Читать книгу Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs And Religious Beliefs - Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa - Страница 21

THE SPAWN OF THE DRAGON

Simba the lion was old. Simba the lion was weak – mad with hunger and frustration. There is nothing more terrible for a beast once strong than to find itself slowly succumbing to the ravages of old age. And, in the hostile forest, age is the greatest and most final calamity that can befall a living creature, be it lion or antelope.

Antelopes that feel the onset of old age in the weakness it brings to their swift limbs, know that the stream of their lives has at last run dry. They know that for them the hour of Kalunga, the God of Death, has come and, when the herd madly flees from the smell of lions, they will be forced to lag behind – an easy prey even to the most inexperienced young lion.

The lion who feels the icy claws of old age slowly paralysing his mighty leaping muscles, and who feels the dizziness of old woman Time clouding his mind and dimming his eyes, comes inevitably to realise that he has already hunted his last impala, and that for him the sun of life is setting in a blaze of gold, scarlet and purple.

So, Simba the lion was lying under the young musharagi tree not far from a sluggish river bordered by rustling reeds, and in whose cool bosom a herd of water beasts bathed lazily, their enormous bodies protruding like so many smooth glistening rocks in the rippling waters.

One of the water beasts raised its ugly head and yawned hugely, exposing blunt tusks insultingly in the direction of the slowly weakening lion with the golden light of the setting sun full on his face. The lazy breeze of sunset was softly playing with his ancient mane, and the tall grass through which his head was barely visible.

Among the reeds bordering the river something moved and a sacred flamingo rose into the forest-scented air, slowly beating its graceful pinkish-white wings as it crossed the river to join three of its females on the other side. But Simba the lion had no eyes for all this; the forest had lost its magic. The silvery river with its water beasts, its nesting flamingoes and playful otters had lost its enchantment. The only voice for which he had ears was the voice of hunger growing savagely in his famished, shrunken belly. The only music for which he had ears was the song of starvation roaring like a wild tempest through the caverns and tunnels of his dulled mind.

Aieeee! Simba the lion would have given his eyes, yea, his very life for just a mouthful of meat from the side of a wildebeest three days dead! Surely anything, no matter how putrid and vile, any worm-crawling carrion, was better than a slow death of starvation. In vain the old lion wished that just one thin, spavined antelope should pass within reach of his age-numbed claws. He had not eaten for three whole days.

It was cruelly strange to see that the older one grew the faster the impalas and zebras seemed to be. Why were these wretched creatures so incredible? Did they not know that they were created by the Great Ones for the sole benefit of lions? A vision of a herd of zebras floated briefly across the troubled skies of his disordered mind. A million curses on the striped over-fat wretched brutes! Why did the Great Spirit have to give them such swift feet?

The old lion’s thoughts were cleaved abruptly by an interruption. They faded out like morning mist before the rising sun and old Simba lifted his battered head with a start! Something was coming . . . and it was coming his way!

With a cautiousness born of years of bitter experience Simba lowered his scarred head until he was looking through the long elephant grass, rather than over it. He breathed a deep breath of living air. Eyah! there was no doubt about it – the strange scent was there and it was getting stronger. Whatever was coming was taking its time. But of one thing the old lion was now sure – it was some kind of food that was coming his way! Fresh and vibrant strength poured like liquid fire along his spine. His excited tail slowly stiffened and a low growl of satisfaction involuntarily pushed itself forth from the depths of his ancient chest, to be promptly stilled by the voice of experience. Nothing must give the approaching prey a hint of his presence. Silence now . . . absolute silence . . .

It seemed as if the very stream of Time had come to a standstill as the lion waited; the forest, the river and everything about his environment suddenly assumed an odd unreality. Then they casually emerged into view . . . strolling slowly through the long grass . . . Human Beings!

There were two of the creatures – male and female. And old Simba narrowed his yellow eyes as he contemplated their approach. They were walking for all the world as if they owned the forest – as if all the trees and the mighty ageless river belonged to them or their fathers. They were walking as if they were the chief and chieftainess of Creation. Simba the lion watched them coldly and in his animal mind took in each detail of their features and attire, as they drew nearer and nearer . . . and their scent grew stronger in his anxious nostrils!

The female was the Spirit of Beauty personified. She was Perfection in a most perfect form. She was not only beautiful, but she radiated beauty as a hot stone radiates heat. The waiting Simba could sense the great beauty of the human female and he could sense also the great goodness in her soul. He beheld the sensitive beauty of her face, the oval face with its round prominent forehead, its clear eyes that scanned the world with an expression of deep wonder. He noticed the small flat nose and the tiny nostrils, well placed above a smiling mouth. A mischievous goddess had placed that mouth there as a trap with which to catch the lips of men.

She was the essence of purest perfection. Some Goddess of Skill must have spent days of precious time moulding each bulge and curve of that heavenly physique. This woman was living beauty carved in dark brown musharagi – a statue of perfection carved in living ebony.

Her attire was simple indeed: she wore a short skirt of tanned cheetah skin heavily trimmed with cowrie shells around the hems. Bracelets of copper and ivory flourished on her arms and around her neck blazed a necklace of bright copper oblongs engraved with signs of secret wisdom. Her hair was combed up into two lobes, a hairstyle known as the ‘ears of the caracal’ – the oldest hairstyle in the Land of the Tribes. Sacred cowrie shells decorated her soft hair and a beautifully carved comb of ivory showed in the back of her head.

The old lion did not know it, of course, but he was looking at the most famous and most beautiful woman that ever lived – Marimba, the daughter of Odu and the incomparable Amarava, Mother of Nations. He was looking at the woman who gave the tribes some of the oldest and most beautiful songs on earth and who invented countless musical instruments, each destined to carry her name in some form or other – Marimba, the Mother of Music.

The man was tall and slender, but strongly built. His face was not handsome, but it was determined and manly, like the rest of his body. And whereas the woman beside him was beauty incarnate, he was the personification of strength and invincible loyalty. He wore a crude loinskin around his manly hips and a band of python skin around his head. A necklace of the teeth of hyaenas was around his muscle-corded neck, while a solitary bracelet of copper shone on his right forearm. In his left hand he held a crude shield of buffalo skin while in his right he carried a weighty harpoon of wood, tipped with a flake from the shin-bone of a giraffe. He carried this strange weapon because at this time the tribes had not yet learned the secret of extracting the hard iron from the ironstone. That knowledge was brought to this continent by the Strange Ones very many generations after the events here mentioned occurred. Only copper was known to our ancestors at this stage and this metal was too soft for use in weapons. It was good only for ornaments.

The old lion waited quietly while the two human beings drew closer. The forest and the river seemed to vanish and in the lion’s eyes only the two humans had any substance – only them he now saw, to the exclusion of all else.

He saw how the man’s eyes never left the bewitching face of the woman by his side – how he looked for all the world like an impala helplessly caught in the hypnotic spell of a glittering python. He could see how the man smiled at her gently, reassuringly, and spoke softly to her as if trying to banish the great sadness that clouded her gentle eyes – a sadness that the old lion could sense was clouding the soul of the beautiful human female, like a foul storm-cloud clinging and obstructing from view the snowy top of a beautiful peak.

Then it dawned on the old lion that the human female was trying to urge her man to go back with her to where both came from and not to penetrate the forest any deeper. The unusually beautiful woman had a premonition of danger. But just then something happened which left both humans paralysed with fear and which gave old Simba the golden opportunity he had been waiting for! A bird of thunder – an eagle – had been circling high in the heavens for some time and now this rider of the storm suddenly dived from the red, blue and gold expanse of the sunset sky. He dived with wings partly spread and cruel talons fully at the ready to grab what his keen eyes had spotted. He passed directly over the heads of the startled humans, fanning them with the wind of his fearful passage. He dived into the tall grass to their left and shot up again into the glowing heavens – a young steenbuck struggling in terror in the grip of those pitiless claws.

While the shocked humans stood rooted to the ground, numbed by this awful and rare omen of violent death, old Simba gathered every ounce of his fast-ebbing strength, and launched himself in an all but feeble charge!

Marimba felt the heavy blow that struck her on the side of her head, sending her reeling to the ground, straight into the dark valleys of unconsciousness. She did not see her fearless husband hurl himself upon the lion that had brought her down. She did not see how his bone harpoon glanced aside harmlessly from the shaggy flank of the hunger-demented beast. Neither did she see how he, with a strength above the strength of an ordinary man, threw himself barehanded upon the snarling lion and dragged it off her. She did not see her husband locked in mortal battle with the lion whose claws all but tore his strong body to shreds. And she did not see the shaggy maned savage beast drag the limp form of her lord and husband away through the tall grass.

Simba the lion had found a meal at last.

And the Princess Marimba, Chieftainess of the Wakambi Tribe, had lost yet another husband, the second husband she had lost since the cruel Goddess of Evil, the night-walking Watamaraka, had laid a curse upon her. The Mother of Demons had one day approached her and commanded the shocked daughter of Odu and Amarava to become one of her handmaidens in the Land of Darkness, and this Marimba had flatly refused to do. Watamaraka then placed a curse upon Marimba saying that any man she would love and marry would die violently, and in her presence, within three moons of their marriage. Exactly three moons after the curse was pronounced, Marimba’s husband, the hunter Zumangwe whom she had married sixteen years earlier and who was the father of her young son, had been trampled to death by a rogue elephant.

Marimba and the boy Kahawa had managed to escape by climbing a tall tree and had watched in horror as the head of their home met his untimely death almost immediately below them. Two years later Marimba had married again, and in order to prevent the curse of Watamaraka from being fulfilled, the Princess Marimba had kept her new husband a virtual prisoner for two whole moons, confined to the village of the Wakambi and never allowed him to go out with the other men on a hunt.

But the man had tired of being protected like an overgrown child by a woman. He wanted to face the perils of the forest and risk his life as all brave men should. Marimba had pleaded again and again, resorting to all her womanly subterfuges to keep her lord and husband at home. Finally Marimba had to give in to her valiant consort; she allowed him to go into the forest, but provided she could accompany him, hoping he would then exercise greater care.

They had spent the whole day in the forest and as the time passed she felt the voice of presentiment growing in her heart. She began to beg her husband to return home with her. But he, the stubborn, stupid and stone-headed fool, had laughed at her fears and had assured her that nothing would happen. It had been in the course of their tenth argument that afternoon that Simba the lion pounced upon them.

Now, the sun slowly set beyond the mountains to the west, and as the skies swept their blazing farewell to the departing Lord of Day, the Princess Marimba lay unconscious in all her beauty in the long grass while the water beasts began to leave the gurgling mud to commence their greedy nightly grazing. The sacred flamingoes gracefully retired to their mud and reed nests. And in the silent distance there came the faint sound of a hunter’s horn. It sounded once, twice, thrice, and then it was silent again.

A search party of Wakambi warriors was on its way to find out what had happened to their beloved princess and her consort – why they had not returned to the crude settlement of caves and huts which the Wakambi, the Tribe of Wanderers, knew as their home. In the long elephant grass the breezes of sunset fanned the soul of the beautiful Marimba back from the land of Nothingness and she stirred. She sat up with a blinding headache that dimmed her vision.

The first thing she saw was blood – slowly drying blood all over the patch of trampled down grass, the unmistakable signs of a violent struggle. ‘My husband!’ was the first thought that came to her mind. Struggling against the mists of shock and apprehension Marimba tried to stand up. But she fell back and could only lie flat on her back, quite helpless.

Then out of the empty air above her a bright bronze-coloured apparition took shape. Watamaraka, the Mother of all Demons, presented herself in visible form, with a cruel smile on her dark lips.

‘You will look around for your husband in vain, Oh Marimba: he is in a land far from here, beyond the seventh gateway of creation – the land of Forever-Night.’

‘My husband . . . dead! How can he be dead? I tried to tell him!’

‘You poor babbling fool,’ murmured Watamaraka. ‘I told you that every man you marry would die violently within three moons of your marriage, did I not?’

Fires of hate and fierce anger flamed in the gentle breast of the beautiful Marimba and words of wanton harshness spilled like a fierce torrent from her lovely mouth: ‘You pitiless blackhearted sexless monster! You foul witch from the lowest pits of hell! So you would place a curse on my head, would you? But I can yet defeat your vile schemes. I have already made up my mind that I shall never love another man again.’

‘You stupid human beings! You are all the same, whether mortal or immortal,’ purred Watamaraka nastily. ‘You make a lot of wonderful resolutions, you swear a lot of oaths to do this and not to do that. You bind yourselves with promises without first studying your secret natures – without knowing yourselves first. You never size up your ability to keep your oaths. And you say you will never marry again, my little ugly cockroach!’

‘Ayieeee!’ flared Marimba, ‘I shall never marry again, I swear by my mother’s sacred breasts.’ Her voice rose to a mad shriek.

‘Look down there,’ smiled Watamaraka, pointing down to Marimba’s jutting breasts, ‘What is the purpose of those, do you think?’

‘What have my breasts to do with my oath?’

The harsh voice of the evil goddess turned soft and gentle as she said to the angry and frightened widow: ‘Marimba, you are a very beautiful and desirable woman. And you, the youngest of the few immortals left upon this earth, have one very delightful weakness which you inherited from your mother, Amarava, long before she came under my spell. You know well enough what I am referring to. That weakness will force you to marry again in exactly twelve moons from now. And once again you will suffer the pain of my curse; within three moons of your marriage your husband will die violently and evilly in your presence, and I shall stand nearby and laugh! Until then, farewell, namirika!’

‘Namirika!’* – the unfriendly epithet was more than adequate to describe the great weakness that the Wakambi princess had. But she was shocked at hearing this accusation hurled at her for the first time in her life – and by her arch enemy of all creatures. The Queen of Falsehoods had spoken the truth for once and this truth had brought Marimba face to face with the realities of her character. She now saw herself exactly for what she was, not the wise and tender-hearted ruler of the first tribe ever organised in the land – the first tribe ruled not by force but by wisdom and love. She saw herself not as the loving mother of a boy wiser than his fifteen tender years and braver than a thousand lions, but as a very ordinary, frail woman tormented by the unceasing demands of her own exotic body. The silent forest suddenly seemed to possess voices. The distant tree trunks seemed to have grown faces and eyes that leered at her and mouths that laughed hideously. ‘Oh no!’ gasped Marimba. And just as she lapsed once again into the valleys of unconsciousness she heard the harsh brazen laughter of the Mother of Demons rippling through the forest as the triumphant goddess took her departure to the Land of Forever-Night.

Oko! For the beautiful one this was not only the day of soul-searing sadness and cruel bereavement; it was the day of self-revelation too. And this day which comes to all of us sooner or later in the course of our lives on this earth is the most painful in a human being’s existence. Many of us go through the swamplands and deserts of life swathed in a glossy kaross of self-delusion. We deceive ourselves into believing that we are wise, strong and invincible, and that in all the world there is no one like oneself. We believe this until the day when we have to stand and look down upon the false images of ourselves lying shattered at our feet. And on that day we discover that we are the exact opposite of what we thought we were.

