Mythic Journeys

by Paula Guran

  When I backed away, the thing appeared to be gone, hiding itself among the rocks with nothing but the shimmering to show where it lay. Two steps to the right . . . and it became whole, sitting as if it had been planted there by the gods at the dawn of time. A man could have stood right next to it, and if the sun was not just so, and your eyes attuned just so, it would not be seen.

  I backed away. An evil smell hung in the air. Burnt, choking, sudden and strange. It caught in my throat and made me cough.

  “This is a bad thing,” I said.

  Fire seemed to dance on Cagen’s face. Instead of stepping away from the thing, he moved toward it like a man walking in sleep. Instead of preparing himself for struggle, his arms lay limp at his sides.

  “I’ve seen them in museums, but never been this close . . .” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  He took another step toward this metal thing.

  The machine was tilted, like a silver tortoise shell lying half against a rock wall. Had it carried something alive, and somehow wounded? Had its own metal arms tunneled into the earth to hide from its enemies, or to find a place to die at peace? Cagen thrust himself against one of the largest rocks. He grunted, strained, and sweat burst out on his forehead. The rock groaned, then slid down the silvery metal and was still.

  The machine made a sound like angry bees. Then, a door as high as my shoulder slid up with speed I had never seen, as if the open space it revealed had always been. Inside, blackness stared back at us.

  “Hide yourself!” I said to Cagen, but he seemed not to hear me. “Is something still. . . alive?”

  “Fifty years?” he said. “No, it’s dead.” But his voice as not certain.

  We watched the open doorway for several minutes, and no sky creature moved inside the machine, nor any man. The smell from inside was an old smell, like dirt and dust and old dead flesh. The evil burnt smell had faded. The door seemed to invite us closer, like a sweet voice in our ears, although it was silent.

  “I’m going to look inside,” Cagen said.

  I meant to tell him he was being foolish, but I said nothing. Instead, my feet surprised me and trailed behind his on the rocky soil.

  Cagen’s arm clung to the thing’s doorway, perhaps so he could pull away if a sky-beast tried to yank him inside. I stooped beneath his raised arm to see what his eyes beheld, telling myself that even if the machine roasted me, or somehow stole my breath, it would make a worthy last sight to bring my grandfather.

  In the next breath, my courage was rewarded.

  There, on the floor just inside the doorway, lay something dead. It was not human or animal. Although it was curled like an infant, the creature had once been as tall as a man, or taller. The bones made me think of a wasp mated to a crocodile, and its bones were splintered just as mine would have been. It was good to know these creatures were mortal, not gods. Cagen grabbed my hand, squeezing my own tender bones hard. I knew why: we were men of two legs, born beneath the same sky, who had seen a creature from beyond the sun. It looked like a cousin of our world; a creature that might walk here, or could have walked here long ago, in the old days when gods and giant beasts ruled the earth. I will call this thing a sky lizard.

  As I stared at that thing in the ship, Cagen’s stories became real in my mind. Now I could see the horror of the flying machines, killing all people with fire. Compared with this sky lizard, even the oddest white man and I were brothers.

  “We must leave here,” I said.

  Cagen held his hand up in a gesture to silence me. This is a great insult to an elder, but I knew his intent.

  We waited in a long silence, and no army of demons swarmed from within the machine’s belly. Perhaps we would not be killed after all.

  Cagen knew the ways of white men who could salvage broken machines and learn to make them fly in the air. The lands I knew were behind me; and in front of me was Cagen’s world. One at a time, we bent and entered the door. It remained open behind us, but the walls themselves began to glow, enough pale red light to see everything within.

  Walking farther inside this machine was like entering an animal’s stomach, all dark red walls, cords and membranes. The floor of the machine held three nests of woven vine-like cables, each nest large enough for a small man.

  Cagen stared at the nests. I could hear his mind telling him to lie down. I saw it in his eyes.

  “Do not do it,” I begged him.

