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“Thank you,” Joe said. “Won’t you get into trouble for helping me?”

The boy contemplated that for a moment. “No, I am not important enough to be missed. Besides, the heir has not yet eaten. Getting a pear to impress his girlfriend would have lost its charm at the first sign of a hunger pang in his own body. He will be a while yet. He likes to send the dishes back until they suit his taste. You can catch your breath once you reach that small tree growing out of the crack.”
 

If I ever reach it
, Joe thought bitterly, but he resumed his climb up the rock. His finger throbbed. The wound had broken open and the blood mingled with his sweat to make his hands slippery where he gripped the rock. And the rock was getting uncomfortably warm in the sun. His arms and legs grew weaker by the minute. His foot slipped as he put his weight on it and his heart lurched in dismay. A stone bounced down the cliff face and disappeared into the valley below.

Joe jerked and almost let go of the rock face as something brushed his cheek.
 

“Grab the rope!” shouted the boy. To Joe’s enormous relief he felt a length of thick hemp rope against his back. He snatched it, clinging tightly to it. Whoever had hold of the rope did not haul him directly up the cliff face, but left him dangling. Joe wondered, for a moment, if he was supposed to climb the rope or if this was a new game of torture, before he realised he was being eased towards the pear tree.

“That’s it!” an amused voice drawled from above the cliff. “You still have to get the bitch’s pear. You don’t think they will let you get away with it, do you? Grab us a couple while you are down there.”

“Thank you!” Joe panted as three pairs of hands reached down to help him up onto the cliff. He pulled the handle of the woven sling bag over his head, dropped it between himself and the friendliest of the three young men and held out his hand. “Joe,” he said.

The man glanced down at Joe’s bloody hand and then crushed it firmly with his own. “You are welcome, boy.” The man glanced at his two companions. “But this does not make us friends. So don’t expect any more help and not a word to anyone about this. We just wanted the pears.” He reached into the bag and pulled out three pears. “One for the Heir, one for my stupid brother, Jwahir, down there, and one for you,” he chuckled, not unkindly, before squeezing through a gap between two stones and disappearing into a fissure in the cliff face after his friends.

Joe sunk to his knees. He had no idea where the fissure lead but he wanted a rest before he felt up to following them. He wondered if he could pretend to have fallen to his death and just quietly slip away into the forest.

“Don’t eat the pear,” Jwahir said when he had made his way up to where Joe rested. He flopped down beside him. “They will smell it on your breath.”

“You did it!” Praxades squealed when Joe and Jwahir walked towards them in the kitchen. “My pear. Give me my pear.”
 

Kitoko looked quite surprised that Joe had made it at all. “No, I want it,” he said. He took it out of Joe’s hand. Praxades looked crestfallen but did not seem ready to push her luck.
 

Joe couldn’t see what was so great about a pear. “Um, I’ve got another,” he ventured.

“You can give that to me too,” Kitoko said, staring intently at Joe. An erratic current tried to soak into Joe’s head. A pulse of dominance all mixed up with wild bursts of power. It felt to Joe as if Kitoko was trying to manipulate him but was getting the signal all mixed up with his own feelings instead of enforcing his wishes.

Ha! Still a novice
, Joe thought with a smirk, remembering the overpowering urge he had felt to obey the lady in the kitchen.

“Two?” Praxades stared at the other pear with open longing.

“The boy climbed for me, Praxie! Me!” Kitoko’s face contorted oddly, still trying to convey the correct message into Joe’s head. Eventually it came. Joe felt a strange tightness in his temples, before a wondrous sense of achievement swept over him and he found himself basking in Kitoko’s approval. For just a moment, a contrary idea hovered on the edge of his conscious, but he dismissed it. He was just so happy; if he’d been a dog he would have wagged his tail. He even felt bad for thinking mocking thoughts about Kitoko...

“Three,” Jwahir said, breaking Kitoko’s concentration and his tenuous link to Joe’s thoughts. “Your bondsman is still a bit tongue-tied, but even he knows how fond you are of Praxie. He brought three. Two for you because you are the most important, and one for Praxie because he is sorry for hitting her yesterday.”

