The Forty-Second Tusk

At dusk there were forty-one tusks. At dawn there were forty-two, and Salim bin Nasser was lying across them with the back of his head broken open like a dropped gourd.

I counted twice before I shouted. I am the karani, the clerk, and counting is what I am paid for.

The boma was waking around me: a hundred and thirty porters coughing over their fires, the thorn fence black against a grey sky. Salim's coffee pot lay in the dust by his hand beside two little cups, both empty, both smelling of cardamom. My master never poured coffee for anyone he did not want something from.

I looked at his face and thought: Well. He will never find out about Tabora now.

Then Kulwa came through the smoke.

Kulwa walks at the head of every caravan with the flag over his shoulder and a kudu horn across his chest. He is Nyamwezi. He has walked from the lakes to the sea eleven times. He stopped at the edge of the ivory, looked at Salim, and took from his pouch a pair of spectacles with no glass in them.

"Why—" I said.

"Coast men believe what a man in spectacles tells them." He hooked them over his ears and crouched. "Who else has seen?"

"The guard." I pointed: a boy sitting against the thorns with his spear across his knees, shaking. "He says he was awake all night."

"He was asleep, then," Kulwa said, without looking round. "I'll talk to him later." He touched the tusk under Salim's cheek. "Tell me what happened, karani."

So I told it the way it looked. Salim had come out to lay his hand on his ivory, as he did every night, and leaned on the stack, and the tusks came down on him.

Kulwa parted the hair at the back of Salim's skull with two fingers. "Here. And here. Both at the back. And look where he is: on top of the tusks, not under them. If the stack came down on him, where are the ones that fell?"

The stack stood as I had built it at dusk. Not one tusk lay across him.

"There are forty-two," I said. "Last night there were forty-one."

Kulwa's eyebrows went up behind the empty frames. "Then somebody hit him from behind, twice, and put the club back with the others."

Three days we had been camped at Ilomo's wells while his headmen unrolled our best white merikani, sniffed it and called it rotten. At midday Salim was to sit under Ilomo's fig tree and settle the hongo, the toll every chief in Ugogo takes for letting a caravan pass and drink at his wells. Until it was paid, Ilomo's people sold our porters water a gourd at a time, for beads. It tasted of cattle, and not one pot could be filled for the dry road east.

"Bury him here and Ilomo charges us for the grave," Kulwa said. "A man who dies in Ugogo spoils the ground. Last time it was ten doti of cloth, enough to dress ten men, and a goat, for a porter with a bad chest. For a coast master with a red beard?" He puffed out his cheeks. "And there's the hongo. We settled twenty doti yesterday, but this year Ilomo wants powder too. Four kegs on top. Salim's been telling him no for three days. Ilomo has a brother-in-law across the valley to kill before the rains. If he smells weakness, he won't bargain for our guns. He'll take them."

Behind us the word was passing from fire to fire. Kulwa's men were owed four months' pay at the coast on Salim's word, and Salim was lying on the ivory with flies at the corners of his mouth.

"If they think nobody's left to pay them, they'll run tonight," Kulwa said quietly. "In little groups, into Ilomo's country, with no water."

He stood and blew the long, lazy call that told his porters nobody marched today, as if it were any dull morning. Then, without turning his head: "Find me the tusk that isn't his."

Each of Salim's forty-one bore his uncle's mark, a hooked sword burned into the base, and my inked number. I went along the pile on my knees, rolling them over. Nine. Twenty-six. Four. Kulwa worked from the other side, humming through his nose.

He stopped humming.

He had it across his knees: a small tusk, a cow elephant's, pale except at the thick end, which was dark and tacky and had hair stuck to it. No sword. No number. He wiped the base with his thumb, bent close and turned it to the light: three short strokes and a crescent moon.

I knew that mark. I had cut it myself in Tabora, with a borrowed knife, into the tusk I had bought on credit. At the coast it would have paid off half my debts. Salim would have had me flogged for owning it. I had sewn it into the bottom of a bale of blue kaniki cloth, where nobody knew it was but me and God.

At the thorn gate the guard found his voice: Ilomo's headmen were on the path. Early. A great many of them.

Kulwa looked at me over the empty rims.

"Rashidi," he said. "They'll be here before you can finish a lie. So don't start one."

"It's mine," I said, loud enough that the porters at the nearest fire turned their heads. "I bought it in Tabora. I never brought it out here."

Kulwa looked at me a moment longer. "Later," he said.

