Shadow Valley by Steven Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

greater sign could there be?”
Oh
, he thought,
why not call it magic?
If anything had ever deserved the name, this was it. And if it was not magic, if it was some wonderful gift of earth or sky, where was the harm in letting the others believe it divine?
    T’Cori pointed northwest. “I saw that ridge in my vision. Beyond it grazed antelope and warthogs.”
    Frog closed his eyes and whirled off into a private world. Three human figures congealed out of the chaos. His heart leaped and his eyes burned with tears. This day, this precise
moment
, was the very best of his life.
    “Brothers,” Frog said, gazing out over the cactus trees, the sand and brush and heat shimmer from which the flesh of his flesh and heart had emerged.
Scorpion. Hawk Shadow.
“Fire Ant. Do you see me? Am I what our people need me to be?”
    For a moment his brothers’ ghosts danced over the sand. That vision dissolved into heat mirage and then condensed into new dark forms as nine men approached in three lines of three.
    Frog squinted. Who could these be? He could not trust his eyes but thought that it might be the dead hunters from the Mk*tk wars, from the time of Great Sky’s climbing. Perhaps the gates of heaven had opened. Perhaps their loved ones were returning from the place beyond death. Would not such a miracle signal that this was their promised land, a home in which their people would not merely rest but root, grow and bear new fruit?
    What would he say to Hawk Shadow, who had been exhausted in the climb, remaining behind as others had scaled the peak? How could Frogever explain that they had tried to return in time, only to find Hawk’s wolf-ravaged body?
    And what would he say to Fire Ant? Would words ever hold what his heart needed to say? Could Fire Ant forgive him for choosing Sky Woman over his own flesh? The tears flowed more rapidly now. Everything had seemed so clear on Great Sky. T’Cori had received her vision, a message that the Ibandi would have to leave the mountain’s shadow if they wished to survive.
    Fire Ant would not countenance it. Demanded that she change her story, that she not tell the people what she claimed the gods had told her.
    Ant thought that all the Ibandi might rally around the heroes who had climbed Great Sky. That those heroes would lead the Ibandi and become great hunt chiefs.
    But T’Cori would not yield. Crazed by his own visions, Fire Ant had threatened to kill her. Frog stood between them, playing the protector. Struck his brother in the head with a rock to slow him. What foolishness, to think Sky Woman needed protection. She had lured Ant onto a thin sheet of frozen water, through which he had plunged into a searing death below.
    Many times, Frog had dreamed of that horror. He would have given his life for a chance to relive it. Surely there had to have been another way, something other than death and betrayal and shame.
    Frog shook himself out of his fantasies, blurred vision falling away as he realized that the newcomers were not a dream, but not his brothers either.
    Not kinsmen. Not bhan. Not Ibandi at all.
    Curiosity warred with alarm as Frog crawled sluggishly to his feet.
    Their dusty calves were too thick. Their lips and ears were pierced in clustered rows. “Who are you?” the first asked Frog. His words were so thick Frog barely understood them.
    A keloid spider crouched from brow to chin and across the stranger’s cheeks. A bleached splinter of bone pierced his upper lip. While no larger than Ibandi, their bodies were nettled with old scars. Their cold eyes held no compromise. These men had seen death in endless waves, were more comfortable with war than peace.
    A gravelly taste coated Frog’s mouth, as if he had licked a rock. Leopard Paw and Snake were suddenly, quietly, behind him. From the corners of his eyes, Frog saw that they gripped their spears almost as tightly as they had a quarter ago, when facing lions.
    “We come from Great Sky,” T’Cori said.
    “We speak to