The Child's Elephant by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

blame them. I wouldn’t want to be cut up into pieces by a panga.’
    ‘And so . . . what? . . . the child army should just be allowed to run wild . . . to go anywhere it likes?’
    ‘They already do,’ said the woman who sold eggs. ‘The stories are terrible if you travel further east. There the rebels have taken over whole towns. Their commanders sit in the market squares, laughing and drinking, their guns hanging on straps over the backs of their chairs. And out in the bush the villages are empty. No one dares stay any more. They go to live in the camps that the government has set up for them. Their stomachs are empty while the rebels feast on their crops.’ She paused to shift herself into a more comfortable position, but nobody else began speaking. Everyone wanted to hear what more this woman had found out. ‘Life in the camps is dreadful,’ she continued. ‘More people than you can name are all crowded onto one tiny spot. They hand out food but it’s not enough for a family. You send your daughters for water and they have to queue all day long just for one gallon can. But who would dare leave?’ She spread her hands helplessly. ‘If you go, you just run into the rebel army. And what then? If you are young and strong they abduct you and force you to join them; if you are old and weak you are lucky to escape with your life.’
    ‘No one will take my children,’ Fat Rosa declared stoutly. She seldom went anywhere without her daughters at her side. In the village they joked that all three could fit inside her broad shadow. But there was nothing funny about what the egg-lady was telling her now.
    ‘That’s what you think. It’s what they all think,’ shesaid. ‘But you have no choice. One moment you are working out in the shamba, the next the child soldiers are in your compound. They are running like rats around the village . . . and they are just as ferocious. They will slaughter your laying hens and take all your seed grain, strip your crops of their harvest and steal your knives from the thatch. In a village called Jwato,’ the woman went on, ‘they rounded everyone up at the point of a gun. Even the chief’s youngest son, who had seen them and run to hide by the river, was found in the rushes and dragged back. Everyone was gathered into the central compound. They were weeping and begging; but the soldiers just laughed. Mothers had to stand and let their children be chosen. That’s what you must do if you value your life. And even if you don’t, it’s no good. They will shoot you . . . or worse . . .’ she added with a significant look. ‘And your children will still be abducted just the same.
    ‘In Jwato,’ she continued, ‘all the strong boys and girls were separated out. Those that clung to their parents were beaten with millet pestles. One had his arm broken. And then, laden with burdens of whatever food had been ransacked, they were marched off into the bush. None of them, as far as I know, has ever come back.’
    Muka listened, appalled. She could feel the sweat creeping in runnels through her scalp; it ran down the sides of her face and the back of her neck but she kept her mouth firmly shut. If Bat’s grandmother had been there, she suspected, she wouldn’t even have been allowed to listen. The old lady would have dreamed up an errand for her to do. Better keep it a secret, the girldecided; better not to discuss what she had just heard. In the corner of the market place, a huge dark bird was wrestling with a creature that it had pinned under its claws. It was a rat: one of the impudent rodents that scuttled through the shanties, sitting up on their hind legs to examine those who passed. The bird tugged at the fur with its beak, exposing raw flesh beneath.
    As they set off for home, Muka was unnaturally silent; but the worries were simmering away in her head and she hadn’t gone far before they finally boiled over.
    ‘What would happen if the child soldiers came our