Great Sky Woman (40 page)

Chapter Fifty-five

Just above Frog, Uncle Snake’s old arms were unsteady as he searched for handholds. Frog paced his breathing, almost as if he was running up the vertical wall. Who had first done this thing? Who had cut the first steps in this wall? How long had they been there? Were they cut anew every year? Every generation? He was too exhausted to call out his questions to Snake, but they tumbled crazily around and around in his head like shrikes with broken wings. How many attempts had this taken? How many lives had been lost in the conquest?

T’Cori was just below Fire Ant and ahead of Scorpion. She climbed with her face aglow, all suffering and pain temporarily forgotten, suffused with an ecstasy of sheer effort. The other girl, Raven, was between Uncle Snake and Hawk Shadow, ahead of Frog. She was larger and stronger than T’Cori but climbed as if she was a lizard.

It was cold, cold of a kind he had never experienced. Frog’s limbs felt as heavy as wet logs. Even considering the intensity of the effort, he was left unusually drained, as if he had made the climb carrying Wasp on his back. Frog gasped for air, and no matter how much he sucked down, it didn’t seem to help.

One at a time they made it to the top. Hawk Shadow pulled Frog up. He and Snake helped Fire Ant, who in turn helped T’Cori and Scorpion and Raven. They lay panting for a time. As they waited for their hearts to stop pounding they drank a little water from their skins and ate some dried meat. As they rested, Frog studied the next territory: a plain of ice and splintered rock that opened onto a rocky flat desert like those found far to the south and west.

The skin on his face felt as if it was burning, the sun blazing bright enough to blind him. They struggled to push themselves, not knowing how long they could continue such effort, but the harder they pushed, the more strength seemed to leach from their bodies.

They tried singing songs, chanting, anything to keep the breath in their lungs, but it simply wasn’t enough.

“We must go more slowly,” Snake gasped. “More slowly.”

“If we do, then we freeze,” Hawk said, anger and fear mingled in his voice.

The air was as dry as sand, and the wind cut them like bamboo whips. There were very few plants, only lichens and small mosses. They saw no animals save a few crows. There was little to keep anything alive. They saw a mouse once, skittering between the harsh shadows. It, like the eland, stared at Frog and then disappeared.

Here on this new plateau there was something on the ground that Frog had not seen before, and he bent to touch it. It was cold, gray-black on the surface, but pale beneath. As he rubbed the stuff between his fingers, it melted away.

He sniffed. “What is this?” he asked, hands shaking.

“Dead water,” Snake said. “They call it ice.”

“Then, it came to life in my hands,” he said.

He bent beside a tiny stream. Some kind of cold clear matter covered the water, and he cracked it with a rap of his knuckles, and then bent to sip.

Dead water? Live water? It was colder by far than anything he had ever touched, but still delicious. In one place, they were actually traversing a patch of the odd stuff, and Hawk Shadow’s foot smashed through into wetness beneath. He was more startled than hurt, and they chuckled as he pulled his leg back out.

“Wet!” he said, and laughed at himself, shaking the water from his feet.

Late that day Snake saw more signs, and led them to a cave just large enough to hold both the seven Ibandi and a tiny fire. T’Cori had never been so happy for a fire in her life. The walls were close enough to concentrate the heat, keeping the brutal cold at bay as if it was a starving lion gnashing its teeth just outside the cave’s mouth.

Despite the weather, T’Cori was in good spirits. As the rest of them grumbled and joked to hide their fear, she felt herself really nearing the presence of her gods for the first time. She was almost fevered with anticipation.

They all huddled together for warmth. Raven trembled, arms wrapped around herself, squeezing the skins against her body, seeking warmth. Without a word, T’Cori drew her close, and they hugged there in the cave. She let Raven cling to her, shared her heat. “Why aren’t you cold?” Raven asked.

“Control your breathing, as your mother taught,” T’Cori said. “Pull it down into your belly and light the fire.” Raven nodded and closed her eyes. Almost immediately her shivering decreased.

