The Sword & Sorcery Anthology

by David G. Hartwell

  It was then that she heard four sharp, clear musical notes sound behind her.

  As one, Dossouye and Gbo spun to confront the latest intruder. A lone man stood near the bodies of Mahadu and his horse. But this one did not look like a daju. Indeed, never before had Dossouye encountered anyone quite like him. He was a composition in brown: skin the rich hue of tobacco; trousers and open robe a lighter, almost russet shade; eyes the deep color of fresh-turned loam. His hair was plaited into numerous braids of shoulder length, each one sectioned with beads strung in colorful patterns. Beneath the braids, his oval face appeared open, friendly, dominated by warm eyes and a quick, sincere smile. A black mustache grew on his upper lip; wisps of beard clung to his chin and cheeks. His was a young face; he could not have been much older than Dossouye’s twenty rains. He was as lean in build as Dossouye, though not quite as tall.

  In his hand, the stranger bore the instrument that had sounded the four notes. It was a kalimba, a hollow wooden soundbox fitted with eight keys that resonated against a raised metal rim. Held in both hands, the small instrument’s music was made by the flicking of the player’s thumbs across the keys.

  No weapons were evident to Dossouye’s practiced gaze. More than one blade, however, could lie hidden in the folds of the stranger’s robe. As if divining that thought, the stranger smiled gently.

  “I did not mean to alarm you, ahosi,” he said in a smooth, soft voice. His Abomean was heavily accented, but his speech was like music.

  “I heard the sounds of fighting as I passed by,” he continued. His thumb flicked one of the middle keys of the kalimba. A deep note arrowed across the riverbank—blood, death.

  Gbo bellowed and shook his blood-washed horns. Dossouye’s hand tightened on the hilt of her carmined sword.

  “Now I see the battle is over. And you certainly have nothing to fear from me.”

  He touched another key. A high, lilting note floated skyward like a bird—peace, joy. Gbo lowed softly as a steer in a pasture. Dossouye smiled and lowered her blade. Rains had passed since she had last known the serenity embodied in that single note.

  But she had been deceived before.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “I am Gimmile, a bela—a song-teller,” he replied, still smiling. “You can put down your sword and get dressed, you know. I will not harm you. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could. One Abomean ahosi, it seems, is worth at least two daju—and I am certainly no daju.”

  Dossouye felt his eyes appraising her unclad form. She knew she was bony, awkward...but that was not what Gimmile saw. He had watched her move, lithe and deadly as a great cat. He noted the strong planes of her face, the troubled depths of her eyes.

  Dossouye did not trust Gimmile. Still, he had spoken truth when he said he could not harm her. Not while she had a sword in her hand and Gbo at her side.

  “Watch him,” she told the war-bull.

  As Dossouye walked to her pile of armor, Gbo confronted the bela. Gimmile did not flinch at the size and ferocity of Dossouye’s mount. Instead, he reached out and touched the snout of the war-bull.

  Seeing the bela’s danger, Dossouye opened her mouth to shout the command that would spare Gimmile from the goring he unwittingly courted. But Gbo did nothing more than snort softly and allow Gimmile to stroke him.

  Never in Dossouye’s memory had a war-bull commanded to guard allowed itself to be touched by a stranger. She closed her mouth and began to don her armor.

  “Were you about to cross the Kambi when the daju attacked, ahosi?” Gimmile asked, his hands pulling gently at Gbo’s ears.

  “The name is Dossouye. And the answer is ‘Yes.’”

  “Well, Dossouye, it seems I owe you a debt. I think those daju might have been a danger to me had you not come along.”

  “Why a danger?” Dossouye asked, looking sharply at him while she laced her leather cuirass.

  “A bela’s songs can be...valuable,” Gimmile replied enigmatically. “Indirectly, you may have saved my life. My dwelling is not far from here. I would like to share my songs with you. I also have food. I—I have been alone for a long time.”

  He plucked another key on his kalimba...a haunting, lonely sound. And Dossouye knew then that her feeling echoed Gimmile’s. Her avoidance of human contact since she had left Abomey had worn a cavity of loneliness deep within her. Her soul was silent, empty.

  She looked at the bela; watched Gbo nuzzle his palm. Gbo trusted Gimmile. But suspicion still prowled restlessly in Dossouye’s mind. Why was Gimmile alone? Would not a song-teller need an audience in the same way a soldier needed battle? And what could Gimmile possess that would be of value to thieves? Surely not his songs or his kalimba, she told herself.

