Nhamo almost fell out of the tree in her haste. She ignored the fallen animal as she raced for the picture. The same puff of wind that had blown it away stirred the coals in the fire. They flared up briefly, caught the paper, and burned it to ashes before Nhamo even got close.
She knocked the coals aside with her bare hands, ignoring the searing pain in her fingers. But it was already too late. The picture blew away like the ashes that had been beaten in the mortar so long ago in the village, the day Vatete died.
Ambuya…, they whispered. Sister Chipo…Masvita…beloved Nhamo. Please do not be frightened. I must go now. I know you will follow when you can. The ashes floated off on the wind, carrying the message.
30
Nhamo lay on the platform. The ruins of her belongings lay around her, but she didn’t bother to check them. The sun had passed over the trees once or perhaps twice since she had crawled to her present bed. She had drunk water—Rumpy hadn’t been interested in those calabashes. She had eaten nothing. What was the point? She didn’t even put her arms around the grain bag. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
Below, the baboons ransacked the smoking-platform. Nhamo turned on her side and watched a line of ants move up the tree trunk. Perhaps they had found their way to the kudu meat. What difference did it make?
Once she stirred enough to climb out onto a branch to relieve herself. She saw that Rumpy no longer lay on the ground, so he must have survived.
More time passed. It was dark, then light again. She saw Fat Cheeks with Tag draped over his shoulders, and Donkeyberry searching the remains of the calabashes on the ground. Rumpy appeared. His limp was far worse. He moaned to himself as he struggled along, and the other baboons seized the opportunity to bully him.
The water ran out. Nhamo’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her body smelled strange—not dirty, exactly, but old, like a musty cave where animals had laired for a long time. Her head ached. It doesn’t take long to die of thirst, she thought dully. She didn’t think she had the strength to climb down the ladder.
Darkness came, and with it a cooling breeze. The sound in the leaves was like water rushing across the sky. The moon was growing again, and its milky light spilled through gaps in the tree’s canopy.
I’m on my way, little Disaster, said Crocodile Guts. He had a string bag hefted over his shoulder. My relatives have brewed beer and my oldest son has bought a goat to sacrifice at the coming-home ceremony. It’ll be good to see them again.
Nhamo didn’t answer.
I suppose Anna will be there. I hope she’s forgiven me for dying first. Crocodile Guts scratched his hair thoughtfully. I would have liked a sacrificial bull, but times have been hard recently. My sons have promised me a bull as soon as they can afford it. I’ll probably have to remind them.
Nhamo watched him stride along the bottom of the lake as easily as a man on a forest trail. Just before he moved out of sight, the boatman turned and called, The njuzu might be lonely for a while. Don’t be surprised if they pay you a visit. And then he was gone.
First Mother, now Crocodile Guts has deserted me, thought Nhamo. She watched the cool moonlight slide along the platform. The baboons stirred on their rocky perches. An eagle owl called as it floated along the upper airs.
Sh sh. Something was moving in the grass below. Hhhhuh, came a sigh. Nhamo tried to ignore it. So what if something wanted to kill her? She wanted to die.
The sounds went on, sh sh. Of course, she wanted to die on her own terms, not some horrible beast’s. Her plan was to stay on the platform until her spirit was driven away by thirst. She had seen people die of cholera. Eventually, they fell into a fevered sleep that deepened until they simply let go. There were worse ways.
Nhamo put her eye to a gap in the platform. Two njuzu girls were weaving around the thorn barrier, looking for a way up. They lengthened their supple bodies until they were thin enough to slither between the thorns.
Nhamo felt a chill pass over her. She was too dehydrated to break out in a sweat.
Up they came until they reached the first foot hole Nhamo had carved into the tree trunk, before she made the ladder. Now the njuzu did a very strange thing. Instead of sliding around it, which they could easily have done, they searched until they found a fragment of wood. It might have been part of the storage platforms Rumpy had smashed.
