The Enchanted Castle (Shioni of Sheba Book 1)

by Marc Secchia

  Mama could have made ten of her with plenty to spare. When she became enraged, which was not often, she reminded Shioni of a rogue elephant she had once seen break loose from the King’s menagerie and thunder down the main avenue of Takazze, scattering the crowd like a flock of panicked sparrows. As the story went, once when riled by a warrior, Mama had picked him up by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his trousers and tossed him out of a window. She could believe that–easily!

  Shioni hung her head, not daring to look at either of her friends. She peeked out of Annakiya’s window. Dawn out there, and the fiery furnace of friendship in here. To tell the truth, she was a little afraid of Mama in this kind of mood.

  “You are so selfish!” stormed Annakiya. “I can’t believe you! Honestly! Fancy coming back looking like you’ve been trampled by a hippopotamus! Fancy sneaking off in the first place. Ginab Village? You rotten little liar! What kind of a friend are you?”

  “It was the lion.”

  “Only a lion? Pah!” Mama Nomuula threw up her hands in disgust. “Next time it’ll rip your head right off your stupid shoulders! The horrors I’s been put through this night, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Didn’t your mama teach you nothing?”

  Suddenly she covered her face and began to sob loudly! Shioni could only stare, appalled by the storm she had started.

  She wailed, “But you ain’t got no mama… but me… and I can’t take no proper care of no girl that’s given me… oh, God! Not again!”

  Between sobs and pauses for profuse nose-blowing, Annakiya and Shioni learned that Mama Nomuula’s family had all been captured by slavers many years earlier.

  “We was taken in a ship along the coast, far, far from home,” she told them. “We was many days, stopping here, stopping there. We wasn’t fed much, so many slaves got sick. I’s not needing much extra feeding so I was fine–not good, just surviving. Then one night a storm blows up from nowhere and before you knows it, the waves came crashing all over the deck and the slaves are screaming and a-crying for their chains to be unlocked. The men was chained to the decks, the women to each other or to their children. We was driven to the rocks. My husband, his chains took him down with the ship. My girls and I got hold of a piece of wood. But the waves was too strong. We was beat against those rocks over and over… and I couldn’t keep them from being smashed! Not even with these arms God’s a-given me…”

  She rocked back and forth, keening softly.

  Annakiya crept into Mama Nomuula’s arms first and drew them around her. She made furious faces at Shioni until she, too, found a place on Mama’s ample lap. “We’re your girls,” the Princess whispered.

  “Your girls,” Shioni echoed. “I’m sorry, Mama–I promise I’ll never do that to you again. No more lions.”

  Mama Nomuula’s arms suddenly clasped them so tight that both girls squealed. Great gales of laughter forced their way through her tears. Now she couldn’t stop. She laughed until she wheezed that her sides were hurting, and the more Shioni and Annakiya questioned her, the more she laughed. Finally, she gasped, “No more lions, Shioni? Fat chance! And Annakiya, my precious Princess–if you’s my girl, you just made me Queen of Sheba!”

  Annakiya’s response was a hilarious combination of a gasp and a chuckle.

  “Queen Mama,” said Shioni. “Sounds perfect. With the authority vested in me as the lowest of slave-girls in the mighty Kingdom of West Sheba, I hereby declare–”

  “Declare anything you like,” cried the Princess, entering into the fun, “and I shall make it so.”

  Mama would make a fine Queen. Finding herself unexpectedly choked up for words, Shioni settled for hugging Mama as tightly as she could. But her shoulder twinged as though someone had stuck her with a pin, right where the lion had clawed it open. Mama Nomuula disengaged herself from Shioni’s arms and then pinned her with a fiercely rolling eye.

  “Right,” she growled. Shioni imagined she was thinking about rolling up her sleeves and pounding her like dough on her bread-board–maybe harder, or with a handy rolling pin. “Out with it, you rascal! Where’s you hurt this time? And just you be telling us the whole story. I’ll have none of your monkey tales or half tales or no other kinds of tales, or so help me–”

  “Did you treat Selam’s ankle?” asked Shioni.

  “You didn’t drag that poor girl along on this sheep-brained adventure too?”

