Imaro: Book I

by Charles R. Saunders

  They were still at close quarters. Before Kanoko could draw his simi back for the final stroke, Imaro fastened his hand on the wrist of his foe’s sword-arm. Then he squeezed, exerting the same strength that had burst his bonds in the manyatta from which he had escaped weeks ago. Bone cracked, and Kanoko bit back a cry of agony as his simi fell.

  Yet true to what he had learned in mafundishu-ya-muran, Kanoko did not falter. He smashed his free fist against the side of Imaro’s head. Any other man would have been stunned by the impact, but Imaro only curled his lip in disdain and struck a bludgeoning blow of his own full into Kanoko’s mouth. Jaw broken and teeth sheared off at the roots, Kanoko sank to his knees.

  Thoroughly beaten, Kanoko was still an Ilyassai. He groped for the hilt of his simi on the blood-specked ground, found it, and lurched painfully to his feet. Imaro awaited him, armed with his own simi, which he had retrieved at the same time.

  Kanoko stumbled toward Imaro. With both hands, he raised his simi, then drove it forward. His target was Imaro’s face.

  Imaro easily parried the feeble stroke. Then he buried his blade deep into Kanoko’s body, transfixing him just below the breastbone. As Imaro tore his blade free, Kanoko fell backward with a gurgling groan. A crimson sheet of blood cascaded down his abdomen.

  Incredibly, Kanoko clung to life. Glaring up at Imaro, he choked out words barely intelligible in the red froth that bubbled from his mouth.

  “Why… did… you run… from Ngatun… at the olmaiyo? Why?”

  The last word was almost a scream.

  “I did not run,” Imaro replied quietly. “I have been telling the truth all along – Muburi used his mchawi to let you see what he wanted you to see – what you wanted and hoped to see.”

  Kanoko did not respond. Imaro leaned closer to him.

  “Do you believe me now, Kanoko?” he demanded. “Do you?”

  Those were the last words that passed between the bitter foes. Imaro never knew how Kanoko would have answered his question. When Imaro finished speaking, Kanoko’s eyes were already glazed in death. And Imaro knew that the lion that encased Kanoko’s emerging soul would prove a formidable challenge for any young warrior seeking to earn his shingona…

  Then a rippling splash from the pool caught Imaro’s attention. He raised his eyes from the corpse of Kanoko and looked at Keteke. She had sunk deeper into the water, so that only her head and bare shoulders were showing. Imaro’s eyes frightened her. They were a killer’s eyes, hard and merciless as those of Ngatun.

  “Why are you still here?” Imaro asked. “Why didn’t you run back to the manyattas while I was fighting Kanoko – your new man?”

  “Are you going to kill me, too?” she asked in return.

  “You betrayed me,” Imaro said in a flat voice. “You were no better than the others who cursed me during the Shaming. You went with Kanoko as willingly as my ngombes did.”

  “And what else would you expect me to do?” Keteke flared. Her face suddenly contorted with a resentment that was as deep as Imaro’s.

  “You carried me away from my tribe as a prize of battle,” she accused. “You brought me to the manyattas of the Ilyassai, the Feared Ones, the ravagers of the Tamburure. Oh, I hated you then, Imaro. But then, with time, I realized that you were a warrior unlike any other I had ever seen. I could not understand why your people treated you as they did.

  “But you treated me well – better than any of the other Ilyassai would have done. You were going to mate with me honorably, not just use me as a captive. I never cared what the others called you. You were a better man than any of them.

  “Then they brought you back from the lion-hunt as if you were the prey. I could not believe what Muburi and Kanoko said. I know you are not ilmonek. But the Ilyassai believed it, and I had to pretend to believe it too, if I wanted to live. And I wanted to live, even if it meant hating myself for turning against you. What else could I do, Imaro? I wanted to live.

  “I went to the manyatta that night to give you what comfort I could before they sent you away – I told Mubaku a different story later. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you free, and Kanoko there, too. I screamed – just as I screamed when you carried me away from my Zamburu people.”

  She looked at Imaro, who stared back at her, saying nothing. But his simi was still in his hand.

