“Turn her,” Mubaku said to the warriors who were still holding Katisa.
Obediently, the three men positioned Katisa so that her back faced Mubaku. Then one of them used the point of his spear to trace a line in the dust about two paces away from her feet. The other two pulled her muvazi away from her shoulders, baring the skin of her back.
At Mubaku’s behest, a boy fetched him a stick of wood slender and strong enough to have served as a spear-shaft. Gripping the stick firmly in both hands, Mubaku bade the warriors holding Katisa to step aside.
Then he swung she stick against Katisa’s naked back. Wood met flesh with a sound like the strike of lightning against a tree. Pain seared through Katisa’s body. Her knees buckled and a scream struggled to escape her throat. But outwardly, she neither struggled nor cried out. The crowd muttered is approval, for refusal to acknowledge pain was the way of the Ilyassai.
Again, Mubaku swung. Again, the stick struck. Again, the pain. Again, no sound escaped Katisa’s lips.
But this time, the impact of her father’s blow drove her a step forward. As the next blow landed, she tried to plant her feet more firmly. For if Mubaku succeeded in forcing her to cross the line in the dust, even worse punishment would ensue.
Mubaku was a powerful man, and the blows from his stick pushed her ever forward. Her legs weakened, and her knees became numb. The smooth skin of her back became a grid of swollen welts, some of which were beginning to bleed. The scream caught in her throat was forcing its way ever upward, and she was losing the struggle to dam the tears threatening to burst from her eyes.
Only a moment before the tears would flow; before the awful pain would rip an outcry loose; before her feet staggered the final inches across the spear-cut line, the stuck shattered in Mubaku’s hands – and the beating was done.
Katisa heard the sound of splintering wood and saw part of the stick fly past her. Her back was composed of layers of agony, each one worse than the last. Darkness eddied around the periphery of her vision. She could no longer feel her legs. Yet she knew she must not fall across the line. If she did, the phenomenal fortitude she had demonstrated would mean nothing...
Her unyielding resolve could carry her no farther. She felt herself reeling to the ground. With a final, heart-wrenching effort, she twisted her body so that she fell on her side. Even so, the impact of her landing jarred her welted back, and sheer agony stitched through her body. Then she lay still and unconscious ... only a hairsbreadth away from the furrow in the dust.
Grim pride showed in Mubaku’s eyes as he looked down at his daughter. At least some of his family’s honor had been salvaged. Yet even as his foot erased the line beside which Katisa lay, a voice spoke deep inside his soul:
Would you have done this if Junyari were still alive?
He had no answer.
In the meantime, the Death-Drum pounded a doleful dirge for Karamu long into the night. For Karamu ... and Katisa.
THE BLACK BLANKET OF night lay above the Tamburure, broken only by the wan light of Mwesu the moon and the scattered stars. In the manyattas of the Kitoko clan, night-fired burned like red-orange eyes, while the ngombes milled somnolently in their thornbush enclosure. No one stirred other than the night-sentries and the boys whose duty it was to tend the cattle.
It was the night of the second day since the death of Karamu. Katisa had finally fallen into a fitful slumber. It was not the heartache of her lover’s passing that disturbed her sleep this night. Nor was it the pain that lingered from the beating her father had given her. Nor was it the certainty that Chitendu would be coming for her the nest day that pulled moans from her mouth and sent shudders through her limbs.
The pain in her back had become bearable – partly because she was Ilyassai, and partly because the welts had been healed by the balms and poultices of Mizuna, the Kitokos’ herb-woman. As the oibonok practiced sorcery with spells and incantations, so the herb-woman worked healing-magic with roots and leaves. Many were the warriors and women who owed their lives to Mizuna, who was so old that even the clan’s elders were as children to her.
It was a dream that troubled Katisa’s sleep this night.
She was a bodiless soul, floating amid a milieu of vague colors and indistinct shapes. She felt nothing. She understood nothing. She could hardly even recall who she was ...
Suddenly, her surroundings snapped into sharp focus. She was suspended somehow between the bright blue bowl of the sky and the flat plain of the Tamburure, a sea of yellow grass dotted with acacia and baobab trees. Twenty Ilyassai warriors strode through the grass. Straighter, taller, prouder than all the rest strode a figure she recognized as Karamu. Against her will, she drifted closer to Karamu, until his fiercely handsome face blotted out everything else.
Abruptly, the focus shifted. Again, she was floating above the warriors. She saw Chitendu raise the spiraled horn to his lips and sound the challenge to the lions. The bestial clarion boomed ... and was answered by the roar of a huge, black-maned monarch of the plain.
Karamu stepped away from the other warriors, and glided toward the great, tawny predator stalking through the tall grass ...
Katisa knew what was coming next. She tried to shut out the sight of Karamu’s impending doom. But she had no eyelids to close. She wanted to scream a warning to Karamu, who now crouched and tensed his spear-arm as Ngatun’s tufted tail lashed in anticipation. But she had neither mouth nor voice.
