The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  “Oh, you knew, Mum, you knew, don’t tell me—”

  “—no, I didn’tt, I didn’tt—”

  “—now you just can’t pretend you didn’t know!”

  “I didn’tt!” she screamed and stood, grabbing him by the shoulders and then crush-hugging him to her chest.

  The wall banged three times, rapid-fire. “Shutt up!” she yelled at it.

  “Oh, so now that you know, you’re sorry?” said Rap. “You’re gonna protect me? Is that it? Like you’ve always protected me? That’s hilarious!”

  She pushed him back but kept his shoulders in her claws and yelled.

  “How can you can say thatt? I’ve always proteckited you! I crossid two caantries on foott proteckiting you! I crossid rivers with crocodiles proteckiting you—”

  Ring. Ring. Ring—

  “Mum, I swear to god—!” He stepped back from her. “There were times . . . . ”

  He’d said it so low she craned her head forward and squinted.

  “There were times when that old bastard called that I just pushed him, pushed him, just hoping he’d try something. Figured if he came over when you were out, tried to break in . . . I’d be justified. Even the police couldn’say anything. If he woulda just come over . . . ”

  —his mother’s mouth, a dead gasp in it, and her eyes black moons in white skies, and he thought: At last.

  “I’da slit that motherfucker’s throat.”

  Her mouth, unhinged.

  Silent sobs.

  She sat. Actually sank into that couch. On the couch’s arms, the dangling edges of the couch’s throw-cloth. Shaking with her shuddering.

  Priceless. She’d never cried about him. Only after one of her fights with Doctor Liberia, the married asshole who treated her like shit.

  Shit was what was left when you took something beautiful and delicious and full of life and chewed it up and dumped it in acid and squeezed the hell out of it until it was nothing but a mess.

  A school night. First night before the first day of grade twelve.

  She reached out to him and he bolted out the door.

  Heard her running after him, bare feet slapping grubby carpet on stairs and the concrete outside, and him scrambling to unlock his bike with her grabbing and tearing at him and him shoving her away with one arm—

  Jumped on his pedals and her grabbing him again, screaming to come back home that instant, but him wrenching himself away and wobbling forward as fast as he could—over a rock or maybe a branch or maybe her foot?—and hearing her slap-slapping barefoot down 118th Avenue behind him—

  Clearing the 7-11 parking lot, speeding away beneath gaunt white streetlights gazing down from halos of moths and flies.

  Her sobbing and screaming echoing down the silent darkness of 118th Avenue: a man’s name, again and again . . . .

  Six:

  Mother~Sister~Daughter

  The Book of Then

  1.

  I sat alone near the embers after Master Jehu told me the truth about my martyred father, my sword-wielding mother, my betraying, murdering uncle, and his son, my cousin, Yinepu.

  Me, the embers, the moon and the stars.

  I couldn’t talk. I wouldn’t.

  So they finally went to sleep and left me by myself.

  He’d kept all this from me. For years.

  And Yin, to think, to think that his own father—

  Not even Falcon was there. With all his disappearances of late, who knew where he’d gone to, or when he’d return . . . if ever?

  I couldn’t count on anyone.

  While the compound slept in the dark silence, I walked out with a water-skin slung over my shoulder.

  I refused to go shadowed. Instead I raked the night with my eyes, plucked Fang from my belt, silently daring anything or anyone to come for me. My hands were too dry. They ached. They were agony. I knew I had to anoint them with a balm of blood.

  2.

  I walked a day.

  I saw a family of black hares. Fang was in my hand. They flattened their ears when I stepped on a fallen palm frond. I took another step and they merged with the shadows of the jungle.

  I saw an ibex before it saw me, but its nose twitched at my stink and leapt away.

  Finally I saw the lioness whose intended ibex dinner I’d just sent running.

  She chose me as substitute.

  Her blood was steaming. I’d never had a hot bath before.

  Fang’s white glow shimmered pink.

