by Yaba Badoe
When Linet’s coaxing was met with silence, she poured words into the mix: ‘It’s unbelievable,’ she said. ‘It’s like, if I were to wake up tomorrow, step in the lake and discover that the water in it had turned to mud. Surely those people understand they’re hurting themselves?’
‘Grandma says it’s only when people are given time to taste the bitter fruit of their deeds,’ I replied, ‘that they begin to learn from them, like my Uncle Batu.’ At the mention of my uncle’s name, his tale of unhappiness in the city burrowed like a weevil in my mind.
Adoma remained quiet. Bereft of language, she stared blankly at us while we each held her hand. I teased her fingertips and as I touched her, pictures of what she’d endured unspooled. Linet shivered. She too saw what Adoma had witnessed. And she too felt Adoma’s shame at having failed to protect the river and forest.
‘I should have spent my nights there,’ her heart murmured. ‘If only I’d been present when they arrived, maybe I could have stopped them.’ Her eyes wet with tears, Adoma hung her head in despair.
‘It’s not your fault,’ said Linet, touching the stone Old Hester had given her. It dangled from a string around her neck. ‘What else could you have done? You and Okomfo Gran-pa could have been killed if you’d got in their way.’
I agreed. The trick, as Pa would say, was to live through misfortune, learn from it and then act decisively. Those fruit bats had indeed been a warning that the balance of our world was askew. But now that our sanctuary in the forest was gone, what should we do?
‘Okomfo Gran-pa says that while we’re learning the tools of our craft, we must be patient,’ Adoma’s heart answered with a sigh.
‘That’s what Nana Merrimore says,’ Linet confirmed, ‘as well as your grandma and pa, Zula.’
I nodded. ‘They’ve taught us well. We know what we believe in. We are for the earth and the sky.’
Taking up my cry, Linet added: ‘We are for every creature that walks and crawls on land. Every creature that flies in the air or lives in water.’
Adoma’s pulse quickened.
‘We are children of the sky, sky-warriors,’ I said. ‘Protectors of the earth, determined to do our best by aligning ourselves with nsoromma. Take heart, Adoma! We may have been defeated this time but one setback does not mean the battle is over.’
I leaned forwards and as my forehead touched theirs, my sisters and I swayed in silent communion.
Outside our den, a September gale surged, hammering the rocks around us with sand. The squall blasted everything in its path. Dark clouds rolled over the cave, somersaulting through the fir trees below. As the branches creaked, the trees bent to the tempest’s tune. The seasons were changing. The heat of summer was giving way to cooler autumn days, while high in the mountains at the Sleeping Giant’s mouth, nights already cold were becoming colder.
Linet trembled. Her brow against mine, her new talisman glowing, I saw a bird hatch within her. The chick tumbled from its shell and opened its wings, stretching. A tiny feather fluttered on to my lap, while in Adoma, I saw a leopard break free. I suppressed a growl and pulled away.
Right now, simply being a friend to Adoma was what mattered most. Little by little, as the wail of the gale soothed her, her thoughts settled, and after her tongue lost its numbness, Adoma described what had happened next at the river.
‘Milo wouldn’t let go of me,’ she said. ‘I had to carry him on my back, while Gran-pa Okomfo was so distraught he could hardly walk. The shrine in pieces and the river, the sacred river, the source of life to us, destroyed.’
‘We hurried back to the village to speak to the chief – a relative of Gran-pa’s. I never knew that Gran-pa had so many words rattling about in him. How he talked and argued and talked some more. We were in the chief’s palace by then. Gran-pa had poured libation, so that the ancestors would be present to hear everything.
‘“Listen,” said Gran-pa. “The least we should do in this life is make sure that what the ancestors left us, we pass on to the next generation. And to think that your son, Junior, is working with strangers to spoil our river. The goddess of the river will not forget it.”’
