Two Feet -- A Free Chapter from the Novella

Home of Two Feet

...here's a FREE chapter from the novella, Two Feet :- recent family discussions have questioned this incident as having put a "curse" on the family...in a light hearted way. Well...that's for you to decide, but interfering with the Sangoma folk and the spirits may, perhaps, have repercussions. Who knows? Hope you enjoy and, as always, please, please comment on the Blog Site. It only takes a second or two.

Many thanks. Mark. The Author. 

TOSSING A PEBBLE

Feet have taken me to a boulder near Executioner’s rock. Mabuza sits alongside me, his thick fingers searching in his snuff box.

As always, the midday sun has cast a blanket of silence over the veldt. The sun’s heat has sapped energy and wrapped all life in a blanket of lethargy.

A bullfinch clings to a stem of elephant grass. Its beak is wide open as it pants like an ageing marathon runner.

A sun soaked Tok -Toki beetle squats lifelessly near my feet, unable to resume its normal antics of hurrying to and fro like a lunatic in a padded cell. Its black hide reflects the sun above. Bored, I want to push the beetle toward a hint of shade with my toes, but I don’t because it will probably spray me in its defence and my feet will stink for hours of something that smells like cat’s piss. It will think my toe is a mouse or maybe the head of a snake and lift its backside and squirt.

I leave the Tok -Toki in its lethargy and pick up a few stones.

Mabuza sneezes beside me, and I get a whiff of his snuff.

My older brother has traipsed off into the still elephant grass, toward the scarecrow shape tree further up the hill, to shoot pigeons. The tree was struck by lightning last year and the consequent fire ravaged the hill for hours. All the tortoises were fried. Their blackened shells dotted the hillside like the aftermath of some medieval battle. The crows came in their hundreds and fed all day.

I toss a stone over the cliff’s edge and wait to hear it land. I count to three before I hear the stone clattering away down there. I wait for Mabuza’s rebuke, and it comes in less than a second.

“For what you do this?”

“There are only bones down there Mabuza, old and dead bones.”

Mabuza scoffs at me and shakes his head. This is a good sign. He is ready to talk.

“I do not throw a stone on your head when you are sleeping.”

“No. But I’m not dead.”

“They are sleeping!”

“But dead.”

“Sleeping!”

“Dead!”

I waited for the deep sigh, and it came as I expected it to; rattling up from his stomach and up through his chest, like the sound a grumpy bear makes that has recently been chased out of hibernation by a snake seeking hibernation.

“The First King could not sleep because of those bones.”

I now gave my full attention to Mabuza. My plan of edging him on for a story had been a success. I shifted my feet around on the ground and dug them in a little deeper in search of cooler soil, making sure I did not disturb the Tok -Toki beetle, of course.

“Is this before you were born?”

“Is the young master going to throw stones while I speak?”

“No.” I get the message and shut up.

“The First King was unhappy because he was hearing from all the kraals all over about the Sangoma. The voices he was hearing were telling him sad things. The Sangoma was using his magic with the Indunas all over. For the Induna to be strong, he must listen and do what the Sangoma say. For this, the Induna was frightened because quick, quick the Sangoma can make the Induna die.”

Mabuza shifted on his rock and he leant forward, getting closer to me. He dropped his voice and tucked in his loin cloth, so the heated surface of the rock did not scorch his testicles.

“Quick, quick the Sangoma can tell any sick people that to get better, they must be  killing the Induna and bring to the Sangoma maybe the Induna’s heart or his ear for to make medicine, to make muti. Sick people will do this thing because maybe the sick is in their head and they do not see that the Sangoma is playing tricks.”

“The First King is hearing this all over. All the Indunas are scared because of being made into the muti. The First King, he does not sleep. He chases his many wives away from his bed because of this Sangoma nonsense. The First King does not want trouble with all the Sangomas. One is okay, two, maybe four but all together is not good.”

“Maybe after two weeks, the First King is taking scoff with Ma-Swazi. Ma-Swazi is a white man who makes cotton there at Big Bend and the First King is telling him about the Sangoma and the Induna trouble. It is good scoff I think because Ma-Swazi tells the First King he can help.”

I let Mabuza have his moment, not interrupting, even though I am certain he is dreaming of what delicacies the King had offered this Ma-Swazi person on that day.

“Ma-Swazi tells the First King to bring all…ALL the Sangoma to here. Here, where we sit now. Yes, to bring them here in maybe two weeks. The First King – he put his voice in the wind and soon all the Induna hear that the King is wanting scoff with the Sangoma. Aye – all the people are talking with this problem and the Sangoma are happy for this. When people are talking, the power is strong.”

