Reincarnations Read online

  Closer, closer… A submachine gun spat a great number of bullets, but was hardly a weapon of finesse or accuracy. "Fire!" Tolbukhin shouted, and blazed away. The Nazi noncom tumbled down the steep side of the wash. Some of those bullets had surely bitten him. The rest of the German squad lasted only moments longer. One of the Hitlerites lay groaning till a Red Army man went down and cut his throat. Who could guess how long he might last otherwise? Too long, maybe.

  "Now we go on home," Tolbukhin said.

  They had practiced withdrawal from such raids many times before, and maskirovka came naturally to Soviet soldiers. They took an indirect route back to the collective farm, concealing their tracks as best they could. The Hitlerites sometimes hunted them with dogs. They knew how to deal with that, too. Whenever they came to rivulets running through the steppe, they trampled along in them for a couple of hundred meters, now going one way, now the other. A couple of them also had their canteens filled with fiery pepper-flavored vodka. They poured some on their trail every now and then; it drove the hounds frantic.

  "Waste of good vodka," one of the soldiers grumbled.

  "If it keeps us alive, it isn’t wasted," Tolbukhin said. "If it keeps us alive, we can always get outside of more later."

  "The Comrade General is right," Khrushchev said. Where he was often too familiar with Tolbukhin, he was too formal with the men.

  This time, though, it turned out not to matter. One of the other soldiers gave the fellow who’d complained a shot in the ribs with his elbow. "Da, Volya, the Phantom is right," he said. "The Phantom’s been right a lot of times, and he hasn’t hardly been wrong yet. Let’s give a cheer for the Phantom."

  It was another soft cheer, because they weren’t quite safe yet, but a cheer nonetheless: "Urra for the Phantom Tolbukhin!"

  Maybe, Tolbukhin thought as a grin stretched itself across his face, maybe we’ll lick the Hitlerites yet, in spite of everything. He didn’t know whether he believed that or not. He knew he’d keep trying. He trotted on. Collective Farm 122 wasn’t far now.

  MOSO

  "Moso" is also an alternate history, but of a different sort-an ecological a-h, you might say. Each member of the cat family chooses prey based not least on size. Cats eat mice; bobcats eat ground squirrels; and so on up to leopards, which eat things like baboons and smaller antelopes, and lions, which eat larger antelopes and zebras. No feline big enough to hunt critters like rhinos and elephants ever evolved. But what if one did?

  Tshingana saw the vultures spiraling down from the sky as he walked out from the kraal to the cattle. Many, many vultures were descending. Something large must have died, Tshingana thought, and not far away. He trotted through the scrubby grass to see what it was.

  Large indeed: an elephant lay not far from a stand of acacia trees. The vultures hopped around, not getting too close to the great mountain of meat. Other, larger scavengers were there before them-hunting dogs; hyenas; and three lions, one a big, black-maned male. Tshingana’s hand tightened round the knobkerrie he was carrying, through he was nearly a quarter-mile away, not close enough to be interesting.

  Not even the lion showed any inclination to approach the elephant’s carcass. Tshingana understood why a moment later, when a moso climbed up onto its prey and began to feed.

  The youth dropped his club. He shivered all over, though the morning was already warm. He had never seen a moso before. Now he understood why the storytellers of the baTlokwa tribe likened the greatest of all cats to lightning and fire. What but lightning, fire, or a moso could bring down an elephant?

  The moso would have made three, perhaps four, of the big male lion. Even across several hundred yards, Tshingana could see its fangs gleaming as it tore chunk after chunk of flesh from the flank of the animal it had killed. Had it not been atop the elephant, though, he might never have spied it at all, for its striped coat, dark brown on tawny, was made for blending into grassland.

  It raised its enormous head and looked toward Tshingana. Those golden eyes seemed to pierce his very soul. He shook his head, rejecting the idea. Surely he was too small and puny for the moso to notice.

  So it seemed, for the beast started eating again. Tshingana remembered the cattle he was supposed to be tending. The rest of the boys in his iNtanga-his age group-would be angry at him for giving them more to do. He loped away with a ground-eating stride he could keep up for a couple of hours at a stretch.

  The cattle were not that far away. The other herdboys jeered and waved their fists at Tshingana as he approached. "Was the inside of your hut too dark to remind you it’s daytime?" asked the tallest of them, a skinny youth named Inyangesa.

