Her brow wrinkled. “I feel that in a new land, we need a dance as quick and light as rabbits. Bring the drum, and we will teach our men the rabbit rhythm.”
“Yes, Mother,” T’Cori said.
“Sky Woman, tell them the story of Zomo the rabbit drummer,” Stillshadow said. “Hunters use Rabbit when they must run fast and quiet for a short time. This is Zomo’s rhythm.”
T’Cori’s hand fluttered on her drum, tapping out a song. As the thumps triggered memories of dance and song and mushrooms, she searched her memory, hoping to earn a smile, or an affirming nod, from her mentor….
Zomo was not very big or strong, but he was a very clever rabbit. But Zomo was greedy and wanted something more than cleverness. He wished for wisdom. Father Mountain told Zomo that in order to earn such a boon, he would have to do three things.
First, he would have to bring the scales of Big Fish to Great Sky. Second, he would have to bring the milk of Buffalo to Great Sky. And third, he would have to bring the tooth of Leopard to Great Sky.
Zomo promised Father Mountain to do exactly these things.
First, he traveled to the edge of the sea seeking Big Fish. There he sat and began to play his drum. He played so loudly that Big Fish heard the music and swam up to dance upon the sand. Zomo beat his drum faster and faster. Excited, Big Fish danced so fast that all his scales fell off. Naked and embarrassed, Big Fish leapt back into the sea.
Zomo scooped up all the scales in his sack, wiggled his tail and hopped off into the forest. While hopping through the trees, he saw Buffalo. He insulted Buffalo by telling her she wasn’t big or strong. Zomo dared Buffalo to knock down the little palm tree.
The little rabbit made Buffalo so angry she ran to tear the tree up by its roots. But because the bark was soft, her horns got stuck fast.
While Buffalo struggled, Zomo slid down, reached under her and filled his drum with milk.
Then Zomo went to the top of BreakClaw hill, a place where Leopard was known to hunt. He tipped his sack and sprinkled scales on the path, and then tipped his drum and spilled a few drops of milk into the dust.
Zomo went to the bottom of BreakClaw and hid behind a big rock. Soon Leopard came walking over the hill, where he lost his footing on the slippery scales and the milk. Leopard slid all the way down the hill. His face hit a rock, and a tooth popped out of his mouth. Zomo grabbed that tooth and ran away just as fast as he could.
So he took the three things back to Great Sky and climbed it, and at the top he found Father Mountain. “See?” he said. “See! I did what you asked me to do.” The little rabbit stood proud and tall. “Give me wisdom!”
But despite all he had done, Father Mountain just laughed at Rabbit. “You are clever enough to do what cannot be done,” Father Mountain said. “So now I will give you wisdom. Three things are worth having in this world. Courage, good sense and caution. Little rabbit, you have much courage, a bit of quickness and no sense at all. So the next time you see Big Fish, Buffalo or Leopard—you’d better run!”
And that is why to this day we sing: Rabbit is not big. Rabbit is not strong. But Rabbit has wisdom, so he runs very, very swiftly.
At the same moment T’Cori finished singing her story, her fingers fluttered to a rest.
The six women around the fire had been joined by others, including men and children, come to hear the tale. They smiled and clapped along, and laughed with pleasure as she came to a close.
While warming, their praise skimmed the surface of her heart. Only Stillshadow’s approving nod warmed her to the core.
T’Cori, Sky Woman, had done well.
T’Cori lay on her back beneath their lean-to, her stepson Medicine Mouse sleeping at her side, his wet nurse’s milk moistening his breath.
Throughout the rest of the camp soft burring snores replaced conversation and laughter. The twin fires burned low.
For a time she thought that Frog lay sound asleep at her side, then felt him nudge her ribs. The shadowed darkness barely revealed his form, but she felt him jerk his head toward the lean-to’s open side.
Taking care not to awaken his son, T’Cori followed Frog out.
Their tens of families had clustered their skins and lean-tos around the fires. With the exception of a pipe-smoking shadow to the south, all seemed quiet and still.
