Asanda knelt before the invisible box. Well, invisible no longer. The fire had burned every fibre of life in her garden. Rain and two days of harsh winter sunlight had baked the ashes into a clay that had hardened over everything. The beams that once held up the mesh walls were burned to stubs, and with no bones, the roof sagged low enough to brush the stone table in the middle of the ruins. The invisibility runes etched into the box had only half adapted to the grey-black ashes; half of it still held the shades of green and yellow of the ferns it had been hidden under.
A late autumn wind stirred flecks of white ash off the lock. No. An early winter wind -- there were teeth in the breeze, and far beyond the yellowing hills, the Wayfarer was a ribbon of glass against the glare of the sun.
Asanda brushed the back of her fingers over the lock. Its inscriptions hummed under her touch, warming, transmuting. The lock turned from iron to jade. She twisted it and the lid popped open.
Inside, the box was lined with panels of citruswood. Thrown carelessly – angrily, really – into the corner of the box was the rune eye. It stared back at her, little more than a plain leather pouch bound on either end with scabs of burnt hair, but it stared. Into, through, beyond her. Scalp tingling, Asanda cast her eyes aside from it and took what she had come for.
Khaya came up the stairs just as she shut the box and rose, glass hammer in hand.
She turned as she heard him padding across the plastered ash. Spirits, what was she wearing on her face that made him hitch in his step like that. He stopped halfway across the garden and looked almost ashamed for stopping, but he still kept the stone table between them.
"Khulu wants you down for breakfast."
She stared at him, and for a moment she was the rune eye, piercing through his essence. He had lost weight in the days following that final struggle with the Sunspear, not much, but there was a thinness to his nose and neck, and a sunken shadow bored into his face by sleepless nights and abandoned meals. But woven into his flesh was his spirit, a violent thing battering against the inside of his skin, waves throwing themselves against a cliff face.
"Asanda, did you hear me? Breakfast."
He spoke calmly, as though he feared she would startle and leap off the roof. But under his voice were the undertones of his spirit, the restlessness, the... seething. Not for the first time in the last three days, her stomach heaved and a spasm crawled across her back. The voice was air pushed through the flesh, but it was also spirit pushing into the world as fire pushes smoke through a chimney. His flesh spoke with love and shared grief but his spirit was a smog. Hearing him speak was like trying to drink milk and vinegar at the same time.
"You need to leave," she said, then winced.
What she had meant to say was that he needed to go eat, and she needed a little more time alone, but that would have cost her more words than she had just then. It didn't help that her voice broke into a rebuke with the words.
Khaya rubbed his eyes, and a great sigh pushed out of him. "And go where, Asi? If I go to the dining room I'll have to watch Khulu stare at her porridge until her chin quivers and she gets up to leave. If I go to the kitchens, all the gossip will die as soon as I sit down. Whoever's there won't say a thing but their sympathy... it'll... I don't know."
"Cloy. Like honey."
"Exactly. But even that's preferable to the Long Walkers who keep hounding me about sending a pursuit after the Inner Plainers."
Asanda's brow twitched. "The Inner Plainers?"
"They snuck away in the middle of the night and took Dumani's corpse with them. If they present it to King Kani before we can explain ourselves--"
"They've been gone half a morning. Send the Walkers."
He looked up at her with shock that was in perfect harmony with the anger his spirit shot at her. "In the middle of the night – two nights ago."
Something inside Asanda tore a little, and some inflection came into her voice. "Two nights, why did you wait so long?"
Khaya pointed at himself, incredulous. "Am I a Walker? Ndoda was always in charge of them!"
"And you are the next son."
"And you are the next ruler!" He slapped the table with both hands and shook the mesh before his shoulders slumped. His spirit had flared then retreated back into him, but it left a bitter residue on the inside of Asanda's mouth. He sank onto the bench. "I don't know if you've noticed, Asi, but Ma is dead and Ndoda is dead. Third Hill is yours now."
"Don't be stupid." She winced again as his nostrils flared but pushed through. "I abdicated. Years ago. Third Hill is yours."
"A boy cannot govern."
"Then go become a man."
"I intend to, but in that time, you're meant to take the mantle."
Asanda clenched her jaw, so tightly she thought her teeth would knit together.
"Please, Asi. I know you're hurting as much as I, but—"
"You know nothing."
She said it quietly, and saw the chasm rip between them as she did. As little brother do, his hurt gave way to a moment of hesitation, that instinct that tells siblings to give each other a brief window in which to throw in their most desperate apology, but the moment passed and she offered none. She had been too scared to save her brother, and then she had murdered her mother. Her guilt was spent.
