Shadow Valley

by Steven Barnes

  Bat Wing glanced back over his shoulder at the ten or so family groups in easy sight. Others were straggling along farther back. “Will we wait for Sky Woman?”

  Frog forced himself to shrug. “She will find us.”

  Before the sun had moved a finger toward the horizon, they came upon the sparsely grassed banks of a trickling stream. A weeping wattle tree’s spreading branches webbed the ground with shade. Careful to avoid ant nests and sharp rocks, they set their lean-toms and skin rolls for the night.

  During rest times, food was shared within and between families. Whether the wanderers originated in Fire or Earth or Wind bomas, all now stood within the same circle, walking toward unknown horizons.

  Just before the sun touched the western horizon, Frog went to find his mother, Gazelle Tears. She and his younger brother were on the far side of the shallow bowl chosen for the night’s camping, near a tumble of fallen trees. He had just greeted her when a boisterous shout reverberated through the hills. “Stillshado w!” came the cry. “They are back! The dream dancers have returned!”

  Worry flew from his heart. “At last.”

  His mother squatted at the side of their new fire, feeding it twigs. “You were afraid?” she asked. Time had sharpened his mother’s shoulders and cheekbones. Her hair was streaked with gray but not yet white. Nor had she clipped that hair short as many other Ibandi women do when the loss of their moon-blood signaled entrance to the elders’ circle.

  “Of course not.” The lie slipped from his tongue so quickly that he barely tasted it. It would not do to have his people know how heavy his heart grew whenever his love left his sight.

  He was soon directed to the stream just south of the camp, where it burbled across mossy green rocks. There he found T’Cori and Stillshadow, filling gourds with fresh water. Game tracks dappled the ground around them. Perhaps this was the place they had sought?

  T’Cori smiled up at him, but continued to busy herself with some little game that she and her teacher had been playing. To Frog, that smile had always been like the birth of a new sun.

  To some, T’Cori seemed a sparrow. But Frog was not deceived by the long fine bones in her forearms and thighs. She was stronger than any hunter, any champion of the wrestling circle. Her strength, not his, had carried them to the top of Great Sky.

  Her gleaming hair cascaded to her shoulders in tightly woven braids. Her hairline descended slightly at the center of her forehead. Like most dream dancers, she wore a deerskin covering both her breasts and her sexual organs.

  All human beings had seven eyes: two on the face, two in the palms, one in each foot, and one in the the sexual organs—the seventh eye, the most powerful and precious. A dream dancer’s sexuality was for her to gift and for no man to steal with hands or eyes or root.

  T’Cori’s eyes were the most remarkable thing about her: they were the color of yam skin, brown with greenish tints and speckles of yellow as bright as sunflowers. They were soft but piercing. He often wondered if they could see past his skin to the blood and marrow beneath.

  Stillshadow cupped water from the stream with her hands, raising them and offering her apprentice a sip. Every time T’Cori bent, the old woman let it run out between her fingers. They laughed heartily, and then the game was repeated. He drew close enough to hear Stillshadow’s whispers.

  “Listen,” Stillshadow said. “Whether flowing from the ground, touching your lips or cooling in your gourd all are water, yes?”

  T’Cori nodded.

  “How did you see water on Great Sky? Steam? Rain? Streams?”

  “And there was more,” T’Cori said. “Hard, clear water. There are no words to describe how cold it was. Even more, pieces of the cold hard water fell from the sky.”

  Frog cleared his throat, announcing his presence. “Old one,” he said, “did Great Mother give you a vision?”

  “Yes,” Stillshadow said. “Soon. There.” She pointed at the northern horizon, as she had countless times before. Then, as if her strength was spent, the crone’s shoulders sagged, and she seemed to collapse. “I must rest.” She shuffled off to find shade.

  Frog scanned the shallow brown rise of the distant hills, their straggly thorn bushes breaking a monotonous horizon.

  A dust-colored hawk bent the branches of a bush only a spear’s throw away. Its head rotated almost like an owl’s, gazed at him and T’Cori.

  “Blessings, winged sister,” she said.

