Great Sky Woman (18 page)

If there was any solace to be found, it was in the fact that the other boys seemed even more deeply miserable than he, limping and crying out if their thighs rubbed against their wounded roots. What a fine flock of young hunters they were! Even rabbits would have little to fear from such a toothless pack.

As the other boys sweltered in fever or washed the pus from their new wounds, the hunt chiefs recounted endless tales of their own youthful days, and how soon after becoming hunters they had been singled out for possessing unusually strong or fast limbs. Recognized, the boma fathers nominated them to be hunt chiefs.

They also spoke of hunting secrets, and traveling far to acquire or practice them.

And they danced, oh how they danced at night, their bodies making the most expressive gestures, forming the most awe-inspiring shadows, and Frog was entranced.

“Small men are afraid of their brothers’ power,” Cloud Stalker said. “Big men raise their brothers up, that heroes may arise from our ranks. I tell you the story of a hero. It is also the story of the first bird on Great Sky.”

And he began to dance.

Once, a long time ago, there was a huge, shapeless monster, Kammapa, who spread terror through the land. He devoured every man and child on earth except one old woman. Without a man to give her seed, she birthed a child who was born wearing holy amulets. She named the child Mountain Walker, knowing that he would rise high and travel far.

“Is there no one but you and I in the world?” Mountain Walker asked his mother.

“My child,” his mother said, “once the land was covered with people, but the monster who haunts the mountain has slain and eaten them all.”

Hearing this, Mountain Walker knew that his name meant he would have to slay this beast. They fought, and Kammapa swallowed Mountain Walker whole, but with his knife Mountain Walker cut his way from inside the beast, releasing himself and all other people from its stomach.

Mountain Walker became grand hunt chief, but people were not happy, for they feared his power. So they decided that Mountain Walker should be murdered, and tried to throw him into a deep pit lined with stakes. Walker was too clever, and escaped.

Then his enemies built a fire in the center of the boma, and tried to throw him in. But in the frenzy, they threw in another man instead, and the screams were horrible, the smell driving the moon from the sky.

They tried to push him over a cliff, and to smother him in a cave, and always he was too strong and smart. But their hatred took the heart from Mountain Walker, and he grew weary of fighting them. So he let them kill him, and when he died, his body went into the ground except for his heart, which became a hawk and rose up Great Sky, and sits still on the shoulder of Father Mountain.

The hunt chiefs told them of the climb to the top of Great Sky, to the world of the dead. Some of the boys who had lost parents or beloved cousins wept to hear the words, see the songs the hunt chiefs had carried back from the forbidden land.

They danced out tales of swirling, howling demons made of white powder, defending the passage to Father Mountain’s home, and of heroes who had called forth the courage to overcome them. Frog had never heard such things and was confused. What should he believe: his eyes and ears, or the words of these awesome men? He was uncertain, knew only that he would give anything and everything, even his life itself, to see such magic.

He remembered the black and white stones in Cloud Stalker’s belt. Did that, and what Frog had done to save Lizard, prove that there
was
no magic? Or had magic merely failed at that moment? Or could it be that he was an instrument of Father Mountain, and that the nature of magic was different than he had ever thought?

In this sacred place, this cave on the slopes of Great Sky, he could more easily believe.

But he swore to himself that one day he would climb the peak and see the gods.

Or see nothing.

Whichever there was.

Even these great men, and great they were, lacked the answers he sought. Perhaps at the top of Great Sky, he could ask Father Mountain. If the god existed at all. Frog no longer knew what to think. There was power here, and knowledge, but he also sensed an emptiness, just beyond the light of his knowing.

Chapter Twenty

Frightened, but too proud to show his fear, Frog stood shoulder to shoulder with his healing cousins as the boys faced one another in a circle beneath a stand of wild fig and whistling thorn trees. “This is what you will do,” Cloud Stalker said. “One at a time, each of you must step into the circle, and you will fight all of the others for as long as we chant.”

“What are the rules?” Frog asked.