Thus it was with the Princess Marimba on the day her lord and husband died – that day when Time itself was still in its infancy, so many hundreds of generations ago.

She had been firm in her belief that she was wise and strong enough to withstand the savage onslaughts of cruel fate. But she never realised that every human being born of a woman carries in him, or her, the seeds of his or her undoing. Even as she lapsed into unconsciousness Marimba knew with a sick feeling in the valleys of her mind that she would marry again and that she would suffer bereavement once again.

Kahawa, the son of Marimba, was very angry; his young eyes were red from weeping and he could not sleep. He was angry with his dead stepfather for having exposed his dear mother to the dangers of the forest in spite of her warnings and protests. He was also angry with his stepfather for having been foolish enough to let a lion, and an old lame one at that, eat him. The tall, stone-headed, stupid son of a club-footed hyaena should have known better than to let himself get killed and so make the incomparable Marimba and the whole of the Wakambi tribe unhappy. Serve the stupid wretch right! Did he not know that his wife was an immortal and that her words and her warnings had to be obeyed and heeded? ‘Good riddance!’ thought the boy coldly. ‘Now my mother can concentrate on ruling the tribe instead of spending the greater part of the day in that silly fool’s arms!’

It was well known that Kahawa had intensely disliked his stepfather while he lived, and he disliked him even more now that he was dead. He could not understand his mother’s grief. Why, that idle good-for-nothing was much better off dead, so why waste tears over him?

Kahawa let out a snort of anger and turned over on his left side on his bed of skins and dry grass in the cave. He stared angrily at the pale silver moon through the mouth of the cave. He heard the distant low wailing of the women of the settlement who were gathered in the Great Hut to mourn with their Chieftainess the death of her husband. He also heard the low groans of the two thousand warriors who were gathered, fully armed with clubs and bone-tipped harpoons, outside the Great Hut to pay tribute to the dead Royal Consort.

All these sounds disgusted Kahawa, and he was still snorting his anger at the moon like a young buffalo bull when the open entrance of the cave was briefly darkened by a fat silhouette. His best friend, Mpushu the Cunning, entered and sat down near the entrance, regarding the son of his beloved Chieftainess with the usual expression of admiration on his fat, sweaty and fish-like face.

‘I see you, Oh Mpushu,’ said Kahawa.

Mpushu’s ivory-white teeth gleamed in the moonlight against the ebony of his oily face. ‘and I see you too, Oh Eagle of Marimba.’

‘You are well known for an early sleeper, Oh Mpushu, so pray tell me, what brings you out at this time of the night?’

Mpushu’s face seemed to grow oilier. His big round eyes seemed about to fly out of their sockets and he swallowed noisily once or twice. And then he just sat staring at Kahawa – his big mouth opening and shutting. He was obviously lost in the forests of fear.

‘Has the Hyaena of Darkness eaten your tongue, Oh Mpushu? asked Kahawa. ‘Why is it that you do not talk, Oh my friend?’

‘This unworthy one is afraid to arouse the anger of the Royal One,’ said Mpushu softly. ‘This lowly Mpushu is afraid to be burned by the sun that is the wrath of Kahawa.’

‘Mpushu,’ Kahawa said gently, ‘to me you are like a brother and I have always found reason to be thankful for your advice. Speak your mind and tell me what troubles you so.’

‘Eagle of Marimba,’ said Mpushu after a short silence, ‘Mpushu never worries about himself but for the prince who honours him with his friendship. And while this unworthy lay on his side in his hut early this night he heard men whispering outside.’

‘The ears of Mpushu are sharper than the bone needles the women use for sewing skin blankets together and his brain is more cunning than that of the jackal in the forest. Tell me, Oh Mpushu, what were the men whispering about?’

‘The miserable sons of tree-dwelling monkeys were speaking ill of my prince Kahawa,’ growled Mpushu. ‘It was that night-walking charlatan Somojo and that fat fool Kiambo. They were saying it was a thing of deep disgrace that the Eagle of Marimba was not showing his sorrow for his dead stepfather by standing outside the Great Hut in armed vigil as the rest of the Wakambi men are doing. Kiambo even went as far as to say that Kahawa seems pleased that his royal stepfather has gone to the land of Forever-Night.’

‘The miserable fat hyaena is quite right!’ cried Kahawa savagely. ‘I am glad that my stepfather is dead, and tomorrow I intend to go into the council hut and tell these back-biting jackals so to their faces! I loathed the man while he lived and I hate him still though he is dead.’

Mpushu wiped his sweaty face with the back of his hand and the expression on his cunning face became even more fish-like as he said: ‘Eagle of Marimba, there are times when a man must swallow his pride and push his personal likes and dislikes into the depths of the darkest forests of his mind and do things which he would never have dreamt of doing. And for you, my prince, such a time has come.’

‘If you think that I must pretend – and like a hypocrite mourn a man I hated, Oh Mpushu, then you can go back to sleep, because that I shall never do. I have never pretended in all my life and I shall not start now.’

Eagle of ‘Marimba,’ insisted Mpushu calmly, ‘when you are a chief, or the son of one, there are things you have to do simply for appearance’s sake, simply for the benefit of the stupid fools you rule, even if such things go against your feelings and your pride and conscience. A chieftain must hold the love and respect and the esteem of his subjects, always, otherwise he is lost. A chief or a prince must avoid being the laughing stock of his people, or evoke their scorn, because once that happens he is a chief no more. And your obvious pleasure at the death of your stepfather is fast making you the laughing stock of the Wakambi, Oh Royal Kahawa.’

‘What are they laughing at me for?’ demanded Kahawa hotly.

‘As they went away I heard Kiambo and Somojo agreeing that you are a petty-minded fool who carries hatred to ridiculous levels, to beyond the grave . . .’

‘What!’ cried Kahawa furiously, leaping to his feet and reaching for his spear. ‘The foul beasts dare insult me, the son of Marimba! Their muddy sour apology for blood shall redden my spear!’

‘Killing those two will only make matters worse, Oh my prince,’ said Mpushu calmly. ‘Violence and force are sure signs of failure on the part of the ruler, Eagle of Marimba. Killing his own people can only increase a ruler’s unpopularity.’

‘Well?’ cried Kahawa fiercely, ‘what do you then suggest I should do? Do you want me to go out there and kiss the buttocks of the men who have insulted me?’

‘No, my Lord, I would never dream of suggesting that you do something so easy. But I do suggest that early tomorrow morning you and I go out into the forest, hunt the lion that ate your stepfather, kill it and bring its head here for the rest of the people to see. That would greatly impress our tribe and make you very popular.’

‘And it would also please my poor mother!’ cried Kahawa, becoming quite excited about this brilliant suggestion. ‘Oh Mpushu, you are the very fountain of wisdom!’

‘I believe so . . . yes,’ said Mpushu modestly.

Kahawa was so excited by the prospect of the coming lion hunt that he could not sleep that night. It was months since he had killed a lion and if there was one kind of beast that the son of Marimba wanted to wipe out of existence it was lion. Kahawa hated this kind of animal only a shade less than he hated his stepfather, and deep in his rebellious and turbulent soul this youth nursed a profound contempt for the custom of his tribe of first asking the gods for permission to kill lions.

When dawn stained the eastern skies a pink-red, Kahawa deliberately omitted to perform the lion-hunter’s ceremony and to request Heaven’s permission. He was content with washing his face, gargling with water mixed with powdered mbaba root, and combing his hair with a four-toothed ivory comb. Seizing his bone-tipped spears and elephant-skin shield, he rushed out to wait for his friend Mpushu at the gate of the vast Wakambi settlement.

At the gate the young prince waited with fuming impatience and he watched as the slowly rising sun sent its first rays to bathe the huts of the settlement where his mother ruled the first organised tribe in the land. It was a tribe of nomads and pioneers, the first Bantu to penetrate the land which in later years was to be known as Tanga-Nyika. Still later, the northern division would be known as Lu-Kenya. This great settlement was built near the top of a steep hill, and it circled this hill as a ‘headband of honour’ around a bald chief’s head. A heavy palisade of thick logs with a solitary gate went round the outside of the settlement like some formidable diadem. Behind this stockade were five thousand huts. These huts were crude and rather ugly compared with those built many generations later. The upper reaches of the hill were honey-combed with caves and natural shelters, where lived those of the Wakambi who disliked the too modern idea of huts.

The Wakambi had fortified their settlement, not against attack by men because, as far as they knew, they were the only representatives of the human race in the fantastic and frightening land, but against the terrible beasts which no story-teller must ever describe – beasts known simply as the Dija-Nwana, or ‘Night Howlers’. These terrible demons loved to raid human villages during their mating season in the first moon of summer, and they would carry away men, women and children and devour these in their dark dens on the shores of the mighty lake of the Falling Star – known today as Nyanza.

Those were terrible days – those days when the Dawn of Time was still red in the horizon of Eternity. Those were the days when Outcast Gods, Dimo Giants, Viper Maidens, Life Eaters and Fire Leopards and many other monsters, vicious and horrible beyond description, still roamed a frightened earth.

But let us not delude ourselves into thinking that these horrible creatures no longer exist; they do. They take human shapes and cause evil in the lands of men. They disguise themselves as human beings and cause mighty wars in the lands of the tribes before vanishing once more into the ‘Land-that-is-and-is-not’. They leave thousands of foolish human beings to kill each other. They can take over the bodies of people whom we know and commit vile crimes as them. These Evil Ones are with us yet.

Kahawa waited with growing impatience for the coming of his friend, his feet itching to take off into the mysterious forest. He longed to see the red blood of a hateful lion splatter the earth.

At last Mpushu appeared, unarmed and very scared-looking indeed. His thick-lipped fish-like mouth opened and closed like that of one just speared by a fisherman. Kahawa was amazed. He was disgusted and annoyed when his fat friend suddenly gasped: ‘My lord, we must not go and hunt this lion today.’

For a few moments Kahawa was too angry to speak. His one great wish was to send Mpushu flying to the ground with a blow from his fist. But with great effort he controlled himself, fighting down the savage rage – the fumes of which clouded his brain and dimmed his vision with a red haze. When he found his voice at last he said, coldly and in measured tones: ‘I have always suspected you are a coward, Oh Mpushu, and now I am sure!’

Mpushu’s eyes bulged and his ebony black face grew blacker. He swallowed noisily once and then said hoarsely: ‘You know that I am no coward, Oh Kahawa . . . you know it!’

‘If you are not a coward then go and get your weapons and let us proceed,’ said Kahawa, still in the same cold voice.

A few moments later the two friends made their silent way down the hillside towards the brooding forest. Kahawa was thirsting for the blood of the old lion. His brain was already alive with pictures of himself standing triumphant over the old beast slowly dying at his feet.

But Mpushu was quaking with fear – fear from no earthly cause.

It was well past midday when the two friends, who had not spoken a single word to each other since leaving the settlement, came at last upon the trail of the lame old lion Kahawa had sworn to kill. They followed the trail from where the lion had eaten Kahawa’s stepfather to where he had lain for the night. They followed the trail thence to where he had brought down a young impala which he had only partly eaten. They followed the trail from the carcass to where the old beast himself lay peacefully under an overhanging rock not far from the northern shore of the great ‘Lake of the star that fell’.

It was Mpushu who first saw the lion lying there, the many battle scars on his tawny hide plainly visible. His eyes were still shining with that fire of greatness and unconquerable courage that one finds in all these noble beasts. Lonely, mateless and weak with age, this lion was still as regal as he had been in his younger days. A chief dethroned in some savage woodland battle, yea, but a chieftain nevertheless.

‘Your lion, my lord,’ whispered Mpushu.

A gleam of demon-like delight burst upon the cold eyes of Kahawa. He raised his long spear with the needle-sharp point of bone and covered himself with his knee-length shield of elephant hide. Slowly he approached the lion with Mpushu close behind him.

He was about ten paces away from it when the beast turned his head and swept both his would-be attackers with his burning golden stare. He watched them as they came through the long grass, quietly, almost contemptuously, and he did not even move a muscle. His teeth bared and his eyes narrowed as Kahawa ventured another step or two. But for the rest he just lay there, calmly watching the hunters.

Suddenly Kahawa felt his fierce courage deserting him. Suddenly he was not a warrior thirsting for blood but a puzzled young boy facing a situation he could not understand. Lowering his spear he turned and looked at his friend – just in time to see Mpushu also lowering his spear, which he had held poised a thumb’s length above Kahawa’s kidneys.

‘You treacherous jackal! You were trying to stab me from behind! Are you mad?’

‘No, my prince. I had made it my unpleasant duty to kill you in order to stop you from killing this lion.’

‘What are you talking about, Mpushu?’ asked Kahawa in blank amazement. ‘You . . . my friend . . . would have killed me . . . and you yourself suggested it.’

‘I would not have allowed you to take another step closer to the lion, my lord. You see, that lion is set there as a trap by the gods. If you kill that beast the Wakambi will be exposed to total annihilation.’

Kahawa’s face was a mask of sheer astonishment and open-mouthed surprise. He stared at his friend for a few moments as if doubting his sanity. Then he said: ‘You are talking gibberish like a drunken monkey, Oh Mpushu; I beg you to make yourself clear.’

‘After I left you last night, Oh Eagle of Marimba,’ said Mpushu in his customary respectful tone of voice, ‘I went straight into the soft valleys of slumber. Then I had a dream such as I have never had before in all my life. I dreamt that you and I went into the forest to hunt this lion you see lying there. The dream was so clear that even now I am still amazed at its clarity and accuracy. In my dream we came upon the lion exactly as you see him here, and that clump of herbs between his paws was there, in clear detail. I saw you stab the lion, and just as you withdrew your spear the lion changed into the princess Marimba, your mother, and she screamed at you while lying there, blood pouring from her mouth.

‘I woke up with a start, but a few moments later I must have drifted off to sleep again. I dreamt the same dream over again – exactly the same, in every detail. Early this morning I went to see that toothless crone Namuwiza, the priestess, who told me that she too had a dream similar to mine, only longer and more detailed. She said I must prevent you at all costs from killing the lion, because if you did the whole Wakambi settlement would be wiped out this very night by a race of men who never smile, a race of men from the north. Both you and I would be slain and your immortal mother would be carried away.’

For a long time after Mpushu had finished talking, Kahawa still stared at him like a man in a deep trance. Then, dropping his weapons, the son of Marimba approached the old lion and stood looking down at him. The old lion stared indifferently up at the human youth. There were tears in Kahawa’s eyes as he turned to his friend and said, almost harshly: ‘Come, let us go.’

Simba the lion watched the two humans turn and go, watched them until the forest swallowed them and they vanished forever from his sight. Disinterestedly, he wondered just what they had come to do to him and why they left without doing it.

