Griots

by Charles R. Saunders

  “Mosuoe Oshun must think highly of you to confide in you this way.”

  “Why do you keep up with the crescent blade, Sekadi?” said Kalefo. “Anyone can see Mosuoe Oshun is right.”

  “If anyone can see it,” said Sekadi. “It seems stupid to talk about it. Even dangerous.”

  Kalefo’s soft angelic features bent as he considered her words. For a moment Sekadi was reminded of cousin Lebo. “Dangerous?” he said. “Why would talking be-”

  Sekadi’s fist caught him a sharp blow to the temple and sent him sprawling.

  #

  It was near sunset before the big male made another appearance. As always, he was in the company of Mosuoe Nemisa. As usual she was talking softly as they walked while he simply gave the occasional nod.

  Sekadi paced them, making sure to keep whatever structures she could between them. The conversation of the previous night was still with her, short-circuiting her bloodlust.

  If the big male was the untempered blade Mosuoe Nemisa described Sekadi could not restore her honor by killing him. He had to be at his best or his death at her hands would only compound her original disgrace.

  Nemisa and the big male passed behind the novice dormitory and out of Sekadi’s sight. There were several practice rings carved in the earth back there as well as a small pool. One could see them all from the upstairs windows.

  All the other novices were heading in for afternoon meditation. Sekadi hated meditation. She had a hard enough time sitting still for lectures. Spending two hours on her knees seeking ultimate stillness was like torture.

  She’d earn a week’s scullery duty for skipping it but it was punishment she’d accept gladly if she discovered something to help her regain her honor.

  * * *

  The novice dormitory was a stark contrast to the Mosuoe’s cloisters. Gold-stained tunics, having been tossed haphazardly at laundry bins rather than into, hung on them like bloody war banners. Shoes and parchments and even the occasional communication broach lay wherever their owners had dropped them waiting patiently for their eventual return. Beds were unmade, platters of food teetered precariously on the edges of cabinets, desks or any other vaguely horizontal surface. The place was the chaotic opposite to everything the Mosuoes strove to perfect.

  Only the weapons, the crescent blades and scimitars of the novices, their knives and whips and spears hung in pristine readiness on pegs on the longer wall.

  Sekadi bounded silently up the stairs to the senior novice’s room. It was only slightly less chaotic than the junior’s space below; Sekadi’s own cot being the center of this particular storm.

  She crept to the nearest window and peered down at the practice circles. Sure enough, Mosuoe Nemisa and the big male were moving slowly to the center of the nearest one. Did they mean to spar?

  No.

  They continued to the other side of the ring, taking up positions on either side of the small pool.

  The big male knelt, his sword laid naked and flat across his knees in the position of openness.

  Nemisa said something– it sounded like “begin”– and then she walked off, never sparing the big male a backward glance.

  #

  The sun had almost been eaten by the horizon and still the big male had not moved. Sekadi had missed all her afternoon classes, all her scheduled spars. She was about to miss evening meal but she couldn’t break off from her fascination with him.

  “Go down there,” said Mosuoe Nemisa’s voice suddenly beside her. Sekadi hadn’t heard her approach, hadn’t felt even the slightest disturbance in the air. “You want to know him, do you not?”

  “I want to kill him,” said Sekadi.

  “Yes,” said Mosuoe Nemisa. If there was amusement in her voice, Sekadi couldn’t say. “You’ve been trying. And failing.”

  “Yes, Mosuoe,” said Sekadi, her voice suddenly thick.

  “Why, do you think?”

  “Mosuoe?” said Sekadi, still watching the big male. “Why do I try or why do I fail?”

  “Either,” said Nemisa. “Or both. They are the same.”

  Sekadi hated Mosuoe Nemisa when she was like this. It wasn’t often but when the mood struck her Nemisa could speak in the most infuriating riddles, totally opaque but whose solutions, once known, were embarrassingly obvious.

  “I don’t know,” said Sekadi after a time.

  “Battles are rarely won from a distance, Novice,” said Nemisa. “Go down to him.”

