TLADI

Chapter 14

"Why does she look as we do?" A voice said, in a strange tongue that she found herself understanding. You had to be multilingual to live in the village from which she had come. All the races that Africa had ever produced could be identified there. Yet it was a tongue that she had never heard before and perhaps that meant that it was not of Africa (either that or she had a very limited vision of the size of Africa). Such thoughts confused her even more...

"And she is even clothed as we are." Another voice said. Tladi wondered why she understood, she wondered if she would die and she wondered at how perfectly that would resolve her current predicament.

"It is of no consequence, she is an intruder, she has seen us, and therefore she must die." A deep masculine voice said. The sharp swords were raised as a prelude to the death strike...Tladi wondered why her whole life was not flashing before her eyes... the sharp swords had been swiftly descending then...

"Wait!!" The same deep masculine voice said in that same strange tongue. The sharp swords abruptly halted millimeters from various vital parts of her body. An extremely tall hooded figure, to which the deep masculine voice belonged, made a hand gesture. Suddenly many hands were holding Tladi down. She did not bother struggling but glared angrily at them with that one dark indigo eye. Thunder rumbled in the distance. 

The cloaked figures looked up sharply, briefly, they focussed on Tladi again as a large pale hand held her equally pale head in a surprisingly gentle manner. Tladi realized that her head cloth had slipped off; she had not been able to remember exactly when this had happened. A silent gasp erupted as the man who had ordered them to stop began to pull off her eye patch. Tladi struggled fiercely; she had never gone without her eye patch. Only Umthunz'omnyama had ever seen her without her eye patch, thus it was a violation to her.

Her struggles were in vain, they only held her tighter and the eye patch was pulled off roughly, to reveal... pure, pale, smooth, unblemished skin. There was absolutely no scarring, the skin from her cheek went uninterrupted over the hollow where her eye should have been, past the ridge where her eyebrow should have been and up her forehead to her scalp, completely uninterrupted. The deep masculine-voiced man traced one long finger over the smooth skin where her eye should have been almost in a kind of caress.

"There is bone beneath the skin where her eye should be..." He fiercely whispered in that tongue that Tladi had given up wondering why she could understand. 

"This means that she must have been born with one eye, designed perfectly, without even an empty space... protected by bone..."

"The prophecy," one muttered and suddenly they all looked to the sky, Tladi followed their gaze... Around the full moon, the brightest stars were arranged in such a way that they formed an eye, the moon serving as the iris. Tladi was immediately released among whispers of "The All-seeing One Eye!" in that strange tongue. At that point, she lost consciousness. The last thing she heard had been "If the prophecy is true, then she will come again..."

That was all she remembered about last night. It seemed to her like it could have been a dream. When she awoke, her head cloth was tied around her head in the exact way that she always tied it. In addition, her eye patch was there, almost the way that it had always been. She hastily looked around her for the man she had come to find... where is he?! Was her panicked thought. There he was! Just behind her head. Tladi smiled and her face lit up like the sunrise.

She clumsily dragged him to Umthunz'omnyama's camel and cumbersomely heaved him onto it. Together, they began the long journey across the desert, back to the village, his home...

I wish Tladi had just left him there! Umthunz'omnyama immediately thought when she heard the news. What is it about love that insists that somehow it will make a way no matter what happens?!

"Umthunz'omnyama, No." a quietly deep booming voice said, dramatically entering her hut and her thoughts. It seemed 'The-Red-eyed-Mob' had a knack for reading Umthunz'omnyama's mind.

"There was nothing to be done. You know that you would have done the same thing in her position..." He trailed off.

"But I don't think you understand... why did the sequence of events happen like such? There have been too many coincidences, it's like someone else is in control here..." Umthunz'omnyama whispered in her deep, rough, solemn voice.

"The ancestors-"

"No, the ancestors do not operate like such..." Umthunz'omnyama interrupted 'The-Redeyed-Mob'. Silenced, he knelt behind her and began to massage the tension out of her neck and back. Umthunz'omnyama tried, in vain, to think happy thoughts...

Happy thoughts were the last thing on Tladi's mind as she knelt by the unconscious Stima's reed mat. She had been sitting there watching him, unmoving, since she had brought him back from the desert. That was over a day ago. She had refused any food or refreshment and had unknowingly succeeded in making sure that no one visited Stima since he had arrived. She had been doing a lot of thinking. She realized why she had been sitting there for so long. She was memorizing his face. This was because she knew that when he opened his eyes again, that would be the last she saw of him.