The drum had been silent for seven days. And in the village of Kyebi — where the red-dust roads wound between great odum trees and the smell of palm oil and firewood hung sweet and smoky in the air — seven days of silence was not just Unusual. It was the sort of thing that made everyone look at each other and wonder if the world had decided to stop working properly. This is a bedtime story worth listening to very carefully.

The Great Talking Drum of Kyebi had always been there. It was older than old Nana Kofi, who kept it, and older than his grandmother's grandmother, who said she remembered hearing it boom across the hills when she was just a baby. The drum was the village's voice. It told people when to come together. It announced the names of new children. It spoke to Nyame — the great sky god of their ancestors — on behalf of everyone below.

Then one morning, the drum said nothing at all.

Not even a whisper.

Nana Kofi pressed his wrinkled ear against its stretched skin. He tapped it gently with one finger. He tried singing it the old songs. But the drum just sat there, round and silent and a little bit sad-looking, like a very large, very quiet frog.

"Has anyone done something unkind?" asked Nana Kofi, peering around at the gathered villagers.

Everyone looked at the ground.

"Has anyone been foolish when they could have been wise?"

More ground-looking.

"Has anyone been cowardly when bravery was needed?"

A truly tremendous amount of ground-looking.

Nana Kofi sighed. "Then someone must go to the place where the Pra River bends. There grows the oldest odum tree in all the forest, and beneath its roots lives the tortoise Akua, who remembers everything the river has ever said. She will know what the drum has forgotten."

The villagers shuffled their sandals. The forest between Kyebi and the river bend was dark, and full of things that rustled in ways you couldn't explain.

And then a girl named Abena stepped forward.

She was nine years old. She had a gap between her front teeth and she was not, she thought, especially brave. But she was curious. And sometimes, being curious is braver than being brave.

"I'll go," she said.

—

The forest smelled of wet bark and green, living things. Every few steps, a bird called out from somewhere invisible — not the cheerful songs of the sunny forest edge, but the low, wondering calls of birds who had chosen to live in the shadows. The trees pressed close. Their roots rose above the ground like kneeling giants. The air was cool and tasted like rain that hadn't fallen yet.

Abena had not walked far when she nearly tripped over a tortoise.

A very old tortoise. Upside down.

Her little legs were waving slowly in the air, like she was trying to swim through nothing, which is the least useful kind of swimming there is.

"Oh!" said Abena. She knelt and set the tortoise gently right-side up on the path. The tortoise smelled of river mud and old, old leaves.

The tortoise blinked slowly. "And who are you, child who is small but not afraid to touch old things?"

"Abena," said Abena. "Are you Akua?"

"I am Akua," said the tortoise. "I have been upside down for three hours and I have had a Very Great Deal of time to think. Would you like to hear what I thought about?"

"Yes please," said Abena, because she was curious, and also because this seemed like exactly the sort of conversation you ought to have in a place like this.

"I thought," said Akua, very slowly, the way someone says something they mean completely, "that the drum does not speak because nobody in your village has spoken truly to each other in many months. They say polite things. They say careful things. They say fine things. But the drum carries True Words. And True Words must first be spoken by people before the drum can carry them up to Nyame."

Abena sat down on a root. She turned this over in her mind like a stone she'd found in the river. The forest dripped. Something small rustled in the undergrowth and went still.

"So I need to… speak something true?" she said. "Right now? To you?"

"Right now. To me."

Abena thought for a long, long moment.

"I'm scared," she said at last, and her voice came out small and honest. "I told everyone I wasn't, but I am. And I want to be someone my village is proud of. But sometimes I don't know if I'm enough."

The forest went completely still.

And then — from somewhere back in the direction of Kyebi, rolling through all that green darkness —

*Boom.*

Low and warm and round. Like a heartbeat waking up.

*Boom. Boom.*

Akua smiled, which a tortoise can do if you know exactly what to look for. "There," she said softly. "That is what the drum was waiting for."

—

Abena ran home. The drum was singing by the time she pushed through the last of the odum trees and into the village clearing, its voice rolling out over the red dust and the cooking fires and the wide-eyed faces of people who had been staring at the ground all week.

Nana Kofi stood beside the drum with his eyes very bright. "It started again," he said softly. "Just a few minutes ago. All by itself."

"Not all by itself," said Abena.

Nana Kofi looked at her for a long moment. Then he placed his hand gently on the top of her head — which in Kyebi is how you say *well done, and also well done, and also I am very proud*, all at the very same time.

That night the drum spoke long into the darkness, and the village sat around the fire together beneath a sky full of stars, and for children ages 6-12 who love a good story before sleep — this kind of warmth, glowing soft in the dark, is the very best sort of thing in the world.