Caravan by Dorothy Gilman

Author:Dorothy Gilman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-05-28T18:30:00+00:00

12

I had pleased Bakuli, whose eyes were shining with pride—my family, I thought, and smiled back at him, and then I was untied and free to leave the shrine, which I frankly did not care to see ever again. Scarcely capable of walking I was helped back to the compound by Amina and Bakuli, leaving behind a crowd of excited villagers staring at the broken bowl.

I had pleased Amina, too. Once back in the hut she began a long and animated conversation with Bakuli, whose gift for languages both Amina and 1 depended on heavily. At the end of this Bakuli told me solemnly, "Amina say 'Bako yan â dû kibâ' —the stranger has strength. She make good medicine, Missy. She know charms, spells, medicine to heal. She say you have good iko so you be good to teach such. She want to teach thee."

This sounded a better exercise for my thoughts than the work in the fields and the water carrying that I'd been doing, and I agreed at once. I was curious, too, remembering how ill I'd been when I reached this village, and how Amina had quite possibly saved my life with her medicines and her care.

In this way I became attached to Amina as her apprentice and all during the season of the cold and windy h üntürü she taught me her medicines, beginning first with the incantations spoken over each herb to give them power. These I learned by rote, but even knowing the little I did of Hausa I could make absolutely no sense of their meanings so that I came to believe what Bakuli had told me earlier, that the power attributed to them by Amina lay in their sound, and certainly the sounds covered a variety of octaves. Each incantation that I faithfully memorized began with an appeal to the collective spirits called the 'iskoki —this much was clear to me—but what followed would remain forever gibberish to my ear. In any case, between the incantations and the medicines, Amina cured Shehu's baby son of fever and a rash, and during the cold and dust of the hüntüru even Isa was among those who came to Amina with bad coughs that she eased.

She taught me to work, with leather, too, which was more important to her than I'd realized, for living in such barren thorn country she had to acquire many of her herbs by trade with others. It was community work to slaughter the goats and tan their hides, but a portion of the skins were Amina's to dress and decorate. Dressing the leather was as hard as hoeing in the fields: using the brains of the goat I would rub the skins hard and then rub them again and again with damp sand. Next, with knife and awl and a polishing stone Amina would begin her work of cutting, dyeing and fringing, making really handsome leather bracelets, sandals and belts that she would trade when an Arab merchant, such as

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