Shadow Valley by Steven Barnes Read Free Book Online

feared he was serious, then saw the mischief a-dance in his eyes.
    Ah.
That was
her dear Frog.
    “There is more.” She smiled.
    “Then let us celebrate more fully,” he said and thumped his spear butt against the ground. “Another miracle!” he called. “Let me bring Little Brook and Wasp and Mouse and call my mother and Ember and Flamingo. It is a good night: our circle has grown again.”

Chapter Six
    Frog, Uncle Snake and Leopard Eye crouched at the watering hole’s edge. The afternoon sun peeled Frog’s back, the sharp, spiky grass cut his skin and tiny, black gnats sipped the tears from his eyes. Half a moon had passed since T’Cori’s father had revealed her sisters and Stillshadow had declared the reunion a good omen, one promising happy days to come.
    In truth, it seemed to Frog that the old woman used
any
opportunity to tell them good days were soon to come. But for once, he wondered if she might be right.
    Because here, right before his eyes, was a miracle.
    Hands of hands of leopards, lions, ibyx and warthogs lazed sleepily as if all one happy winged, hooved and clawed family. With glazed and groggy eyes they stared at one another, as if barely aware that some were fang and the others flesh.
    The pond was the largest they had seen since leaving Great Sky. It might have been fed by rains or perhaps an underground spring. Although there was no sign of a stream leading into it, the waters were deep and clear. Slender trees with broad-leaved branches lined its banks, offering shade. But the water’s source was not what puzzled Frog.
    The meat-eaters and the leaf-eaters barely noticed one another, too fascinated by the flies buzzing around their snouts. What matter of dream was
this?
“They lay side by side,” he said. “I do not understand why the lion does not kill the antelope. Are they too tired even to eat?”
    Beside him, Uncle Snake had ceased peering stealthily through the grass and was sitting cross-legged in plain sight, scratching the dead skin on theleft side of his face. “I have heard,” Snake said, “that only the hungry lion frightens the antelope.”
    “And how does the antelope know the difference?”
    “For that—” Snake grinned “—we must ask an old antelope.”
    They crept closer. Frog’s belly gnawed at him. For far too long, he had eaten little, save tubers and jerky. Slings had killed birds, and traps had netted moles and monkeys, but it had been moons since a real meat gorging, when sated hunters and their families groaned with bursting bellies, rolling onto their backs to belch and fart thanks to Father Mountain.
    And now, as in a starving man’s final dream, meat beyond reason lay within arm’s reach. “What are they doing?”
    “Drinking,” Frog said, “and sleeping. Strange, but they seem
happy.”
    “Happy?” Snake was dubious. “Perhaps it is not water for men or animals. Perhaps it belongs to the gods, and they will be angry with us.”
    Magic.
There, that word. Frog had stood atop Great Sky and had seen nothing. The world he knew contained many things, things that he could not explain, but no gods. And he had been to their home.
    Even if he was the only one who knew it, who could or would speak such truth, truth it remained. “We should be careful, I think. Perhaps it takes away the hunger. I have never seen this. It is … a new thing.”
    “Like fill grass?” Snake asked. “Is this what you think?”
    Frog felt certain. Dark fruit twice as thick as his thumb clustered on the branches and scattered on the ground near the water. “Perhaps. I have never seen that fruit. Perhaps it is like fill grass. It falls in the water, they drink … and their hunger goes.” Hunters used fill grass to kill hunger pangs on long hunts. Not magic, just a gift of the plant people. If this oasis was such a gift, his mind could grasp it eagerly.
    The water flowed from his mouth.
Father Mountain
, if this was not a wondrous feast, such a thing had never existed at