They moved around to the other side of the acacia’s trunk, sitting close enough for thigh to brush warm thigh. “What is it?” she asked.
“I have thought long about this, and come to a decision.” He paused, as if gathering strength. “I want you as my woman.”
She stared at him for a moment, and then struggled not to laugh. “I cook your food, I share your roof. I spank your son when he is bad and kiss him when he is good. What more remains?”
“My tongue tripped. I want you to be my wife” he said. “For us to make ceremony before the tribe, before Father Mountain and Great Mother. I want us to own each other and proclaim that bond before all: to the sky, the mountain and the earth.”
She sighed, mirth gone. “Great Mother’s children have needs. And those she provides. We do not get everything we want.”
He smacked the flat of his hand against the ground. “Why not! So many things in the world have changed. Why not this?”
She waved her hand at the lean-tos and twin campfires. Peaceful now. Tomorrow, they would rise and walk another day. And a few days after that, another walk. And on and on, until Stillshadow and Sky Woman told them they had found a home. “Look upon them, Frog.”
“Upon who?”
“Our children,” she said.
“Children?” He rested his hand on her rounded belly. “Do you see the future now?”
T’Cori laughed. “No, fool. I mean our people. The ones who follow us. They trust us. Need us, like children do. Hands of hands of families.”
“I see them,” Frog said.
She leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “Just as you see the faces in the clouds. Watch them. They watch us. They try to laugh, to sing, to dance. They try to be brave … but they are afraid. Too many things have changed. If all things change, they will have nothing to hold on to. We must wait.”
“Wait?”
“Yes,” T’Cori said. “Yes. In seasons, all things come. You and I can love, because more and more every day our people see you as our great hunt chief. But if I became your wife too soon, they would say you had taken Great Sky’s woman. Then, what if the jowk makes evil play with us? If a hunter is gored or if plague falls? If a baby is born with six toes, they will say our union is cursed. Please, my love. We must be strong.”
“But … you will still share my hut?” he asked, irritated by the pout in his own voice.
She nodded. “Only as long as you will have me.”
“Then you are mine forever.”
T’Cori sighed, and nestled closer. “We have lost so many things.”
“My father,” Frog said. “Three brothers.” Scorpion and Fire Ant, dead in fire. Hawk Shadow, torn by wolves.
“And I, four sisters.” Small Raven, dead of cold. Fawn Blossom, killed by a crocodile. Dove and Sister Quiet Water, lost to the Mk*tk
Could such tragedy be overcome? Dared they even to hope?
“Can we hold on to each other?” His voice was a little strained. Anxious.
“Of course, big ears.” She laughed. “Who else would have either of us?”
Chapter Four
In girlhood, Hot Tree had danced from dusk until dawn, but those days were now gray ghosts. Muscles once tireless now felt like rotted string.
“My bones are heavy,” she said more to herself than anyone else. In still water, when the sun was just so, her grandmother smiled back at her. So strange. How could this be? Where had this old woman come from? Deep within the cocoon of fatigue, Hot Tree still felt like a girl.
A boy with a round head and a huge nose tugged at her arm. “Gramma? Is there something you need?”
She shook her head. “No, Snail. Just gather the firewood. P
ick up branches in the firebreak. Be a good boy.”
“Always,” Snail said.
Imitating his full name, Snail Crawling Backward dropped to his hands and knees and scurried away giggling, toward the boma’s walls and safety. She barely noticed, looking off toward the south, her brow furrowed.
Something was wrong. She could not see it. Could not hear it. But whatever the danger, Great Mother would protect them. She knew it.
Ibandi men had beaten the Mk*tk. Surely now their gods would smile upon them and protect them.
Surely, the Mk*tk would not dare strike their hallowed ground.
That evening, Hot Tree served her family yams and monkey meat on a bed of crossed broadleaf Most of those remaining in her daughter’s boma were old men and children—barely enough hunters to provide flesh. There was rarely as much meat to share as there had been before Great Sky had died.
Nor were there enough men to protect them. Something tickled at her nose, a scent … sweat? Perhaps—if that sweat mingled the musk of man and lion.
