Shadow Valley (28 page)

She placed his hand on her swollen belly. “Fool. We
are
a family. But I cannot be your wife.” She turned away from him. “Leopard Eye washed my child, and now Leopard Eye is dead. I do not wish you to die.”

“T’Cori,” Frog said, “I sexed with Fawn Blossom, and she was taken. She died. When we were together after you ran from the Mk*tk, you asked if I would sex with you, and I said no. That was why.”

“Because you thought that sexing Fawn might have caused her death?”

“Why not? You say that because you and Leopard Eye sexed, he died.”

He pulled her more tightly to him. “There was no sin. That is
my
child inside you. I can smell it.
My
child. And I would wish no man dead for washing my child.”

She gazed down into the valley’s bowl. He could taste the teeming gazelle and giraffe and zebra … the smell and feel of it all dizzied him.

“It is like a dream,” she said.

“You hold my child in your belly.
My
child. Not Father Mountain’s. It is time I claimed you. Is it not best for a child to know his father?”

“His father might be a god.”

“No!” Frog crushed her painfully tight. “I gave you that seed.
My
seed. My son. And no one, man or god, will stand between me and my son.”

Her eyes flew wide. “You speak sin!”

He was prepared to do far more than that. All the terror he had controlled for the entire day suddenly exploded into rage against the gods she believed in, gods that had been willing to have their priestess devoured alive.

How could he make her understand? It was
men
who had saved her, not gods. “Sin?” he said. “Then let the wind whistle in my hollow bones. For you I climbed to the top of the world. I stood with you against my brother, and so he died. For you, I walked ten tens of horizons. You are my woman, and you will make me your man.”

She tried to match his stare, and finally quailed, leaning the top of her head against his chest. “Frog,” she said. “Frog. Once, I wanted nothing in the world more than to be yours. I wanted to taste your breath in my mouth, feel your skin so close I knew not where mine stopped and yours began. I was shown that those dreams were wrong.”

“They were never wrong.”

“They were never right,” she replied.

“We can
make
them right. You and I. In this new world, where men walk with wolves,
we
say what is right and what is not. These are
all
our children, even the graybeards. You and I climbed the mountain.” He spoke as if the idea amazed him still.

T’Cori shook her head. “Frog, Great Sky
let
us climb Him. And then allowed us to return to our people. For our own purposes? No. For His.”

“I don’t understand,” Frog said.

“No, you don’t. Once I hoped that you would see the world I see, but you do not. Perhaps cannot. As I do not see the faces in the clouds. We were given different eyes. Trust me,” she said. “I see what He wants.”

And this thought, at last, made him pause. “What does He want?”

“He wants His children to live,” she said. “And grow. To find new places. To love and have children.”

“Does He want us to be together?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think He does.”

Frog grinned. Gazelle Tears, Flamingo and Ember would dance to hear the words he now wished to speak, to know the emotions bursting in his heart. “Then He is a good god.” Frog grinned. “And I will love Him again.”

For many days, Fire Ant and his men had run north seeking signs of Frog. Now, at last, the signs had grown clearer.

Here at the riverbank the ground was cracked and dry, the easier for Fire Ant to read the footprints and the double tracks of Stillshadow’s sled. This was a very good thing: if they were still carrying the head dream dancer, then it stood to reason that she was still alive.

His people had crossed here, and from the growth of brush he reckoned no more than two moons before. He and his men were closer. The hunters were closing the gap on the prey

Ten men could travel faster than tens of families, with their old women and children to slow them down. That knowledge gave him confidence, and he pushed onward.

Flat-Nose sheltered himself in the shade of a bushy-topped live-long tree, relishing the smell of blood and shit from the Ibandi hunter they had nailed to its trunk.

They would get no answers from the dying man. He had been gutting a freshly killed zebra when they had come upon him. The weakling had run like a woman and then fought like a girl.

Dove was not with them, so there had been no way to translate his groveling
answers. Flat-Nose needed none, merely anticipated the pleasure of cooking and eating the striped kill before the Ibandi’s bleeding, dying eyes.

Flat-Nose had the tracks of his true prey, could pick them out of countless others. He would find the man who had ended his brother’s line. Soon, Flat-Nose would find the monkey and peel him.

Three double hands of his clan traveled with him, battle scarred and ready to sing their death songs. None had a goal greater than spilling their enemies’ guts. Then they would probe the steaming mass of their innards for answers. The greater the foe, the more powerful the magic.

These Ibandi were powerful enemies. The men seemed almost like women, but they had had enough fire in their blood to enter Mk*tk territory and kill their children. There was something pure in that, and their response was just as pure.

Flat-Nose stood in the shade of the man they had spiked to the tree. Their enemy was traveling north, or had been, moons ago. But Flat-Nose smelled the wind and caught a whiff of something blowing from the west. A stench of weaklings. Flat-Nose thought his enemy was following the herds. According to his people’s stories, the herds traveled north and then swept back south.

