Great Sky Woman by Steven Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

mixed and rolled them together into a ball, then crushed the pellet beneath the infant’s nose, releasing a strong minty aroma.
    A moment later, the baby blinked hard. Her eyes wandered away…and then back. And then away…and then back. And remained on the crone. Not exactly focused, but…
    Stillshadow moved to the side, and this time the infant’s eyes followed more closely. Back the other way.
They followed.
    Strange. She had initially assumed the foundling was blind. With this new development, it seemed almost as if the girl had been waiting for Stillshadow before deigning to focus on things of this world.
    The medicine woman gazed up at Great Earth’s misty expanse. “Who is this baby?” she asked.
    There was no response. She raised her voice. “Do you know this girl-child?”
    If the wind was the mountain’s voice, Great Mother chose to whisper her reply, and Stillshadow’s old ears could not hear. She held the infant up higher. “Who are you?” she asked. “Can you see me? What do you see?”
    The child thrashed her arms and legs. The little round brown face wrinkled up tightly. With a faint liquid sound, greenish curd flowed out of her behind and plopped onto the ground. Stillshadow squinted.
    “You shit like a man-child,” she said.
    The baby smiled at her with infinite satisfaction.
    Stillshadow’s blood bubbled like water running over rocks. Not two moons ago her waking dreams had whispered of a coming. Could this child be the crucial One she and the other dream dancers had anticipated? But…there were other stories, tales that Stillshadow had heard from her teacher, who had heard them from hers.
    We change,
the old stories said.
We are not as strong as once we were. But there will be more. There will be new people. And the old people will die. In time even the gods themselves will die.
    There will be two, and one will be a girl with no name.
    Sighing with a strange contentment, the crone enfolded the infant in her arms and rose to carry her home.

    Originally, Stillshadow had planned to travel farther south to Water boma, but now decided to return to Great Earth. While her guards maintained a respectful distance, she walked with spine erect, carrying her new charge in arms suddenly as strong as they had ever been. “My girls! My girls! I am back, and I have brought a new sister with me. Come out, lazybones!”
    Although it was a two-day trek up Great Earth to the ash cone hidden behind her summit, the dream dancer encampment was only a half day above the plain, a steep and beautiful walk between honeysuckle and weeping fig trees, tall blue-green grasses and countless berry vines.
    Like other bomas, their camp was ringed with thorn walls. Unlike the camps around Great Earth and Great Sky, the dream dancer camp had been in the same place for a generation, the dancers using their magic and knowledge to keep it clean and free from pests. In all her journeys, Stillshadow had never found another permanent boma.
    The waters flowing from Great Sky nurtured a constant source of game and fruit, such that the Ibandi had remained in its shadow for all their history. They traded with other tribes from the north and the east, their people migrants, following the herds and the seasons. Only the Ibandi were rooted, all the proof she needed that they, and no others, were Father Mountain’s first and best-loved children.
    Dream dancers, chosen at birth, were selected and trained for the clarity of their seven eyes. Although they did not take mates or raise families as the boma folk did, they lay with hunt chiefs and had children, that both flesh and spirit might live on after breath had ceased. But their hearts were trothed to Father Mountain, and their bodies belonged to the people themselves, rather than any mere mortal men.
    The wooden lean-tos and huts rustled, and one at a time her students emerged: some small, some of them tall and strong, some as young as five springs, others women old enough to be her