Shadow Valley

Summer’s warm rains had long since riven the earth, then dried again to dust. Three moons would wax and wane before the winter rivers swelled within their graveled banks.

Hot Tree had lived most of her adult life in Fire boma, the bamboo-walled cluster of huts a day’s walk southeast of Great Sky. Now her hair was streaked with white, her brown skin deeply wrinkled, her breasts empty sacks. Years had cooled the fire in her dancing feet. She felt both hollow and heavy, and knew it would not be long before Father Mountain summoned her bones.

So much had changed in the past few moons.

For generations unknown the Ibandi had lived within the sheltering shadows of the mountains called Great Sky and Great Earth. The peaks were home to Father Mountain and Great Mother, whose timeless passion had birthed the world.

Three moons ago, Great Sky had exploded, the cataclysm wreathing the sky in stinking smoke and spewing rivers of boiling mud down its verdant slopes. Trees had been wrenched up by the roots, tumbling like dead brush. The Ibandi hunt chiefs had died. Some believed the god Himself had perished, but Hot Tree did not, though she well believed that the explosion was a sign of His displeasure with their wickedness.

Whatever the truth might be, a second disaster soon struck. From the south came the Mk*tk, brutal men who killed many and even stole three of the sacred dream dancers. The bloody war had almost undone the Ibandi.
If Hot Tree’s daughter had not brought her here to Water boma, Tree did not know what might have become of her.

Much had changed since then. Sky Woman, the girl who had earned her name by climbing Great Sky, had fled north with half the tribe, accompanied by her lover, Frog Hopping, who had climbed Great Sky with her in search of wisdom. Some said he was a mighty hunter, but Tree had never been impressed by Frog. Both his elder brothers, greater providers by far, had died on the great mountain, but their widows, Ember and Flamingo, had traveled north with Frog.

Hot Tree inhaled deeply. The afternoon air reeked of burnt grass. She stood just outside the boma’s bamboo gate at the edge of the wide blackened zone singed every moon to deny hiding space to leopards. Beyond that dark space, grass grew knee-high, and beyond that the plain was broken by round and flat-topped trees and dusky scrub ranging out to a thinly ridged northern horizon. The air smelled of dust and burnt thornbush.

Her old eyes could just barely distinguish a hyena’s brownish-gray pelt, lurking a spear’s throw from the edge of the blackened zone.

Another four or five spear casts distant loped three giraffes, two adults and one calf half the height of its parents. Even as she watched, they dissolved into the shimmering air, much like the cloud creatures the strange boy Frog had so often babbled of.

Night Song approached from behind. Hot Tree would have known that tread among tens of others: Song’s rotten left knee caused her to drag that leg a bit. No hunter’s accident or thieving disease had caused this, only that great hyena, time itself.

“I wonder where they are?” she said, not realizing she had spoken aloud.

“Stillshadow?” Night Song’s hair had faded to gray stubble. At times it was difficult to see the nimble young dancer trapped within her twisted, heavy frame. Despite her age, Song’s voice was still honey, and her dark eyes brimmed with curiosity. Song was Hot Tree’s sister-in-law, an old and valued friend. “Gazelle? Sky Woman?”

“Yes. And Snake,” she said. “Sweet Snake. When he was young, and I was not yet old …” Her smile was both bitter and sweet. Despite the intervening years, the memory remained a deep, swift ache.

“Do you wish you had gone with them?” Song asked.

Hot Tree sighed. “It is strange. Fire boma seemed so hollow. Then, I thought I was too old to go along. Now I fear I was not young enough to stay.” The old ways were shattered. If
… if
the Ibandi could rebuild, that new world belonged to young skin, not old bones, even such sacred bones as Mother Stillshadow’s.

“Perhaps they will return,” Night Song ventured. “They will learn it is safe and come back to us.”

Hot Tree made a clucking sound. “And how will they learn that?”

“What?”

“How will they see that it is safe? Are we to send runners? We do not know where they are.”

Song shivered. “I made a song,” she said. Many of their people forged habits that complemented their birth names. “I sing it to my daughters, and as I go to sleep …” She described it, sang a bit. It spoke of the old woman who had birthed so many of them, named most of them, and whose acolytes sung the sun to life each dawn. “Perhaps she will hear my song,” she concluded, “and they will return….” Her voice trailed off, as if unable to convince even herself.