Shadow Valley

by Steven Barnes

  They trusted him to guide the hunters, to read sign and smell water in the wind. More, they needed to trust someone—and to have someone to blame when things went poorly. At this moment, blame for the failure of their hunts sat directly on him. Now his woman was attempting to compensate for his failings. He hoped, he prayed that she would succeed, but he did not know what he would feel if she did.

  He searched to find even one space within his heart free of guilt or fear, and he failed. If T’Cori’s ceremony did not succeed, what would become of them?

  Before his mind could travel further along that path, Sky Woman appeared.

  Only six dream dancers had accompanied Frog and T’Cori on their travel north. All but Blossom, T’Cori and Sing Sun had turned back. Now only T’Cori and Sing Sun remained. But in the moons since their departure, Stillshadow and her apprentice had been sharing the secrets with a few of the women who had dared the walk north.

  This is a great medicine journey, Stillshadow had once said. And those who dare all, win all. The woman who follows me, follows Sky Woman, has a dancer’s heart.

  And Frog thought that might have been the truth. The six women swayed toward the hunters balancing ostrich-egg water bowls in their palms, singing as they stepped. Their faces and shoulders were painted to resemble blue and yellow flowers, their hair twisted up with mud and bits of shell and bone, lips painted bright red.

  Their songs were not in human tongue. They babbled bits of animal talk, their mouths formed wind and rain sounds, shifting and changing from step to step so that thought fled Frog’s mind. Fled from words and toward pictures, memories, away from reason and toward sensation.

  “Come, men of the Ibandi,” T’Cori called, beckoning them.

  The two tens of hunters knelt or sat cross-legged, forming three rows. They stared at the dream dancers, too entranced even to blink. If before, the women had seemed little more than dusty traveling companions, now they seemed to have regained a precious fragment of their former glory.

  Leopard Paw’s lover, Sing Sun, dipped her finger in cool water and drew a symbol on Frog’s forehead. “Blessings unto you, hunter,” she whispered, her mouth close, her breath warm, sweet and moist. “You are our life. It is your strength, your courage, that keep us alive. You fill our bellies, feed our children. You are the muscle, the sinew, the brain. We are your heart.”

  She brushed her lips against his ear, depositing upon his nervous flesh a single, precious kiss. A promise? A taste of the world unseen?

  There was no other world. No gods. No jowk. Frog felt as if she had peeled away his skull and licked his brain.

  Fire.

  Flames raced through his bones, consuming his marrow as she moved on to the next hunter in line.

  From the corner of his eye he saw that a different symbol had been painted on each hunter’s forehead, although he could not see what the symbols had been.

  “Close your eyes,” T’Cori said to them. The last thing he glimpsed before he obeyed was Stillshadow, sitting behind her on a rounded, brown-speckled stone, whispering to herself, seemingly watchful despite her blindness. She nodded approval as the women passed from man to man, drawing fingers over their faces, shutting the hunters’ eyes.

  Finally T’Cori herself approached Frog. Her cool soft fingers against his cheek soothed him. In the last instant before darkness stole his sight, her face, wreathed in ceremonial shells and paint, was barely recognizable as the woman he cherished. He realized that the truth was as she had said: Sky Woman was not his. She belonged to the tribe, and, as painful as it might be to admit that, it behooved him to remember, lest she be forced to remind him herself.

  He closed his eyes.

  One of the women—he didn’t know which one—pressed against his chest, reclined him until the sand pressed against his back. Strong, small hands uncrossed his legs and stretched them out straight.

  “I need you to hear me,” she said. He knew the voice: Sing Sun. “You, the men of the tribe, the hunters, must listen to a weak woman. But the hunt chiefs, who once did such things, are with Father Mountain now and cannot help us. You must listen to me, because there is no one else to hear.”

  Sing Sun chanted her words, and slowly they were echoed by other voices. Who was there? Judging by the footsteps tapping lightly around him, it was possible that half the tribe had gathered around.

