Shadow Valley

by Steven Barnes

  And within moments, joining in the butchery, slippery with blood and intestines and breathing a cloud of hungry black gnats, he had almost forgotten his own toasting.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  That night, the Ibandi camp was a feasting glory. T’Cori and Sing Sun chanted and stamped and sang, performing their blessing ceremonies. The gods, if gods there were, seemed receptive to their entreaties. Frog wondered if such a miracle could actually be. Might they have found a home?

  He and Leopard Eye had gathered branches and vines, constructing the camp’s largest lean-to for Stillshadow, near an elephant-head-shaped rock half buried in the soil. T’Cori had led her mentor to the rock in the early morning hours. Blind and frail but blessedly agile, the old woman climbed up and sat cross-legged, staring out toward the camp as her people mended clothes, sharpened tools and prepared for their day. She had not yet called it her sitting stone, but that day could not be far off.

  When Frog and the hunters returned from the valley floor, bowed beneath their bloody loads of giraffe ribs and legs, Stillshadow smiled even before the first glad cries of greeting rang in her ears.

  While the meat sizzled on the twin campfires, she swayed back and forth to the rhythms of an invisible drummer. All in the camp felt their woes dissolving before the waves and eddies of that silent song.

  T’Cori brought Stillshadow down from the rock and sat her near the fire to feed her. All were quiet and still until the chief dancer took the first bite. She set her teeth in it, and then pushed it away. “Later,” the old woman said to T’Cori. “Bring it to me later, in my hut.”

  “The meat is good,” T’Cori said.

  “I knew it would be strong and sweet,” Stillshadow said.

  “It is right that we give thanks to Great Sky,” T’Cori said. “We cannot see Him, but He sees us, blesses us, keeps us strong.”

  Frog laughed. “The night is His shadow.”

  He looked up at the clouds. There amid the billowings and shadings, he saw Hawk Shadow drawing a bow, aiming at a … rabbit? Yes, he could just make out the ears and tail. And there … the shape of a spiked cactus. So sad almost no one else could see the cloud world.

  “Frog,” Gazelle Tears said, “your son wants you.”

  “That is good,” Frog said, “because I want my son.”

  She handed him a warm brown bundle of deerskin and wriggling arms and legs. Medicine Mouse gurgled and reached a chubby hand out to Frog, a broad and contented smile on his face.

  “Perhaps,” Frog’s mother said, “you can teach him to see the faces.”

  Frog held his son. This was the only heaven he needed: his family, safe and near. T’Cori and Gazelle Tears. His sister, Little Brook, was on the far side of the women’s fire with her own family, and his younger brother, Wasp, would probably marry soon.

  This might be the place, he thought, and this might be the time. Shadow Valley had everything a man or an entire tribe could desire.

  Gazelle Tears’s face was sharp now, all cheekbones and chin. She had clipped her hair down to gray stubble, as grandmothers often did. It was a strangeness to Frog. Men and women started life as squalling infants, almost exactly alike. They diverged into different lives and patterns of dress as they reached adolescence. Boys with their loincloths, girls with their leather skirts. In adulthood they lived nearly separate lives, different tasks, different fires, different lodges. Then as elders, the circle completed itself, and they once again seemed almost identical. There was a wisdom and a shape to all of it that warmed him. “Mother, what kind of baby was I?”

  “Like all others.” Gazelle Tears smiled. “Wrinkled and ugly and beautiful.”

  “What do you best remember about me?”

  She hesitated, searching her memory. “You’d had five summers,” she said. “It was a cool evening. The east wind rattled the walls. We built the fires high that night. You were asleep when I laid my head down, but I awoke to find you gone.” Her eyes widened. “So frightened I was! I thought that perhaps a jackal had wiggled under the wall and clamped his stinking teeth onto my son. I went out looking, and found you by the fire.”

  “What was I doing?”

  “‘Making friends with the fire people.’” She cackled. “That is what you said. You said that you could talk to them.”

