by Marc Secchia
Curious villagers began to gather around the General. Not many–all the women and children were still being held hostage inside the huts, Shioni thought. Somewhere out there, one hundred and fifty Sheban Elite warriors had drawn a net of swords, spears, and arrows around the village.
“People! Listen to me!” Getu shouted suddenly. “We have sensed a great evil among you, hiding amongst the people of this village. We Shebans practise magic. Since ancient times, we have captured and harnessed the powers of asmati witches to root out evil and destroy it. This is what has made us strong!”
Utter silence greeted his words. Even the chickens dared not peep.
“Warriors of Sheba, bring the asmati devil to me!”
Fighting her bonds, Shioni scuttled purposefully down toward the General. The warriors were doing a fine job of jerking her about. Everyone had enjoyed themselves at her expense. So help her, she was ready to explode! The villagers drew back with wide-eyed stares. Many made signs to ward off evil.
Getu gripped the sack covering her head. “Now, the asmati will tell us the truth. Is there evil in this village? Men who have committed murder? Tell me, I command you!”
So saying, he whipped the sack away. Shioni drew breath, and let out the finest scream of rage she could produce. The pain in her scalp considerably raised her volume as the General snagged a healthy hank of her hair together with the sackcloth and tore it loose. She surged forward, so surprising the warriors that one tripped over a stone and fell heavily.
“Hold the creature!” bellowed Captain Yirgu.
“It’s too strong,” cried another.
“Get it!”
Shioni shook herself from head to toe, mostly to rid herself of the flies, and fixed the full force of her rage on the General. “I’m hungry, Master!” she growled, in her best imitation of one of Kalcha’s pet hyenas. “Feed me!”
For a second, General Getu was taken aback. Princess Annakiya had darkened huge rings around her eyes with kohl, and then applied red tincture to her lips, including a fanciful trail of blood running from the corner of her mouth down to her chin. Her hair had been matted with mud, her cheeks and forehead soiled with dirt. She must look a sight.
“Down, you asmati devil!” roared the General, whipping out his sword.
The four warriors wrestled her to her knees, not without a fight. Shioni snarled, “Blood! Blood!” She spat and frothed and threw herself against the ropes.
“Hold the beast, men! Don’t let go. Down, I command you!”
In the village, a child began to wail. Shioni distinctly heard a man call on God to save him. Encouraged, she rubbed her cheek against Getu’s knee. “Feed me the blood of evil men, Master,” she hissed.
The General’s flinch was real enough. “Don’t touch me, you monster. Now, asmati, breathe deep of the air of this village. Tell me what you smell. Leave no evil hidden. Seek out the stench of the wicked.”
Shioni sat up as though stung. Trying not to gag at the reek of her clothes, she sniffed the air several times in different directions. The watching villagers took another step back. She laughed a chilling, high-pitched cackle. “Oh, Master, it smells so good! Shiftas with dark deeds and dark souls–they taste the best. I’m hungry, Master. So hungry! Unleash me, Master.”
“You’ll hunt soon enough, asmati.”
“When, Master?”
“After sundown, when your powers are at their greatest.”
Shioni jumped up and down, screaming, “Blood! Oh, yes! A sweet, lovely feast!”
“Take it away, men!”
The warriors seized the ropes with glee. Shioni had no trouble displaying her rage as they yanked her slave-collar, making the ropes burn her skin, and bruised her ribs with a couple of prods of their spear hafts.
General Getu turned to the villagers, shaking his head. “If there’s evil here, the asmati will sniff it out. Those of good heart will be safe. But those with blood on their hands …”
The warriors dragged her backward, step after step. Suddenly, Shioni screeched, “Watch my eyes and ears fly into the forest!” She pushed at the hornbills with her mind. “They watch for me!”
Several dozen hornbills, who had collected on the nearby trees and bushes, took to the air with a sudden clattering of wings and an angry rattling of beaks. That was the final straw. A long moan came from within one of the huts, abruptly chopped off. The four warriors, chuckling quietly, dragged her back to Princess Annakiya.
