The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  “‘The truth is like the sun: with the same rays a bringer of life and yet a champion of death.’” Grateful he hadn’t forgotten. “‘Sustainer and annihilator, it grows the one plant full and sweet, while it shrivels the other one into crackles. The time to know will come when it is right, but it is not right yet.’”

  Moon: “So you understand. I hope. Doesn’t mean the sun is trying to burn those crops, even though that will eventually happen. But it’s up to you whether you keep on watering them.”

  Rap nodded.

  “C’mere,” said Moon, gesturing towards the mantel.

  Rap came over to where Moon had brought a candle. They looked at a framed photo of a boy and a girl, probably six and ten, standing on either side of a chubbier Moon whose hair was thicker and all black. The boy’s arms were at his sides, but the girl had her arm around Moon’s waist.

  “That’s Kiya,” he said, pointing to the girl. “And that’s little Ptah.”

  “You have kids?” gasped Rap.

  “They’re not mine. Legally,” he said. “Or biologically. But I raised em both since my boy was six months. Their mother, Katrina . . . we met right here in E-Town. She already had em both, had em from some idiot goof who had no idea how much gold he and Katrina had mined. Rich and stupid.

  “When I met them, this little girl was already four years old. Spooky. Barely spoke a word. Probably on account of Katrina and her boyfriend Todd having named her—can you believe it?—Toddrina.”

  “That’s a name?”

  “Not in my scrolls. Name was sposta be ‘a symbol of their love.’ Symbol of the fact they didn’t know shit about a decent name. For whatever reason they just named the boy Pete. He got off lucky. But Todd, the freaking loser, he took off after baby number two.

  “I met Katrina when I was in my last year of electrical engineering at university. She was beautiful. And desperate to get man for herself and her kids.

  “Me, I loved em all, and yeah, I loved being a rescuer. I was only twenty-one, and suddenly I was instant daddy. I renamed those kids. She let me, let me do that. And we got married, and moved to the States, and for a long time, it was good. But Kat . . . . ”

  Moon put the picture down, looked out at the dark city.

  “She was always into get-rich-quick-schemes, and she finally found the best scheme of all.”

  Rap waited.

  “I never met the dude. Just as well, cuz I’da probably killed him.”

  Moon cleared his throat. Twice. Then the hail went drum-rolling again, and lightning-cymbals lit up cracks in Moon’s face like lunar canyons.

  “Bottom line, she served me with papers, cut me off from the kids. My kids. I’d raised em, saved em, basically. But she had never let me legally adopt them. And Buddy Dude was a lawyer. You can guess which kind.”

  Moon’s eyes: a mess like ten years of not-sleeping, like rustjunk stomping a lawn to death, like food shoved to the back of a fridge, rotting and dripping.

  Rap hated that woman he’d never even met, that she could break the strongest man he’d ever known.

  “See,” croaked Moon, “cuttin somebody off, not talkin to em, not warnin em, not givin em a chance. That’s . . . that’s one of the worst things somebody can ever do to somebody else, Rap.”

  Hail sizzled the roof, rattled the window.

  Rap felt something: not the burn, but a brine, like puke.

  Couldn’t look at Moon, even when Moon walked to the window.

  “If you . . . if you wanna have your mum in your life, Rap . . . if you wanna have me in your life—”

  The window shattered.

  Rap rushed over to Moon.

  “You okay?”

  Moon knelt in the puddle of rain and ice chips, glass shards and dark droplets in halo round him on the worn linoleum. Wind, feeling like snow. And Moon, motionless and kneeling.

  “Brother Moon!”

  Moon snapped out of it. They grabbed tea towels, broom and dustpan from the kitchen, and while Rap cleaned up, Moon taped a black plastic bag round a sheet of cardboard, then duct-taped it into the window frame.

  Rap held up for Moon what had smashed the glass.

  A looked in his eyes like he was holding the Holy Grail.

  A hailstone.

  The colour, shape and size of an egg.

  Moon put it tenderly into a jar and then into the freezer.

  He brought out sheets and a pillow, told Rap to call his mother so she wouldn’t be calling police-hospital-and-morgues all night, and then went to bed.

  Rap took the couch, turned on his phone long enough to text his mother that he wasn’t dead and that he’d see her sometime in the future. Wasn’t the first time he’d gone night-hawk.

