Abengoni

by Charles R. Saunders

  The ships drew closer. The cheers of the Uloans on the beach drowned out the rumble of the waves that lapped the shoreline. But when the ships came close enough for their occupants to become clearly visible, the triumphant shouts of the Uloans fell silent, as though a single hand had clutched and squeezed all their throats at once.

  The shapes that lined the decks of the Uloan ships were not alive. The occupants of the ships were jhumbis, one and all. Not a single living Islander could be seen on the ships; only clay-coated figures with broken sea-shells as substitutes for eyes and teeth.

  Like all the other women on the beach, Awiwi cried out in horror and protest at what she saw on the ships. She didn’t try to look for Bujiji. She could not tell the jhumbis apart, nor did she want to. If Bujiji had now become a jhumbi, that meant he was dead and gone from her forever, even if he could still walk and do the bidding of the huangi.

  Awiwi’s own outcry awoke her, as it always did when nightmares like this plagued her sleep. But this time, there was another cry as well.

  Instinctively, she reached for the infant at her side. Her hand touched him ... and then she could feel him being pulled from her grasp. His cries were muffled, as though something was covering his mouth – or constricting his throat.

  In the dim Moon Star light that filtered through the flimsy thatch of her lean-to, she saw her baby son moving slowly toward the structure’s entrance. He wasn’t crawling. He was being dragged by an ubia-vine as thick as her wrist. The plant had wrapped part of itself around the infant’s throat, and was choking him even as it inched its way into the darkness outside the lean-to.

  With a wordless cry of rage, Awiwi reached for the coral dagger she kept at her side. Then she seized the part of the vine that was not wrapped around her son, and began to hack at its green flesh. Even as the ubia-vine writhed and buckled, the baby’s cries weakened. Awiwi’s slashes became wilder, missing as often as they landed. Some came close to cutting her baby. Yet enough of them eventually landed to rip the sorcerous life out of the ubia. When the vine finally lay still, Awiwi frantically tore its loops from her baby’s body, not noticing that the infant lay silent.

  Awiwi lifted him and laid her ear on his small chest. And she heard the tiny flutter of his heartbeat. He was unconscious, but alive.

  As she held her baby to her breast, Awiwi sobbed quietly, tears falling from her face to the infant’s brow. She had not yet given her child a name. None of the infants born in the Uloas since Retribution Time had been named. The father and a huangi had to be present for a proper naming ceremony to occur. But all the fathers and all the huangi had departed for the war on the mainland. Without their presence, the new children had to remain nameless.

  As time passed, the ubia-vines had become bolder. If the huangi did not arrive soon, the human inhabitants of the islands were in danger of being overwhelmed by the animate vegetation.

  “Legaba ... help I,” Awiwi whispered into the darkness

  She made that plea out of lifelong habit, even though she knew her words would be answered only with silence. Legaba was ... gone.

  Awiwi refused to countenance the possibility that the Spider God had vanished forever. To think that would be to lose all hope. And the loss of all hope would be the final step into the abyss of oblivion.

  But still ... Legaba was gone, leaving no trace of a presence that had existed since the time the Uloans began to worship him. And so were Jass Imbiah, and the huangi, and all the fighting-age men, and even the walking dead. Each day that they did not come back was another day closer to the end of the Uloans who remained on the islands. And they would remain, despite the mwiti. They could build boats, but there was no safe destination to which they could sail; certainly not to the Mainland, nor to the Sea of Storms.

  The ubia-vine’s attack had occurred swiftly, although to Awiwi its coils had touched her infant’s skin for a loathsome eternity. Her outcry had awakened women in neighboring lean-tos, and some of them now came to her, and held her, and whispered soothing words into her ears. They knew all too well that on the next night, one of their children could be the target of the ubias’ hunger.

  They tried hard not to lose hope. But the struggle was growing too difficult, and before long, their will to live would be gone.

  4

  For many generations, the Uloans had lied to themselves about part of their past, until they had finally forgotten it ...

