Frog and the nameless girl and the ash man had stood atop the damaged summit and felt the icy breath of Father Mountain. The nameless one said that Father Mountain demanded their people flee the Mk*tk, find new homes.
He himself had heard nothing.
They descended, exhausted and disoriented, and it came to him that the nameless girl must die. It was the only answer! The witch said that the Ibandi should run rather than fight. His fool of a brother refused to kill her. Fire Ant attempted to slay the witch, knowing that if she died, Frog would fall in line.
Instead of helping, a bewitched Frog smashed a rock into his head. The ash man saw the rock coming, tumbling through the air, swelling as it approached. He could have moved. Should have moved, but could not, somehow entranced by the spin.
Pain. Blackness. The next thing he knew, he was on his knees. At that moment, as if his senses had been heightened by pain, he glimpsed the witch’s fire. It was … beautiful. A bright blue at the edge, a shimmering cloud of creeping flame with fist-sized shadows floating within.
Still, all night he had hunted for the two of them. But before he could lay hands upon the witch he plunged through the ice into a clay tube boiling with steam. He could not see, could not think. Could do nothing but scream.
The pain drove him out of his mind. When he awakened, the steam was gone.
Blistered, groaning, he crawled out.
He remembered little of what next occurred.
For moons he wandered half crazed, eating whatever carrion he could scavenge or half-rotted tubers he could claw from the earth. His blisters finally healed, and he was able to sleep an entire night without waking with his own screams in his ears. He was a wild two-legged living on the mountain, wandering with no thought of returning to the lowlands. Why would the dead return to the land of the living?
For certainly, this was what it was to be dead. Wasn’t it? He was so alone. If all men who died went to Father Mountain, where were they? Where are the others? Why was he so alone?
He remembered finding a stack of rocks, and he knew there was something within it that was important to him. What was it about these rocks? Drawn with charcoal, the symbols for “hawk” and “shadow.” Slowly, the pieces came back to him. The importance was …
Was …
This was not merely a stack of rocks. It was the marker for a grave. But whose grave? And why did he care? In a hell so vast and lonely that one dead man could not find another, of what importance was a single grave?
Hawk Shadow.
That was the name. But what did it mean? What and who was that name?
Brother.
Hawk Shadow was his brother.
He tumbled aside the rocks, finally revealing a torn and worm-eaten corpse.
He took the moldering skull in his hands and pulled. “Live. Up! Join me. Come with me and we will hunt again together.”
The neck loosened in his hand. The stench of rotted flesh filled his nose.
“Run with me, Brother. Wrestle with me …” His voice broke.
The head came fee in his hands. He stared at his brother’s face, then pushed it back into the earth.
Alone in hell, he cried.
Ash man awoke.
Moon Runner crouched beside him. “Were you in the dream world?”
“Yes,” the ash man said. “The dream world. Am I alive?”
“Unless we are also dead,” the hunter said. “Our people will be so happy to see you.”
The ash man was still a bit numb. He curled back up, sucking the knuckles of his right hand.
“Frog,” he whispered.
“You know Frog Hopping?” Moon asked.
“Know him?” the ash man said. “I taught him to walk. Frog is my brother. My name,” he said, “is Fire Ant.”
Chapter Eighteen
The man who had once been Fire Ant was walked a day southeast to Fire boma, where he had spent his youth.
It seemed to him that the wall between the world of men and dreams, even the wall between the living and the dead, had thinned.
It was all strange and a bit dizzying. Wherever he went, children touched him, men and women embraced him. After, they whispered of the wildfire burning in his eye or how his flesh had nearly melted away. But they said these things only to each other, never to him. There was something about Fire Ant, something strange that had happened to him upon the mountain. Something that attracted and repelled his cousins.
His rescuers escorted Ant to the healing hut and set him upon a bed of grass. As the women slathered his flesh in healing herbs, a Fire hunter named Brave Buffalo crawled trembling to his side. “I tell you this, Fire Ant, because you returned from the mountain. Yesterday I saw a terrible thing.”
