He rushes past, then circles back, and I scramble around on my hands and knees and throw myself protectively over my beautiful little Mtundu.
“Hoa! You are mine now, little beauty!” the man pants as he trots back to us. His eyes are wide, his lips split into a triumphant grin.
I pet Mtundu and try to sooth him as the man’s shadow falls across us. My little brother is sobbing hysterically, his tears turning to mud on his dusty cheeks. My body is trembling all over. I cannot help it. I squeeze my eyes shut and wish my kidnapper away. I know why he has assaulted us, and curse myself for being so flirtatious. I know he cannot be wished away, however, and when his hands fall on my shoulder and he tries to pry us apart, I begin to scream.
“Quiet!” he hisses, and when I do not obey, he smacks me roughly on the side of my head.
I turn my face toward Mtundu, and squeeze my eyes shut even tighter, still screaming, and he smacks me again, harder this time, making stars flash in the dark behind my eyelids.
I stop screaming. The side of my face is burning. My right ear feels as if it has burst inside. The warrior yanks me up and away from Mtundu. I fall on my buttocks, but I scramble toward my baby brother and try to scoop him into my arms.
“No! Please!” I cry as the warrior grabs me by my hair and hauls me back.
Mtundu rises to his feet and holds his arms out to me, bawling in terror, and the warrior steps forward and kicks him in the chest. My baby brother is flung back violently by the blow. His head strikes the heat-baked ground with a thud. His arms roll out limply to his sides. His eyes have turned back in his skull so that only the whites are showing.
“Mtundu! Mtundu!” I scream.
The kidnapper sweeps me into his arms. His flesh is hot and slick with sweat. I try to wriggle out of his grasp as he hitches me onto his hip and starts to carry me away. I scratch his face with my fingernails.
Go for his eyes! Try to blind him!
He jerks his head back in surprise and I wriggle loose, but I don’t get far. He kicks me in the buttocks and sends me sprawling face first into the dirt, and then he makes a fist and strikes me hard in the cheek. The whole world goes dim for a moment, like a cloud has passed in front of the sun.
I try to push myself up. My arms are wobbly and weak, and then I see my blood pattering into the dirt beneath my face. Several big drops. Bright red. The thirsty ground quickly swallows them, turning black where they have fallen.
I am bleeding, I think, but the thought is distant. It is like someone else has thought it, someone who looks like me, who kneels as I am kneeling, but who is several feet apart from me.
My abductor lifts me and begins to trot away. I hang from his arms, too weak, too far away from myself, to fight him anymore. I am beaten. He has won. I turn my head and look back as my abductor jogs away. I see little Mtundu rise dizzily to his feet. He falls and gets up again, a tiny brown speck in the middle of the great open savannah.
Run home, baby! Run back home to Mama! I want to cry out, but I cannot summon the strength to shout to him. I cannot seem to make my lips and tongue work.
My face feels like it’s swollen to twice its normal size, and there is something hot and wet trickling down my chin and chest.
I watch as Mtundu grows smaller and smaller.
He sees me being spirited away. He tries to follow, but he is too young, too slow. He cannot keep up. It is impossible.
Oh, my sweet Mtundu! My poor little baby! I think. How will he find his way back home without me?
Then the land slopes down and Mtundu vanishes into the whispering grass.
It is like he has been swallowed by the earth.
6
“Mtundu,” I groaned, black tears coursing down my cheeks.
Zenzele sucked in a sharp breath and pulled me tight to her breast, her fingers in my hair. “I know,” she whispered. “I know, beautiful one. It will be over in a moment. Just a moment longer. I promise.”
I looked to the bright winter sky, so clear and still. The heavens were strewn with stars. There were so many of them it looked like whole galaxies had collided in the firmament, smashed together and burst apart, their twinkling guts spilled from horizon to horizon.
Then the memories swelled. They engulfed my thoughts like flood waters, sweeping me away from the present, away from my identity, and into the past of the woman who held me.
