Chicks - Chicks 'N Chained Males Part 26

He whirled on her. "Thatis the b.u.t.t of a man of the Nmboko tribe. And as the Sky G.o.d is my witness, neither I, nor my ancestors, haveever had monkey tails!" He stamped the b.u.t.t of his spear on the ground, slapped his other b.u.t.t, and stood there glaring at her in challenge, and she was not fool enough to contradict him, regardless of what the ancient stories said regarding the ancestors of the Nmboko tribe and their dalliances with Aktebo, the Queen of Monkeys.

Thatshould have been the end of it. A warrior had stood his ground, denounced a mere night-market storyteller, and stamped one b.u.t.t and smacked the other. And as everyone knew, you didn't argue with the guy with the spear.

Unless you were an orisha or a mmoatia. Everyone who heard the stories knew that you didn't argue with G.o.ds or faeries either.

At the man's last word, the beautiful blue gla.s.s eye-bead he wore about his neck shattered, as if the gla.s.sblower had taken it from the kiln too quickly, not allowing it to cure. Yet something was left behind on the string, something black and sorcerous, and Mbutu watched as the dark knot of!num energy uncoiled itself, like a serpent birthing from an egg, pure!num, invisible to the eyes of all but poets and sorceresses, but as both, Mbutu certainly counted. The!num flowed and wavered for a second, then struck in a flash, grounding itself into the warrior's chest like lightning into a tree. At which point the back flap of the his loincloth lifted without the aid of his hands and something long and brown and furry uncoiled itself like . . . well, like nothing half so much as a monkey's tail, like the men of the Nmboko tribe had in ages past, and apparently now well into the present.

The warrior hadn't noticed, or at least, not the tail. He was looking at his chest and the powder of blue gla.s.s across the burn of the!num- strike. "You witch!" he cried. "What have you done to my eye-charm?"

Mbutu paused, licking her lips, wondering how to explain that it wasn't her, she wasn't responsible, and pretty as the talisman had been, the warrior had greater concerns at the moment, when a small child, not knowing the wisdom about men and spears, or the dangers of strange magic, reached out and grabbed the end of the tail.

The warrior screeched like a monkey and jumped in the air, whirling about in a fighting stance, only to find a child. The little girl sat down on the ground, pointed at him and wailed, "Monkey!" while bursting into tears, not yet having learned that it was not wise to pull a monkey's tail, no matter how fuzzy and alluring it might be. And when that tail was attached not to a monkey, but a warrior of the Nmboko tribe,such an action was doubly foolish, especially to those who knew the full account of the "The Monkey's Tale" or "Ufaro and the Furry Temptation."

Which Mbutu certainly did, as both storyteller and sorceress, and she took advantage of the monkey-man's distraction to beat a hasty retreat, fumbling wildly through the tangle of talismans and baubles about her neck, trying to find the necklace of the owl spirit, which, if she worked the charm correctly, would turn her silent and invisible, and hopefully not invite the displeasure of Bwillo, Orisha of Owls, for being invoked without a propitiatory offering of fattened mice.

Unfortunately, this was not yet one of her tales, and Mbutu was far less skilled, or at least less well organized, than Gefghen the Storyteller, aka Gefghen the Sorcerer, who would not only have obese rodents and all other appropriate offerings for the orishas, but would also have a far better filing system for his talismans than simply wearing them on necklaces of different lengths. Or perhaps it was just the fact that he was a man, and had never had b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and so the stories of Gefghen and his Tales of Tales and Sorceries had completely failed to mention what happened to the necklaces of a no-longer-girlish sorceress who ran from a monkey-tailed warrior of the Nmboko tribe while wearing nothing more than a patterned skirt and a light scarf.

Mbutu dodged around the weaver's booth, past the village well, and through the court of Ozomo, the palm-wine merchant, hearing a cacophony of screeches of "Aieee! Pretty lady! Pretty lady!" which were either the wine merchant's less-than-discriminating patrons or else the hundred trained parrots of Fat Etemboko, the bird catcher, who ran the shop next door.