“Snarling little lion cub!” growled one of the warriors, cuffing the back of her head playfully.
“The burning pits of Erta have nothing on what those wretches saw today,” laughed Captain Yirgu, taking his turn to punch her shoulder playfully. “Quick, get her out of sight.”
“Is that hoofbeats I hear?” asked Annakiya, chuckling at Shioni’s expression.
Indeed, the first bandit was already fleeing the village, howling his terror to the skies as he flogged his horse with a piece of rope. Several more were not far behind.
“Fought us like a wounded lion,” said the third warrior, handing his rope to Annakiya. “With respect, Lady, I’d keep this one tied up if I were you.”
“I’ve a good mind to,” agreed the Princess.
“Anni!” Shioni turned to the last warrior, awkward with her hands still fastened immovably behind her back. “Untie me. Please.”
He looked displeasingly uncertain about the idea.
“Shioni, all tied up again?”
“General … please, tell the Princess–”
“I think she’s scared of you. I’d be.” He screwed up his nose. “You stink like a hyena’s intestines, girl. What in God’s name did your so-called friends put on you?”
“Crushed stink-beetle,” said Annakiya. “Come, we need to get you back to camp, Shioni. Heaven help me, I’ve no idea how we’re ever going to get rid of that stench.”
Shioni scowled liberally at everyone she could see, and a few bushes for good measure. “Will someone, please … the ropes?”
“I’ve always thought that grovelling is a fine quality in a slave, wouldn’t you say, General?”
“Couldn’t agree more.” General Getu’s tone was carefully neutral. “That was some fine acting there, Shioni. You were steaming and bubbling like a pot of Mama Nomuula’s best doro wot.”
While she resented being compared to a pot of Mama’s famous spicy chicken stew, there was something else in the General’s tone that made her words storm out, “I wasn’t acting! I was so furious, so outraged–”
“Very good. Amazingly realistic, I thought.”
Shioni’s jaw dropped. “You didn’t!”
General Getu just laughed a perfectly wicked laugh. “You were brilliant; maybe netted us The Hyena. Princess, do me a favour. Don’t untie the scary slave-girl until I’m well away down the trail, alright?”
Chapter 8: Showers and Lakes
Two morningS after Jibu and his bandits fell to the Sheban forces, it began to rain. Shioni sniffed discreetly. She still smelled, as the General had so politely put it, as fragrant as a hyena’s intestines. Not even a healthy dollop of Annakiya’s expensive perfume provided enough disguise. At least her hair was clean, washed three times in the river by the Princess’ somewhat apologetic hand. Shioni was becoming weary of everyone waving their hands beneath their nostrils when they passed by. Even the normally stern Captain Yirgu!
The donkey handler was terribly proud of his new shirt, however. He bowed at least twenty times to the Princess while never quite managing to complete a single sentence of thanks.
“Wasn’t he sweet?” said Zi, who still found the goings-on of humans to be a constant source of amusement.
“Well, after the warriors wrecked his old shirt–”
“There wasn’t much left to wreck,” Annakiya said primly, shifting her knee so that the rain would not splash on it. “It was indecent, Shioni. I’m glad you threw it away.”
“She was so filthy it would hardly have mattered,” Zi poin
ted out. “Anyway, even the hyenas will avoid that spot for centuries to come.”
“Zi, your way with words …”
Azurelle brightened. “I sparkle with wit, as always.”
“What does the map say, Anni?”
The Princess tilted the map so that her supposedly illiterate slave-girl could read it. “I make us about here, Shioni. Good progress–we’ve been nine days on the trail. We’re past the marshy loop and heading more directly toward Gondar at last. But we’re about to run into all these nice tributaries marked on this map. Which is why, I assume, General Getu is looking so pleased that the rain started.”
“A gentle drizzle,” Shioni quipped, having to raise her voice as the rain began to pelt down in earnest.
Many of the warriors raised their shields above their heads as the rain turned abruptly to clattering hail. An awning over the howdah protected Shioni and the Princess, but the poor donkeys plodded along through the puddles, bedraggled and looking ever more soulful as their rough grey coats became soaked to the skin.