His spirit stopped reaching out. It retreated from his skin to his bones to his marrow and liver. It was like watching a mural fade off a wall. Suddenly he was just flesh that breathed and made expressions, his innermost self guarded with walls only a youth could make so thick. He opened his mouth, and Asanda hoped for a biting word from him. An eye for an eye to mend the balance.
"You need to mourn, Asi. Properly."
It was a forgiveness, of sorts, though not really. It was a scab to stop the bleeding, and she suspected it would only lock the rot inside.
"I visit Ndoda's grave every morning and evening," she said. "I cry over the stones we laid over his ashes and sit in silence with him to aid his passing."
"And Ma?"
That little tear snagged on his words and that inner veil fell in rags inside her.
Asanda's fist tightened around the hammer, and the tiny flame floating inside its glass head fluttered.
"Her body's been on that pyre for two days and two nights, Khaya. We've burned twelve crates of wood to keep the blaze high and hot in that time and we've barely managed to singe the lashes."
"You said it yourself, the Sunspear was soaked deep into her flesh. It'll take days for it to burn out. That doesn't mean we shouldn't..." Khaya shuddered, grew silent, then openly wept as he dug his palms into his eyes.
Days. She had said that in hope, without any care of examining the vessel before the elders of Third Hill had taken it. In those final moments, that body had been Lang'engatshoni's, not her mother's. It would take weeks to burn. It could have taken years for all she cared. Those hands, that face that glowed red in the pyre... her mother was nowhere to be found on that pyre. There was nothing to mourn there.
The true death was still happening inside her. When Asanda had ripped her mother's spirit away from the Sunspear, she had known three hours of victory. For the rest of that afternoon, as everyone locked under the Sunspear's spell had blinked back to consciousness, she had left the chaos of the world happen around her. She had been within, cradling that little flame of life that was the last of Nomvula on earth. In the fourth hour, the flame had fluttered. In the fifth, it had withered. Now, when she looked within, it was like standing in a pitch black room, staring at the red ember of a snuffed candle.
How could she mourn, when her mother would only really die tomorrow or the next day?
When she looked up at the bench, Khaya was gone. The sun had moved from midmorning to noon. There was a tray on the bench, covered with a kitchen cloth.
The joints in Asanda's ankles popped as she walked to the bench and peeled back the cloth. Bread. From the dampness of the cloth, she knew it had been warm when it was brought up. Next to it was a bowl of meat, but the grease had cooled to suet. The bread had a little bit of heat left on the surface, though it was hard to tell how much. Her fingers were frozen through from the wind. She pulled the cloth back over it and went downstairs.
There was nothing left of her room. The beds and shelves and desk had been moved out so workers could get started on replacing the broken floorboards. The garden fire had blackened her curtains, so those had been taken down. They had had to drain the milkwater pool to drag the body at the bottom of it out. It had taken six men to pull the corpse out. Asanda knew Anathi could have done it on her own, but the Bound had refused before she had even been asked.
Glass hammer in hand, Asanda walked across the threshold of her mended doorframe. She was neither within nor without as she ghosted through the manse, she simply let her spirit drift where it please. Between its roiling bile and whatever she wore on her face, her presence went before her like a wave, and all she crossed paths with suddenly found it more convenient to duck into an adjacent corridor to go wherever they were headed.
One of the older men (Old Tali? Jele?) who ducked out of her way had a swollen eye and a cut on both his lips. His limp was so bad he nearly fell into the quad when he sidestepped her.
The ground beneath her bare feet changed from clay to gravel, then gravel to grass. Her face grew warm and her nose wrinkled of its own accord. Only when Asanda pulled her consciousness back beneath her skin did she notice the fire before her, climbing twice as high as she was tall. The earth under her feet was oven hot. She leapt back and bumped into a bony chest.
"If you think the body will burn quicker if we chop it up, I'd recommend an axe over a hammer," her grandmother said. "But if you think you're going to even touch my child's body right now, I'll kill you. I'll kill anyone who tries."
She said all this while holding Asanda to her chest in a tight embrace, rocking her gently. Her grandmother pressed a kiss to her scalp.
"It's all I can smell anymore," Asanda said into a wiry forearm.
"It doesn't smell like a pyre should, does it? No stink of cooking meat or burning bone. It just smells like applewood, can you believe it." Her voice grew dark. "I overheard Jele saying it was the nicest smelling pyre he'd ever been around."
"Her spirit's not in there, Khulu. It's just flesh."
