breathe life back into it. There was a gale of feminine laughter which the angry chieftainess quelled with a look of cold fury in her glittering eyes. A deep respectful silence settled upon the group of watching maidservants while the boy, with sweating face and inflated cheeks, and a heart that was almost stopping with cold fear, huffed and puffed in vain to revive the dead animal.
‘That animal had better come back to life, Oh little vermin,’ said the princess cruelly. ‘If it does not you will soon wish that you had never been born.’
The badly frightened boy tried his best. He tried everything he could while the queen watched him coldly and impassively, and the handmaidens watched with broad smiles on their faces.
‘Why,’ said Marimba at long last, ‘it seems to me as if you find it easier to kill an animal than to bring it back to life!’
‘I cannot make it live again, Oh Great Queen,’ stammered the boy. ‘It still wants to remain dead.’
‘Then you must surrender yourself to punishment,’ said the queen ominously.
‘Please do not kill me!’ screamed the boy in utter terror. ‘I am still too young to die . . . I do not want to die!’
‘The animal that you killed with the fruits of your evil brain did not want to die either,’ observed Marimba.
‘Please . . .’
‘Seize him!’ cried the princess to her attendants. ‘Seize and hold fast the pestilential horror!’
The giggling girls fell upon the boy and held him fast. He struggled and kicked and bawled in vain. He yelled to his friends to save him. But those loyal friends had proved their loyalty by vanishing into the sheltering bush, leaving him to face the music alone. ‘Bring him to the village – I want to deal with him properly in the presence of all the people.’
The gathered Wakambi were sitting in a great semicircle in the High Place of Justice at the very summit of the hill which was now known as the Hill of the Wakambi. The princess Marimba sat on her throne at the foot of an upright slab of rock that was known as the Rock of Justice. She was flanked on either side by two old men.
The old man on her left was known as the High Accuser and the one on her right was known as the Mercy of Heaven, and it was his duty to plead for mercy on the prisoner’s behalf – but not to defend him from the accusation.
Marimba was the one empowered to execute the prisoner after he had been found guilty. The power to execute was granted to all those people who had seen the prisoner actually commit the offence for which he was charged.
Trials were held only at the ‘rising of the moon’ among the Wakambi and everybody was waiting in silence, where even a whisper was strictly forbidden, for the rising of the heavenly orb. Night had fallen and the land was swathed in the dark mantle of obscurity, and in the scowling forests below the Great Village lions were roaring their fury at the glittering stars, while leopards coughed defiance to all and sundry.
The boy, Malinge, who had been caught by Marimba in the act of wantonly destroying living things, knew that the coming of the moon would also mean the coming of his own death, and he was numb with fear. He turned round and looked in the direction of his parents seated with the other villagers near one of the great Fires of Justice that had been lit in a semicircle to illuminate the High Place of Justice. There were seven such fires, each representing the Seven Gates of Creation that separate this material world from the bright bronze plains and crystal forests of Tura-ya-Moya, where the gods have birth and where Lizuli, the whore of eternity, dances nightly before the thousand eyes of the Most Ultimate.
These fires were not kindled with wood, but with the leaves of the mpepo plant and were fed with the bones of that kind of animal against which the accused had committed the offence. When a man was charged with murder, human bones were fed into the fires. On this occasion the bones of antelope were fed into the fires.
Malinge cast a pleading glance at the face of the grim and bearded warrior that was his father and found no mercy and no recognition there. Nor did his own mother and other brothers seem to know him at all. He knew he was alone – and lost. Then, with that breath-taking majesty that fills the eyes with tears, the moon rose above the distant mountains.
As it rose, a wild scream of naked terror was torn from the lips of the wretched Malinge and he tried to bolt out of the Place of Justice. But Mpushu and Kahawa seized him and held him fast.
‘Stand still and take your punishment like a man, Oh Malinge,’ said Mpushu. ‘Do not try to cheat the lion of justice of his juicy prey. Nothing very serious is going to happen to you. You will only be deprived of your nose and ears and then thrown to very, very hungry crocodiles. Something worth looking forward to, eh?’
‘Aiyeeee!’ shrieked Malinge in appreciation.
‘Malinge, the son of Katimbe, the son of Ngungu, the son of Lembe, here stands accused of having wantonly and wilfully destroyed a living thing for no other reason than to see the effect of the new kind of snare that he had invented.’ The voice of the High Accuser was harsh, a rasping croak. ‘He destroyed a little steenbuck ewe with young in its belly, and here you can see for yourself the sorry remains of his victim on the Tray of Accusation. This boy was not hungry when he committed this deed, neither had he the intention of taking the animal to his father to prepare for food. It was a clear case of wanton useless destruction of life, in direct defiance of the Laws of Odu. Malinge must die. He must die so that the Great Mother’s displeasure at this demon-like act should be disarmed, so that the wrath of the High Gods be not showered upon us like evil hail. Malinge must die – not to deter others from committing the same offence, but that by dying he can take his heinous sin with him to the land of Forever-Night, away from the huts and villages of the Wakambi.’
With this the High Accuser sat down, fiercely scowling at the villagers assembled before him. An even deeper silence settled heavily upon the High Place of Justice.
The other Old One, the Mercy of Heaven, then rose totteringly to his ancient, withered feet. ‘People of the Wakambi: to you this unworthy one addresses this message. We all know that the young boy Malinge is guilty and we all know that he must suffer the most ultimate form of punishment, because if we let irresponsible young people kill the animals of the forest wastefully, it will not be long before the High Gods will deprive us of all living things on which we depend for food. It will not be long before the forests become only the haunts of starving jackals and hyaenas with no other animals in sight, and we would all die the shameful death of hunger. So I, too, agree that this young man must be punished. But I plead that we give the boy the opportunity to explain to us in his own words just why he did this thing and why he felt prompted to break one of the oldest and most sacred laws of our people, and above all, why he dared to improve on our standard methods – why he rendered these more cruel as the very design of this trap shows.’
His voice faltered and he sat down, wiping the sweat from his wrinkled brow with the back of his hand. There were tears on his wrinkled cheeks and his gentle tired eyes were inflamed and bloodshot.
‘Stand up, prisoner,’ bellowed the High Accuser. ‘Stand up and tell us why you broke the laws of the gods, why you dared to improve upon the things that our ancestors invented. Do you consider yourself wiser than your forefathers?’
‘N-No,’ stammered the boy, ‘I only thought . . .’
‘Listen, oh vermin,’ rasped the High Accuser, ‘this is
