Nyumbani Tales

by Charles R. Saunders

“No!” Amma said vehemently. “If we go tonight, the old woman’s suspicions will be proven correct – at least to people like Atuye. We must wait a day, maybe two, before departing. By then, they’ll have other things to think about.”

  “What other things?”

  “Perhaps the gazelles.”

  Babakar dug his fingers into her arm.

  “What do you know of the gazelles?” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” Amma said, glaring full into the big man’s eyes.

  Contritely, Babakar released his hold on her arm. Before he could say anything further, Amma spun on her heel and strode stiff-backed and silent to their dwelling. Babakar followed – but only after one last, despairing glance at his twice-ruined wassa-field.

  Amma remained uncommunicative while they gathered their few belongings, mostly Babakar’s. As they ate a supper of millet cakes and thin stew, Babakar spoke encouragingly of the possibilities that awaited them in the cities of the south. He could put his war-skills to use as guardsman to a Merchant Lord, or even the Emperor, he reasoned. And the Merchant Lords were always seeking women to peddle their goods for them beneath the huge, multicolored awnings of the market squares.

  Since the time of the First Ancestors, the market had been the province of women, and an attractive one like Amma would find little difficulty finding a place in a square. Perhaps the loss of their crop was not as disastrous as it seemed, he reassured.

  Amma was indifferent to his enthusiasm. After the sun sank in a crimson blaze beyond the horizon, and they prepared to retire for the night, she rebuffed Babakar’s advances, keeping her asokaba wrapped firmly in place as she curled close to the edge of the sleeping-mat.

  When Babakar reached to touch her shoulder, the skin felt cold before she flinched away. It was as though the fire and tenderness of night before had never occurred.

  Anger stirred in Babakar as his ardor ebbed. Then the flash of resentment faded as quickly as it had come. The abuse Amma had endured since the coming of the Sussu night have driven another person over the brink of madness. The destruction of the wassa-field by the gazelles must have seemed to her yet one more in an endless series of calamities.

  Though she might prefer to battle the demons of the past alone this night, Babakar vowed that when morning came, Amma would know that she need never again face them alone. Thus resolved, he drifted into a deep slumber that remained undisturbed when Amma slid quietly from the sleeping-mat and melted into the shadows outside the doorway ...

  HARD HANDS SHOOK BABAKAR out of sleep. His eyes flew open; bleary darkness and shadowy shapes swam before him as he was hauled roughly to his feet. Alertness came in a rush as the intruders hustled him out of the doorway to his dwelling.

  “What is this?” he shouted hoarsely.

  The indignant words that were to follow died in his throat at the sight that greeted him in the moonlight.

  Starkly silhouetted in the pale glare stood Kuya Adowa. Her hand was clenched firmly on the tira-pouch dangling between her breasts, and her face bore an expression of wrath and hatred. Behind her, several of the neighboring farmers stood in a tight circle, surrounding ... Amma.

  They were armed with staves and long daggers. Two of them carried torches. Quick glances to his left and right confirmed that it was Mwiya and Atuye who firmly pinioned Babakar’s arms.

  Enraged, Babakar surged strongly against his captors’ grasp.

  “Damn you!” Babakar shouted. “You dare to invade a man’s house and drag his woman from her bed? Are you Sanghai or Sussu?”

  That insult stung Atuye into delivering a sharp blow to the side of Babakar’s head.

  “You know damn well she wasn’t in your house, iri Sunkulu,” Atuye growled as Babakar staggered. “We caught her on her way from the field of Falil iri Nyadi.”

  Babakar froze, his instinct to continue struggling overridden by shock. He had assumed that Amma had been torn from his side moments before he had been awakened.

  “Amma ... is this true?” he asked.

  She did not reply. Her head was bowed; he could not see her eyes.

  Abruptly, Kuya Adowa spoke.

  “Let him go,” she said. “This isn’t his fault.”

  “What isn’t my fault?” cried Babakar.

  “You should have come to the Council of Elders, Babakar,” Kuya Adowa said with a note of pity in her voice.

  “Why?”

  “We decided that the farmers whose fields had escaped destruction would guard their crops tonight to drive away the gazelles, should they return. Falil, here, was one of those who kept watch. Tell Babakar what you told us, Falil.”