  Frog pressed his lips against his son’s warm, smooth skin. His boy-child. His son. A boy to teach to walk. To talk. Perhaps to see faces in the fire. Please, if there is anything out there to hear, let my son see the faces.

  For now there were two, Frog Hopping and Bat Wing. Let there be one more. Perhaps this thing, this strange sight, was like a fire. If only one man possessed it, it was a spark. Two, a flame flickering in the wind.

  But three …

  Three might grow into a blaze.

  Curls of peppery steam wafted from the fist-sized chunk of giraffe meat T’Cori carried to Stillshadow. When she carried the mat of folded leaves into the lean-to, the old woman was curled on her side beneath a straw roof, muttering to the jowk, her gnarled face shrunken and withdrawn.

  If she knelt, her head brushed the lean-to’s straw roof. Still, it was wider than most, the ground draped with skins and scattered with Stillshadow’s possessions: medicine bags, her ritual drum, a walking stick, bones for casting.

  Sing Sun sat beside Stillshadow, busy scraping white fibrous fatty tissue from an ibyx hide with a flat rock. Beside her was a chunk of a young palm trunk the length of her forearm, already mostly hollowed.

  A new drum?

  T’Cori passed the meat beneath Stillshadow’s nose, and after a few such passes her mentor took it.

  She gnawed on it a bit, and then handed it back. “It hurts my teeth,” Stillshadow said. “I did not want the others to see, but it is hard for me to chew now.”

  T’Cori understood. Without a word, she chewed the meat thoroughly, and then spit the gob into Stillshadow’s palm, and repeated this process until Stillshadow emitted a low, contented belch.

  T’Cori beamed with pride.

  “Giraffe meat is good,” her teacher said. “Did I tell you of my dream?”

  “You have shared many dreams, Mother,” T’Cori said.

  “This one was of women with long, spotted necks.”

  “Did you see the valley?”

  Stillshadow frowned. “I do not remember. But I saw a wall of fire.”

  “Ah,” T’Cori said, brightening. “Frog was almost burned. That may be what you saw. But the long-necked women …” She chewed at the inside of her mouth. “Women … giraffes …” She shook her head. “Are we to be eaten?”

  “If your men are good lovers, yes.” Sing Sun cackled, and the three women dissolved into mirth.

  It felt good, better than T’Cori had felt in many days, or even moons. “I need your help,” she said to the old woman. “I need to know what to do now, to make this place our home.”

  For a time T’Cori thought that Stillshadow had wandered too far into the dream world, but then the old woman spoke. “The drum,” she said. “We need to bless Sing Sun’s drum.”

  “A drum,” T’Cori said. “What songs would this drum need?”

  “We will need to be wise and clever and swift in this new place. Here, we will need the rabbit song.”

  “Why that?”

  “To be careful in a new place. Quick and clever—but not too brave,” the old woman whispered. “Sometimes, caution is more important than courage. When the mountain died, we struggled to heal our people. I have thought of many things we did not try. And one of them is the rabbit song.”

  “You fear the gods have died?”

  Stillshadow ignored the question. “I fear that we have traveled so far, and for so long, that we have broken our soul vines, that which connects us to the jowk. When I drum, my vine grows strong.

  “The drumming is a way to find Great Mother within me. A way to speaking with Her. I must honor the tree jowk and the animal who gave her skin. The drum will teach us from the m
oment we sit down and touch it, speak to it, dance with it. My eggshell thickens and all my demons rise: I forget that tomorrow comes and want everything today. I want to believe that all that is wrong in the world is caused by others, not me. Never me. I am the great Stillshadow.” Her mouth twisted in grim humor. “As a girl, I believed I could make something that could not be improved. But in my heart I feared that I could not be what my people needed me to be, that I could not fulfill my dream self. I feared that others might be better than me, and I hated them for it.”

  “Hate?” T’Cori asked, startled. “Mother, you feel such things?”

  The old woman gave a brief, humorless bark of laughter. “Do you think that I did not hate when I heard what the Mk*tk did to you? That I did not fear, knowing that I must have been a very bad teacher?”

