Two Moons by J. Raymond Ractliffe - Chapter 27

Two Moons is a new novel by J. Raymond Ractliffe that explores the inner spirit life of Africa, her people and their powerful faith in the world of the Unseen.

The Mark of the Two Moons
Chapter 27

     Konjaru could feel the warmth of the fire as it touched his skin. His eyes fluttered like butterflies, fighting to rise and open in the air. The hours spent in one prone position on the earthen floor now brought stiffness to aching muscles, his bound hands and feet could not be stretched out relieving cramps that began to pull tightly at him.

His temple throbbed where Zizi had struck him. The flying ash and scalding embers had blinded him, his eyes red hot and filled with the dust of her fury. Konjaru had struck out blindly with his blade that had moments before held a quivering Sampanga. The blow that had come out of his blindness had pitched him forward into the deeper darkness and the visions that came from the world of Ngai and his Ancestors.

His mind's eye now filled with the memories of Majura as she stepped into the stone circle from the darkness and touched his face with her hand and her words.

A chill pierced his heart. With a dull ache, he remembered the words that were of his son. He did not know the meaning of the Two Moons, nor the warnings of loss and of the life struggles that were to come. That his son was to survive and live was all he needed to hear.

A sound rose into the night, a steady wailing pitched high as it rode the rising smoke from fires dotted around the compound. It came from all quarters around him, voices rose to join the pain of those wounded in the spirit. A child's cry found his own mothers voice and added to the chorus as they sang of loss and misfortune that had come to the people of the village.

It was the ancient song that heralded the news of the passing of a Great Chief.

A heavy dull hand reached down and grasped tightly at his heart, holding his breath and squeezing a tear from his eyes as he listened to the singing that marked the death of his father. The sounds around him dulled as the pain filled his spirit with an unbearable sense off loss.

He remembered now that he had come to this place after hearing of a conspiracy that had threatened the carved throne of his father, snaking its way to the fevered blood of his son who now lay healing under the Milk Eye of Majura. Konjaru's haste had not won him time to save his father from the poison borne from the ritual knife that had made his son a man.

Now his father's body lay cold, wrapped in the wild spotted skins of a Chief, the healing draughts removed from his side with the last remaining proof that his journey to the stars had been hastened not by Ngai but by the evil of man.

Konjaru's pain became focused as the sickening image of Zizi and Sampanga coupling like dogs filled his mind. While his father lay dying from their evil, Zizi offered herself as prize to the one whose evil had ended his father's voice.

A sharp stone that lined the flickering fire caught his eye. He raised his bound hands towards its sharpest jagged point and dragged the leather thongs along its ridge. Like grinding meal for a midday feast, backwards and forwards he pulled until he could feel the pressure begin to ease as the thongs became frayed and weak.

One then two of the strands gave way, until finally with a sudden snap the power trapped in them to bind him gave way. His still numbed fingers took much longer to find the threads and unlock his ankles. It was easier to cut his bonds with a stone than find the knotted threads for his final release in the darkness.

Konjaru paused now that he was free, rubbing his swollen ankles and wrists. This was the time to think as a man and not rush like an animal into any further traps they might have been set for him. It was too late to save his father, the singing cries of his people and wailing of children in the night a testament to their success.

He leaned over and peered out of the doorway into the night's darkness. Fires blazed against the stars as families stood huddled outside their doorways. The inner walls too close to house their grief. The soft night air cooled against wet checks, tear swollen eyes spilling over as memories filled hearts with laughter and pride.

He could hear rustling near the royal compound. Padded leather feet drummed dust into the night air like the restless cattle straining against the posts of their enclosures. Hushed voices spoken together ran like trickling waters, each sound blending with the next to form a gentle ripple.

Out of this mixture of fire lit dust and blended voices, out stepped Zizi from the shadows from the interior of his father's royal hut. In her hands the last glistening bowl and ragged cloth that ministered and wiped away the foulness of his dying. He could see her bowing to the elders as they spoke to her, answering them respectfully in return to their pressed questions.

When their questions could no longer be answered and only the silence of the night filled their air between them, they finally spoke no more and stood silently facing their unspeakable grief. Their eyes searching the skies for answers that would not come, they dared not look to another's eyes for comfort for fear their strained hearts would reveal the tremors that shook the interiors of their souls.

In this final silence, Zizi withdrew from their eyes, turning back towards her own hut. She walked slightly stooped, favoring one side as she left their circle. Thinking this to be her pride as the eldest wife of the chief, Konjaru did not know that the stiffness was caused by his own blade striking her as he fell.

Konjaru pulled back away from the entrance of the hit into the folds away from the fire Woven cloth hanging from a soot stained rafter allowed him to blend into the darkness, only his burning eyes revealing the anger and grief that awaited Zizi.

A rustle outside, scraping sand and stone from her feet spoke that Zizi had come. The seconds seemed like minutes as he waited for her. In his mind, the swirling emotions suddenly found their focus. What had been a raging fire now became cold and clear.

From the stiffness of her side, a grunt of pain escaped Zizi's lips as she slipped through the doorway. Then she paused with a louder gasp as she stared at the empty space on the floor that had held Konjaru. Only the flayed leather strands lying discarded in the firelight proof that Konjaru had been bound here in her hut.

That fool Sampanga had not done what she has asked, to make sure that he was bound tightly and unable to escape.

"I will kill the stuttering fool, the next time I see him. Damn him!" she said out loud as she came in through the doorway.

