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Between moaning about their aches and pains from the rapid ride and boasting about their bravery, Tariro and the hyena youth seemed to be getting on very well.
 

“You should have seen me, Ethan,” Tariro said, grabbing him by the hand and hauling him up the bank. “A supply tube landed right amongst a group of hippos, so I had to float in a tube nearby to distract them while Amun snuck in between them to get it. You will be particularly glad because it was the one with your sweets.”

Ethan just wanted to lie down. He felt cold and shaky.

“Sweets?” Fisi said.

“The best sweets ever,” Tariro said, his eyes lighting up as he rummaged among their wet salvaged things for the tin. He opened the lid and offered one to Fisi who stared at them, confused.

“Like this,” Jimoh said, selecting a toffee and unwrapping it to demonstrate.
 

Fisi chose a sweet very carefully, removed the wrapper as he had seen Jimoh do, and popped it into his mouth. He shut his eyes and adopted a blissful expression.

“Honey,” he said. “Tastes like honey.” He pushed the tin towards Ethan. “You might be able to trade this for the missing boy,” he said. Then he leaned forward and grabbed another handful, as if he could not help himself.
 

Ethan took the tin from them and climbed into his sleeping bag.

“Who stole your cell-phone?” Tariro sneered, but Jimoh berated him firmly in Shona and Tariro backed off. Ethan hoped Jimoh had not told Tariro about the blood.

Jimoh made Tariro go through the equipment with him carefully. They separated the wet stuff from the dry. He sent Fisi to dig a hole close by to bury the sweet papers and any equipment that had been bashed beyond repair.
 

“We will cut this up for catapult,” he said, untying the hessian cover from the tube they had floated on in the morning. It had burst during its descent. The mosquito nets were soaking wet, but he assured Ethan that they would dry by nightfall in the sweltering African sun if he hung them along a branch of the tree. He behaved as if it were perfectly normal for Ethan to be huddled up in a sleeping bag against the tree trunk in the middle of a hot afternoon while everyone else worked.

Jimoh untied Ethan’s hat from its tube and placed it on Ethan’s head, darting a glance at his own hat resting on Fisi’s head. Ethan found he was hugging himself to stop shaking. Looking over at Fisi, now enjoying his fourth sweet, he was not resentful, exactly, but he wished Fisi would give Jimoh his hat back. He should have given it back to Jimoh as soon as they returned.

Moments later, aware of movement behind him, he turned to find Fisi standing awkwardly with the hat in his hands. He shot Ethan a knowing look, plonked the hat on Jimoh’s head and wandered off towards the river.

Did I do that?
Ethan thought, just as a sharp pain seared through his head. Great, that was all he needed – a headache.

But the headache did not last. It was just the one sharp pain, like an ice-cream brain freeze. Had Fisi done it to him? There was definitely more than met the eye with the folk from Karibu.

Jimoh showed Tariro how to make a fire. He tied together a small bundle of dry sticks, roughly the length of his foot, and placed them on the ground on top of some dry tinder. Then he threaded a length of vine from his right hand under the bundle to his left hand. Holding the bundle of sticks down with his feet, he pumped his hands up and down alternately, rubbing the vine against the bundle till the friction caused enough heat to make the tinder smoke. By the time Fisi came up from the river with two enormous freshwater bream from Darwishi, they had a roaring fire going.

Gogo Maya was woken at dawn by a din of high-pitched whispering in the branches overhead.
 

“Nomatotlo,” she grumbled, still half-asleep. She should have known they would find her too early in the morning, busy little bodies that they were. After her terrible night sleeping in the forest, she was in no shape to work out what they were saying. She hadn’t felt this weak for years and her amulet hadn’t been much help, seeing that it had been virtually drained by the boy, Ethan. Come to think of it... there was something not quite right about that boy. She had studied him closely at the pool and found nothing remarkable about him, so how had he known he could suck power out of her? How had he dared?
 

“Five more minutes,” she scowled at the little information-gathering spirits, trying to rearrange her leaden limbs into a position in her bed of leaves that didn’t involve sticks digging into her back. She needed a little time to put her thoughts in order.
 

