Great Sky Woman

The epic story of how primitive humans, without words or machines, set in motion civilization's long, winding journey to the present. Thirty thousand years ago, in the heart of the African continent and in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, lived the Ibandi, who for generations nurtured their ancient traditions, and met survival's daily struggle with quiet faith in their gods. T'Cori, an abandoned girl, and Frog Hopping, a boy possessing a gift that is also a curse, are two of the Ibandi's chosen ones. Though they live in different encampments, Frog and T'Cori are linked through the mysterious medicine woman known as Stillshadow, who has sensed in them a destiny apart from others'. Through the years, and on their separate paths, T'Cori's and Frog's fates entwine as an inevitable disaster approaches from the southfrom the very god they worship. For as long as there have been mountain, sky, and savannah, there has been a home for the Ibandi. Now, in the face of an enemy beyond anything spoken of even in legend, they must ask their god face-to-face: Do we remain or do we depart?

Steven Barnes is a prolific author and scriptwriter who has been nominated for Hugo, Cable Ace, and Endeavor awards. His work for television includes episodes of Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Stargate SG-1, and Andromeda. A lifelong student of human performance technologies, he holds black belts in judo and karate, has lectured at the Smithsonian, and is a trained hypnotherapist. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Tananarive Due.


From the Hardcover edition.

Chapter One


Stillshadow was ancient now, what her people called a “woman of dust.” Four tens of warm rains had moistened her deeply weathered face. Daily walking on plains and hills, hot tea brewed from the poison-grub plant’s spiky leaves and milky roots, and the grace of Great Mother Herself kept the old medicine woman’s back straight and her tread light. Stillshadow was thought tall, standing a handsbreadth higher than the average Ibandi woman, the height of a typical male. Her skin was the color of dark clay, her black hair tightly coiled, her wise old eyes black and flecked with gray. Like other medicine women, other dream dancers, she covered her breasts and genitals with beaten and softened deerskin flaps, partially for protection from the cooler air atop Great Earth, but also in recognition that her seventh eye belonged to Father Mountain and His sons the hunt chiefs.

She clicked and clucked to herself, and slipped a wrinkled hand into the speckled brown deerhide pouch dangling at her waist. From it she extracted a fibrous pellet of crushed insects, ground leaves and herbs, bound with fresh moist fungus from sacred caves on Great Earth’s western face, the powerful hallucinogenic mixture medicine women called godweed. The crone tucked it between her gum and lip, savoring the chewy texture with anticipation. Her cheek tingled as the extracts of nettle-berry, thistleroot and poison-grub leaves filtered their way into her blood.

Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, exposing the whites. Stillshadow surrendered to the divine connection, sinking back against the broad flat rock she and the mothers before her had called their sitting stone. From there, she gazed down from Great Earth’s heights to the valley floor, the rock-tumbled, bamboo- and grass-filled plain, familiar slopes she had walked and climbed since childhood. Two days’ walk to the north, filling the horizon, stood Great Sky, the tallest mountain in all the world, in whose misty heights the Creators themselves lived their fierce, jealous, eternal love.

Squatting, eyes tilted to the clouds, Stillshadow hummed a trance song to herself, idly scraping lines and curves in the loose black soil with the tip of her walking stick. Her eyelids slid closed, newborn stars scintillating in the pulsing blackness. Once immersed in this state of waking dream, the old woman’s scrawling intensified. After a time she opened her eyes to examine what she had created. Most days, little met her eyes save an overlapping tangle of meaningless doodles. From time to time her mystical state produced something of unusual symmetry, truth or beauty. Those few drawings she etched again upon her sitting stone, carved into a tree trunk or painted upon one of the countless rock walls and shelves jutting from Great Earth herself.

Four hands of small huts were arranged like mushroom rings on the slope behind her. Constructed of wood and patched with mud, most were lashed firmly together with vines and green branches, but one central hut was sturdier, a wasp’s nest of sticks and clay. Come rainy season, the unfired clay would dissolve, the sticks separate, the roof and walls collapse upon themselves. The drawings sheltered beneath it would fade like last moon’s dreams. This, however, was considered no tragedy. Indeed, this was the way it had always been. Come the dry season Stillshadow would begin anew, as had the grandmothers before her. In hands of pictographs she would recount the previous year’s events, adding memories of the deeper past, as well as inscribing visions from the future. Until, of course, the rains erased those as well.

But that was good, as appropriate as spring’s sky-spanning butterfly swarms, the golden clouds heralding the return of the vast and vital herds: gazelle, giraffe, deer, eland and countles

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Excerpted from Great Sky Woman by Steven Barnes
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