  The hawk skawed, flapped its wings and climbed steeply into the sky.

  “I wonder,” Frog said, “if she knows something we don’t.”

  “We have horizons to cross,” T’Cori said, “but we will find it.”

  Frog wondered. “You are sure?”

  “Very sure.”

  “I was worried about you,” Frog said.

  She trailed her fingers softly along his arm, sending sparks. “It was only three days. I was safe with Leopard. You know that.”

  “There are many kinds of danger.”

  T’Cori frowned. “What are you saying?”

  “He has no wife,” Frog said. “His root swells when he dreams of you.”

  “Ah. You see these things? You dance in the other world now?”

  “No, but a man knows these things.”

  “So does a woman,” she answered. “And no matter what he dreams, I am yours. Unless, of course, he needs me to make medicine with him.” The corners of her mouth turned upward, hinting at mischief

  Frog made a clucking sound. “If you are to be his medicine, he had best be very, very sick. Sick enough to wilt his root.” Could he demand that Leopard meet him in the wrestling circle? Certainly. And one day he might do that, if he wanted to eat dust a few times.

  She rubbed cheeks with him, smooth against rough. “You have nothing to worry about.”

  Frog laughed. “I will be back to eat soon. We have yams and spring hare for dinner.”

  Her eyes sparkled. “A feast.”

  Frog headed off toward a circle of men, who were sharpening spears and knives. They waved as he approached.

  Uncle Snake stood quiet and alone at the circle’s edge. After the death of Frog’s father, Baobab, Snake had hunted for food for his brother’s family and cared for them. After his first wife’s death, Snake had married Frog’s mother and raised Frog. His left eye had been torn away by a lion many years before. A pale web of scars masked the left side of his face. His uncle’s good right eye blinked as Frog approached. “I will go and see if the women need anything,” he said.

  “Uncle!” Frog protested. “Wait. Please. Sit with me.” They squatted together, away from the others. The wind rustled around their ankles, rippling the grass.

  “It is worst with the children,” Snake said.

  “What?” Frog asked.

  “Their eyes are so bright,” the old man whispered. “The young ones believe in this great man, this hero named Snake.” His thin shoulders rounded forward. “Why would Father Mountain not give me a stronger heart?”

  Frog knew his uncle’s pain but could not ease it. After the Mk*tk war, the holy women had decided to climb Great Sky to ask Father Mountain and Great Mother for advice and aid. Seven had begun the climb, two had completed it. Four had died and one, Snake, had given up. But Frog and Sky Woman had lied to protect Snake, had made him a hero of the climb.

  What a wonderful, blessed lie it had been. In that lie, Hawk Shadow had died on his feet instead of his knees, crawling away from the wolves. Fire Ant had died defending Sky Woman instead of trying to kill her. Snake had driven them on with the supernatural strength of his num instead of turning back like a coward.

  His uncle, whose strength and courage had failed him, had been transformed by Frog into the strongest of them all. Was it wrong to protect the man who had fed and raised him?

  He considered, then asked the question that itched at him. “When was the last time you took pleasure with my mother? She loves you, and you do not touch her.”

  Snake’s
lips twisted in annoyance. “Why do you say this?”

  “I know my mother,” Frog said. “When she is loved, she dances through her day.” He paused. “She has not danced in moons.”

  “I am old,” Snake said, “and my root-fire is low.” Snake seemed unable to meet Frog’s eyes. “I should steal num from Gazelle?”

  Frog shook his head. “You cannot steal what is given freely. And I do not believe your root has wilted. Just a year ago, around the fire you bragged of how you made her sing in the tall grass.” A hummingbird-swift shift of Snake’s eyes told him his arrow had struck home. It was Snake’s spirit that failed, not his flesh. “You have loved little since we came from the mountain. Since we began our journey. Is she so ugly to you now?”

  Snake winced. “Do not say such things!”

  “Are her breasts empty?” Frog bore in, deliberately provoking. Anger was better than self-pity. “Perhaps her eyes were brighter when she’d danced fewer winters. Has she lost a girl’s easy step?”