  That night I found the tallest tree I’d ever seen in the Savage Lands, as tall as the white, straight-sided mountains I’d seen in the vision that Yinepu’s master had shown us on the night Yin and had nearly killed each other.

  I climbed it, found a resting space to perch. I closed my eyes, whispered words-of-power someone once had taught me, and while watching the crescent moon lift like an ibis on a hot, dry updraft, I found myself softly singing: hroo-hroo . . . hroo-hroo . . . .

  3.

  I awoke to the brilliant gold of sun. The whole disc, bright like forever, perched on the horizon.

  I clamped shut my eyes, shielded them with my hand.

  Where there should have been fingers, there were feathers.

  I stretched out what should have been my arm, but was my wing, and knocked myself off my branch, hitting others on the way down, spreading both wings to slow myself before I slammed into dirt and rocks below.

  I landed, looked down.

  Talons on long, curving toes.

  I moved my tongue around—I had no teeth. Just a beak.

  How?

  Walking was awkward—the balance of it. I wobbled and fell, got up, managed a few more steps.

  I tried flying, but couldn’t figure out how.

  I spent the rest of the day trying.

  That night, my wings finally knew what to do.

  I slid silently among the stars.

  I bathed again, but this time inside the mind of a cloud.

  When the sun again gave birth to itself and all the sky flared to life, I felt the pull, like a thirsty tongue tastes mist.

  Below me was the City of Dogs.

  I glided down, felt the wind’s hot and rough caress, slowed and wrapped my talons round the shoulder of a fallen statue.

  The dogs caroused at will, but left alone the central square of abandoned stone structures.

  On a granite platform there was a black stool glistening like water beneath starlight. Someone was sitting on it, hidden behind vines like a tent-curtain.

  In a wing-beat I knew it must be Yinepu’s Sorceress.

  She called to me—not in human words, but in Falconic:

  Come to me.

  My wings took me before I could even form the idea to refuse, and I perched upon her arm.

  My little bird . . . she said sadly, stroking my head feathers . . . don’t you know who I am?

  And instantly I knew who she was, and I became a boy again, and fell to the ground.

  “Mum?”

  4.

  “You don’t look like I remember,” I said.

  Her hair: it was eight thick braids plastered with mud. She’d decorated the skin around her eyes with black strokes and curves—stains of berry juice?

  So many years.

  So disturbing.

  “You do,” she said, her voice buckling from what seemed like pride and fear at the same time. “And yet, you’re so grown up. You . . . you look like your father did . . . when he was your age. So handsome!” She breathed in sharply. “You’re a man now.”

  I didn’t want to hear her shit. “Where the hell’ve you been?”

  Her eyes said she could’ve wrung my neck like a chicken’s.

  But then she forced herself to look into the sun as if she were counting all nineteen of its rays.

  Finally she smoothed her face and said, “Listen—” She said the name she’d given me when I was a baby. I told her, “That’s not my name anymore.”

  “What?”

  �
��I’ve blacksmithed my own name. I’m Hru.”

  “Hru? What kind of a name is—oh. Of course. Well then . . . Hru . . . that’s going to take some getting used to, isn’t it? Well, Hru—”

  She spun out a long story about how my father’d been murdered by my uncle, how she’d had to run for her life, how she’d hidden and ranged through foreign lands seeking support, how she’d failed out there and returned to seek out every city, village, hamlet, farm, quarry and hermitage to raise an army, how she’d been recruiting and training legions of warriors, witches and warlocks to take back the Blackland. How she’d been hunting for all the hacked-up pieces of my father’s body because she’d made a deal with the gods—

  And suddenly I knew. “You trained Yinepu.”

  “You know Yinepu?”

  “Don’t lie to me. I know he would’ve talked about me to you. All this time . . . you knew I was alive. But where were you?”

  “That’s not . . . . Yes, son, he talked to me about someone named Hru, but how was I supposed to’ve known that was you?”