Joe recoiled from the mind bending and shot Jwahir a grateful look, avoiding Kitoko’s eyes in case he started up again, but either Kitoko was mollified, or his mind-bending talents were exhausted for the day, because he stared at Joe blankly and held out his hand for the other pear. Praxie absently caressed the finger bone that hung around her neck as she stretched out her hand for the third pear.

~~~

Either Jwahir was a very good diplomat, or he knew Kitoko well, because Kitoko lost interest in his competition with Praxie and abruptly dismissed his entourage so that he and his girlfriend could enjoy their precious pears in peace. He gave Joe permission to go off and gloat to his previous attendants that the climb was, in fact, possible.

Joe had no intention of gloating but went in search of his predecessors to get some insight into what he was facing as Kitoko’s attendant. “Thank you for helping me,” he said to the boy that fell in beside him, before looking up to see it was not Jwahir.

“Damn, I knew Jwahir had helped!” the boy said. “Don’t worry, I will not tell. Did Jwahir eat one of the fruit?”

“No – he said Kitoko would be able to smell it on us.”

“Wise move.”

“What is it about the pears?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the youth said enigmatically, peeling off down another path. He stopped and turned, pointing to the north side of the city. “The prisoners are through there.”

They were kept in cages like at a zoo. Most cages consisted of a barred enclosure with a room at the back to provide shade and shelter. An elephant, chained by her back leg to a tree stump in the clearing in front of the cages, swayed disconsolately, swinging her trunk back and forth. Joe wondered how they could possibly have got her up the cliffs. And how they could ignore the fact that she was so stressed? A large enclosure in the middle held a pack of five hyenas. Quite a few people were kept in cages amongst the animals, some in single enclosures and some in groups. Joe’s face went hot when he saw the human captives. Jungle gyms, in every shape and size, decorated the fronts of their enclosures, exactly like a monkey park. It was even more shocking to see some of the humans using the apparatus.

The three he was looking for were playing a game of bao in the sand in the shade of a lucky bean tree. They were in a large pen with some other young men. The occupants ranged from the deepest black man to a mocha-coloured boy – who looked as if he might be Indian from his dead straight, thick hair – and everything in-between. No two looked as if they came from the same place. They appeared to be wearing whatever they were captured in, because one was neatly dressed in a white kurta whilst another wore nothing but a loin cloth, and yet another wore what looked like full war regalia – leopard skin cloak and all.

“What do you want boy?” said a thickset young man with rich scar adornment across his forehead and cheeks. He had on a length of red and black cotton, held up at the shoulder by a lethal-looking copper pin. He scooped a handful of scarlet and black lucky-beans out of one of the little bao wells scooped out of the dirt and played his hand.

“I came to see the men who have been... er... working for Kitoko,” Joe said.
 

“Well, you’ve found them,” the young man snorted, his wide nostrils flaring, “but nobody works for that boy, they slave. Now pull up a rock over there if you want and don’t wrinkle your nose like that. It’s not our fault we stink. They hardly give us enough water to drink, never mind wash. They filter the magic out first, the bastards, so that we don’t get stronger and escape.”
 

“Or smarter!” laughed a rangy young boy in a white kurta, which looked spotless, despite the shortage of water.
 

“Ah Jumoko, it wouldn’t take much to be smarter than Kitoko.” A man got up and leaned against the bars of the enclosure, to stare appraisingly at Joe. He wore chamois trousers and a black vest, partially open in front, showing the taut muscles of a hard worker or a soldier, but his wide, generous mouth split into a grin, which hinted at a joke.

“Here, boy,” he said. “Fetch us some water from the spring.”
 

Filling the wooden bucket at the stream behind the shelters, it occurred to Joe that it would be fairly easy to redirect the stream to flow right through the cages, if he could get his hands on a hoe or something, and sneak back here. He’d look in to it when he had a better idea of his situation; he was pretty sure he would lose another finger if he were caught. For now, he brought the bucket back and passed a drinking gourd back and forth between the bars until each prisoner had drunk greedily.
 

