Free Shadow Valley by Steven Barnes Page B

morning sun.
    Beneath the slanted roof of sticks and leaves, Stillshadow lay curled on her side, muttering aloud to gods
or jowk
unknown. T’Cori had packed the old woman’s eyes with mud and cactus pulp, then covered them with wet leaves.
    Despite her own growing fear, T’Cori struggled to find some part of her still unshaken, unafraid, able to offer visions or leadership. As a consequence, she barely noticed when Frog approached from behind her.
    “How is she?” he asked.
    “I am not sure,” the young medicine woman said. “Her
num
and
jowk
are weak, but her face-eyes … they are dead.”
    He shuddered. “When we found her, she was staring at the sun. She did not move. Did not even blink.”
    T’Cori nodded. “Why would she do such a thing?”
    Frog had no answer, and closed his eyes.
    T’Cori tried to imagine what he was feeling. Frog already felt unable to act or decide or do anything other than follow her lead.
    Was he now imagining himself sightless? Wondering what use a blind hunter would be to his people? Did he think that if he lost his eyes it would be best for him, for her, for all of them if he walked out into the brush and kept walking until Father Mountain took his bones?
    Yet somehow, Stillshadow seemed undiminished. In fact, there were ways in which the old woman now whispering to the spirits seemed more alive than she had even a moon ago.
    Almost as if she heard the blasphemous thoughts, Stillshadow pushed her way up to a seated position. From behind her herbal wraps, she seemed to be gazing
through
T’Cori’s flesh. The ancient eyes saw bone.
    Her dust-parched throat was capable of little more than gravelly whispers. T’Cori offered her a water gourd. The medicine woman sipped and swallowed.
    “Bring ten pebbles,” Stillshadow said finally.
    “Pebbles?” Frog asked.
    “At once!” she snapped. Then Stillshadow lay back again, seemed to shrink to the size of a child.
    Frog retreated from the lean-to and ran off to do as she had asked, returning swiftly with two handfuls of stones.
    When he had placed them on the ground before her, Stillshadow smoothed her hands over them. She plucked up a purplish one and rolled it between her palms. Then, one stone at a time, she laid out a circle, only deigning to speak when the circle was complete. “Every year,” she said, “the herds go north in spring and return in fall. They travel to Father Mountain’s favorite grounds, to amuse him with their feeding and fleeing and rutting. They grow fat on Great Mother’s sacred grasses, on the four-legged flesh. They go out—” her hand traced up and then cut across to the left “—and they return. To find them we must travel
west.
There, we will find hunting lands as fine as our own, where the herds travel as they return home.”
    “Always,” Frog said, “we thought that the animals went out, and returned the way they went, in a line. You say they travel in a great circle?”
    Stillshadow ran her fingers along the earth, fingers brushing the freshly grooved soil.
    “What would that mean?” Leopard Paw asked.
    Stillshadow tried to push herself up to her elbows. “What serves the four-legged serves the two-legged as well. Find them, and we find our way.”
    “It will be done,” Frog said.

Chapter Ten
    Bracketed between her brothers Leopard Eye and Leopard Paw, Blossom escorted their mother back to her lean-to.
    Blossom’s heart beat like a hummingbird’s wings. She craved and cherished any moment spent with Stillshadow, struggled not to resent the fact, obvious to all, that the chief dream dancer preferred Sky Woman to her own flesh and blood.
    Blossom was four hands older than the girl now called Sky Woman, and in fact had been the foundling’s wet nurse. But despite her purity of heart and strength of blood, Blossom had never risen high among the dancers.
    Blossom had helped her brothers build their mother’s shelter, wedging it between a dead ant nest and a cactus tree. Twice the size of