The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

Both boys: “University?”

  “Yes, university!”

  “Brother Moon, all respect due,” said Jackal, tilting his head so his locks grazed his right shoulder, “but, but, university? I mean . . . what good’s that gonna do?”

  “Better jobs, better money, live longer and healthier? What’s not to like? Get smart or die slaving!”

  “My dad has a PhD,” said Jackal in a small voice.

  Raptor snapped his eyes towards his brother, who never talked about his father. Moon’s eyes widened.

  “And he drives a taxi.”

  Moon paused to pour coffee for a customer and give him a login code for carrel #3.

  “Okay, I transform that,” said Moon. “It’s true. A lot of our people from the continent are in the same pit. Pilots who aren’t allowed to fly, surgeons who aren’t allowed to slice, teachers who aren’t allowed to teach—”

  Jackal: “I can’t afford fifteen-twenny grand trainin for a job they aint even gon give me.”

  “Listen,” said Moon, “you two are smart. You know the Scrolls, you’re masterful with words when we make our Daily Alchemy . . . we talk about books, you’re both insightful. Your posts on the Street Falcons blog are excellent—”

  “You read those?” The bright words’d bubbled out of Raptor before he could stop them.

  “Course I read them! Why wouldn’t I?”

  Moon brought them to carrel #6, opened up their school’s website course listings for English and laid out their battle plan: they were immediately to get out of Grade 12 remedial lit class—English 30-2—and re-register in half-year Grade 11 academic English, 20-1, so they could take 30-1 in the second semester. He’d give them any help they needed.

  “But later for this ‘good enough’ bullshit. You two have gold minds. Why your teachers never saw that before—well, we know why they didn’t see it. When it’s our kids, getting sixty percent is supposedly the best we’re capable of. No cause to worry or even call home.

  “I’d been teaching you? I’da pushed you into advanced placement. That’s what I took when I was your age, and not even half the class had your smarts. They were just there because their parents were judges, doctors, professors—ambitious people who wanted trophy kids, regardless of what they could actually do.”

  Jackal: “But what about a J-O-B? Even if I got the paper?”

  “Bruh, success is like . . . like a penalty shot. You grab your stick, focus on the net, you still gotta beat that goalie, but yeah, you could score. But you skate off the ice, take your blades off, then you have zero chance of hitting the mesh.

  “I can’t guarantee you’ll make the point, but I do guarantee that you’ll get that shot, and that means being ready for it when it comes, and staying on the ice.”

  Moon asked him what he wanted to do for a career.

  “I wanna be a producer, like Jay-Z.”

  “J-C, Jay-Z,” said Raptor, and they all laughed. Jackal dropped: “He’s got like two hundred million dollars—”

  “You wanna be a producer? Supreme.” Still at carrel #6, he image-Googled Jay-Z, brought up the boyish-looking aging rapper in a power suit.

  “So you go to NAIT and study sound engineering. Get a diploma so you can work in any music studio anywhere in the world. You take some business courses so you can handle your own money—”

  “Yeah, but Jay-Z never went to university, and he’s super smart.”

  “Think about basketball, bruh,” said Moon, image-searching for shots of b-ballers. He clicked on two, left them up.

  “The buzzer’s gonna go off in ten seconds. Do you get lazy, like this guy, don’t even run, just take the shot from behind the centre line? Or do you run like this guy to take your shot from the key?”

  Clicked back to Jay-Z.

  “Jay-Z’s one in a million. There’s maybe a coupla dozen music producers earning his kinda money. You’re damn right, he’s smart. You think a lawyer’s smarter than he is?”

  Jackal said, “Hell, no!”

  Raptor: “Maybe Brother Maãhotep.”

  Jackal: “Well, yeah. He’s pretty smart. But he aint rich.”

  “Brother’s doing well,” said Moon. “But outta all the uneducated but intelligent young rappers out there are, how many you calculate wanna get rich, but end up poor? Maybe, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent?

  “Now, what percentage of educated lawyers who aren’t smart get rich? Or at least Maãhotep-comfortable?”

  Raptor rolled back on his heels. Jackal eyed him sideways.

  “You transform that?” said Moon. “Yes, Leadites and Pyrites buried your father’s gold. That’s a fact. It’s serious. But you were born in the Savage Lands, transform? So what can you see, because your Shining Eye was forged here, that your father can’t?”

  Jackal looked at the screen, then at Moon. “I can see the traps? The pits the chainsmen dug in the ground?”

  “Transformed. And what else?”

  “I can track the Wanderers? Like, to build up an army?”

  “Transformed. And?”

  “I can train the Mesnitu and make my own forge?”

  “Transform—”

  “I can drain the Swamps of Death and master the elevated lands, and raise a Golden Fortress for the orphans of the Savage Lands—”

  “Transform—”

  “I can create hope, joy and justice to make stand those who weep, to reveal those who hide their faces, and to lift up those who sink down—”

  And all three of them leapt in: “In doing so, we will all rise nearer to the Supreme.”

  Grade 7. Raptor, sitting at the back of the class. His homeroom teacher Mr. Manna, the same one who’d called him “dumb as a sack of hammers” in front of a colleague without realising he could speak English . . . he was making the class announce what career they wanted when they grew up.

