{"product_id":"great-sky-woman-isbn-9780345459022","title":"Great Sky Woman","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe epic story of how primitive humans, without words or machines, set in motion  civilization’s long, winding journey to the present.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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’. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThrough the years, and on their separate paths, T’Cori’s and  Frog’s fates entwine as an inevitable disaster approaches from the south—from 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?“[An] adventurous epic laced with history and folklore.”—\u003ci\u003eTennessee Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Hugo Award nominee [Steven] Barnes embellishes his twentieth novel with folklore, spiritualism and impressive atmospheric detail. . . . A satisfying read with a tantalizing, ominous twist at the end.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003eSteven 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.\u003ci\u003eChapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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 countless others of Great  Mother’s four-legged children in mouthwatering profusion. Ultimately the  rains, however harsh, were merely another part of the cycle. They  destroyed nothing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A short, slight girl with a deer’s wide-eyed grace approached from behind  her. The child paused a respectful moment, then softly asked: “Mother?  What do you see?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This was Stillshadow’s youngest daughter, Small Raven. Raven had lived  just eight rains, but her exquisite shadow-dancing had already earned a  place at the Spring Gathering’s central fire. Raven spent too much time  twisting her hair into patterns, cared too much for the bits of shells she  laced onto her necklaces, and for inventing meaningless little snatches of  song she would caw in the voice of her namesake. But the girl had an  undeniable talent for medicine as well. If she proved as powerful a dancer  as Stillshadow hoped, and she stayed the course, her future held great  promise.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Many things,” Stillshadow murmured. “Not for you. Not yet.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “When?” Raven asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “One day. Or not.” She rose, walked two hands of paces and stooped to  enter the central hut. Its entrance was low enough to force entrants to  crawl humbly, a reminder of their status before the great mountains.  Through strategically placed holes in the roof streamed yellowish light,  illuminating the glyphs and grooves scrawled in the dirt below. The  symbols represented moon and sun, birth and death, rain and wind. This was  the history of the Ibandi, Great Mother’s first and favorite two-legged.  The mural was re-  created every year, beginning at the first full moon after the butterflies   returned, to be completed before the orb melted and was reborn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raven followed her mother at a respectful distance, again waiting as  Stillshadow squatted, peering at the designs. “How can I help?” The  child’s wide eyes sparkled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Stillshadow raised her palm in a clear message: By remaining silent. She  scrawled in the dirt, muttering to herself in singsong. “Wolf’s woman  Twilight bore two children. See how the line grows!” She pointed at an  extension scratched in the dust a mere hand of days before. “More and more  are born. Something new comes. Something new . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “New?” Small Raven asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Too late: once again, Stillshadow had vanished into her waking dreams.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You scare me, Mother,” Raven whispered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When the crone finally emerged from her trance and regarded Raven, her  dark, ancient eyes were webbed with blood, the pupils contracted tightly.  The girl shrank back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I am sorry,” the medicine woman said, her voice still thickly furred with  godweed. “But Great Mother takes me to far places, and where she leads, I  must follow.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raven nodded, confusion sharpening her narrow little face. “What do you  see?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Stillshadow paused before answering. “For lives beyond counting our people  have ringed the mountains. Soon it may be time to go.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Go?” Raven asked. “Leave Great Earth? Great Sky? What would we do? Where  would we go?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I can see it,” Stillshadow said. “But I know not when, or where. The  world changes.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Through narrowed eyes Stillshadow watched the horror dim her daughter’s  fire, knew the strength required to control it, and felt great pride. She  took her daughter’s hands. So smooth, where hers were rough and wrinkled  with age. For a moment she remembered when Night Bird, her mother and  mentor, had held her own small hands. How impossibly wise and beautiful  and ancient Bird had seemed. How wondrous to know that Raven doubtless saw  her the same way. “I hope one day my seat at the spring fire will be  yours. But it may not be here, in this place.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You hope?” Raven said, young voice plaintive. “You do not know?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I do not know,” the old woman confessed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Where do we go?” the child asked again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raven’s num-fire wavered with confusion, and Stillshadow regretted her  inability to assuage it. She shrugged. “I do not know. And I may not live  to see it. But I feel one truth: a child will be born. She comes, and in  her seven eyes lives our new home. We must search for her.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Raven peered more closely at Stillshadow’s symbols. Some resembled  monkeys, or elephants, or sunrises. Stillshadow suspected that Raven  thought some to be mere meaningless scrawls. That would be understandable:  Small Raven’s training was far from complete. Stillshadow felt that the  eyes of Raven’s face and hands and feet were wider and clearer than those  of any child she had ever trained. When at last Raven’s seventh eye  opened, she might be the greatest dreamer of all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sometimes Stillshadow wondered if those were merely the hopes of an old  woman with more sunrises behind than before her. She could not serve her  people forever, and hoped it would be one of her fleshly daughters who  carried on. Certainly, she had not kept all of her children. Those  unsuited to this severe life were raised in the bomas below. One of  Raven’s brothers as well as two older sisters had been raised in Water and  Wind bomas, the villages to the south and north. But one sister, Blossom,  lived the dream, and one brother ran with the hunt chiefs, so the flesh  continued.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But was Raven destined to lead the dream dancers? To lead their people in  concert with a boy, perhaps already a man, who would one day join the hunt  chiefs on Father Mountain?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Stillshadow did not know. In time, Great Mother shared all knowledge. That  time was yet to come.Author of Shadow Valley [quote]--Tennessee Tribune","brand":"Del Rey","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300014280933,"sku":"NP9780345459022","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345459022.jpg?v=1767728470","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/great-sky-woman-isbn-9780345459022","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}