The three friends enjoyed a final glimpse of Boma when they crested a hill. Zhura could just see thatched roofs and lazy trails of smoke through the trees.
Boma was the only home she knew. For all of her life she'd been protected from demons and men that might do her harm. Now her only wards were the flimsy bracelet around her wrist, and the courage of her and her friends.
They continued deep into the bush. Kaj hacked a path through the foliage. Amina brought up the rear.
Amina advised them to stay off of the beaten path that followed the Little Mongoose south, in case they encountered traders who might remember their passing. So they had left the western edge of Boma through Chief Bindi's yam fields and cashew trees, and then followed the ancestral stones until they found the river. They crossed to the east bank, opposite the trail, and forged their own path. It was slow going through the bush, but they hoped to leave little trace behind.
Zhura, still flush with sex-induced vigor, carried a shoulder sack with her medicines. Like Kaj, she also slung a basket on her back, packed with the magical swaddle cloth, food and spare garb.
She dropped behind some, so that she could speak easily with Amina. The other woman carried her own antelope-skin bag. One of the gifted knives from Menga hung sheathed upon the waistband of her slit skirt.
"I didn't expect you to come with me," Zhura said. "What about your mother's trade?"
Amina's mother was a leading market-woman in Boma, with trade connections in all of the Sung villages, and as far away as Morore.
Amina shrugged. "She's been threatening to hand her trade down to her nieces instead of me," Amina said. "I chose to take her at her word."
"The crone will have to do without me as well," Zhura said. She regretted leaving the old woman so suddenly.
"She'll find someone else, perhaps a young herb-witch at another village," Amina suggested.
The market-woman's daughter drew a waterskin from her sack. Cupping some of the water in her hand, she began to wipe and wash the blue paint from Zhura's eyes. "You are not the herb-witch of Boma anymore, Zhura. Let's see more of your lovely face."
After she finished, Amina replaced the waterskin and rummaged further into the sack.
"There is another reason I had to leave," she said. Amina pulled out one of Ntoza's cock-shaped summoning stones.
"By the First Woman," Zhura gasped. "You didn't!"
"I wasn't going to stay there waiting for Ntoza to hunt down her warding stone," Amina said. "Besides, this woman trades with demons, and she was seducing you. I couldn't let that happen."
Zhura shook her head in disbelief. Her friend's habit of collecting other people's property was becoming legendary.
"Did you steal it before you saw the demon, or after?"
"Before. While you were in the hut getting rutted senseless, I was fleeing from demons," Amina said, grinning.
"It isn't a warding stone," Zhura said. "It's a summoning stone. There is a demon tied to it that we can summon if we learn how to use the stone."
It occurred to Zhura that the demon might be somehow tracking its stone, leading Ntoza to them. She had to find out more about how it worked.
"I'm thinking of another use for this that does not involve demons," Amina said. She held the clay phallus at eye-level, examining it with a mischievous expression. It was roughly the length and width of her forearm.
Zhura looked ahead, where Kaj steadily cut his way through the forest. "Does Kaj know about the stone?"
"Of course. He wants to use it on me."
"We will need to test it thoroughly," Zhura agreed.
"Repeatedly," Amina giggled.
Zhura recognized many of the medicinal trees of the forest - black-barked stinkwoods, needle-leaved junipers, with dawe conifers dominating along the river. Bromeliads and orchids grew beneath the canopy, along with snap-traps that caught insects. The uneven ground was treacherous, with buttress roots and vines snaking in all directions.
After the first couple of hours, Kaj slowed and stopped. He wore only a breechclout. His powerful chest glistened with sweat and pulsed with heavy breaths.
"Will we make it?" he called to Amina.
Amina peered down from the ridge they were on, to where she could see shining ribbons of the Little Mongoose. She shook her head.
"There is a tiny village a day's walk on the trail from Boma. A few families who smoke bees for honeycomb and hunt game," she said. "I don't see how we can make it by dark at this rate. But it may be for the better that we do not pass through there. We will be remembered."
Kaj handed Zhura his matchet - a short, single-edged chopping blade ideal for coconuts, melons and vines. Zhura took the handle with a grin, and led the way. She marveled at her own strength and vitality, improving their pace as she sliced through slender branches, forging ahead.
By the time the sunlight was fading in a clouded sky, they were sure they had not reached the settlement. But Kaj spotted a hunters' lean-to on in a clearing just upslope from the water.
The simple shelter was large enough for them all to lay out their raffia mats. Gnawed animal bones were scattered in the reddish dirt that surrounded it. Wedged in the corner, between the roof and ground, was a small stack of firewood and a coil of sisal rope.
Exhausted, they spread out their mats. They ate a half-hearted supper of dried yam chips, nuts and some tamarind pods they'd picked during the day.
"There's no warding stone here," Kaj observed as he set a small fire outside the shelter. Usually warding stones were planted around even the smallest village, to keep demons away.
"Maybe the hunters carry their stones with them," Zhura said. "Let me see if I can get the summoning stone to work."
Amina reached in her sack and handed Zhura the phallus. The herb-witch marveled how long and thick it was. The surface was smoothly polished and etched with drawings that depicted humans - or human-shaped creatures - mating with each other in various positions.
Kaj and Amina watched with evident interest.
Zhura felt her ears grow warm. She tried rubbing the smooth ceramic, fingering the tip, and then fisting it as best she could, as if she were jerking a foreskin up and down the shaft. It seemed for a moment to grow warmer, but Zhura decided it was her imagination.
"Do you wish to be alone with it?" Kaj asked, eyebrow cocked.
"Perhaps not tonight," Zhura said, trying to hide her embarrassment. "We are all tired."
Zhura set the stone aside. They all went in turn to the river, where Zhura stripped off her sweat-dampened skirt and blouse, to wash and hang overnight. She laid the magical cloth out on her mat, so that her knife and staff would be close at hand. Then she tried to sleep.
But rest would not come easily. Zhura's gaze was drawn to the dying fire, and to the dark jungle, which echoed with the cries and calls of beasts that hunted in the night. She saw their glowing eyes in the bush, and hoped they were not demons. She felt - or perhaps she imagined - ants and spiders skittering across her flesh. As tired as she was, she could not sleep.
Maybe she had been a fool. Zhura had a home and a life in Boma, however scorned she had been. She had left all of that for an unknown fate in a foreign land. And she'd brought her friends, who had given up even more.
Only a day ago, she lay with Ntoza, savoring the kind of passion she had never known. What if Ntoza was telling the truth? What if she was unaware of any plots, unaware that Zhura was daughter to a king?
