Marauders
“Where do you hide the grain!” the brute roared at me. His sunken cheeks were a pair of pits, his lined skin sagged, and he had the glassy, protruding eyes of a famished vulture. The pockmarks that riddled his face stared back at me like a thousand raging eyes. He was a vagrant, long hounded by starvation and the infernal sun.
He had forced me to kneel on the floor, with my hands tied behind my back—a powerless thing. I caught the glint of reflected sunlight as one of his lackeys twisted his machete. It was a fine blade with a gleaming, sharp edge—a dangerous weapon, which could hack off my head in one ugly strike.
The haggard brute grabbed my shoulders and shook me until I thought my neck would snap and my teeth fall out. He was much stronger than he looked. The wasteland had turned him into bone, sinew, muscle, and skin. And into an animal that knew nothing except instinct and survival. He brought his face within inches of mine.
“Are you deaf and mute, you cow? Show me where you grow your grain!”
His rancid breath caught me like a heatwave. It poured out of a mouth lined with yellowed teeth, which were stained with rust-coloured streaks. I gagged and fought the urge to vomit all over his ugly face. Whether he beat me or threatened to kill me, I’d never tell him. Death was certain either way.
“Bitch!” he snapped before he backhanded me hard across the cheek.
I crashed onto the ground with the ferocity of a felled tree, my arms useless in breaking the fall. My head rang as it bounded against the concrete floor. I could only yelp and squirm and grimace as the pain radiated across my skull and tugged at the headache threatening to swamp my brain. The sting of the slap had been a gentle nudge by comparison. The room spiralled around me, and my vision went dark as if I had fallen into a chasm.
My brother grunted and cursed and scuffled with the two other brutes who pinned him down.
“He’s a real animal!” one of the marauders snarled, the stupidity of the irony lost on him.
He knelt beside me, my brother, Tapiwa, just as helpless to save us. My mother was also restrained beside him. A mother and her two children had been imprisoned in their modest rondavel by six evil men: that was what famine had done to us.
The haggard savage jerked me up, making my brain wobble like fermented milk. My vision zipped behind the rest of the world as he pulled me back to my knees. He peered at Tapiwa whilst a malign smile tugged at the corners of his lips.
“You’re the man of the family,” he told my brother. “It’s your duty to protect them. Tell me where you grow and store your food and we’ll let you go. If you refuse, you’ll all die.” He ogled at me. “But, we might take this one with us, your pretty sister. She’ll be our plaything until she’s all used up and we’re bored of her.”
Tapiwa opened his mouth, and I threw him a vicious look. He might have looked like a man next to the gaunt marauders, but he was only seventeen. I was nineteen, and I knew better than to trust these foul men.
Sure, they held vicious-looking machetes, but revealing our secret wouldn’t save us. At best, we’d suffer quick deaths by the blade. At worst, we’d slowly succumb to hunger, thirst, and disease in this arid land. I would not suffer through a drawn-out death. Swift and precise suited me just fine.
One of the brutes with a scar on his cheek kicked Tapiwa in the gut, making him groan as he hunched over. I blinked back my tears before they could fall. Three pairs of dry eyes glared back at those vile men. We couldn’t show weakness. Marauders came and went. They were desperate men, who were slowly dying beneath the blistering sun. If we held our ground, they would have no choice but to leave us and seek out weaker victims.
Scarred Cheek raised his machete to Tapiwa’s neck, its keen blade marking my brother’s skin with a red line. Mother gasped. “Enough!” she screamed. “We don’t have any grain. We forage every day like everyone else.”
Vulture Eyes, their leader, smirked. He reached out to touch my cheek. I flinched from his bony fingers, which had disgusting, dirt-crusted nails. “Not with such full cheeks and such pretty, glowing faces. You’re lying. Tell us what we need to know before we start hacking off limbs.”
“We’ve learned to survive on tart wild fruits, bitter leaves, and roots,” Mother insisted. “And we catch locusts whenever they fly over our lands.” The tremble in her voice almost made her believable.
It wasn’t all lies. We learned to survive on the arid land’s bitter harvest years ago before my father left us in the hopes of saving us.
“You remained in this village where most others left or died,” said Vulture Eyes. “Don’t bother lying. We know you’re hiding something.”
“Look around you!” Mother snapped. “Do we look like a wealthy family?”
The man’s gaze landed on the central hearth and stove, which was a crude thing made of bent and welded strips of wrought iron. Only grey ash was piled below and scattered around it. He scanned the simple, built-in shelves at the back wall, which housed an assortment of old and dented steel cups, plates, and pots. Guided by the whistling wind, he looked at the two small windows, one of them with a cracked glass pane.
He pursed his lips, making his face look more pinched. An abundance of food was a privilege enjoyed by the rich, yet he was only confronted by the poverty common in our village.
“I’m done playing games,” he barked. “Hold out her arm.”
One of his lackeys cut my bonds and jerked out my arm. I tried to resist and pull away, but I was useless against two men. They hit me whenever I tried to tug my arm away until my cheek and shoulder were numb. One held me by the shoulder and the other pulled at my wrist.
“Please,” Mother pleaded.