  Falil, whose age could not have been more than eighteen rains, stepped shyly from the knot of people around Amma. His eyes seemed to reflect the moonlight in his dark face as he spoke.

  “I watched my family’s field from a tree that grows near it, so that I’d be better able to see the gazelles coming,” he said. “For a long time, nothing happened. I was about to fall asleep when I heard something coming into the field. I thought it might be the gazelles. But when I looked, I saw her.”

  He jerked his head toward Amma, not daring to look at her. His fear of her was obvious.

  “She didn’t see me, though,” Falil continued. “I was about to climb down and ask her what she was doing in my field, when she pulled her turban off her head. I saw the moonlight flash off something in her hair. Then she took off her asokaba and rolled on the ground ...”

  With a bellow of outrage, Babakar leaped at the youth. Atuye and Mwiya had not released their hold on him, though, and they dragged him back.

  “She didn’t see me!” Falil cried, his eyes wide with fright. “She rolled and rolled, and she changed. When she got back to her feet, she wasn’t a woman anymore. She was a gazelle!”

  “This is madness!” roared Babakar. “Have you people lost your senses, to listen to stories a child wouldn’t believe?”

  “I know what I saw!” the younger man flared. “She was a gazelle. She raised her head and gave a cry like nothing I’ve ever heard before. After that, she stood still ... for how long, I do not know. Then I heard a rumble of hooves, and a rustle in the wind, and suddenly a whole herd of gazelles was in the field. There were scores of them, eating our millet. I should have climbed down and yelled at them to scare them off. But I was afraid. If you had seen how she changed ...

  “At last they were done, and they ran off to the west ... all of them but her. She rolled on the ground again after the others were gone, and when she stood up, she was a woman again. She put on her turban and asokaba, and walked away from the field. I climbed down from the tree and ran to the field of our neighbor. We caught her as she came down the road to this house, then took her to Kuya Adowa. The rest, you already know.”

  Babakar shook his head in disbelief. He looked pleadingly at Amma, but she would not return his gaze.

  “Kambu,” Kuya Adowa whispered. “An animal imbued with the power of a spirit-being beyond the realm of man. They control the actions of the animal they invade, and they can assume the shape of humankind and speak the language of men. They read our thoughts, and tell us what they know we would most like to hear. Yet even though they may look human, they are not.”

  Her voice shook with fury and fear as she continued.

  “Babakar! Your woman is a kambu. A kambu cannot love. She means only evil for you. If not, then why didn’t her creatures spare your field?”

  “No,” Babakar groaned. “No! I cannot believe it ...”

  “Yes!” screamed Kuya Adowa.

  Her spidery black hand reached up and tore the turban from Amma’s head. Babakar gasped. It was not a bare, fire-seared scalp that lay revealed in the stark moonlight, as Amma had led him to expect. Her head was covered by a cap of wooly black hair, as that of any woman of Songhai would be. Sprouting from the front of her skull, however, were two small, spiraled horns ... the horns of a female desert gazelle.

  A wave of despair swept over Babakar.
He recalled Amma’s words of only a night before: “You must not touch my turban ...”

  “Amma,” he said with a sob, wondering if even her name was a lie. She had not mentioned it before he told her of his first Amma.

  For the first time that night, Amma’s eyes met his. Her face, even beneath the spiraled horns, still absorbed him in its loveliness.

  “One of the Sussu you killed during the war was the son of a sabane – a powerful sorcerer, a master of the Black Talk,” she told him. “The father used his skills to discover the slayer of his son. Then he used the Black Talk to bind me to his will; to use me to force my people to carry out his vengeance.

  “I resisted, but his power was too strong. The effort it took to bind me killed the sabane, but the power of his Black Talk remains. I am compelled to carry out his command: to call my people like locusts to destroy your crops and starve you to death. The sabane was mad with grief. He wanted all of your people to suffer for your deed.”

  “Lies! Lies!” screeched Kuya Adowa. “Can’t you see this is a creature of evil, a thing that deserves death? Her very appearance is a lie!”

  Amma turned her gaze to the tyinbibi, and the elder gasped and shrank back a step. Then Amma’s eyes returned to those of the stricken farmer.