  “Yes, Imaro, Kanoko took me for his own, just as you did,” she continued. “And yes, I allowed him to. I was alone, a captive among the people whose name Zamburu parents use to frighten children into obeying them. Now, Kanoko is dead, and you stand there like a demon, come to take my soul. I have nothing left. If you mean to kill me, Imaro, then do it quickly!”

  Keteke gazed up at Imaro through eyes blurred with tears. Her water-beaded shoulders trembled in anger and fear.

  The murderous fires in Imaro’s eyes were banked now. For the first time since he stepped from the brush to battle Kanoko, he seemed human again.

  “I will not kill you, Keteke,” he said.

  “Then take me back to my people, the Zamburu,” Keteke said quickly. “There is nothing left for you among the Ilyassai, or for me, either. I think you are the reason Muburi has not been seen lately… if you’ve slain him, as well as Kanoko, then you have already had your vengeance.”

  Imaro seemed to be considering her words. She went on, her words tumbling over each other in her haste to speak them.

  “But if those deaths are not enough, and you still hate the Ilyassai, then join the Zamburu! My people will forgive you your part in the last raid against them if you lead their warriors into battle against the Ilyassai. You know all the Ilyassai secrets of warfare. You could teach the Zamburu to fight as the Ilyassai fight. With you at their head, the Zamburu could drive the Ilyassai out of the Tamburure!”

  Slowly, Imaro shook his head.

  “Why not?” Keteke demanded.

  Then he told Keteke of the face Muburi had conjured in the green flames, and of his intention to go to the Place of Stones to confront his unknown enemy.

  “Fool!” Keteke cried when he was done. “You are a fool, Imaro – and I am already dead!”

  She kicked herself backward into the deepest part of the pool. Water closed over her head. She did not resurface.

  Cursing in anger, Imaro cast down his simi and plunged into the pool. Diving deep, he spotted her floating limply near the bottom of the pool. Imaro’s huge hands closed roughly on her limbs. Gathering her in his arms, he planted his feet on the silty bottom, then propelled himself and his burden to the surface.

  The moment Keteke’s face broke water, she sputtered and hissed cries of protest. The water churned wildly as she struggled in Imaro’s iron embrace. When she finally spat out the water she had swallowed, she began to sob bitterly. Acrid tears trickled trails of accusation down Imaro’s broad chest while he held her.

  Then he astonished Keteke by gently covering her mouth with his own. His arms pressed hard against her wet, naked back, and moments later, her own arms circled his shoulders.

  After a time, the water of the pool once again began to churn…

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Imaro awoke with a start, still caught in the grip of the nightmares that had haunted his sleep. The details of the dreams were fading rapidly; he could recall little other than huge, amorphous shapes with blood-rimmed holes for eyes, and the sinister echo of inhuman laughter. He stirred sluggishly at the memory of that laughter – then snapped into full, wakeful alertness.

  Quickly, he gained his feet and scanned the small encampment he had put up for the night, far from the pool where Kanoko’s corpse lay hidden beneath a pile of rocks and grass.

  Mwesu hung like a round, cataracted eye in the black shroud of the night sky. The fire Imaro had built to discourage predators was now only a pile of dimming embers. And the shelter of sticks and grass he had made for Keteke was… empty.

  A quick, thorough search revealed the unsettling truth: while Imaro slept, the Zamburu woman had left the enca
mpment. Angrily, Imaro had berated himself for falling asleep. He could not remember dozing; one moment, he was gazing at the shadowy forms of the beasts slinking beyond the circle of light his night-fire cast, then he was groping his way back from uneasy slumber.

  He remembered what had happened earlier, before Jua went down. After the ardor of their lovemaking in the pool had passed, Imaro had told Keteke what he intended to do. He would return her to the Zamburu, as she had asked. Then he would go to the Place of Stones. And when the confrontation with his enemy was over, he would join her in the land of the Zamburu.

  But Keteke was convinced that Imaro would die at the Place of Stones, which was as taboo a place for her people as it was for the Ilyassai. When she was unable to dissuade him from his purpose, she slipped into a state of resigned apathy. Under her breath, she began to chant a Zamburu death-song, until, finally losing patience, he shouted her into silence.

