Chapter 188 - Zenzele, My Love part 7

"What is your name, woman?" my abductor demands when I awaken.

"Zenzele," I answer, but my swollen lips make the word sound funny. I flex my jaw and wince. Even such tiny movements are painful.

"I am Onani," the man responds.

I sit upright and cast my gaze about. It is hard to see from my left eye. It is nearly swollen shut. I explore my face with my fingertips and hiss. My cheek and left brow feel enormous, the skin soft and spongy like the flesh of a mushroom. The lightest touch there stings like biting ants.

How long have I been sleeping? I wonder.

It is dark now, the heavens pregnant with stars, and draped in silver moon-limned clouds. My last memory is of Mtundu, growing smaller and smaller in the distance as my kidnapper steals me away. I cried out to him one last time, telling him to run home, trying to point in the direction that he should go, but there was no hope for him—no hope for either of us! He was too far away to hear me, or to see my pointing finger. Pain and exhaustion had swept me into darkness as the savannah rose up to devour my baby brother.

The night is loud with the cries and grunts of the savannah's nocturnal denizens. I listen to hyenas laughing eerily in the dark, birds screeching and whooping and cawing, and far away, the snarls of a great cat. The calls of the great cats sound very similar to a person yawning, but it makes my blood run cold.

Lions!

"You are safe," Onani says reassuringly. He stirs the fire with a long stick. Bright embers spin skyward from the disturbed coals, flashing and then fading away.

He has built a boma from thorny acacia, constructing it in much the same manner my father does when he spots a pride of lions too near to our home. He has stacked the branches high so that they form a protective wall, completely encircling our camp. A hungry lioness would have to leap over the enclosure if she wanted to get at us, but I have never known one to try such a thing, not with a fire burning inside, not even if she were starving. Animals are instinctively frightened by fire.

Mtundu has no fire tonight, I think.

And no thorny walls to shield him from the teeth and claws of the beasts that roam the savannah. He is probably already dead, I think. Dead and in the belly of some hungry animal.

How long did it take some predator to spy him alone and sobbing in the middle of the grassland? Long before Mother and Father ever realized we were missing, surely! It was my fault he was dead. I was careless, childish. And now… now I belong to this man. I know why he has stolen me, and I know I will never see my brothers and sisters again. Mama, Papa, my brothers and sisters… they are all gone!

I begin to cry, and Onani looks angry.

"Stop that!" he snaps.

I try to do as he says. I try to make the tears go away, but I cannot. My head is like an old water-sack that has sprung a leak. I scrub my eyes with my hands and grind my teeth together, but the tears keep coming. They roll down my cheeks, hot and stinging.

Onani sighs loudly and turns away from me. He scowls up at the moon, listening to the lions yawning in the dark, acting as though I no longer exist. The fire crackles, its orange and yellow light refracted by my tears into a hundred glimmering sparks. I feel the absence of my baby brother, my family, my home, to the depths of my soul. It is a dark pool, and I want to drown myself in it.

Later, when the tears have run their course, Onani offers me food. He does not have much. Some dried meat. A few berries. I have not eaten since morning and I devour the food ravenously. My belly does not care that this man has abducted me, or that my beautiful little Mtundu is probably being digested in the guts of some hungry beast right now. My belly only knows that it is empty.

"Do you have any water?" I ask, swallowing the last of the dried meat.

"No," he says. "There is a small river just to the north of us. We will go there when daylight comes. You can drink then."

I nod. It is no use to complain.

Sometime later, a large animal passes near the boma. I listen as its body whispers through the grass, its breaths rasping in and out of its chest. My muscles are tense. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but the creature-- whatever it is-- moves on without harassing us, and my heartbeat slows to something more like its normal steady pace.

Onani looks at me and grins, the whites of his eyes very bright in the dancing firelight, and then he rises and moves to my side. Without speaking, he pushes me onto my back. He tugs at my skirt for a moment, unable to figure out the way that it is tied, and then he grows frustrated and yanks it to one side, exposing my genitals. I close my eyes as he parts my knees with his hands and rolls on top of me. His breath blows across my face, and I turn my head to one side, trying not to draw his air into my lungs. His organ is huge and hot and hard. I yelp as he prods my uke with it.

"Open up, girl," he laughs breathlessly. "Let me inside you."

I am too small. It will not go in.

