But when he thought of how pervasive the influence of the Fidi had become in the capital of the Empire, and when he thought about what he had seen, which had prompted him to decide to undertake his long journey, Eshetu’s resolve returned. Finally, he had told his tale to a soldier whose house he had helped to rebuild. The soldier had relayed Eshetu’s story to an officer, who in turn had passed him along to another officer of higher rank.
Finally, the story had reached the ears of the Emperor – and, presumably, the Leba. A soldier from the Palace Guard had come to Eshetu with a summoning to tell his tale directly to the Emperor. Despite Eshetu’s nondescript appearance, and humble kabbar status, the soldier had treated him with respect, and the crowds in the streets – even the quagga-drawn gharris – moved aside to make way for him and his stern-faced escort.
And now, he was about to pass through the portal that led into the Gebbi Senafa. In all the long years his people had dwelled near the border of the Thaba country, none of them had ever had an audience with, or even seen, an Emperor. And now, there was no one left back home to know that Eshetu had been the one to do so.
2
Gebrem looked at Kyroun. Then he looked away, not because he could not meet the Seer’s calm gaze, but because he could no longer trust his judgment about the man who had saved the Matile Mala Empire and brought new hope for the future of its people. A small, unseen cloud of suspicion hung between then now ... a tiny, but persistent, shadow of doubt.
Only once before had such misgivings seeped into Gebrem’s mind. That time had been in the beginning, when he first saw the Seer teetering with steely determination in front of the mast of the White Gull after the Fidis’ vessel had crashed into the docks of Khambawe’s harbor.
The tale that the kabbar was telling throughout the city had, at first, startled Gebrem. As the implications of the story became clear, a sense of unease had crept into him, like a persistent ache or a chronic illness.
He did, however, have the satisfaction of knowing that Kyroun shared his sense of unease. As it was, relations between the two men had become somewhat strained since the departure of the Tokoloshe, though they had not disagreed over the decision to allow the Tokoloshe and the Fidi Dwarven to depart without hindrance. However, they had shared a dismay over the fact that for all the power and position they now possessed, there was nothing they could have done do to forestall the Tokoloshes’ resolve.
That was the first setback the Emperor and Leba had experienced since the defeat of the Uloans.
And now, this ...
“We will learn the truth,” Kyroun said mildly.
This time, the Emperor held Kyroun’s gaze. If the Seer was troubled, nothing of it showed in his gray eyes.
“I hope so,” Gebrem said.
A discreet knock sounded at the door of the small chamber Gebrem and Kyroun had chosen for their meeting with Eshetu. The chamber was unadorned, furnished only with chairs and a low table. Servants had left cups of kef on the table. Intricate designs were incised in the wood of the table and chairs.
Both the Emperor and the Seer wore plain blue chammas over their senafil. They had eschewed the other accouterments of their status. Kyroun had suggested doing so to put the kabbar at ease, and Gebrem had agreed.
“Enter,” the Emperor said.
The door swung open, and the guardsman ushered a blinking, disoriented Eshetu into the presence of the two most powerful men in the Matile Mara Empire. The soldier, who would remain in the room, closed the door behind him. No one expected any trouble from the kabbar, but caution still prevailed, and the soldier’s hand did not stray far from the hilt of his sword.
Recalling stories told over several generations about the proper behavior in the presence of the Emperor, the kabbar dropped to his knees. Then he prostrated himself on the plain stone floor.
“Get up, man, get up,” Gebrem said impatiently. “It is not necessary for you to do that. No one has done that for years.”
Abashed and astonished, Eshetu rose awkwardly to his feet. He almost fell, but caught himself in time.
“My apologies, Mesfin,” he stammered.
“No apologies are necessary,” the Emperor said. “Sit. Relax. Drink your kef. And tell us this news you bring from afar.”
The kabbar sat, reached gingerly for the cup of kef in front of him, and took a swallow of the dark brew.
“I am told your name is Eshetu,” the Emperor said. “And you come from ...?