  “Of course not, Mama. I found her long before the lion found me.”

  Mama rolled her eyes. “God, please grant this child ten angels in heaven, because one ain’t nearly enough!”

  “I suppose I should start with this,” said Shioni, pulling the neckline of her tunic aside until her bare shoulder slipped into the soft dawn light.

  Annakiya, eying the furrowed wound in alarm, gasped, “Make that twenty!”

  “He was a nice lion,” Shioni said, rather weakly.

  “And when Mama and I have finished thumping the stuffing out of you until you’re flatter than that mattress on my bed, I’ve something to show you.” The Princess sat Shioni down rather grimly on the stool beside her dressing table. “Now speak, you disobedient, but rather wonderful; runaway, but run-right-back-again; chewed-up like a lion’s toy, sorry excuse for a slave-girl!”

  Chapter 16: Reading the Scrolls

  “Trumpet fanfare please!” Princess Annakiya shoved open a large iron-banded door and ushered Shioni within. She winced as Annakiya unwittingly patted her sore shoulder.

  The room was not large, but it was crammed to the ceiling with rack upon rack of scrolls. More piles of scrolls had been tossed haphazardly between the racks. Everything was covered in centuries of dust.

  Shioni imagined the room must have been abandoned in a hurry. There was a scholar’s writing desk in one corner with several quills standing ready in a metal pot on its corner, and a scroll half-unfurled across its surface, as if the scribe had been interrupted in the middle of his work.

  “Heaven in a room for you, right?”

  The Princess clapped her hands. “Just look at all these records! Father was so excited to receive the plans for the castle! He’s found two armouries already, and a treasure room.”

  “You found the plans? And my–”

  “Nothing about your secret passage under the baobab! But, who knows what we might find in here? Some of the scrolls are even written on papyrus rather than parchment, they’re that old! And they’re all in such good condition–no rats, no insects, no mould…”

  “You are excited, aren’t you?” Shioni smiled at her friend.

  “Then you’ll help me sort through this mess?”

  Shioni glanced toward the doorway. “I’m not supposed to be able to read, remember?”

  “Dratted laws,” said Annakiya, scowling. Then she smiled sweetly. “Very well, I have just the idea. You do the sweeping, dusting and tidying, and I’ll do the reading.”

  “Not fair!”

  As they dug through the piles of scrolls that morning they discovered most were unbearably dull: inventories of supplies, records of patrol movements, visits of nobles and important people, and the names and deeds of the warriors of the castle. But in several places Annakiya found references to gold and silver mines which had been worked by the builders of the castle, and in another record, a reference to the ‘great treasuries’ of the King of Axum. This was new information–while she knew of many legends, she told Shioni, to find them confirmed in writing was excellent news. The King would be pleased.

  “My guess is that this castle was built by the Nubians,” she added, with rising excitement, “or even by the Egyptians, who built the great pyramids after all. It may be five hundred years old! I wonder how the Axumites captured it?”

  “This one is interesting,” said Shioni. “It says the original name of the castle was ‘Hiwot’–which sounds a lot like the old word for ‘life’, doesn’t it?”

  Annakiya snatched the scroll from her. “Don’t let them catch you reading!”

&nbs
p; “Just dusting it off,” she said innocently, puffing a cloud of musty-smelling dust at her friend.

  “Yuck! Stop that!” She sneezed three times, each time more violent than the last. “Mama Nomuula’s right about you, you’re just a troublemaker.”

  “Did you know she’s a ferengi too?”

  The Princess made a silly face. “Shioni, whose thoughts are circling with the eagles now? Don’t tell me you never noticed! She’s so fat she can’t even ride a horse! How many Sheban women do you know who are built like her?”

  “Well, I noticed… sort of. It’s hardly the most important thing about her, is it?”

  “Thinking with our stomach again, are we?”

  “Anni, you take that back! I do not think with my stomach! Yes, I love Mama’s cooking, but–”

  “Isoke is always telling me to take smaller portions.” Annakiya imitated her tutor, “’It’s not ladylike. No Princess stuffs their mouth like that, Annakiya!’ Manners, ha. Always manners. As if she or Father think of anything but who I am to marry one day.”