“There are no rules, except that you stay in the circle.”

Frog watched as the largest and the strongest of them all, a boy named Baboon Eye from Wind boma, stepped into the middle. The men began to chant as the boys rushed him. Baboon fought back as best he could, but there was just no way to keep the strokes from falling upon him, and he was dragged down and thrashed. Frog gripped his own staff with sweating hands, wincing at every vibration as he thumped Baboon about the ribs and legs.

It was both exhilarating and frightening. What would happen when his own turn came? How would it feel? What would he do?

And so it went with the next, and the next after that.

In each case the men chanted for about ten and ten breaths, time enough for a generous serving of misery. Frog’s stomach soured, and he could smell the stink of Rat’s fear, and Scorpion’s as well.

Scorpion did well, moving this way and that with the agility gained through endless days of wrestling and tumbling, but then he tired and was dragged down. He curled into a ball and wept as they thumped him.

And then came Frog’s time. Old River Song stood before him, peering deeply into his eyes. “Into the circle,” he said.

Frog felt very clear, very calm. They had devised the rules. He might use them in his own fashion.

The center of the circle was a very lonely place. All of his cousins faced him, their arms and ribs welted, knots on their foreheads and blood trickling from their noses. They blinked back sweat, chests heaving, simultaneously fearful and excited. Each of them had, in turn, suffered in the circle. They wanted to see how Frog would bear his pain, carry his wounds.

“Go!” River Song called. Instantly, Frog grabbed Scorpion, spinning him so that he was behind his stepbrother, arm around Scorpion’s throat. The boy was so surprised that he hadn’t time even to squeal. As the others attacked, Frog wheeled Scorpion around and around, using him as a shield. Strokes intended for Frog fell on his cousin instead. Frog felt himself going into a kind of trance, so that he watched the staves falling and it seemed that it was all a dream.

And then it was over. His shoulders and forearms stung a bit, and he felt swollen skin low on his back, but that was nothing compared to the drubbing his brothers had taken.

Frog swore that he saw the hint of a smile on Uncle Snake’s ravaged face. “Once I told you to bring me a new thing if you found one, something no one has ever seen before. That,” said Snake, “was a new thing.”

That was the last thing they did before the hunt chiefs blessed the boys and led them back down the mountain path.

When Frog finally trudged through Fire boma’s burnt clearing and through the gate, Wasp and Frog’s younger cousins regarded the returning young men as awe-inspiring strangers. He saw his own face in theirs, longed to tell them what had happened to him.

And then realized that no, he did not want to spare them the terror. If
he
had endured it, why not the sprouts? He managed an exhausted smile at the thought. He now understood exactly why no one had ever warned him.

He could hardly wait until it was Wasp’s turn.

Sweltering in the day’s heat, any bit of shade was a welcome respite.

“Welcome home,” Gazelle said, and offered him a gourd of water. He drank deeply, sighing with gratitude. In the loving, tender expression on his mother’s face was the kind of pride that he had never seen before.

My son is a man,
she was saying.

Not yet, Mother,
he answered without speaking.
Soon now. Not yet.

Frog crawled into his hut and collapsed onto his side, perspiring and shaking.

He thought he would not be able to sleep, and rest did elude him for a time. Then suddenly he found himself in the world of dreams. In that mystical place trees pranced, and gazelle were rooted to the ground. Everything in his world had changed order, position, perspective. Nothing in Frog’s world was the same as it had been. In all likelihood, nothing would ever be the same again.

Frog awoke sweating from a dream in which hunters hunted animals who in turn hunted fleeing boys. He could not see his own face anywhere among them. Was he hunter or prey?

We are both,
Snake had said.

When he crawled back out of the hut, the sun was heading toward the western horizon. He saw Scorpion creeping around behind the huts, but when their eyes met, his stepbrother flinched.

What next?

