I’ve been thinking a lot about dying.

No, not like that; I’d never off myself. It’s not the bitter, they’ll-be-sorry-when-I’m-gone sort of dying. Not the incurable disease sort or the hit-by-a-bus sort either. Nah – none of the usual suspects. The kind of dying I’ve been thinking about is more along the lines of we’re-about-to-have-a-drought-and-someone-must-pay. That someone would be me, so you can call it death by lack of rain.

Which is kind of logical, I guess. Rain usually represents life, right? Food for the earth and all that. Ja, sure – for everyone else. For me, right now rain and everything connected to it mean certain death. In two weeks, if you want to get technical. Six months before my fifteenth birthday. How is that fair?

I’m trying not to lose it, but it’s hard. I can’t stop the thoughts turning in my head. I can’t stop thinking about what dying will feel like. There’ll be pain, ja, but I’m not even worried about that. I’m worried about what happens afterwards. The pain will be an extreme version of something I’ve already got a handle on. Pain means a person is still alive. But then it’ll stop hurting, and that’s the shaky part. That bit between pain and nothingness, or the afterlife, or whatever. The tunnel. The waiting room. What does that feel like? I wonder, but I don’t really want to know.

Rocking back and forth on the riverbank, I hug my knees and look up at the patches of sky visible through the trees. Clear. Cloudless. Super summer sunshine, no chance of showers. The ground under me is soft and mostly dry.

I’ve shaken off my guards, which isn’t hard to do once I get past the edge of the Capital City. The guards are zoo monkeys. They’re fine in the concrete jungle but they lose their way out here in the bush. Too many strange noises and smells. No whirring sounds of machines, no squealing tyres. It confuses them. They know I’m somewhere in this wilderness, though, and it won’t be long before they track me down.

I like to come out here ‘cause it’s peaceful, but today I can’t find that peace. Fear keeps climbing up my throat, digging its claws deep. I swallow and it slides back down, but never stops climbing.

Another wave of panic hits and I rock faster. My breath comes in little gasps. My mind spins around two words. Rain and dying. OK, maybe there’s a little more focus on the second word. My heart’s beating so fast I’m afraid it’ll explode. They’ll find me lying here on the riverbank and no one will ever know my secret. I’ll die a beloved prince, a tragic hero. I’ll live forever in the words of the praise poets, Kitso of Sedibeng, the lion cub, the seed of the great tree, he who carries the name.

I lie back on the ground slowly, settling into this idea. A heart attack would be better than a firing squad, for sure.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I do not want to be shot. It’s not like it’ll be one neat bullet in the brain – BANG! Goodbye. It’ll be a bullet in the leg, and the arm, and the stomach, and the chest. It’ll be raining bullets (ha ha). BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG! Pain, blood, screaming. And only then, after the in-between – Goodbye. I can see them now, all those guns, narrow barrels pointed at me. I can hear myself pleading for mercy. “Don’t do it! Wait! I’m your prince, remember? I’m a kid!” But the faceless shapes behind the guns don’t care. They fire anyway.

I sit up and bend over, trying to take deep, calming breaths, but each one is like a knife in the ribs. Kitso, stop thinking about guns! There’s nobody here. No army. Breathe. Think positive energy and soothing music and birds chirping.

My eyes open and take in the steady current of the river. That helps a little. My ears strain to hear the water and the sound of the wind in the trees. I breathe in the smell of damp and listen for the birds. Nobody’s going to kill me today. For a minute I forget about death and think instead about life. My life, and how it got to this point.

My story’s complicated. The thing is it’s not even really about me. It’s about rain. Where I live, everything is about rain. I try to think back to the beginning, but that’s too much history. If I’ve only got two weeks to live I need to focus on the present. Right now. September 2nd, the start of summer. A beautiful day. I’m sitting near the river thinking about dying, and trying not to think about dying.

The name Kitso means knowledge. Funny, right, since it’s my lack of knowledge that’s going to kill me. I guess that’s ironic. Is it irony or the other thing? Ag, whatever it is, there’s a little too much of it going around at the moment.

As the only child of the reigning Kgosi, I’m heir to the two halves of the kingdom – the wet, evergreen Delta and the parched Desert. I know how it looks on the outside. Like I’ve got it made. Leopard skins on my shoulders and diamonds filling my pockets. Servants and money and people being nice to me because they have to. I’ll never have to worry. I’m set for life.

And if that was all I had to look forward to – a throne, loyal subjects and a wife I don’t love from some kingdom up north – I would be set. I definitely wouldn’t be planning my eulogy. But I’m not just heir to the chair. I’m also heir to the Stick.

***

Tell us what you think: Kitso is about to be crowned King. Why does he feel that he faces death?