Switch! (14 page)

I hope it’s gone for good, he thought, checking the surrounding forest in case it hadn’t.
 

A purple crested lourie rustled in the canopy far above Joe’s head, its scarlet flight feathers flashing as it glided the short distance from branch to branch. His hand moved absently to the slingshot around his neck but he did not pick up a pebble. He easily could have shot it down, but he just didn’t feel hungry enough to kill such a beautiful bird.
 

“I’ll probably regret that when I’m starving later,” he muttered out loud. He knew he had to size up his situation as soon as possible. First evaluate his physical condition, then take stock of his surroundings, and then make a survival plan. According to Jimoh’s dad, who had been teaching him to hunt since he was little, you had to find water, then food, and then shelter. He wished Jimoh was with him now – he would know what to do – then dismissed the thought; there was no point in both of them being lost.
 

I suppose I’d better get on with it, he thought, pulling himself up to his feet. As long as he kept busy, he didn’t have to consider just how dire his situation was. And how lonely he felt... At least he was in good shape. His fingers, when he held them out before him, were quite steady, and he had no injuries. The strange weakness of the night before seemed to have worn off. He knew there was no point in questioning
why
he was here; all he had to do was figure out how to get back home.

He thought he would start by looking for ants. If he could follow them he knew they would eventually lead to water. With a bit of luck he might find a stream, which in turn would lead him to a settlement. Although he shuddered to think what kind of a settlement he would find. Talking tigers and Tokoloshe! He didn’t think he would ever get over it. A cursory look at the nearest trees didn’t reveal even a single ant. He would have howled in frustration if he hadn’t been afraid of attracting something horrible. He already felt vulnerable in his electric blue swimming shorts, hardly the most effective camouflage for a forest.
 

A huge cashew tree, full of fruit, stood tantalizingly on the edge of the clearing, but he’d heard they were poisonous when raw. He was not sure if that applied to the apple or the nut, but he did not dare eat either. The bent nuts poked out of the bottom of each red apple like the handle of a baby’s pull toy.
And why not?
Joe thought. With all the other weirdness around him, it wouldn’t surprise him if the fruit played a tune if he were to pull on one of those nuts.
 

Just beyond the cashew a baobab tree towered above him. Damp weather had rotted the centre, leaving a void inside, about three paces in diameter. It would make a good shelter when night fell, Joe decided, if he hadn’t found a track by then. But when he stepped inside to check it, the trunk was hollow to the sky. He could see a hawk flying in lazy circles overhead.