  "More likely he stopped for ukuHlobonga with one of the girls," suggested Tshingana’s half-brother Sigwebana. Everyone laughed at that; Tshingana felt his face grow hot. Men and women did ukuHlobonga when they did not want to start children. None of the herdboys had yet spent seed even at night, though, so Sigwebana was just being rude. He was good at that, Tshingana thought.

  "Where were you, Tshingana?" asked his best friend Mafunzi.

  "I saw the vultures come down, so I went to see why," he answered.

  "I didn’t see that," Sigwebana said.

  "I did," Mafunzi said, "and over from the east, the direction Tshingana came from. What was it, Tshingana?"

  "A moso killed an elephant, over by the acacias. I saw it eating," Tshingana said importantly.

  The rest of the youths stared at him, eyes wide and white in their black faces. Then Sigwebana snickered. "You lie, Tshingana," he said. "Come on, tell us who you were playing ukuHlobonga with. Was it Matiwane? She’s pretty, isn’t she?" His hips thrust obscenely.

  Tshingana hit him. Yelling at each other, the two herdboys rolled in the dirt, punching and wrestling. The others cheered them on. Finally, with honors about even, they warily separated. Tshingana wiped dirt, dry grass, and a few bugs from his hide. "It’s the truth," he told Sigwebana, who was doing the same thing. "Go look for yourself if you don’t believe me. I hope the moso eats you, too."

  "It wouldn’t," Inyangesa said. "Moso don’t bother with people, any more than lions with rabbits: not enough meat for them to worry about. Moso don’t even bother much with cattle."

  "How do you know so much about moso?" Mafunzi asked. "You’ve never seen one. Nobody in our iNtanga has ever seen one, or in the group older than we are, either. Nobody except Tshingana, I mean." He grinned at his friend.

  "I don’t think he saw one either," Inyangesa said.

  Tshingana wanted to hit him too, but he’d just had one fight and was pretty sure Inyangesa could beat him. All he said was "See for yourself. Take Sigwebana with you."

  "We’ll both come after you if you’re lying," Inyangesa warned him. "By the acacias, you said?" He started trotting toward them. After a moment, Sigwebana followed.

  "What will you do if they don’t find it?" Mafunzi asked.

  "So you don’t really believe me either, do you?" Tshingana said bitterly. "It was there. They’ll see it."

  He and Mafunzi walked along, following the cattle and occasionally yelling and waving their arms to keep the beasts together. The herd was not a chief’s fancy one, with all the cows the same color, but, Tshingana thought, that only mattered to chiefs-the milk was just as sweet either way.

  Inyangesa and Sigwebana were gone so long, Tshingana began to worry. They might have been too small for the moso to care about, but more than a moso had been by the acacia trees. Some of the predators there were of a size to find herdboy a fine meal.

  No, here they came, Tshingana saw with relief. Not even Sigwebana deserved to be eaten by hunting dogs… he supposed. Certainly it would set the kraal in an uproar if he was. On the other hand, if he was going to call Tshingana a liar-

  He wasn’t. He and Inyangesa were almost leaping out of their skins in excitement. "It’s there! It’s there!" they shouted, and Tshingana’s heart leaped too. He’d almost begun to doubt himself. He glanced over at Mafunzi. His friend had the
grace to hang his head.

  "Big as a-big as a-" Sigwebana seemed stuck for a comparison. Tshingana did not blame him. Only rhinos, hippos, and elephants were bigger than that moso. Tshingana’s half-brother went on, "A lion got too close to the elephant’s carcass, and the moso roared at it. It sounded just like thunder, but even more frightening. You should have seen that lion scramble backwards."

  Inyangesa said, "I know it’s not noon yet, but I think we should bring the cattle back to the kraal early No one will be angry at us when we tell what we found."

  "We?" Tshingana yelled in outrage. "Before you did not believe me, and now you want to take credit?" He balled his fists. He still did not want to fight Inyangesa, but it did not look as though he’d have much choice.

  Then Mafunzi said, "For finding a moso, there is enough credit to go around." Inyangesa nodded. After a moment, so did Tshingana. Mafunzi was right.

