Nomvula

37 - The Soul of Soils

The tea touched her dead lips and brought her back to life.

Dying was not the worst pain. Nomvula had died once before, or come close enough to call it death. She had been five, crawling with her belly against the hard-baked earth of the Sunland low fields, a lone acacia tree shading a nest of two heart-sized eggs.

The Gathering Game was for the brave, the patient, and the cunning alone. No child who feared an elder's switch never even thought to play it. Nomvula was unbeaten in five attempts, and under that tree lay her sixth secret victory, which only her two accompanying friends would ever know of. The yolk would go well with the salt in the pouch sown onto the inside of her hide skirt. She would make the finest beads from the shell, and this time, she would leave them unpainted so none who played the game could doubt her prowess. The whole village would know.

As a chief's daughter, her lashings would be doubled by law. It wouldn't matter. Her father would use a hard hide strap so that the beating wouldn't cut her, but it would bruise. It would be worth it. Tata would secretly be proud of her, and prouder that the village knew that his daughter showed the signs of a General who would one day be swift and wicked-witted on the battlefield.

This was a game that punished the hesitant, the slow, or the day-dreamers, as did the ostrich matriarch that eventually found her.

Birds were not meant to make the earth thunder when they ran. It was a cruel nature spirit that had fashioned the ostrich with wings too small to fly but large enough to drive gusts of sand into the eyes. Nomvula had been stunned by that alone. At five years old, the beat of those wings had been enough to knock her off balance as she sprinted away, but even without sand burning her left eye, the ostrich was a terror in a sprint. It caught up to her in three long strides and brought her down. A hen scratched and a cock scored, but an ostrich tore. A talon had ripped a line of fire over her kidneys, hooked into the bone of her hip and slammed her onto the earth with the strength of something that weighed two of her. It ignored the stones her friends threw at it as it hammered her brow and nose and lips with a stone-hard beak. A second talon found the inside of her thigh before a lucky pebble struck its eye and sent it fluttering backwards in a storm of dust.

As her friends distracted the bird and did their best to scare it away while moving away from the nest, Nomvula had looked down at the blood lathering her dust-covered thigh, the ragged skin on either side of a bright red tear. She had taken bruises before, cracked bones, rattled her skull until she collapsed, but barring a few scrapes to knees and elbows, it was the first time she had truly bled.

The blood poured out of her thigh as if she were bleeding for two grown men. It turned the hot earth dark and sticky and made her head light as if the weight were draining out of it. She stared but did not cry out. Stunned and unable to staunch the blood flow with even two hands, she eventually flopped onto her back and stared up at the Sun God. He heated her skin and burned her sweat until she fell asleep.

She must have slept for less than twenty heartbeats, because when her eyes opened again, her two friends were stuck in the highest branches of the acacia tree, with the matriarch standing at its bare, her long neck craned back.

Without ever commanding her body to do so, Nomvula had stood, fresh blood slowly trickling down the sticky mess over her knee and calf. If she ran or simply walked to the ostrich, to this day she did not recall. The hands that wrapped around its neck were not her own. When it tried to defend itself, its beak struck the chin of a different girl, one who had no fear, no hesitation, no sense of pain. It struck the chin of someone who knew pain enough for seven lifetimes, the ear of war chiefs who had died with spears in their shattered ribs, the scalp of chieftesses who burned the land up when they bled. A beak strike on her cheek opened a new cut. A wringing of her hands settled the matter.

In the end, she had been spared a lashing and the egg yolk had been used in a poultice for her thigh. Her father had greater concerns than punishing children for a dangerous game, and greater matters to explain to his only child. That night, she learned of Old Ones she did not know she had. She learned the secret of the daily chalk baths her mother insisted on. She learned of the Sunspear, and questioned why its spirit had taken her ten years before anyone else in history. No answer came. The next day, she made her beads from the ostrich shells, and gave three of every five beads to the friends she owed her life to: Ndoda, son of Mveli, and Asanda, daughter of Qaqamba.

Of the beads she kept, she spent that day painting them white with the smelly white unguent her mother put in her bath water daily. As her soul fitted itself again into its natural flesh, Nomvula opened her eyes against the brightness of runelights and groggily reached for the beads around her neck before she realised her hands were bound with black iron.

Her daughter was standing over her, an empty tin cup in her hand, looking down at her with a naked disgust that made the scar across her lower back tingle. The skin over Asanda's left cheekbone was caked in hardened unguent; her eyes had turned from honey to yellow bile.

Asanda's scalp was shorn, and the whole room reeked of burning hair.

"Never again," she said, before walking away and disappearing up the ladder to her garden.