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CHAPTER I
They raised me who thieved me from a battlefield, so I know no family and have chanced upon naught in the hunt for my roots. I grew up in the jungles of Isiko, in the land of deadly warriors, but being a son of their enemy they taught me no skill to tend or mend.
Darabi’s Dija, that cemetery of woods, where a healer died of fever, where the widow’s tear was for her husband’s rival, there I met my foremost calling in life. Wood hated me, I knew, and I hated wood, but here I was, the disciple of a lumberjack, so I smiled upon wood.
On the day I was expelled, wood had its muscles tightened against the blades of my trade, blunting them as I hacked into its lanky nape. I conquered, but the kill that fell before the buyer, as I was told, was as hideous as a pauper’s purse, so Darabi dragged me to conference and dismissed me with no less than: ‘Loafer, loafer without patrimony, go to Maaya; go to the witch, for only such a one can dismember you from doom.’
Hunger then put me in the cult of a charlatan who was a herbalist who traded impotent concoctions. Our market was shingles, boils, barrenness and all manner of diseases that the sons of women grumbled of.
On the morning of our confinement, we had washed a foetus off the innards of its parent till they both became corpses. I swore innocence but my liberty came by Darabi, who was representative of me, for he argued: ‘This loafer hasn’t a knowledge of herbs, nor has he the eye of a diviner. His hands are not skilled. His brain hasn’t a discretion; he wanders into all servitude, profitable or vain.’
WAHOME MUTAHI 2010 ENTRY FORM
