Rose Heart: Rose Heart, #1

By Elizabeth Caroll

A coming of age story about a girl trying to find herself.

The story is set in an African village, which despite modernity, still clings to traditions.

Abandoned as a child, she's adopted by a kindly man who brings her up as his own. Though she is seen as a foreigner by most and is often teased for her looks, in her father's house she finds happiness, acceptance, and eventually love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mika Publishing
• Release date: Feb 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224859085

Book preview

Chapter 1

No child deserved Abla’s fate. She was born to unfortunate parents in an unfortunate situation and became of great inconvenience to the whole community.

Naboin’s son found her the day after her mother died, as the neighbourhood boys brought the livestock home for the evening. Her cries were weak, near strangled, and young Eku, short for Ekuwom, mistook it for a puppy. He broke away from the group and rushed towards the sound. He intended to find the puppy first, be the first to hold it, and hence lay claim to it.

He was disappointed when he found the source of the cries. It was not a puppy. It was the ugliest animal he’d ever seen and would have resembled a child if only it wasn’t so scaly, and the wrong colour.

Evil! he whispered sharply, backing away, fearing that this could be a play of evil spirits in their folklore. Ekipe’s doing! the little boy spat out resolutely.

All warnings from his grandmother came back to him. His mother was always telling him not to listen to her. He too had thought the older woman an imaginative liar, full of stories of ogres eating people, and evil spirits disguising themselves as children, until today.

Stay away, Ekipe! he warned sharply, his voice thin despite his determination, betraying his young age. I am no fool to fall for your tricks.

Soon, his cousin and the older boys in the village in their company, arrived at the scene. They’d heard the cries too, and had debated what animal it could be, before they realised Eku wasn’t among them. The area was filled with dangerous animals, and so urgency brought them here fast, each sighing with relief when they saw Eku unharmed. But then they saw the bundle before him and slowly backed away.

It’s evil spirits playing tricks on us, Edenyo, Eku said, running to his cousin for protection. We must kill it before it infects us with discord.

Edenyo pulled Eku to his side, but he did not take out his staff to crash the creature’s head as Eku had expected.

Don’t touch it! Eku cried out in fear. Edenyo, the eldest among them, stepped forward, picked up the ugly thing, and then began running homeward, leaving the others with the task of leading the livestock slowly.

Edenyo touched it... Eku was horrified. How could he be so foolish? What will happen to him? Eku asked, turning to one of his cousin’s peers.

Walk faster, the much taller and older boy beckoned, gently tapping him with his herding stick as though Eku was part of the herd. Let’s go home and find out.

Eku was miserable. He was certain Edenyo was already possessed by evil spirits. How could his cousin touch the creature so easily? It was Ekipe’s oldest trick.

Already mourning his beloved cousin, Eku trudged home with the herd.

By the time Eku and the others arrived at the village, the whole place was in a state of uproar. The boys had agreed to report Edenyo to the village elders, but it seemed like the elders had gathered already to discuss the matter. They sat for baraza under a large mvule tree in the middle of the village, surrounded by other villagers desperate to overhear their discussion.

Eku spied his father among the assembled villagers. Forgetting that he ought to lead their livestock home before nightfall, he left them wondering about and pushed his way through the animated crowd to his father’s side. Naboin barely registered his presence, or he might have instructed him to complete his duties first. Eku was clever to remain quiet.

Ajuma’s child, his grandmother’s voice proclaimed from the circle of elders. Eku was too short to look over the heads of the assembled and locate her, but he knew her voice well enough.

Are we sure? a hoarse voice managed despite his fit of coughing.

Must be, another spoke up.

Around him, the listening crowd pressed tightly together as close to the elders as they could without breaking the two steps rule that ensured the elders remained isolated.

It was a child? the young boy of four wondered to himself. Ajuma’s? Wasn’t Ajuma daughter of Nanuk, their neighbour to the east, found dead yesterday?

It was impossible, he determined. The whole village must have fallen for Ekipe’s tricks. That ugly creature couldn’t possibly be a child. He knew children. His mother had just birthed him a sister not too long ago. She looked nothing like the bundle screaming in the middle of the elders’ baraza. She had big beautiful eyes and skin as smooth as honey. He’d licked her to confirm, when his mother was not watching. She did not taste like honey.

Where’s Nanuk? another elder called out. No one answered.

Where’s Nanuk? he asked again, louder this time.

Nanuk wasn’t among the gathering, or any of his family members. Eku’s father was among the men sent to summon them. The Ethuro home was not too far off if one ran the whole way. But Nanuk, and everyone in his family, refused to come back with them. Nanuk only sent one message back, that the Ethuro family recognised no daughter called Ajuma of Nanuk. The message was clear, she’d been disowned, even in death.

