He had been wrong, and could barely find the strength even to think the thought. This was another world. They had come where no living men should go. He heard voices in his head; lights danced in his dimming vision.
Where was Lion Tooth? Had his flesh not melted yet? Where were the others who had died?
Fire Ant leaned close to Frog. “Brother,” he said, “I see nothing.”
The two brothers leaned against each other as T’Cori collapsed to her knees. She seemed only a bundle of bones and fur.
Frog thought he had never seen a more frightening, wonderful thing in all his life.
What did she see? Where now did her spirit fly?
There is a place beyond contentment, beyond thoughts of knowledge or joining or even peace. A place where the mind no longer defines itself in opposition to the outside world. T’Cori had found that place. It was a world of light, the world she had known as an infant. Her eyes were open, wide, unfocused, her tears freezing upon her cheeks. As had happened once before, long ago, she was not blind; she saw everything.
Father Mountain? Great Mother? Everywhere around her. Within her. She was beyond words, even words so fine and powerful.
“We have been fools,” she whispered. “Fools to think our gods live atop the mountain. They are everywhere, or nowhere at all.”
Frog thought that perhaps they were destined to stay here, to lie on the ice and rock until the wind sucked the life from them. There was no air to breathe. Certainly they were now above the stars.
T’Cori placed her foot against the ground, pushed at her knee and managed to rise part of the way before sinking back down. Frog knew he should help her but could not move. The girl tried again, and this time rose and staggered to them, her face a death mask. “I have seen,” she said. “I know. We must…return…to the living world.”
They were too exhausted even to reply to her, just nodded, and staggered back to the edge, slid down the ashy slopes, climbed down far faster than they had ascended.
Chapter Fifty-six
T’Cori’s eyes were wide but sightless still. Without the help of Fire Ant and Frog she would have fallen to her death.
After a half day of walking and sliding downhill, movement as mindless as branches waving in the wind, the air thickened, and Frog found himself able to think, to speak, to understand that he had acheived something that none of his people had ever done.
Cloud Stalker had never been to the top of the mountain. Nor had Boar Tracks, or Uncle Snake, or any of the other hunt chiefs. Only the sons of Baobab, and the strange girl without a name. The reality was more wondrous than anything that had ever been sung or danced around the fires. The demons were stranger, more illusive and dangerous. They masqueraded as natural things, and slew in ways no man or dancer could defend against.
T’Cori seemed not wholly human to Frog. She was…something different. As Stillshadow was, as Raven had tried to be. There was no doubt in Frog’s mind that this was a holy woman. From Ant’s expression, Frog could see that his brother was in such supernatural awe of the girl that he barely wanted to touch her.
White flakes began falling from the sky into her blind, open, staring eyes. The powdery dead water was covering their tracks. Even Frog’s numbed mind realized the dangers. “How will we find Hawk Shadow?” he asked.
Fire Ant studied the ground and then the rock formations. “I know the signs,” he said.
They kept moving, not daring to stop for almost a full day, until they reached the tree line. If they stopped, they would freeze. They would die.
As creatures devoid of human thought they came gratefully to a niche in a rock wall, a notch wide enough to protect them from the weather, where shared body heat and furs might get them through the night. Even dead, the spirits of the hunt chiefs protected them—the niche was stocked with firewood.
“One more day to Hawk Shadow,” Ant said. Ant labored frantically with his fire-bow there in the rock crevice, seeking to create warmth. They had nearly surrendered to despair when the first curl of smoke rose, and flame blossomed.
They groaned with pain as the flame began to drive the cold from their bones. They fed the fire until it roared, and Frog and Ant gave thanks all night long to the hunt chiefs they had cursed while climbing the ice wall.
Frog moved so close to the fire that he could smell his furs singe. Please, Father Mountain, he said to himself, ancestors, whatever there is…let us not be too late to find Hawk. Let him be safe.