  * * *

  The novice dropped into a crouch before him on the opposite side of the little pool. He’d heard her approach, of course, just as he’d smelled her scent on the air and marked her as that same one who he’d almost killed the day before.

  Her black tunic and leggings made the edges of her figure indistinct, like a shadow.

  She carried a scimitar, fashioned in the style of Aganju the Maker, whose point she now dipped into the pool making small ripples. Her stance was a little loose, lacking the confidence of knowing her own center of gravity but he could tell she would have that knowledge soon.

  Her face betrayed nothing, she’d learned that much, but her eyes danced with fires he knew all too well.

  “Greetings,” he said when it became clear she would not speak first.

  She still kept silent, watching him for a few more moments with predator’s eyes. Had she been older, he knew, or just a little more seasoned, his own hand would already have gripped the pommel of his sword.

  “What are you doing here?” she said at last.

  “At the moment?” said the big male. “I am talking to you.”

  “You have dishonored me,” she said.

  “The dishonor is mine, Novice,” he said.

  “I’m going to kill you,” she said.

  “You have tried three times, Novice,” said the big male.

  “Those were tests,” she said, a little too quickly. “I had to see where your weaknesses lay.”

  The big male said nothing for a time. He seemed to be fighting an urge to do something with the corners of his mouth. Then, “Had you not learned them during our first spar?” he said.

  Sekadi had an urge then too. It had to do with plunging her blade into his throat. Though she still had no idea why, she resisted it.

  “I needed more,” she managed finally.

  “And now,” said the big male softly. “Do you know where I am weak?”

  “You– “Sekadi knew she had to be careful not to reveal her intrusion into the Mosuoe’s cloister. “It is said that you were raised by humans, whom you chose one as a mate over one of the Orisha.”

  “I have had two mates,” said the big male. “The first was of our kind.”

  “And the other?”

  “She was not,” he said.

  “What happened to them?” said Sekadi.

  She was sure she detected a shadow cross his face as the time stretched between them. He was so formidable to the eye and yet, when one got close, there were all his weaknesses exposed.

  “The first died helping me seek revenge on my father,” said the big male with obvious difficulty. “And the other . . .”

  He trailed off and Sekadi had the impression that he was struggling to hold something back, some large emotion perhaps.

  “The other?” said Sekadi.

  “The other was murdered by a coward,” he said.

  “Not in battle?”

  “Not really,” said the big male. “No.”

  “That is not honorable,” said Sekadi.

  “She lived a life of honor,” said the big male, defiant. “She was fierce in battle. She should not have died that way.”

  “Do you think she will be accepted into the Hands of Olodumare?”

  “I-” the big male stopped abruptly as if the words had suddenly grown too large for his throat. “I do not know.”

  Sekadi said nothing else then, only made patterns in the water with the edge of her blade.

  After a time, she left him, fading into the l
ong shadows like blood seeping into a charnel field.

  * * *

  “He still lives,” said Mosuoe Nemisa.

  Sekadi was on her perch, looking down on the temple, thinking. She was no more surprised to see Mosuoe Nemisa than she was that she hadn’t tracked her arrival.

  “I could not do it, Mosuoe,” said Sekadi, not looking down.

  “So, I see,” said Mosuoe Nemisa.

  Sekadi watched as the big male, carrying a bedroll and a water skin, left the Pilgrim’s quarters. She marked each of his steps as he strode once again toward the pool.

  “He’s not like us,” said Sekadi

  “He is a great warrior,” said Mosuoe Nemisa.

  “But he is not like us,” said Sekadi, still watching as he knelt beside the water. He drew his sword from its great black sheath, laid it across his knees and assumed the position of openness. “He carries the spirit of his dead mate with him.”

  “Yes,” said Nemisa. “Yes, he does.”

  “It would be dishonorable to kill him,” said Sekadi after a time.

  “Indeed,” said Mosuoe Nemisa. “And why is that?”

  “He uses all his strength to hold her,” said Sekadi. “He has nothing left.”