Simba the lion was overcome by a great weakness; he wanted to stay just where he was, come what may. He was aware of a deep sense of contentment and peace, and a pleasant weakness was slowly creeping through the valleys of his brain like heavy, soothing mist. He slowly lowered his shaggy head between his great front paws as the gathering mists in his mind made his head feel very heavy.

Softly he closed his eyes. He never opened them again.

Mpushu and his subdued, strangely silent friend Kahawa were still some distance from the hilltop settlement that was their home when the son of Marimba said to the older youth quietly: ‘Mpushu, do not look behind you now. Neither must you show any signs of fear or excitement – but we are being followed by a strange man and he is not far behind.’

‘Is . . . is he one of the Evil Ones . . . a Life Eater maybe?’ stammered Mpushu, his teeth chattering with fear.

‘I know not, Mpushu, but this much I am sure of – he is following us to find out where we stay, and at all costs we must not let him discover the settlement!’

‘What . . . what are we going to do?’

‘We must ambush him, kill or capture him,’ said Kahawa coldly. ‘I saw his face through the corner of my eye as he looked over a bush some time back, Oh Mpushu, and I know he is not one of our people. His hair, for one thing, is of a strange hair-style, with a bundle above his forehead.’

‘Where can he have come from?’

‘I do not know, but I think we have been wrong in thinking that we, the Wakambi, are the only human beings in this land. There is another race of men we have not realised existed, and that man following us is a member of this race.’

‘And this means that . . .’ gasped Mpushu.

‘This means that our first duty now is to reach the settlement and alert the people. But first we must dispose of that man behind us. Now this is what we must do . . .’

The stranger was tall and lean, and there was an inbred viciousness about him that made Marimba sick with fear. Although he was now unarmed and bound securely hand and foot with strong thongs of kudu skin, he still looked dangerous and the Wakambi warriors standing around him seemed to worry him not in the least. In fact, he looked up at them as if they were just so much useless vermin.

Mpushu and Kahawa had carried the tall stranger between them for a long distnace after knocking him unconscious with a stone when he blundered upon their ambush. They had brought him to the base of the hill of the settlement and shouted to the guards to help them with their captive. They had tied him securely and brought him to Marimba, who was trying her best to interrogate him, without any response.

‘We mean you no harm,’ she was saying; ‘we only want to know who you are . . . and from where you come.’

‘Humph,’ grunted the stranger.

‘I know you are not a Life Eater or a Night Howler,’ pleaded Marimba. ‘You are a new race of man we never knew existed. Tell me, to what race do you belong and where are the rest of your people?’

‘Huh,’ growled the stranger.

‘This creature will not answer your questions, Oh Marimba,’ cackled the toothless witch Namuwiza. ‘But I know why he was following the two young men. He is a scout for a large force of other creatures like him which is even now a quarter of a day’s journey from here . . . and coming fast.’

‘How do you know this, Oh honourable wise woman Namuwiza?’ asked the princess, turning her beautiful, troubled face to look at the scrawny hag.

The old woman cackled a weird witch-laugh: ‘Little Namuwiza dreamt it all last night, all by her sweet self . . .’

‘To me, all warriors!’ cried Kahawa fiercely. ‘All available spearmen to me! They must not catch us unprepared . . . whoever they are. All warriors to my side – recall all hunting parties from the forest. Bring out every spear, every axe in the village . . .’

The people hurried into action, inspired by their fierce leader Kahawa. Great bundles of bone-tipped spears and harpoons were brought out while blasts from horn bugles recalled the hunting parties from the forest. Men ran hither and thither spreading the word throughout the great settlement.

Oblivious to the burst of activity around her, the princess Marimba was kneeling down beside the trussed-up stranger, studying him with great interest and curiosity, not unmixed with fear and admiration. The stranger was a man such as she had never seen before – handsome and yet very evil looking: one who could, she imagined, kill thousands of fellow men without the slightest pang of pity or remorse. She saw his long narrow face with its high forehead and square jaw. She saw his thin-lipped cruel mouth with its hard wrinkles at the corners. She saw his strange-looking long nose and deepset hard eyes, from whose depths gleamed the fire of resentment. She saw the strange hair-style – the thick bundle of plaited hair gathered above the forehead and tied firmly with a fine skin cord that went around the head to another bigger bundle jutting out like a woman’s breast at the back of his head. She saw how his ears were pierced above and below, with heavy copper ear-rings that weighed them down. She saw ten necklaces made from the bones of human fingers and claws of lions and leopards adorning his neck. Lastly she saw his long spear lying some distance away where Mpushu had thrown it, with the other strange weapons the stranger carried.

This spear was not bone-tipped like those of the Wakambi. It was tipped with a heavy shard of ligwadla rock, and the princess noted with great relief that the spear, though formidable looking and heavy, was inferior to the bone-tipped Wakambi lances, because the latter could be sharpened, while when the more fragile stone point became broken the whole head had to be replaced.

But the other weapon filled Marimba with fear. It seemed that the stranger relied mostly on this weapon. It was a great bow with a well greased string and a heavy quiver full of stone-tipped arrows.

The bow was unknown to the Wakambi and many warriors were standing around and looking down at it in obvious puzzlement and dismay. It was clearly a deadly weapon and the Wakambi had no answer to it.

It was Mpushu who found the secret of opening the stranger’s tight-lipped mouth after all else had failed. He merely strode up to the prisoner and said in cold disgust: ‘Whatever race spawned a miserable coward like this one is indeed very unlucky. Just look at him lying there; he is almost wetting his loinskin with fear and yet he tries to look brave!’

The stranger’s eyes narrowed with anger and his gleaming teeth were bared in savage rage. His voice, heavy with a foreign accent, was barely a whisper as he said in clear though halting Si-Wakambi: ‘What did you call me?’

Mpushu whistled jubilantly. ‘So the beast can talk, can it? It is not dumb after all! I called you a coward, Oh vermin, and that you most certainly are.’

‘Untie my hands and feet, then we can talk further . . .’

‘Untie your limbs?’ exclaimed Mpushu in mock surprise, to drag out more conversation. ‘But we have only just caught you.’

‘You miserable fat idiot!’ bellowed the stranger. ‘I’ll tear you limb from limb as soon as I am free of these bonds.’

‘No loinskin-wetting foreign coward is ever going to tear me apart,’ said Mpushu happily. ‘And especially not a starveling like you.’

‘I am no starveling,’ roared the stranger. ‘You are speaking to a Masai, you bloated dog!’

‘You are what?’ asked Mpushu, highly amused, ‘a Makai? What is a Makai? From what slime-pit does a Makai crawl? It sounds like some kind of carrion worm.’

‘I said I am a Masai!’ bellowed the captive. ‘And soon you will be cracking your stupid jokes in the land of the dead. The armies of my father, Fesi the Wolf, are very close at hand. You will all be dead by midnight.’

‘But what have we done that you wish to make war on us?’ asked Marimba softly, now that the prisoner’s tongue was thoroughly loosened.

‘The Masai need no reason for making war,’ sneered the captive. ‘They fight whom they please, whenever and wherever they feel like it.’

‘But you are human like us, and you cannot kill people for no reason,’ protested the beautiful woman.

‘The Masai are more than human. They are invincible and their might in war is beyond all human might,’ boasted the prisoner. ‘The Masai are gods and ’tis you who are low-down human vermin.’

‘Oh!’ breathed Marimba. Her breasts heaved and a rare flash of anger brightened her large eyes briefly.

‘The Masai are the “Great People”, the true lords of Creation. To us, war and killing are the very breath of life, more pleasant than a woman’s kiss, and more heady than marula beer.’

‘For a captive in enemy hands you have far too big a mouth,’ said Kahawa coldly. ‘I am strongly tempted to take a deep breath of your life, if you find such an experience so recommendable.’

‘A Masai welcomes death at any time it chooses to come, and in whatever guise it comes. So your childish threat is wasted on me.’

‘You persistently praise your race,’ said Mpushu brutally. ‘But we are far from impressed. To us you sound like a zombie repeating words that some wizard has taught you. You are a poor example of the human race.’

‘My soul, my body, my life, my whole being belongs to Nangai of the Mountains,’ said the man in a terribly inhuman tone. ‘Nangai commands, I obey. Nangai is everything, I am nothing.’

‘Who is Nangai?’ asked Marimba.

‘Nangai is the One who Is. Nangai is the One who commands and is heard.’

The little witch Namuwiza cackled weirdly. ‘These poor Masai are a race under the cruel spell of an outcast god who lives in the forests of Killima-Njaro. Little Namuwiza knows it all . . . Te-he-he-he . . .’

The hunting parties had all returned safely and the great gate was securely shut. The Wakambi were in tense readiness as they scanned the forests below for the first sign of the oncoming enemy. Night was falling fast and the land was once more shrouded in mystery.

On the high palisades warriors stood to arms – hard-eyed and tense in every muscle – waiting for the Masai to come storming up the slopes of the ancient hill on which the First Village stood. As the night crept across the land with its sombre mantle, people became touchy and easily irritated, but they remained hard of eye and grim of face. The First Village ever built in the land was under the shadow of suspense and was firmly gripped in the cruel claws of the vulture of fear. Then the people heard a strange sound: a sound that was not of this world, that flowed through the silent dusk like a silver river through dark forests.

It was a sound such as no human ears have ever heard before. It penetrated the very depths of the soul like cool water down a thirsty throat – like oil, soothing oil killing a cruel pain. Men stared at each other with incredulous wonder. Others groaned, and wept, blatantly and without shame.

It was a sound of unearthly beauty, and to the surprise of everybody it came from the throat of Marimba!

She had taken the deadly bow of the captive Masai and had fitted a gourd to the middle of the bow itself, transforming the deadly weapon of war thus into the first makweyana bow-harp the world had ever seen. Not only had Marimba invented the first musical instrument, but she was singing the world’s first song as well:

Oh, little star so far above—

Oh, smiling moon up yonder;

You who on these fruitful vales

Shed, aye, your heatless light.

Carry my song on the wings of your light—

Bear my refrains to the ends of the world;

Carry my voice to the Land of the Gods

Beyond the plains of Tura-ya-Moya.

Tell the Great Ones that live there forever—

Tell those that rule all the stars up above—

Tell the mother of all the seas and the earth

Beyond the plains of Tura-ya-Moya:

Tell them that though the hyaenas of death

Prowl without my kraal tonight—

Tell them that all these perils I’ll face

And that I’ll never cringe nor cower.

Tell them that I, their humble servant maid,

Shrink not from the scowl of a foe—

For they who have the Great God as ally

Are twice the victors in war!

Tell them their servant implores them

For strength and their guidance true;

Mad is he who through Life’s swamplands goes

Without the guides from Tura-ya-Moya!

The Wakambi gathered in awe around their princess, their eyes wide open like so many astonished children. They had never heard a human being sing before. Never before had they heard sounds like those that streamed forth from the bow-harp as the princess gracefully struck the string with a short length of cane. They joined her as the magic of the song overwhelmed them, and soon the whole settlement was singing.

Their voices, most discordant from lack of experience, rang out across the startled heavens and the sleeping forests echoed and re-echoed to the heavenly strains of Tura-ya-Moya.

And the vast Masai armies advancing through the forests upon the Wakambi settlement paused in bewildered confusion as that unearthly melody reached their ears faintly across the dark distance.

‘Nangai of the Mountains, save us!’

Like a deadly flower growing in a meadow of green grass, another strange idea was born in the brain of the princess Marimba as she sang. This idea had nothing to do with music; it had a lot to do with death – soon to be meted out to the advancing Masai!

She promptly ordered her warriors to cut broad, long strips of strong kudu hide while she organised the women into gathering piles of round stones in strategic positions behind the palisades. This done, the princess called her commanders together and explained to them the use of the slings of hide with the stone shot. The men listened in blank amazement as the incredible woman explained the use of this simple and yet deadly weapon that she had just invented.

The night was as dark as the face of death. A mighty storm was building up its wrath in the east and into the ears of Kahawa came muted peals of savage thunder and he also saw the distant flickers of searing lightning. Kahawa was alone; he was one of the many guards posted all along the narrow walk inside the great stockade to give the alarm should the Masai risk a night attack. He was excited and his pounding heart beat faster than usual. This was war. This was no stupid conflict between mere clans over a mere trifle. This was the real thing: war in its deadliest form, a war between two different races of men!

Never since the very dawn of time had the land seen anything like it – two different races locked in a battle to death.

Kahawa was impatient; he wanted the Masai to come quickly so that the battle might begin sooner. He wanted to see the effectiveness of the weapons used by either tribe and especially the effectiveness of his mother’s latest invention. Its effect should be devastating indeed!

A soft footfall induced him to whirl around, his heavy war club firmly gripped in his hand. But he gave a sigh of relief when a well-known and beloved voice said softly through the darkness: ‘Kahawa?’

‘Mother!’ whispered Kahawa fiercely, ‘what are you doing here?’

‘I, too, am a warrior, Kahawa,’ came the rich voice from the darkness. ‘My son must not think that he is the only one who knows no fear. His mother is fearless too.’

The dark shape that was Marimba moved closer to her son and a far-off flash of lightning was reflected briefly from the copper ornaments she wore. Kahawa felt a strong urge to tell his beloved parent to stop being foolish and to retire to her hut. Kahawa loved no one on earth more than he loved his mother and it did not matter if the whole Wakambi nation were wiped out, as long as his mother was safe. It was understandable therefore that his mother’s next words filled him with an insane rage and an unquenchable hatred of the Masai.

‘Kahawa, I wonder whether it would not be wise for me to surrender myself to the Masai when they come. It might stop them from attacking the village, and stop a needless war.’

‘Mother! What in the name . . .’

‘Listen child, that Masai you captured has been talking to us again. He told us the Masai have known for a long time that we were here. They have known about us for many generations but have simply chosen to leave us alone and continue fighting amongst themselves as they had always done. But some while ago their evil outcast god Nangai, who has enslaved the very souls of the Masai, ordered them to attack us and, after wiping our tribe out, bring me back to him alive.’

‘Bring you to him!’ cried Kahawa furiously. ‘And what does he want to do with you?’

It seems that when Nangai was driven out of the land of the gods he was wounded grievously by an arrow of Mulungu, the Father of Light, and he has been bleeding slowly out of existence ever since. His left arm has been almost completely eaten away by the poison from Mulungu’s arrow and he is dying the slow death of an immortal god. In order to survive he needs the living flesh of another immortal, a human immortal, to consume raw. He must also drink a little of that immortal’s blood every day. And I happen to be the only immortal within reach.’

‘Ayieeee!’ cried Kahawa in utter disgust. ‘You must not think of surrendering yourself to that foul monster, Oh my mother. I cannot bear to think of you being mutilated by that ogre!’

‘My son, there is no other way. Nangai is dying fast and he is getting desperate. If he cannot get me one way he will the other, even if it means annihilating the entire Wakambi tribe. I cannot let this happen. I love the Wakambi people too much to be the cause of their destruction.’