“Let her go!” Tapiwa threatened.
Both struggled against their bonds, and Tapiwa was punched and kicked a few times to shut him up.
Their leader picked up his machete from where he had left it leaning against the wall. It winked at me as sunrays danced along its blade, ready to become intimately acquainted. I squirmed within the men’s grasp like a worthless bug. My heart pounded inside my chest and flooded my brain with a terror as insidious as poison.
My mother and brother were now screaming, even as they were hit and pinned down to the point of chafing their knees.
Ignoring their protests, Vulture Eyes tapped my elbow with the cold steel of his blade. That tap was the epicentre, and my whole body trembled uncontrollably. I had only one prayer: for a quick death. It was thoughts of the pain that terrified me into a stupor.
As he raised his machete for the strike, my family’s cries became barely perceptible whispers. I scarcely heard my own thoughts. The whole world was reduced to the mean blade about to lop off my arm and cause me impossible pain.
But, I refused to cower or beg. His would be a slower, more excruciating death than mine. I cursed him to wander the wasteland, hunger, thirst, and the blazing sun being his dogged companions until his bitter end. I closed my eyes. If there was an afterlife, I’d meet my father.
“Stop! Stop!” Mother screamed above everything and everyone. “They’ll show you to our crops, Tarisai and Tapiwa. They’ll guide you. If you harm them, you get nothing.”
I opened my eyes to see the brute smirk at the news. He had won without even spilling any blood. Hate and rage rose from my gut like bile intent on burning my throat.
A Green Past
Our land used to be green. Mother told us that when she was a child, no more than seven, the land was green for almost six months in a year. Fruits bloomed in trees, and wild grasses carpeted the ground. Her grandfather even told her of lush seasons from his youth, when rain sometimes poured like a rebuke from the ancestors and the crops always grew. And when herds of cattle roamed and grazed undisturbed, claiming the land as their domain.
Our favourite stories were from her childhood when she described skipping her chores and going with her adventurous brothers to find wild fruits—mazhanje, matamba, hute, masau, berries, and cactus pears. She would say the bursts of flavour in her mouth and the sweet, dripping juices were always worth the lashes she got from her mother afterwards for abandoning her chores.
My brother and I couldn’t envision such a green place. The fruits she told us about were just names. Even the flavours, we couldn’t imagine. It was a wonder that Mother still remembered almost four decades later.
As she grew older, things changed. The land became dryer and the people became more desperate. She said as the decades passed, there were more people and less food. Every year was declared a drought until even the weather forecasters stopped predicting what had become the new reality.
She told us about a n’anga who came to our village for a rain dance. Our village, Imbahuru, was in the northeast of Zimbabwe, a place that had always been green and beautiful, so it must have been the spirits that were angry. They only needed to be appeased. The n’anga, rumoured to be a powerful spirit medium, swore that he would bring peace to the spirits and rain to our land.
The traditional beer was brewed, the drums were beaten, villagers got drunk, and morals stretched to their limits. Women gyrated in the village streets, swinging their hips and buttocks at any man who cared to ogle. By late afternoon, when clouds darkened the skies, the people flew into a frenzy.
Mother wouldn’t tell us the exact details of what happened in the night, but flesh entwined with flesh under the influence of the euphoria. Nine months later, young, unmarried girls and faithless wives couldn’t hide their swollen bellies.
The euphoria of that night, however, was shattered swiftly and brutally when villagers woke up to splitting headaches, unsettled stomachs and retching neighbours, bright blue skies, and the raging sun. The n’anga was chased out of the village in nothing more than his underwear.
It became clear after that farce that things wouldn’t change. Men and women started travelling to the cities even though they knew that there was nothing there for them. Food had become expensive, land infinitely more expensive, and jobs were scarce.
My father left with the other men when I was thirteen. He never came back. With each passing year, I had trouble recalling his face with perfect clarity. He was always a mirage, each exact line on his face, each expression, and each feature hazy.
About a year after Father left, the marauders began visiting unprotected villages—half-starved men armed with nasty weapons. When not foraging for food, we usually shut ourselves inside our huts and prayed that they would ignore us. For the most part, they did. Some caught us outside and barged into our hut, only to be met with pitiful poverty.
“It’s almost funny,” Mother had said after one such intrusion, although her face displayed the least amusement.
“When I was a child, people were occupied with their smartphones and the latest fashions and trends.” She had snorted. “Rural electrification was a thing back then, also solar energy. But, it all ended; it ended as the countryside died and no one cared to invest here. No one cares about you when they can’t profit from you.”
She had peered at me and my brother in turn, and I regarded her stern face, with all its gentleness erased by the years of hardship.
“They’ll never tell us,” she had said, with tight lips, “but the rich and powerful in this world don’t care about us. It was true when I was a child, and it’s true now. For decades, they took and took from our beautiful nation for their own profit. Even with all our natural resources, our country was long considered poor because of this selfishness. And, now that there isn’t much left, the rich keep for themselves and their kin.”
