Like all the other women on the beach, Awiwi cried out in horror and protest at what she saw on the ships. She didn’t try to look for Bujiji. She could not tell the jhumbis apart, nor did she want to. If Bujiji had now become a jhumbi, that meant he was dead and gone from her forever, even if he could still walk and do the bidding of the huangi.
Awiwi’s own outcry awoke her, as it always did when nightmares like this plagued her sleep. But this time, there was another cry as well.
Instinctively, she reached for the infant at her side. Her hand touched him ... and then she could feel him being pulled from her grasp. His cries were muffled, as though something was covering his mouth – or constricting his throat.
In the dim Moon Star light that filtered through the flimsy thatch of her lean-to, she saw her baby son moving slowly toward the structure’s entrance. He wasn’t crawling. He was being dragged by an ubia-vine as thick as her wrist. The plant had wrapped part of itself around the infant’s throat, and was choking him even as it inched its way into the darkness outside the lean-to.
With a wordless cry of rage, Awiwi reached for the coral dagger she kept at her side. Then she seized the part of the vine that was not wrapped around her son, and began to hack at its green flesh. Even as the ubia-vine writhed and buckled, the baby’s cries weakened. Awiwi’s slashes became wilder, missing as often as they landed. Some came close to cutting her baby. Yet enough of them eventually landed to rip the sorcerous life out of the ubia. When the vine finally lay still, Awiwi frantically tore its loops from her baby’s body, not noticing that the infant lay silent.
Awiwi lifted him and laid her ear on his small chest. And she heard the tiny flutter of his heartbeat. He was unconscious, but alive.
As she held her baby to her breast, Awiwi sobbed quietly, tears falling from her face to the infant’s brow. She had not yet given her child a name. None of the infants born in the Uloas since Retribution Time had been named. The father and a huangi had to be present for a proper naming ceremony to occur. But all the fathers and all the huangi had departed for the war on the mainland. Without their presence, the new children had to remain nameless.
As time passed, the ubia-vines had become bolder. If the huangi did not arrive soon, the human inhabitants of the islands were in danger of being overwhelmed by the animate vegetation.
“Legaba ... help I,” Awiwi whispered into the darkness
She made that plea out of lifelong habit, even though she knew her words would be answered only with silence. Legaba was ... gone.
Awiwi refused to countenance the possibility that the Spider God had vanished forever. To think that would be to lose all hope. And the loss of all hope would be the final step into the abyss of oblivion.
But still ... Legaba was gone, leaving no trace of a presence that had existed since the time the Uloans began to worship him. And so were Jass Imbiah, and the huangi, and all the fighting-age men, and even the walking dead. Each day that they did not come back was another day closer to the end of the Uloans who remained on the islands. And they would remain, despite the mwiti. They could build boats, but there was no safe destination to which they could sail; certainly not to the Mainland, nor to the Sea of Storms.
The ubia-vine’s attack had occurred swiftly, although to Awiwi its coils had touched her infant’s skin for a loathsome eternity. Her outcry had awakened women in neighboring lean-tos, and some of them now came to her, and held her, and whispered soothing words into her ears. They knew all too well that on the next night, one of their children could be the target of the ubias’ hunger.
They tried hard not to lose hope. But the struggle was growing too difficult, and before long, their will to live would be gone.
4
For many generations, the Uloans had lied to themselves about part of their past, until they had finally forgotten it ...
When the first explorers from the Matile mainland had reached the islands centuries ago, they had found human inhabitants as well as the animals and the mwiti. The population was small and scattered, and the people had a name – the Kipalende. A small-statured, peaceful race whose origins predated those of the Matile and Thaba, and even the Tokoloshe and the Kwa’manga of the Khumba Khourou thirstland, the Kipalende lived in harmony with the mwiti.
The Kipalende had no need to build dwellings; the trees shaped themselves into shelters for them. They had no need to hunt or cultivate food; the fruits of the mwiti-plants provided all the sustenance they required. In return, the Kipalende nurtured the mwiti and spread their seeds and pollen, and protected them from the depredations of hungry creatures such as the munkimun. The Kipalende knew neither want nor warfare, and they were unaware that there were other people in the world; people who could neither understand nor respect the way of life that had sustained them for thousands of years.
In an overweening arrogance born of their recent acquisition of the power of ashuma, the explorers, and the settlers who arrived on their heels, saw the Kipalende as nothing more than tree-dwellers only a step above the munkimun – an obstacle that had to be swept away or trampled beneath the feet of the Matile. The early settlers decided that they needed to remove the Kipalende. And that was what they did. In less than a generation, the Kipalende were gone – exterminated. In ensuing years, the Uloans expunged from
