Please make love to me now. I ache for you with all my body and all my soul. I want to feel you inside me, touching my core. We must never be parted from each other again.'
With the dawn light and the river mist drifting across the water, the flotilla pulled downstream in line ahead. The oars were muffled and the silence was eerie. The archers lined the gunwales with their arrows nocked. Thatched roofs appeared out of the mist, and Taita signalled to Meren at the helm to steer in closer to the bank.
From the shore a dog whined and barked, but apart from that the silence was complete. The mist stirred with the morning breeze, then drew aside like a veil to reveal the crowded squalor of the Chima village.
Taita lifted his sword high, then brought it down sharply. It was the signal, and the trumpeters blew a ringing blast on their curling kudu horns. At the sound, hundreds of naked Chima came out of the huts to gape at the oncoming boats. A wail of despair went up, and in wild panic they scattered and ran. Few had armed themselves and most were still more than half asleep, stumbling and falling about like drunkards as they ran for the shelter of the trees. Taita raised his sword arm again and as he dropped it the archers let a cloud of arrows fly into them. Taita saw an arrow transfix an infant strapped to the back of a running woman, then kill the mother cleanly.
'Take us to the bank!' As the prow touched the shoreline he led the rush.
Spearmen and axemen raced after the routed Chima. From ahead there rose another wail of terror and despair as they ran into Hilto's ambush. The swords of Tinat's men thumped into living flesh, and made a wet sucking sound as they were pulled free. A naked Chima ran back towards Taita with one of his arms lopped off at the elbow. He was squealing shrilly as the blood from the stump sprayed over his own body, painting him a glistening scarlet. Taita cut him down with a stroke that
took away the top half of his skull. Then he killed the naked woman who followed him with a single thrust between her dangling dugs. In the rage of battle he felt no pity or remorse. The next man held up his bare hands in a despairing attempt to divert the blade. Taita cut him down with as little compunction as he would have crushed a tsetse fly crawling on his skin.
Trapped between the two lines of armed men, the Chima darted about like a shoal of fish in a net. Retribution was cold and ruthless, the slaughter furious and sanguinary. A few of the Chima managed to break through the closing ring of bronze and reach the river. But the archers were waiting for those who did, and so were the crocodiles.
'Did any escape?' Taita demanded of That, when they met in the middle of the field strewn with the dead and dying.
'I saw some run back into the huts. Shall we go after them?'
'No. By now they will have armed themselves, and will be as dangerous as cornered leopards. I will not risk any more of our people. Put fire into the thatch of the huts and smoke them out.'
By the time the sun had risen above the trees it was all over. Two of Tinat's men had been lightly wounded, but the Chima were annihilated.
They left the corpses lying where they had fallen for the hyenas to deal with, and were back on board, sailing northwards again, before the sun had made its noon.
'Now only the swamps of the Great Sud stand in our way,' Taita told Fenn, as they sat together on the foredeck, 'the swamps in which I found you. You were a little wild savage, running with a tribe of them.'
'It all seems so long ago,' she murmured. 'The memory is pale and faded. I remember my other life more clearly than that one. I hope we do not encounter any of the bestial Luo. I would like to forget it all completely.' She tossed her head to throw the dancing golden tresses back over her shoulder. 'Let us talk of more pleasant things,' she suggested. 'Did you know that Imbali has a baby growing inside her?'
'Ah! So that is it. I have seen Nakonto looking at her in a peculiar way. But how do you know that this is so?'
'Imbali told me. She is very proud. She says the babe will be a great warrior, like Nakonto.'
'What if it should be a girl?'
'No doubt it will be a great warrior like Imbali.' She laughed.
'It is good tidings for them, but sad for us.'
'Why sad?' she demanded.
'I fear we shall soon lose them. Now that he is to be a father,
Nakonto's days as a roving warrior are numbered. He will want to take Imbali and his child back to his own village. That will be soon, for we are nearing the land of the Shilluk.”
The terrain along the banks changed its nature as they left behind the forests and the elephant country to enter a wide savannah dotted with flat-topped acacia trees. Towering giraffe, with reticulated white markings on their coffee-coloured bodies, fed on the high branches and below them, grazing on the sweet savannah grasses, herds of antelope, kob, topi, eland, mingled with herds of fat striped zebra. The resuscitated Nile had brought them flocking back to partake of her bounty.
Two days' further sailing, and they sighted a herd of several hundred humped cattle, with long swept-back horns, grazing close to the edge of the reed banks. Young boys were herding them. 'I doubt not that they are Shilluk,' Taita told Fenn. 'Nakonto has come home.'
'How can you be sure of it?'
'See how tall and slender they are, and the manner in which they stand, like roosting storks, balanced on one long leg with the other foot resting on the calf. They can be none other than Shilluk.'
Nakonto had seen them too, and his usually aloof, disdainful manner evaporated. He broke into a stamping, prancing war-dance that shook the deck, and hallooed in a high-pitched tone that carried clearly over the reeds. Imbali laughed at his antics, clapped her hands and ululated to encourage him to greater efforts.
The herders heard someone calling to them in their own language from the boat, and ran to the bank to stare at the visitors in amazement.
Nakonto recognized two and hailed them across the water: 'Sikunela!