Salim's prayer mat lay rolled beside the coffee things. Kulwa shook it open, laid the small tusk on it, rolled it up again and tucked it under his arm, the way a man tidies his own sleeping place. Then he stood and faced the gate.

They came through it a dozen strong, the guard boy dragging the thorn bush aside for them. Spearmen first, then the grey-bearded elder who had drunk Salim's coffee every evening, then the youngest of the headmen, a big cheerful man who laughed at everything and was married to Hamisi's sister. Behind them, yawning, with a millet cake in his hand, came Hamisi.

Hamisi was Salim's slave, and Salim's tongue. He had been born somewhere in these hills and carried down to the coast as a small boy, and he spoke Swahili, Nyamwezi and Kigogo, the Gogo language. Most nights he slept on a mat just inside Salim's tent door.

He saw Salim and stopped yawning. He stood a long time looking at the red beard in the dust. Then he came over to me, broke the cake in two and put half in my hand.

"She makes them for her husband," he said. "Eat it. It's going to be a long day."

Behind him an old porter called out, "Karani! Who pays us now?" Hamisi half turned before the man saw his face and looked past him to me. Hamisi and I were the same height and build and both wore the white coast robe; from behind we were one man. Salim was stout, and the eight gunmen he had hired at the coast to guard the ivory and the powder wore dark cloth.

Salim had never learned a word of Kigogo, and Ilomo's elder had no Swahili. Kulwa, for all his eleven journeys, only shrugged when the Gogo talked and waited for someone to tell him what they'd said. So for three days every word between our camp and the ridge had gone through Hamisi, and it went through him now. The elder spoke for some time, calmly.

"He says your master sent for him last night," Hamisi said. "He came down and drank the bitter coffee. Your master offered him a keg of powder for himself, if he would talk Ilomo into taking cloth instead. He says he refused, and he went straight up and told his chief." Then, lower, just to Kulwa and me: "I sat at the fire and did the talking for them. Afterwards I walked the old man up the path. It was late, so I slept at my sister's."

I looked at the two little cups in the dust. Two cups, and three men at that fire, and I had not thought about the third because the third was always Hamisi. Salim never poured for him.

The young headman had been looking at Kulwa's spectacles. Now he made rings of his fingers round his own eyes and peered about the boma, and said something to the others, and they laughed.

"They admire your spectacles," Hamisi said.

Kulwa smiled and turned his face to them so they could get a better look. I was standing by the ivory, beside him, and I saw his hand close on the kudu horn at his chest until the knuckles stood up. Headmen had laughed at those spectacles all the way from Tabora and he had never minded. I did not know what to make of it.

The elder spoke again, and Hamisi turned to us.

"The chief is insulted. His elders are not for sale. At midday he'll price the grave and the hongo together, under the fig tree. Send up the cloth that was agreed now, and bring all six kegs."

Six kegs was every grain of powder we carried.

The headmen went back up the path. Two youths stayed behind, squatting by the gate with their spears, to count anyone who went out. Kulwa sent two porters to carry Salim into his tent, then turned to me.

"Where was it?"

"Sewn into the bottom of the kaniki bale."

He nodded and went off towards his porters with the mat under his arm, and I went to buy water to wash my master.

I came into the tent with six gourds of water, paid for with the beads I had been saving for my own thirst, and stopped in the doorway.

Just inside, where Hamisi's mat always lay, a chain was coiled on the bare ground: an iron neck-collar and a length of links. The porters who had carried Salim in laid him on his bedding and went out past me without a word, and I heard the news of the chain go along the fence faster than the news of his death had.

I knew that chain. It lived at the bottom of Salim's tent load, and he had used it once on this road, before Tabora, on a porter who took his advance and ran. I did not like to think what it was doing by the door.

Hamisi came in behind me, stepped over it as if it were a root, and knelt by the body.

At home a dead man is washed by three men and wrapped in three white cloths, and I meant Salim to be in the ground before sunset. The gunmen had found things to do elsewhere, so there were two of us. I fetched the plainest merikani from the bales. Hamisi took it out of my hands.

"Not that. The good bolt."

The good bolt was the one Ilomo's headmen sniffed every day and called rotten. "The uncle will ask where it went."

"Then tell him we buried his nephew in it." He was already pulling it down. "Give me my knife. I need something to cut it with."

