Contritely, Babakar released his hold on her arm. Before he could say anything further, Amma spun on her heel and strode stiff-backed and silent to their dwelling. Babakar followed – but only after one last, despairing glance at his twice-ruined wassa-field.
Amma remained uncommunicative while they gathered their few belongings, mostly Babakar’s. As they ate a supper of millet cakes and thin stew, Babakar spoke encouragingly of the possibilities that awaited them in the cities of the south. He could put his war-skills to use as guardsman to a Merchant Lord, or even the Emperor, he reasoned. And the Merchant Lords were always seeking women to peddle their goods for them beneath the huge, multicolored awnings of the market squares.
Since the time of the First Ancestors, the market had been the province of women, and an attractive one like Amma would find little difficulty finding a place in a square. Perhaps the loss of their crop was not as disastrous as it seemed, he reassured.
Amma was indifferent to his enthusiasm. After the sun sank in a crimson blaze beyond the horizon, and they prepared to retire for the night, she rebuffed Babakar’s advances, keeping her asokaba wrapped firmly in place as she curled close to the edge of the sleeping-mat.
When Babakar reached to touch her shoulder, the skin felt cold before she flinched away. It was as though the fire and tenderness of night before had never occurred.
Anger stirred in Babakar as his ardor ebbed. Then the flash of resentment faded as quickly as it had come. The abuse Amma had endured since the coming of the Sussu night have driven another person over the brink of madness. The destruction of the wassa-field by the gazelles must have seemed to her yet one more in an endless series of calamities.
Though she might prefer to battle the demons of the past alone this night, Babakar vowed that when morning came, Amma would know that she need never again face them alone. Thus resolved, he drifted into a deep slumber that remained undisturbed when Amma slid quietly from the sleeping-mat and melted into the shadows outside the doorway ...
HARD HANDS SHOOK BABAKAR out of sleep. His eyes flew open; bleary darkness and shadowy shapes swam before him as he was hauled roughly to his feet. Alertness came in a rush as the intruders hustled him out of the doorway to his dwelling.
“What is this?” he shouted hoarsely.
The indignant words that were to follow died in his throat at the sight that greeted him in the moonlight.
Starkly silhouetted in the pale glare stood Kuya Adowa. Her hand was clenched firmly on the tira-pouch dangling between her breasts, and her face bore an expression of wrath and hatred. Behind her, several of the neighboring farmers stood in a tight circle, surrounding ... Amma.
They were armed with staves and long daggers. Two of them carried torches. Quick glances to his left and right confirmed that it was Mwiya and Atuye who firmly pinioned Babakar’s arms.
Enraged, Babakar surged strongly against his captors’ grasp.
“Damn you!” Babakar shouted. “You dare to invade a man’s house and drag his woman from her bed? Are you Sanghai or Sussu?”
That insult stung Atuye into delivering a sharp blow to the side of Babakar’s head.
“You know damn well she wasn’t in your house, iri Sunkulu,” Atuye growled as Babakar staggered. “We caught her on her way from the field of Falil iri Nyadi.”
Babakar froze, his instinct to continue struggling overridden by shock. He had assumed that Amma had been torn from his side moments before he had been awakened.
“Amma ... is this true?” he asked.
She did not reply. Her head was bowed; he could not see her eyes.
Abruptly, Kuya Adowa spoke.
“Let him go,” she said. “This isn’t his fault.”
“What isn’t my fault?” cried Babakar.
“You should have come to the Council of Elders, Babakar,” Kuya Adowa said with a note of pity in her voice.
“Why?”
“We decided that the farmers whose fields had escaped destruction would guard their crops tonight to drive away the gazelles, should they return. Falil, here, was one of those who kept watch. Tell Babakar what you told us, Falil.”
Falil, whose age could not have been more than eighteen rains, stepped shyly from the knot of people around Amma. His eyes seemed to reflect the moonlight in his dark face as he spoke.
“I watched my family’s field from a tree that grows near it, so that I’d be better able to see the gazelles coming,” he said. “For a long time, nothing happened. I was about to fall asleep when I heard something coming into the field. I thought it might be the gazelles. But when I looked, I saw her.”
He jerked his head toward Amma, not daring to look at her. His fear of her was obvious.
“She didn’t see me, though,” Falil continued. “I was about to climb down and ask her what she was doing in my field, when she pulled her turban off her head. I saw the moonlight flash off something in her hair. Then she took off her asokaba and rolled on the ground ...”
With a bellow of outrage, Babakar leaped at the youth. Atuye and Mwiya had not released their hold on him, though, and they dragged him back.
“She didn’t see me!” Falil cried, his eyes wide with fright. “She rolled and rolled, and she changed. When she got back to her feet, she wasn’t a woman anymore. She was a gazelle!”
“This is madness!” roared Babakar. “Have you people lost your senses, to listen to stories a child wouldn’t believe?”
“I know what I saw!” the younger man flared. “She was a gazelle. She raised her head and gave a cry like nothing I’ve ever heard before. After that, she stood still ... for how long, I do not know. Then I heard a rumble of hooves, and a rustle in the wind, and suddenly a whole herd of gazelles was in the field. There were scores of them,
