Nomvula

34 - Blood

General, when the sun rises tomorrow, you and your men must leave."

Asanda drew from every instruction in behaviour her mother had ever taught her; she straightened her spine and drew the back of her shoulders slightly together, she kept her chin level and looked down with her eyes  so that the focus would be on the bridge of her nose, should she need to hint at a sneer. All this made up less than a fifth of the false confidence she put out; the rest of it came from the foreign weight that made the inside of her left ear itch.

At last, Dumani smiled. "Why, because I've exposed the weakness in your mother's regime?"

Some of the old bachelors harrumphed their agreement. Asanda saw the condescension in the General's smile, but part of her attention was sniffing after the finger he tapped against his beer urn, the stiffness in his shoulder that was from more than just propping himself up on an elbow. The two of them had an audience, one that the General could play to, however clumsily.

Old, drunk, angry men don't want subtly. This thought she kept leashed inside her head. Letting thoughts slip was a habit Asanda had never found the time or need to outgrow, but now her thoughts flickered like candlelight in the wind, scrutinising every word, searching for the right ones, trimming all extra meaning from them until their purpose was singular and sharp.

"Yes," Asanda said, surprising herself as much as the men around her. "You have exposed the one weakness in Queen Nomvula's reign." Her jaw seemed to clamp down on its own accord, waiting for the right head to enter the snare.

Dumani sat up and crossed his long legs, the smile crawling up to his eyes. "Straight from the daughter's mouth. Tell me then, Princess, how exactly can you tell me to leave when I am the one solution to your mother's problems?"

Some of the men in the den grunted louder, more than before. The air was full of the beer on their breath.

Asanda took a step forward so that she was ahead and slightly in front of Athi. "You misunderstand, but that is forgiveable. You are a great man of war, General. The crack of your club is as loud as the clouds your name commands to thunder." There was a lull in the crowd outside between fights; Asanda used the opportunity to lower her voice, to make her next words personal. "But the Hundred Hills has no need for fighting men. We get by with clever sailors, diligent farmers, well-paid artisans."

Dumani actually laughed. "Ndlovu's army is a thousand strong, near enough in numbers to trouble my own. Only your clever sailors keep him from these lands, and even then, your Queen now courts him! What will you do when those very sailors take their ships and haul the Elephants onto these lands?"

"Our artisans will welcome them with cotton shawls and new metal heads for their spears," Asanda said. "Our beermakers will enchant them with sorghum beer and marula cream steeped with orange blossom and wild honey. Our farmers will tour them from the groves to the orchards to the vineyards to the fields and back around – it will take several days to witness all the wealth they will marry into." Trust yourself, Ma almost said. "And finally they will shame all the men you sit with in the stick fights, men who lounge in the stale heat of a lobby rather than growing the wealth of the village they so readily suckle on."

Dumani sneered, despite the near-imperceptible excitement and glee bubbling under his skin. It was testament to the General's experience that he hid an advantage under a false retreat. "You mock these veterans who fought for this land long before your father was born?"

The bachelors were silent.

"I cannot mock them," Asanda said, "without mocking the beer they drink, which comes from Mama's crops. I cannot mock them without mocking the commune they hide in, which was built with stone hewn by young hands from Thirtieth Hill and freighted up the Wayfarer by Nubian war ships." The crowd grew louder again, but Asanda kept her voice even so that those in the den would have to lean in. She was desperate to run, to wretch right there between her feet, to do anything but to spill out the foulness that seemed to leak into her left eye. She smiled as the General had. "I cannot mock them without mocking the young women who walk by their communes on their daily errands, who are plump with the Queen's grain, safe with the Queen's ships, and like to marry the very lowest and the very last of the Queen's dogs before ever laying an eye on such–" old, she was prepared to say "–forgotten things."

The noise of the watchers on the street could only lean against the new silence in the communal den. It found no crack to slip into, it found no hole to crawl in through. All Asanda heard was the chattering of her own teeth as they clacked against each other. Her spine shivered and sent cold waves crawling along her ribs. Hot tears burned the underside of her eyes. This was not her. This was not her.

She arched an eyebrow and scoffed as Dumani slowly stood. Bait did not describe it. She had poured enough blood into the water to send every shark in the East Sea swimming up the Wayfarer.

"Whore!"

The word alone made Asanda wince, but there was a lifetime of bile and black blood pushing against it, more anger than any person of twenty years could know if they lived another ten.

Dumani wheeled around as the bachelor who had yelled it charged past his shoulder, the knotted head of his club held above his head in a fist that pulled thick tendons along his forearm. There was beer froth on his bottom lip, and the sooty stain of pipe smoke on his white beard. Darker than the stain were his eyes, shark eyes but for the veined whites of his pupils, piercing malice through Asanda's own as he barrelled forward.