by Dilman Dila
Behind him, Acii fought with the rope. It had become serpentine, and was squeezing the boy, like a python trying to crush prey. She was still an eagle, her talons between the boy’s flesh and the rope. The black substance cleared from the sky, allowing her to use lightning. She struck the rope, at a point that might have been the snake’s tail, setting it on fire. The rope released the boy. It dropped to the ground and burnt to ash.
Acii took the boy in one claw and flew back up the street. His parents were still leaning out of the window, praying for Oks to spare him. Acii put him in their outstretched hands, and they pulled him into the safety of the room. Then she returned to the rooftop and changed into a little girl.
Benge found her panting in exhaustion, her body bruised from the fight. She bled above her eyes. He touched the wound. The bleeding stopped and the cut slowly vanished.
“Are you ok?” he said.
She nodded. “I just need to catch my breath,” she said.
#
Though most of them had stayed hidden and did not see it happen, the second attack convinced many of the conservatives that Benge had nothing to do with Raluf’s disappearance. Chalina and his wife, whose son he had saved, spoke of how he fought against the evil carriage. The testimony did not win the Oksians over, but it at least compelled them to listen to Benge.
“It’s a Cuku sorcerer,” he said. “A man you all know. Kasito.”
He stood in the middle of the road, between the temple and the courthouse, with the two factions on their respective sides, still wielding arrow guns.
“Liar,” someone said. “We Cuku don’t use magic.”
“It’s you backward slaves who use magic,” another person said.
“Kasito is a good Oksian,” the priest said.
Kasito was the only Cuku in town who did not own slaves. He used robots to run his farm. He lived alone with three sons. He attended Oksian rituals every week, and was often the largest contributor whenever the priest needed funds to run temple activities.
“You’ll find the boy in his basement,” Benge said. “They’ll turn him into a robot to work the farm for the rest of his life. All of his robots were once people.”
A murmur of disbelief rippled through the town.
“The boy is alive because he has a big scar on his back,” Benge continued, again projecting his voice above the murmur. “Kasito wanted him for a sacrifice to an ancient power that you know as Wiir. It can only work if he offers a young boy without any scars or missing body parts, that’s why he attempted to take another kid today. I could go out there to fight him, but then you’d never believe me. So go see for yourselves.”
With that, he walked out of town, leaving them in a thick silence.
He did not go back home. He settled under a mango tree and opened his inner eyes and ears to follow what happened next. The psychic current had told him everything about Kasito, a sorcerer who hated Oksism because it destroyed the world. Forests were vanishing, animals were becoming extinct, the climate was changing at an alarming rate, all because Oksism made people believe this world was not their home. Kasito wanted power to defeat Oksism, to make people see that paradise was the world they lived in, not a mythical place beyond the stars. The dramatic kidnaps were his first shots in the war against Oksism. His cause was noble, but he thirsted for the power of the gods. He wanted the power to make the sun stand still, to wipe out stars and change the shape of the moon. He believed he could achieve it through human sacrifice.
The mayor prevailed upon the town to, at least, search Kasito’s house. The two sides then stopped their war, formed a posse and sped to the cotton farm. The priest and the mayor rode beside each other, ahead of forty volunteers. Acii followed the posse as an eagle, watching from amidst the clouds. A robot opened the farm gate. The men sped through miles of cotton to the red house. They found Kasito, his three sons, and Raluf, waiting on the front porch.
“I can’t believe this,” the priest said.
“Well,” Kasito said. “You won’t believe that you worship a false god either.”
“Oks is not a false god,” the priest said.
Kasito smiled. “Look,” he said. “Let’s not fight. We’ve been friends all our lives and I don’t want to kill anyone. Here is the boy. He is unharmed. Take him away. In the morning, we’ll be gone. Me, my sons, and the farm. When you return you’ll find nothing but a wilderness. We’ll start a new life very far away from here.”
“You –” the priest started to say something, maybe to insist on Kasito burning at the grate in front of the temple, but the words could not come out.
“We’ll publish your picture in the news,” the mayor said. “The whole world will know what you did. Wherever you go, they’ll know you are evil. They’ll lynch you.”
Kasito shrugged. “I can live with that,” he said. “Leave now, or else you’ll never find your way out.”
Without another word, the mayor put the boy on the back of his horse and sped away from the red house. The priest and the men followed. Kasito remained on the porch, watching them go in a cloud of dust. He must have thought there would be no war, for when Acii’s lightning came, he had no protection. It struck him in the head, splitting open his skull and searing the flesh off his bones. It took Benge by surprise too.
The three sons watched the sky in resignation but Acii swept away the clouds and called up a rainbow. It was a sign that she was sparing them. They conjured doves to fly around their house in acknowledgment. They knew magic. Benge realized that they could be valuable allies in the campaign against Oksism. He decided to make them his students.
#
Three days later, Benge got a surprise call. The mayor burnt incense in a clay bowl and chanted a phrase, which wafted to Benge like a prayer. He was taking a nap, and woke up with the voice of the mayor in his ears. For a moment he was confused. He could not understand why the mayor was contacting him at day time. He opened his inner eyes, and saw the mayor performing the ritual in the conference room of the courthouse. There were thirty people around the table, including the priest. The town’s council. Many were radical conservatives. Was it a trap? Had they forced the mayor to contact him?