  Sometimes she even knew. She’d just hafta deal.

  4.

  Moon woke Rap at sunrise.

  Together they recited the nine oaths of the Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh, standing in a shenu of two to create their Daily Alchemy.

  Toast and eggs, then Moon sent off Rap for his first day of Grade Twelve, but not before Rap asked for another reading list.

  Moon scribbled down some names, then reached shelfward to hand him Street Soldiers by Joseph E. Marshall and sent him packing.

  The city looked like a war zone on Rap’s ride to school: shredded gardens, massive tree branches laying across roads, broken glass everywhere, even a car window smashed. Hundred-thirty kilometres-per-hour winds’d do that. Specially with hail.

  First period, Day One, and within fifteen minutes Rap’d already covered borrowed paper with drawings of Static Shock, Warlock, Huey Freeman and Spawn.

  Couple of Somali guys kept turning around glancing at him, then swiveling back smiling and whispering.

  Ignored them and everyone else the whole morning, drawing, in classes he didn’t care about with teachers who would never know him.

  At lunch he found JC, and for the second time in his life, he apologized sincerely.

  After telling him an eighty-percent accurate story of how he patched up with Brother Moon, he gave him a drawing.

  He’d spent most of the morning penciling it, using a Sharpie for the block-blacks and a Pilot Fineliner for the detailed inks: a Starlinesque splash of Hru and Yinepu battling crocodiles and chain-wielding, slaving murderers in the Swamps of Death.

  And the logo, below: Supreme Raptor and the Black Jackal.

  JC: “Dude, dude, dude! This is the absolute shit!” Rap smiled. “I can really keep this?”

  “Yeah. Just don’t tape it up in your locker—”

  “Gimme some credit! I’ll obviously put up a photocopy! I’ma stash this in Mylar!”

  Two girls who looked like siblings but weren’t—one was Jamaican and the other was Nigerian (Rap knew from first day roll-call in his Social class)—kept sneaking peeks at him from their open lockers.

  Rap snapped at JC, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “What? Maybe they think you’re cute. Go spit some game, man.”

  “Yeah, right! Everywhere I go last coupla days, people’re staring at me, whispering . . . I mean, what the hell?”

  “Like you don’know.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  JC’s eyes went wide, followed by his grin. Then he took out his Zune and clicked through it.

  On the small screen, a small Rap, JC and Sixpac moved a crowd in a shaky, hand-held universe. Hoots and applause nearly drowned out Rap’s rhymes.

  “Dude, you’re a star! We’re stars! There’s like four thousand hits on this shit, and a coupla hundred comments!”

  “Man . . . !”

  “Just assumed you knew. Been on YouTube for a month! Somebody musta cell-phoned it or something.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Uh, excuse me? Mr. Cut-Off-and-Un-Friend-Everybody-and-Napalm-Every-Bridge? I’m sposta be telling you Golden Eye’s gonna go on tour with Maestro and Politic Live when you won’t even hardly talk to anyone?”

  Rap took the dis. He des
erved it. “Guess it’s time to make some changes.”

  “Time to live, man. L-I-V-E: Liberate Intelligence, Victory-Evolve! Golden Eye, Do or Die! I got my own crack of Fruity Loops, dude. Me and Sixpac already got enough beats for like two albums!

  “Shit, this video’s practically the top recruiter for the Street Falcons! We’re up to like a hundred people already, fuh real! You should peep the size of the shen-rings we build—”

  JC stopped. “What, what is it? You look like you just got pantsed.”

  Rap sucked his teeth.

  JC: “Oh, I get it. You’re thinking, when you bugged out, you were like the number-two man right after me, and now you’re at the back of the line?”

  Rap: “Well, first off, you were the number-two man after me. But . . . yeah. Gonna feel weird. People I don’t even know, knowing scrolls I haven’t even heard of . . . . ”

  “Dude, don’t worry. Maãt rules everything around me. Can you transform that?”

  Out a month and he was already way behind on the lingo.

  Over lunch JC sneak-peaked him the new Scrolls, spun him tales of the new crew and all the mad shit they were doing, and they laughed, schemed, bragged and dreamed.

  And for a few minutes he even folded up his umbrella despite the forecasted hailstorm with his mother.

  5.

  “Supreme Raptor!” squealed Ãnkhur from across the room.