The cities were run on this philosophy of excess and selfishness. It was an insidious disease, which had trickled from the heads of the wealthiest down to the toes of the common citizens. The outskirters were cast aside for being the useless type of poor. We didn’t clean the wealthy citizens’ houses, tend to their gardens, grow their food, or slave off in their factories and companies; so, we were irrelevant. It was a genocide.
Worse, still, reckless men in other parts of the world had pumped greenhouse gases and poisons into the air for generations. Yet it was us, who knew nothing of industry, who suffered the effects. I could have gone through life furious if I wasn’t too busy trying to survive.
Those of us who did survive the wastelands spent our days scrounging like primitives. Technology had become a thing of the past, replaced with old hunter-gatherer methods. Expensive brick houses had been traded for clay-plastered rondavels. Energy was a precious resource that was only expended in activities directly linked to survival.
My brother and I had never seen a city. Mother had. They had become more compact, dome-like within their aura of impossible possibilities, and they were always guarded. Getting into Harare, the capital, was like entering another country. People within cities referred to those on the outskirts and in the wastelands as uneducated, uncultured, lawless, freeloaders, criminals, and dangerous. We even heard stories of men shot by enforcers for trying to sneak into Harare without the right papers. There were few resources, and no one wanted to share.
So, we were alone. Mother drilled this lesson into our heads, especially after father had been gone for more than a year and we realised he wasn’t returning. We never waited for an Earthly saviour nor did we chafe our knees in prayer. We foraged every day to survive.
Drought-resistant trees and plants survived on the few days of rain per year. Acacia pods, we could boil and eat. The leaves and bark we could use to make tea. Sometimes, we sliced cacti, which we ate raw when famished or boiled when we could spare the firewood. Whenever it rained, Mother harvested leaves, shoots, and roots from trees, shrubs, and weeds she knew to be edible. It was also a time to catch plump flying termites, ishwa, as they flew out of their holes.
On lucky days, we found mopane worms in the mopane trees that dotted the landscape. They were one of the rare delicacies that only needed to be plucked or shaken off their perches on the branches. Mother told me that she had been deathly afraid of the large caterpillars as a child. My brother and I never had the luxury. The feel of the wriggling worms in my palms only put a grin on my face.
Sometimes, we caught lizards whenever they were slow enough or stupid enough to allow us. Early mornings were the best for catching them when the sun was just coming up and the lizards were still sluggish.
Mother brought mice, those tasty mbeva, and these great beetles on some days. Only she knew how to catch both. The beetles, mandere they were called, frightened me because they secreted a red liquid whenever they were trapped together. It made me think of violence and blood and murder. It didn’t help that I only found the beetles crunchy, without the accompanying flavour.
*
Two years after Father’s disappearance, my brother and I were foraging further and further from home for food and firewood. One afternoon, I was startled by a desert hare as it bounded from a shrub a few steps from us. I gasped and grabbed Tapiwa’s wrist, momentarily oblivious to the rare prize. Tapiwa, however, glanced at me with a grin before wrenching his arm and sprinting after the hare.
I ran after him, also excited. But, the more the hare stretched the distance between us, the less convinced I was that we would catch it. I yelled at Tapiwa, but he wouldn’t stop. I was especially panicked as we came too close to the Shanduko Mountains.
The hare scurried up the mountain slope, and my heart almost stopped when Tapiwa ran after it. The smallest child knew those mountains were sacred and dangerous; the playground of vengeful spirits! Mother had warned us repeatedly. Men would go mad, or disappear in them, or both. One thing rang true in all the cautionary tales: whoever ventured up those mountains never came back. Everyone with sense in their heads avoided them.
The hare had driven my brother mad! Or maybe the ancestors tested us, and we failed miserably. I finally allowed myself to breathe after I had caught up with Tapiwa and grabbed the back of his T-shirt. But, he had already taken us too far up the mountain.
“Let go!” he said, panting as much as I was.
“Are you crazy!” I shot back. “Don’t you see where we are?”
“That doesn’t matter. We’ll lose the hare.” He peered up the slope for his prize.
“Doesn’t matter?” I muttered, in disbelief. Surely, he hadn’t been too young to grasp Mother’s warnings. “This place is dangerous.”
He stared at me, with a scowl. Behind his hungry eyes was a kind of blood lust for the hare. “Look around you,” he snapped. “Is anything chasing us? We’re wasting time on old stories whilst the hare escapes.”
I couldn’t argue with that, but warnings were there for a reason.
“We will never catch it.”
“We can find its burrow and smoke it out, maybe set a trap.”
As I considered this questionable plan, he yanked his T-shirt from my grasp and continued up the mountain. I followed him as if in a daze, caught between all the warnings and the potential of getting real meat, maybe a whole family of hares. We never caught anything bigger than mice and lizards. Was the reward not worth the risk? Brazen as he was, maybe Tapiwa was right. After all, we were already on one of the mountains yet nothing attacked us.
We climbed without actually knowing where we were going, even though Tapiwa said he followed the hare’s trail. He insisted on finding the burrow before dark. I was afraid of getting lost, but my brother, ever trying to be the clever one, reminded me that he was great with directions. So, I followed him, although I kept looking back to the base of the mountain. Even without considering the descent, we’d have to walk eight kilometres to get back home.