An hour or so later, the iron-grey sheets of rain lifted just as abruptly as they had arrived. The sun broke through the clouds, beaming with good cheer. The ground steamed, the donkeys flicked their long ears cheerfully, and somewhere behind, the Sheban warriors struck up a marching song.
Shioni shaded her eyes as she stared out over the rolling tan hills, dotted here and there with acacia, baobab, and the vast, umbrella-like giant fig trees. Lower in the river gullies, the vegetation thickened. Small pockets of forest clung to the arid hillsides. All the rain had vanished. She pointed out a strange, conical mountain to Annakiya, who said, “That was once a volcano, Shioni. The hard pipe remains, while the rest has been eroded away.” Shioni wrinkled her nose at her friend to suggest she was lecturing. “Well, you can’t be seen to read scrolls, Shioni,” huffed the Princess. “It’s illegal for slaves to read.”
“Maybe taking away the slave-collar will allow more blood to flow to her brain,” suggested Zi, discreetly sunning herself on the floor of the howdah.
“Oh, how your wings sparkle in the sunshine, Zi,” said Shioni, deciding to poke some fun at someone else for a change. “You look like you’re wearing delicate diamond filaments on your back.”
Azurelle swelled so blatantly with vanity that Shioni thought she might just pop.
Annakiya sighed. “Shioni was being sarcastic, Zi.”
Shioni said quickly, “Look, here come General Getu and the scouts now.”
The Princess followed her finger. “Good grief, that’s a moving dot. You can recognise him from here?”
It was on the tip of her tongue to add that the General was upset about something, but now she wondered how come her eyes were so much sharper than Annakiya’s. In fact, several minutes passed before Captain Yirgu’s lookout sighted the riders, and several more before he confirmed it was Getu.
After covering the ground between them at a rapid trot, Getu shouted up to the howdah, “Princess, you need to see this. Can you ride ahead with me?”
Shioni hated being left behind to tend the elephant. Bored, she tracked a herd of zebra with her eyes. It was amazing, despite their black-and-white stripes, how they managed to blend in with the terrain. And she moped on Shifta’s back for the time it took them to catch up with the General’s group, which at the column’s pace, was over an hour.
At length they crested a small, rocky ridge, and Shioni found herself looking out over a lake. The faint trail led squarely into the middle of it.
“That wasn’t on the map,” said Shifta.
“You can read maps?”
“I can listen to conversation.”
“Shioni!” General Getu’s battlefield bellow cut through the hubbub of the arriving Shebans with ease. “Get over here, and bring the elephant. Captain Yirgu, set up camp. We’re not going any further today.”
Shioni joined the General as he prodded his mount into a trot along the lake shore. A dark scowl made his face even more forbidding than usual. Delays never improved the General’s patience. Annakiya was already up ahead, surveying something Shioni was beginning to appreciate too. There must have been a ravine here, but it had somehow become blocked up and flooded, creating an impromptu lake just alongside the much deeper, more dramatic gorge of the Takazze River. A narrow bridge of rock separated the two. Annakiya stood near a fissure, perhaps fifteen or twenty paces wide, where the river must have run before. Now the muddy flow thundered through in a wide sheet of water.
She swung quickly down the rope ladder and walked over to Annakiya. “I brought Shifta.”
“We need to shift the blockage.” The Princess pointed. “If you look over the edge, you’ll see there are whole trees down there, Shioni. It’s a mess. We could sit here and wait for the water to go down, or travel what the scouts think would be seven days upriver to find the next available ford. But the best would be to find a way to move this blockage.”
“So the tributary became a lake?”
A warm breeze ruffled her hair as Shioni gazed out over the awesome river gorge. It reminded her of the cliff-top trail she had taken in the Simien Mountains to rescue the King’s horse, Thunder. Countless centuries of erosion had scoured the land. Great striations of rust-red sandstone vied with streaks of darker granite. The riverbed seemed impossibly far below. The far side was hazy with the heat of the day, but she could still make out the odd individual tree on the far slopes. Eagles were black dots down there, lazily riding the thermals.
