Great Sky Woman (24 page)

At this range she could not only see his
num
-flame, but feel and almost taste it.

T’Cori was beyond shock, spiraling into a territory where her mind was losing its ability to function. These men—if men they were—were simply stronger and more nimble than Ibandi. If they were expanding into the north, she feared her people were already lost.

All the way back to the camp, she screamed. As they untied her hands she sank her teeth into Notch-Ear’s meaty shoulder. That, at last, evoked a response. Notch-Ear pulled her around and hit her in the mouth, just once, quite hard.

The world went white and then black, then slowly spun back into focus. T’Cori staggered back and blood gushed from her mouth, and she stared at the ground, unable even to move. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, spit out the fragment of a tooth. Her world was pain and fear.

That night they came for T’Cori. As their hands closed upon her, she tried desperately to find that secret place outside herself, a place where she might be able to elude the horror. She tried to dissolve the world, to escape into the realm of light and fire.

And failed.

They dragged her into a hut made of lashed, straw-covered willow branches. A low fire cast only a dying glow before Notch-Ear threw an armful of branches on it, coaxing it to crackling life. They pulled her over a log in the middle of the hut, tying her hands to stumps. She pulled and twisted but could not free herself. T’Cori craned her neck to look back over her shoulder and watched Notch-Ear approach her. His shadow was a man’s, but the
num
-fire glimpsed from the corner of her eye was monstrous. His seventh eye was like a burning brand, flaming with purples and harsh, muddy green.

She wanted desperately to faint, to die, but could not.

Shadows are part of the waking dream.
So Stillshadow had said a lifetime ago. If she could bend his shadow, she might bend his body. She strove desperately to make the magic come, the magic she had been taught, the magic that had always been a part of her existence.

Sudden, vital pain ripped this final hopeful fantasy away. She bleated as he pushed his way into her, screamed as her flesh tore. T’Cori prayed to Father Mountain to spare her, to take her away, but her prayers were drowned out by her own groans.

This man, in this place, was T’Cori’s first. He howled and shuddered within her, and then withdrew, and was replaced by another.

But now, thankfully, Great Mother finally heard her prayer and accepted her, trembling, into darkness.

When T’Cori came fully back to consciousness, she was being dragged along the ground. The Mk*tk tossed her into the pen. She collapsed, feeling filthy inside, as if something precious had been stolen. Fluid built up over and over again in the back of her throat, and she hacked and spit, trying to breathe.

All the rest of that night, she sobbed. T’Cori closed her eyes, trying to visualize Great Earth, but could not. She felt that she had lost something she could never regain. Her seventh eye had been ripped open and then blinded.

“I am nothing,” she whispered. Her fingers grooved the dirt beneath her. Four small troughs, graves long and wide enough to bury the fragments of her shattered
num.

And not all her sisters’ comforting touches could brighten her darkness, all that endless, lonely night.

Chapter Twenty-nine

As a ripple of faint echoes rang through the night, Frog awoke from sleep. Darkness still enshrouded the hills. Here, so far from the land he knew, he was very careful where he set spark to tinder. He did not want enemies to see it, and he had come far enough west and south to know he’d reached lands unknown to all but the bravest hunters.

There was danger about: that much he could sense. But on the other hand, risk would make whatever victories he had all the sweeter. What stories would be his to tell!

But…what was that sound he’d heard upon awakening? Faint, grief-stricken echoes of…what? He raised his head. Had it been merely a wisp of dream? Had it been something of this world?

Frog lay very still, ears straining to catch another wisp of sound. Nothing.
Only the wind,
he thought.
Nothing but the wind.

The night seemed uncharacteristically cold. He fed a bit of wood to the dying fire and pulled skins over himself more tightly.

Frog loved the grasslands. Most Ibandi had a name for everything. Frog Hopping had five. Not just
dik-dik,
“tiny antelope,” but
spotted, close-eyed, quick-dik, tiny giant
and
sour.
Not just grassland but
sweet grassland, lion lair, soft-soil, water-rich
and
spiky.
He knew that he should have felt more fear: there were so many ways to die. But when his eyes and ears were fully alive he felt as transparent as water, as if he could not be seen at all.

If he recognized a fruit and knew it to be good, Frog would stop to eat it. If he didn’t recognize it, but saw monkeys eating it, he took the risk. One greenish sweet fruit he munched through happily, and then stopped to examine with greater care. The seeds were small and white and three-cornered. Where had he seen such seeds before? It came to him with shocking suddenness. He had seen them in the scat he and Scorpion found in the shattered bhan boma.