Feeling the warmth of the rising sun on her skin, her eyes drifted shut, and she thought about the first time she had come across the Nomatotlo.
 

She still felt a pang of sadness after all these years as she remembered her young self, bending over her dead mother in that detached sort of way of the near starving. Despite the twisted knot of hunger in her belly and her dry lips, she had not wanted to go back to the swamp for water. Even that small action had seemed like too much effort.

It was no one’s fault, her mother had told her when they’d reached the derelict cottage two nights before. People went hungry everywhere. It was the depression. That had done nothing to ease the aching in Maya’s chest, and no amount of crying seemed to be able to revive her mother. Sometimes, when the pain in her stomach became too bad, she’d heard high-pitched voices whispering to her from the rafters:
 

“Follow,” they’d murmur softly.
 

She couldn’t see them, but she could smell them. The faint scent of burned cookies wafted off them, setting her mouth watering every time they drew near.

On that day she followed the smell, and their voices, out the door and down the road towards the swamp. Not sure whether she would catch them and eat them, or if they would coax her into the water and drown her, she stumbled after them till she saw the man sitting cross-legged on the ground waiting patiently for her.
 

He stood up when she came, smoothing out his white robes, and advancing cautiously. One hand clutched a felt hat, decorated with an assortment of fur, feathers and seed pods, while the other hand smoothed back a shock of snow-white hair. His kindly face seemed to glow from within.

“I have come to take you home,” he’d said with a radiant smile, before turning towards a peculiar doorway hovering incongruously in the clearing. It looked like a slab of glass that had turned to gel.

At first she’d been unable to focus as they stepped into the icy opening, only vaguely aware of the tightness in her lungs and the freezing air that burned her throat when she breathed. Shivering, she’d held her arms tightly across her chest and walked beside the man. Heaven was a bit cold for her taste, and she’d felt poorly dressed for the weather up there, and for meeting God. But they had not gone to heaven. Instead they’d stepped out of the opening into the warm heart of Africa. Home.

That warm, fuzzy feeling did not last long. She’d found herself plunged into a hard and primitive way of life, almost before she had got her strength back. Up at dawn to see to the animals; a pole and mud hut; no electricity; no indoor privy. Still, she could not complain – there had always been enough to eat, and there were no white folk to boss you around. Even now, Gogo Maya allowed herself a satisfied smile. Was that why she was wary of the boy, Ethan, she wondered? It had been so long since she had seen a white person. He certainly had not seemed that bossy with the others at the pool. Had she exaggerated their arrogance in her memory of them over the years, or had they changed with time?
 

The serene man, Tacari, had explained to her that the opening they passed through to the magic place had come about by accident. One of his ancestors, a crafty
nyanga
, had been carried off from what they now believed to be Cameroon as a slave. Once the
nyanga
recovered from her shock and the terrible boat journey to the new world, she had set about constructing a powerful amulet, with which she opened up a tear in the clearing beside the swamp, to get herself back to Africa. Unable to find Cameroon from so far away, she had been drawn towards the magic in this rift valley. She and her friends came through to the Karibu forest where they’d set up Waheri village. The little information-gathering Nomatotlo attached themselves to the villagers, and had been spying for them ever since.

“Maya... Maya... Maya,” whispered the Nomatotlo. “There is work to be done.” She pulled herself up with a sigh. They were not that hard to understand when they spoke directly to her, and in a language she understood.
 

“Okay, I am up, but I am not strong enough to do anything,” she warned, turning towards the faint biscuity scent of them. “Where am I?”

“You are in Karibu forest. Near Malamulu settlement,” they whispered.
 

Well, that was a bit disturbing. She did not feel up to dealing with anyone from the Kishi hyena settlement, Malamulu. Not that the Kishi people would dare to attack her, but Gogo Maya was not altogether sure
they
knew that. She liked Gogo Nagesa as much as anyone, but the old hyena woman had allowed the young ones in her pack to degenerate into a bunch of hooligans, especially that Mesande and her crowd.
 

It could have been worse – she was lucky she had not ended up down in the rift valley. That would have been a long walk without the powers of her amulet.
 

“Lewa is here,” whispered the Nomatotlo, “and that new boy, Aaron. If Lewa cannot help you, Aaron can carry you back to Waheri village.”

