The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

The kettle whistled.

  Old Man Maã hotted the pot, dropped enough loose leaves into a massive tea ball for everyone around the table.

  Tea steeped. They cleared dishes, washed and dried them together, except for Seshat who’d prepared the meal.

  5.

  Next day. At the airport. Kiya, Raptor, Araweelo, and Raptor.

  Raptor, waving goodbye to Ptah without offering him a handshake.

  But he held out his collected edition of Static, one of his few possessions that wasn’t burned since he’d been transporting it from his mother’s place to Moon’s on the night of fire.

  Hadn’t had much choice in clothes for the same reason, until the Falcons got together with some hand-me-overs and a Zeller’s gift certificate.

  Ptah, shaking his head, trembling. “I have to pay for things I want!”

  “It’s okay, Pete,” soothed Kiya. “When someone gives you a gift, then it’s the right thing to do, to take it. You just say thank you.”

  “Thank you for the gift, Raptor.” Took it. Kept away from Raptor’s fingers.

  “You’re welcome.” Relieved.

  Kiya, looking more like Zoe Saldana than ever now that she was finally smiling, leaned down slightly to hug Raptor.

  Wasn’t Moon’s daughter genetically, but somehow he saw Moon’s face in hers, and felt suddenly wrong. Like watching his own sister in a bikini.

  Plus, there was ’Noot.

  Asked her to stay in touch via Facebook. Promised she would.

  “Uncle Maã said you wanted to study Law,” said Kiya. “You should think about coming to Minneapolis. There are some great law schools there. Or Howard. I might go there, too.”

  Shocked at her implication. “Thanks.”

  “I liked what Seshat said about that story,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  Her smile, gone. “I was angry at Moon for such a long time,” she said. “My mother lied to me about him. And when I found out she lied, I mean, I guess I’d kinda known for a while . . . but, I just, I felt so stupid and ashamed, it was just easier to stay mad than switch.”

  He nodded a been there.

  “Do you think—I mean, I never even wrote back to all the letters he sent me, even after I found them in my mother’s closet. Do you think he—”

  “He absolutely loved you, Kiya. No question.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and hugged him tight, and then took her brother and flew away.

  “C’mon, Mr. Bootiful,” said his mother, and they walked out with her arm round his waist and his round her shoulders.

  In the parking lot, inside the car. Engine on, heat flowing.

  His mum didn’t put the car in the drive.

  Raptor finally turned on the stereo. Pharoah Sanders was on the deck. “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” Just starting . . . the bells and then the bass line. A long one—display was clicking down from 9:02 . . . .

  Let that agonising joy ring out in the silent car, while inside his head he wrote out a scroll, crumpled it, and tried again a dozen times while Sanders’ tenor sax soared skyward.

  Finally.

  Didn’t have a clue what else to say. Or how to say it.

  “Mum . . . ” he croaked, “you’ve lost . . . so much . . . . ”

  They crushed each other in their arms, gear shift and CD compartment between them. Ignoring the interference.

  When the CD finally shifted to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” Araweelo put the car in gear, and they drove away.

  6.

  Snow coming down. Him texting on the highway back into town.

  So when they got to Al Hambra, ’Noot was already waiting for him in a heavy coat at the door.

  His mother, smiling. Staying in the car while he got out. Said she was “going out for groceries.”

  He smiled back.

  Inside. Sitting, drinking President’s Choice cola. And neither saying anything.

  Till Raptor turned to her.

  “It was pretty dumb of me to talk about visualising us married.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But it was still sweet.”

  “If we’re gonna . . . be boyfriend and girlfriend” (nearly choked on the words) “it’s gonna be tough. You know that, right? With your family?”

  She sniff-laughed. “You hardly have to tell me that.”

  He chuckled.

  “But I’m happy,” said ’Noot, “that you want to. You know. Try.” She wet her lips. “So what changed?”

  “I talked with Brother Moon . . . before he died.” Deep breath. “He helped me . . . work through some things.”