It was his knife. In Tabora he had haggled a whole afternoon for my tusk, until the price came down to something I could borrow. Then he had put this knife in my hand. "Cut your own mark," he said, "so it's yours and not the uncle's." I cut three strokes and a moon, and forgot to give the knife back, and he had never asked for it until now. I took it from my belt and handed it over.

We washed Salim. Hamisi sat with the broken head in his lap and held it steady the whole time, so the water ran off the red beard and not into the wound. He talked while we worked, but not about Salim. He talked about his sister.

"Do you know how I found her? The first evening, at the well. I was waiting my turn and I sang, the way you do. My mother's grinding song. It's the only thing I brought from here." He sang a line of it under his breath, over Salim's head. "A woman with a pot on her head stopped and sang the next line back." He wrung out the cloth. "She was four when they took me. She remembered the song and not my face. She says I have our father's ears."

"She wants you to stay."

"Of course she does." He touched the knot of his waist-cloth, where he had thirty dollars sewn: silver Maria Theresa dollars, the coin every price at the coast is reckoned in. I had watched him save that money for years, from errands and from interpreting for other traders. I had never saved a dollar in my life. "I offered him my money. Did you know? Thirty dollars, for myself. He said, we'll talk at the coast."

I had been at the ledger that day, on the other side of this tent. I had heard what Salim said. Your money is mine already. Ask again and you go to the coast in the chain, and from there to a plantation on Pemba. I said nothing. A proud man can tell his own story the way he likes.

He laid the head down gently and started cutting the good cloth.

"The old man said yes, you know," he said. "Last night. To the keg. He's got a daughter married across the valley, into the house Ilomo wants to burn, and he didn't want our powder going over there any more than Salim did. Then Salim laughed and said if Ilomo still asked for powder at the tree, he'd tell Ilomo whose keg it was." The knife went through the cloth in one long pull. "I walked him up afterwards. He didn't say one word the whole way."

"Then it was him," I said, and I hoped it was. Whoever killed Salim had done it with my tusk. If it was not the old man, the next man anyone would look at was the one who owned it.

"I didn't say that."

"It has to be somebody. And Kulwa already knows the tusk's mine."

"Then tell him it isn't. He can't prove a mark. Anyone can cut three lines and a moon."

"I already told him. The porters heard me."

He went on cutting for a moment. "Then Kulwa will have to look after you," he said.

We had Salim wrapped when the voices started outside. I went to the door. The old porter who had called me that morning was standing there with thirty men behind him, and he was looking past me at the chain.

"We saw it," he said. "He meant it for us. At the coast, when we asked for our four months, that's what we'd have got."

"It's all in the ledger. Every man's due."

"Salim's word is in your book, and Salim's dead." He did not raise his voice. He put a hand on one swollen knee. "This is my last road, karani. These won't carry another load to the coast. Those four months are what I live on when I'm home for good. We go at dark, unless somebody makes our pay good."

Kulwa came back at mid-morning and sent Hamisi up the ridge with two porters and the twenty doti, to see it counted. Then Kulwa went and sat down in the dust beside the guard boy.

The boy was a porter's son on his first road, fourteen at most.

"I know your mother," Kulwa said. "She walked to the coast with me the year you were born, with you on her back. Next year, when I carry my own flag, she's coming with me. If she hears you slept on guard, she'll beat you. If she hears you lied to me about it, she'll leave you at home."

The boy cried for a while. Kulwa waited. Then it came out.

"I let the old Gogo man in and he went to the fire, and I sat back down by the gate. I didn't watch them. They were only drinking. When he got up to go I pulled the thorns aside for him and pulled them back after. He went out by himself. Salim was talking loud, so I looked back at the fire." He pointed across thirty paces of trodden ground to where the coffee pot still lay. "There was a man sitting with his back to me. A thin man, in white. Salim was facing him, talking. Then I sat down. I only meant to rest my eyes."

A thin man in white. Every porter in earshot turned and looked at me.

I had counted forty-one at dusk and lain down beside the loads along the fence with the ledger box under my head, and nothing had woken me but the cold. So it was not me at that fire. And Hamisi had told me he walked the old man up the path. The boy said the old man went out alone. One of them was wrong.

But the boy had lied once already that morning, and I was the man who owned the club. If I called my friend a liar in front of the porters on a frightened boy's word, I knew how it would look. I kept my mouth shut.

Kulwa got up, went along the fence to the kaniki bale and tipped it over onto its top.

The bottom seam had been cut open and sewn shut again.

