Imaro: Book I

by Charles R. Saunders

  The sound that issued from Imaro’s throat then was like nothing anyone had heard before, in or out of the wilderness. Those who were near him – friend and foe alike – drew back at the sight of the rage and torment on his face and the lethal glare in his eyes. The respite lasted only for a short time. Then the fighting resumed, with renewed ferocity.

  During his moment of distraction, Imaro lost his chance to salvage a victory. For the soldiers’ commanders had seen the same opportunity he had observed, and they were quick to take advantage of it.

  Instead of fighting the surviving tuyabene, the soldiers prodded and redirected them toward the haramia. The tactic succeeded. Between the tuyabene and their numerical advantage, the soldiers were beginning to prevail against the bandits.

  Imaro continued to take his own deadly toll of attackers. But other haramia were falling. Kongolo went down, as did the last two Umtala. Even haramia who fought near Imaro were dying. Ngodire was still alive, however, and still fighting.

  In the distance, Bomunu and Chimba’s horses had become mere dots, headed toward the Kakassa River – toward the passage Chimba had promised to reveal to the haramia.

  Never before had Imaro retreated from a battle against man, beast or demon. Fleeing a fight was not the way of the Ilyassai, nor would it be the way of the haramia under Imaro’s leadership. But he had led them to a defeat that was growing more imminent by the moment. And Bomunu had stolen Tanisha…

  “To me!” Imaro commanded. “To me!”

  The haramia who were still standing fought their way to their leader. Some of them did not make it to his side. Those who did gazed at him with battle-weary eyes. Much of the Ilyassai’s leather armor had been hacked away, and not all of the blood that spattered his limbs belonged to his foes.

  The haramia feared him, and in truth some of them were beginning to hate him. Yet their hopes of surviving what was becoming a massacre rested solely on him.

  “Get in two lines and follow me,” Imaro said.

  The remaining haramia, who numbered only a few score, obeyed Imaro’s command. Ngodire stood at the vanguard, at Imaro’s side. A moment later, the warrior charged forward, his sword slashing a bloody path through the tangled ranks of soldiers and tuyabene. Like the spear it resembled, the haramias’ formation plunged through the enemy, and suddenly, there was open space in front of them.

  “Keep moving!” Imaro shouted.

  Again, the haramia obeyed. Some of them had fallen, but all of them would have died had Imaro not led them through their foes. They ran. The few of them who were mounted outdistanced the others. All the survivors headed in the same direction the traitor Chimba and the woman-stealer Bomunu had taken.

  Under other circumstances, the soldiers would have pursued the fleeing, defeated enemy. However, with the haramia gone, the remaining tuyabene focused their fury solely on the Zanjians and Azanians, as Imaro had anticipated. By the time the soldiers managed to kill all the river-demons, the haramia were gone from sight.

  “Do we go after them now?” Mwenye Mkojo asked, as he and Chuwumba surveyed the corpse-strewn field of their costly triumph.

  “No,” Chuwumba said. “It’s not worth the loss of one more man from either of our armies.”

  The Zanjian commander shook his head as he watched the clouds of flies that were already descending on the dead.

  “The haramia are finished,” he said. “N’tu-nje is finished. After what happened here today, his own followers will probably kill him.”

  “What about N’tu-nje’s head?” Mkojo asked. “Both our monarchs demanded it.”

  Chuwumba gestured toward the haramia corpses.

  “Any one of them will do,” he said.

  Mkojo nodded agreement. The two commanders parted then, realizing that their alliance of convenience had effectively ended, and that the next time they saw each other, it would be on a different battlefield, against each other. Separately, they supervised the burial of their armies’ dead, leaving the haramia and the tuyabene for the scavengers, which would feast for days and leave an army of unmourned spirits behind.

  When a pair of Azanian soldiers lifted Angulu’s body to drop it into a common grave, the midnight-black cloak he wore caught on one of the men’s weapons, and the cloth ripped apart. At the sight of what the rip revealed, the soldiers turned their heads away in disgust and quickly threw the corpse in with the others.

