Nyumbani Tales

by Charles R. Saunders

  He could also have had feminine companionship for the night, but for once he declined the pleasure. This was a time for solitude and silence, so that he could examine the various – and sometimes conflicting – things he had heard about the nunda.

  Of one thing, he was certain: the nunda was real. The tales told by the villagers of Kantaro were too lucid and consistent to attribute to mere superstitious hysteria. But the creature’s behavior was too complex, too malevolently intelligent to be that of merely a ferocious beast. Indeed, it had been the fact that the nunda’s fierceness surpassed its cunning that had enabled the people of the East Coast to drive it from their lands.

  Chewing absently on a narcotic bhanga leaf, Majnun considered the waganga who had disappeared when the nunda had come. Damali ... that was her name. Yet mere rural witch-women had never possessed the power of shape-changing. Only a sorcerer who had delved deeply into the dark secrets of the Mashataan could do such things ...

  Suddenly, a faint sound reached Majnun’s ears. As the prince tossed aside his bhanga leaf and reached for the dagger beneath the leopard-skin that covered him, he heard the sound again. Then he saw a dim, hunched shape momentarily blot out the dim light at the entrance to his kibanda. Stealthily, the figure moved inside, and Majnun’s grip tightened on the jewelled hilt of his dagger.

  In the darkness inside the kibanda, the shape became even more shadowy and indistinct. Before he could react, a set of slim, surprisingly strong fingers closed around the wrist of his dagger hand, holding it immobile. As the other hand reached beneath the leopard-skin and slipped inside Majnun’s loincloth, a pair of warm lips fastened upon his mouth and a hot tongue battered insistently against his teeth.

  Majnun wrenched his dagger-arm free, but the weapon clattered harmlessly to the floor. His hands travelled across a lithe, naked body writhing passionately atop his own, and he soon began to return the intruder’s embrace with equal fervor.

  Slowly, Majnun turned over on his pallet, forcing the woman’s body beneath his. Momentarily removing his lips from hers, the prince murmured: “You are, of course, Damali.”

  “I am,” a subtle, seductive voice replied. “And I should ask you how you know that. But there are more important things to be done now, aren’t there?”

  Her nimble hand tore away the silk of Majnun’s loincloth, and her mouth travelled slowly down the prince’s chest. And Majnun proceeded to make love with the waganga, knowing fully well that the witch-woman was the key to the mystery of the nunda.

  AN HOUR OR SO LATER, as the lovers lay in a languid embrace, Damali said: “You are just as he told me you would be.”

  Feigning naivety, Majnun asked: “Who is ‘he’?”

  “Him,” Damali whispered, pointing a nearly invisible finger toward the kibanda’s open entrance.

  Quickly the prince sat up, not ungently disengaging himself from the witch-woman’s arms. He looked toward the opening – and froze like an alarmed antelope.

  For even the cynical, iron nerves of Majnun were not fully prepared for the sight of the looming shape that blocked out the dim semicircle of light. Few were the men who had looked upon the face of a nunda, and fewer still those who survived to tell the tale ...

  Mouth agape in a soundless snarl, the face of the nunda was beast-evil incarnate. Its tufted ears lay flat against its broad, sloping skull; and its giant muzzle wrinkled as it bared twin fangs the length of Azanian scimitars. But the most terrifying aspect of the huge, cat-like beast was its eyes. Even in the semidarkness of the kibanda, they glowed like spectral yellow flames – flames kindled not by the ravening instincts of a predator, but by ... intelligence.

  For a moment, the terrible eyes of the nunda burned into those of Majnun. Unable to move, the prince could only stare back in trapped-prey fascination. But the nunda did not attack him. Slowly it retreated from the opening, for all its bulk as silent as a substanceless wraith. Then it turned its impossibly muscular body and stalked toward the kibanda that housed the sleeping Mzikala.

  Freed from the spell of the nunda’s eyes, Majnun reached for Damali, for whom he had questions that demanded immediate answers. But during the interval of the nunda’s appearance, she had disappeared. There was no trace of the waganga in the kibanda’s dark interior.

  Cursing furiously, Majnun leaped to his feet. As he hastily knotted a length of cloth about his naked loins, the prince knew he was powerless to prevent what was about to happen. Still, he ran out of the kibanda, past a pair of guards who stood strangely somnolent, their spears held in slack hands.