  He did not listen to me, and lowered himself into the vine net.

  The moment he touched them, the vines moved, fifty years may have been enough to kill men from the stars, but the machine itself still lived Cagen screamed and struggled, but the vines snatched him backward as a mother might an infant. Cagen’s arms were pinned. Metal snakes darted from the ceiling, burrowing into his flesh as he howled and bled. First his arms. Then his legs. His head. He writhed, screaming an English curse. Afraid, we always speak our first tongue.

  But the next language he spoke was not English. I had never heard it before. His words no longer sounded as if they came from a human throat.

  I grasped Cagen’s wrist, and the chair swallowed me too—but not in the way it swallowed Cagen, with tiny spears. The machine swallowed my mind. My thoughts were no longer my own. I felt as if I were drowning in someone else.

  All the world shattered into pieces. Great villages burning. The shadows of flying and walking machines plagued the land, as the metal tortoises slaughtered the fleeing. Rivers boiled with blood. Screams and running and endless death.

  Above, the pitiless stars.

  I screamed prayers, and quickly reached for my medicine pouch. I shook powdered frog skin on Cagen three times, begging the gods to help him. Still, his body convulsed, eyes bulged, hands clutched at the vines. He screamed again.

  And bucked.

  Then . . .

  The machine rocked. I lurched and caught myself. . . then realized that the tortoise-shell had heaved in time with Cagen’s motion, just a beat late.

  I understood: Cagen had made the machine move.

  I did not know how that could be so, but I had felt the humming beneath my feet from the instant Cagen was trapped in the chair. When he moved, the vibration grew stronger.

  The machine was feeding on him. The machine was a hunter, too, like its long-dead master. A dog will hunt with a man, will follow his orders. This thing obeyed like a dog . . . but it was no dog.

  I pulled at the cords binding Cagen. One came loose from the back of his head, and the others dislodged as well. I pulled him from the chair. He was babbling as I dragged him from the ship.

  The door closed behind us.

  I pulled him back only a few steps, but the machine was gone when I glanced behind me. A chameleon. Unless you were very lucky, or unlucky—or the machine wanted you to see it—you would pass by and not notice where it lay. The machine might have been there when I was a boy, but spared me.

  I pulled Cagen as far as I could, but the rocks made our journey difficult.

  He was gasping for breath, eyes wide and staring wildly. I understood: The machine might be chasing us, hiding in the wind.

  “Ohhh . . . he finally groaned. “My head.” He cursed in English again.

  “What happened to you?” I said to Cagen.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and cursed in English again. He brought his knees to his chest and rocked, mumbling to himself. More curses? Prayers?

  The vines had entered his arms, but the wounds had already stopped bleeding, as if someone had held fire to them. Strange.

  I could not leave him. If the machine came for us, we would die together. But darkness took mercy on us, and when the dawn sun awakened we breathed still.

  The next day we began our trip back to the People’s camp.

  “I think it might be best if we didn’t tell anyone about this,” Cagen said, limping as he walked. “I can’t think of any good that would come of it.”

  “My people will not understand,” I said, although it was my duty
to report the discovery to the elders. “It will make them afraid. Fear and drought are too heavy on us to carry at once.”

  By the time we returned to the camp, we had agreed on silence. Cagen, returning to the white man’s world, would say nothing. I would not offer it even to my ancestors on the wall. I am ashamed to admit I was afraid.

  A Spider came from the sky for Cagen, driven by a soldier. Air shooshed from each of its five legs, sending dust over everything. Most of my people had only seen a Spider once. Now, it was twice. But despite their curiosity, they turned their faces away from the thing, pretending not to see Cagen as he prepared to leave us. It is a great sign of affection—as we say, My eyes would hurt too much at the sight. The People live and die together, so we do not have practice saying goodbye.

  Except, once in a while, we lose our sons to the great villages. This pained me as much as when my own sons left.

