15. STRAGGLERS

The return of the army

Standing in the Owongo cave entrance and pretty as ever, Mirumda was looking out for her man. He frequently had to go hunting and often he was away for lengthy periods. Not all of the small animals he wanted as prey were willing to be easily caught! But all living things need food and the humans in that cave were no exception, especially as there were two additional children in need of sustenance. Mirumda had thought of asking around for spare titbits, but a pervading fear that the two little ones might be a first wave of attack wouldn’t easily go away and she and Owongo were beginning to be looked upon by some as some version of traitors.
So she was particularly worried about Owongo’s safety when she saw him leading a man she didn’t recognise from the direction of his favourite and most productive hunting ground. At first she wondered if the man was forcing Owongo to go before him as if her man was a prisoner, then she noticed that the stranger was limping and found walking difficult and that it was Owongo who had two large hares hanging from one hand as he helped the other man along, so she waved cheerily.
The two children from the burnt village were playing together, but the boy, Brava, came up to her to see what she was waving at.
“What is, mama Mirumda?” he asked, and then he noticed the man who was clearly a stranger as far as Mirumda was aware, and his face lit up as if illuminated by a hidden and glorious light.
“Dada!” he cried out, and took off at a great speed, running towards the two hunters as if propelled by the greatest of joys.
“Woah!” cried Owongo as the boy catapulted into the arms of Quanto, who looked at him in surprise before a broad smile stretched across his face.
“Brava mine!” he shouted, “Oh Brava, Brava, I feared…”
Enlightenment crossed Owongo’s face, and he found himself smiling too.
“Brava your boy?” he asked.
Quanto nodded happily. “He my son,” he said proudly.”He not at home when volcano exploded! It was night time and he sleeping with friend in shack nearer mountain, and I thought him dead!”
“I was trying to find you, dada,” explained Brava, “and I got lost, then nasty men threw stones at me, stones hit me, hurt me, but Owongo saved me and took me to live with him and lady Mirumda. And Coo-coo: she there too!”
“Coo-coo? Girl from neighbour cave? She there too?”
Brava nodded, and by that time the little party had reached Mirumda standing by the cave entrance.
“Who have here?” she asked, looking suspiciously at Quanto. She had missed the parental greetings and was puzzled. She knew that Owongo easily attracted friends, but this man, looking weary and with quite nasty looking wounds all over him, wasn’t, she thought, the sort of man he befriended under normal circumstances.
“Bravo’s dada,” Owongo told her briefly, “he lost, and I find him!”
By that time the other three children, Mirumda and Owongo’s twins and Coo-coo, had come forwards from where they’d been playing at the back of the cave, to see what the sudden excitement was.
“Quanto!” squealed Coo-coo, and she also hugged the stranger, who was beginning to look less abashed and more at home with the two youngsters hanging from him.
“Quanto refugee from mountain explosion,” Owongo tried to explain, but out of the blue Prince Dickory, who was still guarding the start of the mountain pass, though Owongo could see no good reason for him to be doing that, had also come to see what the surge of excitement was. And he noticed Quanto.
“Who this then?” he barked, “when all good men ‘cept Wongo are off fighting for our tomorrows?”
“Oh, Prince Dickhead,” grated Owongo, “if you must know, this is Quanto and he is the father of the boy Brava here. You know which boy: the one who fled the fires of an exploding mountain in fear for his life, only to have an idiot throwing stones at him as he hoped he’d reached safety. Let me see, Dickhead, which idiot might that have been?”
“You…” began Prince Dickory, but he was lost for words. Then a fresh thought crossed his mind. “You mean, this man here, this refugee, is after your home? Is wanting to cast you and yours out so that he can bring his urchins in?”
“Who this moron?” asked Quanto, “saying such things? I was told when I was tiny that the folk this side of the mountain are our brothers, our cousins, the lucky few who escaped the wrath of the volcano last time that it showed its anger and destroyed our ancestors’ lives… that this time it took my woman who I loved more than I loved life…”
“Dada,” put in Brava, this man our enemy. This man send hoards to take our homes, kill those who lived past the mountain’s anger, this man the root of evil…” His actual pre-historic words have been rendered in a language my readers can understand, and by evil he meant something a thousand times more rotten than you or I think as evil.
Prince Dickory had a hundred different things he could say, but he knew he was in a position of physical weakness. And in addition he knew that Owongo, cheerful and good humoured as he normally was, could none-the-less defeat him in a physical sense while his own personal bully boys were following his instructions and possibly still a day’s march away.
It was while he was shaking his head and searching for a fresh argument against those who had witnessed the explosion in the next valley that Quango noticed something high on the mountain pass.
“Who they?” he asked, pointing, “men and women, struggling and bleeding, even sliding down the side of the hill? I not know them, they not people from my village and anyway nobody would allow women to join a force because they might get hurt, or worse…”
Owongo knew who they were because he recognised several of them. And, leading the way though obviously exhausted was the thug the Prince had called Crackhead. And those straggling behind him looked as if they’d neither eaten nor slept since they had departed as an army fit for battle and in the mood for blood.
But now they were a feeble trickle that could threaten nobody. Some of them sat down for a rest, sat on the rough gravel that was the only surface the path they were on had, and as they sat one or two of them even slept.
“Here your army, Prince Dickhead,” scorned Owongo, “victorious it seems.”
© Peter Rogerson, 21.11.23