“You are praying,” T’Cori said to Frog. “I see the red in your num-fire.”
His eyes flew open with shock. “How do you know?”
“The num-fire flared around your head,” she said, and laughed delightedly. “It has returned!” She clapped her hands together, joyous as a child. “Great Mother, thank You, thank You! I can see again.”
And although in the confined space the wash of sound seemed slightly uncanny, she could not stop laughing and giving thanks, far into the night. The two brothers looked at her askance, and huddled together for warmth, staying as far away from her as they could get without retreating into the storm.
Frog and Fire Ant awoke to see T’Cori crouched there in the cave mouth, eyes fixed on the dead white water falling from the sky, drawing symbols in the ash and ice.
She drew and then she curled into a ball and began to tremble, her eyes rolled back. There was nothing that they could do to help her, could only wait and pray that she survived.
“Soon, my brother,” Fire Ant whispered. “She will come to herself, and tell us what the gods told her. We will slay the Mk*tk. I will lead our people to victory, with you and Hawk at my side. And the sons of Baobab will be the most honored of all.”
There was a dreamlike quality to Ant’s words, a fervent belief that surprised Frog. Perhaps Ant had had his own vision at the mountaintop, a vision neither he nor T’Cori had glimpsed.
A vision of power.
When the girl rolled up to her knees, both brothers were watching in respectful silence.
“They spoke to me,” she said finally. “They told me what we must do to preserve our way.”
“How do we fight the Mk*tk?” Fire Ant asked.
“Father Mountain says,” T’Cori told them, “that we must find a new home in the north.”
Frog could barely believe his ears. What? Leave Great Earth and Great Sky? What would they do? Who would they be?
Ant’s voice was husky with shock. “What does this mean?”
T’Cori spoke as if to a frightened child. “That we must leave this land and find a new place.”
“No!” he screamed. “This is wrong! It is all nonsense! Not after all we have done! I am a man! A man does not give up his dreams because a woman scribbles in dead water.”
Frog tried to object. “No—”
Ant whipped his head around, pointing with his finger as if it were a spear. “Stay out of this, little brother,” he said fiercely. “It is not your affair.”
Unmoved by his wrath, T’Cori replied, “I say only what Father Mountain told me to say.”
Ant snarled, fingering his obsidian knife, “Then perhaps I should cut out that lying tongue.”
“Fire Ant, no,” Frog protested. “She is a holy woman. You must not say such things.”
“I speak as I will.” He pounded his chest with his fist. “I am boma father now. Our brother did not make the climb. The hunt chiefs did not make the climb—and they are dead. We are the new hunt chiefs! We will make the law!”
“My brother—” Frog began.
“Be silent!” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth. “No! We have been tricked. She was with the Mk*tk, gave her body to the Others. She is their woman, not ours. I say she speaks for them!”
“That is not true,” Frog said.
“No?” Fire Ant snarled. “No? She says to leave without a fight. Our women are strong! They believe in their men. What filth and cowardice is this?” Ant turned back to her. “You should die for your lies,”
he snarled.
“Stop this,” Frog pled.
T’Cori locked eyes with them, her expression bleak. “I will speak only truth, even if it costs me my life itself.”
“Listen to me,” Frog said, and stood between Ant and the holy girl. “I am sure you will be boma father, and one day will be the first of the new hunt chiefs. Wherever we are, whatever we do. And the tribe will follow you if you have done what must be done, seen what no one else has ever seen.
“Ant,” he went on, searching his mind desperately for the right thing to say, “whether we go or stay, we need both the dream dancers and the hunt chiefs, together, or our people will die, for we will have nothing to cling to. Stillshadow may be dying. This girl is the leader now. If we must leave this place to save our people, you will be the savior, you will be the greatest leader we have ever had, and songs will be sung to you by your grandchildren’s grandchildren.”
