[piosenniel]

Jamilah watched with interest as Khasia ran off. There had been that brief moment when a spark of light shone through, when the girl’s spirit had shown itself in her eyes. But then those others had called her away, and the shadow had fallen over her features once again.

Qamar had been right in her estimation of these young ones. Something had infected them, something dark. Absentmindedly, Jamilah rubbed the moon tattoo on her left hand, wondering what medicine she knew might prove useful against this strange ailment of the spirit. It was a puzzle to her. More insidious than the usual complaints she dealt with. She sifted through her memories, finding nothing with which to compare it. This was such a deep sickness, something that rent the very fabric of the world she knew.

In the distance she could see her daughters as they sat in the shade watching their children play beneath the branches of the baobab. And scattered about, hands bent to the completion their daily tasks were the other families of the tribe. Strong, healthy roots sent up healthy shoots.

An old story came to mind, one from the dreamtime of her people, before time flowed only one way, from past to present:

The great, old baobab grew tall and strong, its branches reaching outward as the edges of the sky rested on it. The People walked tall and proud beneath it. Its fruits made them strong, its medicines kept them healthy. It clothed them. Gave them shelter. And so they thought it would be forever.

Then, one day, or so it was told, the sky tilted, the great tree canted to one side, tipping dangerously, crazily. The leaves curled and began to die. The fruit rotted just as it flowered. A great cry went up from the People and they were afraid, calling on the elders for help.

The elders gathered their strength and sang a song of healing as they walked slowly about the great tree. And there it was they found it, as they spiraled in, beneath a section of the roots. A fat, poisonous spider, dark as night, had sunk its fangs deep into the roots and sat sucking the lifeblood from the tree. Swollen, and slow, from its own greed it could not escape them. They raised their bush-knives with a great cry and fell upon it, killing it. But so deep was the hurt it had done the tree that the withered roots could not be made whole by time. And so the elders took up their knives once again. And this time they carefully cut away the damaged parts, peeling back a thin layer of healthy root.

They tended it carefully and in time the tree flourished and flowered. And the People, too, grew strong and walked tall beneath its branches, as did their children, and their children’s children.

Jamilah watched the distant figures of the young ones as they hurried to whatever dark plans lay in their minds. She wondered what shadowed creature had got hold of them. Would the elders be able to drive it from them? How many of them would they need to cut away from the tribe before the poison that they now bore became fatal to them all.

‘Tonight, after the evening meal,’ she said firmly to herself, ‘when the hunter’s moon is up. We will meet then.’

[ June 16, 2003: Message edited by: piosenniel ]