  “Your face-eyes are closed,” she said, “but I want you to open your hand-and foot-eyes. They will guide the bow, the spear. They will follow the meat trail, you must find and ask your prey the great question.

  “And that question is: Will you die for us? Are you willing to feed our women and children? Will you yield in blood, knowing that in time all things return to Father Mountain, that all souls are equal in His mighty eyes? Knowing that in the beginning, all things came from Great Mother and that they are all Her children?

  “Because understand: all existence is num, but all life is jowk. Num makes jowk. Jowk has num. All jowk is num, but not all num is jowk. All life is only jowk, wearing uncountable skins. As water can be poured into skins and eggshells and cupped palms, jowk is found in many shapes. But do not mistake the skin for the jowk. You and your prey are the same jowk, wearing different skins.

  “It is the nature of life to rise and fall. We ask that if this is your time, you fall for us and not for the jackal who waits in the shadows. Submit to the strength and courage of our hunters, and we will sing your praises, where the jackal only laughs as his jaws crack your bones.

  “Breathe for me,” she said. “Push the air out. Then relax, trust Great Mother to give you air. Just exhale and relax. Again and again.

  “When you call your woman to you, do you not feel your seventh eye yearning? And when you call the antelope, is it not the same fleshly hunger?”

  “See them,” T’Cori said, taking Sing Sun’s place. “See them. See your women in your minds. Feel their soft skin against yours. Feel your heat rise.”

  Nervously at first, the men grasped their roots.

  “No!” T’Cori’s voice rose sharply. “Do not touch yourself. See the touching, but do not touch.”

  Confused, Leopard called out, “What do you ask of us?”

  “See it in your mind! As if you were dreaming. Before you fall asleep or just after you awaken, there is a moment when the worlds of man and dream are very close. There, I know, you have thought of hunting and sexing and other things. Use that same dream mind. See yourself. Touch yourself… but only with your mind.”

  Finally grasping her meaning, the men spread their arms and gripped at the ground with their fingertips, eyes tightly closed.

  Slowly at first, then with greater and greater fervor, their hips gyrated. They bucked and arched, barked and howled as if trying to mate with the clouds above them.

  “Now,” T’Cori said, “that same yearning, that same connection … extend your soul vine to the prey In your mind, see the animal you wish to hunt, as if imagining your lover.”

  “Yes!” one hunter screamed. “By Father Mountain!”

  They were shouting and writhing and coming now. In all his life, Frog had never heard such a thing. Had anyone?

  His breath sang in his throat. As the pace quickened, his body hummed on and on with unrelieved tension. The women’s clapping grew louder. They hummed and sang along with his breathing.

  T’Cori’s bright, quick voice winged above the others’. His mind-eye saw her clapping her hands and stamping her feet, driving them on with her num.

  Frog’s own breath somehow turned inward, so that he was riding a river that blazed through the darkness behind his eyes, taking him away and down and away.

  Once again, Frog Hopping stood upon Great Sky, gazing down at the plain. Upon it grazed uncounted hands of impala and giraffe. He had but to climb down and claim them. A hand at his shoulder seared his skin. He turned around to see his beloved brother Fire Ant’s skeletal fingers clawing at him. Ant’s eyes and cheeks were hollow. At Frog’s left shoulder
stood Hawk Shadow, his eldest brother. Both Hawk and Ant were dead men, all maggot and shriveled flesh.

  “Brother,” they spoke as one, “mourn not for us. All two-legged die. And so must the four-legged. If they do not perish upon your spear, it is not because they were so swift or clever. It is because you have given your flesh, but not your bones, to the hunt. Give yourself. Give …”

  Their bodies unraveling, they disappeared.

  There were no bones beneath their flesh.