  Suddenly Dossouye wanted very badly to hear Gimmile’s songs, to talk with him, to touch him. Weeks had passed since she last met a person who was not a direct threat to her life. Her suspicions persisted. But she decided to pay them no heed.

  “I will come with you,” she decided. “But not for long.”

  Gimmile removed his hand from Gbo’s muzzle and played a joyous chorus on the kalimba. He sang while Dossouye cinched the saddle about the massive girth of the war-bull. She did not understand the Mossi words of the song, but the sound of his voice soothed her as she cleaned daju blood from her sword and Gbo’s horns.

  Then she mounted her war-bull. Looking down at Gimmile, who had stopped singing, Dossouye experienced a short-lived urge to dig her heels into Gbo’s flanks and rush across the river....

  Gimmile lifted his hand, waiting for Dossouye to help him onto the war-bull’s back. There was tranquility in his eyes and a promise of solace in his smile. Taking his hand, Dossouye pulled him upward. He settled in front of her. So lean were the two of them that there was room in the saddle for both. His touch, the pressure of his back against her breast, the way he fit in the circle of her arms as she held Gbo’s reins—the bela’s presence was filling an emptiness of which Dossouye had forced herself to remain unaware, until now.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  “Along the bank toward the setting of the sun,” Gimmile directed.

  For all the emotions resurging within her, Dossouye remained aware that the bela had indicated a direction opposite the one the fleeing daju had taken. Yet as she urged Gbo onward, her suspicions waned. And the memory of the flashing thing the beardless daju had dropped faded like morning mist from her mind.

  A single pinnacle of stone rose high and incongruous above the treetops. It was as though the crag had been snatched by a playful god from the rocky wastes of Axum and randomly deposited in the midst of the Mossi rain forest. Creepers and lianas festooned the granite-gray peak with traceries of green.

  This was Gimmile’s dwelling.

  Dossouye sat in a cloth-padded stone chair in a chamber that had been hollowed from the center of the pinnacle. Its furnishings were cut from stone. Intricately woven hangings relieved the grayness of the walls. Earlier, Dossouye had marveled at the halls and stairwells honeycombing the rock.

  As she finished the meal of boiled plantains Gimmile had prepared, Dossouye recalled stories she had heard concerning the cliff-cities of the Dogon. But Dogon was desert country; in a land of trees like Mossi, a spur of stone such as Gimmile’s tower was anomalous.

  Little speech had passed during the meal. Gimmile seemed to communicate best with his kalimba. The melodies that wafted from the eight keys had allayed her misgivings, which had been aroused again when the bela had insisted Gbo be penned in a stone corral at the foot of the pinnacle.

  “You wouldn’t want him to wander away,” Gimmile had warned.

  Dossouye knew it would take an elephant to dislodge Gbo once she commanded him to remain in one place. But Gimmile had sung his soothing songs and smiled his open smile, and Dossouye led Gbo into the enclosure and watched while Gimmile, displaying a wiry strength not unlike her own, wrestled the stone corral bar into place.

  He played and smiled while lea
ding Dossouye up the twisting stairwells through which thin streams of light poured from small ventilation holes. He sang to her as he boiled the plantains he had obtained from a storage pot. When she ate, he plucked the kalimba.

  Gimmile ate nothing. Dossouye had meant to question him about that; but she did not, for she was happy and at peace.

  Yet...she was still an ahosi. When Gimmile took away the wooden bowl from which she had eaten, Dossouye posed an abrupt question:

  “Gimmile, how is it that you, a singer of songs, live in a fortress a king might envy?” Gimmile’s smile faded. For the first time, Dossouye saw pain in his eyes. Contrition stabbed at her, but she could not take back her question.

  “I am sorry,” she stammered. “You offer me food and shelter, and I ask questions that are none of my concern.”

  “No,” the bela said, waving aside her apology. “You have a right to ask; you have a right to know.”

  “Know what?”

  Gimmile sat down near her feet and looked up at her with the eyes of a child. But the story he told was no child’s tale.