Unfortunately, it was night, and the doors of the courtyard, the ones that led out into the desert, and possible escape, were locked and barred. And Mbutu turned and tried her very best to look small and una.s.suming and hope that the warrior would not notice her behind fifty drunkards, more than half of whom were the bandits that the gates were officially locked to guard against.

Mbutu looked around the bar, at the men and women leaning on the rail behind which Ozomo and his wife ladled watered palm-wine from open crocks, hoping to find a warrior of consummate skill and pa.s.sable honesty, like Temzarro from the Twenty Tales, or Ulata of the Flas.h.i.+ng Spear, who, if the tales were to believed, felled twenty warriors before breakfast without even breaking a sweat. Yet aside from the sudden horrible Miracle of the Monkey's Tail, nothing that had happened that night was like anything from the age of legend, when Mfara and Gefghen and Ulata had walked, and Mbutu only looked from one unfamiliar face to the next . . . until she saw the s.h.i.+mmer of a hundred times a hundred bra.s.s rings and cuffs accentuating the tall and lithesome form of Talisha, the knife-dancer. Talisha, the scarred, who displayed her wounds and raised cicatrices with as much pride as her skill. Talisha who wore no clothing aside from her bangles and the strips of leopardskin she had cut from one of the children of Osebo, the Leopard, with nothing more than her wrist knives, and that when she was twelve and living in the same village as Mbutu.

Talisha was also known as Talisha the Mad, and while so far as Mbutu knew she had never killed twenty warriors before any meal of the day, or even in her lifetime, all Mbutu needed was for her to kill one, after dinner, and she didn't care one way or the other if she broke a sweat. By the orishas, she wouldn't even mind if Talishafailed to kill the man with the monkey tail, just so long as he quit chasing her with the spear.

Mbutu ran behind her. "Bangles!" she hissed, using the pride-name the warrior had chosen early in her career. "Hide me! Hide me and I will pay you well! For the sake of the friends.h.i.+p we shared as girls, hide me!" Talisha looked back, more than a little drunk, and squinted. "Who-Oh, it is you, Baubles," she said, using the taunt-name she and the other wild girls had given Mbutu when she first apprenticed to old Rashna, the village sorceress, and Mbutu had tried, unsuccessfully, to explain the importance of the many beads of her spirit necklaces. "What trouble have you gotten yourself into now?"

This was answered by a scream of "Witch!" and a responding chorus of "Pretty lady! Pretty lady!"

cinching the fact that it had been Etemboko's parrots, or perhaps indicating that Ozomo's wife was not watering the wine as much as she usually did and some man had gottenexceedingly drunk, and could now no more recognize "lady" than he could "pretty."

The Nmboko warrior stood in the middle of Ozomo's court, one hand on his spear, the other pointing directly at Mbutu as he cried again, "Witch!" and the monkey tail curled in the air like an inquisitor's crook which had somehow become entrenched in his b.u.t.tocks.

Talisha stood, her bangles chiming up and down her arms as she stood to her full great height, and she took a drunken step forward as she removed the leather guards from the circular knives she wore on each wrist. "Who is it who is calling my good friend Baubles a witch?" Talisha purred, like a true daughter of the orisha Osebo, and Mbutu was glad because much as Talisha had never been her friend, or even shown any particular kindness to her at all (and in fact, much to the contrary, had often tormented Mbutu until she finally gave up the game as poor sport), Mbutu also had never seen Talisha back down from a fight, or let go of even the slightest excuse to pick one.

The man of the Nmboko tribe stood as proud as he could with the monkey tail kinking his spine. "I am!"

he shouted. "Look what she has done to me!"

Talisha looked him up and down, at last p.r.o.nouncing, "You appear to be a perfectly healthy man of the Nmboko tribe, and I can see nothing wrong with either you or your tail. What did Baubles do? Give you that ugly loin cloth?"