Fire Ant rolled onto his side. “What?” Brave Buffalo. Did he know this man? All memories from before Fire Ant’s death seemed to dissolve when he tried to fetch them, like clutching water.
“I was traveling in the south and came upon Rock boma. Its walls were burnt and broken. Most were dead. Five squatted in the ashes, drinking their tears.”
“What happened there?” Fire Ant asked.
“I am not sure,” Buffalo said. “But Mk*tk, I think. They attack our bomas. They make our hunters run.”
“What can we do?” Boar Tracks asked. “They are too strong.”
“None are so strong as he who returns from death,” Sun Runner proclaimed. “Bone is stronger than muscle.”
“We are blessed!” Moon Runner crowed. “No one can stand before us! The Mk*tk will tremble, for when they come against us again, we will be led by a man who cannot die.” He dropped his voice to a superstitious whisper. “He is already dead!”
“Perhaps we do not wait,” Fire Ant said.
“What do you mean?” Brave Buffalo asked. “We should run away, like Frog?”
“No!” Ant said fiercely. “I mean that we must make the Mk*tk fear us. We go to them. Kill them in their huts, not crouch and hope they have forgotten us.”
“What are you saying?” Brave Buffalo asked.
“I am saying that the time for cool blood—for running and hiding—is past. I say that I came to you from Father Mountain and that he expects us to fight with courage.”
Swayed by his passion, the others listened. “We must gather the people,” Moon Runner said.
“Soon the people come together,” Fire Ant said. “I will speak with them face to face. And then they will know.”
All day, Far Sigh had walked with her mother and father. They had awakened her before dawn. In all her nine summers, she had never seen them so excited. Mama and Papa lived in a boma east of Wind, and the first runners had reached them just after midnight.
Not even waiting for breakfast, they walked.
Far Sigh was excited, too. They had told of a man come back from the dead, returned from heaven. All year, she had barely seen a smile on her father’s face. Papa’s brother had died fighting the Mk*tk. Papa sometimes awakened screaming in the night, so that Mother was forced to stroke his forehead and sing him to sleep.
At times, Far Sigh sang to him as well, her young voice blending with her mother’s, trying to take Papa up into sleep.
By the next afternoon the first folk from Earth, Wind, and Water bomas gathered in the shade of the sacred Life Tree, the giant baobab that had shaded the Ibandi since Great Mother sang the first sun to life.
They had brought children with them, too. She didn’t often see boys from other bomas and relished the opportunity. One day one of them would be her husband. She wondered who it might be. Mama had said that the first day she met Papa he had won a match in the wrestling circle. She gave him a handful of berries. Even as he ate them gratefully, she knew he was hers.
And Mama had been no older than Far Sigh!
The Life Tree shaded first two, then ten, then hands of tens of Ibandi. From around the Circle they had come, bringing all their precious hopes. Papa said that Fire Ant had new bones and could carry all their hopes upon them.
Far Sigh thought this to be a very wonderful thing.
“Can it be true?” a big-nosed Wind tribesman asked.
“We have all heard the stories,” answered a woman holding a baby in each arm.
The Earth clansman who spoke next had narrow, nervous eyes. “What if the Mk*tk attack?”
“Since Great Mother first birthed the world,” said a Wind woman with bone-pierced ears, “we have all come here every spring. We have danced in the Life Tree’s shadow. We have never been attacked. No one would dare.” Despite her words, she seemed to Far Sigh as nervous as any of the others.
“Wait!” the narrow-eyed man said, arm outstretched. “He comes!”
Far Sigh turned to follow his pointing finger.
Three men were walking from the direction of Great Sky, the man in the middle trudging as if he were half asleep. His hair was dusted white and so were the edges of his face.
Most of the adults around Far Sigh turned their heads away, as if afraid to meet his eyes. Their voices fell silent.
When Fire Ant had walked on ahead of them, the Earth tribesman whispered to the Wind woman: “His leg … he does not limp. I thought he had been injured.”
She replied with a true believer’s fervor, “New bones.”
