by Karen Prince
“Where am I?” Joe ventured, once he had got over the idea that there really were Tokoloshe, and he was actually talking to a tiger.
“Not from here then?” Hajiri said, flopping down and stretching out to his full three meters on the ground.
“I don’t know? Is this India?” Obviously tigers came from India, he thought, and it had an Indian accent, but India was impossibly far away, unless he really was dreaming or had been unconscious for weeks. “I’m from Tjalotjo in Zimbabwe.” He wondered if he would die in an instant, or if the tiger would take its time killing him and eating him. He knew there was no point in running. He felt too disorientated and, besides, running would probably make things worse.
“Tjalotjo,” Hajiri drawled. “Never heard of it. I have heard of India though. My ancestors came from there.
“Er, where are we? And how did I get here? And how come you can talk?” Joe said shakily.
“Dear boy, I have always been able to talk. As to how you got here – I have no idea. I got separated from my party during the hunt this morning. Got bored and wandered off, if you must know. They will have gone back home without me, selfish lot.” Joe’s eyes widened as Hajiri unsheathed a four-inch claw but the tiger only scratched his chest with it in an unthreatening way.
“Now where was I?” Hajiri went on conversationally. “Oh yes, I was just casting about for someone to help me with my fire and there you were. Lying there all floppy.” He looked as if he was trying to fix his face into a sympathetic expression but fell short of the mark.
“Do you suppose I wished you here?” the tiger said, livening up. “Such a strange kind of magic pervading this kingdom. Most unsettling. Can’t get used to it myself, heaven knows I have tried. Just when you get used to one preposterous thing, another pops up. I blame the witches. In fact, you being here probably has something to do with the witches. Wouldn’t question it too much – a waste of time, my boy.” He shivered ever so slightly. “But I ramble,” he said, turning to Joe. “You are in Karibu, and I am glad of the company. Perhaps you will be kind enough to light my fire. Then you can tell me all about... Tjalotjo, was it?”
7
Begrudging Help
Gogo Maya slumped in the shade of a tree, alternately checking her pulse and anxiously watching the pool. It was taking an awfully long time to recover from the switching without the healing power of her amulet. Salih had finally persuaded the pale, weedy boy with the curly blond hair to go into the pool after it, but he was taking far too long to surface. It probably would have gone better for him if he had taken off his trousers and boots before going in. She hoped the silly boy had not gone and drowned himself, because she really needed that amulet, and soon.
“The handsome black kid would have been a better choice,” she grumbled to Salih, flexing her jaw muscles. They were still sore from the wedged mango pip. “I suppose he was too busy trying to revive me.”
Salih stood up and stretched, arching his back, then glanced towards the pool. “No, the smaller one was the only one I could read,” he said. “And, as unlikely as it seems, it was the smaller one who took charge and revived you. He seems to have some magic of his own.”
Gogo Maya shot him a skeptical look.
Her head snapped around as the surface of the water exploded at last, and a large crocodile launched itself out of the pool, dragging the hapless hero onto the muddy riverbank by the foot. Her amulet sailed through the air, almost landing back in the water. She watched Salih take a furtive look around to check if anyone else had noticed it in the confusion. He then sidled up to it, lifting it carefully by the leather thong that joined the two stones, and brought it over to her. She snatched it up eagerly and clutched it in both hands.
The expected fuzzy feelings of wellness did not channel up through her body. Uncurling her fingers, she inspected the amulet with a disgruntled grimace. It lay there on her palm, dead.
“He must have touched the amber!” she huffed. “The energy is completely spent. It will be hours before I have the strength to switch back to Karibu, even supposing I can make a bloody switch.” She fixed the boy with a sour look as his handsome friend rushed to help him. “I don’t know why he bothers,” she grumbled. “The drenched brat will be perfectly fine after draining my amulet.”
“You’re going to have to engage with these people,” Salih said in his stern voice. She hoped she was not going to have to remind him who was in charge. “Take some responsibility, even,” Salih went on. “They are obviously distraught at the loss of the boy, Joe.”
