Mgaru was well aware of Mkumbo’s courage. The man had once stalked and slain a leopard turned man-eater. What was it, Mgaru wondered, that could so reduce a man like Mkumbo?
Seizing the hunter by the arm, Mgaru attempted to shake some sanity into him.
“Mkumbo!” he shouted. “What are you trying to tell us, man?”
Mweyzo, who had pushed his way back to the dock when he heard the disturbance, also yelled at Mkumbo.
“What is it, hunter?” the diop demanded. “Are we under attack?”
Mkumbo’s eyes cleared. When he spoke, his voice was a hoarse croak, as though his throat had been worn raw by shrieking.
“They come,” he said. “Like an army of giants, they come, destroying everything in their path ...”
“What comes?” Mweyzo demanded. “Elephants?”
“No, not elephants,” Mkumbo cried, his voice rising again. “Piobo! A herd of piobo, coming this way!”
At the sound of that name, a hush fell upon the Bagara. The piobo was a creature even closer to legend than the nsanga or dilali. The “elephant’s mad cousin” was the way the piobo was commonly identified. Mindless rampage, utter destruction – those were the attributes of the piobo.
In the sudden quiet, heard what their talk had masked before ... a growing, thunderous rumble; a beat like ten thousand war-drums reverberating through the forest, punctuated by the trumpets of a horde of demons ...
Terror stabbed the hearts of the Bagara when the first of the nightmare beasts crashed out of the forests and into the shambas. Bulky, barrel-shaped bodies; massive, columnar legs; python-thick trunks – in those attributes, the piobo did, indeed, resemble the elephant. But the piobo stood a man’s height above the tallest of elephants. And instead of curving outward from the upper jaw as in an elephant, the piobo’s tusks jutted downward from their lower jaws.
Their shaggy coats were the color of mud, and their ears were small and round rather than large and triangular like an elephant’s. Their tiny red eyes glared with madness as they marched forward, oblivious to the puny obstacles presented by the shambas. More than two-score piobo thundered toward the town. The ground rocked beneath them.
The Bagara stared in open-mouthed astonishment at the immense wall of flesh bearing down on them. Behind the piobo, the shambas were smashed flat. The sudden realization that the piobo were heading directly toward them snapped the paralysis that had gripped the Bagara. Instantly, the town became a chaos of people rendered as mindless by fear as Mkumbo had been. The Bagara had driven marauding elephants fro their shambas before. Lone elephants, however, were as nothing next to the mass of piobo. Even the boldest of the Bagara fled before the oncoming behemoths.
As the trumpeting piobo began to crash through Bagara houses as if they were mere heaps of straw, a large number of men, women and children headed for the river. Others bolted for the patches of woodland flanking the town. And some, terrified beyond rationality, sought the dubious shelter of their houses of wood and thatch.
Those who stayed in their houses died when the rampaging monsters smashed the structures with their tusks and bodies. Some of the ones who fled for the woods were crushed like insects beneath the piobos’ churning feet. It was at the river, however, that the carnage was greatest.
Maddened with fright, the kibokos threw their riders from their backs and attempted to flee the first piobo that reached the river. They were too slow. The piobo, twice the weight of a hippopotamus, trampled and gored the towing-beasts as easily as they did the humans who milled in panic between the piobo and the river. The tusks of the piobo were splashed with blood as they stabbed downward in mad frenzy.
During the first rush to reach the river, Zuriye and Mgaru had been separated. Only sheer good fortune had spared Zuriye from being trampled along with the others when the first wave of piobo splashed into the water. She stood rooted by horror, her mind clouded with unreasoning fear.
Then a loud wail, rising above the trumpeting of the piobo and the cries of the dying, penetrated that cloud. Turning toward the sound, Zuriye quickly discovered its source: a small child left behind in the panic and confusion. With a start of dismay, Zuriye realized the child was standing stock-still in the path of a piobo that had become separated from the rest of the herd.
Unmindful of the risk she was taking, Zuriye hurried toward the screaming child. Scooping the small body into her arms, she scampered out of the way of the piobo’s ponderous feet.
But the small, blazing eyes of the piobo had detected the brief flash of Zuriye’s motion. With an agility frightening in a beast of such immense weight, the piobo wheeled toward the fleeing woman. Noticing a pile of wreckage that had once been a house, Zuriye dropped the child behind the rubble, out of the piobo’s sight. Then she raced off in a different direction, praying that the gods of Komeh lend wings to her feet – or grant her a swift, painless death.
The ground trembled behind her as the piobo pounded forward. She could hear its enraged bellowing drawing nearer, nearer ... and the trees were too far away. She screamed when she felt the tip of the piobo’s trunk brush against her back.
Then she heard a sudden squeal of pain. And the thundering footfalls turned away from her. Zuriye stopped running, turned – and gasped in consternation when she saw Mgaru tormenting the behemoth.
Mgaru was using his spear as a prod, jabbing it into the piobo’s flanks and dancing out of danger as the beast sought to trample him. His thrusts were far from lethal ... but they did serve to distract the piobo. Ducking under a sweep of the piobo’s trunk, Mgaru shouted: “Run for the trees, Zuriye! I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up!”
Zuriye knew he was right, and she shivered at the thought of the sacrifice the young Bagara
