Gaadai’s Gift
3270 BC
The child was sleeping when Bakalo found him. Bakalo had shot two rabbits and a pouched rat, and now they were slung over his shoulder next to his bow while he went to refill his water-skin. There was a stand of baobabs amid the scrubland, and when he got close to them, he saw the child, curled up beside one of the trunks.
The boy stirred at Bakalo’s footsteps and looked up anxiously. He was starving, the hunter could tell, and he had the signs of thirst on him too, and the marks of injuries. Some of the wounds had been inflicted by animals, and it was the rice-mother’s own luck that they’d healed rather than festering. He’d taken no precautions against another attack, and the hunter wondered whether he was too exhausted to protect himself or whether he’d stopped caring.
Bakalo looked past him to a hollow that another hunter had made in one of the baobabs – there always was one, in a stand this close to the village – and scooped up the water inside with his skin. On impulse, he offered some to the boy, and marked his look of surprise as he drank.
He doesn’t know we use baobabs as cisterns, he thought, and that was even stranger than the child being there in the first place: children of three knew that, and this boy might be a precocious four or a stunted eight.
“Let’s find you something to eat too,” Bakalo said, and the child looked at him uncomprehending. He found a fallen fruit and cut it with his flint knife, scooping out the pulp and mixing it with the water in the skin. “We need to wait a few minutes,” he explained, and again the child didn’t understand. He shrugged and sat down in the shade to wait.
The boy said nothing, but he didn’t run. After a while, the hunter put his hand on his chest, said “Bakalo,” and pointed to the child. If he’d expected the boy to repeat the word or say his own name, he was disappointed; the boy sat as still and silent as he’d been before.
More time passed, and Bakalo opened the skin and saw that the pulp had absorbed the water; he stirred the mixture again into a thick tan liquid. He drank some of the
bouye, savoring the sour-sweet taste, and handed the child the skin and mimed raising it to his mouth. The boy followed, grimacing at the unfamiliar taste but following his first swallow with a second.
The hunter took the skin away. “Not too much at once. Not when you’ve been starving.” He took a few steps away from the baobabs and gestured with his arm. “Are you coming?”
Bakalo wasn’t sure what the child would do, and indeed, the boy stood at the edge of the trees for a moment and hesitated. He looked north, scanning the horizon for something, and evidently didn’t find it, because he took a fearful step out of the grove and followed where the hunter led.
“Is that where you’re from?” Bakalo asked. “Up north?” The child didn’t answer, but Bakalo could guess; like the tribesmen who came in from the desert to trade, his skin was a medium brown rather than black like Bakalo’s, and his hair came in waves rather than the hunter’s tight curls. He looked north every time Bakalo stopped to give him some more
bouye, and he looked north sometimes as they made their way toward the village, and did so one last time as the settlement came into sight.
Durubara, it was called – five acacias – and the trees formed a central space around which eighteen huts of pole and thatching were arranged. The sun was setting as Bakalo and the child reached the threshold, and men were returning from hunting or dredging canals while the women came in from the rice fields or put aside their pottery. The smell of cookfires mingled with that of the goats and guinea-fowl by the trees, and the sounds of the work-day were fading amid singing and conversation.
Bakalo’s hut stood open in the gathering darkness, and Mari, who he treasured most in the world, was stirring a pot of rice-mush in the fire-pit beside it. She turned as he approached, her necklace of clay beads rattling, and registered only the slightest surprise as she took in the child beside him, Bakalo liked to bring home curiosities.
“Where does he come from?” she asked.
“The north, I think. He’s a child of Gaadai, the desert-spirit.”
“Does he have a name?”
“He doesn’t speak. Whatever happened to him must have taken his wits.”
She pursed her lips. “Can he work?”
“I don’t know.”
“He can eat, I’m sure.” But she smiled in welcome, and there was enough rice-mush to fill three gourds, and they sat together, looking past where the granary stood on its stilts and down to the the dark Niger stained golden by the sunset. There was room in the hut for three, as well.
