Nobody's Slave Read Free

him - I've never seen one as big as this!’
    Madu looked; it was true. Even shrunken in death the leopard looked larger, stronger, than most. That must be why he had managed to leap out of the pit, and break the bars round the door so easily. He struggled to his feet, and felt again the sickening twinge from his wrenched ankle.
    ‘Too big. I don't know if I can carry him, with this foot.’
    ‘You’re not supposed to carry him with your foot, are you? You've done enough tricks for today as it is.’ Temba grinned, but Madu did not respond. ‘What's wrong with it, anyway?’
    ‘I don't know. I must have twisted it under a root when he came for me.’
    Temba bent down to look at it. Madu winced as he felt it, gently, with his fingers.
    ‘Not beautiful, Madu - but then it never was. It's swelling already - like an elephant's foot. Can you walk on it?’
    ‘A little.’ Madu showed him. ‘I don't know if I can bear a weight, though.’
    ‘You'll have to, Madu. I can't do it alone. Come on - let's start now before that foot swells up completely. It’ll be Mganza's charms and potions for you, though, when we get home.’

2. War Drums
    T EMBA UPROOTED one of the strongest poles of the cage, and they lashed the leopard's paws together around it. The first two times they tried to lift it, they collapsed together in a heap; but at last they managed, and staggered awkwardly towards the edge of the clearing, showered with rubbish by a mocking troop of monkeys who had suddenly appeared. Temba had wanted to leave the spears in the leopard’s body, for bravado, but the spears snagged in trees and bushes, so they wrenched them out and stumbled steadily on, cursing the monkeys, and pausing frequently for rest.
    ‘I'll tell Nwoye, if you like,' said Temba, at one pause. ‘He'll know it was your idea, but he may take it better from me.’
    ‘Then he’ll think I'm afraid, because I let you speak.’
    ‘He won't think that - not with your wounds, and this leopard to prove how brave you are. He's hard, but he's a just man, Madu - he has to be hard on you to seem fair to the others.’
    ‘He has always been hard. Even when we’re alone.’ Madu spoke bitterly, as he often did of Nwoye, his stepfather, and yet he knew there was truth in what Temba said. For this year Nwoye was also the elder in charge of the manhood training, and so he could not be seen to treat Madu any more kindly than the rest, even if he had wanted to.
    But Nwoye had seldom been seen to treat Madu kindly, even before the manhood training. The reason was simple. Madu's mother had been captured in war; she was a Sumba, a slave of the Mani. The Sumba and Mani had once been allies, but for years now they had been enemies. After a battle, Nwoye had chosen her from among the captive women, and made her his second wife, for she was beautiful; but he had not realised, at the time, that she was also pregnant. And so when Madu had been born, six months later, the son of a Sumba mother and a Sumba father, Nwoye had felt himself the joke of the village, having a son which he had neither fathered nor wanted, with none of his blood in its veins.
    He could easily have rejected both Ezinma and her son, casting them out to find their own way back to the Sumba, or starve. But Nwoye was a man of honour as well as pride. He kept Ezinma, and in course of time fathered his own daughter, Ekwefi, from her; and he treated Madu fairly, so that no-one could ever say he denied Madu anything he would have given his own sons.
    No-one, that was, except Madu. For Madu knew how little, how very little love came with what Nwoye gave him, how seldom Nwoye had shown the slightest sign of pride in what he did. And that made all the difference.
    It would have been better, perhaps, if Nwoye had rejected him altogether; then Madu could have hated him, and then forgotten. But Nwoye had tried, a little, sometimes, to love the boy who had made him a public mockery. And it was because Madu cherished