  As a young bela, new to his craft, Gimmile had come to the court of Konondo, king of Dedougou, a Mossi city-state. On a whim, the king had allowed the youthful bela to perform for him. So great was Gimmile’s talent with voice and kalimba that the envy of Bankassi, regular bela to the court, was aroused. Bankassi whispered poison into the ear of the king, and Konondo read insult and disrespect into the words of Gimmile’s songs, though in fact there was none. When Gimmile asked the king for a kwabo, the small gift customarily presented to belas by monarchs, Konondo roared:

  “You mock me, then dare to ask for a kwabo? I’ll give you a kwabo! Guards! Take this jackal, give him fifty lashes, and remove him from Dedougou!”

  Struggling wildly, Gimmile was dragged from the throne room. Bankassi gloated, his position at Konondo’s court still secure.

  Another man might have died from Konondo’s cruel punishment. But hatred burned deep in Gimmile. Hatred kept him alive while the blood from his lacerated back speckled his stumbling trail away from Dedougou. Hatred carried him deep into a forbidden grove in the Mossi forest, to the hidden shrine of Legba....

  (Dossouye’s eyes widened at the mention of the accursed name of Legba, the god of apostates and defilers. His worship, his very name, had long ago been outlawed in the kingdoms bordering the Gulf of Otongi. At the sound of Legba’s name, Dossouye drew away from Gimmile.)

  In a single bitter, blasphemous night, Legba had granted Gimmile’s entreaty. Baraka, a mystic power from the god’s own hand, settled in Gimmile’s kalimba...and invaded Gimmile’s soul. Wounds miraculously healed, mind laden with vengeance, Gimmile had emerged from the shrine of evil. He was more than a bela now. He was a bearer of Baraka, a man to be feared.

  On a moonless night, Gimmile stood outside the walls of Dedougou. Harsh notes resounded from his kalimba. And he sang...

  The king of Dedougou is bald as an egg.

  His belly sags like an elephant’s,

  His teeth are as few as a guinea fowl’s,

  And his bela has no voice....

  In the court of Konondo, the people cried out in horror when every strand of the king’s hair fell from his head. Konondo shrieked in pain and fear as his teeth dropped from his mouth like nuts shaken from a tree. The pain became agony when his belly distended, ripping through the cloth of his regal robes. Only the bela Bankassi’s voice failed to echo the terror and dismay that swiftly became rampant in Dedougou. Tortured, inhuman mewlings issued from Bankassi’s throat, nothing more.

  Gimmile had his vengeance. Soon, however, the bela learned he had not been blessed by Legba’s gift of Baraka. For Legba’s gifts were always accompanied by a price, and Legba’s price was always a curse.

  Gimmile could still sing about the great deeds of warriors of the past, or about gods and goddesses and the creation of the world, or about the secret speech of animals. But the curse that accompanied Gimmile’s Baraka was this: The songs he sang about the living, including himself, came true!

  “And it is a curse, Dossouye,” Gimmile said, his tale done, his fingers resting idly on the kalimba’s keys.

  “Word of what I could do spread throughout Mossi. People sought me out as vultures seek out a corpse. They wanted me to sing them rich, sing them beautiful, sing them brave or intelligent. I would not do that. I had wanted only to repay Konondo and Bankassi for what they had done to me. Still, the Baraka remained within me...unwanted, a curse. Men like the daju you killed surrounded me like locusts, trying to force me to sing them cities of gold. Instead, I sang myself away from them all.”

  “And you—sang this rock, where no such rock has a right to be?” Dossouye asked, her voice tight with apprehension.

  “Yes,” Gimmile said. “I sing, and Legba provides.”

  “Legba sent you this tower,” Dossouye said slowly, realization dawning as Gimmile rose to his feet. Gimmile nodded.

  “And Legba has also sent—”

  “You,” Gimmile confirmed. His smile remained warm and sincere; not at all sinister as he flicked the keys of his kalimba and began to sing....

  Dossouye’s hand curled around her swordhilt. She meant to smash the kalimba and silence its spell...but it was too late for that. Gimmile’s fingers flew rapidly across the keys. Dossouye’s fingers left her swordhilt. She unfastened the clasp of the belt that secured the weapon to her waist. With a soft thump, the scabbard struck the cloth-covered floor.

  Gimmile placed the kalimba on a nearby table and spoke to it in the same manner Dossouye spoke when issuing a command to Gbo. As he walked toward her, the instrument continued to play, even though Gimmile no longer touched it.