  The wa-nyanume’s body had… altered. Protruding pustules had formed on his skin, and the proportions of his limbs had changed in a way that repelled the soldiers, hardened though they were to the horrific sights of war.

  Not recognizing what they saw, the soldiers assumed the protuberances were the marks of some unfamiliar disease. Saying nothing to anyone else, they piled other bodies on top of the Angulu’s.

  Had Imaro been there to see the deformities, he would have recognized them immediately. For he had seen similar protuberances, fully formed, on the misshapen body of Chitendu, in the Place of Stones…

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  As Jua set, the remnants of the bandit army rested. Some of the haramia leaned on their weapons. Others, too exhausted to stand, lay on the ground. Little more than two-score of the haramia had survived the battle against the soldiers and the tuyabene. All the survivors bore wounds, some serious enough to be fatal if left untreated.

  The country to which they had fled was rugged, with an abundance of thornbushes and huge rocks that seemed to grow out of the ground. As always, the wildlife remained wary of the two-legs and their steel.

  Thus far, no one had detected any signs of pursuit. Some of the bandits thought the soldiers would be satisfied with the massive defeat they had inflicted. Others believed they would be hunted down until the last of them was dead. Still others preferred not to think at all about what might happen the next day, and the day after that. They were alive. That was enough for them.

  It was not enough for Imaro.

  “We will stay here for the night,” he said. “In the morning, we will follow the trail of Bomunu and Chimba – and Tanisha.”

  “‘We?’”

  The speaker was Ngodire. Bitterness laced the Ndashikuya’s tone as he looked at Imaro in a way no haramia had since the day the warrior had withstood the initiation – and a way Ngodire had never looked at him before.

  “There is no more ‘we’ among us, Imaro,” Ngodire continued. “The ‘we’ is dead, as are all the others the hyenas are eating now.”

  “They will eat us, too, if we continue to follow you,” said Mtobo, the young bandit who had captured Kulutu, unknowingly sealing the doom of the Umtala and all the others who had accompanied him.

  Imaro could only stare at the two men, not believing what he was hearing.

  “You were going to lead us to a new kingdom, N’tu-nje,” said Mtobo. “And so you did – to a kingdom of the dead.”

  The other haramias nodded in agreement. Even the ones who had been too fatigued to stand a moment ago were now on their feet, eying Imaro warily. Their hands touched the hilts of their swords.

  “Do you not want vengeance against Chimba and Bomunu?” Imaro asked. “Do you not want to help me to get Tanisha back?”

  “If you get your woman back, that is good for you,” said Ngodire. “And if you are able to kill Chimba and Bomunu, that is what those jackals deserve. But you will have to do those things by yourself.”

  Ngodire kept his hand on his sword-hilt, for the expression on the Ilyassai’s face was frightening to behold. But he spoke on, regardless of what the words were costing him, for he had not lost his respect for the Ilyassai as a man and a warrior – only as a leader.

  “We will not follow you anymore, Imaro,” he said. “And you will not follow us, either. It’s better that we all go our separate ways. When the soldiers realize they will have to hunt us one-by-one, maybe they’ll leave us all alone.”

  Again, the others agreed. Now, all of them had their weapons drawn. So did Imaro.

  “We d
on’t want to kill you, Imaro,” said Ngodire. “We owe you our lives. But you owe too many deaths. Death follows you.”

  Imaro stared hard at the haramia. But he was not seeing them. He was seeing the Ilyassai. The rancor in the eyes of some of the haramia was reminiscent of the way his mother’s people had looked at him during all the time he had been among them, until the death of Chitendu in the Place of Stones.

  And Imaro’s own emotions were travelling along a familiar path, as well. He shoved his sword back into its sheath.

  “Go your way, then,” he said, his tone as bleak as the landscape that surrounded him.

  The bandits did not attempt to conceal their relief. With their advantage in numbers, they could have overcome Imaro sooner or later. But many of them would have died before he went down. It was better to end it this way, with no more deaths among them.

