head rush brought her back down onto her haunches. ‘Don’t go,’ she pleaded.
‘You’ve not eaten in two days,’ scolded Mumu Abena. Braced between her stout legs, a recurved bow was being strung. The bow had once belonged to Ashwana’s father and it was a beautiful piece. It had an accentuated curvature and was detailed in the ridged horn of a caprid. For years it had resided, unstrung, in the barkskin tool case.
‘Mumu, I’m not even hungry,’ said Ashwana. She was telling the truth. She could barely sip on water without nausea. The sickness had caught her swiftly, as it had the rest of her kinship. Three weeks past, the hunter Bulguno had been the first to catch the illness upon his return from a hunting trip in the Central Craters. In that time it had spread and almost all of the kin complained of fevers, pains and insomnia. Within days, the kinship had its first death – it had spread from there.
Lying back down, too tired to argue, Ashwana looked about their carriage – the rusting iron walls, the mesh ceiling, the familiar plastek curtains. It was a small space, a mere cubicle within the road train of their kinship. She could not remember how long they had been camped. They moved with their nomadic road trains, the relics of early prospectors.
Many of them still had working gas engines that were thousands of years old, retained and cared for by the shamans. The engines failed often, and they camped until the shamans could coax life back into the valves and pistons that were beyond her understanding. She could not remember how long they had been camped there.
Ashwana’s aimless gaze fell upon the shrine that hung above the boiler stove at the centre of their cabin. Hanging from a length of rope was a square clay face, framed by charms of squall feathers and the dismembered hoof of a male caprid. The face was of the Godspawn. A tiny wooden dish of acid berries and gourds was placed beneath it as an offering. Despite the fact that their oven had been cold for days, and there was no other food in the carriage, Mumu Abena had spared enough for the Godspawn. It seemed all they did these days was appease the Godspawn, but in return they received nothing but suffering.
Ashwana had lived with her grandmumu for all the twelve years of her life that she could remember. Without her parents, life had been hard within her nomadic kinship. The community moved often, following the migration patterns of the horned caprid, and it was difficult for her mumu to keep up without the help of anyone else. By all rights, Mumu 32
Abena was an elder, and an elder’s immediate family had a filial duty to ensure she was well cared for. But Abena had no other family except little Ashwana and she was too young to do much.
Of course, that had not stopped her from trying. Every day, she tried to tend and milk the caprid, but her hands were too small to placate the wild, shaggyâhaired animals. She tried to gather sticks for the communal fires, but she had not been strong enough to carry the enormous bales on her head like the other women. Mumu Abena often laughed and told her that she was not yet old enough and she should play clap sticks with the other youths.
‘Your skin is not old and dark like mine,’ her mumu would say to her, while pointing to the deep, leathery bronze of her own skin. The sun of their land was exceedingly harsh and while bronzed skin was a sign of seniority among elders, tanned children were a sign of impoverishment. It meant the child had to work, and was a source of great shame. Her mumu was too proud a woman to live with that.
So it was that Mumu Abena, old yet spry, tended to their few domestic caprid, cooked, wove and contributed to the kinship in every way she could. It was a burden she should not have had to bear given her age.
But in the past season, things had become progressively worse. Since the strange lights in the sky, there had been little to eat for weeks. Travelling herdsmen from distant kinships had brought word of a plague spreading from the Northern Badlands. Ashwana’s kinship had dismissed it as the panic of isolated northern plainsmen, but they had been wrong to do so. It was not one plague, but