“The wind stinks,” Hot Tree said.
Snail hugged her leg with all the strength in his small arms. “I smell nothing, Gramma.”
“Go to your mother,” Hot Tree said.
“Nana,” Snail Crawling Backward begged, “come with me.”
“Never you mind,” the old woman said. “Just go.”
Hot Tree shuffled to the gap in the boma’s bamboo wall. It was a man and a half tall, its poles sharpened at the top and lashed together with vines and leather strips. Its door of woven thorn branches was open during the day and closed at night. Although dusk had descended, the door had yet to be lashed shut. She squinted toward the east. Nothing but dried grasses and flat-topped acacia trees, dappling the plain as far as the eye could see. She started to turn and then changed her mind. If there was nothing out there, why did her spit curdle in her mouth?
Then as she turned, she used a hunter’s trick: from the sides of her eyes she caught something she could not see straight on. Men thought this secret belonged to them, but women could use it as well.
Every moon, hunters set fire to the brush around her daughter’s boma, to deny cover to lions and leopards. The edge of the blackened zone snarled with dense brush. Her tired old eyes detected one shadow oddly … different within that tangle of moonlit thorns and stalks. Larger than a man, but smaller than a lion. It was darker, harder than the other night shapes. Motionless as a cactus, it crouched.
Then it began to move.
Stealthy as a spider, the shadow crawled toward the boma.
Her muscles became bones. Now she detected other forms, humping across the burnt grass, blending with the shadows as clouds throttled the half-moon. Hot Tree might have been in the dream world, her arms and shoulders struggling to run, her feet rooted to the earth, stuck as fast as her namesake.
Thick, twisted silhouettes stood erect, shadows casting shadows. Stillness. Apish faces stared through her, past her, intent upon the boma walls to her rear. One. Two. Three. Another. A hand. Two hands of two-legged shadows. Spears and clubs bristled. As yet unmoving, they regarded the woman standing in the gap in the boma’s thorn walls.
She backed away, at first unable to speak, then suddenly unable to stop screaming, “MK*TK! MK*TK!”
Fighting panic, Tree barely dragged the thorn wall halfway closed before the first wave of attackers fell upon her. Agony drove thought from her mind as a spear point pierced her belly She fell back, blood clotting the breath in her throat. The Mk*tk stomped on her chest and wrenched his weapon free, then leaped toward the huts.
Inside the boma, her people screamed and ran, trying to claw their way through the thorn walls. There they were caught by the Mk*tk, trapped by the very walls that had once sheltered them.
Curled onto her side, blood-slimed fingers clutching her belly, Hot Tree’s dying eyes reflected the flame from the huts and boma walls. She heard Snail Crawling Backward scream for his father. His mother. Anyone.
No one.
She closed her eyes, praying as her grandson’s howls dissolved into grunts of pain and terror.
Pleading for Father Mountain to take her, Hot Tree lived to hear her sisters, wrists lashed together, wail as the Mk*tk’s flaked rock knives stripped meat from their men’s bones.
She lived to see the Mk*tk leader, a blunt-faced giant with two finger stumps marring his left hand, raise his bloodstained arms to the moon. She lived to hear her people’s thick, wet sobs die to silence.
Only then, after everything she loved had turned to dust, did her broken heart end its dance.
The sky swam with stinking black smoke, Flat-Nose’s solemn tribute to God Blood. As leader of his clan it was his responsibility to see that his people’s every action, every deed was right in the eyes of He who had vomited forth the world.
Their deeds would be woven into Flat-Nose’s death song, the tale he had composed his entire life. It was a bleeding tattoo etched into his victims’ bruised skins, designed to carry their souls to God Blood. If the forces of night found a man’s story to be good, then the terrible one might choose Flat-Nose’s flesh as a special, succulent meal at the end of days.
Surely, God Blood would approve of this: slaughtered weaklings, sobbing females taken for pleasure and work. Young grubs peeled and staked for the vultures.