  Apprehensive over what Keteke might do in her current state of mind, Imaro had decided to forgo sleep so that he could make certain she would not attempt, once again, to take her own life. During his own past, thoughts of ending his seemingly unendurable existence among the Kitoko clan had sometimes crept into his mind. They were snake-thoughts; with the iron edge of his determination, he had slain them. Yet, snake-like; those thoughts had continued to writhe long after they had been slain.

  Impatiently, Imaro shook himself out of his abstracted mood and peered intently at the grass. The pale light of Mwesu illuminated a story told by the patterns of bent blades and broken stems of grass.

  The beasts that should have sought to attack him once the fire had died had approached the encampment, but their spoor ended only a few paces from where Imaro had lain. Once they halted, the predators had wheeled and fled, as though impelled by sheer terror.

  Then Imaro found Keteke’s trail. The track led northward – toward the Place of Stones.

  Even in Mwesu’s pallid light, Imaro could see the strangeness of Keteke’s spoor. Normally, a person’s strides varied in length. Such variations were slight, but were easily detectable to a hunter’s eye. But Keteke’s tracks were spaced evenly, indicating a stiff, unnatural gait – the gait of one whose will had been usurped by mchawi, by sorcery that guided her footsteps.

  His face set in resolute lines, Imaro swiftly donned his single garment and gathered his weapons: the simi of Muburi and the arem of Kanoko. His great thews tensed in anticipation of what he sensed would be a final battle against the enigmatic face in the emerald flame. It was as though he were about to face Ngatun again… but this foe would be far more dangerous than any lion.

  Imaro snarled soundlessly. There was no need for his enemy to have utilized Keteke as bait to lure him to the Place of Stones. That was where he had intended to go since the night he saw the face in Muburi’s flames. If Keteke had been harmed on his account…

  Without further deliberation, Imaro began to follow the tenuous path to the Place of Stones. The force impelling him was as insistent as that which had ensnared Keteke. But Imaro’s was by far the more dangerous compulsion, for its origin lay not in mchawi, but in the hatred that sustained his soul…

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Night still cloaked the sky when Imaro came into sight of the Place of Stones. The land surrounding the ruin was marked by a change in the vegetation: the few trees there were stunted and warped, and the grass grew scraggly and sere, unlike the thick growth that carpeted the rest of the Tamburure.

  In the distance, the warrior could see a pale, green glimmer emanating from what, at first glance, appeared to be a small hill. Hills of any size were a rarity on the flat Tamburure plain.

  Green, Imaro thought. The color of the fire when the face first appeared…

  There was an unpleasant, even offensive quality to that glow, a suggestion of a presence that had no place in the Tamburure. But when Imaro, suddenly repelled by the alien sensation the glow imparted, attempted to shift his eyes from the luminescence, he found that he could not do so. The glow was beginning to pull him. It beckoned him as a flame attracts a helpless moth.

  Imaro did not succumb easily. Even as his feet involuntarily carried him toward the glowing excrescence on the Tamburure, he fought against the force that slithered insidiously into his mind. All the way to the edge of the looming mass of rock, he pitted his will against the mchawi that ensnared him. Yet still, it drew him to the Place of Stones.

  Ages ago, the misshapen pile of crumbling masonry was a building, an edifice of colossal proportions. The gigantic stone blocks from which it had been constructed once fit together with immaculate precision. But that time was thousands of rains ago, as humans measure time. Now, the structure was only a mound of aging stone, futilely defying the passage of the rains even as the name of its long-dead builders had long since been forgotten. It hulked in the midst of the Tamburure like a monument to a time so distant that even the land surrounding it had changed.

  Yet the ruin was not entirely dead. Keteke was there … her trail led directly into the ruin. Someone else was there, too… whoever it was that had created the ensorcelling green glare that controlled Imaro’s movements as though invisible strings were attached to his limbs.

