“It looks like a crocodile attack,” Ahadi finally said. “Asumini was wounded but got away from it. I’d say she died later from loss of blood.” He rubbed at his eyes with a paw. “Of Penda, there is no sign. The crocodile must have found her easier prey.” He looked away.
Rafiki stared at him, feeling the blood drain from his face. The fear and pain fell away, replaced by a numbness. He stood mutely for a moment, then nodded and turned away.
CHAPTER 39: TRUE FRIENDS
When the moon rose later that evening, orange and full in the night sky, it found Rafiki sitting silently in the naos of the baobab, his medicine pouch clutched in his lap, staring silently at the paintings on the tree’s side. The branches moved slightly in the night breeze, making strange shadow shapes on the wall, and giving the paintings an eerie lifelike quality.
He remembered his speech to Dedou in the council the day he became a shaman. “I tell you brothers that I am an expert on suffering, for I have suffered greatly. It was suffering that put me on this path. But I also understand love, for I have received much of it.”
He sighed. “An expert on suffering,” he said reproachfully. “You were right, Dedou. I was a young optimist speaking from my inexperience. A fool who knew so much of herbs but so little of pain!”
Reaching into the pouch, he pulled out a small bowl filled with a whitish paste. “Deadly Euphractus,” he thought. “So the promising young shaman finally makes his last prescription. Something to relieve suffering in the heart.” He dipped his finger into the bowl and scooped up a small clump. In tiny doses, it would relieve cramps, but he had enough on his fingertip to kill every mandrill in his village. “So it has come to this,” he murmured, staring with unfocused eyes at the paintings. “Busara, forgive me. All your teachings are like kudra seeds scattered in the wind. I have not passed on the light.” He rested his gaze on Asumini’s portrait one last time, then sighed. “Live forever. Live forever in love.” Opening wide, he closed his eyes and with a trembling hand lifted the paste towards his mouth.
“Rafiki?”
Sighing again, he lowered his hand and spoke without turning. “Please leave. I can not help you right now.”
“Why not?”
“It is none of your....” he whirled, intending to drive away the owner of the voice, but stopped when he saw Uzuri sitting quietly behind him. “Oh, hello.”
“What’s wrong?”
“My wife and daughter died today,” he said simply. “I am in mourning.”
Her eyes gleamed in the moonlight as she gasped in surprise. “Oh, gods! Both of them?? Rafiki, I’m so sorry!” She moved closer until her foreleg was touching his shoulder.
“It’s quite all right, my dear. Thank you.” He patted her forepaw. “Things like this happen. It’s life, I guess. Good or bad, we can all die at any time.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “You seem to be taking it rather well.”
“Yes, well, as a shaman, I’ve learned to accept death in one form or another. It happens. We should not fight it; we should prepare for it.”
Her eyes focused on him sharply, and she frowned. “I would think instead that we should try to enjoy life all the more for it.”
His lip trembled and he turned away to face the wall again. “Perhaps you should go.”
As he shifted, she spied the paste on his finger. “What’s that?”
“Oh, just something to help me feel better.”
Uzuri sniffed at it. An acrid odor burned her nostrils, and she flinched. She drew back, the muscles at the corner of her jaw tightening as she looked at him. “Why don’t I try some? It will make me feel better too.” Quickly, she bent and touched the paste with the tip of her nose.
The response was immediate. Rafiki sprang up as if shot. “Don’t lick that off!” Desperately, he seized a gourd of water and splashed the end of her nose, rinsing away the paste that had stuck there. Picking up a soft leather cloth, he dried it carefully. He bent and sniffed it closely, his own nostrils twitching intently, then shook his head and repeated the process.
While he was drying her nose a second time, Uzuri flicked a paw out and slapped the bowl away. It clattered over the edge of the baobab and dropped silently through the air to shatter on the roots below, spraying the ground with white death.
Rafiki observed this silently as tears began forming in the corners of his eyes. “It will take me three days to collect that much,” he said. “Please be a good girl and leave me alone.”
She looked him directly in the eyes. “Make up your mind. Should I be a good girl, or should I leave you alone?” Flopping to the floor on her side, she motioned to him with a paw to join her. “We lions have a custom that might make you feel a lot better.”
He looked at her but said nothing.
Inwardly stung by his refusal, she pressed on. “When someone we love dies, we roar. It’s our way of getting the grief out. Don’t you shriek or make some sort of noise when you grieve?”
“We cry.”
She shook her head. “We do too. But I mean something big. Something that tells the whole world how you feel.”
“No, we don’t do that.”
“Try it.”
“I’d feel like a fool.”
“You’d feel better. Shout it out. If you can’t roar, just yell, ‘She’s gone!’”
“She’s gone!” He sighed. “There, did that make you happy?”
“No! Not gone hunting herbs. Gone! Make my ears tingle!”
“She’s gone!!”
“Didn’t you love her more than that?? My gods, she was your wife! It was your daughter! It’s not fair! What kind of husband and father were you??”
“Stop this! You’re making me angry!”
“Good! It’s not fair, and you SHOULD be angry!”
Rafiki’s hands began to tremble. His eyes narrowed to slits. The tides of his breath rushed in and out. “I’m mad as hell! I try to live the good life, and what do I get?? First my mother, and now this!! All my training is not worth a pile of Kavana husks!!” He picked up the paint pot and viciously swung it at the paintings, spattering them with red hemorrhages. “Stupid, useless paintings! Stupid house in the middle of stupid nowhere! No one to stop her from taking the child! Stupid brother in a stupid meeting of the stupid council! Oh gods, why did I bring them out here!!” He took his staff and began to beat on the paintings as he shrilly shouted, “And where were the gods in all this?? I gave my life to them, and look at how they repay me--nothing but heartache, neglect and bitterness!!”
Rafiki faced the wall and sobbed for a few silent moments. Finally the staff dropped from his hand and he meekly said, “I didn’t mean it, Aiheu. I’m sorry. I’m sorry! Please don’t hold it against me. Please don’t abandon me!”
With mixed penitence and desperation, he wiped a few red spots off the eye of Aiheu and used some of the spilled paint to fix the smears. It looked like an eye again. In one corner of it he drew a tear.
“He understands, Rafiki. It’s OK that you’re mad at him right now.”
At last he turned to face Uzuri, his face drawn and tear-stained. “Is that how it feels when you roar?”
“Perhaps.” A tear began to run down her cheek. “Do you feel better?”
“I feel so.... I feel....” His lip began to quiver, and he broke out in deep sobs. “I’m so alone! All alone! My youth is gone, and everyone I love I hurt!” Uzuri nuzzled him, and he grabbed tightly around her neck and sobbed on her soft fur. If he hugged her too tightly, she didn’t complain. She stroked him with her pink tongue, wiping away the salty tears.
“Maybe I feel better now,” Rafiki said. “Maybe I’ll make it.”
Uzuri stayed with him. Every moment she was off the hunt, she spent trying to bring Rafiki out of his shell of severe depression. She would tell him stories and groom him like a cub. She even searched out special things for him to eat, though she recognized very little of what was in his diet. A few eggs, a few fallen fruits that she learned to recognize. By and large, he had little appetite, but she would cajole him to eat. He would stare vacantly, but rub her soft fur with his arm as she talked. When she could not be there, she had Makedde sit with him with strict instructions that he not be allowed to mix any of his own medicines.