Free Shadow Valley by Steven Barnes Page A

our blood. And now, when my people need me most, my inner eye sees nothing. Is this right? Have I not served you?” She listened for an answer that did not come. “I beg you to tell me: Is this right?”
    In the wind’s cold cry there were no words, no answer. Her fingers gouged grooves in the rough, sandy soil. “Help me.”
    Stillshadow stared and wept and sang. And in answer to her final call the sun struggled to be born, wet and red from its celestial womb.
    Before she reached the edge of the camp, T’Cori heard Frog’s
“Huh! Huh!”
exhalations from around the cairn of weathered, sand-colored rocks marking his practice site.
    She watched as he turned this way and that, jabbing and cutting. It was almost like a dance, really. The body flow was the same, but Frog was concentrating on something outside himself, a target. Dream dancers focused within.
    When Frog paused to hawk out some of the dust gumming his throat, she went to him. “I was told to be silent, but I worry.”
    He wiped away a thread of sweat dripping from his lashes. “What is this worry?”
    “Mother Stillshadow went out last night,” she said. “She did not return.”
    His hand froze. “Where did she go?”
    “She said she needed to find our dream.”
    He stuck the tip of his spear into the ground. The gesture was so familiar to her now, and so dear. He reminded her of a brown flamingo. “We will find her,” he said, “or leave our bones in the sand.”
    For half a quarter, Frog, Uncle Snake, and the Leopard twins had tracked Stillshadow through the mud flats and brittle grass. If Frog had believed in gods, he might have offered a prayer for her delivery. Any other Ibandi might have made such a prayer, but other Ibandi had not climbed Great Sky or gazed into the icy silence at its peak. This knowledge, more than his worries for Stillshadow, dogged his every step.
    “This is good,” Snake said.
    “Wait,” Frog said. He dropped to one knee and turned an ear into thewind. He heard a single distant howl, followed a few breaths later by two more. “Do you hear?”
    “Baboons,” Leopard Eye said.
    “Hyenas, also,” Frog said. “Come.”
    As morning shadows drifted across a wide and fire-scarred plain they ran. Across grass and through scrub they ran, across tumbled rocks and through scratching stands of cactus. Their sprint slowed to a trot and then to a halt. There just beyond the parted grass crouched four of the spotted, heavy-jawed scavengers. Beyond the hyenas clustered a troop of baboons.
    They were big ones, half the size of men, covered with bone-white fur. Their jaws were longer than the width of their narrow shoulders. Black lips peeled away from gleaming fangs. Their eyes, far back up on their heads beneath a sheltering shelf of brow, burned like tiny yellow fires.
    Five hands of the manlike creatures were circled, the young and the old hidden behind a line of aggressively postured males.
    At first Frog doubted his eyes, but there in the center of the circle, with the elders and the young, kneeling just beyond the hyena males, an ancient woman stared out into the western horizon.
    “Father Mountain”
Snake whispered.
    As the Ibandi approached, the hyenas barked and fled. But the baboons merely parted their ranks, almost as if they had awaited the humans’ arrival. For all the notice she gave to the scramble of furred limbs, Stillshadow might have been made of stone or wood or even been a woman of chalk, a mere silhouette scratched beneath her own sitting stone.
    “Old Mother?” Frog said.
    “Great Dancer?” Snake dropped to one knee. “Speak to us.”
    Frog came closer. “Stillshadow?”
    No response. For a moment he wondered:
Could she be dead?
Panic fluttered in his chest, but then he realized:
No. There.
His newly sharpened eyes detected the rise and fall of her withered shoulders.
    Stillshadow tumbled sideways into their arms, as all about them her hairy guardians danced and howled their fierce delight to the