  Snake growled and raised his hand as if to strike his adopted son. He hesitated and lowered it again. “Do not speak of your mother so.”

  “Why don’t you go to her?”

  Snake’s nostrils flared, but his tongue found no words.

  “Uncle,” Frog said, “as men, we think that all our strength comes from our muscle, our bones, our num. I think that is wrong. I think that a man is strong when his soul vine binds him to his woman.”

  “What of the hunt chiefs?” Snake retorted. “They lived without women, and were they not strongest of all?”

  A good question. All had died, save the coward Boar Tracks, who had refused to attempt the climb of Great Sky.

  Could the dead ones have been strongest of them all? When he, Frog, had done what they could not? All his life he had believed the songs and stories, but now he was not certain. “Were they? Did they? Uncle, they all had Ibandi women. Whenever a hunt chief’s root hungered, he needed only walk down from the mountain and display it. You suffer no weakness. You believe you are no longer worthy.”

  Was that a smile tugging at Snake’s lips? “Perhaps.”

  “Uncle … I was strong because I had the Nameless One, she we now call Sky Woman. You walked alone.”

  “And your brother Fire Ant?”

  Frog flinched as if Snake had thrust a stick at his eye. “I do not speak of him.”

  Snake frowned. “Frog, he is dead. He died trying to save his people. There is nothing you could have done.”

  “Perhaps.” Frog ground the ball of his foot into the dirt. When he finally replied, his voice was flat and harsh. “And if you could have been braver, stronger, you would have been. And can be now, if you will forget the past and look to our future. Your future. With Gazelle.”

  Snake found Gazelle Tears with her younger son, Wasp, and Fire Ant’s plump widow, Ember, and her baby. All crouched near the stream’s trickle. As their campfire burned to glowing coals, they busied themselves with preparations for the evening meal. Ember held her infant girl to her breast with her left arm, as she and Wasp pounded seeds against rock, splitting the husks and shaking out the meat to make mush balls. “I bring impala,” Snake said, and dropped the carcass on the ground before Gazelle.

  “It looks scrawny. Not juicy at all.” Her eyes twinkled. “But I will cook, and we will eat together. Wasp,” she said, “clean this.” If they found a home … when they found a home, the boy would begin his run with the hunters. For now, he remained close to his mother.

  “We need to speak,” Snake said quietly.

  Her pounding slowed. She moved a bit farther away from her son and daughter-in-law. “You need to ask? When have I refused you anything?”

  He looked south, toward Great Sky. For the first moon of their travels, the sacred mountain had wavered behind them in the distance. Then only when the air and heat and light were just so did it appear, as if floating above the horizon. And then one day … it was gone. “Perhaps because we are distant from our home.”

  “Sky Woman says that home is where we build our fire. Where we feed our families. Where we hold each other.”

  He looked at her, curious. “You’ve heard stories of what happened on the mountain?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Everyone loves a hero,” Snake said. “They make dances and sing songs for the hero. I do not know who this ‘hero’ is. Is it this ‘hero’ you love?”

  Gazelle Tears laughed.

  Wasp grunted, sawing at the web of muscle between the deer’s ribs. The boy was a smaller, younger version of his brother, Frog. Grunting, he ripped a section of ribs free and handed it to Ember for approval. She nodded and passed it to Gazelle Tears.

  She selected herbs from a leather pouch, and crumbled a healthy pinch onto the meat, then began kneading the seasoning in with a smooth, clean rock. “I brought our sons, Frog and Wasp, our daughter, Little Brook, into the world through my body. Each was born wet and wrinkled. Brook cried as if she were the first lonely soul in all creation. I helped Frog take his first steps, and now people speak about my son as if he is no longer a two-legged. It makes me laugh.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “I don’t know what my son felt and saw on the mountain … but he is still my son, as much as he was before he could wipe his own bottom.”

  “And what of me?” Snake asked.

  “I don’t know what happened to you on Great Sky,” she said, “but you are still my husband. When you rub your hips against me, my body opens to you. It is no hero I pull inside me. It is the man who fed my children when their flesh father died. The man who taught little Frog to wrestle and hunt.”