That meant that whoever had killed the bhan folk had come from this direction. Could such fruit also be found in the north, where some thought the beast-men had originated?

It was wetter up in the north, and the green fruit plant’s deep roots and tough skin suggested a drier clime. That lent weight to the idea that whoever had destroyed that bhan boma had come from the south, eating this fruit along the way. Perhaps the killers had dried some for eating while on the move.

Fear and excitement mingled as Frog felt his senses opening more widely, the entire world becoming a stream of smells and sounds and sensations, his human mind sorting through them, comparing them with everything that he had ever known, and drawing conclusions about what might come next. It was a sense unlike any he had ever experienced. A hole opened in his mind, a portal to a world undreamt of.

He was no mere boy, to be protected by his relations. He was a man, a hunter, as his father and his father before him, and he swelled with the thought that this was
his
time.

This was what his people had sent him out to find.
Himself.

Clearly, Father Mountain smiled upon young Frog. A young ostrich had succumbed to his spear, and his traps had caught two rabbits. With hunger and fear as instructors, he was learning. If you paid attention, life itself was the greatest mentor.

No longer did he consider his walkabout to be torture. It had become a fierce, demanding and dangerous adventure.

Visible first as a man’s skeleton with outstretched arms, a dead, hollow old baobab tree rose on the plain before him like the ghost of a slain giant. Its gnarled, ashy exterior said it was much older than the sacred tree at the grounds of Spring Gathering. The hollow was as tall as two men, and wider than Frog could spread his arms. The interior stank of bat scat, but he found bits of bone, scraps of carved wood, and the remnants of a fire as well. So. Someone had been here before. He looked at the tumble of burnt wood, and guessed that they were not Ibandi. It showed no deliberate banking of the fire. His entire body tingled, as if lightning had struck nearby.

His first contact with the Others!

There was no way to be certain of how long they’d been gone, but Frog knew that all hunters repeated successful behaviors and discarded unsuccessful ones. Anywhere a hunter found prey once, he was likely to return. When and if that happened, Frog did not want to be there.

So instead of sleeping in the tree, Frog backtracked, being very very careful to wipe out his footprints. Then he burrowed into the grass.

And he waited.

A quarter of the night passed, during which it finally occurred to Frog that this might not be quite the splendid adventure he had hoped for. It occurred to him, in fact, that this might have been the single stupidest thing that he had ever done.

In the distance, baboons hooted.

Frog had very nearly decided that the smartest thing he could do was to run north as fast as he could, when there was a disturbance on the other side of the clearing.

Out in the waving field of yellow-green grasses, something stirred. A baboon? Perhaps. He couldn’t make it out, but had seen the stalks rustle. It happened once, and then again, and both times the wind had been still. Then something…some
one
emerged from the grass. A great, hulking figure moving with unnatural lightness. To his considerable surprise, Frog was less terrified than fascinated.

His Ibandi brothers moved with formidable ease and power. And of course the hunt chiefs ran and wrestled like gods. But this creature and those that followed it walked more like apes than either men or immortals. They loped, occasionally pausing to sniff the air. Instantly, Frog began circling downwind of them, knowing that if they smelled, saw, heard or sensed him in any way, they would kill him.

Their backs, chests and shoulders were more tightly curled with hair than the smooth Ibandi torsos, and more thickly muscled as well. They entered the clearing, snuffling, and then approached the tree. He counted: two, three, four of them. One of them climbed into the baobab, so lightly that their arms must have been stronger than Frog’s legs. The others took up position outside, keeping guard.

What were these strange creatures doing? He did not know, but they spent less than a quarter at it, and after they were finished they sniffed the air again, then trotted off to the south.

After they were gone, Frog looked into the tree. A few things had changed: a small bleached dik-dik skull, an antelope skull, and a baboon skull with scraps of hairy flesh still attached had been placed in a circle. Something…mud? Ash mixed with water or urine, perhaps, had been used to scrawl a mark in the middle of the circle, something that looked vaguely like a half-moon.

He stared at this. Hunting signs? Messages for others of their kind? Or communications to their god? Overcome with sudden chills, he backed away.

As Frog stood staring into the tree, he realized that he was about to do something suicidally stupid. He was going to follow these creatures.

