Drum (2 page)

Further down the path, he entered the gate to the stockade which surrounded his village. High on the poles were the bleached skulls of his ancestors' conquests in battle. No new skulls had been added for many years, for today it was more profitable to capture a man alive than to kill him and the taste for human flesh had long been forgotten. Inside the stockade, in front of her father's hut, Iba was grinding millet. She knelt before the stone mortar, letting the pestle rise and faU rhythmically, her upstanding young breasts tapering to pointed nipples, rising and falling with the motion of her arms. Tamboura saw the glance she stole in his direction and knew she was conscious of his coming, and so he added a bit of hip-swinging swagger to his walk. He spread his arms wide and back to grasp the hooves of the antelope, the better to broaden his shoulders. As he neared her, she glanced shyly up at him, then coquettishly lowered her eyes with the same shameless modesty the other girls had employed. He felt her eyes tracing the soiled arabesques of his loincloth and he rejoiced in the involuntary response which riveted her attention even more avidly.

Balancing the burden on his back, he squatted on his heels until his eyes were level with hers.

"After tonight?" His question was more of a command. She giggled and turned her eyes away but only momentarily. "After tonight there will be blood," she taunted him. "But the blood will stop."

"And after the blood there will be a soreness." "But the soreness will not endure. And then . . . ?" Now she avoided his eyes. "And when the soreness has stopped, it will be the night of the dance," she sighed. "But," she tossed her head, "it is the night that I have promised to another."

He reUnquished his burden and grabbed her hand. The force of his grip made her drop the pestle.

"You are hurting." Iba made much of trying to pull her hand free from his grasp.

"I shall hurt more unless you take back your words. You are promised to nobody but me. When you quit the dancing, you will wait for me beyond the kraal, by the garden of your father."

"Why should I wait for you?" She was still struggling.

"Because I choose you as my first and I shall not disappoint you. And you? You know that you desire me and that there will be no other."

She snatched her hand away and in so doing she deliberately brushed it across the now tautly stretched loincloth.

"There is a possibility." Her eyes met his and she smiled.

Tamboura straightened up with the energy of hidden springs in his knees. Unable to contain himself, he bounced on his toes. The heavy burden was no longer heavy and he ran from her to the largest hut in the kraal. It faced the clean-swept circular dance compound of hard-beaten earth with the black fire circle in the center. In front of the hut were the carved tree trunks of his ancestors' spirits. He slipped the buck to the ground.

"Mandouma, my brother!" he called out. "Come, the buck that I have killed for my feast tonight is here at your door." He waited until his brother appeared, a man possibly in his forties, for the black wool was graying at his temples, although his powerful body foretold that which Tamboura's promised.

Mandouma stood in the doorway, looking down at the antelope. He noted the single wound in the neck.

"A good kill," he admitted grudgingly. "With one throw of the spear. Go now to the house of Kanili to prepare yourself for the blood sacrifice that will make you a man." He waited in the doorway until he saw Tamboura run across the dancing ground and enter the hut of Kanili. With his bare foot he kicked the buck's head, studying the wound, then re-entered the hut.

A woman's voice, that of his wife, Zarassa, whined from the semidarkness.

"The cub has returned."

"That he has." Bansu languidly raised himself up on one elbow from the pile of skins on which he was lying. "Of course the little lion has survived all the ordeals of preparation and of course he has slain his meat offering for the feast. Now what shall we do?"

The dim light that entered the doorway glinted on the knife that Zarassa tossed to Bansu.

"No, woman, not that!" Mandouma reached down and picked up the knife. "His blood is my blood and it cannot be spilled by me, and not by you or my son. His spirit would haunt us and torture us."

"Then let him live!" Zarassa stamped her foot. "Yes, let the brat live and let him grow up to plot against you and wish for your death that he may be king. Let him take the place your own son should rightfully have; you know that Bansu can be nothing as long as Tamboura lives. Not until he dies can Bansu sit at your feet in the council and echo your words. I say that Tamboura must die."

Zarassa could not see the quick raising of Mandouma's hand in the half-light, but the sharp crack of it against her teeth caused her to reel and fall to her knees.

"Shut your mouth, woman! It is as big as a crocodile's and clatters like the dried pods on a tree. There are other ways."

