Nomvula

32 - The Thorns of the Spirit

Asanda spotted Athi patrolling the East Wing corridor and recoiled. He saw her a heartbeat later and waved with his hide shield, then he started jogging towards her. The sunlight bounced off the courtyard pond nearest the corridor and shone a fractal rainbow over the chords of sinewy muscle in his thigh and shoulder.

Her mother's spirit churned in distress, battering against its wall with vague tides of confusion and panic. Asanda leaned against the corridor wall to steady herself against the nausea pushing down towards her naval. Ma's spirit was twice as old and large as her own, with sharp edges that were already cutting a migraine into her skull. It took all of her decade-long practice in focus separation to keep the wall from cracking; when Athi came close enough for his familiar smell of well-tended leather, sweat, and clean hair to hit here, Asanda shut her eyes and swallowed the metal taste in her mouth.

"Princess?"

She heard notes in his voice she had never noticed before. Under the easy waves of a man content and secure in life, there was worry and a little hesitation. Ma's rigorous study of behaviour and expression was already bleeding into her own senses.

Asanda rubbed her eyes and forced herself upright, despite the fist closing around her naval and the cold fire crawling up her neck. "Athi. Hello."

He made the mistake of touching her shoulder and leaning down to look into her eyes. "Are you alright?"

Though he was taller, they were of an age. The touch wasn't overly familiar; Athi was the type of rare man born without the double-edged knife of subtext. He touched to still, not to suggest, he met a gaze to look, not to be seen. That and his utter lack of complaint about most things meant, at third-in-command, he had risen as high as his skill with shield-and-club and smiles would take him. It also made him one of three people on Third Hill whose company Asanda enjoyed without reservation. But today that touch sent lightning crackling through her shoulder and up to the invisible bruise in her left temple...

Oh.

Asanda's face went lax as a fresh wave of nausea hit here. She wrapped a hand around the rune-eye, glad that the heat of the day hid her blush. Her mother's spirit suddenly stilled, then shrunk into itself.

"What's wrong with you?" Athi asked.

Asanda gently pushed his hand away. It was one thing to see a parent as a hard-lined ruler, a bruised person, a demon... Such things anyone could see. It was another entirely to feel the foreign weight of another human spirit inside you, leaking its hidden knowledge, emotions, and instinctive desires into your own flesh. Would that she could push those away as easily.

Now that she knew what the problem was, it was a little easier to breathe. "Where is General Dumani?"

"He went down to the village." Athi drummed his club against his shield in a soft rhythm, the worry gone from his face now. "There are a couple of stick fight tournaments happening today. Said he was bored."

Asanda's first instinct was to relax now that the General was no longer in the manse, but Ma exploded in a burst of distrust and urgency.

"I need to see him," she said, rolling her left shoulder.

"I'll walk with you."

Asanda massaged the left side of her face as an annoyed sigh escaped her.

Athi misread it. His club stopped drumming. "I shouldn't presume."

It's not you. "I would like the company, but please walk downwind."

He took up his rhythm and his smile again. "The drinking yard's a mess of arguing old folk. We'll sneak out kraal-side." 

As they walked down the corridor together, Asanda caught Athi sniffing under his arm. He shrugged and continued playing the seamless, pleasantly simple rhythm that framed his life.

Asanda tucked the bound mess of her lock and the rune-eye into the collar of her house shift.

**

The kraal was utterly decimated. Twisted walls of thorn branches lay broken and trampled on the hard earth, with only the wooden poles that had once held them up still standing. The ground inside the kraal was rutted as if an elephant had danced through mud, and only old dark patches of blood – some in the thorns, some on the poles, the brightest on the face of a round stone in the middle of the space –  spoke of what had happened here. Ma's only cuts were tiny scratches across the back of her shoulders.

"That's what the elders are arguing about," Athi said as they walked around the broken walls. "No one knows what happened here – Naledi's kid only saw all this when he was bringing the cattle home last night."

Asanda tried to rub the lightning out of her left ear. "What do the elders think did it?"

"Everything from a mad cow with weeping udders to a silent, angry wind your mother's ancestors brought down on the thing." That beat of club on hide was the only sound in the shattered yard; a war drum in its infancy. "No one can agree on what caused it, but no one's arguing it means nothing short of chaos."

"And what do you think?"

Athi shrugged. "I think if everyone stopped yelling and helped out, they'd have the kraal fixed in time for the cows to come home tonight. You?"

Asanda touched the rune-eye through the silk of her shift. Two rivers of fear trickled down either side of her spine, one old and slow and deep, the other rapid and foaming against sharp rocks.

Ma, this is the last thing you need to see.

Athi chuckled. "If she saw this, I think she'd throw aside her peaceful ways and cut a bloody path to whoever was responsible."

Asanda pursed her lips, but Ma's silence was absolute.