Switch!

by Karen Prince

  “Hi, I’m Aaron,” he said in an American accent, “and this is Lewa.”

  Ethan could see Tariro do a double-take. Tariro liked to adopt an American accent himself when he wanted to act cool, but it was nowhere near as good as this boy’s. He seemed at a bit of a loss for words. He turned to greet Lewa.

  She looked almost as surprised as Tariro but she was staring at Ethan. She appeared to be absentmindedly counting the assortment of brass tubes, bird feathers, ceramic beads and seed pods that hung from a leather thong tied around her waist while she reached her other hand out and curled a lock of Ethan’s hair around her finger.

  “Gold!” she said in wonder. “Aaron told me this was possible but I thought he was teasing.” She had a lovely singsong voice and spoke English with a West African accent, similar to but not the same as Gogo Maya’s. “You must let me braid it for you.”

  Ethan frowned and pulled away from her. As dirty as he felt after all those days in the bush, he wasn’t quite ready to have some stranger’s fingers touching his hair.

  “Er... I don’t think so!” he said. “I think I will leave my hair as it is.” Come to think about it, he couldn’t believe she just put her hands in his dirty hair. She was as bad as his cousins. Were girls the same everywhere?

  Her own short kinky hair was pulled untidily into many plaits that radiated like antenna around her head. He guessed it would be hard to braid your own hair, but still, that was no reason to let her loose on his.

  Aaron laughed and removed his loosely woven turban to reveal hair that was parted into a design of intricately shaped sections along his scalp, the end of each short twist decorated with a plain white cowry shell.

  “You might as well give up,” he said. “She gets around to everyone she likes in the end – whether you want it or not.” With his wide mouth set in an easy smile, and his brown eyes gentle in expression, he could have been Jimoh’s big brother.

  Jimoh, who’d removed his hat and was twisting the brim around in his hands, quickly put it on his head again at the mention of braiding. Not that his hair was long enough, but you could see he was not taking any chances. With a quiet signal to Rafiki and his Tokoloshe companions, he went off in search of a shady spot. He’d promised to teach them how to wind his strips of salvaged inner tubing onto forked saplings to make slingshots for the rest of them.

  “Okay, but this is last one!” His voice drifted back as he tore a strip off the bottom of the Kanga he had got from the Sobek for yet another Tokoloshe child who wanted to wear the same as him. Ethan noticed as he went that Jimoh’s kanga was getting shorter and shorter as the day wore on, and the collection of strange dangly paraphernalia he had attached to the hemp rope around his waist was growing.

  Gogo Maya and Salih settled down to trade stories about their return trips to Karibu, joined by the Tokoloshe grandma and a group of gnarly village elders, each with a decorated drinking horn full of fearsomely sour wine. Tariro sat and ate another bowl of food with Aaron and Lewa, fascinated to discover that Aaron actually was from America and wasn’t just putting on the accent.

  “He just loves the attention,” Ethan said, to no one in particular, and then jumped when Fisi responded.

  “She is the witch I told you about,” Fisi said. “You should warn Tariro not to kiss her. It could only cause trouble.”

  Ethan noticed that Fisi and Shenzie had hung back, almost avoiding the witches. Unable to imagine Tariro kissing Gogo Maya, even if she drowned again, Ethan shook his head, and then realised the hyena youth was talking about Lewa.

  She did not look much like a witch to him but he said, “Jeez, if I warn him he will be all the more determined to do it. He already thinks he has the healing power from drinking the water at Sobek Lake.” He was surprised to find himself just a little put out that Tariro had monopolised Aaron and Lewa. Especially Lewa. He had bloody better not kiss her, he thought.

  “Here is what we have to do,” Gogo Maya said later, once everyone had eaten and they’d gathered round the well for the plan. “We will approach the city from the north, because that is the side where the menagerie is.” She drew a map in the sand with a stick, giving Ethan a long-suffering sigh that said she could have done without the added complication of rescuing hyenas. But he held fast. He had promised Fisi. They had exchanged blood over it.

