Shadow Valley (13 page)

“God Blood watches us,” said Flat-Nose. “He knows our strength and courage and smells shit in the guts we spilled. Know that he is pleased.”

Bone Knife grinned. “What we did to those few weaklings, we could do to all their bomas.”

“We do not know how many there are. We must learn.” Flat-Nose said.

“But they killed so many of us before,” Broken Sharp Tooth said.

“Did you not see that their men were gone?” Flat-Nose snarled, angered by his hunter’s weakness. “That we killed them at will and took their women?” He slammed his fist upon the ground. “God Blood screams for vengeance. He says our time is coming.” His eyes blazed. “No. I lie. He says our time has
come.”

All the rest of the night they sang their death songs. They had been good sons and brothers and fathers. If they could live the rest of their days from their balls, at the moment of death they would feel in their flesh not the fangs of wolves or jackals but those of God Blood Himself.

Then they would be part of His flesh. His teeth would be theirs, for all time, ravaging all of creation.

After the pain came the power.

Great Sky’s slopes were choked with thornbushes and vine-thronged trees, and rich with four-legged game. Only as the slopes steepened did the vegetation thin, and only as the mountain rose so high that the land below seem peopled by ants did the mountain breezes cool. Finally, the thickly seeded slopes yielded to desert and from there to the only snows to be found anywhere in their world.

At the very top, the eruption had torn chunks away, melting the white cap and flattening the peak.

But before one reached such rarefied heights, in Great Sky’s forests could be found the finest hunting beneath Father Mountain’s sky.

Five Ibandi stalked Great Sky’s lower slopes. Three were from the cardinal bomas: Moon Runner and Sun Runner from Earth, Fast Tortoise from Wind. The fourth was Boar Tracks, the last surviving hunt chief. The fifth was Rock Climber, his brother.

“How goes the hunt?” Fast Tortoise asked.

“I will not climb these slopes again,” muttered Sun Runner.

“You saw the ghost?”

Sun Runner nodded fervently. “Yes, just for a moment. I am sure it was one of the dead hunt chiefs. I tell you, they return from heaven!”

Boar Tracks bristled. He was a tall, handsome hunter who had lived five hands of summers. He was the last of the chiefs, alive only because he had not been on Great Sky the night the mountain died.

Did the death of the mountain mean the death of their god? There was
no one left to answer. Boar Tracks wished he could still consult with the elder hunt chiefs. With any hunt chiefs at all. He had never felt so alone.

Now he’d had word that Rock boma had been destroyed. Signs of Mk*tk raiders—so their loss in the Mk*tk wars had not been a permanent wall, merely slowing their progress. What now? If the dead had been seen on Great Sky, might it mean that the hunt chiefs would return to them?

“Why can he not come to us? Why would he hide in the shadows if he is one of ours? I say he is beast-man.” The beast-men were people, he supposed. Not Ibandi, not Mk*tk, not even bhan. Barely more than monkeys, in his thinking, they lived in the sacred caves on Great Earth. Surely, the “ghost” was nothing more than such a wretched creature, far from home.

Sun Runner and his son Moon Runner were both fleshy men of great strength and skill. Scarred in battle and the hunt, their support of Boar Tracks would be critical to his future plans. There was no one left to lead the Ibandi. Surely, they needed Boar Tracks. Sun Runner tended to agree with him but was not yet convinced of his right to leadership. Well, a brisk session in the wrestling circle would cure
that.
“Perhaps the dead lose their way?”

“We hunt,” Moon Hunter said. “I would meet this ghost for myself.”

“Where did you see him?” Boar asked.

“It was near the big rock, where the water runs,” Sun Runner said.

“Then that is where we will go.”

Timing breathing to footsteps, the men hiked up the mountain. Green sprouts on every trough of the avalanche-plowed earth proclaimed that the eruption’s damage had begun to heal. Blasted trees still lay scattered like toys discarded by an angry, infant god.