7
“What is your name, woman?” my abductor demands when I awaken.
“Zenzele,” I answer, but my swollen lips make the word sound funny. I flex my jaw and wince. Even such tiny movements are painful.
“I am Onani,” the man responds.
I sit upright and cast my gaze about. It is hard to see from my left eye. It is nearly swollen shut. I explore my face with my fingertips and hiss. My cheek and left brow feel enormous, the skin soft and spongy like the flesh of a mushroom. The lightest touch there stings like biting ants.
How long have I been sleeping? I wonder.
It is dark now, the heavens pregnant with stars, and draped in silver moon-limned clouds. My last memory is of Mtundu, growing smaller and smaller in the distance as my kidnapper steals me away. I cried out to him one last time, telling him to run home, trying to point in the direction that he should go, but there was no hope for him—no hope for either of us! He was too far away to hear me, or to see my pointing finger. Pain and exhaustion had swept me into darkness as the savannah rose up to devour my baby brother.
The night is loud with the cries and grunts of the savannah’s nocturnal denizens. I listen to hyenas laughing eerily in the dark, birds screeching and whooping and cawing, and far away, the snarls of a great cat. The calls of the great cats sound very similar to a person yawning, but it makes my blood run cold.
Lions!
“You are safe,” Onani says reassuringly. He stirs the fire with a long stick. Bright embers spin skyward from the disturbed coals, flashing and then fading away.
He has built a boma from thorny acacia, constructing it in much the same manner my father does when he spots a pride of lions too near to our home. He has stacked the branches high so that they form a protective wall, completely encircling our camp. A hungry lioness would have to leap over the enclosure if she wanted to get at us, but I have never known one to try such a thing, not with a fire burning inside, not even if she were starving. Animals are instinctively frightened by fire.
Mtundu has no fire tonight, I think.
And no thorny walls to shield him from the teeth and claws of the beasts that roam the savannah. He is probably already dead, I think. Dead and in the belly of some hungry animal.
How long did it take some predator to spy him alone and sobbing in the middle of the grassland? Long before Mother and Father ever realized we were missing, surely! It was my fault he was dead. I was careless, childish. And now… now I belong to this man. I know why he has stolen me, and I know I will never see my brothers and sisters again. Mama, Papa, my brothers and sisters… they are all gone!
I begin to cry, and Onani looks angry.
“Stop that!” he snaps.
I try to do as he says. I try to make the tears go away, but I cannot. My head is like an old water-sack that has sprung a leak. I scrub my eyes with my hands and grind my teeth together, but the tears keep coming. They roll down my cheeks, hot and stinging.
Onani sighs loudly and turns away from me. He scowls up at the moon, listening to the lions yawning in the dark, acting as though I no longer exist. The fire crackles, its orange and yellow light refracted by my tears into a hundred glimmering sparks. I feel the absence of my baby brother, my family, my home, to the depths of my soul. It is a dark pool, and I want to drown myself in it.
Later, when the tears have run their course, Onani offers me food. He does not have much. Some dried meat. A few berries. I have not eaten since morning and I devour the food ravenously. My belly does not care that this man has abducted me, or that my beautiful little Mtundu is probably being digested in the
guts of some hungry beast right now. My belly only knows that it is empty.
“Do you have any water?” I ask, swallowing the last of the dried meat.
“No,” he says. “There is a small river just to the north of us. We will go there when daylight comes. You can drink then.”
I nod. It is no use to complain.
Sometime later, a large animal passes near the boma. I listen as its body whispers through the grass, its breaths rasping in and out of its chest. My muscles are tense. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but the creature-- whatever it is-- moves on without harassing us, and my heartbeat slows to something more like its normal steady pace.
Onani looks at me and grins, the whites of his eyes very bright in the dancing firelight, and then he rises and moves to my side. Without speaking, he pushes me onto my back. He tugs at my skirt for a moment, unable to figure out the way that it is tied, and then he grows frustrated and yanks it to one side, exposing my genitals. I close my eyes as he parts my knees with his hands and rolls on top of me. His breath blows across my face, and I turn my head to one side, trying not to draw his air into my lungs. His organ is huge and hot and hard. I yelp as he prods my uke with it.