A plantain, just beyond the baobab, reminded him of something he’d learned at school. If he could cut it down and scoop out a hollow in the centre of the stump, water should draw up from the roots. It was quite nice to think he had not wasted his time at school entirely. The tree even had fairly ripe plantains that he could eat later when he got hungry. He would start there.

~~~

Joe stopped to kick the tree in frustration. Without the aid of a knife it had taken him hours to hack away at the trunk with a sharp stone. He had a feeling that he had lost more water through sweating than the amount of water he was going to find. Not a good start. If he had known he was coming, he would have brought along some tools, a machete perhaps, or a knife at least. But it had all happened so suddenly... like magic. Joe shook his head.
No time to think about magic. Be practical!
 

Finally he managed to push the trunk over with a resounding crack, and scooped out a shallow bowl shape in the stump with his stone. To Joe’s relief, the depression started filling up with water almost immediately. Not sure if it was safe to drink without filtering, he stripped off his shorts and knelt down beside the stump, put the fabric against his lips and had just started to suck up the liquid, when the plaintive, wistful sound of a thumb piano drifted through the trees towards him.

Humans!
Joe thought with sudden relief, but then just as quickly wondered if he shouldn’t hide. There was no telling who they were, or how many. On the other hand, he was desperate for the water he had worked so hard for, so he sucked it up through his shorts as fast as he could.
 

Halfway through scrambling back into his shorts, a young girl broke into the clearing. She stared at Joe with a strange expression while he hopped up and down on one leg, mortified with embarrassment, trying to get his other leg into his shorts.

With both hands clutching the tortoise shell resonance chamber of her instrument, the girl’s thumbs wound down her tune to a distracted plink... plink. She continued to stare at him incredulously.
 

“Excuse me,” Joe said, trying to turn his back on her, but his toe caught in the shorts and he let go of them before they made him topple over and fall to the ground.

“Don’t move a muscle,” growled a low, gravelly voice as a second girl, a bit older than the first, stepped out from behind her. She held a Y-shaped sapling in front of her like a water divining rod, with one hand on each of the forks, and the stem pointing at Joe. The brindle pelt of her tunic was an exact match with the hair on her head. No ordinary hair, either. It looked more like wiry fur, in various shades of ginger, darkish brown and grey, decorated with plant fibres and bird feathers.

Lowering her sapling, she began to circle Joe, catlike, placing one bare, dark brown foot warily before the other. Amazingly, she looked like she wanted a fight. At first he couldn’t take her seriously. She was a lot smaller than him for a start and he wasn’t about to fight with a girl – especially when he was naked.
 

He wondered if the sapling she held was some sort of weapon. Smiling at her unsteadily, he was about to explain that he had found water, which they were welcome to share, when, in a vicious blur of speed, she slammed him to the ground. The two of them grappled with each other, but as small as she was, Joe was no match for her in strength, and he couldn’t bring himself to hit her. Within seconds she had him on his back, his hands pinned above his head, her angry amber eyes glaring into his.
 

Joe didn’t know what to do next. “Okay. You win,” he shrugged awkwardly, trying to get up. Joe was no coward, but his shaky voice betrayed him. There was something not quite right about her. Apart from her impossible strength, close up she smelled more like an animal than a girl.
 

The smaller girl dropped her thumb piano and came over tentatively, to help roll him on to his side and tie his hands to the Y-shaped branch behind his back. They yanked him to his feet and he stood unsteadily.
 

He wanted to rewind. He wanted to say, “I didn’t realise you were this serious.” What he said was, “Can you at least put my pants back on?”
 

The vicious girl did not deign to reply. She turned on her heel and walked back into the forest the way she had come without looking back. The other one helped him put his shorts on, all the while shaking her head as if he were an idiot for taking them off in the first place, and then picked up her musical instrument and followed her friend. The haunting plinkity-plink of her piano drifted off into the forest.

Joe hovered near the clearing. They hadn’t ordered him to follow them. How could they be so confident that he would? He could simply work his bonds loose and go his own way.
 

No matter how hard he strained, though, Joe’s hands were unable to reach each other, or wiggle free. Each hand had been bound tightly with lengths of leather, from fingertip to elbow, to a fork of the sapling.
 

He tried easing the sapling underneath his legs, to bring his hands to the front, where he could chew through the binding, but he found they’d strung a chord between the forks to prevent him from doing that.

Defeated, Joe tried to sit down on the ground and think, but he found he couldn’t even do that. The stem of the sapling, which hung downwards, dug into the ground behind him, jarring his arms painfully, and toppling him onto his side. Grimacing with pain and frustration, he pulled himself to his knees but the sapling stem trailing out behind him forced Joe forwards into an awkward bow.

It dawned on Joe that he would not be able to defend or feed himself all trussed up, and the only ones around to untie him, possibly for hundreds of miles, were fast disappearing into the forest. Praying they did not mean to kill him, he stumbled in the direction of the music, as fast as the thick undergrowth would allow.
 

Branches scratched at his arms and chest and tore at his exposed face as he hurried after them. He stubbed his toe, and swore angrily, wishing he’d been wearing shoes when his world had turned upside down. He even looked over his shoulder from time to time, almost hoping to see the tiger.

By the time he caught up with the girls, and fell in behind them as he suspected they knew he would, the vicious one had cut herself another dowsing rod. She stripped the bark off it with her teeth and held it out in front of her, completely ignoring her prisoner. When he tried to negotiate, she slapped him so hard across the mouth he tasted blood.

The other girl at least interrupted her tune to hold the thorniest branches aside for him so that they didn’t scratch him. Eventually the undergrowth became so dense she gave up on the tune. Dangling her tortoise shell finger piano at her side like a small handbag, she fell to pushing the foliage aside in a rhythmic movement. If Joe moved quickly he found he could slip in behind her before the branches switched back to slap him in the face.

As the day grew hotter, flying insects gathered around his lips and his eyes, and no matter how much he spat and shook his head, he was unable to chase them away. Eventually he felt so defeated he could have wept. Tariro would have seen this coming, he thought bitterly. Tariro would have smacked her.
 

Who ever said manners cost you nothing?

