Reincarnations

The sun was heading down toward the western hills before the band of men finally reappeared. They moved slowly; as they drew closer, Tshingana saw that they were burdened with as much meat as they could carry. His stomach growled. He patted it, anticipating a feast.

The women working in the fields set down their hoes and digging-sticks and rushed out toward the returning men with glad cries: they saw the meat too. "Raise the fires high tonight!" Inyangesa shouted.

Shamagwava turned to him. "Since you had the idea, you can gather the wood." Inyangesa’s long, mobile face fell. Tshingana laughed as he sadly shambled off to start dragging in branches and dry grass. That was a mistake. "You can help," his father said.

Sigwebana was doubly foolish, for he had seen the fate of his companion and his half-brother but laughed anyhow. That drew Shamagwava’s attention to him. With three boys hauling fuel, soon the fires could have been made big enough to roast food for the whole baTlokwa impi- -big enough to cook for a regiment, not just the folk of this kraal.

Ndogeni, bent almost double under the great chunk of elephant meat on his back, set down his load with a sigh of relief. Flies descended on it in a buzzing cloud. Ndogeni took no notice of them. He walked over to Tshingana and spoke to him most seriously, as if he were a man and a warrior: "There was a moso, Tshingana. We saw it just as it was leaving the carcass, and heard it too."

Inyangesa’s father Uhamu, an even taller, thi

Ndogeni nodded. "If you ask me, the moso is an umlhakathi- -a wizard-in the shape of a beast. It must be more than simply a big cat. A lion’s roar is savage, but it does not put that heart-freezing dread in a man."

Uhamu visibly gathered himself. "It is gone now, though, and we have this lovely meat it left behind. And I will drink millet-beer, and after I have drunk enough I will forget I was ever frightened in all my life. And for that, the headache I will have tomorrow will be a small price to pay."

The elephant meat proved tough and strong-tasting. Tshingana ate his fill anyhow, as much for the novelty of it as for any other reason. He also drank a couple of pots of beer, which left him yawning even before the evening twilight was gone from the sky.

His mother Nandi was already snoring on her grass mat when he got down on all fours and crawled into the hut they shared. As soon as he closed the low door behind him, the hearthfire made the hut start to fill up with smoke. His eyes watered as he got his own sleeping-mat down from where it hung on the wall. He lay down.

The air was a little fresher near the ground, but smelled of the cow dung that had been pounded into the dirt to make a smooth floor. To Tshingana, it was part of the smell of home. Aided by the beer he’d drunk, he drifted toward sleep.

Cockroaches scuttled through the straw of the hut’s walls, darted across the floor. One scurried over Tshingana’s leg. He was snoring himself by then, and never noticed.

The moso wandered away from the kraal, following the elephants on which it preyed. The brief notoriety that had accrued to Tshingana for first spying the beast slowly faded as newer matters caught the fancy of his clan.

Among those newer matters, to Tshingana’s mortification, was his half-brother Sigwebana’s coming of age. The two of them had been born about the same time; Tshingana had always assumed he would reach puberty first. But one night Sigwebana woke with his belly wet-manhood had come to him, while Tshingana remained a boy.

Sigwebana was revoltingly smug about the whole thing, too, which only made it worse. Tshingana vowed revenge, and got it. When a boy became a man among the baTlokwa, as among other nearby Bantu tribes, one morning he drove his kraal’s cattle far out into the grassland, trying to hide them from everyone. The longer he succeeded, the greater the success expected from him in the future.

Tshingana stalked Sigwebana like a lion going after a gnu. It was not even noon when he found his half-brother and the cattle in a drift-a wash with a trickle of stream in the bottom- surprisingly close to the kraal.

He stood at the top of the drift, yelling and jeering, drawing boys and men to Sigwebana. Sigwebana wept and cursed and looked as though he wanted to throw his new man-sized assegai at Tshingana.

That evening, back at the kraal, his father took him aside. "You did well-maybe too well," Shamagwava said. "No one likes to be humiliated… and Sigwebana is my son too."

"He shouldn’t have boasted so much," Tshingana said sullenly. He knew he ought to feel guilty, but could not manage it.

"I suppose not." Shamagwava sighed, "How do you imagine he will act, though, when your turn to hide the herd comes?"

Tshingana’s lips ski

"Maybe you should have," his father said. "Be sure Sigwebana will think of little else. I ca

For the next few weeks, the problem of what Sigwebana would do remained only a worry at the back of Tshingana’s mind. But then he awoke one night from a dream of confused but overwhelming sweetness, to discover that his seed had jetted forth for the first time. By the usages of the baTlokwa, he was a man.

He watched Sigwebana as he told Shamagwava he had spent himself in the night. His father pounded his back, almost knocking him down, and roared out the traditional bawdy congratulations. His half-brother, though, looked at him like a leopard studying an antelope from a thorn tree.

Shamagwava gave Tshingana a man’s assegai, a weapon a foot taller than he was. "Tomorrow the cattle are yours, my son-for as long as you can keep them," he said. His eyes slipped to Sigwebana, who was, after all, also his son.

Knowing how his half-brother would go after him, Tshingana had no great hope of keeping the clan’s herd undiscovered for very long. Staying on the loose till mid-afternoon would be fine. Anything better than Sigwebana had done would be fine.

Even if he thought he’d be quickly caught, Tshingana did not intend to make things easy for Sigwebana-or for the rest of the clan. He crawled out of his mother’s hut just past midnight, a good deal earlier than it was customary for herdboys-turned-men to head off to hide the kraal’s cattle.

The cattle were convinced it was too early. They lowed in sleepy protest as Tshingana moved aside the heavy poles that barred their pen. "Shut up!" he hissed. He knew Sigwebana would be up soon no matter what he did; he did not want the beasts rousing his half-brother all the earlier. That kept him from whacking them into motion with the shaft of the assegai, as he would have done otherwise. Instead, he gently coaxed them out of the pen and away.

Luckily the moon was only a couple of days past full. By its light Tshingana managed a fair pace, not what he could have done in daylight but much better than the crawl he would have had to use in real darkness.

As best he could and for as long as he could, he kept the herd to the same path it used going out to its usual grazing grounds. If fortune smiled, the tracks the cattle were making tonight would be hard to pick out from the thousands of other hoofprints, some fresh as yesterday, that pocked the grass.

The kraal was invisible by the time the eastern horizon lightened toward day. Tshingana danced a few steps-he’d come farther than he’d dared hope. In a while, he could start thinking about where to abandon the usual track and strike out for a proper hiding place.