Chapter 9: Africa
MATTHEW was surprised when a very different human being grabbed him from the darkness and pulled him out into a very different-looking place. Stephanie was nowhere near him and he’d dropped the book before he was seized. “Who are you?” he shouted in fright at the dark-skinned giant keeping him in the air with tough, sinewy arms, his legs dangling uncontrollably. “Let me go.”
The man barked at Matthew in his native tongue with a deep, guttural voice and this briefly silenced the boy. “Where am I?” Matthew wondered, his eyes quickly eating up his surroundings. Mud huts with thatched roofing littered what looked like a forest clearing and more dark-skinned people filled his view. “Am I really in a movie?” he asked himself, bewildered. The big man dropped him on the ground, grabbed his arm and dragged him against his will towards a central hut bigger than the others. “No! Let me go,” Matthew hoarsely screamed. “Stephanie!” he called out. “Nora!”
The African shouted him down.
Matthew thought this fellow was magnificent without his bad attitude and suddenly became more aware of him. Ostrich feathers decorated the man’s headgear and ankles, and he wore a short leopard-skin skirt by the side of which protruded a broad machete from beneath a crocodile-skin belt. The man’s chest and face had chalk decorations on them, and cowry shells produced music on his ankles. Presumably, this individual was an African warrior, and many similarly dressed men surrounded the central hut where he was taking Matthew to. Exposed girls and women alongside many children watched the boy’s futile struggle with the warrior, soft laughter playing on the sides of their mouth.
Was this where Nora was being held? Amongst ebony warlike Africans? Matthew looked around in renewed dread. “Nora!” he repeated, and the man cursed him in his native tongue. “I cannot understand you,” the boy protested. “I must find my sisters.” He wedged himself on the ground with his foot and realized he was wearing funny-looking shoes before the warrior simply lifted him up and threw him over his shoulders, talking to him in that same incomprehensive language all this while. “You don’t get it, do you?” Matthew snapped at his oppressor. “I CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU!”
The boy was shaken up a bit for shouting like this and flung over the other shoulder, his head now facing backwards and his legs kicking away before the man. It was then that he saw Stephanie, and his falling morale plummeted.
Stephanie was dressed in an old-looking dress and shawl, and had on a crazy hat. Others clothed like her surrounded her, and these women and children were graciously as Caucasian as Matthew’s foster sister. “Stephanie!” Matthew hollered. The girl caught his voice like every other person. She turned towards him in amazement. She looked confused by his utterance. “Stephanie, it’s me, Matthew!” he tried again, but Stephanie looked away and lowered her head.
Matthew’s morale nose-dived the more. He didn’t bother to question this strange reaction in anyway, because all the events of the past few hours could never be logically analyzed. Whether he thought otherwise or not, he must begin to believe that he and Stephanie were no longer in France, nor were they even in Europe, and provided this was not a movie set he could not still remember how he came to be a part of, he knew they must quickly solve the puzzle posed by the book before it became too late.
He remembered he no longer had it with him.
The warrior dropped him before the central hut and turned to a young boy sitting on a leopard’s skin. Matthew lost interest in the man’s conversation with the boy as he stared at the crowd of fighting men and ordinary people who had surrounded the hut. An old, hideous-looking woman dressed in animal hair kept staring at him, but he tried as much as he could to ignore her. She reminded him of scary movies and he didn’t like that at all. Why did she have to dress so weirdly? And why were her people holding him and his foster sisters? What was their connection with the book? Again, Matthew looked around him at the gathered crowd. These men, women and children will hamper any attempt on his part to escape, since none of them would gladly make way for a fleeing prisoner. This meant he would have to make up his escape plan as events unfolded. Nora and Stephanie he would have to find some other way to save.
Now Matthew’s eyes drifted back to the two figures beside him. They were deciding his fate in the strangest language he’d ever heard. The boy talking with the warrior seemed to be the village chief, since he was richly adorned and many servants waited on him. This character appeared to be in the same age bracket with Matthew, who tried to see the face that was partially covered with ostrich feathers. Black hands pushed his head to the ground in consternation.