  Took her all of two seconds. Rap’d just stepped into the Street Laboratory, the new Street Falcon HQ a block east of the Hyper-Market—

  (Felt it: first time there for him. But not for the Falcons he’d shut out for a month. Plus the newbies—

  (Glanced round the walls: posters of Malcolm X, Wangari Maathai, Thomas Sankara, Lubna Hussein, Mo Ibrahim, and a shelfload of Africentric books and DVDs—)

  —then everybody was watching Ãnkhur flinging her arms around Rap’s neck.

  Cheeks burning, and despite his usual miserable self he couldn’t help but smile.

  Ãnkhur: “Hotep, Brother Raptor! Welcome back!”

  First close-up he’d ever had of those ripe-plum lips.

  Really wanted to push Ãnkhur away before she could detect the effects of those lips on his circulation, but she had him vised to her waist.

  “Sister,” he finally giggled, “you’re like an unopened can of Coke.”

  “Huh?”

  “Always bubbly.”

  She laughed and hugged him again. “And you’re always corny! Good thing I love popcorn!”

  Over her shoulder he saw Sixpac. She’d probably boyfriended up by then. Felt his heart go crusty.

  Wiggled out of Ãnkhur’s hug to drop a Throne-clasp—left fist into right palm—on Sixpac.

  Clamped his jealousy, too. Couldn’t do like JC said, make Golden Eye into E-Town’s hottest hip hop crew, if he was beefing with their producer over a female.

  Then dropped thrones on everybody else he knew, adding in Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh.

  JC hadn’t been exaggerating about recruitment. The Street Laboratory was packed. Including with kids he’d never imagined would go anywhere near Alchemy. Kids in jeans the size of potato-sacks. A kid with a yellow-metal grill, and—damn!—at the back of the room in bandanas, two little Sudanese kids . . . was that the same Dinka Lil Wayne and Lil Bow Wow from 107th Ave?

  “Look at brother’s eyes,” laughed Sbai Seshat, Ãnkhur’s aunt, standing next to Moon. “Only 4:30 and the gang’s all here. Aint nobody here running on CP time, young man.”

  “Well go on, newbies,” said Brother Moon. “Introduce yourself to the city’s most YouTubed hip hop contender!”

  That was all he needed to hear to know for sure that Moon had forgiven him.

  Too many new people to remember their names, and too many original Street Falcons who had new Kemetic ones: Sixpac was now Senwusret, after the three pharaohs who’d conquered swaths of Europe; Jorrel was now Joser, after the pharaoh of Imhotep who’d designed the Step Pyramid; the dark-skinned brother Ahmed was now Kem-Ur (“Great Black”); the Rwandan sister Crystal with the cute French accent was now Sekhmet, after the lion goddess.

  A legion of new kids ranging from junior high to high school graduates, dressed anywhere from street to straight, skin glowing from midnight to sunrise, and faces from Cairo to Kingston and Alexandria to Amber Valley.

  And to all of them he was either Raptor or Supreme Raptor, and JC, coincidentally, was exactly what he’d logoed him as on the drawing: Black Jackal.

  With his prodigal-glitters dimming to gleams, Rap scanned the new scene, the new relationships, new potential rivals, and new potential burns inside the storefront of not much but tables and chairs against the walls.

  Place was packed. Had to be a hundred kids, easy.

  His eyes kept landing on a new sister. Must’ve been two inches taller than Rap. Huge smile. Glamourous weave she kept leaping from one shoulder to the other like a starlet’s cat. Still went by her Leadite name, Thandie.

  Brothers were orbiting her like spy satellites stealing intell before a war. That smile: sunshine, baking sand at the shore. But the eyes were ice cubes in a drink.

  And then the door jangled and in ran Almeera, the Somali girl who always wore a loose hijab and hoodie with a rhinestone Playboy logo.

  Rushing—

  “Sorry I’m la—”

  —and slamming into Brother Moon’s chest.

  Everyone laughed. Almeera, shrinking, mortified: “Sorry, Brother Moon!”

  “Sallright, Sister Yibemnoot,” said Moon. Rap X-rayed the name: Heart in sky? Heart of the sky?

  She crinkle-smiled, slipped through the crowd to find a place in the shen-ring forming. Had a graphic novel tucked under her arm. Persepolis? He’d read the library’s copy. She reads comics? Damn.