“Over my dead body,” Gogo Maya bristled, wobbling to her feet and glaring into the forest. There was no way she would submit to the indignation of being carried by anybody.
 

“Okay, you can come out now. I can see you,” she called. Not that she could, but the inexperienced Aaron could not possibly know that.
 

Aaron pulled away from the shadows several metres to the left of where Gogo Maya was looking. He was a dark young man, with an open expressive face and a ready smile. Well, he’d proved to be stealthy, but it didn’t do to let the boy get too cocky. Besides, he had a head start. She understood he’d been a thief and a burglar in New Orleans before he’d come through Tacari’s opening.
 

“Where’s your friend?” she said.

“Can’t see her myself,” he said, opening his hands in a gesture of futility, giving no indication that she had been addressing the wrong spot.
 

Lewa emerged from the gloom of the forest, giving Gogo Maya a little start. She had been standing less than six paces away, waiting to see if she would be noticed. There was a twinkle of mischief about the girl. With her jet-black skin and short, kinky hair she was easily camouflaged in the forest. Today she wore her hair sectioned off into squares and pulled tightly into plaits, which spiked out like exclamations all over her head. Gogo Maya could hardly believe she had failed to spot the iridescent beetle shells attached to the end of each spike. What would that girl be wearing next?

“Thank you for coming,” Gogo Maya said, in a tone almost bordering on respect. She had not yet fathomed the depths of Lewa’s magic, except to know that it was many times more powerful than her own. The villagers at Waheri thought she had come from Bahar Dar, across the valley, but Gogo Maya was not so sure. Lewa had appeared one day, in the magic forest, as a young child. The Kishi hyena pack from Maradzi village, ever the opportunists, had captured her and, before they had worked out that there was no one to ransom her to, Lewa had succeeded in bending the entire pack’s will to her own, making their lives hell. The pack had ended up begging the witches to take her and, come to think of it, had never taken a human hostage since.

“Gogo Maya!” Lewa took Gogo Maya by the hands, her dark eyes sparkling. A wall of raw energy rushed into Gogo Maya like a tidal wave, almost taking her breath away. Her blood virtually crackled with it. Lewa didn’t heal exactly; she just bombarded you with enough energy to recover by yourself. “Where have you been?” Lewa asked, as if nothing powerful had happened.
 

Gogo Maya struggled to appear casual against the sudden barrage of sharpened senses. “I went to put beads into the bottom of Rafiki’s well to make amulets,” she said, resisting the urge to rub her tingling extremities, “and some other stuff of course,” she added casually, avoiding any mention of mbogo roots. Was Lewa acting all serene to impress Aaron? No, she decided. The girl genuinely dispatched her magic with as little effort as that.
 

Lewa turned towards Aaron and explained in that teacher’s voice she liked to adopt: “Gogo Maya specialises in amulets. She will make you one like mine.” She lifted her black tunic, loosened the drawstring of her trousers and pulled them down slightly to reveal a string of ceramic beads around her hips. “It will protect you from the Almohad if you bump into them in the forest. They are very strong, but that is not what you have to look out for. They have developed extraordinary beauty and seductive ways to go with it. One or two Waheri witches have almost been lured into slavery by them over the years. Gogo Maya soaks her beads in the magic of the Tokoloshe well before she makes her amulets.” She beamed fondly at Gogo Maya. They both knew Lewa had no need of the amulets and she only wore hers to humor Gogo Maya.
 

Gogo Maya relaxed slightly. “Speaking of Almohad, someone... or something to do with Morathi’s clan – and probably the Almohad, themselves – has got hold of some new magic. They captured Salih and me,” she added with a sniff. “They were very threatening, too. We had to do my special switch to escape, but we jumped too far – right out of Karibu. I’m afraid we sucked a boy in. He’s a bit younger than you, Aaron. It has caused many complications. That is why Salih isn’t with me.”

She hesitated for a moment, debating whether or not to tell Lewa about the other boy, Ethan, then shrugged. The Nomatotlo would tell the girl anyway. “Well, that and the fact that another boy drained so much energy from my opal that there was not enough for us both to switch back.”