Grace

by Calvin Baker

  The group recoiled or else thrilled to the sight of blood, according to their makeup, but were all primed and eager for more.

  “Gazelle gets away, life continues. Leopard gets gazelle, life continues,” Ali planed his hand evenly.

  “Look, there’s another leopard, up in that tree,” someone called, as Ali brought the lorry to a halt.

  We were stopped there beneath it for upward of half an hour, as the leopard slept through the hot afternoon, and the rest snapped endless pictures of the cat, and then pictures of themselves with the leopard in the background.

  We spent two more days on the savannah like that, and every day was like the one before it. But Sylvie was happy, and what pleasure I had was in that.

  The evening of the third day, as we headed back to camp for the night, the plain was heading to water and eat or else den down hungry. We stopped near a large mudhole, where the hippopotamus and okapi cooled themselves in herd, but suddenly all scattered amid a chaos of bleats and cries, as a dark rumble rolled low and powerful through the earth.

  On the other side of the mudhole two colossal lions were circling one another, backing up toward the water. They were uninterested in prey. Off to the other side, a lioness in estrous watched them with supreme indifference.

  The lions displayed their manes in turn, escalating the threat in stages until they filled the plains with echoing thunder, which terrified everything within hearing. Even at our distance, with the protection of the truck and guards, we feared being any nearer. The hair of their manes extended on end, until they were present in all their unbridled power and savage majesty.

  One of them sprung an instant later, and it was clear, as they fought there, it was not for anything but the abundance of the future, which waited stoically for the hero of that contest, whichever of them it was. Even those in the truck were too awestruck by their battle to wager on it.

  The titans rose and fought in the air on uplifted legs with gruesome ferocity, each clawing for the throat of his opponent, before crashing back to the earth, where they fought ever more violently in the dust. It was not long before one of them began to fade, the other to triumph over him. The vanquishing lion, sensing his victory, let loose a thunderous roar in the red evening sun, declaring his dominion over the plain and right to ride further on down time’s arrow.

  When he roared next his foe did not respond, but began stealing away in defeat. The alpha would not let him part, though, until he had sealed his conquest with a coup de grâce, which he did in a swift brutal blow that left the other denatured. The hero went off with the lioness after that; the other, back into the dry savannah grass to die.

  The others snapped away with their cameras, never taking them down from their faces the entire time. Sylvie was gripped between watching and turning away in distress.

  “It’s horrific,” she said, her face twisted in pain. “We should not be seeing this.”

  “It is the jungle,” I shrugged my hands. “It is what we are here to see.”

  “Now I have seen it. I am ready to leave.”

  Ali heard her, and turned the engine and headed back to camp, as the others still thrilled and cooed like pigeons at what they had seen.

  “When the lion goes off with the lioness they make love three days. Thirty times every day, and do not eat,” Ali reported over the drumming motor.

  “That is why they fought so hard,” the others joked, as they reviewed the footage they had shot.

  “What will happen to the one who lost?”

  “He will die. Or if he lives he will lose his mane, and it is a bad life for him after that.”

  “That poor fellow,” said Effie. “Isn’t it awful, Edward?”

  “I only hope,” Edward said, still looking behind us to the lion in the grass, “when he had them, he let them swing a bit from time to time.”

  At camp there was a fire prepared, and the smell of roasting meat, which warmed against the oncoming chill. It was our last night at that station, so we were permitted showers to cleanse the red savannah dust, as the evening sun departed.

  While Sylvie wrote in her journal, I returned to the campfire, where the others were already gathered, drinking the last of the cool beers, which Ali had put out.

  “How did Ms. Sylvie like the big show?” Ali asked, coming over to where I was seated.

  “She liked it fine, Ali.”

  “What about you, sahib? You didn’t like it so hot?”

  “It was something to see.”

  “You cannot let the others bother you so much, boss. Just focus on the land. On the first day you see the green and golds. On the first night the moon and stars. On the second day you hear the birds and insects. On the third day you can see the difference between the types of plants and rocks. On the fourth day the insects no longer bother you. If you stay out here long enough and look the right way, you will eventually be able to see everything and how connected it is. The rest won’t bother you so much then.”

  “Thanks, Ali.”

  “You hear what happened in the north?” One of the Coalition cut us off, coming over to where we were.

  “No?”

  “They are all done for,” he said. “They sent in planes from Brussels, and those rebel boys have nowhere left to run.”

  We gossiped until the beer was exhausted, and someone produced a bottle of the local spirit and passed it around the fire. The others added it to their chai, not knowing a bad bottle of the stuff could blind you.

  We had dinner together sitting on dry logs, reliving the day’s adventure, until one of the Coalition produced a ukulele and started playing it, not too horribly, but he started trying to sing and had no voice. Sylvie and I slipped away after that, as they began to carry on under the stars.

  From our tent in the trees we heard Effie sing a Gaelic dirge as we tried to sleep, and I thought less meanly of them for it, and was even happy for the music.

  We remained awake deep into morning, whispering and laughing idly under the stars, until I shifted myself toward her beneath the covers.

