Nomvula

61. Asanda

Suddenly there were tears in Asanda's eyes, turned thick and black as they mixed with the soot on her lashes. She closed her eyes to shut them off but that seemed only to make them flow harder. Sobs racked through her pained muscles, and there was pain in her heart, mighty gods there was so much of it, more than her vessel was built to hold.

She had known this ache before, at the death of her father. It had been as if someone had carved a piece out of the side of her body. It was the type of loss that took with it some capacity for joy but also for pain, and in its place was an emptiness that made grief bearable. But the evening after her father's burial, Anket had appeared in her garden, a figure draped in white, frowning at the parchment she had left there the day before.

"My dear, I know you are hurting," he had said, not looking up from her unfinished work, "but that is no excuse to mistake the third joint theorem for the fifth."

"I was trying to build a window seat for my mother," she had said, her grief briefly replaced by anger at this stranger questioning her work.

He looked up at her then, eyes the colour of old honey. She mistook his expression for disapproval, but there was a smile to be found, she realised, if one looked between the creases of those eyes. "Well then, let us build one correctly."

And just like that, the grief had been carved out of her. It was not a perfect surgery, because the spirit is not broken up into neat pieces. It is closer to gobs of multi-coloured clay that are kneaded together all the days of one's life, but with those simple words Anket had gently hollowed out the sobs that bubbled under her every breath and taken out the lead ball between her shoulders.

From that day to this one, Asanda's body had been a house divided in two. In one half there was light from grand windows, busy feet marching down corridors, and the warmth of ovens, hearths, and good conversation. In the other half, the drapes were closed and the tables covered in canvas to keep the dust off, even as mildew grew in unopened cabinets. Anket had been the keeper of the barrier between those halves, and his death now threw harsh light into the deepest shadows and with it awoke ever wood worm and gnat that had called the dark home. They crawled into the light and dimmed it, even as the darker half brightened.

She was whole again, a bone snapped into place, and the shock would have emptied her stomach if there was anything in it. Instead, her mouth went dry with the spittle she was coughing out.

Look at the danger your mother's foolish ways have cast around you. Lang'engatshoni was in the middle of the room now. His eyes fell to her, then to Khaya, who lay unconscious against the side of the desk. Your enemies are given hospitality and use it to turn your household against you.

"Move away from him." Asanda had opened her mouth to say the words, but all she managed was a quiet exhale that died halfway up her throat. He had heard her, though, in spirit if not in voice.

Why should I? I am no closer to him than the General was, than your father's killer was. You could not move them, with what power will you move me?

His spirit flickered around the contours of her mother's flesh again, lingering longer this time before corroding beneath the surface again. Asanda's awareness of him went beyond what she had felt when Anket lived. Then, she had seen her mother's body but felt the Sunspear. Now, their forms flickered into each other, her mother's form becoming more transparent, the Sunspear's more opaque.

He was killing her. The body would survive but Lang'engatshoni's spirit was pushing her mother's out of the safety of flesh, letting the natural world slowly burn away from it.

Ma, no.

He took three slow steps towards Khaya. They were not the controlled, languid steps he had taken through Anket; he walked as if a force were pulling him backwards. The Queen's face frowned. Her mother fought. Two spirits waged war inside Nomvula's frame – one a mortal, one an ancestral god – and for a moment, her mother was winning.