by Dilman Dila
“What about the note you wrote,” I interrupted him.
“What note?” he said.
“You left a note on the bed. It said, ‘don’t worry. We are on our honeymoon.’”
“I left no note,” he said. “I fell sick and passed out.”
He woke up in the cave, on the papyrus mat, to the blinding glare of candles and a suffocating sweet smell. The pain had gone. Meg sat next to him, her arms wrapped around her knees, tears on her face.
“What happened?” he asked her. “Where am I?”
“In a witchdoctor’s shrine,” she replied. “We took you to hospital but the doctors couldn’t help. So we rushed you here. You nearly died. You had a big wound in your stomach.” Okello checked his tummy, and sure enough it had a large wound, as though he had been operated upon. “Boke did witchcraft on you. He was jealous of you. He wanted to kill you. But jajja saved your life.”
Meg broke down and wept. Okello hugged her.
“I have to pay for your cure with my life,” she added.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“It’s only for a few days. He assured me I’ll be dead only for a few days and after six days I’ll resurrect. Please be strong. It’s the only way.”
“Meg, what are you talking about?”
She yelped in pain. A severe headache attacked her. It had peculiar characteristics. It affected only one side of her head at a time. First, it was the right side. Then the pain shifted to the left side. For an hour, the pain seesawed in her head until it finally exploded. A fire burned her brain. Her nose bled and stained the white gown. At ten to midnight, she asked for the time. He replied after a glance at the clock.
“I’m going to die,” she cried. She grabbed his hands. Her nails sank into his flesh. “I’m going to die at midnight.”
The clock started to tick. He was sure it was not ticking before. It was so loud it echoed all over the cave, each tick banging into his skull like a hammer.
“Oh Meg,” he said, wiping sweat, blood and tears off her face. “I’ll find another doctor.”
But the clock struck midnight. Meg died.
Okello held her in his arms, too shocked to do anything. Too shocked to cry. He did not realize the old man had entered the room until he heard him clear his throat. Okello looked up, and saw a face as black as soot, a bald head with a thick, white beard. He wore nothing but bark cloth. Dozens of necklaces made out of bones and shells hung around his neck. His arms and ankles were decorated with bracelets made of animal skins.
“She’ll be alright,” the old man said.
“She’s dead,” Okello cried.
“It’s the jajjas,” the old man said. “They saved your life so they asked for hers in return, but only for a short while. She’ll resurrect on Friday at midnight if you do exactly as I say.”
Okello believed the old witch. He believed his wife would resurrect. He followed the instructions meticulously. He kept vigil by her deathbed. Every midnight, he smeared her body with a special oil, which the ancient Egyptians used to mummify their dead. Every hour he knelt beside the corpse and told her how much he loved her. No one else could be in the shrine with him. He could only leave it at nine o’clock in the morning, to use the bathroom or to get food, which the old man left outside. He ate nothing but cow milk and blood. The smoke swirled around him. The sweet smell encouraged him. Rigor stiffness held the corpse. A net of ghastly blue veins appeared on her skin, which was now yellowish and transparent. He could see the rot in her flesh, the maggots crawling under the skin. Her eyes bulged out of their sockets and looked like two eggs on her face. The pupils disappeared, leaving a dead white terror glaring, with maggots swimming in it like fish in a glass bowl. Okello braved the horrors and patiently waited for this hideous creature to come back alive. He had a lot of hope until I walked into the shrine.
#
Okello did not know how to contact the old man. He could only wait for him to show up. If he did not come at midnight, when Meg was supposed to resurrect, he would come the following day at nine to bring him food. At a loss of what else to do, Okello continued with the rituals. He knelt by her side every hour and said how much he loved her.
The minutes ticked away. Okello sat by the corpse, restive. I kept a good distance away by the door, which was of no use for I could not get out. Only a magic word could open it. Okello knew the password. He would not tell it to me. The noisy clock filled the night with a creepy tick tock tick that stressed the silence. The candlelight made the shadows dance. The smoke made the room spooky. We sat still. We waited.
