“They told us they were gonna take us all to foster homes in England. But I was there with my mother, and most of those kids had at least one parent. Stealing children . . . those fucking Pyrites!”
Looked at the banks of blinking machines, the sine wave telemetry of Moon’s heart.
“When I came here and learned how to use the internet,” said Raptor, “I found out six of those bastards’d gotten convicted in Kenya for child abduction, and a bunch of journalists, too, journalists who’d been covering up their crimes for them. Got sentenced to hard labour.
“But the British government, those khetiuta leaned hard and on the little old Kenyan government. Poof! Every last one those Pyrites got pardoned.”
Raphael’d woken up on a sheet inside the barely-lanterned darkness of Seth Apsey’s tent. It was the stink that knocked him awake. A big block of Trappist cheese with a hunting knife sticking out of it on a wooden cutting board. Reeked like men trapped together inside a cell for days, sleeping and sweating and pissing and shitting, without relief, in the baking heat.
Head ached like he’d been puking. His asshole hurt like he’d had diarrhea for days. Naked, and smelled of shit and blood.
On the cot, Seth was grunting, tossing sweatdrops from his greasy hair, bucking and shoving his cock into the unconscious limpness of nine-year-old Wacera.
Raphael’s blood became lava.
The hunting knife plunged through Seth’s ear and into his brain, and his body kept spasm-fucking Wacera as it shuddered to its death.
Pushed the monster’s carcass off of Wacera, failed to wake her up, then found his own clothes and hers and dressed them both. Carried Wacera back to where her father slept, crept back in silent sobs to where his mother slept.
“And, and, and,” said Raptor, palms into the broken levees of his eyes, smock-sleeve against his nose to staunch the snot.
“In the, the, the morning, when they found that fucker dead . . . . An mlungu murdered? We couldn’t stay. A, a whole bunch of people just took off to, to wherever.”
Grabbed tissues, blew his nose twice, three times.
“I never told her,” said Raphael. “Or Jackal. Or anyone but you.”
Moon’s eye, on the unbandaged side of his face. Wide open.
Horror dwelt there.
He’d never let Moon hug him. And now he couldn’t hug Moon.
Moon, with his one good hand, gestured.
Raptor took that hand, held onto it for life, saw Moon’s eye soften, and he crumpled against the mattress with his head near Moon’s knee.
Cried there until a nurse came to tell him he had to leave.
8.
The man was Seshat’s friend, but Araweelo’d also worked on his campaign. Raptor’d heard of him, but didn’t know a damn thing about provincial politics.
All he knew was that “Brian” was a fifty-something White dude with a greyblack moustache, and he’d been able to pull the paperwork together almost overnight.
“And, yeah, right there and . . . there,” said the MLA.
Moon, with Araweelo holding the form for him, weakly signing his name, barely an X.
Seshat and Maãhotep witnessed, each of them clamping jaws and setting eyes.
The hospital wasn’t supposed to let this many people in. Even with the special dispensation, Seshat, Maãhotep, ’Noot, Kiya, Ptah, Jackal and Raptor were allowed to enter and remain only for these last few minutes of the ceremony.
Araweelo stood beside Moon in his bed, resplendent. A southern Sudanese red flowered dress with beads and cowrie shells. A red veil.
Kiya, in borrowed, beautiful Muslimina fashion from ’Noot’s cousin, since Kiya was a full half-foot taller than ’Noot.
Moon’s throat was too damaged for speech. And when the MLA said to kiss the bride, Araweelo leaned down and kissed Moon so gently Raptor wondered whether their lips had even met.
Zero:
Peace~Life~Eternal
The Book of Then
1.
Men and women, fighters all, danced and sang on the day following the Night of Victory Over the Destroyer.
I remember that morning like it was now.
There was mist pulling away from the kiss of the River Eternal. Spray from oranges and limes, freshly bitten, sparkling on the breeze and in my nose. Hard-boiled eggs, hot-born from cooking water, and callus-handed warriors with too-big fingertips pulling bits of shell from breakfast.
