one answered. Mpushu noticed that silence had once more claimed the village – or what was left of it. The Night Howlers were silently awaiting further instructions.
‘I asked you a question, young mortal dog!’
‘Marimba is my mother, Oh Nangai, and I have taken her to a place of safety. You, and even the Most Ultimate God will reach her only over my dead body!’
‘Nangai is not here to bandy words with immature mortals and he does not appreciate childish sentiments. Bring forth the female Marimba?’
‘The mighty god Nangai can go and relieve himself in a rat hole!’
‘Wretched mortal, you obey my command this instant, or I shall pass further instructions to my beasts that howl in the night.’
Kahawa knew the meaning of naked fear for the first time in his life. He knew that Nangai was serious and that gods, high or low, active or outcast, never make idle threats. They are not burdened with a conscience like human beings, nor are they loaded with emotion. A god does not know the meaning of love or loyalty; these are human weaknesses. Only the Goddess Ma suffers from these weaknesses and we have inherited ours from her.
‘You keep me waiting, miserable mortal. I give you ten more heartbeats!’
Mpushu began to weep. He tried to implore Nangai, but the god ignored him and addressed himself only to Kahawa. The Night Howlers looked appealingly at Nangai, waiting for the order to commence their delicious meal. Nangai ignored them just as he ignored Mpushu.
‘Well, mortal, your time is up.’
There was no reply from Kahawa. Through further moments of silence Kahawa’s hand closed firmly around the hilt of his bone dagger and Mpushu saw a gleam of unearthly light in the eyes of his young friend. Then very calmly Kahawa measured his words: ‘My answer is still No, Oh Nangai!’
The young prince Kahawa half-drew his bone dagger from its sheath. Into his eyes there came a look that Mpushu could not at first explain. It was the look that comes into the eyes of one who has just had a shattering inspiration, one who has suddenly found the answer to a problem that had been gnawing at the back of his mind with the persistence of a rat. Mpushu saw his friend direct a stare of unspeakable contempt at the god Nangai floating on his throne in empty air. Then the young Kahawa sneered right into the god’s face, sneered as one sneers at a human enemy whom one holds beneath contempt.
Suddenly the eyes of the god blazed with cold, murderous fury. He realised that a dead Kahawa was more unlikely to speak than a live Kahawa. He made a snap signal to the nearest Night Howler, who promptly snatched up Kahawa and held him aloft in one vulture-like claw.
‘Now, mortal, speak or you shall die!’
Kahawa began to laugh, a harsh, contemptuous and insulting laugh. The Night Howlers stared first at him and then at Nangai in great puzzlement and even the human beings huddled together looked at the son of Marimba in blank amazement.
‘Under the sun that shines in the skies above,’ Kahawa said at last, ‘there is nothing more tragic, more pathetic, than a creature once great and powerful, still clinging with stubborn tenacity to the tattered shreds of his vanished power. There is nothing more tragic than the sight of this creature trying to deceive itself and others into thinking that it still holds the power it held in the past. You are such, Nangai, you are no longer a god. You are nothing but a slightly higher form of common demon. When Mulungu drove you from the golden valleys of Tura-ya-Moya like a wounded and beaten cur he also stripped you of your immortal powers. You use force, Nangai, you torture like a common human thug. You used to have powers with which, if you had retained them, you could have learnt the whereabouts of my mother by simply reading my mind. Using force is an admission of failure. You are a failure, a pathetic fetish that-once-was and the Masai are your dupes. You send them in force to attack the whole settlement when all you could have done was to render yourself invisible, enter our village unseen and carry my mother away. You had to have help – on a large scale at that – you wretched fallen fetish . . .’
‘Silence, mortal dog! When I wish to hear your raving and idiotic prattling I’ll ask for it! Where is your mother?’
‘Find her yourself . . . use your godly powers . . .’
Nangai gave a brisk command to the Night Howler, who slowly started sinking his talons into the flesh of Kahawa.
It was just then that a miracle happened – a miracle in the form of a song that came floating through the night air like a ghost of pure mercy and deliverance. This song had a magic spell about it. It stunned the fiendish Night Howlers. There was a musical instrument in the singer’s hands which in future years became known as the karimba or kalimba. This unearthly music sent a haunting melody through the night and wove a mighty spell around the squatting Night Howlers. It paralysed them – destroyed them.
They let out a mighty roar in unison and, as though they had all become victims of an alien virulent leprosy, their scaly flesh began to slough off their skeletons and to flow sluggishly down the slope of the clearing in the ruined village. Wisps of reeking steam erupted from their distended slime-green bellies as their foul bowels burst with sounds terrible to hear, and from these wisps floated the ghosts of the people they had already devoured.
These ghosts were happy – happy to escape and float away to the land of Forever-Night, there to await their reincarnation.
But first they joined in the song sung by the woman with the kalimba. They soared and dived and soared again. They danced and weaved and leaped in the dark night air, and a regiment of them capsized the evil Nangai’s throne and he fell like a lump of cow dung into the reeking, oozing slime that had been the flesh of the Night Howlers. All the people who had been herded together became caught in the webs of the Song of the Kalimba. They tore off their soiled loinskins, skirts and ornaments, flung them aside, and raised their arms in thanksgiving to the High Gods for their deliverance, after which they too joined in the sacred Song of the Kalimba.
Dead and living joined in and the very stars rejoiced. The gods wept crystal tears and bowed their heads in tribute and acclaim. Marimba led the hosts of dead and living with her song until the eastern sky greyed with the first promise of coming dawn.
Eventually she dropped her kalimba and ran to where her son was lying. She threw her arms around him and wept. She kissed his forehead and both his ears and, drawing him close to her soft breasts, she wept long and loud, tears not of sorrow but of pride and pure joy and unfathomable happiness. When she released him Kahawa did something which shocked his gentle parent and the rest of the Wakambi but which was to become a firm Law of the Tribes in generations to come. With an abandoned axe of sharpened stone he deliberately chopped off his own right hand.
With the bleeding stump raised high, he addressed the shocked Wakambi: ‘People of the Wakambi, with this gesture I am laying down a new law that you must accept with your hearts and souls, and make it part of your lives until the rending of the knot of Time. In order to prevent my parent from delivering herself to the evil Nangai, I had to strike her unconscious with a club before I could hide her. But the ends do not justify the means; I broke the very Law of the Stars by striking the sacred vessel that carried me for more than nine agonising moons. Let this be your law, your very siko, that anyone, male or female, who strikes his or her mother for any reason, shall forfeit his or her right hand – voluntarily or otherwise. By this
