Chapter One
As a tree fully clad in think fiber creeping stems closely attached and growing to the boom, so was a man. Only that he didn’t have leaves but he was masculine and tall enough not to balance with any other human being. His voice was a bang that could be noticed even in the middle of a moon full night of interaction. It was Wakabi the hunter, well known across village reed borders among animals and people. He was also an elder in Busiki.
At the gates of his mushroom compound spears beatified the edges and each mushroom’s entrance of his five wives other spears stood there. In addition, the oldest spear lived at his old Paapa's mushroom who lived as the eldest among the community. He had lived to be known as the Oldman. It was a portioned homestead that depicted Wakabi's brevity, chieftacy and integrity.
Wakabi though a hunter of animals, he was also a hunter of humans next to the spirits of the land just as his Oldman was a great warrior. Wakabi was the village and the village was Wakabi.
Depending on the sun’s bearing that contemporary formed a shade on the necessary side of Wakabi's mushroom, Wakabi would rest on his hide at that one shade side of the mushroom and then at the opposite part a time later. It was a habit he stole from the Oldman and hence the Oldman did the same. Nevertheless, whenever there was no tilt the Oldman would enter his mushroom at noon of the day. At that time of day his son would visit Kamira, a very good friend.
It was told that Wakabi and the Oldman were always in hiding as there mushrooms were in line to one another and parallel to the crawling sun’s course. Therefore, they never got to meet during their relaxing interval, face to face by the mushroom tilts. Little was shared among them, if any it was mainly at the elders’ meetings. Side by side Wakabi's two dogs Uniza and Mugeme also relaxed in their master’s shade. It was that hour of the date when women, girls and boys were at work.
One mild afternoon as Wakabi's women sat down to greet old Paapa-in-law after their daily lethargy in the heavenly hot.
‘If the ground you cultivate wasn’t fertile then you leave it for the sun and you find another…isn’t that true?’ the Oldman told his daughter’s-in-law instead of responding to their respectful greetings.
The women replied that the Oldman's words were true and breathing. Then in no chronological birth order Wakabi's only children who had no sisters saluted Oldman and he repeated the same words as before. The boys too believed him to be right without any lame word.
The women’s Paapa-in-law had offered a shrub riddle they didn’t correctly figure out despite their reply. Many thought he was talking about his tiredness on earth. His chin was pointed and getting sharper everyday which caused wrinkles above his face, for his skin was in itself tired like a rough tree bark about to peel off. The daughters-in-law believed their head remarks. Oldman wasn’t doing a workable thing apart from attending high-level meetings that took him several hours and energy to and fro, with his three legs having got the third one from a hard society deciduous tree. It was a leg without knee, ankle or toe facets, and its thigh’s size equivalent to the rest of itself. Considerably Oldman was almost to fall front wards due to the bending backbone had he without this third leg.
When Wakabi greeted his Paapa, the Oldman told him it was seven absolute seasons since part of Wakabi's land was neither bothered about its fertility nor was it productive. Therefore, such estate had to be detached out of the worth grounds. Evil of the earth resided in such unblessed acres. The Oldman continued that his son’s barren wife Mubika had to return to her descendants before she claimed a rightful position among Wakabi's ancestors. Yet she had nothing but a big debt. Wakabi was told that should Mubika die in his mushrooms while childless the pessimistic omen of barrenness would transcend forever in their clan.
At last Wakabi understood the infertility of land but none of the women knew a clue of truth, for they had disappeared, leaving Paapa and son speaking elderly matters. Women were not involved in men’s congenial colloquy; they were only listeners.
The Oldman didn’t conclude emphasizing his proverb to the son, that Wakabi had not harvested even a single edible gourd. However, the land only sucked the rain from the skies. The Oldman didn’t forget that yet more Wakabi's eldest son Kyeyago was growing rapidly. It was dangerous for his clan to leave the heir with unfertile estate. The Oldman's other talk was that a new estate could be attained but unless the unyielding yard was done away with no luck would he have in attaining fertile yards. The Oldman retreated to his mushroom, he had exercised is elderly duty.
Wakabi said no word during old Paapa's proverb recount but only paradox over took is strength. The earth was turning against his most thought of woman.
Meanwhile Mubika as the facilitating tripod woman of the day brought a pumpkin dish in a calabash for her husband. Mubika had tried to extract edible words out of Wakabi. Though she asked why his face was against a smile, Wakabi only managed to talk tears. Mubika reminded him that men never cried and if so it was done silently not explosively.
Mubika believed that strange news had knocked the mushrooms and that perhaps news called for one of Wakabi's sons to be sacrificed by the riverside in the name of the spirits. Wakabi had past long told is Mubika that his sons were never to appear sacrificial as the village thought of people and the river.
Mubika had had great disappointments over the times but kept strong because of the husband’s fondness in her beauty. Children, women and men were eligible to humiliate her barrenness. Mubika wasn’t supposed to be greeted as a superior woman by children but she had to greet them, customary they were regarded of a better breed than herself. Slander words like, the woman who feared babies; the empty belly, the beautiful ugly, all meant Mubika. She had managed to accept these words and other proverbs as being better than returning back to her Paapa's mushroom, since it would give her multiple humiliations.
The next day Wakabi took his footsteps to Kamira's mushroom. Wakabi had slept in complete openness of the heart and night. He was thinking and wondering how to handle the hole to be caused by Mubika's departure. Now he believed it was Kamira to help him out.
Kamira had never seen his friend so much demolished in the face with total depression. It was at this moment that Kamira realized that Wakabi had walked alone without is hide to sit on and the defensive spear which he had never left behind before. Immediately Kamira found a spare hide for Wakabi and a spear soon than any person noticed. It was a cultural law for distinguished men and all boys to move at attention.
Wakabi told Kamira to send off Mubika on his behalf for he couldn’t do it by his mouth. Wakabi had narrated all the Oldman had touched on with his ageing tongue.
‘You’re behavior is little like Uniza and Mugeme running away from a cat.’ Kamira accused the friend.
‘The moment she’s gone I will demolish her mushroom on return to my mushrooms.’ Wakabi promised Kamira, in self-defense.
Kamira held his other hide-seat by the armpits and his spear sleeping in his right palm then went off, living Wakabi in his mushroom. As Wakabi kept is silence in pain Kamira's two wives appeared by the mushroom entrance, they sat down and greeted him. He sorrowfully didn’t respond not even telling his troubles. Such matters were unshared between the two sexes. Kamira's two girls sat down and greeted Wakabi and he softly responded. It was these two girls that often conveyed Wakabi to need a girl of his own blood. The relationship between the girls and their Paapa Kamira always knocked on Wakabi's mind. They were like sisters to Kamira. The girls about almost equal seasons of age they could do almost everything their Maama's did without over looking any stage and each other. It was such girls that owned hope from their Paapas and Maamas for future recognizable sons-in-law. In no daunt they were constructively engaging into beauty as the old saying beckoned that beauty came with hard work.
The girls supposed like twins because of their resemblance to Kamira but they were of different Maamas. The younger girl having caught up with the elder sister, people called her mayiga to mean horns, there was striking equality.
Kamira having reached the other mushrooms and having been greeted by Wakabi's wives, he called Mubika back as she was leaving for the well. ‘It is the fifth season when girls like you who never bother to become women went back to their Paapa's unfertile land rather than staying in great Busiki. Even the night mosquito as a better life than your breath.’ Kamira was convinced and courageous in his words. Before Kamira went any further the girl-wife was tearful and only she could do is trace for her bridal pot and get read leave. Kamira had a duty to witness her diminishing with the thin village path, lawfully.
‘Ha! Ha! The animal skin you didn’t come with it,’ Kamira alerted the girl; she had to leave the hide in Wakabi's mushroom. As she walked off with her pot and tears, she gathered leaves and bemusedly covered her empty under-abdominal entrance and exit.
As Mubika passed by Kamira's mushrooms, Wakabi could notice her crying politely as her hands engaged the face. Mubika was in a new less valuable cloth. As Mubika disappeared Wakabi run back to his mushroom and told his boys to follow their Maama until she arrived safety at Bugweri border. He feared for her safety. Hardly any cases of barrenness were evident, that even the elders didn’t know whether the boys were acting legitimately to escort out their Maama. However, in this circumstance Wakabi wasn’t supposed to indulge much with the woman axed.
The boys and their spears caught up with Mubika and politely they trailed behind her sorrowful tears. Mubika was troubled of leaving without a child from the husband she served. Moreover, at other times she thought it was fine but another moment her barrenness troubled the mind.
Chapter Two
Mubika was noticed from a far, her head’s rip sneaking out slowly like a germinating mushroom from the dirt. She had held grief along the journey. She had last traveled the same route two seasons ago. When she had come to the medicine man, without a pot on her head. Now she seemed a stranger in the land she was born and everyone was getting aware that the price of her barrenness had grown protruding strongly than her beauty. She had changed a lot, only her fat breasts showed the diversions, a big girl in leaves clothe. She had returned yet her mind wasn’t thinking of working hard and pay back the seven season barnyards full of peas as compensation for the several seasons she spent with Wakabi's clan without a yield of her own fertility.
Mubika had the greatest sorrow in life. Back in Busiki she could hold it because of a good husband although her beauty brought no its own inheritance. Now the girls she used to head to the swamp and play with, the boys of her olden times in Bugweri were all having their children. She was a beauty so much reckoned in the old days before this intrusion wound of her inbeing. The pain of coming back as barren was germinating by every slide of the sun.
Mubika had no exterior scar by the sword grass of the swamp-way, her skin reflected every other good thing men were born for, the eyes would show her as a goddesses in the dark, more to that her behind could lead a man forget his worries and path and punch to follow her. Sweet! Sweet Mubika, the village used to sing. Her Paapa had attained customary value and publicity for the fruits of his swing.
Mubika found her Maama had past away a few days ago and only her Paapa welcomed her. Nevertheless, her head seemed the mother of all sour water. Her beauty was a hoax and already meaningless. She went to her Maama's grave and wept more tears of barrenness and her Maama's remains. The women who tried hard to unseal her daughter’s sickness but failed and now Mubika had to solely care and cure the pain.
Night fell and night rose when Mubika was silently plague tearful, her eyes grew red and unbeau. Thin and wrest to her Maama's current mushroom. In less than many moons’ appearance and sun’s daily life, the Bugweri village understood her as the crying girl and not tolerantly regarding her in-depth plight. She had at one time gathered men from a far to come and only glance at her beauty. Moreover, others sailed with marriage proposals but now it was no more.
A really wonderful girl wasn’t easy to marry. Tales ago pointed at the chief of Bugweri who was turned down by a girl, beautifully indescribable. When the chief returned to his chiefdom, he was regarded weaker than women and then sacrificed to the spirit because the girl rebuffed the chief’s marital work plan. Beautiful girls were few and had grace to choose on their future husbands. A style that made other unworthy girls respect the heart spiritisses and wished they had that luck too. For many girls ended up in the hands of men without titles in society.
Within a scratchy moment, her Paapa named a temporary piece of land for Mubika to rain on it new breath and determination. Gradually as a snail marking its path without a sap left hind. It took her sometime to pick up her body and soul into earthly reality. More so the planting season wasn’t ready, for the earth was still in disagreement with the sky. Morning connived with her on the plowing preparations, working for her soul alone, no child or husband. Still tears never forgot her crossroad. She was right to pour the watery-eyes into her garden, a teammate to her own infertility. It was inseparable. A sort of barrenness season.
Mubika's Paapa gave her wholesome seeds and kept on trying to console the constant memories out of her politely. Nevertheless, everything around her seemed acting against her will, the ground she ploughed, the Paapa who sought parenthood. She wished not being born at all. Now born and ripe but unable to give birth. Children around the village who would never interact with her own, because she didn’t have any. How would she live?
From time to time memories of her young youthful girlish beau was alive and little was on clutches. The compound that was their playground with almost everything apart from the plummeted mushrooms, which included any she left behind apart from her Paapa's and her late Maama's mushroom. Where Mubika laid her jaw of sorrow. Her Paapa had reluctantly delayed to plug it into soot as if aware of his forthcoming daughter of sorrow. The way forward to the well hadn’t changed although there were a few more fresh galvanized mushrooms here and there. The history stayed still as dumbness.
The smoothful shinny skin was controlled by despair, agony that ate away the good flesh and built a reptile rough body surface. The un-aged was now switching plunges into an ageing symbol of a person. Pain they would say, sickness they would never agree.
As a chief Mubika's Paapa gathered the village, the village’s only tops. He needed a naked truce upon his daughter in society. The daughter who would never have any grave site if her belly wasn’t fecund garden of flesh nativity. Only see her die and be thrown into the river, away to flow to distant lands and spirits. The chief narrated a chronicle length of his daughter like her own spirit among the lord of spirits. The end and beginning in her blood and certain benevolent insults awaiting her. Moreover, here he forgot to speak about her beauty that he had never neglected to phase in among men of authority, wisdom and promise. It had always given him the postgraduate interface of his powers among beautiful women.
Comfort was the only compromise among the chiefs’ brains and circle. Certainly they couldn’t isolate her from memories in her inner being. Nevertheless, the elders conceded adamantly to call their medicine man’s powers to apply. The medicine man didn’t attend the council gathering personally not even sending is prodigy spirits. May be he sent them? I don’t know. The elders dial was never to give up, for their society too, needed a cleanse from profound misindulgive pitfalls.
That who gives birth to neither richesse of martens it’s not of her wish nor the richesse of martens herself-were part of proverbs, phrases and words that captured waves between mouth and ear. From one field of mushroom to another. Adjusting and accommodating sympathetic feel and hope for the sorrowful daughter as long as life lived in her, was the theme. Affinitive rapportious feelings carried goats, cocks, ducks, calabash, seeds, hides, peas and words for her beginning.
Still the richness in her brought more pain than compassion, the apparent knot of having everything without a child was the weighing issue. In addition, although person’s heartfelt lived justifully, still with many Maamas’ Mubika's folk was remodified into a brand children’s tale called the omen in beautiful Mubika. An additional story on her erstwhile.
On the same village a new bride at Mubika's neighborhood was believe to a similar disease of emptiness because for five years the bride’s Maama played marriage without producing even a seed. However, this new bride and Mubika grew up in different generations but same village and so she married a village mate. Little attack was bountiful in her situation but now her neighbor Mubika had crossed to a new village that meant her agony lived beyond every village she had life with. The trauma of why she didn’t marry a Bugwerian was an unmien issue from women and men of Mubika's generation.
One of Mubika's old friends in their childhood past days, lived on and she often came by to share her pain. She had five children and so she lived humanly. One moment she told Mubika to consider the medicine man’s wisdom again as long as she longed for a baby. She had been sent by the chiefs to entice Mubika to the power of the village. However, little did Mubika know about it. Mubika compiled and explained her many trios with the medicine man that failed. Nevertheless, Mubika agreed promptly to try again.
For the first time Mubika talked about the living feelings of her husband. That even though she was hated, her husband never showed up in the same mien and so the greatest human she had found. Now wasn’t anymore. Though she had no children, Wakabi was her child and husband.
Mubika prepared supper for her Paapa as she arranged to exit. By the time Namakiika her friend arrived to convoy Mubika to the medicine man, she had finished cooking and saving her Paapa's dish in a calabash and into his mushroom.
As Mubika and Namakiika walked through the village they could count their history. Remembering fellow girls who married off in other villages and recounting men that loved them. It was then that Mubika recalled the song that brought her fame in voice to sum on her beauty as they went along the way singing their memories,
The tall handsome hunter
His spear never leaves the hands
He gives me sleepless nights
If you find him
Let him know
The girl in the next village
Has sent him greetings
And the day I will meet him again
My flower tongue shall sing his strength.
The song was sang over and over again that a few women who remembered the cadence and children who had learnt it joined in the ode. In addition, as Mubika with Namakiika continued, they would leave a soft sound in different huts were the song was alive. The song that married off Mubika to Wakabi.
It was the first moment from the time Mubika came to her Paapa's village that people saw her smile and happiness. She had taken time off her dirty fate to enjoy the lively earth. It was all because of Namakiika, the old friend.
They bypassed the well and saw themselves in the girls who were fetching water. That well hadn’t dried at all since she left but its trough had only enlarged, Mubika sought through the mind. It had widened just like the route they step-punched.
As they advanced, they could notice the sacred rock of fortune. Only village elders and chiefs were allowed to reach the sacred rock. Moreover, people had narrations that the rock only appeared in daytime and at night it would sink down into the earth. The people of Bugweri believed in the rock and told how it house sheltered spirits of ancestral consultation for the whole Busoga territory. At the entrance of its sacredness stood a spear that a wild animal was always sacrificed by from every visiting elder for the ancestors. The sacred stone could talk to the ancestors who in return communicated to the chiefs or elders who visited the rock.
It was quite a distance. Mubika's friend told her that the son of the late medicine man she had left was now the current powerful herb specialist. Mubika recognized having met him before. The two friends had lived one generation below this medicine man.
As they arrived the dark seeming and scaring environment of the healer’s mushroom, he scandalized elementary charms of the soul-heart out of them; terrific oppressive fear took over. They couldn’t see him but there they sat before his powers and frontier. The medicine man knew Mubika.
After the late Lwazilwataka the greatest of medicine men in times tales, the Bugweri powers never grow stronger. It was told that Lwazilwataka could heal a person who lived sixteen villages away and that he healed the Gganda king of a hydro cell. As he pressed and squeezed a banana stem back in his garden, the king at the thrown was pouring out filth and tears worth a well. From that moment the king respects the powers in Bugweri, for his own wise men were dormant although docile. Lwazilwataka would be buried alive and then rise out of the grave with is might herbs then start dancing. Therefore, he was capable of rising out dead bodies. One time a woman died while pregnant old and it was a crush bother to burry two persons in the same grave. Two different spirits, it was impossible. Lwazilwataka made the dead woman give birth to a dead baby. He gave the woman’s body its soul strength to gas the baby. However, none of those powers did the now medicine man possess.
‘Are you both barren?’ The medicine man voice penetrated the shrine noise.
‘No, am fruitful.’ Namakiika replied softly, while Mubika was lost, how did the man understand what had brought us here, she thought.
‘That’s a dodge but I know you’re fruitful,’ the medicine man said. ‘Let the one you’ve accompanied listen…if a hunter doesn’t know is former mistakes then he dies by the jaws of the animal he hunts it’s better you come back the next day before evening without the fruitful one.’ The medicine man meant to say to Mubika.
It was then that Mubika analyzed the medicine man’s anecdote and understood she had always made a mischief of coming with her Maama to the medicine man. That’s why the herbs didn’t truly experiment. This hour around hope grew in her life a fetus that a baby was to be born of her beauty should the medicineman apply his expertise.
The medicine man escorted the two friends through the thin way. They patched the uneasily seen ground. Through the night in a quick match of togetherness as they seemed the only people alive in the village. Only the night wind touched their presence as they passed groups of huts asleep. Voices of insects that trapped darkness in silence spelt in their head hearers. Only one spear was guarding three humans in the thickest of animal times.
First they reached Mubika's mushroom and then the last leg continued until they found Namakiika's mushroom. Moreover, there stood her husband Balyedusa in waiting. When Balyedusa saw the medicine man his temper froze it had been frenzy mini-seasons ago. Otherwise, a woman coming back in the late night without her man but personally or another male apart from the medicine man, a spear was rightful to cut off one toe for every night this crime was committed until she was toeless and banished.
Balyedusa having been tipped off by is other wives about Namakiika's disappearance in the late hours of noon, he had prepared the spear and outside his hut; sitting and waiting, he later uplifted himself from the hide and continued to linger in lose hope.
During daytime the medicine man traveled in the wickedness of forests, far and wide. Their freedom wasn’t restricted in mobility. Traveling and searching for traditional herbs of society’s needs. Digging out roots, cutting stems with his spear, gathering special anti hill soil and scooping leaves with the same weapon. All these were thrown in his woven bag, in the multiple fingers of the gods.
Chapter Three
Wakabi was never the original unsubtle man after demolishing Mubika's hut. His muscles sat upon exterior strength of destruction but internal brawn had softened to a womanish heart. No woman equaled her in his life. She was the fifth wife but first at heart. Wakabi believed there was something wrong in the society he was born into. It was attacking him. Culture lived stronger than life. He felt the Oldman was against his wife’s intent at heart. Though they were both elders in the village, Wakabi remained a child, a child to respect the words of his Paapa.
Wakabi hadn’t slept since then, but only thoughts of Mubika's departure propelled him. He hardly said or talked a sentence or two from the last period meeting with Kamira.
The Oldman kept on telling Wakabi that if the desert found them in this village they would certainly need to migrate, unless there wasn’t any other land or the other well-off landowners where confrontational. Oldman was catalyzing Wakabi to find a bride able to transform sorrow into joyful wonders. He had noticed his son’s anguished wrathful behavior. Wakabi hadn’t talked or greeted the Oldman since that past narking moment. They seemed to be undergoing a concession.
Wakabi could bypass his Paapa without a say and silently the Oldman would grasp a lap of saliva through is Adam’s apple throat. He feared the son just like anyone else and yet he did everything due to customary rules and as an elder. Wakabi also resentfully kept his lonely pain because of is Paapa's resigning times. He knew the Oldman's real energetic form deteriorated the moment Wakabi's third wife Mutwala was ill pregnant. The Oldman began curving while his walking stick become taller than him. He was getting tired. It seemed they were born together with the stick; he lawfully had a reason never to carry a spear.
One of the nights Wakabi woke up earlier enough than any other. With his hunting dogs dressed in bell gongs from fragments of Kamira's workshop. Weaponry combated with a hunting net, spears, to his mastery work he moved on. A man overrun by a woman thing and now fitly adjusting to wash away the rich sense of touch that drew into a bitter smell in air. His dog Uniza headed the way into the jungle and Wakabi followed as the other dog Mugeme came as the hind side detective.
On absorbing the gongs pattern, birds would awake and talk to each other and other animals had to either take off or wait for the next danger. The forest was getting kindled by Wakabi who was bewildermently intrepid especially with is dogs and spears alongside his conspicuous brawn in spite of the late nightshade. It was Wakabi’s other mushroom, somehow he knew where to pass or hide when the need emerged.
He began by planting the weaved net made of simple but strong creeping sterns and roots. Through trees in a supposed loose straight line of a wall-like form so as to ease the trapping of running and ignorant animals. Suddenly Wakabi sat down, leaning on the closet trunk; he appeared aimless towards forest circumstances. Uniza and Mugeme stood by puzzled; they too had never seen their master put is stamina to rest while at work. Later the dogs made cowardly mourning. Their master was thinking of Mubika. He didn’t know whether Mubika arrived thoroughly, for the boys had returned but never did they give a smooth return report. In no irony the animals he was trying to ambush could have suck her blood without any resistance. He wondered why, he hadn’t taken Mubika back personally. All in all customary decree disagreed with a man returning the woman. He recalled how Mubika came several years ago as a jubilant young girl in the hands of dignity besides a great warrior and hunter. Now she had returned as an ominous woman.
Only the seven caches full of peas were what would take Wakabi to Bugweri and then he would have a second look on his Mubika. He neither really believed to regain Mubika nor to receive her any more.
Although Wakabi seemed to take a nap the forest whispers always guaranteed is alertness. Though the dogs lived awake their fear had grown thicker and thicker as the woodlands they where in, not even a single loud you could hear of the bucking and spinning but sharp cries alone. Then in a whiz of a wind speed the dogs began to nest their safety and this brought Wakabi's reasoning apparent upon a fierce creature being within their circles. Wakabi's mind grew simultaneously with is strength. He stood up as he held the spear to relay up too, his muscles vibrating with steadiness for any attack. The animal disappeared soon than never. It was a diamond like eyed creature in the night that would never come closure to bright object. So Wakabi knew it was of the leopard family. The dogs had run behind their master, extending slow by slow backwards.
Wakabi adored the dogs as vigilantes and they too trusted their master more than any one other. Wakabi took is former postural stalment, he wasn’t afraid of any breathing thing. A man trying to rejoin mental connection with Mubika.
The leopard didn’t go far, it disordered Uniza and Mugeme again. The dogs strolled hind wards until Mugeme webbed into Wakabi's trap. The leopard stood light fully with strawing noises, Wakabi was obviously clear and aware. He sensed is dog being trapped as Uniza dropped back but Wakabi wasn’t about to change concentration from the beast until it disappeared again. As the webbed dog wailed Wakabi was unable to unwrap it especially due to the unpredictable beast. It kept on returning and retreating. Otherwise, his two dogs knew Wakabi was better than them courageously.
Not until birds began jumping and flying over the earth surface and night screaming woodland rhythmatic insects were dying out. When one side of the firmament was clear than another opposite side that Wakabi freed the then still entrapped and whooping dog, Mugeme. He restructured the hunting net and went off with his friends, scratching and bumping forest materials. The bucking and running started as Uniza sniffed a possible creature ahead. Wakabi was in his senses. In no seconds wasted a spear flew to pierce the animal but missed the target. Wakabi was confronting a lion. As he arrived at tree hanging the spear, he extracted the weapon vigorously and in sharp quickness, and then continued with the dogs. His original javelin had skinned into a tree.
Wakabi's potentiality was awake, moving through bushes of the forest like an elephant and the dogs running ahead of him with their gongs ringing around the inpenetratable, he had started is mastery art of hunting. Throwing steps as long as his leg’s length, it wasn’t alien for Wakabi to jump anthills and several other obstacle shrub points.
With the gongs ding-dinging in the lion’s listener, it was taking off for its life. The forest animal had decoded the noisy chime as a signal called jeopardy. Moreover, hardly could they wait to meet the dog gongs, for Wakabi was quietly rang is spears alongside the dogs. Sounds of scared small animals adjusted through their own mastery escape as Wakabi spearheaded for the beast of beasts. All the main four animals ran through the talls like inhabitants, yes, all that lived inside their mastery reality was experience.