Adoma quivered, a flicker of memory closed her eyes. Teeth gritted, she opened them again: ‘That’s when the chief smiled. A fat, greasy boflot smile. An I-feel-sick-and-need-to-burp smile. Too much sugar in the dough, too much oil in the frying pan. His lips twitch, I tell you. Then he calls a small boy. Asks him to fetch a pouch. The pouch on his lap, the chief opens it and hands Gran-pa a wodge of money. Plenty money. Money enough to feed us for three years. And Gran-pa? He won’t touch it. “Nana Chief, what do you take me for? You forget, I was your prefect at school…”
‘The chief repeats his boflot smile. He urges Gran-pa to forget about our shrine by the river and concentrate on the one in the village instead – the one in our backyard. He should put it all behind him, the chief says, and chop small. Gran-pa shakes his head this way and that. No, he won’t. He can’t. Now the chief orders him, commands him to take his share. When Gran-pa insists that he won’t touch a pesewa of the chief’s bounty, Nana Chief says: “Okomfo, I advise you not to become a thorn in my flesh. If you do, I shall be forced to pull you out and throw you away.”
‘Gran-pa could sense the hair at the back of my neck bristling. Quick as a mosquito about to bite, he catches my eye and blinks to tell me “no”. He could sense what I wanted to do: blast the man to the next world and plunge thorns in his feet to stop him returning to planet earth. Gran-pa squeezes his eyes at me, gets up and we leave without saying a word.’
11
I am wolf.
That night after I return home to our ger sleep lulls me. I’m running with a pack of she-wolves. The biggest of them twists and turns through a sea of feather grass, moving like a white streak on the steppes. In wolf-light the grass glistens pink and gold, reflecting the last of the sun as it slips from the sky.
Stretching my legs, bounding as quickly as I can, I catch a whiff of gazelle and whine.
The biggest wolf turns sharply and her dark, amber eyes pierce mine. ‘When we hunt as a pack silence is our friend.’
She signals to the she-wolves and changing tack, they start circling our prey. I run ahead, eager to be in at the kill.
‘Back!’ the biggest wolf warns me.
I freeze. Instead of a gazelle, an enormous brown bear lopes towards me. I snarl. Hackles rise. About to charge him, a heave from the biggest wolf shoves me aside as she shoulders the brunt of the bear’s blow. Fangs bared, the pack lunges, and one after the other savages him.
They rip out chunks of flesh, chunks of fur and gristle. They snap at legs and knees. The bear keels over and the pack pounces at his neck, tearing it open. Blood seeps into the steppes; and as the wolves eat, their leader at my feet gently licks me.
12
Zula
My soul journey felt too vivid to be a dream. Combined with Adoma’s anguish, it troubled me, digging in my mind, dirt in my eye. Dirt that I couldn’t remove or blink away, niggling at me as darkness gave way to light.
I described my night travel to Grandma as she stirred a cauldron of stew she’d cooked for breakfast. She listened, prompting me with questions about the colour of the bear, its size.
Once she’d heard what I had to say, Grandma frowned: ‘Your quest was about much more than you, Zula. Did I ever tell you that Little Bear was my nickname for your Uncle Batu?’
I shook my head. Hardly anyone in our family mentioned my uncle if they could help it. And when they did, it was to use him as an example of how not to behave.
‘Batu means loyal,’ said Grandma.
The suggestion that my uncle hadn’t lived up to his promise dangled between us as the weevil inside me tunnelled out. ‘What happened to him?’
Grandma sighed, stirring the pot. ‘My last-born was going to be a shaman. When he strayed, when he turned his back on us, he lost his wits.’
Grandma slapped her thigh, and her del, a calf-length
garment fastened at the shoulder, quivered.
‘But isn’t my uncle better now? Pa seems to think so.’
‘So did I until you told me what you saw in your night travel, Zula. A twisted tree cannot straighten itself easily. But this I do know: skin-walkers are coming and so is your uncle.’
‘But it wasn’t real, Grandma!’
She handed me a hot bowl of food, holding it so I was forced to attend to her words before eating. ‘In the same way that they’ve destroyed Adoma’s sanctuary in the forest, skin-walkers have their eyes fixed on the Giant’s mouth.’
‘No!’
‘Remember the rumours we heard earlier this summer? Rumours about miners who plan to dig into the Giant’s belly to search for copper and coal?’
‘That’s not going to happen yet! Pa said it would take years for our politicians to decide what to do. And before they decide, they’ll let us have our say.’