  Scant heed did Dossouye pay to this latest manifestation of Gimmile’s Baraka. Taking her hands, Gimmile raised the ahosi to her feet. She did not resist him. Gimmile sang his love to her while his fingers tugged at the laces of her cuirass.

  He sang a celebration to the luster of her onyx eyes. She stopped his questing hands and removed her armor for the second time that day. He shaped her slender body with sweet words that showed her the true beauty of her self; the beauty she had hidden from herself for fear others might convince her it was not really there.

  Gimmile’s garments fell from him like leaves from a windblown tree. Spare and rangy, his frame was a male twin of Dossouye’s. He sang her into an embrace.

  While Gimmile led her to a stone bed softened by piles of patterned cloth, the ahosi in Dossouye protested stridently but ineffectively. She had known love as an ahosi; but always with other women soldiers, never a man. To accept the seed of a man was to invite pregnancy, and a pregnant ahosi was a dead one. The ahosi were brides of the King of Abomey. The King never touched them, and death awaited any other man who did. Such constraints meant nothing now, as Gimmile continued to sing.

  Dossouye’s fingers toyed with the beads in Gimmile’s braids. Her mouth branded his chest and shoulders with hot, wet circles. Only when Gimmile drew her down to the bed did he pause in his singing. Then the song became theirs, not just his, and they sang it together. And when their mouths and bodies met, Gimmile had no further need for the insidious power of Legba’s Baraka. But the kalimba continued to play.

  Abruptly, uncomfortably, Dossouye awoke. A musty odor invaded her nostrils. Something sharp prodded her throat. Her eyelids jarred open.

  The light in Gimmile’s chamber was dim, Dossouye lay on her back, bare flesh abrading against a rough, stony surface. Her gaze wandered upward along a length of curved, shining steel—a sword! Her vision and her mind snapped into clear focus then, the lingering recall of the day and night before thrust aside as she gazed into the face of the bearded daju, the attacker whose life she had spared.

  “Where is...moso?” the daju demanded. “You have it...I know.”

  Dossouye did not know what he meant. She shifted her weight, reflexively moving away from the touch of the swordpoint at her throat. Something sharp dug at her left sh
oulderblade.

  Ignoring the daju she turned, slid her hand beneath her shoulder; and grasped a small, sharp-edged object. She raised herself on one elbow and intently examined the thing she held in her hand.

  It was a figurine cast in brass, no more than three inches high, depicting a robed bela playing a kalimba. Beaded braids of hair; open, smiling face...every detail had been captured perfectly by the unknown craftsman. The joy she had experienced the night before and the fear she was beginning to feel now were both secondary to the sudden pang of sadness she experienced when she recognized the tiny brass face as Gimmile’s.

  “That is...moso!” the daju shouted excitedly. Eagerly he reached for the figurine. Ignoring the daju’s sword, Dossouye pulled the moso away from the thief’s grasp. Her eyes swiftly scanned the chamber. With a tremor of horror, she realized she was lying on a bare stone floor next to a broken ruin of a bed.

  “Hah!” spat the daju. “You know how...to bring moso to life. Legba made...Gimmile into moso to pay for Baraka. But moso can...come to life...and sing wishes true. Mahadu and I...found moso near here. Could not...bring to life. We were taking moso...to Baraka-man...when we saw you. Now...you tell...how to bring moso to life. Tell...and might...let you live.”

  Dossouye stared up at the daju. Murder and greed warred on his vulpine face. His swordpoint hovered close to her throat. And she had not the slightest notion how Gimmile could be made to live.

  With blurring speed, she hurled the moso past the broken bed. The figurine bounced once off jagged stone, then disappeared. With a strangled curse, the daju stared wildly after the vanished prize, momentarily forgetting his captive. Dossouye struck aside the daju’s swordarm and drove her heel into one of his knees. Yelping in pain, the daju stumbled. His sword dropped from his hand. Dossouye scrambled to her feet.

  Twisting past the daju, Dossouye dove for his fallen sword. And a galaxy of crimson stars exploded before her eyes when the booted foot of the daju collided with the side of her head.

  Dossouye fell heavily, rolled, and lay defenseless on her back, waves of sick pain buffeting her inside her skull. Recovering his blade, the daju limped toward her, his face contorted with hate.