Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord Read Free Book Online Page B

truthfully.
    She narrowed her eyes and moved her head snakewise from side to side as if trying to look at a very tricky mirage. ‘I can't see you very well. Why?'
    He thought for a moment; truth is harder when one lacks the necessary vocabulary. ‘I'm standing on the edge of the world. It makes things blurry.'
    She got up and dusted herself off, apparently satisfied with that. ‘All right. Good-bye.'
    'Wait! Will you??ill you take me with you?'
    She squinted at him again. ‘Why?'
    'I have to help someone discover something.’ That was all he said, but for some things, tone and expression are more potent than vocabulary, even when you are a discorporate entity standing in the interstices of time and space.
    She believed him. ‘All right. Come.'
    He stepped over the threshold and ran skipping towards her, a vaguely cloudy image gradually coalescing into an identical six-year-old girl.
    She smiled then. Imaginary Twin was a familiar game. ‘I'm Giana. What's your name?'
    The djombi thought, shrugged, and replied, ‘When I am without a shadow, I may be called Constancy-in-Adversity, though others who see me differently have sometimes named me Senseless-Resignation-to-Suffering. I am a small thing, as you can see, but my mother says I am quite powerful in my own way.'
    Giana nodded. The names were too large and the concepts too weighty for her to grasp, but the last she could understand. Mothers tended to say things like that, usually just before sending you to the well to fetch water.
    'Would you like to go play in dreamland until I come back?’ the djombi asked her.
    Her eyes lit up. ‘Would I!'
    He—or rather we must say ‘she’ now, as djombi take the gender of their shadows—took her by the hand and guided her gently to lie down on the ground.
    'Now you're blurry,’ she told the child softly as she tucked the long grass in a nest around her.
    The child smiled back with sleepy sweetness, and then she was in dreamland.
    The djombi stood up and looked over the fields. In the near distance there were other people tending to their animals in the pasture, all intent on their tasks, no-one noticing the strange momentary twinning of a little girl. One figure in particular now seemed familiar—a tall girl leading a cow by a long rope, a pail of milk balanced on her head.
    'Giana, come here! I'm done with the milking,’ she called over her shoulder with an older sister's offhand bossiness.
    'Coming, Laira,’ cried the djombi in her little girl voice, and she ran over the fields into Makendha.
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    6
    the djombi begins to instruct paama in stick science
    * * * *
    Six-year-old Giana was being exceptionally naughty and no-one could figure out why. She would not play with her little friends, she often ran off when she should have been helping in the kitchen or fetching water, and, strangest of all, when her mother gave her a lash with the switch for her laziness, instead of crying as she would normally do, she gave her mother such a reproachful and annoyed look that the poor woman dropped the switch guiltily and edged away, feeling extremely unnerved.
    Giana's Gran, who had become perceptive through years of experience, told them to leave the child alone. She said that something had got into Giana's head and they would have to wait until it went back out again. Giana gave the old lady a big hug and got a wink in return, but her older siblings muttered about how spoiled she was, and how they would never have gotten away with such behaviour when they were younger.
    There was little connection between Giana's family and Paama's, so Giana was forced to go looking for Paama herself. She wasted an entire day trying to see her and speak to her, either out in the fields or in the court, but each time there were too many people around, or someone who could not be safely ignored was telling her to run along.
    In the meantime, there were tantalising glimpses of the potential of Paama's new gift.