The slight tremble in his right hand.
Father, save me.
He could see some things more clearly now. The bodies of the two naked natives—one an elderly man, the other a young woman—dead on their perches on either side of the gate. He found that he couldn’t process this madness with reason, so he released his attempt to do so and walked on.
Down the hill. All the way to the gate, keeping his eyes forward so that he wouldn’t have to look at the dead body on either side.
He was wondering how he would enter the village when the gates began to swing out, each pushed by a warrior. Like a blossoming flower, the Warik stronghold opened to him.
And yet there was no beauty here that he could see.
Still he walked, arms limp by his sides, breathing deliberately as he passed through the gate and into the village.
The wide path was packed down the center, muddy along the edges. Round huts had been built on stilts in rows set back ten or fifteen paces. At least one human skull bleached by the sun hung above the entrance to each hut.
A long line of warriors had stationed themselves on either side of the path. All were armed with spears or axes, some with steel machetes. Their faces were painted in blacks and reds and they wore bands on their foreheads, arms, and legs. To a man they stared at Stephen with round, white eyes, as though dead.
They didn’t show any signs of hostility. They did not scowl or shout or lift their weapons. These were warriors enslaved by fear and uncaring of all but their own survival. They were only funneling him toward the one he’d come to see.
Kirutu.
And his mother.
Slave of Kirutu.
He was seeing a part of himself, he thought. This place was only a much larger version of his own costume, determined to protect what it understood as life.
This was darkness. And yet he couldn’t identify with the darkness. He felt misplaced. A bird in the sea.
Villagers stripped of hope were exiting their huts and loitering, watching. Hugging their bodies, as if this too might offer them some protection.
Did they know who he was? Had they seen other white men or women in the eighteen years since his mother had given her son to Shaka and herself to Kirutu?
Stephen wasn’t sure what he was meant to do, so he did nothing but walk. Forward. Headed directly for a second fence that surrounded a tall structure at the end of this long warrior-lined path.
Lela had been right, he thought. They’d known he was coming.
A small naked child hanging on to the thigh of one of the warriors pointed her stubby finger up at Stephen and asked a question, which the man ignored. Several other children were hurrying through the village behind the warriors, eyes wide with wonder. They were too young to realize that they were enslaved.
Like a child, Stephen, Shaka said. Always, like a child.
These were the first he’d ever seen. Such wonder in tiny bodies, clinging to innocence, still unaware of the madness lurking in their own minds, waiting to overtake them.
He walked on feet of clay now, separate from all that his eyes saw. Many women of all shapes and heights gathered, some supporting children hanging off their bodies, others peering around huts, afraid.
An older man with graying hair and a toothless smile squatted between two huts. Stephen stopped. Here he felt a momentary bond. The man’s grin was, like Stephen, an anomaly.
One of the warriors grunted and waved his ax at the looming fence fifty paces on. They wanted him to keep moving. He was expected.
He resumed his walk, feeling more disconnected from the strange forms around him with each step. And he began to understand why Shaka had said this would be his most difficult test.
To walk among men. For this task Stephen suddenly felt unequipped.
A dead body hung from a tree limb—a young man, limp at the end of a rope that had been tied around his neck and pulled over a thick branch high above.
At the base of that tree sat a man who was missing an arm. The stump was wrapped in bloodied leaves. And yet the children near him paid neither the wounded man nor the limp body any mind. They were interested only in Stephen.
He swallowed back a flood of emotions and walked on.
The space between the huts began to fill with more onlookers staring dumbly at him, the white man dressed in a lap-lap, bearing no weapons, walking freely to his fate at Kirutu’s hand.
But Stephen did not belong to their master—he had his own. And Kirutu had no power over his.
The Tulim village his mother had written of had been orderly and beautiful, abounding with laughter and song, clean and ornate. That world was gone.
Instead he was surrounded by death, the smell of feces and rotting flesh ripe in the air. Somewhere deep within his mind, the sound of distant screaming returned and with it a single, simple question.
What if I do forget?
And then another question, even as he approached the second fence that circled Kirutu’s stronghold.
Forget what exactly? Which part?
Because suddenly there was so much to remember.
The gate to the second fence swung open, and Stephen was greeted by the sight of a wide, manicured courtyard. It surrounded an expansive rectangular structure built of hardwoods, roofed with thatched palm leaves.
These were the grounds of royalty.
No fewer than two hundred warriors stood around the footing of what could only be Kirutu’s palace. Another twenty lined each side of the path leading up to the structure.
Stephen walked through the gate, heard it latch behind him, and stopped. Ornate carvings of faces and spirits, many stained in reds and blacks with touches of yellow, covered the building’s hewn timber walls. A dark entrance opened into the structure at the top of sweeping steps.
All of this Stephen saw at a glance, but it was the warriors who drew his attention. To a man these were stronger than those outside the courtyard. The red and black markings on their bodies and faces had been drawn with more care, and many wore colorful feathers in their headbands.
They did not look at him, they glared. They did not merely stand, they were poised, tall, with deeply defined muscles. They did not speak, they screamed, not with their throats, but with their hearts.
They screamed fear. And hatred.
This challenge could break you, Stephen.
The thought surprised him. Nothing could break him, of course, and yet he felt that this challenge might, and this more than anything disturbed him.
Do not forget, Stephen.
Forget what?
Who he was…but who was he here? A boy in a man’s body, momentarily lost in a sea of rage and insanity. Why had Shaka sent him here?
To find his mother. She would know what to do.
Or was he to tell her what to do?
Stephen took three more steps before a warrior to his right stepped out of line, closed the distance between them, and struck him on the shoulder with a club, jarring his bones.
He staggered to the side and righted himself, momentarily stunned. The man glared at him as if expecting him to speak.
But to speak what?
Another blow struck him—a warrior from behind had swung a stick at his lower back. Pain swept up his spine.
He turned to the man, wondering why they were hitting him. Was he doing something they disapproved of? He posed no threat to them.
“Do you stand like a god in his courtyard?” the second man who’d struck him yelled.
Another stick slammed into the backs of his legs, just below his knees, and this time Stephen’s instincts got the better of him. He leaped forward, spinning to ward off any further blows, thinking the next one might snap his bones.