"I know, child. But do you think I care? I raised that flesh."
"And it raised me. Then it punched a hole through my brother's throat."
Her grandmother was silent for a long time. The warmth of the pyre, her khulu's embrace, and fatigue all rolled Asanda's mind into a ball of drowsiness. Maybe it would be alright to sleep, to let the world grab its own reigns for a change. A team of horses could trample her now and she would not notice – her mother's spirit was fading inside her, why couldn't she?
Her grip was just starting to loosen on the haft of the hammer when her grandmother said, "Two more minutes, then do whatever you came to do."
"Five more."
"No. Two more then we're done. You need to eat and we both need to sleep. There are difficult talks to be had, talks we should have held days ago. Half the elders want to know why they woke from a trance to find Dumani's corpse on the lawn. Half want to know what we'll do when Kani sends his army this way."
"Tell them the truth, on both counts."
"With no definite ruler for them to turn their complaints to? No. Everyone is holding their questions out of the laws of mourning, but that ends soon. There's a lot that needs to be put right between then and now."
"I don't want the crown, Khulu."
Her grandmother's embrace did not loosen, but something inside her did. "I'm staring at my daughter's corpse. Now is not the time to tell me about all the things you do not want."
"She was my mother."
"And Ndoda was your brother. Between the two of them, they kept you free from the throne you tossed away. Khaya must still undergo his rite of passage before he can become king, and we are in the most dangerous season for it. Even if he starts now, that is a year where you will have to stand in the gap."
Something in Asanda told her to look up at the Wayfarer gleaming beyond the fire, then at the lands beyond it.
"Buhle..." The thought turned ashen on her tongue.
"Athi brought her back. She's in my room, under lock and watch but comfortable."
Asanda shook her head against her grandmother's chest. "There will be nothing comfortable here when Ndlovu brings his army to take her back."
"He won't cross the Wayfarer. Negotiations might happen, if he's met by a Queen and not just the daughter to one."
Panic stirred the stillness inside her. "He has Jabu."
"Yes, he does. And you have his daughter. Kani won't attack us because his son is a hostage to Ndlovu. Ndlovu won't attack us because his daughter is hostage to us. And we won't attack anyone because we're not stupid enough to spark a war with no army."
"It's a very shaky truce."
"And time is rattling it with vigour, but it was Nomvula's final gambit. I think she acted stupidly – fatally so – but she took into account that she might fail. She didn't buy us time but..."
"She bought us hesitation."
"So we can't afford to." Her grandmother released her, turned, and walked back towards the manse.
Asanda looked down at the flame in the hammer, how it seemed to dance in tune with the pyre, like a child watching a parent dance. She stood alone in the yard now. Her, a dead body before her, a dying spirit within her.
The chill of the winter noon burned away as she stepped into the orange pool of firelight on the grass. She pushed forward and the heat pushed back. Another step. Another. The front of her dress smelled like cotton pressed with a hot iron, and the fire-dried grass crunched underfoot.
Her spirit twisted around her liver as she pressed through the rolling waves of hot air, and suddenly she was standing a step away from the fire itself. One step and she could walk in, fall asleep. It wasn't tempting. Temptation could be overlooked. Temptation wasn't inexorable. This was...
Lang'engatshoni opened his eyes. Asanda brought up the hammer and smashed it right between them.
The glass shattered and the flame burned into a white light that turned the grass and sky silver. Red flame turned blue, orange turned green, and Lang'engatshoni disappeared under a blaze of white fire that hissed as only the elephant serpents of legend are told to do.
Asanda stumbled back as wave after wave of heat pulsed against her skin. She had to crawl out of the light with her back to it and her eyes shut. Even then, the world was hard silver veined by the vessels in her eyelids. By the time she could open her eyes, she was on her hands and knees at the edge of the lawn, and the smoke rolling off the fire carried the first hints of burning meat in it.
Just as her grandmother had done, Asanda turned her back to the pyre and walked away. What she had felt when she stood a step away from the fire... that was a part of her she would have cut out and burned if she could have.
A long slumber had smothered her after the sound of Ndoda's throat caving in had reached her ears. When she had taken her mother's spirit, she had sunk deeper into it. When the spirit fluttered, she was drowning in it. It was a numbness of spirit, which was greater and further reaching than anything the flesh thought it could mimic. But now, slowly, painfully, she felt the first signs of awakening. She was coming back to herself.
The first thing she needed to do was apologise to Khaya, then eat and sleep. She needed to make right with what family she had left and draw them near. She had not checked in on Anathi since the day after the drowning; she was family too, what grief she held was hers to share if she wished. Qaqamba too.
