Great Sky Woman Read Free Page A

The coarse knotted hair above his narrow face was chopped low to the scalp. His scarred hands were strong enough to break the strongest vines or tear a tortoise shell apart without a leverage stick. His hard black eyes could track a warthog across rocks on a moonless night, and his broad nose could smell zebra scat half a day distant. He squatted at the men’s fire, chipping away at a new blade, occasionally offering a knife prayer to Great Earth, the colossus of rock and forest swelling just north of the boma.
    Let the blade be strong. Let my arm be strong. Let the leopard tremble, and the gazelle offer her throat to my spear.
    As boma father, responsibility for the poor hunting might well be laid at his feet. So far, despite their occasional grumbling, he was still much honored by his fellows. That, of course, could change in a single moon or moment. Nervousness made his hands slip, tearing his own fingernail.
    “Father Mountain!” he growled, and thrust the injured finger into his mouth. The world of women was a mystery to him. Touching a woman in her moon-blood could drain a man’s strength. A hunter who witnessed a woman’s ceremony without permission might offend Great Mother Herself. Any self-respecting zebra or eland would be ashamed to die for such a weakling.
    Five rains ago Water Chant’s first wife had perished giving birth to a son who, in turn, ceased drawing breath before his second moon. Water did not want to lose another: his people might think him a man whose seed killed his own children. With such a reputation, fathers would be less likely to offer his sons their daughters…if sons he ever had.
    His gray-bearded cousin Leopard Paw crouched next to him, sensing his unease. “She screams,” Leopard said, scratching in the dirt with the blunt end of his spear. In a year, perhaps two, Leopard would no longer run with the hunters. “Big voice, that woman.”
    “Makes for a strong son.” Water Chant’s face was set strongly, revealing no concern. Father Mountain thought excessive emotion unseemly in a man. Who cared what the hunter next to you felt? When the lion charged, all that mattered was a strong arm, sure aim, a cool heart, and nimble feet. Any fool knew that much.
    The sun was dying when the midwife finally emerged, a big, dusty, bloodstained woman whose moon face was tired but satisfied. “The child is born,” she said.
    Water Chant’s lips pursed and he made a sound like a burbling brook, a way of asking fortune from the earth spirits for whom he was named. He stood, then crouched to pass the flaps of striped, gut-stitched zebra skin, chosen to complement his wife’s totem. Their hut, floored with packed earth and lined with sweet grasses, was just large enough for a family of four to sleep side by side. The walls were of lashed sticks, the gaps between them packed with mud. The ceiling was multilayered, interwoven with sticks and vines in the Ibandi fashion, and covered with straw in such a way as to repel rain while admitting a cooling breeze.
    That ventilation was important: the air reeked of blood and sweat and woman fluids. There in the shadows Zebra Moon lay exhausted. Blood stained the woven reeds beneath her. A glistening wet child lay panting on her swollen breasts, emptied by the effort of clawing its way from the dream world. The umbilical cord had been cut and tied, but still dangled, as long as Water Chant’s thumb. In time it would wither to a nub.
    Zebra’s sister Meadow held the child out to him. The hunt chief gazed at it, studied the space between its legs. “Not a son,” he grunted.
    “A strong child,” Meadow insisted.
    He spread the girl’s legs more fully, checking to see if perhaps a penis might be concealed within the moist folds. With a resigned shrug he handed her back. The child thrashed and wailed now, her cries of distress filling the hut.
    Chant wished to wail his own disappointment. He needed a son, a boy to whom he could pass on his knowledge of the