  When the first explorers from the Matile mainland had reached the islands centuries ago, they had found human inhabitants as well as the animals and the mwiti. The population was small and scattered, and the people had a name – the Kipalende. A small-statured, peaceful race whose origins predated those of the Matile and Thaba, and even the Tokoloshe and the Kwa’manga of the Khumba Khourou thirstland, the Kipalende lived in harmony with the mwiti.

  The Kipalende had no need to build dwellings; the trees shaped themselves into shelters for them. They had no need to hunt or cultivate food; the fruits of the mwiti-plants provided all the sustenance they required. In return, the Kipalende nurtured the mwiti and spread their seeds and pollen, and protected them from the depredations of hungry creatures such as the munkimun. The Kipalende knew neither want nor warfare, and they were unaware that there were other people in the world; people who could neither understand nor respect the way of life that had sustained them for thousands of years.

  In an overweening arrogance born of their recent acquisition of the power of ashuma, the explorers, and the settlers who arrived on their heels, saw the Kipalende as nothing more than tree-dwellers only a step above the munkimun – an obstacle that had to be swept away or trampled beneath the feet of the Matile. The early settlers decided that they needed to remove the Kipalende. And that was what they did. In less than a generation, the Kipalende were gone – exterminated. In ensuing years, the Uloans expunged from their memories the fact that predecessors had existed on the islands, and so did the mainlanders.

  But the Kipalende were not truly gone.

  The mwiti possessed a shared sentience, but it was not like that of humans or animals. The source of their awareness was not restricted to specific organs such as eyes or ears. Changes in sunlight, variations in vibrations in the air or ground, shifts in the direction of the breeze that carried chemical signals... these shaped the consciousness of the ubia-vines and the rest of the mwiti.

  And because the mwiti had extended their consciousness to join with that of the Kipalende, the plant life had shared the torment their human symbiotes had suffered at the hands of the invaders. And the mwiti had absorbed the spirits of the Kipalende, and kept that part of the doomed people alive long after the dust of their bodies became an element of the islands’ soil. Now, the Kipalende were part of the mwiti, from the ubia-vines to the tallest of the trees.

  No longer were the Kipalende timid. Their spirits had become vindictive, and they bent the inchoate consciousness of the mwiti to their influence, and to their goal: vengeance against the descendants of those whom had destroyed them. The powerful sorcery of the Uloans was all that prevented the mwiti from overrunning the islands in the aftermath of the Storm Wars. That had been the Kipalendes’ best chance to fulfill their desire for reprisal, and their spirits slipped into dormancy when that opportunity was thwarted.

  And now, that protective sorcery was gone. The unseen barriers that had thwarted the Kipalendes’ revenge were gone. Freedom had come. And so had an unanticipated kind of Retribution Time for the Uloans who remained on the islands, with the reawakening of the Kipalendes’ spirits.

  The mwiti were now capable of a full range of movement. Ubia-vines slid more swiftly than serpents along the ground. Grass blades whipped, curled and wove together, into vast, moving webworks, as though the air had become a gigantic loom. Even the thickest of tree-branches had become as limber as the tentacles of a squid or octopus. Flowers grasped and clawed like an eagle’s talons. Roots clutched the soil and propelled huge trees forward.

  Immediate
ly after the magic that had kept them at bay vanished, the mwitis’ consciousness had momentarily overwhelmed that of the Kipalende. The plants had revelled in their liberty, and underwent a period of anarchic growth and movement, during which they posed scant threat to the now-vulnerable Uloans.

  In the midst of the chaos, however, a glimmer of greater purpose kindled in the consciousness of a single, aged papaya tree in a forest on Jayaya Island. The papaya was hardly an imposing tree; others were far larger and bore brighter blossoms and more plentiful fruit. But the consciousness of the Kipalende loomed larger in this papaya than in any of the other mwiti, for it was the refuge of the greatest among them, a shaman who was the principal link between his people and the plant life. As the others dueled with branches and leaves and roots, the lone papaya remained motionless, easily fending off the intrusions of its more aggressive neighbors.

