“I say they are human,” Rock Climber agreed. Ant thought Climber would be a good fighter if he allowed the jowk to flow through him, as it ran through his own new bones. “Human. And men want revenge. We must never forget that. The days to come hold nothing but terror and blood. Blood. We slaughter them, they slaughter us. Where is the end?”
“You speak like an old woman. We sweep the earth of them. Kill them. Kill their pups. Kill their women. Then they know us. Then they know what it means to challenge Father Mountain’s children.”
“How can you say such things?” Rock Climber asked.
Fire Ant leaned close to him, gazing into the firelight reflected in Climber’s eyes. “I speak as one already dead. You speak as one soon to be.”
Rock Climber lowered his head. “I meant no offense.”
“Then listen more than you speak.”
Without taking his eyes from the ground, the man backed away, humbled and frightened.
Fire Ant threw his shoulders back. “Will you follow me, or do I fight the Mk*tk alone?”
One at a time, two hands of hunters stood.
As anyone could see, Great Earth was smaller than Great Sky. But the dancers believed that, beneath the ground, Great Mother’s home was actually the larger.
Fire Ant and his ten hunters climbed trails until they found the terraced cluster of huts and sacred fire circles that were home to the dream dancers. Although six had originally traveled north with Stillshadow and Sky Woman, all but two, Sing Sun and Wind Willow, had returned to Great Earth.
“Tell me everything you know,” he said to Wind Willow, the eldest of the remaining dancers. She was tall and thin. Ant thought she had the saddest eyes he had ever seen.
“After Frog Hopping rescued Sky Woman from the Mk*tk,” Wind Willow said, “she told us all she could remember about her journey. She made this.”
She led him to Stillshadow’s sitting stone. It was as high as a man’s shoulders, but smaller stones to the right made a ladder so that the old woman could climb without assistance. Its base was scrawled with drawings of sun and sky and men and beasts. And on one side, etched into the stone itself, was a map.
Ant traced his fingers across the drawings, feeling their power. Yes. These women were holy. Whoever had made such unspeakably beautiful drawings had been blessed by the gods. He felt their power, even now. “When my brother Frog returned with the girl, he told you all he knew.”
Wind Willow nodded. “If our stolen sisters have not moved, it might be possible to find them. Sky Woman said that Dove and Sister Quiet Water remained with the monsters. If you could bring either of them home, it would be a miracle.”
“And what if I found both?”
“Both?” Her eyes sparkled with awe. She looked at him in a new way, as if considering for the first time that he might be more than just a man. “If you could bring them home … To do such a thing, you will have to be very lucky and very clever … or beloved of Father Mountain.”
“He wants me to bring your sisters Dove and Quiet Water back to the Circle,” he said. “Now … tell me all you know.”
Fire Ant listened to the dream dancers as they told of Sky Woman’s journey. Everything she had said to them came now to him.
For men running and walking swiftly, the Mk*tk were only three or four days south. When he had learned all he needed, Ant gathered his two hands of men, descended from the mountain and walked south.
Chapter Nineteen
A drifting mountain of gray clouds masked the full moon. Within its pale shadows, the Mk*tk mothers and grandmothers roasted venison and yams for their men and children. Flat-Nose watched the others eat without tasting the flesh himself. He wanted hunger in his gut, gnawing like a rat.
Flat-Nose needed to speak to them, and he liked to do this when they were fed and he was hungry. Hunger was good. Hunger led to anger, which led to the killing fever.
“Your time has come,” Flat-Nose said to the young Mk*tk males clustered at his feet. “God Blood put the strength in your balls. You need but call to him. He calls to you in your enemy’s gut. Free God Blood to run in the earth, and you make the world strong. Make yourself strong. Your blood. Your enemy’s blood and shit on your spear. All are good. Kill to free God Blood.”
A young boy, his hair cropped at the sides so that it stood like a thin ridge of stones, jumped to his feet. “I am Wood Knife! Son of Pierce Bone. You are so strong. I will be strong, too.” The boy seemed ready to piss on himself, so pleased he was just to sit with the men.