The next day it took Frog almost a quarter of walking before he felt alive and loose. They wound through more of the dry, rocky plateau, littered with great startling rocks that looked as if they had never been weathered by wind and dust.

Up higher, the dead water grew thicker, and actually began to blow from the sky as flakes. The rocks were covered with the white-gray stuff. When they reached a slick, pale wall they tried to climb it. Wherever it touched their skin, it seemed to suck the life away. Fire Ant tried to climb, but his feet scrabbled without finding purchase.

“What do we do, Uncle Snake?” Frog asked. “Where do we climb?”

Snake peered up at the wall, the confusion written clearly on his face. Had things changed so much? “I…I don’t—”

“Over here!” Scorpion cried. Off to the left, around a curve, the wall was broken into a tumble of icy boulders. The shears looked unweathered, and Frog suspected it had happened recently.

And then, without any warning, Uncle Snake began to scream.

“We can’t!” he said as the dead water blew around them. “The hunt chiefs tried but never were able to go farther.”

Frog stopped breathing. All the sound in the world seemed to stop as well.
What?
What had Snake just said?

“What are you saying?” Hawk said, their faces very close.

Snake could not withstand the blunt force of Hawk’s wrath, and turned away. “We lied,” he said. “We lied to all of you. No one has ever been to the top. Ten tens of men have died trying. It cannot be done.”

Scorpion stared at his father, mouth open in disbelief.

“Did Stillshadow know?” Raven asked, eyes wide with horror and betrayal.

“Cloud Stalker never told her,” he said, “But I think she suspected. Perhaps she would have warned you. I do not know.”

They stood gape-mouthed and disbelieving. “We have to turn back,” he said. “I’d hoped that we could make it. I’d thought that perhaps we would find the strength. I was a fool.”

Frog gazed at the cleft in the great wall, the place where, perhaps only a moon before, a titanic slab of rock and dead water had burst away like the flesh of a sun-rotted melon, and a cascade of boiling mud had cleansed the mountain.

Distantly, far down the slope, wolves howled.

Frog thought of the terrible suffering they had already endured, and the brothers and cousins glanced at one another.

“Who wants to go back?”

Snake’s legs seemed to melt as Fire Ant screamed, “We trusted you, and you lied.” Fire Ant slapped Snake, the man who had married their mother, who had fed them, who had raised them. Again and again Fire Ant struck, until Snake’s scars ran with blood. Snake took it, never struck back, did not even raise an arm to deflect the blows.

Hawk Shadow gripped at Fire Ant’s arm, trying to hold his brother back as Ant vented his frustration and fear.

“No!” Hawk said. “That is
enough.
”

Snake dropped his head.

“You are my father no longer,” Scorpion said. “To think you tried to shame me during my manhood ceremony. To think how I sought your approval. I would have done anything for you!” he screamed. “Go, liar. Go, coward.”

Snake stood, blood drooling from his lips to spatter on the ground. The spiderweb of scars covering the left side of his face had never seemed so brutal, his empty eye socket had never gaped so darkly.

Frog gripped Snake’s hand. His uncle, the man who had been the only father Frog had ever known, trembled with shame and cold. Who knew what he felt, the reasons that the hunt chiefs had lied to them all?

Then Snake pulled his hand from Frog’s and began his walk down the mountain.

“What does this mean?” Hawk asked, watching the old man retreat. “There is nothing up there?”

Frog was deadly calm. “That the top
cannot
be reached. That there is nothing there. That it was all a lie.”

The wind howled around them, driving the cold more deeply into their bones.

“What do we do?” Raven asked. At that moment she seemed to have lost her mother’s power. She was just a tired, frightened young woman.

“I don’t—” Hawk Shadow began.

“We climb,” T’Cori broke in, closing her eyes. “In my dreams, I have seen the top, and they are there. The spirits are there. Father Mountain is there. If we go back, our people die. We must go on.”