Closer to her feet, she saw what the Princess had pointed out. The fissure was a jagged, deep cleft; in places, water still jetted through a tangle of rocks, branches, and roots, and tumbled down the slope into the faraway Takazze.
“General Getu thinks there must have been a landslide upstream,” Annakiya said. Her hand slipped unexpectedly into Shioni’s. “He thinks that’s where the trees and branches came from. Once a few became stuck, others piled up. Rocks carried along by the flow became stuck as well. You can see how deep the river should be. It’s risen at least thirty or forty paces above normal.”
“We can’t swim or raft the lake, can we, Anni?”
“Not unless we find suitable wood nearby. The last forest was a day back down the trail. And you don’t really want to swim this.”
“Why not?”
“He’s why.”
Shioni’s eyes grew round. “Where did that crocodile come from?”
“Maybe a lake upstream; washed down by the flood. We’ve only seen one … so far.”
The crocodile cruised along not far from the shore. Beady dark eyes surveyed the shoreline, the long body and tail curving through the water behind it. How big …? Its jaw gaped open to snap up a dead tilapia fish. More than big enough, Shioni decided, to have a warrior for breakfast. “Fine. Tell me what to do.”
“Two things, Shioni,” said General Getu, so close to her ear that she jumped. “Levers from the top, and ropes from lower down. We’ll try both.”
“But I’m not strong enough–oh. Sorry, Shifta, I forgot about you.”
“Nice blush,” said Annakiya. “I think the elephant’s just a little stronger, wouldn’t you say, Shioni?”
“Maybe I can just tell the crocodile to leave?” she replied crossly.
“That could work,” said Getu. “But it would still take too many days, Shioni. Most of these men can’t swim. We’d need rafts. Fetching wood, constructing rafts … delays, delays. My sense is that if we can shift enough of this blockage, the water pressure might just blow it out. We’d cross tomorrow.”
Shioni could tell by the edge in his voice that the General would not tolerate much more discussion.
“Come on, Shifta,” she said. “Let’s get started.”
Chapter 9: Crossing Rivers
General Getu could WHISTLE up a storm when he wanted to, and stormy was definitely the mood of the afternoon. A flurry of orders had the Sheban Elites hopping about like a plague of frogs. Patrols to secure the area. Hunters sent
off at a run. Camp to be made. Engineers to examine the blockage. Warriors to test the water depth with their spears before Shifta approached the barrier. More warriors to chop down the nearest available trees to turn them into poles. Another team set to figuring out if they could get a man over the edge, beneath the waterfall, to tie ropes to parts of the blockage and have the elephant haul them out.
Shioni patted Shifta’s head. “Right, Shifta. Heave!”
Shifta promptly snapped the large branch the warriors had positioned behind a sizeable boulder.
“Pathetic scrap of wood,” snorted the elephant, tossing it to one side with his trunk. “Get me closer, and I can shift that boulder on my own. Tell them those ropes won’t work. Maybe triple the thickness.”
“General,” Shioni called down, “Shifta says to triple the ropes if they’re going to tie them to something.”
Getu scowled. “Thinks he’s that strong, does he? Good. Warriors! Get me more rope.”
Shifta shuffled forward along the narrow rock-bridge, perilously close to the edge. Shioni, seated atop his neck more than eleven feet off the ground, found herself clinging on for dear life. “Easy, Shifta. Take it slow. Shouldn’t we take the howdah off first?”
“Good idea,” he nodded, and began to swing about.
“Shifta! Oh–how do you balance like that?”
“When you’re my size,” he replied with a chuckle, “you learn to balance your bulk.”
“May I remind you I’m allergic to flying elephants?”
“Except when they save your life.”
Dusky or Chief must have told him. As Shioni took a trunk-ride down to the ground, she projected her gratefulness to him. “Except then, Shifta.”
With the help of several warriors, Shioni had the howdah lowered to the ground. But at Shifta’s suggestion she kept the straps in place.