Flat-Nose did not let the pleasure he felt touch his face. “You will be strong and brave,” he said. “Your uncles taught me to kill. All were great men, good killers. I promise: you will make God Blood smile.”
He cuffed the boy affectionately. Wood Knife yelped, but his eyes glowed with pride.
• • •
“I am tired,” Flat-Nose said, lying back on his grass mat. The thatch ceiling above him was an irritant. He wanted to be out under the sky, making his kill. But it was better to start off tomorrow, after resting. Flat-Nose hated to admit it, but he was not the spry young buck he had been ten summers past. In those days, it felt as if he could run and hunt and fight and hump from dawn to dusk, one moon to the next.
He flexed his left hand, staring at the stumps of his lost fingers, feeling numbness where once had flowed power. Sometimes, it felt as if the fingers were still there.
Ghost fingers.
He shut those thoughts away: there was still more than enough left of him to give God Blood His greatest feast.
His first wife, Hip Thorn, bowed her head. “Yes, husband. Let me feed you.”
He grunted approval. “I will have food and then sex and then sleep.” He turned to his third wife, short and skinny, kneeling in the shadows. “You will sex me,” he said.
“Yes, husband,” Dove replied, her Ibandi accent scraping at his ears.
For many moons now, Dove had lived with her Mk*tk captors in one of their scattered, extended family groups. Their clusters tended to be raggedly protected by strength of spears rather than the circled thornbushes to which she was accustomed.
As Flat-Nose’s third wife and a prize of war, Dove was a slave of some privilege. Her sister Quiet Water was held by a family a half-day distant, composed of three brothers mated to seven females. While not a wife, Water was used sexually by all three men and beaten by the women for the slightest offense.
This morning seemed no different from the others: awaken before dawn, prepare food and wait until her man had eaten before satisfying her own growling belly. But the endless routine was interrupted when Quiet Water appeared in the boma doorway following two of the hulking brothers who shared her. Come to join Flat-Nose, no doubt.
They had seen each other few times in the last moons. Quiet Water was Dove’s height, but had always had a placid, peaceful nature that reflected her name. Now Quiet seemed no longer a living thing. Her eyes were like cold stones. “Dove,” Quiet Water said, “I have not seen you since Fish moon. I wish I did not see you now. It would be better for you to be dead.”
Dove shook her head, feeling nothing but pity for her sister. “You do not change. If you do not, you will die soon. Remember Fawn Blossom?” she asked. “Can you still see T’Cori’s face? Our sisters could not change.” Fawn Blossom had perished in a crocodile’s jaws. Their nameless sister had killed a Mk*tk hunter and then jumped into the same river, had screamed as she was swept away across the waterfall. What had happened to her? Dove did not know and could not allow herself to ask that question. To such questions, there were no comforting answers.
“What would you have me do?” Quiet Water asked.
“Give in to them,” Dove said. “Since I did, Flat-Nose has not hurt me. I gather, cook, sex and sleep. Life is not bad.”
She gazed out toward the northern horizon. Somewhere lost in the misty distance was Great Earth. In former years, the sight had gladdened her. Now, her heart was a stone.
“How
can you say this?” Quiet Water whispered.
“What else am I to say? Our men did not rescue me. They did not save you. Where are they?” She raised her hands and shrugged. “Where is Father Mountain? I have learned something,” she said, “a great truth. Would you hear it?”
Quiet Water said nothing. Dove leaned close. “God Blood’s hate is stronger than Great Mother’s love.”
If Dove had brandished a knife, Quiet Water could not have retreated more rapidly. “Blasphemy! And a lie. Our men hurt them,” she said. “You saw it. Not all returned, and the ones who did missed fingers and arms and eyes. I could smell it. Our men scared them.”
“That is your own stink you smell. The Ibandi are not ‘my men.’” Dove said. “The Mk*tk fear nothing.”
“What are you saying?”
“That Flat-Nose is my man,” Dove said defiantly. “And he is the strongest man in all the world. He could kill three Ibandi. Four.”