Wakabi could aim for several times unto the bouncing and hurdling beast but he felt numerous lost chances. Moreover, no could he throw a second spear before picking up the other unless is instinct conceded to approve that the lion wasn’t able to counter fight. It was so because Wakabi could cast a spear for more than hundred meters distance. Behind the lion one dog was on the left side and another on the right side. The animals would stretch in a legless format above the ground and whenever they touched the earth it was for less than a second, then they rose above again as if they hadn’t been on the earth before. Gongs toll lived in both ears of the beast that it feared to run either to the right or to the left. In addition, right in between the dogs was Wakabi with one spear suspended by the thigh level, as the other swung above the shoulder, almost aware of its culprit.
Has people told any legend of hunting the one common maxim existing in all, was that every hunter was made of speed and marathon adhered with human toughness. Therefore, it was true with Wakabi.
They had now flown over their village borders and heading further with the lion. Wild thorny green society and others had already scratched Wakabi due to the fast pace. Eminently his body was described in deep dark black skin scars, the hunter’s badge. As the saying traveled, the hunter’s body belongs to the wild earth. It was a manner of telling a great and perfect hunter from the rest of the posse. Moreover, every time Wakabi returned from the mastery art, a calabash of various trees tough saps muddle was laid at his mushroom entrance so that he could smash it on the wounds. To nurse and cure is manly pains before the next hunt. Wakabi always told male striplings that no wound hurts if the consequential animal is killed, however, if they lost the animal, double twinge would yield. One for missing the creature and the bodily pang as the second torture. It was like the brute was hunting them rather than their art being after the beast.
Wakabi again aimed is spear for the beast’s life but he cast it sooner than it lift off from the earth; hence he missed it once more. It was cunningly agreeable heaving any aim to meet the animal in space; then the beast would fall fiercely and by then increasing the spears in-depth was right. By the time he picked up the fallen javelin the dogs were still on the chase path with little to bark at, Wakabi followed in gear velocity yet again.
Watering women and girls got into uttering pierce full shrills, the swamp was mad. Although they had heard the hunting gongs, the lion approached sooner than the dogs surfaced. The tools of watering were abandoned unaware as every female sought for shed but the lion had long passed. The sudden phobia remained intact even after witnessing the dogs and Wakabi at skill. Some women had already reached in the closest mushroom, it was a flash when they never held their breasts while running and you believed they were faster than men. Then it wasn’t a crime swapping into any hut for precaution’s sake.
The hunting of undomesticated swine could make a pregnant maama give delivery as it was always narrated about Wakabi's coming on earth. It was then that completely heavier women were discharged of their earth toiling duties until after giving birth.
By now the rear sun was encouraging and Wakabi having joined a new village it called for other hunters into the hunt. More dogs got engaged in hounding the lion as Wakabi's dogs slowed back. The fresh gong dogs swung around the quest, the speed of hunters was reemphasized and this gave Wakabi more guts, as the beast was apparently scared about the numerous rings that gonged the earth. He knew death was close by but lifeless is what he was fighting against.
In a stressful disguise the lion was warier, beating all possible odds as it began alternate sharp turns to avoid a coming spear. This would call the voices of hunters to turn right or left into the toll road of the running being lion. The dogs too had already twisted their direction. Shouting and shouting the hunting seemed a happy sport.
In all customary policies the hunting oral law was a great social break through that interrelated village-to-village, kingdom-to-kingdom. A person could travel through a handful of villages and hunt in the sixth village or the next-door village. In addition, hunters came to acknowledge one another through this artistic formula of rules and action. The legal reason was basing on a fact that if any early expeller got weakened in the hunting, he couldn’t lose is meal to the hunter who joined the expedition later on. Because at such a stage the beast would have been enervated strengthlessly that it was promptly easy to spear down. Hence, if any intruding hunters killed the creature, it belonged to the original hunter. In most cases of such circumstance the earlier hunter would give the end poachers a quantity of the dead beast. Moreover, hunters kept this rule for if you went against it, the next hunting would probably drive the hunt and you to a different village and certainly you wouldn’t carry back the hunt because he who serves others with distrust deserves not to be trusted too. What you did to the other hunters they did it unto you.
The implicit popularity of Wakabi was that he never runs behind little worried animals like feral pigs, wild goats, untamed little animals but always stood touching wild plucky beasts; lions, leopards, tigers, wild cattle. This agitated other hunters to enroll with Wakabi, and learn is tactics and spiritually become courageous. He was a man getting into the hunting folks of Busoga village, every hunting season with a banner for brevity. However, people like Wakabi could face a lion face to face and kill it, which too distinguished him from the remnant hunters of the beast animals.
As the hunter searched and moved on against the lion, when surely they knew it was about to feel the spear, songs of hunting citation began;
Trap net
There it comes
Get hold of him
Chorus: My family circle will feed on him
The hunters too will have a divide
Wakabi the great hunter will take the rest
Sharp spear
There it goes
Pierce is stomach
Then the refrain came again before they sang about Muyizi god of the hunters whom they believed he sucked the blood of the beast when it passed away.
It wasn’t quit simple to death-hunt any animal of the beast family. The hunter had to roll over miles and hills again and again if their net didn’t assist them, until the animal was worn out that a spear tapped the animal’s blood spout. And so below the day’s sun, the running lion came to a weak apex that even its roaring was tired to frighten any amateur hunters. Then within that period several zoom flying spears pinned its flesh, blood swam out as it roared its last cry, and it was dying quickly. It happened in a built up throng of song at the outskirts of Bukooli that the four-leg-some king of the beasts was dethroned.
The snuffer tired dogs were already arriving and silencing their gongs as they independently lay down in hard breath that also disjoined their jaws for fast pace inhale and exhale. They couldn’t attempt any other hunting that day, thereafter. Wakabi was by the meal slicing a hind leg and the other hunters lit a fire. Sparkling their spears’ tails speedily closely together and rocklike, sparks would appear and in a cloud of wind with dry shrubs thereby, a hot chemistry was produced.
While sharing a conversation than Wakabi learnt about a white spirit murderer who was going to come to the chiefdoms around Busoga and over, to takeover their institutions. Moreover, that the king of Gganda requested the Basoga chiefs kindly to terminate the white spirit before he reached Gganda to overthrow is kingdom. Stories emphasized that the king went down on his knees to secure is treaty with Busoga chiefdoms. Other said, the king was possessed as the Gganda ancestral spirits were against him. The king had promised to pay sums of women and other wealth in goats, cows and cocks to every Busoga chief; should the white spirit be blocked before arriving in his kingdom. Hunting was away of exchanging ideas and information of agency.
Soon the men’s talk followed, Wakabi was assured how Bukooli had enough virgins that if he decided to have one, he would end up with a ten-some-figure. Young bleed with still hot circulating blood that would heal the most impotent man.
For each bit of roasted meat at the hunters’ disposal, it was consumed there and then. In addition, the innards soft tissue and bones with enough marrow went to the dogs. Meanwhile, Wakabi was thinking of feeding Kamira with news about girls in Bukooli for he deserved another wife. In addition, if he so wished, he needed to build another hut in time for welcoming the supposed bride.
Wakabi had already been joined by his dogs, Uniza and Mugeme, and they too hard their share of fresh bones. Wakabi pierced a spear through the remaining animal flesh and by the support of his shoulder balancing pivotally the scale of his strength and the gore drizzling meat. He started off is journey back to the mushrooms of Busiki as the dogs snuffed backwards through the route that brought them into Bukooli. Though eagles and birds prey birds trembled to their salty saliva’s curiosity as they flew about and swung from one woody trunk to another branch. Some birds reached Wakabi's mushrooms but without ability to snatch a single vein of flesh.
Wakabi having arrived at the mushroom; it appeared different, every bit of components of Mubika's demolished hut resurfaced apparently destructive in the compound. What used to be his wife’s mushroom, where he used to naptail in the night. Mubika's former skin attire also concentrated and connected his thoughts as it lived by the door side of his mushroom. In the light way, Wakabi could easily throw is pupils on the hide wear.
Wakabi only called is boys and ordered them directively to find the hunting net in the forest. After they were supposed to journey with a fore thigh of the dead beast to Kamira's mushrooms. From then he hardly said any multiple sentences but only entered is mushroom. Though by now much attention was walking about how the great hunter had come in with another lion despite is heartache. People only concluded that actually blessed persons never lose but there is always something for them to gain.
Peaces of the animal were now in a casserole pot and boiling critically. Moreover, even though when it was ready and taken to his mushroom to be served by the hunter Wakabi wasn’t ready neither to serve the meat nor to eat. Therefore, the boys on return from the compact timbered area they feasted as their Maamas’ observed the mystery of wild sweetness they had to boil but never allowed to eat.
The woman had grown with strong dismay luck of goodness between each other especially after Mubika's departure. Their husband hadn’t approved any of is wives equivalent to Mubika. So the more Wakabi ignored to eat, the much they hated themselves. It was a tough and rough progress.
Chapter Four
Mubika always went early in dawn to the gardens as not to stay in the mushroom and think of her past in Busiki. Good enough it was now a better season; she had covered enough plowing. Planting was almost in a few days ahead. Mubika was now able to sing a little as she struck the soil breaking it apart. Now her friend Namakiika would send her girls to help Mubika. Namakiika had explained to Balyedusa and also Mubika's Paapa had told lots of dictums to convicely request a hand or several from Balyedusa's compound towards Mubika's capacity. Mubika's strength was germinating out the historical chafe.
Mubika would have a steal on the little girls dreams over the past night. For after subtly greeting Mubika, the girls would narrate their contact with sleep and in the evening she would take the dreams to her Paapa for interpretation. One morning the girls came too Mubika and the eldest sought through memories how she had borne herself and her sister and later she died and immediately after the narration process the other girl emphasized empathetically that she had dreamt the real vision as her sister.
It was then that Mubika gave return answers to the girls former-day dreams elucidation by her Paapa. Then they would advance engage fully in toiling the earth with songs as;
This soil will eat me up
Even when I dig it
It will eat me up
Even when I step on it
It will eat me up
This soil will eat me up
Within the bright sun
It will eat me up.
It was a common cadence on the gardens and gardeners allover Busoga. In addition, the more tunes transcend through air by voices, the stronger grounds were attacked and divided at a faster pace with the digging tool. It was morale boosting and merriment to the cultivators. As the digging spear went deep the song went deeper. Until the soil under was hotter than the sun above than the day’s work ended.
On completion of the day’s cultivation Mubika would lead back the girls as they sang songs of praises unto their work. Moreover, as easy as they arrived Mubika thanked Namakiika gratefully, smiling and saying the softest words of recommendation to every hand of help. As Mubika left the girls, they would revisit sounds of cultivating music that day, extending their love over Mubika's soprano only that….
Mubika's new fangled life was being refurbished small-by-small, with almost a faintly smile to expose her red spouge holding its white spears; it was a step forward. Mubika would go to the well after reaching home just as she often accomplished in the decrepit times. It was she, the obsolete girl among the pot carriers. On return from the waters she would pick a few sticks here and there along the path, as her pot balanced spiritually on the head. The sticks were for cooking. Sometimes she would meet with the cultivate girl-helpers and she would aid their water fetching and then levering the pots unto their respective nuts.
When she supposed picking sticks that needed breaking, Mubika wouldn’t lever down the pot and then crack the gathered dry coppice. She got addicted to carrying water and the hearth place woods in her hands in chorus. Nevertheless, it was such male work of firewood collecting that abundantly recaptured back her anguish on earth to seem real than pain alone.
This day, during the practice of picking simple wood and breaking it, Mubika's pot got broken, as she was boosting it back on her carrier head. Its strength become heaver than her muscles could hold and speedily it gravitated until the ground where it joined its ancestral earth. With busted crockery pieces, the water splashed on her and the grounds that resided closer swallowed it. Mubika told herself about growing old without a reason, who would look after her grey age if she hadn’t any offspring. On another eavesdrop; the broken pot meant her Maama had just died that minute. However, she had already past away.
Mubika while holding his head in terrific thoughts and mood walked to the mushroom with only firewood. Soon she recalled the folk her Maama feed her while a little girl and which still glued on the tongue of fortitudes ancient meaning throughout village conversations. The story of an OldMaama who gave her grand-daughters pots so early enough before marriage and told them that whoever broke her pot would marry the estranged village frog. It was the animal believed to have survived since the ages of earth evolution and believed to be the ugliest of all animals. It wasn’t to be disturbed but only respect was adore unto it, for if you found it along the path, you had to secure its way ahead. For even the earth grains that molded the pot were constraints of swampy soil, where the honored frog slept. Obviously the girls kept dear precautions whenever their pot lay. With musical tunes vibrating to and from the well, they would stay sweet and young. One day just like Mubika and faulted on the pot, one of the eldest girls of OldMaama broke her pot. Her sister continued and reached home to report the matter of concern about the broken covenant. The mishap girl had already tempered her way up high a tall tree; she wasn’t steady and ready at all to take care of a frog’s coldness, steam for it, plow for a frog, and give it the night goddesses dance. When the OldMaama arrived at the accident spot to witness the truth she didn’t see the daughter but only evidenced pieces of clay bowels and dying solution of necessity. Until they looked up on the tree that the girl lived at the tip of it. Swinging and swinging as if having a ritual dance in the tree cave. Later the young sister began to sing for the other sister to climb down…
Namussubo you’re not a bird
You’re my Maama's child
You come down
The broken pots
We shall model other one
Lonely, her OldMaama came and sang too…
Namusuubo you’re not a bird
You’re my eldest grand child
You come down
The broken pots
I will mould another one
The mishap girl started singing as she climbed down…
Am not a bird
Am not a bird
Am sister of my sister
Am a child of my Maama
Am a grand child of my OldMaama
The broken pots
We will mould other ones.
By the time she arrived at the roots everybody was happy and they left for the mushrooms. In addition, whenever the pots were broken and the girls climbed the tree, the song always called them back and none of the girls married the frog. That is how I saw them.
By the hindmost of reality of memorizing the old folktale Mubika was aware and willing to mould another pot. Her distress was promptly shifting away as she returned to the well and engaged in pot modeling. Mubika started intermingling the brownish soil cream. Molding circular saucer kind that turned into a modeled calabash shape and as if she deserved to cover the calabash-like top, the mould appeared as the sun’s perimeters then she ended but adding protruding lips and the pot was apt. The exercise was seconded with memories of how her Maama used comparably work of art to adore her. Mubika soon remembered, she was the only alive daughter of the late womb. Her sister had died closer to her bridal season and that moment her Maama's grief was as equal as Mubika's recent lanky sigh.
Its bottom by her abdomen altitude carefully nursing its exquisiteness as they moved to the mushroom she lifted the new pot. It had to relax while dehydrating in the solar rays in order to concrete itself perfectly.
For sometime Mubika's mushroom and her Paapa's were to lack water and firewood. Until a beneficent hand offered a pot to boil a cock or duck. In the same state Mubika would find herself butchering and molting the domestic lives. This regathered the meaningful wound inside her belly. A few teardrops would sink beneath her feet and others would walk along her cheeks. Still a minor courage was emerging out of this pain.
Afternoon was running closed and so Mubika had to reestablish her schedule with the medicine man. Her jaunting began sooner than later. Namakiika had been notified about her going away and the girls were aware of not being at Mubika's gardens the next morning. Nevertheless, that depended on the medicine man’s art and time, Mubika told her helpers.
When Mubika got to the man’s mushroom, she was embraced in a tremendous act of cultural herbist’s comic performance. He jumped up and down, crawled along the ground, ran allover the mushroom demarcations and then shook the stem pillar of his administrative center. Therefore, the head leaves and glass of the hut shambled down on Mubika. She felt a puzzle invitation than never in the past, a sacred movement of ancestors mobilizing their intention in the mushroom. Moreover, due to the great dimness inside the hut Mubika couldn’t notice the opulent truism. The medicine man had already changed his voice into a blunt bubbling installmental speechful ancestral tone as he communicated with the spirits. Mubika knew that the greatest of elders of the earth speaking in a manly ancient rhythm. Then within his vocals the medicine man’s powers requested Mubika forcefully to get a short spear, as the exigency was to stir herbs of barrenness.
Mubika left in good time than twilight. She was petrified but with an understanding that her flesh enigma was at recovery. Especially this time when the medicine man’s performance of panacea was getting involved more than the late chances. He used not to ask for a short spear but some grass of her private hair. Now the spear was a key element in diagnosing her and more so it was a cultural symbol. Moreover, Mubika had heard the coming and talking of ancestors. Mubika was unscruffyly elated and in her nut’s assignment, she was prepared to reach her husband’s friend in order to attain a short spear. She had agreed therewith. Soon after that she would be back in Busiki forever and have children with Wakabi. Mubika magnified her prospects.
It seemed her inner spirit had signaled earlier that she had already discharged her helpers’ morning garden work. Now the next day by the same time of the day, Mubika was sure of being back with a rite spear.
Mubika had to brief Namakiika before setting at her mushroom. Telling intuitions from the medicine man and her absence the coming morning. Mubika told her Paapa too, having reached the huts.
It was then that Mubika asked her Paapa about the new girls dreams. The old Paapa lay is tiger skin and slept himself on it. His head focusing the now dusky view of stars and then absorbed the dreams as his eyes were closed. Mubika repeated the dream’s imagery once more and as his eyes were intrigued in the nightmare and star imagery. He interpreted the visions, meaning that the girls were both to have twins on the same day but it wasn’t completely any good dream because they will soon die on the same day.
The beginning of interpretation had made Mubika gracefully bad; the next words uplifted her in-depth sorrow. Her Paapa ended by ensuring that Mubika never at any one season tell the girls about the last outrageous answer. For they would live with amiss thought about the earth when they were still young. Mubika was caught between happiness for the girls and dismay. She knew they were to have babies of which she had never dreamt of, a teardrop or two scolded down her face. Nevertheless, as she reconsidered the day’s expenses and the medicine man’s practice, a valuable content full of hope restructured her compassion. The girls would never live to see their babies too, twins were a dangerous omen to be thrown in the forest, and it was the only remedy.
Chapter Five
Boys were mentally irritated for not socializing with girls yet together they’re born and grew up in a particular generation. Observing young sharp breasts and the beauty of nakedness that never was a part of their future. In addition, so much isolated the two sexes between social occupations and cultural rituals.
Boyhood was significant in the forest; young males from allover the village would meet here while gathering firewood. Moreover, their gossip or rumor would tour through wind about girls and beauties, their ugliness and boldness. Nicknaming girls was a true game. Another day, Nkuutu named one elder’s daughter an evil girl which hearty hurt the brother in the forest. In less truce exchanging sticks to pierce different sides of the story. Sticks crossed the inner forest as the boys got divided, one side opposite the opponents. The gathered firewood had turned into spears and the defeated side always left sooner than the victors. Challenge engrossed them. Nkuutu and the brothers had won the forest battle but there was another fight ahead with the elders, to prove the erroneous side. No witness was called upon; they had attained the ware news through a young informer. Both sides of the elder’s meeting challenged each other. They proudly assented to reconcile the boys for the village would never collectively survive if a generation grew up picking on one another a vengefully.
Competing in tree climbing started up by a whistle of one boy’s mouth skip tic air. The competitors would vastly strangle in convincing their participants how they reached the hint most point before the rest. The forest was apart of the boys and at such an instance human sounds would overtake the natural tree burting and birds chitchatting. Therefore, the boys would systematically tune their ultra voice boxes,
I wonder the spirits
They never give me that girl
The one I know and who knows me
That girl now at the well
…
Somehow the last melodies were co-structured to accommodate a girl’s name the lead singer admired. However, in the light of melodies every beautiful girl’s qualities were seconded with an ugly character of her inner being. Nevertheless, the ugly names stood unchanged for their good deeds went concretely unnoticed. One song could connect to another like the thin infrastructure that operated the village.
It was in the forest that Nkuutu; Wakabi's fourth son exposed the beauty of his mouth tone. This ultimate male pronounced consideration that some girls owned threatening vocals that would make a man think thrice. Nkuutu could tongue twist languages of birds and so the forest he internally admired, imitating and adjusting bird traps. It occurred that he was embodied deeper into his Paapa's hobbies. Nkuutu would lie dead in the forest as his brothers observed is cunness, with a few seeds scattered on his back and only guarded by a static hand, the birds would end up in his five without finishing Nkuutu's germs and might.
Nkuutu was liked by is brothers, for his existence met something was being done and time would die by laughter. For not only did he sing and trap birds but also added sweet lies. Nkuutu once told how old women were the spirits’ wives and that’s why they never produced at their age but only satisfied the air around their bodies. Little was there to lie about but Nkuutu always had something new for the flock. Moreover, one of the hottest equivocate to the brothers was that Nkuutu lived as a god of the spirits. Because he could emulate sounds of all animals, trees and everything that had a spirit. The brothers started worshipping and respecting the little Nkuutu to cleanse their transgressions and prepare a fortunate future on earth of hunting and beneath the earth. The prevaricate was taken serious. For every meal share the brothers had to always give a snap to Nkuutu as sacrificial, they would lay it on a tiny rock in his mushroom where they all slept and by morning nothing was seen. “Nkuutu the god has eaten is share,” the boys would whisper to one another.
The boys believed Nkuutu was a god and the greatest defense he built around his untruth was emphasizing that should any brother tell any human being about his godhood they would never live to see humans but animals alone and so they only had to let animals and trees know of his godhood if the brothers were to live among humans. Nkuutu soulfully conquered is brothers, Kyeyago, Lubbadi and Mugabi by his musical cohesion that animated spirits and others. The boys would leave certain verses in the rhythm to Nkuutu; he had a tender creative imagination that often bridged music with its environmental features. Therefore, he could breath out words compatible to trees, birds, animals, wind and all that made the earth its mushroom.
Sorrowfully elders didn’t acknowledge Nkuutu's sounds and never had they even heard of the forest singers. Moreover, by the time boys were gathering firewood the girls were also toiling with their Maamas or at the well gathering more than a few pot full of water. A singing man wasn’t acceptable as a real man but a woman at heart.
Customary for every firewood butch taken by a particular compound they had to gather another butch that was left in the middle of the forest by the Manly Oak Tree. As contribution for the cleansing ceremony that happened once in a hand-fingers season. The big occasion smelled from a far.
The forest was at many seasons safer during some part of the night than at daytime. In darkness of man’s eyes the beasts were out on the look for survival and so in light of man’s eyes they were ready to rest. Nevertheless, brutal indigenous forest animals came traveling with man’s time. That meant a grill alarm would communicate throughout the village about a mislocative intruder. Men would color themselves in various sizes and heights of spears ready to attack hadn’t the enemy quickly run away at the first call or the next from the viewer alarming. Hence, in no manner could the boys leave their spears while on a trek. In addition, if any brother left behind the safety instrument they all had to return in order to reequip their deterrence. To natures agreement the craven obeys the unpoltroon, some animals had found themselves in various parts of the forest that woods weren’t dry at all to alter their catnap.
The boys would scope huge leaves high above their spears to wall-up their private parts. With another scope of the thin clipping stem that orbited tightly their waist leaves. Their buttocks were always dirty and obvious.
On the other margin of attachment, girls applied lots of oral and practical gardening lessons with their Maamas. It was at such moments that Maamas’ saw periodical times of their daughters; just analyzing a girl’s inscipous behavior their Maamas would understand and comfort them. Encouraging the girls that a woman’s age is allotted with earth blood that comes around every moon.
At the mushrooms or village gatherings did girls and boys converge yet with no marital combination agenda.
At wells girls drummed through their best art of mouth-mongering, backbiting new brides of the village and mysteriously proving their credibility having been the necessary would live choice of the bridegroom. Tongue plucking about unprepossesive boys and other unmonstrous kids of the village, the men they wished to espouse. Such tittle-tattle in girls minds didn’t stay at well, friends would rumor to their Maamas’ who later on chitchatted with their husband upon the well subject. In stipulation the husband would carry on the words to the intended secret heart man. Choice was a man’s birthright not a woman’s legality. Unpicked girls matched into neighboring villages until they found their admirers.
The pots laying by the bush edge like tortoises, the girls would start dancing crookedly on their toes to the well founded reverberate of the mouth and instrumentals of their palms. The well was well with a flamboyant circulating air that crisscrossed about. Shaking and shaking passing their moments as they waited to marry off their unused vagina. It was from their husbands that brides got animal skins to cover the recently spoilt nakedness and so leaves would be forgotten unless otherwise. Singing in soft voices like each girl sought to have the more babyish sweet sound;
That man who is there
One who fought a beast
and won the battle
He shouldn’t forget
having won me too
Am a little different
My flesh doesn’t get finished
like the beasts
You can break my pot
but it’s not made of clay
Come and kept this pot of warmth
…
The girls were in great din when unexpectedly concluded just when they were almost to mention a man’s given name. Wakabi's wives had arrived to gather the necessity. The women were also talking about the girl who was once part of them but now had exited their circles. In addition, they too got into an abrupt disclosure. The women were unable to interact as certain specific issues at their distinctive stage with the young girls. Wakabi's wives had been talking and taking comforting oath before earth and its rulers for not having played a role in her departure. Nevertheless, the calamity titillate that their husband hadn’t turned to any of them pierced all their hearts treacherously.
The girls got involved in converging water and then left. They were unsupposed to talk about their periods by the well; it was another code content that surrounded girls with pots at water bodies. They would end up not getting married. Moreover, when such sodden escaped out, they knew growth towards marriage was close than formerly. Sighting their future beyond the verses they cried out passionlessly.