"Whose load?"

A broad Nyamwezi at the next fire got to his feet. "Mine. Since Tabora there's been something hard in the bottom. Dug into my neck every day. Yesterday afternoon I asked Hamisi to fix it. He pads all the loads. He opened it up and said the old padding had gone hard as wood, and he put new in. At supper I leaned on it, and it was soft all the way down."

"Who knew there was a tusk in there?" Kulwa asked the carrier, but the porters answered, several at once: "The karani."

"Hamisi had it open," somebody said, near the back.

"Hamisi opens every load in this camp," the carrier said. "And the karani told us himself, the thing's his. If Hamisi found it, he'd have given it back." Nobody argued. Hamisi had mended half their straps on this road.

The eldest of the gunmen walked over with three of his men.

"The karani owns the club, and the boy saw a thin man in white," he said. "Ilomo wants whoever killed him. Give this one to Ilomo's boys at the gate. Maybe then the grave costs cloth and a goat, and not our powder. Without that powder we're eight men with empty guns from here to the sea."

Two of them took my arms. Kulwa stepped in front of the gate.

"My pay's in his book," he said. "Next year that pay buys my own caravan. My own flag, forty men. Give him to Ilomo's boys and there's nobody left to stand in front of the uncle and read that book out." He looked round at the porters, and they went quiet. "Your pay's in there too. Tie him if you want. Keep him here. Let Ilomo hear it under the tree."

The gunmen argued among themselves. In the end one of them cut a length of cord from a load and began to tie my wrists.

"In front," Kulwa said. "He's got to walk up that hill."

They tied them in front.

They sat me in the shade of the ivory with a gunman squatting beside me.

Hamisi came down from the ridge before noon. He looked at my wrists, and at the gunman, and at me, and walked away without a word. Then he came back with a gourd of water and knelt. My fingers had gone numb under the cord, so he held the gourd to my mouth himself.

"Kulwa will talk for you at the tree," he said. "They listen to Kulwa."

Then he went to mend the carrying straps on the kegs, and while he worked he sang his mother's grinding song.

Kulwa sat down on my other side, filled his pipe and sent the gunman to the porters' fire for a coal.

"Now," Kulwa said. "Tell me."

So I told him what I had kept from the porters. Hamisi had haggled for my tusk in Tabora, so when he opened that bale he knew whose it was. When he offered Salim his thirty dollars, Salim did not say we'll talk at the coast. I heard him promise Hamisi the chain and Pemba, and this morning the chain was lying where Hamisi slept. The thin man at the fire was not me; I slept all night. Hamisi says he walked the old man home, and the boy saw the old man go out alone. And when I told Hamisi the tusk was mine, he told me to say it wasn't.

Kulwa drew on his cold pipe. "That bale was opened yesterday afternoon, hours before the old man came down to drink. So Hamisi had your tusk, and he never told you he'd found it."

"It could still be the old man," I said. I did not want it to be Hamisi.

"Maybe. The boy was asleep, and anyone can drag that thorn bush aside. The old man could have come back in the night to shut Salim's mouth. The bale tells me Hamisi had your tusk. It doesn't tell me who had it after."

Across the boma Hamisi pulled a strap tight with his teeth and went on singing.

"Then tell the gunmen it wasn't me."

"On whose word? The boy's, who swore to me this morning he never shut his eyes? Yours? You own the club, karani, and the whole camp heard you say so. The boy saw a back. Only the old man saw who was still sitting at that fire when he got up to go. And the old man talks through Hamisi, and only when his chief asks him."

"Then what do we do?"

"Two things. At the tree, you say out loud that the tusk is yours. And whatever the gunmen do to you, you don't fight them."

The gunman was coming back with the coal. I looked at Kulwa, who had never told me anything he did not have to, and I nodded, because there was nobody else.

At midday we went up.

Six porters carried the kegs. The gunmen came with their guns, two of them at my elbows. The old porter carried Salim's prayer mat with my tusk rolled inside it. Kulwa went first with the flag over his shoulder and his spectacles on, and Hamisi walked beside him to be his tongue. The path climbed from our gate for a quarter of an hour. At the top, where the village began, a great fig tree shaded a trodden meeting-ground, and beyond it the path went on climbing between the huts. The first hut, a short way above the tree, was where Hamisi's sister lived.

