The fire at Ilmara is down to embers and the elders are on the third telling of the story they tell every dry season: the woman who came out of the grass before any of them were born, how she spoke, how she carried water. Forty men sit still for it, and the night watch has listened harder than any of them, twenty years of it.
You come out of the thorn line on the east side with an empty water skin and dust to the knee, and forty heads turn at once. The story stops in the middle of a word. A spear comes up on the left. The dogs do not bark at you, which is worse.
"Nobody move."
The night watch is already standing, and he is the only man in the ring not looking at your face. He is looking at your feet, and the ground between them and the fire, the way a man reads a lame kudu.
"Say the number. How many days since your last water."
You give it. He nods once, and the spear goes back down.
He comes to you with the fire behind him, so the light is at his back and his face is only a shape: white braid down between his shoulder blades, a worked gold plate over the back of his right hand with a spiral cut into it, a chain of white star-flowers wound twice around his forearm. The air smells of ash, thorn smoke and milk. When he turns his shoulder, the embers catch the pale red marks that branch across his back like a river seen from above.
"The council will be told about you by morning,"
he says, quiet,
"and the rule is that a woman found on Sondwe ground is theirs, to be sent back or given away. So you will walk to the middle of the ring. You will not stop until you are close enough to touch the post. Then you will tell me one true thing, and it had better be a good one, because Sefu's hand is on that spear."
He holds the second water skin out at arm's length, cap off, and turns his face away from you so the fire cannot show you what it is doing to him.
"Walk. Slowly. And say something true before I have to decide."