  “You still want to, after what we saw today?” Sylvie asked, moving away from me.

  “I do,” I said.

  “It was awful how he suffered,” she said.

  “He got to lord over things awhile,” I replied. “It should not stop us from making love.”

  “Maybe,” she allowed, as I cupped her breasts in my hands, “but only if we make love all the way.”

  “I thought we always made love all the way.”

  “That is not what I mean,” she answered, moving her body back toward mine.

  Her voice in the darkness was clear and sultry, and I felt her pelvis move under mine, until I could feel each vertebrae.

  “Come,” she said. “Make love to me all the way.”

  “I will,” I told her.

  “Until we make the world again?” she asked.

  “No one can make the world again.”

  “I feel divine tonight. Don’t you think it would be beautiful to make the world again?”

  I thought how magnificent that would be. We made love and I told her we could try to make the world again. If we succeeded or even if we did not, it was beautiful and good to try. Again and again we tried.

  33

  We were spooled under the warm covers, still deep in the transparent hour of sleep, when the breakfast bell rang. We rose reluctantly into the morning chill, and climbed down to eat. We were moving up into the highlands that morning, which would entail a day’s travel, so there was a full breakfast of hen’s eggs, fried bacon, pineapples, blood fruit, sweet bananas, ugali, and bread toasted in the fire then slathered with raw cream butter.

  Sylvie was trying to give up meat, but savored the smell of frying bacon as we sat on the night-damp logs and ate around the morning fire. It was still before sunrise when we finished, and barely light when we climbed into the lorry with our gear for the long drive across the country.

  Instead of taking the main road,
which would have consumed most of the day and taken us first back to the capital, the truck cut crow-wise through the countryside, so that we would reach our new base camp, up in the foothills of the mountains, by lunchtime.

  The massive wheels made short work of the dusty road, and it was impressive to see the sixty-year-old vehicle still so reliable. The high beams carved a path through the morning fog, as the wheels found the ruts of a desired path the truck had etched out on previous journeys over the trail.

  “It will last another hundred years,” Ali boasted, driving with the genial self-possession of a man at ease in his world, as he began to tell the story of how he had driven the truck from Europe, across the top of Africa five years earlier, to get his start in life.

  When he saw we were still full of sleep, however, and did not need to be entertained, he fell into an equally good-natured silence. I had thought him a buffoon when we met, but had grown to understand he was not even an extrovert, but a quiet man, wearing the mask the world required of him, and trying to make a virtue of that. When the world was not there he slipped his mask right back off, as easily as coming home from the office, and the man he was beneath did not suffer too great a harm from carrying the burden for the man he presented to the outside.

  Sylvie rested her head on my lap, and I propped myself against the side of the truck, in a not too uncomfortable position, as we absorbed the juts and bounces of the road, until we eventually fell in the rhythm of our own breathing, and were able to fall back asleep.

  I do not know how long we had been dozing, but time passed until we were roused by a violent jolt, bringing the truck to an abrupt halt. We had struck a cement barrier, hidden in the fog, and could see shadowy figures in the road up ahead, surrounding the lorry and speaking brusquely to Ali in one of the local languages.

  I peered out the side rail, and was able to make out a group of men in military fatigues, brandishing a ragtag assortment of Russian, American, and Chinese rifles and machine guns.

  “What is happening?” Sylvie asked, rousing from sleep.

  Before I could answer, one of the men fired his rifle in the air, and pulled a dazed Ali from his seat. The rest of the bandits quickly streamed around back, where they trained their guns up at us, and began mounting the sides of the truck.

  As the first of them boarded, Edward, who was nearest him, swung his pack like a shield into the soldier’s midsection, sending him sprawling to the ground.

  From the road one of the others let loose a staccato burst of rounds, which struck Edward hard in the chest. His blood spattered, and all afterward was the high shriek of terror in the ear, snapping each of us aware of nothing else but our own mortality.

  They climbed quickly inside the lorry then, dragging Ali up behind them, as the one up front took over control of the wheel. None of us spoke when the engine restarted. They trained their guns at our heads, before throwing Edward’s lifeless body down onto the plains, abandoning it in the dirt.

  The vehicle gained speed, moving still in the direction of the mountains in the distance, above the cloud layer, as Effie shrieked in protest.

  “We hereby requisition this vehicle in the name of the Army of the Revelation,” one of them said, nervelessly ignoring her cries. “If you do not resist, no harm will befall you. If you do—” He looked toward the body in the path behind us.

  “You killed my husband,” Effie sobbed violently. “You killed my husband.”

  “You have driven into our territory,” he replied.

  Ali looked away guiltily, but dared not say anything.

  “He was a good man,” Effie challenged with the authority of her grief. “We haven’t done anything. We are innocent.”

  He laughed. “There are no innocents. Only those too ignorant to see.”

  “We don’t even know what your bloody war is about.”