“But leave here…” Ant seemed almost ready to cry. “This is our home. We cannot leave the mountain.” He paused. “I would like songs,” he said finally, voice weakening. “I just want to be a great leader. Perhaps she is right….”
The girl T’Cori crouched behind Frog. “There is fear in his fire,” she murmured.
For many breaths they stood staring at one another, the wind howling outside the cave. Fire Ant’s tongue wetted his cracked lips. He closed his eyes and groaned. “The dream is ending,” he said. “If not for that fall, I would have been a hunt chief.”
Then Ant met Frog’s eyes squarely, softened his voice. “Let us kill the girl, and then you will tell them that they died, they all died, on the mountain. You will tell them Father Mountain said that we are to stay, and that I am to lead. You will say these things.”
Frog saw how Ant’s eyes burned. He saw that Ant would not allow this girl to steal his power, and he would do anything, anything at all. Frog himself had found the title of grand hunt chief intoxicating. How much more so had Ant?
“She would betray us, brother. Betray all our people. Betray you, and me, and Hawk. We can lead, brother! Her throat is soft. Slit it, so I can see you will not betray me. Then we will find Hawk Shadow, and the sons of Baobab will lead our people.” He was almost pleading. And Frog understood why.
Fire Ant loved Frog and did not wish to harm him. But he would. If he must, to save his people, to secure his own destiny, yes, he would.
Fear and love and duty all warred within Frog. Where were his loyalties? To brother? Tribe? Father Mountain?
And where was a small, nameless girl in all of this?
“Kill her,” Fire Ant begged.
Suddenly Frog grabbed T’Cori and pulled her frantically through the mouth of the cave. They ran, Fire Ant racing after them.
Then Frog spotted a stone just smaller than his fist. He dove, grabbed it, rolled, sighted and threw all in one motion. It soared true, striking directly between Fire Ant’s eyes with a hollow crack. His brother roared and fell back.
“Run!” he screamed to T’Cori, and she needed no urging.
Furs flapping in the wind, they fled out into the drifting dead water, leaving tracks that any child could have read.
Down the mountain they tumbled. And now he was profoundly grateful that Fire Ant had lost some of his speed and that the girl was fleet of foot.
They gained some distance, enough that they were able to scramble over rocks and find a hiding place.
The snowfall covered their tracks rapidly. In most environments, Fire Ant would have found them within moments, but this was still a strangeness.
But…what was this hiding place?
“Look,” T’Cori said, and pointed to the wall. A few paces away a ring of stones poked through the powdered ice: another of the shelters found and marked by the hunt chiefs in their efforts to climb Great Sky. Again, even in death, the hunt chiefs protected them.
They huddled together, and distantly they heard Fire Ant’s frustrated roar, his angry calls as he searched for them.
And then, silence. The great hunter Fire Ant was stalking.
“Will we die?” she asked.
“We might live,” he said.
But the night passed, and the cold began to gnaw at them. They knew they could not start a fire.
She reached for him. “Once before, I offered myself to you,” she said, and in the dim light he saw her lips curl in a smile. “Now I don’t think you can refuse.”
Fear. Awe. So much regret and confusion, all happening at the same time. He didn’t know what to think or to say, but did know that he didn’t have the strength to say no. Nor did he have the inclination.
T’Cori’s hands flowed over Frog’s furs, beneath his furs, seeking his body.
She urged him to sit upright, and she wrapped her legs around him, sitting in his lap. His root was already firm and ready for her. She took a deep breath and settled upon him, a great rush of warm air leaving her lungs as her body swallowed him.
“Don’t move,” she said, wrapping her arms around his chest. “We must make this last. There is a breathing way I was taught. Follow my lead,” she said, and deepened her breathing.
He could feel the heat flowing through her and into him, and his shuddering ceased. He felt her breathing, long and deep. Like the hyena breath? Similar, yes, and he began his own breathing. The two melded and the heat grew stronger, so that her own eyes widened.
“How do you know this?” she asked.