Chapter Six
Wakabi made a confederate assembly with Kamira. Trying to side step his faculty of commemorating the past vast earth of a fallen girl. Kamira was spear shaping in his mental workshop, covered in a shinny-dripping layer caused from the burning furnace of medieval ages. Though Kamira's energy could be exhibited in his rough portioned body little was it connected to man’s intrepidity but only bracing. He was a child among elders.
By the help of two metal hooks he could draw out a hottest piece from the furnace and dealt with it. Then he cast over a few sentences to his friend. Kamira was part of the furnace heat and so little did they negatively counter hate each other. He was a master of metals.
Kamira stayed always younger than Wakabi and this reserved his internal behavior slumping easily towards is friend.
The saintly relation binding between the two village mates was the spear. People said that Wakabi was the best hunter and warrior and Kamira was the spear assembler. This often unveiled Wakabi's respect to Kamira because though he was a hero with the society spear, he was underneath the undisputable smith caliber in weapon formulation. On the other fingers the great spear smith Kamira was an amateur hunter though a substance warrior. It was due to his hereditary spirit from a spear making extended family that Kamira joined the elder’s council. The first-born boy who ruled over the elder sisters as a rule in any family.
Kamira’s furnaces sculptured the best shapes of spears, some with two or three or four sharp piercing heads. As other smith knew only one sharp pointing model and yet still with out fashioned sticktail. Kamira's spears were totally and perfectly ironic from its base to the sharp vertex end.
The villages come to understand Kamira and Wakabi friendship was the spear relationship. Moreover, by this reason Kamira's mushroom never went out of meat just like Wakabi's own mushrooms. People gambled beneath their tongues with letters entwining Kamira's disability to canter for his burdens but all these words passed with the wind. Only for a small percentage of perceptional considerations did Kamira observe is inadequacy and much of it he believed criticism wasn’t to outweigh friendship. So long as Wakabi came back with a brute on the shoulder-back, Kamira had to receive a piece of it. In return Wakabi seemed to own a wealth in spears than Kamira. Any type or kind of spear lay in Wakabi's mushroom. The true incongruity was that whatsoever Kamira attained was consumable and whatsoever Wakabi got was durable.
The two pals developed stronger than blood kinship. A mirror __expression of being from the same womb of a woman. The two were in the same village. Wakabi was from a brave family history and Kamira originated from chicken chain of descendants with regard to beast hunting. Some people thought the pal ship between them was because Kamira was a poltroon but it was proved unnecessary when Kamira beat up Mubika for greeting him while standing on her two feet and he uttered that it was such ineffectual humans that were extra stubborn. Wakabi never articulated a thought about it. Though after seasons, words escaped out there cave how Wakabi drawback on the basic symbolic reason that Kamira would start molding spineless spears to toss Wakabi into the jaws of beasts. Persons had tried to twist turn victory towards Kamira but still the strength of Wakabi who lived among the uncommunicative wild breath remained unshakeable beyond and allover Busoga.
It was Kamira that Mubika faint heartily hated most. Nevertheless, as a girl or female her mouth yield where never considered out of range with her nose to wonder within society. However, by the time Mubika withdrew from Busiki, she respected Kamira more than Wakabi internally.
Kamira and Wakabi were nervously perplexed upon the unexpected arrival of Mubika, slightly forgetting what they were involved at that eye-catching moment. Her face in recovery eyes, it was a mark of the endless tears from Busiki to Bugweri. She knelt down and greeted Kamira honorably and then turned unto her husband, she did the same. Not quickly asking about the co-wives she hardly glanced at Wakabi eye to eye and if it did happen Mubika briskly repatriated her focus. Mubika somewhat knew Busiki wasn’t her home, and had it not been Wakabi's thankful humanity she wouldn’t bother to alleviate her internal throes.
Mubika told the smith that only a short little spear she deserved and indeed a pot full of peas she had received from her friend’s barn was at his disposal to balance her haggling in winning over the spear. Kamira selected one of the newly made spears and refurnished it to sculpt Mubika a short weapon.
‘How are my in-laws?’ Politely Wakabi's base penetrated the atmosphere.
‘There no longer your in-laws.’ Mubika went against Wakabi.
‘You’re still mine that’s why you’ve come for a short spear.’ Wakabi is speech confronted the girl; he failed to make her a woman for some good seasons.
‘Yes, but do you think it will apply?’
‘Ask the spirits of the ancestors, they will help.’
‘Before I forget your Maama-in-law is already a spirit.’
‘My condolences…ask her, she must be understanding a lot by now.’
‘Let me ask about your sons; how are they?’ said Mubika.
‘Fine.’
‘And the other women, my co wives before that day that divided us.’
‘They miss your handwork.’ Wakabi replied.
‘Did the goat become expectant?’ Mubika asked humbly, for she left while one of the domestic animals was on typical heat.
‘Indeed am happy for it, in the next several seasons ahead it will add on our wealth.’
‘The cow, does it have a young one?’
‘Yes! Last night it got two brood and by morning when we noticed its curse it was slaughtered along with its calves by men’s sharp spears in agreement to destruct the omenous life it was creating.’
‘And did the hen’s eggs hatch?’
‘Yes, all the twenty five are living, none for the eagles and kites as yet.’
‘She must be a good mother.’
As Kamira fashioned the weapon he recalled the old story that somehow integrated relatively with Wakabi and Mubika. It was about a great hunter who lived with two wives and loved the younger woman more yet she stayed a girl and the other first wife lived a woman’s life with children. The hunter’s day work reimbursement after the search for animals ended in the young barren wife’s mushroom and so the elder wife survived upon her harvest. The other lived the opposite life of course. And so another day the hunter’s colleagues told him not to over waste is feelings for the barren second girl but consider that the first wife generously might have supplementary affection for the hunter than the other woman. The great hunter disagreed but is colleagues continued to suggest that if he needed to acquire earlier wisdom upon which of the two women liked him most and who will mourn him sorrowfully on his death day, then it was time he faked is death. For death and mourning had a connection to adulation. The hunter agreed to the experiment. They went hunting as usual and that day they killed several animals than never before and then they fastened the great hunter in grass to compose him like a corpse but considered is breathing life with ventilations for inhaling and exhaling. Then one of the hunters run to the mushroom to announce death of their great hunter. It was then that the hunter’s first wife lamented highly that even drums calling the village’s awareness to their hero’s death weren’t heard. Moreover, the second wife was crying politely to her self in her mushroom. As the first wife at the same time cleaned the entire compound and her mushroom to prepare for her husband’s body arrival. The second woman only cleaned her mushroom. When the great hunter’s mortise arrived, it was laid in the second woman’s mushroom and as the first wife mourned thunder fully, the other woman was almost singing rudely. Moreover, the pretending dead body was aware of its wives accent individually. The villages near and far were already in tears and sorrow and now the flesh from the hunt was put in the first woman’s mushroom. The first wife cried that now her intonation was trying to jam. Then the colleagues untied their great hunter. They narrated to the chief why they had to apply such boding evil. Hence the day’s hunt was sacrificed to the gods to cleanse the omen act of death pretence. Her husband rightfully dismissed the second wife and her mushroom was demolished. The great hunter lived a new life. It was the friends telling his life. That’s how I saw them.
Now Wakabi could be in the same old tale. Kamira wanted his friend’s mind reconfirm the history but he stayed reserved, cut between loyalty and remittance. He glanced at Wakabi like a strange folk tale, is mouth almost to say a word but Mubika stood by his remarks were allowed to passed down is own gullet.
With no time the furnace was inarticulate, the notes of clang! Clang! Clang! During shaping of the medicine man’s spear was done. When Kamira's workshop was in production the surrounding areas knew clangs and echoes would travel long distances pitching every ear in its path. Although Kamira preferred working in the night for the blowing river winds to accelerate the burning fire flames, the village elders repudiated that particular notion. It could cause numerous sleepless nights that impregnated men’s senses to dance with their pregnant wives at times which were against the cultural jurisdiction.
Very soon the short spear was cooling down from the hot hot, it was finale. Mubika having noticed her longing instrument, she handed over her imbursement to Kamira, a pot full of peas but he declined the return. Kamira sought his work wasn’t beseeching for anything from her personality. Mubika disagreed unto the pretence of her disability to recarry the peas and the spear back to Bugweri and even the spirits would honor the cry if she hadn’t a sweat in attaining the ritual spear. Kamira promised that had it not been a spiritual word she would have taken the load along the trek on her legs, he wouldn’t have possessed the garden harvest. Wakabi was unable to say the next sentence between is Mubika and Kamira. An on-looker he sat.
‘I will be glad to build your mushroom again.’ Wakabi said. As Mubika deposited the peas in Kamira's two shoulders pivoted powers.
‘I too think of serving your mushroom but now that its broken how can it grow again in the same place, may be the next time it will germinate from a tree.’ Mubika groaned around her words towards Wakabi.
‘You know a season comes when mushrooms appear again, they always have a particular place and season to stay and grow. I know that season will come…I will set up another permanent one for you. My life is happy inside despite the sorrow at my eyes.’
‘Only the spirits can tell, but my mushroom is no more.’
As Mubika got her short spear, empty pot and told farewell, she reminded Wakabi to consider a chance and obtain his seven barnyards full of peas. Wakabi rocky grumped the thick saliva in his mouth as Mubika's words were now taking control of his then strong internal comfort. Mubika's words were now taking control of his then strong internal comfort. Mubika swept the path as the little thin earth dust beneath her steps run into space mayhem, Wakabi couldn’t stop her but only observed the scenery. She had come when least expected. Then all the trouble of greeting every living human in reach of her shouting when traveling in Busiki considered again with a tiresome soreness of saying good bye on her pullout. Not at all neglecting the kneeling and raising a head while on the move. Her beauty was becoming more and more ignominious in Busiki.
Wakabi had come to let Kamira know that is deep thirst for Mubika's absence among the mushrooms around him was painful so as he could attain some friendly advise. Now Mubika came by and then left, she seemed on a journey that will never turn around. Finding another woman wasn’t the medicine, Wakabi knew it, memories of Mubika still cried inside of him. For several days after his recent hunting Wakabi didn’t eat anything from is wives cookery until Kamira influenced him slightly to teeth smash a few edibles.
‘Have a spear.’ Kamira offered another of is newly created weapon to Wakabi.
‘You have already given a spear….’
‘No, I haven’t,’ Kamira refuted outwardly.
‘The short spear that Mubika has taken is valuable than that one. Already enough to fill my satisfaction.’ The hunter compiled to regard the short spear that would bring back Mubika. Perhaps.
At last Wakabi got hold of the spear and thanked Kamira, he sought of him as the greatest of great brothers in his inside breathe. Wakabi promised the clouds, wind, and earth that he should never be buried until Kamira had mourned him enough. Wakabi continued to emphasize that unless the earth thorough smoked Kamira before him, certainly he will mourn Kamira until he joined him and the ancestors. Kamira penetrated on Wakabi by hesitating that the words he was being feed on were the right fruit seeds to tell Mubika.
Wakabi buried is head in the palms sullied upon what actually befell his penis once whenever he lived in Mubika's mushroom now that she had to leave. His only moral consolation based on is breeding of other children from Mubika's co wives. Nevertheless, lacking a girl also worried him a bit despite the many heirs at hand. With numerous boys Wakabi's clan would grow widely but little was foreseen of the boys natural strength to further survival history as great warriors and inbred hunters after their Paapa's death.
On another note, Kamira intended to prompt Wakabi's understanding of a new bride soon to be within the smith’s mushrooms. The bride was far from Busiki but the right season to vomit such excellent news wasn’t appropriate for now due to Wakabi's Mubika emotions. Kamira thought and knew if a new woman curved by is waist Wakabi would probably absorb an idea to nurture a new bride, forgetting Mubika's distance away.
‘Even the most oldest and wise, we elders know he can be deemed with a little doltish.’ Kamira told Wakabi and he too absorbed every enunciation and then Kamira emphasized is good wish for the hunting friend to escort him to the new brides family introduction observance. Moreover, until when Kamira returns with a new face for the village. Without saying too much, Wakabi accepted. Kamira understood the saying that it’s not the news that is important but it’s the oration method of the news which makes it important.
People had started telling how beautiful Mubika went with his voice by convincing him to speak is aspiration through the pot-mouth and it shall be granted. Infact, that after Wakabi's prayer she covered the pot-mouth and then proceeded to Bugweri. It meant that Wakabi could retain is voice only after praying thankfully in the same pot again, however, if the pot got broken before his respeech Wakabi would never say much conversations anymore. Indeed he was almost not speaking among people. It was all hearsay created by Nkuutu the god.
Chapter Seven
Mubika was under her own steam to the medicine man for a second phase since her reappearance with the short spear. Something hadn’t been reattributed to counter drive her disease but the traditional medicine man was uncontrollably reveled. He had seen the metallic short spear made by Kamira's wit; and now was the day Mubika had to reestablish her being with the traditional healer. The appointment was by evening when the gods were stably relishing, when no common man did any retrograding experiments against their resolve and supernatural wisdom. A time when they looked at everyone’s mind and judged peoples past from which they prophesized their future. The time set by the medicine man to meet Mubika. He promised her everything would workout and also she would talk to her late Maama on this day.
Mubika carried only a short sharp smile along the way to the healer’s shrines since the proper short spear was already in herbal engagement. Mubika was told; she would find the short spear red-hot before interacting with the gods or the ancestors.
As Mubika's focus enclosed to the healer’s mushroom the shash-shash, shash-shash, sounds of broken pot pieces and beads were gambling in the healer’s guard. Shaking and shaking is bells; beads; beans from a broken pot saucer, and every echo dismissed away Mubika's smile. She joined the sounds eternity by the healers call with a blast tone that seemed to be obeyed by the shash-shash. Then the medicine man called Muchara, Baana, Mwami the spirits of women, children and men correspondingly. Shouting for reputable turns and within the sixth announcement, different tones in classification patterns determined the children spirit speaking or the other two firmaments lives. Shash-shash adopted the background noise and within an allowance interval of reduced shash, one of the spirits would speak. All in all the spirits approved that should Mubika truly be entitled to a child she needed to look upon every law and order from the medicine man’s mouth. Indeed, for various reasons ago Mubika had disturbed their grand supremacy in cultural assistance.
Only her ears seemed breathing, the other parts of her were may be dead, almost giving birth to the wastes in her empty belly just to loosen the stress indulging her. Sweat all over her beau like a smear of melon oil, her right to be heard was half its normality, lively scared yet upon all odds loving to live again through her child’s stories of Maama. The shash-shash covering everywhere was now almost normal due to fear and anxiety the spirits started descending through the medicine man. He was now speaking in Mwami’s accent ordering Mubika to lay back and there and then Muchara proceeded descending into Mubika's eternity with a smooth tone. Mubika implemented upon the wish of the spirit. The earth was different, no longer the medicine man personal reality and Mubika too was no more but only two spirits now. Then Baana the spirit of children; all three in one entity.
Mwami started rubbing Muchara’s belly with his palms and like often a god’s reverberation it was a loud and rough inside the mushroom but outside not even a falling guard smashed on the earth would be heard by the mushroom’s outlet. The spirits were busy at work. The stomach was rasped heavily and noisily and then a herb ointment smeared but Muchara wasn’t in any introvert sting all the frightening had been washed away into the command and elaborative grit of spirits. Mwami wasn’t at risk for it was common patronage that he always stood by such empty girls. Traditionally.
Mwami gave is sought to Muchara upon the red-hot short spear, it was ready to perform the ritual cleansing of the empty belly, for that’s why it was fabricated in a black dry animal sheath to never be cold for long before Mubika's prevalent return. Mwami was ready to insert the short spear into Muchara’s private pelvic mouth and sooner than later the short spear was hurting through Muchara’s abdomen, through corners and curves. Moreover, there instantly Muchara mostly noticed Mwami’s existence but the short spear ran through herself ahead and backwards like a lost hunter without dogs. As Muchara felt a little pain that seemed fleshy, Mwami was almost throwing his last chance with the short spear. The best of the game was right there and here. Baana was silently descending into Muchara. In addition, the sooner Baana settled in the belly, Mwami’s short spear had coincided with the children’s spirit in Muchara’s tummy. They were three spirits all tightly together, Muchara, Baana and Mwami. It was then that Mubika realized having the medicine man playing into her canal status.
Mubika remained come, the spirits had lost their true accents and so was the medicine man. The shash-shash had disappeared from its unhidden noise; tongue tied ness captured the mushroom shrine. Mubika was told the short spear had to stay with the medicine man but in the supernatural earth of spirits for more indulgency with the ancestral earth and shrubbery form ointments.
Mubika was down, the spear had gone into her more and more yet no blade blood could she witness or acknowledge, the medicine man had penetrated her. Now she wondered whether she was to conceive by Mwami the spirit or the medicine man. In the making of sexual dance it was the spirit but now it’s the medicine man, the only man before her. How could it be that in a cultural trial to avoid girlish life, she had made herself a misfortunate whore by sleeping with a second man in the history of her femininity. How would Wakabi easily sympathize over a child in her of the medicine man’s semen if at all she had conceived? Yes, she had experimented a slip leak of fertility inside at almost the climax of the ritual. Mubika complimented never to easily let Wakabi and Busiki learn of her incidents in Bugweri. But how could that be she thought while having in mind the saying that your can hide a scar but you can’t hide pregnancy. A few minutes ago the short spear had worked in a different manner than whenever Wakabi mounted her.
The medicine man with a defensive spear led Mubika out of the mushroom shrine to her Paapa's mushroom compound. The night on earth seemed polite, which wasn’t the case but only their minds stood thinking independently through what went before and the upcoming. The medicine man believed himself being a man, he had canal knowledge with the girl he grew up with wishing the same. The knowledge great people of the village had failed to feed Mubika, he managed to provide her. It was the virgin side of his tale which no other person would ever know, for it would mark the end times of his medicine powers’ success. No man would send a woman or girl for treatment to him again. That wasn’t regrettable upon when the secret sneaked out but also how would Wakabi react unto the pregnancy of Mubika by a healer.
Mubika realized they hadn’t shared more sacred words but the final guilt of offending spirits and gods. It was the medicine man interchanging speeches of different spirits and back into his own volume, which also was an imported baffle to Mubika.
The medicine man consoled himself on high grounds that the secluded will live on even after his death on earth.
Chapter Eight
Wakabi's third wife’s son, Nkuutu wasn’t given solid nourishment one day for a snoozing background of not importing hearth sticks. Nkuutu had done this life habit thrice and a couple of times before. This time, although his Maama spared concealed a lap of her own share for Nkuutu, Wakabi gluttony called for it and swallowed every bit of the fragments. It hurt Mutwala internally more than it exalted upon Nkuutu.
Wakabi made a confirmation statement of truth before the ancestors that unless Nkuutu brought a cluster of firewood by his own sweat, Nkuutu wouldn’t have another meal apart from the last he had consumed the day before. His Maama had pledged whole fully and heartily to find away of gathering fuel on behalf of the son but her husband declined the humanitarian spirit.
Nevertheless, the one thing every brother knew about Nkuutu in such instances was the padora mind exposure that they would never permanently tell apart from his upset ness and mind molting. Only his Maama recognized a differentiation that emerged silently in Nkuutu right from the start that no other person could determine easily to formidable conclusions.
Nkuutu would exaltedly do any fatigue in the smallest hours possible only if not compactly victimized on skeptic criticism. In agreement, he was often the number one accomplisher in any work among the brother.
Soon at the conflict’s roof Nkuutu heard from the Paapa's language distancing him from the slumbers among is mushroom compound if he did not bring fuel by night call. Nkuutu's Maama sought for the hearth place fuel and off she went. Meanwhile Nkuutu was at the mushroom gate without talkatively geared up to defend mount himself. Nkuutu's step Maamas pleaded ground fully for the child but their negotiation was as bad as rubble of noise.
It was said and approved that from the day Mubika left, Wakabi had never been a person in himself within society. Mutwala first approached Wakabi's friend Wakabi to lobby and bring around Wakabi on earth there by swaying her son’s stay. As Kamira arrived and began the win over, he lost victory. What had mentally happened to Wakabi was immensely beyond understandability. The entire mushrooms across the village become aware of Wakabi and Nkuutu's disarray but the elders kept silent, for it was Wakabi's duty to take Nkuutu before the ageing council and iron out their misunderstanding. In any case Nkuutu hadn’t said a word or two to show is disagreement but only kept on receiving rewards of intolerable caliber and neither did the elders hear a dirty sentence about Nkuutu solely but only smooth honey-coated copies of the boy’s olden times.
Mutwala's return with fuel clusters on her head with a deep sweating expulsion of energy did no good. She only had to turn and persuade her son into stick hunting fuel clusters for the mushroom compound before the birds nested their wings.
Nkuutu went on fuel hunting after realizing a layer of thin water on Mutwala's seer. He brought the first, second and third cluster of fuel, one followed by another that everyone was comically happy but no good facial intentions dressed up Nkuutu's look. Everything was running well, he added a forth and fifth cluster and whistles from the brothers and onlookers sprinkled into the air, the village happy like he was performing a rite. Nkuutu's Maama's merriment was stolen from every glittering side beneath her nose. Nkuutu having laid the fifth fuel cluster, though the mushroom gate he walked out and in the same direction he traveled, the observers went dumb full and saw the young soul into diminishing dimensions of their village. He wasn’t returning, they said to one another, that forever he’s gone to join perhaps the forest boys or the indecent animals of the village.
Only observing the return of Nkuutu with a sixth fuel cluster. His head was jocud; people whistled once more to his good workaholic symptoms but little did they externally or internally recommend Nkuutu's complicated heartfelt capacity completely in what he was exercising, by the time. Nkuutu returned to pick other clusters and within the next accessible minutes more and more fuel walked in. During this route the whistles weren’t heard of, the village was now eminently and silently aware of Nkuutu distaste of life. Nkuutu's Maama told how enough hearth place stick he had gathered worth more seasons ahead. Nevertheless, Nkuutu didn’t stop on her motherly words and despite the new beginning of her tearful face; her son kept on supplying fuel to the mushroom. Nkuutu was annoyed inside and outside of him.
The stripling didn’t speak at all to any one but only listening was done without even physical response implementation. The cocks and turkeys come back for their night nap but it seemed Nkuutu's day time had just arouse maturely. Firewood was covering almost every empty ground of Wakabi's mushroom.
Wakabi began to fear for is son’s life that he called upon his other children to follow up Nkuutu's workmanship with their spears. The forest was now a dark haven for wild beasts getting awake, ready to articulate their night duties.
As people sought sleep Mutwala was mouth-gassing trials to desist her son’s laborious intent. Enough hearth sticks for almost the entire village mushrooms was sleeping in her husband’s mushrooms. Nkuutu's brothers and Wakabi himself intended to impose a trick of offering the activist son a meal of peas to cool him and reconsider his minds over-exercise but Nkuutu discounted the hoax. Wakabi was already rewinding is mind vividly on the question of why he had to counter emphasize the fuel verdict upon is son erstwhile. The pain of parenthood was digesting him up. Meanwhile, on the mushroom side, Nkuutu's Maama had already began a trail of silent weeping in installments every time her son headed for the forest but his return would offer minimal painful thoughts again. The mushrooms were now the fuel compound and the earth learnt from Nkuutu's brothers that the gathered hearth place woods in their Paapa's compound was picked from the forest pile clusters that were a contribution by every mushroom compound for the cleansing ceremony of the village.
In reality none of Wakabi's compound mates had a nap as Nkuutu kept on throwing sticks over other sticks. The other sons having accompanied Nkuutu, their Maamas threw away their wonder and dreaming moments to rejoin their sorrow and worry upon all the sons of the mushroom. In addition, more perfectly each Maama's heart lay at her son’s safety through the dark wild earth.
Through the catnapping birds in deciduous trees, talking insects of the night and hissing animals of the bush, boys would feasibly penetrate the thick waist-level grass that kept the pavement forth and from the village forest. The other part of earth night had consciously died.
Tens and tens of fuel clusters had been brought in and enough diphtheria was covering Wakabi's lungs yet Nkuutu showed no signs of tiredness or giving up the hearth place fuel transit. Wakabi command ordered is other sons to man arrest Nkuutu and engulf him to his Maama's mushroom but the boys refuted their Paapa. The boys were aware of the powers with their brother; he was a god, where else would you find a person carrying all those clusters without reaching exhaustion. Nkuutu's silence had boiled into the gods’ silence, the superficial leaders who never say a word or two but hear from their subjects. No could the boys let their Paapa know Nkuutu's super imposed standard, for Wakabi wasn’t an animal or a tree. The boys escorted Nkuutu to and from the forest with the knowledge of being guarded by occult power and though spears walked with them it was a normal practice. They knew of none danger before Nkuutu the god.
Wakabi got up from the diphtheria and lifted Nkuutu into his Maama's mushroom and there he set several of the brought clusters all around the mushroom to bar Nkuutu's exit.
Though after that persons of Wakabi's mushroom and the neighboring mushrooms had a siesta, Nkuutu's Maama almost didn’t sleep. In fact she was the first human to move out of her husband’s mushroom before the first cock’s siren to the villages. Therefore, she watched her hut to endorse Nkuutu's custody than the first siren alerted the village. The morning sun that called for people’s hard work was at a junction close to the village hours; the cocks and turkeys also sought the earth out there was safe and lively. Soon Mutwala discharged the mushroom temporary stick-doors which proof protected her Nkuutu. Thousands of fuel combustive would have murdered her son, she thought. Observing Nkuutu breathing in and out in a dreams pattern, she left him for a while.
The morning seemed compressed into Wakabi's compound, early laborers kept the eyes in this fuel compound as they passed by. Their mouth splitting the worst parables. They had attained the day’s gossip topic while at their farms. Kamira too was coming to confirm the rumors of his friend’s fuel compound and so he recognized its truth far from arrival. Parts of the path were Nkuutu stamped in the night was the same passage mat Kamira had to utilize and witnessed were dry fallen wood barks in pieces sufficient enough to let him blaspheme to the unofficial hearsay. Kamira didn’t find Wakabi; everything had settled to normality, he didn’t ask about the numerous clusters but only shock his nut with complex imagery visions of what took place. Wakabi had gone hunting.