At nine, just after the clock’s ninth dong, and just after he told the dead thing how much he loved it, Okello yelled and darted away from the corpse.
“Meg – she spoke – Meg spoke! Did you – did you hear?” I had not heard anything but the clock. “She said she loves me too. She spoke.” He laughed. It sounded like the insane clash of metals. “Maybe it will still work,” he said. “Maybe she’ll still come back to life.”
At ten, he let out another shrill scream. “Look! Look!” He bounced like a ball as he pointed at the corpse. “She moved.” I had not seen anything. “Look! Again!” I turned to the corpse. It was stiff on the mat. “She’s waving.” But the corpse was not moving at all. “She’s coming back,” he said into my face. “Two hours left.”
Eleven o’clock. Okello grabbed me by the arms and dragged me to the corpse. For one who looked sick and starving, he had enough strength to force me to look at the dead body. It had changed. Its eyes were back to normal size. The yellow complexion and the blue veins had disappeared from her skin. I could no longer see the rot and the maggots in her flesh. It now looked like Meg. “See? See? One hour left.”
One very long hour.
We waited. Okello paced about, gesticulating, whispering to himself, panting. I still sat by the door, trying to stay calm, sweating profusely. We waited. Midnight drew closer, closer. Okello’s pacing became frantic, his gesticulations violent. The ticking got louder. I put my fingers in my ears to shut out the noise but it only got louder, louder – louder! Until finally the clock started to dong – once, twice, thrice. We froze, our eyes glued to the corpse – six times, seven times, eight times – each dong echoed in the cave with an icy terror – twelve dongs – midnight.
Meg woke up. Like one startled out of sleep by a nightmare, she stood up, confused, frightened. Alive.
“Meg,” Okello whispered. I was flat against the wall, trembling. “Meg.” Okello inched towards her, mesmerized, arms outstretched to hug her. “Meg.”
Just when he thought everything would be alright after all, something started to happen to her. Her pupils vanished, and the dead white terror returned. Fangs sprang out of her mouth, claws shot out of her fingers and toes, hair sprout out of her face. Even before she completed the transition into a beast, she attacked. With a demonic cat’s shriek, she lunged at Okello. They tumbled onto the floor, wrestling. She had a firm grip on his neck and she did not stop squeezing, her claws digging into his flesh, drawing blood. And as Okello’s life seeped out, she continued to transform into a cat-like creature.
I snatched a candle and torched her gown. She burst into flames. She rolled off Okello to fight the fire. She tried to rip off the burning gown, but the oil he had smeared on her body was highly flammable and it had soaked in. Her hair caught fire too. She fell to the floor, a burning mess, screaming, twitching.
Struggling to breathe, blood pouring out of his neck, Okello barely managed to utter the magic word. The door slid open. We staggered out, and fled from the cave. We ran until we reached the ruined homestead, where I had left the motorcycle. We sped back to town.
#
Okello survived. There are scars on his neck and stomach, souvenirs from his first marriage. He has never stopped thanking me for saving his life.
When the residents of Merikit heard our tale, they mobilized and under the leadership of a shaman and set the homestead alight, burning everythin
g. Meg’s body was in the cave, charred. Nobody touched it. Instead, they rigged dynamite around the onion-shaped rock and blew it up.
No one caught sight of any of the living dead. The photographs that were taken during the wedding were of no use. They faded away leaving nothing but white blankness on the paper. They probably slipped away to another area, or maybe they are still in the vicinity. Maybe some people in the mob who torched up the homestead were living dead too. We shall never know.
A Bloodline of Blades
Mozze’s tribe lived in caves in a mountain on the fringe of the empire. They were tall and had the color of burnt wood. They wore long dreadlocks decorated with brightly colored beads. The peak of their mountain looked like a white cloud in the blue sky. Under the full moon, it turned into a gleaming pearl that inspired them to make merry all night long.
Mozze looked forward to the next full moon, which coincided with the Elephant Festival. He dreamt of winning the Green Drum with his new song, mpenzi moja, a love ballad about a poor belle and a prince. He had practiced it for many moons, tried it out on many instruments, until it flowed out of his soul like a bewitching stream sparkling in the moonlight. As the fiesta drew closer, he became restless, desperate, like a hanging man struggling to free the rope around his neck.