  Without further words, the haramia turned and left Imaro behind – just as he had left the Ilyassai. He had not looked back at the Ilyassai. Only one haramia looked back at him – Ngodire. Long after they had dwindled into the distance, Imaro stared in the direction they had gone.

  My people, he thought.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Imaro was alone.

  Without the Ilyassai …

  Without the Mtumwe …

  Without the haramia …

  Without Tanisha …

  The last time Imaro had been so isolated was immediately after he had left the Ilyassai, when he had wandered through unknown country before his encounter with the river people. His solitude then had been self-imposed. Now, he had been cast out by outcasts.

  As the warrior had expected, the trail of the fugitives led him close to the banks of the Kakassa River. Chimba was indeed leading Bomunu and the captive Tanisha to the promised passage. The roar of the river drummed in Imaro’s ears. His first sight of it had caused him to gape in amazement.

  Unlike the Damba Bolong, or the nameless stream from with the tuyabene had come, the Kakassa flowed swiftly, like a predator pursuing its quarry. Also unlike the other rivers, the Kakassa was studded with rocks – not round, smooth stones that could be used as a pathway across its breadth, but sharp, jagged rocks like the ridges along the back of a crocodile. It was the rocks, more than the current, that made the Kakassa impassable.

  Imaro sensed mchawi as he came closer to the river. But the presence of the sorcery was old, like a trail washed to near-invisibility by the passage of many rains. It was as though some sinister force had exerted an unnatural change in the river a long time ago.

  Scrub bush was the only vegetation that grew on the Kakassa’s banks. The tracks of the horses Bomunu and Chimba rode were clearly visible. Their mounts had given them a long lead over Imaro. He wished he could run as fast as the Kakassa flowed. He knew that he would eventually find the way across the river, wherever the hoof marks finally ended.

  Toward the middle of the day, Imaro saw the horses. They were riderless, and as they drew closer, Imaro could see that their gear had been stripped away. The horses were running, their eyes rolling with fear, for a pair of lionesses were pursuing them across the scrubland. Fast as the horses ran, the great, golden cats ran faster.

  The lionesses brought one of the horses down, and its dying shriek echoed above the roar of the Kakassa. Having taken their prey, the lionesses allowed the other horse to escape.

  As he watched the great cats devour the horse, Imaro knew he could not be far from the passage now. Bomunu and Chimba would not have abandoned their mounts very long ago. If they had, the beasts of the wilderness would have killed them before now.

  The warrior picked up his pace, loping as he once had through the grass of the Tamburure. He focused on following the tracks and finding the passage. Resolutely, he banished all thoughts of the haramia from his mind. Consumed as he was by the need to rescue Tanisha and slay her abductors, that was not a difficult task.

  By the middle of the afternoon, he found the place where the hoof marks ended. He saw the horses’ saddles and bridles, which had been carelessly cast aside. And he saw – and heard – a huge cataract that led straight downward.

  Gingerly, Imaro peered over the precipice. The roaring waterfall ended far below, sending up thick clouds of mist that were unlike the unnatural vapor Angulu had conjured. Beyond the mist, he could see that the Kakassa, and its rocks, extended to the distant horizon.

  He also saw the passage… a narrow ledge near the top of the precipice, which led behind the waterfall.

  Imaro wondered how Bomunu and Chimba could have carried an unconscious Tanisha along such a narrow pathway.

  And if she was conscious…

  He looked down again. Imaro was no climber; he was a man of the flat savanna. He would have preferred wrestling with Isikukumadevu to clambering down to the ledge, then following it under the waterfall. Still, if city-bred men like Chimba and Bomunu could do it, so could he.

  Breathing deeply, Imaro levered his way over the edge of the cliff, and clung to whatever hand-and footholds he could find. He did not dare to look down again, not even when his feet touched the ledge.

  Then he inched carefully along the ledge until he reached the waterfall. Its roar deafened him; his kufahuma sense was useless. The relentless cascade nearly knocked him from the ledge before he managed to pull himself to safety behind its flow.