Mutwala returned to her mushroom, looking at her son, he was awake. There he sat with sticks barks in his bushy head that extended Mutwala's familiarity of its consequence unto Nkuutu. Such grown up bushy hair sheltered evil spirits on her son’s life from the time of his early upbringing seasons. Mutwala had always cut off Nkuutu's black grass to none existent before it grow to be black trees but this time she had forgotten about the manure full head. That’s why he carried clusters and clusters from the forest to the mushroom as if he was a spirit and he couldn’t talk to anyone regardless of their natural standards.
Mutwala got a spear blade and began slashing away Nkuutu's hair. She could budge roughly through her son’s pate for numerous rounds as if she was rousing about meat in the pot until the head was black and blamelessly clean.
Nkuutu said is original word after so long by thanking is Maama for throwing off the hair. Secrets of his evil spirit remained in the Maama's heart alone. Moreover, no any other people sense fully knew it from her mouth nor did the son know the brains of his hair. Every person always told how Nkuutu might never excel through the manhood ceremony because of the extra ordinary intrigues that rotated besides him to be considered partially inhuman. They conquered the belief that one night Nkuutu was to stay in the forest at the Womanly Oak Tree and then another night his partial body and soul would sail down the river or the beast’s throat. However, Nkuutu's brothers didn’t share on the same underdetermined conclusion, Nkuutu had painted greater godly powers than gathering clusters in the forest. With a head so ominous where would Nkuutu bear children or live a life of his Paapa, the other people thought. Otherwise, when such knavery happened his brothers understood the practicability of super psychic advantage in him.
Nkuutu asked along what had happened to the great clusters that were looking at him, ‘did they walk in’ he said. The boys laughed and gathered their own smiles collectively and then informed Nkuutu of is capacity that implemented incredulously to the clusters’ stay in the mushroom compound. Nkuutu denied outwardly his acts and recommended is wonderful sleep that he encountered with the goddesses of women. The goddesses showed him a beautiful girl, so beautiful than beauty itself, as a reward to him for the work well done on earth. The boys silently murmured to each other, ‘he was communicating through woods to the gods, is among them.’ They’re only boys of Wakabi's mushrooms.
Mutwala was stressfully worried about Nkuutu's growth that would seal an edge on her slashing off the hair. Yet his future wives weren’t supposed to cut off their husband’s bushy hair, for they were still girls until they gave birth to a child. It was then that their husband’s hair top fell short by the spear blade.
Nevertheless, at certain junctures Mutwala was coming to terms, for she followed the same footpath of spirits that were odd in her hair. Therefore, she was the only girl in Bukooli whose pate never was braid or plaited into potato like fine designs that often brought business in the dark’s moon month. The forest shrubs would only restore health at her over ripe age of bride hood, otherwise, before that old-time the traditional medicine fell to its incompetence against Mutwala's powers. She was about to tell Nkuutu is only future bushy shrub of hope but she didn’t know if he approved of harboring evil spirits, it was always the first step in anointing to the medicine’s power intimately. Nkuutu hadn’t done this as yet.
Mutwala entered history through the same disease; persons narrated allegory of seasons and seasons away before the seasons Nkuutu was to be born; how a chief in Bugweri had come to bride up Mutwala. Moreover, on the night she was presented to the chief she made an informal contest. Just when the chief presented is hand to hold and shake Mutwala's own, she pulled him with disgravity from the stool and right behind her the chief fell on the entourage from Bugweri and then left quietly. The intended marriage ended. Mutwala wrestled the chief down. Mutwala's hair was put unto test; it had been weaved in plaits, stunning for the right affair. It’s because of this adversity that Wakabi perhaps married her to freeze down her internal power and raise his. No wonder Mutwala dispersed Mubika so much because she originated from Bugweri; she referred men from that side as weak in nursing human watering and strength for women. It was the cat and dogfight, historically.
When the Bugweri populace heard of how the cat beat the dog that entertained the bridal day, the chief was dethrone. It was an enduring embarrassment to Bugweri as a whole and not the chief alone. How could a woman wrestle down a chief, a man, a person with great self-esteem among men, the Bagweri murmured? On the other side the Bukooli people were jubilant, a woman of their soil had thrown down a chief of Bugweri. Mutwala was receiving appraisals from members of her village with gratified gifts, she was considered for chieftainship. The wedding had ended into a fortune tale of a bridal wrestling match.
Chapter Nine
Chief elders stockpiled at the village grounds to exchange opinions about their lands recalcitrant man. Under a tree canopy they sat in a circle. The fuel for cleansing the land was now in Wakabi's mushrooms, the elders had learnt. How could the gods and goddesses exalt befool fire to roast the village’s sacrificial animals? The might indiscernible rulers would not accept the human effort. Wakabi the defendant wasn’t to appear or attend the trial; he was the trouble-framer.
Such unusual less seasoned court marshals were massively unadvertised. Mulala the unheard medicine man was the coordinator; he had passed over from one elders mushroom to another letting them to enterprise their roles as prosecutors and plaintiffs at the trial grounds. Wakabi wasn’t to be informed, neither the drum was hit nor was the horn blown; it was a secret trial.
Kamira arrived last and the elders’ forum had gone apparently to the downfall of Wakabi. Settled on their hides in a circle, all seemed to be in a skin uniform. Through phrases, stories all exposed equity of Wakabi's trial; he was to be punished.
‘An elder…one of us as polluted misery on the young generation...how then can he go easily. It will lead to the death of cultural values.’ Mulala said.
No democracy, nor final judge, the speeches pointed against Wakabi's unbelievable disobedience. Kamira was much a listener than a chatterer.
One elder, Mulala engaged on saying, ‘unless Wakabi is sacrificed to the gods, there will still remain a gap to misread the gods forgiveness, the ogre augury ousting will also be indefinably undermined.’
Mulala's non-garland sentences opened Kamira's mouth, speaking from all points of his mouth, he couldn’t sweeten up Wakabi's propose becoming a sacrifice. Kamira reminded the jury on how the intent criminal was about to be ordained as a guardian of hunting and warriors, the highest honor in village elder circles. ‘Wakabi's end meant also an end to our hunting glory and worship delight,’ Kamira said, in sighting songs and phrases of recognition brought about by Wakabi. It was Kamira standing by a friend. One surviving proverb he cited in between his words was that, ‘a king is like a lake, you can’t dispense him, otherwise, you risk drowning.’ Kamira continued, ‘their many other penalties to consider than sacrifice; one of these was to let Wakabi carry back the logs…’
‘Unless we are putting the offender above our ancestors he deserved to be a fine to the gods.’ Mulala interrupted.
‘Okay kill a strong man and when war comes you will look for a strong man.’ Kamira dashed in another proverbial support for Wakabi.
The jury seemed hushed as Kamira spoke, may be listening or only observing the clapping lips, readjusting their former positions perhaps. Nevertheless, what Wakabi had done had never been heard of in their lives and times gone by of the village. Mulala emphasized that returning the clusters wasn’t enough punishment. Kamira hence repeated is later saying and added that Mulala should come up with the execution plan in sacrificing Wakabi. It was then that visions of Wakabi's power against their entire summed up strength began figuring through their minds. Trying to sacrifice a hero wasn’t easy.
Kamira told the jury to let Wakabi return the logs and make a cleansing sacrifice for his compound; it would be enough punishment. Kamira walked off the ground. Moreover, for a while the other elders were resistant but then one by one followed Kamira. It wasn’t a protest, he only found out how many elders were for and against the sentence in his own opinion. The jury was seconding Kamira. Mulala remained at the grounds for another while before following the gang. Kamira had won the case against Mulala since he went with a large following. Wakabi wasn’t aware of the jury’s sentence by the elders. This time Mulala had to meet Kamira and concede defeat.
It was common law that an elder committed a crime once and excused the second time he repeated the same offence, and the third time even a prince wouldn’t be forgiven but attain due penalty. So Kamira's defense for Wakabi was a secondary supplement, otherwise, hadn’t there been him to stand against all abnormalities and the jury appeared to fall on one side of sacrificing Wakabi, common law wouldn’t have applied. On the other hand had the ejected number of elders equaled to the still ground-held elders then it meant a repeat of the trial.
Wakabi's sentence was passed and it was Kamira's duty to inform him. Moreover, no sooner had he told the verdict than Wakabi underlined of him being more than a great great great friend. It was the defendant’s supporter supposed to unveil his tactics to the criminal act. But Kamira didn’t speak about Mulala the hardcore, it was by common law substance that such jury people were to be protected, otherwise, it would govern wider divisionism within the village. Nevertheless, he knew Wakabi and Mulala were always naturally distinct extremities. For Wakabi was soon to be honored great fully yet Mulala the healer wasn’t to be honored and yet more so Mulala often consulted with the spirits of the land.
The Oldman was angry about is son that every moment of the hearing, he only shock is head and never lamented a word or several during the minutes. He couldn’t swallow the fact that Wakabi had derailed backwards just within his glorious age. He was the second man to eject the trial circle, as is head bowed only the walking stick gave unemotional support to the ageing Paapa. It had taken him numerous hours to hop over the logs along with is hopping stick.
‘It was wrong to accelerate the torture of Nkuutu at such a height of laboring upon hundreds of clusters.’ Kamira told Wakabi.
It had been a shoulder-to-shoulder basis of the trial and justifiable. Wakabi promised not to indulge so much on Nkuutu's nut. In any case he had acted in the shadows of Mubika's emotional impact, Kamira learnt. Wakabi began by spearing off a cock’s crown head, and then smeared its blood over his body. The cocks remains were to be burnt thoroughly unto the gods, spirits that no bone was there for a dog or man but only black ash imitating the soil, the kind other cocks, chicks, hens feed on. The sun was staggering between its path and Wakabi observed the mystified wood hip, wondering if he could manage its transition practice. Indeed after very few clusters returned, Wakabi requested for a flood to cool down his sweating muscles. He had taken so long since this kind of toiling and it was so much different from hunting. Now and then cocks, hens and their chicks would cross ahead of him along the route to the holy part of the forest, they thought he was to forever block off their side of the domestic earth. Wakabi had married at a younger period in their times and history of generations, so he had done little tripod-stick gathering.
Wakabi glimpsed at the remaining abundant clusters every moment he came to carry back another butch and at sometime looked at Nkuutu with disbelief but again in approval. He realized every person had something he could do best and admitted having not known Nkuutu's abilities. Nkuutu was a fuel transition hero, though little was linked to hunting and warrior ship. Wakabi's wives and boys stood worried in thanklessness of what judgment had happened to their heroic husband and Paapa respectively. Perceiving the arrow of destiny changing in their lives, if at all costs Wakabi was being demoted to a commoner’s status? They didn’t know there had been a death sentence on his head than repositioning the divine clusters.
Kamira come again, this time to stop Wakabi from the entourage to his marriage due to Wakabi's current hard work, for afterwards he deserved enough rest yet they entourage had to travel over the night for long miles. Wakabi disagreed and pertained to finish the work and then join the entourage to the big festival. On reconsidering of his attendance to Kamira's wedding is pace increased that he began lifting two, three clusters at once. How could he absentee himself from a great pal’s marriage celebration, the bridegroom who had just got him this current punishment for his big headedness. His dogs traveled with him but still they’re at their only exercise of protection than being log haulers. Wakabi's spear was held together with the wood, just in case.
Wakabi ensured is first wife was organizing a living cock, a nice leopard hide and a spear for the navigation over the night. It was the work Mubika often did for Wakabi though it was traditionally an assignment for the first wife as head of other wives.
Nkuutu kept is politeness throughout his Paapa's adventure, his hair was short and unaware of is marvelous contribution to the current stake in operation. A child before manhood was a gift from the gods and he had to be honored just like he was to attain respect from his own children. Torturing a child was a howl appall in the god’s hearts.
Chapter Ten
Kamira, Wakabi and other elders of Busiki trekked through the night wind and silent earth where glowing insects were the only light on the lower loam material. Moreover, sounds of others worried nighttime insects picked through the solid dim. Men’s foot thumps were the heaviest noise.
Every elder’s right arm with an iron protector and their left hand with a cock and animal skin in the armpits. The men were prone and willing to get through their way no matter anything.
Within their steps they had to cross a holy river between Busiki and Bukooli. It was a sacred river that every human; young and old had to dance along the provided viaduct to the other face while singing,
Mwiga I have never seen you
Mwiga it’s my first time to see you
Mwiga let me pass you
Mwiga I will come back again.
It was a moment when men imitated girls they had ever seen dancing and eminently copying the test as each one of them sang to the holy waters. At the new bridge face a cock was slaughtered to thank gods and spirits of letting their souls across Mwiga. Hence, small children who were afraid and not ready to speak never extended over the sacred waters until they’re grown up and went through the rhymes of Mwiga.
Past and ago, this sacred river swallowed several warriors of Busiki as they forgot to request permission to hold them to the other face and only songs of war were loud and clear. Yes, they all crossed but also didn’t sacrifice a cock afterwards, on return the river had dried up to sand level, the Busiki regent emerged triumphant, so they moved within the trough singing victory words. Nevertheless, the sacred river managed to accommodate all the soldiers and there they died as the water refilled its surface. The Bakooli celebrated. So it’s believed of harboring enough skulls and fish, not forgetting the rusted fighting spears. It was believed the sacred water speaks and could transfer from one area to another location depending on its wishes. Moreover, this happened normally after the seasonal sacrifice when all villages besides its reroute had to sacrifice a virgin girl and boy without fail.
It was at this river that animals gathered in the dark and drank off their quest, then part away upon hearing letter of coming humans. Scoffing, hobnobbing animals could be listened too while fetching water by their spoon tongues. The sacred river.
Now already in Bukooli they continued for a distance. Only the scrambling of their animal hide attire added a conversation with the earth night. This moment they couldn’t talk about their women’s horrified secret manners, they’re neither cowards nor anything else, and silence was their other weapon. It was a time when they feared even the lightest grass next to them. Wakabi's presence was alien, they were silently waiting for his other tactic of warriorhood, they had conspired to sacrifice him but now they stood amidst his strength. However, wasn’t he afraid too?
A cock-a-doodle-doo broke the dumbness within their steps and there and then the cock was knifed off its throat. It was truly untimely for the cock to misinform the elders upon the eleventh hour of sunrise. Here they lay their camp and glow a fire, roasting the cock for the spirits and themselves to keep a boiling high temperature.
Until the rightful cock-a-doodle-doos was timely than they rose up again to forward the journey. Holding their recent hide-beds and remaining cocks, not distancing away their spears that slept in there five, no one could easily step on them. All they apt to give notice of their existence in Bukooli to the closest chief in the foreign land and there they received one inhabitant to walk them anywhere legitimately to their requests. With stops here and there while being introduced to other chiefs, the day covered a lot of delays for security reasons. However much of their coming had already been communicated through various channels of Bukooli, the same terminal that Kamira utilized to acknowledge the soon to be wife. Still it wasn’t a guarantee to zoom up and down anyhow.
When Wakabi, other elders and the gentleman of the day arrived to the brides mushroom, they were given new animal skins and spears as gratitude of welcoming them through the unpredictable night. All women and girls in Bukooli were in one compound; pots of water lay in waiting to quench there visitors thirst and others sat on their blaze stool, the cluster fuel was enough, so were other hearth stones glittering in bubbling heat. The giant festival pots of the village had now surrendered to the fanatic chemistry as they murmured inside, more and more dry roots were encouraged to soot form their organisms.
A medium pot full of feast soup was sited at center stage of the guests and with a calabash given to each guest they would scoop a liter or so to lip sip internally.
With the bride leading the girls, a dance was accumulating their whole bodies pillared by their toes, their waist grilled inside-outside and side by side, like they were boneless, every part of their naked bodies seemed willingly apart and participating. The hide and wooden crafted drum slummed every eardrum beyond the bridal compound; women across the platform were singing with the beating drum and dancing girls. The guests were amicably hosted with music lines;
She has got a smith
the man of metals
He has got a virgin
the art of life
She will give birth
his spears will protect
A smith of life marries
a smith of metals.
The music was considerate to the function.
A pot of meat was stationed before the guests, another section of feasting had began only each guest’s calabash had to cater for their gratuitous avidity. Within the same moment the guests introduced their origins, sighting about five dead generations that hardly connected to a total outside generation not from Busoga and also three honorable class services in Busiki. The guests cited having come to pick the most beautiful girl, otherwise, a parent would not surrender her daughter if such combined crumpet letters didn’t prescribe the smoothest allure her daughter’s being in-equivalent to any other. It was the bride price of a marriage.
Women had already begun their long lasting business of word mongering. Selecting on Wakabi and uncovered how he got his third woman from the same village. In addition, that Bukooli had most beautiful ladies of Busoga only that they often married elsewhere. Wakabi too partially remembered his marriage to Mutwala, he also had chance to meet his in-laws but little was shared between their mouth at the moment, for if a son-in-law was so talkative he would easily say or use the taboo obscene words to the elderly-in-law. Among the circulating words Wakabi and other elders heard a salvage phrase that Mubika was impregnated by the medicine man’s penis. Wakabi was lowered; he hardly ate another piece of roasted red meat and much of it camped in the jaws for so long and unready to make it follow the throat crossing.
How on earth couldn’t Busiki know about Mubika's potbelly and such priority flew to Bukooli yet Busiki stood stuck between them, Kamira thought wonderingly.
Again the drums started chattering along side the confabbing women lips composition as the dancers mood raised dust. Their bodies getting lowered and then raising again in the heart of sounds, the spirits and spiritisses were also listening.
The bride was given a pot that she was to utilize in her womanhood, a symbol of transition from one family to begin another. A gift from her Maama as she left the mushroom. Accompanied by her aunt, they had to travel under the designated evening so as towards dawn the bride and Kamira engaged on the gods’ food.
The entourage moved back with two extra souls they crossed through mushrooms and mini forests, it looked like a short journey than before. Dancing and singings they went across the bridge of the sacred river, sacrificing cocks thereafter and continued into their heartfelt Busiki of the elders and a new being for the bride.
Whenever Wakabi looked on the bride, the return and history of Mubika built in his head, the medicine man had made naptials and impregnated the woman at his heart. Yet as a medicine man his clients were to be protected for their husband and not to be loved by healers. A sequential happening of hoary, misery dwelled on his face.
Darkness had buried the sun, the entourage had arrived to their respective mushrooms, the village was aware of a new bride in Kamira's mushroom. They knew what Kamira was to pertain that night but it wasn’t easy. The bride refused to offer her pelvic pot to the husband before her aunt despite the emotional swaying tried by the aunt and Kamira himself. ‘It is going to be painful,’ she said. Kamira couldn’t believe it was the girl who was dancing happily and singing for the Busiki entourage. Did she think Kamira was going to look at her and she gets pregnant without serious secrete pumping. In this instance Kamira had to make infatuation to her aunt observantly to experiment the inner and outer of a woman’s body beneath her husbands strength. Until it was done, the bride went through the sex trial at the aunt’s envisage. It was done, the bride had her puberty age screwed creatively that she was only waiting for another naptial, this time without spasm reservation. .
The aunt acted as the eyewitness if canal blood didn’t stream out of the bride’s warm pot. Hence, the bride’s none virginity could impose a common aspect for her Paapa to pay heavy sums of domestic animals for making the bridegroom unclean. In addition, the Paapa would find another virgin girl from his mushroom to cleanse the man’s attained immorality of having slept with a whore.
The next sun afflicted with sacrificial thanks ceremony in the forest. A season of coming into contact with their bygone Paapas and Maamas, the ancient life of time. The thanks offertory gathering, this happened once over twenty-four moonlight periods, for all harvests of the previous seasons. Every type of mushroom had to provide a blood breathing animal or two for the Manly Oak Tree portion of the ancestral forest. Every living person, elder or not, women or girls, children and spirits were believed to be at the Manly Oak Tree as early as the morning sun. However, Kamira's new bride had to stay away from the forest for several moony seasons before participating in the thanks ritual. She hadn’t yet served the village. They stayed with her aunt about Kamira's compound; the aunt was neither a village member nor promising to be.
No drums were supposed to litter the air and even music in any kind was not tenable as they would cause spirits and gods divert their attention from the aroma sacrificed of their village harvests towards the thundering drums and raining songs of the past causing them to dance. In addition, the boys at the Womanly Oak Tree were never allowed to attend the thanks ceremony of the village. The outcasts.
The migration curved the village patently into the day’s quietness. It was disserted like a green desert, only animals talked to one another in their none amorphous languages and a few birds that didn’t follow up the ancestral forest ceremony.
No spears were to appear at the ceremony, for the village wasn’t going to war wit its ancestors. The fire was lit and one cluster of fuel after another would be multiplied upon the burning flames, every able human participated. The second function began as the smoking forest puffed into the stratosphere. The crowd sweating in its own contact with the fume, they started throwing live animals on the red fire from a distance. Crying and screaming animals bungled up and down the danger in search for safety but the sooner they died. The oily and watery reaction with fire catalyzed along side the mimicking burning wood stove. The vibrating odour kept the people awake while galloping lapfuls of accumulated mouth lubricate of greediness.
Although many trees were burnt down in this forest, the Manly Oak Tree never died at any one time. It survived through ancestral family trees and family trees. The two Oak trees were older than any other relatives. Therefore, they were called the Manly Oak Tree and Womanly Oak Tree. The Manly Oak Tree being regarded the guardian of the village. It had absorbed a lot of rituals and rites. It stood masculine tall and boldly bulbous among natures creation. It was told that its roots depth dug deeper down into soil that they equaled its open tallness from the surface ground to the sky above.
Elders, women, girls, boys, men began thanking their ancestors over the past seasonal harvests orally, every person had to look up into the sky as they focused on he Great Tree and lament the names, powers of all the spirits and gods they knew. Paying thanks to the ancestors on regard to protection and driving away evil intentions was another episode of the ancestral ceremony. They were also supposed to request for future and further ancestral assistance at all corners of legitimacy and common understanding of the social hereditary behaviors.
The greatest myth of this Manly Oak Tree was unto its capacity to move. People incited of its patrols over the night throughout the village and it never crossed borders. It was believed the might and strength of Busiki even after misfortune was as a result of this ancestral forest tree.
A checking smile covered the forest, a mixture of flamed feathers, animal coats, bones, meat, blood were inhaled. The spirits were happy and excite as the village humans took cover against the lung destroyer but they never absconded the forest perimeters. Beasts in the forest ran out of the interior and at such times may be the jaws of the wild summarized some outcasts at the Womanly Oak Tree. Moreover, could such outcasts approach the Manly Oak Tree they would end up in the red smoky heat.
Just when the sun was between noon and sunset, the ancestral forest ceremony concluded. The fire still spoke for days and nights even in the grinning rain, their still remained a handful material to turn into ashes. Blackness took over the greenish area; soot was born.
Soon after the sacrifices as people were about to exercise their teeth tongues, throats, stomach plus the anus back at the mushroom the Oldman felt down and despaired between what a good ceremony it was and how wrongful it was performed. He remembered that the elders didn’t come together to request for kindness and protection from the spirits and gods. The Oldman concluded that enormous tragedy was along the way into Busiki. The Oldman didn’t eat but falsified his good health belly-wise. He didn’t sleep throughout the night, for he went through the ageing wrinkles of is body’s life. Trying to trace the last season such obliviousness took place and the unseen auger that joined there after but couldn’t find nourishment from his ago head book.
Chapter Eleven
Wakabi stole himself out of Busiki into Bugweri, no one knew about is immediate disappearance. Not even the dogs he had to disagree with before departure. The pregnancy of Mubika had slumped back Wakabi's mind, further more he had participated in ancestral forest ceremony with a young half-baked wisdom. He almost didn’t know the ceremony had taken shape. Mubika having been feed with the medicine man’s diet was unfolding is inbeing ingredients that never applied. Wakabi had a constructive ending that it was a trick for the shrub man to penetrate Mubika's body and soul. Wakabi concretely never realized he had covered a great distance; he was walking aimlessly but in the lawful path. The sun was igniting the earth that in reaction blazed is soles, that too was unrecognizable.
Wakabi did greet is in-law and started by discontinuing the medicine man’s work in the most debris description. Wakabi narrated that if the shrub given to Mubika was of equity to other barren clients, then there was no grudge to sustain his gentle heart. However, if the medicine man hadn’t planned to impregnate Mubika then she would have got cured long before this nth time, otherwise, Mubika deserved no extra conspicuous drug.
Mubika's Paapa listened while moving through the corners of his mushroom compound. Wakabi didn’t know how much a bid was between his in-law and Mubika; this kept the in-law in a relaxed mid-smile mood. The confidence that her daughter eat each and every word of his lips than Wakabi's pelvic soup, kept him king over Mubika than Wakabi. This family affectionate started as low as Mubika's birth, many things happened all together. He received news of a new land segment from the head chief, his hen’s eggs had hatched, all his goats formed young ones and his Maama's spirit appeared to him in a dream from distant lands. Therefore, Mubika's birth was gracious in nature, a sign of multiple wealth and so she was much loved than her elder and young sisters that they lived in her shadows just like her co-wives. Moreover, little did Wakabi become aware of his in-laws influence to induce Mubika's marriage to him.
Mubika's Paapa was now thinking of is daughter more than the marriage he didn’t acknowledge whether it existed after her banishment or not. Nevertheless, one case of merit; it wasn’t Wakabi's decision though a cause of his aboriginal laws. Mubika was now a happy woman and again new hazardorous winds were blowing around her recovery, the old in-law reflected. How could he blame the medicine man’s capacity that other men didn’t own more so Wakabi himself. The humiliation, sadness and disheartening of her daughter were overturned by the medicine man. Mubika hadn’t any mushroom at the medicine man’s compound for she was officially married to Wakabi. The in-law cogitated before Wakabi.
