Makola (littlebuffalo) wrote in olympianthreads, @ 2014-11-16 14:33:00 |
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Makola arrived for his weekly counselling session with Sera already quite tired. He had thought that his second year classes would be easier to deal with; there were less of them and they were all focused on one subject, and although he still struggled with language problems, things weren’t quite so incomprehensible as they had been.
So far into this year though, it seemed that the opposite was true. He spent all his time before, after and between classes and meals reading, just trying to keep up with the other students. It wasn’t easy - he had to grasp the meaning of each individual word before he could summon an understanding of the sentence, and then the paragraph. It was slow going, and he considered giving up at least once every hour. The reading gradually improved his English, and these days, with a solid foundation to build on, he learned faster. But the classes were moving still faster than he could learn. The complex medical jargon never seemed to end.
His favourite class was Water. The lectures used words he could understand, and he was progressing well in the practical classes. He might be far behind the others when it came to words and tests and numbers… but magic was something he somehow understood. It was instinct. Like the hunt.
He didn’t think about home as much anymore. He didn’t have time. When the stray thought or memory drifted across his mind, his main thought was that he wouldn’t fit in there anymore. In a way of course, he never had. Uchungu. Sorrow, a bad omen they had named him, at birth. If he went back now, he wondered, what they would think of him? Full to the brim with new words, new language. Used to wearing strange clothes. Moving water with his hands, with his mind. Probably they would think he was a demon and cast him out. It made him sad to think it. He knew it was a true thing, but to admit that he knew better was to name the tribe ignorant.
He sat with Sera for the best part of an hour, assuring her that although he was working hard and feeling it, he was keeping up and didn’t need any extra help. He had extra help coming out of his ears. What he needed was more hours in the day to study. He sat in a chair nodded assurances and sipped water from a glass. Could he have been any further away from home in that moment?
As he left, he felt oddly shaky on his feet. It was unlike him, he was usually very stable and graceful on his feet. The shoes and the man-made floors had taken some getting used to, but these days he could get around just as easily as if he were barefoot on hard dirt. He made his way out of the building, thinking that perhaps he really had been working too hard. He would have to go back to his room and close his eyes…
As he went along the path the heavy tired feeling seemed to get more and more irresistible. He gait became more unsteady and he was forced to lean against a wall to gain his balance. Just a little further, he thought, but his legs refused to move. He managed to force one foot a little way, but when the other refused to follow, the other dragged behind, and his knees and hands hit the ground, his palms scraped pink, but he felt no pain. He was falling into a grey mist. His shoulder hit the ground, and that was all he knew.
-~.*~.*~.-
The sun was riding low over the purpling yellow horizon. There was a giant bonfire burning in the camp, and lithe dark bodies were dancing around it. Makola watched with a smile growing across his face. There they were. To a stranger they would have looked a tangle of arms and legs and clapping hands, firelight and shadows making faces indistinguishable, but he knew them all. They were his brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles. His mother and father were there too. He never saw their faces; he wouldn’t have recognised them if he had, but he knew they were there. There was only one person missing.
“Nugga nugga nuggaaaa! Nugga Nugga Nugga, Nuggamakola! Nugga, Nuggamakoooola!!”
A small dark hand landed on his arm, over the scar that covered the main of his forearm. He turned away from the blazing heat of the fire to look into Kagisola’s face. In the lost years she had grown from a skinny, limber young girl into a beautiful woman of the tribe. Her hair was cropped short to the skull, and she had woven reeds and beads around her head and neck and sewn into the pink-dyed fabric of her sarong. “Husband,” she said, smiling.
“Wife,” he said, breathlessly. He looked down at her, drifting the back of his fingers over her sarong. In the distance the chanting continued, over and over. “Nuggamakooooola!!”
“Come and dance with us,” Kagi said, beaming.
“They’re chanting my name. Why?”