“Imbesh,” Eshetu replied, putting the cup back on the table. “It is a village in Kembana.”
Gebrem nodded.
“Jass Shebeshi’s country,” he said. “Your Jass did not attend First Calling. Before the Uloans invaded, Alemeyu spoke of correcting Shebeshi’s defiance. But now, if we understand the news you bring correctly, that may no longer be a concern. He is facing other, more pressing, concerns.”
“Yes,” Eshetu agreed, showing spirit for the first time since he came into the presence of the Emperor and the Leba. “Shebeshi is a fool. And we will all pay for the idiocy of pushing the Thabas too far. My family is no more. Imbesh is no more. And if the Thabas attack again, Jass Shebeshi will be no more.”
After a short silence, the Emperor spoke again.
“You have all our sympathy,” he said. “And your family will be avenged.”
Eshetu bowed his head in acknowledgement of the Emperor’s promise. It was the Leba who spoke next.
“The tragedy that struck your people is not the only news you bring to us,” he said.
“No,” Eshetu said, shifting his gaze to Kyroun.
“You have seen people who look like me,” Kyroun said.
Eshetu nodded.
Kyroun reached out and took one of Eshetu’s hands in his own. Gebrem took the other. Eshetu’s first impulse was to pull his hands away. Who was he, a mere kabbar, to be actually touching an Emperor and a Leba? But the grip of the other two men was too strong; he could not pull away.
“Tell us your story, Eshetu,” Kyroun said. “As you speak, we will join you in your memories. And we will know the truth.”
The Seer’s last words were directed as much to Gebrem as they were to Eshetu. The Emperor inclined his head in acknowledgment of Kyroun’s thrust.
Eshetu never knew whether he had begun to speak of his own volition, or if the sorcery wielded by the Emperor and the Leba pulled the words from his mind and his mouth. But speak he did, and at great length, until long after the time the sun sank in the sky and the Moon-Stars rose, while Kyroun and Gebrem shared his experiences in the Oneness ...
3
Eshetu lay beneath a mound of corpses. Their weight pressed heavily upon him, and he could barely draw breath. His only hope that he would be able to continue breathing at all was that the pile above him would prove deep enough to absorb the thrusts of the Thabas’ assegais, the broad-bladed stabbing-spears that were the chief weapons of the warriors of the south.
The bodies were not enough of a barrier to drown out the sounds of Imbesh’s demise. Eshetu could hear the crackle of the flames that were devouring the tukuls, the round, conical-roofed dwellings typical of the kabbars of the Matile countryside. He could hear the screams of women who would soon be taken south, never again to see their homeland. He could hear children crying. He could hear the anguished shouts of Matile men who, like him, were trying – and failing – to protect their families and their land. There were simply too many of the crimson-painted Thaba warriors. Always, too many.
And he could hear the hated war-cry of the Thabas, the sound all kabbars who lived on the borderland feared: “Sigidi! Sigidi! Sigidi!”
After a time that seemed to have no end, the cries from the Thabas and the Matile alike ceased. And no longer did he hear the loathsome sound of assegais ripping open the bellies of the dead and exposing their entrails, as though the Thabas were killing their enemies twice. Yet they did the same to the bodies of their own dead, a practice the Matile had never understood. There was much about
the Thabas that the Matile did not comprehend, nor did they care to try.
Eshetu did not begin to burrow his way out of the mound of corpses until his air had nearly run out. As he pushed through a tangle of arms and legs, he thanked the Jagasti that the Thabas had not pulled all the bodies above him aside during their ritual of disembowelment. At the same time, he cursed the remote Matile deities for allowing Imbesh to be destroyed.
When he finally extricated himself from the bodies that had shielded him, Eshetu looked at what was left of Imbesh, and tears began to mingle with the blood that covered his face. Some of that blood was his own, spilled from the assegai-slash that had felled him as he fought. The rest of it had seeped down from the bodies that had fallen on top of him.
