Nomvula

40 - The Glass Shell

Now, twenty bachelors sat along the curved walls, their eyes hard as the thick glass that trapped them. Their shackles tinkled against the floor, metal on glass. Dumani was strapped to the black iron beam in the middle of the cell, and he was smiling. She had not been thinking of him just then, but when their eyes met, that smile faltered the smallest touch.

"You struck my daughter," Nomvula said, working to gather thoughts and words.

"Oh, but Queen, I never lifted a hand to the Princess Asanda."

"To the heart of influence, the spear of consequence." The Genera's voice had echoed off the walls, Nomvula's did not. She found enough focus to concentrate on the raised angle of his chin. "When you lead armies to battle, it is the spears, swords, and arrows of others that work, but the General who claims the victory. It is the same in defeat. This is law."

Dumani found enough give in his shackles to shrug. "It is Hundred Hills law."

"And on what land were you arrested? The man who swung the club under your influence, did he strike a Princess of the Inner Plains? The Elephant Plains? And when you are brought to trial, is it not a court of the Hundred Hills that will condemn you?"

Some light entered his eyes as he caught her deliberate choice of words. "Condemn? The club was owned by your daugher's own guardsman, the bachelor who struck her was in the throes of strong herbs, and drunk, and incited by your daughter's words, not mine. For a woman working on such flimsy evidence, you make a great assumption about my fate."

"The fist does not make assumptions about the fate of the berry in its grasp. It knows only what will happen when it stops worrying about staining its palm and decides to squeeze."

The General put sweet innocence in his smile, if only to add bitterness to his words. "Have I stained your palms, Queen?"

Light flashed across Nomvula's vision like lightning striking. In the brief flash, she saw under the General's skin, saw the strong muscles of his heart, the decade-old cracks and knits on his bones, the threads of his nerves and the still-sleeping tumour by his left temple. It would only take a touch, a word, a little cut on her skin to bring the Sunspear into the worldly plane to awaken the seed-sized ball of death there. When the light faded, she was looking just above Dumani's left eye. When she looked down at them proper, those eyes belonged to Khaya, as dark as wild honey.

"Stained is a good word," she said softly. "Now, if you're done pretending the forty other lungs in here aren't burning away what little air came through the door with me, I would like to bargain for my son's life."

**

The clay avatar that was Anathi sat halfway down the stairwell, ready to jump down if called upon, but her attention was split. Only the most immediate, physical parts of her being were focused on the Prince at the bottom of the stairwell. She smelled the salt of the sweat drying on his neck, heard his slow breathing rasp up the earthen walls, a wind-whisper over his heart's thunder. Some of that basic consciousness was rationed out elsewhere, too: the conversations while men rebuilt the kraal, grandmother milling flour under a palm tree to ease her sore heart, the leopard prince silently praying in the guesthouse.

Maybe one fifth focused on all that. Another fifth stayed in the clay ceilings of the hallways, absorbing conversation like thatch locking in the soot of a cooking fire. All of these she would mould into a vision to be massaged into the Queen's dreams that night.

Three fifths of her attention, however – for it took that much to see further than the shadow of her own hill – was trained at the foot of First Hill, where the wind slowly blew gold flakes and ash from the untended grave hidden there. The ash, when unbalanced by the man-magic in the gold, was to ward against worms and anything else that might disturb what was part grave and part prison. Gold and ash to keep things from coming in. Under the earth were heavy iron chains that had been bound around the flesh of a stillborn foetus. Iron to keep a thing from coming out.