Grandma snorted. ‘Politicians don’t listen to people like us. Believe me, my winter wolf, for the sake of earth and sky, we must prevail.’
*
A few days later, Grandma began coughing. Grandma was frailer these days and when she took ill, all of us – Ma, Pa, my brothers, my uncles and their families who lived close by – paid particular attention to her.
Within a half-hour of her cough starting, Pa dipped into his medicine box and brewed a sweet tea of honey and ginger for her chest. From noon to late afternoon, the cough dogged her, so that with every tickle in her throat her innards heaved, until she was forced to take to bed breathless, complaining of aches and pains in her joints.
Next morning, after a sleepless night of Grandma’s tossing and turning, Pa sent me on an errand in search of plants to heal her. I was to go across the steppes in the direction of the Sleeping Giant. There, on the slopes of the mountains, I would find the herbs he needed to soothe the fever raging in Grandma’s lungs.
I set off on Altan, the horse Pa had given me years earlier on our return from our first visit to the Giant. I’d chosen him when he was a foal in Pa’s herd, and had named him after the sky the morning he was born – Red Dawn.
I’d fed and watered Altan and made sure, when he was old enough, that I was the one who rode him first. By then he was used to me. So much so, that once I’d lassoed him, I easily leaped on his back.
Altan bucked and whinnied. He wriggled, spun around. I smoothed down flames in his mane, which flickered like embers in wind. I dampened the blaze and then gentled him by whispering his name and mine.
‘It’s me, Altan. It’s me, Zula. Zula, your friend.’
Altan neighed, pawing the ground. He bucked a second time, and then galloped over scrubland. Grasses parted in his wake, lizards scuttled as his legs, hitting their stride, thundered along the length of our grazing ground.
Grandma has a saying that a Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings. In Altan I discovered my wings and whooping with joy, I clung on. Within minutes, my horse settled into a canter. And all the while a westerly wind enfolded us, murmuring tales of friendship between Mongols and their stallions.
On the second morning of Grandma’s cough, a day heavy with foreboding, Altan and I travelled at a gallop. The morning sun hung low in the sky throwing a ghostly shroud of light over the landscape. Pa had made it clear that I had to find the plants he needed quickly. Old lungs hot with fever, weighed down by phlegm, can strip life away within hours. It can snuff it out as quickly as a blast of cold air can dowse a candle, Pa said. I didn’t need further prompting to understand that Grandma’s life was in peril. I set off determined not to let her down.
The landscape we rode over was alive. Larks flitted above shrubs, kestrels glided behind clouds, then swooped to catch snakes. For mile after mile, tall grasses flurried in the direction of a breeze scented with wild garlic. I breathed it in, and as the tension in me gradually eased, the sight of saxaul trees on the horizon told me we were almost there. Give or take an hour or so, Grandma would soon be better.
I was so convinced of what my heart longed for that my eyes were blind to warnings, which on any other day would have given me pause. The closer we came to the mountains, leaves and grasses were sprinkled with dust, I failed to notice. And I failed to take heed, a few moments later, of a hazy mist on the horizon.
My mantra was ‘Grandma will soon be better. Grandma will soon be better.’
Altan slowed to a canter, then a steady trot as we approached the slopes of the Sleeping Giant. To my left were the beginnings of a birch forest. I directed Altan straight ahead up the steep rise of the first hill. On our descent the other side of a rock-ribbed slope, a bright colour caught my eye. It blinked at me. Blinked and then winked.
I dropped from my horse and scrambled to take a closer look. Yes, it was one of the plants I was looking for: a late flowering gentian, a cluster of blue bell-like flowers at the tip of its stem. I removed a knife from my side pouch and dug it up, carefully teasing it out of its moist home: roots, leaves, stem and flowers. I placed the plant in my pouch.
By my reckoning I’d been away from home for about two hours. All I needed to do now was to find the fruit and leaves of a juniper bush. I clambered on to Altan again and was riding down the hill, when I noticed a caravan of trucks snaking along the ravine of the Sleeping Giant’s mouth.
