Ama (4 page)

“Where are you from?” she asked. She was following in his tracks. They had left Damba some way behind.

Suba's reply froze on his lips. He halted so suddenly that Nandzi collided with him.

“What is it?” she asked.

Then she saw the body lying face down across the path. The head was all but severed from the neck. The ground was soaked with blood. She took a step back.

“What is it?” Damba asked in his language, pushing past them.

He inserted the toe of his leather boot under a shoulder and turned the body over. The head twisted to one side showing a severed artery and windpipe. Nandzi put her hands over her eyes and uttered a terrible cry of woe. Then she fell to her knees and retched. She had eaten nothing since the previous day. She tasted bile. Damba looked at her and smirked.

“Women!” he said aloud while he waited for her to get up. “Come on, let's go.”

Nandzi looked up at the vultures.
It might have been Itsho
, she thought.
No! Itsho escaped. Itsho escaped. Itsho escaped.

She repeated the words over and over again, willing her mind to control Itsho's fate. She could not bring herself to contemplate his death.
Itsho escaped. Itsho escaped
.

The river turned out to be no more than a trickle of water running in a narrow channel which meandered along a sandy bed. Soon, as the dry season progressed, the flow would stop completely. Small trees grew on the banks, an oasis of green shade in the scorched dry plain. They washed their hands and faces in the cool water. Suba dipped his ladle into the shallow stream and began to fill his calabash. Damba kneeled to make his own ablutions. Nandzi watched Suba for a moment. Then she began to dig a small pit in the sandy bed.

“What are you doing?” Damba asked.

She did not understand his question and continued to dig. When the hole was big enough she forced the empty calabash down into it. The water flowed in over the rim. Suba was still struggling to fill his vessel.

Nandzi tried to break off a handful of grass from the bank but it was too tough. She pulled and it came away with a sod of soil around the roots.

“Hold it,” Damba told her and cut off the roots with his sword. He smiled at her but she did not see his face. She formed the grass into a ring and put it on her head. Suba helped her to lift the full calabash. She steadied it and adjusted the balance while Damba helped Suba in the same way.

Damba led them up the hill. Vultures were picking at the naked body. Damba slashed at them with his sword. They screeched at him, flapped their great wings and hopped aside. Damba let the captives pass. Nandzi averted her eyes, unwilling to witness the damage the birds had inflicted on the corpse. It was not custom to leave the dead unburied. The man's spirit would wander without peace and return to trouble the living. She wanted to ask Damba to let her dig a grave, but she had no means of communicating with him.

“Do you speak their language?” she asked Suba. “We should ask him to let us bury the dead.”

“Small,” replied Suba and added, in explanation, “from the market.”

He had come to a fork. He took a rough path, made by the passage of a horse, which would lead back to the camp by a shorter route than the way they had come.

“What should I say?” the lad was asking, when he came across another prone body.

It was lying on its back, naked like the first they had seen. The impact of a horse's hoof had crushed the skull and splashed the victim's brains around. Flies droned on the fragments of flesh. (Once she had asked Itsho how it was that flies, and hyenas and vultures too, so quickly located a new source of food.) The face was unrecognisable, but Nandzi recognised the body at once. Unaided, she lifted the calabash from her head and set it carefully on the ground, taking care not to spill any water. She knelt by Itsho. The worst had happened. Deep inside her, this was what she had feared. Now she could not avoid the reality. Yet she felt that this was all a dream; and that somehow her disembodied spirit was watching the scene from a distance. She was completely calm. She laid her cheek upon his chest. The body was still warm. She lifted his arms, one at a time, and stretched them over him, placing his hands over his genitals. She looked up. The vultures were still busy elsewhere. She must cover the body. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Damba.

“It is someone you know,” he said.

“Tell him,” she said to Suba, “tell him it is my husband.”

“I am sorry,” said Damba, when Suba had explained. “Bring the water and we will come back with a hoe to bury him.”