We climbed for such a long time that my fears almost evaporated. We became less cautious, more adventurous, and we were stepping before we looked. The sparse trees on the slope were more like dried branches and twigs and trunks. In truth, it was a tree graveyard. We walked over a carpet of dried leaves and twigs, and their crunch reminded us that we were still in the land of the living.
So, when the thing happened, it was so shocking and utterly terrifying. In one moment we were walking and chatting, and in the next, we were falling and screaming. I thought the dead had pulled the ground from under our feet and dragged us into the underworld. We tumbled and bumped into each other as we fell. When we eventually stopped on hard ground, my arms and legs were itchy from the cuts and scrapes.
We were a tangle of arms and legs as we tried to get up and off each other. Judging by the darkness that met us, we were in the underworld.
“We’re alive!” exclaimed Tapiwa as if he doubted it. “Where are we?” He could not hide the tremble in his voice. I wondered if it was fear, nerves, or both. With the adrenaline that surely coursed through his veins, I doubted if he would have been able to tell the difference.
I, too, couldn’t contain the anxiety flooding my brain or the pounding heart that made my veins throb. My limbs shook like they belonged to someone else. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. A bit of light came in from above and did little to illuminate the place. “We’re in a cave,” I told him. Our carelessness and stupidity had landed us inside a mountain.
I shrieked when I saw the skeleton, making Tapiwa jump twice—at the shriek and at the sight of the bones. The little sunlight let in through the hole reflected off the bones, lending them a hint of life. The teeth seemed stuck in a grin and the eye sockets glared at me. I grasped Tapiwa’s hands, even as mine shook. I had never seen human bones before, but I was sure they were supposed to be whiter. I shuddered at the thought that something in those dark depths had eaten the flesh off them.
The fairly intact skeleton was next to a large, peaked rock. The poor soul must have struck it when he or she fell through the hole. Tapiwa and I had been lucky to miss the rock as we tumbled in a tangle of limbs.
“We’re alive,” Tapiwa whispered whilst he gripped my hands to steady them. He glanced at the skeleton and swallowed hard. “He’s dead, and we’re still alive. We only have to climb out.”
Although I attributed his courage to the rashness of a teenage boy, he calmed me somewhat. What I couldn’t get over was how the skeleton had been a person, a living person with a past, and who had harboured hopes within a beating heart. Somewhere out there was a family who missed them. I imagined their ghost rising from the bones, and I shivered. Cobras hissing at our feet couldn’t have made me wish to escape that cave sooner.
We had fallen in so deep through such a steep hole that I doubted we could ever climb out. We still tried, though. But, all our efforts were rewarded with broken and bleeding nails and more cuts and scrapes on our exposed arms and legs. Unless we were to sprout wings or lizard limbs, there was no way we could escape through that hole.
We shouted for help, even as the despair almost made me cry. Only Mother cared about us, but she couldn’t have known where we were. With raw throats and aching hearts, we finally gave up.
As it darkened outside our already dark prison, we accepted the inevitable: we were trapped. We huddled on the floor and trembled in the cold night. It could have been thirty minutes or two hours, for all I knew. I kept on thinking this was our punishment for climbing up the sacred, forbidden mountain. This was the punishment of the ancestors! Not even twenty hares would have been worth it, yet we suffered for the mere idea of one hare.
I thought about Mother. I thought about whether she would survive on her own or, indeed, if she would want to. In our cruel world, living was mostly a function of who or what to live for. When I dozed off, I dreamt of two new skeletons in the cave and mother’s skeleton in our hut. The bones were so white and clean as if they had never been tarnished by flesh. They had been picked clean by the maggots, I realised.
I woke up with such a shudder that Tapiwa also stirred beside me. I decided that we wouldn’t die in that dark place. He was my little brother, my responsibility, and I wouldn’t watch him die. The hole we had fallen through wasn’t an option, but there could be another way out of those caves. I would find it!
I led Tapiwa through the tunnels. We stumbled in the dark for most of the night as we searched for a way out. We rested whenever our energy or spirits were sapped or when we got tired of stubbing our toes and tripping.
I had never felt thinner than I did when I was in that dark place. Navigating by touch alone really made me feel our skinny arms and the bones sticking out of our elbows. Although we’d always been mostly skin and bones, that place was a cruel reminder. I was also reminded of how exhausted and famished I was. It was a miracle that we didn’t just give up and let death take us to a quiet place untouched by misery.
After an eternity of walking blind through the caves, we finally got a glimpse of morning light filtering through the dark. The elation forced a grin on my face, and I imagined one on my brother’s face, too, as I searched for it in the dark. My heart beat so hard that I thought my brother also felt it thumping against him.
We didn’t speak, afraid to jinx our luck, but we gripped each other’s hands tighter and quickened our pace toward the light. We approached the arched opening, and we bathed in the morning light. Then, I saw the grin on my brother’s face and his bright eyes. Just that look on him made my heart summersault with bliss.
Near the opening but within the cave was a glistening pool of water. We couldn’t believe our luck! We could have drowned, the way we scrambled to that pool and drank like parched animals. The feel of the cool water on my face was immediately invigorating. It was like one of those flying dreams; it was like waking up from it and realising that you actually could fly!