He sent a carriage. Unlike Kasito’s, his was a simple two-wheel vehicle made of plain wood and drawn by a single horse. It rode up the street in a gentle gallop. Town folk came out to watch as the mayor boarded it. No one shouted insults, or threw missiles at the juju vehicle. The carriage vanished from the street. The people turned away and went on with their businesses.
A few minutes later, Benge sat with the mayor under the mango tree in front of his house, drinking banana wine out of gourds, listening to the zephyr in the tree.
“Kasito’s children came to us this morning,” the mayor said. “They pleaded for forgiveness. They said they did not know their father practiced magic. They want to stay. The priest is against it. He wants them to leave. But the town council voted in their favor. It was a narrow win, sixteen ayes and fourteen nays. But before we make a final decision, we need your opinion. Are these boys are evil? That’s why I came.”
Benge smiled. He had visited Kasito’s sons the previous day, and offered to mentor them. They had accepted. They had never been comfortable with their father’s quest to gain more power using human sacrifice, but they were eager to continue the war he had started against Oksism.
“They are innocent,” Benge said. “Don’t punish them for sins of their father.”
“But they use those juju robots,” the mayor said. “You told us they were once people. How can they be innocent? How could they not know?”
“Yes,” Benge said. “Those robots are dead people. Zombies. The boys knew. But they were under the influence of their father. They are willing to cooperate. They have agreed to get rid of the robots and employ humans to work the farm.”
“Good,” the mayor said. “The council will be happy to hear that.”
A brief silence settled between the two men.
; “Do you want to talk to her?” Benge asked. The mayor had previously visited only to talk to his dead wife.
“No,” he said. “Let her rest in peace.”
Benge thought about his dead wife, maybe he too should let her rest. With the changes happening in town, he would not have to stay in hiding anymore. He would not be lonely anymore. Maybe it was time for him to find a new wife.
“Yes,” he said. “Let her rest in peace.”
Itanda Bridge
The soldiers came shortly before sunrise. Obil was brushing his teeth in front of his muzigo. Most of his neighbors were already up, washing clothes, cooking breakfast on charcoal stoves in front of their doors, or cleaning their teeth and spitting into the gutter that ran through the compound. The smell from the drainage channel overpowered the stench of the fish market, in which the compound was situated. The bustle of activity made the narrow courtyard look like a tunnel in an anthill. There were two rows of about thirty doors facing each other, leading to single roomed muzigos. Unlike Obil who lived alone, every other apartment had a family of about four. There were so many children, and they made so much noise that Obil almost did not hear the soldiers approaching.
Vehicles rarely came this early to the market, so when an engine hummed, a sudden hush fell upon the courtyard. It sounded like a truck. Obil’s business did not have much competition. He owned a motor canoe, which took passengers to islands. But his neighbors were fishmongers, and the sound of the approaching truck meant an approaching buyer. A few people cursed because they had not woken up early enough, while a man started to blame his wife for making him oversleep. Then, panic gripped the market when someone shouted ‘kichwa red!’ His neighbors scrambled into their muzigos, locking the doors. Several people fled from the street into the courtyard, and ducked into the row of pit latrines to hide.
Within a few seconds, Obil remained alone in the courtyard. Kichwa red was slang for a commando unit. They wore red caps, and were famous for panda gari, the cordon and search operations to root out terrorists. The people they captured, although innocent, were never seen or heard of again. Obil wanted to run and hide, like his neighbors, but that would be useless. He knew the soldiers had come for him.
He looked around, at the abandoned basins full of soapy water, at a toothbrush with paste still on it, thrown into the gutter, at a baby’s shoe with holes in the toes, at the clothes on the wires dripping onto the dirt yard, at the dozens of charcoal stoves, some of which had been upturned in the panic to hide. The smell of burning food now mingled with that of the gutter, and of fish.
The vehicle screeched to a halt, its tires grinding on the tarmac, adding the stench of rubber to the complex odors of the market. Boots thumped through a muddy corridor as the soldiers charged to the compound. The first gunman burst through the small wooden door. His cap was the color of fire. His uniform was plain green. He had a sergeant’s stripes, and carried a pistol. Behind him came five soldiers, also in red caps, but whose uniforms had yellow leopard spots.
Obil threw his hands up in surrender. He still had a toothbrush in one, a plastic mug in the other. His lips smeared with foam. He wore nothing but shorts. The sergeant walked up to him, and gave him a reassuring smile. Obil kept his hands high above his head. The sergeant took a photograph out of his pocket, glanced at it, and then put it away.
“Come with us,” the sergeant said.
“Let me get dressed,” Obil said, wondering where they got his picture.
The soldier did not respond, but he did not do anything when Obil resumed cleaning his mouth. They watched him in silence. He spat into the gutter, and then walked into his muzigo. He had suspected they would come for him from the day they occupied Itanda Bridge, a week ago. A rumor had spread that they were looking for divers. The previous day, when news broke out that three vehicles had crashed off the bridge and plunged into the river, Obil had become certain that they would come for him. He thought they wanted divers to drag bodies out of the water.