Fire Ant took his place beneath Life Tree’s jagged canopy. He paused, waiting until their whispers stopped, then raised his arms. “I climbed the mountain! Not you … or you … or any of you did this thing. You remember what Frog Hopping said to you. I climbed. I died, and lived with the jowk and the hunt chiefs.” He inhaled deeply, as if intoxicated by the air itself. “My brother returned to you, but I remained with Father Mountain, where I saw things no man may speak of.”
The people whispered and stirred. “You seem a man …” a woman said.
Fire Ant turned his gaze upon her, and she backed away without another word.
“When I close my eyes I see the burning lake,” he said, his voice a dreamy slur. “If you doubt, come with me. We will climb Great Sky together. Then, if you survive the wolves and demons and the freezing fire, you may ask the dead if I speak truth.”
No one said a word. His voice sent chills from Far Sigh’s toes to her fingers. Her little heart beat so quickly she thought she might die. This was the most wonderful thing she had ever seen. A man returned from the dead!
What had he seen? Had he spoken to Father Mountain? Would he kiss her head?
Around her, no one spoke. Their eyes were like Papa’s when he sat up screaming in the night. Far Sigh knew they were afraid, but what was there to fear? This was a spirit come to guide them.
And so Far Sigh was the first to speak. “I will follow you!” she called. The adults around her shook themselves, as if she had stirred them from slumber. Then they laughed and cheered.
Little Far Sigh jumped up and down with joy. To see such a thing! And to be the first to speak! It was almost more wonderful than her small soaring heart could bear.
“I will follow him!” Moon Runner said.
“He has my spear!” his father, Sun Runner, said.
One at a time, at first a few and then by hands, they stood and cheered until the mountains rang with their call.
Some of the dream dancers had left with Stillshadow, but most had either remained or returned over the last moons. Five of the young dream dancers approached with caution and reverence. Slender deerskin flaps covered their breasts and genitals; their hair woven into tight curls, fixed with mud and bone splinters into glyphs representing their names and totems.
“We have awaited a sign.” Water Song, the youngest of them said, then knelt before Fire Ant.
Boar Tracks had watched the fuss over Fire Ant for days, had held his tongue, but anger and resentment had swelled until he could no longer contain himself. “I have watched you eat and sleep and shit,” Boar Tracks said. “I say you are a man.”
“A man?” Fire Ant said. His nostrils widened and his eyes narrowed “A man may be beaten. A man may be killed.” Fire Ant leaned close. Smelled him. “You are Boar Tracks, the last of your kind, the last hunt chief walking this world. I spoke to your brothers while I was with Father Mountain. Do you know what they said?”
Boar Tracks’s mouth opened and closed without producing sound. His sense of shame warred with his anger.
“They told me there is a reason you are the last. They say that you ran” Fire Ant said, “that you ran from the Mk*tk like a little girl, piss dribbling down your legs as you fled. While the rest of us fought and bled for the Circle, you shook your ass at them and ran. They said you were not with them on the mountain when the terrible thing happened, because Father Mountain does not want cowards in heaven.”
Boar Tracks growled and narrowed his eyes. Fear and anger wrestled. Anger won. “No man speaks to me so.”
“I speak as I please, but I am no man,” Fire Ant said. “You can spill the blood of a man or stop his breath. Come to me. Test my spear.”
Boar Tracks had the strange and unsettling sense that he had danced too close to a consuming fire. “Spear? N-no,” he stammered, tongue suddenly thick in his mouth. “If you wish to wrestle in the circle …”
“No!” Fire Ant screamed. “That was for another time. This is a time for Ibandi to be more than hunters! You doubt Father Mountain? And you doubt my dream—that our people can be more than great? We can be more than men have ever dared. But first, weaklings like you must bleed. Hear me. I have already died. Today, you go where I have already been.”
Boar Tracks flinched, as if something sharp had nicked his gut. “No …”
Fire Ant was all bones. Boar Tracks knew himself to be strong and fast, a fine young hunt chief in his prime. But there was something, perhaps in Ant’s num-field, that scratched at his nerves.