After we’d had our fill, we splashed each other with the water whilst squealing like toddlers. A silly thought even entered my mind: I wished we knew how to swim. The pool wasn’t large, but I doubted anything could have beat frolicking within it. It seemed like a bottomless thing.
We had never seen so much clean water! We got most of our water at a manual borehole six kilometres away from our home. The water always came out slowly, and the place was always crowded. The other boreholes that were closer to our village had dried up years ago or they trickled brown water on occasion; mostly the oldest in our village had patience for them. So, only the one borehole remained to my family; the deepest one, Mother had told us. We learned to ration water as toddlers.
The cave’s opening led into a valley, which was shielded by mountains on most sides. The mountains formed a kind of C around the valley. My brother and I had walked right through one of the mountains to reach it. And, it was the most stunning place I had ever seen. Tufts of grass and stems of blackjack jutted from the valley floor. A few common lizards lounged on rocks as they welcomed the morning light.
It was a paradise in our eyes, and I was sad to leave it almost immediately. With Tapiwa and his great sense of direction in the lead, we eventually found our way around the mountains and back home. When Mother saw our faces, she vacillated between relief and fury. We had been gone for over thirty hours. She had been sick with worry, unable to get even a wink of sleep the previous night. The rest of the time, she had spent searching for us. But, Tapiwa and I gushed about our discovery, about how we would never go thirsty again.
At the mention of the pool, Mother looked concerned, horrified even. She inspected us as if we were imposters doing too good a job of impersonating her children. She asked if the pool wasn’t the domain of the njuzu, those vicious mermaids who abducted and killed people. Men went missing, after all, in those mountains.
Tapiwa and I glanced at each other and laughed at her for holding on to beliefs we had held on to just a few hours ago. Our excitement had made us discard centuries of conventional wisdom. The pool wasn’t big enough for njuzu, we assured her. And if there were any, we both would have been taken after the noise we made whilst playing in the water. The treacherous crevices had likely swallowed the missing people; the rest was superstition and hearsay.
Mother ventured to believe, hope even, because she knew she had raised clever children. Her delicate smile was like the rising sun. Although she had only gotten a village education decades ago, she took pride in thinking herself out of a problem. So, she agreed to go back with us. But this time we went back prepared, with ropes and leather harnesses that were once used to restrain cattle, old paraffin lamps, and water bottles.
We climbed down the hole that had introduced us to the caves, and we walked through the mountain. We had figured that cutting through the mountain was much faster than going around the mountain range. Knowledge of the awaiting valley opening made the trip a lot faster the second time. When we reached the pool and valley, Mother’s awe slowly turned into realisation.
“We could grow food here in the valley,” she said, her eyes sparkling.
Tapiwa and I exchanged looks. Agriculture was an unknown art form to us. Mother was only reminiscing, I thought. But, she proved how serious she was when we each lugged a pair of five-litre bottles of water for sixteen kilometres. Mother carried twenty litres, utilising both her hands and the top of her head. Our destination was Varimi Village, which was twenty kilometres from Imbahuru, our village. Varimi had been rumoured to have seeds, a rumour that turned out to be accurate.
We traded the water for handfuls of maize seeds, sorghum, millet, beans, and peanuts. We even got a few bulbs of our local sweet potato, mbambaira. When asked by the villagers where we had gotten so much water, we said we had been saving it for almost a year.
“Our secrets can save us as much as food in our bellies,” Mother had warned me and my brother. “And we will learn how to protect what is ours,” she had added, with a sternness in her voice. In the lawless wastelands, the strong and brutish took from the weak. We would not be weak.
“Money has no use here anymore,” she said as we walked back home with our much lighter loads. She lifted the handful of beans wrapped in plastic and squeezed them in her palm. “This is all that matters now. Let the cities keep their pieces of paper and numbers on computer screens.”
Hostages
Four of the marauders escorted me and my brother out of our home whilst two remained with mother. Their leader went with us.
“Tapiwa and Tarisai will show you everything they know,” Mother had told him, yet she threw me a cunning look. I would not soon forget her words.
We passed through several huts on our way: what used to be our village. Few villagers were left, and most were old men and women, emaciated by hunger and sickened by hopelessness. Other times, when we passed their huts, they stared at us with drooping, glassy, blood-shot eyes whilst they mumbled to each other. But, not this day. They knew marauders had come, and they had shut themselves inside their huts.
“They’re despondent creatures,” Mother once said of the oldest amongst them. “They console each other by telling stories of how everything used to be better when they were young and vibrant. They remind each other of the rains that never failed, the greenery that invigorated the spirit, and the food that was always adequate. They’re stuck in the past.” I imagined that only a morbid fear of death could have kept them going.
We helped them with food and water whenever we could. But never so much that we gave away our secret.
“No one can be trusted,” Mother had warned us. “The very people we help can be our downfall if we reveal our cards.” The marauders had ambushed us at the crack of dawn, and we were shocked when they insisted that we had a secret. Who knew if it wasn’t our neighbours who had sold us out?