  The owner of the face in the fire awaited him…

  Sweat bathed Imaro’s brow as he battled against the power that had invaded his mind. His struggles were to no avail. He began to clamber up an incline of jagged stone that had once been a stairway. At the top of the incline, an opening gaped like the mouth of a titanic lion, flanked by the stumps of pillars that had outlasted the long-vanished gates they had been built to support.

  Imaro stopped – was stopped – at the summit of the ancient stairway. And he stared out onto the roofless, time-ravaged interior of the Place of Stones. Then unwilling legs carried him into a scene that had no counterpart in his previous experience. Never before had he encountered such decrepitude. And never before had he been enclosed by walls of stone.

  The interior stretched like a counterpart to the Tamburure, with broken stones taking the place of grass. Shapeless heaps of rock from the fallen roof lay in clusters larger than an Ilyassai manyatta. The entire, eerie vista was lit by a lurid green glow that had no discernable source.

  A shudder shook Imaro’s massive frame. Unfamiliar though he was with structures other than manyattas and bomas, he could still sense an alienness about this ruin, an intuition that it belonged elsewhere. In the glare of the sourceless illumination, he could see faint outlines of grotesque images graven on the scattered stones. And he remembered what the elders said on nights when the stars were hidden behind curtains of cloud… whispers that the hands that built the Place of Stones had not been human…

  Again, Imaro felt the tug of an unseen tether. The presence that had wormed its way into his mind had gained full control of his movements now. Against his will, Imaro paced toward a mass of stone larger than any of the others, and less affected by the passage of time. Though there remained only a hint of its original contours, its outline suggested it was a vast chamber that had somehow escaped the full effects of the collapse of the building’s roof, ages ago.

  When Imaro drew nearer to the half-fallen chamber, he saw a singular shape become visible among the shadows cast by broken walls. It was man-like, of prodigious height, towering over even Imaro. A voluminous, cowled cloak swathed the figure so completely that not a single feature was left unconcealed. But Imaro was certain that the face hidden in the folds of the cowl was the same visage that had appeared in Muburi’s fire.

  It was the face of his enemy: enemy whose volition had usurped his own, and was forcing his legs to carry him closer… closer…

  It was only when he advanced to within three strides of the cloaked figure that Imaro came to an abrupt halt. The same mchawi that had dragged him through the broken portal now held him fast, entrapped in sorcerous shackles that sapped his strength and will.

  A new enemy rose against him now. It was an enemy he thought he had long
since conquered, during the course of mafundishu-ya-muran. The enemy’s name was fear.

  Then the figure stepped out of the shadows. Its cloak shimmered iridescently in the green glare. Abruptly, the figure jerked its head backward, and the cowl fell away, revealing a face. As Imaro anticipated, it was the same face his arem had pierced while it hovered in Muburi’s flames.

  No longer distorted by the flickering of a fire, it was clearly the face of an Ilyassai man. Only its lambent green eyes were incongruous – no human on the Tamburure had ever possessed eyes that were not dark.

  The head, though of normal dimensions, seemed much too small for the outsized body that bulked beneath it. Uneasily, Imaro wondered what kind of body was hidden beneath the folds of the glittering cloak.

  Then the face opened its mouth and spoke, breaking the silence that reigned in the Place of Stones.

  “Do you not know me, son of Katisa?” it grated. “Do you not know… Chitendu?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Chitendu!

  The name seared like a white-hot iron through Imaro’s mind and memory. Had his tongue not been rendered as helpless as his limbs, he would have roared like Ngatun challenging an intruder.

  Chitendu!

  One of the few facets of her past that Imaro’s mother had shared with him had been about Chitendu, the former oibonok of the clan. Imaro knew Katisa had fled southward to avoid a forced marriage to Chitendu. Then she had returned to the Ilyassai to expose the ultimate evil of Chitendu’s mchawi. The spears of the warriors had driven Chitendu from the manyattas. When he was spoken of at all, Chitendu was considered a dead man, and the lion whose body his soul inhabited was thought to be defiled, and was pitied.

  “The Ilyassai were fools to think I would not survive,” Chitendu said, as if he had read Imaro’s thoughts.