The hot air reeked of flesh and flies. Jackals and crows circled as the Mk*tk departed, driving the howling women before them. The Ibandi women’s anguish was a beautiful thing, but he did not want them to lose all hope. A single woman might even be allowed to escape, to give the others spirit, spirit that Flat-Nose and his men might then relish shattering. Thin boned and small they were, but if they were like his third wife, Dove, they were ready and eager to learn what a true male demanded of a female. And, in time, their supple backs and buttocks would yield all that was required. That was the true nature of the female, something these weaklings seemed not to understand.
They would find Flat-Nose an excellent instructor.
Not one Mk*tk dared looked back. Although brave beyond the ability of an Ibandi to conceive, there were limits: it could blast the body and soul for mere mortals to watch God Blood at feast.
Chapter Five
In T’Cori’s dream, a green creeper vine as long as the horizon stretched between the peaks of Great Earth and Great Sky. She was a ring-tailed monkey climbing hand over hand across that divide. But when only halfway across, arms rose up, like the arms of beast-men who had clutched at her in the sacred caves. They pulled her down, and as they pulled, she changed from a monkey to a woman once again, and the beast-men transformed into Mk*tk.
And they did to her what they had done in hands of hands of other dreams, on ten tens of other nights.
T’Cori blinked her eyes open and was born into darkness.
Medicine Mouse had rolled against her hard, restless in his sleeping space between her and Frog. His soft, warm mouth sought her nipple in vain. Her milk had not yet come down. Today she would have to take the boy to her adopted sister Ember, who produced milk enough for Fire Ant’s daughter and Mouse as well.
But for now, the tiny slack body, eyes closed, mouth open, smelled of last night’s liquid supper. And T’Cori reassured herself that the perils of the dream world did not always follow men and women into the world of flesh.
“Whaaat?” Frog’s voice was groggy as he pushed himself up.
“Dreams.”
Frog nodded. “I know. Every night I see death.”
“Mk*tk?”
He nodded.
“Every night,” she said, “I dream they push at my body They take what is not mine to give.”
He pressed his lips to her forehead. “What you have, no one can steal.” He rose, grasping his spear near the point.
She did not have the heart to protest his blasphemy or mourn his blindness. Whatever he was not, whoever he was not, she needed him and so did her people.
“Train hard,” she said. “When I c
lose my eyes, I see blood.”
By the time most hunters crawled out of their lean-tos, Frog had already painted a human outline upon a tree trunk. Before others had wiped the sleep from their eyes, the calluses on his palms were already hot and raw.
He thrusted, changed positions and poked again with a twisting of wrist and arm, imagining the spear tip digging its way through muscle.
As the others prepared themselves for the day’s walk, they scratched their heads as he thrust and gouged his spear into the pitted wood until his hands bled and his strong young body gleamed with sweat. Frog shut the gawkers out of his mind. He did not see the surrounding termite mud hills, or a berry juice outline on the tree trunk. His eyes saw only snarling horror and the death of hope.
“What are you doing?” Leopard Paw asked from a few safe paces distance.
Frog’s tree was a spear’s throw away from where most Ibandi were encamped, near the forest of chest-tall, orange-brown termite mounds. When his foot brushed one of the insect trails, he paused to shake a few six-leggeds off his heel.
“Practicing,” Frog said.
“Why?”
“A dream.”
“Well,” Leopard said, “the tree looks very fierce.” The hunters laughed.
Frog did not let their mockery touch him. One day they would understand. That day of truth terrified him as no previous imagining ever had, but he could not shut the fear away. Not this time. That had been his tactic through much of his life. This time, he would turn fear into skill.
When the other hunters drifted away, Snake remained, watching, fingers twisting his thin beard. “I watch you train. You were not seeing boars or lions in your mind. You saw men.”
“If Mk*tk are men,” Frog replied. He stepped sideways, then stabbed and slashed the tree from a new angle as if it had threatened Medicine Mouse. He dreamed of Mk*tk. T’Cori dreamed of Mk*tk. When two dreamed as one … only a fool could deny that tomorrow and today were bleeding into each other. “Are they?” he asked. “Are they men?”
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