That meant that if he went toward the setting sun, he could cut moons off their pursuit. Catch the Ibandi.

Kill them.

All.

Most of their shared campground was quiet now, but Frog sat by the fire, watching the camp’s outer edge, where a few Vokka lay curled on their sides, sleeping. As he watched, a wolf padded in from the darkness to sleep next to the tall gap-toothed man named Thal.

“Look. Another wolf,” Snake whispered as a gray-muzzled beast padded in from the shadows. “Let’s watch, and see if it melts into a man.”

Frog said nothing. If he remained awake and alert, would he be rewarded with such a miraculous sight?

“Wolves,” Snake whispered in Frog’s ear. “How can you stand to rest so close to them? With their fangs so close to your only child? Wolves killed your brother.”

“Time kills us all. I do not hate time.”

“You are the strangest man in the world,” Snake said.

“Are they really wolves?” Frog asked. “Are the Vokka really men?”

“Yes, I think them men.”

“See that the Vokka trust them with their children.”

“Then,” Snake whispered, “the Vokka are ugly fools.”

Uncle Snake rolled over to his own space, and was soon snoring. Frog lay down, and kept one eye open as long as he could. He did not know when he fell asleep, but he did know that, so far as he could see that night, no wolves transformed into men.

• • •

Clumsily at first, but gaining grace with every passing day, Ibandi and Vokka began a dance older than either people. They shared tubers and nuts and ways of constructing huts. They compared ways of dancing, sharpening knives and splinting broken bones. T’Cori found the Vokka hard on the eyes but human, kind and, she thought, good.

Ibandi and Vokka men fell at once into competition with one another. Who could jump highest? Run fastest or longest? The Vokka had the edge in raw physical power, but T’Cori found them a little slow to grasp nuance.

But if males came to know each other by test, women accomplished the same thing by sharing.

The leader’s soft-eyed woman was called Kiya. Kiya was apparently the aunt—or older sister—of the rescued child, whose name was Rushing River. Thal, whose name meant “Tall One,” was either father or uncle.

Kiya was heavy with child, but still spry and strong enough to caper with the others, and encouraged T’Cori to join them.

For a moon following T’Cori’s flight from the lions the two expectant mothers had shared a nightly dance, the others clapping and cheering to their odd meld of skill and clumsiness. Then one night, their good fortune ended.

The drums had pounded, the twin fires leaped and roared. The very stars above shimmered in time with their calls. Suddenly, Kiya clutched her belly and fell to the side, her legs glistening wet in the firelight. T’Cori caught her before her head struck the ground, both crying out as if they shared a single heart.

Kiya’s kin helped her onto a grass mat and began the business of bringing a new child into the world. T’Cori sat with her, holding Kiya’s thick strong hand, rocking back and forth and saying what few words of comfort and reassurance she knew in Vokka.

Their efforts were of no use. The baby was born backward and bluish, the cord wrapped around her neck. Dead.

Blood smeared Kiya’s legs, muddied the mat beneath her.

T’Cori watched, forgotten, as the dead child was bundled and put to the side, and the Vokka women fussed over their sister.

From their efforts T’Cori realized that the Vokka knew nothing of stop-bleed, the flowers that could slow the seepage. She still had a handful of the crumbly dried purple blossoms in the medicine bag slung around her shoulders. Within a quarter she had brewed the potion, adding other herbs to make it stronger.

She brought the brew to Kiya and her sisters, and made sign for her
friend to taste it. The woman was feverish by now, too delirious to decide. But her sisters had danced with T’Cori. They looked at her belly and reckoned one mother unlikely to poison another.

Kiya sipped the potion from its ostrich egg cup, and by nightfall, she bled no more. Kiya had lost her child, but Kiya’s husband, Thal, Tall One, had not lost his mate. And that was, at least, something good.

T’Cori did not understand the Vokka, but friends need love more than understanding.

As men stalked the valley for food, the women hunted for the things that would make this their new home, searched together for the wood to construct drums, for a great ceremony of beginnings.

Night after night, T’Cori, Gazelle Tears and Stillshadow sat with the Vokka women, seeking the bits
of the jowk
tongue embedded in the human language. Through dance and drawing and hand symbol and sand painting, they sought the words and concepts both shared: “Food” and “water.” “Birth” and “death.”

They drummed, danced and mimed their tales of hunting and fighting and traveling. The Vokka drum rhythms were primitive, bland, slow. Within their two beats the Ibandi found five.

Uncle Snake and Leopard Paw tried to teach the Vokka their own rhythms, but found them slow in uptake, heavy footed and easily frustrated. These new bhan were good friends but hardly family.

T’Cori had spent the early hours searing breakfast mush balls in last night’s coals. Each was the size of a child’s fist, crisp brown on the outside, grainy orange within. More important, they were delicious.