As we walked the wasteland, the Shanduko Mountains loomed before us and taunted us to dare them. They were the most prominent feature for kilometres and as daunting as they were massive. It was no wonder that they had been held sacred for generations. Even the marauders exchanged glances as we closed the gap toward them.
Their apprehension put a smile on my face. When I glanced at Tapiwa, his eyes were as bright as stars. We had some power over the brutes. Our knowledge was our strength, and Mother had made sure to remind us.
The landscape had been cleaned of most of its trees over the years. It was a world of dust and whirlwinds and baked earth. Half the time, I had my eyes half-closed to protect them from the dust clouds. The sun bore witness but spared us no pity. It beat down upon my head and back until its rays were like needles pricking my skin.
Further out, beyond the mountains, more trees dotted the land: thorn trees, mopanes, and massive baobabs. They were resilient, immutable, and good; truly, the only living things that deserved to survive the drought. But, they wouldn’t survive us and our hunt for food and firewood for long. The thought made me sad.
Tapiwa and I led the brutes, without a word exchanged between us. There was an unwritten rule that energy was better expended only when necessary. There was also no point in wasting words on the savages. The silence was filled with heavy breaths, all of them from the marauders. They may have been threatening us, but my brother and I were healthier, and fitter. It didn’t help matters that they carried machetes whereas Tapiwa and I walked free of burdens.
Their clothes, though ragged and dirty, consisted of trousers and shirts. From the stench they gave off, they had grown accustomed to soaking the marauders’ sweat. And, the brutes sweated then. By the time we got to the mountains, they would be tired, weaker enemies. I consoled myself with such thoughts and with a yearning for revenge.
When we reached the base of the mountains, the marauders could have sliced their trepidation with their machetes.
“This is a trap!” one of them told their leader. His chapped lips quivered. “These brats have brought us here to die. Everyone knows the Shanduko Mountains are a death trap.”
“Then stay here, coward!” his leader snarled.
He nodded at me. “She has more balls than you.” He threw an ugly look at Chapped Lips. “And, when we come back with food and water, you won’t get any of it! You can die alone somewhere and spare us your stupidity.”
“She’s not afraid because she thinks she’s already dead, her and her brother,” said Chapped Lips. He swiftly brought his machete to my neck.
“Tell us what’s in those mountains!” His eyes went wide. “Look at her; look how she doesn’t even flinch with a knife at her neck. She’s a witch, her and her mother. I saw the looks they gave each other. What kind of women, who don’t even shed a tear?”
His leader shoved him from me, and his machete grazed my chin goodbye. “
You’re mad from the sun!” his leader barked at him. “Everyone knows that if you follow the rules of a sacred place, you’ll be safe. Even a child will tell you that.”
Chapped Lips was huffing, and his eyes popped out like a chameleon’s. “And you know the rules?”
“Idiot!” the brute with the scar on his cheek spat at Chapped Lips. “We only need to respect the place and not complain or say anything stupid.”
Tapiwa and I couldn’t suppress our smiles. I prayed that they would hack each other to pieces.
“He’s right,” said the fourth marauder, who had a hooked nose like an eagle’s beak. But, his eyes skittered about as if he expected nasty spirits to attack at any moment.
Chapped Lips looked from his leader to Scarred Cheek. He relaxed his bony shoulders. “Okay,” he said, before shooting me a savage look. It was a threat as clear as the blazing sun in a cloudless sky.
We climbed up the mountain, following the one path we knew to be safe. Tapiwa and I smirked and exchanged glances every time one of the brutes slipped on the rocks. A bad enough fall would have rid us of one of them. As we progressed, however, luck wasn’t on our side. Though they got scrapes, none of them got injured.
We reached the entrance to our cave: the hole that introduced us to the dark place four years ago. But, it wasn’t a treacherous trap anymore. Tapiwa lifted the camouflaging door we made to hide the entrance. It was a latticework of branches, twigs, and dried leaves, which did its job very nicely; no one had discovered our secret yet. Behind the door was a ladder, which we had made with rope and pieces of wood.
“We go through there,” Tapiwa told the marauders.
“Now, I know it’s a trap,” Chapped Lips grumbled.
Their leader spared him a sharp glance before he turned to Tapiwa and me. “Why do we have to go that way?”
“It’s the fastest way,” I told him. “The other option is going around the mountains, and that would take half the day.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Two of my men will go down first. I don’t plan on you two running off.”
Hooked Nose and Scarred Cheek got down the ladder, then Tapiwa and me. The remaining two came after.
The skeleton that welcomed us to the caves all those years ago was long gone. We buried it, along with a few other human bones we found after more comprehensive explorations of the dark depths. I hated how the marauders wouldn’t see any of the ugliness; only the meticulous work we had done over the years. It was like we had slaved off all that time for the brutes.
Before I lit the paraffin lamp we kept near the entrance, I emptied the matchbox and stuffed the matches in my shorts’ pocket. It was dark enough that our captors didn’t notice or care to look. I lit the lamp with one of the matches and led the way.
My family had been down these caves so many times that we could have navigated them in the dark. It would have been easy for Tapiwa and me to escape from the marauders, but they would have eventually found their way out of the caves and back to our house. No, escape wasn’t a good option.