“No. He will settle down fine in Karibu once he gets over the shock,” she assured him. “Lucky to be there, if you ask me.” This was a nice place he came from, she mused, having a look around, but nothing near as beautiful and exciting as Karibu. There was plenty to entertain a boy there.
Salih gave her that look.
“Oh, stop worrying,” she snapped at him. “Morathi will probably ransom the boy to us once we get back. If he really hates it at Waheri village, we could always get Tacari to take him through the tear.” Gogo Maya was well aware that the exit through Tacari’s tear was on the other side of the world, but she had heard that people in the outside world were capable of travelling great distances in a relatively short space of time. His people would have him home in no time at all.
“We can’t take him to Waheri without explaining to Tacari how we got him there in the first place,” Salih said.
Salih had a point, she groaned. Tacari was going to be furious. Not only at the risk to Karibu, if she and Salih were discovered on the outside of the hidden Kingdoms, but if he found out she and Salih had borrowed some of his own magic to construct the switching opal in the first place, he would be apoplectic.
“And we don’t know that the boy is with Morathi,” Salih said. “Even if he is, who knows what those Tokoloshes will do in their present state? They’ll probably pass him on to whoever is supplying the nzuri thana that makes them so crazy. We have to make a plan to extract the boy from Karibu as quickly as possible, before anyone else finds out.”
Absentmindedly selecting a fallen berry from the ground beneath her shady tree, Gogo Maya peeled away a section of the tough reddish brown skin and tasted the yellow brown pulp. It had an orangey flavor, almost exactly like the mahobohobo at her village, only smaller. She spat the familiar torpedo-shaped pip out into her hand and inspected it closely.
“Look at this fruit, Salih. It’s almost exactly the same as the ones at home,” she said. “We can’t be that far from Karibu. Perhaps we can get the one who drained the amulet to go to Karibu and fetch the other one.”
“He won’t be able to find Karibu from here.”
“He would if he knew what he was looking for,” she said, and then adopted a slightly wheedling tone, adding, “and if he had someone to guide him.”
Salih ignored her clumsy attempt to manipulate him. He gave her, and the pip, a noncommittal glance, and then settled down on his haunches to watch the drama with the half-drowned boy unfold.
The drenched one rolled over and retched into the sand, then shot up and scrambled away from his friend, whipping his head around in fright.
“Where is the crocodile?” he croaked, patting himself on the chest and wheezing. He pulled a piece of water hyacinth out of his hair, stared at it in disbelief, and retched again.
“You look like a drowned rat,” his friend grinned. Oddly, he seemed quite smug about that.
“Thank you. I hardly hurt at all,” the drenched boy huffed. Then he peered at his leg as if he’d lost something. “It must have grabbed me through my pants.”
Gogo Maya leaned back against the tree trunk, crossed her arms over her chest and grinned. She was prepared to enjoy the boy’s discomfort. Things would have gone much more smoothly if he had done what he’d been told instead of draining her amulet. She could have healed both of them if she’d had control of it, and she would still have had enough power left in the opal to switch home.
“W
hat the hell did you think you were doing stalking into the water all creepy like that, Ethan?” the handsome one shouted at the drenched one. “You were down there so long I thought you had drowned.” He stabbed an angry finger in the direction of the rapids. “You were lucky that croc pulled you out.”
Where the boy pointed, Gogo Maya saw a small girl squatting on her haunches between two enormous crocodiles, patting them on their snouts and talking to them in soothing, clicking tones.
“Well, that’s disturbing!” she said to Salih. “Is she a witch? Do I need to explore the minds of those crocodiles? Because I don’t think I have the energy.”
“No need,” Salih said. “I can pick up on their thoughts.”
Gogo Maya watched with interest as the leopard cocked his ears and twitched his whiskers, all the while gazing steadily at the crocodiles. Although she felt the little cold prickles of his awareness spread out to include the crocodiles, Gogo Maya was worried to discover that she could not quite understand what the crocodiles said to Salih. Perhaps the switch had made her a little weaker than she’d expected.
Salih gave her a quizzical look when she failed to respond to the crocodiles’ information, then shrugged and told her what they’d said. “The little girl has a particular fondness for the crocodiles, but they are not her familiar. More... friends. Friends of the whole community, I understand. They have lived here for some time. They feel most anxious about the drowned boy.”