  “We will have to release the prisoners without being seen,” Gogo Maya went on. “This should not be difficult. I understand the Almohad are too lazy to guard their prisoners well. Then Fisi and Shenzie must strike out for the safety of the nearest Kishi village, which is Mudziku village, if I remember correctly. The rest of us will look for Galal in his reception rooms.”

  She handed around amulets made out of scraps of carved wood, broken ostrich shell, unidentifiable tassels and copper plates. Ethan noticed she had added the ceramic beads from the well to them. “These will protect you from the Almohad’s beguiling ways,” she said.

  Gogo Maya eyed Fisi for a moment before handing him an amulet. “You, I had to think about,” she said. “Don’t you go letting that Mesande get hold of this. I know you are involved with her in some way, Gogo Nagesa told me. I don’t trust that girl as far as I can kick her.”

  Fisi’s lips parted in shock at Gogo Maya’s vehemence, but he was not as shocked as Shenzie. She backed away from him, clutching her amulet to her chest. “You!” she gasped “You and Mesande! She is the one who lead Tabita into the trap.”

  Ethan watched as Fisi’s expression went from one who had just won a gold medal at the thought of owning an amulet at last, to one who has just been disqualified.

  “Figures,” Gogo Maya said with a shrug. “Oh, don’t get so upset, Shenzie, the boy would have had no way of knowing. You have been tricked by Mesande yourself, if I remember correctly. Now you two wear the amulets around your waists. We don’t want you strangling yourselves if you change.” She went on in a matter-of-fact voice, seemingly oblivious to the hornet’s nest she had kicked between Fisi and Shenzie. “Everyone else can wear them around their necks if they want, but beware, the Almohad might be able to slip them over your heads. Do not get too near any of them.”

  Bending forwards towards Grandma Wanyika, Gogo Maya handed her a pungent smelling dried root from her bag. “The Tokoloshe can come with if they want,” she said. “Bring plenty of arrows – Grandma Wanyika will make the potion. Now be careful with that, Grandma. It is what’s left over from my last mbogo root. If our plan goes badly, we will rely on you to put everyone to sleep.”

  A ripple of excitement ran through the assembled Tokoloshe in anticipation of this rare treat, but Jimoh looked worriedly at the amulet around his waist. “Gogo, what about amulet for Tokoloshe?”

  Lewa laughed. “The Almohad would never touch the mind of a Tokoloshe. They believe the Tokoloshe can turn the beguiling back on them. It is a myth, of course, but they believe it.”

  “I started that rumour,” Grandma Wanyika chortled, elbowing Ethan in the ribs. She seemed to have taken to him. She’d squeezed between him and Jimoh despite the fact that there had been no space. This close up, Ethan could have sworn he heard faint whispering sounds coming from the vermin in her hair.

  “I believe they used to capture Tokoloshe but they caused too much mischief,” Lewa said, shaking a finger fondly at Grandma Wanyika.

  “The rest of you will pretend to be witches,” Gogo Maya said, getting back to the plan. “They will believe it too, once they fail to beguile you. They are unnaturally afraid of witches. They think we can suck up their souls and send them to the other place. Some of us have the power to confuse them.”

  “They’re afraid we’ll turn them ugly,” Lewa put in. “We can’t really do it. They’ve had centuries of practice at making themselves beautiful, after all, but we can make some of them think they’re ugly.”

  “Jimoh and Tariro will go immediately towards Joe and put this amulet on him to shield him from the beguiling,” Gogo Maya went on, handing another amulet to Jimoh. �
��I don’t think we will have any problem persuading them to part with your friend, once he stops responding to their nonsense, but we also have to find the jumper who started this problem or no one will be safe in the forest.”

  “What’s a jumper?” asked Tariro, with a worldly-wise expression on his face that irritated Ethan. He noticed that Tariro had managed to manoeuver himself between Aaron and Lewa.

  “Some kind of a body-snatcher,” Aaron said.

  “What is body-snatcher?” Jimoh asked.

  “It is a soul that can steal someone’s body just by touching it,” Lewa explained, fiddling with the copper snake bangle on her upper arm and smiling at Tariro with her radiant smile.

  “Will the amulets protect us from it?” Tariro said.

  “Yes!” Gogo Maya said, with all the authority in the world.