On a cold afternoon twelve days to the fete, as he roasted a giant rat in the kitchen of his cave, he hummed the new song. He had a sweet voice. It gave credit to the gossip that his real father was a musician. They said that his mother was already pregnant when she ran away from her husband, who her family had forced her to marry, to live with her forbidden lover. Mozze did not let the gossip distract him. His voice drifted with the smoke up the chimney, into the gardens above, where his wife, Mishash, milked a mbisi. He sang in rhythm to the sound of milk jetting into a clay bowl. But then, the music of her work stopped. She was listening to his song. He knew her eyes were closed in a swoon, and love was flowing through her veins like a fresh stream coming down the mountains after a long dry spell. He closed his eyes too, and let the lyrics waft up to her like the enchanted smoke of a djinni.
But their only child, Jez, suddenly broke the magic of the moment.
“Pa!” Jez screamed, his voice boomed down the chimney into the kitchen, drowning out Mozze’s song. He was returning from the forest where he had gone to collect ritti leaves to feed the mbisi, and he had caught his mother swooning. “You are not a silly girl!”
Mozze went quiet. The contempt in the boy’s voice made him regret the decision to go public with his music. But at that time, it had sounded like a good idea. His wife had just been barred from attending a cousin’s wedding party. His was an isolated family, a pariah family, because he was an assassin. Mishash hated it. She urged him to do something about it. Music was the only solution he could think of. He believed it would show off his romantic side, give him a new image other than that of a blood thirsty monster. However, the moment he signed up for the contest, the gossip about his true father started, and it had poisoned his son.
“I belong to a family of real men!” Jez now shouted. “The sword is my destiny, not a useless drum!”
Mozze heard him smashing the ritti leaves onto the ground, and then stomping away.
He had to make his son understand the importance of his musical ambition. In another twelve moons, Jez would be old enough to marry, and he would have trouble finding a bride. No man would let his daughter marry into a family of assassins. The only way was for a girl to fall so madly in love that she defies her father, elopes, and gets disowned. That was how Mozze had found his wife. That was how their forefathers started families. In isolation. With curses from the girl’s family. Mozze did not want it to happen to Jez. He wanted his family to be accepted, to join others in roaming from cave to cave, singing, dancing, telling stories, laughing and drinking yellow wine every Tukasday. Getting the chief to award him a green drum would be the first step in that direction. He had to make Jez understand.
He removed the rat from the fire, and walked out of the kitchen into a vast room draped in a myriad of crisscrossing lights. Gems and mirrors reflected a sunbeam that sneaked in through a crack on the mountainside, lighting up the cave with a dozen colors. A circular carpet lay in the middle of the room, inside a ring of three-legged stools. Here the family ate their meals, hosted the few visitors who came by, and made merry. Six caverns dug in the wall served as bedchambers, a bathing room, a granary and the kitchen. The cave was covered with paintings of animals, both real and imagined. The mountain elephant, the tribe’s totem, dominated.
The entrance was only four feet high. Mozze had to crouch to get out into the warm, evening sunshine. He found Jez throwing knives at a tree. Jez did not acknowledge his father’s presence. The sound of steel striking wood illustrated his fury.
Before Mozze could say a word, a rustling in the footpath below distracted him. He turned to see Hinko, the old innkeeper who lived at the foot of the mountain, struggling up the steep slope using a bamboo crutch, panting and sweating. Mozze wondered what was so important that the old man had to climb rather than send a messenger dove.
“Hinko,” Mozze said. “What’s the bad news?”
The old man forced out a smile in spite of the exhaustion.
“Ah,” he said. “Can’t a friend visit his neighbor these days?” He glanced at the tree to admire Jez’s practice. The boy had thrown over a dozen knives into the bull’s eye. “We sure have a new knife master.”
“Tell Pa!” Jez said, as though his father was not present. “Instead of teaching me, he sings like a silly girl!”
