As though with one voice, the Uloans screamed out their hopeless fear. They begged Legaba and Jass Imbiah to save them. But those cries went unanswered as the Ishimbi reached their ships. Oars splintered like sticks against the Ishimbis’ adamantine forms. Then the Ishimbis’ arms struck their first blows against the hulls.
The ships shuddered as though in agony. Huge holes appeared where the Ishimbis’ arms hit – above and below the water’s surface. The Ishimbis struck again and again, turning the stout timbers of the ships into kindling. Scores of Uloans fell into the water like ants from a hill torn apart by the claws of a badger. Some sank; others struggled desperately to the surface of the water, where they stared in dread and resignation at the destruction that surrounded them in the city they believed they were destined to destroy.
Rapidly, the ships disintegrated, then sank. When the last vessel of the invading fleet went down to the bottom of the harbor, the Ishimbis stopped moving. It was as though they were ... waiting.
In silence, the defenders of Khambawe lined up at the edge of the docks and stared out at a scene of sheer desolation, starkly illuminated by the night-sun the power of Almovaar had placed in the sky.
Floating scraps of wood and sail-cloth were all that was left of the Uloans’ ships. Human forms bobbed amid the flotsam – most of them dead, others alive. Some of the survivors swam aimlessly, pushing corpses and wreckage aside. Others simply floated and stared at the sky. And there were those who shouted defiance and waved their fists at their enemies.
The defenders, Matile and Fidi alike, looked at each other. They knew what the Ishimbi were waiting for; they knew what had to be done. Although their blood had only shortly before pulsed with the lust to kill, they loathed the thought of undertaking the final, gruesome task that lay before them.
Still, it had to be done ...
Soldiers stripped off their cumbersome armor. Everyone, military and others alike, put aside their heavier weapons, took up whatever knives and daggers they could find, and placed them between their teeth. Then they jumped into the water and swam toward the defeated, weaponless Uloans, who remained hopelessly defiant while they waited to be slain.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aftermath
1
The glare of the new day’s sun painted a pitiless portrait of the devastation the Uloans’ invasion had wrought on Khambawe. The night-sphere fashioned by the Almovaad Adepts and the Amiyas in their Oneness had long since disappeared. Even the mist that constantly drifted in from the sea had thinned, laying bare the extent of the worst damage that had been done to the Jewel City since the long-ago end of the Storm Wars.
In the harbor, wreckage from sunken and half-sunken ships pounded against the docks like the drums of a death-god. Bloated corpses blanketed the surface. The small amount of water that could be seen between the bodies and the ships was tinged with red. Already, sharks and other sea-scavengers were devouring the remains, of which most were Uloan. But more than a few Matile dead provided food for the scavengers as well, for the Uloans had fought until the last of them died. As the sea-creatures competed viciously for their repasts, the harbor roiled as though a storm stirred its waters.
The Ishimbi statues once again stood in their places at dockside. They were still wet, and the dampness caused the dark stone surface of the gigantic carvings to glisten in the sun. Tufts of seaweed from the harbor clung to the Ishimbi, mute testimony to the events of the night before, which before then would have been thought to be possible only in legends.
On the streets of Khambawe, the survivors of the melee wandered in weary aimlessness, or lay exhausted amid the bodies of the fallen. Lakes of blood congealed on the paving stones. Burnt skeletons of trees stood like mute sentinels guarding a realm of ghosts. Charred timbers poked from piles of rubble where buildings proud and humble alike once stood. Soot obscured the brightly painted facades of the houses that remained standing. Market stalls lay smashed and overturned, their goods a clutter of trampled garbage.
Although it was too soon for the piles of human corpses to begin to putrefy, the inert jhumbis had long since disintegrated into heaps of clay, bones, and liquescence, exuding a reek that competed with the smell of smoke that continued to hang in the air. In the meantime, like the sharks in the harbor, the packs of hyenas that haunted the fringes of Khambawe had emerged to feast at a banquet of carrion. The survivors were too exhausted to drive them – or the buzzing clouds of flies that hovered over the bodies – away.
