Imaro did not speak. He glared at the n’tu-mchawi with eyes that mirrored the frustrated fury in the eyes of the caged lion. Then N’tu-mwaa bent to peer more closely at Imaro. He gazed searchingly. Then his face twisted with wrath.
Turning on the startled Turkhana war-leader, he cried: “Fool! Did I not tell you to capture an Ilyassai? This is no Ilyassai!”
Dismay and disbelief swept through the band that had ambushed Imaro.
“Not an Ilyassai?” the leader protested. “If this is not an Ilyassai, why are three of my best warriors now food for Mbweha the jackal?”
“He broke Wagulembe’s neck even as we broke our clubs on his skull,” cried another.
“We saw him play with Chui the leopard before slaying him with one thrust of his spear,” added a third.
“And he was chasing an Ilyassai ngombe,” said the warrior whose arm still bled from Kulu’s goring.
“He fights like a lion, and that’s what makes an Ilyassai,” the leader said flatly. “He has Ilyassai hair; he wears Ilyassai clothes; he bore Ilyassai weapons. How can you say he is not an Ilyassai, N’tu-mwaa?”
The sorcerer had remained unperturbed during these protestations. At his insistence, the warriors inspected Imaro with eyes more appraising than they had been during the heat of battle. Now, the disparities between their captive and the other Ilyassai they had known were unmistakable: the broader features, the bulkier physique, the darker skin – all marks of a legacy alien to the Tamburure.
“N’tu-mwaa, you are right,” the war-leader finally agreed. “Whatever this young one is, he is not Ilyassai.”
“Whatever he is, this whelp is of no use to me,” N’tu-mwaa said venomously. “Kupigana demands three hearts… the three hearts of the Ilyassai: the ngombe that are their life; the lions that give them their manhood; the men themselves, who rule the Tamburure and keep the best grazing land for their cattle.
“Kupigana wants a heart from each. And I, a man apart from any other… only these three things can bring forth the power of our god to rest in me. Then, I will make us the masters of the Tamburure, not the Ilyassai.
“But this one you have brought me – he is useless! He must have stolen the ngombe you say he was chasing…”
Imaro leaped without warning. Though the hobble prevented him from running, the muscles in his thighs possessed more than enough spring to propel him toward the n’tu-mchawi.
No longer did Imaro seek to learn the reason for his mysterious captivity. Rage shattered the restraints of caution. He had not spent years absorbing the abuse meted out by the Ilyassai, only to hear the same insults, and worse, spill from the mouth of a Turkhana.
His arms strained against his bonds even as he crashed full into the startled N’tu-mwaa. The impact hurled them both to the ground. Imaro landed on top of the sorcerer. He clutched at the dagger bouncing against the Turkhana’s bare chest.
N’tu-mwaa’s body was as supple as a serpent’s; he twisted and writhed while Imaro fought to get a grip on the dagger’s hilt. Before Imaro’s hands could find full purchase on the weapon, N’tu-mwaa slid from beneath him.
The initial surprise of Imaro’s unexpected attack was gone. Now, other Turkhana leaped into the fray. Somehow, Imaro managed to find firm footing while five warriors dragged him from N’tu-mwaa. With a violent, wrenching motion, he shook off the Turkhanas’ grasp.
But his freedom was only momentary. His arms and ankles were still tied; he was almost helpless. Two warriors rushed him from the front. Others dove at his back and sides. Imaro levered his bound arms upward. His fists landed solidly against the chin of an onrushing Turkhana. The warrior spun backward, crashing onto the ground.
Imaro’s bound arms clubbed against the side of another Turkhana’s head. He pivoted to strike at another assailant – but the hobble betrayed him. Jerked off-balance by the rope connecting his ankles, Imaro sprawled headlong onto the grass. Half-a-dozen Turkhana buried him beneath a pile of heaving flesh.
Had they removed the sheaths of their wrist-knives, the warriors would have slashed Imaro to ribbons. But they remembered N’tu-mwaa’s admonition, even though they no longer believed their foe was a true Ilyassai. They kept their weapons sheathed – with the exception of one, whose razor-sharp edge drove downward toward Imaro’s snarling face.
Before the circular blade could strike, a white-blotched hand fastened about the wrist of its wielder. The descent of the blade was abruptly halted. With a strength surprising for one of his gaunt appearance, N’tu-mwaa tightened his grip until the warrior cried out in pain and dropped his weapon. The disarmed warrior trembled as N’tu-mwaa fixed him with a baleful stare.