Bread, round and brown, puffing up on hot dome rocks, then flung as discs to outstretched hands. Flutes, lutes, voices. Laughter. Stories of what to do and where to go and how to dance and whom to kiss and how many babies to make when everyone got back at home.
And the sun.
2.
I couldn’t dance. And I couldn’t sing.
My limbs might’ve lost their metal, but they hadn’t found their water, either. The poetry that had dominated my voice, that fanatical devotion to a cause, had shattered like forge-steel struck one too many times.
When everyone was celebrating, my words would not cavort, not even inside my mind. No longer did they shine like emeralds. They fell from my mouth, stones in sand. Soundless, even, because I couldn’t bring myself to talk.
But the Revolution demanded I resume my motion, even though all I craved was sleep and eternity to grieve, to wail for everything we’d lost to win what we had gained.
And I wore yet another title, one I hadn’t asked for, manacles, a yoke.
Sun-King Hru.
3.
We constructed boats, sailed the River Eternal to the lowlands, found the city called Het-Uar, the capitol of my defeated uncle. Its perimeter of blood-encrusted pikes.
We buried all the thousand skulls and desiccated heads we found upon them.
At the centre of the city lay his pyrite palace.
Maybe there’d been a time when the idea of watching its metal friezes melt, its ramparts burn, its guard-towers implode in the all-consuming flames . . . .
Maybe there’d been a time when such images promised comfort. I’d probably imagined I’d be shouting raging, joyful curses, hurling stones at stone statues of the Destroyer, condemning him millions upon millions of times.
But while my legions danced and sung around the incinerating mansion, hefting all its looted treasures they’d looted back again, the castle’s death-smoke burned my eyes and throat, and dried my lips.
4.
We glided on the current to the lowlands, floating next to teeming fishes, their scales flashing in the noon.
Twenty years before I’d seen this place the first time. Unrelenting fog, black spider-trees, cascades of crocodiles, children beating each other to death and drowning in the sludge.
Twenty years before I’d given it a name I later found everyone before me had already known, as if everyone’s ear had caught an echo of the tremors from the birthpangs of the world, as if everybody’s noses smelled the same corrupting afterbirth.
The Swamps of Death.
Now, only sunlight and clear water.
I leaned over the prow to look into the water, hoping I’d see a smiling child’s face reflecting back to me.
But all I saw there was an old killer, a butcher for whom songs were being sung, from whom prayers were being memorised, for whom ten thousand glorious, poetical, absurd and overbearing titles would never be enough.
5.
We reached our destination. I left my Grand Vizier, my brother Yinepu, in command while I made my pilgrimage alone to descend to Sacred Cavern.
I slipped my way around the stony teeth, plunged ever deeper into darkness, until I found the sparkling ceiling, the house of stars.
And the inner chamber where my father sat upon his turquoise and obsidian throne.
I bid you enter here.
I bowed, and shut my eyes.
And then he spoke again.
You know me. I’m the one who loved you before you were even born.
“Duh-daddy?”
“Hru, com
e see your father.”
His voice was soft as water. No more crashing echo from eternity. No more an underworld-beshadowed god-king. The throne, the cavern, the gold-rimmed eyes . . . they all disappeared to me. He was just a man.
I came to him, an adult, and he waved for me to jump into his lap. And it never occurred to me that I should not. My war-bulged muscles smoothened, my scars melted like footsteps in the riverbank, and beside my ear I suddenly felt the long-ago cut-off single braid of a child.
I stopped myself, but almost started sucking my thumb.
In his lap I was the child I’d forgotten ever having been, while he kissed and cuddled me as if decades had never turned to embers.
And then I saw them, over his shoulder, lurking in the shadows and lit by torchlights, their skin now the total-black of my father’s, their eyes rimmed in glittering gold.
I almost screamed.
“Daddy!”