The Nmboko warrior screamed and raised his spear, Talisha immediately falling into a fighting stance, and when the warrior lunged, she knocked the spearhead aside with her bracelets with a chime of bra.s.s.

She then kicked forward with her right ankle-knife, which she had either somehow taken the guard off of or had never put it on in the first place. Regardless, a bright slash ran up the warrior's thigh and down, a long swatch of flesh peeling away from the muscle to dangle from his left knee.

"A pretty mark, monkey-man," Talisha cried. "Let me give you its mate!" She stepped forward with a whip-kick with her left ankle, but he dodged back, then feinted with his spear.

Talisha moved back, laughing. "You will have to try better than that, Nmboko monkey." She shook her shoulders then, making her magnificently scarified b.r.e.a.s.t.s s.h.i.+mmy, taunting him. "Come, try to get a piece of this. There's no sport in a little tongue-wagging sorceress like Baubles. Try yourself with a woman who knows how to dance!"

"Witch!" the Nmboko man screamed, utterly confused as to who or what he was dealing with, and lunged again with his spear.

With a shake of her arm and a spin of her bracelets, Talisha caught the head, half of the bra.s.s bangles looping about the shaft as it thrust forth, the others protecting her arm from the edge of the blade. She grabbed the wood and held it then, tugging against the Nmboko warrior, then executed another snap-kick, the ankle-blade this time contacting the middle of the spear and snapping it in two. The warrior-man was caught unaware, and fell directly on his tail, literally, as Talisha disengaged the half-spear tangled in her bangles and tossed it up to catch in the timbers that roofed Ozomo's winestand.

"What, all you can offer me is that short stump?" Talisha cried, then leapt over the p.r.o.ne warrior and kicked him upside the head.

He did not move. Not even when Talisha grabbed his tail, pulled it straight, then slashed down with her wrist, severing the furry appendage, leaving the Nmboko man with nothing more than a fuzzy stump of a few inches, like a baboon's, which, if rumor had it correct, many of the Nmboko men still had. Talisha took the tail and draped it around her neck like a dancer's boa-a.s.suming that on the day the Sky G.o.d created the boa, he'd not only forgotten the legs, but the scales as well, not to mention a head-then returned to Mbutu. "An interesting breed of enemy you have, Baubles." She sat down at her customary place at the bar and took a swallow of palm wine. "When did you pick up witchcraft?"

"It was not me," Mbutu protested quickly. "I was telling a story when suddenly-bang!-the!num flashed, and the next thing he was wearing a monkey ta- ".

Mbutu broke off as a drunken merchant, wearing a princely das.h.i.+ki and more necklaces and gold rings than Mbutu had acquired in all her years as sorceress, staggered up and put a rude-to-the-point-of-suicidal hand on Talisha's shoulder. "Talented work, pretty lady," he said, feeling her many and beautiful scars. "I could use a pretty lady like you in my household."

Mbutu saw the danger sign. Talisha might be beautiful, but she was beautiful the way a leopard was, and you didn't put your hands on one like that either. But the merchant advertised his wealth like a cobra did its poison, for it was clear that only a fool would kill him, for only a king would be able to afford the death-price his family would demand.

Talisha might be mad, but she was no fool, and knew better than to strike him back. Physically at least.

"Pretty lady?" she inquired, removing his hand from her shoulder. "It would appear to me that it is you, not I, who is the 'pretty lady.' Indeed, you have more necklaces and rings than Baubles and myself combined!"

"Pretty lady! Pretty lady!" shrieked the parrots, and the merchant took his much beringed hands back with an offended sniff, resting them proudly on his many necklaces and tokens of wealth-and Mbutu watched as a blue gla.s.s eye-bead, almost lost in the sea of treasures about his neck, suddenly shattered, and a flash of!num sunk into the merchant's chest. Which began to swell. And swell.

