His musing was rudely interrupted by the rip of two monkey-fangs into his left cheek.
“Aaah!” Okosene screamed. “Kungurus-kansusu, I want you to make Ajema as she was!”
Immediately, a tremendous weight bore down on Okosene’s shoulder. His knees crumpled. His backbone folded. He collapsed to the ground beneath a veritable mountain of human flesh. And he nearly suffocated before Ajema thought to roll off him.
Ignoring her, Okosene lurched to his feet and glared wildly up at the guinea-fowl’s limb. Already, the kungurus-kansusu was flying away.
“Wait! Wait!” shrieked Okosene. “I wish I were the Oba of Benan! I wish I had a million cowries! I wish ...”
Something soft, wet and white dropped from the sky and spattered against Okosene’s face. The guinea-fowl was now only a black speck disappearing rapidly into the white face of the Nyumbani moon.
Okosene Alakun buried his face in his hands and wept.
“You’ll never do anything right, will you?” the harsh voice of Ajema commented.
Okosene looked at her. The white guinea-fowl dropping stood out against the darkness of his skin. Ajema stood stark naked in the moon’s glow, every obese inch of her exactly as it had been before Okosene’s first encounter with the kungurus-kansusu.
A strange light ignited in Okosene’s eyes. He bent and picked up a fallen tree-limb. He moved toward his wife.
Ajema screamed ...
FOR MANY RAINS THEREAFTER, the people of Nyamem regaled any outsider who would listen with the tale of how Big Ajema ran naked through the town in the middle of the night, shrieking at the top of her lungs as her husband Okosene the Daydreamer pursued her with a leafy cudgel in his hand. The incredible sight so astonished the night watch that they had forgotten that Okosene was to have been executed in the morning.
Neither Okosene nor Ajema was ever seen again in the vicinity of Nyamem. But as the rains passed, the legend grew of a ghost that flitted through the nearby bush, setting spectral snares among the trees. And roast guinea-fowl soon became a culinary rarity, as the bird’s numbers soon dwindled to the point of extinction.
AMMA
OF ALL THE AFRICAN-oriented myth-tales I have written, this one is my favorite. It is a combination of two West African folktales. “Amma” first appeared in 1978, in my friend Charles de Lint’s magazine, Beyond the Fields We Know, and was reprinted a year later in DAW Books’ The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series VII, edited by Gerald W. Page. It was later reprinted again in the Mothership anthology, edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall. Jerry Page took a fair amount of flak from critics who questioned whether “Amma” truly qualified as horror rather than fantasy. I’ll let you be the judge.
A soft strain of music drifts delicately among the familiar midday noises of Gau, capital city of the empire of Sanghai. Softly it weaves its way through the shrill bargaining of market women; the intrusive importunings of tradesmen; the strident admonitions of adhana-priests to prayer and sacrifice at the shrines of the gods; and the clink and jingle of mail-clad soldiers strutting through the streets. The music is easily recognizable: notes plucked by skillful fingers from the seven strings of a Sahanic ko.
There are other ko-songs that mingle with the general hum of the city, for the ko is popular, and Gau large. Yet some there are in the teeming populace who pause when the notes of this one reaches their ears. By the singular quality of its melody, they know that this is no outdated local strummer of weary songs, nor love-struck youth seeking to impress the object of his callow affections. They know, these connoisseurs of the ko, that a new griot has come to Gau.
Before the final notes of the song have faded, a crowd is gathered at the saffiyeh, a small square off the main marketplace where, traditionally, a newly arrived griot comes to display his talents. The stranger sits with his back against a whitewashed wall; his fingers dancing lightly across the strings of his instrument. More like hands hardened by the gripping of sword or plow, these, than hands accustomed mainly to the touch of lacquered wood and slender wire.
Beneath the road-worn garments of a wanderer, the griot’s frame looms large, yet strangely gaunt, as though once-massive thews have been reduced to the minimum amount required for physical activity. His sepia-toned face is solemn and middle-aged, webbed with lines scored by adversity. Large eyes, dark and luminous, seem fixed upon a point somewhere above the heads of his audience. Two tira, leather charm pouches, hang from beaded cords around his neck. Beside him rests a great empty turtle shell, upturned to receive the bronze coins and quills of gold-dust he hopes to earn from his listeners.
The crowd stands quietly. There are turbaned men swathed in voluminous johos over cotton trousers, and turbaned women garbed in colorful asokabas that descend from waist to ankle, leaving the rest of the body bare. Children clad after the fashion of the adults squeeze between their elders’ bodies, the better to hear the ko of the new griot. The dry-season sun burns like a torch in the cloudless sky, bathing ebony skin in a sheen of glossy perspiration.
The griot’s tune ends. His listeners stamp their feet on the dusty pave: a sign of approval. Even though no coins or quills have yet found their way into his tortoise shell, the griot smiles. He knows that a man of his calling is first a story teller, no better than second a musician. His ko has served its purpose. Now it is time for him to earn his day’s livelihood.
“I am going to tell a story,” the griot says.
“Ya-ngani!” the crowd responds, meaning “Right!”
“It may be a lie.”
“Ya-ngani.”
“But not everything in it is