Without giving them a chance to respond, Jez stomped away down the path like a sulking mbisi. Mozze sighed, and then he helped Hinko up the last steps into the cave. He returned to the kitchen, and resumed roasting the rat. Hinko took off his sheepskin coat and draped it on a hook, and then he sat on a stool near the door.
“Wine?” Mozze handed him a jug of the yellow drink made from bananas.
“No,” Hinko said. “It indeed is bad news. I got visitors. Three Messengers.”
Mozze’s heart fell. He did not want any job before the full moon. He had waited for so long, practiced for so long. If he failed to perform during the Elephant Festival, when the entire nation gathered for a feast at the foot of the mountain, he would have to wait twelve moons for another chance to win the Green Drum.
“Who is it?”
“King Amara.”
The name drove into Mozze’s ears like a sword. He dropped the rat into the fire, splashing embers. Hinko shot out of his stool to save it. He dug it out of the fire, scalding his fingers, and dumped it onto a large, wooden tray.
“King Amara?” Mozze whispered. His throat was dry, his voice hoarse.
“The pay is very high,” Hinko said, licking his fingers to ease the pain. “A thousand gold bars. Two-fifty now, the rest after the job. It must be done before the Elephant Festival.”
Why?
Mozze rose to his feet. His knees felt weak. He took a sword off a hook on the wall, and stared at his image in the blade like a devotee staring at a holy statue. Whenever he saw his reflection, he saw his father, the swordsman, who taught him how to use a knife before showing him how to handle a spoon. The swordsman who killed Kwekwe the evil wizard, thereby bringing peace to all kingdoms. And who, rumor said, was not his real father. He often found consolation and reassurance in the memories the mirror evoked. But now, looking into the blade, he could not remember what his father had looked like. Mozze dropped the sword as though it had turned into a snake.
“No,” he whispered.
“You’ve killed kings before,” Hinko said. “Three kings. You killed Rampo whose guards were two-headed wolves. Who else has killed half a dozen two-headed wolves in a single fight?”
Rabbit ears! It struck Mozze so suddenly that lisis set his legs on fire. He slumped to the floor in agony, fumbled for the green, wooden vial in his undergarments and took a sip off it. In an instant, the pain vani
shed, but it left him exhausted. He sat up, panting.
“Is it lisis? Has it eaten your legs so much that you can’t work anymore?”
Mozze shook his head. “Why must it be done before the festival?”
It took Hinko a few heartbeats to comprehend the conspiracy. “Prince Manet!”
Mozze nodded. King Amara ruled over all the seventy tribes, though each tribe was autonomous and sub-ruled by a chief. The king had two sons. The young one was Palla, the favorite. He would be crowned heir during the Elephant Festival. The eldest was Manet, but he could not rule for he had married a rabbit-eared woman. However, if the king died heirless, the chiefs would have no choice but crown his eldest son, Manet, as the law required.
“Ow no,” Hinko said. “That rabbit-eared creature will become our queen!”
“Obscene.”
“But will the chiefs accept a rabbit-eared queen?”
“Probably. Many fools today think those creatures are like us.”
“Ow no. How can we bow down to rabbit-ears?”
“We must warn the king.”
“No, Pa,” Jez said.
Startled, Mozze and Hinko turned to see the boy at the kitchen entry, flipping a knife. The lights from the living room illuminated the green beads on his dreadlocks, conjuring the picture of a strange crown.
“You must take this offer.”
Mozze’s eyes flushed red in anger. “When did you start telling me what to do?”
“I’m no longer a boy,” Jez took out a second dagger and started to juggle. “I’m old enough to marry.”
“The stupidity of youth,” Hinko said.
“Why won’t you do it?” Jez said.
“In this cave,” Mozze said, “we kill only the evil. King Amara is not evil.”
“Really?” Jez said. “Why then did he let his son marry a rabbit-eared creature?”
Mozze opened his mouth to retort, but he realized the boy had trapped him in his own argument. He saw Jez wipe his mouth to hide a smile of triumph.
“This is not about good kings and bad kings,” Jez said. “It’s about a man running away from his duty because he wants to sing.”