  Raptor spent the long wait with coals in his lungs till it was his turn, hating being forced to talk in front of the class, but telling the truth: he wanted to be an astronomer.

  In front of everybody, Mr. Manna told him he should focus on something attainable.

  “Do you know what ‘attainable’ means, Raphael? You’re probably good with your hands, right? How about being a cook or something like that? Or maybe house painting. Long as there’s houses, there’s always gonna be money in house painting. But a scientist?” He actually goddamn chuckled.

  “That’s just not attainable for someone like you.”

  A gaping asshole. Raptor’d never doubted his own brain: when he put his mind to a task he was smarter than almost anyone he knew.

  But so what? What was attainable on the open roads of the world when the pyrites posted men like Mr. Manna with swords at every gate and border?

  “Earth to Raptor,” said Moon.

  Jackal was looking at him, too, eyes waiting. “I said, what do you want to do for a living?”

  Reflexively, shrugging: “I’ont know.”

  Instantly, Moon: “I don’t believe you. If you could do anything, if you could be anything—”

  Burning, his shoulders—

  And the cell phone ringing in his pocket.

  Checking: his mother. Excused himself, slipped into the corner to take it.

  After he motioned for Moon to step away from the cash register so they could talk in the corner.

  “My, uh . . . my mother.” Shook his head as if to shake away the embarrassment. “She wants to meet you.”

  “Based on your voice, should I be afraid?”

  “Honestly, I don’know. Maybe.”

  “How long do I have?”

  “I can stall her for maybe a week.”

  “Stall her? No disrespect, but how hard a woman is she to deal with when she’s angry?”

  “Like the Devourer of Souls.”

  Moon snorted. “Thanks for the heads-up. In the meantime, you get your registration changed, transform? And tomorrow I wanna X-ray your math skills.”

  9 pm. His and Jackal’s shifts w
ere over, and since he Jackal’s parents were actually letting him sleep over a second night in a row (what was one more teenager inside a Somali apartment?), they headed out together.

  His mother. She was resourceful. Like a detective when she wanted to be. She knew where Moon’s businesses were.

  Raptor’s worlds were on a collision course and there was nothing he could do to stop it. And not Static, not Master Jehu, not even Hru and all his legions armed with shining golden hammers had the might to hold back planets.

  14.

  Saturday. Just before noon. At the flight school off Kingsway Avenue since 8 am, learning how to check the flaps, the ailerons, the rudder, the suspension and fuselage, and then the fuel and oil levels.

  With the pilot beside him inside the Helio Courier’s cockpit, Raptor checked the radio, local air traffic, weather and wind speed, and then the pilot taxied into position before lifting him, Jackal and Moon into space.

  Still ten days away from witnessing his mother storm into the Falcons’ Somali mosque forum on autism and yank his mentor into a side room to order him, “Stop tryingk to steal my son!”

  So in that pristine moment before world rammed into world, Raptor hurtled through the sky while encased in steel, his brother and his teacher at his back, his heart hammering like a guild of blacksmiths.

  The pilot yelled at him above the roar that it was time, and Raptor put his left hand on the controls, and vibrating up his arm into his heart was all the power of the engine and the wings, and by uniting the circuit with his right hand, he felt exhilaration coursing through him left to right: arm, leg, leg, arm, head. . .

  . . . descending. . .

  . . . banking. . .

  . . . strong-arming the delicate labour of staying on course. . .

  . . . and climbing . . . .

  The Helio rattling in the rushing river of air, loud like swimming inside a vein of lightning, and the sky a membrane of blue so intense it was an infinity away and close enough to touch.

  And for the brevity of those forty minutes suspended above the earth, and for the first time in his short, broken life…

  Raptor felt

  entirely

  free.

  Seven:

  Replace~Elevate

  The Book of Then

  1.

  I’d abandoned my Master, my cousin-and-brother, and my fortress of children.

  I was alone in the Savage Lands.

  And I’d murdered my own mother.

  I invoked my words-of-power to become a shadow. Said them again, and and again, again, kheper-nyi em khaibt, kheper-nyi em khaibt, kheper-nyi em khaibt . . . until the shadow became so deep that the world itself became a shadow to me. The stars darkened. The moon was snuffed out. My hands in front of my own eyes were gone.

  I’d melt into the night and be done with it all forever.

  No more nightmare nights of abandonment and rage. No more trying and failing to save kids from being butchered by crocodiles. No more witnessing soldiers enslaving children, beholding hills of severed hands left behind as flesh-cairn warnings. No more being lied to or denied the truth by those I trusted most.

  No more.

  2.

  And so I stayed in the realm of shades.

  How long’d I been there? Half a day? A month?

  But I could still hear.

  Everything was choked and thick and far away, like I was drowning at the bottom of the Swamps of Death.

  Thudding of many paws on sand . . . .

  The flapping of wings . . . .

  . . . Yih, seseneb, ser, skhai Aset-netchit,

  Aset-uret-mut-Hru, Aset-Mehhit. . .

  maãkheru em Yih . . . .