Mubika arrived from the well; she had two pot fills, the internal or inner one that lived through four seasons and four seasons of day and night she carried it. And the other swamp pot, artificial in making. The top pot on her skull seemed lighter to put down no sooner she saw Wakabi; quickly she knelt down and greeted him but their contact being inactive though none was to blame.
The short spear, Wakabi remembered; the last time Mubika was in Busiki and realized it was the background strategy to offend him by the medicine man. How could it be connected to Mubika's barrenness if it wasn’t the medicine man’s penis in her beau.
Wakabi told the two, if she was to return to Busiki then the medicine man had to be terminated but he would never live without Mubika and let the shrub man brag about his grate thing.
Wakabi was told, he would never have Mubika again, and she didn’t belong to him anymore. These were the first harvest from the old in-laws bubbling barn. The old in-law continued by inciting that even a king couldn’t eat what he spate; otherwise, if a king could do so, then he was ready to suck the dirt too. Though Busiki was powerful Bugweri was ready to defend their daughter, their unborn grand child and the medicine man. Mubika's Paapa as a village chief had the keys to untrouble the healer’s life towards death and yet more the healer was his in-law for having healed the mental wounds of his daughter. Mubika had just learnt how to laugh once more and talk swiftly without unusual word gaps of distrust. He couldn’t let Wakabi kill that once more.
The old in-laws words caught Wakabi ear by ear and made him so small in is own capacity and politely got primed to leave. Holding his spear and animal skin and out of the in-laws mushrooms he walked off as Mubika witnessed every quick step he lay on the dusty earth way towards Busiki. Wakabi reflected on his speech to Mubika's Paapa, if he had told the right words or wrong approach along with his emotional pain.
Wakabi was assured that if he had come for anything it was the seven mushroom barns full of peas, for they were ready. However, Wakabi didn’t turn back not even a twist of his neck to profess upon the in-law’s thundering words.
In his own right as an elder with a probitous personality all over Busoga such words were a social indictment and degrading. This day Wakabi believed every man had a strong spirit, somewhere in his lifeline. For the reality, his in-law had all the strength to disrectify and unranked him. Yet more the old in-law couldn’t withhold his utterance. As he walked back, recalling every declaration that pierced him as a spear from the in-law’s hoarding opening, analyzing their truth and falsehood, Wakabi was enormously depressed. He had never come cross to cross with such charlatan ominous verbs as from his in-law.
Assemblies of moles were intercepting a head of Wakabi's annoyance, from a single edge of the bush to the other single without screeches but only a dive into hiding was heard. Immediately Wakabi superstitiously inferred it was a dirty luckless day for him, the way in front was developing into danger yet back at Mubika's Paapa's compound he had at once gained distance of unreceptive tongues. The moles were a symbol of unexpected trouble. Uncontrollable precarious state took on Wakabi that is ancestral artmanship as a great hunter and warrior prevailed in predatory of unimaginable animals and attacks on humans but little did he craft grasp how to kill or trap a wild rat. He always knew it was the small ants that brought down a mastery tree crippling it on its knees. With his spirit in the spear, Wakabi tried to crucify one or two moles but he ended up falling in the muscular grass without hurting the universe little moles. They too had an art against all men in their own bush huts.
Wakabi didn’t throw so many legs; one followed by another before fore sighting a moving galvanized leaf full dressed up man, as he came closer the leaves gave way to the covered hides wear. Immediately, Wakabi considered the motion gritty to be the medicine man. Wakabi initiatively become tough spirit and body, his muscles were expanding the nearer he drove towards the medicine man. Images of Mubika and the healer appeared inseparable in his purpose; the short human spear substituting Kamira's trademark and at once Wakabi inclined to exterminate the medicine man. As the two strangers seemed imperative to salute one another Wakabi intervened with a spear in the healers stomach, the healer slumped is breath that had turned into a cough and fell by the path side, scrambling with his last remarks, he was no more as tributes of blood decorated his death.
Wakabi's breath changed just like is mind reversed as before the murder. He had finished off the healer but now couldn’t reroute from the other channels to Busiki. He explored through the wild animals life, it wasn’t alien to him as a hunter. Now Wakabi's heart felt partially relieved, the healer was dead, before Mubika. Though they had a child Mubika would never be regarded as the healer’s wife. All possibilities were now dead. For she failed to protect him perfectly against all odds of death and no would her Paapa take care of a child with a grand child. Wakabi knew she was to return and live with him in Busiki. He was ready to receive Mubika with time.
Drums told of the elder’s death, a special sound that was dedicated to passing away that every ear trap learnt of a gone hero in the village. A woman had found the body and started lamenting to earth then mourning drums began; the spirits too, assembled. As a medicine man he had to be laid to rest in a special honor. Young men had started digging the earth; these were men with only one wife or none. One after another would spear out the soil at the backyard of the healers mushroom, deep and deep the diggers were getting down and buried into their own strength. Men of meaning stood besides, instructing diggers how a healer’s grave had to be constructed. Seven meters deep was the maximum width for a great medicine man like him and so depending on one healer’s power a different dimension would be allocated to the grave.
From a distance Wakabi had heard the mourning beat and automatically knew they weren’t asking for him although back at the grave area Mubika and her Paapa had talked about Wakabi's existence in Bugweri without a guardian and so every talker pointed at Wakabi as the intruding murderous stranger. Some men of almost brave integrity were sent to search for Wakabi and finish his life before the Bugweri barricade. Nevertheless, Wakabi had encouraged himself to fall into land of his birth, safe and full of liberation air.
Men narrated the vulnerability diseases and witches the now dead had healed. Many remembered the unpleasant incident of a lost girl of the village, by the waterway side her sisters saw her sailing away on the channel without any protector, the girl sat comfortably on the stream and on and on continued until at a certain point that she spun into the zealous waters. The other girls reported the matter and it was the now dead healer who assured the village it was a visit to spirits of the well. The healer told the girls parents to fill every bowl, calabash, and pot, anything that could hold water in their mushrooms to unite the spirits of the well to the water in the huts. Therefore, they had to borrow some other pots and then the now dead man inserted a herb in one of the pots, and stirred about for along moment. The water circulated around and around again, even after the healer’s exit. It was late in the early evening when the girl returned, just when the water in the pot stayed still. She narrated her tale. The spirits had welcomed her delightfully, they danced and sang for her, they told proverbs and praises of their times. It was a graceful place with its king called Bwofa eno nneka meaning, ‘after death this is home.’ He had unshakable authority and stamina.
All the dead’s material were squeezed into the grave with his shrubs and shrines curving closer by the body’s setting. For those healers who lived lower that him a few of their belongings had to stay on earth. It was an out-tearful phase as men and women had to surrender their enunciation into burial songs and dances;
Thy stones shall fall on me
they shall fall on my heart
It will be at such a time
that the stones will fall on me
Just like there falling on a great healer
thy stones will fall on me
They shall beat my heart
…
Mourning as crumbs of the once dug out sand was thrown to cover the healer’s grave; he had died by the hands of another outlander.
After the medicine man’s burial, the village council had to settle the myth at hand. Was the village under siege or not? In addition, all Bugweri elders fell on one side, Wakabi was the trouble but though the healer had made non-circumstantial cure of Mubika's illness, death wasn’t the true answer of reward before discussions. They promised to retaliate as soon as their weak spirit become efficient and together, they were to wrestle down great Busiki.
Wakabi was now far within Busiki and from the in-laws land. As a hunter and warrior he feared no single-handed wild creature but any watch or shoal of them was a threat especially recently that he had promised neither Uniza nor Mugeme to accompany him. Good a little, it was in daylight and he had sworn not to engage in any hunting unless the wild brutes disturbed him and for any reason he had not come to hunt. It was a bit of fear that brought this conclusive awareness. Just like he left inaudibly and so was his re-entrance.
Chapter Twelve
Wakabi sat outside is mushroom; the sun was almost at noon. He was fore observing young sons pell-mell to the Busiki village grounds for the manhood meeting date. Striplings promising wonder and prelude shows. Striplings under minding other peers with abusive lips hassling, one group of mushroom striplings disseminating a volley of negative thoughts to another group of mushroom striplings. Wakabi could see in the boys the past and recalled that none of such aggravated ill words did he receive. Every man of there times feared and liked him for his ebullient body built fibers.
Wakabi had learnt that the village knew his absence and the death of the medicine man. Kamira had reported the concern and put it out him that the elders were glad for acting singularly against those that tried to kill Busiki's spirit. Amidst his memory, two cocks were deliberately starting to beak each other; it was because of a hen that was intercepting Wakabi's dirty reed fence of the mushroom. Uplifting their gullet feathers to almost malting beyond the comb, they could slump a little and jump unto each other as they tried to beak off the comb. With sparkling noises Wakabi learnt that cocks always remained chicks with a difference of cock-a-doodle-doo upshot. However, just as he passed such analysis to the birds he could see himself among the catastrophe of childhood, he had just slaughtered a noble man of another village. The pot-mouth like laughter he had explored before withdrew insatiably. Nevertheless, as the cocks continued to fight, spectators had diverted their initial programs, putting empty bets on which one of the beakers would win the beautiful hen that was colored in black feathers with proportionate figure and hen walked off not bothered about any two feather raffled brawlers for its possessions. As the spectators shouted high and high while encirclement ring was being formed around the beakers, one of them was almost frightened and sought through the escape hole of the spectator’s legs while the other targeted the comb to be beaked, causing more louder applause in the compound as the other beaker chased the coward cock over precincts and bushes and the hind yard graves until the triumphal cock returned to its medal, the easy hen.
The manhood occasion was a time when striplings reminded themselves of their underhand knavery forest flashes. For it wasn’t a wood storage place alone but also every stripling had a duty to hunt down or up any reasonable animal. In the forest the feast would be and begin, striplings slicing the animal and frying it up until ready to suit the belly. The initial killer would retain the animal hide until this day. Therefore, so a few striplings came in rabbits, pigs and other medium animal hides covering their private surroundings, all these hides Wakabi could differentiate which animal they belong to with rational intellect. Qualities as size, thickness, softness, reekness, all were detective instincts of discerning which hide once belonged to a particular animal. It was shame to bring a mole or rabbit hide to the grounds but nevertheless, it was better than reporting without a hide but leaves. For the initial judgment of qualifying was to prove some animal had died by your hands in sight of other striplings.
It was encouraging that Wakabi's sons had powerful hides and so girls were there, advancing their milky teeth, black eyes, open breasts and plaited hair through Nkuutu and the brothers. Shaking their bungles made out of Kamira's wit that surrounded their waists, arm twists and necks to call attention. Nkuutu always said seduction was as old as the first woman on earth.
This time again Wakabi's stripling, Nkuutu was the designer of his brothers’ attire for they too wore their first antelope skins. In the forest while singing and playing, Nkuutu had long reasoned out the antelope’s path, it was that hobble animals often took different routes but commonly tress passing a typical sign. Nkuutu knew the antelopes hopped and hopped by big deciduous trees, they were against small stems that they were netted into. With the aid of his brothers, elementary antelope size holes were dug besides two to three trees, the holes were then covered with simple weak sticks and grass that animals fell into them without running for miles over mountains, hills, river banks; the boys kept their secret of cheap hunting. Nkuutu was a god indeed, his brothers would say.
Of course elders were at the function to assess their striplings life on earth. They had worked through their generations with success and backdraw but the facts established that elders were prosperous having abided to such a day that they too were once assessed by their fore Paapas. Now it was the elders gyrate to weigh the village’s striplings.
Arriving at the manhood function without the ancestral tool; the spear always equaled into the source stripling to stay a stripling. It meant the stripling wasn’t ready and steady to watch against odd momentous insecurity. While if it was proved that nor did the persons in question have spears back at their mushrooms it was condemned as laziness, which resulted into total outclassing the striplings. This category almost six where made outcastes from the village; by the entrance to grounds an elder stood, watching who was who and whose spear did he hold or not. Wakabi and Kamira being the main assessors of this season they picked out spears smith fully of the homelands and the other weapons of Bugweri, Bugabula, Bukooli, and Bulamongi. With a mark of the Busiki spears the stripling owner held another rating against other striplings foreign spears, for such iron weapons were in versatile strong unveto posture. Failure at such a category meant to wait and participate in the next manhood occasion. This time there were ten ten three who had to wait for another manhood function.
People were applauded and vexed, Nkuutu passed the manhood first and second stage, which they didn’t expect. Nkuutu was now legible to find a helper outside Busiki just like his brothers. He swiftly destroyed the boyhood scapegoats. He was once a dormant stripling among the mushroom. At this point they were allowed to find women from other villages. Such striplings who had better hides and spears were now socially esteemed over the women’s stratum. The new men were agitated to show their human sturdiness among striplings and women but not into libido in the wild animal text. The more these new men exploded their hurting and warfare capabilities the better life did they approach times ahead.
The new men had the privilege to continue wearing their hides, as the non-successful had to restate the green non-lasting underwear. The young men hadn’t any warrant to socially interact with striplings. They were beginning a new phase; upon this mark a story of Mugezzi was tutored unto them. A long time ago Mugezzi returned in the night and told the wondering wife how he had butchered Munage and indeed she agreed on observing her husband with blood on his hands and knife. Sweetly Mugezzi made her take an oath never to expose his blood full hands, the wife went on to say;
By my husband
I stand on this
What my husband says
Is what I say and do.
Days and nights passed with a glued mouth of their secret. The people asked about Munage’s disappearance but didn’t encroach on any clue beyond the painted red color in Munage’s mushroom. This bachelor and important man is a great warrior, they told one another, how then could he be killed and if so where is Munage’s body? Mugezzi and the wife were as silent as Munage. The elders went on trying to uncover the truth about their lost elder but no answer was reaped. Certainly they decided to consult the spirit earth to find out where Munage’s body lay. Before the spiritual consultation was to happen Mugezzi out openly caused callous blank verse unto his wife, beating her, his mind had turned untamable. In retaliation the first words within tears that flew from Mugezzi’s wife’s mouth was her husband’s murder of Munage. The wife elaborated were Munage’s remains were buried as told by her husband. The drums were answered, calling every woman, man and person into Mugezzi’s compound, he had killed Munage, they told each other. People wondered how great friends had fallen into a murderer and victim untimely play. The wife took the elders to Munage’s grave; exhuming and exhuming. Yes the soil was soft and recently disturbed in texture, yes Munage must be here the diggers explained to the gathered crowds. Soon they reached the corpse of dog, Munage wasn’t in there. Mugezzi had convinced Munage a friend and colleague to disappear into thin hiding so as to find out how much trust or secrecy did his wife own at heart. By the disappearance of Munage, Mugezzi killed a dog and buried it after smearing and painting blood in Munage’s mushroom and on himself too. Mugezzi narrated is reasonable account of trickster on emphasizing to learn the wife’s trust or secrecy and now he had achieved it. Indeed he told the people that when Munage appears before their eyes the wife had to leave his personality. Mugezzi had to call out Munage from the thin hiding place and made ancestral sacrifices to the gods and spirits of the land in ensue to clean the imposition of Munage’s death. A woman has no secrecy, the elders said to say to the new men who had passed the manhood assignment.
The new men had a final task before their inbeing potentiality; two amongst themselves would hold a dead driest animal skin one side and another, spreading it out vertically that a brand new man had to run towards it-stop and then pierce through the suspended dry hide. If any man’s spear crossed through the rough skin he become the leader of the new generation. This time Nkuutu was advanced on as a leader and so automatically he joined the elders circle.
One qualified leader wasn’t enough in Nkuutu's age band. This brought a lot of fear and disguise within the elder’s sphere. Wakabi and Kamira believed that shouldn’t there be real sharp edge spears from the workshop for the manhood function; the generations to come were to be almost girls. The other elders believed that had they to be attacked by any village; Busiki would fall in the arms of intruders without any resistance.
Initial outcasts were not supposed to be seen in society, apart from being observed at the Womanly Oak Tree in the forest. They had to join the other society of immoral beings.
Boys living a low life but not different from their ancestors. In trees they slept, eat and worshiped the Womanly Oak Tree. They too lived with sharp sticks that kept their security and the hunting down of wild rabbits and pigs. Some lived so long just when they’re expected to die before the fall of the tenth moon.
Not for opposition, they knew the calendar days of the village and so during the ancestral cleansing ceremony they stayed at the village grounds or at the riverbanks and when such manhood functions took place they stayed in the forests mushroom tree. They knew the meaning of every rhythm of the drum and the horn. All they were denied was the free production of life. The outcasts lived politely and only died of natural calamities but not by the wishes of the banishing society.
The old outcast boys had inherited a rhyme in their lives and so they never ignored any banished humans because of being evil spirited as the original society believed. Therefore, in solidarity they spoke out to their new comers;
What we eat; the ancestors once ate it
What we do; the ancestors once did it
What we fail; the ancestors once didn’t know it
We shall survive; we shall survive.
The boys developed their own life that cheered new outcasts with confidence of new everlasting breathe. Although they had no iron spears to slash off their ever growing hair which totally distinguished them from society. Life was possible.
Chapter Thirteen
Moony evenings wore a different face on the village. Moments when children didn’t early for kip nor did the men think of dancing their women until dawn. Stories were exchanged among women to their children too. And here was Wakabi saying a few social elements to one of his highly qualified son, Nkuutu, ‘have you ever heard of the eagle-hen romance story?’
‘Yes Paapa,’ the new man of the mushroom spoke out.
‘That’s what my ears want to eat this moony evening.’ Wakabi burst out.
‘The hen was married to eagle, along long time ago, happily in love that no other bird could find hen for marrying however beautiful your feathers were while at the existence of eagle. A time when one bird specie married another. Eagle listened to hen just like hen did the same. However, one day they disagreed when eagle returned with a duckling for dinner. Eagle was told to return the duckling because it was hen’s distant niece and its Maama was a sister to hen. However, eagle refused and ate the duckling. Hen divorced eagle and duck hated her sister’s husband more and her sister too. Eagle begged hen not to separate but hen disagreed; she was worried that eagle would almost eat his chicks too. Eagle told hen he wanted to go with is checks but hen declined on the pretext that why did eagle need to go with the chicks if he couldn’t carry away a single egg before hatching. Eagle promised and got determined to take the chicks and that’s why he keeps on kidnapping chicks to this day. However, whenever eagle flew with chicks in his stabbing claws they would die before arriving eagles new mushroom, the nest, and there he would eat the lifeless chicks. Because of this hen’s sister learnt how to fly in order to protect her ducklings. From then it was the beginning of female animals contract marriages with their sons and brother. Brothers and sisters also had contract marriages. The animal earth was under total chaos because of eagles roughness and hen’s politeness. A case that even we elders have never seen its solved to this hour. That’s what I saw of them.’
Wakabi cleared is throat and said, ‘good you know that part of eagle-hen story but do you understand the meaning?’
‘No Paapa Wakabi.’
‘You see, now your a man but with still little wisdom of cultural senses. That’s why you still need my guidance and wit. But the meaning derives from hen marrying her own son cock and cock becomes polygamous with his sisters that to this very day hen, chicks and cocks survive and so eagle can’t exhaust the chicks no matter how angry he stays and keeps on attacking, there shall always be chicks to grow into hens and cocks.’
The moon was still alive, the shouting from neighbors and far away could be heard, children singing and dancing. A true night of god’s visit, for every moony night was when the unseen masters visited, for they’re unable to see their earth during the light day and that’s when their spirit angels were at work. That’s why every return of the moon was a different start of a season of the year.
This new moon came with Mubika, with her pot on the nut and the other almost to cough a baby. For a moment Wakabi's mushroom compound dumbfounded like a vacuum. Wakabi smiled and helped to put down the pot and there into his mushroom it lay. Mubika understood; she was to sleep in Wakabi's mushroom, for neither could she see her mushroom not even its ruins they had vanished into thick air nor could her husband set up another in the night’s hour.
Mubika breathed well after showing up from the bushes alone, it was good luck perhaps that on a moony night the breasts took time to avoid their hideouts. She reckoned unto Wakabi's brevity because a wife picks from his husbands habits. Without a spear Mubika had turned up to other people, they thought it was a ghost. No, it was Mubika. Her co-wives were almost getting old against her return; Wakabi had long started consolidating his position by sleeping in their mushrooms but now that Mubika had come back no more heat for their pots. The woman in leaves, another animal skin had been left behind deliberately.
‘Women! My wives.’ Wakabi called his wives. They all came out from their mushrooms after responding at once to their husband’s cock-a-doodle-doo. ‘Can’t you see Mubika is here and pregnant.’ Sooner than later the co wives began greeting her, they had entered the mushroom in the past as non-verbal protest on noticing a woman with a pot at night. Things might be changing, Mubika thought. ‘I expect each one of you to help her, since she has no seeds in the gardens, she needs every day’s meal.’ Wakabi told is wives, manly.
Although Mubika slept in Wakabi's mushroom, the god’s food wasn’t eaten. A pregnant woman almost eight moons heavy could lead to a man’s banishment and it meant sanctions from feeding on the god’s meal for life. Hence men kept their faith not to fuck pregnant women. This night Mubika had carried along a third pot of hot air, she had learnt of Bugweri's planned invasion of Busiki for the revenge of the healer’s death. Moreover, all this Wakabi learnt in a bulge of the night when total darkness overthrew the moon once more.
As her Paapa waited for Mubika who had gone to the swamp, she wasn’t seen further more. He grew an assumption of may be Mubika had visited the new healer Bamulese, but that also failed to yield her return. By the moony session when Mubika had already reached Busiki, her Paapa was still waiting by his mushroom compound with a spear. Her child had returned to save the husband. War was on the way.
Reverberates of an owl rotated in the night, Wakabi heard it scrolling its voice over and over again that he paused the kip to see where the owl was. The owl was footing from the compound, on the Oldman's mushroom. As it was told, when this bird came by your mushroom then you were about to die and no body ever dared to chase or kill the owl, new perilous curves would befall your life and your kinsmen at large. Its voice was final; owl the bad omen of death.
By early sunrise almost everyone and the neighbors had heard the owl cry but the secrets of death timing on the Oldman was known to only grown ups and not children. For the young would trot here and there announcing the Oldman's knocking death told by the myth owl yet he was still alive. The Oldman himself knew the owl was crying from his mushroom’s roof. And as the mushroom compound occupants greeted him that morning, he responded knowing it was the last, put on a blight smile that exploded his living gum that was unable to hold its teeth. The Oldman was almost laughing is last.
Wakabi sent off Nkuutu to let the elders know Bugweri's package for their village, meanwhile, he needed to re-erect Mubika's mushroom. By morning as he got out last from his sleep an anthill had long germinated from where Mubika's mushroom used to stand.
‘She came back before you…you where not there by yesterday evening.’ Wakabi was speaking to the small anthill. For everything had a spirit he believed. Then began demolishing its wet compact network of soil veins. The then mushroom had fallen to the wild solidarity of tiny jaws slowly by slowly; the sticks and leaves that once covered the mushroom had got rotten and aided in the anthill construction.
‘I know you grow faster than a tree but this isn’t your place.’ Wakabi continued speaking to the peeved anthill and its components as he started throwing stones in the now ditch deep ring area. Mubika's mushroom entrance door had faced Wakabi's own mushroom since history and that’s where he deserved it to remain.
‘I wonder were you got water to soften this hard soil for your mushroom, you tiny soil ticks, but if you’re too wise then build on the rocks that have pounded your background.’ Wakabi seemed convinced incrementally that the tiny social workers were listening and understanding in spirit. From the neighboring bush Wakabi obtained thick dry logs to adjacently build the foundation parallel to the pillar in Mubika's mushroom. Mubika wondered, he had brought the logs without branches leaves to cover the mushroom, was it to be an open mushroom? Her co wives systematically were telling proverbs of revenge in their hearts with an accompanied internal delightful laughter. They knew Wakabi was hitting back upon her for the medicine man’s pot belly, for a while Mubika also knew how horrible cookery with the medicine man’s act was bearing its new ripe fruits before the child was born. However, a child belonged to the man who took care of him or her and so Wakabi heard to believe the unborn child will be his, in anyway the medicine man was beneath their feet, Mubika thought over.
Wakabi swam into his mushroom and returned with the best of his hides, that he began pinning them with grass around the mushroom under construction. The co wives reverted to self-agony and Mubika took their happy place. There was no mushroom a cross ridges and borders like the new invented Mubika's mushroom built by the hands of his Wakabi.
Wakabi's mushroom compound was a stopping juncture for every village mate and those who had received the news. Everyone come to see by himself or herself the art of Wakabi's mind. Moreover, in a few days to come people were promising their soul of diverting from stick-leaves mushrooms to stick-hides mushrooms. For those who hard enough hides. The colorful designs of leopard dotted hides, lion fur and sheep hides, wild cattle skins overshadowed the entire village with instinct exposure. The new mushroom also branded Mubika's return as humans questioned who was to dream in it.
Mubika's co wives wondered for how long was Wakabi to sleep in the new mushroom before they totally concived that he could neither make naptials to them or even call them into his mushroom. The nine moons a head were along period indeed; each one’s heart would arrogantly concede. Every one of them was in her own mushroom, all thinking of the same common inflict that they had no control at all.
As the Oldman held his stick that substituted is strength, with a tobacco pipe in the teeth less gum. He murmured a few wise parables, ‘unless you face trouble you can’t provoke the earth, it’s what makes a man live to learn and teach the young. Every night and day is as tough as the desire to life extension. For now Mubika is happy than when her belly was bare, but what if that unborn child was a girl to be married off in later times. Would she have given birth to this village’s fortune or nothing at all. The way she left her Paapa in Bugweri was in the same truth that the unborn would vanish from this village.’