Ilomo sat under the fig on a stool. He was a heavy man with a big easy laugh, but while we set the kegs down in front of him his eyes kept going back to them, the way Salim's used to go to the ivory. His elders sat on either side of him, the grey one among them. The young headman stood at his shoulder. Around the edge of the ground stood young men with spears.

I did not wait to be asked.

"The tusk that killed my master is mine," I said. "I bought it in Tabora with borrowed money. I give it to the chief for the grave."

Hamisi put it into Kigogo. While he spoke I watched Kulwa, and nothing in Kulwa's face moved. The old porter unrolled the mat and laid the tusk on the ground before the stool, and Ilomo leaned forward to look at the dark end of it, and laughed.

Then he stopped laughing, turned on his stool to the grey elder and asked him something short. I had no Kigogo, but I could hear the edge in it. The old man had drunk Salim's coffee, and his chief had not forgotten.

The elder answered without looking at any of us. Four or five words.

"The chief asked who stayed at the fire with the red-beard, after the elder left," Hamisi said. "The elder says: the one who writes."

The two gunmen had my arms before he finished. The eldest was in front of me with his knife out and the point under my jaw, and I heard the others bring their guns up behind me, and then a sound like wind through dry grass as every spear on that ground came down level, pointed at the gunmen. Ilomo spoke, not loudly.

"He says there'll be no blood under this tree," Hamisi said.

I did not fight. I had promised. I hung in their hands with the point under my chin and looked for Kulwa.

He had taken off his spectacles. He folded them slowly and put them in his pouch. Then he spoke to the elder in Kigogo.

In three days I had not heard one word of it from him. He spoke it easily, without searching, like a man talking in his own yard. He told me later how he had come by it. On his first road, as a boy, he had been left behind with fever in a Gogo village, and the family who nursed him spoke nothing else. Ever since, he had let the Gogo talk in front of him and never shown that he understood. The meeting-ground went quiet. The young headman's face went grey. The elder stared at him. Kulwa asked it again, gently, and waited.

The old man lifted his arm and pointed at Hamisi.

"He didn't say the one who writes," Kulwa told the gunmen in Swahili. "He said the one who speaks for him. That one."

The hands left my arms. The gunmen turned toward Hamisi, and Hamisi, who was standing nearest me, moved first. His left arm came across my chest and pulled me back against him, and his right hand put the knife to my throat: his knife, the one I had cut my mark with. He began backing up the path, dragging me with him, uphill, away from the tree.

We both faced down the slope, so I saw all of it: Ilomo on his feet, the spears swinging round, the gunmen with their guns up and no clear shot past me, Kulwa beside the flag, very still. Hamisi shouted over my shoulder at Ilomo, in Kigogo, the same words again and again, his voice breaking on them. Ilomo did not answer. Then Hamisi called out to the young headman, shorter. The big man looked at his chief, took a spear out of the hands of the youth beside him and turned its point on us with all the others.

Behind us, up the path, a woman's voice called out. One word. It might have been his name.

I felt Hamisi's head turn toward it, and the edge of the knife drifted off my throat by the width of a finger.

I took the blade in both my tied hands. I closed my fingers on the edge and dragged it down and away from my neck. Then I let my legs go and threw myself forward, down the slope. His arm was still locked across my chest and his head was still turned toward the hut, and he came over with me. We rolled down the path together over stones and roots, and all the way down I held that blade and felt it cut into my palms, the right one deepest. I did not let go.

We stopped at the edge of the meeting-ground. I was lying across him, face down, the way Salim had lain across the ivory. The knife was between us and my hands were still around it. Over us stood six or seven of Ilomo's youths with their spears raised, and I could not tell which of us they meant.

Ilomo's voice came across the ground, one word, and the spears stayed where they were.

Kulwa worked the knife out of my fingers. The gunmen pulled me off Hamisi and took hold of him, and he let them. When I could lift my head I saw a woman standing in the doorway of the first hut above the tree, with both hands over her mouth. She did not come down.

Kulwa gave us what came after, a sentence at a time, in Swahili, while he cut the cord off my wrists and bound my hands in strips torn from my robe. The man belonged to the coast. He would go back with us, to his master's family and their judge. The tusk paid for the grave.

Then Ilomo's elders rose and walked away to the far side of the fig, and talked there with their heads together. In eleven journeys, Kulwa told me afterwards, no chief's council had ever needed to walk out of his hearing. Once the grey elder looked back across the ground at him.

When they came back, they asked for four kegs, and the cloth already sent.

Kulwa walked down the hill beside me, slowly, and told me the rest.