Eku was puzzled by all this. He did not yet understand that a father could refuse his own child, and that her siblings and mother could deny her too. Ajuma was Nanuk’s daughter, Eku was certain. She had three sisters and three older brothers. How could they all forget her existence so suddenly? He was certain the wailing creature was responsible for this as well.

Ajuma is Nanuk’s daughter, Eku said to himself defiantly. He wouldn’t allow the evil spirit to scatter his thoughts on this one fact.

I will not forget that I know Ajuma of Nanuk, he said firmly, to himself. She was nice.

He’d seen Ajuma wander about the village. No one talked to her. She built her own hut at the edge of the village. She had two goats which she milked and bled for food, and one had been heavy with child when he saw her a few days ago.

Yesterday morning, however, Ajuma seized to exist. Eku didn’t understand that concept either, that one day Ajuma was smiling at him, offering him a berry, and he responded by spitting at her feet like he’d seen villagers do repeatedly, and the next day she was gone.

Her body was found lifeless. All assumed that her child died unborn with her, until Eku found it. His grandmother later explained that the spirit of Ekipe claimed Ajuma, confused her, and is why she ended up dangling from a tree branch. It was years later that Ekuwom understood the concept of suicide.

She birthed the child, then killed herself. It all fit together when his father later told him of the claim Ajuma brought to the council of elders, to have a passing mzungu engineer brought to answer to the elders for making her a woman and then shunning his duty to marry her. The mzungu had been part of the explorers seeking oil reserves in their district. It was common knowledge that Ajuma was often in their company, serving them food and laughing with them.

Ajuma, daughter of Nanuk, third son of Ethuro, had been a clever girl with a bright future, it was claimed. Her father adored her and had seen to it that she attended school almost every day, a luxury few girls in the area enjoyed. Being the best in English at school, it was only natural that she should exercise her language prowess with the visiting wazungu. People frowned at her company, but no one thought she’d be as foolish as to get involved with them, so involved that she found herself with child. It was preposterous!

The council of elders tried to contact the exploration company and have the said mzungu report to them for a hearing to settle the matter, but the company refused to comply, and after closing shop and leaving the area, there really was nothing else to do.

Eku hadn’t really known Ajuma, other than that she was Nanuk’s daughter, their neighbour, and that she often gave him ripe berries whenever they met. He’d accepted her berries until the rest of the village began to spit at her, and so he spat at her too whenever he met her. If he’d been older and more attentive, he’d have noticed the growing bulge of her stomach, and the stifling air of melancholy around her.

Ajuma ran off and birthed the child herself, planning to discard it and all proof that it ever existed so as to salvage herself, and hopefully still manage to convince one of Eku’s uncles to marry her as a second wife. It was the only clean break she could hope for. However, Ajuma found she couldn’t kill her child. She was not brave enough, and she never made it home. A sole acacia tree was her final resting place, with one of her necklaces serving as the solace giver. But as luck should have it, or misfortune, depending on whom you asked, hyenas didn’t go hunting that night and Eku found the child the following day.

As Eku grew older and learned more of Ajuma’s troubles which led to her suicide, he grew more bitter about the whole affair. He didn’t know who to blame for Ajuma’s painful last months of life. The mzungu? Society? Himself for spitting on her because he saw others do it? Had they all been so cruel that she preferred to strangle herself? Had the future seemed so hopeless for the young woman?

As expected, the council of elders were harsh in their ruling on Ajuma’s child that evening, even as it wailed from hunger and discomfort before them.

If Nanuk won’t recognise the child as his blood, and considering its unfortunate conception and the grief it brought its mother, driving her to such a maddened decision, this child is a curse, and would be a blight to our society and any family that helps it, one of the elders spoke up, his words harsh and unforgiving. I propose we end its life as a mercy.

Eku agreed, and was glad when the elders echoed their acknowledgement.

I don’t agree! a quieter voice mumbled, stunning all. It was a voice few ever disputed with. The village doctor, his every movement raising chimes and clinks from his beaded head to foot attire, kept speaking. We welcome worse luck by killing it.

Are you sure? another elder asked.

Will the sun rise tomorrow?

All discontent ceased. It was believed the village doctor was in direct commune with the spirits. To displease him was to invite misfortune.

But who’ll take it in?

No one spoke up.

One of the elders turned to the village doctor. We do not wish to displease the spirits, but you witness it yourself. No family is willing to take her in.

The village doctor could not take her in. The role required celibacy and solitude, unless when grooming an heir.

Well then... he began.

It’s only a child, Eku’s grandmother interrupted tenderly, face turned to the child who’d cried herself to sleep. An unfortunate child. And then to everyone’s surprise, she resigned to say, I’ll keep her.

Grandma, no!

No one listened to him. All eyes turned to Naboin. Eku’s father was the eldest son in his home, and with his father dead, he was the head of the family, so he could stop his mother from adopting the cursed child. They hoped he would. It was the right thing to do.

He did not.

