Five days’ walk southeast …
Halfway up Great Earth’s tangled slopes, three hands of well-tended huts clustered on a series of flattened terraces. Before the new sun rose above the huts, Sister Quiet Water had already bundled her grass song mat on which she would kneel to sing the sun to life. Her medicine bag held her pellets of herbs and plant extracts.
So many strange turns her life had taken. Mother Stillshadow had taken her into the dream dancers when she had seen eight summers, and there she had thrived. Along with her sisters she had been captured by Mk*tk and endured horror and shame. But Ibandi hunters had rescued her and brought her home.
And now … Mother called to her.
She did not know where she was going, only that she had to walk. And that it would be far, farther than any dream dancer had ever traveled alone.
In most previous times, a hunt chief had accompanied a traveling dancer. But there were no more hunt chiefs. These were different days, a time to change the roles Great Mother and Father Mountain had established for men and women.
And despite whatever unknown dangers lay ahead, joy danced in her heart like sparks in a whirlwind.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Cross-legged and content, Bat Wing sat between the evening fires, enjoying the easy company of his mother and her friends as they laughed and gossiped. The night was crisp and clear, his chin tingled with the sticky juice of roasted gazelle haunch, and all was right with the world.
Then he caught a glimmer of something out of the corner of his eye, and turned to look beyond the shadows. At first the darkness yielded nothing, but he had a slow and growing certainty that he was being watched. He experienced the sensation as a creeping of the skin along his neck, an awareness that was like the num tremors that Great Sky Woman sometimes spoke of.
To the boy’s shock, Uncle Frog had said he did not believe in such things. That he trusted only what he could touch and taste, see in the sky above him, feel in the earth below.
But what, then, was this strange certainty?
Might the fire children have something to say to him? Listening, he heard only the crackle of the branches.
No. Nothing.
“There is something in the shadows,” Bat Wing said, and his mother, Butterfly, laughed.
“There is nothing in the shadows,” she said. “This is another of your strange dreams.”
“I am awake, Mother,” the boy replied. “And there is something.”
The boy walked away from the firelight. Yes, something lurked out here. The prickle at the base of his neck began to spread, as if he had rolled in poison vines. What was he doing? This was not his world. He barely knew this world at all. Back at Wind boma north of Great Sky, every stone had been his friend. He knew every lizard, every beetle and its kin, every cactus and sweet bush from root to leaf. But here?
“Hello?” Ten paces away, close to the ground, at first barely distinguishable from the play of light and shadow, was a pale, grublike hand, the shadowy suggestion of a human head. A spill of loose straggly hair, like dead grass, fell across its face.
Bat Wing ran for Frog and the men.
Frog had been smoking a pinch of sleep herb in his bone pipe, its pleasant trill intensifying the warmth radiating from Sky Woman’s thigh, the satisfaction of a full belly and the companionship of fellow hunters. He felt more relaxed than in many, many moons.
Young Bat Wing came running to them with an expression of mingled excitement and anxiety.
He told them what he had seen. Curious but not alarmed, the five men, spears carried erect, ventured to the camp’s edge.
“Come out,” Leopard Paw said.
“Wait,” Frog said. “There is a strangeness here.” In all their years of trading and meeting with other tribes, only the Mk*tk had been disastrous. Even the Spider Face’s people had simply warned them away. As a result, these strangers triggered caution but not panic.
T’Cori stepped forward. “What are you?” she said.
“Sky Woman says there are all kinds of jowk alive in the world,” Bat Wing whispered. “Beneath rocks. Behind trees. Lurking in shadows. Perhaps this is one of those?”
Frog chuffed. No. No jowk. But was it a threat? That creeping of his skin indicated curiosity more than fear.
T’Cori held out a piece of yam the size of her palm.
A whimpering from behind the rock, and Frog lifted his torch. Then slowly, one chubby limb at a time emerged.
A child, perhaps eight summers in age. The first and most startling thing was that the child’s skin was the color of a fish belly, sickly white. Had the child rolled in chalk?
“So ugly,” Leopard Paw said.
Facial bones were broader and heavier than an Ibandi’s child’s face. Her hair hung limp as clusters of dead vine. Leopard Eye gripped his spear hard. “Mk*tk?”
“No,” T’Cori said. “I knew Mk*tk children … they were not like her. She is much too pale. Paler even than beast-men.”
The firelight reflected from her eyes as they might a cat’s. She even made a mewling sound.
“She is hungry,” T’Cori said.
“How do you know it is a girl?” Bat Wing asked. He himself was not even certain it was human. If it was a jowk, and he stared at it too long, mightn’t it slip into his dreams tonight, eat his flesh and steal his skin? But Sky Woman surely knew more than he of such things, and she did not seem afraid.
Frog seemed to take his lead from her, so he did not show nervousness either.
Very well. He, Bat Wing, would not show fear either.
“I know,” she replied.
“Where are her people?” Frog asked.
“I cannot say, but I know she is hungry.” T’Cori took the chunk of yam to the edge of camp, to the firelight’s wavering edge.
“Be careful,” Frog cautioned.
She clucked at him. “You stay back, great hairy beast. Stay back.”