However the hyenas, whether they were irimu or not, avoided the noisome remains of the jhumbis.
So did the flies.
This was the face of the Matile’s victory, a success harder-won than any of the triumphs of the ancient days of conquest and glory. It was an achievement that would eventually be written into volumes of history and woven into new tapestries that would adorn the walls of the Senafa Palace, and be remembered in countless songs and stories. It was the final, definitive victory over the Matiles’ worst enemies, who were their kin before the different paths they took forced them into a conflict that obviated those ancient blood-ties.
Yet for all that, an utter defeat could not have looked much worse than the triumph the Matile had managed to achieve.
2
Tiyana awakened slowly, painfully. Outside her eyelids, the sun glowed so insistently it was impossible for her to keep her eyes closed any longer. She remembered what she had seen in the Oneness before the insensibility of sheer exhaustion overcame her: victory ... the Uloans routed ... the Ishimbi walking ... the final, horrific slaughter in the harbor ...
She blinked, opened her eyes, sat up ... and bit back a scream as a lance of agony pierced through her. Every muscle in her body ached; every heartbeat was a pulse of pain. Even her bones cried out in protest against the price the application of the ashuma of Oneness had exacted. Tiyana closed her eyes again, and waited until the worst of the aches subsided.
Of the incredibly powerful ashuma she and the others had wielded the night before, nothing remained – not even a tingle. The Oneness was gone as well. Her mind seemed a weightless thing, drifting without direction inside her head.
She had allowed herself to think that the power Almovaar bestowed would be limitless, and without consequences, as legends averred the ashuma gifted by her own gods had been. Now, she sighed inwardly at the foolishness of such an assumption.
Of course there would be a price to pay, she thought. And she understood then that Nama-kwah and the other Jagasti had not exacted a price from the Amiyas when they worked their small magics because the deities had little left to offer in exchange for any demands they might make on the bodies and minds of their worshippers.
Tiyana decided to try opening her eyes again. Her vision wavered, then swam into focus. She saw the other Amiyas and Initiates sprawled on the grass, their circle broken. In the middle of the circle, Gebrem and Kyroun leaned on one another like a pair of drunkards. The abi rested between them. No longer glowing with ashuma, the instrument of power seemed nothing more than a simple metal rod now, bereft of the Jagasti-symbols that had distinguished its significance before the Amiyas had declared their loyalty to Almovaar.
Byallis lay next to Tiyana. The Fidi woman’s eyelids opened slowly. Her eyes were brown, like Tiyana’s. Her hair was brown as well. But her skin was almost translucently pale, even after the months she had spent under the Abengoni sun. Seeing the Adept more clearly now, Tiyana’s gaze took in Byallis’s round face, full features and the plump body beneath her sweat-soaked robe. Perspiration had also plastered Tiyana’s own chamma to her skin.
Byallis smiled at Tiyana. Tiyana smiled back. She was about to speak. Then she felt movement at her other side.
Keshu had already risen to his feet. Tiyana gazed up at him. He was looking away from her as he stretched his body. She watched his muscles ripple like those of a young bull beneath his dark skin. And she felt the beginnings of a second awakening inside her, despite the exhaustion that enve
loped her like a blanket.
Then Keshu turned his gaze to her. As their eyes met, Tiyana remembered what she had gleaned from his thoughts the night before. Keshu also remembered. And his eyes shifted away from hers in a combination of chagrin and embarrassment; reactions echoed in Tiyana despite the arousal in her loins.
Before Tiyana could decide whether or not to speak to Keshu, she heard other movement behind her. Painfully, she twisted her body around and saw the four Callers of Nama-kwah standing nearby. The Callers had not participated in the incantation of the night before; they were singers, not Vessels. Soot covered their faces and chammas, and the hems of their garments bore bloodstains – mute witnesses to their nightmarish struggles to survive the brutality of the Uloans’ invasion.
Tiyana tried – and failed – to distinguish her friend Yemeya from her sisters, whose names were Jubiti, Tamala, and Zeudi. It was Yemeya who spoke to her; the others remained silent, as though grief had constricted their throats.