So close. It seemed that they could almost see the summit now.

Onward they would go.

The rock-and-ice wall facing them was impossible to climb. No handholds had been cut in years past. One slip could mean a lethal fall. Their fur-wrapped feet would never find safe purchase, and their numbed fingers would fail.

So they journeyed west around the wall, until Scorpion called: “Look!”

There in the ice, a river of boiling mud had burned a tunnel as tall as a crouching man. How far had it come? How far would it reach? Was it possible that it might take them around this impossible wall?

They backtracked far enough to gather wood to fashion into torches, then climbed back to the tunnel. Hawk’s hands trembled as he made the fire, but when at last it obeyed his summons they lit torches and climbed the river of mud. The walls of the tunnel were of blue ice, and sometimes jutting slabs of rock. Frog moved slowly, testing his footing, the glow of the torches reflecting back strangely, like the moon’s reflection on a calm night. The tunnel rose at a shallow angle, and there were points where the ice and dried mud beneath their feet was actually warm.

Without warning, gusts of warm moist air gushed up from the tunnel floor. “It feels like a woman’s breath,” Frog chuckled.

“She’d have to have the biggest mouth ever,” Scorpion laughed uneasily. “I feel it all over my body—”

Something in his voice, a sudden stressed rise in pitch, made Frog turn around. His brother’s eyes were like twin flaming moons, impossibly wide, his mouth pursed in a surprised circle.

The ground beneath him sagged, a jagged crack running from one side of the tunnel to the other.

He tried to take a step away from the unstable area, when suddenly he dropped a handsbreadth and a scalding gout of steam swallowed him.

Oh, how Scorpion screamed! The pain and fear in that cry would echo in Frog’s ears for many moons, haunting his sleep.

Frog fell backward, shocked, his brothers screaming around him. When his eyes cleared he saw Scorpion, body wedged halfway into the earth. He howled and thrashed. They clutched at his arms trying to pull him out, but then the ground cracked more and he slipped from their grasp. Another steam flower blossomed in the tunnel, and they ran, Scorpion’s screams ringing in their ears.

“Demons!” Raven cried. “Fire demons!”

They fled upward, the steam billowing in pursuit. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Fire Ant screamed, and clawed his way ahead of all of them. The steam caught them, and was almost but not quite hot enough to sear their skin.

They reached a point where they could see light above them in the tunnel, and climbed up the curved sides to the surface, helping one another.

T’Cori was the first, but not strong enough to help them. Hawk Shadow was next, and he and Fire Ant helped Raven up.

Frog was the last.

They stood there at the top, waiting, and then called down into the darkness. “Scorpion!” they called. “Scorpion!” but they heard nothing. Frog sagged to his knees.

His cousin. His stepbrother. Cruel, and cowardly, and loyal. For all things, good and bad, that Scorpion might have or have not been, the most important was that he was Frog’s stepbrother. They had run together, eaten together, slept side by side in the hut for so long, he knew if Scorpion was there by the smell of his breath alone.

Fair and foul, Scorpion had been his brother. And now he was gone.

Raven clutched at his arm. “One who dies here, on the mountain,” she said, “is already in heaven. You will see him again.”

Frog was too tired to argue with her, too heartsick not to hope that she was right. He would see Scorpion again.

If an afterlife still existed.

They found themselves in a crystal valley, amid countless ice mounds sculpted by the flow of hot mud, and amid cairns taller than a hand of men. The ground beneath their feet was of frozen mud, and the ice fell from the sky upon them. Strangely, the traction was actually better here, where the mud had thickened.

Raven paused on their march. Until now, the girl had stopped frequently, seeming to grow weaker by the breath, but now she seemed inspired.

“She is here,” Raven said. “I can feel Great Mother.” She appeared to have regained herself. They could see Stillshadow’s strength in her eyes, hear it in her voice. When she looked at T’Cori, her smile deepened. “Do you feel her?” she asked. T’Cori nodded rapidly, the ice caking her hair.