Boar Tracks lowered his cupped hands into the stream. He set one foot against a mossy log and splashed his face, wiping down the salt to discourage mosquitoes. He’d searched all morning and had yet to see anything remotely resembling a ghost. What would a ghost track look like? Until he knew, he would look for footprints, bruised leaves, broken twigs, scat … anything that might assist in his search.

Everywhere, the mountain’s death throes burned his eyes: frozen rivers of mud, splintered trees, boulders and crushed brush funneled into a tumbled confusion. Frog and Sky Woman had seen all this while the mud still steamed and the demons roamed freely. Boar Tracks had not made that climb. Every night, before he slept, he asked himself if he had been a coward not to.

No. He had been right. Frog had returned from the mountain babbling that the gods wished the Ibandi to abandon their home. Someone needed to lead the Ibandi to their future. Frog and Sky Woman had fled. Boar Tracks would stand.

“What happened here?” Boar asked.

Moon Runner shrugged. “Is this where the gods died?”

“Died?” Boar asked.

“I do not know much, but it looks like death to me.”

“Look,” Rock Climber said.

There, partially hidden beneath a slurry of dried mud and a covering of morning frost, gaped a cave mouth as high as a man’s waist. It looked as if an enormous rodent had dug away at the left corner, so that a tunnel led down through the debris.

Single file, they crawled through the narrow hole into the darkness and damp.

Boar Tracks wrapped moss around a dry stick and struck fire, fanning it into full flame. When he stood, a pale red tide washed the adobe walls. “The kiva,” Boar Tracks murmured. “I was just a boy when first I came here. And after that there were many, many ceremonies….”

“I lost my foreskin here.” Moon Runner held up his torch. “But I never came again. There was nothing in all the world I wanted so much as to be a hunt chief. I was not chosen.”

“I was chosen,” Boar said. “At the time, I thought it a great thing.” No regret or resentment tainted his voice. Sadness, perhaps. “Now, they are all dead.”

Boar held a torch up to the walls. “It looks as if someone clawed this out with his hands.” The flickering light revealed scraps of fruit, a gnawed skunk hide, some rat tails, a handful of charred sticks. “Someone has eaten, slept here.”

“Who?” Moon Runner asked. “Beast-men?”

Boar shrugged, trying to act unconcerned, but the back of his neck burned.

They crawled back out and spent a quarter examining the rest of the site. Most hunt chiefs’ corpses had been unearthed by now, but from time to time hunters discovered another screaming skeleton.

No bones this time, but Moon Runner dropped and traced his finger in a heel-shaped imprint. “A man.”

“Ibandi?” Rock Climber asked.

Sun Runner knelt beside his son. Half a heel mark and three shallow toe indentions. “Who can say?”

Mk*tk? No, too small. But Boar Tracks knew he was looking at the print of an adult male. This much he could say but, like Sun Runner, could not go further to say if it was Ibandi, bhan or one of the outlying tribes. Why couldn’t he tell? He was certain his dead brothers would have known at once.

But then, he had never been the best of them. Since the mountain died, he seemed to have lost whatever special
num
he might have once possessed.

Beside him, Rock Climber gasped. Boar Tracks spun to see a bone-thin figure approaching through a stand of young bamboo. From head to toe, his brown skin was smeared white with ash.

“A ghost?” the hunt chief asked. The ash-covered man stared at them.

Fear.
Boar Tracks clenched his belly, seized control of his breathing.
Breathe like a brave man, feel like a brave man
, Cloud Stalker had sworn. “Do I know you?” Boar Tracks asked, and gave his name.

“And I am Sun Runner,” the gray-hair beside him said.

The ash-covered figure seemed dazed. “I …” He shook his head.

With every breath, the ghost’s ribs poked through his skin, so that he resembled nothing so much as a mud-covered skeleton. He held out one scalded, trembling hand. “Food,” he said.