“Uncle Snake said to bring back meat,” he whispered, so softly that he could not hear his own words. “But what if I bring back knowledge of the Others? And the hunt chiefs use that knowledge to defend us? Then I will be the greatest of hunters.”

And that is how he came to follow the band of Others as they traveled south. They loped along at a brisk pace, still very alert to the grass and wind. Although the pace made Frog pant, it seemed entirely casual for the Others. They never seemed to tire, and if they hadn’t stopped from time to time to dig into the earth or scratch bugs from each other’s pelts, Frog might have become winded. By the time the day was half gone, he was praying to a Father Mountain he was no longer certain of that one of them might break a leg. He kept circling right and left to stay downwind, or too distant to alarm them…he hoped.

Chapter Thirty

T’Cori’s days had melted into a blur. First, the pain of the broken tooth had kept her from sleeping, sent her into a constant frenzy of weeping until Quiet Water, tapping some unknown well of strength, gathered the grasses and herbs necessary to compound a poultice for her to bite down on. Within a quarter the pain faded. She tried to thank the tall girl, but it almost seemed that Quiet Water was floating in a dream, had been able to help T’Cori only at the cost of emptying herself out. For after that one final act of kindness, Sister Quiet Water drifted away for the last time.

Flat-Nose, Notch-Ear and several more of the Others attacked the dream dancers in their degrading nightly ritual. After a few rotations there was no more ceremony about it. If they wanted a woman, they took her, and seemed little concerned whether it was one of their own flat-faced, ugly women or one of the new acquisitions.

Already the abuse had numbed her three sisters. In ways it seemed that T’Cori was in the same sort of daze, but she had finally found her way into a waking dream state. Stillshadow had often spoken of such a trance.

It is not sleeping. It is not waking. You have had dreams where you were awake, yes?

And you know of sisters who walk, but still sleep, yes?

This is the place I speak of. This place where you feel no pain, where you see what others cannot. Where all the world is magical. It is sleeping, walking, awake. Do you understand?

She never had. But now T’Cori did.

The Mk*tk seemed to consider the four dream dancers new members of their tribe. As long as the girls did not try to escape, they were treated without undue cruelty. They were fed, allowed to bathe in the waters of a river just a short walk away from the cage. If they tried to run away they were beaten, but not badly enough to reduce their ability to perform their daily chores.

T’Cori watched helplessly as her mind began to die. She heard voices within her head, dull, damning voices she had never heard before, speaking in a chorus. She yearned to summon her ability to see
num
-fire, and could not. The world spun until she teetered perpetually on the edge of nausea. Constantly weary, the girl just wanted to roll over and sleep, but she was afraid to close her eyes for fear of nightmares even worse than her waking terror.

As she had many times before, T’Cori tried to speak to one of the Mk*tk women. The woman was heavy-lidded and stank of fear, and also possessed a deep feminine scent almost like moon-blood, although T’Cori did not think she was on her menses. “We have to escape,” she whispered. “Help me. Help me.”

The woman’s eyes were dull and dead. T’Cori recognized this mind space, had seen it in the eyes of the poisoned deer.

She gave up and crawled over to Dove and made the same plea. “We have to escape!”

But Dove was no longer the same girl who had once laughed and sung and danced so joyously. Terror and shame had transformed her into a creature of small, startled movements, twitching at the slightest unexpected thing.

Dove stared at T’Cori as if it took great effort merely to recognize her sister. Then she said, “There is no escape. We were wrong about Great Sky,” she said dully. “
This
is the land of the dead.”

“We are alive!” T’Cori protested. “We feel, we dream. We will die if we don’t act.”

“No. We will live if we please them. We must please them.” Dove’s voice broke when she said this. Her eyes shifted to the side, as if wondering if a Mk*tk was coming. Then she scuttled away and would speak to T’Cori no more.

On the tenth day after her first assault, T’Cori saw a terrible thing, a thing that never left her memory for the rest of her life. It happened like this:

While their lives were confined to a narrow cycle of waking, eating, gathering, cooking, rape and sleeping, they were allowed to go to the river to wash themselves and the gathered food every few days. Fawn seemed to have regained just a bit of her strength. When Dove faltered, Fawn helped her twin carry her basket of tubers, whispering to her to keep strength.

On this day, as the women washed, several new Mk*tk hunters had joined the group. T’Cori had the impression that their current habitat was some kind of temporary boma, that Flat-Nose was their chief, and that others of his people were gathering slowly, perhaps for a push northward.