  “So he is weak,” said Nemisa. Sekadi nodded. “And it is dishonorable to kill the weak.”

  Again, Sekadi nodded. There was too much feeling in her for words just then, a condition easily noted by her master. Nemisa let her sit awhile and mull. Then,

  “Mosuoe?” said Sekadi.

  “Novice?”

  “He is weak,” she began, her mouth having a hard time with the words. “Yet he bested me, nearly killed me.”

  “That was only his body, novice,” said Nemisa. “Do you mark the difference?”

  It was clear that she didn’t. Nemisa had expected as much. The final mystery was always hard for the young to grasp, especially when they were as gifted in the Arts as Sekadi.

  She let the time tick between them and the child wrestle with her thoughts.

  “Do you know why your father sent you to us, Sekadi?” said Nemisa eventually.

  Sekadi remembered the conversation, how her father had ordered her to go, how she’d railed against him, and how, despite her railing, she had been trundled off to the distant monastery while her brothers and sister went off to fight.

  “He wanted to protect me,” said Sekadi but the words were thick in her mouth, distasteful. She’d fought against the thought and mostly won even before coming here. Her father was weak, like this male. Her father, fearing the coming war, the war to which he’d happily consigned all of her siblings, had sent her off to this forgotten anachronism of a place to keep her from harm. She loved him but hated the weakness in him, the dishonor. If only she knew the place inside him where the weakness lay, then she would cut it out of him herself. Sekadi fought the tears of rage and despair that welled in her eyes. What in the hells did her father have to do with anything, anyway?

  “Your father is an honorable warrior,” said Nemisa. “He wants you to be so as well.”

  “I am,” said Sekadi.

  “You are honorable, yes,” said Nemisa. “But not yet a warrior.”

  Sekadi wanted to scream that she was a warrior, that none of her peers could match her despite her small size, that none but the masters and this newcomer had bested her despite her size, despite the inefficiency with the crescent blade her body forced upon her.

  What she said was, “Why not?”

  Nemisa’s smile at that was unusually warm, almost soft.

  “There is more at our hearts than battle, novice,” she said and pointed to the big male, still kneeling, still hoping to find rest for his spirit, still failing. “He knows. He’s out of balance right now but he knows what is at our heart. Just as your father knows. Just as you may know one day.”

  “Can you not just tell me, Mosuoe?” said Sekadi.

  Nemisa shook her head. “No, Sekadi,” she said softly. “But I have confidence that you will learn the answer in time.”

  “I hope I will make you proud, Mosuoe.”

  “You will,” said Nemisa. “Or you will not be the warrior either I or your father hope.”

  Sekadi said nothing. It was clear she didn’t know what her master was talking about. Not yet. Having no more words, the novice turned her face back to the distant warrior, on his knees, searching for and finding neither balance nor peace.

  Nemisa left her there, threading her own way back through the familiar stones of the mountain down to the temple that had been her home for so long.

  The Queen, the Demon, and the Mercenary

  By

  Ronald T. Jones

  Ajunge the demon-sorcerer narrowed his scarlet eyes in contempt. Five hundred horsemen clad in armor, bearing lances, thundered across the grassy expanse toward the high tower occupied by the twisted mage. The tower was unlike any structure that existed in the land of Zanjii. Smooth sides, windowless, stark, blindingly white, the edifice shot up into the sky like a gigantic sword. There was no protection around the tower. No walls, no moats, no sentries on duty. There was not a single construct to give hint that the demon-sorcerer had taken defensive precautions against attacking armies.

  Ajunge’s contempt deepened, etching heavy creases in his serpentine face. Why take defensive precautions against foes he did not respect? Ajunge muttered a spell. A red aura surrounded him. Each word pouring from the demon-sorcerer’s mouth increased the aura’s luminosity, bathing the apex of the tower in a fiery lighthouse glow. The circular glow stretched into a band of light directing onto the plain below right in the path of the oncoming horsemen. The horses slowed and reared up in panic before the wall of light. Several horsemen tumbled off the backs of their mounts.