  “You are American,” he replied, not really caring what her nationality was. She was of the West. Effie was wise enough not to correct him. “You are in every war, and never know what they are beyond your own narrow interests, which you tell yourselves are justified that you are saving women from their men. Children from their way of life. One helpless brown body from another savage brown body. Isn’t that right? By the great, loving hand of democracy. This was the lie of colonization, and you never tire of believing your own lie, which you now masquerade in a different play. It is ever the same. First you divide neighbors; then you divide families. But before any of this you must divide the person from himself. One so divided would do anything to himself, or his people, as the leaders you have imposed on us have. But if a man enslaves his own people, it is because he is a slave himself. Now we are a country ruled by your slaves.

  “You have your own politics and your own histories of the world, and with these you replace men and women. But your world has forgotten the truth Rome taught to you, and your progenitors certainly knew: The only way to colonize a people is absolutely and for all eternity. If you do not have the stomach for that you are only stirring mischief. Freedom comes only through the voice and will and blood of the people themselves. Everything else is jerry-built. But you do not care what happens anywhere, so long as your dogs do your bidding. We choose to be men. Free and alive in our own country, or else dead and free in the earth.”

  “Fuck your bloody war. You killed my husband. You killed my husband!” She screamed in anguish of what only moments ago had been her life.

  “If we have made a mistake, and your husband is collateral damage—I have lost many, so I know your pain,” he said in a tone all the more disquieting for seeming sincere, as he looked at her with an eerie compassion.

  “Monster,” she screamed.

  “Tell me what your custom is, and how much it will take to make you whole, or else, if you prefer, I will find you a new husband,” he laughed.

  Her tears subsided after that, overwhelmed by the fear of his threat. Her breathing was still erratic, though, until it seemed she might come apart completely. His menace and the dead man had cowed the rest, so that no one else spoke, or made eye contact, or tried to comfort her, until Ali spoke up.

  “I am sorry, ma’am,” he said. “It is my fault.”

  “It is not your fault, Ali,” Effie answered, releasing him.

  “My job is to get you there safely, but I got us captured. I was shortcutting. Now look what I have done.”

  “You put your own road where there was none but you needed a road to be. They just ambushed us, is all.”

  “Quiet,” they commanded from the rails of the speeding truck, where they had entwined themselves like malevolent vines.

  In the commotion I slipped the bracelet I always wore from my wrist over to Sylvie’s, as we clasped hands. It was a string of different-colored wooden beads, I had picked up long ago, which she pressed her palm over, then began fingering like a rosary. Her head pressed tight into my chest.

  “What is going to happen?” she whispered.

  “We will be fine,” I held her wrist. “Try to stay calm. But if anything too bad happens, the center one opens.”

  “What is in it?”

  “A cyanide pill,” I said. “If anything unspeakable happens, and we are not fine, eat it. But only if things are so bad you think there is no other way home.”

  34

  We rode along silently as the drought-stricken plains turned to green hills, and the hills gave way to the gray mountain mist, with the peak of Mount Clarel, their last redoubt, poking up through the clouds. The angled light of the dying sun fell on us like their slanted guns, as our pulses tensed and beat faster in the cobalt air, and the soldiers watched like esurient hawks in the silence.

  Our only measure of security was our value to them. We were their pawns and their insurance, to be dealt out and traded for safe passage in dire straits; sold for ransom, for food, for guns; or else deployed as shields to guard them, like talismans, from incoming fire.

  Not that they believed they needed shields. They had other tal
ismans, believing themselves to be protected from bullets by magical spirits, whose protection had been invoked with the ceremonial sprinkling of waters from the lake, applied to each soldier in turn by their commander when they first joined that army.

  For some this magic seemed to work. They were not dead. The soldiers guarding us were the last of these, the final survivors from the bedraggled group of insurgents who had been in the field near three generations, as the men whose talismans failed them were used up. The wants of the war morphed with each successive generation in the field, and the war they inherited from their fathers’ fathers was as different as their allies from outside, until they had no allies left, only themselves, and their reasons for fighting were no longer coherent, only the pent-up emotions of three generations of war and bloodshed and betrayal and still no satisfaction for their claims. They had been fighting since before any other part of the continent rebelled, and before the larger world rolled itself into the tumult, like dice, to find vengeance or oblivion in the chaos. Land to feed themselves, cloth to cover themselves, materials to build the machines of their desires and destinies, new dogmas to soothe their complaints, new ideology they might seduce themselves into believing to replace the ones that had come before, all were slaughtered when the magic of their talismans failed. They would fight from that mountain until the last talisman of the last man flickered out and perished.

  Their first leader had been a notorious man, called Achilles Asha, who was taken from his village as an eight-year-old by priests, who came and snatched all the first-born children from that part of the country, after a minor rebellion led the colonial rulers to send the priests to help extinguish it.

  There were no birth records and Achilles, second of twelve, was home while his brother was at pasture with the herds. His parents put him forth for sacrifice instead.

  The children they abducted were then dealt out in the capital like playing cards, and Achilles ended with a group of Jesuit missionaries, where he was trained to someday return to help convert the others. By eighteen he had accepted this fate, until one night, as he read in the library, he found a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, and it was like speaking to like; self communing with self without interdiction. Corpus and spiritus joined. Song of his own song. What was boy became warrior.