  “When I told you my name, you didn’t say, ‘You’re Hru,’ like you’d just figured out who Yinepu’s friend was! Did you? Did you?”

  She leaned back, nostrils flared, but I leapt in.

  “So for years, you’ve been training my cousin, teaching him your words-of-power, even though you abandoned me, your actual son!”

  She breathed in quickly to answer, but I kept on.

  “You know how long I dreamt about you? How much I cried and begged the gods—the gods you always told me would let us down, or didn’t exist, and now I find out you’re making deals with them?—to come back to me? To take care of me? To love and protect your own son instead of leaving me to have to kill again and again in the Savage Lands just to stay alive for one more sunrise?”

  “I looked for you!” she yelled. “For months! And found nothing. For all I knew, you were dead! But I still kept—”

  “Maybe you just wanted to believe I was dead, so you’d be free of me!”

  “I didn’t want to believe it was you, because I didn’t want to believe again, to raise my hopes that you were alive just to have to grieve losing you all over again—”

  And then I was looking down at her head, rolling beside the black throne until stopping face-down, and her topless neck and body slumping into the throne and falling forward to the dirt.

  And in my hand was Fang, dripping and steaming with my mother’s gore.

  The Book of Now

  1.

  Past 1 AM, stars suffocated by clouds, and the sky like a bed sheet with flashlights behind it.

  Standing in the alley behind the Hyper-Market, Rap felt all those splintered glaciers of hail gathered way above his head, felt them like they were just about to stab his neck and back, like he was being lowered onto a bed of nails.

  Must’ve been five minutes banging on that door. Knuckles and ego took it for five days.

  Finally footfalls coming down the stairs, and the shove on the door, and the gap beaming yellow light nightward, and the silhouette of the man eclipsing it.

  Moon.

  Slumping when he saw Rap.

  Somehow his eyes, his whole face, slumped with his body.

  And Rap winced while separate burns competed for his body.

  The older man’s eyes mustered not even a glare. Barely a glazed gaze.

  “Mr. Ani,” said Rap, figuring he’d lost the right to call him Brother Moon, “I, I just . . . . ”

  Hadn’t figured out what the hell to say. It’d been a month since he’d seen his Sbai.

  And now way past midnight, the night before the first day of his final year of school, after taking his mother’s head off in the worst fight he’d ever had with her, he was here.

  Finally: “Uh, can I, can I . . . ?”

  Moon backed up.

  2.

  He’d been up in Moon’s suite before, but for a month Rap’d told himself he’d never enter it or the Hyper-Market again.

  But there he was, with the streets dark and the sky flaring white. His bones creaked at him that he shouldn’t’ve been there. Eyes throbbed, too big for their sockets. Gut like a toilet.

  And neither of them had said even a word yet.

  Standing on the other side of the room, Mr. Ani leaned over his electric samovar to pour himself a cup of tea. Didn’t offer any to Rap. Didn’t offer him a chair, either.

  “It’s one in the morning.” Mr. Ani blew steam off his tea. He didn’t say, What the hell do you want after all this time?

  But Rap heard it, anyway.

  Lights flickered inside. Sky flickered outside. Wind kicked up.

  Thunder hit worse than a bad neighbour’s party.

  Rap. Wordless. No cards to play.

  “My . . . my mother . . . . ”

  Moon jerked forward a step, his eyes snapped suddenly awake.

  “We . . . had this huge fight—I was screaming at her—she was grabbing at me an I just took off an left her in the street—”

  “Whoah, whoah, whoah—slow down.” Moon gestured towards the couch. “Take it from the start.”

  Wind tidal-waved the suite again. Sky flickers, and thunder smashed sooner this time. Rap glanced at the ceiling like it was going to crush him for his sins.

  Sins he listed, not in any neat order, but in a cyclone.