The merchant's chest grew, and his waist slimmed, and his hips grew wider and wider, suited for childbearing, while his eyes became as clear as diamonds, his hair long and black as midnight, and his teeth became remarkably like cowrie sh.e.l.ls. Sea-washed. Without the snails.

The most beautiful woman in the world since Princess Mfara, or perhaps just her reincarnation, looked at her fingers, then touched her face, then touched her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then screamed.

"Pretty lady! Pretty lady!" shrieked the parrots.

The spitting image of Princess Mfara, a.s.suming that Princess Mfara were in the modern age and had taken to wearing men's das.h.i.+kis, looked at Mbutu and Talisha in horror. "What have you witches done to me?" Talisha looked at Mbutu, but after Mbutu did not respond, the warrior replied, "We have done nothing to you, 'pretty lady.' Indeed, if anything, you have done this to yourself. By your impudence, you have attracted the attention of a mmoatia, or perhaps even an orisha, and they, not we, have done this to you."

The merchant, or merchant princess, looked at them in horror as again the parrots shrieked, "Pretty lady!" "Oh woah!" wailed the merchant. "What is to become of me?"

Mbutu thought he had an excellent chance of marrying a prince, or even becoming one of the many wives of a less discerning king, but didn't feel it politic to say so. "My friend Bangles and I," she said with a small side-glance to Talisha, to see if the warrior objected to the familiarity, "we go far back. We have had many great adventures and faced many strange perils together." "Great" and "strange" were of course highly relative terms, but when she was seven and Talisha had been eight, it had seemed a great and strange adventure for the village girls to steal the akua doll from Farmer Naniko's gourd patch and put it in the bride hut of the chieftain's son on his wedding night. "If you were to give us three bags of gold and an elephant tusk, I am certain we could find the witch or mmoatia who worked this magic, or perhaps the orisha you offended, and persuade them to restore you to your proper form."

The mention of money, at least, shocked the merchant back to sobriety. "Three sacks of gold and an elephant tusk? Preposterous! Besides which, how do I know you have the ability to do what you say?"

Talisha waved the b.l.o.o.d.y end of the man-sized monkey's tail in the merchant princess's face. "There was just a man who was upset at suddenly having a monkey's tail like his ancestors and we fixedthat. I'm certain we can fix your problem as well."

"Though it will, of course, take a bit more time," Mbutu added, looking at the princess's ample chest. "I doubt you would want such . . . an expedient . . . solution."

The princess looked at her, then at her own b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then looked away, as if she could somehow pretend they did not exist. "I'm certain I could find cheaper help."

"But not better," Talisha purred back. "And never on such short notice. Though perhaps Baubles here has asked more than you are able to pay? I am familiar with the mercenary trade, and we could settle for what wealth you have on you now, with a sack of gold when we solve your problem. Plus reimburs.e.m.e.nt for incidental expenses."

The merchant princess looked at her hard. "Half my jewelry now, half later. Nothing more."

"Save expenses," Mbutu added.

The princess paused. "Save expenses,"she agreed, then added, "but I expect receipts. And results."

"And you shall have them," Talisha promised.

"Now where," Mbutu asked, "did you get that lovely blue bead charm . . . ?"

Mbutu and Talisha traveled through two more villages, hearing stories of a fat hippo, an ugly stork, and the village braggart whose endowments were now just as grossly exaggerated as he had always claimed.

And always there was a blue bead in the tale, one of superlative beauty and finest craftsmans.h.i.+p, paid in trade for one service or another by an unknown and unremarkable young man, most likely a bandit. "I say a witch is responsible," Talisha insisted, her bangles jangling with the gait of her horse, even beneath the loose cotton robe she wore as protection against the sun, "a witch with a very sick sense of humor."

