Nomvula

43. The Colliding Stars

Despite that bushfire in his eyes, Ndoda broke into a smile as he approached, rein in hand. "Ma, I'm back."

"I see that. Three days early."

He stopped two paces away. Some uncertainty rocked him, and only then did Nomvula register the anger in her voice. Nomvula stepped forward, kissed him, hugged him -- mostly because she had genuinely missed her son, but also because she didn't want to examine just how brittle that warrior mask of his was. If she could crack it with a reprimand, Dumani would splinter him before a spear was ever raised.

She stepped back and looked up at him. That uncertainty had not left his face, and the tension in his chest clearly mirrored hers. 

"Ma," he began.

"Go wash down your horse," Nomvula said, as gently as she could manage. "Treat her to some sweet cane after her grains. Then go greet your siblings."

His jaw twitched under his scraggy half-beard, and there was suddenly very real anger in his eyes, then shame, then that uncertainty riding under it all again. When his eyes flicked up to the top of the hill, Nomvula knew. He had spent this whole journey telling himself exactly what he would feel when he came home: a hero's welcome, intimidation in the foe, a rousing victory. Not a mother's telling off. 

"Go," she said, pointing over her shoulder with the shortspear.

He frowned when he looked at it. Though Ndoda wasn't a king yet, by Hundred Hills law he was entitled to his father's lands and his maternal grandfather's possessions, but the last thing Nomvula was going to do now was send her son into the manse with a fireglass spear in hand.

"It's for your own good," Ma said with a wink. "You don't want to listen to old women greeting each other, do you? Besides, it will do well to walk home on your own accord and not with us crones in tow."

It wasn't much, but Ma gave him a way out that would save some of his pride. Ndoda kissed his grandmother on the cheek as he passed. Nomvula didn't turn around in case she caught him looking back.

"I hope you have a plan, Vali," Ma said when Ndoda was well out of earshot.

"Having a plan is never the issue." 

Qaqamba was only fifty paces away now, close enough for her pendant to throw around visible curves of colourful light. Nomvula heard the jangle of her anklets and forced her foot to stop bouncing. 

"Execution, however..."

Such was Qaqamba's service to the Sunlands that Nomvula's father had named her as his daughter's personal bodyguard the day of her wedding. At that point, Qaqamba had been in her sixties, of respectable retirement age, though she had been wearing her hippo-hide armour on the day. When they had come to the Hundred Hills, where the grass was lush and the people just starting to get used to the idea of year-long peace, the old woman had grown bored, as tends to be the case with people of legendary ability put to menial tasks.

When Nomvula had her first warship built, Qaqamba trained its crew -- and whichever guard she deemed competent -- in melee and the art of three-man ambushes. Those crew members and guards had learned enough from her in the three years she trained them to train every subsequent crew and guard under Third Hill's rule. There were three reasons why Ndlovu's numerically superior army had never crossed the Wayfarer, and why Nomvula's Long Walkers could terrorise their borders at will: ships, longarrows, and Qaqamba's boredom.

So when she finally came to stand in front of Nomvula, there was a brief moment of awkwardness since neither woman knew who should defer to who. 

Old age had shrunk her former mentor, but she still almost shared an eyeline with her horse. Nomvula had to look up at her grey eyes and her hard brow and her thin mouth. Large ears peeked out of ash-white hair that fell over her bony shoulders in thick twisted locks. Though the last decade had reduced her to sinew, Qaqamba's feet looked as hard as horn, and her hands were strong, knuckly things half-bent into fists.