“Stop! You’re hurting me,” Matthew begged them, and they pushed his face further into the soil. Their chief signaled them to stop and the boy slowly raised his head. Now, the man who had brought him there stepped forward again before the monarch and ranted for some time in his tongue while angrily pointing at his prisoner from time to time. “He’s lying, my . . . king,” Matthew objected vaguely to whatever the man was saying. “He’s not even speaking English.”
But he was ignored.
Two attendants came forward and prostrated themselves before the throne. Matthew thought they were there to remove him, but they stood up and walked towards their leader instead. With long, ebony fingers, they parted the feathers above the young ruler’s forehead and Matthew stared at a very familiar face, blinking.
“Anderson?”
“Kill him,” the African-American boy said in crisp, clear English.
“No,” Matthew shouted, as much surprised by the order given as he was in finally seeing the face of the person who had given it. Funny enough, nobody moved to seize him. They seemed unable to comprehend what their chief had just told them to do. Anderson had to show them what he meant by drawing the edge of his hand across his neck to Matthew’s disappointment, and two young, able-bodied men stepped out to seize the white prisoner.
“Anderson, it’s me, Matthew,” Matthew attempted again, fighting to free himself from the Africans. I’ve gotta save you! They’ve brainwashed you with their magic and I know why you’re here! Don’t do this.” But the boy king only acknowledged recognizing him by a flicker of his eyes, remaining unmoved. The African men started dragging Matthew away against his will. “Anderson,” he shouted, dropping to his knees in a bid to slow them down. “Why are you doing this to me?”
His bent knees and right-angled legs left the ground.
“You killed Fat George and Mary Ann, and now you want to kill me, too,” Anderson suddenly snapped, standing on his feet and causing everyone to fall on their knees except Matthew, who was already on his. “I know you somehow brought me here to be eaten by the lions in the forest, but I survived! I survived to become a chief and you must now suffer for your . . . crimes.”
“I didn’t kill them,” Matthew denied half-heartedly before his mouth was clamped shut by black hands. He wondered what the chief’s people would do if they knew their ‘leader’ still went to middle school, but then they literally worshipped him and must think his English was a divine language from the gods, while the prisoner’s was from an evil source.
The chief sat down and the people stood up. Those holding Matthew freed his tongue. “I don’t know what happened to Fat George and Mary Ann, Anderson,” Matthew yelled as his would-be killers started dragging him again. “You have to believe me.”
A man suddenly shouted from behind the crowd and they stopped pulling Matthew on the ground. The fellow burst out from the crowd and prostrated himself before Anderson. He had something in his hand and everyone, including those pulling Matthew, wanted to know what it was.
“Hey! That’s my book,” Matthew challenged the man. “Give it back.” He stamped his right foot on the bare one of the only person now holding him and tore free to snatch the book and escape through a gap he’d been closely watching in the crowd. Many gave chase.
“Catch him,” Anderson ordered his men. “Don’t let him get away.” The chief was amazed by the di
stance the prisoner had already covered. “Kill him! Bring him down,” he shouted anxiously.
Arrows and spears started coming Matthew’s way but he didn’t look back. He might have touched Anderson’s name by mistake instead of Nora’s back in the château in France, but how sure was he that this was how he got to where he now was? What made him jump the Mediterranean and land in Africa? How could he save Stephanie and Anderson now? Was Nora there in the forest with them? And Stephanie. Why was she in a different place with all those people when they were once together? What were those imprisoned people to those savages? Food? Was Anderson now a cannibal?
He was heading towards the forest.
His pursuers refused to follow him.
“He’s getting away,” their young chief vented and his head warrior turned to him and read his thoughts by his actions, shaking his head in disagreement.
“Numa,” the man said aloud in his tongue, and Anderson nodded with satisfaction.
The African warrior was right.
Numa was the first word he’d learned from the tribe when they found him alive in the forest and praised him for his courage and ability to evade these big, wild cats.
Very hungry, big, wild cats.
“You’re right,” Anderson told the man. “The lions will get him.”
And if they don’t, the thick forest will.
And if the thick forest doesn’t, hunger certainly will!
Good old hunger.
The Black Book Page 30