"This morning, the spectacles. The young headman said, Look at the Nyamwezi playing coast man. When our brother-in-law speaks for Ilomo, no coast man will fool us again."

"Brother-in-law."

"Hamisi. Ilomo had promised him a place as his own coast-speaker. That's what he was shouting at the tree. You promised me! Your speaker, and no master would take me from your country!" He walked a little way before he went on. "Ilomo heard his elder say the one who speaks for him. He watched the gunmen take you and let it go, because he wanted Hamisi. Then Hamisi put a knife to a guest's throat under the chief's own tree and shouted that promise out loud, with me there understanding every word. Keep him after that, and every caravan on this road hears from me that Ilomo shelters men who kill their masters. No coast man would sell him powder again. So he gave him up."

"Would you have told them?"

"Yes."

"And the young headman?"

"He's the one who carried Ilomo's offer down to Hamisi on the first day. He has to go on living under Ilomo."

"And the old man? You said he could have come back in the night."

"He could have, until the tree. The old man named the one who stayed at the fire, and Hamisi told us he'd said you. When I asked again in Kigogo, Hamisi didn't argue. He grabbed you."

We walked on a little.

"The old man told his chief he refused Salim's keg," Kulwa said. "He doesn't know what I heard him say to his friends for three days. I think he argued for four."

"It cost you," I said. "Talking to them."

"By the rains every chief on this road will know. Next year, when I carry my own flag, nobody will say a word in front of me that they don't want me to hear."

We buried Salim at sunset, a little way from the boma, in the good merikani. I said over him the prayers I knew. When the grave was filled the gunmen turned to look at Hamisi, who stood between two of their men, and the eldest said it should be done here, now.

"Not here," Kulwa said. "This is Ilomo's ground. Another death on it and we pay for another grave."

The gunmen looked at me. Their pay was written in my ledger like everyone else's, and now that I was not the killer, I was the only man left in camp who could speak for the uncle.

"Bring the chain," I said.

One of them fetched it from the tent. The men who had tied my wrists that morning held Hamisi while I put the collar round his neck. My hands were bound in cloth and the right one would not close, so I did it with the left, and it took me a long time, and none of them offered to help.

"Let them do it here," Hamisi said quietly.

"No."

"Rashidi."

"At the coast I'm going to tell the judge about this chain," I said. "Where it was lying, and what Salim said to you about Pemba. I was at the ledger. I heard him."

He looked at me for a long moment, and said nothing else.

Before dark the porters came to the tent, all hundred and thirty of them, with the old porter in front. Kulwa put his spectacles back on and named their terms for them. Every man would be paid from the ivory at Bagamoyo, before any of it crossed to Zanzibar. Whatever the uncle refused to pay, the karani would owe.

I added it up while he talked. It came to more than all my debts together.

"You don't have to put your name to it," Kulwa said, low, at my shoulder. "The uncle will refuse half of it. You'll be paying off porters when you're an old man."

"And if I don't, they go tonight."

"Some will. I can hold most."

"Every man who goes leaves a load on the ground, and some of those loads are tusks." I looked at him. "If the ivory doesn't reach the coast, you don't get paid either, and there's no flag of your own next year."

He didn't answer.

I opened the ledger, took the pen in my left hand and wrote it down, slowly, in letters like a child's, and signed. The old porter looked at the page, which he could not read, and at my hands, and nodded, and the men went back to their fires.

Late that night I took Hamisi his porridge. The end of his chain was fastened to the tent pole, near the ivory.

"I knew you'd count," he said. "And I knew you'd hide it."

"I would have."

He put down the bowl, bit through the stitches of his waist-cloth, and put the thirty dollars into my left hand one at a time, counting them aloud, all thirty. "For my sister," he said.

Kulwa walked up the path with me in the dark. She was standing in her doorway as if she had been waiting there since noon. I put the money into her hands and she took it without counting.

By the law at the coast Salim had been right: there a slave's money belongs to his master, and the uncle would want it in the ledger. I never wrote it there.

At dawn Kulwa blew the call to march, and I stood at the gate with the ledger open on my arm and counted them out. A hundred and thirty porters. Forty-one tusks. Two kegs of powder. One man in a chain, who stopped in the gateway and turned to look up at the ridge, where his sister stood alone against the sky. Nobody pushed him. When he walked on, I wrote it all down with my left hand, and Kulwa lifted his flag, and we went east with every pot full.