“Nothing to fear,” Snake said. “No one baits a snare with a child.”
The pregnant Sky Woman knelt down, the piece of potato in her hand. In the wavering light of the twin fires, it seemed to Frog that the child’s eyes were almost as pale as her skin.
“She cannot speak,” Leopard Eye said. “She is not even bhan.”
“She is a child,” Sky Woman said, “and alone.”
Frog glared at her.
“Well,” Frog said, “if you’re going to feed her, at least give her something she cannot find for herself.”
He retreated to the men’s fire and returned carrying a chunk of giraffe meat. With the edge of his glassy black knife he cut away a juicy strip and slid it onto a broad green leaf. The other men grinned at him. The Ibandi had traded with bhan and others for generations. The rules of hospitality were clear: a stranger was to be sheltered.
Any other rule would be death for all in an environment as unforgiving as the savannah.
Monsters such as the Mk*tk were the exception, not the rule.
Sky Woman’s eyes closed. Her voice was as soothing as a sleep song. “I know what it is to be alone. If you cannot understand my words, hear my voice.” She spoke as sweetly as if singing to Medicine Mouse.
“I am not your mother,” Sky Woman whispered, “but I am all mothers. You are not my child, but you are all children. Accept this food and fire, and I will stand between you and harm, as if you were my own. Hear my voice.”
For an instant, their shared gaze wound together as tightly as strangler vines. Then Sky Woman put the food down and backed away.
After the child ate, she made a heap of grasses and vines, and curled up at the campfire’s edge. The child stared at the little hutch where slept the blind but mighty Stillshadow.
There was no sound, no motion, no clue of her presence. Regardless, Stillshadow’s voice rang out strongly. “Who is looking at me?” she called. “What is this child?”
“Sleep, Old Mother,” Sky Woman replied.
“How does she do that?” Frog asked.
Sky Woman shook her head. “The jowk sees everything. She speaks to the jowk.”
Sky Woman watched the child, her thoughts unknown even to herself. “We must protect her.”
“It is not ours,” Leopard Eye said.
Stillshadow spoke. “The wind blows, a leaf moves. Things happen, and things change. Light and shadow, sound and echo.”
“What is this?” Frog asked.
Sky Woman raised her hand. “She says that we must treat this child as one of our own.”
Leopard Eye remained unconvinced. “But who can say how her people would treat one of ours?”
“Yes. Who can say? Let us show the way. I say this child is bhan … but human. And that she is under our protection, as long as we have shelter to give.”
Frog and T’Cori did not retire to their lean-to that night. Although it was cooler on the valley’s rim than on the floor, their shared body heat and proximity to the twin fires kept them warm.
She had been unable to stem the excitement she felt building up inside her while watching the sleeping child.
“What is it?” Frog asked.
“I look at her, but see myself,” she said. “Alone. Always I was alone, even surrounded by my sisters.”
Frog scoffed as he carved bamboo slivers from the point of his spear. “Surely not true. None of us can live alone. It is not our nature.” Earlier he had made a small fire, and let it burn out. The glowing coals were perfect, turning the spear point into a solid mass, more effective in the kill. He toasted it over the coals, watching for the tip to brown and little curls of pungent smoke to rise.
“Still.” The night wind was warm, but T’Cori shivered as she considered the sleeping child. “That is the way it felt.”
“I think her people are kind,” he said. The spear was smoking a bit. He pulled it back, blew on it, and then began heating it again.
“How can you know this?”
“Because Great Mother makes most humans kind. And because she trusted us,” he said. “Trust is learned, and easily broken. If her people had beaten or raped her, she would not have come to us so easily. Or if her people told her strangers are evil. Look how she rests. She smiles as she dreams.”
“All children should sleep so,” she said.
“We will protect her,” Frog said.
“Yes,” T’Cori said, “we will.”
“Because you say so?”
“Yes. Because I say so.” She laughed. But there was something there, a truth considered but unsaid, a new Life Tree’s first green sprout.
They did not have long to wait for the next startling thing. The next morning, before the camp was fully awakened, before the child had stirred, three very strange males appeared at the camp’s edge, accompanied by two equally strange females. They were pale as grubs, shorter and wider than Ibandi. When their lips pulled back, their teeth were square and blunt and impressively gapped. They wore loincloths and leather sandals with leather straps laced up their calves and thighs, and a sort of chest covering made of a zebra or deer skin with a hole for their heads. They carried spears at their sides, but upright, as hunters meeting hunters, not with tips low, as if confronting enemies.
They halted ten paces away, as if waiting for the Ibandi to say or do something.
All that made sense to Frog. The child’s weak skin had prepared the Ibandi for such strangeness. What made him slap his own face was the impossible vision of three shaggy black wolves walking at their sides.
He remembered the odd footprints, the mingled imprints of men and animals. Those tracks had been the same depth in the same dried mud, suggesting that they had been made at the same time. But men might have been hunting wolves, mightn’t they?
He knew now that all his clever reckoning had been in vain.
Male or female, two-or four-legged, all were silent. The child ran to them, braying in words he did not understand.
“What are they?” T’Cori asked.
