that he would have to watch Sidumo carefully. He couldn’t run away. Sidumo had the directions to Lunwabu’s Indumba, and if he had made a pact with the wizard he would lead him to the muti bag with or without Mandla’s help. Somehow he would have to get hold of the paper in the pouch around Sidumo’s neck. As Sidumo was bigger and stronger than him, he would have to bide his time and steal the directions.
Having made his decision, Mandla hurried after Sidumo, more determined than ever that he was going to be the one to find the sikhwama of Lunwabu.
10
When it began to get dark, Sidumo stopped at an abandoned homestead and instructed Mandla to fetch firewood. By the time Mandla returned, carrying a bundle of kindling and dry logs, Sidumo had disappeared, so he busied himself with making the fire. But it was only when the fire was blazing, and the crumbling earth walls of the homestead were black silhouettes against the starry sky, that Sidumo suddenly reappeared. Squatting silently beside the fire he took a pipe from his shoulder bag, stuffed it with dry herbs, and dropped a red ember into its bowl. The fragrant smell of insangu rose with the smoke, and Sidumo inhaled deeply from the pipe, holding in his breath until the spirit of the herb had entered his blood and bathed his brain in its stupor.
Grandmother had told the apprentices many times that insangu was not to be used for pleasure, but for healing. When used correctly, she had often said, the herb could relieve many ailments and give deep insight into the ways of the spirit, but when taken only for pleasure it led to weak-mindedness. Mandla looked at the glazed, dreamy stare in Sidumo’s half-closed eyes, and nodded to himself. Grandmother had been right.
Soon Sidumo slumped to the ground and lay on his back, snoring and snuffling like a sleeping dog. As soon as he was sure that he was really asleep, Mandla crept as close as he dared to the older boy and tried to loosen the thong of the muti bag around his neck. However, he quickly realised that the knot was too tight and that he wouldn’t be able open the bag without taking it from around Sidumo’s neck. So, taking a stick from the fire, he held it against the thong, careful not to burn Sidumo’s neck as the glowing tip began to eat away at the thin leather.
Suddenly the bag came loose and fell into Mandla’s hand. Kneeling quietly next to Sidumo, he opened the neck of the bag and shook the contents onto the ground. Grandmother’s directions fluttered out and he quickly folded the paper into a small square and stuffed it into his own pouch. He also recognised the small bag of teeth that Sidumo used for divination and the small pouches of herbs and clay vials in which he kept his special potions. Mandla had seen all these objects before. But amongst them was a new item, a small metal box as long and as deep as his thumb.
The box was tightly bound with wire and Mandla had to twist and bend the wire until it loosened and he could slip it off the box. But even then the box appeared to have no clasp or lid and Mandla turned it this way and that in the flickering firelight for a long time before he realised that it was in fact two boxes, one inside the other.
Mandla carefully pulled off the topmost box, letting the smaller container remain on the palm of his left hand. Then he held the box closer to the fire, so that the light fell inside. His heart leapt in shock when he saw the contents, but he couldn’t pull his gaze away. In the bottom of the box was an eye, a human eye, and it was staring back at him with an unnatural, unblinking glare.
Immediately, Mandla had the uncanny feeling he was being watched, that a mind filled with poison and hatred was looking at him from within that staring, ghastly eye. As if to confirm this he thought he saw a flickering movement, a reddish shimmer of life in the pupil of the eye, behind the lens. Was it the flames making it appear that there was a spark of life in the eye? Mandla blocked the direct light from the fire with his free hand and peered more closely into the box, looking into the dark pupil of the eye. Again he saw a movement, a glinting surge, and suddenly, rising out of the eye, through the pupil, a scaly head, reddish-brown, followed by a lithe flat body, rising towards Mandla’s own eye as he peered into the box.
Mandla recoiled in fear and dropped the box.
The eyeball fell onto the ground beside Sidumo’s arm, and through the pupil emerged the largest, most vile centipede Mandla had ever seen. Without hesitation, the centipede slithered onto Sidumo’s arm and plunged the stinging talons underneath its head into Sidumo’s flesh.
As the poison entered his blood, Sidumo sat up with a howl, brushing at his arm in confusion and pain. Then, suddenly, he looked about with a strange expression on his face. When he spoke the voice that came from his lips was not his own. It was an old voice, a distant voice, a voice that crackled and quavered with spiteful humour. “So, little witch, you have escaped the kiss of my sweet pet?” the voice said. “What shall we do with you now? The kiss would have made you mine. Instead it has been wasted on this hyena!”
Mandla had been right! Sidumo had made a pact with the wizard to turn Mandla into an umkhobo, a zombie. But now his own body and mind were possessed by the dark spirit of a wizard.
“Come here, child,” the wizard continued, reaching out to Mandla, “come and let me touch the cub of Ngwemabala.”
Mandla took a step back and watched as the umkhobo began groping blindly along the ground, patting the earth as though trying to find something. In a flash, Mandla realised that the umkhobo was blind. The wizard couldn’t see through Sidumo’s eyes. He needed the eye from the box in order to see.
With a shudder, Mandla picked up the eye from where it lay and placed it back in the box. Firmly closing the box over its tight-fitting companion, he slipped it into his pouch and slowly backed away from the fire and the dark figure of the umkhobo. With quiet steps Mandla melted back into the shadows until he was at the edge of the yard, then he turned and fled into the darkness.
11
Mandla ran blindly through the darkness, tripping over stones and fallen branches in his hurry to get away from the umkhobo. He didn’t choose any direction, but by good fortune he found the path leading eastward through the bush, and he sprinted along its beaten track for hours until his legs could run no further. Finally, he found himself in a gully between two hills. The moon had risen, and from the pale light of its crescent Mandla saw that he was surrounded by massive granite boulders, scattered on the hillside as though cast there by a giant hand. Leaving the path, and scrambling through a gap in the thicket of shrubs that grew between the boulders, he moved up the hill, threading his way through the vegetation and the granite sentinels that towered above and around him, until he found a hollow space under an overhanging rock face. He crept in and rested with his back against a small ledge, looking out through the entrance at a sky full of stars.
As he tried to catch his breath, Mandla could hear his heart beating loudly, not only from the exertion of his running but from fear, the fear that the wizard was following his trail, sniffing out his whereabouts with dark magic and dispatching his servants to track him down … Even now they might be approaching the cave, he suddenly thought, and for a moment he felt his fear well up and overflow. He half rose, poised for another headlong flight, and then he sat back down again. Was he not the disciple of Lunwabu, greatest of the tangoma, whose spirit was even now watching over him? He let out a long sigh and closed his eyes. He visualised the smiling face of the chameleon sorcerer and felt his confidence return. He had work to do and no wizard was going to stand in the way of his destiny. Tomorrow he had to find his muti bag before the wizard’s servants could get their hands on it. But for now … he suddenly realised he was so tired that he couldn’t stay awake a moment longer. He lay down in the soft sand of the cave and within seconds he was fast asleep.
***
A new pattern of stars was framed in the entrance of the cave when Mandla awoke. The sun hadn’t yet risen,
