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Shaver rode north. The horse’s long-legged walk was, he reminded himself, fast. That was why he had let himself be talked into riding the damned thing. It felt interminably slow, and its odd jolting pace rolled Shaver’s stomach, and left a taste like sour milk in his mouth. When he was young, the Sotho had not used horses. Nor, he thought, touching the handle of the odd assegai tied onto the saddle-bag, iron tip carefully padded with leather, had they used these damn things.When Likhang had brought the thing from his trip out east, Shaver had thought it was a toy. Absurdly short, and front-heavy. One could throw it like a knobkerrie, he supposed, but a knobkerrie was heavy enough to have a chance of working even if only the handle struck. Using a spear that way seemed foolish. Even now, after Likhang had explained to him the vicious effectiveness of the things, he could not totally believe it, and he had carefully tied his own, reliable knobkerrie next to the odd thing. His knobkerrie was longer than the assegai – unusually long, and almost un-throwable, even for someone of Shaver’s height. It was a weapon for midnight cattle raids, for overwhelming force in the dark. In a moment of desperation, Shaver had cracked the skull of a charging bull with it. It was also, in Shaver’s opinion, an excellent walking stick, and he wished he was using it.He prodded the horse’s sides with his heels. It had no obvious effect. He supposed that was, on balance, the best that could be hoped for.When dark came, he found a stretch of good grass, and staked out the horse for grazing. This, at least, was familiar ground. He built a fire a short distance away, and ate a small dinner, prodding the fire with the assegai – the long iron blade was, if nothing else, an excellent poker.The stupid miniature spear, and these horses, and all the things that came with them. The world, his world, in a handful of years, had transformed into a race between two twin apocalypses.Shaver heard the faintest sound, a whisper of wind in the grass, but a wind which Shaver could not feel. It could not have been more than five feet behind him. By sound, it might be an animal, but there were not many wild animals that would come so close to a fire. He drove the tip of the assegai into the dry soil in front of him, convenient to his right hand, and felt the shaft of his knobkerie with his left foot.He took a breath. “Well, you may as well sit down. I’ve eaten the food, but you can enjoy the fire. And if you sit down, and stop making that noise, maybe you won’t stampede the… ah, startle my horse.”The man stepped forward, and sat close on Shaver’s right. Too close for the knobkerrie – it would have to be the silly little spear if anything came to it. Or his hands, of course. Damn it. He shouldn’t have been able to get this close. When Shaver looked up, though, the man was familiar. Nearly as tall as Shaver himself, lean, and dressed in odd, closely cut black cloth. The fire reflected in points of orange light from the tips of his fingers, and from something strung around his neck.“Oh! Pussycat. Sit. We need to talk. There is still beer in the smaller skin there. I’ll want it, if you don’t.”The man reached over, languidly, and took the skin, uncorked it, and put it to his lips. He raised his head appraisingly for a moment, and then spat. He spat several more times grabbed the larger skin, swirled water from it in his mouth, and spat it out as well.“That is foul. It was foul when it was brewed, and you have been carrying it on the back of a horse for – how many days?”“Three. Give it here.” Grunting skeptically, the black-clad man passed the skin over, and Shaver drank deeply. He nodded. “Yes. It is quite bad.” He took another gulp. “I wonder if there might be some kind of, oh, I don’t know, magic metal, that someone might have. Someone could, perhaps, make a bottle out of this magic metal, that might keep the beer from spoiling? But who could we ask who might know where to look for such a thing? I suppose it is hopeless.”The man in black scowled. “That joke wasn’t very funny the first time you told it. It is not getting funnier.”Shaver shrugged. “You are, of course, the master of comedy. Look at your, ah… hat?”The man sighed loudly – too loudly and too dramatically to be genuine annoyance. This was an old game. He peeled the hat away and tossed it beside him, revealing the man’s face, broad and smiling. It seemed more lined than Shaver remembered.Shaver had never known exactly how to describe his relationship to the other man. They were not rivals in any meaningful way, though they never conversed without the kind of jockeying that might suggest it. The man had good, if oddly accented, Sesotho, but he was certainly not Sotho himself – he would never engage in the Sotho clan politics. There was no patronage between them – Shaver held none of the man’s cattle, and owed him no support – nor the other way around since, as Shaver had to keep reminding himself, that should be equally plausible; they were equals. The man made that fact easy to forget. The two also were not, quite, friends, though there was sometimes a sense of the friendship that could have been. It drifted between them like the smell of flowers in spring.They were business partners, who traded facts. Shaver told the tall man, selectively, omitting anything prejudicial to the Crocodile clan, what he knew of Sotho politics, and passed along the rumors of the Xhosa, the Khoikhoi, and even occasionally the newcomers along the coast. In return, the man offered his own information (equally selective, Shaver was sure) of the territory to the north. This information was culled, Shaver supposed, from hundreds of other people like Shaver himself, scattered across the world. Shaver knew a few of the man’s other