Shadow Valley

by Steven Barnes

  That last dying sunlight shone down upon a darkened valley. The ridge of mountains on the other side was, what? Half a day distant?

  Within that shadowed half-day’s circle moved clumps of greater darkness. To eyes rapidly adjusting to the night, those clumps separated like a dark fluid running down over a rock, revealing themselves to be … living things. Herds. Was he dreaming?

  “Where are we?” Stillshadow mumbled thickly, stirring from her trance.

  “I don’t know, Old Mother,” T’Cori said, “but I have never seen a place like this.”

  “I think …” Snake said, “I think I have heard of this place. We are only five days from Great Sky, but our hunters never come here.”

  “Shadow Valley,” Stillshadow whispered. Frog’s heart jumped. “Be very careful. It is said that jowk walk here. The legend is of wolves who walk like men.” It was more words than the old woman had strung together in many days.

  As they descended the northern wall, the dying sun set fire to a lake in the valley’s southwest quadrant. Water aplenty! Wobble legged with awe, they picked their way down the slope. At first Frog thought his eyes had deceived him.

  Tens of tens of tens of four-legged. Striped zebra eating side by side with wildebeest. Buffalo? Yes, a spear’s throw from the zebra, a wide-horned black buffalo grazed, gazing almost directly at him.

  “My belly thought never to see such herds again,” Frog whispered.

  “Has any man counted so high?” Bat Wing asked.

  There was a strangeness here. The hills that had grown to block the horizon from east to west ringed this entire valley, a rise of steep mud-colored swellings dotted with small flat-topped trees and grasses so green Frog wondered if this place had its own clouds and rain, different from that on the outside.

  “Look at the mountains. They are a great circle,” Snake said, voice soft with wonder.

  “We rest. Our people are exhausted. Serve the last of the meat,” Frog said, feeling new num flowing up his spine. His fingers tingled. “And then …”

  “Then what?” Excitement boiled Bat Wing’s voice.

  “Tomorrow we hunt!”

  The children had journeyed far, but despite their fatigue, they were eager and excited to explore the valley’s sloping wall. They could not sleep, and their twittering noise kept the hunters awake. “Dance them a story,” Stillshadow commanded of T’Cori, and she thought awhile.

  At first she thought to protest: she felt too tired to do anything but sleep.

  But she was happy that Stillshadow was still rooted in this world enough to care. Her mentor was probably correct: a well-told tale would calm them.

  T’Cori began to sway, and the people put down their burdens and came to watch as her voice and body wove scene and story together into a waking dream.

  “A long time ago,” she said, “there was another hill, and another hard climb …”

  A young hunter had been climbing all day, and at last became tired and sleepy. He thought he would lie down for a while, having drained himself searching for game.

  While he slept, a lion came seeking water in the midday heat. It saw the young man and thought to drag this nice piece of meat to the shade for a leisurely meal.

  It grabbed the hunter’s leg, and the pain awakened him. The hunter was very frightened! He knew that if he made a sound the lion would know he lived and would kill him at once.

  The lion dragged the man over to a tree and thought to have a nice drink of water before its meal. It jammed the hunter’s head between two roots and turned to go down to the lake.

  At first the man tried to struggle, then went limp as the lion turned around. The lion had seen the movement from the corner of its eye, and suspected that the hunter still lived. It returned before the man could escape. It sniffed and growled, but the hunter didn’t move. The lion licked the tears running down the man’s cheeks, enjoying the salt.

  A stick pricked the man’s back, but he couldn’t move.

  Convinced that the man was dead, the lion went down to the lake. When it did, the man sprang up and made his escape, twisting this way and that to confuse the trail.

  When he returned to his village he told them that he had been almost killed and that they must wrap him in hartebeest skins so that when the lion came to seek him, he would not be found.

  Because they loved him, they did this thing for him, wrapping him in hartebeest skins so that the lion would not find him.

