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For many generations, the Uloans had lied to themselves about part of their past, until they had finally forgotten it ...
When the first explorers from the Matile mainland had reached the islands centuries ago, they had found human inhabitants as well as the animals and the mwiti. The population was small and scattered, and the people had a name – the Kipalende. A small-statured, peaceful race whose origins predated those of the Matile and Thaba, and even the Tokoloshe and the Kwa’manga of the Khumba Khourou thirstland, the Kipalende lived in harmony with the mwiti.
The Kipalende had no need to build dwellings; the trees shaped themselves into shelters for them. They had no need to hunt or cultivate food; the fruits of the mwiti-plants provided all the sustenance they required. In return, the Kipalende nurtured the mwiti and spread their seeds and pollen, and protected them from the depredations of hungry creatures such as the munkimun. The Kipalende knew neither want nor warfare, and they were unaware that there were other people in the world; people who could neither understand nor respect the way of life that had sustained them for thousands of years.
In an overweening arrogance born of their recent acquisition of the power of ashuma, the explorers, and the settlers who arrived on their heels, saw the Kipalende as nothing more than tree-dwellers only a step above the munkimun – an obstacle that had to be swept away or trampled beneath the feet of the Matile. The early settlers decided that they needed to remove the Kipalende. And that was what they did. In less than a generation, the Kipalende were gone – exterminated. In ensuing years, the Uloans expunged from their memories the fact that predecessors had existed on the islands, and so did the mainlanders.
But the Kipalende were not truly gone.
The mwiti possessed a shared sentience, but it was not like that of humans or animals. The source of their awareness was not restricted to specific organs such as eyes or ears. Changes in sunlight, variations in vibrations in the air or ground, shifts in the direction of the breeze that carried chemical signals... these shaped the consciousness of the ubia-vines and the rest of the mwiti.
And because the mwiti had extended their consciousness to join with that of the Kipalende, the plant life had shared the torment their human symbiotes had suffered at the hands of the invaders. And the mwiti had absorbed the spirits of the Kipalende, and kept that part of the doomed people alive long after the dust of their bodies became an element of the islands’ soil. Now, the Kipalende were part of the mwiti, from the ubia-vines to the tallest of the trees.
No longer were the Kipalende timid. Their spirits had become vindictive, and they bent the inchoate consciousness of the mwiti to their influence, and to their goal: vengeance against the descendants of those whom had destroyed them. The powerful sorcery of the Uloans was all that prevented the mwiti from overrunning the islands in the aftermath of the Storm Wars. That had been the Kipalendes’ best chance to fulfill their desire for reprisal, and their spirits slipped into dormancy when that opportunity was thwarted.
And now, that protective sorcery was gone. The unseen barriers that had thwarted the Kipalendes’ revenge were gone. Freedom had come. And so had an unanticipated kind of Retribution Time for the Uloans who remained on the islands, with the reawakening of the Kipalendes’ spirits.
The mwiti were now capable of a full range of movement. Ubia-vines slid more swiftly than serpents along the ground. Grass blades whipped, curled and wove together, into vast, moving webworks, as though the air had become a gigantic loom. Even the thickest of tree-branches had become as limber as the tentacles of a squid or octopus. Flowers grasped and clawed like an eagle’s talons. Roots clutched the soil and propelled huge trees forward.
Immediately after the magic that had kept them at bay vanished, the mwitis’ consciousness had momentarily overwhelmed that of the Kipalende. The plants had revelled in their liberty, and underwent a period of anarchic growth and movement, during which they posed scant threat to the now-vulnerable Uloans.
In the midst of the chaos, however, a glimmer of greater purpose kindled in the consciousness of a single, aged papaya tree in a forest on Jayaya Island. The papaya was hardly an imposing tree; others were far larger and bore brighter blossoms and more plentiful fruit. But the consciousness of the Kipalende loomed larger in this papaya than in any of the other mwiti, for it was the refuge of the greatest among them, a shaman who was the principal link between his people and the plant life. As the others dueled with branches and leaves and roots, the lone papaya remained motionless, easily fending off the intrusions of its more aggressive neighbors.
The Kipalende part of the papaya’s consciousness reached out to the other mwiti, and it sent a message that soon worked its way into that of all the animate vegetation of the islands.
Destroy them, not us, the Kipalende shaman in the papaya urged. The time for vengeance has come.
Swiftly, the rest of the Kipalende spirits regained control over the mwiti. Swifter still came a new message from the spirit of their shaman.
Now it ends.