  “A kambu can love, Babakar,” she said softly.

  With an abrupt move, she bolted through the circle of men around her. One of them managed to grasp her asokaba, but Amma tore free and raced on, a naked shadow in the moonlight.

  “Stop her!” Kuya Adowa screamed.

  One of the farmers hurled his staff. Whirling end-over-end, it struck Amma on the back of her head. She fell heavily. Before she could rise, the farmers were upon her, striking hard with their staves. They hit her with the frenzy of men killing a poisonous snake.

  Crazed with sorrow and rage, Babakar broke free from Atuye and Mwiya and rushed toward Amma’s attackers. Just as he reached them, an unearthly shriek rose. With a ferocity he had not felt since the last days of the war, he seized two of the men and hurled them violently to the ground.

  Then he stopped, looked down and swayed like a man drunk on palm-wine. For the broken, bleeding body sprawled before him was not that of a woman. A dead gazelle lay there, its eyes staring emptily upward – as emptily as Babakar’s eyes stared down. He dropped to his knees and reached out to touch the head of the fallen creature.

  “That sound,” Falil iri Nyadi said nervously. “It was just like the one she made when she summoned the gazelles.”

  “Listen!” Atuye said suddenly. “Can you hear it, coming from the west? A rumbling sound ...”

  Though they did not answer him, the others had, indeed, heard it. The sound grew louder. It was like the beat of an insistent drum, growing in intensity, yet retaining an underlying delicacy of tone.

  “Look!” cried Falil, pointing to the dark western horizon.

  The others followed his gaze, and beheld a shadowy mass detaching itself from the black gloom. Individual shapes became discernible: graceful forms advancing rapidly in breathtaking bounds. Spiraled horns flashed and glittered in the moonlight.

  “Gazelles,” whispered Kuya Adowa.

  Her hands clutched convulsively at her tira; strange words of sorcerous import spilled from her lips.

  “What’s wrong with you, woman?” snarled Atuye. “What harm can a herd of timid gazelles do?”

  “They don’t look so timid to me,” said Mwiya. “I thought you said there were scores of them, Falil. Looks more like hundreds now.”

  “She called them,” Falil muttered.

  “I cannot stop them!” cried Kuya Adowa. “Run!”

  “From gazelles?” Atuye scoffed.

  A four-legged body arrowed toward him – head down, horns pointed outward. The sharp tips of the horns hit Atuye full in the chest. With a strangled cry, he went down, eyes wide in incredulity even as blood spurted from his mouth.

  Terrified, the others turned and fled, dropping staves and torches alike in the panic that clawed at their souls. They were too slow. Living projectiles of hoof and horn hurtled like lightning among them. The speed that served the gazelles so well in flight from the great beasts of prey had now become a weapon, deadly and inescapable. Screams rose amid the quiet thunder of hooves as the antelope plunged their horns through the bodies of their human prey.

  Babakar had not moved when the others fled. He seemed unaware of anything other than the still form lying in front of him ... until a flying body caught him on the shoulder and bowled him over onto his back. He raised his arms defensively. The gesture was not quick enough; a pair of fore-hooves struck him in the stomach. His breath whooshed out and he doubled over in pain.

  It was then that he saw the leaping messengers of death, and heard the cries of their victims. There was a curious absence of fear as he awaited his own demise. But the finishing blow never came.

  Clutching his injured abdomen, Babakar looked up into the eyes of a large male gazelle. In those dark orbs, he saw ... recognition? Compassion? Pity? He thought he could detect those things in the glimmer of the gazelle’s eyes, but he knew only that the antelope did not further attack him.

  Grunting with the pain the effort caused him, Babakar raised himself on an elbow and looked upon a scene of sad carnage. Falil, Mwiya, Kuya Adowa and all the others lay as dead as the thing that had been his Amma. The huge herd of gazelles stood still now, blood dripping from their horns and caking their hooves. Silver trails glimmered down their narrow muzzles. They were weeping. And Babakar wept with them, for what man could endure the tears of those beautiful killers, tears that mixed with the blood trickling down the graceful spirals of their horns?