"It's too big," I gasp, my eyes squeezed shut.

He tries again, and I cry out as the blunt head of his organ pierces me, but he can only wiggle it in a little way.

Disappointed, Onani rolls off me. He makes a low growling sound, looking up at the stars.

I pray to the spirits that he will leave me alone now. Maybe he will even be frustrated enough to release me in the morning! What good am I to him, if he cannot put his pele inside me?

But he does not give up. After a little while, he sits up. He sets upon the knots of my skirt again and finally solves the puzzle of them. With a triumphant hiss, he pulls my garment away and tosses it aside.

"Now, I will have what I need," he says.

He pushes my legs together and rolls me onto my side, facing away from him. He positions my body so that my knees are raised in a squatting position. I do not resist. I do not want him to hit me any more. "Relax your body," he says. "This will not hurt." He spits into his palm and smears his saliva between my thighs, and then he eases his stiff organ between my legs.

It slides moistly into the cleft of my inner thighs. Holding my hip in one of his big hands, he begins to saw his organ back and forth between my legs. After several minutes, he begins to stroke my leg and back and hair, and I feel a warm flush in my groin. My stomach flutters as his organ strokes against the soft folds of my uke, but I do not make a sound. I will not give him the satisfaction.

I lay there as he humps against me, staring at the dirt and the tufts of sear grass that cling to it just below my cheek. I ignore the sensations in my lower body, thinking only of my breathing, my heart throbbing slow and steady in my chest. The fire crackles and pops. Insects buzz sonorously. In the darkness beyond the boma, lions yawp and yawn.

The pace of his thrusting grows more rapid. His fingers dig into my hip, and then he stops. He grunts loudly, his body stiffening, and hot fluid gushes from his organ. I feel it pulsing out of him. I look down and watch it dribble from my thighs.

Gasping, he rolls onto his back.

I lay without moving for several minutes. I am not sure what to do. Is he finished? Will he want to do it again? I have watched Mother and Father couple, and their lovemaking lasted much longer than Onani has coupled with me. Finally I decide that he is finished with me. I sit up. Onani peeks at me from the corner of his eye, but he does not move. He looks as if he is already half asleep. I scoop the sticky fluid from between my thighs and look at it, then wipe it on the grass with disgust.

"Did you enjoy it?" he asks.

"No," I answer.

He frowns.

His fingers are laced across his chest, one knee cocked in the air. His organ is still slick, but it hangs limply between his legs now like it is ashamed.

It should be!

"When you get a little bigger," he says, "we will be able to do it in the normal manner. Until then, we will have to do it as the zozo do."

Zozo are young men who have the hair on their bodies, but who have not yet gotten married. Two of my older brothers are zozo. They get mad if anyone calls them that. When father calls them zozo, he always laughs.

"Boys do that to one another?" I ask, my lip curled back in disbelief.

He snorts. "The ones who cannot overpower a woman."

I do not reply to that. None of my brothers ever did such a thing! Not that I was aware of, anyway. I clean myself with the corner of my skirt, wiping off my groin and hands. The fluid he ejaculated between my thighs is drying quickly. It is sticky and smells like mushrooms and dead fish. I sniff it, and the smell makes me feel nauseous and slightly dizzy.

I am oddly offended that he has made light of our coupling. So he would mate with me as if I were a boy? I glare at him and his satisfied grin makes me boil over with anger.

Tonight, when he falls asleep, I will kill him, I think.

And I try.

But he wakes when I reach into his sash. He seizes my wrist as I fumble with the sheath of his knife, and I freeze in surprise and terror, and then he pulls me across his thighs and spanks me.

I retreat from him in tears when he finally releases me, my rump hot and stinging. He laughs. The humiliation is worse than the pain. And the shame--! The shame that he has gotten the best of me again, that I am helpless, a hostage to his whims, and that he has no fear of me. I am nothing to him. A plaything.

"Glare at me all you want," he warns me, "but try something like that again and I will slice off all of your fingers. I'll cut them off one at a time-- shwip-shwip--!" Gesturing with his hand. "Do you doubt my words?"

I peer into his eyes, and I do not doubt. I shake my head, wiping snot from my nose.

"Speak!" he shouts.

"No," I sniffle.

Satisfied, he lies back, but he shifts his sash so that his knife is underneath his arm. He peeks at me with one eye, then, smirking, he goes back to sleep.