With that she turned to go and Kahawa felt like a man who had been stabbed to the heart. His mother was his very life and she was the only person for whom he had any love. He did not relish the prospect of losing his only surviving parent. Come what may, he was not going to allow his mother to surrender herself to Nangai.

He leapt after the departing silhouette and struck her a stunning blow on the back of her head with his war club. Using two of the five battle slings he had with him, he tied the heavenly form of his unconscious parent securely hand and foot. He then carried her to a small cave near the summit of the hill and gently laid her down within, rolling a great boulder over the mouth of the cave.

As he turned away from the cave the Masai launched the long-awaited attack. It was as sudden as it was ferocious. One moment the settlement had been wrapped in silence, with the distant growls of the oncoming storm the only sounds heard; the next moment alarm horns were sounding all along the stockade as keen-eyed night guardsmen saw shadowy figures creeping up the boulder-strewn slopes towards the village.

Wakambi warriors burst out of their huts and raced for the stockades as a withering storm of Masai arrows fell upon the village. Men and women caught in the open screamed hideously as falling arrows tore into their bodies. But the palisades were manned by then and the Wakambi were fighting back fiercely. About five thousand battle slings snapped and a hail of humming stones decimated the first wave of attacking Masai warriors. The survivors dived back into cover, from where they directed a hurricane of arrows at the settlement.

Covered by the fire from the survivors of the first wave, a second Masai attack-wave erupted from the darkness, rushing against the palisades. Though another humming tornado of slingstones mowed into this wave, too. Men died horribly in the battle-torn night; they died as slingstones crashed through their skulls or thudded into their bodies. They fell screaming as stones, as large as fists and larger, shattered their arm bones and shins.

A group of Masai reached the stockade in one place and tried to climb it. A fierce hand-to-hand battle ensued. Spears of all descriptions were flourished – bone-tipped and stone-headed; heavy wooden clubs and maces with heads of stone or copper; axes with heads of bone or common granite – all these hacked, smashed and thrust pitilessly. Quite a few Wakambi found the massive jaws of hippopotami most useful, and amongst these was Mpushu the Cunning.

The battle raged till well past midnight while the storm crept nearer and nearer, adding its own senseless fury to the clamour of the fighting below.

Twice on that horrible night the son of Marimba hurled back single-handed groups of Masai climbing the stockade; he was wounded thrice in the fierce fighting.

The angry storm put an end to the battle. The wildly furious thunder crashed and boomed its anger at the struggling human creatures down below. Men were deafened and shocked by the loud peals of unearthly thunder. The ground shook and vibrated as the voice of the Thunder Demon tore through the very fibre of the earth and the rain-pregnant clouds seemed to burst into hideous flame as sheets of purplish-white lightning ripped them to shreds of billowing, whirling wool. Bolt after bolt of forked lightning split the heavens apart as an axe splits the head of a man. And then, with a flare of flame as bright as the midday sun and a crack that sent even the bravest of the brave cowering down like whimpering children, a bolt of lightning split a tall mopani tree from the crown to the very roots.

Rain had not yet started to fall, but the Masai broke away and fled. The Wakambi, too, ran like so many rabbits for the safety of their huts and caves. A roaring fire was started in the forest by the lightning that had struck the mopani tree and hungry flames leaped high with joy, like a Sunfish Maiden leaping and writhing at a kiss from her lover. Shrill screams were heard above the shattering anger of the storm as Masai, frightened out of their wits, ran through the burning forest to escape the deadly embrace of the flames. Many were caught by the grumbling wind-fanned fire and burnt to death, shrieking like insane women for their traitor god to save them.

Then hail came, as big as babies’ fists, in a howling curtain to scourge the dazed earth with insane mercilessness.

The storm thundered for the best part of the midnight hour and the Wakambi cringed and cowered in the darkness of their huts and caves. But gradually the storm spent its passion and the midnight winds of heaven carried the angry clouds away. A silence deeper than the deepest wells fell upon the dazed land. It was an eerie silence that was as ugly as it was frightening; it was the silence of Death.

‘Listen, Oh Kahawa,’ whispered the grizzled old witchdoctor Somojo. ‘Listen!’

‘I hear nothing, Oh Somojo,’ whispered Kahawa.

‘Yes, my prince, that is what I mean – the silence is unusual. And yet it is terribly familiar!’

‘It is like the silence that precedes an attack by the Night Howlers,’ said Mpushu soberly.

‘The Night Howlers only attack in early summer,’ argued Kahawa, ‘and now it is well into late summer.’

The frightened men lapsed once more into silence and the Great Silence seemed to deepen. Kahawa found his thoughts drifting towards his mother. He found himself wondering how she was faring in the dark cave in which he had imprisoned her. Heedless of his cruel throbbing wounds, he rose and made for the door of the hut. He never passed through it.

The hut was torn apart as though it were a ball of cobwebs, showering the petrified men inside with grass and broken twigs. Kahawa looked up and found himself staring into the great redly luminous eyes of a creature of unbelievable proportions whose dark silhouette obstructed the stars now peering through the clouds – a nightmare creature which had grasped the big hut in its vulture-like talons and was slowly and gloatingly tearing it apart to get at the men inside.

For a few moments the brave son of Marimba was paralysed with fear. He stared with hypnotic fascination deep into the huge eyes of the Night Howler – eyes that blazed like glowing embers, lined with veins that glowed like red-hot copper. The burning split pupils were the size of warriors’ shields.

Then Kahawa instinctively hurled his war club, landing it straight in one of the Night Howler’s eyes. The eye shattered and the glowing fluid poured down to the ground while the huge monstrosity let out a howl that split the night in two. Other Night Howlers descended upon their wounded comrade and quickly devoured him.

Others were still raising havoc amongst the huts. Most people managed to flee in wild terror into the caves, but quite a number were caught in the open and these were being driven into one area. Stray ones were promptly gobbled down. Many a warrior who had fought like a thousand lions, defending his wife and children against the alien Masai only a while earlier, ran like a rabbit, wetting his loinskin all the way and screaming like a mad girl, while a bloody-jawed Night Howler played havoc with those same wives and children.

Only Mpushu and his badly wounded friend Kahawa had the courage to fight, urged by their initial stroke of success. Already between them they could account for six of the hideous hell-monsters. They had accidentally discovered that the Night-Howlers’ eyes were most vulnerable and easy targets in the dark. And each time they succeeded in hitting the target the creature would cringe and fall and many others would settle upon it, giving the tribe a brief respite.

The newly invented slings turned out to be most formidable weapons and practice was making Kahawa and Mpushu quite expert in their aim.

The great settlement was already razed to the ground and all the people who could not reach the safety of the caves were concentrated by the Night Howlers into one panic-striken madly screaming mob, ready for an orgy of devouring. But they were waiting as though to commence on a particular command.

Mpushu and Kahawa knew they were fighting their last battle. Their arms were numb through handling the slings without pause and they knew it was now simply a matter of time before they too were overwhelmed. Finally, they decided they could do nothing about those already herded together and they made off to reach the safety of a cave. As Mpushu turned to flee, a strange manly voice halted him in blank astonishment:

‘My friends, I am with you.’

Kahawa, too, turned to look at their newly found friend and got the shock of his life. Running with them was the tall Masai whom they had captured earlier – Koma-Tembo.

This totally unexpected ally put new strength into the two young men and, standing together, the three of them took a heavy toll of the Night Howlers. They fought until a voice of no earthly origin rang out as though from the empty air above their heads:

‘Lay down your weapons, oh mortals, and yield yourselves into my mercy. I am Nangai and when I command I am obeyed.’

The three men dropped their slings to the blood-stained ground in paralysed amazement. They could vaguely discern a queer apparition in midair above them. They knew very well what Nangai wanted even before he spoke.

‘Where is the immortal female Marimba?’

No one answered. Mpushu noticed that silence had once more claimed the village – or what was left of it. The Night Howlers were silently awaiting further instructions.

‘I asked you a question, young mortal dog!’

‘Marimba is my mother, Oh Nangai, and I have taken her to a place of safety. You, and even the Most Ultimate God will reach her only over my dead body!’

‘Nangai is not here to bandy words with immature mortals and he does not appreciate childish sentiments. Bring forth the female Marimba?’

‘The mighty god Nangai can go and relieve himself in a rat hole!’

‘Wretched mortal, you obey my command this instant, or I shall pass further instructions to my beasts that howl in the night.’

Kahawa knew the meaning of naked fear for the first time in his life. He knew that Nangai was serious and that gods, high or low, active or outcast, never make idle threats. They are not burdened with a conscience like human beings, nor are they loaded with emotion. A god does not know the meaning of love or loyalty; these are human weaknesses. Only the Goddess Ma suffers from these weaknesses and we have inherited ours from her.

‘You keep me waiting, miserable mortal. I give you ten more heartbeats!’

Mpushu began to weep. He tried to implore Nangai, but the god ignored him and addressed himself only to Kahawa. The Night Howlers looked appealingly at Nangai, waiting for the order to commence their delicious meal. Nangai ignored them just as he ignored Mpushu.

‘Well, mortal, your time is up.’

There was no reply from Kahawa. Through further moments of silence Kahawa’s hand closed firmly around the hilt of his bone dagger and Mpushu saw a gleam of unearthly light in the eyes of his young friend. Then very calmly Kahawa measured his words: ‘My answer is still No, Oh Nangai!’

The young prince Kahawa half-drew his bone dagger from its sheath. Into his eyes there came a look that Mpushu could not at first explain. It was the look that comes into the eyes of one who has just had a shattering inspiration, one who has suddenly found the answer to a problem that had been gnawing at the back of his mind with the persistence of a rat. Mpushu saw his friend direct a stare of unspeakable contempt at the god Nangai floating on his throne in empty air. Then the young Kahawa sneered right into the god’s face, sneered as one sneers at a human enemy whom one holds beneath contempt.

Suddenly the eyes of the god blazed with cold, murderous fury. He realised that a dead Kahawa was more unlikely to speak than a live Kahawa. He made a snap signal to the nearest Night Howler, who promptly snatched up Kahawa and held him aloft in one vulture-like claw.

‘Now, mortal, speak or you shall die!’

Kahawa began to laugh, a harsh, contemptuous and insulting laugh. The Night Howlers stared first at him and then at Nangai in great puzzlement and even the human beings huddled together looked at the son of Marimba in blank amazement.

‘Under the sun that shines in the skies above,’ Kahawa said at last, ‘there is nothing more tragic, more pathetic, than a creature once great and powerful, still clinging with stubborn tenacity to the tattered shreds of his vanished power. There is nothing more tragic than the sight of this creature trying to deceive itself and others into thinking that it still holds the power it held in the past. You are such, Nangai, you are no longer a god. You are nothing but a slightly higher form of common demon. When Mulungu drove you from the golden valleys of Tura-ya-Moya like a wounded and beaten cur he also stripped you of your immortal powers. You use force, Nangai, you torture like a common human thug. You used to have powers with which, if you had retained them, you could have learnt the whereabouts of my mother by simply reading my mind. Using force is an admission of failure. You are a failure, a pathetic fetish that-once-was and the Masai are your dupes. You send them in force to attack the whole settlement when all you could have done was to render yourself invisible, enter our village unseen and carry my mother away. You had to have help – on a large scale at that – you wretched fallen fetish . . .’

‘Silence, mortal dog! When I wish to hear your raving and idiotic prattling I’ll ask for it! Where is your mother?’

‘Find her yourself . . . use your godly powers . . .’

Nangai gave a brisk command to the Night Howler, who slowly started sinking his talons into the flesh of Kahawa.

It was just then that a miracle happened – a miracle in the form of a song that came floating through the night air like a ghost of pure mercy and deliverance. This song had a magic spell about it. It stunned the fiendish Night Howlers. There was a musical instrument in the singer’s hands which in future years became known as the karimba or kalimba. This unearthly music sent a haunting melody through the night and wove a mighty spell around the squatting Night Howlers. It paralysed them – destroyed them.

They let out a mighty roar in unison and, as though they had all become victims of an alien virulent leprosy, their scaly flesh began to slough off their skeletons and to flow sluggishly down the slope of the clearing in the ruined village. Wisps of reeking steam erupted from their distended slime-green bellies as their foul bowels burst with sounds terrible to hear, and from these wisps floated the ghosts of the people they had already devoured.

These ghosts were happy – happy to escape and float away to the land of Forever-Night, there to await their reincarnation.

But first they joined in the song sung by the woman with the kalimba. They soared and dived and soared again. They danced and weaved and leaped in the dark night air, and a regiment of them capsized the evil Nangai’s throne and he fell like a lump of cow dung into the reeking, oozing slime that had been the flesh of the Night Howlers. All the people who had been herded together became caught in the webs of the Song of the Kalimba. They tore off their soiled loinskins, skirts and ornaments, flung them aside, and raised their arms in thanksgiving to the High Gods for their deliverance, after which they too joined in the sacred Song of the Kalimba.

Dead and living joined in and the very stars rejoiced. The gods wept crystal tears and bowed their heads in tribute and acclaim. Marimba led the hosts of dead and living with her song until the eastern sky greyed with the first promise of coming dawn.

Eventually she dropped her kalimba and ran to where her son was lying. She threw her arms around him and wept. She kissed his forehead and both his ears and, drawing him close to her soft breasts, she wept long and loud, tears not of sorrow but of pride and pure joy and unfathomable happiness. When she released him Kahawa did something which shocked his gentle parent and the rest of the Wakambi but which was to become a firm Law of the Tribes in generations to come. With an abandoned axe of sharpened stone he deliberately chopped off his own right hand.

With the bleeding stump raised high, he addressed the shocked Wakambi: ‘People of the Wakambi, with this gesture I am laying down a new law that you must accept with your hearts and souls, and make it part of your lives until the rending of the knot of Time. In order to prevent my parent from delivering herself to the evil Nangai, I had to strike her unconscious with a club before I could hide her. But the ends do not justify the means; I broke the very Law of the Stars by striking the sacred vessel that carried me for more than nine agonising moons. Let this be your law, your very siko, that anyone, male or female, who strikes his or her mother for any reason, shall forfeit his or her right hand – voluntarily or otherwise. By this siko I beg my ancestors to cleanse me, and my children’s children, of the foul taint of my sin, and I also beg the forgiveness of both Ma the Great Mother, and of the beautiful Marimba, who is my mother.’

‘My son, my dear child, did you have to do it?’ Marimba caught her son as he sagged to the ground and everybody crowded around to assist with easing the agony of the brave prince. Kahawa smiled up at his mother and whispered: ‘Tell me mother, how did you manage to escape from the cave?’

‘I did not, son; I was rescued by the witchwoman Namuwiza and her two sons just before the Night Howlers devoured them, and I spent some time making this instrument to help you . . .’

Kahawa heard no more as unconsciousness claimed him.

