The Sleeping Baobab Tree (18 page)

Bul-Boo finally got the message.

“Sorry, Madillo,” she said quickly. “It’s not true. There was no man. It was Nokokulu who carried you to the car. She’s stronger than she looks. She said you stayed asleep because you were exhausted from all the noise you’d been making.”

“But there was a two-legged hyena,” I said, before I could stop myself.

At that they both turned on me.

“What?”

I probably shouldn’t have blurted that out, but this wasn’t the part Nokokulu had told me to keep quiet about. And as I was the only one who had seen it I decided it was OK to carry on.

“We were driving away, you were both asleep, and the car hit something. It made a kind of thudding noise as if we’d knocked someone over. I asked Nokokulu if I should get out and look in case we had killed someone, or an animal or something. But she said no. In fact she said she didn’t care what it was as long as her car was all right. Even if it was a baby.” (That was an exaggeration, but you cannot tell a good story without exaggerating.) “So we drove off and I looked behind us and do you know what I saw?”

“No.”

“A giant animal, bigger than a lion but not quite as big as an elephant. It was lying there as if it was dead. Then suddenly it lifted its head up and it stared at me. Stared right at me with yellow eyes. It was as if it knew me.”

Mum says I have a condition called confabulation – where I fill in details where there is supposed to be nothing. So if it’s a story about a horse galloping through a town and coming out the other side without incident, by the time I tell it the horse will have had seventeen extraordinary experiences along the way. Maybe she’s right.

“Did it stand up?” Madillo asked.

“No. After it lifted its head it lay down in a weak, dead kind of way. And I couldn’t see much as Nokokulu wanted to get away and it was dark. I couldn’t even see how many legs it had.”

“Fred, are you making this up?” Bul-Boo asked suspiciously.

“No! I couldn’t make something like that up,” I said.

“Well, you could,” Madillo argued. “We all know that.”

She was right. I probably could.

“You know, Fred,” said Bul-Boo, “it could have been a stray dog from Pambazana village. A really big dog that wandered off and happened to get in the way of Nokokulu and her yellow car.”

“It could,” I conceded, “but it also could have been a two-legged hyena. A Man-Beast. Couldn’t it?”

She shrugged, as she does when she doesn’t want to admit that I could be right.

The three of us sat looking at one another for a few moments until I jumped up and said, “I challenge whoever of you is first downstairs to a game of Ultimate Tenkaichi.”

We all ran down to the playroom and managed to spend the next hour on the PlayStation, miraculously uninterrupted by parents, small irritating younger brothers or great-grandparents. That was a first.

Bul-Boo and I played against each other and Madillo sat next to us giving a running commentary.

The three of us together. As it should be.

The
tall man runs slowly in the moonlight, his steps even and steady. He will run like this until he reaches his home.

As he runs he thinks about the beast who roamed this earth since time began: a creature who outlived the hunters, the traders, the farmers and the fishermen; a creature who kept to himself, and hid behind the smallest of rocks or up in the tallest of trees; a creature whose size changed in the moonlight.

He has seen him too many times to count.

And now he is gone. For ever. His footprints will no longer frighten the people who come here seeking answers from those who have gone before them; he will no longer prey on those who venture out of their villages.

The man thinks about the old woman, the one who has no fear in her, not of the living or the dead. She is a mystery to him. He had not seen her before, yet he felt that he knew her. On her face were the lines of those who lived long ago.

It was she who ended the reign of the ancient creature.

It was she who blessed the small girl with the sleep of forgetting.

As he runs he knows he will not be able to forget the old woman. He cannot, for she has freed him from his burden of following the creature who has no name; the burden of trying to protect those he would attack; and most of all the burden of failure.

He watched as the young girl crept out of the small tent; watched as she walked fearfully to where the creature had been. Then he saw the eyes, the greedy yellow eyes. They were also watching.

The yellow eyes moved away from the girl and stared at the man. The man stared back, feeling the waves of hopelessness flood through him.

Then the beast started walking slowly and quietly towards the young girl, with the strange gait of one who should have four legs but now has only two. He rolled as he walked, his body awkward and clumsy, his small withered arms held in front of his face.

The young girl looked up as the shadow fell across her. She stood perfectly still, frozen to the ground. She did not scream. The beast leant down and scooped her into his arms. The tall man had seen this before. He knew that when the fear was this big all else stopped.

Now was the time. It was always this way.

The tall man came and stood in front of the beast. He no longer feared him, because he knew it was not him that the beast wanted. He had stood before him like this many times. Sometimes he had saved those that the beast preyed upon; more times he had failed.

“Leave this one. Leave her. Let her return to her family.”

The beast held the young girl tighter and laughed, a howling rough laugh that bounced off the trees.