  Then the people went about their tasks, as if nothing had happened. The lion came and demanded that they give him the hunter. They refused, and it bit the throat of the closest hunter. They shot it with poisoned arrows, but although it screamed with pain, it would not die.

  The village elders cried out that they must give the lion the young hunter that if they did this it would leave them alone. The people would not do this, for they loved the hunter, who was their son. Many died as the lion raged among them, seeking the hunter. They shot it with arrows and stabbed it, and still it lived. It broke the huts to pieces, and they knew that it was no ordinary lion. It was a jowk wearing a lion’s skin.

  And the young man knew that he could not let this thing happen any more. He came out from under the hartebeest skin and went to the lion. The lion bit the young man to death, even while the villagers were stabbing and shooting it.

  And only then did the lion die.

  Frog did not watch the story: he had seen it hands of times before. Leopard Eye was entranced, but Frog was watching the shadows.

  For all his days, fire had fascinated Frog, and that interest had not decreased with time. After the others had wandered off to their sleeping places, he placed more wood on the fire, and as it roared he took his spear and fought the shadows. When they moved, he moved, thrusting and parrying until he lost the sense of being a two-legged, until his human mind peeled away to reveal a beast of reflex and instinct.

  Then, inspired, he pulled a piece of soft chalk from his pouch and drew a Mk*tk outline on a slab of rock. He attacked the outline, watching the shadow-play as he did. Again and again, tens of tens of strikes, each faster than the one before.

  Is this what the hunt chiefs had done? Was this how they had become great? Was there any chance at all that if he wore his flesh to the bone, he might discover some tiny fragment of their wisdom?

  His fear mocked him. It is not enough. You are not enough.

  But it would have to be enough. Stillshadow had called this placid valley a place of jowk. By this she meant spirits who walked the earth. He did not believe in spirits.

  But monsters lived. There were monsters behind them. Monsters before them. What choice to make? There was food here and water. Eventually, hunters could not merely hunt. Certainly, the great hunt chiefs had understood this. The last year had taught Frog a frightful lesson: Eventually, hunters had to fight.

  He did not believe in spirits, but fire seemed to him a living thing. The fire folk ate, they slept, they lived and died. Their sparks flew up to the clouds. If there was magic in the world, it would be found in fire.

  He fed the fire until it leapt up to lick at him. “Help me,” he asked the fire. “I want what you want: food and shelter and family. Help me.”

  The fire folk answered him with their dancing. Their shadows birthed enemies to pit against his speed and skill. And until his strong young body was slack with fatigue, he killed them again and again.

  Frog awakened to see T’Cori sitting at the edge of their skins, gazing out across the valley.

  “What is it, my love?”

  “I was in the dream world,” she said.

  “What dream?”

  “That I was you. And that I dreamed.”

  “You dreamed you were dreaming?” He scratched his head. “That is a strangeness.”

  “So many odd things,” she said and nuzzled against him. They passed the night holding each other. Her scent was more dizzying than the magic water had been, and the living warmth of her belly pillowed his weary hea
d.

  Despite their lack of sleep, when the sun was finally born along the eastern mountains, neither was tired at all.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Good hunting depended upon fortune, upon the elements of wind and fire serving them. For this, Frog trusted in luck. The others trusted in Great Sky’s goodwill, in the songs and dances of the holy dreamers.

  In the day’s new light, it was easier to make a complete picture of their surroundings. The ridge of hills stretched off into the distance, arching around to make a bowl. The walls were rock tumbled but crowded with trees, more than they would have dreamed from the growth upon the outer wall.

  The Ibandi had camped on a shelf of rock less than a quarter-way down the ridgetop. There, the families were crowded but not cramped.

  As they ate their morning mush balls and jerky, the people gathered at the edge of the shelf and gazed down into the valley. Their stomachs rumbled and their mouths watered. Could anyone predict how long this bounty would last? Although the game below them seemed without end, this entire place was a miracle such as only existed in dreams. Mightn’t the animals simply melt into the grass at any moment?

  Mightn’t Father Mountain be preparing the cruelest joke of all?

