SHANICE NDLOVU

The first time I truly dream the whole homestead wakes in a shatter of screams. We are many. All three of my dead gopa’s wives, all twenty of their children and the countless cousins; everyone flees their huts into the open silver of the moonlight, emptying their lungs and shaking with nightmare. The same nightmare, one that I have dreamed since my father left our homestead and took up with another woman over the Ishu hills.

In the dream, my father and I sit beneath a tree squeezing large green mopane worms as they wiggle between our fingers. The air is thick with the stench of their guts and the ground is slippery with their blood and excrement. My father is laughing, his large teeth glowing as he picks up a worm and it squirms; I swear I hear it scream as his thumb and forefinger press from beneath its fat head, down its pulsing body and through the tail – squeezing out its insides and its life. He cackles and I laugh softly because I miss him and maybe he will come back if he sees that I am not horrified, that I accept this about him.

When he reaches for the next worm, it leaps from the basket and stands before us, a woman, the woman who took him. She stretches as we watch her, as small as a worm one moment and as big as the tree the next. My father clutches my hand – he does not want to leave me. The giant woman drags him by the other arm but I pull him back, my strength shocking me. The woman and I play at our tug of war and I almost don’t see it each time my father’s arms tear from the socket. He untangles like a woollen doll and rolls everywhere, his head popping off, the life squeezing from him as he had done the worm. When his head rolls to my feet I scream myself awake.

Everyone in the homestead wakes from this same dream, somehow, I see it in their eyes as we all gather in the moonlight. And they all know that the dream is mine. All women are dreamers in the mud valleys. My goma can touch a man’s face and learn the name he answers to when he sleeps. My mother can dream a storm days before it sweeps the ground from beneath our feet, can always dream it when something terrible is on the way. Yet, for all that dreaming she cannot anticipate this storm she has brewed herself. Such dreaming as mine, even here where anything could happen, is unheard of.

My mother picks me up and I cling to her. I have grown too big for her arms to hold but I bury my terror in her neck. I feel hands peeling my mother’s arms from me and dragging me down. I feel the rough leather of my goma’s skin, and I hold on to her hand as she pulls me from the crowd.

We sit inside her hut, around her smoky fire, and talk as women do while we drink her bitter beer. She does not say that she is scared, but I see it, I hear it in how she chooses her words.

‘You only just start and you already feel to shake the valley, Lami?’ she says. My eyes are trapped at the bottom of the beer diwo. This is a gift, she tells me, but it is also power that can so easily be poison if not mastered. I nod along as she speaks; I swear I will heed all her teaching. I may even believe I can keep my word. Yet, my goma’s gift is my father’s currency and it is not long before talk spreads out of the valley and over the hills of Ishu. Many times  he makes his way back with bread and salt, each time my uncles keep him at bay with ease.

That is, until one afternoon that passes for winter in the valley, the heat still pierces through the clouds and burrows through trees. I am playing in the shade with my greatest friend, Ndalo. I watch her close her eyes and mumble a song, and then after a while she reaches into her fingernail and slowly, painstakingly, pulls out a leaf.

‘I dreamed it,’ she says with the widest smile.

I am in awe. I place my palm beneath hers for I can not dare touch the leaf for myself. It is brown and dry but, oh so beautiful, as the girl who has dreamed it.

‘You can have it,’ she says, lifting her palm and letting the leaf fall onto mine.

‘No, I couldn’t,’ I say, feeling the soft weight of it.

‘Yes, you can, I will dream more.’ Ndalo lifts the leaf from my palm, kneels before me and tucks it into my hair. I can smell the sun on her, and the mud we played in earlier.

‘Let me give you a dream too,’ I say. She sits down. She is closer now, our knees touching as she nods.

I draw a breath, hold it as I close my eyes and let it out softly through my mouth. I hum the song and feel it soak into my spirit, softening my bones. In the dark behind my eyes, I see her leaf and from it I grow a tree, a tall unbowing thing somewhere with much rain. Up the rough tree bark, through the tangle of wet branches and the light drizzle, away from the smell of wet earth and predator eyes – a shock of yellow through the green. A large fruit that is sweet between teeth sinking into it, juice trailing down the arm and onto the chest.

I pull from the dreaming and open my eyes. I hold the last breath I took. I cup my hands and blow the breath into them. It rolls out white as a cloud and gathers into a ball in my hands.