Although dusk was darkening the sky, flames from the burning tukuls and teff-fields would burn well into the night. Light from the fires picked out corpses strewn like chaff throughout Imbesh. Men of fighting age, the elderly of both sexes ... all lying with their bellies opened by Thaba assegais. Several mounds of earth indicated the Thaba corpses that lay in the village as well, for the southern warriors left their dead behind, buried where they fell, taking only their ox-hide shields back to their home villages as tokens of their courage.
Imbesh’s women of child-bearing age were gone, and the children themselves, along with the cattle of the village. Shetu knew the fate that awaited any Matile woman who fell into the hands of the Thabas. He thought of his sister, Sallamawit, and of Desta, the woman he intended to wed. And when he thought of them, and of his brothers, his father and mother and all the others who were either dead or carried off, he dropped to his knees next to the pile of corpses that had saved him. And he howled out his anguish, not caring if any Thaba stragglers heard him.
He never knew how long he remained that way: on his knees, screaming wordlessly until his raw throat could no longer produce any sounds. Finally, he collapsed in exhaustion as the tukuls and the fields continued to burn, and the corpses of his family and friends bled, and their blood soaked the land Jass Shebeshi had hoped to reclaim for the Matile.
When Eshetu awoke, the only sound he heard was the buzzing of the clouds of flies that had already settled over the bodies of his fellow villagers. He heard the sounds of other, larger scavengers on their way to the carrion-feast. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he was surrounded by smoking ruins and stiffening corpses.
Laboriously, he rose to his feet. He wondered why he was still alive, when the rest of the people of Imbesh were either dead or stolen. And he could not find an answer that satisfied him.
Without conscious thought, Eshetu searched for a weapon. Many were scattered among the ashes that were all that was left of the tukuls. Swords, daggers broken shields ... all used in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to defend Imbesh from the Thaba hordes. Eshetu picked up a fallen sword and inspected it in the morning light. Its blade was blooded, but undamaged. Eshetu sliced it through the air, and drew grim pleasure from the sound it made.
It was then Eshetu decided what he would do. He would find out which way the Thabas had gone after their destruction of Imbesh. If the warriors had forged further north to ravage more of the villages of Kembana, he would try to get ahead of the invaders and give whatever warning he could. And if they were headed south, back to their homeland in the rolling hill country, he would follow them.
And when he caught up with them ...
He did not know what course he would take then.
Before departing from Imbesh, Eshetu had one more duty to perform. He did it poorly, and might as well not have done it at all.
The Matile of the countryside interred their dead in a fashion similar to that of the city-dwellers. Instead of small stone houses, however, the kabbars made tukul-shaped monuments from hardened clay. The prospect of properly burying the dozens of corpses scattered throughout Imbesh sickened Eshetu. He knew he could never do it before the scavengers ate most of them.
Instead, he placed a single handful of Imbesh’s bloodsoaked soil on each of the bodies – people he knew well, or to whom he was related, now reduced to fodder for the flies and vultures and hyenas that would soon come. He hoped his people would forgive him when he saw them again ... when he joined them in death. And he knew when that day came, he would have to answer to Metelit, the Jagasti who was the Goddess of the Afterworld.
After he dropped the last bit of dirt through a cloud of flies, Eshetu departed from Imbesh without looking back. The drone of the flies droned in his ears long after he had left the charred remains of his village behind.
Not much time passed before it became obvious to Eshetu that the Thabas had not pushed farther into Kembana territory. Imbesh had been their only target. The destruction of Imbesh was the lesson the Thabas intended to teach Jass Shebeshi. But Jass Shebeshi would need many more such lessons before he would acknowledge the foolishness and futility of his ambitions, Eshetu mused bitterly.
With no sign of the Thabas to the north, Eshetu turned and headed southward, toward the Thabas’ own country. Although he retraced his steps part of the way, he bypassed the remains of Imbesh. He had no desire to again see what he had left behind there.