* * *

A great happiness settled over the land and the Wakambi prospered and multiplied, so they could afford to wrinkle their noses at the Masai in contempt and defiance. The Masai were forever freed of the evil spell of the traitor god Nangai, though they never lost their stiff-necked pride and their arrogance, which was like a disease.

Marimba invented many more songs: love songs, hunting songs and even songs to sing when a beloved one was interred. She invented the xylophone, which is still called the marimba to this day.

People sang and whistled and their souls were uplifted by the melodies and tunes their immortal queen had given them. For the first time since the escape of Odu and Amarava from the destroyed land of the First People, human beings held feasts and dances and came to know again the soothing joy that beautiful tunes bring to depressed and life-weary souls.

For a full ten years Marimba refused marriage. She sturdily resisted the powerful demands of her own bothersome body and endured the searing agony of lonely nights of weeping herself to sleep. She saw her son happily married to two Wakambi girls and prospering in general happiness. She saw more villages of Wakambi clans built to accommodate the spreading population. Soon the original settlement became the High Village of a small empire which she ruled with wisdom that only an immortal can possess.

As the years wore on she found it more and more difficult to resist the ardent wooing of her greatest suitor, Koma-Tembo, the lion-hearted Masai whom Kahawa had captured and who had stood side by side with him against the evil god and the Night Howlers, so many years earlier.

Then one night that which was written in the stars and destined to happen, did happen! Lo, not even immortals are immune to fate.

The hut was dark. The hut was lonely. And in its dark interior on a pile of lion and leopard skin blankets reclined, in queenly solitude, one of the most beautiful women that ever trod this earth – Marimba the peerless, Marimba the Goddess of Music, the Goddess of Happiness.

There was a deep sadness in her long-lashed eyes and a crystal-clear tear stole unbidden down the side of her flat little nose. The battle is hardest when one has oneself for an enemy, and Marimba was her own enemy in many ways. Outside the hut there was merriment. Hundreds of Wakambi were feasting and dancing round a great fire in the village clearing. The happy night rang with their laughter and lusty singing. The appetising smell of boiling and roasting meat was heavy in the night air. But she who had brought the happiness to her people was no partaker of it that night.

A dark shadow crawled into the hut through the low arched entrance and the immortal heart of Marimba stopped beating for a few misty moments. Well she knew who it was who had just slipped into the hut. It was the man whom she loved with all her immortality – a man she desired with every vein and artery in her hungry body. But she dared not accept him for fear of sealing his doom.

The reddish-yellow light of the distant feast fires played on one side of his manly face. It accentuated the deepset smouldering eyes and it made the hard lines about his imperious mouth and strong nose appear more harsh.

Koma-Tembo the Masai was, even though seated and at peace, a man born and bred to love, to command and to fight. Marimba watched him through misted eyes as he sat there near the door of the hut and longed for him as an impala longs for the cool waters of a woodland stream. Yet she was praying to the One Thousand Gods that the man should keep his distance and not come any nearer than he was. Well did the deathless woman know that should the great Masai come any closer her fiery emotions would betray her – and him!

‘I see you, Oh Koma-Tembo,’ she said with a great effort.

‘And Koma-Tembo sees the bright sun of his life,’ was his measured reply.

‘Koma-Tembo basks in the sun that scorches,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘There are suns in whose light it is not wise to sit.’

‘I mind not being scorched by the sun that is the incomparable Marimba,’ he said with a smile. ‘Neither do I mind being drowned by the pure river that is she.’

‘Marimba has told the woodheaded Masai many times why she cannot accept him as a husband,’ said Marimba. ‘And yet Koma-Tembo is as stubborn as a frog that refuses to be driven out of the hut with a broom.’

‘From the incomparable Marimba, Koma-Tembo will never take No for an answer.’

Suddenly the princess lost her temper and even as the angry words poured from her mouth, her desire for this son of the Dragon of the Waters grew until it seemed like a mighty wave of burning lava from the fiery belly of Killima-Njaro. ‘You are a fool, Koma-Tembo! You men are all stupid, stubborn fools! Your lust pulls you by the nose right into the valleys of undoing. You will never leave things well alone. I have told you a hundred times that I cannot accept you as my man, because you would be dead within three moons of our marriage. I am trying to save your life, you porridge-brained fool! You must now leave this hut immediately.’

‘Before I leave your presence, Oh sun of my life, I must first hear you say you love me.’

This was too much for the tormented woman. Tears welled out of her eyes, wetting her face, and deep sobs shook her beautiful form. She turned and shrieked at the Masai: ‘You know that I love you – you have known for two years. You only keep on asking because you like to torture me. Now get out of this hut quickly . . . hamba! simbira! You . . . you mulila-busiko . . . Night Howler!’

Koma-Tembo was astonished. His mouth hung open in a most un-Masai fashion. He had not known that his queen had been in love with him for two years already, and that she was held back from marrying him only by the curse on her head. Like all Masai, Koma-Tembo had little use for life – be it his own or anyone else’s – and it was more pleasant for him to spend three moons with Marimba in love and happiness than a whole lifetime of suffering and loneliness. And as he advanced those few paces that separated him from the object of his love, Koma-Tembo knew very well that he had exactly three moons to live – but he also knew that each day of it would be worth more than a thousand lifetimes.

As he took his beloved gently into his battle-scarred arms, he told her so.

Marimba was shocked to feel the hands of the Masai on her. She shuddered and let out a small gasp of fear. Feebly she tried to push him away. But her arms, instead of thrusting, tightened about his neck and drew him closer, while her body strained savagely against him. Her willpower shattered against the rocks of desire and went flying into a million shards of rainbow-coloured crystal. What deadlier betrayer is there than one’s own body? What fouler enemy had the human being than the desire that flows in the blood of his own veins? Marimba was lost.

Later – much later that night Marimba went out into the village clearing to join in the all-night feasting and dancing round the great fires. Never before had her people seen her more lively, more active and vivacious. She was the very fount of song and hilarity, and she danced like an uninhibited tempest ravaging a country.

But Kahawa was not deceived by his mother’s cheerfulness. He saw through it clearly as through a crystal-clear drop of water. He had seen the tall Masai enter his mother’s hut and he guessed the decision she had made even before she announced it to the cheering people.

Marimba had decided to marry again after more than ten years – and she was going to suffer the agony of bereavement once again. All her cheerfulness, all her vivacity, was an attempt at shutting out of her mind this unpleasant fact.

It was a year-and-a-half later and the beautiful queen of the Wakambi was alone in the dark forest. She sat on the bank of the same river which, so many years ago, had seen her second husband attacked and devoured by an old lion. That same river had seen the death of Koma-Tembo, the valiant Masai, whom she had loved as she had never loved any other man before.

Koma-Tembo had gone out with about fifty hunters and snare diggers to trap a rhinoceros that had taken up residence near the river and had developed the habit of charging groups of women who came from the village to fetch water. As usual, Koma-Tembo had volunteered to take the most risky duty of all; this time he had chosen to be the decoy man. In this capacity he had to lure the beast towards the circle of great pits cleverly covered with poles and grass. Once inside the circle, the animal was provoked to blind fury by a shower of stones and sticks hurled by the other hunters who were hiding in the undergrowth. As decoy, Koma-Tembo had to expose himself at this stage and invite the beast to charge him. He would then lead the beast to one of the pits whose cover was strong enough to carry the weight of a human being, but not that of a heavy beast.

Koma-Tembo had successfully decoyed the furious rhinoceros right into one of the great snare-pits, but he had tripped and fallen into it himself. The Masai and the rhinoceros had met the same fate at the points of the deadly stakes planted in the bottom of the pit.

Marimba was disconsolate. She had taken to the habit of going alone into the forest merely to sit in a secluded spot and meditate – with her songs as her only company. But the people she ruled noticed that the more their queen suffered at the hands of the gods the more beautiful became the songs she composed and sang, and the more fantastic the musical instruments she invented.

She invented six different kinds of reed flutes, and pipes.

She was sitting alone near the river when Kahawa, now known as ‘The Left-handed’, came along the river bank at a run and in obvious excitement – a rare thing with him indeed!

‘I am here, Oh Kahawa. I am over here.’

Kahawa came striding through the undergrowth. He was fully armed and he wore the usual hard expression on his face. But his brow was, in addition, clouded by a great puzzlement which surprised Marimba very much.

‘What is the matter, Oh Kahawa?’ she asked as she rose to her feet. ‘What has happened, my child?’

‘Come with me, Oh mother,’ said Kahawa with barely concealed excitement. ‘Come with me, for I have to show you yet the strangest sight of your life.’

Marimba followed her son through the dark scowling forest. She followed him through glades where the breeze whispered in the tall grass and through swamps where otters played amongst the reeds, and swamp birds nested in the tall lubaqa.

They went eastward towards the distant mountains and soon Marimba found herself paving a way up the boulder-strewn slopes while the ground fell gradually behind her. A cruel shrub armed with vicious dry thorns scratched her smooth immortal thigh, drawing blood of heavenly purity. She let out a small cry of pain and Kahawa whirled, his stone-headed mace gripped tightly and at the ready. Then he saw the scratch and the blood and a strange intense feeling he could not identify swept through the valleys of his soul.

‘Maie agwe!’ he cried; ‘you are hurt, mother!’

‘It is nothing, Oh my son. It is nothing but a scratch from a thorn-bush.’

‘Sit down and rest, mother.’

‘I am not tired, my child; we can still go on.’

‘Mother, sit down,’ commanded Kahawa fiercely.

‘You are a true son of your father,’ said the surprised woman with a weak smile as she sat down on a boulder. ‘But you must not use force all the time, son; force destroys him who uses it.’

‘Mother, force is good when used to defend or protect things that one holds dear, and to defend you I am prepared to use all the force in the world.’

‘My son, you must never concentrate all your love on one thing or one person. You must learn to extend your love to the world in general, because you are part of it and the world is part of you.’

‘I hear you, Oh mother,’ said Kahawa softly.

‘And above all, you must try and be a good husband to the two girls I gave you for wives, my son. They are always complaining that you come home with a terrible temper – you refuse to touch them and criticise the food they cook for you.’

‘But mother,’ protested Kahawa, ‘I did not want to get married in the first place. I have no time for women. Besides, those two you gave me are the worst you could find. The first one, Lozana, is a frightened bore who chatters like a jungle monkey from dawn to dusk without pause, and the second, Lukiko, is a fat stupid idiot who not only reminds one of a lost buffalo stuck in the mud, but smells like one too, and has the brains of one . . .’

‘My son!’ cried the mother. ‘What words are these? What horrible things are these that you are talking? It is your duty to beget children to carry your father’s name on to generations to come and your personal feelings must never interfere with that duty. Whether you love your wives or not is beside the point. Now, Kahawa, I want to see either or both your wives pregnant in two months’ time . . . and I shall tolerate no further back-talk from you!’

‘Oh mother, I have far better things to do in life than begetting noisy bawling babies.’

Marimba was about to make a heated reply when she was interrupted by the sudden appearance from behind a boulder of Kahawa’s friend, Mpushu the Cunning. Mpushu was sweating profusely from his hard climb up the hill. He threw himself on his knees and crossed his arms in front of his fat face in salutation to Marimba. Then he lifted his fish-like face and said to Kahawa: ‘I have been down to the strange beasts, Oh Eagle of Marimba, and I have found out something that is a great surprise. The beasts are not only harmless but they are so docile that you can actually pull the ears of some of the females and they will follow you.’

‘What strange beasts are you talking about, Oh Mpushu?’ asked the puzzled Marimba.

‘Come with me, Oh Mother; come and see,’ Kahawa urged.

Puzzled, Marimba followed her son and his friend farther into the rocky hills of the north-east. They climbed over a hill and halfway down the other side they stopped. ‘Look, mother, look down there in the valley.’

Marimba followed her son’s pointing arm and her eyes met the strangest sight she had ever seen. The valley below was full of the strangest animals. These animals were like buffalo but a shade smaller and, unlike the buffaloes which are all the same colour, these animals ranged in colour from black to dark brown, from red to white. Many of them were either brown-and-white, black-and-white, or had brown bodies and white bellies. All had horns that were totally unlike anything Marimba had seen before.

‘What are they, my son?’

‘I do not know for sure, mother, but from what I gathered from the survivors of the people who brought them here, they are known as tame animals, mother.’

‘Tame animals? They look dangerous enough to me.’

‘They are quite docile, mother, and there is something about them one does not find amongst wild beasts.’

‘How did you find them, my son?’

‘Mpushu and I had been out on a hunt, mother. We saw these strange animals from where we are standing now. At first we thought they were a kind of antelope and we decided to hunt them. But, strangely, they did not run when they saw us, neither did they charge us as buffaloes would. Then Mpushu noticed that there were people with the strange creatures and we went down to investigate. We found that all but one of these people were lying in the tall grass and dying of some sort of epidemic. We saw that there were ten men and three women, and all the men were either dead or dying fast, and that of the women, one was still alive. And she does not seem to be suffering from the malady at all.’

‘Whence come these people, my son?’

‘I do not know, mother. The surviving woman is too frightened of us to talk clearly. But when she does talk, it is a pleasure to listen.’

The surviving woman was hardly more than a girl, a pretty little thing with rather prominent front teeth, and with a skin that was as black as pure ebony. She wore her hair plaited into numerous tiny plaits that hung down her forehead and down her back. She wore an ankle-length skirt of leopard skin and a necklace of strange shining beads and sea shells. Broad bracelets of bronze blazed upon her arms and forearms. She looked up as Marimba came and stood facing her. Under the curious gaze of the immortal woman the strange girl lowered her eyes selfconsciously.

‘Tell me, child,’ said Marimba at last, ‘where do you come from?’

It took some time for the strange girl to answer. ‘From Nuba . . . we come . . .’

‘Where is Nuba?’

‘Away – far, far, far.’

‘What are those animals you have brought with you?’

‘Meat animals – we eat. Also milk – we drink.’

‘You eat the meat of those animals, and drink their milk?’

‘So – so we do.’

Then Kahawa asked the girl what had killed those people with whom she had been. In her strange halting way she explained that her father and his servants, and her mother, had eaten mushrooms cooked and served by the other female servant, who had also eaten some. The girl had been saved by the fact that at the time of the eating she had been suffering from a bad headache and had no appetite at all.

Marimba asked the girl what her father had been doing so far away from his native land. Her answer shocked Kahawa and brought tears into the eyes of Marimba. The girl said it was a belief among their people that if one travelled southward long enough one will eventually reach the Land of Peace. Her father had been a priest in their native land and a firm believer in this myth. He had taken all his wealth and wife, daughter and servants and had set out southwards in search of the Land of Peace.

Abruptly the little stranger girl threw herself into the arms of Marimba and begged for protection, as she now had no parents. It was customary in their land for orphans to be adopted, even by complete strangers, and would Marimba please adopt her and protect her? As for the cattle, would Marimba please take them?