‘Come here,’ I say to Ndalo and she leans in, ‘open your mouth.’ She obeys, her eyes on mine as I blow the breath from my cupped hands through her lips. She breathes in and her eyes cloud over as she slumps back. I know she feels the dream as real as any moment she has lived, as true as my hands holding her sides and keeping her up. My eyes are set on her, the deep and drawn out breaths that rattle her chest and leave her mouth in a sigh. I cannot see anything else until rough hands grip and separate us. A hand over my mouth, tasting of old milk and sweat. Then a cloth wound around my face, over my mouth and eyes before I am tossed onto a hard shoulder and carried off like a sack of dry root.

A scream tears from my lungs when I am thrown to the ground, finally allowed to see and not breathe cotton. There are four men, one of them is my father and all of them laugh. I soon learn that the other three have brought us to him, brought us both because they did not know which one of the two I was. Ndalo lays on her side on the ground, crying quietly, her legs behind the wall of her black arms. I try to speak to my father but the words will not leave my mouth. My mind cannot wrap itself around the idea of this man with his large hands licking his fingers to count silver cowries. The man who thinks nothing of leaving me.

‘And the other one?’ one of the men asks him.

‘I don’t know her,’ says the thing wearing my father’s flesh.

‘She has good bones.’ The man reaches for Ndalo’s chin. She shrieks and flails as I finally call out, ‘Ababa, please.’ My father does not look at me. Not even when the man says, ‘I will take her for a cowrie?’

He tosses the silver; my father catches it.

The man pulls Ndalo to her feet and she punches and kicks, stronger than I ever was but she is no match for him. My body is water, my mind barely simmering where I sit, a puddle on the grass. Ndalo screams as the man punches her belly, and the sound of her voice strikes my spine. And I finally learn something else, not just how much I love my friend but also how. I shout once, the afternoon blinks and that second stretches to an eternity. I crawl into the depths of all their dreaming, and pull whole into the light all that they hold in the terror of the dark behind their eyes. The dreams they cannot dare to remember stand before them, touching their skin and grinning poison.

That is the last I see of my father before he goes mad. I learn then the power of my dreaming. The world unfurls around me and shrinks my homestead into a speck.

Time stands soft, breathing and malleable between the girl beneath the trees, and the woman I am when I finally make it back to my homeland. I am tattered and weary, tongue mud-thick with thirst. I have seen little of human life along the way, trudging through an eternity of barren white – the work of my hands. I do not expect to find anyone here. I know that those not claimed by hunger and thirst have long been savaged by the pipe.

It does not take me long to find my homestead. I stand at the mouth and let the years wash over me. When I think of my death, I think of my body over the sinking mud valleys, leagues of shocking Mopane-green leaves that gloss in the morning with dew reflecting the sun of dawn. Not much remains of that old land. The drought has eaten all to desert dry, the trees stretch as skeletons and the mud valleys have wrinkled into dusty cracks of white salt.

That night I sleep in the ruin of my old homestead but in the morning I cannot bear it. The ghosts shriek in the crumbling mud walls, in my head. I wander the valley and stumble upon another home. There, a nursing woman in the crisp morning light, two of her other daughters peeking from behind a hut. It does not kill me to see her, not the way I thought it would.

‘You did not recognise me,’ she says, she does not ask, as she grins the rust-streaked lines that split her yellow teeth like dirty gold wire. ‘I have changed.’

‘It’s not that,’ I say and it isn’t. I take a swig from the cup she hands me and nearly choke. ‘It’s only, you were the last person I expected to find here. I…’ I did not expect the gods to be so cruel, I mean to say, but the words catch in my throat like the rusty water.

‘You have not changed much,’ she says, almost meaning it, even though I know it cannot be true.

Eventually she asks about the white line down my face, and I tell her. I let her run a trembling finger from my forehead, over my chin, so close she smells of the salt and rust, when she leans in, and I smell wet mud. I know that I imagine it. It’s been too long.

‘It almost looks intentional,’ she mumbles, milky eyes screwed to the line she traces and retraces, learning and marking, the way she would when we were girls together in the dewy grass.