  The Kipalende part of the papaya’s consciousness reached out to the other mwiti, and it sent a message that soon worked its way into that of all the animate vegetation of the islands.

  Destroy them, not us, the Kipalende shaman in the papaya urged. The time for vengeance has come.

  Swiftly, the rest of the Kipalende spirits regained control over the mwiti. Swifter still came a new message from the spirit of their shaman.

  Now it ends.

  5

  Awiwi cried out in fear and disgust as she kicked at an ubia that was trying to wrap itself around her ankle. The vine fell away. Then it snaked toward her again. Others followed.

  Holding her baby tightly in her arms, Awiwi backed away. She had been retreating since the dawn of this terrible day. So had all the rest of those who had taken refuge on the Jayaya beach.

  When the first light seeped into the morning sky, an army of ubias had swarmed out of the forest. The Uloans who were still asleep at the time died agonizing deaths, covered with ubias that leeched the blood out of their veins. Those who, like Awiwi, were fortunate enough to be awake had fought desperately to free themselves from their assailants. They fled their lean-tos and made for the beach, closer to the final embrace of the sea.

  Behind them, their flimsy shelters were quickly overrun by swarms of ubias. People who had not been alert or swift enough to elude the attackers had become little more than struggling lumps barely visible beneath a writhing carpet of vines.

  “Fire! Catch they on fire!” one of the elders shouted as he cut and tore ubias from his legs.

  He rushed toward a cooking fire that still burned several yards away, and thrust a piece of wood from it into the mass of ubias that was still in front of him. With a sizzling sound, the vines shriveled and blackened in the flame. Wielding the brand like a flaming sword, the elder burned a wide swath through the ubias.

  Others followed the elder’s example. Risking their lives to reach other fires, they lit the wreckage of their shelters, pieces of driftwood, patches of dry grass – anything that was combustible. Soon, a rampart of fire blazed between the Uloans and their attackers. The hiss and pop of burning ubias punctuated the crackle of the flames.

  But the respite proved only temporary.

  As the Uloans stared in renewed horror, the sheer mass of the ubias began to snuff out the flames. Unlike even the most obtuse form of beast, the animate plants of the Uloas bore no instinctive fear of fire, for all their vulnerability to that element. And they also had no fear of death. For them, the loss of hundreds, even thousands, of their numbers had no consequence. All that mattered to the Kipalende part of them was the fulfillment of their deadly purpose.

  Slowly, the flames died, leaving a mass of charred ubias in their wake. And a new wave of vines passed over the remnants of the others. Again, the Uloans retreated before the onrushing horde of ubias. And a new enemy emerged as tendrils from rapidly growing mwiti roots erupted from the ground and coiled around the Uloans’ ankles and up their legs.

  Overcome by a sense of futility, some of the Uloans simply ceased their struggles and allowed the plants to pull them down. Others continued to fight for their lives, even as the water of the ocean lapped at their heels.

  “Legaba! Legaba! Save we!” many of them shouted, even though they knew their god no longer heard them.

  Others uttered screams of rage and despair. And still others bore their fate in bitter silence. The end of their existence was in sight ... but so, on the horizon of the sea, was something else.

  Awiwi was the first to spot what was drawing closer to them.

  “Ships!” she shouted, her voice soaring above the din. “Ships! Them come back to save we!”

  The other Uloans turned and looked to the sea. At the sight of the line of ships in the distance, they let out a long shout of relief and joy. But the cries of elation died in their throats when they realized the ships were not Uloan after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Tiyana’s Task

  1

  Pel Muldure was glad to have a deck rocking beneath his feet again – even if it was the unfamiliar planks of a Matile vessel, sailing in the equally unfamiliar waters between the Abengoni mainland and the Uloan Islands. His White Gull had been damaged beyond any hope of repair during the battle against the Uloans. So had most of the Matiles’ ships. Much of the time between then and now had been spent repairing the ships that were salvageable and building others from scratch. The scuttled remains of the White Gull rested on the cluttered bottom of Khambawe’s harbor, along with many of Muldure’s regrets.

