by Coral Walker
With his head reeling and his mind still on the blue bokwa, Jack threw another glance into the dark passage behind, hoping to catch another glimpse of blue light, before he turned and followed Dad.
Dad was standing right by the fissure. His lone figure cast a long ominous shadow across the chamber floor. Gripped by a sense of foreboding, he moved quickly forward. The fissure was in front of him, and he shivered when a gust of wind blew into his face.
Beyond the gaping hole, a vast space spread out.
“Pit of Hell, the bottomless cliff,” Dad murmured.
“So that’s it, a dead end,” he heard himself groaning, frowning at the thought of going back to those dark, bokwa-infested caverns.
“Where are Brianna and Bo?” Dad asked, looking concerned.
There, in the back the chamber, stood a jumble of rocky pillars; stray lights bounced from one surface to another, revealing strange shapes and gloomy cavities.
Booming laughter shook the air, and they jolted to attention and brought up their swords. The laughter was from one of the tall, shapeless pillars and echoed and re-echoed from wall to wall. Soon, out of the gloom, floated a pale figure writhing in distress.
“Brianna!” Jack cried out before his eyes took in the dark, formidable figure behind that was restraining her.
“Lord Shusha!” came Dad’s cry, quivering with barely suppressed anger.
With lengthy strides, the man marched forwards into the light. Immediately they saw he had one hand coiled around Brianna’s torso like a rope while the other clutched her throat, so he was physically lifting her off the ground and leaving her body dangling.
“Let her go, Lord Shusha, I command you!” Dad said in an authoritative tone, and raised his sword.
“Command?” the dark figure sneered. “Are you deluded, my Prince? She is in my hands. What’s more, I have your son,” he threw Jack a sidelong glance and chuckled, “not that one, but your own flesh and blood!”
Behind him, Ms Upright tottered out, clasping Bo tightly in her arms. She wobbled as she click-clacked her killer heels on the uneven floor. The giant man Putu was ambling at her side with deliberately small steps.
“Dad,” Bo cried, his eyes sparkling.
“Bo...” Dad called, choking, and the hand grasping the sword trembled.
“If I were you I would drop that metal thing,” said Lord Shusha coldly.
For a while, Dad stood in silence. It was eerily quiet — the only sound was his shuddering breath as his breast shook at each gulp of air. When he broke the silence with a sigh, his shoulders slumped, and the sword slipped from his hand.
Jack’s heart lurched at the clank of the sword hitting the floor, and he heard Dad murmuring in a humble tone, “My Lord, do as you please with me, but let my children go.”
Lord Shusha laughed again, and the chamber seemed to shake with its booming resonance. When he stopped laughing, he directed his cold glance at Jack. “How about your sword, boy?”
Jack’s face flushed with anger, as he gritted his teeth and clutched his sword harder. Lord Shusha was now smiling amicably, yet at the same time, his hold on Brianna’s neck tightened. Brianna, her face as white as paper, writhed in agony.
Biting his lips hard, Jack slackened his grip. The sword gave a small bounce and landed by his feet. Quickly Putu came forward, and with a flick of his foot, kicked the sword away from him before he took his arms and twisted them backwards.
“Kneel, my Prince,” barked Lord Shusha to Dad.
Jack caught a glimpse of the agony etched on Dad’s face as he lowered his head. When he raised it again, he dropped to his knees.
No sooner had his knees touched the ground than something dark and slender rushed out from Lord Shusha’s floor-length cloak, and struck Dad with a ferocious blow to the chest, knocking him sideways. It disappeared back into the cloak just as fast.
“My Prince, it should be your father who is shivering there and receiving that assault. The majestic, the great and magnificent King Lagos ...” chortled Lord Shusha. “He must be foul-smelling by now, with tomb worms gnawing his fingers and toes.”
“Didn’t my father always trust you and treat you like his brother?” gasped Dad, returning to a kneeling position.
“He stole my woman!” roared the hooded man, and his face distorted suddenly under the shadow of the hood.
“No! You can’t mean the Queen!” Dad gave a desperate cry.
“Yes, the Queen, her Majesty the Queen, your mother, my Prince! She is my Queen. Mine, mine! Mine alone!” Lord Shusha barked, and his long, slender body shook all over.