  Shioni suddenly felt sorry for her friend. Imagine being expected to do nothing but marry who your father told you to? In some ways, she had more freedom as a slave! Freedom to talk to lions, she thought, flexing her tender shoulder, and freedom to be stuck down wells by cruel warriors. All those times she had been jealous of Annakiya played in a shameful procession through her mind. Princesses had their problems too; just different ones.

  Chapter 17: Mama Makes a Plan

  Suddenly, SHIONI became aware that Mama Nomuula had swept into the room, carrying a tray of delicious-looking goodies. “Girl,” she said, “don’t get your face stuck like that!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you sat on a wasp.”

  Annakiya giggled. “Mmm, what smells so good, Mama?”

  “None for you,” said Mama Nomuula. “It’s not ladylike to drool over your food. Now, girls, you’s been stuck–don’t groan, Annakiya, what if Isoke heard you? You’s been a-hunting in this dusty store too long without my good food in your stomachs. Heavens, it’s nearly dinner time and what you been thinking?”

  “Ooh, many things, Mama.”

  “Annakiya, you’s asking to be put over my knee–Princess or no Princess, it’s no matter to me. You too, Shioni. You can’t eat scrolls!”

  Between bites, the girls told Mama Nomuula what they had discovered.

  “I’s been thinking all day in my hot kitchen,” said Mama, wiping some imaginary sweat off her neck. At the same time, she lifted Shioni’s sleeve to check her wounded arm. “The villagers said nothing about no mountain witch, but they sure twitched like naughty boys caught stealing when I was talking to them.”

  “Father cares nothing for witchcraft,” said Annakiya.

  “Exactly.” Mama beckoned them closer and lowered her voice. “Matter of fact, when he was leaving for Takazze, I heard him speaking to the warriors. He don’t believe in no witches, nor magic, nor dragons and such… and said he won’t have ‘that women’s chatter and foolishness in his castle’, or suchlike. I’s best be watching my tongue then, hadn’t I? That’s what I thought. You too, both of you. The King said he’d punish any such gossip good and proper.”

  “But Mama–”

  “No crazy elephants or magic talking lions from you, Shioni.” Mama made the sign of a cross with her fingers, just as the priests did it. “Though God save us, I never seen such cuts as yours heal so fast. And no impossible red-eyed pythons neither.”

  Shioni plonked down the scroll she was holding. “Mama! I’m telling the truth, you’ve got to believe me! And even if you don’t, how many snakes are there crawling around this castle? It’s not natural! And the hyenas–”

  “Girl, you’s steaming more than one of my pots!”

  “–they’re saying that when the witch comes, they’ll eat our bones!”

  Mama Nomuula drew Shioni into her arms. “Honey, shh. Don’t you be wound up so tight! And don’t you be wriggling out of my arms neither. You need love–all creatures do.”

  “Humph! There are enough bone-crushing hyenas around this castle without you crushing me with your hugs, Mama!”

  But she really didn’t mind, even when her friends were fuming at her, as she deserved. A cold shiver tickled her spine. After all, it could have gone much, much worse with Anbessa…

  She kissed Mama Nomuula on her cheek. “That’s for making you cry earlier.”

  “Honey, that water’s far down the river already,” said Mama, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. “Now, as I was saying: I’s been a-chewing all day, so much I feels like a cow chewing her cud. It’s a mighty strange story. But this old nose smells something more–I mean, you don’t just meet this Lord of the Lions without there being some reason. He didn’t stop to pass the time of day. He gave you a name. A name, like some huge pair of shoes you got to grow into!”

  Shioni’s eyebrows crawled upwards. What an idea! What a picture! But Mama was rushing on like a storm blowing across the plains.

  “That wise-woman of Ginab’s a queer one. Just wait until I nabs her! She might as well just push that young man off the path into a bush, for all she said. I’s thinking the rest is just wise woman mumbo-jumbo. We knows you’s a troublemaker. Why dress it up?”

