Nobody's Slave (2 page)

But there was no pain. None at least until he opened his eyes and leaped back from what he saw - almost as fast as the claws that raked the back of his left shoulder. But it was the leopard's last real movement: the rest were just helpless, shuddering twitches as Madu stood, staring down at the dead animal. His spear, he saw with amazement and pride, had gone right into the leopard’s mouth, and the weight of the animal’s spring had carried the spear right on through its brain and out of the back of its head. 

‘Aaaaah! Ah! Aaaaaah!’ The words came out of his throat, quite meaningless, as he stood for a long second staring down; and then the shuddering began. His whole body was shuddering, twitching like the leopard’s, and the pain from his foot made him sick. Temba ran up, his eyes wide with wonder.

‘He's dead! You killed him, Madu boy, he's dead! Hola! Hooolaaah!’ Temba shook his arms over his head like a victorious wrestler, shouting their triumph to the treetops. Madu grinned weakly, and lifted his foot to put it on the leopard's head, the victor's right.

But the foot slipped on the fur and the other twisted again, worse than before. He lurched and fell backwards over the leopard, banging his head on a treestump; and a lizard fell on his hair.

‘Oooh!’  Madu lay against the stump, his chin propped on his chest, his feet sprawled over the leopard in front of him. He felt the lizard scuttle away across his face and wondered why Temba was laughing.

‘Hola! The g ... great hunter! B ... behold the killer of leopards!’ Temba bowed solemnly, spluttering, before him, as the warriors would do on the day he was accepted into the tribe. Madu turned on his side and was sick.

Temba's voice changed, abruptly. ‘Madu? Has he killed you? Maduka?’ Temba's hand gently touched his shoulder, coming away red with blood from the long red marks where the leopard's claws had raked him. ‘Madu, he has hurt you! Is it anywhere else?’

‘No.’ Madu sat up, feeling weak, but better. The shuddering had gone, and the shoulder didn't hurt badly, yet. ‘Only my foot.’

‘Your foot?’ Temba looked, but there was no blood.

‘I think I twisted it. What about you, Tembi? Did he hurt you at all?'’

‘Nothing.’ Temba grinned, his brilliant white teeth gleaming in his black, handsome face. He turned proudly round to show off his unmarked body with delight, as though he himself could hardly believe it. ‘See - perfect! Skin as smooth as a baby’s!’

‘And head as empty, too!’ answered Madu. ‘Poor widow Zanda!’ It was a well-worn joke of theirs. Temba was notoriously proud of his body, convinced it would give him the pick of the girls in the village; Madu was always teasing him about it. Girls wanted brains as well as beauty, he said; the only one interested in Temba’s body was the ugly, sex-starved widow Zanda. As for the new scars on his own shoulder, Madu thought, they would make him look more manly; that might appeal to the girls more.

'Meeeeh! Meeeeeeh!' The wretched, indignant wail of the kid came from the edge of the clearing, where it was caught in a bush. Temba untangled it, and led it out.

‘Ah, be quiet, can't you, and be grateful! You who nearly killed us! Bow down, foolish goat, and thank Madu, the great hunter and thinker!
He
saved your life, not me! Madu, the mother of your herds comes to greet you!'

‘The mother of
our
herds, not mine,' said Madu quickly, a little surprised. Saving the kid had been his own idea, but they had both agreed that if it worked, and the elders let them keep it, they would share the little goat between them – and the praise too. Was Temba backing out now because things had nearly gone so terribly wrong - blaming him?

‘I'm sorry, Tembi,’ he said. ‘It was my fault, the gate was too big. We shouldn't have tried it - you were nearly killed when I ran.’

‘Me, killed? Never!’ Temba pointed indignantly to the broken shaft of his spear, still in the leopard's neck. ‘Look there, Madu boy; I stopped him with that! And me with never a scratch!’

‘There'd have been no scratch at all if we'd done it the normal way. Or dug the pit deeper.’ As he spoke, Madu remembered that first terrible snarling leap out of the pit, which should never have happened.

‘But we are alive, with a fine story to tell!’ Temba grinned at him, vain and proud as always. ‘Praise to Maduka and Temba, who killed their leopard with two blows of their spears, and saved the kid too! With nothing but a few scratches to show for it.’ He peered at his friend’s back more carefully. ‘Madu, you’re bleeding - is it bad?’