“No matter how pure and revered you might think her blood is, she was poor and homeless once, just like me — orphaned at a young age.”
A peculiar smile crossed the shadowed man’s face, blunting his angular features. “She was adopted by Lord Dutlus who brought her up just as he did his own daughter Yola. She grew up to be such a fine lady that people said she was the moon of the night and the sun of the day. She had so many admirers that Lord Dutlus had to repair the steps to his door many times on account of her countless young suitors.”
“I heard of that, and I wish I could have seen how she looked when she was young,” Dad murmured.
“Then you would have been enthralled yourself,” said Lord Shusha casting Dad an indignant glance, “No one could escape the spell of her beauty, not even me! I was mad then, doing everything I could just to see her, and I felt I was getting somewhere as she started to notice my existence. Then there was Prince Hecros.”
“Prince Hecros was my uncle, my father’s brother who died long ago while asleep in his garden. A venomous bokwa bit him.”
“Lord Tulardigo taught you well your family affairs my Prince. Did he tell you exactly what kind of bokwa bit him? What was it like?”
“Look here,” he continued, and momentarily removed his hand from Brianna’s throat. He shook the hand slightly before extending it towards Dad with its palm facing up. From under his large sleeve, a tiny, black-and-white-stripped bokwa the size of a child’s shoelace slithered out and coiled up in his palm. “Weebinee, such a beauty, agile and limber. She might look petty and youthful, but, in fact, she is advanced in age. Bokwas of this kind lives many long years. Have a good look at her — the weebinee, the beauty, the very one that ended the life of your uncle, and the luckiest one of her kind, having the pleasure of feasting not just on one, but two royal princes.”
With an unexpected flick of his hand, Lord Shusha watched with sheer delight Dad’s distressed squirming as the bokwa sprang onto him and disappeared into his loose collar. It appeared after a while from under one of the sleeves and wrapped its slim body around Dad’s wrist like an exotic bracelet. Dad groaned in pain as the bracelet tightened all of a sudden. With a frantic movement, he thrashed his arm about in desperation to be rid of it.
“If I were you, I’d keep as still as possible,” Lord Shusha said in a flat tone. “So long as you keep still, you will not die yet. She is thirsty, and intent on quenching it with blood. She sups slowly, I assure you, so you have a while to live. Don’t ruin it by flailing your arm about like that, or she will do away with you before you know it, and I will miss the pleasure of telling you the rest of my story.”
The bokwa on Dad’s wrist raised its head in alarm as if it sensed something disturbing in the air. Lord Shusha, too, was alerted, and turned his head, eyes peeled like a hawk.
Though Brianna hadn’t moved, her forehead was furrowed in concentration. A faint chattering sound came from her lips, audible only to ears strained intently to perceive the sound.
The black-and-white bokwa started tossing and turning in apparent torment.
At once Lord Shusha discerned the source of the sound and linked it to the distress of the little bokwa. As quick as a flash he thrust his hand back onto Brianna’s neck in a frenetic movement, and clutched it hard until the noise was silenced.
It was to no avail, however. The bokwa, the very one that had kil
led Dad’s uncle, squirmed so much that its grip on Dad’s wrist was loosened. At the first chance Dad shook his arm again, and it made off into a crack in a rock.
Lord Shusha was dismayed and shouted in rage, “You are too troublesome, Brianna!” He hurled her all of a sudden against a nearby pillar of rock and crushed her against it with a furious strength. Before she could struggle, bokwas shot out from his cloak like arrows and daggers, and were instantly all over her. At the same time, bokwas, big and small alike, swarmed out from the shadows and crannies of the rock formations and threw themselves upon her, one after another. In no time, Brianna was bound seamlessly from neck to toe by countless serpents.
“Targar clacks to frighten my weebinee away — you’ve done that well Brianna. But the one with real power always wields it in silence,” he sneered at her.
Turning his face away from her, he chuckled, “It’s a pity that Tyanna chose such an immature youth. She’ll never learn how to use her power properly.”
“If I’m not mistaken, I am facing a bokwaman, Lord Shusha,” said Dad in a grave tone.