  To that, T’Cori had no answer.

  “I had every eye upon me. I could not be tired or angry or less than perfect. I could not be afraid. But all of us fear, my daughter. All creatures of flesh feel fear. But the children need to feel that there is someone too strong for fear to control.”

  T’Cori sat beside Sing Sun and ran her fingers along the palm trunk’s grooved bark. Looked inside. The work of hollowing it out was half done, and she set herself to scraping out more of the wood pulp with a flat, sharp-edged rock. Time passed, and she lost herself in the light, pleasant trance induced by sacred work.

  Sing Sun broke her trance. “Mother, are you sure this is the skin you wish?” She seemed to choose her next words carefully. “Did you … know it has a hole in it?”

  “And you do not?” The old woman cackled. “Our holes make us what we are. Holes help you remember that only Great Mother can make a perfect thing. It keeps us from becoming proud.

  “You will never find the perfect tree. And yet, all trees are perfect.”

  “How—” T’Cori caught herself and shook her head. “There is so much to learn. I will try to understand.”

  Stillshadow took the drum from T’Cori’s hands. “We must open ourselves to the drum’s spirit. Its spirit is the spirit of the deer or oryx or the tree, whatever flesh and bone the drum is made of.” She set it between her knees, and began to slap. Her hands were a dancing blur. “When the drum moves your hands, you forget everything except the music and the sound. Great Mother’s children are not spirits. Not gods. There are things we cannot do, must not even try.

  “But to change anything, to do anything, to teach anything, I must go deeply inside myself. In the womb we hear the beat of our mother’s heart. It is where we … and all rhythm … begin.”

  Although blind and seemingly near death, Stillshadow tapped and slapped a rhythm so rich and alive that the three of them swayed where they were seated. Magic! T’Cori watched the blinding-fast play of her hands, switching from flat to fingertips in a twinkling.

  Now slow. Now quick. Now like water, and then fire and then the steady beat of the earth. With a flicker, it elevated into wind.

  Stillshadow might have barely enough strength to walk, but her drumming humbled them all.

  Now each hand moved at a different tempo. Bah-bah-ba-bah! “It was Cloud Stalker who mastered this,” she said. “He taught me a bit, but there is a way of drumming that is a men’s thing. I could never have drummed as he did. All the leaping and tumbling about! Hah!” She chuckled to herself, warmed by the memory.

  “Great Mother gave us the drum. When men drum, they are rooting themselves, bringing the energy from their heads down into the earth. Drumming opens the feminine. When I drum, my soul vine roots into the ground. Drumming creates balance, and I am both grounded in Great Mother and connected to Father Mountain.

  “The drum connects us to the truth of the jowk, the faceless face of all living things. We are one voice and we are all one. Fear disconnects us; drumming dissolves the fear.”

  Her hands fluttered. Now T’Cori no longer saw her wrinkled flesh, the wizened body ready to return to the earth. Stillshadow seemed wind, water, fire, jowk unfettered by flesh.

  “A drum is passion. It burns at your touch. The drum seeks you, every bit as much as you seek the drum. If you make the drum with your whole num, the connection is there. Feel it tremble like the heart of a deer; hold the drum over your heart and direct the healing num toward the muscle that protects and holds your love.

  “Each animal that gives its skin to the drum has its own medicine,” she said. “Oryx medicine comes from the west. They are the thunder beings, wind jowk, water jowk and fire jowk dancing together. Oryx gives the stamina to stay the course and heal our hearts. It goes deep to our core, our guts, where we remember all we learned as children.

  “Oryx helps us release tears, which heal and let us grieve our losses. Oryx helps us release to the world above Father Mountain.”

  Her words wove a trance. T’Cori felt her sense of time slipping away, the dream world slipping closer by the moment.