One of the snakes carried the wood to the hole in her fangs and the other butted it into place with her head. In a moment the rift was healed. They went on to the next hole, and the next until the trunk was smooth again. Then they came to the ring of birdlime.
Nhamo had put it there to discourage the caracal. She watched to see how the njuzu would handle the problem. They slithered down the tree and gathered up dry grass. Back and forth they went, gluing the grass to the birdlime until it was covered up. When they were finished, they glided over it as smoothly as if they were rustling across a rock.
Nhamo had to admire their cleverness, but she realized she was about to have njuzu in her bed. She wanted to die, but she did not want snakes crawling all over her first! She crept to the other end of the platform. Her body trembled with the effort.
The njuzu coiled over the edge with their eyes glittering in the moonlight. One of them found a calabash Nhamo was certain was empty and dived her head inside. Water droplets twinkled as she rose again. Her mouth brimmed with water.
“No!” cried Nhamo, clinging to the trunk. “Go away!”
One snake twined around the girl’s body, ssuh, and came up by her face. She lightly caught Nhamo’s lower lip with her fangs and pulled the girl’s mouth open with surprising strength.
“Aaugh!” Nhamo gasped. The other snake bent over her mouth and poured the shining water inside. It was cold, cold! It sank into her body like a frog diving into a lake. At once the njuzu shook themselves loose, rippled over the rim of the platform, and disappeared.
Nhamo was shocked to the very depths of her being. She clung to the tree, shivering violently. She had swallowed something offered by the njuzu. Did that mean she was condemned to live with them forever? Or did the rule only apply to food? One thing was certain: Her determination to die had completely vanished. Now she passionately wanted to live. She only hoped she wasn’t too late to try.
Nhamo’s first chore, as soon as darkness lifted, was to get water. She was badly dehydrated. Her skin was loose and her ears buzzed, but she was filled with a kind of strength that had been missing the day before. She dipped the calabash—the one the njuzu had used—into the lake and drank repeatedly. She lay under a tree to let the water take effect.
After a while she returned to the lucky-beans and ate some of the dried meat. The whole day was spent drinking and eating. She noticed that the tree trunk was still scarred by foot holes and the birdlime barrier was still intact. Was the njuzu visit only a dream?
But that night they were back, filling the holes in the bark again and gluing grass to the barrier. This time they didn’t force Nhamo to drink. They murmured to each other as they rustled through the branches. Nhamo couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the sound was oddly comforting. She fell into a deep sleep and when she awoke, they were gone.
Nhamo couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She was sitting by the mukwa log, trying to shape the outside of the boat, when it came to her that something had subtly changed about the forest. The light was different. The sky remained as cloudless as ever, and the heat was even more oppressive than usual. Her body was covered with sweat that wouldn’t dry.
Then she realized what had happened: Buds were swelling on the branches of all the dry trees. New leaves were forcing their way out. A subtle green hue hung over the forest. And that meant…
The rainy season was on its way.
During the dry season many of the forest trees lost their foliage. But unlike the vines and grass, they didn’t wait until the first rains to start growing again. They knew somehow that the storms were about to arrive. Nhamo had seen it happen b
efore. In two or three weeks towering clouds with swollen purple bottoms would rise out of the east. Branchcracking winds and thunder that shook the bowl of the sky would descend on the island, along with torrents of life-giving rain.
She hadn’t a hope of finishing the mukwa log by then.
Nhamo was appalled. She couldn’t possibly cross the lake during the storms. She would have to stay on the island until the next dry season. Alone.
Nhamo stumbled back to the platform and lay in the shade of the lucky-bean canopy with her chest heaving. She wanted to cry—or scream—or throw something hard. So many emotions ran through her, she couldn’t decide which one to feel. All she could do was lie there and pant. Alone.
The baboons returned full of complaints. Hunger and heat made them irritable. Nhamo watched Rumpy creep from one to another, trying to beg a grass root. They all shouted at him. He was again the scrawny bag of bones she remembered from the little island. Poor Rumpy, she thought. The high point of your life was when you knocked me down.