“Open up, girl,” he laughs breathlessly. “Let me inside you.”
I am too small. It will not go in.
“It’s too big,” I gasp, my eyes squeezed shut.
He tries again, and I cry out as the blunt head of his organ pierces me, but he can only wiggle it in a little way.
Disappointed, Onani rolls off me. He makes a low growling sound, looking up at the stars.
I pray to the spirits that he will leave me alone now. Maybe he will even be frustrated enough to release me in the morning! What good am I to him, if he cannot put his pele inside me?
But he does not give up. After a little while, he sits up. He sets upon the knots of my skirt again and finally solves the puzzle of them. With a triumphant hiss, he pulls my garment away and tosses it aside.
“Now, I will have what I need,” he says.
He pushes my legs together and rolls me onto my side, facing away from him. He positions my body so that my knees are raised in a squatting position. I do not resist. I do not want him to hit me any more. “Relax your body,” he says. “This will not hurt.” He spits into his palm and smears his saliva between my thighs, and then he eases his stiff organ between my legs.
It slides moistly into the cleft of my inner thighs. Holding my hip in one of his big hands, he begins to saw his organ back and forth between my legs. After several minutes, he begins to stroke my leg and back and hair, and I feel a warm flush in my groin. My stomach flutters as his organ strokes against the soft folds of my uke, but I do not make a sound. I will not give him the satisfaction.
I lay there as he humps against me, staring at the dirt and the tufts of sear grass that cling to it just below my cheek. I ignore the sensations in my lower body, thinking only of my breathing, my heart throbbing slow and steady in my chest. The fire crackles and pops. Insects buzz sonorously. In the darkness beyond the boma, lions yawp and yawn.
The pace of his thrusting grows more rapid. His fingers dig into my hip, and then he stops. He grunts loudly, his body stiffening, and hot fluid gushes from his organ. I feel it pulsing out of him. I look down and watch it dribble from my thighs.
Gasping, he rolls onto his back.
I lay without moving for several minutes. I am not sure what to do. Is he finished? Will he want to do it again? I have watched Mother and Father couple, and their lovemaking lasted much longer than Onani has coupled with me. Finally I decide that he is finished with me. I sit up. Onani peeks at me from the corner of his eye, but he does not move. He looks as if he is already half asleep. I scoop the sticky fluid from between my thighs and look at it, then wipe it on the grass with disgust.
“Did you enjoy it?” he asks.
“No,” I answer.
He frowns.
His fingers are laced across his chest, one knee cocked in the air. His organ is still slick, but it hangs limply between his legs now like it is ashamed.
It should be!
“When you get a little bigger,” he says, “we will be able to do it in the normal manner. Until then, we will have to do it as the zozo do.”
Zozo are young men who have the hair on their bodies, but who have not yet gotten married. Two of my older brothers are zozo. They get mad if anyone calls them that. When father calls them zozo, he always laughs.
“Boys do that to one another?” I ask, my lip curled back in disbelief.
He snorts. “The ones who cannot overpower a woman.”
I do not reply to that. None of my brothers ever did such a thing! Not that I was aware of, anyway. I clean myself with the corner of my skirt, wiping off my groin and hands. The fluid he ejaculated between my thighs is drying quickly. It is sticky and smells like mushrooms and dead fish. I sniff it, and the smell makes me feel nauseous and slightly dizzy.
I am oddly offended that he has made light of our coupling. So he would mate with me as if I were a boy? I glare at him and his satisfied grin makes me boil over with anger.
Tonight, when he falls asleep, I will kill him, I think.
And I try.
But he wakes when I reach into his sash. He seizes my wrist as I fumble with the sheath of his knife, and I freeze in surprise and terror, and then he pulls me across his thighs and spanks me.