“Men have their own secrets,” he said, and managed a smile.
He dared not spend, for fear of freezing. Still, there on the edge of release a delicious heat cycled through him, and they remained there for quarters, until the sun rose, and they finally allowed themselves to find release. It was not a powerful orgasm, as if the night-long lovemaking had drained some of the exquisite intensity. It was more of a flowing, a gentle current sweeping them up and taking them over the edge together, into a moment of almost unendurable brightness…and then a comforting warmth.
Swaddled in their furs, they shared their heat.
“Where did you learn that breathing way?” he asked.
“It is a way to burn the poison from our bodies,” she said.
“It is a way to run without tiring,” he said.
They laughed, and held each other. With the warming air they tried to get a bit of sleep. But much to Frog’s surprise, his body was swiftly ready again, and he found T’Cori an eager partner. And if the second joining was not so long as the first, it was even sweeter, and more intense by far.
Chapter Fifty-seven
The wind was quiet in the morning, so that the first thing either of them heard clearly was Fire Ant’s distant voice. “Little brother!” Fire Ant called. “Come out. You know I would not hurt you. Give me the girl, then you and I will get Hawk, and we will go back down the mountain. Hawk needs us.”
So Fire Ant had stalked them part of the way but then lost the trail. Frog’s brother was good. Far too good. He would pick up the scent again, and then they would die.
“Would he kill you?” T’Cori asked.
“No,” Frog said. “Unless there was no other way to stop you.”
She did not speak, but her breaths were a rapid panting high in her chest.
He answered her unspoken question. “I will not leave you,” he said.
“What will you do?”
“I will be back,” he said.
“I know,” she said. And he knew that she did.
As Frog crawled out of their cave, he saw that the snow was thinned in places by trickles of steam from beneath the earth, creating a dizzying mixture of heat and cold.
If he could lead Fire Ant away from her, then perhaps T’Cori might make her way back down the mountain with her message. If not…well, at least he had had a taste of magic, for magic she was, and he had no more doubt about it. At least he had visited the home of the gods, seen the spirits, known that the dead lived again.
“Brother!” Fire Ant cried, and Frog spun to see Ant.
Frog and Fire Ant faced each other, just the two of them braced against the wind, their life paths having brought them to an almost unimaginable moment in time. There was nowhere for him to run, and if he tried, Ant would catch him.
And kill him? Would he? Frog prayed not, but did not know. The man before him no longer seemed like his brother.
The trip up the mountain had changed them all.
Frog felt empty, not even frightened. If there was any emotion remaining to him, it was a kind of sadness.
“Where is she?” Fire Ant hissed. An enormous welt swelled above his right eye. The time for compromise had passed. Frog could not see the num-fire surrounding Ant, as T’Cori could, but knew she was right: Ant would kill them both.
“Here,” she called, and to his despair, Frog turned to see the waifish T’Cori standing on the powdery dead water, her feet wrapped in furs, almost floating there. So beautiful. He, Frog, could run fast enough, perhaps. She could not. All was lost. Ant would kill her and dare Frog to tell a story no one would believe.
Fire Ant turned to him and smiled. “You lose, brother,” he said. “We win.” He stalked toward T’Cori, arms raised.
But he had taken only three steps when the surface beneath his feet cracked, and a gout of steam gushed up around his feet. He turned around and locked eyes with Frog, the anger and ambition vanished. All that remained was panic.
“Brother,” he said, “help me!” He tried to take a step, but the roof of the ice tube continued to crumble.
Frog could not move, could only stare, his gaze sliding back and forth between the two of them. T’Cori’s face was so cool and placid that she seemed completely above everything that was happening now, as if she was the living presence of Great Mother Herself. So small she was—small enough to stand on a thin sheet of dead water above the ice tube.
The last thing Frog saw of Ant was a flailing, and then the tube ceiling collapsed, steam gouted up around him and he fell, screaming, into the void.
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