“Tiyana, there is something you should see in the Beit Amiya,” she said.
“What is it?” Tiyana asked.
“You need to ... see.”
Tiyana tried to rise but stumbled, her legs still weakened and her mind disoriented. Then a hand touched her shoulder. It was Keshu, reaching down to help her to her feet. A tentative smile touched his lips, then vanished. An unspoken question remained in his eyes. After a moment’s hesitation, Tiyana placed her hand in his, and he raised her gently and effortlessly. Then he released her hand and pulled Byallis up as well. He did not look at either of the women once they were on their feet.
Some of the other Almovaads and Amiyas had also risen, but they were still disoriented. The Callers, however, were focusing their attention on Tiyana, Byallis and Keshu. They gave Byallis a curious gaze, wondering what she and the other Fidi were doing in the Amiyas’ sacred compound. When Tiyana told them who the Fidi woman was, and what she and the other Almovaads had done to save the city, all four Callers bowed their heads and raised their palms as a sign of respect and gratitude.
“You may come with us, Byallis,” Yemeya said.
“Thank you,” the Adept said.
As the group crossed the grass on their way to the House, others – Amiya and Almovaad alike – gave them quizzical looks, but didn’t follow. And Kyroun and Gebrem remained inert on the ground, as though their efforts had used up all their vitality, leaving them as empty as drained talla cups.
When they entered the Beit Amiya, the Callers led them to the hall where the stone images of the Matile deities stood – or, as they soon saw, had once stood.
Tiyana let out a wordless cry at what she saw. Keshu bit back a curse. Byallis simply stared and shook her head in disbelief, appalled at the sight of sacrilege even though it had been perpetrated against deities that were not her own.
Sometime during the night, the statues of the Jagasti had fallen – or been deliberately toppled. They were now nothing more than scatterings of broken stone in front of their pedestals. Only the marks of long-dead sculptors’ carving distinguished the pieces of the gods and goddesses from the rubble that littered the streets outside the Beit Amiya.
Keshu was the first to find his voice.
“This has to be the work of tsotsis,” he growled.
“Tsotsis? Here?” Tiyana asked in disbelief.
Keshu walked to the pedestal that had held the image of Halasha, the Jagasti he served. He pushed some of the statue’s pieces away from the front of the pedestal. His actions revealed that the mask Keshu had worn during his Calling ceremonies, and placed in that spot in a bitter act of renunciation the night before, was gone. He went over to Nama-kwah’s pedestal and pushed its remaining rubble aside as well. Beneath the rocks, there was nothing. The silver mask that had once fit so well over Tiyana’s face had vanished.
“Your father had always suspected there were tsotsis among us, posing as shamashas,” Keshu said to Tiyana. “But we could never uncover them. They were too clever.”
“But why would tsotsis, who respect neither laws nor gods, want to destroy images of the Jagasti?” Tiyana wondered, thinking of the nameless girl who had attended her after the First Calling during which the Fidis had arrived, and wondering if she had been one of the tsotsi infiltrators.
“What are the Jagasti to the likes of them?” Keshu retorted.
Before anyone could answer that question, another Amiya, who had come into the House behind them, spoke.
“The Leba and the Seer have awakened, and they want all of us to be gathered together,” the Amiya, a woman who had been the Vessel of the river-goddess Ateti, announced. “They say something is wrong.”
3
Despite the final killing in the harbor, there were still Uloans alive in Khambawe. They were the blankskin spies ... spies like Sehaye, whose message concerning the coming of the Fidi had been the catalyst that began Retribution Time.
For a long time, Sehaye had cursed the fate that had caused the huangi to choose him as a gatherer of the mainland’s secrets. His childhood and adolescence had been a nightmare of taunts as his skin remained featureless while that of the others around him became living testimony to their adulation of Legaba.
The huangi had told him he would be facing more danger than any of his tormentors could imagine; and as an infiltrator, he would be performing an exemplary service for the Spider God. And Jass Imbiah herself had assured him that when Retribution Time came, he would receive his spider-scars in a ceremony of blood and honor.