  There was an ominous lack of sound in the chief-village, as if everyone in it had fallen prey to the same lassitude that had afflicted the guards. Suddenly a shrill, agonized scream split the silence, followed by several more of successively increasing intensity.

  Then Majnun stopped short and stared in horror at the nunda as it emerged from Mzikazi’s kibanda. In its jaws it carried a ruin of flesh and bone that had, only moments before, been a man. There was not an inch of Mzikala’s blood-drenched corpse that had not been shredded by mighty talons or punctured by fearsome fangs.

  With almost visible contempt, the nunda shook the remains of Mzikala from its long fangs. Then, slowly and deliberately, it began to move toward Majnun. Gigantic feline thews rippled beneath its spotted hide as it advanced inexorably.

  Majnun looked back at the guardsmen. They were awake now, perhaps wrenched from their spell-slumber by Mzikala’s death-shrieks. One-by-one, heads popped from the kibanda-entrances. At the sight of the giant cat and the ghastly remains of Mzikala, the Kantarans gasped in horror. The guards remained motionless, transfixed now by fear rather than sorcery.

  Swiftly, Majnun turned and tore a spear from the unresisting hands of one of the guards. He knew such a weapon was a puny thing, indeed, for a nunda was to a lion as a lion is to a leopard. Still, he faced the huge sabertooth, which was even now gathering its great muscles for a leap. For a fleeting moment, its demonic green eyes glared disconcertingly into Majnun’s ... then it sprang.

  Immediately Majnun dropped to one knee, bracing the butt of the spear against the ground as the shape of death loomed terrifyingly above him. Lean muscles tensed like coiled springs, Majnun waited as the nunda hurtled toward the gleaming point of the spear. Then, at the last possible moment, he threw himself aside as the huge feline impaled itself on the full length of the spearshaft.

  A thunderous roar of pain and rage was the nunda’s first sound, and the noise shook the night as the beast struggled with the hard-wooden shaft buried deeply in its breast. Frantically, Majnun scrambled to escape the nunda’s flailing paws. But before the prince could get clear, a glancing blow struck him across the shoulder. Had he caught the full force of the blow, his arm and half his shoulder would have been torn away. As it was, Majnun was sent spinning half-conscious to the ground.

  Dazed, he lay and awaited the death he knew would soon be his. But death did not come to Majnun. Instead, the prince heard cries of awe and terror from the people of Kantaro. Dull pain throbbed in his shoulder and dim lights flashed before his eyes as he dragged himself to his feet.

  When his hazy gaze finally focused on the nunda, Majnun blinked in astonishment and dawning horror. For where the dying nunda should have been lay the body of a naked black man with a spear-shaft sprouting like a stem from his shattered chest.

  As Majnun came closer to the man, he saw that there was still life in his body, despite his grievous wound. He breathed in short, tortured gasps, as if he were attempting to speak. As the Kantarans gathered around the sprawled body, Majnun knelt and held the pain-wracked face gently in his hands.

  It was the face of Kimanu, his long-exiled brother prince.

  “You planned all of this, didn’t you, Brother?” Majnun said softly. “You knew that Al-Imamu would send me here to investigate your reign of destruction. You also knew that Mzikala would be sent with me. It was Mzikala you wanted, in vengeance for naming you a sorcerer and causing you to be exiled
.

  “The waganga Damali sought you out and urged you to consummate your vengeance, for she wished to use your shape-changing power and the mkali to undermine the rule of Mbiyu, whom she hated. It was she who would place sleep-spells on the villages, then tell you who to slay in your nunda-form. She promised that when you fully discredited Mbiyu, you would rule in his place, with the help of the hill-dwellers. One day, you would become powerful enough to wreak vengeance on our father.

  “Is this not so, Kimanu?”

  The dying exile stared up at his brother. Demonic fires still gleamed in his eyes, but their light was fading rapidly. Still, he strove to speak.

  “It is so,” he choked, blood seeping from his mouth. “You were always the clever one, Majnun.”

  Then coughs wracked his agonized body and blood spurted from his mouth to mingle with that already welling in the hole in his chest surrounding the spear-shaft. With a final, convulsive shudder, Kimanu was dead – his exile complete.

