“But the tusks,” murmured MYalu at length dismally.
“It is not I who have two tongues,” responded Marufa indifferently.
And with that MYalu had to rest content. Marufa indeed had no interest at all in the passions of Zalu Zako, MYalu and Bakuma. Merely the time had come for the witch-doctors to choose the victim for the Harvest Festival: Bakuma was young and good looking, a dainty morsel that should please the taste of the officiating doctors, and her owner and uncle was a man of no importance: so accordingly he had made known the sin of her name through the divination.
In the solitude of his own hut upon the hill Zalu Zako sat and pondered sulkily. His young and fierce temper was stimulated and the seed of rebellion against the domination of the priesthood was quickened by the fate of his new love; although the masonic secrets of the craft were denied to him, he, as son of the royal house, was suspicious of the powers of the [pg 128] Unmentionable One and the priesthood, as many an one had been before him; yet in spite of that the verdict was absolute, for he was too crushed by terror of the consequences to permit of any hope of annulling it.
The fiat not only doomed Bakuma to a terrible death at the third blooming of the moon, but from that very instant the tabu came into force; for being thus accursed by the possession of two sounds of the sacred name, she was deemed unholy. Her half-sisters and their mother, with whom Bakuma shared the hut, fled to another and were exorcised by the wizard, which, as everybody knows, is an expensive ceremony; gourds and pots, spoons and utensils of all sorts, were left to the sole use of the unclean one and would be burned upon her demise. A magic line was drawn around the hut out of which the soul of the girl as she slept could not escape to bewitch anybody. Neither her name nor anything that had been hers would be ever mentioned again; any word of a household article or any thing or beast which had one syllable of the name “Bakuma” was changed, lest the user be accursed and bewitched.
For the whole day, in this isolation, sat the girl Bakuma, Marufa’s useless love charm clutched in her hand, as bewildered as if the earth had suddenly turned inside out under this fact so stupendous and stupefying. She did not weep. She squatted in the door, her eyes staring with the glazed inquiring expression of a dying gazelle, a bronze question to Fate. At the feeding time her mother threw her bananas into the circle. Bakuma looked at them as they flopped near to her as if she did not realize what they were. She made no stir to cook or prepare them. The cool twilight came [pg 129] and passed like a blue breath. Above the insectile chorus of the night beneath the crystal stars came the faint thrumming of a drum from MKoffo’s hill. The sound of music and dancing reminded Bakuma of her ambitious dreams. She could neither weep nor wail; she merely emitted a faint gasping sound. But her mind began to work jerkily, yet more fluently. Visions of the form of Zalu Zako were weaved and spun in the darkness: the lithe walk of him, the haughty carriage of the head. Slowly greened the sky until the banana fronds were etched in sepia against the swollen moon. The dismal croak of the Baroto bird shattered the black cocoon of Bakuma’s mind.
“Aie-eee! the foul bird of my despair!” she wailed, and at last wept. Then she rose and flitted like some green ghost into the plantation and across to the place of water where her lover had first spoken her sweet, recking naught in her mist of despair of spirits of the night nor of the breaking of the magic circle. The moon spattered the squatted form with blue spangles and turned the falling tears to quivering opals. Bakuma broke into wild lament.
“The black Goat hath cried three times in my hut!
My soul hath wandered and been caught in a trap!
Aieeeeeeeeeee!