Widening his eyes in mock surprise, Lord Shusha exclaimed, “You realised my Prince, finally!”
Suddenly his face turned grim, and his hands opened slowly. “But I am not just an ordinary bokwaman my Prince, but the soul of all bokwas, the ruler of them all,” he declared, and threw off his cloak.
21
Bokwaman
Jack’s eyes rounded in amazement.
Bokwaman! Bokwaman!
Even in his nightmares, he could never have conjured up so many bokwas on a person’s body. Hundreds? Thousands? Of different sizes and different colours, wriggling and slithering, in and out of each other, moving and changing so rapidly that he couldn’t keep track of them all.
Now Lord Shusha was spreading out his arms. Taking it as a signal, the bokwas slowed and raised their heads. It was an uncanny and ghastly sight. As the bokwas came to a standstill, Lord Shusha looked like a monstrous sculpture made of thousands of serpents sticking out straight like spikes.
Lowering his arms, he looked well pleased. He then locked his gaze on Dad’s stunned face and studied it. “That’s what I have desired for so long to see on your face — the shock, the pain, the despair that was etched on my face many moons ago. Listen, Marcus! After your uncle died, your mother, fading like a withering flower, came to seek comfort from me. She lent me her hand, and I kissed it. I almost had her, but then like a puff of smoke, she was gone. Two days later came the royal announcement of her engagement to Prince Lagos — the new heir to the throne. For three days and nights, I roamed the cliffs lonely as a beast and couldn’t stop until I came to this resolution — I swore in my heart I would have her bear my child, and the child would one day be king; I swore one day I would laugh in the face of Lagos and watch him and his progeny suffer and die.”
He paused and raised his head slightly to draw a long breath. “It was a desperate wait, to see her joy and plainly know I was not part of it ... and then came that fateful night — the night I tasted her.”
Lord Shusha giggled and licked his lips with a smile. “Yes, I tasted her. A radiant night it was, and the banquet, the most luxurious you can imagine. Barrel after barrel of wine, so delightful and strong that people yielded up their mind to its pleasure and slumbered like logs in the darkest hours before dawn. I hosted the banquet at my castle, and I did what any host would do — I helped myself to whatever was left on the table —”
All of a sudden Dad sprang up, he threw himself at the bokwaman. But before he reached him, a flock of bokwas darted out, leapt onto him and wrestled him to the ground.
Trapped hopelessly, Dad moaned.
“She wasn’t drunk, but I had plenty of ways to make sure she didn’t know what she was doing. She suspected it. I could see it in her face the next morning. But what could she do — the new Queen, young and innocent? Soon afterwards she was pregnant. I hadn’t expected the baby to live. It’s rare for a baby with the blood of a bokwaman to survive the birth. But miraculously the baby lived, and so did the mother, the Queen. Mapolos was the baby — a boy, a god-sent gift, entitled to be the future king. Although he was disfigured, stuck in a shape between a man and a bokwa, who cared? He had survived the worst part — to be born alive — and the rest was just a matter of time and opportunity.”
“Mapolos was poorly as a baby, made sick by the bokwa venom that was produced inside him and leaked into his blood. For many moons after he was born, I treated him by using my blood to dilute and detoxify the venom. I married Yola, the daughter of Lord Dutlus, purely in the hope of having her bear me a child that could sustain Mapolos with her blood. Yola was soon pregnant, and the pregnancy was so troublesome and painful that it was beyond hope that the baby and mother would both pull through. But in the end, the baby survived at the cost of her mother.”
“The baby was Cici, whose blood was a perfect match for Mapolos,” he paused, as if the very mention of Cici’s name brought him to a new train of thought that distracted him.
“For a long time, I was in the dark about how to make Mapolos king, until the day you and Princess Zelda disappeared, sending the kingdom into turmoil. I knew this had to be a chance for Mapolos, but I couldn’t figure out how until I met Ms Upright.”