The tall man’s heart beat faster.

The beast did not move.

The tall man knew this trick. Once before he had walked forward to try and grab the prey away, but the beast had been quicker than he was. In the blink of an eye he had opened his wide jaws and snapped them shut over his victim. The tall man had never walked forward again.

Just then he heard a sound behind him and turned round.

A tiny old woman was standing there. The tiny old woman who he now thinks of as he runs towards his home.

“Ha!” she said, pointing at the beast. “You, put that child down. Now.”

The beast laughed again.

A small grin appeared on the old woman’s face.

“Laughing Hyena, you think that frightens me? Two-legged Hyena, you think that frightens me? You do not know me, but after today you will not laugh again.”

The beast opened his mouth, but instead of laughter a swarm of buzzing honey bees flew out. An endless swarm that seemed to glow in the night. They landed on every part of him, his eyes, his nose, his ears. Some turned around and flew back into his open mouth.

The tall man watched as the beast twitched and turned with each sting.

“Laugh now, you two-legged cowardly runt of a creature, laugh now!” the old woman said, hopping back and forth from one leg to another.

Suddenly the buzzing stopped and the bees turned, as one, and disappeared into the night.

“Give me the girl now,” the old woman instructed.

The beast looked at her, silently, his legs trembling.

“Ha!” the old woman said, and the beast slowly collapsed, falling softly to the ground.

The tall man ran forward and grabbed the young girl from his little stunted arms. A cloud of dust rose up around the beast and a strangled breath came out of his swollen mouth.

The young girl looked up at the man who now held her, her eyes wide with fear.

“Come here,” the old woman told him. “Put her down on the ground.”

The tall man did as he was told and placed her gently down. The old woman leant over her and softly ran her fingers over her eyes. They closed.

“The Sleep of Forgetting,” the old woman whispered. “It will wipe all this from her mind.”

Then the tall man lifted her up again and took her to where the old woman led him.

He knows she is safe now, the small one and her sister who looks no different from her. Safe and at home.

The tall man stops running. He has reached the banks of the Kariba Dam. He sits down on the soft shore and stares out over the shining expanse of water, his heart filled with gladness.

For the first time in centuries he can rest his weary body.

For the first time in centuries he has nothing to fear. His task is complete. He too will sleep, and forget.

As with
The Butterfly Heart
, lots of people played a part in this book’s arrival. Thanks first, as always, to Tom, Amy, Christie, Kate, Aisling and Maurice and to my extended family, every single one of them. They know who they are – in-laws, out-laws, nephews, nieces, cousins, aunts and uncles. It is said that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family: given the choice I would change nothing.

A special thanks this time to Orla Mackey in Kilkenny. Orla did the teaching notes for
The Butterfly Heart
and
The Sleeping Baobab Tree
. She is, to my mind, the kind of teacher that all teachers should be – kind, curious, hard-working, creative, insightful and patient. Thank you, Orla.

Many other people are due thanks for their role in this book and their support of
The Butterfly Heart
: my lovely writers’ group, the Crabapples: Jean, Gemma, Una and Geoff; Siobhán Parkinson; Vukani Nyirenda at Kalimatundu Tales; John Nchimunyality Cargula; Mwanabibi Sikamo at Uprooting the Pumpkin; Bwalya Chileya; Mary Esther Judy; Mpikeleni Duma; Karabo Kgoleng; the Phiri family in Lusaka; Colleen Cailin Jones; Elaina O’Neill; Rachel Leydon; the Coopoo family; Marian Oliver; Louie Calvert; Alice Bennett; Stephanie Meaney; Brian Roche and St John’s School; Daniel Sana and Sydney Chibbabbuka of Bantu Pathfinders; my young writers’ group in the Kilkenny Tech; CBI and
Inis
for their fantastic support of children’s literature; the judges who awarded me the Éilís Dillon Award; SCBWI for their work in promoting children’s books; the libraries, the wonderful libraries, we are privileged to have them; the Kilkenny bookshops – we are blessed in Kilkenny with great bookshops and they have been a fantastic support; and all the other bookshops around the country. And to anyone else I may have forgotten … sorry! Any omissions I will make good on my website at
www.thebutterflyheart.net
, I promise.

To Sophie Hicks, still a Wonder Woman amongst agents, and to Edina Imrik and all the staff at Ed Victor; to Emma Lidbury and Gill Evans at Walker Books, both truly gifted editors, for once again showing faith in my writing; to Gillian Hibbs (at
www.gillianhibbs.co.uk
) and Maria Soler Canton for the beautiful artwork and cover design; to Conor Hackett and everyone else at Walker Books, a magical publisher.

This book, like
The Butterfly Heart
, is set in Zambia. As my childhood home it lingers long in my memory, may it flourish and grow.