"What other ways, my father?" Bansu rose languidly to his knees, swaying slightly in his slender elegance. The tone of his words mocked his father.

Mandouma pointed out through the doorway.

"Go, climb the highest tree in the kraal and tell me what you see. No," he shook his head, "you are not man enough to climb it, so I shall tell you what you would see. You would see a circle of little fires where Ama-jallah, the Arab slave trader, camps with his caravan for the night."

"The slave trader." Zarassa was rubbing the sting from her mouth. "What has that to do with us?"

"We have eighteen captives in the stockade whom we will trade with him tomorrow; also the young hunter Sabumbo, whose father sells him to pay the debts for his new young wife."

Zarassa clapped her hands. "Then get me a length of red cloth with bugle beads to trim it—the brightest red he has and beads that are many colors."

"And a mirror to see myself in." Bansu stood up. "But not one with a paper edge. I want one with a metal rim that stands by itself."

Mandouma's hand menaced his son. "You are stupid, both of you. All you can think of is worthless finery. Don't you understand? Tonight we will deliver Tamboura to him."

Bansu's wide grin showed his teeth gleaming white in

the darkness of the hut, but his grin vanished in an instant.

"Consider, my father," he said. "The brat's a pet of Kanili's. If you sell him, Kanili will put a curse on us all."

"And need Kanili know about it unless you blab it to him?" Mandouma's tone emphasized his son's dull-wittedness. "Listen! Tonight after Tamboura has been anointed white with the clay, will he not be brought here to his own hut for the blessing of his family and for the drugged beer? Will I not then, as his brother and sponsor, escort him to the circle around the fire and hold him in my arms while the knife cuts him?"

"Yes," Bansu agreed. "So you did with me."

"And how you screamed." Mandouma spat on the floor. "You disgraced me and your ancestors. But that is past. Tonight when Tamboura drinks his beer here, it will have a triple portion of the powder that kills the pain. It will make him sleep. We will carry him off to the Arab but we shall not sell him, we shall give him. Then we shall tell Kanili that Tamboura suddenly turned coward and became one of the craven ones who fear the knife and fiee to the bush. Many boys have done so in the past."

"Kanili will know better. He knows the brat is brave."

"Kanili will not be able to prove it."

"But why give him away?" Zarassa was indignant. "He is worth at least a bolt of cloth, a "copper kettle, a mirror for Bansu and a gourdful of beads."

The motion of Mandouma's hand silenced her.

"Him I shall not sell. He is the son of my father. I give him to Ama-jallah on one condition—that he hide him until the caravan is many hours on its journey from here tomorrow. We shall never see him again and the elders will burn the pole with his marks and his spirit, for those who flee the knife are adjudged dead. He will be gone and his blood will not be on my hands or yours, nor will we receive any profit from his body."

Zarassa crept across the floor of the hut and flung her arms around Mandouma's knees, slavering his thighs with her kisses. Bansu came over and laid his arm around his father's shoulders, but Mandouma kicked the woman so that she fell backwards on the floor, and angrily thrust his son's arm away.

"And when he is gone, you will both shut up. 'Get rid

of Tamboura'—'Kill Tamboura'—'The brat did this, the cub did that, punish him, flog him, poison him.' I'm sick of it and weary of your badgering. Perhaps with him gone we shall live in peace." Mandouma stalked angrily out of the hut.

chapter ii

Slowly, painfully, Tamboura struggled through vast, frightening quagmires that grew, wavered and diminished into wet, slimy malformations that curtained him from reality. But his consciousness plodded on and up through the miasmic silt until at length he was able to open his eye; and behold something quite as unreal as the narcotic-inspirec horrors from which he had just emerged. There was a continuous motion which kept his head a-bobbing, and a darting pain which seemed centered in his ankles and wrists. The parched dryness of his lips and mouth extended far dowr into his stomach and the throbbing in his head made hia feel as if the top of his skull had been sliced off and birds were picking out the insides like ravens around a bursi calabash. An eerie light of alternate white and red stripes, which seemed like hot bars of metal, enveloped him.