  Who was there? What was happening?

  Flickers of light . . . the moon smashed

  on the surface of the water. . .

  Real? A dream?

  Was I dying?

  Who are you?

  I’m the Measurer.

  Ah, so you’re the Measurer. Your reputation flowers across Ta-Seti, the Blackland, the Savage Lands, even down to Rebarna.

  Thank you.

  That’s not a compliment. They call you a baby-eating baboon. They say you snatch up children after ambushing their parents and slitting their throats, then “appear out of nowhere” to these wandering orphans like you’re some sort of saviour. Take them to your prison and then do gods-know-what to them.

  People believe whatever they want, even obviously idiotic things.

  I notice you didn’t deny my charge, Measurer. So how about it? Are you the one who kidnapped my son? Enslaved him? Imprisoned him? Broke his spirit to make him think I’m his enemy?

  Dogs, growling, ready to attack . . . .

  Whispered:

  Keep your legion still, my son. Don’t let your belly control you. Close your Shining Eye, and dream of a lotus flower sipping from the mists of morning.

  Silence.

  You’re wrong, milady. Yes, I recruit abandoned children, but not for the mines, not for the fields, nor for the dunes of organised murder. Others do that—you may know some. I recruit these children for my school. I teach them because no one else will. We work together to feed and house each other. And no one’s enslaved, except perhaps by loyalty or love. Yes, your son’s in a prison, but not one I made.

  Again, silence.

  I strained at the edge of my hearing,

  hearing nothing, and even the shards of light died.

  . . . absence, not even echo,

  not even shadow, not even spark . . . .

  . . . simply

  n o t h i n g . . . .

  3.

  I’d forgotten I’d ever had eyes, forgotten they’d ever been open or closed.

  I opened them anyway.

  I was gone from the world.

  Below my feet:

  A vast white disk of silt and sand.

  It ran to distant edge of a black dome embedded with stars.

  And before me was Master Jehu.

  Except his skin was even darker than usual, as black as the sky above, and his eyes were rimmed with gold.

  “Master . . . where are we?”

  He touched my shoulder. His hand was cool water on burned skin.

  “My son,” he whispered, “I’ve taken you to my secret abode: the Silver Desert. When all you children are asleep, this is where I go to pray and think. To become strong again.”

  I looked around in awe, and when I gazed up, my gut leapt as if I were looking down, as if the only thing keeping me from falling were the Master.

  There, “down” in the sky, a disk of blue and green and streaked with white. Somehow I knew it was where I was from.

  “Master, thank you for this blessing. But . . . why’ve you taken me here?”

  “You . . . you don’t remember . . . what you did, do you?”

  What did he mean? I tried to understand, but my past was thick, wet, jade-dark, cold. I tried moving through that night-jungle, but weeds and vines wrapped round me till I couldn’t move.

  “My boy,” said the Master sadly. We sat together on white rocks. “You sank so far into the shadow-world I took me months to find you.”

  Why didn’t he give up after all that time? “You looked for me for months?”

  He was surprised, and even hurt.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  In his eyes: all his years, all his children saved, and all the ones he’d lost.

  I hugged him. He hugged me back without hesitation.

  We walked past jagged silver mountains, finally kneeling to drink the sparkling water from a lake of tranquility.

  He told me what I’d done.

  It was like the Swamps surging over me, full of shit and blood and brine and vines, and a whirlpool sucking me down—

  —and the Master’s hand caught me, and pulled me back.

  “All this time,” I whispered, panting, panting, “I’ve been asking, ‘Who is the Destroyer?’ And—”

  “Yes. Well,” s
aid the Master, “there are questions we all need to ask of others, and of ourselves, forever.”

  He held my shoulder. “Come with me.”

  4.

  Down we went.

  Deep inside a vast bubble in the rock, the Master led me to a basin in the stone. He made me stand at the centre.

  He ascended stairs hacked from the walls, stood beside a huge stalactite whose bottom was shorn off, the broken fang of a monster big enough to swallow the sun.

  Whispered: words-of-power. . .

  . . . echoing, echoing, ECHOING INTO THUNDER.

  Molten silver erupted from the stalactite, flooding the basin and scalding me up to my legs, my chest, my neck—

  —screaming, and the silver burning me, chewing the meat from my spine, screaming and screaming, burning, DROWNING—

  —and as I died, they bubbled up beside me: Duam, our strongest warrior, guts boiling out of his belly—I held onto him . . . blackened, smoking skeletons—I clutched them . . . children, their hands full of roots and rocks and each other’s eyes and teeth—I grabbed them . . . a woman’s torso, her empty neck—I held onto it, too . . . and that woman’s head, her face, her eye-sockets puddled with searing silver, reflecting my face while her mouth screamed steam—I reached for it, too—

  —above, upon the stairs, Master Jehu yelling at me, echoing thunder crushing his voice—and yet—

  Do not drown in the

  Swamps of Death!

  —but how? How could they be here?

  Let go of them!

  He hurled a great golden chain which unfurled all the way to me.

  Hold fast!

  My vision was white with agony. My hands were burning bones dripping flesh. I couldn’t—