Shadow Valley Read Online Free PDF

protect them.
    Surely, the Mk*tk would not dare strike their hallowed ground.
    That evening, Hot Tree served her family yams and monkey meat on a bed of crossed broadleaf Most of those remaining in her daughter’s boma were old men and children—barely enough hunters to provide flesh.There was rarely as much meat to share as there had been before Great Sky had died.
    Nor were there enough men to protect them. Something tickled at her nose, a scent … sweat? Perhaps—if that sweat mingled the musk of man and lion.
    “The wind stinks,” Hot Tree said.
    Snail hugged her leg with all the strength in his small arms. “I smell nothing, Gramma.”
    “Go to your mother,” Hot Tree said.
    “Nana,” Snail Crawling Backward begged, “come with me.”
    “Never you mind,” the old woman said. “Just go.”
    Hot Tree shuffled to the gap in the boma’s bamboo wall. It was a man and a half tall, its poles sharpened at the top and lashed together with vines and leather strips. Its door of woven thorn branches was open during the day and closed at night. Although dusk had descended, the door had yet to be lashed shut. She squinted toward the east. Nothing but dried grasses and flat-topped acacia trees, dappling the plain as far as the eye could see. She started to turn and then changed her mind. If there was nothing out there, why did her spit curdle in her mouth?
    Then as she turned, she used a hunter’s trick: from the sides of her eyes she caught something she could not see straight on. Men thought this secret belonged to them, but women could use it as well.
    Every moon, hunters set fire to the brush around her daughter’s boma, to deny cover to lions and leopards. The edge of the blackened zone snarled with dense brush. Her tired old eyes detected one shadow oddly
… different
within that tangle of moonlit thorns and stalks. Larger than a man, but smaller than a lion. It was darker,
harder
than the other night shapes. Motionless as a cactus, it crouched.
    Then it began to move.
    Stealthy as a spider, the shadow crawled toward the boma.
    Her muscles became bones.
Now
she detected other forms, humping across the burnt grass, blending with the shadows as clouds throttled the half-moon. Hot Tree might have been in the dream world, her arms and shoulders struggling to run, her feet rooted to the earth, stuck as fast as her namesake.
    Thick, twisted silhouettes stood erect, shadows casting shadows. Stillness. Apish faces stared through her, past her, intent upon the boma walls to her rear.
One. Two. Three. Another. A hand. Two hands of two-legged shadows.
Spears and clubs bristled. As yet unmoving, they regarded the woman standing in the gap in the boma’s thorn walls.
    She backed away, at first unable to speak, then suddenly unable to stop screaming,
“MK*TK! MK*TK!”
    Fighting panic, Tree barely dragged the thorn wall halfway closed before the first wave of attackers fell upon her. Agony drove thought from her mind as a spear point pierced her belly She fell back, blood clotting the breath in her throat. The Mk*tk stomped on her chest and wrenched his weapon free, then leaped toward the huts.
    Inside the boma, her people screamed and ran, trying to claw their way through the thorn walls. There they were caught by the Mk*tk, trapped by the very walls that had once sheltered them.
    Curled onto her side, blood-slimed fingers clutching her belly, Hot Tree’s dying eyes reflected the flame from the huts and boma walls. She heard Snail Crawling Backward scream for his father. His mother. Anyone.
    No one.
    She closed her eyes, praying as her grandson’s howls dissolved into grunts of pain and terror.
    Pleading for Father Mountain to take her, Hot Tree lived to hear her sisters, wrists lashed together, wail as the Mk*tk’s flaked rock knives stripped meat from their men’s bones.
    She lived to see the Mk*tk leader, a blunt-faced giant with two finger stumps marring his left hand, raise his bloodstained arms to the moon. She