11. INVESTIGATION

OWONGO AND A PRINCE
11. INVESTIGATION
Even to Owongo, Mirumda was a bright and lovely woman with the sort of vocabulary Prince Dickory would have been proud of had he owned it, which I suppose he ought to have, being a wannabe leader of a primitive tribe of early humans. But he was all bluster and greed and self-serving.
“Tell all, darling,” whispered Mirumda to the child, and Coo-coo nodded and began.
She very clearly, and with many a sob, explained to Mirumda, with Owongo eagerly listening in, how she had been awoken in the night by the loudest ever noise in the history of everything. That was how she had described it, and neither of her listeners could find any fault with her description. The loudest noise in the history of everything seemed to be a most accurate description of what had woken them during the night of the wild awakening, as Owongo called it.
Then, rather tearfully, she accounted what had happened to her parents.
“Daddy rushed out of our home cave to see what was going on, and he was hit by falling flames from the heavens,” she said, and went on to suggest that the flames had devoured him until he stopped screaming and was no longer moving.
Mirumda’s heart almost melted for the little girl who seemed capable of taking quite a lot of pain and misery in her stride.
“Don’t you worry, you’re safe now,” whispered Mirumda, and Owongo nodded. They had two children of their own but could quite easily squash a third child in.
There was a sudden fuss outside the cave entrance and Owongo tut-tutted (in prehistoric language, of course, and possibly without a single tut) to himself, and went to his entrance to see what the fuss was.
It was the woman, she with a bitter face and the look of one who never gets anything wrong in her own eyes, the one he had heard Prince Dickory call Susu, and she was holding the boy Brava by one ear and a clump of his hair. The boy, fearing for his life, was howling, and she was screaming at him, about being a thief and a robber with his mind set on stealing everything her tribes-people had and taking it to his own home on the other side of the nearby mountains and then lead a host of enemy grown-ups to help his rob what he hadn’t managed to steal first time round once he’d had a good look at the way things were.
Owongo shook his head. “Do you know what you sound like?” he asked her, “you sound like mindless hag. Like unthinking w***e. Not like woman with thinking in her head.”
“I speak the truth!” snapped Susu, “I know what they’re up to! Did you not hear that noise in the night? Have they not prepared some dreadful weapon with which to besiege all of us.”
“We have heard of a mountain exploding,” sighed Owongo, “of the girl’s father burning to a cinder with powerful flames consuming his body. And of others reduced to ash in the twinkling of an eye…”
“Lies, all lies, to put us off our guard!” snapped Susu, “whoever heard of mountains that explode like that? Whoever heard of grown men burning to cinders? You, Owongo, has been told a mighty fistful of fairy stories and more fool you, you believe them!”
At that, Mirumda still holding on to Coo-coo appeared being Owongo, her face one portrait of troubled anger, for she had heard the child’s story and knew that the woman, once, apparently, a friend of Prince Dickory, had told them, and she had seen the fear in Coo-coo’s eyes and smelt the foul smoke on her tiny body.
“Right you, stupid woman,” she grated, “you go with my man now, and see! Owongo, you march creature looking like a woman up the mountain until you reach the top, and let her look at what dear little Coo-coo has spoken of.”
Owongo experienced a sudden fear when he heard Mirumda’s orders, for plainly that’s what they were, but he knew her well enough to know that she had already worked out that, despite fires and danger, her man would survive. Coo-coo had survived her journey down, so he must surely be able to survive the struggle up. So, in one simple movement and possible using excessive vigour, he grabbed hold of the offensive Susu and started marching her towards the foot of the mountain down which the two children had fought their way so recently
Despite her frantic efforts to pull away from him, Owongo, very much the stronger with muscles honed by a life-time of hunting, managed to rush Susu onto the slope of the mountain. Every so often their own mountain vibrated as if some mighty subterranean force was at work, and they were accompanied by showers of rocks and large stones shaken loose by the movement. But even though Susu screamed her protests, inventing quite a few unpleasant words many of which were meant to insult her captor’s naked genitalia, he continued to half-drag her up the slope.
By the time he neared the top half a day had passed and he was worn out, but he persisted until they could see down the other side.
The sight that met their eyes was one of devastation. There was a trail where molten rock had scorched its way downwards. There were fires flaming or smoking in various random places left behind it, and the air itself seemed to be so laden that it wasn’t easy to breathe it. But it was the sights of the people down there, not so many but those who had survived so far, wandering around, looking for family members and weeping with harsh screams when they found the dead body of a loved one.
And bodies there were. Dven with a casual glance Owongo could see a good dozen, some smouldering, others reduced to skeleton ash. And mostly women, weeping when they saw someone they loved, only reduced to scorched flesh or even ash.
For, readers, love back in prehistoric times was felt with the same intensity as it is in our own times.
“You see armies?” Owongo asked Susu, “you see forces with mighty weapons? Or maybe you see unhappy men and women hoping to find a son or daughter who has survived the disaster? For this is the world you are afraid of, the world you would die fighting against. For these are your cousins, and they are in dire need of your help.”
“Cousins, you say?” she whispered.
“Well, it is said in old stories that our own people came over this same mountain from a similar disaster, and escaped death by the tiny fraction those poor people are searching for.”
The he stood up tall so that he was sure that he was visible from below against the sky, waved both arms having released Susu, and shouted in his loudest voice, “Come, my neighbours, there is clean air, clean water and good meat this side of the mountain…”
The he sneered at Susu, and added, “with a little bit of luck that will bring your army of rapists and thieves, and maybe you will want to help them, for they are all your cousins, each and every one of them.”
© Peter Rogerson 15.11.23

Author's Note

My apologies for the small font, but it seems that Writerscafe has decided I don't need to adjust the size of my own font.

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[Peter Rogerson]

iI am reposting this entire story on Wordpress under the name of PETERROGERSON5.