Nkuutu informed Wakabi that every elder was looking unto him to train and combat the village. Wakabi recalled the news Mubika had snatched into Busiki and then disappeared for Kamira's compound, as his wives politely sought refugee in the Oldman's parable. Mubika on the other hand understood the Oldman's dislike of her and now it was descending unto her unborn child, a curse from the Oldman. Pouring incriminated words on an innocent unborn instead of oiling his last blessings unto his lineage.
The Oldman trekked to the village grounds. He had known what Nkuutu was disseminating through the elders by the mouth guide of Wakabi. Nevertheless, Nkuutu had unforeseen sight that the Oldman had to hear the message from him too. ‘When your wife gives birth you might forget your Paapa,’ the Oldman had collided with Nkuutu and told him so. Then enormous apologies flew out of Nkuutu to nurse the insult to grand Paapa until they both reached the grounds. The Oldman had refused to forgive his grand son and when they arrived he told Nkuutu that it was common practice for a man to eat alone and his wife and children independently also. Moreover, it was a woman’s labor to see her husband eating; all the Oldman deserved was Nkuutu to walk him to the grounds. Old age was at total wisdom. Nkuutu laughed at his grand Paapa’s sagacity and then returned to the mushroom to collect his spear and shield. Wakabi and Kamira were already waiting for the village warriors.
Back in Bugweri Mubika's Paapa was being fined for her daughter’s discrete performance. A child who had come in tears and pain, She was a traitor. All Wakabi's in-law’s wealth in goats, chicken, sheep, and cows were confiscated and his title as elder was repealed. His life was descended into his childhood that no respect what-so-ever did even a recently young child he saw after birth was to greet or help Mubika's Paapa. It was a customary law that such persons connected to traitors despite their influence had to belong nowhere socially.
Little did Mubika acknowledge that she couldn’t cook two pots on one tripod, or else one had to sit on the mouth of another pot. In addition, even though so; the under pot was the one to heat up the apex pot. Her Paapa was in pain despite her feelings for him and straight away Wakabi was assembling his warriors for a possible defense or attack on the village where her Paapa lived.
Chapter Fourteen
For two moonlight days the grounds had occupied the elders and warriors of the village. It seemed no much work but the trainees had to comply and succeed in all hindrance measures. Warriors had their own shields but the spears had to be provided. They were restless men being taught the military phenomenon.
‘Kill the enemy for he won’t spare you; attack him by your spear first; be fast and the shield in the opposite arm should push him off to death; pull out your spears sooner than your approached by another enemy, don’t sympathize with the dead, just pull out your spear mercilessly and attack another enemy or else shield yourself against spears as you recover your own spear. You may not necessarily recover your own spear but take on the dead enemy’s weapon and use it against the next contemplating enemy himself. Until you hurt the last man than your can retreat.’ Wakabi was commanding.
One warrior after another would surface with determination to javelin over a complementary tall tree on the grounds. Every warrior had to pass through this phase completely, otherwise, any javelin attempt that got stuck into the braches and sometimes trembled down through the undetermined leaves and channels meant a repeat. Until you qualified with three consecutive javelin without interception of any kind of failure. It was tough.
The second elementary practical was to run and aim the javelin across the Butebenzi River. Out dated spears were at disposal to let no losses if at all many warriors cast their spears in the running waters that swallowed their metals. In addition, this exercise was also repeatable in case of failed attempts by any warrior from casting the javelin across the river. A lot of things happened with the river, the village had to sacrifice a repentance feast for the piercing of the waters otherwise it was believed to dry up had it been misused without blood of any animal.
The warriors were jolly in Wakabi's leadership and it wasn’t long that is exemplary teaching were visionary experimented. He had thrown the spear over the tall deciduous tree and the Butebenzi River. Some warriors believed Wakabi could speak with any spear and only him heard its response. Despite the unproved rumor, the warriors and coincided with the spiritual connection between the two as godly evidence. Wakabi had lived a spearly life.
Combined with a rehearsed jelly moral warriorship songs, every warrior had a reason to defend Busiki. The drums were neither in recite nor the village dancers; it was a manly activity with manly characteristics.
The warriors had to train how to get lost through the long grass by bending their abdomen and walk for multiple distances amidst trenches at both a timid and sound speed, were a perfect secondary training.
Almost at the last bit of it, a warrior had to symbolize an attack against another warrior and at instinct approach a warrior had to drive away an enemy’s spear by the art of his shield’s movement upwards so as to clearly attain a good vision of were to hurt the enemy. With brute sticks Wakabi's warriors were able to act this phase to absolute perfection.
‘Women and children shouldn’t be killed and elderly without intention to destruction shouldn’t be murdered. Still you have to finish off every able man until you take control of the minor ages under captivity. A besieged area can’t be exited without my say-so. Lastly, every one of my warriors has to come with his spear from elder Kamira's workshop here at the grounds when you hear the horn call. And so let it be the same spear and shield from elder Kamira that everyone of you have to return with after victory or otherwise you will become a traitor and taken as a captive too.’ Wakabi had finished his work for three full days and nights. For at no any time did all men return to the mushroom. He had appointed elder Nkuutu a commander to a particular battalion and he too had a battalion to control and so elder Kamira had another battalion. One battalion had to stay at the training grounds over night and another the next day, all warriors getting combated to the bush night weather.
Back in the mushrooms elder Kamira had reasonable capacity to stay away from the military discipline. Smelting, heating, banging and cooling metals, Kamira was at his smithy workshop. Ensuring the best quality iron ore that had to quantify into the fastest and strongest weapons. With sharp headmost edges that only a touch could cause a great burn and a bleeding skin. It was elder Kamira's talent. Although the noise of crying metals had been ruled against, this moment was socially salient that he had to move the workshop’s productivity even in the dark seconds. Sleep wasn’t substantial at this hour of the village. Kamira too, compromised with night hours when scorching winds would sensitize the fire to mould spears and at the same time it would blow away the metals heat during the cooling process. So work moved fast and swiftly with internal satisfaction.
Wakabi had to comeback to the mushroom along side the elder Oldman. For two good evenings it was the norm. The Oldman was observing the art of warriors and comparing it with the past and where some military tactics were skipped, the Oldman had to come in. with the Oldman's cloudy low sizeable hair and vein chained face and the mouth pipe that grew old with him.
On this last day the Oldman clutched his deep throat, throwing out grease like saliva that dropped by the path side, coughing and coughing repeatedly. ‘Wakabi you’re my son, my only child, all your brothers and sisters died before boyhood and womanhood. Moreover, those who were born with defections like three or less fingers and one eye were thrown into Butebenzi River. To me it was like a curse but your living has helped me that I will enter beneath my feet with ability to let your forefathers know I left behind a clan’s man, a strong man that am so glad to talk about. Nevertheless, the earth has never run out of disappointments and so your spirit in Mubika that over covers your first wife shall yield worse calamities in the clan. Those are your women I can’t admire them for you but always show the first wife her goodness, the first woman to sip your soup. You know the stories of this land and then time will come when you will not be forgiven about it.’ The Oldman lectured his son. Wakabi despite is strength and might never at anyone moment did he exchange obnoxious vernacular with the Oldman. Somehow he had a special place for the Oldman. He was a good listener.
Then the pipe fell from his mouth soon it was seconded by the Oldman's kneeling on the ground that left him cold; earth-age had ended for the Oldman. It wasn’t later when the big round-eyed owl appeared on the tree by the path and began shrieking and squealing. Elder Wakabi, the other elders stood by the Oldman's body and Wakabi could recite his Paapa's last words, “you know the stories of this land and then time comes when you can’t be forgiven about it.’ Wakabi was reminded internally of Mugoolo a great man who died and rose again; ‘if Mugoolo died twice why is it that he can’t be buried for a third time; if greatness was great then Mugoolo deserved to breath to this very day just like Lwazilwataka, he too would be living.’
Wakabi told elders the comfortable proverb that encompassed that death was meant for all. The owl was no longer heard of. Off it had accomplished its prophecy.
The elder decided not to sound the drum, for Bugweri would perhaps take advantage of the burial farewell to attack the village. In addition, more so the Oldman had passed away at night at the ominous noise of the owl bird, a period that had a lot of cultural pretexts attached to such a dead body. One of them was to bury the dead in a standing format and at that particular piece of land at which the death took place. No human lamentation or special burial ceremony was required for such people. It was like passing away of a person in his or her sleep. Just as Kamira's Paapa who passed away in a dream in his mushroom and the bird had come around before; there he was buried. It meant such dead had excelled beyond the spirits and spiritisses rank on earth and directly were connected to the gods and goddesses. They could instruct spirits in their works and so the Oldman was being considered as a god. In addition, no items of his were to be buried with him; the gods have enough of everything.
That moment they called up warriors at the ground to begin accessing the soil. Men weren’t supposed to cry and women weren’t accepted to mourn. The Oldman had died in a happy matter; nevertheless, their cry would even alert Bugweri's strategy to attack. The village was at an awkward fear, for they told proverbs of how it is a child who empties and defaults its Maama's breasts which once were the magnets of men’s eye and compact with beauty.
Kamira too had permission to appear at the burial site just as the entire village had foregathered. Reminiscing through he Oldman's breath full hurly-burly; ‘he had fought in wars of their times, a motivator of the young species, he was a ruthless warrior.’ One of the elders spate his review of the gone hero. ‘He was a better tactician in military with a thing for spears,’ the elder advanced, people of the dead’s rank and generation where the only permitted persons to speak of the Oldman's history. ‘The Oldman's Paapa died my toes plus my fingers and my toes of moons ago.’
‘No, it was my toes plus my fingers and eight figures of moons ago, remember this is another moon session.’ One of the elders intercepted.
‘You can’t count a moon that our Oldman didn’t complete,’ said the former in defense. ‘So it was twice my toes and seven of my fingers, moons ago that the Oldman's Paapa died.’ The elder continued to enlighten the grieved; it was a common anachronism that required accurate keenness.
‘The Oldman's last living spouse had died my fingers and two toes of moons ago. The oracle of the Manly Oak Tree in the forest disowned the Oldman after he pierced it with his spear; it made sure no child was a live to mature with the earth again from his body despite the many wives. Most had to return to their Paapa's background and Wakabi's Maama had just passed away to leave the Oldman in the hands of Wakabi. She is now sleeping at Wakabi's backyard. It was the Oldman who planted the common law that Mubika faced before men’s lenses, with supportive suggestions that such girls were socially ill-starred.’ Another ageing elder spoke of the Oldman. ‘It helped the village because sons were menace full characters who could eat and drink from their late Paapa's calabash. Yes, it was legal before but why should my son eat from my calabash before my brother did so.’ The elder elaborated history.
The people in the village were learning a history of their fore Paapas and its from this moment that Wakabi recognized why he lived as the only child of the late Oldman. In a sequential social sought he believed that had his brothers and sisters lived on, part of them would also be elders of the land and would be having wives and families or otherwise.
As the sympathizers freezed and craved in the out cold air the diggers were competing to make the Oldman’s new mushroom, it was warm though dark in the vast hole under. A narrow hole that was deep, the spears were constructing it and there the Oldman would stand to continue the uncompleted journey. What the sympathizers didn’t know was that in the same hole the ancestral Manly Oak Tree mischief was to be buried. The Oldman had died without telling any person the warnings in their past sanctuary to the spirits and gods of the village.
As the Oldman was being buried four spears were placed at the four angles of his new earth mushroom to protect him along the way, all spears pointing to the villagers feet. It was in the night that he died and that’s when he was joined with the gods. It was a quiet burial. The eldest human of the village had started another age from spiritual birth-hood within the invisible kingdom.
Chapter Fifteen
The next morning a woman of the village was on his way to the planting toil that she heard morale war songs and yet she had left her husband at the huts. She seemed brain torn between the village training at the grounds and the soldiers’ morale in their territory. At last she ascertained on warlike enemies otherwise her husband would have been at the village grounds. Therefore, she ran back like a male unable to hold her breasts just to communicate her ears’ message. Indeed, she implemented her plan despite her being late.
Hooo hooo! Hooo hooo! the ivory horn began calling its warriors, the unwanted visitors news had reached Wakabi's ear. Every able man and warrior was sending himself to the village grounds, his shield in the sister arm and a spear in the brotherly hand. That was fuss, the sky was scorching the warriors’ heads and the soil’s sultriness burnt their soles. Caught by the sun’s fever it was their first battle as they capped their heads with shields and ran to their command centers. The sky had never been extremely indignant as this before, the atmosphere looked pale and restless.
The horn was blown until Wakabi arrived at the grounds; he had given Nkuutu his spear and shield to reach before him at the command centers. He found the three warrior fractions independently from each other and only his section missed a leadership symbol. The division that was being controlled by Mulala in Kamira's absence was reedited into the smith’s hands. Wakabi got his commanders and planted himself between them, then told them they were to attack from the respective sides they stood at by this moment; for he was ready to deform the enemies face. The martial on Wakabi's sister side was to confide the enemy from the riverbank and the other martial from the forest perimeter.
As a senior warrior and hunter Wakabi was Busiki's cartography, sketching out the landscapes advantageous plot without condone. The Basiki warriors would also trap morale songs of the enemy.
‘A period has come for you to protect your wives, your children, your land and your ancestors’ spiritual freedom. Now you’re to determine either to be your enemy’s servant or a master, okay let us go.’ Wakabi gave the last words and began switching on war songs, leading his crony warriors,
Today it’s fire
Spear with spear
Tomorrow its control
Seizing the enemy
Shielding his land
Marrying his women
Taking his children
Today Busiki is to control Bugweri.
The warriors sang with a rollicking taste into the meaning of each poetic line. Their spears right at fist and the shields close to their chests as they sang melodies that got into a cacophony with the enemy’s echoes. They had reached the border of Bugweri and Busiki, the enemies on their side and Wakabi's battalion in Busiki. They matched strongly in a line facing the enemy. Who ever tramped into the others land would start on the skirmishing he would have to attack. Bugweri did invade before Busiki assaulted. A blitz circumference, the music had absconded vacillatingly into languages of shields, spears and bawling martyred warriors. Image of a blood bath were substituting the green, brown earth complexion. Life was being lost.
The once hearth sky had been over powered by imperious clouds. The overcast firmament had long battled its way through, controlling every area beneath the warriors on the ground. It was turn for Mulala to instigate is supernatural powers over the threatening rains to be coerced into Bugweri. In addition, there he took cover in the grass and started inciting Madhi the god of rains, Bileli the god of clouds to change direction into Bugweri. Lastly he knotted several grass leaves in condition that its main vein’s apex pointed to Bugweri. After that he continued calling upon the gods miracle.
At the same time Bamulese the Bugweri supernatural mediator planted the tail of his spear in the ground, partially, and shouting followed his reprisal to the rains that if they deserved to die and never pour again in this land, let them fall on the fixed spear. The murk clouds wheel spanned above like another war in heaven; thunder and lightening vibrated and flashed through the rotating vapour. The medicine men’s powers were controlling the skies; Busiki and Bugweri were also fraying in the skies above.
Mulala was over won, the waters started like a mini drizzle, he reiterated with the practice of trying more grass flying into Bugweri bearing in order to armistice the gods, Madhi and Bileli. It decreased for a while. Then the downpour refreshed increasingly, his gracious talk with the gods was fruitless. The battle on the ground began to retreat, commanders cried through the water arrows with their horning, leaving behind a hip of non sense dregs and offal of perished warriors, torn shields and sleeping spears.
Bamulese knew he had won the battle in heaven. After this downpour no more rains would see Busiki soil for quite along season. Not even a trace of the grey running sky water-well would tramp through Busiki airspace. There clouds had been captured in a black physics battle between the spear and the multi-grass knitting.
Suddenly, the red wrangle shifted to the forest as both sides sought camp from heavenly tears. Here it run out of proportion, each man with another and then attacking the next victim or victor was the case. The commanders had almost lost command and identity among their subjects and so the impact was to spell blood alone to persons whose face appeared outlandish. In other manifestations where the opponent’s face was invisible, the warrior had to save himself, for the enemy might have already identified him. These intuited soldierly fighters from the same side not indicatively got involved on foraying one another unnoticed. The trees too participated in the war, hiding running warriors and being speared as their baby trees too revenged onto the warriors. Part of the forest was evidently flattened, its bush lost of eroding legs and dead warriors. The disaster was big indeed, a blood bath saying it all.
Bugweri blew their horn’s password of retreat, the blitz was so thick, and the fighting very hot, his men exited the forest to their homeland huts. The other side was also accepting their sour experience and with merry contentment they had punished pert Bugweri though not to their set objectives. Neither would they accept to follow up the retreating warriors, what would happen next wasn’t to be underestimated. Bugweri warriors had witnessed their fallen comrades as many as the Busiki dead troops and so the survivors deserved to live.
It was a tough exchange of death as Busiki people carried their matrimonial fallen warriors to be buried. Little was left in their mouth and throats to sing about, frightened that they would breathe out their last bit of oxygen. Bugweri warriors who suffered treatable damages and unable to retreat were taken as captives. The once heavy showers were now incidental.
Busiki mourned its dead among them was the commander of one battalion. Nkuutu died with all his men at a time when he was ripe to go hunting with Wakabi. Kamira lost a few warriors and Wakabi lost less. Most likely the offensive ignored to face Wakabi's battalion. All in all the dead were half of the battalion; others were injured. Busiki's living warriors were accounted for except Mulala, his body or personality was not a located within the battlefield saga. A few had survived on both border codes in conflict.
The mourning and sniveling took several days and nights, when people were not required to work anywhere but nurse the wounded and give comfort to the bewailed families and society at extension. History had been recorded in red ink.
Wakabi found a baby at the mushrooms but the ache of not blissfully besieging Bugweri warriors and the death of Nkuutu blinded the fact that Mubika had given birth. Demoralized by the poor fight performance, he wondered whether his living warriors and Bugweri battalions patronized his extra brawn copyright. Wakabi named the baby girl, Omusaikwitaka meaning “blood on the land” in memory of the savage battle between Busiki and Bugweri. Wakabi stayed in sadness, he had lost Nkuutu the boy he believed would light his inheritance of warriorship and hunting into the upcoming generation. Now Wakabi remained with only a few perchance strength less boys. Nkuutu had twisted around person’s feelings after the manhood season.
Chapter Sixteen
Captives had to denounce their birthplace for a new mushroom village. For the woman who nourished a culprit’s injuries and stings was to become wife to the captive, if she had lost her husband by the captive’s indirect endeavor. He had to take care of a new family as a man, taking the children as his own just like he would care for the children he bore in Bugweri. It was a hereditary attempt to revive society as soon as possible after many men had been spiritified.
Captives who didn’t find women to warm their copulation organ had to marry from outside the village apart from Bugweri. Nevertheless, they too had to prove being good hunters; it was a natural dowry package for a girl’s Paapa to consider any man’s wishes.
The captive were swept together unto the village grounds, new laws and customs of necessity were feed into their captured ears. They were all below the standard of men who had fought for Busiki. They were to obey the elders of the territory. Society had to take on a new twist like a lizard it was in hibernation, nurturing a fresh tail.
Those who had died at the battlefield and were unwedded had no place in society again. The beasts monitored in control of human flesh, birds of prey also flew there and then to beg a piece. They were reigning over the tones of Busiki and Bugweri as muteness symbolized by the citizens.
A miss of fragrance penetrated the air as stinking dead bodies were whiffing into much of the polished sun. It always reminded the people of their ruffle. It seemed to be another ctuous; this time between humans and the air they couldn’t avoid inhaling. Moreover, in a few hours, it was as normal as human feaces stink but then later it could reactivate.
As Kamira sat by is mushroom workshop he thought whether Wakabi was really a great warrior and indeed if is being a great hunter qualified him to be a great warrior and why then did they have to fall by the back like amateur wrestlers. Kamira advanced to believe though Wakabi often gave is family whatsoever that didn’t mean he should never doubt his ability as a warrior. How could Bugweri warriors, a minor society cause all this havoc? Kamira was flabbergasted.
Then, the more former images of destruction that covered his mind, the massive causes did he think of. He knew the spears from his hands were perfect and secure. He persisted that perhaps Wakabi didn’t put forward the best martial work out to the warriors. Then he approached on another clue of him not having prayed and asked permission from gods and spirits of metals and war. Kamira was only mechanizing the spears with over excitement as the best smith, forgetting the supernatural performance of the invisible rulers. He came to conclusion, he had contributed to the warriors’ failure, otherwise, they would have on slaughtered them and then capture their land, women and children. They would have remained with only life advancement.
Wakabi too, had been in the same profession of searching through the mind without a balancing answer. He had occupied himself with demolishing his late Oldman's mushroom in order to reign over his thoughts but yet with another failure. Everything had gone parallel with his performance. ‘Were the gods and spirits against me,’ he thought and then conceded, ‘but I have never hurt any of them, may be society as a whole was a cause of debacle.’ Wakabi continued to think but remembered that as an elder the doings of society were to be healed by him. He knocked on Kamira, ‘perhaps he molded weak weapons that the warriors were massacred like white ants. ‘Kamira must have made poor weapons, otherwise, I gave the finest to our men,’ Wakabi told his soul and body. The pain of not capturing entire Bugweri was maturing on the prerogative that society might wonder of his strength and brevity, if it was a short time instinct that had frozen with age or buried with his late Paapa. Wakabi seemed to have no answer.
Bugweri was triumphantly jubilant; it had never killed any of Busiki's soldiers in the historical battles before the recent fight. Yes, they had lost with many captives going to Busiki but Bugweri had also murdered many of Busiki’s soldiers. It was Bugweri that passed on news of beating stiff tough rough Busiki throughout the villages of Busoga. They were over conversant Busiki had found a challenger. Of course Bugweri knew that other villages that used to rub shoulders with Busiki were now almost ready to fear Bugweri too, although it wasn’t the case before this born battle mark of Busiki and Bugweri. Bugweri before the battle had religiously requested the superlative grace of gods and spirits concerned to perform a part in warfare.
By the help of Mubika's Paapa the only able man who didn’t accompany the Bugweri warriors was capable of arresting the missing man of Busiki. Mulala was found besides Bamulese’s predecessor’s grave with particular sticks planted at the headmost side of the grave and smashed complex foliage materials speckled on the mausoleum. Mulala had managed to exhume the tomb’s skull without excavating but only supernatural spiritual licence.
It was culturally understandable that such a skull contained the dead medicine man’s wisdom of gods and spirits of which Mulala had attained by touching it first before any other person. Mulala had to stay with the bony case, for he couldn’t’ return the filth in the crypt.
The only medicine man of Busiki couldn’t return. As the villages were fighting, he was in pursuit of divine wisdom and there in he got into the hands of Mubika's Paapa. The only captive for Bugweri, the village had also praised their might over him among other regions of Busoga. They had captured Busiki's medicine man. Therefore, they couldn’t let him freely leave with their land’s paranormal sagacity. He was given mushrooms of one of the dead; restarting a new life with half dozen women and two less twenty children. Mulala had left behind another family on his own and right now it was in the hands of another captive. Bugweri was smiling over having two good medicine men and more so Bamulese had paralyzed Busiki mystic potency that the rain began to fall in favor of Bugweri's warriors.
Mubika's Paapa's troubles were getting consideration among the Bugweri people; he had protected their property from intruders. He was fighting a war at home and in the dexterity where the Bugweri surviving warriors didn’t return with even an instant disabled captive. It was mercy and thanks towards Mubika’s Paapa. The man was restored as an elderly chief of Bugweri. Twists and turns of a conspirator.
Chapter Seventeen
Men in white robes with bushy beards and rigid sticks paralyzed Busiki. They had been followed from the moment they both crossed into the village boundaries. It’s probable that each village was accompanying them into another.
They were looking for something, so hard to communicate about with the endemic society. There language so alien, every part of their lives strange like a woman kingdom sovereign. Light in face, they were taken to Wakabi's mushroom and every citizen seemed to be there. The cultivators had abandoned their administration. The lazy relaxed men had got something to gaze at. For a moment the late antagonistic attack molted from their mind; replaced by a new muse. People touched them to accept if they had true flesh.
Wakabi had recalled the topic of bone color people traveling through blackland. Moreover, here they’re, in Busiki. Communication wasn’t a feast but another intrigue of signs and symbols. The bone color intruders had to save there being in Busiki by all possible characters and codes to let the persons understand him. They had to draw pictures on the ground of symbolic meaning to their sentences.
One bone color person suck to the ground and geometrically draw the earth’s waters and land sketches on soil. Pressing the soil. ‘Africa, Africa’ the bone color breast-less woman said before the crowd, pointing with emphasis at Wakabi and connecting the same finger to the African atlas. ‘Arabia, Arabia,’ he continued teaching, this time associating himself with Arabia. Wakabi then learnt he was in Africa and the other man was from Arabia. The Basiki where now smiling and laughing, they were half way of communicating, the new words were sounding from every mouth. People retouched the white Arab too prove if he wasn’t a ghost just as they had done sometime past in humanity’s puzzle.
The Arab then run into the hearth place under a medium tree about the compound, got a calabash of water and sprinkled the ocean areas. The people now got a perfect picture of land and water, the surface area of life. The Arab repeatedly pointed at Wakabi and others and then pointed on the African thought of continent to enlighten this point. The white Arabs incessantly repeated this signal to identify themselves with the Arabic sphere.
It wasn’t easy to elaborate a thing. One Arab sat a meter away, another had to get a formulated rolled message from the seated Arab to Wakabi, then he returned to the ground map, putting a thumb in the Arabic atlas and then flying the thumb into the African map. Over and over again, then shook Wakabi's hand, meaning greetings from the Arab king unto you the African king. Wakabi unrolled open the written on paper and nothing could he read. A zigzag handwriting of ink, almost nothing but rigidness. Only keeping the eyes around the scrawl still meant a significant disregard of the odd.