  “We don’t know,” Lewa said at the same time. She shot Gogo Maya a warning glance which did nothing to reinforce Ethan’s confidence in Gogo Maya’s judgement. “But it is the best we can do. Salih and me, and possibly you, Ethan, can read the Almohad thought patterns, but the jumper is in some way shielded. Gogo Maya could not read him when he attacked her in the forest.”

  “I think I can hear the Almohad too,” interrupted Tariro. “I think I heard Fisi before, on the cliff.”

  “Not unless you kissed a witch,” Fisi said grimly. Shanzie had stopped glowering at him. Perhaps her own mistakes with the dreaded Mesande had been enough to give her some perspective on Fisi’s, but he didn’t look ready to forgive himself anytime soon.

  “Ethan kissed a witch!” Aaron gasped.

  “He kissed Gogo Maya,” Tariro said, and laughed, glancing at Lewa, knowing when he was on to a good thing.

  “Eew!” Aaron shuddered.

  “Moving on... Moving on,” Ethan grimaced.

  Gogo Maya took a large gulp of her sour wine and doubled over in a coughing fit. “We’ve made an amulet for Galal,” she went on, once she’d got her breath back. Ethan was grateful for the change of subject. The amulet was similar to the ones she had given the rest of them, except for what looked like fibres from the funky smelling root woven into it. “It is very powerful, but we only had time and enough mbogo root to make one. We think the jumper is planning to take Galal’s body so that he can rule the Almohad. Lewa thinks he is biding his time and studying the leader’s ways, so that no one will notice when he takes over.” She nodded at Lewa. “We have to reach Galal and convince him to wear it without alerting the jumper. Now if only we had something to attract Galal...” Ethan was sure he saw her peer at him from behind her braids before looking up at the sky.

  Jimoh poked Ethan in the ribs from the other side of Grandma Wanyika. “You must give Gogo Maya stones to put on amulet to give leader for gift,” he said.

  Without hesitation Ethan drew the five gems out of his pocket, even though he was pretty sure Gogo Maya had set him up. Salih must have told her about them, he thought. But he would be glad to be rid of them. He was tired of looking over his shoulder all the time for the Mokele Mbembe. Salih was right – if he offered them as ransom, the Almohad would probably just keep the gems and Joe. If this insane plan did not work, the Almohad might just keep all of them.

  Tariro’s eyes grew wide at the sight of the enormous sapphire, violet and burgundy gems resting on Ethan’s palm. “Jeez, Ethan, where the hell did you get those?”

  “Er... The Sobek gave them to me,” Ethan said. “Well, they didn’t make me put them back again,” he whispered to Jimoh at the boy’s sharp intake of breath at the whopping lie.

  “Perfect!” Gogo Maya exclaimed, accepting the gems and neatly dodging any further questions from Tariro. “Almohad love jewels, and Galal is particularly greedy for them.”

  “There will be consequences,” Salih muttered under his breath.

  “Well, we can let Galal deal with that,” Gogo Maya harrumphed. “We are, after all, saving his life.”

  “You two,” she indicated Lewa and Ethan, “will try to find the gap in the thought pattern.”

  “How?” Ethan said, worried.

  “Everyone thinks all the time, Ethan,” Lewa explained. “Our presence will make them anxious, so they will think even harder. Just look at each person for a moment till you feel his or her pattern in your mind, then move on to the next. If there is a complete absence of thought, that will probably be the jumper. I will sweep the left hand side of the room and you can sweep the right. We will meet in the middle, which will be wherever Galal stands.” She pointed at Tariro, Jimoh and Aaron. “You three will pretend to do the same to make them think you are all witches.”

  Ethan thought it was a terrible plan. He was not so sure Gogo Maya had as much confidence in her amulets as she implied. Even if the amulets worked. If the Almohad were so strong, what was stopping any of them from physically grabbing Tariro and Jimoh before they managed to get the amulet onto Joe, and simply holding onto them as captives? What was to stop them from grabbing himself, for that matter? It was all very well for Gogo Maya; at least she looked like a witch with her hooked nose and her general oldness. What if he failed to find the Almohad thought patterns? He could find Fisi and Shenzie easily enough now, and the Tokoloshe, but they were very excitable and projected very loudly.