Chapter 2

A series of unfortunate things happened soon after the cursed child was brought into Naboin’s homestead. The first was Nanuk, its grandfather, who visited the Naboin home the next morning, to curse it and deny its existence, saying it ought to be condemned to death.

Eku was puzzled by the man’s hard-heartedness. He had disliked the child back when he thought it a creation of evil spirits. But now he knew it was a real child, and though he wished another family had taken it in, it did not deserve to die.

Why does father Nanuk hate Ajuma’s child? Eku asked his father after the controversial visitor left. Ajuma is dead. Shouldn’t we be kind to the dead?

It was taught that the dead were the pitiful ones, no matter what terrible people they’d been when alive. They were pitiful because they had no more chances to defend themselves from accusations or redeem their choices in life. The same fate they died with was to await them in their spirit lives.

Poor man, his father said, excusing Nanuk as a bereaved father. It was easy to empathise with him. His daughter was defiled and shunned by not just anyone, but a son of the Turkana’s mortal enemy.

No one disliked the wazungu like the Turkana. Their first arrival at their lands, a century ago, had brought with it their downfall, all Turkana claimed. They squashed them, used them, and alienated them from their trading partners to ensure that they remained poor and unadvanced. This series of systematic social annihilation had made it difficult for them to catch up with the rest of the country. Eku had heard this account repeatedly, and it was ingrained in his mind. They were poor because the mzungu made it so. Their lands were dry and unyielding because of the mzungu. Their rivers were drying out because of the mzungu. Their livestock died of diseases because of the mzungu.

Are the wazungu supernatural? Eku erred to ask once.

The question earned him a hard smack to the back of his head from his father. Eku was stunned. The blow hadn’t hurt much, but the act seemed extreme considering Naboin rarely raised a hand to his children.

They are flesh and blood like you and me, Naboin stated flatly. They do things differently, but they are human like us.

Though Naboin was uncomfortable with having the cursed child in his home, and feared the blight she’d bring to his family, he was a soft-hearted man. He could not bring himself to do that which ought to be done, give the child the mercy of death. Many of his peers advised him to accidentally drop the child on its head, or lead his livestock to where it played so an accident might take care of the matter. It was tempting, but he restrained himself.

The child was an abomination, he was certain, but he found he couldn’t think of killing it. His mother adored it. Her face was brighter and looked much younger as she fussed over it. All milking women refused to place their tits in its mouth, no matter how hard his mother begged or how much she offered. Even Naboin’s wife openly refused, though she was still milking with Ajele, only a few months old. Naboin knew better than to force her to it. It was his mother, Eku’s grandmother, who’d offered to take care of the child, and so Naboin left her to deal with feeding it.

Mama Naboin was not a woman who easily accepted defeat. Her lone milking cow did the job just fine. Eku would rush out on early mornings to the dome-shaped hut on the other end of the homestead, his grandmother’s house, to watch the mzungu child suckling from the tits of the milk-cow, her tiny pink body supported by his grandmother’s wrinkled hands. The scene amused him. A calf would suckle on the other tits, while the cursed child suckled beside it.

Contrary to what all expected, the child grew, and strong too. She even stopped looking so pink and began thawing into a comfortable brown, though she never quite got to the right hue that might identify her as Turkana. Even her hair colour refused to comply, where its texture might be forgiven.

Mzungu child, or Naibon’s mzungu girl, was what people called her. She wasn’t given the dignity of a name for her first five years. It was a political matter rather than cruelty, really. Many wondered if it was right to give her a Turkana name, as she wasn’t really one. They also feared angering spirits whose names she might bear.

But she needs a name, Naboin’s grandmother insisted yet again one evening, nearly six years after Eku found her.

I agree. But what name?

You’ve travelled, my son. Don’t you know of a foreign name?

As usual, Naboin fell silent when his mother asked this of him.

We’ll name her Abla, Naboin relented that evening, to all their surprise.

Abla? Eku tried the foreign name, struggling through the unfamiliar assembly of sounds.

It’s a Swahili name, meaning a rare rose.

It was a special name to Naboin, though his family was not aware of its background. After his initiation, he and his peers ran off south looking for an adventure, and had met with a bigger sea than theirs. They walked along the sea line and witnessed a world far removed from their own. It was a world of tall white buildings manned by lighter-skinned people who answered to the wazungu. The image sickened them, but they were not surprised. The south had always been traitorous.

The young warriors watched the locals with distaste. Communication was difficult, and the new initiates were feeling too self-accomplished to bother with picking through their broken schoolyard Swahili, even when all they needed was drinking water. In the end, they’d taken to forcefully fetching their own well water to drink. The villagers usually scampered away in fear, and at one village the police were called.

Naboin and his peers had no love for the police. They ran to hide. In the house Naboin chose to hide in, he met her.

Hair cropped short, close to her head, eyes large, and teary golden, lips succulent, and tinged dark, she asked, Who are you?

Warrior,