T’Cori’s mind was drifting away again when a sudden, panicked scream tethered her to earth. She twisted around in time to see a crocodile lunge up from the water. Almost as long as two of her, its pebbled moss-green flesh dripped water, rows of gleaming teeth flashing as it buried them in Fawn’s arm.

Suddenly awakening from her trance, Fawn twisted, struggling desperately to tear herself away. Blood gouted over the crocodile’s snout as it dragged her into the water.

With one great despairing wail, Fawn disappeared beneath the surface.

Dove screamed, a sound like a throat being torn out with hooks.

T’Cori heard herself scream, the shock rooting her in place.

Fawn surfaced one more time, eyes impossibly wide, her distended face glistening with water. Her mouth jetted blood and a single wet scream, and then she was gone.

Her basket of tubers floated away in the current.

The Mk*tk ran about, jabbing ineffectually at the water with their spears, confused and perhaps even frightened. When they finally grasped that there was nothing to be done, they pulled the other women back from the banks and to the cave.

T’Cori felt nothing. She struggled to find some shred of emotion, but it seemed that the pain of the last days had burned something out of her heart. She heard the screams, remembered her sister’s distended face, saw the blood slick on the muddied banks…and felt nothing.

All she could think of was that a crocodile’s teeth were not the worst possible instruments of death.

T’Cori had wound her way to the world of waking dream, a safe space, very different from the hellish state of Dove and Quiet Water, who had screamed and sobbed and then yielded into a dull, beaten, barely human state. She escaped into this distant world when Flat-Nose came to sex her.

As terrible as it was, on some other level she began to grasp that Flat-Nose was not actually trying to
hurt
her. Rather, he was trying to make her a woman of the Others, pouring his seed into her that she might grow heavy with child.

His
child.

She could only pray that his seed would fail to root.

She looked down at her body, trying to see her
num
-fire. Should she have been able to see it? To sense whether or not she was pregnant? Perhaps once that ability had been hers, but not now.

Slowly, the dream-world became a place of refuge to her. On successive nights she came to know it well. It was a world of feeling and symbol and memory, and it welcomed her into its depths.

She dreamt of Mother and Father, She deep within the earth, He atop Great Sky, T’Cori’s imaginings of what such a being might be, and what might protect His kingdom. A fearsome dream.

She did not see Great Sky as mountain or as not-mountain. This dream had come before, and never, upon awakening, could she be certain what she had seen or experienced. Never could she relate her knowledge to others. It seemed that there were no Ibandi words for the new perceptions, and without words, she could not hold on to the experience.

She sensed more than saw Their mighty presence. In Their way, with dance and gesture of arm, leg and hand rather than words, Mother and Father spoke to her. “Who are you, my child?”

“My name is T’Cori, of the Ibandi,” she said.

“And why do you come to Us?”

She spoke to Them with the yearnings of a child who has never had a father or mother, one who dreamt that perhaps the greatest of all parents would be those loving Ones. “I have been captured. Our hunters were killed, and I am badly used. Please help me.”

The darkness roiled. For a moment she saw something resembling a nose and a face. Could this be truth? Could human eyes see Great Mother and Her mate? “Your fate is yours, and you must walk your path. But there will always be a safe place for you,” She danced. “Here, with Me.”

“Can I please stay?” Even to herself, T’Cori’s voice sounded small and still.

She looked down from the mountain’s mystic heights. She saw a small girl from Great Earth bent over a log. Her hands were lashed down. The giant Flat-Nose stood behind her, pushing rhythmically. His hands clutched her hips, his head thrown back as his thighs slapped against her buttocks. His fellows watched and laughed and clapped along in time with his thrusts as he rutted for his own pleasure and the entertainment of his brothers.

Behind him were two other Mk*tk, impatiently awaiting their turn.

“Please?” she begged.

Her mighty voice was filled with regret. “It is not more than you can bear,” She said.

“How can you know?” T’Cori whispered.

No answer.

Worse, she had begun to fragment. The single voice in her head was becoming a confused, frightened chorus. She was being pulled back into the world of pain and shame. “Help me!” she pled. “I don’t want them to take me again.”

Great Mother took her hand. “I won’t let you go. Stay with Me awhile.”

She enfolded T’Cori in Her arms. And in that mighty embrace T’Cori slept, safe at last.