  Frog saw many things then: earth and fire and water. He watched clouds melt and re-form into the faces of men and women. From their cloud sitting stones they mocked the petty affairs of men. Around him the breathing dwindled to lustful calls and groans. Sparks drifted in the wind like fireflies. Flames seared the darkness behind his closed eyes. They were like falling stars, only these flew upward from his groin, as if he was self-pleasuring. His root grew firm. With every breath those sparks grew fatter. He was no longer trying to direct his breath. The strange thing happening in his body was no longer under his control. It was like running down a hill that gradually grew steeper and steeper. At first, you control your feet. Then, the earth itself pulls you, and you can do nothing save run or tumble.

  He was tumbling.

  The light seared his eyes. In the midst of it stood a great antlered deer, a buck who had climbed atop a doe. He humped his hips, thrust as if burning with seed. The buck’s vast dark eyes met his own.

  “Mate, my brother,” Frog whispered. “Make your children. And then … die for me.”

  The buck’s eyes clouded, and he nodded his crowned head. Then the fire within Frog erupted, and his body was rocked with num enough to char his hair.

  • • •

  Frog’s eyes fluttered open. All about him, the ground was littered with the hunters’ curled bodies. Each had experienced his own powerful changing. Frog’s hand brushed his root. His fingers came away dry: there had been fire but no spend.

  Truly, this was a miracle.

  Chapter Thirteen

  As dust devils danced amid the thornbushes and scrub, seven hunters prowled in search of prey.

  “I am strong. I am fast and brave. I hunt for my people.” Uncle Snake’s good right eye narrowed fiercely.

  “We will kill many!” Leopard Paw said.

  “Quiet,” Frog said. “The prey approaches.”

  “Truly,” Leopard Paw said, “Sky Woman is a mighty dancer.”

  The brush on the far side of the clearing rustled, and a hog’s bristly head poked through. They froze: the pig was still beyond spear or arrow range. It sniffed the air. Would the breeze betray them? Curse it, they were upwind and had not masked their scent.

  “You are thirsty, so thirsty,” Frog coaxed. “The water is cool. Come to the water …”

  Instead, perhaps sensing danger, the hog backed away.

  The shadows lengthened and then shrank once again. Although they waited with both patience and skill, they gained nothing.

  “Let’s go back,” Frog said. “Perhaps some of the others were more fortunate.”

  “If not,” Leopard Paw said, “I will be eating fill grass tonight.”

  “If only we could find fill grass,” Frog said.

  “If not,” Leopard Paw grunted, and spit toward the south, “then plain grass will have to do.”

  • • •

  The hunters straggled in quietly that night. The most successful of them had been Leopard Paw: three hares swung limply from his belt.

  Gazelle Tears took the fattest and hefted it by the ears, clucking with disapproval. “This won’t feed many,” the old woman said. “I thought you were a great hunter.”

  She laughed, and the old toothless ones chuckled along with her.

  “A few hares change nothing. This is worse than it was before,” Uncle Snake said. “We cannot live like this.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The afternoon sunlight glinted from the thin, oily stream running a spear’s throw from their camp. Wispy black monkey thorn trees and a single stunted baobab shadowed the water, vied with the thin grass for its moisture. A few hands of Ibandi children romped in the shallows, splashing and rolling and pushing each other as their mothers filled gourds and skins.

  Frog and T’Cori sat between the twin fires, watching the play with a shared wistfulness. Not so long ago, they were still children, surrounded by a world that could be brightened by a few moment’s play

  Now, they knew that tomorrow would come and might not bring happiness with it.

  T’Cori’s face was long. “I fear it did not work the way it should have. My magic was not strong enough.”

  “We will hunt,” Frog said. “It is not for you to say if you are strong enough. That is for Great Mother. For Father Mountain.”

  “I must raise my num” she insisted. “Weave it into a soul vine. Still-shadow was our strength, but now she is blind. There are so many things that we relied on her to do in the dream world.”

  “What things?” Frog asked in a quiet voice. She rarely revealed dream dancer mysteries, and he never pressed her.

  “She walked the second path,” T’Cori said. “She awakened within the dream. To awaken within the dream gives one the ability to awaken in this world as well.”

  “We are not awake …?”

  Her eyes went very wide. “I should not have said that. It is a great secret.”