  “You will still cook my meat?”

  She pressed her palm against his forehead, and gave him a little push. “Always.”

  She plucked a pair of tubers from the pile beside her, rolled them in green leaves and handed them to Wasp, who slipped them into the coals. “Do you remember our first night together?”

  The very memory sweetened the moist, warm air. “Of course.”

  She touched his arm. “Tell me what you were thinking.”

  Snake nodded. “When my wife died, I mourned and thought my heart had dried. You made me food and made me laugh and made me come.”

  “These are all good things.” Gazelle Tears chuckled.

  “I needed these things,” Snake said. “And you needed a man to hunt for you.”

  “Even before your wife died, you hunted for me,” she reminded him.

  “Yes. But after she returned to the mountain, I hoped you would see me with warm eyes.”

  In that moment, Gazelle Tears seemed a young girl once again. “All my eyes are warm to you, Snake. All are open now: two hands, two feet, two face-eyes.”

  “And the seventh eye?” he asked.

  In answer, she rubbed her rump against his. The smoothness soothed one ache but intensified another. If the sudden, delicious heaviness in his root was any measure, he was not quite as old as he feared. Snake smiled. “Perhaps tonight …”

  “Yes.” As she pounded the seeds, her tempo quickened.

  “A walk in the brush …”

  She sighed as if he had entered her already. “I will roll my hide. It might be nice to have a place to sit.”

  “Or lie.”

  Gazelle’s shyness had vanished, replaced by something with sharp, friendly teeth. “Yes. It might.”

  Snake crouched between his wife and Ember. Ember’s man, Fire Ant, was gone, dead on the holy mountain. Since his death Ember had been closer to Gazelle Tears than ever. She had chosen to travel with Frog rather than return to her own boma.

  Here, Ember was a legend’s widow. She seemed to take some comfort in that, at least enough to get on with her life.

  Could a legend’s widow be stronger than a legend? This was not a question Snake could answer. Instead of trying, he busied himself pounding leaves and herbs and ground seeds into the slab of deer ribs. In every way, tonight would be a feast.

  The sun was a
thumbnail-sized spark, sinking toward its grave below the western horizon. To T’Cori the clouds seemed layered there, dark orange at the bottom and edges, darkening in the middle as the sky sighed and prepared for sleep.

  She and the other women tended to gather at their own fire, a few paces from the men’s. A world away. Out here on the unknown northern savannah, where their former lives had blown away like cobwebs in the wind, the informally drawn boundaries seemed more important than ever.

  Tonight, six women crouched around the blaze, its living shadows painting their faces. Hearts open, they awaited morsels of wisdom or comfort from Stillshadow Perhaps they would be called to sing. Song and dance could transform a dreary night into a celebration. T’Cori had brought along her drum in hopeful anticipation.

  The lead dream dancer sat at the edge of a log, her elbows resting upon her knees, her weathered face tilted up to the darkening clouds. Stillshadow rested her hand over her heart. “I die soon.”

  Fear tightened T’Cori’s throat. “Mother! Do not say such a thing.” Then she paused. “When?”

  “Not today or tomorrow,” the old woman promised, “but there is much to teach and little time to share it.”

  Relief flooded T’Cori’s heart. She could lead, alone, if she must. But please, Great Mother, not yet.

  “Where do we begin?” Sing Sun asked.

  “When we find our new place,” Stillshadow said. “We must make a new drum.”

  “What is wrong with this one?” T’Cori asked. She reached down and ran her hands along its worn sides. The drum was as tall as her forearm, as broad as a large man’s hand. It was formed from a hollowed willow log, with deerskin pegged with bone splinters stretched around the rim. T’Cori had owned it since childhood, and she slapped her palm against the drumhead to make a high, mellow thump.

  “It is a fine drum,” her teacher said, “but a new land needs new music. We make it from the trees, from the animals. In that way, when we play, we speak to the land itself. We will walk on. We need to be swift but careful.”