  She didn’t ask for an explanation. Just nodded.

  “There’s this one poem,” he said, “in one of the last books Moon was ever reading. He had it bookmarked. I can’t remember the whole thing, but . . . . ”

  “Please!” she said. “Tell me!”

  He was lying. He’d memorised the entire poem for her. It was the sonnet “Courage” by Claude McKay. His recitation reached its peak:

  But in the socket-chiseled teeth of strife,

  That gleam in serried files in all the lands,

  We may join hungry, understanding hands,

  And drink our share of ardent love and life.

  His heart, shooting thunder up his arteries into his eardrums and his brain.

  But he’d been transformed.

  The trembling was no longer from terror, but from anticipation.

  She touched his hands. He touched her cheek.

  She didn’t kiss him, and he didn’t kiss her.

  They kissed each other.

  And she tasted like red delicious.

  7.

  Raptor and Jackal, to all the world inseparable, roamed Khair-em-Nubt in the light and falling snow, chatting up any young brother or sister they met after disarming them with smiles.

  Noted names and faces of everyone who gleamed, and if they ever met again and if the gleam was still there or greater, then they’d grant them Resurrection Scrolls.

  In fact that day, they did run into four kids, two sets of siblings, they’d twice before encountered while out “mining.” So Raptor and Jackal gave them each a scroll, Jackal joking when he saw their confused faces, “Don’be smoking them, neither!”

  One girl, opening up her scroll right there, seeing hieroglyphs and the alphanumeric code beneath the Grand Seal of the Alchemical Order, ooed and said, “Cool!”

  Raptor named their website and told them to check out ’Noot’s latest reading list (containing the novel he’d been reading, Allah is Not Obliged). And then they continued on their way and their labours.

  8.

  At the Dinka youth club house—barely a hallway with chairs—Raptor grabbed the door handle

  “Fuh real?” said Jackal. “That’s great.”

  Inside, tall, skinny, dark-skinned South Sudanese, not only Dinka but Nuer and Nubian.

  Raptor tried out a few phrases in Dinka, chatting up some young men and saying he was available to help tutor younger kids and offer English help to anyone who needed it.

  On the street, Jackal said, “Since when do you speak Dinka? That was Dinka, right?’

  “My mum’s been teaching me.”

  “Geo, man! Damn, been meaning to tell you. Show you, actually. Found this a few days ago. Doing some etymology for teaching summa these eggs.”

  Raptor took out his Android, thumbed, showed Raptor:

  Raphael. Masc. proper name, Biblical archangel (Apocrypha), from L.L., from Gk. Hraphael, from Heb. Rephael, lit. “God has healed” from rapha “he healed” + el “God.”

  Raptor looked back up. Didn’t know what was on his face. Wasn’t even sure what was coursing up and down his spine. But felt it crackling.

  Jackal smiled again, big enough to shoot sparks. “You’re welcome.”

  9.

  Walked the long distance across Khair-em-Nubt and then up to Khair-em-Ãnkh-Tawy.

  Stopped in front of Data Salvation Laboratories.
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br />   The DSL’d survived the fire, mostly, and was back open for business, still staffed by the quiet Rwandan brother Hakizimana, still owned by Moon’s partners Seshat and Old Man Maã with a third share owned by Moon’s estate.

  Whoever’d torched the Hyper-Market and the Street Laboratory didn’t know about the DSL—or ran out of time destroy it.

  “This is where got resurrected,” said Jackal.

  Raptor nodded.

  “I love you, JC,” he said.

  Jackal looked—not embarrassed—but stunned.

  “I love you, too, Rap.”

  They hugged each other, a shenu of two.

  0.

  Moon, Raptor and Jackal. Standing in the glory of a prairie dawn. Birds chirping, cat tails absolutely still in the sweet, cool air.

  At the very edge of hearing, first bees of spring: a string-section tuning before a performance.

  To the east, a slough: sapphire beneath the sky.