‘That one was not,’ I say, and her eyes flicker to meet mine. We stay that way for a flinch but it stretches in the white expanse, back in time and swallows the past in a gulp. I taste the whisper of pleading for forgiveness, but it swallows my words too and belches out an echo that there is no need for such a thing when there is no past. She must see something in my eyes because she flinches back and crouches behind her bundled baby.

‘You have other lines?’ she asks, as though we are still only just talking.

‘Yes,’ I say, feeling for my chest. The skin is tender where the black was burned from it. ‘When we … When I began trying to cook dreams I soon learned there was a price for all of them, steep and—’

‘Salt!’ she laughs, why does it hurt me?

‘Yes,’ I force a smile, ‘but I would learn about that much later. Back then it was slight heat over the city, headaches for all of us around – things we could live with.’

The baby mewls and she picks her up and holds her close as her arms begin to sway, practised. She is so small in her mother’s arms but her skin already carries the pale hew of the salt. Are the children born here already white?

‘And then?’ She urges.

‘And then I learned the bigger dreams had a bigger price, yes, but they also left a mark on the cook.’

I see the question brew behind the salt speckled crease of her forehead. I clench my jaw and will her to not ask, plead with whatever remains of this land, to snatch it from her tongue. She must not ask, she must not ask of the dream that splits my face in two. I would not lie but I would not know how to answer.

‘What was the dream that first marked you?’

The gods of this land are dead!

A breath huffs through my nose and I feel my shoulders sink. ‘I was young,’ I say, ‘I had not yet learned to let go.’

Ndalo looks away, her baby feels her discomfort and begins to cry. Her left shoulder juts out bony and pale white towards me, shielding her baby as she weeps. I know I read too much into a gesture so small, I know, but it still aches, just as my fingers ache when I stare down at their tough tips burned white with blasphemy, just as this land aches from the work of these fingers. It all aches and aches until I wake at night sometimes and cannot breathe for it.

‘Where will you stay?’ she asks me and by the soft edge that coats her voice, she has seen me.

‘I stayed at home last night – in the old homestead,’ I say.

‘You cannot sleep in a ruin,’ she whispers, and I stare back down at my hands.

The older of her girls looks to be the same age we were when we knew each other best of all. She is tall like her mother, and she kneels at my feet as she passes me a battered plate of ground baked root. I take it from her hands and our eyes meet, they are not her mother’s, but they are known to me.

‘The one hand washes the other,’ she says as she lifts the plate.

‘And the world is clean,’ I respond, as I take the plate from her, the old words a blade sliding across my tongue.

She hesitates before she makes to stand, and I ask for her name just as she finds her feet.

‘Thuna,’ this girl named for a grave says to me. Her mother casts her gaze to the baby again, pretends she does not hear. I bite into a root to keep my lips from trembling. The root is bitter and hard, but it settles my jaw as my teeth work through it.

‘What was it like up there?’ Ndalo finally asks me when we are alone again.

Was it worth it? I hear the question beneath the question, the one she would never ask. I tell her what I can about the city I found, and the city I made. 

As the sun sets, a cold wind sweeps through the plain carrying the sharp scent of salt that is on everything. I pull my coat to me and fiddle with the urge to reach for my pipe. Ndalo coaxes a fire between us and she settles at it. A man walks into the homestead and announces himself. They all answer as one and I mumble along with their words, ‘Share the fire,’ all but gone from me. The little girl springs from behind the hut and races into the man’s arms. He picks her up with ease. He walks to us.

It is not wholly dark yet. I know he sees me as he stands by the fire – I know too because his breath catches and he stills, quiet and staring. I am not surprised that it is Amu, he is who I would have married were I the one left behind or were I ever able to be with a man.

‘Ancient eyes,’ he says, all slow and close like he is glad to see me. I finally will myself to look. He is changed but still very much the boy I knew in his large, black eyes, the only part of him not white with salt.

‘You got old, Amu,’ I whisper and cannot help my smile. He could always do that, melt the freezing from me.

‘And you are still’ —he huffs out a breath as he places his daughter on the ground and sits beside me, grabs both my hands in his as he shares my log, his warmth— ‘still frozen in time, Thuna lami.’

I laugh, no one has called me that in years, or made me laugh with my belly this way. ‘I am still not your grave,’ I finally say. I see Ndalo across the fire, drawing the salt with a stick. She smiles, her eyes slightly hooded as she watches us.