The cave was hotter with all those bodies pressed around me, smellier too. The sound of so many scuffing feet was also unfamiliar, like cackling witches on a deathly quiet night. I kept very close to my brother as we led the way.
After we had walked for about fifteen minutes, the bend in the cave that turned right came into view. At the bend’s elbow was a nook that was still hidden in darkness. We kept supplies there. I looked at Tapiwa and our eyes met. He nodded.
I lowered the lamp such that my torso hid it from the men behind us. I flattened the matchbox in one hand and used it to smother and put out the lamp’s flame. The cave plunged into inky darkness, the kind of darkness that could have unnerved the very devil in his lair.
Chapped Lips sucked in a sharp breath.
“Where did the light go?” He could not hide the tremble in his voice.
“Where are you?” their leader demanded of us. “What happened to the light?”
The vile men muttered amongst themselves as my brother and I scurried to our nook. The marauders may have played a tough game, but in truth, they were cowards. They victimised decent men and women because they didn’t have the fortitude to survive on the land like the rest of us. They were weaker than children. I reminded myself of this as I fumbled for our weapons at the nook.
Tapiwa was right beside me. We both reached for the same spear, and he let it go for me to take it. I grabbed a dagger, which had a makeshift scabbard and straps that I could tie around my waist. I routinely sharpened it on my visits to the cave. I could have shaved someone’s nose hairs with that blade.
With my dagger secured, I picked up a torch: a luxury we kept in the cave only for emergencies. Tapiwa got the same three things for himself. Thanks to our food and water, we had been able to trade for weapons.
I found my brother’s arm in the dark and tapped it twice near his wrist. It was the signal for, Are you ready? He returned by also tapping on my arm twice: yes, I am.
The stupid marauders couldn’t shut up, making their positions obvious in the dark. My brother and I, however, were as quiet as the dead as we snuck toward them.
“They’ve left us for dead,” Chapped Lips groused.
“Shut up!” their leader hissed. “We can retrace our steps. And, when we find them, we’ll kill the whole lot of them. After they’re dead, we’ll come back here and take whatever they thought they could hide from us.”
I released some of my rage by strangling my spear until I thought it would snap. These beasts deserved death. We had never killed anyone, my brother and I, but we had trained with our spears and strategised to death over the years. Still, my heart thumped in my chest and made my veins throb.
I reminded myself of the cowardly brutes, who, even then, panicked like lost children. My hands finally stopped trembling, and I prayed Tapiwa had also found his courage. “Now,” I whispered so softly that I could have been a ghost. I switched on my torch.
The leader flinched as the light bathed his dumbstruck face and blinded him. He was rigid and disoriented as I thrust my spear straight through his belly. He stumbled back and dropped his machete, its clatter resounding in the cave like a maniacal demon. He let out something between a grunt and a yelp before clutching my spear.
I yanked out the spear, and its sharp point sliced his palms. His blood spilled out of his guts into his hands, and the foul smell of a latrine filled the gap between us. Thankfully, there was nothing in my stomach to retch. The brute cried out and fell to his knees whilst the life leaked out of him.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Tapiwa kill his chosen victim. We switched off our torches in unison. That was the strategy we came up with: blind, confuse, and attack. We scurried back to make sure that our two remaining enemies wouldn’t find us. The cave was filled with the screams of the living and the dying. And the smell of death.
A certain unease settled in my bones. It wasn’t that I had killed; it was how easy it had been to snuff out a life and the satisfaction I had felt at getting my revenge. It almost frightened me how much I craved a similar fate for the rest of the marauders. Only their agony and death would quench my new obsession.
The two remaining brutes muttered and whimpered in the dark whilst they stumbled about like jittery prey. They had thought themselves the hunters, but the tables had turned. The air whistled as they swung their machetes. The fools were so loud that they couldn’t have hit anything blessed with a pair of functioning ears.
I switched on my torch, and its light landed on Chapped Lips’s face. There was more than fear in his eyes; rage burned in them like fire. I was quick again. I thrust my spear at him. Impossibly, he dodged the weapon and grasped the shaft as it glided past his belly. He viciously struck the spear with his machete.
My whole body quaked and my teeth rattled before the spear was jerked out of my hand. He tossed the spear behind him like a toy he had snatched from an unruly toddler. My heart leapt to my throat. I was defenceless again, gawking and paralysed. I glanced at Tapiwa, who was also getting trouble from Scarred Cheek. I was on my own.
Chapped Lips’s face took on a hideous look.
“Bitch!” he hissed. “Today, you die!”
He swung his machete. I jumped back, but the weapon grazed my forearm, its sting making me yelp. He lunged and viciously kicked me in the gut, knocking the air out of my lungs. The blow threw me against the cave wall. My gut was on fire, my back a masterclass in agony. I groaned but dared not hunch over for fear of his sharp blade. That wall kept me from crumpling to the ground.
My whole body hurt, and my enemy sneered. A gentler girl would have cried, but gentle girls died.
He lunged again, and I was immediately alert like any cornered prey. I glanced at the torchlight.
