larger and more intimidating, until finally they stood awestruck in its presence. It was taller than ten tens of men, like something placed by the hand of Father Mountain, a divine boma gate protecting the afterworld.

  T’Cori paused, uncertain what Snake might do next. The old man was breathing hard and seemed a bit perplexed himself.

  “What do we do?” Raven asked Snake.

  “We climb,” he said. “The hunt chiefs cut handholds and footholds. I think…” He searched around the base until he found another of the hunting signs. “Yes, here. I think I can find them. Follow me.” Rock ledges jutted from the splintered surface, so the climb itself was not as bad as T’Cori had feared. The furs covering her feet were the most treacherous threat, and the men seemed actually to have more trouble than either she or Raven—except Frog, who gritted his teeth and kept up. Twice Hawk Shadow slipped, and was caught once by Scorpion and once by Snake. The ground below was soft, but the higher they rose, the less that mattered. And finally the ground seemed so far below them that it was clear that any fall at all would be the end of life.

  “Be careful, Ant,” Frog said after a rock moved a thumb’s width in his grasp. “Be careful with handholds. You are heavier than you think.”

  His brother laughed, but T’Cori noticed that after that warning he sought roots and rocks more carefully.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Just above Frog, Uncle Snake’s old arms were unsteady as he searched for handholds. Frog paced his breathing, almost as if he was running up the vertical wall. Who had first done this thing? Who had cut the first steps in this wall? How long had they been there? Were they cut anew every year? Every generation? He was too exhausted to call out his questions to Snake, but they tumbled crazily around and around in his head like shrikes with broken wings. How many attempts had this taken? How many lives had been lost in the conquest?

  T’Cori was just below Fire Ant and ahead of Scorpion. She climbed with her face aglow, all suffering and pain temporarily forgotten, suffused with an ecstasy of sheer effort. The other girl, Raven, was between Uncle Snake and Hawk Shadow, ahead of Frog. She was larger and stronger than T’Cori but climbed as if she was a lizard.

  It was cold, cold of a kind he had never experienced. Frog’s limbs felt as heavy as wet logs. Even considering the intensity of the effort, he was left unusually drained, as if he had made the climb carrying Wasp on his back. Frog gasped for air, and no matter how much he sucked down, it didn’t seem to help.

  One at a time they made it to the top. Hawk Shadow pulled Frog up. He and Snake helped Fire Ant, who in turn helped T’Cori and Scorpion and Raven. They lay panting for a time. As they waited for their hearts to stop pounding they drank a little water from their skins and ate some dried meat. As they rested, Frog studied the next territory: a plain of ice and splintered rock that opened onto a rocky flat desert like those found far to the south and west.

  The skin on his face felt as if it was burning, the sun blazing bright enough to blind him. They struggled to push themselves, not knowing how long they could continue such effort, but the harder they pushed, the more strength seemed to leach from their bodies.

  They tried singing songs, chanting, anything to keep the breath in their lungs, but it simply wasn’t enough.

  “We must go more slowly,” Snake gasped. “More slowly.”

  “If we do, then we freeze,” Hawk said, anger and fear mingled in his voice.

  The air was as dry as sand, and the wind cut them like bamboo whips. There were very few plants, only lichens and small mosses. They saw no animals save a few crows. There was little to keep anything alive. They saw a mouse once, skittering between the harsh shadows. It, like the eland, stared at Frog and then disappeared.

  Here on this new plateau there was something on the ground that Frog had not seen before, and he bent to touch it. It was cold, gray-black on the surface, but pale beneath. As he rubbed the stuff between his fingers, it melted away.

  He sniffed. “What is this?” he asked, hands shaking.

  “Dead water,” Snake said. “They call it ice.”

  “Then, it came to life in my hands,” he said.

  He bent beside a tiny stream. Some kind of cold clear matter covered the water, and he cracked it with a rap of his knuckles, and then bent to sip.

  Dead water? Live water? It was colder by far than anything he had ever touched, but still delicious. In one place, they were actually traversing a patch of the odd stuff, and Hawk Shadow’s foot smashed through into wetness beneath. He was more startled than hurt, and they chuckled as he pulled his leg back out.

  “Wet!” he said, and laughed at himself, shaking the water from his feet.

  Late that day Snake saw more signs, and led them to a cave just large enough to hold both the seven Ibandi and a tiny fire. T’Cori had never been so happy for a fire in her life. The walls were close enough to concentrate the heat, keeping the brutal cold at bay as if it was a starving lion gnashing its teeth just outside the cave’s
mouth.

  Despite the weather, T’Cori was in good spirits. As the rest of them grumbled and joked to hide their fear, she felt herself really nearing the presence of her gods for the first time. She was almost fevered with anticipation.

  They all huddled together for warmth. Raven trembled, arms wrapped around herself, squeezing the skins against her body, seeking warmth. Without a word, T’Cori drew her close, and they hugged there in the cave. She let Raven cling to her, shared her heat. “Why aren’t you cold?” Raven asked.

  “Control your breathing, as your mother taught,” T’Cori said. “Pull it down into your belly and light the fire.” Raven nodded and closed her eyes. Almost immediately her shivering decreased.

  The next day it took Frog almost a quarter of walking before he felt alive and loose. They wound through more of the dry, rocky plateau, littered with great startling rocks that looked as if they had never been weathered by wind and dust.

  Up higher, the dead water grew thicker, and actually began to blow from the sky as flakes. The rocks were covered with the white-gray stuff. When they reached a slick, pale wall they tried to climb it. Wherever it touched their skin, it seemed to suck the life away. Fire Ant tried to climb, but his feet scrabbled without finding purchase.

  “What do we do, Uncle Snake?” Frog asked. “Where do we climb?”

  Snake peered up at the wall, the confusion written clearly on his face. Had things changed so much? “I…I don’t—”

  “Over here!” Scorpion cried. Off to the left, around a curve, the wall was broken into a tumble of icy boulders. The shears looked unweathered, and Frog suspected it had happened recently.

  And then, without any warning, Uncle Snake began to scream.

  “We can’t!” he said as the dead water blew around them. “The hunt chiefs tried but never were able to go farther.”

  Frog stopped breathing. All the sound in the world seemed to stop as well. What? What had Snake just said?