  After taking in their sober nods, Mama continued, “Now this Kalcha witch we don’t know. The warriors haven’t found her. But if this Anbessa says there’s a witch, then I thinks she’s as real as them scars on your arm, Shioni. And she don’t mean us no good. In my country I’s heard of such wickedness, Shioni, of witches controlling people and animals… it makes me shudder and a-shiver all over just to think of all that evil there in the mountains, and all around us.”

  Shioni and Annakiya exchanged glances of dismay. Mama Nomuula was scared! The room seemed to grow darker, and Shioni found herself checking the corners and under the table to see that nothing was hiding there, waiting to pounce.

  “But how can we warn the King?” asked Annakiya, who had turned pale. “I can only imagine how mad Father would be… his face goes so purple when he’s angry.”

  “We can’t,” said Mama. “No, he’s gone back to Takazze, and that brute Dabir’s in charge.”

  “But we have to do something!”

  Mama Nomuula nodded solemnly. “Yes, Shioni, for the sake of everyone here in the castle, we must. Sheba is in our hands.”

  “Well, I can do my best to find something in all these records,” Annakiya said stoutly. “I already found two armouries, didn’t I? And heaps of treasure!”

  Shioni grinned at her friend. Trust Annakiya to look for answers in a fusty old scroll! But there could be months of work in this room alone, and Kalcha was already plotting their ruin. No, there must be something more they could do…

  “You did, honey,” said Mama. “But I’s bothered. One thing you told us, Shioni, just don’t add up.”

  “Nothing adds up, Mama! I can hear animals!”

  Mama waved her hands as though that issue were a piece of meat attracting flies. “Don’t you get distracted, girl. You keeps that talking animals business hid under your headscarf, you hear me? Here’s the thing: why, by all that’s sacred, would this Kalcha set a magical python–and it must be magic, with them eyes–in a secret chamber to guard a bottle?”

  “Yes!” cried Annakiya, leaping to her feet. In her excitement, she scattered scrolls left and right. “What’s in the bottle? It must be something important, right? I mean, you wouldn’t leave some strange bottle down there in the first place, would you? Maybe the baobab has ancient magic! Maybe the castle is cursed! Maybe… what do you think, Shioni?”

  But Shioni had leaped to a different conclusion. “No, Mama,” she whispered, feeling quite sick at the thought. “Don’t make me!”

  “I knows your heart, honey,” said Mama Nomuula. “I wouldn’t make you do nothing bad.”

  “What–oh!” said Annakiya. “You want her to go get that bottle, don’t you?” She looked
from Mama’s grimly-pursed lips to Shioni’s ashen colour. “Well, I’ve a thing or two to say to you, my friend!”

  “What’s that?”

  The Princess lifted her chin and scowled fiercely. “You’re not–absolutely not–doing anything on your own this time, is that clear?”

  “Phew,” said Mama. “A royal command!”

  Shioni had to laugh. “Yes, your Highness!”

  Chapter 18: A Trunkful of Advice

  The chief elephant examined Shioni from his great height and heaved exactly the kind of sigh Mama Nomuula reserved for the hijinks of errant children.

  “Less haste and more understanding would improve your manners,” he said, finally, in a deep and very ponderous voice. Exactly the kind of voice Shioni would have imagined an elephant should have. “Fancy running up here like you’ve a swarm of bees buzzing around your head, and blurting out your questions without a word of greeting! Rude–”

  “Chief, you promised.” The oldest of the females–Dusky–laid a motherly trunk on Shioni’s shoulder. “She is young, and the young are full of hasty airs and hastier words.”

  Shioni resisted an urge to rub her eyes or exclaim in disbelief. She could understand elephant speech! She was standing in the sunshine in the middle of the elephant pen actually talking to the five elephants. Shioni looked about her quickly, but none of the handlers were paying her any attention–they were much more interested in catching a late afternoon snooze in the cheerful sunshine. Hiding her fingers beneath her crossed arms, she surreptitiously pinched the skin of her left side. Ouch! Definitely awake. As loony as a howling, moon-mad red wolf. As the elephants argued back and forth, she muttered, ‘I must act normal’. Several times.

  And what exactly was normal? Especially when she was practically bursting with the need to try to steal that bottle from the python’s lair, and the Princess had decided instead to take several more days to investigate the scroll store. At least that would allow her shoulder time to heal.