Shadow Valley by Steven Barnes Page A

she is blind. There are so many things that we relied on her to do in the dream world.”
    “What things?” Frog asked in a quiet voice. She rarely revealed dream dancer mysteries, and he never pressed her.
    “She walked the second path,” T’Cori said. “She awakened within the dream. To awaken within the dream gives one the ability to awaken in this world as well.”
    “We are not awake …?”
    Her eyes went very wide. “I should not have said that. It is a great secret.”
    Frog’s teeth toyed with his upper lip. “What manner of worlds do you see? I see this one, and it is all I know.”
    “As you have told me, many times.”
    “What is it that Stillshadow once did that she can no longer do?” he asked.
    “She knows every berry, lizard or fruit. Knows every four-, six-or eight-legged.” T’Cori’s head swam with the memories. She remembered her first climb up the slopes of Great Earth, picking the delicate purple, black-edged morning glories. Only Stillshadow knew where the first would open, its nectar a rare medicine. Stillshadow knew the very day the green berries would turn red. She knew by touch and sight and smell when a blister or boil was ready for cutting.
    “All of them have uses,” she said. “Many times we would be walking, and she would suddenly find a new plant with a purple berry to our right. And then a quarter later, a dung beetle rolled away buffalo scat to our left. She knew how to mix berry and crushed beetle to heal fever.”
    That comment caught Frog by surprise. “The world is so large … how can you know enough?”
    “Not knowing,” T’Cori said.
“Feeling.
Her egg and its fibers embraced the
num
of things, knew how the
jowk
combined to make things useful to men. The butterfly whispers in her ear—”
    “Butterfly?”
    T’Cori flushed. “Oh! I keep forgetting that you do not know these things.” She looked swiftly to either side, to see if they were being overheard. No one near the trees, no one near the tumbled tan rocks. Then she whispered, “Great Mother was a butterfly.”
    Frog sighed. “And Father Mountain is … what? An elephant shrew?”
    “A spider.” She poked him with her elbow. “The father of all spiders. Do not jest.”
    “I try,” he said. “You do not make it easy.”
    She glared at him. “The butterfly teaches her to do these things. She does not speak to me as often or as clearly.”
    A pause, and then she added, “And when they do speak to me, they don’t tell me things I want to hear.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Thank you. I have been alone all my life, except Stillshadow. And now … she abandons me.”
    “I will not leave,” he said. “T’Cori … forgive yourself. We cannot make the rain fall or the wind blow. Be happy with what we can do.” He brightened.“See? I begin to sound like you. Does that mean that if we are together long enough, you will begin to sound like me?”
    “As long as I do not
look
like you, pig face—” she rubbed her nose against his “—or
think
like you! Look!” She tucked her hands into her armpits, flapped her elbows and cawed like a crow, pointing at the sky “I see cloud people!”
    “Where?” Frog said, squinting up into the afternoon sky.
    “There! Hawk and Scorpion are wrestling.”
    His expression flattened. “You laugh at me.”
    “Sometimes,” she said, “laughter is all that stops the tears.”
    She pressed against him, tangling their arms and legs together. “You do not see what I see,” T’Cori said. “The world is not rock and wood.”
    “What is it, then?”
    She sighed. “Wind and fire and sensation. We leave scat, Frog. All men leave sign, wherever we go. All the world’s creatures do this. We are netted in all our yesterdays.”
    “There is always tomorrow,” Frog said. “Perhaps you and I will not be there, but the new sun is always born.”
    A pause. Over a whistling wind, a hyena’s distant cough. Then: “Will I be ready?”
    “Yes,”