Frog shrugged. “Never have I seen the like. Ugly. No color, like a cobra’s belly. Surely they are the child’s people.”
Now there was movement: wolves padded back and forth around the strangers, keeping their distance from the Ibandi spearmen.
“Wolves!” T’Cori said. “Are these the wolf folk? Are those their … women?”
One of the strangers made grunting sounds deep in his throat and pointed. The child jabbered back, perhaps in monkey speak.
The pale ones took their child and left. The wolves walked behind the humans, crisscrossing as they paced back and forth until they were well down the slope and away to the east.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Two days southeast …
For a day and a half, Sister Quiet Water had walked without sleep, without rest, barely eating. When she needed to make water or defecate, she did. She occasionally paused to drink and fill her drinking gourd, but she gave her bodily needs no more care than that.
Her eyes were fixed on the western horizon. As of now, only a few dimly viewed trees broke the line. But soon, she hoped, she prayed. Soon.
“Mother,” she said, placing one foot after the other. “You call. I come.”
In the hutch where she lay in blindness and chaos, Stillshadow’s mouth curled in a smile. It was good. Everything … was good. She could see everything, knew that good things were coming. And when they did come, Stillshadow, stretched so tightly over the abyss, would finally answer Cloud Stalker’s call and be released from the flesh into the jowk.
She had known such things with Stalker. Truly, the jowk had gazed out at her through his eyes. Their soul vines had gripped each other, their fibers entangled. Soon, she would be with him again, and their love-play would rival that of Great Mother and Father Mountain.
They would make thunder!
She raised her voice, calling her spirit daughter, she who had earned the name Sky Woman.
She heard the sound of hands and knees shuffling across her hut’s floor. Stillshadow sniffed the air. Yes, it was T’Cori.
“Yes, Mother?”
“Our men are hunting here, and the prey is strong. Frog almost died bringing us bounty. If our men take such risk, we must prepare for the day that they risk too much.”
“What are you asking?” T’Cori’s voice was so sweet. She would miss it. Stillshadow reminded herself that the girl was clever, with good instincts. She would have to phrase her request carefully.
“We need to prepare the last gift, in case one of our men is wounded too sorely,” she said. She named a series of plants, including the one called strangleweed.
“Mother …” T’Cori’s voice winced. The girl knew these plants. And knew that this formula would end a wounded hunter’s woes, but they might also end those of an old medicine woman.
Stillshadow smiled. “Do not worry, my child,” she said. “I promised to stay until I am no longer needed. All is well.”
Stillshadow had never lied to the girl. Had never broken a promise. She would need every bit of that authority now.
Chapter Thirty
By the time the new day waned, T’Cori and Leopard Eye were a half day from the main camp, on a mission to gather strangleweed. The life within her seemed heavier with each new morning, but despite that burden, she was happy and surprisingly nimble of foot. It felt almost like returning to childhood, every step a dance, every gust of wind a song. This was what the dream dancers did, and it was comfortable returning to her accustomed role.
Frog had not been pleased by her plans to explore, so soon after their arrival. But it was not a man’s decision to make. She was a dream dancer. Even more, she was Stillshadow’s heir, and it was custom for the head dancer to travel alone for days at a time in the brush, trusting in her own skills and Great Mother Herself to keep her safe. A trip with only Leopard Eye was merely a step in that direction.
So much to learn and see! In the valley’s center, near the largest watering hole stood a gigantic fig tree. Roots as thick as her body burst from the grou
nd in a tangle. Its upper branches buzzed with bees. She had never seen such a tree, and thought it a great and sacred thing.
That morning, Leopard Eye had thrown a fist-sized rock with thrilling accuracy, braining a gray hare in mid-hop. He stuffed it into the leather sack she kept slung around her shoulders, and arched his eyebrows mischievously. “Supper!” he said.
This was a good place. So many birds, insects and plants to learn. And those strange pale-skinned people! Sheltering their child had been the first strong step toward friendship. The Mk*tk had been inhuman, killers who killed for no reason she could understand. The Spider Face’s folk were merely defending their land and magic water. As sad and disappointing as that was, they had granted the hospitality of a night’s rest.
Sharing was the way of the savannah peoples. And if these new pale strangers lived here … and knew that the Ibandi were protectors of children …
Was there not enough here for all to share?
Every fiber of her being said that it was good.
“Look!” T’Cori pointed at a red and white shrub only a hand’s length high. “Another one. I have never seen anything like it. Birthweed keeps for many moons when dried. This is good, because at Great Earth it is so hard to find. But here, it seems to be everywhere!”
Leopard Eye nodded. “Sky Woman … we should think of making camp.” He pointed to a trickling stream before them and then to the valley wall at their backs. “This place would serve better than most. It has water and some protection.”
“Then it is good,” she said.
He frowned. “In truth, I do not like being so far from the others. We do not know this valley well. Or, if we must travel so far, at least let us bring more guards for you. You are too precious to us, to our people. We see the same plants within a stone’s throw of our people. Why take this chance?”
T’Cori clucked. “This is how your mother became who she is. She knew every plant. Some are for food. Some are for wounds, stopping bleeding. Some make magic smoke for visions.”
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