contacts – he had expected to have to talk to a woman he knew in a village near Gabarone, to pass word on. And Shaver even knew a little more, beyond the few bare facts and necessary contacts the man had admitted – it was possible to keep secrets even from the great night raider of the Crocodile clan, but no one could manage it perfectly. He had seen, after months of effort, seen the man’s city – one quick glimpse, with the howling of the patrols’ guards in his ears, and with only a quarter moon for light. The glimpse had worn on his mind ever since – it was not that it was like a dream, but rather it was too real, and the idea alone might tear through the world’s soft fabric with its weight.Perhaps Shaver’s world was not merely on the point of death. Perhaps it had never been.Setting down the skin, Shaver said, “many of the Xhosa are worried.”The man nodded, the lines on his face fading, as his slight smile disappeared and was replaced by an expression of blank calm. “What are the Xhosa worried about?”Shaver paused. Then, “no,” he said. “No. We are not playing this game tonight. You know what the Xhosa are worried about. The Nguni villages that have come together. The man Shaka. This toy.” He rapped the handle of the assegai with his knuckles. “That far east, if I know it, you know it. I’m not prey for you to play with, pussy-cat”The two stared into one another eyes for a time. “You have come a long way to tell me something I already know,” the man said. Shaver did not answer. He did not even blink. The man tried again. “And being worried, what will the Xhosa do?”Shaver, whose face had been entirely immobile, tightened his lips, and looked. “I don’t know. They will not all do one thing. Some will fight, if it comes to it, but the people I know there, they don’t think they could hold. Some may take their herds and come into Sotho country. A few of the western Nguni, I think, certainly will. Then more of them, with Shaka’s boys behind them. With Shaka’s little toys in their hands. I expect… I expect that they will test our hospitality.”“And the Sotha,” the man asked, “what will they do?”“We,” Shaver said, stressing the word slightly, “will do various things, too. Some of us, for instance, will think what people we know who could, if they chose, stop the Nguni, stop the Xhosa. Who could, failing that, offer a refuge against their advance. We might seek these people out and remind them of the favors they owe us. Of the duties they have, favors aside. But you are asking the wrong questions. What you should be asking, since it is the question that will matter most in the outcome: what will the Wakandans do?”The man scowled. “This is more difficult, more complicated, than you suggest.”Shaver shrugged. “Perhaps. I really know very few of the facts. Perhaps the time has come for you to explain them.”“And it isn’t Shaka we need to worry about. He is only a symptom. They are being displaced too, by the uh… the…” -- the man’s Sesotho sometimes broke down when he was emotional or speaking quickly -- “the Lekgowa. It is the Lekgowa we will need to come to terms with. Far to the northwest, things are bad, very bad, already, and it will only get worse.”Shaver sighed. “Again, you may be right. Again, you have the information and I do not. And again, it makes no difference. No Sotho clan can stand against the Nguni. No Sotho clan can stand against the Xhosa, if they should all move at once. If the Lekgowa are worse, as the rumors suggest, as you, who should know, insist, we cannot stand against them either. But could you do these things? If it came to it?”The man was silent. “If the answer is yes,” Shaver went on, “even if it is perhaps, then the thing need not be put to the test. If you were known to be a power, that threat might be enough. There would be things I could do, even with the idea of Wakanda. You know me. You know my reputation. You know my name.” Still, the man would not speak. “Or perhaps you could merely give shelter, perhaps not to everyone, but to enough. My followers, the followers of some other Crocodile chief, or chief from some other clan. Let us shelter. Give us the time we need to unify, to have a chance.”The tall man, at last, shook his head. “You know that is not something we can do. That you know so much… that should have been enough to kill you. To declare ourselves to the world at a time like this? To take in hundred of strangers and set up some puppet kingdom among the Sotho? No. You ask too much. I am sorry. You, perhaps, your family. We could find a place for you, not with us, but somewhere safe. But no more than that”Shaver looked at the fire, which had burned through most of the wood, and was guttering. Soon there was only the dim glow of the coals. He had not expected anything else. He stared silently until he knew without looking into the growing shadows to his right, that the man had gone. He wondered if he should have asked again, if he should have pleaded.No, he thought. No. Equals do not plead favors of one another.He jabbed the assegai into the fire, stirring the coals back to life (how long had he sat starring at the dying fire?) and added wood. More, and more, until the fire let out a blazing light that blurred his vision, and left his cheeks burning. Equals. He jammed the assegai into the heart of his hand (burning the knuckles on his right hand). In a moment, the fire caught and danced up the short handle. In the morning, when Shaver set off back south, back home, he left the assegai blade there, the blackened iron cutting through the ash and into the sod. A dozen yards away was the short stake to which he had tethered the horse, and the rope still tied to it, linking it to the bridle, thrown down carelessly beside it. The horse still stood next to, grazing. Shaver had, after all, camped on the best piece of pasture for miles around.