As Kahawa and Mpushu rounded up the two thousand beasts and drove them towards the High Village of the Wakambi, Marimba asked the girl what her name was and the girl answered: ‘Rarati . . . it is this one . . . my name . . . respected Ma-Rimba.’

‘Rarati,’ said the princess Marimba, ‘your name shall never be forgotten. Future generations shall hail you as the one who brought the secret of cattle-keeping into the Land of the Tribes. I greet you, Oh Rarati, my daughter.’

The beautiful queen of the Wakambi, the peerless Marimba, was walking through the forest with her handmaidens on her way to the riverside to bathe her body in the cool waters. Birds sang in the trees overhead and the forest was heavy with the scent of thousands of flowering shrubs. Myriads of butterflies and colourful insects were fluttering in clouds of white, blue and brown among the wild flowers and the buzzing song of nyoshi, the bee, was clearly heard in the blinding sunlight. Timid hares galloped through the long grass and the cooing voice of le-iba, the turtle dove, added yet more enchantment to an already enchanting day.

The sky was the purest of blue. Only a few clouds were to be seen in the eternal expanse of the heavens and these were as soft as wool and as delicate as the body of a Sun-maiden.

As the queen went through the forest, her great eyes were as alive as moon crystal. From the enchanting woodland scene she drank in inspiration as the grateful grass drinks the morning dew. Where the ordinary man sees only the trees, she saw them in their dignity and superb beauty; and where the ordinary man hears only the rustling of the breeze through the branches of the trees, and the senseless twittering of the numerous birds, she heard the soul-stirring verses of the Song of Creation.

She was not very far from the river when she saw a number of young boys gathered together above something that lay in the tall grass. The boys were talking and gesticulating excitedly and were all patting one amongst them on the back in obvious congratulation. Their voices floated through the scented air into the keen ears of Marimba and, as one might expect from this great woman, she left her retinue and went to investigate. What she saw there filled her with anger and disgust, and tears sprang unbidden into her eyes. One of these boys had invented a particularly vicious and cowardly kind of snare with which to catch young antelopes. He had tried it out and it had worked all too well. Lying on the ground with a cruel noose around her lifeless neck was a young steenbuck ewe which had fallen a victim of this fiendish trap, and the poor animal had only a few days to go before it produced young.

‘Which of you sons of night-howling, splay-footed, green-bellied hyaenas invented this thing?’ demanded Marimba hotly.

The boys made no reply. They just stared at their dusty feet in very frightened silence. Two of them wetted their loinskins at the same time, much to the amusement of the royal handmaidens.

‘I asked you a question, you mud-wallowing tadpoles!’ cried Marimba.

At last one of them said in a voice that was hardly a whisper: ‘I . . . I did, Oh Great One.’

‘You did, did you?’ cried Marimba in a burst of ecstatic fury. ‘Now indeed, you are going to suffer for your deed!’

‘Mercy please, Oh Great One,’ whispered the boy.

‘Marimba has no mercy for bloodthirsty little idiots of your kind,’ said the angry queen coldly. ‘Breathe into the nostrils of that animal and bring it back to life.’

The astonished followers of Marimba saw the boy lift the head of the dead buck and actually try to breathe life back into it. There was a gale of feminine laughter which the angry chieftainess quelled with a look of cold fury in her glittering eyes. A deep respectful silence settled upon the group of watching maidservants while the boy, with sweating face and inflated cheeks, and a heart that was almost stopping with cold fear, huffed and puffed in vain to revive the dead animal.

‘That animal had better come back to life, Oh little vermin,’ said the princess cruelly. ‘If it does not you will soon wish that you had never been born.’

The badly frightened boy tried his best. He tried everything he could while the queen watched him coldly and impassively, and the handmaidens watched with broad smiles on their faces.

‘Why,’ said Marimba at long last, ‘it seems to me as if you find it easier to kill an animal than to bring it back to life!’

‘I cannot make it live again, Oh Great Queen,’ stammered the boy. ‘It still wants to remain dead.’

‘Then you must surrender yourself to punishment,’ said the queen ominously.

‘Please do not kill me!’ screamed the boy in utter terror. ‘I am still too young to die . . . I do not want to die!’

‘The animal that you killed with the fruits of your evil brain did not want to die either,’ observed Marimba.

‘Please . . .’

‘Seize him!’ cried the princess to her attendants. ‘Seize and hold fast the pestilential horror!’

The giggling girls fell upon the boy and held him fast. He struggled and kicked and bawled in vain. He yelled to his friends to save him. But those loyal friends had proved their loyalty by vanishing into the sheltering bush, leaving him to face the music alone. ‘Bring him to the village – I want to deal with him properly in the presence of all the people.’

The gathered Wakambi were sitting in a great semicircle in the High Place of Justice at the very summit of the hill which was now known as the Hill of the Wakambi. The princess Marimba sat on her throne at the foot of an upright slab of rock that was known as the Rock of Justice. She was flanked on either side by two old men.

The old man on her left was known as the High Accuser and the one on her right was known as the Mercy of Heaven, and it was his duty to plead for mercy on the prisoner’s behalf – but not to defend him from the accusation.

Marimba was the one empowered to execute the prisoner after he had been found guilty. The power to execute was granted to all those people who had seen the prisoner actually commit the offence for which he was charged.

Trials were held only at the ‘rising of the moon’ among the Wakambi and everybody was waiting in silence, where even a whisper was strictly forbidden, for the rising of the heavenly orb. Night had fallen and the land was swathed in the dark mantle of obscurity, and in the scowling forests below the Great Village lions were roaring their fury at the glittering stars, while leopards coughed defiance to all and sundry.

The boy, Malinge, who had been caught by Marimba in the act of wantonly destroying living things, knew that the coming of the moon would also mean the coming of his own death, and he was numb with fear. He turned round and looked in the direction of his parents seated with the other villagers near one of the great Fires of Justice that had been lit in a semicircle to illuminate the High Place of Justice. There were seven such fires, each representing the Seven Gates of Creation that separate this material world from the bright bronze plains and crystal forests of Tura-ya-Moya, where the gods have birth and where Lizuli, the whore of eternity, dances nightly before the thousand eyes of the Most Ultimate.

These fires were not kindled with wood, but with the leaves of the mpepo plant and were fed with the bones of that kind of animal against which the accused had committed the offence. When a man was charged with murder, human bones were fed into the fires. On this occasion the bones of antelope were fed into the fires.

Malinge cast a pleading glance at the face of the grim and bearded warrior that was his father and found no mercy and no recognition there. Nor did his own mother and other brothers seem to know him at all. He knew he was alone – and lost. Then, with that breath-taking majesty that fills the eyes with tears, the moon rose above the distant mountains.

As it rose, a wild scream of naked terror was torn from the lips of the wretched Malinge and he tried to bolt out of the Place of Justice. But Mpushu and Kahawa seized him and held him fast.

‘Stand still and take your punishment like a man, Oh Malinge,’ said Mpushu. ‘Do not try to cheat the lion of justice of his juicy prey. Nothing very serious is going to happen to you. You will only be deprived of your nose and ears and then thrown to very, very hungry crocodiles. Something worth looking forward to, eh?’

‘Aiyeeee!’ shrieked Malinge in appreciation.

‘Malinge, the son of Katimbe, the son of Ngungu, the son of Lembe, here stands accused of having wantonly and wilfully destroyed a living thing for no other reason than to see the effect of the new kind of snare that he had invented.’ The voice of the High Accuser was harsh, a rasping croak. ‘He destroyed a little steenbuck ewe with young in its belly, and here you can see for yourself the sorry remains of his victim on the Tray of Accusation. This boy was not hungry when he committed this deed, neither had he the intention of taking the animal to his father to prepare for food. It was a clear case of wanton useless destruction of life, in direct defiance of the Laws of Odu. Malinge must die. He must die so that the Great Mother’s displeasure at this demon-like act should be disarmed, so that the wrath of the High Gods be not showered upon us like evil hail. Malinge must die – not to deter others from committing the same offence, but that by dying he can take his heinous sin with him to the land of Forever-Night, away from the huts and villages of the Wakambi.’

With this the High Accuser sat down, fiercely scowling at the villagers assembled before him. An even deeper silence settled heavily upon the High Place of Justice.

The other Old One, the Mercy of Heaven, then rose totteringly to his ancient, withered feet. ‘People of the Wakambi: to you this unworthy one addresses this message. We all know that the young boy Malinge is guilty and we all know that he must suffer the most ultimate form of punishment, because if we let irresponsible young people kill the animals of the forest wastefully, it will not be long before the High Gods will deprive us of all living things on which we depend for food. It will not be long before the forests become only the haunts of starving jackals and hyaenas with no other animals in sight, and we would all die the shameful death of hunger. So I, too, agree that this young man must be punished. But I plead that we give the boy the opportunity to explain to us in his own words just why he did this thing and why he felt prompted to break one of the oldest and most sacred laws of our people, and above all, why he dared to improve on our standard methods – why he rendered these more cruel as the very design of this trap shows.’

His voice faltered and he sat down, wiping the sweat from his wrinkled brow with the back of his hand. There were tears on his wrinkled cheeks and his gentle tired eyes were inflamed and bloodshot.

‘Stand up, prisoner,’ bellowed the High Accuser. ‘Stand up and tell us why you broke the laws of the gods, why you dared to improve upon the things that our ancestors invented. Do you consider yourself wiser than your forefathers?’

‘N-No,’ stammered the boy, ‘I only thought . . .’

‘Listen, oh vermin,’ rasped the High Accuser, ‘this is not a world that belongs to you. If you want a world which you can improve then you can go and create one for yourself. In this world you will take your place as the insignificant speck that you are and you must conform to the rules as laid down by our forefathers. You must not try to improve on anything that they found good enough. You seem to have forgotten that it was the love for inventing new things that caused the destruction of the First People. Don’t tell me that you have never heard the Seven High Laws of Living, because I know that you have.’

There is something known as hope, and that something has the habit of shining brightest when a man gets most hopelessly lost in the forest of fear and despair. Hope is a false star shining brightest on the darkest night of one’s life. In the words of the High Accuser, the doomed boy Malinge saw a glimmering thread of hope and he seized it and held fast to it. A man about to die loses all fear. He throws all respect and dignity to the Seven Winds and says and does exactly as he pleases, and Malinge did exactly that.

‘You doddering old hypocrites!’ he screamed at the top of his squeaky voice. ‘You are not fit to sit in judgment over a lame and half-dead fly. You say I broke a law by inventing something new. Why then is our Queen Marimba not being accused of inventing all those new instruments with which she makes music?’

Malinge’s hope of revenge on the woman who had brought him to trial was drowned in a flood of laughter that followed immediately on his impudent outburst. The assembly laughed long and loud till the High Accuser had to stand up and roar for silence.

‘You utter fool!’ he bellowed. ‘You miserable, impudent rat! Marimba is an immortal, an appointed servant of the gods on this earth, and what she does is done at the command of the most High Gods. Royal Marimba, pronounce sentence upon this mud-wallowing dog.’

Marimba stood up and her great eyes were bright in the moonlight. There was also a great sadness in those eyes that was beyond human understanding. Her voice was soft and gentle as she said: ‘Malinge, I am not your executioner and I find myself unable to order your death. But I am not going to let you escape lightly. The High Gods tell me that you are an habitual and stubborn law-breaker, who acts thus for the sheer pleasure it gives you. It also gives you pleasure to see innocent animals die in agony. I now order that you be taken away from here and your legs broken with clubs so that you may never walk again, and your hands destroyed by paralysing your fingers.’

Marimba looked down at the ugly snare that Malinge had invented and shuddered. There was no mistaking it – the thing was deadly and only a madman, a monster of cruelty, could have invented this sort of thing. No wonder the old men had overruled her and had thrown Malinge to the crocodiles just before daybreak.

Then Marimba got down on her knees and began to work. She dismantled the long trapdoor consisting of oblong flat pieces of wood tied together with buckskin thongs and gut. She made small alterations to the pieces of wood so that they were no longer of the same length and thickness. She ordered her handmaidens to bring her a number of cusana gourds of different sizes and to open each end, making a big hole in one end and a small one in the side. Her next order was equally peculiar: the gourds were to be put in a large clay bowl at the gate of the village and word spread that all the old women of the village were to pass their morning water into the big bowl for three successive days. This, explained the great princess, was not only to place a permanent blessing upon the instrument; it would also make the gourds resilient and durable.

Afterwards the gourds were boiled in animal fat to make them more resilient and waterproof. With her own delicate hands Marimba assembled the instrument while vast crowds of Wakambi men and women watched in awe and astonishment. She first assembled the hardwood frame with four carved legs, and along a flat piece of wood that connected the two ends of the oblong frame she stuck the gourds by their mouths firmly with tree resin.

She then covered each of the holes in the sides of the gourds with silky laminae which she obtained from the nests of the munyovu wasp, also stuck firmly with tree resin. The gourds were arranged under the central plank in gradually diminishing size. Then came the pieces of wood that formed the trapdoor, also arranged in the same order according to size, each piece directly across a corresponding gourd resonator. The strips of wood were suspended above their resonators by two lengths of thong.

Thus the xylophone – the marimba – was born. Soon this melodious companion of the feast and the dance was sending its notes through the festive air, each note as gentle as a maiden’s promise. The xylophone is a living instrument which can bend its notes to fit the blood-warming melody of a wedding song or harshen its voice and convey to the human mind the clamour and dark horrors of war – or the thrilling excitement and suspense of the hunt. Even without the accompaniment of a human voice one can tell a whole story with the xylophone alone. One can use the voice of this holy instrument to create various moods in one’s audience. While other instruments speak to the ears, the xylophone speaks to the heart and the soul. Indeed it is an instrument worthy of bearing the name of the Goddess of Music.

In building xylophones only hard and well seasoned woods must be used. Great care must be exercised in selecting the wood for the various notes. There must be no pores, or the slightest crack.

Timber from a hardwood tree once struck by lightning is excellent. These sacred instruments must never be built in times of war and famine; neither must they be made by people who are sterile or spiritually perverted, or physically deformed in any way.

‘Great Marimba,’ – the voice of the tremendous woman, a cook, was low and full of great love and respect – ‘it is with great regret that your servants failed to cook your favourite dish of stamped peanuts today, for lo, the old mortar has finally worn through its bottom and is now nothing but a useless hollow log. It is only good for firewood now and we must ask the woodcarvers to fashion us a new one.’

‘Do not burn the old mortar, Oh Mandingwe,’ said the princess with a mysterious smile. ‘The truth is that I have been waiting for something like this to happen for quite some time. I shall transform it into something which will add yet more pleasure to the lives of the people whom the gods have entrusted to me to rule and guide along the paths of peace and wisdom.’

‘Marimba is indeed the mother of wisdom,’ whispered the fat cook.

‘Nobody is the parent of wisdom in this world, Mandingwe. I am nothing but a puppet serving the will of Those-we-do-not-see, and I try to serve as best I can. Now bring me the skin of a newly killed wildebeest, and also send Kamago the woodcarver to me.’