They offered the ghost a handful of dried antelope. He ate ravenously, then emptied their water gourds. Moon Runner handed him a piece of dried yam. As the others gathered around him, mystified, the stranger satisfied his appetite.

“Are you a hunt chief?” Moon Runner ventured.

Boar Tracks tensed. The hunt chiefs were dead.
He was
the last. What was this creature?

The ash man shrugged. “I do not know.”

“Did you battle with demons? Did the dead water rise and suck your strength?”

The ash man’s eyes glittered. “Yes,” he mumbled. “I think I did.”

“This is a great day,” Rock Climber said, “a great, great day. A master hunter has returned from the dead!”

The ash man squatted, face buried in his hands, as if desperately pondering their words. Then he looked up. “I was!” he screamed. “I was in hell! I saw the dead animals dancing in their bones. They tried to catch me, but I was too fast!” Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, he began to speak.

“Father Mountain told me to fight the demons,” the ash man said. “I am a son of the mountain. When asked, I fought!” He danced and whirled and mimed hunting and fighting. Stiffly at first and then with growing fluidity he crouched and pounced and thrust.

“And what happened then?” Sun Runner asked.

“And when I won,” the ash man said, “our mighty god brought me back to the world, back so I might speak His words.”

Moon Runner jumped to his feet and raised his arms to the sky. “Behold the miracle!” he crowed. “He has come to lead us.”

The ash man’s eyes glittered. “Say this again.”

“I said that you were sent by Father Mountain to lead us.”

The ash man’s stained teeth gleamed.

On the mountain that night, swaddled in skins and with a full belly for the first time in his strange and splintered memory, the ash man dreamed:

He saw his people frightened, scattered, crying for answers no man could offer. So seven were chosen to ask questions of Father Mountain Himself. The climb was an endless nightmare of fatigue and terror. Two had perished, a medicine girl and a hunter. Another hunter had gone lame and been left behind.

Frog and the nameless girl and the ash man had stood atop the damaged summit and felt the icy breath of Father Mountain. The nameless one said that Father Mountain demanded their people flee the Mk*tk, find new homes.

He himself had heard nothing.

They descended, exhausted and disoriented, and it came to him that the nameless girl must die. It was the only answer! The witch said that the Ibandi should run rather than fight. His fool of a brother refused to kill her. Fire Ant attempted to slay the witch, knowing that if she died, Frog would fall in line.

Instead of helping, a bewitched Frog smashed a rock into his head. The ash man saw the rock coming, tumbling through the air, swelling as it approached. He could have moved.
Should
have moved, but could not, somehow entranced by the spin.

Pain. Blackness. The next thing he knew, he was on his knees. At that moment, as if his senses had been heightened by pain, he glimpsed the witch’s fire. It was … beautiful. A bright blue at the edge, a shimmering cloud of creeping flame with fist-sized shadows floating within.

Still, all night he had hunted for the two of them. But before he could lay hands upon the witch he plunged through the ice into a clay tube boiling with steam. He could not see, could not think. Could do nothing but scream.

The pain drove him out of his mind. When he awakened, the steam was gone.

Blistered, groaning, he crawled out.

He remembered little of what next occurred.

For moons he wandered half crazed, eating whatever carrion he could
scavenge or half-rotted tubers he could claw from the earth. His blisters finally healed, and he was able to sleep an entire night without waking with his own screams in his ears. He was a wild two-legged living on the mountain, wandering with no thought of returning to the lowlands. Why would the dead return to the land of the living?

For certainly, this was what it was to be dead. Wasn’t it? He was so alone. If all men who died went to Father Mountain, where were they? Where are the others? Why was he so alone?

He remembered finding a stack of rocks, and he knew there was something within it that was important to him. What was it about these rocks? Drawn with charcoal, the symbols for “hawk” and “shadow.” Slowly, the pieces came back to him. The importance was …

Was …

This was not merely a stack of rocks. It was the marker for a grave. But whose grave? And why did he care? In a hell so vast and lonely that one dead man could not find another, of what importance was a single grave?