  The herdboys got the cattle turned round, though the beasts were inclined to balk at having routine broken. They moved so slowly and resentfully that it was nearly noon by the time the beehive huts and thorn fence of the kraal drew near.

  Still, they were early enough to be noticed. Several of the women out hoeing in the millet fields around the kraal yelled at Tshingana and his companions. The yells turned to curses whenever the cattle tried to nibble the crops or stepped on the young plants nearest the track.

  The commotion the women raised made the kraal’s men look up from what they were doing. "Too early to milk the beasts yet!" shouted Mafunzi’s father Ndogeni.

  "But we saw-" Mafunzi began.

  Shamagwava the smith shouted him down, as grown men shout down youths all over the world: "I don’t care what you saw. Go back out and see it again till the proper time." Shamagwava was father to Tshingana and Sigwebana, by different wives. He was as burly as his trade would suggest-not a man to argue with, not at any normal time.

  This time was not normal. "Father, we saw a moso!" the two half-brothers yelled together. Sigwebana even smiled at Tshingana afterwards. After years of squabbling, they’d found something about which they could agree completely.

  Dead silence for a moment, almost as unusual round the kraal as mention of the greatest cat. Then all the men were shouting at once, most of them in high excitement. But Shamagwava said, "If they’re making this up to keep from working…" As smith, he worked more steadily than the rest of the baTlokwa men, and had exaggerated notions about the value of labor.

  Even as Shamagwava complained, though, Ndogeni asked, "Where did you see it?" The boys quickly told him. He got down on hands and knees to crawl into his hut. When he came out, he was carrying several assegais-throwing-spears as tall as he was, each with a span-long iron point- -and his oval cowhide shield. Several other men also armed themselves. "We will go look," Ndogeni declared. They trotted off toward the stand of acacias, which was hardly visible from the kraal.

  "They can’t be thinking of hunting the moso!" Tshingana exclaimed. The assegais seemed flimsy as reeds to him, when set against the bulk and power of the elephant he had seen.

  Shamagwava came out to him, set a hard hand on his shoulder. "If there is a moso, they will not hunt it," he said. "Why should they? Moso rarely trouble men or cattle. But they will drive the scavengers from the body of the elephant, so they can bring back fresh meat for us."

  Tshingana’s mouth watered. It occurred to him that the men were scavengers of the moso too, no less than the vultures or hunting dogs. He did not care. Meat was meat. He had never tasted elephant before.

  His father brought amaSi to him and Sigwebana. They ate the milk curds and waited for the men to return. Mafunzi and Inyangesa started milking some of the kraal’s cattle, but only halfheartedly. Their heads went up at every sound-they were waiting, too.

  The cattle, impatient to get back to the scrub for the afternoon’s grazing, lowed and tossed their heads. The herdboys, though, did not want to take them out, and the few men left at the kraal did not insist. As much as anything, that showed Tshingana how remarkable the moso was.

  The sun was heading down toward the western hills before the band of men finally reappeared. They moved slowly; as they drew closer, Tshingana saw that they were burdened with as much meat as they could carry. His stomach growled. He patted it, anticipating a feast.

  The women working in the fields set down their hoes and digging-sticks and rushed out toward the returning men with glad cries: they saw the meat too. "Raise the fires high tonight!" Inyangesa shouted.

  Shamagwava turned to him. "Since you had the idea, you can gather the wood." Inyangesa’s long, mobile face fell. Tshingana laughed as he sadly shambled off to start dragging in branches and dry grass. That was a mistake. "You can help," his father said.

  Sigwebana was doubly foolish, for he had seen the fate of his companion and his half-brother but laughed anyhow. That drew Shamagwava’s attention to him. With three boys hauling fuel, soon the fires could have been made big enough to roast food for the whole baTlokwa impi- -big enough to cook for a regiment, not just the folk of this kraal.

  Ndogeni, bent almost double under the great chunk of elephant meat on his back, set down his load with a sigh of relief. Flies descended on it in a buzzing cloud. Ndogeni took no notice of them. He walked over to Tshingana and spoke to him most seriously, as if he were a man and a warrior: "There was a moso, Tshingana. We saw it just as it was leaving the carcass, and heard it too."