  “But that would mean the void is closer to the hunt chiefs,” her mentor’s liquid voice continued. “Our hunters tear their flesh while hunting. How can you ask an animal to die for you if you are not willing to lay down your own life? The hunter hunts not only giraffe and antelope and pig.” Her voice dropped to a rumble. “He hunts death itself. Not as an ending but as a new beginning. Drumming with oryx keeps us grounded in our num— our center, our power.”

  “And what of the deer?” Sing Sun asked. “My drum uses the skin of a deer.”

  “Deer medicine touches and heals our hearts—the medicine of the north: the red road and the path of the heart. When we are healing our heartbreaks, or opening the heart and learning to speak from the heart, drumming with deer is powerful medicine. Deer will open you to your heart’s true dream.

  “We make each drum with love, respect and prayer. We offer smoking herbs to the jowk. Our hunters bring us their kills. We strip the skins and scrape them. Then we look through all the hides and select only the finest for our drums.”

  “How do we make this special thing?” Sing Sun asked. “I never learned such wonder.”

  “All dream dancers and hunt chiefs make drums, and then the drums go out to the bomas. Each boma made its own drums, and some were wonderful, but always, those made by the dancers and chiefs were the best.

  “I think this is a new time,” Stillshadow said. “Call your sisters Flower and Morning Thunder. Call all who have will and heart. Now, from this day forward, every Ibandi woman must learn to dance.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  On their third day, Frog and his uncle Snake went exploring along the valley floor, seeking better camping space. And a quarter-day’s walk from their old site, Frog saw something that made him stop and stare.

  Human tracks. Not Ibandi, though. The thick toes and broad forefoot were strange enough, but even more oddly, wolf tracks mingled with the human.

  He knelt beside them. Sniffed them. Ran his fingers around the rim. His narrowed eyes scanned the trees and grass. Old hunters said their grandfathers had told tales of spirits in Shadow Valley.

  He did not believe such stories, but what to make of this? Wolves that walked like men? Men that became wolves? “It is a new thing,” he said.

  “You and your ‘new things,’” Snake said. But despite his mockery, his single good eye glittered. He crumbled a bit of mud from the man’s tracks between his fingers. And then a bit from the wolf’s. “I would say they were made the same day. But that doesn’t mean they were made at the same time.”

  “No,” Frog admitted, “it does not.”

  But his mind saw men with wolf legs, and wolves with men’s feet. And his heart doubted what his mind thought it knew of the world.

  Stillshadow dreamed. In that dream she hovered above the lake of living fire, the jowk. And that fire consumed the things and people she loved. They cried out to her as they were melted and created and melted again and again.

  However many years the most benevolent gods might grant one of their human children, not enough time remained for
her, or anyone, to fix the world. Because the Mk*tk had taken her, T’Cori now doubted her own magic. Sing Sun had never had much sight, and Blossom … poor Blossom had had none. The sisters she had traveled to join had little more.

  The old ways were dying, the new ones not yet born.

  What else was there? What could she do? This was a new place, where food was so plentiful their prey almost walked up to them and begged for death. What new rituals might it call forth?

  A rounded valley, green when the grass outside its walls were said to be brown. Where water sparkled, while outside the streams ran muddy.

  A place where men and wolves walked side by side.

  The jowk called to her, promising rest after a lifetime of service. Cloud Stalker was there as well, or whatever the jowk might remember of her lover. She remembered him: his strength, his laughter, his moonlight caress. In her bones, she was his woman, his wife, even though he was dead. And she would continue so after her bones were in the ground.

  But she could not go home to him until she knew her people were safe. Could not, and would not.

  What to do? What to do?

  She reached out across the web of soul vines connecting all sleeping two-legged … and came upon a knot of her children, the children of… Fire boma. Something had happened, and they had fled. She was not certain where they were. The dream world was a world of sensation, of emotion, not geography. But for the moment they seemed safe.

  To her surprise, among them was Sister Quiet Water.

  Ah. A deep well of pleasure rose in Stillshadow. A lost daughter whose num- field felt calm and content, with no shadow of violation or captivity.

  This was a good thing, a great thing, a thing to gladden her old heart. And for the rest of the night, they danced the dream together.