Back in her youth, Gogo Maya had lived in the crocodile-infested Louisiana swamps. As an expert on these matters she felt compelled to argue. “I’m pretty sure you can’t tame a crocodile,” she said. “They don’t have the memory for it. Just when you think you’ve made friends, they forget who you are, and bite you.” On the other hand, she couldn’t help wondering if the crocodile had been trying to help the boy. She prodded Salih on the shoulder. “Delve a little deeper,” she said. “See if they are strange... or different. I have a feeling we were drawn to this place by something, and it sure as hell wasn’t that boy, even if he does have a bit of magic of his own.”
The drenched boy, Ethan, the other one had called him, obviously didn’t see the crocodiles as suitable companions either. “Get her away from those crocodiles!” he croaked, trying to rise up and go towards them, but another boy planted a hand on his chest to stop him, speaking rapidly to the handsome one in a language Gogo Maya did not recognise.
“No, apparently they won’t hurt her, they’re some kind of a pet,” the handsome one told his friend with a dismissive shrug. “So, why did you go into the water like that? We were worried about you. You could see Jimoh’s guys already dredged the pool.”
Muttering something unintelligible about having pit bulls as pets, the boy, Ethan, said, “The leopard made me.” He sounded unconvincing, even to Gogo Maya, who knew it was true. “I was supposed to fetch the witch’s amulet. Well, the leopard says she’s a witch... Anyway, the amulet’s a sort of jewel. I should have it here somewhere,” he added, patting his pockets.
“Just because she’s old doesn’t make her a witch...” began the handsome one. “What do you mean, the leopard made you?”
“What a nice boy,” Gogo Maya chuckled, with a touch of approval.
The boy, Ethan, pointed a finger at his temple. “It told me, right into my head,” he practically wailed. “It threatened me.” They both looked over at Gogo Maya and Salih. The leopard lounged beside her, preening and fluffing up the white tip of his tail, looking as harmless as a domestic cat.
The handsome one laughed. “Don’t be lame, Ethan, you are making this up. It was just protecting the woman. It must be her pet.”
“Familiar,” corrected Salih mischievously, getting a smothered laugh from Gogo Maya.
The boy snapped his head around and glared at Salih with open animosity. “You see?”
“What?” said the handsome one.
A group of scruffy, barefoot boys picked their way past, careful to avoid going too close to Salih, and joined the two others. They were led by a scrawny youngster in a red shirt and a filthy hat pulled low over his eyes.
“Ah, you are feeling better, Ethan.” He placed a hand on the forehead of the drenched one and held it there, even when the boy recoiled. “I will send some of my men to fetch my dad.”
“Will your dad fetch my uncle?”
Before she could stop herself, Gogo Maya leaped up, almost choking on a pip, and cried, “No! No! Don’t fetch him! He will not believe! Things will get too complicated! I will get trapped here!”
She clapped a hand over her mouth. Drat, she thought, she was going to have to help now. Past experience had led Gogo Maya to be wary of grown-ups. They usually came armed with the authorities and awkward questions, and she felt in no shape to take them on, weakened as she was.
“We have to fetch men to help us find Joe,” a boy explained to her. He spoke kindly enough, but Gogo Maya was not about to trust him just because he was smaller than her. He had a vicious-looking machete dangling from a rope around his waist. It had dried blood on it.
“I will help you find the boy, Joe,” she said quickly. “I know where he is. Well, nearly.”
The boy gave her a puzzled frown. “How do you know?”
“I just know in my bones,” she said, as evasively as she dared.
“You mean in your bones bones or throw bones?” The boy, Ethan, was a bit too quick off the mark for Gogo Maya, and not the most polite. He shot his friend a self-satisfied look, then said, “See, I told you she was a witch.”
Gogo Maya glowered at him. She did not hold with rudeness, even if he had blown some sort of life magic into her. Any point in pretending to be a kindly old woman had disappeared with the mention of grown-ups. “Well, you’re perfectly right, young man. I am in fact a witch,” she told him. “Now don’t get all huffy, we’ve had a sort of... accident. I have exchanged places with your friend.”
