Samanya stared at the strangers trudging up the bank from the river. "Have you ever seen anyone with a face that pale?" she asked her big brother Bakari. The men wore headgear with brims like flattened baskets. Their clothes covered them from neck to toe. "Perhaps they dwell in caves and must hide from the sun when they crawl out."

Bakari laughed. "They rowed up the river under full sun, and there are no caves downstream."

One stranger called and waved, an unseemly gesture. "Barbarian," Bakari said with a sniff of disdain.

The other two travelers carried large packs on their backs and gazed at all the folk of Chidzurgwe who came out to see them. "Traders?" Samanya guessed. Bakari nodded.

Chidzurgwe's headman gave stiff greetings to the three men. He and the strangers threw words back and forth until they settled on a dialect partly understood by both sides. "Ah," Bakari said. "They know tribes closer to the coast. They must have come from the sea, from some far country."

The headman appointed a spokesman from among Chidzurgwe's traders, then went about his own business. So did Bakari. Samanya and other children followed as the spokesman led the strangers to the marketplace where mats and booths already hosted folk from near and far. What do ghost-white foreignors have to trade? Samanya wondered.

Ghost-white bowls and jars, painted with blue designs, glinting in the sun. Beads of every color and shape. Skinny jars clear as water but hard as copper. Samanya had seen ceramics and beads before, carried by traders with honest dark skin, but not the skinny jars.

Many citizens took interest in the goods, but the traders turned down the copper offered in exchange. "Smooth," they kept saying. "Give us smooth."

Samanya and her friends ran to find smooth pebbles, smooth twigs, smooth monkey pelts.

The strangers frowned. "Smooth!" they insisted. "Ororo! Ororo!"

When Samanya held out a piece of ivory, one trader grabbed her wrist. "Ororo!" he cried, grabbing at her copper wrist bangle. He yanked it free and pointed to the gold wire adornment. "Ouro, ouro!"

"Mine!" Samanya cried, reaching for her bangle.

The trader shoved one of the clear jars into her grasp instead. If anything was smooth, this glass thing was. She shook her head. Her grandmother had given her that bangle. She thrust the bottle back, other hand open, demanding. "Mine!"

The three barbarians grabbed at wrists of women and girls, trying to take any bracelet spangled with gold. Squeals and screams brought the men of town, Bakari among them.

"Ouro, ouro!" the strangers cried as they were wrestled to the ground. "Trade for ouro!"

"The fools seek gold?" Bakari scoffed as he helped tie the men. "Why don't they say so? Can't talk straight, and don't know which way to turn. Coming to copper-rich Chidzurgwe when everyone knows the gold mines are north at Masappa."

Samanya took back her gold-spangled copper bangle. "The word," she told the ruffians, pointing to the gold wire, "is dhahabu."

Set in Zimbabwe in the 16th century.

Swahili and Portuguese were mangled in the making of this story.