“This whelp is for me to slay as I will, in the way that I wish,” the n’tu-mchawi grated. “And my wish is that he be left outside the encampment tonight, for the jackals to devour, even as they devour the warriors you say he killed.”
“Must we then return to the Ilyassai country to capture another warrior?” the Turkhana war-leader asked. His lack of enthusiasm for such a venture was plain.
“No,” N’tu-mwaa replied. “They will come to us. Some of them are bound to be on the trail of the missing ngombe. We will wait for them; then I will have a true Ilyassai to join lion and ngombe.”
The warriors exchanged uncertain glances, which angered N’tu-mwaa.
“Do not stand there, gaping like children!” he snapped. “Get this whelp out of here – now!”
The warriors hastened to drag Imaro to his feet. Then the young warrior spoke for the first time since he had been captured.
“Spotted man… your life is mine,” he said quietly.
N’tu-mwaa looked at him. The temptation to laugh at those futile words passed before he could act on it. For there was something disconcerting in the stubborn set of the strange youth’s features, the defiance smoldering in his night-dark eyes…
N’tu-mwaa turned away. Half-a-dozen Turkhana moved to carry out the sorcerer’s command. They expected fierce resistance from the young warrior, but it did not come. As they knotted grass cords around his legs and carried him from the enclosure, the warriors reasoned that the false Ilyassai had resigned himself to his fate.
Their reasoning was wrong.
CHAPTER FIVE
The pale light of Mwesu the moon picked out the various shapes of the Tamburure night: moving of nocturnal prowlers and their terrified prey; immobile clumps of flat-topped acacia trees scattered across the plain; and a lone figure, human, struggling mightily to free itself from tenacious bonds.
Hours had passed since the Turkhana had unceremoniously discarded Imaro in the grass. Despite the hunger that was beginning to gnaw deep in his stomach, Imaro strained continuously against his bonds. His efforts seemed of little avail; not only was the grass fiber of the ropes much more resistant than it looked, but the Turkhana had bound him with such cunning that he could not raise his arms high enough to reach his teeth, making it impossible to chew his way free.
In time, Imaro knew, he would slacken the ropes sufficiently to wriggle loose. But he also knew he would have little time once the predators and scavengers became aware of his helplessness.
Only moments before, a pair of jackals had skulked cautiously toward him. Imaro roared at them with all the fury of Ngatun himself; the display of bravado had frightened the carrion-eaters, and they had fled. But he knew that before the night was done, braver beasts than Mbweha would confront him.
He suppressed an impulse to scream in frustration. His limbs were bound in a way that prevented the full use of his strength. If the Turkhana had only thrown him near some protrusion of rock against which he could abrade the ropes … there were many such outcrops on the plain, but Imaro knew that the rustling of the grass he would cause by searching for one, then rolling toward it, would surely attract the attention of a lion or leopard.
Instead, Imaro continued to apply pressure against the ropes. A core of determination burned deep within him. He must break his bonds; he must free Ku
lu before it was too late for her; there must be a reckoning with N’tu-mwaa…
Suddenly, a wild uproar broke out in the direction of the Turkhana encampment. Although the warriors had left him some distance from the thornbush barrier, he could hear a keening wail of feline agony. A shudder passed involuntarily through the youth’s frame. Never before had he heard such a cry torn from the throat of a lion. Uneasily, he wondered what N’tu-mwaa had done to the captive Ngatun.
Then he heard the bellow of a mortally wounded ngombe.
Kulu!
Anguish was a knife-point, twisting in Imaro’s heart. He barely heard the howls of human horror that followed the death cry of his ngombe. Nor did he heed the shrill, awful laughter that could only have come from N’tu-mwaa.
“Kulu! Kulu! Kulu!”
Imaro shouted his ngombe’s name as he rolled frantically through the grass, searching for a hard surface to rub against his bonds. No longer did he concern himself with attracting predators; the chaos from the encampment would claim the attention of every beast in this part of the Tamburure. And it would obscure whatever noise he made in his efforts to free himself.
Desperately, he rolled and twisted in the grass. A cry of exultation escaped his lips when something hard and rough scraped against the small of his back.