Then come the gifts from the Arab king, a white robe was out for Wakabi and in the same comic procedure, the Arab revisited the sketch on the grounds, dimensioning the origin of the robe. The walking stick and other items too, absorbed concern throughout the spectators. The sketch had drawn to much attention just as the robe, walking stick and other items given to Wakabi. People were observing Wakabi as their own great and yet more Wakabi himself could see a rebirth of respect among the civilians, more so from the white Arabs. The white Arabs’ visit totally sheltered the ago spear dramatics. Wakabi immediately found the hides unwanted and now the soft intertwined cloth was his new confident commodity.
Soon Wakabi was to give in to another practice, a symbolic attendance that seemed a payment to the Arab king for the gifts. Wakabi was giving up indirectly all the gods; Bileli, Madhi, Baana, you name them and attach Wakabi to Allah. The Arabs narrated in another pictorology communication how Allah was the supreme God over all gods and goddesses. That Allah had given them knowledge to make robes and stick and even walking all the way to Africa. The paradox in Allah developed when the Arabs told elder Wakabi that had he consulted Allah, he would have merged victor in the recent skirmish. How did they know about the battle? Elder Wakabi thought. It was Allah’s guidance, he inwardly answered.
Not later he was invited to revolve in a prayer for Allah. Wakabi had already witnessed how Arabs saluted Allah and many more civilians were attracted. The posterity of bending and sealing humbleness while looking unto Allah, the kneeling down and throwing their heads unto the ground was a comic significant seductive routine. Although the Basiki didn’t know words that accompanied Allah prayers, the Arabs knew they had taken a great step in practicing and exporting Islam to Africa. In no later hours, they had finished praying that elder Wakabi was given a name from Allah. It was Mohammed, the Arab told him, and elder Kamira was named Jamil by the Arabs, just as Mubika was called Fatima. Many people were cherishing the new Arabic names. The Arab had made is impact. The Arab promised them that whatsoever they prayed for and from anywhere, their Allah would be with them.
Society had become dormant that even elder Wakabi Mohammed shared is mushroom with the two visitors, no man littered disgrace. Although it was against norms for a man to share a mushroom with other men, it was a sign demonic to the goddesses. The detriment so evil that was connected to man’s impotency with regard to poor feeding on the god’s meal.
The night had been short due to the moon existence and yet more due to the white Arabs’ seduction that stayed until moonlight departure. Moreover, by morning people were early enough to approach elder Wakabi Mohammed’s compound again. Reexamination with the white Arabs as their own daily purpose was being misused. Telling of their dreams about the white Arab and Allah. Elder Wakabi Mohammed meant to say how he didn’t feel the night winds as the past dream nights due to the robes. By the same morning the Arabs’ communicative tool still survived on the earth, people acknowledged it beyond topography but as a sacred entity connected to the Arabs’ Allah.
This morning after the Allah prayers, the Arabs made a barbaric theatrical art. Each Arab with a village spear, they formulated a practical instance of fighting and that the loser was to be taken as captive. In addition, the captives were against society’s wishes and hence evil to Allah. The Arabs must have recited their approaches before arriving to Africa with this artistic __expression; they were smart. The message in acting was requesting elder Wakabi Mohammed to give them Bugweri captives that resulted from the skirmishing.
Society was jumping in a new twist at a high rate of adaptation and disposition.
Then Arabs got a spear and then their rifle and laid them together on the soil. Soon signals of equality crossed the floor every minute; trying to say the spear and the rifle do the same work. Then, the rifle was elevated high above their chests as the spear suspended within their legs beneath. The Arab watched a flying kite; he dropped the spear and held the rifle targetfully that he shot down its freedom and joy of the skies. The sound of one bullet gave birth to a salient mute for seconds. Some men had already reached the forest for hiding; it was terrible in their ears. As the bird fell on the earth some people also fell on the surface and later laughed wonderfully that the Arabs had to join them with irony laughter. As some civilians confronted the bush to find the bloody dead bird, the search caused more broad laughter and the wonders of the magic Arabic stick.
Wakabi Mohammed was again sought out of peopled Busiki that he started engineering the rifle at the expense of Arab coaching. Very diminutive spears were fixed into he magic stick and aiming at another flying bird, the rifle gassed a bullet. Although Wakabi missed the targeted bird, he almost downed it as it shook its tail feathers in escape. Wakabi was beyond happiness. He was given another diminutive for the rifle but still his aim was unjustified. For Wakabi Mohammed to attain another very diminutive spear to operate the magic Arab stick, he had to handover the Bugweri prisoners of war into Allah’s hands for purification.
Wakabi Mohammed’s friendship with the Arabs was superseding the old Wakabi-Kamira relationship in a blink of an eye. Wakabi was against holding a spear in his arms but only the new magic Arab stick that vomited very diminutive spears. People had been mentally controlled; this rifle had aimed and killed a flying bird which instance had never happened before. Not even Wakabi Mohammed could locally spear down or had ever killed a flying bird with Kamira made weapons. ‘Allah must be great,’ the people said to each other.
Soon Wakabi Mohammed was gathering all the captives for the Arabs’ hands. The Arabs told the crowd that Wakabi was doing the act in the name of Allah. Nevertheless, Wakabi really wanted very diminutive spear. Captives who had settled with Busiki families or otherwise were again reestablished in the Arabs’ arms. Several captives’ hands in terror, tied from behind and then a rope bridge connected from one captive to another. Another rope passed around all their necks. Their own battle wounds and scars hadn’t yet recovered and another pain was being supplemented.
Then the Arabs returned to the soil, gathering and molding a spear out of it. The Arabs were trying to let persuasively the people tell him who relates to the spears. First the people pointed at Wakabi as they pointed also on the soil molded spear lying on the ground and then cast their empty hands in a signal of javelin. However, the white Arabs overlooked Wakabi Mohammed. The Basiki had started communicating the Arabic way of pointing a figure. In addition, as the white Arabs started molding another soil made spear, the people pointed at elder Kamira Jamil. They understood the Arabs desired a spear maker.
The Arabs went with Kamira Jamil to his workshop as Wakabi Mohammed followed with misconstrued minds that Kamira was drawing away his visitors. Peopled Busiki now at Kamira's mushrooms, the gun was in Wakabi's hands but without diminutive spears. Wakabi of late had found Kamira Jamil as a useless man in the faculty of manufacturers. The Arab wanted Kamira Jamil to know how to furnace up chains. The white Arabs always had some way of expressing their desires that through they talked without understanding the other community, experimentally they reached their wishes. With knotted grass stalks the Arabs formed a chain got form several ring stalks. Elder Kamira Jamil was able to know what the Arabs deserved and knew he could mold the chains after a strong emphasis of comparing the grass chain with his chimney.
Therefore, his workshop turned from spear making to chain manufacturing after being promised a gun later in time.
The Arabs began their trek out of Busiki after giving Wakabi three bullets and promised Kamira Jamil that they were to return and give him other items that Wakabi Mohammed had received, if he made enough chains. A long queue of captives was being taken away in the name of Allah. The village escorted the Arabs until the village boundaries. Soon the Arabs began whipping and beating the captives to hurry up. With the tumble and halt of one captive the entire caravan slumped unto the ground and after such beatings they were instantly forced to struggle onwards yet already drained. Crying and yelling was their new dialect. Another battle they were not ready to fight while their hands were action less and their heads under death intimidation. Their earth was lost, for not even their gods back at the mushroom would punish them to the Arabic extent. Death was better; they were conceptive in their brains. A certain weight and grace of society was getting foreign.
Back in Busiki elder Kamira Jamil was making the chains swiftly and happily, he was driven by the promise of a rifle from the white Arabs when they return. He had promised himself not to furnace spears anymore given the gun; he would try his smithship upon it.
Wakabi Mohammed had lost one, two and three bullets, that it was no more; he tried to insert sticks, stones but the rifle jammed. Wakabi Mohammed had become much frustrated by the tendencies of the rifle after the expiry jolly ordeal three shots. He wished to follow up the Arabs but now their trampling was far ahead and nor did he submit his wisdom upon which channel they had proceeded through immediately after Busiki. The rifle was nothing now until the return of the white Arabs, someday.
After a while and the departure of the white Arabs society had lost its consciousness, whether to return to their cultural wealth in belief and understanding or call up Allah. Yes, they had done Islamic functions at the Arabs instant existence but couldn’t carry on the same values in their absence especially after the failure of a forth bullet to jump out of the rifle. Because almost every remaining man had tried to give birth to something of their wish. Only air come out yet they couldn’t see it. They to were irritated and annoyed; the white Arabs who tired up parts of their hair had tricked them. Nevertheless, it took elder Wakabi time to pick up his spear again and still never disposal off the magic Arab stick, it slept by his headmost in the mushroom.
When Bugweri heard what the white Arabs had done in Busiki and there bilateral relationship with Wakabi. Most especially the gun that gassed very diminutive spears better than the local type was given to Wakabi. The talk had started traveling like bush fire dishonoring cultural and village boundaries. The Bugweri elders had a meeting in which they coincided on returning the only prisoner of battle in Busiki's hands. The praise of victor in the fading war went unmurmured. The white Arab rifle was changing human minds.
The return of elder Mulala saw the rise of Busiki again as Bugweri took its former position. Cows, goats, cocks and five virgins were brought along side Mulala, seeking redress from the people of Busiki. The empty gun that shot a flying bird was still playing its magic episode in African societies. Every people wanted to think like the gun.
Chapter Eighteen
From rubbish decaying flesh, wolves had to find they weren’t undeviating from their standardized diet as of late. Wolves had turned their carnival habits unto domestic innocent animals. A very good number of mushrooms were unwelcoming about the wolves that had found livestock as a meal every night. Two to three goats and sheep were a balanced ingredient for the wolves yet the village was preparing for the next thanks ancestral ceremony in the forest.
The fifth invasion encroached on Wakabi's livestock. Wakabi had already lost most of all Nkuutu and here were dogs and bitches feasting on his belongings. The pity beasts had exaggerated their never conclusive saliva upon his goats and sheep. It hurt him so much that the case in point resurrected the past losses he had suffered combined with the Arab’s fuse immaturity.
Wakabi remembered his old friend Kamira to tell the right tale. That morning he rushed to the others mushroom. He found Kamira in the furnace with worth a two-meter chain out of his office. It reminded Wakabi that the Arabs were to return and so he looked at his useless gun. He had agreed to travel with it no matter it’s inability. The gun had changed is proclivity, it lay in the manly arm and the spear in the womanly arm.
‘The wolves have munched my few animals.’
‘Ah laa! They need to be tamed,’ Kamira replied in a dirty voice changed by the hard furnace work.
‘Tonight I have a plan for the beasts, I will feed on my livestock from their intestines.’
‘We shall join you, all the village, they ate Mulala's livestock and others, and we will all join you.’
‘Am of a thought, the few men we have should be ready tonight for the wild, these wolves need to be offered freedom before hot roasting their lives.’ Wakabi told a friend.
The Arabs visit had shaded the wolves’ occupation that little was absorbed in the people’s heads but now it was transcending through every mushroom. It was the day’s reality.
‘My friend I have suffered, sometimes their occasions when strength is unworthy, consider the departure of Mubika, the recent death of Nkuutu, now the going of my livestock, I think, I need to stopover the oracle of my homestead.’
‘Yes indeed, I saw you ignoring true friends for that gun and remember the old saying, “stupid ones hunt for future friends and forget their past heroes.” I saw you at the Arabia visit, all your worry had gone but now here you are with me an old friend.’ Elder Kamira was passing through a moment that had shock the village, that he would have done the same had the Arabs’ favor been on his side.
‘Kamira, lets forget the Arabia is a sick guest, I hate him; you know how he offered me an empty weapon.’
Wakabi left Kamira without a quarrel; it was a sensible notion to implement. Wakabi had realized his ignorance too, without divergences in Kamira's words. His last utterance to Kamira was that he was to sleep out for the wolf's throat, that’s what had brought him all the way. When Wakabi reached is mushrooms, he picked the horn and blew it as he walked to the village grounds. He blew the horn, again and again.
The village was geared into abomination, thinking about a new war, how would they, as few as they remained engage into another war. The men refused to turn up. Wakabi continued to blow the horn for another episode. The Basiki men weren’t ready to die; they stayed at their mushrooms. While the women were again gathering at their respective mushrooms for shelter against a possible war as they heard the blown whistle.
Wakabi stopped blowing the warriors whistle and for a time being he thought Busiki had no men existing. He wondered if they had all traveled with the white Arabs. Neither Kamira nor Wakabi's sons answered the horn’s shouting. People had lost interest and security comfort in the warrior hands of Wakabi. He rammed through his optional answers.
Wakabi positively decided to inform each mushroom face to another mushroom soul about the wolves’ menace, which deserved no victory although the past battle of Busiki and Bugweri was neither won nor was it lost. Wakabi informed men who believed this was a social effect to join him in the search and death of the filth wild dogs.
Men began polishing the once hidden spears. Their fierce fight before was tough that no strength was left for the warriors to wash off the human blood their spears had drunk in the now historical village struggles. In addition, as many men uncontaminated their weapons, they could remember the intrigues their encounters received and the resistance they applied. Some of these memories were getting more associated unto their bodies in terms of scars and wounds of a fright they never expected to lose but only prevail as conquests. Some of their comrades had gone with the war and now a great impact had surfaced among children, men and girls. Was really Busiki still powerful or not at all?
Night wasn’t alien or a far, the dark roof spread its might, the moon was to take another while to tramp along its way, and the earth in Busiki wasn’t asleep. With men in the bush, their women and maamas become worried. Would their husbands and sons return? It was their question. Some women were already by now widows.
A man to appear in the upraising without a spear at such execution matters was a traitor by law. Such a man would rather think of staying at the mushroom and snooze. To be found a traitor in Busiki, a spear was offered into your segmented five and you’re required to pierce the first ultimate kill on the beast. Had the traitor failed in the first attack on the beasts, he become illegible to join the forest Womanly Oak Tree.
‘The ear at night is more open, listening to everything but indeed listening to almost nothing but fear that walks through wind. This night try to concentrate your ear traps unto yelling wild animal hum and there we shall head to kill and feast on the beast.’ Wakabi informed the few men.
‘It’s here, there it runs.’ One villager shouted to alert the others. It was the wolf. Had it heard the minutes of the meeting from a corner of the bush? It had by now started touring where and how to pick on the next domestic animals. Of course, the wild dog took off for it breathes life. In addition, just as far as they couldn’t reach it, they heard a sound like a clap it was the wolf. They told each other. The wolf had slipped away beneath silence of the village meeting while elder Wakabi was making a guide point. It was the wolf’s way of avoiding distortion during its mission.
The night developed coldly, the men stayed in waiting for the animal’s return and the beasts too were waiting for the proper security to get them in the mushroom empire. Every side was anticipating but the men were more determined to formulate the wolf’s denouement.
Agog watching men had surrounded all nearby routes in and out of the mushrooms’ perimeter. After along term the wild dog rebounded. They saw their disturber approaching into the interior. The animal passed elder Wakabi's compound and others. The mouth whistles began to tell the watching men to close in. the animal heard a near night shrill sound accompanied by unknown bush movements. For while it relaxed and then changed direction only to find humans in it’s path, it couldn’t trek through the wild bush, dew had formed that could wash a man. As it threatened to secure the route it was speared, that it cried to death. Dew and wolves have never met and conversed. Several spears followed the initial soreness; death had got the wolf.
The call ran about, women, children gathered to the wolf’s death spot. A fire was already glowing and dancing to the wind’s tone. The women and girls were celebrating with the shake shake of their waists and breasts. The music didn’t end;
Wolf ever since you ate our livestock
Today we shall eat on you
From you we shall eat our livestock.
The whole beast suspended on a spear from mouth to anus was burning, pouring its fats unto the already lighting flames and with time peaces of the roast were offered to male attendants. The wolf was heading for Kamira's livestock, the crowds were telling their women. Memories of the past bloody skirmishing were slowly dying.
Young men were now exaggerating the many spears and various tactics in which they bruised the dead beast. It was such men who actually never lifted up their spears at all to impair the wolf. In addition, women and children, not forgetting the girls were always ready to chew such embellishment with a smile and congratulatory words to their sons and men. The female absence at the moment of hunting the wild dog was a source of continuous ignorance. That night went along way through a cherished moment. The meal was incidental and not a hunt.
The next day, men had to wait for another dangerous intruder to be terminated swiftly. Until the area was peaceful at night.
Chapter Nineteen
Any fiasco has a hind string attached. People couldn’t analyze the last season pests unauthoritatively visited their plantations. Plants had exchanged their complexion to almost the host ground. Whatsoever a woman had toiled for was now meaningless. Nevertheless, weeds survived to their solid health. The sun’s punishment to the brown exploited designative difference, which notified that the grass too was having its share.
People began going without garden meals. Indeed if the mushroom heads were incompetent in hunting, for three to two days the members had to live on hungry intestines.
Elders had foreseen this disaster during the caterpillar cropping insurgency. Nevertheless, more so Wakabi's Paapa had personally recognized it earlier than is death, and he collectively declined to agile other elder comrades consciousness of what was to happen in later times. The village hadn’t requested for future guidance from the spirits and gods. As the village attributed this mischance towards pest moth, and the dry land that had overthrown the appealing rough natural green surface caused by hot rays of above. The only person who knew the truth was in ancestral earth. In addition, had he spoke about it; it was the right time to sacrifice a young man to the spirits as repentance and for new requests to be laid out. If this weren’t done, then the famine would continue over a number of seasons ahead.
Through hunting animals great and common were halted along their path, huntresses too could do what they had at hand to hurt a rabbit or so, so as to sip its soup.
The elders had nothing to excuse themselves from famine results because they acknowledged having done their thanks ancestral ceremonial part in the forest quite satisfactorily.
Hunger engulfed the village that gave rebirth to a story of how a flood come to blow away humans several years ago in the term of numerous past past ancestors ago. The flood that was civil to only two men and one woman. Therefore, the woman slept with a man for one night and then next sleep would be for the other man. The woman was able enough to enlarge the population to twenty-three, men were later on able to disagree in the battle to win control. However, it was a new beginning of life, for the race had been reduced to oddly zero. Therefore, the village now in famine era thought the gods were rediscovering and hindering a reverse in society again.
This instant every human prayed for himself or herself rather than for society at extension, though an animal killed by one family was shared by other mushrooms as to lead every human out of the natural predicament. In the battle for survival, Mulala and Kamira unjustly speared an antelope both at once. The two got into a wrangle to prove the other wasn’t the rightful owner of the hunt. There were no witnesses in the forest. Soon they agreed to cut the hunt into two pieces. It was totally equal that the skull too had to be bisected justify. However, Mulala was the first to race with the antelope in the forest and then it disappeared from his tactics. Later on from a different point Kamira started another hunt of the same animal. Nevertheless, they stood at odds. The two men hadn’t used their dogs for the load of gongs and empty intestines couldn’t allow them to run any longer and endlessly.
The lack of internal nourishment went hand in hand with the drying of land. Women and girls were getting worried about the next cultivating season, for the brown would be as hard as a Kamira's products and so ploughing was going to be tougher as the famine itself.
Many neighboring villages were all in amusement as they saw their dictatorial nasty master village crying for food in the forests and bushes, allover valleys and hills. Men began exchanging their daughters for a few peas and pumpkin harvest. Wakabi had no able girls in his mushrooms to balance off for a meal, yet his art of hunting was becoming harder day after day. He would go out with the boys but return with so much nothing, the mobility of humans had set all animals from the nearby forests to other adjoining parts. So Wakabi had too walk several miles before actually starting to forage, this meant he had to wake up earlier than before and try to search for life’s next string.
A few days along the hunger, Mulala unofficially gave away his daughter who was old about to be a woman in return for two mushrooms of peas from Bugweri. However, just as he deserved some young men to carry the load from a far destination to Busiki, they eat enough before setting off. From time to time due to their over point of satiety and the toughness of the survival pills they arrived the next day at Busiki mushrooms. Nevertheless, by the same evening the village was aware of existing food in Mulala's mushroom and so none of it remained as he leniently aided other dearth sufferers. The resultants of Mulala's daughter served the entire village throughout a miserable time scale.
Still the hunger grew, that humans were getting enough of it. The forest too got blighter and ghostly, the leaves had flown down conditionally and only the Manly Oak Tree stayed fertile in this perspective. Humans began eating wild pumpkins and wild peas that lived in the bare forest. Mushrooms that grew on trees and anthills like fungi which were all referred to the outcasts diet at the Womanly Oak Tree, was consumed.
The famine made Busiki seem mourning yet neither a tear was seen nor a following howl sound of the people. They had stopped sharing long conversations for they feared to lose more calories of their delicate lives. They observed each other like enemies yet not. Even when some people concluded, it as an act of the spirits and spiritisses, they didn’t really interact any further. They only recommended themselves to visit the Manly Oak Tree again to enlighten their plight in nature, for how could the other villages prosper wonderfully as Busiki was decaying tremendously.
Contrary the idiotic boys of the Womanly Oak Tree were breasted. Already addicted to forest nuts, stems, roots and others, their store never went empty of want to eat. All they needed to implement healthy wise was to find a sap of water to treat well their thirsty. They found themselves spiritually better than the mushroom occupants, although the mushroom humans believed they were cursed.
The outcasts had evenly begun sacrificing some parts of their hunt to spirits and gods. A people uplifting a different society and at this reverse stage they believed their requests to the gods and spirits had overrun the mushroom occupants. To them the famine in their former household was a praise to sing about;
Molder your great
You attack from the ground
And sometimes from the sky
Molder your great
You attack from the air
And sometimes from the rain
Molder your great.
Chapter Twenty
Elders gathered at the Manly Oak Tree. They were all bony and resembling the trees. They seconded the marvelous supernatural exposure of the Manly Oak Tree, it alone was healthy and the rest of nature was a skeleton. Responsible naked men at night, telling words to the sacred tree as they jumped around and around.
Why don’t you save us
Manly Oak Tree
What did we do
that annoyed you
We gave you our everything
sacrifices and honor
What more do you like
let us know.
Elders uneasily forced their sounds through divinations on behalf of the human race at issue.
Yes I was glad-d-d-d-d-d!
Your sacrifices were taste-e-e-e-e-e!
To this day I still live on it-t-t-t-t-t!
So tasty an honor-r-r-r-r-r!
The Manly Oak Tree swung its leaves vigorously that a pick of patterned weaves were words in the ears of elders that ended in an echo of each sentence’s tail word.
Ask me what went wrong-g-g-g-g-g!
That has cost you several sacrifices-s-s-s-s-s!
Ask me what went wrong-g-g-g-g-g!
Leaves scattered again, the sacred tree was commanding the leaders.
All animals are eaten
All we’re remaining with
are bloodless survivors
Your curses are too great.
Elders danced around the tree while replying.
If you have no…goats-s-s-s-s-s!
If you have no…cows-s-s-s-s-s!
If not even…cocks-s-s-s-s-s!
The sacred voice once more sent echoing assurance.
Isn’t that too much…have mercy.
The elders cried to bargain.
Too much-h-h-h-h-h!
How much too much-h-h-h-h-h!
If it’s to save all of you-u-u-u-u-u!
Human blood is what I need-d-d-d-d-d!
In this silence I need to drink blood-d-d-d-d-d!
Blood of Wakabi's son-n-n-n-n-n!
The sacred utter shouted at the elders, that they shook tempestuously.
The son is coming
Lower your anger please
Wait am to bring the blood.
Wakabi replied quickly to the inviolable tree. The man was shaking, now its sacrosanct respect that shook even Mulala the messenger on earth among the village people was trembling like a leaf.
It was in poetic lines that the hallowed tree accepted correspondence. Special session only elders learnt from one another. A prayer that wasn’t misused, for no other people were administered to confidential spiritual and godly consultations.
Mugabi was woken up that night and he and Paapa joined another mushroom. Wakabi gave him a hunting net and spear and told Mugabi to go ahead of him. They were to meet at the Manly Oak Tree. Mugabi didn’t question his Paapa; he knew times had changed. Therefore, they’re along way, which deserved an early exodus for the hunting.
Oldman-n-n-n-n-n!
Wakabi's Paapa-a-a-a-a-a!
Died with a fortune of life-e-e-e-e-e!
The answer, why you couldn’t triumph-h-h-h-h-h!
in the Busiki-Bugweri war-r-r-r-r-r!
the lies of the white trespasser-r-r-r-r-r!
the living huger that your here today-y-y-y-y-y!
You didn’t ask for future guidance-e-e-e-e-e!
during the thanks ceremony-y-y-y-y-y!
That’s why I ask for the grandson’s blood-d-d-d-d-d!
blood of the Oldman-n-n-n-n-n!
When Mugabi arrived and was in the hands of elders, Wakabi was still at the mushrooms. However, in bundling up the sacrifice for the revered Manly Oak Tree, a thunder struck in the skies and urgently a heavy downpour came down like a fall of the clouds unto earth. The storm petrified the elders’ intentions. The lightening was blight and wide, the thunder louder than ever; the rain was a flood.
With the mystic atmosphere, Wakabi back home realized Mugabi was lifeless. He knew the Manly Oak Tree had drunk his own blood from the son. He thought how the living metaphysics was against his earthly deeds.
I have forgiven you-u-u-u-u-u!
Don’t be worried about anything-g-g-g-g-g!
Here is your blood, your son-n-n-n-n-n!