“The First King came here. Maybe here to this rock. Maybe to sit there with that tree I do not know. Also, Ma-Swazi and also all…ALL the Sangoma came to here. Ma-Swazi he has a gun. He shows the First King a bullet. He says to the First King to say to all the Sangoma, is the Sangoma magic stronger than the magic of this thing, this bullet made by the First King?”

A trickle of sweat navigates a course down Mabuza’s eyebrow and he swats at it carelessly as if it were a circling fly.

“All… ALL the Sangoma laugh at this thing Ma-Swazi asks. (They do not laugh at the First King because even the Sangomas do not laugh at the First King.) Aye, Ma-Swazi laughs, too; but I think maybe his laugh is not like the laugh of the Sangoma because, as you know, the Sangoma laugh is like that Jackal which is eating your mother’s birds. The First King laughs also, right here, maybe on this rock. Ma-Swazi, he says okay to the Sangoma. He will use the King’s magic with the bullet and the Sangoma must use their magic to fight this bullet. The First King is happy for this.”

“Ma-Swazi put the bullet in the gun. Clack!”

Mabuza stares off over the cliff as his fingers slowly open his snuff box. The sky is a pale blue and cloudless. I am tense. My toes are curled deep in the soil. Mabuza knows this. He is well aware that he has my audience and that he can manipulate me like a puppet.

Like a hungry dog watching a man eat a bone, I watch Mabuza dip a little finger in his snuff box and feed it into a broad nostril.

“Just ‘clack’?” I finally ask, my voice rasping.

When Meneer Gerber told us Rooineks the story of David and Goliath and the Philistines and how David took up a pebble and put it in his sling, and began twirling the sling around and around, he would pause at that moment to light his pipe, and even though we Rooineks had heard the story umpteen times, there would always be an impatient but muted “Agggg nooo” from the children, and a shuffling in our seats as we waited to hear how the pebble flew as straight as a winged dove and smote Goliath right in a place where he would have a third eye forever. Meneer Gerber took a long, long time to light that pipe I can tell you.

“Clack,” Mabuza finally says. “The bullet is in the gun and the Sangoma are waiting like people in the shop who want sugar. Ma-Swazi points the gun at number one Sangoma and he shoots here.”

Mabuza jabs his own finger viciously into the middle of his forehead.

My bones shiver with the thought of the sound of that long ago gun shot.

“Number two. Here.”

Clank!

“Three.”

Clank!

“Ma-Swazi shot all of them!?” I yelp.

“No.”

No!? O! Shit. My young bowels will soon not be able to take anymore of this; my toes are as tense as the talons of a hovering hawk that has just spotted its prey.

Suddenly Mabuza stands and with a warrior-type yell he charges toward the edge of the cliff, his loin cloth flapping against his lean limbs like linen on a washing line in a sea breeze.

I stand up. (I think this is where I stood on the Tok -Toki beetle). I shout Mabuza’s name out aloud I think. I don’t know.

After David had slain Goliath and had announced himself as being God’s servant sent to revenge any injustices caused by the Rooinek race, Meneer Gerber would tell the class to all ‘…bloody shut up and wait for the bell.’ He then would put his feet up on the desk and begin leafing through his Marvel comic, and we were left to ponder our English navels.

Mabuza reached the edge of the cliff.

He stopped. He teetered there. He flailed his arms like a newborn chick about to fly for the first time.

“What are you doing, man!?” I shout.

Mabuza falters and spins on his feet, arms akimbo, and he smiles a Mabuza grin at me.

“I was a Sangoma for you! They jumped. Here, to down there. Pffttt!”

With relief, I put my skinny bottom back down on my rock, my legs weak.

“The First King’s power was too strong. The First King was very happy. All the Sangoma were dead. He was happy to sleep that night. I think very happy.”

“You could have slipped and fallen,” I mumbled. A little embarrassed over my childish outburst, I pretended to scrape the soles of my Tok-Toki sprayed feet in the dust to rid them of the smell.

Mabuza left the edge of the cliff and came to stand in front of me. “I did not want to scare you,” he said. “I am sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I mumbled. I looked up at him, the sun hot behind him."Did the First King really come here? And Ma-Swazi and the Sangoma and everything you said?”

“Better next time you ask questions before you throw the stones I think. I will go find your brother.”

Then I was left alone on my rock with my Tok -Toki sprayed feet.

I stayed there for a while I remember. Then I ventured to the cliff’s edge and I looked down to where the grass and the bush converged like a large city’s traffic at the foot of the cliff. The bushes were dense down there. I could barely see the ground. The stone that I had thrown was down there, resting on foreign soil.

I realised then that I had tossed a stone into a moment of history. I realised then that no matter where you are going, or coming from, someone else has already been there.

Like the stone that had flown as straight as a dove’s flight from David’s sling.

I wonder what Meneer Gerber would have thought.

Bloody good riddance is probably what.

The Tok Tokkie beetle