Fool, I chastised myself. You’re helping him kill you. Maybe you do deserve to die.
He lifted his machete for the final strike, his face bestial and his aim true. I switched off my torch as I zipped from the rock wall. I heard the chink of the machete striking the wall whilst I swung up behind him.
I unsheathed my dagger, switched on my torch, and sliced into his throat whilst he tried to recover his bearings. Even as the blood sprayed out of him, Chapped Lips flung his arms and machete back at me. I jumped away from the man’s death throes. His machete clattered on the floor before he grasped his neck. The blood gushed out and spilled between his fingers. It was a thick, oozing mess, which made me shudder. I was a true murderess.
As he convulsed and died like a decapitated chicken, I turned back to find Tapiwa. He also stood over a corpse. He was frozen as he stared at his latest kill, at all the blood that pooled at his feet. I had never felt more pity for him. In the old world, he would have been in school and happy just to learn something new. Instead, he had become a killer.
He had suffered a few cuts on his arms. Scarred Cheek had proved a fierce match. I rushed to him and took a closer look at his cuts.
“Are you alright?”
He nodded as if he was just coming out of a trance. “Just a few scratches.”
I wouldn’t take any chances. There were no doctors to consult if his cuts turned ugly. I tore strips from my T-shirt and used them as bandages on his arms. “The cuts will have to be cleaned.”
“That doesn’t matter right now,” he said. “Mother, we must get to her.”
My eyes were swift to find his. He was right. There were still two marauders holding her captive. Although she had helped in our training and attack strategy, she had mostly left the fighting to us.
“You are young and vibrant,” she would say. “And you are the future. Keep each other safe.” My eyes watered at imagining her gone from the world.
“We must save her,” I told Tapiwa.
Home
With the immediate threat to my life gone, the pain pulsed in my flesh and exhaustion settled in my bones. I fought both as we retraced our steps out of the caves. I trembled as I climbed the rope ladder whilst my heart beat in my ear. Each thump held the gravity of a warning; thump: you haven’t eaten and you’re fatigued; thump: you won’t be fighting in the caves, the daylight will work against you; thump: you’ll get home too late; thump: you’ll lose her, just like you lost your father.
My spear and blade became boulders on my back. And I sweated the little water that kept me alert.
Would the savages be patient enough with Mother? Maybe their leader had left instructions to get rid of her. I held back my tears. Despair would kill me faster than hunger. I looked at Tapiwa, who was ahead of me, for some hope. He moved with the agility and urgency of a squirrel. If he believed that we would save her, so would I.
Once we were on the mountainside, I peered at our village, which seemed little more than stones in the dirt. My heart ached at the thought of the distance we would have to cover. The ache spread out and tightened my whole chest.
We went down the mountain much faster than we ordinarily would have. Our zeal was rewarded with slips on the gravelled slope and the accompanying scrapes and scratches on our arms and legs. But we paid no mind to the itching cuts. Mother was all that mattered.
It was afternoon, and the sun was merciless. I was a sweaty mess by the time we got to the base of the mountain. For once, I wished for clouds to shield us from the worst of the sun; like a fool, I allowed desperation to make me yearn for miracles.
We half-walked and half-jogged toward the village. Within a few minutes, we were soaked and panting. The trip ordinarily took us around two hours, but I was determined to be home in an hour. Although I pushed him, Tapiwa didn’t complain.
We would have been of little use against the marauders whilst exhausted and thirsty, but I couldn’t think of any other way. I loathed our predicament, and the dread kept me on edge. If we were killed, it would all have been for nothing.
When we reached the village boundary, everything was quiet. Our neighbours were still shut inside their huts. I was suddenly angry at them for doing nothing, these people who we helped with food. And, I was also angry at myself, at our secrets, and at the cruel world.
We slunk between the huts like criminals in the night. My ears were sharp, and my eyes swivelled in their sockets to make sure that nothing surprised us.
We peered at our hut from behind a neighbour’s home. No one had lived in there for years, so I felt hidden and safe. Our door was closed, and there was no one around. Tapiwa and I exchanged glances. Sneaking to our own home felt peculiar.
We crept to our hut and pressed our ears to the door. Nothing. Not even voices. Tapiwa’s eyes were wide as he looked at me. Had they already killed her? My heart throbbed in my chest as I gripped my spear tighter. If I couldn’t save my mother, I would avenge her.
Tapiwa kicked in the door, and we lunged inside. I gasped when I saw Mother. She calmly looked up at us as if we had just come in for dinner. Although she was safe, I couldn’t let go of my spear and my heart wouldn’t let up. Sprawled on the floor were the two marauders, without a mark on them. Their faces had anguished looks: bulging eyes and gaping mouths as if to let out wails.
“You’re safe,” Tapiwa muttered.
She nodded before glancing at our blood-stained spears. “I take it the other four marauders won’t be bothering us anymore?”
I nodded. “What happened here?”
“What do we do to rats?” she asked me.
“Poison,” I said, “we kill them with rat poison.”
She smirked. “The famished idiots accepted bulbs of sweet potato after I offered. They thought I’d feed men who’d threatened to kill my children.”
This world had turned us all into killers.
END