As he gradually became more aware of his surroundings he discovered that the bobbing of his head was caused bj the motion of the horse he was riding. The pain in his ankles came from the straw rope which was fastened tc one ankle, pulled tautly under the horse's belly and tied to the other ankle. Both his wrists were secured to th( high wooden pommel of the saddle with leather thongs anc spread over him was a smothering tent-like affair of red and white striped material, supported on thin bamboo poles. He had seen such a contraption in the slave caravans when some True Believer of Allah carried one of his favorite wives along with him, and took care that she be shielded from the view of profaning eyes.

He struggled vainly, pullhig at his wrists to free himself, but the thongs only dug deeper into his already raw flesh. His feet, too, were securely anchored. Now he could view his body, which had been so gaudily painted with clay the night before. The white clay was streaked with his own black skin where the sweat had soaked through and run

down his body in serpentine meanderings. The sticky clay reminded him of the ceremony of the night before. He remembered no pain and strangely enough he felt none now —at least not where pain should be. By spreading his arms as wide as his bound hands would allow and leaning as far back in the saddle as he could, he was able to look down at himself. Now he understood why there was no pain. There had been no cut. He was exactly the same as he had been before.

It was all so diflScult to understand. That it was day now was certain—the light and heat of the sun proved it. But the ceremony was to have taken place last night and by rights he should now be waking in the hut of Man-. domna, sore but happy. Instead he was . . . where was he? I Suddenly he had an impulse to scream out, to raise his |i voice in a shrill cry of fear that would summon someone or some thing to him—a hand to raise the striped canopy, a knife to cut the binding thongs, an arm to stop the plodding of the horse, a voice to explain where he was and why. But a man did not scream. A man did not cry out in his grief and bewilderment. Tamboura stifled the outburst and tried to remember what had happened the night before.

He had left Mandouma's hut and gone across the dance compound to the hut of Kanili, rich in the knowledge that he had killed his antelope with one fling of the wooden spear. Yes, he had bragged about it before the other boys. Kanili had only grunted, but that was sufficient praise from the old witch doctor. Kanili was kneeling before one of the boys and beside him on the floor was an iron trade kettle, filled with a viscous white mixture. This he had smeared over the boy until the lad's whole body gleamed with a white phosphorescence in the firelight of the hut, except for the one vital spot which must of course remain black. Then he had dipped his finger in a bowl of red clay and drawn jagged lines down from the boy's shoulders over his thighs to his ankles. Once finished, he dismissed the boy, cautioning him to stand still and not sit down. Kanili had brushed aside the next boy in line and beckoned to Tamboura to take his place. It seemed to Tamboura that the witch doctor took special pains with his ornamentation. In addition to the jagged lines on his hips and thighs, Kanili drew a crude representation of a lion between his nipples, then, muttering to himself, he had opened a small box,

dipped his finger in an azure powder and further decorated his body.

When the last boy had been painted, they had all lined up and one by one, starting with Tamboura, they had been taken to the huts of their fathers. The village was deserted. All of the women, who were forbidden to witness any of the rites, were outside the stockade preparing the feast, and the men sat rigid and formal in their huts, waiting to welcome the initiates.

Mandouma and Bansu greeted Kanili with the rich-speaking words used on such occasions and welcomed Tamboura into the hut. With unwonted graciousness, Bansu took the] carved wooden dipper down from a shelf and Mandouma! filled it with the yeasty millet beer from a large gourd. He too seemed kinder than usual, and when Tamboura kneltl before him and Mandouma laid his hands on his head to blessj him, his voice was almost tender.

"May you be a brave hunter, my brother. May you slayj many beasts, despoil many virgins and father many sons."] Mandouma handed him the cup.

Tamboura drank. He remembered the bitter taste of the! beer. He remembered sitting on the floor with his back against his spirit pole and then . . . after that he could noti remember anything.

And now he was here, although he did not know where here was. Time passed. Just how much time, Tamboura did not know but the heat inside the flimsy tent was stifling. Heat and pain—wrist pain and ankle pain. Flies settled on the blood that seeped from his wrists where the leather thongs had bit into the flesh. His head ached, his back ached, and the muscles in his arms and legs were cramped with immobility. Time passed and still, in his agony and bewilderment, he refrained from opening his mouth.