Nomvula

6 - An Enemy's Name

Nomvula knelt down by Lifa's hip and looked him over. His eyes were shut tight, breath hissing between clenched teeth — in and out, in and out, tight with pain.

Carefully, she worked his sarong up his leg. His blood was warm on her fingertips, but entirely the wrong colour.

"Don't squirm," she said, perhaps to both of them.

When the cloth cleared his knee, only decades of training kept her flinch to herself. However provoked, Ndoda had retaliated in kind. Jagged bone cut its way out the old man's calf, angled like a half-snapped twig.

A fracture shouldn't look like this, not even a bad one.

The flesh was the colour of air-dried beef, the blood as thick as honey. It was far too soon for fever or infection, but already the muscle above his knee was swelling, and green where the sunlight touched it.

She looked up at Dumani, who stared down with his spear nestled in his folded arms. His back was to the onlookers in the yard; only she could see his disapproving glare.

"And here I was wondering why you wouldn't let me save my cousin, Queen of Suns. As if you'd tend to the man who insulted your son." He was too disciplined to smile; the amusement lay deep in his eyes. "Poison is the ink of diplomacy, after all."

Only Asanda running up the hill kept Nomvula from acting on an impulse older than she was.

Her daughter knelt at Lifa's other side and unrolled a leather-bound kit. She had bound up her locks in a crown that kept them out of the way and coated her hands in fine white powder. Swift fingers laid out glass vials, steel tools, and pouches of bright herbs.

Asanda inspected two polished disks of copper and silver with practiced speed, and skimmed a tablet with a dozen glyphs. She pulled a jade pin out of nowhere, and when she held it up, it reflected no sunlight. Only then did her focus turn to Lifa's leg.

Her fingers stilled. "Tree-sweller."

Nomvula caught Dumani's frown out of the corner of her eye.

"Ma, put your hands up. Quickly."

Asanda hadn't been born with a commanding tone, but she was a quick learner with most tools. Nomvula held up her hands as her daughter smeared a dark paste up to her elbows.

"Make sure you work it underneath and around your nails."

Nomvula did so with trembling hands. "What do we need to do?"

"The poison's like a thickener – zembe worms use it to split trees with their own sap," Asanda said, opening one of the pouches. "If it spreads, he'll peel open like pigskin."

"Asanda. What do we need to do."

Her daughter traced the flat side of a bonesaw. "Three options... hmm, one and a half."

Bakhonto. "What's the surest bet?"

"Amputation."

Nomvula felt her jaw clench. "And the half chance?"

"It would endanger both of you."

We're already there. "Go on," Nomvula said calmly.

"I'd have to cut open his thigh and carve a siphon rune into the bone."

"Does it have to be the bone?"

Asanda shook her head, moved one hand to the disks, the other to the jade pin. "Ma, I can't explain basic rune law to you right now. But the bone buys us time, maybe."

"Fine. What do you need from me?"

"An anaesthetic won't take hold before the poison." Asanda flicked the pin. It pinged with a delicate note that was closer to metal than stone. "You'll need to open yourself up, draw his ancestors near, and beg them for a dreamwalk to hide the pain."

Nomvula's shuddered. And beg my enemy's ancestors to spare me while they spare him...

She glared up at Dumani from the shadow he cast over them all. "Your forebears were great and terrible people in their time. Is there a message you'd like me to deliver?"

He smiled the way pleasant men don't. "Why bother? I speak to them more than you do."