Quiet Water paused, as if listening to the rush of blood in her ears. Then she wrapped her arms around Dove.
After a stiff hesitation, Dove returned the embrace. “I thought you would be angry. Why do you hold me?” Dove asked.
“Because there is a last time for everything,” Water whispered. “Her bones still walk above the ground, but the sister I loved is dead.”
Then, having no other words to speak, Quiet Water turned her back and walked away.
• • •
By the fifth day, Fire Ant had led his two hands of hunters deeply into Mk*tk territory Now, every shadow had teeth. Their courage was dulled, no longer the sharp blade it had been while safe within the Circle. Then, the raid had seemed a splendid adventure. Now, they crept like mice at night and slept during the day. On the eighth night after leaving Great Earth, they spied the campfire of a Mk*tk hunting party and skirted it with great care.
On the ninth day, they edged up a rise and peered down on a cluster of ragged huts around an untidy central fire pit.
They watched as the Mk*tk males cuffed their wives and children affectionately, then marched off single file.
Not a war party, Fire Ant reckoned. They hunt four-legged, not two.
Concealed behind brush and the ridge itself, they scouted and whispered until the day was gone, and their plans were made. “Kill the women and grandfathers!” Fire Ant said. “Kill the children, if they interfere.”
“Children?” Moon Runner asked. His fleshy face, his voice, everything about him seemed repulsed.
Ant hawked and spit in the direction of Great Sky. “Maggots make flies,” he replied.
The first wide-boned Mk*tk woman, caught crawling from her lean-to, barely had time to scream before Fire Ant clubbed her down.
A Mk*tk girl, wearing a thin leather strap to pull back her thorny bush of hair, stood behind a boy with the same flat nose and broad ugly face. The boy ran up to Ant screaming gibberish.
Fire Ant was never quite certain of what happened next.
Did he thrust? Simply raise his spear? Did the boy run onto the fire-hardened tip to suicide, or had Ant meant to slay him?
All he knew for certain was that his arm had moved, the spear was red, and the thick-boned brat lay groaning. His lifeblood streamed out across the earth.
For a moment the sight of the dying boy froze Fire Ant in place. Then he wrenched himself away and joined his men as they ran howling through the camp, their spear tips red.
After the screams of the women and old ones had died to sobs, a hand of hot-eyed Mk*tk children panted, even as they were trapped against a thorn-bush. They hissed and spit at him, betraying not the slightest trace of fear. What spirit! For a brief moment he almost admired them. They were like cornered lion cubs!
“Where are our women!” Ant called out.
Young Sparrow Flies howled in triumph. “We have found Sister Quiet Water!”
When she was brought before Ant, the dream dancer fell to her knees, clutching her savior’s thigh.
He rubbed her hair affectionately. She was an Ibandi holy woman, and he, Fire Ant, had saved her. A rush of blood in his ears and chest told him that Father Mountain was well pleased with His son. “Where is Dove?” he asked.
“She is dead,” Quiet Water said, all flesh stripped from her voice. “My sister is dead.”
“What of the children?” Moon Runner asked, panting.
Ant’s hand tensed on his spear. Why not …? a voice whispered. They stared back at him. One of them sniffled, eyes red, but they did not beg, or cry. Splendid.
Kill them, a voice in his head whispered. They are beasts.
But another, softer voice said: What beasts have the courage of hunters? They are but children.
For many breaths the two voices warred within him. Then at last he decided. “There has been blood enough,” Ant said. “Tie them. Burn the huts. We go.”
Flat-Nose smelled death before he saw it: the night wind carried the scent of blood for half a day’s walk.
He and his men poked through the ashes of their homes, their faces turned to stone. The boma’s bamboo wall was half burned, the huts smashed, and the bodies of their wives and elders scattered and torn.
He himself freed the children but did not allow his heart to feel joy as they cried and gripped his legs in gratitude. No softness. None.
A search for survivors yielded two females. Sobbing, they claimed that a few more might have escaped into the brush.