  “What if Galal doesn’t believe us?” he said to Gogo Maya. “And what’s to stop the jumper from jumping the guy next to him as soon as we identify him? We wouldn’t be any the wiser.”

  “No,” Aaron said. “We thought about that. We’ll know at once because the body he leaves will slump to the ground, dead.”

  “Dead!” breathed Jimoh, his eyes widening in distress.

  “Well, it’s dead already, see. Whoever had the body before would have already left it when the jumper jumped in,” Aaron explained kindly to Jimoh, but Jimoh didn’t look any happier. Ethan suspected he hadn’t been worrying about the left over body but the newly jumped one.

  “So we don’t let anyone touch us!” Tariro said, self-importantly, muscling in on the plan. Ethan noticed he glanced at Lewa for approval as he said it

  ~~~

  Ethan was woken the next morning by the sound of Tariro shrieking, as he shot up off the floor batting frantically at his arm. What now? he thought, sitting up and switching on his headlamp to check the floor around him. He hadn’t tried anything with the magic for a while, so he wondered why his head felt strangely tight.

  “Did something bite you, Tariro?” Jimoh said, sitting up, startled.

  The sound of Tokoloshe children giggling calmed Tariro down. Someone had braided things into his hair while he slept, and then carefully placed his head on top of his arm so as to cut off the blood supply to his hand, and then aligned his hand against his face. His own numb fingers brushing against his face like a dead hand had frightened Tariro when he awoke.

  “You would be laughing on the other side of your face if you had a mirror,” he said to Ethan, with a big grin, flexing his fingers to get the blood flowing back into them.

  Ethan’s hand shot up to his own head. It had been divided into sections and felt all knobby with beads and bits of pipe. He even felt a couple of feathers.

  “Lewa,” Aaron said when he saw them. “She likes you guys.”

  Ethan’s stomach lurched just a little bit. This strangely captivating girl liked him? He supposed she liked Tariro too, but everyone liked Tariro; it was all that boisterous athleticism. In any case, Aaron probably just meant in a friendly way.

  As uncomfortable as the braids were, there was no time to untangle them before they struck camp and moved off towards Almoh. Well, theoretically, there had been time but someone had to see to the water bottles, and then Grandma Wanyika had firmly latched herself onto Ethan with a list of preparation chores a mile long.

  Tariro hadn’t had time to remove his either. He had been too busy helping Lewa. He twirled a plait of leather with an iridescent green feather on the end, as he walked beside Ethan and Salih on the way to Almoh. “I don’t know what
you are so worried about, it’s not as if they can really hurt us,” he reassured Ethan. “I mean, it hurts when it happens, but we can both heal ourselves. I am sure Jimoh could too, if he tried. He didn’t drink quite as much magic as I did at the caves, but I’m sure he drank enough to heal himself.”

  Ethan looked despairingly at Salih. “We have to tell him about the blood before he risks getting himself hurt,” he thought at the leopard.

  Salih stopped walking and looked from Tariro to Ethan and back again. “He won’t want to experience the initial pain,” he said into Ethan's head.

  “Hey, I caught that!" Tariro protested. “Well, almost. What did the leopard say?”

  Before Ethan could think of something to mislead Tariro, Shenzie and Fisi came up behind them. Shenzie was trying to console Fisi.

  “It was my fault,” Fisi wailed. “Damn, I knew there was something off about that Mesande. She was just too sweet.”

  26

  A Favour Repaid

  It took two days to reach Almoh travelling at Grandma Wanyika’s frustratingly slow pace. Eventually, in his anxiety to hurry up and get to Joe, Ethan took her up on his shoulders. She was not that heavy, but he wished she would not keep fiddling with, and adding things to, his hair.

  With a gang of compulsive gatherers to forage for them they did not go hungry either, but the closer things grew to the underground stream carrying the magic, the more distorted they were. After burning his mouth on a strange flattened vegetable with wavy tendrils, and almost eating a disk-like fruit with turned out to be poisonous to humans, Grandma Wanyika took to sorting through the offerings, from her perch on top of his shoulders, before she let Ethan eat anything.