Gazelle gave him a gourd filled with mashed yam and pieces of fish, and a folded leaf with a few chunks of hot blackened zorilla meat. The flesh of the small black-and-white furred four-legged was usually one of his favorites, but today…today it seemed that every taste and texture was far stronger. All the colors, the smells, the flavors…everything so stark and strong that it was as if he had never eaten at all.

His hearing was sharper as well. He could hear every soft, grinding stroke as Uncle Snake slowly and methodically sharpened a knife. Frog stared at his stepfather, and it seemed somehow that he was looking not just at Snake, but at the Snake that he had known as a child. Many, many younger Snakes, with firmer bodies. And then an even younger Snake, one that Frog had never known. His face was unscarred. Both eyes were whole and firm.

A Snake no older than Frog himself. A flash of clarity illuminated Frog’s mind, a sudden, strong sense of where he, Frog, fit into the order of things.

He, Frog, would also grow old—if fortune smiled upon him. If he was wary enough to evade the leopard and the lion, he would grow old. If Frog was lucky and wise and strong and good, the reward was to live long enough to watch his body rot.

Was it possible the only reward for a lifetime of work and risk was deterioration and disease? The naked eye of death itself seemed to fix him, the terror that none of his fellows seemed to fear, because unlike him, they
believed.
And if that was true, then who was really more alive in the mind? He who saw through the tricks and lived in constant fear? Or one who succumbed to the mirage and lived his life in joy?

And if there was nothing but the struggle of life, then what good was it all?

Uncle Snake seemed to have been studying Frog through his one good eye, almost as if he could know Frog’s mortal thoughts. “You go,” he said. “Stay until two moons pass, then you bring zebra. Or boar or topi. Understand? When there is meat to share, you come back.”

There it was. He had always known this day would come, but had had no idea how it would feel. It felt as if a precious part of himself was dying. And yet, and yet…there was great excitement as well.

“Uncle?” he said. There was so much more that he wanted to say, but dared not. Did Uncle look at him, see in him someone like the boy he once had been? Did he know what Frog had done to save Lizard?

Why could he not wrench his thoughts away from death?

Frog felt as if a mist had cleared away, as if for a brief breath he had clarity that no Ibandi had ever known. There were no gods, no magic. Just men, and animals, and plants, and dirt.

And that was all.

Then the mists closed back in again, and that clarity was gone.

What if he was wrong?

Uncle handed him the black rock knife and gave him a hard smile. “You are my brother’s son,” he said. “Since you were a baby, you have been mine as well. You will succeed.”

The knife. He had seen Deep Dry Hole hand Snake that knife. Had Snake accepted it as payment to influence Cloud Stalker? And when the stones had been given, did Stalker return it? Was it a cursed blade, its intentions foiled, and did it now live only to fail poor Frog at some crucial moment?

Frog wanted to wrap his arms around Snake, to feel his strength.
Do you love me, Father? Am I worthy? Am I a bad thing?

But then, for the first time in memory, Snake simply turned his back, as if Frog had offended him. Snake flicked his hand toward the opening in the boma wall.

A question, a plea rose in Frog’s throat, one swiftly repressed.

Frog turned to his mother, Gazelle, who would not look at him either, choosing instead to stare at the ground. Tears dropped from her eyes, puddling in the dust.

So, then. This was goodbye. Young Frog Hopping, the boy he had been only days ago, was dead to them. His heart rumbled in his chest. Today was the beginning of all things! He wanted to be worthy, to make his family proud.

More than anything beneath the sky, more than life itself, he wanted that.

Frog carried nothing but that knife as he walked through the gap in Fire boma’s thorn wall. He looked back over his shoulder and saw Scorpion approaching his father. Frog sensed that Scorpion’s behavior on the mountain had angered Snake, that despite the bond of blood, Scorpion would have to earn his father’s love with a good walkabout. And yet when Scorpion’s eye briefly met Frog’s, there was no resentment there.

It was fear that Frog saw. And that, he could understand.

What was about to come was terrifying enough to drive petty concerns from Scorpion’s mind. They were both in this alone, together.