Kagi cocked her head and lifted one hand to stroke his cheek. “Why do you think?” she said, and pointed to where a pair of zebra and three baboons were being laid out for a feast. “We’ll eat better today and tomorrow than we have in a long time.”
Makola looked at the meat. He looked down at himself. The baboon’s fang hung on his chest accompanied by green vine-like rope necklaces. He was otherwise bare to the waist, his loincloth hung loose on his hips and his bow slung over his shoulder. Strange. He had been half expecting to see cloth where there was skin.
The chant evolved as the dancers whirled around the fire, rising and changing. “Nuggamakola! Makola! Bahati Utajiri! Utaaaajiri!! Makola!”
Makola looked back towards the fire. “Utajiri? But...”
She reached out and put her fingers over his lips. “My husband is the best hunter this tribe has ever known,” she said, soft and smiling. “The very best. A man like that is not Unchungu. Uchungu, sorrow, is your past. Now the tribe names you Utajiri. Luck. Fortune.” Her fingers traced the contours of his face as they had done on their wedding night. They had been little more than children then. “My husband.”
Makola felt his heart swell with joy and pride. He didn’t know of any time in the tribe’s history when a name had been changed in this way, and with such great ceremony. There would be feasting and dancing and singing until the sun rose in the sky, and all night long they would chant his new name. Nuggamakola Utajiri.
A small dark body separated itself from the whirling dancers - a naked boy, only just on his legs but lightning fast over the rocky earth. He hurtled towards them and Makola, unthinking, bent his knees to capture the child in his arms. His son was whole, well-fed and healthy. He felt strong in Makola’s arms. “Baba!” he exclaimed happily, little hands clasping behind Makola’s neck. Kagi put her arms around both of them, and Makola thought he had never been so happy ever before.
“Come and dance with us, husband,” Kagi whispered, tugging gently on his arm. “It is your feast. You must dance with us.”
“I will,” Makola promised. He turned his family towards the fire, ready to join the tribe.
---
The problem with being the Aries Field Manager, fundamentally, was that when something happened in the Administration building, Woody was usually the last to know it. In case of an emergency, things moved quicker, sure, but in the midst of whatever was going on now, the word hadn’t quite reached him just yet. Then again, the day after midterms were over, he guessed they probably wouldn’t expect him to still be out on the field.
He sort of figured on something being up when he came down and found a kid passed out in the middle of the path. He sort of recognised the kid as… what, first year from last year? Yeah. He crouched down by the sleeping body and snapped his figures a few times.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, uh..” Oh, Christ, he knew this. Started with an M, didn’t it? “Kid?”
His hand came down on the kid’s shoulder, intending to shake him awake. He didn’t intend to pitch forward and into the middle of… where was this? Not Olympus, that was for damn sure.
Woody frowned as he surveyed the land. Africa. Had to be Africa. He remembered a six month excursion that had dragged the Woodcock family from Nairobi across a border to Zanzibar. Little bit of time near Mount Kilimanjaro, too. His father had been very excited about Kilimanjaro. His mother had been more excited by dirty bits of metal they found in the ground from over a thousand years ago.
Either way, he had a feeling that this not being Olympus meant it also wasn’t a place they were supposed to be--and may not even have been real.
He caught sight of the group of people around the fire, and he set off in their direction. Not too far away, just a few minutes of walking. When he got closer, he caught sight of the zebra, the baboons, and the kid. Hugging a woman and a child.
Hoping desperately that this was not an occasion when learning Swahili would have been useful, Woody moved closer to the kid from the path. “Hey,” he said, “Hey.” Damnit. What was this kid’s na--oh. “Makola?”
---
It took a while for Makola to register someone calling his name in the midst of all the chanting. He turned to see a tall pale stranger standing there in the dying rays of the setting sun. No, not a stranger. He recognised the man from Aries field. In his first year he’d made quite an impression on the archery field, but then he’d been hunting since he was old enough to walk. He still went by the archery range on occasion, for practice, although it wasn’t anything like hunting a real moving target. Although in the dream he had never been to Olympus, this didn’t seem to matter.
