Ancestor Stones Read Online Free Page A

way your children answered you. As though the world was upside down, and you were the child, they the adults.
    When I was a child I was told my voice smelled of fish. By the time I was allowed to speak I had forgotten how. That is how it was. The way we were raised to be who we are.
    Karabom
said: ‘Never say “good morning” until you have washed yourself.’ Yet the day I crossed her path in silence because I had not yet been to the stream she swore at me for my insolence. People who grew thin and died were being eaten away inside by witches, she told me on another day. I stared at the necklaces of loose skin around her neck, the empty flaps that hung to her waist. Even her ear lobes drooped; the holes where her gold earrings hung had stretched so I could see right through them.
Karabom
told me ofwitches who lured children with gifts of eggs and meat, only to suck their blood and steal their hearts, until one day all you saw running around was the empty flesh.
    She pointed to the weaver birds darting in and out of their nests suspended from the branches of a tree, in perfectly spaced rows, as though some hand had hung them there. And she told me the birds were the souls of all the children who had died.
Karabom’s
lips were black, and when she spoke I could see her teeth gleaming against her dark, tattooed gums. I thought her lips and gums were black because she drank so much coffee.
    In the sky the moon faded against the growing blue. There were men whose skins were luminous as the pale shadows of the moon when it dances across bare flesh, she said. Men who sailed their houses across the sea and who were so thin because they ate only fish and drank sea water. When she was my age people told stories of captured children who sailed with them across the sea and were fed to a powerful demon. Men from faraway villages stole the children in exchange for unearthly possessions.
    â€˜Stay away from the footpaths.’ The air whistled in her nostrils and her breath carried the odour of decay, as though her body had become nothing more than a vessel for a mouldering spirit. ‘Only an outsider clings to the path. And run away from strangers. If they come in good faith they’ll reach the village and make their business known.’
    After a while my mother would come and tap me on the shoulder. I wanted to ask her whether the stories were true. But my mother was always so busy. Too busy to listen. Busy in my father’s house counting little piles of stones: how many trees we had planted, how much the first harvest might yield, how rich we would surely become. When she cooked, my mother served my grandmother first — always, except when my father ate with us. I was brought up not to question my elders, so I kept the stories to myself. But I wasn’t frightened. To tell you the truth I didn’t believe them. Not so much as you might think. I knew people made up stories to tell children so that we would behave the way they wanted us to.
    Hali
, but I remember the day I saw one of the moon-shadow men with my own eyes.
    I was swift. My mother used me as her messenger. I would run the whole distance — sometimes to the fields, to the herbalist when one of us was ill, to the headman at the next village, it didn’t matter — and I would deliver the message, repeat the reply once, twice and run back. Look at you, so busy writing everything down on pieces of paper. Scraps of paper to lose or put away in a cupboard to grow mildew. Nobody ever bothered to teach me to write. They didn’t need to. Instead I taught myself never to forget. When I was a girl, I could run. And I can still remember. Those times when my mother required an answer urgently she spat on the warm earth by her feet. The saliva began to shrivel at once, like a slug thrown on a fire. I would set off knowing I had to be back before the dark patch was gone.
    This day, I remember, Alusani begged to come with me. I knew he