‘Not so bad as his,’ said Madu bravely, nodding at the leopard. Then he realised what he had said, and laughed, a great song of joy singing inside him.
‘Not so bad as his’
was the traditional Mani warrior's victory boast, which he and Temba had heard in hundreds of tales. It was the greatest wish of Madu's life to be accepted as a Mani warrior; and surely this time he had a right to use those words.

Temba laughed too, sharing his joy; and from his laughter Madu knew that Temba would support him, as he always did. They would share responsibility for what they had done, take the praise and blame together. Catching a leopard was a manhood task the boys did in pairs, to learn the value of friendship. Each boy knew how to survive in the forest by himself; but they were taught that a pair working together were much stronger than two people on their own, in every task of life. Many friends who performed their manhood tasks together stood by each other as brothers the rest of their lives. Madu and Temba had been friends since childhood, so they were a natural pair; and yet, because of his birth, Madu had always wondered whether he was a handicap to Temba. That was another reason why he had to try twice as hard at everything - to be worthy of his friend.

Temba knew how Madu felt, and thought it foolish; for him, Madu was the bravest, cleverest, most loyal friend he could have. He knew that Madu wondered if he would be accepted as a warrior of the tribe; he knew also, that if merit and justice had anything to do with it, there was no question of the tribe refusing him. He nudged the leopard with his foot.

‘Have you seen how big he is, Madu? Look at him - I've never seen one as big as this!’

Madu looked; it was true. Even shrunken in death the leopard looked larger, stronger, than most. That must be why he had managed to leap out of the pit, and break the bars round the door so easily. He struggled to his feet, and felt again the sickening twinge from his wrenched ankle.

‘Too big. I don't know if I can carry him, with this foot.’

‘You’re not supposed to carry him with your foot, are you? You've done enough tricks for today as it is.’ Temba grinned, but Madu did not respond. ‘What's wrong with it, anyway?’

‘I don't know. I must have twisted it under a root when he came for me.’

Temba bent down to look at it. Madu winced as he felt it, gently, with his fingers.

‘Not beautiful, Madu - but then it never was. It's swelling already - like an elephant's foot. Can you walk on it?’

‘A little.’ Madu showed him. ‘I don't know if I can bear a weight, though.’

‘You'll have to, Madu. I can't do it alone. Come on - let's start now before that foot swells up completely. It’ll be Mganza's charms and potions for you, though, when we get home.’

T
EMBA UPROOTED one of the strongest poles of the cage, and they lashed the leopard's paws together around it. The first two times they tried to lift it, they collapsed together in a heap; but at last they managed, and staggered awkwardly towards the edge of the clearing, showered with rubbish by a mocking troop of monkeys who had suddenly appeared. Temba had wanted to leave the spears in the leopard’s body, for bravado, but the spears snagged in trees and bushes, so they wrenched them out and stumbled steadily on, cursing the monkeys, and pausing frequently for rest.

‘I'll tell Nwoye, if you like,' said Temba, at one pause. ‘He'll know it was your idea, but he may take it better from me.’

‘Then he’ll think I'm afraid, because I let you speak.’

‘He won't think that - not with your wounds, and this leopard to prove how brave you are. He's hard, but he's a just man, Madu - he has to be hard on you to seem fair to the others.’

‘He has always been hard. Even when we’re alone.’ Madu spoke bitterly, as he often did of Nwoye, his stepfather, and yet he knew there was truth in what Temba said. For this year Nwoye was also the elder in charge of the manhood training, and so he could not be seen to treat Madu any more kindly than the rest, even if he had wanted to.

But Nwoye had seldom been seen to treat Madu kindly, even before the manhood training. The reason was simple. Madu's mother had been captured in war; she was a Sumba, a slave of the Mani. The Sumba and Mani had once been allies, but for years now they had been enemies. After a battle, Nwoye had chosen her from among the captive women, and made her his second wife, for she was beautiful; but he had not realised, at the time, that she was also pregnant. And so when Madu had been born, six months later, the son of a Sumba mother and a Sumba father, Nwoye had felt himself the joke of the village, having a son which he had neither fathered nor wanted, with none of his blood in its veins.