  When the light vanished the Zanjiian horsemen were stunned to find themselves facing an army where nothingness existed seconds earlier. This was an army whose very appearance invoked fear in the fearless. For what the Zanjiian faced were not men, but abominations spawned by depraved sorcery.

  The opposing army looked like men, at least facial wise, but that was where the similarities began and ended. The demon-men, for that was surely what they were, had lean upper bodies like cheetahs that flared out into thick hoofed legs resembling the hind legs of horses. The demon-men’s arms were not arms at all but lengths of bone hard limbs of an ivory white hue that articulated at the elbow joints like human arms. The limbs ended in serrated points that were sharp as sword blades.

  Their sharpened arms were the demon-men’s only weapons. The demon-men were outnumbered five to one, yet neither fear of numbers nor anticipation of battle played across their inhumanly placid faces.

  The human horsemen, by contrast, belted out a battle yell that shook the sky and resumed their charge.

  The demon-men stood their ground like ranks of statues and were just as eerily silent. At the last second, when the horsemen’s lances were a hairbreadth from making contact with flesh, the demon-men acted. They leapt like lions, plunging their limbs through the chain-linked armor of the horsemen. When the demon-men retracted their limbs, they were covered with blood and their victims were sprawled on the ground locked in death spasms. Weaving through the shocked Zanjiians with effortless ease the demon-men slashed and thrust with their dreadful arms. Zanjiian throats were ripped open, heads lopped off in single swipes, torsos spitted like chunks of meat.

  A Zanjiian managed to hurl a javelin that caught a demon-man in the eye. A group of Zanjiians surrounded another demon-man and trampled him beneath their horses’ hooves before finishing him off with a succession of lance and sword blows. But those were isolated successes. The demon-men were too fast and nimble to be so easily pinned down. Plus, they proved far more skillful with their natural weapons than the Zanjiians were with the panoply of man-made weapons at their disposal.

  The demon-men successfully countered javelins, lances and swords, responding with uncanny agility wedded to well-timed arm-attacks that invariably en
ded in death or grievous injury for the recipients. In a matter of a few short minutes the grass plain was sodden with blood and littered with the bodies and body parts of five hundred Zanjiians. The demon-men circulated among the dead seeking out the wounded whose throats they slit with workmanlike efficiency. The horses were not spared either. When the demon-men were finished with the Zanjiians they idled their time chasing down riderless horses which were dispatched in similar fashion.

  When the slaughter ceased, Ajunge cast out the light that transported his precious soldiers into battle. The demon-men were captured in the light and vanished with its passing.

  * * *

  Queen Zara of Zanjii was as renowned for her brilliance as she was for her breathtaking beauty. Indeed, the wit and cunning she had to draw upon to navigate the poisoned brambles of treachery and deceit on her climb to her present position would have taxed less capable minds. Outlanders unfamiliar with the queen would not have been immediately aware of the fortitude that existed behind the delicate allure of her dark brown eyes. Nor would they have imagined the ruthless determination lurking beneath the comely richness of her ebony hue.

  Zara’s mother and father were killed in a palace coup when she was twelve. Ten years later, the then princess rode into Zanjii’s capitol, Malawai, at the head of a conquering army after vanquishing her parents’ assassins on the battlefield. She had snatched a stolen throne out of the hands of thieves to inaugurate a new era of peace and prosperity. So she intended. Five years after her triumph, the demon-sorcerer called Ajunge appeared out of nowhere, his tower dominating an otherwise featureless landscape.

  The sorcerer demanded that the Zanjii Kingdom submit to his authority and that its queen bow before him in a public display of that submission. Zara refused. Since that day, the demon-sorcerer cast a net of terror across the land which Zara was powerless to throw off.

  Now, after a messenger conveyed word that her vaunted iron cavalry, the flower of Zanjiian arms, had failed to dislodge the demon-sorcerer from his lair, Zara sank into a deep, dark pit of despair. She knew what was coming next.

  Time to take a lover.