‘As you say, Oh Marimba,’ said the cook respectfully, falling on her face in obeisance and then crawling backwards out of the Royal Hut.

Marimba turned the old nut-grinding mortar into the first drum the world had ever seen and for the first time since the dawn of creation the forests shook to the pulsing beat of a drum. This instrument became so popular with the Wakambi that almost everybody wanted to have a drum in his own hut. The woodcarvers were very busy indeed. The princess Marimba made them of different sizes, each with a different quality of sound, from the loud hollow boom to the gentle pow-pow. The big ones were known as the ‘male drums’; smaller ones were ‘female drums’, and the very small ones that children could carry around were known as ‘sparrow drums’.

The largest drums she ordered to be reserved for purposes of worship only and these had the symbol of the River of Eternity carved into them in a continuous pattern all round, and on many of these drums were also carved symbols representing passages from the great poems of creation and sacred symbols of Spiritual Secret Knowledge. This she did to preserve the knowledge of the Wakambi for all time. Men were elected to look after these drums and this became their sole duty in life. These ‘Drummers of High Honour’ had to daub the instruments periodically with animal fat to preserve both the wood and the skin. When a drum was attacked by a wood-boring pest they had to wrap it in wet animal skins and then leave it to steam in a hollow anthill which had been heated by a fire till it was red hot.

When a drum deteriorated beyond repair it was the duty of the oldest woodcarver to carve a new one – an exact replica in every detail, and the old one was buried with the full burial honours with which a chief is buried.

Marimba’s drums became so popular that even the Masai copied them, but not for peaceful purposes. One day when Mpushu was carrying a number of drums to a village of the Wakambi he was set upon by three Masai who knocked him flying into a muddy stream and stole off with the drums, but only after requesting him to fetch some more as they would like to steal those too.

The Masai were the first to use the drum for relaying signals, especially military signals.

Give a Masai a stone and he will hit something or somebody with it. Give him any piece of wood and he will turn it into a club with which to brain you. ‘Peace’ or ‘peaceful’ are words that do not occur in the vocabulary of the Masai. To them these are absolutely meaningless abstractions.

With the birth of the drum came the birth of new dances in the land of the Wakambi – dances like the bupiro-mukiti, or the dance of life, performed by both male and female dancers, or the chukuza ya sandanda, the dance of the baboon, which is performed by male dancers only. This is the most muscle-punishing dance that can ever be performed. All these dances were invented for one reason only – expression of tribal religion and the release of that beneficial life-force dormant in every human being, but which, when released, makes one feel closer in the ‘arms of Eternity’.

Also some of the dances performed by young people, like the famous ‘love dance’ of the Kavirondo, and the gqashiya of the Nguni, were invented so that the young people might find an opportunity to use up their excess energy.

Little Nonikwe was waiting. She was waiting with great impatience for something big and exciting to happen and she could hardly conceal the wild excitement she felt; it lighted her face like a midnight beacon. This was all because Nonikwe knew something the other girls in her village did not know as yet. She knew that the Great One, Marimba, was on her way to spend the night in the village – the very village in which Nonikwe’s uncle, Mutengu, was headman.

Little Nonikwe was a pathetic creature. She was not only a hunchback, but she was also totally blind. But all this was amply compensated by the great and rare gift the gods gave her of seeing things clearly long before they happened.

This gift had saved the little hunchback child from being destroyed at the age of eight as all crippled and deformed children were normally destroyed according to the laws of the Wakambi. A child born with any defect was, however, allowed to live till the age of eight to see if it had any special gifts like seeing into the future or the past, reading minds or communicating thoughts to animals.

Little Nonikwe was allowed to live and she lived like a chieftainess in her uncle’s village. She was the most well-hidden and well-guarded piece of property in the village, and this was because Mutengu had a bitter rival and enemy in another new village just beyond the river. This enemy was Lusu, the father of Nonikwe herself. When Nonikwe had been born, Lusu had been so disgusted with the child with which his wife had presented him that he had publicly declared that his wife had slept with a night-walking demon.

Nonikwe’s mother had been disgracefully driven from Lusu’s village and had sought refuge in the village of her brother Mutengu, where she died of a broken heart two moons later. Years had passed, the little girl had grown, and soon word had got around that she was a Blessed One, gifted with powers beyond human concept. When he heard this, Lusu the rascal tried to move the very stars and the mountains to get Nonikwe back. Mutengu had not only refused; he had seized Lusu and beaten him within a thumb’s length of his fat and rascally life.

Mutengu and Lusu had since been deadly enemies and to get his own back, Lusu developed the habit of reporting directly to Marimba with all kinds of accusations against Mutengu – acts of corruption and many breaches of the laws of the Wakambi. These accusations were, of course, utterly false and unfounded.

Eventually Marimba decided to pay Mutengu a secret visit in order to find out for herself if he was really as corrupt and evil as Lusu had made him out to be.

But Marimba had forgotten about Nonikwe. The little hunchback had actually dreamt what the great princess intended to do and woke up early that morning to warn her uncle to expect a secret visit from his queen some time in the afternoon. Mutengu, though startled by this warning, had acted quickly upon it because the blind little hunchback had never before been wrong with her predictions. He had ordered scouts to be posted to give him early warning of the approach of the great queen and her retinue. He had made his wives prepare all manner of food to give the peerless Marimba a welcome feast fit for one of her high and queenly position.

Mutengu had nothing to fear from a visit by his chieftainess because he had no secrets to hide. And not only was he as loyal as the southern wind but he was also as honest as a worker bee. But he did not want to be caught unprepared in anything and he was a strong believer in giving each and every visitor to his village a welcome in accordance with his or her stature.

Mutengu was a very popular headman. Every man and woman in the village could vouch for his great kindness, courage and honesty, and they were all prepared to defend him with their lives against any scandal-mongering back-biter.

The huge clay pots were full of delicious buffalo meat. There were great basins full of well cooked yams and corn cakes. There were also wooden trays full of roast wild fowl, partridge and guinea fowl. There were baskets full of wild figs and stewed marulas, and large cakes of fresh honey from his own beehives. Mutengu was the first man in the land of the tribes to keep bees. He kept them in hollow anthills, and handled them after drugging them with dagga smoke. He had also discovered that bees were inclined to leave him in peace when he dressed himself in a hyaena skin kaross.

Thus the great feast was prepared and brought in readiness for the unannounced arrival of the great queen Marimba. All the villagers settled down to await the arrival of someone who did not know she was already expected, whose surprise visit was a sursprise no more. Visitors from surrounding kraals and villages came as usual to have a free meal in this generous headman’s village, and as usual they told him a lot of tales-that-are-not-true and departed with full bellies and oily smiles. It was also customary for angry men to bring their disputes to Mutengu’s kraal and long arguments and trials took place under the Tree of Justice in the centre of the village. Fines were paid in ivory, ebony, and copper ore, and malefactors were taken outside and executed.

Life was taking its normal course in Mutengu’s village. An old and very tired-looking man came into the teeming village at midday accompanied by his remarkably beautiful daughter and begged a guardsman at the gate to let him spend the night in their spare hut, as he was very tired and had come a long way. This was not unusual and the guards were all too happy to admit the old doddering traveller and his daughter. The shy, beautiful girl greatly interested the burly guards and many were the ravenous glances cast in her direction.

The old man was given the whole haunch of a buffalo and asked to eat his fill; what was left he could take with him on his journey the following day.

The rest of the afternoon was taken up by ordinary activities, such as hauling yelling prisoners to the council tree for trial.

The sun was already setting beyond the western mountains and lengthy shadows were creeping eastwards when headman Mutengu completed his duties in administering tribal law. And still the queen of the Wakambi had not arrived. A small doubt began to gnaw at the back of the mind of the great Induna; he began to wonder for the first time whether his little deformed niece was wrong in her prophecy. Eventually he strode into her hut and knelt down beside the blind child, holding her hand gently, reassuringly.

‘Little one, for once the little spirits have played a trick upon my niece, for lo, the queen Marimba has not come yet.’

‘But she has, Oh honourable uncle, the queen of the Wakambi is here. I can feel the pulse of her thoughts.’

Mutengu was aghast: ‘Child! What words are these? My scouts have brought no news of the coming of the queen. They have seen no warrior escort. And yet you say that the royal Marimba is already within this village!’

‘She is, Oh uncle. I receive her thoughts quite clearly. At this moment she is pleased with the joke she has played on you, and she is convinced that my real father Lusu has accused you falsely.’

‘Where is she?’ Mutengu demanded. ‘Has she made herself invisible?’

‘No, uncle. Tell me, how many visitors are spending the night with us?’

‘Well over a hundred, child, men and women, young and old.’

‘The Great One has come into the village as a common visitor, my uncle. You must command all visitors to report to your Great Hut and there I shall pick her out for you.’

The one hundred and ten visitors were gathered at the Great Hut and a sumptuous supper was in progress. Already the induna knew that one of these many women was Marimba and one thing remained – the identification parade!

Mutengu led his little blind niece, gently holding her hand, past all the guests. He noticed how most of the visitors shrank slightly with revulsion as the deformed child approached. He saw this and he smiled; if only these fools knew that the little deformed child was the equivalent of ten so-called normal human beings. Led by powers beyond human comprehension, the young girl made her way towards the old man and his daughter. The child knelt down beside the girl and gently removed the kaross of respect with which she had covered her head. Mutengu immediately recognised his chieftainess – in spite of her shaven head and the false scar she had improvised with a piece of fish bladder. Mutengu gently pulled off the scar and the great, mischievous eyes of Marimba smiled softly at him.

‘My queen . . . living goddess of the Wakambi . . . what is the meaning of this cruel joke?’

‘I heard that you were a corrupt and vicious man who broke every tribal law laid down. I wanted to see for myself, Oh Induna, and I am glad to say that I found all accusations against you false and groundless.’

The assembled visitors fell on their faces in the presence of their great queen and a deep silence fell upon the gathering like a thick skin blanket. Then came Marimba’s clear voice: ‘Arise, my people, and let us enjoy our meal. Then we shall perform a little dance to thank our host for his great kindness and generosity.’ And turning to Mutengu she spoke softly: ‘Tell me, Oh Mutengu, how did you know about my secret arrival?’

‘This child, with her god-given sight, indicated you to me, your humble servant, Oh Marimba.’

‘I shall give the little one a gift to remember me by. And when we have unseated her evil father in the village across the river we shall appoint your niece as headwoman of that village for the rest of her life.’

A roar of applause greeted the announcement. Men stood up and raised their right hands in salute to the little Nonikwe, Headwoman-for-life of a village and district. And then, into the hands of the little girl Marimba pressed the newest instrument of music that she had invented. It was a ‘hand xylophone’ – a mukimbe – made entirely of reeds.

A mukimbe is an instrument particularly suited for use by blind people or those left weak and convalescing after an attack of one of the numerous tropical diseases. Many a convalescent owed his recovery to the sweet, birdlike, soothing notes of the mukimbe. Thus this instrument soon acquired the nickname of ‘the sick one’s comforter’.

A good mukimbe is constructed as follows: The bulrush reeds must be cut in the middle of summer when fully grown but not yet hard or dry. They must be of equal thickness (a man’s little finger) and of equal length (from the wrist to the elbow). Eight of these are cut and woven together with lengths of reed bark till the whole thing looks like a miniature raft. More strips of green reed are then attached to the raft, fixed both ends, and a strip of wood is then inserted to lift these strips away from the raft in the middle. The whole contraption is then left to dry in the sun for ten days. The woven knots tighten and the strips become taut while the spirit of music enters into them. The strips must all be of unequal breadth and arranged in order of thickness. For an additional rattle effect tiny pebbles can be inserted in the hollow reeds and the openings sealed with tree resin.

The blind child was overjoyed. Tears of pure gratitude welled from her sightless eyes and she clutched the instrument to her heart. She wept as if her soul would melt. ‘Thank you, Oh my queen. I honour you with all my heart, and may you grow as tall as the tallest of tall trees.’

‘Now, now, little Nonikwe, do not cry so. I am going to see to it that you are happy for the rest of your life and that you will never want for anything. Now come, all my people, let us dance before we go to sleep. I have a new dance for you, my lazy ones – the “Three-Fire Dance”.’

The women had become wands of living fire; they were leaping and swaying, twisting and shaking, like things gone completely mad. Marimba was leading the group of dancers in the centre, symbolising the ‘flame of life’ while the other groups of dancers represented the forces that try to snuff out the flame. It was a wild, uninhibited, savage dance that sent the flood of desire surging through the bodies of the men and brought tears into the eyes of the old ones. Every woman of the village was now taking part in the strangest dance of all time, while all the men watched intensely, deeply moved.

But elsewhere in the village three men were conferring – three whose hearts were full of evil and whose souls were caught in the dark webs of evil being hatched against the peerless Marimba. One, called Luchiza, was nothing but a stripling boy, the first-born son of the headman Mutengu. The second was a one-eyed scoundrel named Mbomongo and the third was Kalembi, the old man who had posed as Marimba’s father when they entered the village earlier that day. Kalembi had found an opportunity to slip away unnoticed during the earlier part of the dancing and he now addressed the two others in a bitter and cracked voice: ‘We cannot allow this thing to go on! If we do not put a stop to this woman’s antics soon we shall all be turned into a mob of brainless, capering fools who will do nothing but dance ourselves from the childbirth-hut to the very grave, and on to the land of Forever-Night. I tell you, we have to do something about this.’

‘Tsaaaiieee!’ spat the young man Luchiza, the son of Mutengu, ‘I am a firm believer that the woman is mad. Who ever heard of a nation of dancers? That is what we are already – a mad nation of capering idiots!’

‘Well, my lords,’ said Mbomongo with an obscene leer, ‘if you want to get rid of Marimba I am the man to do it for you. I would enjoy nothing better.’

‘What do you propose we do, Kalembi?’ asked the young man Luchiza, ‘you are the wisest one of the three of us and all the deciding must come from you.’

‘In two years’ time,’ said the old man slowly, ‘we are going to celebrate the escape of Odu and Amarava from the lost land of the First People, and that will give us the opportunity to get rid not only of this loathsome female, but of her impish son Kahawa as well.’

‘I would never relish an open fight with that left-handed madman,’ said young Luchiza. ‘It is easier to fight an angry rhinoceros than engage Kahawa in battle. The man is a monster and to him fear is an unknown thing.’

‘But an ordinary drug can vanquish the fiercest beast, Oh Luchiza,’ said the old man Kalembi. ‘And during that festival there will be many an opportunity to slip a drug into whatever mother or son would care to eat or drink.’

‘But Marimba is an immortal!’ said Luchiza soberly. ‘You cannot kill an immortal, although you can seriously wound one.’