“Come,” Ant taunted. “Taste my spear.”
The world seemed to hold its breath as three men soberly paced off a wrestling circle and marked the perimeter with eight stones.
Fire Ant and Boar Tracks stepped in, each holding his spear tightly. As if preparing to face a charging buffalo, they lowered the fire-hardened tips. For several breaths neither of them moved, then Boar Tracks slid to the side and began to circle Fire Ant, who matched him step for step. Unnerved he may have been, but Boar found a rhythm that calmed his breathing, and he began to relax.
He stabbed.
Fire Ant leaned to the side and slashed within a hair of Boar’s ribs. Boar felt as if he were a crane fighting a snake. His opponent had become a creature of pure motion, a wall of flickering spear. There was no opening. There was no hesitation. When Boar Tracks paused for a single instant, instead of retreating Ant lunged.
Sudden, blinding pain stole sight and thought and the very world itself as Ant twisted to one side and thrust the point of his spear into Boar’s mouth and through the back of his head.
His teeth snapped down on the shaft in helpless reflex. He crumbled to the ground, all num fled.
• • •
Far Sigh could not blink or speak or even move. She knew that her father did not want her to see what she had just seen, but no one had shielded her eyes. All were fixed on the spirit man who had just done a great and terrible thing. Blood splashed everywhere, as if the great Boar Tracks was but a slain zebra.
Her mind spun. She wanted to scream, to hide, felt an awful urge to pee, but she could not look away. Father Mountain had filled the sky with black blood. And now, this man …
She pulled at her mother’s hand. “Is he a god, Mama?”
Far Sigh’s mother’s eyes were as big as wattle nuts. “Ibandi do not kill Ibandi.”
Fire Ant wrenched the spear free and spread his arms wide, crossed his fists and thumped them against his chest. Blood drops flew from the crimsoned shaft.
“Fire Ant is no ordinary man! He will not fail you.”
“What of Stillshadow?” Papa asked. “What of Sky Woman?”
Far Sigh was still frozen in place, watching Boar Tracks’s hands twitch
, as if she were mired in a dream. No one moved toward him as the ground beneath his broken mouth slurred into red mud.
“Sky Woman?” Fire Ant asked. “Who is this Sky Woman?”
“What Stillshadow called the nameless one.”
The man-god blinked like a chameleon squatting on a flat rock. “What Father Mountain tells a woman, Fire Ant cannot say. He told Fire Ant to fight!
“Come with me. You have hunted zebra and antelope and pig. There is more. I will teach you to be hunters of men.”
Far Sigh jumped into the air, screaming and lifted on the screams of her people. And around her, Mama and Papa and all the others jumped and yelled and cried.
They had lost a hunt chief. The very last hunt chief. But in Boar Tracks’s place was something even more precious: a messenger from their god Himself.
Twin fires cast their living light upon the bloodied wrestling circle. Fire Ant watched the flames carefully. His brother Frog had spoken of seeing faces in the fire. Could he, now that he was reborn?
Nothing.
In his childhood, Fire Ant had almost been burned alive of fever. What he now felt reminded him of that sensation: swollen, weightless, the world as glimpsed through a dust storm. Only instead of weakness, he felt stronger than he ever had. The jowk flowed within him. His num was more powerful than any man’s or Mk*tk’s.
Perhaps his traitor brother saw faces, but Ant saw truth. And the men who now swore to follow him saw the same truth: they must fight for their homes.
Blood boiling with excitement, Fire Ant realized he knew the way to do it.
“I know,” he said later that night, “how to put the fear into them.”
“How?” Moon Runner asked. “The Mk*tk know no fear or love, no mercy. They are not human!”
Fire Ant slammed his bloody spear on the ground. Although Boar’s corpse had been dragged away, the others could not take their eyes from the gore-smeared wrestling circle. “No! They are very human. When we outnumbered them, we slew them as readily as they killed us. I will show you. We must not merely defend our home from their attack. We must go to them, to their land, and strike at them.”
Shadow Valley Page 10
