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lived to hear her people’s thick, wet sobs die to silence.
    Only then, after everything she loved had turned to dust, did her broken heart end its dance.
    The sky swam with stinking black smoke, Flat-Nose’s solemn tribute to God Blood. As leader of his clan it was his responsibility to see that his people’s every action, every deed was right in the eyes of He who had vomited forth the world.
    Their deeds would be woven into Flat-Nose’s death song, the tale he had composed his entire life. It was a bleeding tattoo etched into his victims’ bruised skins, designed to carry their souls to God Blood. If the forces of night found a man’s story to be good, then the terrible one might choose Flat-Nose’s flesh as a special, succulent meal at the end of days.
    Surely, God Blood would approve of this: slaughtered weaklings, sobbing females taken for pleasure and work. Young grubs peeled and staked for the vultures.
    The hot air reeked of flesh and flies. Jackals and crows circled as the Mk*tk departed, driving the howling women before them. The Ibandiwomen’s anguish was a beautiful thing, but he did not want them to lose all hope. A single woman might even be allowed to escape, to give the others spirit, spirit that Flat-Nose and his men might then relish shattering. Thin boned and small they were, but if they were like his third wife, Dove, they were ready and eager to learn what a true male demanded of a female. And, in time, their supple backs and buttocks would yield all that was required.
That
was the true nature of the female, something these weaklings seemed not to understand.
    They would find Flat-Nose an excellent instructor.
    Not one Mk*tk dared looked back. Although brave beyond the ability of an Ibandi to conceive, there were limits: it could blast the body and soul for mere mortals to watch God Blood at feast.

Chapter Five
    In T’Cori’s dream, a green creeper vine as long as the horizon stretched between the peaks of Great Earth and Great Sky. She was a ring-tailed monkey climbing hand over hand across that divide. But when only halfway across, arms rose up, like the arms of beast-men who had clutched at her in the sacred caves. They pulled her down, and as they pulled, she changed from a monkey to a woman once again, and the beast-men transformed into Mk*tk.
    And they did to her what they had done in hands of hands of other dreams, on ten tens of other nights.
    T’Cori blinked her eyes open and was born into darkness.
    Medicine Mouse had rolled against her hard, restless in his sleeping space between her and Frog. His soft, warm mouth sought her nipple in vain. Her milk had not yet come down. Today she would have to take the boy to her adopted sister Ember, who produced milk enough for Fire Ant’s daughter and Mouse as well.
    But for now, the tiny slack body, eyes closed, mouth open, smelled of last night’s liquid supper. And T’Cori reassured herself that the perils of the dream world did not always follow men and women into the world of flesh.
    “
Whaaat?”
Frog’s voice was groggy as he pushed himself up.
    “Dreams.”
    Frog nodded. “I know. Every night I see death.”
    “Mk*tk?”
    He nodded.
    “Every night,” she said, “I dream they push at my body They take what is not mine to give.”
    He pressed his lips to her forehead. “What you have, no one can steal.” He rose, grasping his spear near the point.
    She did not have the heart to protest his blasphemy or mourn his blindness. Whatever he was not, whoever he was not, she needed him and so did her people.
    “Train hard,” she said. “When I close my eyes, I see blood.”
    By the time most hunters crawled out of their lean-tos, Frog had already painted a human outline upon a tree trunk. Before others had wiped the sleep from their eyes, the calluses on his palms were already hot and raw.
    He thrusted, changed positions and poked again with a twisting of wrist and arm, imagining the spear tip digging its way through muscle.
    As