Quickly, Zuriye scanned the littered ground. She spotted a pointed pole that could serve as a spear. She picked it up, then advanced slowly on the ill-matched battlers.
Mgaru saw her coming, and grimaced. Then he leaped onto the piobo’s flank, holding on by a handful of lank brown hair. Tightly gripping his spear in one hand, he scaled the beast’s side as though it were a living mountain. The piobo swung its trunk, but Mgaru was already out of reach of the blow as he climbed onto the monster’s back. Stomping about in wide circles, the piobo bellowed in frustration as it attempted to shake Mgaru loose.
Zuriye could only stand back, out of the piobo’s reach. The behemoth was moving so quickly that she would be risking Mgaru’s life as well as her own if she attempted to wound the beast with her makeshift weapon. Wide-eyed with admiration and dread, Zuriye watched as Mgaru crawled along the piobo’s back. Again, the thick trunk lashed at him. He shifted his body to avoid the blind groping.
Finally, Mgaru reached his objective: the massive head of the piobo. Grasping the beast’s flapping ear, he leaned at a perilous angle, drew back his spear-arm, and plunged half the length of the weapon through the piobo’s eye.
The piobo squalled in mindless agony as Mgaru pushed his spear even deeper into the blood-gushing socket. The beast’s cries went unheeded by its fellows, for the rest of the herd had long since forded the Zaikumbe and crashed into the forest on the other side, pursuing a manic journey to a destination not known even by them.
Brain pierced by Mgaru’s weapon, the piobo uttered a final shriek before it stiffened and began to fall. Mgaru moved to spring clear of the body as it toppled. But as he leaped free, his foot caught on the end of the spear-shaft protruding from the piobo’s eye.
Arms flailing in desperation, Mgaru hit the ground. The immense body of the piobo followed. The fear Mgaru had so successfully held at bay was etched sharply on his face as he tried to escape the shadow of the falling piobo. Before he could get away, the full weight of the piobo struck, obliterating him from view. He didn’t have the time even to utter a single death-cry.
Zuriye’s own cry of anguish ripped the air as she rushed toward the looming, inert bulk of the piobo. Of Mgaru, she saw nothing save for a rill of blood seeping from beneath the gigantic carcass. As Zuriye sank to her knees and wept bitterly, the rill swiftly became a stream.
SLOWLY, THE SURVIVING Bagara trickled back to the ruins of their town. They picked their way through wrecked dwellings; searching for spouses, children, friends. The central area was littered with the corpses of Bagara who had been too slow to avoid the feet of the piobo. The docks and the mtumbwis were now nothing but shattered sticks of wood. The bodies of the kibokos and their riders had long since floated down the river.
As the numbness of shock subsided, the survivors began to recognize the faces of the dead. A dolorous chorus of mourning began to drift upward toward the sun. Loudest of all was the lamentation for Mweyzo, who had died in a vain attempt to rescue a relative.
Other dazed Bagara wandered toward the shambas. The crops were destroyed, mashed flat against the earth. There would not be time for another planting before the dry season began.
Slowly, a crowd began to gather around the carcass of the piobo. They saw the blood staining the ground. Those who had most quickly recovered their wits realized who it was that had slain the behemoth. Some had even witnessed Mgaru’s deed. Staring at the kneeling, silver-turbaned figure of Zuriye, they also began to guess why it was that Mgaru had died ...
Then a loud, demented shriek jolted the Bagara from their dark musings. They shuddered, for atop all the other catastrophes of this day, Ajoola the Witch Smeller was among them again.
Ajoola seemed to have undergone a transformation. No longer did he grimace and bound and caper. But his face was still repellently grotesque as the skin around his cut-away nose quivered like that of a sniffing dog. In his hand, he held the staff of the diop. As he spoke, his voice boomed through the silence that had greeted his arrival.
“Who warned you that your doom was upon you?” he demanded.
“Ajoola,” a few voices responded half-heartedly.
“Who told you what you must do to prevent the doom from falling?”
“Ajoola.” More voices spoke this time.
“Who should you have listened to, when others led you down the pathway to death?”
“Ajoola!” Many more voices spoke this time, as the Bagara who had taken the Witch Smeller’s side in the dispute over Zuriye joined the chorus.
“Who, then, should be the diop of Bagara now that Mweyzo and Mgaru are dead?”
A strained moment of silence followed those words. Even now, with their town and fields demolished and more than half their people dead, no one cared to be first to shout the name of Ajoola. Even his staunchest supporters considered him mad, and therefore dangerous despite his holy status.
Then a hoarse, almost inhuman voice roared a response.
“Ajoola! Let Ajoola be diop! Ajoola!”
Later, no Bagara would admit to having been the one who had uttered those fateful words. Now, though, they one-by-one joined the chant until it became a deafening crescendo. Some were Ajoola’s supporters. Others, in their current state of disorientation, were responding to an unconscious need for a strong voice to follow, or something to divert their thoughts from the full magnitude of the disaster that had befallen them. It was as though there was power in the very syllables of the Witch Smeller’s name ...
“Ajoola! Ajoola! Ajoola!”
Then a new, strident voice knifed through