He knew. He nodded like they’d always been there and always would be. My mother. Another woman I didn’t know. And my uncle. My hated uncle I’d spent half my life escaping, and the other half trying to kill.
“Daddy, daddy!” I said, clutching his forearm with both my toddler-chubby hands. “Why’s he here? He’s bad! Don’t you know what he did to me and mummy?”
“Son,” he said, shushing me, holding the sides of my face so I could see him and only him. “He’s here because I want him here.”
“But why? He’s a very bad man!”
He looked at me sadly, like he’d had millions of years to think about it, and would be pondering it for millions more.
“Hru, the lady beside your mother . . . do you see her?”
“Yes, daddy.”
“That’s your aunty.”
I was shocked. I didn’t know I had an aunty. “Mummy never told me about her.”
“She’s your mother’s sister. Aunty Nebt-Het. Your cousin Yinepu’s mother.”
I didn’t feel stupid. I just accepted it the way that children do, even though I’d had twenty years to ask Yin about his mother and never had.
“Your uncle always resented me,” said Daddy. “And resentment, bitterness, jealousy . . . those swords are sharp enough to murder even gods. Do you understand?”
I nodded, but I really didn’t. Even if I’d been old enough to know what my father meant, I was terrified of my murdering uncle standing right there behind him with his sharpened teeth and dagger eyes, my uncle who’d slaughtered our men, who’d executed my Master, who’d beaten me and knelt behind me, who’d . . . .
“He wanted your mother for his wife. But she loved me. So he took her sister for consolation.
“But that made him only despise her. And then when she gave him a son, well, because he couldn’t pry his mind from me, he thought everyone else was the same. So his belly burned with one belief: that your cousin was my son, not his.”
If I’d been a man and not a boy, I would have asked him the obvious question: Was he?
But I wasn’t a man, so I didn’t.
“So he killed her,” said my dad. Behind him, my aunty cried tears of molten gold, which puddled on the dais, gilding it.
“I didn’t know it then,” he said. “They were journeying the lowlands. He said she’d run away. On my journeys of Instruction, I thought I once saw her from a distance. But it must have been her ka in mournful wandering.
“Your mother never believed his story, but I did. And I was too stupid to listen to her about him.
“Oh, I had great plans, son, vast notions on how to change the world, teach everyone the righteous path, Instruct them in my way, which I knew was the way. So I left. I abandoned my wife. And that gave—I gave—my brother all the time he needed to—well. To prepare.”
He crushed me against him, kissing my head again and again.
“I’m so sorry, son.”
I was a boy, but even as a boy I knew the power of those words. Had anyone had ever said them to me?
They were a balm on the burns that covered me.
“Here. I have something for you.” He reached behind his throne. It was a linen satchel.
“Open it,” he said, smiling.
I cupped the contents in my small hands. Tiny gemstones, black and rainbow. Sparkling.
“I’m just glad my Master found you,” he said, cupping my cheek.
And again, because I was a child, I didn’t ask what he meant, or any of the million questions whose answers a son should seek after learning something like that.
But mostly, I didn’t ask because I was again trapped by the terrifying eyes of my uncle. Even here, standing right next to my father in this house of stars, there was fury-hatred erupting from his eyes like pus, like he couldn’t wait to start his treachery again, to trap and hack my father again, to drive my mother into exile again, to enslave thousands again, to defile me again—and that if he could, he’d do it all forever and ever, to all men and women and girls and boys, throughout the universe.
“Daddy!” I grabbed his arm even tighter. “Why do let him stay here with you? Can’t you make him go away forever?”
“No,” he said. “And son, as difficult as this is for you to understand . . . and you will, one day . . . even if I could, I wouldn’t.”
He lifted me from his lap, stood me down. Old scars crept back across my body like slugs returning home. Muscles swole like hills born from earthquakes.
I blocked my uncle’s murderous glare and aunty’s tragic face, and said goodbye to my mother, who smiled at me and blew me a kiss.