He could easily have rejected both Ezinma and her son, casting them out to find their own way back to the Sumba, or starve. But Nwoye was a man of honour as well as pride. He kept Ezinma, and in course of time fathered his own daughter, Ekwefi, from her; and he treated Madu fairly, so that no-one could ever say he denied Madu anything he would have given his own sons.

No-one, that was, except Madu. For Madu knew how little, how very little love came with what Nwoye gave him, how seldom Nwoye had shown the slightest sign of pride in what he did. And that made all the difference.

It would have been better, perhaps, if Nwoye had rejected him altogether; then Madu could have hated him, and then forgotten. But Nwoye
had
tried, a little, sometimes, to love the boy who had made him a public mockery. And it was because Madu cherished these rare, slight shows of approval that he always tried so hard to do everything better than everyone else. He longed for Nwoye to notice him, feel a slight flush of pride that this was a boy of his family, if not his son.

This year, the fact that Nwoye was in charge of manhood training had just made everything worse. He had only been given the post because no son of his was becoming a man, that year; so Madu felt the very choice of Nwoye as a slight. Yet it was Nwoye, or no-one, who would have to lead him before the elders at the Festival of the New Warriors. If he was not accepted then, he could never hope to be a warrior of the Mani. He would revert to being merely a social outcast, the son of a slave. One who could farm, but not bear arms by right. One who could never speak in the Council, never be a free man of the tribe, never lead or decide.

The two boys shouldered the leopard, and began to hobble homewards, Madu in front, setting his own pace. As he walked, he tried to think of himself through his stepfather's eyes. Immediately he forgot the triumph, and thought how nearly it had all gone wrong. It could so easily have ended with the leopard dragging one or both of their limp, dead bodies up into a tree to eat. He remembered Nwoye's constant insistence on the wisdom of doing things safely, the value of not taking unnecessary chances. If only the trap had been stronger, the pit deeper!

Nearer the village, they met a group of younger boys herding goats, who stared at them, open-mouthed with admiration. Temba persuaded two of them to carry the front of the pole; which they did, bursting with pride, while Madu gratefully hobbled alongside, his foot now swollen nearly as big as a gourd.

At first, Madu was so sunk in his own thoughts that he did not notice the drums. Only when the boys began to chatter excitedly, and Temba snapped at them to keep quiet, did he pay attention to what the drumtalk was saying.

The drums spoke most evenings, carrying news between the villages. At first, when he was young, Madu had thought it was just another sound, like thunder or the patter of rain on leaves. Then he had watched his mother and stepfather listening to it, and noticed how people talked excitedly before the drums of their own village answered; and he had realised the drums were talking, sending messages mile after mile through the jungle and across the plain. So he and his friends had begun to listen more carefully, and tried to understand; and recently, in the manhood training, they had been taught to go on long treks through the forest on the orders only of the drums, and learned to make up their own messages in reply, which they banged out to each other on the sides of trees and hollow logs. So now they could understand almost everything of what was being said.

Usually it was news about some festival, or the visit of a travelling priest or tradesman, or a message for a particular family, but tonight it was different. The drums were beating all round them, far and near, one taking up the message hardly before the other had stopped. They were so loud and insistent that birds in the forest grew quiet, and the boys gradually came to a halt. They stared at each other in awe, their heads and bodies filled with the throb of the drums until it seemed they were listening to their own heartbeat, the heart of the tribe pulsing out its message to all its members.

The message was
War
. War - sudden and urgent. Each village to gather its warband - now, at once - and take its women and children to Conga, the nearest Mani town, where they would be safe, and all the Mani could gather to resist the invasion.

The village drums went rattling back: Who was invading? Where? Why must they gather so soon? From the east, came the answer, the Sumba, the mighty King Sheri and King Yhoma at the head of an army of thousands, nearly as big as half their tribe. They had already captured five villages, with great ... 
horror
… was all Madu could understand from the evil rhythm that followed next, but it was long, there was more in it - something about death and …
eating
? Then came the first message again:
Form your warbands quickly, gather, come to the city. Hurry! Before it is too late! Hurry! Hurry!