In the months that followed, the child never spoke, but his wits hadn’t left him altogether: he followed where he was led, and when he was shown what to do, he learned quickly. He worked in the rice fields and mended reed boats and houses. When the water rose, he helped take the huts down and rebuild them on higher ground. Mari showed him how to make clay pots and comb fleece; Bakalo sometimes took him hunting. No one needed to teach him to tend the goats; it was clear enough that he’d done so before, and he had a facility with the animals that others came to admire.
He was a slave – he wouldn’t have been set to do to women’s work otherwise – but in a village like Durubara, there was little difference between slave and free. There was work to do and people did it, and when the work was done, there was dancing and stories told to the beat of drums. Bakalo and Mari, who had no children of their own, came to think of the child almost as a son and to treat him as one. She named him Sama – the gift – and the other villagers followed.
But where there are gifts, there are those who would take them. The headman was growing old – he was almost forty – and his wife and son had died of rice-fever two years before. He wanted someone to look after him, to fetch and carry for him, and he claimed Sama as
his slave. And now, the distinction between slave and free did make a difference: had the child been Bakalo and Mari’s son, not even the headman would have dared take him, but property was his for the asking.
He came with two of the other men, one day after the floods receded when Bakalo was hunting, and seized Sama roughly. Mari’s protests were silenced with a threat; the child’s, not so easily. He couldn’t speak, but he could, it seemed, cry. The headman struck him across the face and, when he still shrieked, did so again, and, with Mari shouting curses behind him, carried him away.
Sama ran back to Bakalo’s hut two days later, and the headman found him, beat him and took him back. After that, he wasn’t seen in the village; he stayed in the darkness of the hut instead.
“We have to go to Gungun,” Mari said, as she and Bakalo ate rice and dika fruits and watched the sluggish river.
“It’s dangerous,” Bakalo answered. “If the king and the elders rule against us, the headman will chase us out of the village.”
“Then we’ll go to another one. Everyone has a right to justice, and we aren’t the headman’s slaves to let him cheat us of it.”
“We, Mari? Or Sama?”
“Justice is his right too. And if we don’t seek it for him, who will?”
“Maybe.” Bakalo laid a hand on his hunting spear. “Maybe we’ve become too afraid of that man.”
No agreement was made, not in so many words, but the next day at sunrise, Bakalo and Mari called the headman to judgment over the matter of Sama’s ownership. The chief took the news with bad grace, but he went down to the boats with them: the look he gave them promised trouble later, but the law was the law.
Sama was there too, in the headman’s boat. “He should be in ours,” said Mari, and Bakalo said nothing and poled down the river.
It took two hours to reach Gungun, even with the river’s current in their favor. None of them but the headman had been there before, and Mari couldn’t help staring as the town came into sight. It was an island packed end to end with houses, and the buildings weren’t made of thatching but mud-brick. As they came closer, their boat threaded through muddy channels, riverside villages and flooded rice fields where hundreds of people were working. The streets by the landing – in Durubara, there was no need for streets – contained hundreds more, and they were making bricks and jewelry and musical instruments and the other things that were only made in towns.
There were shrines too – to the rice-mother, to Father Niger and the land he fertilized, to the sun and the sky. Priests in painted masks trimmed with reeds and goat’s hair performed rites, and the idols were baked from clay rather than the driftwood or colored stones that villagers used to represent their ancestors. Somewhere a pipe was playing; maybe it was an offering to speech and song and justice.
“They say eight hundred people live here,” said Bakalo, but Mari’s was gone, and she had eyes only for the large building that lay at the end of their path.
The place was surrounded by a low wall and a ceremonial gate made from carved wood; Bakalo wondered what treasure the king had had to give the forest people to purchase it. Beyond was a courtyard, and within it, a house twice a man’s height painted red and ochre and decorated with sticks and pieces of polished stone baked into the clay. And by the door of the house – a rich cloth dyed in geometric patterns – there were five stools, and five men sitting on them to deliver judgment.