“I love you, my son,” said one of them. Or both.
“Now . . . return to the world of tears.”
6.
At sunrise, all of us sojourners took chalices or bowls or hands, knelt before what was once the Swamps of Death, and drank our fill from the River of Life, the Eternal River that now flowed free from Cradle to the Great Green Sea.
We unfurled our sails and let the winds, like a mother’s tender hands, carry us upriver towards the Cradle.
And everywhere we stopped, I planted black and rainbow stones, and maize sprouted, and we feasted, and lotus blossomed, and we made perfumes and balms.
7.
It took us twenty years to raise the Golden Temple that Master Jehu had commissioned me to build.
But finally it stood, glorious in perfect geometry and flawless in its masonry, a sunrise on the earth itself.
When I sat upon my throne, I thought of whom I’d been. A refugee. A ranger in the Savage Lands. An acolyte of a dreaming madman in the wilderness, a visionary, a god-beholder. A killer who decapitated his own mother. An atoning labourer. A general. An avenger of his own father. And a king.
I made laws from that throne, and rendered judgements from it. I ordered men to their deaths while sitting in it. I prayed inside it for righteousness, for justice, and for mercy.
I begged the gods to keep us pure, to keep us dedicated enough to gird and gild our fortress walls, to keep them beaming light out to the world, to keep our fortress gates open for all the orphans running terrified from evil men who hunted them for sport or hate or lust. To keep our gates as open arms for everyone who wept, for those who hid their faces, and for those who’d sunk down.
I prayed to them to keep the Golden Fortress from the claws of wisemen, warlocks, and warriors who’d commission priests to compose poems to the glory of pyrite and coat the fortress walls with it, while keeping all the gold for themselves and their idols.
For the Destroyer never died. He lives forever, at the right shoulder of my father. And he can come at any time, or be us if we let him, to rule any palace as his own.
I prayed to them that if that day should ever come, to have the strength to burn our Fortress to the ground.
And then I set to build the Golden Fortress, as ceaselessly as the stars sail the skies, for eternity.
****
So, Duamutef, Hãpi, Imset and Qebehsunuef, my sons strong and good and loyal. You were there for much of what I�
�ve just told you. Is that how you remembered it?
How much of what I said was wrong?
I’m glad you feel that way.
I pray you’re right.
The Book of Now
1.
Cold, dark, but still no snow. Clouds chiseled the stars from the sky, and city lights frosted it navy blue.
And on the street, inside yellow DO NOT CROSS tape and in front of the Hyper-Market’s blackened corpse, flocked Falcons.
Scarves. Toques. Long coats. Puffy jackets.
Gritted teeth. Boiled eyes. Sopping Kleenex.
Gloved hands gripping candles flickering, flickering inside 2L pop bottles cut in half, necks for holders.
Jackal, with a hoist, stood on shoulders of muscled Senwusret. Balanced, leaning on the wall above the still-standing door frame.
Raptor handed him the battery-powered drill and the thick book.
Jackal, deck screws between his lips, taking one at time, drilling the four corners of the yellow-covered tome against the black wall. Raptor, handing him up the wooden laser-etching and one more screw.
And Jackal descended, anointed in soot.
Raptor, gut like magma rupturing into ocean brine. Steam erupting up his gullet, out his nostrils. Eyes floating in sulfuric acid.
Over there, Ãnkhur, Sen next to her, his arm around her. Her head in his chest. Sen’s glove smearing across his own eyes, and again.
Raptor, kneeling beside a destroyed wall, four small ceramic jars out of his back-pack. Each one with a face painted on it: a man’s. A baboon’s. A jackal’s. A falcon’s.
Placed them and their scrolls inside the ruins.
Sekhmet, the Rwandan girl with French accent, standing in the shen and holding her pop-bottle candle, her face above it, and the hiss as its flame died, drowned by water droplets, and the light in her face went out, replaced by smoke.
The Alchemists of Kush Page 42