The Thabas’ trail was easy enough to follow. They had no reason to attempt to conceal the marks of their passage. Long in the past were the days when Matile armies penetrated unimpeded deep into the Thaba hills to capture slaves for the mines and the fields. The Thabas had never forgotten those days. And they would not allow the Matile to forget them, either.
Their new chief-of-chiefs, Tshakane, seemed determined to turn the fractious Thaba tribes into a single assegai, aimed directly at the Matile. Jass Shebeshi had hoped to blunt the thrust of Tshakane’s spear and to make a thrust of his own. Now, that hope was buried beneath the ashes of Imbesh.
As he continued his journey, Eshetu would sometimes see a discarded scrap of clothing or a lost ornament from one of the Imbesh women and children. The forlorn items reminded him that he, alone, could never rescue his people. But he could, in however limited a way, avenge them. If he could find a Thaba warrior alone, he could kill him. And then another ... and another ... as many as he could until his own life was taken. It was a bleak – and likely short – future. But the opportunity for revenge gave him a grim satisfaction.
Soon enough, the ground began to rise in gentle ripples, upward and upward until undulant waves of verdant, tree-clad, flower-spangled, river-threaded hills stretched before him – the Thaba country. And, in the distance, he could see the slow-moving mass that was the raiders and their captives. As the days passed, he cautiously drew nearer to them. But he could not carry out his plan for vengeance. The horde of Thaba warriors were as disciplined as any Matile army had ever been, and he could find no stragglers to kill.
With no other strategy in mind, Eshetu continued to shadow the Thabas. He survived by foraging; the land was as abundant as it was beautiful, and so he had no need to risk discovery by stealing supplies from the Thabas.
He made no attempts to discern Desta or Sallamawit among the indistinct mass of captives. He knew that to see them while knowing all-too-well that he could do nothing to rescue them would have pushed him beyond the edge of madness.
Days passed, each one no different from the next. The Thabas pushed southward, their pace matching that of the cattle they had taken from Imbesh. Eshetu watched and waited. Then the day came when a smaller group of Thaba warriors joined the ones who had destroyed Eshetu’s village.
And that was when Eshetu saw the strangers.
4
“There were four of them,” Eshetu said as Gebrem and Kyroun listened intently while reliving the kabbar’s experiences through the medium of the Oneness.
“They all had pale skins, like yours,” he continued, looking at Kyroun as he spoke.
“Three were men; one was a woman. One of the men was tall and brawny, like the Thabas. His hair was the color of fire. Another was shorter, with brown hair. He carried a drum unlike any other I
have seen. The third man was small, with thick black hair and a black beard. His body was covered in blue robes – again, like yours. And the woman ...”
Eshetu paused and shook his head as though he still could not give credence to what he had seen.
“She was taller than any of the men, and her skin was paler. Her hair was like strands of spider-silk. And her ears were ... larger than usual, and their tips were like the points of daggers.”
Again, Eshetu paused. He looked at both the Emperor and the Leba, as if he were gauging whether or not they believed him.
“Were these strangers captives?” the Emperor asked.
“I don’t think they were,” Eshetu replied. “They were carrying weapons. But the Thabas were still watching them closely. And it looked to me as though they didn’t understand the Thabas’ language – not that I understand it myself. Still, the strangers spoke differently, and the Thabas had to use gestures to make themselves understood.”
Eshetu’s fingers flexed involuntarily in the grasp of the Leba and Emperor, as though he were imitating the Thabas’ gestures. Both men released their holds on the kabbar’s hands. For reasons he could not have explained, Eshetu felt relieved that the contact had ended. However, he had still not finished his story.
“I had never seen such people before. But I remembered that I had heard of pale traders who had come from a land far across the sea – the Fidi – in the songs and stories of the old days. But even in the songs, there had never been any mention of people like the woman.
“I knew then what I had to do. The Jagasti had not allowed me to live only to throw my life away. They had spared me to be the one to see that the Fidi were among the Thabas, and to come here to tell that to the Emperor Alemeyu.
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