Turning onto his stomach, Imaro ground the ropes binding his arms against the low surface of rock pushing through the soil. The grass fibers that had resisted the force of his muscles for so long shredded easily against the stone. Imaro could feel the ropes beginning to part…
Then the tumult in the encampment ceased. And behind him, Imaro heard a rumbling growl. He turned … and stared into the face of Matisho, the hunting-hyena.
Matisho was twice the size of its carrion-eating cousin, Fisi, and possessed none of Fisi’s well-deserved reputation for cowardice. Teeth capable of crushing the bones of elephants lined Matisho’s gaping jaws, and its eyes were twin pools of malignance, reflecting Mwesu’s light.
Another youth might have been frightened into near-paralysis at the sight of Matisho so near. Imaro, drawing upon reserves of strength he never before knew he possessed, wrenched his arms in a final effort to break his bonds. As he did so, Matisho leaped onto his chest. Lethal jaws darted toward Imaro’s face just as the ropes on the Ilyassai youth’s arms snapped and fell away.
Before Matisho’s teeth could reach him, Imaro stabbed stiffened fingers into the beast’s eyes. Matisho yelped in agony, and its slavering jaws veered away from Imaro’s head.
With a lightning-quick twist, Imaro levered his body onto Matisho’s back. For a moment, his weight, equal to that of the beast, pinned Matisho to the ground. Imaro clamped his arms around Matisho’s hairy throat. The youth’s legs were still bound; they dangled uselessly along the hunting-hyena’s spine while Imaro exerted all the power in his arms against the beast’s throat, blocking the flow of air into its lungs.
The youth’s advantage lasted only a moment. Uttering strangled, wheezing growls that were nothing like the yipping laugh of Fisi, Matisho hurled its body in lunge after frenzied lunge, seeking to dislodge the death-dealer riding on its back. The beast flung Imaro about as though he weighed nothing. Imaro clung persistently, the pressure exerted by his arms inexorably constricting the giant hyena’s windpipe.
Had Matisho possessed the agile, taloned forefeet of the great cats, it could have reached backward and slashed Imaro’s arms and shoulders to the bone. But the hyena’s limbs were dog-like, adapted for chasing rather than seizing its prey. The huge beast could only attempt to fling Imaro from its back, then grasp an arm or leg in its crushing jaws.
Its struggles grew weaker. Then, abruptly, Matisho fell. The hunting-hyena’s breath came in ragged, choking gasps; its paws waved feebly, uselessly. Only when even those movements stopped did Imaro release his hold. Matisho lay lifeless, its throat crushed by Imaro’s unfettered strength.
His triumph over Matisho gave him no joy. Only Kulu was in his thoughts.
Kulu is dead, he lamented silently. There was a stinging behind his closed eyelids as he bowed his head and panted from his exertions.
Then he stiffened. His kufahuma, distracted during his battle with Matisho, was screaming a warning. His eyes snapped open – and a gout of flame swept directly toward his face!
Imaro hurled himself backward, just barely eluding the searing fire. Legs still bound, he sprawled awkwardly in the grass. Half-blinded by the glare of the flame, he was as vulnerable now as he had ever been in his life…
N’tu-mwaa did not press his advantage. He plunged the unlit end of the spear-tall torch he carried into the earth. And he glared down at the supine Imaro.
The n’tu-mchawi had dispensed with his cloak; his gaunt, blemished body was naked save for a strip of hide around his loins. Imaro blinked in the flickering orange firelight. Surely, he thought, his eyes were still dazzled by the flames that had nearly blinded him. Surely, the hideous apparition the Turkhana had become was not real… N’tu-mwaa’s face had not really become the face of Ngatun the lion, and it could not be the horns of a ngombe that sprouted from the thick-maned skull – the horns of Kulu, still crusted with the blood of the Turkhana warrior she had wounded…
Imaro tore his eyes from the grotesque sight of N’tu-mwaa’s face. He looked farther down, only to confront a sight that was even more appalling. On N’tu-mwaa’s chest, where his sacrificial dagger had dangled from a thong, blood rilled in sickening scarlet streams from the raggedly severed valves of two hearts suspended from a length of beast-gut.
Bile rose in Imaro’s throat as he was forced to realize that the grotesque thing looming over him was no more an illusion than the flame sputtering atop the torch in the ground.