  Screaming at his mother and abandoning her after their fight. Burning her with other people’s accusations that she was a whore. Wanting to hurt her for the years of chaos—his whole life—but most of all for letting that drunk asshole Doctor Liberia into their lives. Not letting.

  Bringing.

  And he was in that cyclone, flying apart because his centre could no longer hold it all together. He, who never said anything to anybody about his family, here he was, scattering into the gale his poison spores.

  And then the lights died inside and stayed dead.

  The windows went slate-grey electric for a full four seconds.

  Moon placed and lit six candles, and before the samovar went cold, drafted Rap a giant mug of tea spun with twelve spoons of sugar and half a cup of heavy cream.

  He remembered.

  Took the heat in his hands, blubbering into the steam while wind and thunder tried to silence him. Still in his cyclone, still blubbering that the refugee camps were sick, savage places like human zoos, where fugitives, aid workers and soldiers competed over scalping your soul. That his father was dead and he’d never known him and he’d been on the run ever since his father’d died. That his Somali mother hated Somalis as much as they hated her.

  That he hated hearing the phone ring because of Doctor Liberia’s telephonic terrorism whenever his mum worked at night. That his mother let the son-of-a-bitch drunk-drive them home one night on icy streets, and when he fish-tailed off the road into a snowbank he smacked his mother with the C-word twice while trying to floor them out of it. That he wished to god he had the money to get himself out of there.

  That he’d told his mother we’d wanted to lure Doctor Liberia to his death. And to stab her with the truth of that.

  And there were things, true things, terrible things he’d wanted to tell Moon but couldn’t, cuz it’d be summoning monsters up from the bottom of the river that he could never banish back to their netherworld once he’d loosed them. But he could finally say and did say that he was afraid all the time and angry all the time and ashamed all the time, and that, and that, and that the first time in his life he’d really deep-down felt any different—

  “—was with you, Mr. Ani. The first time I can remember! That I didn’t feel like, like I was . . . . ”

  Felt his lip, slick from snot, throat thickly drowning his words.

  “Like I was swimming in, in, in a swamp full of shit. And going under.”

  Thunder: explosion. Apocalyptic bass. Lightning scorching the room like Hendrix guitar. Mr. Ani’s eyes flaring like twin moons.

  And then the drum solo hit: hail so total they co
uldn’t talk.

  So Rap sat drinking tea, grateful for the screaming silence stifling tears and shuddering chest, grateful for the darkness to hide his smearful face.

  3.

  After minutes of overhead ratta-ta-ta-tatta-tatta, rain joined the beat, overtook it, gentler than the icy prelude.

  Finally Rap said words he’d never told anyone but his mother, except this time, nobody was forcing him to.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Mr. Ani. Gazing at him. Chest rising and finally falling. Nodding once in the golden hush of six candles. Almost a bow.

  Moon: “I didn’t know what the hell was wrong. Always knew you were a hurt young brother. Obviously. Got scars like armour.

  “But I gotta tell you . . . . ” he said, hefting himself off the couch to pull the tap on the samovar. No steam left.

  “I gotta tell you, Rap,” and Rap didn’t know whether to sing or cry at the sound of his name, the first time Moon had said it since he got there, whether this was the run-up to an it’s okay or to a get lost forever.

  “You don’t just . . . you can’t . . . when you get angry at people, that’s . . . that’s part of life, all right? Being connected to people, caring about them and then getting hurt . . . that’s just paying admission to the planet. Can’t have one without the other.

  “In the Alphabetical Alchemy, what’s S? Simultaneous. Transform that, Rap. Leadites who don’t accept S, they try living all one way, they get so far out of balance they fall into the Swamps, or they fall off the edge of the world. Either cracked-out or dicked-out or spent-out looking for permanent joy, or depressed and suicidal.

  “You still remember your scrolls?”

  Rap nodded.

  “Book of the Golden Falcon. Fourth Arit. ‘What was the Master’s answer to Hru’s second question?’”

  Sinking hands into mental loam. Digging round cool of roots and worms.