Lips curling tenderly, he glanced over his shoulder at the small woman. “From her, I knew of your life on Earth with Princess Zeleanda, your children and the birth of Bo. How marvellous, a child of a Baran prince and a Rionean princess with the ruler’s faculty for both kingdoms. With Erthar’s advanced bioengineering, everything I desired seemed to be possible — treating Mapolos’ illness and deformation as well as implanting Bo’s ruler’s genes into him. The plight of planet Erthar with its energy crisis and the energy-rich Blue Moon stones found abundantly in the land of Taron cemented the pieces together.”
“Without Professor Nandalff’s knowledge, I approached Kevin Renshell and Peter Pentland and showed them the stones,” interjected Ms Upright in a self-important tone. “You should have seen how their eyes lit up when they saw them.”
“The stones were what Bo was worth,” continued Lord Shusha. “They readily succumbed to some aberrant form of patriotism. We could have waited longer until Bo was at least five, with stronger and more mature genes. One year on Erthar is three moons here; five full Erthar years wasn’t too long to wait. But then the ageing king became ill and started sinking fast. The lords and counsellors started seeking a new heir to the crown, bypassing Mapolos entirely.”
“I pressed the remote button on the Island of Skorpias to initiate the panic procedure that returned you and Princess Zelda here,” Ms Upright took over, and her voice quivered with excitement.
Her face twisted to stifle a giggle, and she continued, “Professor Nandalff never thought I was smart enough to operate those buttons. It was a pity that Bo wasn’t in the bedroom, as I thought he would be. Because of that, I had to take all that trouble to get him myself from the Island of Skorpias.”
Flicking her glance from Brianna to Jack, she suddenly gave vent to all the giggles she had been suppressing. In broken sentences, she continued her account. “I wondered why ... you two ... followed me ... after Professor Nandalff ... had made up ... his mind to take care of you both himself — a rare thing ... that he did ... You two jumping into the hole — the stupidest thing you could’ve done ... If you had listened ... to the small man ... and stayed, you wouldn’t ... have the troubles ... you are facing now.”
“They were meant to come to our land, Ms Upright, and this is their destiny — death in the Pit of Hell. What a waste, Brianna, to see you expire after swallowing the Pearl of Targar. Nevertheless, your healing power has made Mapolos’ treatment a success. Mapolos, my son, was not only cured, but now has the ultimate sovereign’s power to be the lord of two lands.”
He was overcome all of a sudden by intense emotion, and for a second his face was transfixed. “I am now a father who has fulfilled his dream,” he mur
mured.
“What about me, Father?”
Jack’s heart quivered as Cici’s familiar voice floated across the chamber like a wisp of wind. It was strangely distorted and muffled. His eyes strained for the source of the voice but failed to spot it until he dropped his glance to the uneven rocky floor.
A young bokwa of the brightest blue was gliding along a ledge that stuck out of the floor. As the bokwa got closer, he could see it — the cuts and scratches on its body, still raw and fresh. For a moment, it seemed to be heading towards him and Putu. Putu breathed hoarsely, and his tight grip on Jack loosened a shade.
At the end of the ledge, the young bokwa turned and drifted gracefully towards Lord Shusha and Dad. When it was a foot away from Dad, its head rose and kept rising until more than half of its body was wiggling in the air. Quicker than the blink of an eye, it transformed — no longer a bokwa, but a blue-skinned young woman gleaming with scales all over her.
“Cici!” Dad gasped.
Cici shuddered as her name was called, but stood with a stubborn air, shoulders squared and eyes fastened onto Lord Shusha’s face. “So Father — the only reason I was born was because you needed my blood to keep Prince Mapolos alive.”
Her voice was cold and flat, so tense and strained that Jack thought it might give into quivers and sobs in any instant.
“Cici,” muttered Lord Shusha, gazing at her. The light in his eyes that had shone a while ago was extinguished.
“Was that how my mother died — like all those poor women in the Western Tower? Eaten alive by their own bokwa babies? I killed my own mother, didn’t I? I ate her alive!”
“Cici, it was only natural. You didn’t choose, but only did what was in your nature. There’s no need to blame yourself!”
“I killed my own mother — how could I be free of guilt?” her voice cracked.
“Cici ... “
“I don’t want to be a bokwawoman, I’ve never chosen to be one!” she squealed in a quivering tone. With a despairing gesture, she started shuffling her feet towards the cliff.
