In the high country where the miombo woodland thins into open grass, the people said you could tell the season by listening. In the cool months, the wind moved softly through the branches like a lullaby. In the hot months, it hissed across the dry ground and rattled seedpods like warning bells.
That year, the bells would not stop.
The streams had shrunk into tired ribbons. The shallow wells tasted of iron. Even the birds seemed to ration their songs. Mothers measured mealie meal with careful hands, and fathers walked farther each week to find grazing for cattle. When clouds gathered, they teased the horizon and scattered, leaving only dust and disappointment.
So the elders sent a messenger to Mungwi, to the great house of the Chitimukulu.
The messenger arrived at dawn, his feet powdered white. He knelt and clapped his hands in respect. Around him, courtiers moved quietly, but their eyes were sharp, watching the way a farmer watches the sky.
“Bane,” the messenger said, voice rough from travel, “the land is cracking. Children are coughing in the dust. We ask for your counsel.”
The Chitimukulu listened without interrupting. He was not a tall man, but he carried stillness like a spear carried upright. When the messenger finished, the Chitimukulu rested his palm on the carved arm of his chair and looked beyond the courtyard, as if the answer was written somewhere far away.
“Call the headmen,” he said at last. “Call the women who keep the granaries. Call the young ones who run faster than news. Let us speak as one people.”
By midday, the courtyard filled. There were voices like river stones, steady and low, and others like birds, quick and bright. Some asked for immediate action. Others argued over old disputes, the kind that sit in families like silent guests.
The Chitimukulu raised his hand. The chatter fell away.
“We are hungry,” he said, “but hunger must not make us strangers to each other.”
He instructed the headmen to open emergency stores, not for one village only, but shared along the paths that connected them. He ordered that every household with a borehole or a deeper well would be supported with labour and protection, so no one would be forced away by fear. He appointed young runners to carry messages daily between villages so that no rumour would grow larger than the truth. And he told the hunters to rest their traps.
“We do not eat tomorrow’s breeding stock,” he said. “We do not cut every tree and then wonder why the shade has gone.”
In the days that followed, the people worked. They cleared silt from a dam that had been forgotten behind thorny bush. They dug small channels to guide water towards gardens, careful not to waste a drop. Women taught children to cover stored water and keep it clean. Men who once argued over boundaries now stood side by side, passing buckets, their quarrels swallowed by the greater task.
Still, the sky remained hard and bright.
One evening, as the sun reddened like embers, a young girl approached the Chitimukulu’s veranda. She held a calabash of water, but when she knelt, she did not offer it right away.
“Bane,” she said, “my grandmother says rain does not come only from the sky. It comes from the ground and trees, too. Is that true?”
The Chitimukulu studied her, then nodded.
“Your grandmother speaks with wisdom,” he replied. “The land gives water back to the air. Plants breathe it out. The earth holds it and releases it. We are part of that breath.”
He accepted the calabash and poured a little onto the soil at the base of a young tree in the courtyard.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we plant.”
So they planted. Not just one tree for ceremony, but many, along the paths and near the gardens, where shade would lower the heat and roots would hold the soil. The children carried seedlings as if they were chicks. The elders taught which trees were strong and which were kind to crops. The Chitimukulu walked among them, his feet dusty like everyone else’s.
A week later, clouds returned. They were darker this time, heavier, stitched together by wind. Thunder rolled over the hills. Then, in the hush that comes before relief, the first drops fell.
The people did not shout at once. They looked up, almost afraid to hope. When the rain strengthened, drumming on roofs and leaves, laughter broke out like a song released from a tight chest. Children danced in the mud. Women lifted their faces. Men stood still, letting the rain soak their shirts as if it could rinse away the hard weeks.
The Chitimukulu watched from the doorway, calm, but his eyes shone.
When the storm passed, the air smelled new. Streams began to speak again. And in every village, people remembered not only that the rain had returned, but that they had returned to each other first.