  Cagen came to me, and gave me his radio. He shrugged. “Not like there’s anything out there for you, but . . .”

  I took the gift with tears of gratitude. “You are my friend,” I said.

  I was brave enough to watch him leave; my eyes were stronger because of what Cagen had seen with me on the rocks. He alone had shared the sight. I could not turn away.

  As the Spider flew into the sky, two old women wailed funeral songs. The youngest children cried, chasing behind the Spider’s shadow as it glided through the dying grasses.

  “Bring him back!” the youngest children screamed to the metal beast, throwing rocks. “Bring Empty Head back!”

  Their mothers called to them, clucking. Their fathers laughed and tried to explain that the Spider wasn’t going to eat Cagen for dinner.

  They were right, and they were wrong.

  I do not know much of these man-made Spiders. But the other machine, the one from the stars, in the rocks, had eaten Cagen already.

  Warm water from the clouds meant that the drought had finally ended, but the rain gods were no happier with us than the sun gods. The pools stayed muddy. For days, hunger pinched our bellies. The hunters traveled long distances for small game.

  Times were bad in the big villages too.

  At night, lying beside Jappa, I saw bright lights on the western horizon, like the times I remember from childhood. Silent thunder; thunder you heard with your body not your ears. But my inner eyes, this time, were wiser: I imagined the flying machines swooping in the air, trailing their metal snake-legs behind them. I saw fire shooting from their mouths. When the wind shifted, I thought I could smell burnt flesh.

  Had the sky lizards returned to wage another Great War? Or had men turned themselves into sky lizards the way the machine turned into a chameleon against the rocks?

  The death that had killed the cities when I was a boy could now come for us, and there was nothing we could do. I feared for my sons, whom I might never see again. For my daughter, with her husband and family a moon’s walk to the north.

  I feared for my friend Cagen. If he was not dead, I knew he would come to us again, to tell his tales. He would come to paint his wall.

  If he was not dead.

  I heard the shouting before I saw him. It was nearing dusk, four moons after Cagen left us. Four of the young herders ran in to us, calling for the men. A dozen men went out, were gone until the sun set, and then returned carrying Cagen.

  He was half dead with starvation and thirst, and there were cruel wounds on his back and legs, like healed burns. He wore tattered gray pants and shirt, painted with white men’s black numbers. We gave him water, meat, and herbs, and heard his story:

  He told us he went to the greatest city in the world, Dar es Salaam, to the un-i-ver-si-ty, a great school run by elders.

  This land around you is a nation, and that nation is called Tanzania. Because past relations have keen so poor between black nations and white, Tanzania and several other nations in this continent called Africa wish to break free of a gov-ern-ment called “United Nations of Earth.”

  The white nations did not want this to happen, because much of Africa, while poor, is rich with treasures the white nations hold dear. When their petition to separate was brought to court, this UNE retaliated with force. Rebuilt alien war machines rained from the skies, flown by men who had learned to master them. Dar es Salaam was reduced to rubble. Untold thousands of people died in the fires, and thousands more were taken to camps.

  The camps were shantytowns surrounded by barbed wire and vicious dogs. I was in one of those camps, but I escaped, came here.

  I did not know where else to go.

  I took Cagen to my hut, and he slept where my children slept before they were grown. My wife Jappa served him hedgehog and the ant larvae he called “Bushman Rice.” Cagen had walked to us out of a bad dream. A man who has walked away from a dream should be an honored guest. Most men who live too long in the dream never return. But Cagen was not as other men.

  Over the next days, as Cagen healed, he told me more of how men, not sky lizards, slaughtered other men.

  I’m an American citizen, which used to mean something. Not anymore. Because I was a student at the university, I was arrested as an “unaffiliated intellectual” and thrown into a camp. It was a place of hunger and fear . . . and pain. Men and women were beaten and tortured if our captors believed they were lying, or thought we could give them information about Africa’s leaders. We lost everything—even the clothes from our backs. We were clothed in prison gray. Criminals, accused of no crime.