It was the holy Manly Oak Tree in Wakabi's compound and through the highs showered heavily Wakabi realized its voice after a comparison with the backward accent he had heard with elders while in the forest. Now he didn’t know why it had asked for the blood of his son Mugabi. Wakabi, however, confirmed the supernatural powers of the sacred Manly Oak Tree. As they used to say it could walk, it was now in the compound. Yet the rain was real, a grace of the ancestors. While Mugabi was in a dream’s session, he was laid in Wakabi's arms.
Don’t worry-y-y-y-y-y!
He won’t remember a thing-g-g-g-g-g!
When he wakes up-p-p-p-p-p!
The Manly Oak Tree said its last doctrinal verses and disappeared virtuously. Mugabi took control of Wakabi's brain that he didn’t talk at least.
Chapter Twenty One
Who could have faith in this; it hadn’t ever happened in the annals of the villages. All Wakabi's four wives were loaded that their below pouch protruded ahead of their higher surfaced breasts.
Mubika's exit before must have initially captivated these multiple expectancy, village mates had to say. Not subsequent to her departure to Bugweri Wakabi had cut short naptails with his wives and only Mubika could offer him warmth. Moreover, for a future three consecutive seasons the other women were in the same state as their co wife who had been set off. However, in due course of Mubika's truancy Wakabi reconsidered his taste and position as husband to the other women. Was it an act of god?
Now Mubika had to attend to plantations of her husband’s wives individually. Her only baby child taken to the plantations as Mubika planted seeds at the same time ploughing out determined weeds. It was triple work and for a number of plantations. In the process Mubika recalled the little girls of Namakiika, their great little hands and the sympathy Bugweri offered. Her conspiracy to betray words of Bugweri into Busiki had matured thicker season by season. Nevertheless, the question of Paapahood to the little girl was the foundation of everything she implemented.
For any time is breast feeding time, Mubika on and off could return to the yelling baby laying on a hide and nurture her love and purpose on earth. As she sang to her baby
Woo woo! Woo woo!
The girl is crying hungrily
I intend to breast feed her
Omusaikwitaka is crying hungrily.
As many people within the village remembered their great ancestral mediators to gods. It was such famine that starved and murdered humans and strengthened their power to upright the gods’ incomparability. Since in the ordinance of the dearth no Maama had empty breasts for her baby. Great are the gods who protected their offspring.
Mubika exposed a brawny hand in the plantations. For many village mates believed she was supposed to be a man but none of the men had done such challenging tasks. Hence by the moment Mubika left the plantation her muscles weren’t tough but still she had to go to the swamp and fetch lots of water. Until another day that Wakabi ordered the boys to aid their Maama after their gather of forest woods. Mubika was earning respect among the village women. Her strong arms could cock for the entire mushrooms population and take proper care of her co wives conditions at certain times.
The boys’ delay at the swamp always brought Mubika to fetch them back. The boys had been engaged in satirical conversations with the girls’ nudity, whenever the girls stooped to gather water into pots; and the boys desired to leave last. Despite all the glorious mystery, none of the boys broke these virgins. They knew it would cost them a lifetime.
Whatsoever they saw was always part of their talk along the way as Mubika listened and she too added flavor. The boys had learnt highly from the sounds of late Nkuutu. Moreover, it was through this complex melody that they remembered a brother that never lived so long. In addition, within fewer steps from the swamp, the boys announced their art
Girls always with wells
Born with a meat well
Grew up by a milk well
The water well that takes away our thirst
That milk well that made us well today
And your meat well that brought us on earth.
Mubika joined the boys’ song as she walked in-between the queue. In no less tickles the boys imitated their Maama's mouth. Therefore, Mubika heard her accent in the males.
When the boys and Mubika arrived at the mushrooms Wakabi's third wife was in labor pains. This empowered Mubika to quickly lay down her pot and swim into her co wife’s mushroom, held her and to the nearby obstructive bush, they stopped. The expectant’s body was washed in watery sweat. Mubika supported her chest breasts as she humped back and brought the patient’s animal skin then designated it beneath the pumping birth mouth. Mubika, then held her backwards to the ground as the expectant screamed and yelled upon the internal pain, the baby was twisting dance fully inside. In addition, within a few other greater screams of the patient another little scream was born. It was a girl crying in dismay of the earth she was to live in.
It was a bad oracle to give birth in the mushroom, for human blood would instigate the possible meat from the hunting. This new Maama baby must have been Wakabi's second best.
Other women of the village were called by the small scream and so they carried the new baby to the mushroom. Her Maama had to stay in the thick obstructive for some moments. Therefore, the baby wept and cried until she had little to yell about.
Mubika took water for the new Maama to drink and wash her beauty. Afterwards Mubika got her a banana stem from the wild and squeezed out syrup for her to drink so as to quicken her breasts milk activation.
When the new Maama returned to the mushroom she had to suck her breasts white oil before the new baby was breastfeed, only once and then the baby would be free to enjoy the outer earth of the Maama.
Mubika was the busy wife as Wakabi sat by the mushroom welcoming thanks for his short spear’s might harvest. As the visitors came one by another they also discussed possible names of the new infant. Through clan and tribal names like Nakirya, Musubika, Muyodi were scrutinized from the ancestors who handled the names before and their meaning to society.
In relation to the infant, she was crying over and over again. A distinction that did not correlate with the ancestors’ behaviors in account. She called up a name, Namusubo, “Na” representing the she factor and “musubo” meaning hope. They hoped she would stop crying. Later on Namazigga was suggested from one elder but the people conceded that if the infant didn’t halt yelling too much by this time the next season Namazinga will be her identity. “Na” for female acknowledgement and “mazigga” branding the tears.
Though most elders had come with air full hands it wasn’t the same attitude with Kamira, he carried with him a spear to Wakabi. The other elders’ bare mouth words told how he who attained a child didn’t deserve anything else. Kamira defended his act by switching on that for everything good that happened during one’s birth season reflected the good luck in their future and so it was true with bad incidents like the elders empty hands. Nevertheless, Kamira was summoned the more for he found a spear yet the new infant human was a she, why not a pot? The other elders questioned.
Chapter Twenty Two
A great smoke ascended in the regions of Bugweri, a sky-high grey cover. Nevertheless, among the waves of burning air was shouting from far distances, the earth seemed crazy. On one arm Busiki seemed unbothered though they knew it wasn’t a festival day in Bugweri nor was a burial ceremony taking place. Fire had caught the earth.
My good ancestors, the rowdy reached Busiki maturely. Mushrooms were unstuffy by red flames. Barns were burning. Children gambling in a run away, women did the same. Some men with spears tried to halt the aggressor but before their weapons flew death took over their lives. The village was a blaze, the horn wasn’t anywhere to thud while Black soot in the bird’s freedom network was Crying and lamenting.
Death of children, women and men who tried to fly the aggressor dressed the land in a blood lake. The white Arabs had returned without any gifts but death, torture and destruction.
With a rope line of Africans singing distressfully, they were coming from Bugweri and other parts. Mubika's Paapa was among the caravan’s innocent Africans by the rope knot.
Many people in Busiki were taken slaves. Wakabi, Mulala and their boys and grown girls we all curved into slaves. Smoke bared sight of the immediate person to one another. As the Arabs moved to Kamira's compound many other humans joined the rope tie. Nevertheless gun blasts had scattered men as far as the forest, breathing hard in hiding. The Arabs exchanged ropes for Kamira's manufactured metal chain. The chain that entangled Kamira himself had been coiling in the center of the smith’s compound in a circumference equivalent to a bundle of seven mushrooms and it sought the height of any hut. Moreover, not only did the chain become heavy but also its distance end to end was in abundance for another size of slaves.
By the might gun, more and more forest hide seekers were already with the Arabs. A mare sight of this killing machine, it didn’t permit their escape but submission.
Wakabi's expectant wives were never left behind, still carried away at rifle point. Moreover, about this red chaos at Wakabi's compound little Namusubo was disbreasted and so the new Maama become part of other adults with binary grief. The same applied to Mubika and her little one. The two were left to live on spiritual and godly powers. None of Wakabi's adults stayed behind despite the terrible crying of the babies, the boys were also taken. Whatever had happened with Wakabi's mushroom escalated through neighborhoods in Busiki. Long was the line of slaves.
Tears and tears as the black caravan showed its back on Busiki.
Wakabi was found searching to locate the magic stick he was given on the other exit somehow friendly visit but couldn’t even remember when he last saw it or were he had kept it. It had become a skeptic idol without meaning in his mushroom. Now in Kamira's mushroom roof the magic stick slept. Kamira had mind reset that should the Arab bring bullets; he would be the only hero, hence thieving Wakabi's magic stick. Kamira had always understood at what time of the cock-a-doodle-doo Wakabi left for hunting during the dying starvation period, that he managed to steal the magic stick and added it also to hatches of his own mushroom.
When one man, woman, girl or boy fell down or slowed back the rest of the slave queue grounded itself and with a severe whip they had to rise again and continue to the unknown destination. The people didn’t understand what wrong they had performed. The Basiki had just reconciled with the other earth of spirits and gods. Now new severe danger was standing by them at the front, hind and by the long queue while trekking.
Chapter Twenty Three
The idiotic boys at the Womanly Oak Tree were the only males who survived the Arabic atrocities of chains and beatings. Wherever they stayed, the ancestors must have been at the outcasts side with grace.
The queue tears were heard by the boys as the diminished politely out of Busiki. Fear had grouped the idiotic boys that they climbed high on top of trees and hence witnessing the blood coverage in a bird’s sense. Nevertheless, after the Arabs departure the boys didn’t immediately reached their former mushroom hold. However, the sounds of crying baby prompted their quick approach to the mushrooms.
Two girls babies were held and swung by the body hands of the boys to stop the weeping. Nevertheless, even though the little ones tried to stop yelling the nurturing spirit wasn’t by and near and so more crying was done. Slowly by slowly the boys gave water to the little mouths. Through the tough incident the boys were ready to hold the babies lives. Everyone thought an idea and deed to kept life continuity. The boys’ chests we very flat that whenever the little ones touched in a scramble for breast milk the more tears and yelling. Therefore, the boys sought for milk to feed the babies.
The boys sought through other villages, the villages had been left useless as Busiki. Blood burning mushrooms and dead bodies screen the earth. In addition, suddenly a cow was there, standing and milking its calf. The boys immediately did the necessary to attain milk for the babies.
The only people who had to rebuild constructively a new life initiative from almost nil. Near the Maama cow the boys built other mushrooms for safety as the other fire burnt and overcooked for long. Blood and tears had poured like rain.
After feeding the babies with cow’s milk that slipped along a boys finger slowly into the baby’s mouth, no cry was again heard, the babies fell asleep as the boys curiously observed the babies tummy if they’re truly breathing and alive.
The boys slept in shifts night and day just to keep a clear eye and safety unto the little babies. In addition, whenever the babies cried, milk was in full with calabash storage. Indeed after the babies’ survival of some nights and days despite the crying, the boys acknowledged their ability. Everything they did for the babies was done with delight; the babies were living at the hands of brothers. They found pride in rearing the babies and so the babies too found grace in the arms of life. They mimicked the babies’ sounds and played with their little figures, the babies too had to smile now and then over their little gums.
A spiritual and godly sign of the ancestors were still alive.
Chapter Twenty Four
The hurtful torment of being battered and forcefully pushed into acceleration changed to uncontrollable inhuman pressure. Breathing and breathing hard while resisting the limitations of the chain around her neck and at the same time wishing for the free air socializing on earth. She couldn’t travel any further but fell by the route and there she died with a baby in her tummy. Her abrupt stopping caused the entire caravan to ground itself, for it had long and gradually been slowing down. Causing higher canes to spend up the caravan. Now that all persons were at fall more thrashes were passed around persons. By the strokes they had to stand up and in so doing than the caravan and Arabs realized that Wakabi's second wife had died. The hostile characteristic of every individual’s immediate experience didn’t let him or her hear the pain Wakabi's second wife had tried to contain for along way. The Arab had no heart.
From the end point of the chain it was unsought of to untie the dead body as in the same way a person connected to the chain initially. A pang swung once and for all to chop off the dead’s head from the other lives. A future generation at a critical hand of obtrusive terror. The dangerous act in the Arabs hands discontinued the ancestral social power to sing and traditionally bury the dead Maama in an accustomed conduct.
The pain was higher and deeper that hardly the slaves understanding was suspending. Nevertheless, dreadfully they knew that what had happened to Wakabi's wife was truly right before their own necks. Therefore, those who had tried to be brave, never to pour a cry tear at this Arabic act they had to unreel their emotions extensively. Men who were never to cry, were seen with bright reflecting eyes and sailing solutions down by their noses. This collectively moved increasing yelling of other women. However, the Arab didn’t bother at all, all he deserved was to reach somewhere a front with all the beaten flock.
Somehow Wakabi's other two remaining expectant women began to feel justly weaker to breathe and even to cry. Unable to cry on. Not because they were to give birth but the little spirits inside their tummies were to be killed. For at no anyone second would the Arab let a child disturb their valid undisclosed plans. How conductively would the Arabs let a baby suck its Maama's breast while walking ahead, certainly the child would lead to a snail pace of the caravan locomotion. All this analysis walked through the expectant mamas’ minds and considerably couldn’t walk on.
When Wakabi's other wife fell on the earth surface, the caravan also followed her downing, by design the hostages were whipped one by one. However, that first wife of Wakabi refused to get up, they stroked her body and belly in particular repeatedly and toughly like a lion before its prey. But she ignored the consciousness to rise up and walk on hence she was also cut off from the caravan while she still had a breathe.
And as Wakabi's fourth wife understood what actually had happened to her head co wife than she intercepted not to understand what really was the earth meaning adamantly that a human being would physically and mentally punish the softest heart of life, a woman. More so a wife in expectant nature.
Wakabi was as weak as just a born baby, his hands in rotation strings of imprisonment and the neck already at a hanging point of suicide. He saw complete uselessness of the once charismatic muscles that not long ago ran across miles and chased down beasts in the wild. Wakabi’s mind ignition that he couldn’t offer rescue even by a single muscle of his manly index finger. Internally he knew how is life wasn’t in is personal spiritual control, for everything that had happened and was to happen around that circle of fast eventful death moments that all his expectant wives were dead. Apart from Mubika and Mutwala who were also used up by the long way whose destination was undisclosed, a wealth of strength was now poor. Nevertheless, Wakabi as a man had a small amount worth or less sorrow reserved to carry him ahead. Wakabi was a woman.
Not even the sharp sprinkling sun did the victims realize, for the Arab natural hell on their flesh was much persecution they could hardly think of in life. For not even the outcasts at the Womanly Oak Tree did they go through such long slow way to death.
Suddenly flames above fussed rigorously to shadow the gods and goddesses eye. Yet in a time range of trouble when the cloudy signs of rain intercepted the sun, it was acknowledged as the unwillingness for the gods to take control of the situation at danger. This moment the unexpected rains walked in space that all victims wished it to fall there and then like the earthy air they breathed. When the small droplets began falling they decided too sit down all at once as if a command had been agreed and immediately positioned their mouth traps for a few water drops. Nevertheless, the Arab whipped them again and unto their legs they were supposed to trek on. Indeed they continued to show their mouths to the sky like baby birds welcoming their Maama bird, in the instance their eyes were closed and unaware of the way ahead but only propelled forward with the pulling ropes and chains. The droplets were not enough yet their chests were totally dry to offer hope in life.
Compatibly Mubika and the boys wouldn’t think of a composition verse to accompany the left behind maamas nor the unforeseen degradation and torture they faced. Only lost voices they remained with; wilder than a frog’s talk, unable to shout-out a sweet scent of understandable soft rhythms. No could Wakabi and the men strike their roughest of rough warrior ship music to gang down the Arab with his magic stick that overturned society and men of value.
The slave’s slightest human strength from the rest of their body parts, let it be the eyes, nose, ears, considerably their senses descended simply to the feet.
Many victims asked themselves how true their ancestors’ support upon this long unending punishment and others questioned if justify the ancestors lived to guide them. Independently each mind thought its own mystic analysis. Nevertheless, in comparison how truly reliable was the god of Arabs basing on their evaluation of willingly murdering the Blackman and woman?
People like Wakabi and Kamira wittingly before these new signs understood that indeed the god of Arabs was more inhuman than the village ancestors, who were only messengers of the molder. The Arab had changed at a high degree, he no longer communicated through maps and signs of the dumb but only talked through a whip that reacted louder but again not more ostentations as the victim.
Night and day the victims moved on none stop. The oppressed perceived with ages that they were worse than animals. Because at certain short seasons animals had a rest, comparably the victims admirably wished to have been wild creatures. For the animals rested and freely they walked and when death came, it was all at once but not in a slow motion.
The elderly fainted here and there, they were the most whipped by the Arab arm without mercy. Their wisdom age as Paapas and solidified eligible to have men and women older than the Arabs wasn’t any excuse. In one way various families had been joined in this handle of oppression. At stolen points Wakabi's wives had had a glimpse on their Paapas and other old and young village mates. In addition, many lost age mates but all this history didn’t cool their internal contusions and cut afflicted by the Arabs. Therefore, whips had caused some body boils and meanwhile other stroked portions were linking out a red sap. A horror at the hands of white Arabs. Moreover, so much blood parted as more elderly humans were chopped out of the caravan.
Each minute a person withdrew from the caravan, the distance between the head from the other body parts was always and after its act held by the closest hind hostage of its victim, implying he or she had to behave himself or herself otherwise that pang would slice off their lives.
Changefully a moment for the caravan to rest was in the night or day when the Arabs raped hostage women. Unchained from the queue metals, relatively unmarried or married girls or women were openly dishonored before the eyes of their husbands, brothers, Paapas and elders. The chains of pain were incorporated with the disrespectful act that ashamed and dehumanized a woman’s only delightful sensibility among eyes. After the end of the Arabs’ sexual assault they moved on with the night or day.
While the hostages’ customary decree sought that such misbehaving men did deserve to be in the outcasts at the Womanly Oak Tree. Nevertheless, apparently immediate execution would be valuable to throw them out of the breath full society. Reciprocally captivated victims couldn’t practically apply any sentence upon the Arabs.
Chapter Twenty Five
When the cadavers began filling the air around, the boys couldn’t stand the dirty deaden human offer. They had already accepted their inability to grave-feed many of the exterminated humans especially because their energy to dig up the soil was low.
The boys had decided to return to the forest. Along with the growing babies, the calabash, the spears and many hides of the now captive souls. They decreed to stay in the forest until the disappearance of the poor air, and then they would reoccupy their childhood memoirs. The boys knew how dangerous the decaying air was for the babies.
Even though they stayed in the forest, the boys didn’t sleep at all and at once. In turns they slept during the day as at night periods. They kept their eyes open to safeguard the new creation in their hands. In addition, sometimes during the day they would walk about other atmospherically secure areas with the babies and cows and others property of necessity;
Your great
My Paapa’s Paapa's Paapa
My ancestors
You who lie beneath my sole
You made me an outcast
Now you make me the only life
You foresee our future and there future
You save the little younger ones of yours
That even though they can end up in the tough teeth
You decide their destiny to be with us
Your great
My Paapa's Paapa's Paapa
My ancestors.
Two babies in the hands of several males of various ages. They exchanged responsibility from one brother to another. Carrying the babies was so wonderful that every boy looked up to it. In that reasoning whoever held a baby, more attention was given to how he comforted the ancestral siblings. In reality if a moment knocked when he who held a calabash or he who observed the cows’ movements, were in many circumstances inclined to forget there a portioned responsibility.
A negative aspect surfaced, one of the boys with the calabash hadn’t held the little humble baby in his palms for several days equivalent from the sun’s shot on the center of the head until the same time after three days. Therefore, when the baby cried, the boy with nourishment in the calabash wanted to hold her instead of nurturing the milk by his father finger to ban her hunger. Logically the cry of the baby called the fears and tears of the other baby. These males dissolved the disorder by accepting that for the good will of the babies’ lives and blessings from ancestors, they only needed not to fight for the little ancestral spirits but give any kind of care, properly to reinstate hope and future life for the earth.
The boys didn’t ignore about the watery pow pow of little humans, it only gave them smiles that the babies were alive and functioning like any other living person. Relatively they saw in the infants their own babyhood, how their maamas took care of their now grown up lives. And the game maamas give to two babies is the same they offered; to look at each other as they gambled able to stretch small hand fists in their little mouths. It was all amusing. Creating awareness that whatsoever the babies did, the boys at one or more times back in stories they too had applied or tried it out. This was told from the smiling faces of the nuns. Even when the babies were resting there lived a great sense of happiness in the faces of the boys.
Talkatively one of the boys reminded the others too suggest and give names to the babies. The boys wished that had they known the babies’ maamas, they would have carried on their identities. Moreover, neither where the babies twins, for by now they wouldn’t be breathing. One baby was light enough and young and the other was worth a few seasons older. Names were contributed with regard to the circumstances that had enfeebled society. The oldest baby was named Babatwala meaning the baby’s kinships were “taken away,” and more so the baby was somehow older to recognize the absence of her Maama and that her care beneficiaries at the moment were of a different influence. The little baby was named Bulamu to mean “life”; that with the powers of god, life was possible since the two babies were healthy that indeed they were to survive as a symbol of significant records to the happening ominous act at the period of their birth.
At this junction, the boys began sketching an oath to be truly taken relating to their adoration commitment to the two little spirits,
Though a monster like a lion comes
I will fight to save my little sisters
Though I die, I will weaken it
Not to remain with any endeavors to eat
I live for the little babies not myself
So I will die first
I know the ancestors did this for a reason
I live for the babies’ lives.
Other little grown up children who had outlived the caravan trek were in a dilemma. They had cried when their maamas yelled while resisting the Arabs solid nark but it didn’t help. Children were still in a mental disorder with visions of terror, blood and pleading noise that even hope couldn’t ascertain a shinning future. The non-eclipsed nature nights came and diminished for several rounds without the return of their maamas. Though they tried to cope up with the new ill expressed times, so many thoughts through their young minds went unanswered.
Young girls couldn’t get to the farms their maamas’ left due to the great fear of the Arabs and so their lifeline was getting more digressed. The boys to were unable to reach the forest to deal with firewood; fear over weighted their consciousness of being modeled into future men of the villages. Their pupils had witnessed humanity’s worst atrocity at a minimal age.
Some children had seen the mouth of a gun pointing at them immediately after they had witnessed a brother or sister, Maama or Paapa, may be a friend they used to occupy themselves with in the early moony seasons being shot to death. Some children took off for safety but even their hiding corners were still horrifying, for it was such places that they’re told would swallow them up alive. Nevertheless, what they had recently observed was truly greater than the terrifying scare creation their maamas had narrated about. Indeed on that white Arab day, it wasn’t until nearer to early evening that many children returned for safety in the outside. Thanks to the forest boys who gathered and welcomed all humans with comfort and love from the nightmare. Nevertheless, children went through night vision of the scenes they had encountered, hence, creating a scarily night and life. They were beginning to fear dreams too.
Chapter Twenty Six
Only less than a quarter of the captives that multiplied Wakabi's siege family numerous times arrived at a line of water. It was very hot and sandy a place. A puzzle that portrayed less notice as the lucky ones only concentrated on drinking the solvent in all styles. Survivors suddenly wished their relatives had made it to gasp a last wonder before their departure to the other earth.
Otherwise no woman apart from Mubika made it to this watery place and none of Wakabi's boys apart from Mugabi reached here, where a qua fought to control the bank. As it touched the sand, the wind too seemed to participate in the bank wrangle. This also appeared without much attention until the survivors of the once long caravan galloped liters of water with their bowled palms. Already bony and unhealthy they received a few fragmented foods to chance their lives ahead. The survivors knew that many of their caravan mates who didn’t make it was because of lack of nutrients. Indeed had the survivors not drank at this watery land and where to move on another distance, they were only going to die.
A few strong men where almost here, it didn’t matter how much they were whipped; now food was necessary to let them see more earthly items for certainly life can quickly change in the eyes of the ancestors. The survivors told one another, the water had anointed a light powerful ray too remember their language as they spoke again after a dry throat they were carrying along. Wakabi told Kamira that he was certain and ancestrally sure he didn’t have any more tears in is eyeball, that whatsoever he had not cried before the long walk it had all swam out at once.
Many survivors and the formally dead had already thrown away their hide clothes due to the psychological burden that assembled sweat through a sequence of human terrorism. They were survivors because they had a taste of natural water but since they did acknowledge the Arabs plan for them, they were slaves in the making. In addition, they believed their dead colleagues were better off, for the Arab was unpredictable and unreliable.
Long and long past the sun seasons and moon seasons, when the Arab must have pretended to be a good spirit. Someone like a distant ancestor to the Basiki, Bagweri, Balamogi, Bagabula. Wakabi and Kamira by now had forgotten all about the free gifts in contents of a gun, diminutive spear, clothes and the promises from the Arabs. Really, they were currently understanding that the gifts weren’t’ justly released, they were paying the price.
The slaves personally debated to believe the captives who resulted from the Busiki-Bugweri battle had been brought to the same place they were now squatting. It was the one moment they had along rest. Now their feet was boiling and fatty due to the extra foot fatigue they had gone through. Big! Big soles were each slave’s symbol of torture.
More and more magic sticks swung from their hands to the armpits suddenly there was two critical alien languages in the atmosphere. The whites that covered their heads and wore a white dress were now in coats and speaking was done in Mohamedan language, for the word Allah was truly undivided from their lips. The other whites were observantly in comic attire that divided one leg from another, added on the coat and hat on the head. These last whites were wealthy, covered in guns, bullets, clothes, metals in their feet and indeed more of what the slaves couldn’t see.
Big vessels couldn’t attract the slaves’ attention at all. They never knew anything of this complexity modeled out of wood and even their drilling suffering had somehow exclaimed their understanding. The only wondered if life was possible for the next few seasons ahead.
They withdrew from interacting along the dialect |