Nhamo lay back on the grain bag and tried to think. The grinding hunger that tormented the animals would go away when the rainy season arrived. Antelope would have young, and birds would build nests. Perhaps the leopard would return to its cave.
She wouldn’t be able to build fires on wet days. She wouldn’t be able to work on the boat. And all those months alone…
But look on the bright side, she told herself. The island will be full of food. The streams will run again, and the fish traps will become usable. This year she could plant her garden at the right time, although rising lake water might make it difficult to reach the little island.
By evening Nhamo was almost reconciled to the situation. She munched a strip of dried kudu meat and choked down some of the horrid, tasteless water-lily bulbs as she made plans. She would rebuild her platforms and make a watertight shelter.
The full moon rose as the sun set. It was going to be one of those restless nights with the baboons awake and the dassies foraging.
Rumpy tried to climb the cliff and failed. His foot was swollen. Perhaps he had fallen on it when he tumbled out of the tree. He managed to reach a low shelf, where he ensconced himself in a crack.
The njuzu hadn’t visited since the two nights after Crocodile Guts left. Nhamo was frankly relieved. She hugged the grain bag and considered telling a story to pass the time until she felt sleepy. Tell who a story? she thought sadly. Rumpy wasn’t going to listen. He had cowered from her since she had thrust the burning branch in his face. She could hear him groan even now as he fidgeted under the bright moon. Anyhow, an animal wasn’t the audience she wanted. She wanted people.
Oh, fine, she thought. If I can’t get through one night on my own, what am I going to do in three months?
Cough-cough.
Her mind went blank.
Cough-cough.
That sound. She remembered it from the banana grove outside the village.
Cough-cough.
Silence.
What was it doing? Was it standing under the tree? She remembered the leap the caracal had made to pluck a dassie from a rock. How high could leopards jump?
Cough-cough.
Farther away now, it was moving toward the cliff. Nhamo let her breath out carefully. The baboons were absolutely still. Not a single infant whimpered. The troop might have vanished off the face of the earth. The dassies, who had been twittering to one another, had turned to stone. The whole grassland held its breath.
Then, a scream.
It was a terrible, wailing shriek, so much like a human that Nhamo stuffed her fist into her mouth to keep from crying out. It went on and on in ghastly agony. From her earliest childhood that scream came, with a memory of flowing, spotted skin and rending claws, and later of Ambuya tearing out her hair when they brought Mother’s bones home from the forest.
And then it stopped.
The grassland waited.
The bright moonlight shone through the leaves, and waterladen air pressed on Nhamo’s skin.
After a while a baboon infant whimpered. Its mother grunted softly in response. Whow-whow called a nightjar in a breathless voice. One by one the inhabitants of the grassland came alive. They were no longer in any danger. The leopard had selected its prey and they, with heartless ease, returned to their usual activities. The dassies twittered. A ground hornbill uttered its low, panting call.
But something had been subtracted from the chorus of night noises. Rumpy’s characteristic moan as he moved his injured foot was no longer present.
31
I can’t stay,” said Nhamo, looking out over the endless lake beyond the mukwa log. She didn’t know who she was talking to. The island, perhaps. “If I stay, I’ll go mad. Or the leopard will get me.” She felt it was only a matter of time. The great cat had marked Rumpy as his prey long ago. Grandmother said that if a lion or a leopard tasted someone’s tears, it would never be satisfied until it got the whole person.
She considered dragging the log to the water in its present state. She could sit in the hollow and float along—but it would probably flip over with her inside. Anyhow, she couldn’t even budge it. Nhamo contemplated Crocodile Guts’s boat. “He said the njuzu taught him everything he knew about water. I wish they would do something for me.”
Or had they?
Who taught her to swim? And who found her the island with the Portuguese grave? Who told her to hollow out the log with coals? And who slithered up and down the tree fitting pieces of wood into the holes?