  The ledge widened behind the falls. But the rock was slippery, and the path far from smooth. As he made his way across, Imaro’s existence was reduced to water, rocks, and the loudest noise he had ever endured. At the point when he thought the passage would never end, it sloped upward. A few moments later, he was free from the falls.

  He felt as though he had just stepped out of the jaws of a gigantic, growling beast. Not since his childhood had he felt so small and insignificant.

  Drenched as though he had been standing in a rainstorm, Imaro climbed to the other side of the Kakassa. The terrain there differed little from what he had left behind – except for a smudge of green on the horizon. A forest…

  Vultures were circling and landing nearby. With a sense of foreboding, Imaro approached the carrion birds. They scattered resentfully, loath to leave their feast. Not much remained of the corpse on which the vultures were feeding. But it was enough to allow Imaro to identify Chimba, and to see that the treacherous bandit’s throat had been cut.

  “You trusted the wrong man,” Imaro muttered.

  He read the signs of what had happened after Chimba’s death. Two sets of tracks led to the forest in the distance. One of the trails showed furrows in the dirt, as though the person who made it was being dragged unwillingly. At one point, it was clear that the person had fallen, only to be made to walk again.

  Imaro looked down at Chimba’s carcass one last time, as the vultures circled impatiently. Then he looked at the Kakassa, and the chasm that now separated him from his past.

  Everything he thought he had gained since he departed from the Place of Stones was gone now. As he began to follow the spoor of Bomunu and Tanisha, three purposes pushed his footsteps forward: to save Tanisha, to kill Bomunu – and to destroy the Naamans.

  The weapon was unsheathed…

  GLOSSARY

  The Tamburure

  Ajunge: The Spear-God; the highest deity in the Ilyassai pantheon.

  arem: The spear used by the Ilyassai for war and ritual lion hunts. Length – six to seven feet, half of which is edged iron.

  boma: A thornbush enclosure the Tamburure tribes erect to pen cattle and protect temporary encampments.

  Chui: The leopard.

  Fisi: The carrion-eating hyena.

  ilmonek: An Ilyassai youth who exhibits cowardice on his ritual lion-hunt. Literally, “un-man.” An Ilmonek is banished from his clan in a ritual called the Shaming.

  Ilyassai: A tribe of nomadic warriors and cattle-herders, dominant among many other such tribes that roam the Tamburure savanna.

  Itayok: A clan of the Ilyassai.

  Kifaru: The
rhinoceros.

  Kupigana: The god of the Turkhana tribe.

  Kitoko: The Ilyassai clan to which Imaro and his mother, Katisa, belong.

  kufahuma: The sensory attunement or rapport between the Ilyassai warrior and the environment of the Tamburure that sometime warns them of imminent danger.

  kutendea: A gift of succulent grass given by an Ilyassai herder to the cattle of a friend.

  mafundishu-ya-muran: A period of warrior-training lasting from the fifth year of life to the late adolescence of an Ilyassai male. During this period, the youths are isolated from the rest of their clan.

  manyatta: The basic Ilyassai dwelling, constructed from hides stretched across poles. To facilitate transport, the manyatta is collapsible.

  Matisho: The hunting-hyena of the Tamburure, a species distinct from the more common, carrion-eating Fisi.

  Mboa: The buffalo.

  Mbwa: The wild dog of the Tamburure.

  Mbweha: The jackal.

  mchawi: Malign magic, evil sorcery, witchcraft.

  Ngatun: The lion.

  ngombe: The cattle of the Ilyassai; a long-horned, powerfully built stock bred over many generations by the tribes of the Tamburure.

  n’tu-mchawi: A practitioner of sorcery among the Tamburure tribes.

  oibonok: The Ilyassai shaman, who interprets the will of the god Ajunge. Magic – of the benign variety, not mchawi – is an important adjunct to the role.

  ol-arem: A clan chieftain of the Ilyassai. Literally: “first spear.”

  olmaiyo: The ritual lion hunt that marks the final test of manhood for Ilyassai youth. Ngatun must be slain single-handed.