  When Frog retreated from his thoughts, Snake was standing at the edge of the shelf, arms raised. When he saw Frog, Snake spoke with the strongest voice Frog had heard his uncle use for moons.

  “When we hunt,” Snake said, “we hunt as of old. We kill enough for all our people. Enough to dry the meat for hard times. Only then can we believe that what is here will last.” Despite his words, the dead skin on the left side of his face crinkled as he smiled.

  So they went down from the ridge and marched west, marveling at the kudu and fringe-eared oryx and impala. There, hiding just beneath the surface of a water hole, a hippopotamus twitched its ears, then sneezed a flume of water into the air.

  “Could Stillshadow be right?” Frog asked. “Could her blind eyes see more than ours?”

  “Shadow Valley,” Snake said. “My father once told me that monsters dwelled here. Something more than beast-men. He said that my uncles fought great pale things, wolves that walked on two legs. And that we did not need this place: there was hunting elsewhere.”

  “Things have changed,” Frog said. “Now we need it. We both know how stories grow,” he said, and Snake winced. “I see no monsters,” Frog said, “only the fattest, slowest giraffes.”

  “The unseen snake bites the deepest,” Snake muttered.

  And they looked. Monkeys swarmed up the trees, uncounted tens of flamingos stood on single legs, reflecting the newborn sunlight back in shimmering pink waves. The hunt chiefs may have told stories about Shadow Valley, but Snake knew better than most that legends and reality were not always the same.

  They walked the grasslands at the foot of the hills, marveling at the streams and berry bushes and trees whose branches were laden with succulent fruit.

  After a quarter day of walking they reached a cleft ten paces across, deep enough to walk into many tens of paces before narrowing. All agreed that this place would make a splendid trap. The fissure walls extended some hands of men high, but looked accessible from the top.

  “Your eyes are open wide, Frog,” said Uncle Snake, grinning. “Will this place be good?”

  “I think so,” he said. “I call this place Giraffe Kill, for the meat to come.” They backed out of the fissure and looked back across the plain.

  What had made this place? Surely, Father Mountain’s mighty hands and no other’s. It seemed to Frog that the grass was greener, lusher here than in the outer world. The sky above them was brighter, the clouds more crisply edged.

  What was reality and what a dream?

  Frog closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose. The air even smelled better. Greener, crisper, cleaner.

  He opened his eyes again. There, five spear throws distant, as placid as if they had never seen a lion or a man, grazed a hand of spotted long necks.

  “It is too wonderful,” said Leopard Eye. “What if there really are jowk? What if Mk*tk are here?”

  “That is not the legend,” Snake said. “My father said that the creatures were pale as grubs. The Mk*tk are as dark as we.”

  Frog’s belly twisted. He had expected this question to arise, another reason he had spent so much time jabbing at shadows with his spear.

  “There is more than enough for all here,” he said. “If there are monsters here, and they try to drive us away, then we will see. There is enough here for many peoples.”

  “What if they are not people at all?”

  “Then we will see.”

  They crept into position, then waited for the wind to shift. As it often did, in the morning hours the wind blew mostly from the north. By the time the sun died on the western horizon, the breeze came mostly from the east.

  The hunters had surrounded a hand of giraffes, old gray furs and young colts. Frog and his people had busied themselves profitably, using bows and coals to create small fires in the dry grass.

  Then, after a screaming, arm-waving signal from Uncle Snake, they fanned the fires.

  While Bat Wing watched at his side, Frog set his ember to the dry grass. He blew and fanned and bent one stalk to the next. Bat Wing unrolled the zebra skin, and Frog shook it, making wind to drive the flame.

  The fire folk roared to life, mating, bearing young, spreading rapidly.

  By the time the first of the spotted long-necks smelled the smoke, they were half encircled.

  Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, the herd stumbled into a run, fleeing the smoke with their stiff, awkward gait. When they tried to break through the fires, the long-necks found a pair of hunters shouting and waving spears, driving them in the opposite direction.

  Do not surround them. Always give the prey a path to escape….