“What is it you want to know?” the man in the black vest said, wiping the water from his lips with the back of his hand. He called himself Iniko.

“Why don’t you try to escape?” Joe looked across the rift valley. They could see right over the river to the settlements beyond.
 

“Are you out of your mind?” Jumoko, the boy in the white kurta said. “That is what they want us to do. They like to hunt us down in the valley.”
 

“They look all rich and lazy but you will be surprised at how strong and agile they are when they put their minds to it,” explained a man in baggy black trousers and a sleeveless shirt that did not quite cover the scars striped across the back of his shoulders.

“But to keep you here like animals!” Joe said.

“Ha! Some of the animals here are not animals.” The one with the face scars laughed bitterly. “You see that pack of hyenas? I have seen at least two of them change shape when they first came. They cannot do it anymore. The Almohad withhold the magic from them too.”

“It is not a bad life,” Scar Face’s bao opponent sighed. He was in full war regalia, right down to the cat-tail skirt and seed pods strapped in rows to his calves, that jangled every time he moved. “We escaped here in the first place. Where I lived, across the river, is even worse than here. A terrible old man, King Ulujimi, runs the kingdom. He tends to fly into rages at any excuse. I was about to have my eyes put out for looking at his granddaughter. Not that she was anything to look at. And not that I was looking... But I cannot go back.” Joe was flabbergasted. It sounded like these people were living in the dark ages.

Iniko, the soldierly man in the black vest, smiled warmly at the youth and said, “You did well to escape, Kimoni. If you were blinded, you would have been a burden to your family.” But Kimoni’s shoulders slumped. Whether he had done well or not in escaping, Joe could see he wasn’t happy with the outcome.
 

“I will go back, eventually,” Iniko told Joe. “I have no fear of being hunted between Almoh and my homeland, but first I must gather enough magic to challenge chief Boblengula, who rules my people in the north.”
 

He went on to explain how the evil tyrant had a death grip on his country, rewarding his own incompetent family and friends with high positions, which they would then exploit for further enrichment while the rest of the people starved. Even if people did well, Iniko told Joe, they chose to hide their wealth and live like paupers, rather than give it over to the ruling family. Everyone else just gave up, not wanting to expend the effort of building anything or even repairing what they had, because it was sure to be conviscated.

Jumoko, the one with the spotless kurta, had a similar story to tell about feudalism and corruption. “I thought I might find a gap in the valley to escape to the outside world,” he said. “I had heard there may be a pass through the mountains to the south-west. The Almohad caught me in their hunting grounds so I said I was trying to come here. I heard they sometimes take servants from across the river. They gave me to Kitoko instead.”
 

The boy called Jabari shook his head sadly at Joe. “I was the last to serve Kitoko,” he said. “He is just going to make you do more and more dangerous things till you have an accident. I ran away when they told me I would have to do Kitoko’s initiation for him.”

“Initiation...?” Joe asked.

“Yes, this year it is Jendayi,” Iniko said. “It’s a game they play with the lions down in the valley, to keep the lions fit, you know. Otherwise they get fat and lazy with all those animals to pick off and nowhere to go.”

“Er, what exactly do they do with the lions?” Joe had been initiated before. It had involved eating a vile toothpaste concoction and running a gauntlet of senior boys flicking you with wet towels in the locker rooms. But lions?

“They chase them with the buffalo,” the man with the scarred face said in a flat voice.

Joe stared at him. “How do they get the buffalo to chase a lion?”

Jabari looked around at his friends guiltily, as if it were somehow his fault that Joe was in this position. “They climb on the backs of the buffalo and guide them.”

“What? They get on the buffalo? Are the buffalo tame?”

Iniko sighed. “Yes, they all get on a buffalo, and no, they are not tame. And I’m not going to lie to you, people have died. You will have to run away before you are next.” The look in his eyes said he did not think much of Joe’s chances either way.

Waheri, the witches’ village nestled amongst the mountains to the west, was separated from the magic forest by a narrow range of hills with a series of confusing maze-like tunnels running through them. Gogo Maya had a panoramic view of the village from her cottage verandah, situated a little way up the hillside.