  Not a desert, like where so many religions had been born, where mountains and forests couldn’t distract the soul from the blatancy of heaven and earth. But its living counterpart, the prairie, its gently rolling sway a tide on the schedule of God’s long day.

  “Takes a subtle eye to see this,” Moon’d told them so many times that they’d started rolling their eyes about it.

  In the slough. Tadpoles swimming, dreaming of legs and freedom. On the field, a hare, ears back. Motionless.

  Moon, smiled at it all, then even more when he saw the falcon ranging above them.

  At a clear patch, they set up their launch pad for their three-stage rockets and set off two, and then the final one.

  Raptor: “Seems like a rip-off.”

  Moon’s face: horrified.

  Jackal: “You crazy? We did all this work building these things, Brother Moon drives us out here at six in the morning—”

  “Wait a second, wait a second! You didn’let me finish! I don’t mean this trip is a rip. Thanks, Brother Moon. I meant . . . . ”

  Pointed up at the first and second stage rockets, coming down with parachutes. Far lower than the third stage on its slow and downward drift.

  Raptor, riffing: “Look at em. I mean, those lower stages did all the work to get the third stage up that high, hit the zenith, take pictures from way up there like it’s crashing some angel party, then come back like a hero after the war. Or like a scientist after one of those eureka days in the lab. Mr. Third Stage gets all the glory, and what do they get?”

  Waited for the old man to join with jokes.

  But Moon said nothing.

  Suddenly, upon the horizon, the sun was born.

  Moon’s face, gold. His eyes, amber.

  They looked up where he was looking, into the sky for that third-stager.

  The first- and second-stages were halfway to ground, but they couldn’t see the final rocket which had merged with the solar brilliance.

  Moon: “Don’t worry about them, young bruh. They knew what they were doing.”

  The Book

  of the

  Golden Falcon

  The First Arit,

  also called Resurrection

  The boy rescues himself and

  other children from night raiders

  1 The boy awoke upon his reed mat to screams of men in the night. 2 Around him, fire thrashed and consumed the grove of trees, and beyond the circle of children, men staggered with arrows in their necks, and sword-gashes in their bellies, and where they fell, the sand drank their blood. 3 The boy screamed for his mother, and his screams rose like smoke to blacken the stars, but his mother did not come.

  4 And all the children woke, and screamed, for from the chaos came men with murderous knives, and fingers cruel, to slay them all.

  5 Seeing them screaming, the boy yelled to rally them, and they fell behind him in a line, and with his only utterance of power, turned them into shadows who passed beyond the flames. 6 And as shades they waded from the eastern bank through the shallows of the river, found the island in the darkness, and hid in the gullets of caves, where hares dwelled. 7 There they stayed as shades until the dawn, when the bats returned, and until night when the bats left again to hunt, and through another rising and another setting of the sun.

  8 On the third morning, the boy spoke his words-of-power, and the children were made flesh again, and they emerged from the cave to gaze across the river at their smouldering camp, which stank from the burnt meat of men. 9 Hyenas laughed there, and vultures frolicked, and tugged again and again to reveal the bones of the slaughtered.

  10 The children were behind him, crying, “May these hunters never gain mastery over us! May we never fall under their knives!” 11 And the boy, fearing for himself and for them, led them across the shallows to the western bank, and from there they crept and fell to stillness among the reeds and lotus, like rabbits when an eagle blots the sun. 12 And they wandered, lost, afraid, hungry, wounded, and sobbing, past ravaged houses, past bludgeoned bodies, past gutted animals, past burnt crops.

  13 And the boy looked upon the ruins, and asked, “Who is this Destroyer upon the lands?”

  The Second Arit,

  also called Revolution

  The children are swallowed

  by the Devourer of Millions of Souls

  1 In the third month of flight and foraging on the west bank of the river, the boy hatched a plan of revolt against the Destroyer and his men of murderous knives and fingers cruel.