  The leader of the herd came toward Babakar. The beast bent its head; its tongue flickered from its mouth and licked the blood from the wounds its hooves had made on Babakar’s abdomen. Then the gazelle turned and bounded off to the west. As if on signal, the other antelope followed, and within an eyeblink they were gone, only the fading drum of their hooves attesting that they had been there at all. That ... and the unmoving bodies of Amma’s murderers.

  Disregarding the pain that shot from stomach to spine, Babakar iri Sounkalo gathered the broken form of Amma into his arms. He rose. Cradling her close to him, he crooned her name as tears coursed down his ebony cheeks.

  A kambu can love, she had said before she died. Were these her own true words, Babakar wondered. Or had she merely repeated the desperate thought that had leaped into his mind at the end?

  He would never know the truth. And, knowing that, Babakar wept bitterly.

  BY THE TIME THE griot’s tale is ended, a fair-sized crowd congregates at the saffiyeh. For a moment, the people are silent. Then the jeering begins.

  “You’ll never make a living in Gau telling tales like that, griot!”

  “Whoever heard of gazelles attacking people?”

  “And a gazelle turning into a woman? Hah!”

  “I come from a village near Gadou, and I never heard of anything like this.”

  Already some of the listeners have turned to leave when the griot stands up. He is a tall man – taller than he had appeared in his squatting posture. Old fires kindle in his eyes. With a savage motion he pulls his upper garment over his head. Naked to the waist, his body is spare and gaunt, though stretched over a large frame.

  It is not his bare torso, though, that elicits sharp exclamations of surprise from the crowd. It is the two scars that stand out against the dark skin of his abdomen ... scars in the shape of two sharp, narrow hooves – the hooves of a gazelle ...

  The coins and quills of the listeners fill the tortoise shell of the griot. But the griot pays no heed to their generosity.

  “Amma,” Babakar iri Sounkalo murmurs softly as he plucks at the strings of his ko. “Amma ...”

  THE SINGING DRUM

  THIS STORY, WHICH WAS based on an East African folktale, was first published in 1977, in a magazine called Windhaven: Toward a Feminist & Humanitarian Fantasy
& Science Fiction. The editor, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, liked the story even though she thought it was “damnably sexist.” But she also thought it was “important to have the input of authors from different cultural and racial background.” I didn’t think the story was sexist. Perhaps I was in denial. Or perhaps not. At any rate, a few years later, Dossouye may have leaped out of my mind in response to Jessica’s comment. As for whether “The Singing Drum” is, indeed, sexist, I’ll let you decide.

  Near the northeastern shore of the Great Nyanza lay the village of Kigeru. Unlike their cousins to the east, who dwelled in tall, glittering cities that bejeweled the Nyumbani coastline, the Kigerans led a simple life, subsisting by hunting, fishing, farming and collecting shellfish along the shore of the Nyanza, a lake as large as an inland sea.

  And they had two wonders that could be boasted by no other country in all the continent of Nyumbani.

  One was a man named N’gonjo. N’gonjo was a mganga – a doctor, diviner and sorcerer of great renown among the tribes of the Nyanza. It was said that a physician from faraway Cush one visited N’gonjo’s kibanda on the slopes of the Lion Hill, and it was the Cushite who had come away the wiser.

  The other was a young girl named Wambui. She was a singer of songs, and it was said that even the melodious reed-birds envied her voice. It was also said that when she sang to the Nyanza, its blue waves lapped in rhythm with her voice as far as the eye could see. Wambui was the niece of N’gonjo, and often she would sing to him while he worked his spells and healings. Indeed, it was said that Wambui was the only thing that N’gonjo had ever loved, other than his arcane sorcerous mysteries.

  Late one sunlit afternoon, Wambui and the other girls of Kigeru were wading in the shallows of the Nyanza, collecting succulent shellfish in baskets of woven grass. The work was tedious, but with the songs of Wambui, the time passed pleasantly.

  Like beautiful wading-birds were the girls of Kigeru, with their slender, graceful bodies, long legs and satiny, mostly unclothed, black skin. That the girls’ heads were shaven to the scalp did not in the least detract from their comeliness. Loveliest of all was Wambui, whose smile was as striking as her songs.