Where are you? she asked a final time, hoping against hope to hear an answer from Nama-kwah, to feel even a slight hint of her presence.
Nothing ....
2
Above the surface, sunlight glinted faintly through waves of vapor that shifted in discernible patterns, like a tapestry fashioned in the air. As the mist moved, the Degen Jassi, the glittering aristocracy of Matile Mala, gazed at the surface of the harbor from the section of the docks set aside for them. Seated on a gallery of stone benches polished smooth by the backsides of countless generations of ancestors, the lords and ladies of the Degen Jassi watched, and waited for Tiyana to begin her performance.
Gossamer wisps of mist swirled and eddied around their sandal-shod feet, and they tightened their brightly-striped mantles, or chammas, against a slight chill soon to be banished by the sun. Color combinations signified rank: only the Emperor, Dardar Alemeyu, could wear the royal black and gold. The chammas draped the men’s tunics and trousers of bleached cotton; and the women’s bodies, for chammas were the only garments Matile women wore, leaving one or both shoulders bare. The men decorated their trousers, called senafil, with strips of shells and beads sewn into the fabric.
The Emperor sat on a stone seat mounted on a dais that lifted him above the rest of the aristocracy. His white beard framed narrow, ascetic features over which dark skin stretched taut and only lightly wrinkled, despite his age. His hooded eyes stared far into the distance, beyond the place where Tiyana would rise from the water. His head tilted at a slight angle, as though the crown of kingship weighed heavily upon him. Yet Alemeyu’s title of Emperor was more symbolic than real; the present borders of Matile Mala encompassed only a fraction of the territory his people once held across the northern half of Abengoni.
Dardar Alemeyu’s Empress, Issa, sat at his side. Beneath her crown, her hair was beaded with gold and silver, and her royal chamma was striped like a sunset in crimson, gold, and orange. Although the jewelry looped around her neck and arms had been handed down through countless generations of Empresses, each piece looked as though it had been crafted only the day before the ceremony.
Decades younger than the Emperor, Issa had only recently taken the place of her barren predecessor, whom Alemeyu had set aside after too many childless years. She, too, had yet to produce an heir to carry on a royal line that counted its years of tenure on the throne in the thousands. Issa was not alone in suspecting the fault lay within the Emperor rather than herself. But she wisely kept that belief to herself.
If Dardar Alemeyu died childless, the throne would pass to his nephew, Jass Eshana, the Dejezmek, or commander of what remained of the Matile armies. Eshana was the son of the Emperor’s sister. Next in the line of succession was ... Gebrem, his first cousin, the son of Alemeyu’s father’s brother, who had been Leba before him.
To have either man follow him on the throne was the last thing Alemeyu wanted – he was determined that the dynasty would be continued through him. And so he continued his fruitless efforts to extend his ancient line efforts with wife after wife, while the Degen Jassi and others shook their heads in pity, and at times contempt, behind his royal back.
At the Emperor’s other side, a tame cheetah sat immobile as a spotted sculpture. The weak sunlight glinted from the jewels on the collar that encircled the great cat’s neck. At times, Alemeyu thought the beast, which he named Makah, was his most loyal courtier. Almost unconsciously, he stroked Makah’s fur as he waited for Gebrem’s daughter to appear above the waves.
Like the rest of the people gathered at the Khambawe docks, the Degen Jassi were dark of hue, with skin shades ranging from ebony to cinnamon. The hair of men and women alike was worked into rows of braids: for some people thick, others tiny; some short; others long; the men’s mostly unadorned, the women’s bedecked with colorful shells and beads and intricately-carved ornaments of ivory and amber, silver and gold. The stripes on their chammas spanned the spectrum of colors; the garments underneath were mostly white cotton. Some of the Degen Jassi were young; others old. Family resemblances stamped by many generations of ruling-class endogamy were clearly discernable.
Behind the benches of the Degen Jassi stood a row of attenuated statues that at first glance resembled a sculptor’s unfinished products. Their arms had no hands; their legs, no feet. The eyes of the statues were little more than indentations gouged into the slate-gray surface of their faces. Noses and mouths were afterthoughts, and their narrow bodies, standing several times the height of a human, were smooth and sexless.
These were the Ishimbi, and legends spoke of a time when the Jagasti themselves breathed life into the shapes of stone in times of need, and the Ishimbi walked and struck down the Matiles’ enemies. But no one now alive could remember the last time the Ishimbi had moved from their places.
Ranks of soldiers clad in carapace-like cuirasses of hardened leather and armed with huge, curved swords occupied the space between the Degen Jassi and the crowd of commoners who had come to witness First Calling before commencing their daily toils in the city that spread in precincts of flat-roofed houses and towering obelisks behind them.
Jass Eshana, a stalwart man of middle years, stood at their head. His helmet was crested with hair from the mane of a lion he had slain, and he wore a leopard-skin chamma over his armor. The role of the Dejezmek’s soldiers was strictly ceremonial. As the Degen Jassi well knew, the ordinary people of Khambawe were no more likely to rise against their ruling class than were the inanimate Ishimbi. Without the prestige and power of the Degen Jassi, the rest of