Mbutu shook her head, wis.h.i.+ng she was able to afford a better beast than a donkey. "Witches don't have such power. One curse, perhaps. Maybe two. But that would be it. A witch who did such magic as we have seen would be dead, or at least invalid for months, and in any case, one would never be this capricious-it would cost him too much. Or her-witches can be female as well, you know. But I say it is a mmoatia. Perhaps a whole band. The Otherfolk are known to play such tricks and have a strange . . .

logic . . . to the way their affairs are conducted. Mmoatia could definitely do what we have seen."

"Perhaps Spider?" Talisha asked, saying the name of the orisha in hushed tones. "It would fit with the stories you tell."

Mbutu shrugged. "Or Hare. But the orishas seldom involve themselves like this." She speculated a bit more, trying to figure out what manner of magic it could possibly be, and then all speculations died in her mind as they crested the next dune and saw the scene before them: a ma.s.sacre. A complete and total ma.s.sacre. A caravan had been working its way across the desert, with horses and mules and camels, except now the sand was dark with blood and bodies lay strewn every which way, mangled and partially eaten, by the teeth of something-many things-huge and powerful.

Mbutu and Talisha paused for a long moment, drinking in the scene, then went down to investigate, a wake of vultures flying up, croaking in protest. Bolts of cloth lay strewn about, along with dried fruit and other trade goods. They both searched in vain for any sign of life until at last Mbutu grew soul-sick and drew forth one of her necklaces. "Oh Abo," she whispered, invoking the python orisha who had blessed the serpentine beads, "if there are any alive here, any at all, show me . . ."

The beads gleamed in the sunlight, and Mbutu let the!num -fire flow through them, feeling the tug, as inexorable as the coils of the python, as sensitive as the taste of one's tongue.

For a long while they lay still, then the string snaked west, pointing across the desert, like the head of Abo after his prey, and Mbutu motioned for Talisha to mount up again.

They traveled for hours, until at last they found a horse, lying dead in the sand, yet unmarked, run to the point of exhaustion and death. And beyond it, a set of footprints. They followed, the gray-green beads guiding the way over dunes until at last they found a man lying unconscious in the sand.

Talisha jumped down and lifted his head, giving him water, and holding him when he screamed. Yet then his eyes cleared, and realizing they were neither vultures nor desert ghouls, but instead his rescuers, the man calmed. "Shaka bless you," he croaked, then accepted more of the water.

"Tell us what happened," Talisha said simply.

"Oh, it was terrible," the man said at last. "Our caravan was beset by bandits."

Talisha raised one eyebrow. "What we saw was not the work of ordinary bandits."

The man nodded. "But they seemed so at first."

"Tell us what happened," Mbutu said, "exactly." After informing them of a number of inconsequentials regarding the journey, the price of dates, and the relative profit to be had in the investment thereof, the man came to the important information: "And then, as we half expected, the suspiciously unenc.u.mbered group of travelers who had offered to let us share their fire, well, they took out their knives and their swords."

"And then?" Mbutu prompted.

"Our guards took out their knives and their swords."

"And then?" asked Talisha.

"Well, our caravan master, and the head of the bandits, looked at the approximate size of each other's forces, and set down to haggling. Standard, everyday business. Until at last they reached an agreement, and our caravan master ritually cursed them all as being the sons of jackals and evil-minded camels.

Nothing out of the ordinary."

Mbutu paused, drinking this in. "And then?"

"And then . . ." the merchant said, s.h.i.+vering in horror, "that's exactly what they turned into. All of them. .

The date merchant was returned to his family in a nearby village, and Mbutu and Talisha were never so heartily sick of the palm-fruits as they were after the twelve feasts in their honor, involving every possible perversion of dates that twenty generations of villagers and date-merchants could devise. There were date pastries, date punch, date salad, date bread, and date-stuffed-everything and everything-stuffed-dates, with all options either marinaded in palm wine, fried in palm oil, or both. And there were yet more horrors as the jackal-camels-or jacamals, as they became known-attacked again and again.

Something, obviously, had to be done. If just to save them from the villagers.

"We must kill them," said Talisha. "They are vicious beasts, but they can be killed."

