And he could hear the hated war-cry of the Thabas, the sound all kabbars who lived on the borderland feared: “Sigidi! Sigidi! Sigidi!”
After a time that seemed to have no end, the cries from the Thabas and the Matile alike ceased. And no longer did he hear the loathsome sound of assegais ripping open the bellies of the dead and exposing their entrails, as though the Thabas were killing their enemies twice. Yet they did the same to the bodies of their own dead, a practice the Matile had never understood. There was much about the Thabas that the Matile did not comprehend, nor did they care to try.
Eshetu did not begin to burrow his way out of the mound of corpses until his air had nearly run out. As he pushed through a tangle of arms and legs, he thanked the Jagasti that the Thabas had not pulled all the bodies above him aside during their ritual of disembowelment. At the same time, he cursed the remote Matile deities for allowing Imbesh to be destroyed.
When he finally extricated himself from the bodies that had shielded him, Eshetu looked at what was left of Imbesh, and tears began to mingle with the blood that covered his face. Some of that blood was his own, spilled from the assegai-slash that had felled him as he fought. The rest of it had seeped down from the bodies that had fallen on top of him.
Although dusk was darkening the sky, flames from the burning tukuls and teff-fields would burn well into the night. Light from the fires picked out corpses strewn like chaff throughout Imbesh. Men of fighting age, the elderly of both sexes ... all lying with their bellies opened by Thaba assegais. Several mounds of earth indicated the Thaba corpses that lay in the village as well, for the southern warriors left their dead behind, buried where they fell, taking only their ox-hide shields back to their home villages as tokens of their courage.
Imbesh’s women of child-bearing age were gone, and the children themselves, along with the cattle of the village. Shetu knew the fate that awaited any Matile woman who fell into the hands of the Thabas. He thought of his sister, Sallamawit, and of Desta, the woman he intended to wed. And when he thought of them, and of his brothers, his father and mother and all the others who were either dead or carried off, he dropped to his knees next to the pile of corpses that had saved him. And he howled out his anguish, not caring if any Thaba stragglers heard him.
He never knew how long he remained that way: on his knees, screaming wordlessly until his raw throat could no longer produce any sounds. Finally, he collapsed in exhaustion as the tukuls and the fields continued to burn, and the corpses of his family and friends bled, and their blood soaked the land Jass Shebeshi had hoped to reclaim for the Matile.
When Eshetu awoke, the only sound he heard was the buzzing of the clouds of flies that had already settled over the bodies of his fellow villagers. He heard the sounds of other, larger scavengers on their way to the carrion-feast. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he was surrounded by smoking ruins and stiffening corpses.
Laboriously, he rose to his feet. He wondered why he was still alive, when the rest of the people of Imbesh were either dead or stolen. And he could not find an answer that satisfied him.
Without conscious thought, Eshetu searched for a weapon. Many were scattered among the ashes that were all that was left of the tukuls. Swords, daggers broken shields ... all used in the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to defend Imbesh from the Thaba hordes. Eshetu picked up a fallen sword and inspected it in the morning light. Its blade was blooded, but undamaged. Eshetu sliced it through the air, and drew grim pleasure from the sound it made.
It was then Eshetu decided what he would do. He would find out which way the Thabas had gone after their destruction of Imbesh. If the warriors had forged further north to ravage more of the villages of Kembana, he would try to get ahead of the invaders and give whatever warning he could. And if they were headed south, back to their homeland in the rolling hill country, he would follow them.
And when he caught up with them ...
He did not know what course he would take then.
Before departing from Imbesh, Eshetu had one more duty to perform. He did it poorly, and might as well not have done it at all.
The Matile of the countryside interred their dead in a fashion similar to that of the city-dwellers. Instead of small stone houses, however, the kabbars made tukul-shaped monuments from hardened clay. The prospect of properly burying the dozens of corpses scattered throughout Imbesh sickened Eshetu. He knew he could never do it before the scavengers ate most of them.
Instead, he placed a single handful of Imbesh’s bloodsoaked soil on each of the bodies – people he knew well, or to whom he was related, now reduced to fodder for the flies and vultures and hyenas that would soon come. He hoped his people would forgive him when he saw them again ... when he joined them in death. And he knew when that day came, he would have to answer to Metelit, the Jagasti who was the Goddess of the Afterworld.
After he dropped the last bit of dirt through a cloud of flies, Eshetu departed from Imbesh without looking back. The drone of the
