Free Great Sky Woman by Steven Barnes

trick, he thought. Snake’s single good eye saw more than most men’s pair.
    They were offered space within the rude thorn walls, but Snake declined.
    “I thank you,” he said. “But these boys need to sleep beneath the sky, learn to build fires and shelters. I will return to enjoy your hospitality another moon.”
    After additional polite conversation, their little group moved out into the gathering darkness. Frog was grateful. The stench would have made sleep impossible.
    They walked until the boma was out of sight, and then Snake stopped them and they cut thornbushes, built fire and prepared for sleep. Beneath the open sky Frog tossed uneasily.
    With the unconscious cruelty so common among children, he chuckled to himself at the poverty and weak-mindedness of the hapless bhan. Why had Uncle taken them there? His people had no need for their food or shelter. Why? And then he thought he understood. It was so he might thank Father Mountain for creating the Ibandi with such power and beauty. Feeling deep shame for his prior thoughts, Frog rolled over onto his back, staring up into the clouds, promising himself that he would give extra thanks to Father Mountain come next ceremony.
    And then he slept, his last fuzzy thoughts of the boma’s stink.
    If he’d known then that he would never see most of those bahn alive again, dreams might not have come so easily.
     
    The next morning, Uncle Snake gathered them into a circle after their wrestling and breakfast. “Our bows are strong,” he said. “But when we climbed Great Sky, Father Mountain taught us to make our arrows stronger still.”
    He lowered his voice. His empty eye socket and the web of scars over the stump of his left ear gave his words an eerie authority. “You must be careful with what we will teach you. One touch, and you can die.”
    Uncle Snake’s lion-scarred eye was a knot of dead tissue, but his keen right eye missed nothing. He seemed a flowing fountain of knowledge, constantly pointing out plants and spiders that could be used to make death medicine, reminding them over and over that everything they saw, everything they touched, was alive. Still, none of the plant or animal death-spirits in this place was quite strong enough; none was the kind used by the Ibandi.
    He sang endlessly of grubs and toads but only became truly excited when they came upon a dry river wash. There, growing at a lean, was a bush as high as Frog’s chest with straggly black branches festooned with little green berries. “The poison-grub plant.” Smiling, he crouched to scratch at its roots.
    Swiftly, Uncle Snake found several brown cylinders resembling curled dried leaves. “Poison cocoon,” he whispered. “Don’t wake them. If they die sleeping, they go directly to Father Mountain and bless His arrows.” The boys all gathered closely around. Very carefully, he plucked up a cocoon, squeezing it between thumb and forefinger. The pinkish pulp oozed over the arrow’s tip.
    “This is the weakest poison, but still better than nothing,” he said.
    “How do we make it stronger?” Frog asked.
    Uncle Snake scrubbed Frog’s head. “We learn that soon. Now, put the pulp just behind the arrow’s point.”
    “Why?” Frog asked.
    The other boys laughed.
    “So that if you nick yourself, you will not die!” Snake answered.
    So all of them did this, and Snake squeezed sap from the poison-grub plant and mixed it with the insect pulp. He taught them different ways to do it, and how to add certain red-jawed beetles to increase the effectiveness. As he ground them together with the gray, sour-smelling bark of what Snake called a stinger bush, he told them what he knew of its effects. “If you are struck by your own arrow, you will get fever but feel cold. You will have thirst no water can quench. Your piss will turn brown.”
    Frog felt as if he could sense the poison in his blood even then.
    “Your head hurts, and you will grow hungry for air,” Snake concluded. “And then