  For a long while, Majnun continued to hold Kimanu’s face in his hands.

  I’m free now, Majnun thought. Free to walk away from Kitwana, and from the demands of Al-Imamu and the unwanted rank that was his only by circumstances of birth.

  But he had given his father his word that he would return to Mlongo with either the head of the nunda or proof that the beast did not exist. He would return to the capital with Mbiyu and the bodies of his two brothers. He would not allow Al-Imamu the satisfaction of forcing him to break his word.

  A sudden commotion from the crowd brought his attention back to Kantaro. The crowd parted, and two of his guardsmen appeared, dragging a struggling captive between them. The captive was Damali.

  “We caught this one sneaking around the outside of your kibanda, O Prince,” one of the guardsmen said. “What shall we do with her?”

  Majnun looked at the witch-woman. With her lithe, unclad form and fiery, beautiful face, Damali was like a night-goddess come to life. He recalled Al-Imamu’s command to “bring back the heads of those who spread the lie.” His mind conjured the image of Damali’s head lying at the feet of his father, eyes staring in sightless horror, blood encrusting the stump of her neck ... and he brushed the image away as if it were a spider’s web.

  “Give her to the hill-dwellers,” Majnun said tonelessly. “Let her explain to them why their god is no more.”

  DEATH-CATTLE OF DJENNE

  THIS STORY MARKED THE first time I felt I had “got it right” in my quest to transform African folktales into North American-style fantasy stories. And I had to run it through three drafts before editor John Di Prete of Black Lite magazine was satisfied with the result. The trick was to somehow integrate the gist and cultural background of the original story with the story-telling techniques of current culture in these parts. With time, I honed the technique of mastering the adaptation of folktales. Yet the first time retains a magic of its own, in writing as well as other things.

  Death-Cattle of Djenne first appeared in Black Lite in 1976, and was reprinted in Maplecade magazine in 1984.

  A hot wind sighed across the dry, desolate landscape, stirring the ragged cloth of the garment worn by a lone herd-boy. The lean, ebony-skinned youth, whose name was Ahmadu, leaned against his spear and surveyed the pitiful remnant of his peoples’ once-mighty herd of cattle. Vainly attempting to nourish themselves on dry, withered grass were a score of straight-horned, spotted bovines, along with a few small, hornless rhinoceros called nyuka. All the beasts were scrawny and weak; hardly fit food even for a jackal or vulture.

  Shading his eyes against the merciless glare of the sun, Ahmadu stared up into the sky, which was a metallic, cloudless blue. As it had from time immemorial, the wet season should have begun by now, with Shango the Thunder God pouring rain from banks of billowing black clouds.

  But Shango had been silent this year. No thunder had come, despite the entreaties of white-turbaned priests who daily clambered up high prayer-towers to importune the god to release his life-giving rains. Thus far, the chants and prayers of the priests had been to no avail.

  Now, famine was beginning to stalk the land of Djenne. Sometimes, Ahmadu imagined that he could hear the rustling of the shroud of Naberi, the Taker of Doomed Souls, in the dry, incessantly blowing breeze. But it was always the wind ... only the wind.

  As he stood guard over his wretched charges, Ahmadu’s thoughts wandered to the events he knew were occurring in Ougon, his home village, and other parts of the kingdom. Conflict was increasing between Djenne-the-City and Djenne-the-Land. As the dry season wore on, the dwellers of Djenne-the-City were still able to hunt in the southern forests and trade for food from the lands of the east. But in the wide, northern savanna of Djenne-the-Land, starvation was rampant. Already, many cattle and nyuka had died with the withering of the grass. Before long, even the remnants that herdboys like Ahmadu guarded would be gone.

  So engrossed was Ahmadu in the disaster his people faced that he was unaware of the dust-shrouded figure approaching from the east ...

  A MILE AWAY, A CONCLAVE of great importance was commencing in Ougon. The chieftains of the scattered rural villages of Djenne-the-Land had gathered to discuss what action to take now that the king of Djenne-the-City had proclaimed that the urban dwellers could no longer share their food with the people of the north.

  Quickly, the assembled chieftains split into opposing factions. One, led by Dibango of Faroun, advocated that the herdsmen form an army, storm Djenne-the-City, and take the food being denied them. The other, led by Ahmadu’s father, Sankruu of Ougon, insisted that such a course was both fratricidal and foolish. The rains would come soon, they argued, if only they maintained their faith in Shango the Thunderer.