After searching the ruins, the hunters sat in a circle, crouching so close that their knees touched, saying nothing until their leader chose to speak. Flat-Nose squatted and then sat, his hands gripping his knees. A dull wind stirred the curls of burnt wood.
Flat-Nose clawed at the dirt slowly, gazing into it as another man might have studied the night sky, seeking answers or counting stars. He gouged out a handful of dirt and let it run slowly between his heavy, scarred fingers. “What do we do? We burn the bodies. Unite the clans. Find the one who killed my brother’s son.” His brother Notch-Ear had been killed by the Ibandi woman who had escaped over the stream. “We burst God Blood’s belly.”
“How?” A young hunter named Stone Hand asked.
Flat-Nose set his knuckles on the ground, grinding them against the pebbles as might a bull gorilla. “I tell you what we do. We sharpen our knives on their bones. We stick our spears up their asses.” His eyes were banked coals. “They die. All of them. None may live. We drink the last drop of their blood. War to the marrow!”
And all the night, he sang his death song, composing new and terrible verses to an already crimson saga.
Chapter Twenty
While it had taken nine days to find the Mk*tk, it took only five days to return to Water boma, where the reception was joyous and the celebration mighty Fire Ant’s ten hunters gyrated around the twin fires, hooting their courage and skill to Father Mountain’s countless eyes, until their legs burned and their sweat dried.
They laughed and boasted, intertwining their arms with those of the young women, pairing off into the tall grass for a hunter’s reward.
Sparrow Flies moved closer to the fire, desperate for its warmth. Waves of cold shivered his arms and legs. “What happens to the num of the ones we killed?” he asked Fire Ant.
“It flows to their god,” Fire Ant said.
Sparrow stared at the red crust on his spear. When he closed his eyes, his lids pulsed. Tonight, when he slept, his dreams would drown in blood. “To the jowk?”
“I do not know things of this kind,” Ant said.
“Is our jowk the same as theirs?”
“They were not Ibandi,” Ant said.
“No. Not Ibandi. But I think that they were men.”
Fire Ant shrugged. “They did not treat ours like men.”
“Is that the measure?” Sparrow asked, a frown creasing his narrow face. “Do we now allow others to say what we are?”
Fire Ant stared straight ahead. “I dream of the dead world. I do not see Mk*tk there. They may have num. Perhaps jowk. Bu
t they are not men.”
Sparrow heard something dreadful in the darkness, a wavering blend of hyena and human voices. He gripped his spear more tightly, grinding grit into his palm. “Something moved beyond the firelight.”
Ant stood, forcing calm into his voice. “We are ready.”
Then, as if mocking their courage, an odd sound rose from the darkness beyond the fire: inhuman voices mimicking a human chant. A pause, then … sounds of confusion. Men and women screaming in anguish, followed by a hot, wet silence.
Sparrow moistened his lips, trembling. Something final had happened out in the thorny dark. To the hunters who had gone off with their women. To the women who had rewarded their men.
The chant began once again. Sparrow could not understand a single word. The sound swelled. “What are they? What do they want?”
“They want us,” Old Wise Eagle said. “They know we killed their women.”
“Silence,” Fire Ant demanded.
Sister Quiet Water appeared behind him, her soft small hand against his arm. “They attack from one direction, driving their enemy. They do not surround,” she said.
“So?”
“So let me take the women and children, as many as I can, and escape through the back wall.”
Fire Ant considered, then nodded. “Yes,” he said, “as many as you can.”
“I think we die,” Wise Eagle said as she left them.
“All men die,” Ant said, “but some return.”
They gazed at him, overcome with sudden hope.
“Truth?” Sparrow asked.
Fire Ant seemed to change, grow, his aspect swollen with the weight of his intent. “It is true!” he screamed. “If you fight, if you throw your life onto your enemy’s spears, protect your women and children, Father Mountain will see. And He told me that the hunter who makes Him proud might, if he wishes, return to hold his woman and children once again. To again hunt the zebra and feel the wind on his face.”
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