  2 The children gathered the tools of fallen farmers, and sharpened them against rocks, and practiced the way of war until the night when they would rise invincibly like the moon.

  3 But the men of murderous knives and fingers cruel fell upon them, butchered the smallest and the slowest, and chased the others to the river before the boy could turn them into shadows.

  4 Then the Devourer of Millions of Souls rose from the waters, and swallowed the boy and all the survivors in his following. And the terrified murderers fled like hyenas before lions, and the Devourer submerged to the deeps.

  5 The boy and the children wailed their terror in the stench and darkness of the belly of the Devourer, and they were thrown upon each other like knackered bones in the slaughtering yards.

  6 And for seven days, the boy grasped at a rotten fang in the monster’s mouth, and pulled at it with his every strength, crying in rage until he was weak, until those in his following joined him in his labour for freedom.

  7 On the seventh day, the fighters broke off the fang, and the Devourer swam up from the depths, and in a rage spat the children upon the mud and reeds before returning to the dark below, while the boy still grasped the monster’s sundered tooth.

  8 The boy was afraid, for he was in a land that he knew not, and yet he felt the curse of the shallows around him, and told the survivors in his following, “Before the sunset, we must find water, food and a hiding place.”

  9 But the children, being in the agony of fear and thirst, drank of the cursed waters. And some choked and died before they fell.

  10 Others staggered from the mire, groaning as they did, scum-armoured, their eyes like the charcoal of a week-old hearth. For the tendrils of the depths had sucked their souls from them, lodged them in the bottom-mud and slime like sunken pots. He called to them, but they heard him not.

  11 So it was the boy said, “What Swamps of Death are these!”

  12 And hearing the cackling hunters with their murderous knives and their fingers cruel, he fled, alone, into the night.

  The Third Arit,

  also called Triumph

  The boy meets a second ranger

  in the Savage Lands

  1 The boy gathered reeds and branches, weaving himself a home hidden among vines, and transformed himself to shadows against the beasts and men who stalked him.

  2 In the night, he heard the screams of children, and so he slipped from his nest to find those who had fallen from his following.

  3 He beheld them drinking from the cursed waters, whereupon
the largest attacked those beneath them, and they in turn attacked the smallest, whom they threw into the Swamps of Death to drown.

  4 The boy cast off his shadows, confronted the brutal congregation, and dragged the smallest child from the waters where the reeds clutched like hungry fingers. The vicious, swamp-mad children fled, not from the boy-protector’s wrath, but from the crocodile legion descending then upon them.

  5 With the Devourer’s sundered fang in both his hands, he cleaved the foremost crocodile’s head in two. Yet to wield his weapon so, he’d released the rescued child, whom the other scaled and thrashing fiends then shredded into bone and blood inside their vengeful maws.

  6 And the boy, abandoned and alone, fled the Swamps of Death, and returned to his nest in darkness.

  7 When next arose the sun, the boy emerged to forage and to range, and from a distance spied the lifeless march of bound and fettered children by the thousand.

  8 Witnessing their damnable procession, he saw their brutal guardians break the bones of some for grim amusement before casting dozens into mines of lead and glinting pyrite.

  9 Still others, chainsmen led to fields so as to join the sun-whipped toil of ten thousand others digging, planting, pulling in the rock and sand and soil.

  10 The last and largest of the lifeless children drank from skins the bondsmen poured out for them, scum-choked filth drawn from the Swamps of Death. And they were handed hatchets, pikes, and daggers, conscripted into soldiering until released by severing of their limbs or lives.

  11 And understanding rescue of all these conquered innocents was beyond his means as child with but a single weapon and without allies, he returned to his nest hungry, and lying down to rest, he wept.

  12 The sun rose, and during his forage he found a batch of eggs. Two were smashed, their insides feasted on by unknown creatures, yet the third egg was whole, and the boy took it for his meal. But in his hands the shell cracked open, and from it pushed a falcon chick, calling hroo-hroo, hroo-hroo.