I retreat from him in tears when he finally releases me, my rump hot and stinging. He laughs. The humiliation is worse than the pain. And the shame--! The shame that he has gotten the best of me again, that I am helpless, a hostage to his whims, and that he has no fear of me. I am nothing to him. A plaything.
“Glare at me all you want,” he warns me, “but try something like that again and I will slice off all of your fingers. I’ll cut them off one at a time-- shwip-shwip--!” Gesturing with his hand. “Do you doubt my words?”
I peer into his eyes, and I do not doubt. I shake my head, wiping snot from my nose.
“Speak!” he shouts.
“No,” I sniffle.
Satisfied, he lies back, but he shifts his sash so that his knife is underneath his arm. He peeks at me with one eye, then, smirking, he goes back to sleep.
8
We travel north when morning comes. Just as he said, there is a river. It is nearly dried up, brown and sluggish, but I get down on my hands and knees and scoop the muddy water greedily into my mouth. The face that peers up from the surface of the pool does not look like a human face. It is misshapen, one eye swollen shut, lips grotesquely bloated. I sweep my hand through the water. Go away, ugly face! Onani hunkers down and drinks as well. When he has drank his fill, he sits back and smiles at me, breathing rapidly.
“We can only rest for a little while,” he pants. “We have a long way to go today. There is a cave just on the other side of that far hill. No, that one. See? We will make camp there tonight.”
“Are you taking me to the village of the Msanaa?” I ask.
He quirks his face as if he is confused by my question. “I am not Msanaa,” he says. “Some of my cousins are Msanaa. My mother and your neighbor Bobangi are brother and sister, but I am Zul. My father and I were staying with Bobangi when he came to visit you, so we followed along. Bobangi told us your father had many attractive daughters.”
“Where is your father now?” I ask.
“He has gone back to stay with Bobangi. My mother is mad at him. But I am returning home.”
I open my mouth to ask another question, but he waves his hand at me. “You ask too many questions! We need to continue on, or we will never get to the cave before dark.”
He takes my wrist and swings me across the muddy water like a child, then leaps across himself. He waves at me and lopes forward. I watch him run, staggering behind him, and I wonder how I could have ever thought that he was attractive. He is too skinny and he has pale scars on his butt. He stops and turns back and gestures for me to hurry
. What else is there to do? I know the four directions, but I do not know in which direction my home lies now, even if I managed to get away from my captor.
And without his protection, I will die.
We race our growing shadows, but we make it to the cave that he spoke off well before dark. The cave is small and damp, but there is wood already put aside, and Onani quickly gets a fire blazing. He has also speared a meerkat. He killed it shortly after high sun, so we have fresh meat to eat. I am grateful when he shares with me. I even speak the word: “Ziwazi.”
No! I think. I am not grateful! I hate you!
But it tastes so good!
He assaults me again that night, sawing his pele between my thighs, but after he is satisfied, he pulls me to him so that my head lies on his chest, and he falls asleep. He keeps his knife in the pit of his arm so that I cannot kill him in his sleep, but I do not think long about murdering him. I am too tired. I fall asleep, listening to the whooshing sound of his heart beating inside his chest.
When morning comes, he rubs his pele between my thighs again, and then we rise and continue on.
He does not seem to be in such a hurry this day, and he talks about his family as we walk north. He has a large family, with many brothers and sisters. He says that I will be happy there. I think that I will never be happy again, but I do not disagree with him. I just nod. Nod-nod. All day long. It is easier that way.
In the middle of the day, as the sun squats on my head, he pauses to turn over a log and finds a great spider lair beneath it. A large hairy arachnid leaps at him boldly, but he runs it through with his spear. Holding it up proudly, he asks if I know how to cook the creature. Its mouthparts are still twitching.
“Of course,” I say. Mother often prepared borosaabudoros for my father. It was one of my father’s favorite meals. Onani is still looking at me, and I say, “You just have to sear off all the hair when you cook them. I know how to cook! My mother taught me.”
The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3) Page 29