Later when we have eaten more of the baked root, we sit by the dying embers and sip slow from our cups of warm tea, more rust than herb, but I am certain the best I have ever had.

‘We heard you were queen up there in the Morning,’ Amu says. The children have gone to their beds. He sits beside his wife and their shoulders sink into each other against the log they lean on.

‘Had a throne and everything,’ I say, and don’t mean to sound so sad. It grows oh, so quiet. In another life this breeze that tugs at my sleeves would be sweeping through trees here, the branches would creak, and the leaves would whistle secrets into the air. This bright barren sky would be a cloudy glimpse through the swaying shadows, the gods would be alive in the breathing wood of the dense jungle, the soil would be damp and warm if I dug my toes in. And if I closed my eyes I would hear the quiet whipping of my ancestors coiling in the jungle deep.

‘I am so, so sorry.’ I choke on a sob before I even realise I have opened my mouth to speak. ‘I never meant, any of it. I did not mean for any of it to happen!’

Amu is beside me before my tears even touch my cheeks. He wipes them with his salt-white hand, his beautiful black skin a washed memory. ‘You can’t have known, Thuna, you were just a child.’

‘I knew,’ I say, and his hands draw mine onto his lap. ‘Not all of it all at once but I knew, soon enough to stop.’

He does not let go as he asks, ‘We heard whispers … whispers of what happened up there. How much of it was true?’

‘Enough of it,’ I say, and bite the tremble from my lip. ‘The worst of it.’

And then the words pour from me, things I had vowed never to speak out loud.

‘Why did it need to be children?’ Amu asks me. It is sometime into the night, we have been talking a long time. His hands still cling to mine.

‘The hands,’ Ndalo says,  when it becomes clear that I cannot will myself to speak. ‘Smaller hands cook clearer dreams, cleaner hands make the dreams more pure.’

Something dims in Amu’s eyes and I want to fling myself into the flames. I cannot meet his gaze as I speak again.

‘I didn’t know at first, that they were using children. I was in a tower spinning dreams and stacking gold cowries. When I found out, I, I was devastated. And then I thought about it, and I thought that these children would need to work anyway, such was the way of the Morning – the destitute would always need toil. I thought I was protecting them. Better there, in our factories, cooking and folding dreams than out in the city streets, bartering their bodies for bread.’

I am crying again. ‘In the end, I couldn’t even protect them from that.’

I feel the disgust rising from Amu as he pulls his hands from mine. I understand, I know the filth of blood clings to my fingers. Then he drags me into a tight embrace and my breath huffs out of me in surprise. It is enough to undo me.

‘Where will you stay?’ he asks me when I finally manage to stop the tears.

‘At home, in the old homestead.’

‘You cannot sleep in a ruin,’ he exclaims.

Ndalo and I burst into laughter. And I stay the night and sleep on a blanket on the floor between the beds of my namesake and her sister.

When dawn creeps beneath the door, I do not think of my death, I do not think to leave. I step outside and find Amu on his stool, feeding the baby who hangs in the crook of his arm. He stares at me asks: ‘Can you stay a while?’

I say that I will.

I spend the morning trailing Ndalo and her babies as we gather roots in the dead fields of Bhonizi. The memories come and I let them flood me without paying them much mind. Everywhere is dry and salt but my body still remembers what it was to climb for mangoes here, to charge mud slings and make love behind the shrubs in the wet grass. Ndalo looks back at me and I cannot meet her gaze. I feel the tug of that old shadow I dragged from the Morning, reminding me that I owe too many debts. We work in near silence as we always used to, the baby fusses and the sisters take turns lulling her to sleep.

There is a scatter of villagers hemming the homestead as we approach. Ndalo seems to expect them and hands me the basket of roots. I tug at my locks and loose them from the tie atop my head. They fall around my face and I look away as we walk in – I am in no place for eyes although I know that I cannot escape their whispers.

How dare I, here in the salt, with my hair so black and my streaked skin blacker still?

The inside of the hut where I place the basket is dark too. I sigh out loud as I settle against a wall in the shadows, lean back and watch them out there in the yard gathering around Ndalo with their diwo at her feet. They are five, cross-legged on the ground, two men and three women.