~~~

They wove a path through the forest in silence till the vicious girl’s divining rod turned her sharply and homed in on a snake hiding in the leaf litter under a nearby tree. A gaboon viper, its colouring and markings so close to autumn leaves Joe thought even Jimoh would have missed it. This vicious girl would have too, if it weren’t for the divining rod, he thought derisively.

Lifting its large triangular head, the snake gave off a series of loud warnings, its head flattening slightly with each hiss. Small horns just above its nostrils quivered in alarm. Undeterred, the vicious girl stroked it gently on its head with one point of the divining rod, whilst her other hand shot out in a blur and snatched the snake up by its neck.

For a horrible moment as she came towards him, Joe thought she meant to have the snake bite him, but instead she posted it head first into a long thin basket-weave tube she had hanging on her belt. Pulling a cord to lace the tube tightly against the body of the snake so that it couldn’t move at all, she secured its tail to one end and slung it over her shoulder onto her back where the snake dangled, dead straight and upside down. Joe wondered if she had deliberately left its eyes exposed, so that it could see the ground flash past it as she walked. He wished it would slip a little in that tube, just enough to bare a fang and bite her on her backside.

About thirty paces ahead of them, the clearing ended abruptly in a precipice. Below the plateau, the forest stretched eastward and then fell away again to some sort of a rift valley miles below, with what looked like a wide river running across it, stretching endlessly to a range of mountains he could barely see on the distant horizon. His spirits sank further. Even if he could escape from the girls unbound, it would take him weeks to make his way to the river.

Wisps of smoke wafted up over the edge of the plateau, bringing with them the faint whiff of humanity. Joe recognised the strong fragrance of burning acacia wood. It was the same wood the Tjalotjo villagers near his home used to mask the smell of their latrines. Any slight relief he may have felt at the familiar smell was soon banished as they made their way down the steep path to the girls’ village. Vicious seemed totally oblivious to the danger the incline posed to Joe without the use of his hands, but the other girl reached down silently and steadied him from time to time so that he did not pitch forwards and fall down.
 

At the bottom they came up against a thick tangle of thorned acacia branches surrounding a settlement. Joe’s dad built similar bomas around his safari camps to keep the lions out, but this was tinder dry, and unkempt, and at least five times the size. Access was gained via a crawl space. Both girls dropped to their hands and knees, but Joe hesitated. He couldn’t very well crawl on his hands and knees without any hands.
 

“In,” Vicious spat at him. Pushing him down onto his knees, she shoved him towards the entrance where he had to balance carefully in a crouched position, with nothing to protect him from the long sharp acacia thorns that grew in pairs all along the twisted branches. His knees scraped badly, and his face and shoulders grew scratched and bloody, but if he did not move quickly she grabbed the sapling stem that trailed in the dirt behind him and yanked it upwards, sending sharp pains up his arms. Once she pushed him so hard he fell forwards and smacked his brow on the ground, opening a cut above his eye.

When they emerged from the tunnel, the younger girl went her own way, whilst Vicious took hold of the handle of the sapling stem and marched him, roughly and bowed over, through the tumbled-down encampment.
 

Strikingly beautiful people, mostly women, wearing the same brindle tunics as Vicious, barely paused in their work to watch him as he passed.