Heart of lion, heart of ngombe, N’tu-mwaa had raved. And now…
As if he were reading Imaro’s thoughts, N’tu-mwaa spoke, whispering eerily from the lion’s mouth that had replaced his own.
“I have come to claim my final bounty, boy-child,” he said. “Kupigana showed me what the others did not see. They are blind; I have Kupigana’s sight, and I would not let them know what I know. You are not Ilyassai; you are more. More! You have killed Matisho with only your hands. What youth of your rains could have done the same? It does not matter that you are not Ilyassai…”
He tossed his horned, maned head. Beast-madness shone in his eyes. He waved the dagger he had removed form his neck. It still dripped with the blood of Ngatun and Kulu.
“I’ll have your heart, boy-child. Kupigana says you are the one who will become the greatest of all warriors. Heart of the lion, heart of ngombe, heart of the one who is to be mightiest of all – now, I will be mightiest of all, not you. I will lead the Turkhana to victory over the Ilyassai! All of the Tamburure will be mine! Give me your heart, boy-child! Give it to me, now!”
N’tu-mwaa’s voice had risen to an inhuman screech. His curved dagger drove toward Imaro’s chest. The point bit deep into flesh – but not the flesh of Imaro.
It was the flesh of Matisho, whose body Imaro had interposed between himself and N’tu-mwaa’s blade. Hissing like a maddened cat, the Turkhana struggled to pull his blade free from Matisho’s carcass. At the same time, his unsheathed wrist-knife struck at Imaro’s face. The youth shifted aside; N’tu-mwaa’s deadly forearm whipped harmlessly past Imaro’s head.
With one hand, Imaro caught the Turkhana’s arm, just above the rim of the wrist-knife. And he dragged N’tu-mwaa to his knees.
For all the horror of his altered appearance, the Turkhana had not completed his conjuring. He was still only N’tu-mwaa, and even maddened as he was, he could not match Imaro’s strength. He looked upon the features of the not-Ilyassai. Those features had twisted into a terrifying mask of vengeance and hatred.
For a moment, the derangement that drove N’tu-mwaa subsided. And he knew, then, that he faced his doom.
His lion-mouth cried out inarticulately, and his ngombe horns tossed wildly as he fought to free himself from Ima
ro’s iron grasp. Blood fro, the beast-hearts splashed across the youth’s face. Imaro fastened his free hand around the wrist of the hand that held the curved dagger. He forced the blade out of the body of Matisho, even as N’tu-mwaa maintained a desperate grip on the hilt.
Then the dagger dropped to the ground, and N’tu-mwaa shrieked in pain, for the bones in his wrist were beginning to splinter. Imaro was unconscious of the force he was exerting; with the killer of Kulu in his hands, he had become implacable, inhuman…
“It’s not over yet,” N’tu-mwaa snarled.
Jerking his head forward, the Turkhana sorcerer seized Imaro’s shoulder in his lion-jaws. Fangs tore through the young warrior’s flesh. Biting back a cry of pain, Imaro snatched N’tu-mwaa’s dagger from the ground and plunged it into the Turkhana’s chest, in the space between the two hearts that dangled there. Instantly, the lion-jaws relaxed and fell away.
N’tu-mwaa shuddered, then sank backward onto the grass. He gurgled, blood bubbling from his gaping mouth. He seemed to be trying to speak…
For a reason he could not name, Imaro leaned over N’tu-mwaa to hear his dying words. The lion-eyes were dimming, but the Turkhana’s voice was still clear.
“I… cannot die now…” he rasped. “I still have to show them… I am better than they… I am better, even though they say I am not….”
N’tu-mwaa said no more.
CHAPTER SIX
Two corpses – N’tu-mwaa and Matisho – lay in the blood-dewed grass. Their slayer used N’tu-mwaa’s curved dagger to cut the ropes away from his legs. Then Imaro sprang to his feet, free for the first time in many hours from Turkhana restraints.
He glared down at the n’tu-mchawi. N’tu-mwaa’s lion-eyes were still open, reflecting the glare of the torch. Imaro shook his head angrily, as if to rid himself of the inexplicable sense of… kinship… he felt with his dead foe. They were, each of them, different from the others in their tribes. Each, in his own way, had striven to gain the acceptance and respect of those who despised them for their differentness. N’tu-mwaa’s weapon in that struggle was sorcery; Imaro’s, strength.
Imaro: Book I Page 3