“Welcome,” he said, in Hadzane. In the dream it didn’t seem to him that he was required to speak English; he knew he would be understood. Kagi unfolded herself from his arms and took the boy from him, smiling and beckoning to him as she danced away towards the fire. “Have you come to dance with us? It’s a feast.”
In the distance the tribe continued to sing his name, the clapping of their hands and the slapping of their bare feet against the hard earth echoing through the warm night air. He could feel the thrumming and pounding all through his body, as though it travelled through the earth, through the air, and into him. He looked proudly at the feast being laid out. When the sun was down, they would roast the meat over the fire and eat together, pulling the cooked flesh from the carcasses with bare hands. Some would keep for tomorrow, and perhaps the next day, if the air stayed cool. There would be sweet honey and berries, too, and then more singing as they sat together and saluted the night. All for him.
---
The question caught him a little off-guard, Woody had to admit. He wasn’t much of a dancer, unless you wanted to maybe lose an eye. But it was less about the content and more about how weird Makola thought this wasn’t.
“Uh, no,” he said. “I don’t really… look, you don’t…” What, belong here? Great choice of words, Really. Come on, now, this was this kid’s home. Of course he belonged here. The same way that Olympus was his. He moved closer, keeping his eyes out toward the group of people around the fire.
Woody crossed his arms, pressing his lips together in a thin line for just a moment. “Look. I was coming down the path from the field and you were dead out asleep on the ground. I tried to wake you up and… we’re not supposed to be here.” He nodded toward the fire. “Something’s not right about this. We should find a way back.”
---
Makola understood perfectly, which later he would realise was strange, but in the dream it just made perfect sense. He smiled disarmingly at Woody. “It’s a feast,” he repeated. “We don’t need to go anywhere. It’s safe here, don’t be afraid.”
He turned and started to move towards the fire. He didn’t know why Woody was here, but it wasn’t important. He wanted to join the tribe. He wanted to dance and feast and celebrate with his family.
The sun finally sank below the horizon, its dying purple rays drowning into the firelight. The dancers dancers, the chanters chanted. “Nugga Nugga Nugga, Makooooola! Nugga Nugga Nugga, Makooooola! Nuggamakola Utajiri!” Feet echoed on the earth as the sky darkened and the moon rose..
Then, out of the dark, a distant howl was heard. At first solitary, then joined by many voices. Makola looked up, staring into the darkness as though he could see what approached, although he didn’t need to see. That sound was both a blessing to a hunter and a nightmare to the child he’d been when he’d been scarred. The dancers kept dancing, undisturbed by the noise. Probably just a troop passing through. It was mating season. But still Makola did not join the dance. He listened as voice after voice joined the call, as it grew louder and louder, closer and closer. He started to run.
In the distance a dark shape appeared on the horizon, like a cloud shadow, only there was no sun to cast such a shadow. It was very wide, and moving all the time, expanding, getting nearer. Hundreds of dark bodies, clambering over each other as they came down the ridge like a tidalwave. No. There must have been thousands of them.
Makola broke into the midst of the dancers, cursing and shouting a warning. He found a pile of arrows, freshly-made, and grabbed a handful, the other hunters around him doing the same, and swung his bow around. The women gathered the children into their arms, the youngest ones screeching in fear or protest, and ran away with them into the dark. Makola could not see Kagi, but there was no time to look for her. They had named him Utajiri, made him one of the tribe leaders. He had to protect them.
The wave of howling, screeching creatures was a tangle of legs and tails and teeth. The firelight glinted off bared fangs as they drew closer. Maybe ten or more troops together, come to take revenge on the tribe for all their lost members.
Makola gave a shout to the men and lifted his bow, sighting along it with the ease of a great hunter. The first arrow sailed straight across the narrowing space and hit the lead baboon between the eyes, right before the wave broke over them.
---