Nandzi refused to rise. She forced her fingers into the sandy soil and scooped up a handful, testing whether she would be able to dig a grave without a tool. Damba was scared of Abdulai. He would never approve the wasting of time on the burial of an enemy. It must be done without his knowledge. He looked around. They could not be seen from the camp.

“Come,” he said, echoing his words with sign language, “We will go to the camp and come back with a hoe.”

“Tell her,” he said to Suba.

Nandzi pointed to the sky.

“You fear the vultures,” said Damba.

There was a baobab tree nearby. Damba helped Suba to put down his calabash.

“Go and see if you can find branches, firewood,” he said to the lad, showing by signs what he proposed to do.

* * *

“Why have you been so long?” asked Abdulai as they approached.

Nandzi flinched. This was the man who had raped her the previous day. But he did not seem to recognise her.

“I stopped to pray,” lied Damba. “The stream is almost dry. We need a hoe to dig a pit.”

Abdulai grunted.

“The hoes are being used to dig the graves,” he said.

“I think I know where to find one,” said Damba.

He was thinking of the hoes he had looted from Tigen's homestead.

“Don't waste time,” said Abdulai, “We must eat and leave.”

They off-loaded the full calabashes and took empty ones. Cooking fires had been lit. They would eat millet porridge with a little dried fish. If the hunters were successful, the war party would also have some grilled meat.

Damba wanted to leave Suba to dig the grave but Nandzi insisted that she would do it herself.

“Itsho,” she said aloud when they had left her, “You gave your life trying to save me. It would have been better if you had never met us on the way. Then, at least, you would still be alive. Itsho, I love you. I will never take another husband. You are my husband now. I am digging your grave myself, with my own hoe, which was stolen from me. I cannot give you a proper burial in keeping with custom. Even if our captors would permit it, which they wouldn't, there is no Earth Priest here. I cannot even ask the men, my fellow captives, to come. The Bedagbam would not allow. But I will say a prayer to the ancestors myself, to accept your spirit and let you rest in peace.”

When Damba and Suba returned from the stream, Nandzi was still digging and still talking to Itsho. Damba put down the calabash he was carrying and signed to Nandzi to put it on her head, promising that they would return to finish the burial. Abdulai must not know what he was doing.

When Damba and Suba came back from the third trip to the stream, Nandzi was ready. She washed Itsho awkwardly with a corner of her cloth. Then the man and the boy helped her lift the body into the shallow grave.

Nandzi stood up, the hoe still in her hand.

“Oh, Ancestors,” she intoned, “ancestors of Tigen my father and of Itsho's father. I am Nandzi, daughter of Tigen and Tabitsha. Forgive me that I, a mere woman, address you directly. Forgive me that I bring you no drink. You will know the reason. The Bedagbam captured me. My lover Itsho came to rescue me and they killed him. I have had to bury him in this lonely place, far from his home and mine. Protect his body from the wild beasts. Accept his spirit, I beg you, to live amongst you. Accept the spirit of Itsho. I am Nandzi. I have spoken.”

She paused. Damba looked about anxiously.

“Oh Ancestors,” Nandzi continued, “another matter. One of our people, I do not know his name or where he comes from, lies down there. The vultures are eating his flesh. There may be more. I do not know. Accept his spirit too and those of any others who have died in trying to rescue us from the Bedagbam. Do not let them become evil spirits of the bush. It is not our fault that they have not received a proper burial. There is nothing to be done about it.”

When they had finished the filling, Damba and Suba stamped on the soil to discourage the hyenas from digging up the grave. Then they piled stones and branches on the surface. Damba was becoming more and more anxious. But Nandzi was at peace with herself. What had happened had happened. She had done her duty. Itsho would know.

* * *

Nandzi touched Damba's arm and looked him in the eye for the first time.

“Thank you,” she said.

Damba nodded an acknowledgement.
These people are also human
, he thought, as he sent the two of them back into the prison. He had been led to believe otherwise.

Nandzi sat down against the wall. Dry-eyed, she examined her fellow captives. One man was wearing an apron of leaves, another was dressed in bark cloth. Others wore torn and dirty cotton garments. They sat and lay uncomfortably, their wrists still tied behind their backs. She searched for a spark of rebellion, but their eyes were listless, without hope.