  Muldure and some of his crew members who were knowledgeable about the ship-building craft had offered suggestions to their Matile counterparts as they worked. Some of the Fidis’ suggestions were accepted; others politely disregarded. The vessel Muldure now helmed, the Amdwa, combined Matile and Fiadolian design concepts. Newly built, it was the flagship of the Matiles’ refurbished war fleet. As such, the Amdwa was destined to carry the revitalized Empire’s war-commanders, and even Emperors, into future battles.

  This time, however, the ship carried neither Gebrem nor Kyroun, only Tiyana and a group of other Almovaad Initiates, as well as soldiers. The rest of the sea-craft in the flotilla also held complements of Adepts and Acolytes who were proficient in the use of the magic provided by Almovaar. For the entire voyage, both the seasoned and novice Almovaads had engaged in intense preparations for what they intended to do once they arrived at the islands. Strangely, the ships carried only a minimum number of fighting-men.

  Now, across the water that separated the ships from Jayaya, Muldure could see tiny figures, barely discernable as human at that distance, engaged in a desperate – and apparently futile – struggle against foes he could not make out. Many of the people were already in the water, as though something was striving to push them into the sea’s embrace. But he couldn’t make out the enemies they were fighting. He could only see that the islanders were being driven ever-deeper into the water.

  Muldure shook his head in bewilderment as he considered what he was seeing on the island, as well as what had occurred in Khambawe in the days before the flotilla had set out.

  “Hardly any soldiers,” he muttered. “No weapons to speak of. And a foe that is already beaten. What the hell kind of ‘invasion’ is this, anyway?”

  At his side, Lyann shrugged.

  “How do you know it’s supposed to be an ‘invasion’ in the first place?” she asked.

  Now it was Muldure’s turn to shrug. The rulers of Khambawe had not informed him of the details of the mission to the Uloans’ homeland. Along with the captains of the Matile ships, he had been told only that the Emperor and the Seer had decided the time had come to put an ultimate end to the conflict between the mainlanders and the islanders.

  But no one outside the inner circle of Almovaad Adepts knew what that end would be, nor how it was expected to be accomplished ...

  Behind the captain and the first mate, the crew – half of which was Fiadolian and the rest Matile – toiled at tasks such as furling the Amdwa’s sails and securing its anchor. Shouts and cu
rses in two languages accompanied the work.

  Muldure chuckled as he listened to the chorus of complaints.

  Sailors will be sailors wherever they are, he mused.

  Tiyana and her fellow Adepts were still in the ship’s main cabin, just as Kyroun had been when the White Gull entered Khambawe’s harbor. With the Matile woman, however, Muldure experienced none of the uneasiness the Seer had always inspired. Despite the new power Tiyana had acquired, to Muldure’s mind she was still the vulnerable young woman who had first come aboard the White Gull to give aid to strangers in need.

  A stiff sea-breeze stirred the single strand of beads in Lyann’s hair as she followed Muldure’s gaze toward the island. Jayaya differed little from the thousands of other islands she had seen during her travels in the seas off Cym Dinath. But she had never before seen vegetation that swayed against the wind ...

  “Whatever Tiyana plans on doing, she’d better do it now,” Muldure said. “It looks like those people are going to drown before we get to them.”

  Lyann nodded agreement.

  A moment later, the cabin door opened. From it, Tiyana, Byallis, and a half-dozen other Initiates emerged and strode across the deck. On the way, Tiyana’s eyes met Muldure’s, but only briefly. After that brief contact, she looked straight ahead as she led the Initiates to the ship’s rail. Then, as one, the Almovaads levitated from the deck and floated over the side of the Amdwa.

  2

  The last time Tiyana had stepped onto the surface of the sea, she had worn the Mask of Nama-kwah, and had striven futilely to establish contact with the goddess for whom she had been a Vessel. She had been painfully conscious then of the weakness of her ashuma. And even before the day the Fidi arrived, First Calling had been little more than an empty ritual, although she would never have admitted, or even acknowledged, that truth back then.