“I have been such a fool,” whispered Nhamo. After many years even a good boat gets cracks, Crocodile Guts had said the first time she met his spirit. I used to plug them with sap from the mutowa tree.
She turned Crocodile Guts’s boat over and studied the bottom. The gap was as wide as her little finger on the inside, but it narrowed to a hairline outside. She could whittle a slice of wood to fit it—and pack it securely with mutowa sap and wild cotton fiber. It should last long enough to reach shore.
Nhamo worked feverishly all day. She mended every defect she could find, both inside and out. She poked sticky cotton into tiny gaps with a sliver of dassie bone. She held a glowing branch next to the wood to dry the seals. She harvested all her plants from the little island—leaves, seeds, and roots—leaving nothing to replant in the rainy season. Everything depended on this last attempt. She would succeed, or she would join the njuzu in their watery kingdom.
The next morning she said good-bye to the baboon troop. Tag scampered after a butterfly he hadn’t a hope of catching, and Donkeyberry groomed Fat Cheeks by the dry stream before everyone set out on the daily search for food. There was no sign that any of them missed Rumpy.
Nhamo dragged the boat to the reeds and packed it with her stores. She had one fish trap still full of kudu meat, and a few yams and tomatoes. She was encouraged to see that the interior of the boat stayed dry as she paddled along, but to be absolutely sure, she rowed to the far end of the island and spent the night there.
As the sun rose, she set out again, keeping it at her back. The island fell behind her. It was still visible at sundown, and during the night the current drifted her partway back. The second day she forged on, and by nightfall she saw land again.
The forest went on and on, with here and there an inlet. After following the coast for several hours, Nhamo believed that she had reached the true shore and not another island. The dry-season current was so sluggish she was able to move much more swiftly than she had months before.
She saw plumes of smoke. People were living in the forest, but she never saw them. A natural caution kept her from looking for them. They might be cannibals. Nhamo had been away from humans so long, she felt like a wild animal who might be hunted instead of welcomed.
The days passed as she doggedly paddled along the shore. The air grew heavy with unshed rain, although the clouds still hid in Mwari’s country. Sometimes she blundered into a side channel and wasted hours working her way back out. Sometimes she
was so frustrated, she sat in the boat and cried. But always, eventually, her spirit rebounded.
Whenever she saw a mutowa tree, she went ashore to gather more sap and more wild cotton. She pulled the craft onto sandbanks and poked as much caulking as she could into the cracks. The inside of the boat became unpleasantly sticky. Dirt glued itself to her legs. Now and then thunder rolled from somewhere beyond the horizon. She saw lightning far off in the middle of the night, but no clouds.
At last Nhamo spotted a cluster of huts set back from the water. She studied them anxiously. The heat dried her eyes so much she could hardly make anything out. As she got closer, she observed women squatting on the shore, beating clothes on rocks. A girl with a switch sat guard over a cluster of babies. They were exactly like her own villagers! Nhamo’s spirit leaped.
The women shouted and pointed at her. Nhamo struggled to control her fear. What was wrong with her? These were people. She had braved the lake to find them.
The women stared with frank amazement as she paddled toward the land. Nhamo realized she must present a strange sight. Her hair hadn’t been combed since the day before she was to marry Zororo. She wore a girdle of smelly rabbit skins. She had a spear tied to her back and a panga stuck into a makeshift belt. The villagers moved away warily as she came ashore.
“Masikati. Greetings,” said Nhamo, clapping her hands politely. “Have you spent the day well?”
“We have done so if you have done so,” said one of the women. “What—who—are you?”
“I’m Nhamo Jongwe. I’m looking for my father.”
“He isn’t here,” said the woman.
“Is this Zimbabwe?”
“It’s that way.” The woman gestured to the west. Her expression said, I wish you were there rather than here.
“Is it far?”
An old woman who had been sitting in the shade of a tree spoke up. “You weren’t thinking of going in that boat, were you?”