She looked up at the clear blue sky. Then, without warning, she felt reality strike her like the blow of a cudgel on the back of her neck.
Itsho is dead. I am a slave. No one will come to rescue me. I will never again see my mother and my family.

She wailed a dirge. She had never been deeply moved by a death before, not even when Tabitsha had lost a new-born baby. She had hardly seen the child before it died. When the women had shrieked their customary lamentations she had smiled secretly because she thought their grief was feigned. She had always smiled at the way her mother would wail at a funeral. Tabitsha could turn her tears on and off, as if by command.

Now it was her turn to howl; but the cry came from her heart. She wept for Itsho and she wept for herself. The sobbing convulsed her and it would not stop. The men were embarrassed. Nandzi was the only woman in the cell. Their skills did not run to the comforting of a strange woman.

Then Suba also began to cry. He was the youngest of the prisoners; but Suba liked to think of himself as a man and he knew that men did not express their grief openly as women did. He was proud of his manly behaviour that morning, of how he had concealed his shock and had even helped to lower Itsho into the grave. But he too had been snatched from his mother; and the encounter with the two disfigured corpses had shaken him more than he had cared to admit to himself. Now Nandzi's wailing and sobbing broke his reserve and his tears began to flow. Once the dam had broken there was no holding his grief. He cried for his mother.

Suba's outburst penetrated the cocoon of self-pity in which Nandzi had enveloped herself. She stopped crying and wiped her face.

“Suba,” she called, but he paid no attention.

She rose and went to him. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Suba,” she said, “don't cry. Suba, you are a man, you must be strong.”

He paid no attention to her. She sat down by his side and put an arm around his shoulder. Still he continued to cry.

“You were so strong this morning,” she said. “I could not have managed without you. I could not have explained anything to the man. If it were not for your help, the vultures would now be picking over Itsho's body. And I didn't even thank you. I forgot to thank you.”

Suba looked up at her and wiped his eyes. Then he fell upon her breast and sobbed and sobbed. She held him tight. He was only a child, she realised.
And I,
Nandzi thought,
I am already an adult, ready to have children of my own, to be married. I have no right to cry: this boy needs my support.
But she could not control herself and the tears came to her eyes again. So they hugged one another and cried together; and Suba was comforted and fell asleep in her arms.

All this the other prisoners, the men, watched in silence. They were men no longer, Nandzi thought. They had all been emasculated and become the dogs of their new masters.

The guards brought in two bowls of steaming gruel. Their hands untied, the famished prisoners gathered round the bowls and pushed and shoved and struggled for a handful of the watery pap.

Nandzi had no heart to join them. Suba stirred. Gently, she moved him aside. Then she stood up.

“Will you not leave some for the boy?” she shouted at them above the hubbub.

The men withdrew. In their hunger, they had lost their dignity and forgotten the mutual obligations which custom imposed upon them. They looked at her in guilty silence, sullen and surly at having been exposed. Who was this young girl to scold them so?

“Here. Take it,” said one of them, handing her the bowl.

* * *

They walked across country, picking a way through the coarse reeds of the long grass, over low rolling hills, through level patches of desiccated swampland. Scattered trees and termite mounds, as tall as two men, dotted the landscape. The captives walked in a small, tight group. Most of the men wore nothing but a loin cloth. The rough grass scratched their skin. A few wore the pants and cotton smocks in which they had been captured. All were barefooted. None wore a hat. The air was full of the fine dust of the harmattan. The sun was hidden but its fierce dry heat penetrated the haze and withered them. The men spoke little. They were turned in upon themselves, crushed by the consciousness of their new status. Only when their captors cracked their whips to make them walk faster, did they turn on them with a quick look of hatred.

Twice during the morning they came across a running stream. There they quenched their thirst and scooped handfuls of water over their grimy whitened bodies. Once they came upon a dawa-dawa tree in fruit. Abdulai paused to let Suba climb it and even allowed the slaves a share of the pods with their yellow powder.