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

sisters. All were curious and powerful, all learning and growing under Stillshadow’s protection.
    Several of the younger girls approached, accompanied by their teacher, a toothless dreamer named Far Eye. In her youth, Far Eye had been a great walker. Now she rarely roamed far from her hut, and soon, Stillshadow suspected, she would return to the mountain.
    Eight-rained Raven grinned as if she had received a present. “Back so soon? We did not expect you until full moon!” She peered more closely at her mother’s bundle. “A new dancer? From Fire boma?” Stillshadow watched the girl carefully, knowing that beneath her good spirits, Raven was doubtless of two hearts concerning any new addition to their boma.
    Stillshadow shook her head, and Raven’s smooth forehead wrinkled. “Then, where does she come from?”
    Far Eye spat to the north. “The dream world. Her mother’s body. The place all babies come from, silly thing. We need to make room. Bring soft skins, and call your sister. Her milk came down hard, so one more child will be no great burden. Blossom!”
    Blossom was Stillshadow’s eldest, a broad-hipped, sharp-eyed girl of ten and ten rains. Blossom emerged from her hut. In her strong right arm she carried a drowsy baby nursing from one enormous breast. Her left hand toyed with a half-finished braid. “Far Eye? Mother? You called me?”
    “I have another baby for you,” Stillshadow said.
    “Another baby?” Blossom cut her eyes at the medicine woman slyly. “If I take this baby, someone else will have to take some of my cooking and gathering.”
    Stillshadow laughed. This one was loyal but lazy, and not half as bright as Raven. Despite her potential, the girl had never fasted and prayed to Great Mother as she should, and her hand and foot eyes had winked closed once again. Now she managed best simply letting her body function in its most basic fashion: eating, sleeping, loving, making and feeding babies. “Yes, and I suppose you will need extra food.”
    “Yes.” Blossom bobbed her head. The loose braid fanned in front of her eyes. “Good. Well, let me see her.” She began to inspect the foundling. “All fingers and toes.” Blossom peered more closely still, moving her hand before the child’s eyes. At first there was no response, but then the small moist lips curled in a smile. The baby gurgled merrily, eyes fixed on the moving fingers.
    “Is she the One?” Raven asked, voice a bit nervous.
    Stillshadow fished in her deerskin pouch, then crouched and threw the bones, staring at the broken white pieces quizzically. She threw again, and then again. Each time her expression grew more discouraged.
    Finally she looked up. “I cannot see her nature,” she said.
    Raven licked her lips nervously. “Then…she cannot be given a name.”
    Stillshadow scowled and stood, listening to her knees crackle. “So. Until we know her nature, we will call her T’Cori, meaning ‘nameless one.’ In another moon, perhaps, a totem will come to me. One day she will have her name.”
    Her students murmured. All of them remembered the story.
A nameless child will come. She heralds the death of gods….
    The child’s eyes had gone a bit vacant again, wandering, and the girls were puzzled. “Her face-eyes are strange,” Raven said, and kneaded the tiny hands. “I think she sees.”
    “More than most,” the old woman said. “She is new from the dream, closer to Great Mother.” She peered into those eyes again, and then smiled.
    So tiny. So helpless. With such wide-open eyes in face and hands and feet. Without aid, the child would have been dead within a quarter. But why and how had she survived the night, if someone had left her the previous day? Was she bhan? Had her people been killed, as poor Lizard’s had been? Had she been left to perish, or could someone have known that Stillshadow would come along?
    Or…if not some
one,
then what?
    Stillshadow sent her apprentices to their tasks. She needed to make