Nomvula

27 - The Shoots of Life

The Royal Diviner pulled back the wooden gate of the kraal and Nomvula entered. The earth beneath her feet was hard and hot from the mid-morning sun, and with her fifty cattle out grazing, the space was as wide and empty as the foyer in the King's abandoned manse. The sun had long dried up the smell of the cow pats littering the earth, but the wall of twisted thorn branches ringing around the kraal had their own scent, of dry wood that had absorbed years of pipe smoke and cow hide, cooking fires and the fumes of fermenting beer.

In every great stead, the kraal was the home beside the house, where the Old Ones communed in their eternal watch until the petty matters of the world called them forth. When Nomvula reached the furthest point of the thorn wall, she spread her borrowed blanket on the ground and knelt, for she was bringing the world's problems to her ancestors. She could not help looking warily at the long, dark thorns of the kraal's wall, feeling each like the fine points of hairs against her skin, exciting her blood and sending nausea crawling up her throat.

"Old Ones of the Sunlands," the Royal Diviner announced, calling forth Nomvula's ancestors, before acknowledging the King's own. "Old Ones of the Hundred Hills, from whom came Sonele, first King of these lands. Before you stands Kethiwe, cousin-sister to Sonele, law-sister to Nomvula."

Though the Royal Diviner's voice rang loud on this empty side of the manse, Nomvula tuned out her declaration of intent to the ancestors. The invisible hands on her shoulders were heavier now, and like a ray of first light on a cold morning, she felt the warmth of her oldest and greatest ancestor against her back. Lang'engatshoni. The Unsetting Sun, who had married Nomkhonto and with their union birthed the first Sunspear.

"Sunlanders, I turn to you," the Royal Diviner said once she had begged forgiveness for not approaching the kraal with offerings of drink. She turned her face upward, but not even the Sun's rays could shift the deep shade over her face. "Here is your daughter, Nomvula, who carries both the blood of the Spears and the Suns, as has every freeborn child from her back to the days of Lang'engatshoni and Nomkhonto."

Nomvula veiled her eyes as she focused on the heat spreading around her spine, the spreading burn of an Old One's attention. Few had the means and gift to keep their ancestors as close as she did with celebration and remembrance, and even fewer were as sensitive to their attention. Only the Royal Diviner felt them more intimately, and she coated her skin in the clay of the distant Red River to dull the connection enough to remain sane.

With the nails of her left hand, the Royal Diviner scraped the mud from the left side of her face, leaving four long lines of yellow-brown skin. She winced as Lang'engatshoni's heat touched her, and after sucking in a breath through her teeth to keep herself from shaking, a tear ran down her cheek and neck, a single jewel reflecting light in a night sky.

It was a long while before the Royal Diviner gathered herself. When she did, her voice was the low, hoarse groan of a woman in labour. "Twenty years ago, Nomvula came to Sonele a young but soiled bride. Before that, she spent her first twenty years in your native Sunlands, carrying the soul of the Sunspear in her blood, warring in your name. Though she has spent half her life repenting for those days, I feel the pride you hold for her still."

Nomvula's spine stiffened. She turned so that she was kneeling and facing the middle of the kraal. She could not bear the fire leaning into her back, nor the thorns in her face.

"But Nomvula was soiled because by the time King Sonele came to court her, she was heavily pregnant with a freeborn child," the Royal Diviner continued. "Now, in the Sunlands, a child is a union, but in the Hundred Hills, union must be made before the child. Nonetheless, I was there when Nomvula went into labour. I did not approve of the child, but all the same I wept as she lay still and white on the birthbed. I sensed the great soul within her that had died, the soul of the Sunspear, passed from mother to child to grave. Stand, Nomvula."

Though she ruled the Hundred Hills, in all things spiritual, Nomvula was second to the Royal Diviner, so she obeyed. Her thighs burned, and the recounting of her history made her stomach lurch, like biting into a worm-bored apple.

"It was I who insisted the child be buried in the Hundred Hills," the Royal Diviner continued, "in the shadow of the King's house, so I could tend the grave with gold and ash to keep flesh witches and false doctors from such potent flesh. Even in stillbirth, I insisted the birth chord be dried and not severed, so that the child could never experience a cut in the flesh through which the spirit of the Sunspear could take possession of her."

Nomvula's left hand went to the hardened paste over the scratch on her littlest right finger. Her throat was thick with bile at the thought of her almost forgotten years as the Sunspear being turned over like grave soil. The Sunspear had died with her first daughter. If the demon had found her again – and even in her ancestral kraal, she refused to call that spirit of her descendants anything but a demon – she would not remember any time spent in its possession. But any time she tried to deny it, there was the account Khaya gave of her scuffle with Dumani, and the fact that the General himself feared a demon of the same name in his lands.

If... Ancestors be kind, if she truly was harbouring the Sunspear again, there would be no purging it. Her only choice would be to beg to every generation of Old One she knew to suppress that which they were most proud of.

The Royal Diviner scraped the clay from the right side of her face, then ran all her nails down her neck, along her brow, across her hands. As she groaned, her voice rose a little from its deep pit, but it gained a paralysingly familiar timbre that rattled Nomvula's spine. What are you doing? 

"If the spirit of the Sunspear is in her, it cannot be purged, only beaten down whenever it rises, until it is too tired to rise again." The Royal Diviner's brown eyes lightened to honey. Her voice was now that of an Old One speaking through mortal flesh. "Come forth, Sunspear, and be laid down by the power of Sonele's lineage."

"Khetiwe! Don't!" Nomvula flew forward with her hands outstretched to cover the Royal Diviner's near-naked face, to block off the skin through which her ancestors took possession of her body.

Her hands clamped around Nomvula's wrists with iron strength. Her gaze alone pressed down on the Queen like a stone on a toad, then it lifted as she looked over Nomvula's shoulder.

No.

"We lay the Sunspear to sleep in this kraal."

Nomvula's breath squeezed out of her chest as she was pushed with bruising might into a wall of waiting thorns.