Just then I spotted a juniper bush in fruit. In the distance the caravan rumbled on. I was plucking and placing berries in my pouch, when an explosion rang across the valley. Boulders and dust flew in the air. Birds dropped from the sky. A spray of sand and pebbles erupted. The detonation was so powerful that as its sound reverberated across the mountain range, bounding off great slabs of rock, the earth shook, knocking me off balance.
I tumbled onto my bottom as Altan reared. His hooves dangled above my head. I knew he would do all in his power not to harm me, but even so instinctively, I rolled.
Round and round I spun, faster and faster down the hill. Head, body and feet gathering dust, while a squall embedded with soil from the other side of the valley powdered my clothes and skin. And still I rolled until I used both feet to halt my descent.
I sat up, spluttering. Five minutes later, Altan found me. He nuzzled my head and, urging me to stand, prodded my back.
‘I’m fine,’ I told him watching the caravan, sand whirling from its wheels, wind its way to the bottom of the valley.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. What were they doing over there? Why had they blown away a side of the mountain so close to the Giant’s mouth? What if they were going to destroy him completely? Was it in our power to stop them?
For a moment I forgot Grandma. All I could think about was the place I visited and summoned my sisters to in wolf-light: the Giant’s mouth. I saw the wings and talons of the eagles that nested there, heard the baying of wolves that serenaded me when in winter rain and snow, or on parched summer days, I made the journey to break bread with the Giant and sing to him. The more I lulled him in slumber, the more he became a part of me: blood, breath and bone. The deeper his caves and crevices bedded in my soul, the deeper my love for him. I’d loved him since my first taste of drizzles of honey and horse’s milk at seven years old. I knew the crags the Giant lay on as well as I did the lines on my grandmother’s face. If outsiders came and destroyed even the tiniest part of the range, they’d destroy me as well.
I raged, incandescent at the possibility that Grandma was right. What if what we’d thought was rumour wasn’t tittle-tattle but fact, and companies from outside already had permission to mine the mountain? But then why hadn’t we been told? Why hadn’t we been given a chance to have our say? But then if Grandma was right…
I wiped dust off my face and clothes and climbed back up the hill to complete my task. I quickly collected the rest of the juniper and stored it in my pouch. An image of a she-wolf flashed before me.
‘My winter wolf! Where are you?’ she cried. ‘Come home, winter wolf! My eyes want to see you one last time.’
‘Gran
dma!’ I gasped. ‘I’m coming. Altan!’
My horse came to me and we set off back to our pasturelands.
My legs tightened around Altan’s flank. Lengthening his stride, his hooves strummed the ground as his canter stretched into a gallop.
‘Faster, Altan. Faster,’ I shouted and he obeyed. He galloped as never before and with his muscles rippling like wind across the steppes, we returned home.
13
Zula
I jumped down from Altan and flung myself through the door of our ger. Inside was hushed, the only sound the murmuring of Pa’s prayers over my grandma.
‘No,’ I cried. I was too late. That’s what I believed, until I reached Grandma’s bed and saw she was breathing. ‘I’m here, Grandma,’ I said.
Her eyelashes fluttered and in my mind’s eye, she turned midway on her journey to the stars, to wave goodbye.
‘No, Grandma, don’t go! I’ve brought your medicine,’ I told her.
I handed the plants to Pa. He shook his head.
‘Please, Pa! I know you can save her.’
Pa shook his head a second time, but now that I was home surges of adrenalin and hope made me defy him.
‘You’re going to get better,’ I said to Grandma. ‘You’ll see.’
Her eyelids spasmed. She moaned and after what seemed a great effort, opened her eyes.
‘You see,’ I said to Pa, elated. ‘Help her!’
He did as I asked. Perhaps it was Grandma’s smile that stirred him, her raised hand as she reached to touch mine.
Within the hour, he’d produced a concoction of gentian to ease the heat in Grandma’s lungs.
I helped her sip the medicine and then held her hand as she curled into sleep. I watched her, willing her better, willing the gentian to do its healing work. To do it well, do it quickly. I watched and listened. Her breathing was shallow but the colour in her cheeks was better. They weren’t flushed any more. I touched her wrist. Her pulse, though weak, was steady.