Then there was Buhle to be seen too. How comfortable was comfortable? It would not be enough to confine her – peace with Ndlovu would need Buhle to usher it in as well. And so Asanda would have to humble herself to her and make what promises of amends she could – then stand by them.
She was Nomvula's eldest child. Third Hill was hers to govern now; even after Khaya's eventual crowning, she would always need to be foremost in the house, for the house.
Halfway to her room, the last of Nomvula's spirit faded out inside Asanda. She wept freely, naturally, all the way to her bedroom door. The mourning started then. She bled thorough tears and a little of that inner poison dripped out with each. Not a lot, but enough to let her keep living.
She was truly alone now. That should have turned her back to her hiding place, but it only made her realise that this despair – more whole than it had been when there had been the little flame guttering out – was what Khaya had been holding inside him this whole time. She understood. She would find a way to fill close that hole in both of them.
At the bottom of the ladder that led up to her garden, she spared a thought for Anket. Her mentor and anchor, veil and guide. He had spared her the grief of her father's death, but he had also cast the world around her in a dimmer light. She had known this and never thought to correct it, even in her darkest hour. Anket had made the sacrifice of his own accord.
Another spirit to mourn.
Let them pile on, she thought as she set her foot on the bottom rung. Better I see them than hide them. Better I keep their lessons, even if I must shelve them with darker things.
It felt strange to think her own thoughts again, to have only one life living inside her. For a moment, she climbed and simply tried to embrace the single point of warmth coating her liver. When her fingers brushed the floor of the garden, she heard a rasping noise from above.
Asanda froze, though that didn't quite capture it. She was warming up. Her liver pulsed like the air around the pyre did. That single point of life grew hotter inside her, only... No, not heating. There were two flames inside her again. Her own and a smaller one, weak but growing. The rasping noise came again from above.
Slowly, Asanda climbed up to the garden.
The sun was high in a clear, bright sky and the wind was cool and still and smelling a little of ash. The cloth over the bread had been removed, neatly folded, and put to the side. The rasping noise was a house knife being whetted against the stone bench.
Asanda stood as still as the burnt beams, as if any movement might stir the wind and make the image before her disappear like a mirage. Surprisingly, she found the words, "I don't know what you're sharpening that knife for, you prefer to tear your bread in chunks."
Nomvula looked across the stone table at her. The smile was very far from her face and eyes, but Asanda felt it inside her, as though it might suddenly appear on her own face.
Her mother's lips twitched, and she looked down, almost amused. "The knife's for you. You need to cut your nails and decide what you're going to do with your hair. In a month's time, it'll be awkward, so decide early if you're going to shave it or grow it out again."
"I... haven't decided yet."
Nomvula pushed the tray of bread and meat halfway across the table. "Decide while you eat, there are tougher choices ahead of you. But you will make them, I know you will. You're built for all seasons, but especially the harsh ones."
Asanda found herself at the table, her hands on the bread, the aches in her back gone. "How do you know that?"
"Who built you?"
Asanda thought she had smiled at that, until she realised it had never quite reached the surface. Oddly, that felt like it meant more. She tore a hunk of bread and dipped it into the cold stew. Metal rasping stone cut through the distant sounds of the manse, and in the distance the Wayfarer wound its way through the hills, a seam in the land. If only the seams that bound nations were as robust.
"Even rivers change courses," Nomvula said, eyes never leaving her knife. "Over a few years."
"Over a few lifetimes."
Her mother shrugged easily. When she looked up at the Wayfarer, the sun touched her face and cast the edges of her hair in gold. "You're a longthinker, Asi. You can't help but live several generations at once."
**
Thank you for purchasing and reading NOMVULA! If you can take the time to provide some feedback on the story using this form, it would be much appreciated.
This book has been almost a year in the making, and now it sits here, waiting. There will be more to the tale of Asanda and Nomvula, both in fresh adventures and in the re-examining of these ones just passed. This story started out a simple way to explore the ideas, feelings, and concepts that ran through me whenever I visited home, and now, it ends as one that introduced me to new friends, new readers, and new opportunities. That is something I am monumentally grateful for.
I hope it has brought you the same joy it has brought me, or failing that an excuse to not be spoken to during your commute. Thank you for supporting it. Thank you for supporting me. There is a lot more that can be said, but Asanda took my distaste for long speeches. I'd be chuffed to hear what you thought in the comments, though. Say hi, I always say hi back.
With eternal thanks.
Hlumelo