Yet it was Sehaye’s lack of skin-marks that had saved his life. Throughout the invasion, he had hovered in the shadows, furtively slaying Matile who could not distinguish him from themselves. More than once, he had been forced to flee his fellow islanders, because he had no time to make them realize he, too, was a Uloan.
Ultimate triumph over the mainlanders had been well within his people’s grasp. But then the mist came. And the night-sun shone. And the jhumbis died a second time. And Legaba abandoned the Uloans. And the Ishimbi walked. And the fleeing invaders were gutted like fish in the harbor ....
Sehaye cried out and shook his head violently. He was wandering the ravaged streets, hoping to find other Uloan spies. He had not been acquainted with any of them in the past; the huangi had forbidden such contact so that the secret of their presence could be more easily maintained. For all Sehaye knew, he was the only Uloan left alive in Khambawe.
But he did not want to believe that ...
A few Matile who had seen his outburst stopped and stared at Sehaye. But they said nothing to him; his behavior was far from unusual. The shouts and screams of those whose minds had been unhinged by the trauma of the invasion and its ensuing carnage echoed throughout Khambawe.
Sehaye did not trust himself to talk. He could no longer think, let alone speak, in the mainland language the huangi had forced him to learn. He had not been allowed to go to the mainland until he could mimic their speech flawlessly. If he opened his mouth now, however, he would give himself away to the mainlanders. And he knew what they would do to him, stunned and bewildered though they may be in the face of their costly triumph.
Why them not kill I? he asked himself for the hundredth time. He could not answer that question. He could only continue his aimless journey: stepping over corpses, dodging scavengers, wading through pools of blood, adding his crimson footprints to those left by his enemies.
One day, he was convinced, Legaba would speak to him and give him an answer. And this belief was the only thing that was keeping him alive.
4
Even in daylight, Kalisha moved furtively through the Maim. Her stealth was so habitual it seemed instinctive, as was the case with all tsotsis. To relax one’s vigilance even for a moment in the Maim was to die. On this day, though, she need not have bothered with caution. The Maim’s filthy byways were nearly deserted. Even the hyenas had moved on to richer harvests of decaying flesh in other parts of Khambawe.
There were tsotsis in the streets �
�� members of sets other than the Ashakis. But neither they nor Kalisha attempted to intimidate or avoid each other. The Uloans’ invasion and its outcome had left the tsotsis as disoriented as everyone else in Khambawe. And with the rest of the city in ruins, there was nothing left to loot, and thus no reason to assert old – or new – rivalries among the warring sets.
Earlier, Kalisha had wrapped a gold-striped chamma she had stolen from the Beit Amiya around her slight frame. Its ends trailed on the ground behind her as she walked. The chamma concealed a leather sack that contained the Mask of Nama-kwah. The sack was strapped firmly around her waist.
Ordinarily, she would have had to hide the chamma, too, or risk having it ripped from her body by other tsotsis. But on this day, most of the tsotsis she encountered were openly displaying the clothing, jewelry and weapons they had purloined while the rest of the city was fighting the Uloans. Some staggered and reeled, already drunk on stolen talla. Others were chewing khat, and losing themselves in the dream-like escape the leaves provided.
Some of them recognized her.
“Amiya-girl,” they called, sometimes with a laugh.
Kalisha smiled and returned the greetings. Inside, she laughed at them in turn. In her mind, what she carried under her chamma was far more valuable than the insipid baubles the others so proudly displayed.
She could not wait to show the Mask of Nama-kwah to Jass Mofo. Her anticipation of his reaction pushed aside the nagging anxiety she felt as she realized that she had not yet seen another Ashaki tsotsi in the Maim.
Her sense of apprehension intensified when she reached the Ashakis’ mansion – and found no one guarding the entrance. But she did notice large pools of congealing blood marking the places where the set’s sentries usually stood. With that sight, her heart began to beat so loudly she was sure anyone near her would be able to hear its frantic pounding against her ribcage.
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