  “Ridiculous!” shouted Dibango, crashing his fist onto the discussion-table after that argument was advanced.

  Dibango of Faroun was a big man, with powerful thews swelling beneath the thin cloth of his garments. Beneath his gaudy turban of chieftainship was the harsh, uncompromising countenance of a born warrior. It was a man who had fought long and hard to defend his cattle and nyuka against lions, cheetahs and Imalian raiders.

  But drought was an enemy he could not defeat with sinew and steel. To a man of action like Dibango, such a predicament was intolerable.

  “I tell you we must attack the city before our food runs out and our warriors become too weak to wield weapons,” Dibango said forcefully. “Besides, it is clear that Shango has abandoned us.”

  “Your course is out of the question,” Sankruu retorted. “Such an action would only lead to civil war. In that case, our empire-building neighbors to the north would quickly take advantage of the situation and add us to their domain.”

  “Perhaps it would be better to live as Imalians than die as Ku-Djenne,” suggested a voice from the far end of the table.

  The speaker was Bombaye of Kaboun, a chieftain well-known for his timidity. So scornful were the reactions of the others that Bombaye hung his head and lapsed into silence.

  “We must attack the city at once,” Dibango reiterated. “Do you, Sankruu, hesitate because you fear we cannot overcome the soft-fleshed people who dwell behind walls?”

  At that challenge, some of the more hot-headed chieftains began to shout war-cries. There had always been tension between Djenne-the-City and Djenne-the Land, but in the current time of drought and famine, the ancient rivalry was degenerating into an ugly hatred that would easily explode into violence.

  “Again, I say there is no need to fight,” said Sankruu. “We need only wait a few days more, and the rains of Shango will come.”

  “Are you a coward now?” Dibango asked with quiet contempt.

  Instantly, Sankruu was on his feet. He, too, was a large man, for most of the people of the Sahanic countries were of tall stature and brawny physique. Unlike Dibango, however, Sankruu had the face of a thinker – a far-seer rather than w quick-doer.

  The dark eyes of the chieftain of Ougon smoldered in a face that had become a mask of
repressed rage. For he knew that Dibango, realizing that he could not win the cooler heads to his side, had decided to instigate action with his words. Publicly insulted in his own house, Sankruu would have no choice other than to fight the chieftain of Faroun.

  “You forget yourself, Dibango,” Sankruu said coldly, his hand on the hilt of his sword. You are in my house, among my warriors. Does your sword-blade thirst?”

  In response to Sankruu’s ritual challenge, Dibango rose and gripped his own hilt.

  “My blade is thirsty – as are the spears of the men of Faroun,” he said.

  “Then let our blades clash, and drink in place of the spears of Faroun and Ougon,” Sankruu said, completing the age-old challenge to single combat.

  Dibango nodded agreement. Now, the battle would involve only the two chieftains, and there would be no war between Ougon and Faroun, regardless of the duel’s outcome.

  Solemnly, the gathered chieftains filed out of Sankruu’s house to watch bloodshed decide the course of action Djenne-the Land would take.

  IN THE DESICCATED PASTURE, Ahmadu could not be aware that his father was about to engage in a fight to the death against the redoubtable Dibango. But he was well aware of an increasing restlessness among his herd, and that worried him. As the third son of the chieftain, custom demanded that he bear responsibility for the cattle and nyuka. If anything happened now to the remaining skeletal beasts, Ahmadu would have to face the wrath of Sankruu.

  Carefully, the tall youth surveyed the yellow plain. There was no sight of any lions, or marauding packs of hyenas. Yet something in the heat-laden breeze was troubling the miserable beasts, for they were bellowing and bleating in obvious distress. They milled nervously, as though they were sensing a menace more dangerous than beast or raider ...

  Ahmadu’s flaring nostrils caught the hint of a faint, disquieting odor before he spotted a growing cloud of dust on the eastern horizon. Before Ahmadu could make anything of this phenomenon, the herd abruptly broke into a terrified stampede. Even in their weakened condition, the beasts’ spindly legs propelled them faster than Ahmadu could run. They fled in all directions ... except to the east, where shapes were beginning to take form as the dusty haze drew nearer.