"Are we talking of the jacamals," Mbutu asked, "or the chefs?"

Talisha paused, considering. "The jacamals," she said at last. "We must kill them. Cut them with knives, trap them with traps, poison them with date punch." She pushed the cup away from herself in revulsion.

"No," said Mbutu, differing with the warrior for once, "we must talk to them. Explain the situation."

The knife-dancer looked at her as if she were mad, then at last said, "Wait, are you talking about the chefs?"

"No, the jacamals." Mbutu simply spread her hands, allowing her rings to flash. "I spoke to the stork and I spoke to the hippo. They are beasts now, yes, but very clever beasts, and the sons of jackals and evil-minded camels are very clever beasts indeed. Besides which, they have the hearts of bandits, and so can be counted on to be greedy. If we explain matters to them in the right fas.h.i.+on, we can count on them to follow their enlightened self interest . . . and ours, as the case may be."

Talisha leaned closer and took another nut-stuffed date, which were as addictive as they were vile, fromthe tray. "Go on, storyteller. I'm listening . . ."

The plan was simple: a wedding feast fit for jackals and evil-minded camels. Chickens were stuffed with dates and roasted, then placed with more dates into a goat and roasted, then the roast goat was stuffed into a sheep (with more dates) and that was roasted too, and the roasted sheep was stuffed into a slaughtered ox, which was smeared with date paste and left out to bake in the sun, abandoned at the edge of the date grove along with Mbutu and Talisha, who sat in hammocks suspended from the tops of the palm trees like large bunches of dates.

The smell was truly incredible, especially when Talisha put date pips into her sling and killed three vultures who wished to crash the feast. Others were discouraged, after which one of the jacamals finally arrived, eyeing the traditional village wedding feast, which was complete in its presentation except for not having been stuffed into a camel and set ablaze with palmwine as the finale.

Mbutu rubbed her feather earplug, sacred to Dars.h.i.+ma, orisha of parrots, and called out in something between the howl of a jackal and the evil braying of a camel: "Welcome, brother. This feast is in your honor."

The jacamal sniffed the air. "What poison did you use, sorceress?"

"No poison," Mbutu wailed back, correcting her accent in the strange jacamal speech, "merely chicken, goat, sheep, rotted beef, and lots of dates. Lots of them."

The jacamal sniffed again. "And to what do I owe this courtesy?"

Mbutu paused, wondering how to render the flowery speech she'd composed into jacamal cries At last she tried: "Honored cousin, I know that the shape you wear now is not the one you were born with.

Moreover, my partner and I have a proposition which we both might find equally profitable, ending with you being restored to your proper form, and all of us becoming exceedingly rich."

The jacamal waggled its long and evil ears and twitched its equally long and evil nose, which was doubly horrible, for it combined a camel's buck teeth with a jackal's fangs. "What do you propose, cousin?"

Mbutu paused, realizing she was playing a long shot, but a reasonable one to try. "First of all, payment. I have it from my sources that you and your brothers recently came into some startling wealth, a great number of beads of finest craftsmans.h.i.+p, blue eyes, such as are commonly used to avoid the gaze of a witch."

The jacamal spat. "Fat lot of good it did us. They obviously didn't work."

Mbutu smiled to herself. They most obviously did, for after a long while of sorcerous speculation, she had realized this: It was the eyes of a witch that held his power, and as such an eye could protect against them. However, if that eye had been stolenfrom a witch, then that eye would be the curse itself, not the protection from it, just waiting for the extra hint of malice to release the curse and aim the strike. For example, an everyday insult like "You fat hippo" or "You sons of jackal's and evil-minded camels." Yet there was no point in telling the jacamal that.

Mbutu waved one hand and demurred. "Ah, but the lay public does not know of the eye-charm's defectiveness, do they? And the rest of those beads will still be quite valuable, if just for craftsmans.h.i.+p alone." The jacamal nodded. "They would. Certainly there'd be enough to pay for our restoration, if you have that power, sorceress."