‘I just want to get Marimba into my hands for a few moments,’ said Kalembi. ‘And I want her drugged and helpless. Then I would not only make sure that she never again invented any new musical contraptions but also that she forever forgot who she was. I want to turn her into a zombie on that day, my sons. You forsaken fools seem to have forgotten that I am the wizard-lord of the Wakambi!’

‘You mean to say you intend tampering with that immortal’s brain?’ cried the young man. ‘But even you will never dare to go that far, Kalembi!’

‘Somewhere in the forest is a slowly dying god, and this god is willing to reward with immortality anyone who can deliver Marimba into his hands,’ said the wizard-lord. ‘I would like to be the one to do so.’

‘You mean Nangai, the Evil, the monster who nearly destroyed the Wakambi!’ cried Luchiza. ‘I would watch my step with that heavenly renegade if I were you, Oh Wizard-Lord.’

‘I am willing to take any risk to attain immortality, my boy,’ the old man replied.

Meanwhile at the Great Hut the ‘Three Fire Dance’ had reached a shattering climax as Marimba, now symbolising the human soul that cannot die, leapt high into the air with arms spread out appealingly to the gods on high, leapt into the air to fall back into a forest of hands raised by the circle of women below her. The women bore their beloved queen in triumph to her sleeping hut. The assembled men let out a thunderous cheer and raised their war weapons high in salute.

In the darkness, beyond the light of the flickering torches, an old man’s cold narrow eyes blazed with unspeakable hatred and bitter contempt, and a one-eyed man of great ugliness sneered, while a young man whispered: ‘In two years, you putrid slut – in just two years’ time!’

A dark cloud had formed in the peaceful skies of Marimba’s life – a dark cloud that was to explode into a ravening storm of incredible fury.

Lusu was scared, and he had a very good reason to be. When one has slandered an innocent man for many days with intent to destroy him one becomes scared when one learns that all one’s lies have been exposed and the victim’s name cleared of all the slime one hurled at it. But Lusu had reason to be more scared; his victim had challenged him to mortal combat in the presence of the people of the two villages. And now he stood in the middle of the village clearing, his cowardly eyes so misty with fear that the hundreds of people sitting around watching him seemed strangely unreal – like ghosts in a distant spirit land. The only thing that felt real to him was his drenched loinskin.

There was a thunderous cheer as Mutengu crawled out of his hut and made straight for Lusu, and everybody saw with great surprise that he was completely unarmed. The watching villagers were even more surprised when his voice rang out harshly: ‘I intend to make this a battle without weapons. It is my intention to give that lying dog a beating such as no-one has ever seen before. Drop that club, Lusu, and use your bare hands – I dare you!’

Lusu felt his shaky courage evaporating fast. He had depended on this club because he was quite skilled with it. He wept openly with fear and the villagers howled with laughter. Cries of ‘shame’ and ‘coward’ assailed his ears and his nerve collapsed altogether. He turned and tried to run, but one of his own advisors kicked him in the buttocks, cuffed him soundly and pushed him back into the clearing. Mutengu tore into him with the violence of a thunderstorm.

Violent clouds of dust were stirred up by the feet of the fighting men and for a long time the only sounds were those of blows well and truly landed. Then finally a loud scream was torn from the throat of the coward Lusu and he turned and ran like a madman. He bowled men over in his great hurry to escape the wrath of Mutengu. He leapt a high fence and thudded to the ground beyond like a hippopotamus. He got to his feet again and sped blindly into the forest with Mutengu and all the villagers, Marimba included, in hot pursuit. When he noticed the pursuit was gaining on him he urged his short fat legs to increase their effort.

Lusu ran on and on – like the wind through the forest. Loud sobbing gasps left his labouring lungs through a dry mouth. He ran on heedless of the thorns that tore his feet and heedless of the fact that his loinskin had fallen off and that his great shiny black buttocks were exposed to the glare of the sun.

Then the voice of Mutengu was heard above the excited shouts and shrieks of the villagers – a voice raised in fear and great urgency: ‘Do not go there, Lusu . . . watch out!’

The pursuing villagers fell back, but Lusu saw in this an opportunity to run all the faster and he ran straight into Mutengu’s apiary. Like a cloud of dark midnight vengeance, vast swarms of bees set on him. Lusu screamed horribly as the bees all but smothered him; he screamed as they stung him on every part of his swarthy sweating stark-naked body.

He ran screeching to the riverside and leapt blindly into the murky waters. As they closed over his head he suddenly felt incredible pain as the mighty jaws of a giant crocodile closed around his fat thighs.

He thought he saw a gleam of great pleasure in the eyes of the crocodile. That was the last he saw. But there was time for another thought: Had he recognised in those eyes, the eyes of his long-dead wife – mother of Nonikwe? Had she been reincarnated . . . ?

* * *

The silver moon was high in the midnight heavens and the great lake Nyanza was like a plain of shimmering silver in the land of Tura-ya-Moya; the waters of the great lake were so still that one could count the stars reflected from the surface. The night was oppressively hot and humid. In the scowling forests bordering the lake there lay a deep and inscrutable silence.

Very surprising indeed was the total absence of animals; no lions roared and no leopards coughed their opinions about. There was no place on earth like the dark forests that bordered the lake in those days. They were forests of abandon, of desolation, of Hell itself. They did not crawl with life, but with death – in its most hideous form.

It was because the lake Nyanza was not an ordinary lake in those days. It was the Heart of the very Earth and the gateway to lands strange and utterly terrible. These lands were once on the surface of the earth but had sunk to its core as a result of the evil that inhabited them. The gods wanted to bury this evil land forever to save the race of Man. The forests around this lake were the haunts of hideous things emerging periodically from the bowels of the earth: Life Eaters, Night Howlers, Fire Brides and Viper Maidens, who hunted each other the whole night long. Woe betide any venturesome human creature stupid enough to be lost in those forests!

In the great silence under the light of the moon a grim and deadly hunt was in progress this night. The Viper Maidens were stalking the Night Howlers whose blood they drank. Here and there one could catch a glimpse of a naked female form with a long tail and eyes like those of cats, darting from bush to bush in a desperate search for the huge monsters that were the source of their food and sport. Evil was hunting itself for lack of human victims and such hunts by Lower World creatures are well known for their utter pitilessness. Lo! is it not said in our Words of Wisdom that ‘evil hunts and destroys itself?

While this great, silent hunt was in progress in the moon-bathed forests, the slowly dying outcast god Nangai was lying on his soft bed of silver cloud in the dark depths of a cave that he knew as his home. For once the god experienced a flicker of hope: at long last the woman he needed in order to survive was about to be delivered into his hands and into his mercy. The beautiful immortal woman who had done so much to bring happiness into the land of ungrateful men had been betrayed by one of her son’s wives, Lozana, who poured an evil drug into her food. This was on the occasion of the Festival of Odu and the drug had caused Marimba to fall into a deep coma – and into the arms of her ruthless enemy.

The old wizard-lord of the Wakambi had vowed to hand over the princess to Nangai in exchange for immortality. The fierce Kahawa was far away when this happened, having been lured away by the scheming group with a false report that a great lion was terrorising one of the new outpost villages on the border of the land of the Wakambi. Kahawa, who hated lions and loved to hunt them, had set out with Mpushu to the distant village to direct the hunt.

And this night, three days after the wizard-lord of the Wakambi had terrorised the shocked people into making him Chief, a long canoe was gliding its silent way to the island home of Nangai, the Outcast God. There were five people in the canoe: Marimba who was still unconscious, Mbomongo the one-eyed, Luchiza the son of Mutengu, the old wizard-lord himself, and Kahawa’s treacherous second wife Lozana. All these people hoped to gain immortality from Nangai as a prize for delivering Marimba, to whom they had done the most cowardly thing one human being can do to another. The very stars knew already that Marimba would never sing again . . .

Nangai had, on receiving a dream message from the triumphant wizard-lord, promised to use his waning powers of godhood to protect the passengers of the midnight canoe from attack by any of the many kinds of unearthly monsters haunting the lake and its environs. Now he was lying on his fantastic bed of shimmering cloud awaiting their arrival with great impatience; watching with expressionless eyes as the poison in his body attacked the remaining stump of his upper arm; watching without feeling as great blisters erupted down his left side and burst into purulent oozing sores. A god knows no fear and Nangai was not afraid, nor did he feel any pain. He was only interested in containing his existence for reasons he could not bother to find out.

Footsteps sounded somewhere in the darkness beyond the light shed by his own radiance, and he sat up as the wizard-lord of the Wakambi stepped into his presence, leading Marimba by the arm and closely followed by his evil friends.

Nangai did not bother to waste a glance on the nervous humans before him. He was only interested in Marimba – his one chance of survival – and it was she that he caught by the wrist and drew close to him. Marimba knelt down with downcast eyes like the soulless puppet she had become; the god sank his hollow claws into her upper arm and siphoned some of her blood through them into his own system. In front of the astonished mortals a strange thing happened to the outcast god; the blisters covering his body from head to foot gradually healed and a new left arm began to grow. His hard cold eyes lighted with a brilliance of new-born stars and his powerful body started vibrating with an extraordinary quality and power.

Eventually he released the woman’s arm and stood regarding her in great bewilderment. With a voice of strange hardness he addressed the wizard-lord for the first time: ‘What did you do to this immortal female?’

‘I made her into a zombie, Oh great Nangai,’ the man replied in gloating tones. ‘She is now completely at your mercy, and not only does she fail to remember who she is and what she was – she is totally incapable of independent thought of any kind. She shall remain like this forever – a beautiful, soulless, immortal zombie.’

‘Wretch of a mortal!’ cried Nangai. ‘You dare to gloat over what you have done? Does not this blind little brain of yours realise the enormity of your crime? You have committed a crime so great that the very stars are weeping at the sight of it.’

Fear and naked terror seized the old wizard-lord at the strange turn of events and with a hoarse scream he turned to flee. But the rejuvenated god seized him and held him fast while his evil followers fainted one by one. ‘No, mortal, you do not so easily escape the consequences of your vile sacrilege. Both you and I stand here ready for judgment by one much higher than I.’

‘But my lord . . .,’ begged the old wizard.

‘Be silent, you sinful wretch! As a result of your deed I must now surrender myself to punishment by the other gods. I only hope that I am tried by one who is just and impartial.

At that precise moment there came a flash of incredibly brilliant light and a clap of blood-freezing thunder. In the whirling mist of many-coloured light that filled the cavern a dark form took shape and soon, as the flaming mist dispersed, the whimpering wizard-lord found himself staring into the great eyes of a silvery giantess whose very presence seemed to shrivel his dirty soul.

‘Merciful Ma, mother of the stars,’ said Nangai, throwing himself flat on his face, ‘this unworthy creature, unfit to bear the name of god, yields himself into your mercy and justice. And he also yields into your mercy the mortals who committed this evil crime upon the person of Marimba, your loyal servant who has done so much for mankind.’

‘That does not sound at all like you, Oh Nangai,’ said Ma coldly. ‘When one hears you speak in this way one is tempted to wonder just what has become of your usual insolent bluster – and why you speak as though you have at last discovered how to distinguish good from evil.’

‘Great Ma, I began repenting my evil ways immediately I saw what this wretched mortal has done to your servant, and it occurred to me that for a god to stoop so low as to tolerate the committing of crimes of this sort in his name is, in fact, the deepest form of evil. It occurred to me that gods should fight against evil and neither countenance nor encourage it.’

‘That is indeed so, Oh Nangai; a god who works for evil principles is a traitor to his kind, because while the good principles which we support stand for Existence and Life, the former characterise Non-existence and Death. And now I am going to pass sentence on you, Nangai. You have reformed, that is true; but the taint of your sins still clings to you, and therefore you are not allowed to return to Tura-ya-Moya, but you are demoted from god to ordinary High Immortal and you are to be exiled into the land of mortals until the end of time.’

Nangai bowed his head and said at length: ‘Your sentence is milder than my crimes, Oh Great Mother of All, and I praise you for your leniency. But what about this poor woman, this beautiful victim of the ingratitude of mortal men?’

‘It is my will that you be the husband and guardian of Marimba until the very world ceases to be. Marimba had a great love for turning evil things into good, and it is strange indeed to find that as a result of her terrible suffering she has helped in reforming an evil god.’

‘Please restore her brain to her, Great Goddess; please heal the brain of the one I love!’

‘No!’ said Ma firmly. ‘You must take this beautiful woman back to her son and her people as she is, and you must rule and guide the Wakambi for more than a hundred years with this beautiful zombie always by your side – an immortal monument to the evil-heartedness and ingratitude of the creatures known as Man – wanton creatures who destroy ruthlessly those things they should love and revere; unnatural beasts that destroy the trees whose shelter they seek, and defile with excrement the cool streams from which they heal their thirst.

‘She imparted happiness to the spawn of Man; she gave the race of Man music, but what reward has Man given her? Take her, Nangai, and carry her back to the village of the Wakambi. Love and cherish her, soulless though she be, because physically she will yet bear you a hundred sons and fifty daughters and these shall be the rulers of the Wakambi and many other future tribes. Rule with wisdom and strength for a hundred summers, and after that you can retire with your beloved Marimba to a golden sanctuary I shall prepare for you at the bottom of Lake Nyanza.

‘And as for these evil mortals here who sought fame in delivering out a friend of theirs, I now deliver them out to the mercy of the Viper Maidens.’

With these words the goddess slowly vanished, while a host of Viper Maidens appeared on the scene. Dreadful were the shrieks of the wizard-lord when one Viper Maiden sank her fangs into the scruff of his neck and terrible were his struggles and contortions as her venom coursed through his scrawny body. Lozana, the treacherous wife of Kahawa, died shrieking for her husband while the fangs of another Viper Maiden were still buried in one of her ripe buttocks.

Dreadful was the hissing of the happy Viper Maidens as they feasted under the silent moon.

In the dark cave of Nangai the re-born god turned his eyes upon the woman he desired with every vein in his body. She was still kneeling where he had left her, like a soulless toy a child had forgotten. He came towards her and she raised her head and looked up at him with great empty eyes. Tears sprang to the eyes of Nangai and he stooped and raised the beautiful thing that once was Marimba to its feet – drew it close to him and wept his heart out. Then he laid it gently on his cloudy couch.

‘Tomorrow we are going home, my beloved. You shall see Kahawa and Rarati and the rest of your people again. Kahawa has come back after finding that the story of the lion was false. Already he and Mpushu and Rarati have rallied all the people and they are searching for you. Do you hear?’

He might as well have spoken to a carved idol. She merely stared at him, her lips parted . . .

Nangai took his unresisting wife into his arms and kissed her lips for the first time. Her body trembled with a feeling she no longer recognised and her eyes closed in sudden fear and shyness. Outside the cavern the moon seemed brighter and a pleased smile seemed to linger on its round face.

* An old Wakambi word which has no exact equivalent in English. In that language it would have a very vulgar meaning, but not in its Bantu sense. Literally, it combines the two words ‘itch’ and ‘hips’. It is used to describe a woman who has an insatiable thirst for a man.