Fingers pulled the cloth to one side, revealing unblinking eyes that bore into her and stopped her cold. "Not before I have run him through and split him open." Konjaru's voice held her transfixed.

"You both are going to die tonight, slowly and with great pain. And when you have died with your rotting blood spilling into the sand, you will have told me all of the details of your murderous schemes and plans."

From her fingers the bowl and cloth she had been carrying fell to the ground. The loud crack of it breaking snapped her out of her frozen surprise and she lunged at Konjaru with a heart-chilling scream that filled the night. Her outreached fingers curling with murderous intent, reaching for his throat to rip away his words that spelt the end of her years of planning that had now come no nothing.

Konjaru stepped sideways and with open hand, struck her loudly on the side of he head that silenced her scream. She landed in the same cloth that had just minutes before had hidden Konjaru, pulling it down over herself, entangling her as she fell. The stitches in her side splitting as she fought to regain herself, the blood began to seep down her side.

In a jumble of thrashing legs and arms, spewing obscenities at him with spittle and hate, Zizi finally cleared her head from the folds and with eyes flashing fury and scorn, she screamed at him.

"Your father died tonight in his own foul waste, not like a chief but like a sick goat. I gave him the ground beans that tore at his stomach and made him scream like a sick child. He died a little man, as you are and like your son now with the Old Woman"

"I should have killed you before I left tonight, slit your throat and let you bleed into the sand. No one would have known you would then have lived under the entrance door of my hut. They would not have known of the pleasure I would have felt coming to my hut every day, stepping over you as you slept curled like a child under the stones." she hissed.

"You always were a poor choice of a wife. Your belly empty, you had to lay with a dog to fill it with that idiot son of yours." Konjaru said calmly. "You and that stuttering fool Sampanga shall both die for killing my father. But for trying to kill my son, you shall die painfully, screaming for death to come quickly."

With one free hand, Zizi reached for a burning log deep within the fire. Holding it with a clenched hand, she did not feel the hot coals that burned deep within her palm. Repeating what seemed like an earlier scene, she waved the flame before him like a wand, pushing Konjaru back against the wall. Her smile sickened Konjaru, white spittle formed the edges of her mouth, the madness that had fuelled her schemes now boiled over.

With a screaming lunge at Konjaru face, the entangled cloth still wrapped around her legs made her trip and Zizi fell headfirst into the fire in a wild heap.

The wild flames found the most sensitive places. Hot coals filled her open eyes and seared forever in her mind the last image she would have. Konjaru standing before her in the firelight with hatred in his eyes. Zizi's pupils burned, closed forever even as tears rushed in to save them.

Soft and gentle lips that only moments before spewed hatred and scorn, now bubbled and burned as her other hand could not find the earth beneath her to push away the fire that engulfed her head. The flesh around the nose became blacker still, the inside membranes inhaling scalding soot and searing heat that burned away the smells of her own burning flesh.

In a last gasp of hatred, Zizi flung the burning log at Konjaru and rolled away from the burning pain, trying to untangle the fires that now burned the cloth around her. The log flew through the air in a gentle arc and landed in the upper darkness behind Konjaru.

The flames quickly found the driest thatch, drawing more to fuel its hunger. Sparks now jumped to the ground as it licked its way up into the darker recess of the roof and in moments, the hiss of its burning was louder than the cooking fire.

Konjaru's own instinct for survival broke the coolness of his revenge. He stepped back and went through the doorway into the fresh air and waited for Zizi to emerge.

Inside the hut, the thatch was now burning and jumping from pole to pole, raining bright sparks all around her. A last frenzied flurry freed Zizi from the arms of the cloth and the burning coals trapped in the folds. Now she was dancing in the air, patting the burning embers that clung to her skin.

Sightless eyes found no opening away from the pain. Zizi reached out in front of her and found only warm mud walls. Her burned hands searched left and then right in frantic haste but could not find the doorway that was to have been the final resting place of Konjaru.

The whole roof was now burning, the flames falling all around her, burning her back, and the remains of her hair. The thick black cloak of smoke filled her lungs, her sightless eyes were streaming tears down her cheeks.

Outside, Konjaru could hear her screaming, both in pain and heaping curses on his name. Added to the madness Konjaru could hear Zizi's eternal damnation on the stuttering rutting Sampanga. Konjaru waited for her to come through the wooden doorway and the safety of the open air but she never came.

Zizi chose to stay within the certainty of her flaming death knowing that all had failed. The carved throne no closer to her son that it had ever been. The laughter of the woman of the village and certainty of war clubs breaking her legs and being left out on the open had made her choice to stay by her son's bedroll all the easier.

She closed her arms over her breasts as the first burning thatch fell across her shoulders, peeling away her skin until they too fell to the dung floor.

The searing heat tried to enter her mind and scold her dreams before her death.

Standing beside Konjaru by the entrance of her hut, Ngai held Zizi's dreams in his hands as she slipped away into the fire. And when the flames became silent, Ngai raised his hands and shook Zizi's dreams out into the night sky, where they found their place in between the stars. Ngai strode silently away and left the village compound towards the hilltop with the burned high stones that scratched at the sky, where the fevered young warriors lay within the mud walls of an old Milk Eyed Woman.

Only the slow wailing song of the passing of the chief remained in the night air. Of Zizi, the most senior of the chief's remaining wives, only the embers hissed her name until they also cooled to silence.

The dust caused by the trampling and haste of sandaled feet fell back down to the earth. The cattle settled once more into their rhythmic song of night, even the twinkling eyes in the long shadows blinked once more and slept.

The air became still as it waited for the morning.