“With blood,” Naledi says, staring into the mottled meat below her.
“Blood, sometimes. Gold. Herbs. But women like us, we can be more — creative.”
Naledi wishes she had asked her mother what she’d meant, but she’d been served a basket of fried bread, and her mother had let her taste a glass of home-brewed beer. Naledi had fallen asleep drunk, with a pleasant effervescent feeling in her stomach.
“Baboloki! I have your helmet,” she cries now, because she can think of no other offering. The Adze has left behind a trail of trees like broken fingers. A springbok lies flattened along the riverbank. She runs in the direction of the village, following enormous claw-shaped footprints.
“I have the knobkerrie. I have blood. Answer me.”
The swarm of flies floats above her head, unimpressed.
“I can bring you fish. I can bring you a goat. I’ll bring you the Adze, if you just answer me.”
The flies grow in density until they are able to form the silhouette of a human. After a moment, Baboloki’s features emerge from the mass.
“Did you say the Adze?” buzzes St. Baboloki.
Naledi did, but she does not admit it. There had been long, oiled hairs jutting from the Adze’s legs. She cannot remember if she had seen its hooked jaws or only imagined them, strong and sharp like those of a dung beetle.
“Do you want your hat or not?”
“No, no. It looks better on you, and the Adze is the only thing this village has worth offering,” Baboloki says. His body has mostly reformed from the swarm of flies, but his hands still dissolve into humming points. “Sacrifice the Adze, and I will bless this land so that flowers may never grow here again.”
“I don’t know how to kill it,” Naledi says.
“You and the knobkerrie were seeds together. Do what a seed does,” says Baboloki. For a moment, his dark eyes reflect the volcanic red of the blossoms. Naledi had been afraid of the Adze and its long, clicking limbs, but there is something dark and nasty in the hollow of Baboloki’s smiling mouth.
“I will extend the protection of the saints,” Baboloki says, before he tips Naledi’s pith helmet over her eyes, knocks a knuckle against the forehead, and then scatters, droning.
It is not difficult to catch up to the Adze. It moves slowly, pausing to slurp up great mounds of earth. The long barbs on its tongue spear through flowers in the soil. Naledi watches it crush the first three huts at the edge of the village. The air is filled with the snap of wood and bones breaking. Naledi’s knobkerrie feels heavy in her hand, and electrified, like the wetlands after a lightning strike.
“Wait,” Naledi calls after it. “Listen.”
The Adze blinks. Its eyes reflect every facet of the landscape, and for a moment Naledi is filled with vertigo.
“Um, hello,” Naledi says, noticing the soft patch between the Adze’s armored chest and head. She thinks it is very likely that she will die today. Naledi pictures her mother stoking fire over a fallen tree, and wonders if death is the same as wandering into the desert.
“Hello,” says the Adze, as it scoops up more flowers and several goats with its tongue. A hoofed leg slips from its mouth. Around them, men and women with bundles in their arms disappear into the bloodied dust.
“I was wondering if you could answer something for me.”
The Adze drops an antenna toward Naledi’s face and tips the lid of her helmet. Naledi feels as though she has been pushed backward out of her body. The Adze’s buzzing vibrates her teeth.
“If you hurry. The flowers will not be at their ripest for long.”
“Why did you come here, large one? We’ve never seen anything like you before.”
“I go where the flowers go,” says the Adze, and steps forward, trampling a garden. Yams pop up from their tombs.
“There must be flowers elsewhere,” Naledi says. The Adze’s throat wobbles in the soft gap between plates.
“Not as lovely as these,” says the Adze, and it plunders forward into the village.
Naledi lunges after it. Her arms link around the Adze’s fifth leg. She scrambles up, using the hooked rungs of its exoskeleton. The knobkerrie swings from her belt, and she can feel bruises forming before realizing her hip is being struck.
“Stop it. You’re itchy,” the Adze says, as Naledi pulls herself toward its head.
Below them, villagers flee their trembling homes. Naledi sees an arm crushed beneath the Adze’s forked claws.
“You stop it. You’re destroying my home,” Naledi says. They are still a mile from Thaney’s house on the hill, but the flowers have grown heavy and tall, and they droop onto the rooftops. The air is dense with yellow pollen that clogs Naledi’s throat. She imagines it settling in her lungs, and flowers bursting from her open mouth.
Naledi attempts to wedge the knobkerrie into the soft stretch of tissue that connects the Adze’s body to its head. It rears, sending her sliding along the ridges of its abdomen. Nectar pours from the gap between the Adze’s jaws.
“Please don’t do that,” the Adze says, as Naledi scrambles to deliver another blow to its neck. The knobkerrie bounces as if hitting rubber.
The calluses on her palm feel as though they’ve been whittled away. The Adze flicks an antenna in her direction, but Naledi only feels the rush of air that follows. A plan forms in her mind, whole but vague. All hunters attack at the throat, Naledi knows, and she has seen the Adze’s soft trachea expanding and contracting from the ground.
“Listen,” Naledi calls, scrambling toward the Adze’s head. One of the antennae slices through a cloud. “You’re going too fast. You’re going to run out.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that, small thing. The flowers always come back,” says the Adze. It flings its antenna back again, and this time Naledi is able to wrap her arm around it. Sensory hairs scrape Naledi’s stomach. What pollen shakes into her mouth tastes like fruit rind, neither sweet nor bitter, but unquestionably unpleasant.
The Adze wags its head and Naledi falls backward. The sky and flowers briefly mix into a shade of violet. The knobkerrie is bound to her hand tenuously, as if a static charge is all that keeps the wood against her palm. She swings anyway, hoping that if Baboloki has blessed her, then he has also blessed her hands, and they will move against an enemy as if magnetized.
She delivers a blow to the Adze’s throat, but it doesn’t react, except to say, “You’re still around? I thought we had parted ways.”
The pink tongue again unrolls from the Adze’s mouth, as it moves beyond the shattered remains of the marula grove. An escaped bird collides with the Adze during panicked flight. Feathers stick to the nectar on Naledi’s skin.
She lunges for the tongue as it returns to the Adze’s mouth. Naledi is dragged up, catching a protrusion of the Adze’s lower jaw. There is the red of the flowers and then there is darkness that stinks of compost.
We began as seeds, Naledi thinks. She swings thoughtlessly into the softness of the Adze’s mouth, even as suction pulls her downward. The club connects with something spongy, and a moment later daylight thrusts in. Naledi drags herself toward it, but the knobkerrie falls from her palm and tumbles into the darkness of the Adze’s throat.
The Adze retches, sending Naledi rolling forward. Her body swings toward the Adze’s eye, fist ready. It connects, sending octagonal lenses flying from the center of the impact. The Adze stumbles and Naledi falls with it.
Flowers tumble from the sky continuously, like raindrops.
The great creature drops sideways onto the riverbank, and the baboons screech with their heads thrown back. Naledi lands atop its neck. Something viscous and pink splatters against her cheeks. The buzzing briefly lulls, and the world falls silent, aside from the creak of swamp grass bending in the wind.