Ethan’s eyes darted from the red-shirt boy to the boy with the wild hair to see if they had heard her, then fixed on Gogo Maya with an incredulous stare. “How?”
“I switched, using the amulet.”
“What do you mean, switched?” Now he looked close to tears.
Having expected him to be smug once she admitted she was a witch, Gogo Maya felt a vague stirring of guilt that he looked so unhappy. “Well, it is difficult to explain,” she said in a more conciliatory tone. “I hold the amulet and hope to be someplace else and the opal moves me. Of course, wherever I land, the thing occupying that space will be where I was before I switch places.” She still did not hold out much hope that he would believe her.
Surprisingly, he did. He straightened his shoulders, narrowed his eyes and went straight for the weakness in her story. “And it didn’t occur to you that whoever you changed places with might not be happy with that?”
“Usually when I switch, Ethan, I am replaced by a rock or an animal or something,” she offered by way of an excuse, “and I never move far, but this time I seem to have been drawn by this place. Perhaps by those crocodiles.” She glared at the crocodiles. It wouldn’t do any harm to her cause to deflect some of the blame.
Ethan raised an eyebrow doubtfully and glanced over at the crocodiles, but shook his head. “Well, where were you then? Before you... switched."
“In the magic Kingdoms of Karibu, where I come from.”
Pandemonium broke out. The boy with the machete had been interpreting for the other kids. Some of them fell about laughing at Ethan’s gullibility, but some argued vehemently that it was perfectly possible to have a magic kingdom. The handsome boy, who had been lounging up against a log with a half-bored, half-distracted expression, stood up and glared at Ethan.
“Okay, the joke’s over, Ethan,” he said. “You are scaring the little kids.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled out, “Joe! You can come out now!”
The others stared at him, taken aback, but a couple of them looked around as if the boy, Joe, might come walking out from behind
a bush.
Gogo Maya exchanged glances with Salih. Handsome was an odd boy. Perhaps Salih was a better judge of character than she’d thought.
“And where is Karibu, exactly?” demanded Ethan, after the boy, Joe, had failed to materialise and the handsome one had stormed off in a huff.
“Somewhere beyond those mountains.” Gogo Maya gave an expansive wave because she was not exactly sure.
Ethan pushed out his lower lip. “How will Joe get back?”
She hadn’t thought she would have to come up with a solution quite so soon. “I will try and get him back by reversing the switch,” she said. “If you can find me a dish, I will put water in it and scry to see where your friend is. Then I will aim for him and try to exchange.”
Gogo Maya improvised as she went along. She knew the whole business of switching was too inaccurate for her to exchange with the boy, but confusing them with a scry would buy her time to think of a plan, and had the added advantage of showing her where the boy, Joe, was. Now that she thought about it, she would feel bad if the Tokoloshe had abandoned him and he had fallen into the wrong hands, especially if those hands were her village headman, Tacari’s.
After a heated discussion amongst the children, two girls set off reluctantly down the road.
“They get dish,” nodded the boy with the red shirt and the dirty hat. “But they say no more stories till they get back, please. Is not fair if they miss out.”
“Don’t rush back. I can only scry after dark,” Gogo Maya called after them. She had already threatened to disappear the way she had come if anyone brought any grown-ups. The longer they took fetching the bowl, the more time her amulet would have to recharge, and the more likely it was that she would be able to switch.
Back in her shady spot beneath the mahobohobo tree once more, she flopped down on the ground, while Salih went to speak to the crocodiles. Most of the children wandered off and took up with various swimming games, but some followed her, begging for more stories about Karibu. They introduced themselves with lovely exotic names: Tendayi, Tafadzwa, Tekeramayi, Jimoh... and one girl, Happymore, but you could hardly tell. She wore the same khaki shorts that everyone else did. Ethan, had been dressed much more smartly. He took off his wet clothes and shoes and laid them out to dry. Even the underpants he had on smacked of rich boy and Gogo Maya noticed how awkwardly he seated himself in the dirt.