  Inyangesa’s father Uhamu, an even taller, thinner version of his son, shuddered as he lay down the meat he was carrying. "That roar is the deepest, most frightening sound I ever heard, a sound like the beginning of an earthquake. My bones turned to water; nothing could have made me draw close to it, even had I wished to."

  Ndogeni nodded. "If you ask me, the moso is an umlhakathi- -a wizard-in the shape of a beast. It must be more than simply a big cat. A lion’s roar is savage, but it does not put that heart-freezing dread in a man."

  Uhamu visibly gathered himself. "It is gone now, though, and we have this lovely meat it left behind. And I will drink millet-beer, and after I have drunk enough I will forget I was ever frightened in all my life. And for that, the headache I will have tomorrow will be a small price to pay."

  The elephant meat proved tough and strong-tasting. Tshingana ate his fill anyhow, as much for the novelty of it as for any other reason. He also drank a couple of pots of beer, which left him yawning even before the evening twilight was gone from the sky.

  His mother Nandi was already snoring on her grass mat when he got down on all fours and crawled into the hut they shared. As soon as he closed the low door behind him, the hearthfire made the hut start to fill up with smoke. His eyes watered as he got his own sleeping-mat down from where it hung on the wall. He lay down.

  The air was a little fresher near the ground, but smelled of the cow dung that had been pounded into the dirt to make a smooth floor. To Tshingana, it was part of the smell of home. Aided by the beer he’d drunk, he drifted toward sleep.

  Cockroaches scuttled through the straw of the hut’s walls, darted across the floor. One scurried over Tshingana’s leg. He was snoring himself by then, and never noticed.

  The moso wandered away from the kraal, following the elephants on which it preyed. The brief notoriety that had accrued to Tshingana for first spying the beast slowly faded as newer matters caught the fancy of his clan.

  Among those newer matters, to Tshingana’s mortification, was his half-brother Sigwebana’s coming of age. The two of them had been born about the same time; Tshingana had always assumed he would reach puberty first. But one night Sigwebana woke with his belly wet-manhood had come to him, while Tshingana remained a boy.

  Sigwebana was revoltingly smug about the whole thing, too, which only made it worse. Tshingana vowed revenge, and got it. When a boy became a man among the baTlokwa, as among other nearby Bantu tribes, one morning he drove his kraal’s cattle far out into the grassland, trying to hide them from everyone. The longer he s
ucceeded, the greater the success expected from him in the future.

  Tshingana stalked Sigwebana like a lion going after a gnu. It was not even noon when he found his half-brother and the cattle in a drift-a wash with a trickle of stream in the bottom- surprisingly close to the kraal.

  He stood at the top of the drift, yelling and jeering, drawing boys and men to Sigwebana. Sigwebana wept and cursed and looked as though he wanted to throw his new man-sized assegai at Tshingana.

  That evening, back at the kraal, his father took him aside. "You did well-maybe too well," Shamagwava said. "No one likes to be humiliated… and Sigwebana is my son too."

  "He shouldn’t have boasted so much," Tshingana said sullenly. He knew he ought to feel guilty, but could not manage it.

  "I suppose not." Shamagwava sighed, "How do you imagine he will act, though, when your turn to hide the herd comes?"

  Tshingana’s lips skinned back from his teeth. "I hadn’t thought about that," he said in a small voice.

  "Maybe you should have," his father said. "Be sure Sigwebana will think of little else. I cannot even say I altogether blame him for it."

  For the next few weeks, the problem of what Sigwebana would do remained only a worry at the back of Tshingana’s mind. But then he awoke one night from a dream of confused but overwhelming sweetness, to discover that his seed had jetted forth for the first time. By the usages of the baTlokwa, he was a man.

  He watched Sigwebana as he told Shamagwava he had spent himself in the night. His father pounded his back, almost knocking him down, and roared out the traditional bawdy congratulations. His half-brother, though, looked at him like a leopard studying an antelope from a thorn tree.

  Shamagwava gave Tshingana a man’s assegai, a weapon a foot taller than he was. "Tomorrow the cattle are yours, my son-for as long as you can keep them," he said. His eyes slipped to Sigwebana, who was, after all, also his son.

  Knowing how his half-brother would go after him, Tshingana had no great hope of keeping the clan’s herd undiscovered for very long. Staying on the loose till mid-afternoon would be fine. Anything better than Sigwebana had done would be fine.