They stood and waited amid the crowd of onlookers, and examined the men who would judge them. All were dressed in robes dyed with geometric patterns in deep red and blue and green; except for the king, all were forty-five or even fifty. When they questioned witnesses or conferred among themselves, the wisdom of the ancestors seemed to flow from them, although Bakalo suspected they also had more earthly motivations.
At last it was their turn. The elders administered fearsome oaths to the Creator, the highest and most secret of gods, and to the patron of justice. “Guard your voice,” the king said. “If you speak unjustly, the gods will still your tongue.” Bakalo was awed as he had no doubt meant to be, and even the headman looked frightened, but they pled their cases anyway.
“And so?” a green-clad elder said to the headman. “Why is justice on your side?”
“The child was taken at my instructions. Three things must everyone obey: their parents, the chiefs, and the gods.”
“But even the king must follow the law,” Bakalo answered.
“What law, though? What law must the headman follow?” The elder looked at Bakalo keenly. “That is the question, isn’t it?”
The chief spoke first. “The law is that I am the headman. The headman tends the village, so what’s in the village is his.”
A murmur went through the onlookers: the headman had scored a point with his claim on the village’s property. Bakalo searched his mind for a proverb that might refute him. There was one about tribute turning to theft, if he could only remember it…
“The giver decides who receives the gift,” said Mari. She spoke in Bakalo’s place and held the judges’ eyes. “The child was brought to us by Gaadai, and
he placed him in our safekeeping.”
The murmur in the crowd was louder this time, and the elders bent their heads and conferred. The moment went on, and both litigants and onlookers drew in their breath, until finally the king called for silence.
“The judgment goes to you,” he said. “The village may belong to the headman, but gifts of the gods are different. The child is Gaadai’s servant, and the god gave him into Bakalo’s care, and when Gaadai is angered, the rains stop.”
The headman still looked ready to argue, but judgment had been given, and it was clear that the people found the king’s logic compelling. Bakalo and Mari took Sama by the hand and led him through the town to their boat, the one where Mari had sworn he belonged. The current was against them, and the return trip took closer to three hours than two, but it was as inexorable as the Niger itself.
Halfway there, Sama spoke: his first words in the language of the Niger, his first words in any language since Bakalo had found him. “Stay with you?”
Speech, too, was an offering to the god of justice. Mari held his hand tighter, and her eyes filled with unshed tears.
Few people listened to the headman after that. He had been defeated in judgment, the king and elders had found his acts unlawful, he may even have angered the gods: it was hard for a man to hold power after such things happened. He gave orders and made rulings, but few obeyed; others began listening to Bakalo, for all he was not yet thirty.
Sama learned new words day by day, a few now and a few more later. He never remembered his birth-name, so Sama he stayed. Nor did he recall his country, except for confused memories of grazing lands growing dry and tribes fighting bitterly over what remained. But he joined the singing and the tale-telling, and as he grew more comfortable in speech, he began to tell stories he remembered from his homeland.
One night when the river was in flood and the nightjars were calling, Sama told of Atiolo, the ancestor who had tamed the sheep and tricked it out of its wool. The people of Durubara – three fewer than last year after another bout of rice-fever, but four babies would soon be born – gathered and listened, and as they did, they realized they knew the story already.
“Atiolo was our ancestor,” said Uti the fisherman. “We tell of him too.” In the darkness, his eyes were hard to read, but his voice betrayed his surprise: Sama might have been touched by the gods, but how did he know a story of Durubara that he had never heard?
“They say some of our ancestors came from the north,” said Bakalo, “in what is now the desert. Atiolo is a father of his people as well as ours.”
“Then when Sama was destroyed, Gaadai brought him to us. To his family.”
“It was his gift,” said Mari. “Ours for safekeeping.”
Ours in justice, Bakalo thought,
and it was when the king gave good judgment that he spoke. He is a gift, and also a test.
The last rays of the sun painted the river red, and Bakalo thought of tests to come. He and Mari and Sama sat by the fire and remembered deserts and baobabs.