  Frog’s teeth toyed with his upper lip. “What manner of worlds do you see? I see this one, and it is all I know.”

  “As you have told me, many times.”

  “What is it that Stillshadow once did that she can no longer do?” he asked.

  “She knows every berry, lizard or fruit. Knows every four-, six-or eight-legged.” T’Cori’s head swam with the memories. She remembered her first climb up the slopes of Great Earth, picking the delicate purple, black-edged morning glories. Only Stillshadow knew where the first would open, its nectar a rare medicine. Stillshadow knew the very day the green berries would turn red. She knew by touch and sight and smell when a blister or boil was ready for cutting.

  “All of them have uses,” she said. “Many times we would be walking, and she would suddenly find a new plant with a purple berry to our right. And then a quarter later, a dung beetle rolled away buffalo scat to our left. She knew how to mix berry and crushed beetle to heal fever.”

  That comment caught Frog by surprise. “The world is so large … how can you know enough?”

  “Not knowing,” T’Cori said. “Feeling. Her egg and its fibers embraced the num of things, knew how the jowk combined to make things useful to men. The butterfly whispers in her ear—”

  “Butterfly?”

  T’Cori flushed. “Oh! I keep forgetting that you do not know these things.” She looked swiftly to either side, to see if they were being overheard. No one near the trees, no one near the tumbled tan rocks. Then she whispered, “Great Mother was a butterfly.”

  Frog sighed. “And Father Mountain is … what? An elephant shrew?”

  “A spider.” She poked him with her elbow. “The father of all spiders. Do not jest.”

  “I try,” he said. “You do not make it easy.”

  She glared at him. “The butterfly teaches her to do these things. She does not speak to me as often or as clearly.”

  A pause, and then she added, “And when they do speak to me, they don’t tell me things I want to hear.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Thank you. I have been alone all my life, except Stillshadow. And now … she abandons me.”

  “I will not leave,” he said. “T’Cori … forgive yourself. We cannot make the rain fall or the wind blow. Be happy with what we can do.” He brightened. “See? I begin to sound like you. Does that mean that if we are together long enough, you will begin to sound like me?”

  “As long as I do not look like you, pig face—” she rubbed her nose against his “—or think like you! Look!” She tucked her hands into her armpits, flapped her elbows and cawe
d like a crow, pointing at the sky “I see cloud people!”

  “Where?” Frog said, squinting up into the afternoon sky.

  “There! Hawk and Scorpion are wrestling.”

  His expression flattened. “You laugh at me.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “laughter is all that stops the tears.”

  She pressed against him, tangling their arms and legs together. “You do not see what I see,” T’Cori said. “The world is not rock and wood.”

  “What is it, then?”

  She sighed. “Wind and fire and sensation. We leave scat, Frog. All men leave sign, wherever we go. All the world’s creatures do this. We are netted in all our yesterdays.”

  “There is always tomorrow,” Frog said. “Perhaps you and I will not be there, but the new sun is always born.”

  A pause. Over a whistling wind, a hyena’s distant cough. Then: “Will I be ready?”

  “Yes,” Frog said.

  “You are wise. It must be true.”

  “If Stillshadow dies?” Frog asked.

  “Then I become chief dancer. It will be my place to go into the cold spaces, to speak to the jowk.”

  “It seems … so dangerous.” He turned his head away. “You may die.”

  “And you will not?”

  It felt good to laugh at the old, familiar joke. In times like this they were more than a man and woman bonded by family. More than the leaders of a people. They were friends, something unutterably precious. He had family, but aside from T’Cori, no friends at all. “There have not been many smiles of late.” He paused. “I must speak my heart. I do not want my woman to risk herself.”

  “Of course not. And that is probably why dream dancers do not marry.”

  “Women are to be protected,” Frog insisted. Why did women, the beneficiaries of this principle, so often misunderstand it?

  She made a clicking sound at him. “Hunters risk their lives to bring us fresh meat. Is it so strange that your women risk theirs?”