Ndalo sits atop a jutting rock, her legs folded beneath her as well. I see her in the light for the first time, watching her without the fear of her watching me back. It is true, she is older, on her large forehead which creases with more ease now, and around the mouth, and in the flesh around her belly which has borne miracles. The thick coils of her hair are shorter and white as all of her, as all of it here. But it’s her, my Ndalo. There is no mistaking that as she reaches for a diwo and places it on her lap. They all stare up at her. I do not have to see their eyes to know what is in them. I have seen it a thousand times, and more, when a crowd gathered in the Morning to watch me cook. It is awe, it is reverence, it is too dangerously close to worship.

At the height of the empire of the Morning when the city was silver, when I was young and still believed my hands to be clean, I could cook a dream of a river so clear and cool against the skin it was, nearly, a mere drop short of real. Just as the man who paid me a fortune for the dream remembered it. And for a time it would be enough for him to forget that it was a dream and forget that this dream was the reason why that river had sunk to salt.

A dream of water kills a man faster than the thirst.

What Ndalo does is what I could only ever play at.

I sit in the dark and watch her. She is careless with the cloth she has draped over her chest, and it shifts slightly as her hands hover over the diwo. She mumbles softly and I mouth along with her, the old words marking my tongue. Droplets of water drip from the ends of her fingernails into the diwo, stained red with rust, and she looks to the heavens with a sigh, her chest heaving. I want to kiss her neck.

Soon the trickling water runs and the diwo is full. I marvel at the truth of what true power looks like. It isn’t a glass castle in the sky, or the hundred hungry eyes of worship. It’s this, drop by drop in a calabash. As she reaches for the next one, I reach into my coat. I feel for the smooth slip of rounded rock. I find it at the bottom pocket where I keep my mother’s face – next to the pit of snakes, and the ocean of rum, and all the good stuff. The dream glows in the dark before I squeeze and crush it into the end of my pipe. It simmers and I smell the smoke, see Ndalo through it, legs crossed in the yard, her long neck stretched, once dark and now salt. I bring the pipe to my mouth and breathe deep. Ndalo steals the smoke from my lips as I exhale. I swallow the bitter guilt as she puts her mouth to me, and I sink into the dreaming.

When I wake, I am laying flat on my back and the light scrapes the sleep from my eyes. I am outside in the open. I feel cold. I scramble for my long cloak and see that it hangs on the corner of a door. I sigh and lay back on the straw mat. True Ndalo leans over me, fanning me with a basket.

‘We thought we had lost you. You didn’t seem to be breathing,’ she says, the worry deepening the line between her brows.

‘I didn’t mean to worry you,’ I say, and manage to sit up.

‘It will drive you mad this pipe dreaming,’ she says, and I feel oh, so weary of such talk. ‘Or it will kill you as it has done so many.’

I do not answer her, merely stare away towards the hills that were once Ishu.

‘Or is that what you want?’ she asks me in that way she does that tells me she already knows the answer.

‘I, I should head back to the old homestead.’ I try to stand without looking at her. Ndalo, always so much stronger than me, drags me back down by the arm.

‘Look at me,’ she says.

I wish I knew how not to fold to her as I turn and meet her gaze. Steady. My heart drums in my ears.

‘I know this is why you came back to the mud valleys. To die,’ she says, her fingers digging into my arm. ‘I know you also did not expect to find me.’

‘Well, if you know everything Ndalo, then let me leave.’ The hurt in my heart raging, the guilt boiling over.

‘I know that you are not the only one with regrets.’ Ndalo’s grip on my arm softens as do her eyes. ‘I too wonder what would have happened if I made different choices, if I ran with you to the Morning when you asked, if I found a way to make you stay.’

‘Well, your decisions didn’t kill your family and turn the world into salt!’

‘Didn’t they?’

We sit there a while, listening to the thrum of the salty breeze from the hills, sharing a gaze that could not possibly bear the weight that it is charged with.

‘I forgive you,’ she says, and it cracks me open. ‘For all of it.’

For running, for staying away, for the salt, for the world. I begin to cry again like I have water to spare.

‘I am not trying to change your mind,’ she is whispering into my ear now, her breath wet with her own tears. ‘I am only asking you for what you are willing anyway to cast away. What you owe me! Time!’

This story was first published in Power, curated by Joanne Hichens, and is re-published in herri with kind permission of the author and publisher.