  It was another thing he had learned from Uncle Snake. The panicky beasts galloped toward the little canyon. There they would be trapped, and the hunters, in pursuit, could pierce them with spears and arrows and rain rocks upon their heads from above. It was all to the good.

  “Uncle,” Bat Wing said, voice shot through with nervousness, “the fire is spreading too fast.”

  “Come quick!” Frog grabbed the boy’s wrist and pulled.

  In his excitement, Frog had allowed the flames to encircle them. The smoke wreathed his nostrils and crawled down his throat.

  He wiped his watering eyes and squinted through the smoke. Fire crawled along the grass, chewing at the blades and curling smoke as it spread. The wind shifted and … there!

  Not ten strides distant, a gap opened in the line of fire. Frog seized the boy and ran. Then as if the wind itself was an evil jowk it whipped into a frenzy, and the raging wall thickened. If he tried to leap it, he might stumble and perhaps be singed but survive.

  But Bat Wing would never make it through at all.

  His initial panic gave way, replaced by a cold, heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Heat. Air that seared his lungs and blinded him.

  Death.

  His nose and throat burned as if he had inhaled fire. His heart drummed rabbit rhythm, speeding poison to every finger and toe.

  Smoke, excitement, the clamor of the hunt … separately and together they had blinded him. So eager had he been to trap the giraffes that he had placed himself and the boy in peril.

  So. You think you are smarter than other men? And that men are smarter than beasts?

  Even giraffes know to run from fire, he thought. You fool: this place is haunted after all. And soon another ghost will walk the plain. Would his flesh find its way up Great Sky?

  Up?

  Smoke rises, he thought. Fire climbs up a vine. If he could stay close to the ground, perhaps he could spare them both a roasting.

  Frog knelt and began to dig. “Dig with me!” he called to Bat Wing. The boy knelt, and they scraped with their hands, scrabbling until they’d clawed
a trench in the earth. Frog slid down into it and covered his legs and chest with dirt.

  “Get down!” he yelled to the paralyzed boy. Bat Wing climbed down next to him, and Frog pulled the zebra skin over them both.

  As the fire tightened its grip, his heart thundered loud enough to drown thought. For a moment he dared to hope that it might veer away. Then the wind shifted again, bringing the heat right to them. Raw panic seized thought and worried it like a weasel with a rat. Every bit of him yammered to rise and run, to risk anything to get away. He forced himself to stay down, gasping as the air thinned and his skin scorched.

  “Uncle! Mother!” The boy beside him coughed. “Your son is afraid. Help me!”

  Then the smoke flooded his mind, and thought died.

  By the time he awakened and crawled out from under the blackened zebra skin, the sun had set. Was he dead? No, he was breathing. Even more tellingly, he ached from hair to heel. Frog imagined that whatever death actually was, it was not likely to hurt quite so badly. Frog sat up in a field of blackened grass.

  He smacked his hands together, woozily watching a cloud of ash dust fuzzing the air. His head wasn’t working right. His eyes were blurry. Patches of skin on his face and shoulders and legs were singed, but he seemed as-toundingly undamaged.

  Bat Wing lay limp at his side. He rolled the boy’s inert body over, and shook his shoulder. “Bat Wing!” he called. “Bat Wing! Wake up! You cannot be dead. It is Frog, your uncle, who calls you.”

  Bat Wing coughed. His eyes opened, crossed and then focused. Frog hugged the boy almost tight enough to choke him.

  “Don’t crush me.” Bat Wing coughed, and they laughed together, rather shocked to find themselves alive.

  At first so faint he doubted his ears, a chorus of human voices rippled through the night. Leaning upon each other, Frog and Bat Wing limped toward the canyon.

  And there, they found the rest of their hunters. Despite the fact that two of the long-necks still thrashed their legs, the butchering had already begun. Some of the other Ibandi were already slicing away chunks of meat. To his weary amusement, Frog realized that the joy of the kill had been so great, no one had thought to look for him or Bat Wing.