  And it was in that terrible place, for the first time in my life . . . I fell in love. As he spoke of love, Cagen gazed toward my wife, who was listening from the folds of the hut so she would not appear to intrude on the talk of men. All women listen—but Jappa is the queen of hiding herself.

  Fat, laughing Jappa is the queen of all.

  Cagen looked at my wife as if he knew stories that had never been spoken between us. He smiled, and sunlight glowed from his face.

  Yes, I found the woman I want. A medical student from Kenya—Chanya. Even her name is music. She is everything to me.

  She is the only reason I remember how to smile.

  She alone gives me hope there is a God.

  Many gods, I corrected him with a laugh. Love for a woman has made many men forget much more than how to count or to thank the gods. There are men who grow insane from a woman. But Cagen was not that kind. She did not bring war to his heart; the woman he had found brought him peace.

  We comforted each other as people have since the beginning of time. Without her, I wouldn’t have survived. I saw people sit in the corner and will themselves to die. Their families were lost to them, and we had no way to contact them. We knew people were dying when the beatings went too far, and that troops could pull anyone from their beds any time of the day or night. I wanted to die, too.

  But Chanya kept my soul alive.

  It is dangerous to find love in such a hard place.

  “Your heart is strong as well,” I said. “Seeds do not grow without fertile soil.”

  “The mustard seed . . .” he began, like a prayer.

  “All seeds need soil. And rain.”

  We had plenty of rain.

  Just not enough shelter, except for each other. But it was all right for a while. All we needed was to clasp each other’s hands to get through the day.

  But I knew our time together would not last.

  Foreigners who were not from Africa were being taken for “questioning,” but did not return to report the questions. Whispers began: Foreigners were being sent home, or they were being killed. No one knew which.

  I was a foreigner, so I knew that soon this question would be answered.

  Someone who worked with the guards whispered to me that they would come for me at dawn. I saw in his eyes then that he was only a desperate young man trying to live, and to protect his family, but he wanted to do good.

  I found Chanya, of course. Had the guard not told me, I would not have risked sneaking out of the
men’s barracks to find her in the women’s tent. Any of the women there would have told what I did for extra bread and rice for their children.

  That night, I held my beautiful Chanya’s hands, looked into her eyes, and told her to find a way to survive.

  Find kindness, I told her.

  Find mercy.

  Give whatever you must.

  I made Chanya cry.

  And then Cagen wailed like a woman. The children stared: They had never seen a man cry so. So that Cagen would not shame himself, my wife and I took him back into our hut and gave him a bed.

  “He has lost his wife,” I explained to the children who waited outside. But they did not understand. How could they?

  Children have yet to lose anything.

  Children have not seen the world’s end.

  When they came for me, I was on my feet. No fear. No more crying, trembling.

  Many of the soldiers were boy-children. They were hopped-up on drugs, full of childlike glee as they beat us or took women to be raped. These boys had chosen to be called Executioners, and they enjoyed their work. Easy to delude children. They themselves were servants of the black stooges who were enriched and controlled by whites in the UNE, and so once more in Africa, black people brutalized their brothers and sisters.

  The boy soldiers stood me up in a line of other men and women waiting to die, standing atop a trench that was already lined with corpses. We were that morning’s chosen. I wondered if your sky lizards, against whom all mankind had once united, destroyed themselves like this—or was it only man who murdered his brother?

  A few of us in line held tightly to our captor’s lies that we’d be ransomed home to the U.S., Canada, Saudi Arabia . . . wherever. Once we were in the line, no illusions remained.

  Those who were not crying did not meet each other’s eyes. We were all lost inside ourselves. Even when you die together, you die alone.

  The boys had made a counting game of the executions. One boy wearing a general’s cap too big for his head raised a baton and counted “Moja, mbili, tatu!” One, two, three. Three machine guns chattered, and ten bodies crumpled back into the ditch.