“What does your waganga – your witch-woman – have to say about this?” Majnun inquired.
After a meaningful pause, Mbiyu said: “Our waganga, Damali, has not been seen since the first coming of the nunda.”
NIGHTFALL FOUND MAJNUN lying thoughtfully in the dim semi-darkness of the thatched kibanda provided by Mbiyu. With some satisfaction, he noted that his kibanda was larger and better-appointed than the one given to Mzikala. Though it was nothing like the sumptuous chambers he occupied in the vast palace of Al-Imamu, the kibanda was suitable for his needs.
He could also have had feminine companionship for the night, but for once he declined the pleasure. This was a time for solitude and silence, so that he could examine the various – and sometimes conflicting – things he had heard about the nunda.
Of one thing, he was certain: the nunda was real. The tales told by the villagers of Kantaro were too lucid and consistent to attribute to mere superstitious hysteria. But the creature’s behavior was too complex, too malevolently intelligent to be that of merely a ferocious beast. Indeed, it had been the fact that the nunda’s fierceness surpassed its cunning that had enabled the people of the East Coast to drive it from their lands.
Chewing absently on a narcotic bhanga leaf, Majnun considered the waganga who had disappeared when the nunda had come. Damali ... that was her name. Yet mere rural witch-women had never possessed the power of shape-changing. Only a sorcerer who had delved deeply into the dark secrets of the Mashataan could do such things ...
Suddenly, a faint sound reached Majnun’s ears. As the prince tossed aside his bhanga leaf and reached for the dagger beneath the leopard-skin that covered him, he heard the sound again. Then he saw a dim, hunched shape momentarily blot out the dim light at the entrance to his kibanda. Stealthily, the figure moved inside, and Majnun’s grip tightened on the jewelled hilt of his dagger.
In the darkness inside the kibanda, the shape became even more shadowy and indistinct. Before he could react, a set of slim, surprisingly strong fingers closed around the wrist of his dagger hand, holding it immobile. As the other hand reached beneath the leopard-skin and slipped inside Majnun’s loincloth, a pair of warm lips fastened upon his mouth and a hot tongue battered insistently against his teeth.
Majnun wrenched his dagger-arm free, but the weapon clattered harmlessly to the floor. His hands travelled across a lithe, naked body writhing passionately atop his own, and he soon began to return the intruder’s embrace with equal fervor.
Slowly, Majnun turned over on his pallet, forcing the woman’s body beneath his. Momentarily removing his lips from hers, the prince murmured: “You are, of course, Damali.”
“I am,” a subtle, seductive voice replied. “And I should ask you how you know that. But there are more important things to be done now, aren’t there?”
Her nimble hand tore away the silk of Majnun’s loincloth, and her mouth travelled slowly down the prince’s chest. And Majnun proceeded to make love with the waganga, knowing fully well that the witch-woman was the key to the mystery of the nunda.
AN HOUR OR SO LATER, as the lovers lay in a languid embrace, Damali said: “You are just as he told me you would be.”
Feigning naivety, Majnun asked: “Who is ‘he’?”
“Him,” Damali whispered, pointing a nearly invisible finger toward the kibanda’s open entrance.
Quickly the prince sat up, not ungently disengaging himself from the witch-woman’s arms. He looked toward the opening – and froze like an alarmed antelope.
For even the cynical, iron nerves of Majnun were not fully prepared for the sight of the looming shape that blocked out the dim semicircle of light. Few were the men who had looked upon the face of a nunda, and fewer still those who survived to tell the tale ...
Mouth agape in a soundless snarl, the face of the nunda was beast-evil incarnate. Its tufted ears lay flat against its broad, sloping skull; and its giant muzzle wrinkled as it bared twin fangs the length of Azanian scimitars. But the most terrifying aspect of the huge, cat-like beast was its eyes. Even in the semidarkness of the kibanda, they glowed like spectral yellow flames – flames kindled not by the ravening instincts of a predator, but by ... intelligence.
For a moment, the terrible eyes of the nunda burned into those of Majnun. Unable to move, the prince could only stare back in trapped-prey fascination. But the nunda did not attack him. Slowly it retreated from the opening, for all its bulk as silent as a substanceless wraith. Then it turned its impossibly muscular body and stalked toward the kibanda that housed the sleeping Mzikala.
Freed from the spell of the nunda’s eyes, Majnun reached for Damali, for whom he had questions that demanded immediate answers. But during the interval of the nunda’s appearance, she had disappeared. There was no trace of the waganga in the kibanda’s dark interior.
Cursing furiously, Majnun leaped to his feet. As he hastily knotted a length of cloth about his naked loins, the prince knew he was powerless to prevent what was about to happen. Still, he ran out of the kibanda, past a pair of guards who stood strangely somnolent, their spears held in slack hands.
There was an ominous lack of sound in the chief-village, as if everyone in it had fallen prey to the same lassitude that had afflicted the guards. Suddenly a shrill, agonized scream split the silence, followed by several more of successively increasing intensity.
Then Majnun stopped short and stared in horror at the nunda as it emerged from Mzikazi’s kibanda. In its jaws it carried a ruin of flesh and bone that had, only moments before, been a man. There was not an inch of Mzikala’s blood-drenched corpse that had not been shredded by mighty talons
