Why Babies Don't Talk

Ever wondered why babies don't talk until a while when they know a little better, and even when they start talking it's mostly gibberish? Well I was told the reason why by my Ma. It was the period long before dates were written down, when the gods only intervened when they really have to. That was when this happened, what I am about to tell you.

At least that's what I heard.

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Alunta was a new wife and missed her family terribly, and she went to see them. Getting there, she was pained by the depth of hunger she saw them in. Her family had nothing to eat and were on the brink of death, except something happened. Her husband was not wealthy, but they had something to eat. Aluno, her husband, was a wicked man who won her as payment for her father's debt.

He will not allow her give anything to her family and instead mocked her family and soon she stopped telling him about their condition and neither did she beg him any longer as the shame was too much for her to bear and she decided to keep the pain to herself, even though she never stopped thinking about it.

Then one day it seemed as if the gods heard the pleas from her heart.

She went to get some flicker of fire to start hers and she saw something she could share with her parents, she saw two fishes kept smoking on low heat. Looking around, she saw no one but the newborn who was but a day old sleeping at the corner. Quickly taking the fishes, she rushed to her parents and gave them what she could and she returned home. She was glad she could help them and never thought of what would happen when the fishes are discovered missing.

It happened when she was just trying to rest her eyes after a stressful day.

"My fishes are gone!" Otito shouted. Otito was the head wife in the compound, the wife of her brother in-law. Person after person denied taking the fish and Alunta also denied. She could imagine what her husband would do to her if he realised she was the culprit.

Murmurs began, someone suggested that maybe an animal took it, until a little voice was heard. "I know who took it."
All eyes turned to the baby who was yet to be named.

"It was Alunta."

All eyes turned to Alunta who made no attempt to deny it. Aluno wasted no time and ordered the death of his wife. she had brought shame on him, and the elders begged him not to kill her family. He was so angry he threatened to kill them.

The moment her breath was ceased by the force of one of the stones used to execute her, an unexplained rain began. It fell for seven days without pause, the accompanying wind causing a kind of cold no one had seen before. It rained and rained and rained and each baby fell sick with a sore in their throat.

When the rain ceased, the babies remained sick for seven more days and then the fever left them, but they could speak no more and every child born during or after the strange rainfall was born dumb for a while. The elders sought for answers and when they learnt the reason, they mourned but the mourning could not change the mind of the gods.

The gods cried for seven days because they believed that the harshness could have been avoided, that an older child would have minded the way he spoke and maybe Alunta won't be stoned to death. The gods believed that an older person would have employed tact, and though Aluno's decision was harsh and instant, the gods tackled the matter from the root; muting babies until they were a little wiser.

And Aluno? The gods drove him mad. As someone anonymously said...

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

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Is this story true? I have no idea, I am simply the messenger.