  To fit everyone they formed three concentric shen-rings. Moon began the Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh.

  “By the sunrise . . . . ”

  “BY THE SUNRISE . . . . ”

  “ . . . I choose to resurrect myself . . . ”

  “ . . . I CHOOSE TO RESURRECT MYSELF . . . ”

  “ . . . meaning I will purify my body, my mind and my spirit . . . ”

  “ . . . MEANING I WILL PURIFY . . . ”

  The chorus of it, the echo, shimmered up and down Rap’s spine like electro-dazzle up a Tesla coil. He’d never heard more than ten people reciting their oath, and now here that, squared.

  At oath’s end, Almeera, now Yibemnoot, nodded to Brother Moon and stood forward.

  “Today’s Alchemy. September 6. S, Simultaneous, and 6, Mother-Sister-Daughter.”

  Everyone hushed. Gone was the awkward girl who’d bounced off Moon’s ribs. Here was somebody commanding everyone’s attention, even weaved-up Thandie’s.

  “To me, Simultaneous/Mother-Sister-Daughter helps me understand all my roles. I’m a daughter, like all mothers are. And I’m a sister. One day I might even be a mother myself. So even though I’ve got rights and responsibilities in two of those roles now, I’m also preparing for the rights and responsibilities I’ll have as a mother.”

  Rap couldn’t keep from smiling, watching her alchemise. She’d just measured and poured her metals into beakers. Now she was about to fire up the furnace.

  “And even if I never become, like, a real mother, I mean, literally, with my own kids and everything,” said Yibemnoot, “as a mother, like Aset the Avenger, it will be my duty . . . to, to teach and lead my people in the Savage Lands. To show them how to defeat the Destroyer. And raise the Shining Place eternally.”

  “Transform, Sister,” said Sbai Seshat, nodding, and then it was dominos: dozens of heads nodding to Yibemnoot’s every phrase. “Transform,” they echoed.

  “Now, if I become Aset only, a warrior-mother only, then, well, then I can’t live. I wouldn’t even be able to drink from the River of Life, because when you’re in command, all you can even do is just get ready for war. So I have to be, simultaneously, a sister, and a daughter. Just so I can even remember what it’s like not to
have all the answers or even be afraid some times.”

  “Thass right!” said Seshat.

  “And that’s what’ll make me a better Aset,” said Yibemnoot, “because then, I’ll know why some of the young blacksmiths have dropped their hammers. Not because they don’t wanna build, but because their hands aren’t all callused up yet. And I can even tell them, ‘No, that’s okay. Don’t feel bad.’ You know why? ‘Because only soft hands can comfort the Wanderers in the Savage Lands—’”

  “Transform!” said Ãnkhur, without even a shred of her ever-ready giggle.

  “And because I can be simultaneously hard and soft, old and young, day and night, I can hear the cries of those who sink down, and be strong enough to lift them up. I can break the pyrite chains off of Wanderers’ necks, and still place my golden chain into their hands!”

  “Transform!”

  “I can be the master teacher, who is not too proud to learn! Like Ptah-Hotep said forty-five centuries ago, ‘Wisdom is more precious than emeralds, yet it is found among the maidens at the millstone.’”

  “TransFORMED!” said Seshat. Applause crackled the room like hail on a tin roof. “Did young sister here grant gold to her fathers, brothers, and sons, and to her mothers, sisters and daughters?”

  True-indeeds popped out around the rings, cymbals on Yibemnoot’s sax. Her rhinestone bunnyhead sparkled on its black hoodie.

  That girl had just had rocked the house and he hadn’t dropped so much as a single rhyme.

  Damn, thought Rap, and not even a fire-ant’s bite of jealousy on his neck.

  6.

  “So if y’all transform correctly,” said Sbai Seshat, “you’re gonna be up in that cockpit flying the plane your own self.”

  Chattering, laughing, clapping: Sbai’s announcement rocked everyone’s gyroscopes.

  Seshat and somebody named Sbai Maãhotep had hooked up all kinds of amazing gigs through some city councillor who liked what they were doing, including free passes for bowling and movies, two grants for part-time jobs at the Hyper-Market, and even free flight lessons at the municipal airport.

  But flying lessons? He was going to fly an actual plane?