Inside his room, he looked at the row of clothes hanging on hooks on the wall. He could not decide what to wear. He thought of his new clothes, a checkered shirt and a pair of blue jeans. He had saved for three months to buy them. He planned to wear them on Christmas day, when he would ask Amito to marry him. It would be tragic if he died before using them. He mulled for a moment, and decided that wearing them might bring bad luck, so he settled for his work clothes, torn jeans and a worn-out t-shirt.
They drove for an hour, out of the small lakeside town, up a slick road, and then onto the highway that connected the city to the coastal port of Mombasa. A line of vehicles, three miles long, was stranded at the roadside. The soldiers had closed the highway after the accident. Tanks blocked the road five miles to the bridge. As they neared Itanda, Obil noticed a drastic change in the vegetation. The trees were dead. The branches bare and black, as though a wild fire had burned them. The grass had a sick yellowish hue, as though withered in a drought.
The jeep stopped a few meters from the bridge. Only after the engine was switched off did Obil notice the eerie silence. No wind blew, no birds sang, no frogs croaked. He could not even hear the roar of the river, whose rapids could normally be heard from a kilometer away.
It looked like a battlefront. There were tanks on the roadside, and along the banks, which were covered with foxholes. Helicopter gunships were parked in a nearby field. Two long lines of soldiers stood on the bridge, pointing their guns over the railings at the water. They wore the leopard spots of the kichwa red, and were so stiff that they might have been sculptures. The only sign of life was a colonel who paced like a metronome behind them. He paused for only a few seconds, gave Obil a long stare, nodded at the sergeant, and then resumed pacing.
“Go,” the sergeant said to Obil, nodding toward the river.
Obil licked his lips. The sun touched his face like a hot plate. He swallowed hard, and then walked off the road to the edge of the cliff, and looked down at the river thirty feet below. The water normally ran fast, creating rapids that gained fame as one of the best for adventure rafting. But now, the river stood as still as a pond.
A long canoe was tethered to the bank. Two men in civilian clothes sat at one end of it, while a lieutenant stood at the other end, smoking. Obil did not know the two men, but guessed they were expert divers like him. The soldiers must have looked all over the country for those with the talent to go deep under water. Obil was famous for this. He could hold his breath under water for several minutes. On many occasions, after accidents in the lake, they had sent him to retrieve bodies. But what did the soldiers want him to do? Why were they pointing guns at the river?
What was in the water?
It could not be that they wanted him to look for corpses from an accident. He could see no sign of wrecked cars. The river was not deep. In spite of its strange calmness, its level seemed to have remained the same. If a car fell in, it would be visible. They said a bus, and two vans, had gone in. Others said a pick-up truck as well. Yet, he could not see any vehicle. The only sign that an accident had occurred was the ripped balustrade on the bridge. But how could three (or was it four?) vehicles plunge into the river through that tiny gap?
The accident had been questionable. Reports as to what exactly happened had been contradictory. Witnesses disagreed over the number of cars that plunged into the water. Some said four, and mentioned a yellow bus, two commuter taxis and a pick-up truck. Others insisted they did not see any pick-up. The first lot claimed to have seen a man, a woman, and a girl clutching a teddy bear in the truck, but they argued over its color. Some insisted it was dark blue. Others swore it was white. It had happened at three o’clock in the daytime. How could they disagree over such simple facts like numbers and the color of the vehicles involved?
Obil did not like the mission at all. The soldiers were up to something sinister. If it were a simple search for bodies, a civilian, probably someone from the district office, would have approached him. They would have negotiated
payment before driving him all the way here. But the sergeant had not said anything to him, and he had not dared to ask. The drive from his home had been in total silence. Now, they were ordering him to go down there without telling him what to look for.
What was in the river? What made it stand so still?
Obil turned to the sergeant, and met with the dark hole of a barrel. The sergeant smiled, but his eyes had a glint of murder as he nodded at the canoe again. Obil hurried down the steep bank. His legs sank up to the calves in the blackened mud. He was panting, more out of fright than exhaustion, when he climbed into the canoe. The expression on the faces of the other two men only increased his sense of dread. They did not say anything to him, nor did the lieutenant, who stood still at the other end of the boat, chain-smoking.
Obil looked at his reflection in the grey water, which he now noticed moved so slowly, like thick saliva out of an old man’s mouth. He could not see anything underneath. The question that had troubled him since they picked him up churned his stomach. The army had its own divers, highly trained commandos who he had once seen in action in a military drill at the lake. Why didn’t they use them? Why did they have to frog-march civilians at gunpoint to do the job?
Had the army divers gone in, and not returned?
Something was not right. The accident seemed to be a cover up for whatever the soldiers were hiding under the bridge. Obil’s mouth went dry. What would they do if he stumbled onto military secrets? He licked his lips. He would have drunk from the river to quench his thirst, but the grey water looked poisonous. Pimples of sweat clung to his forehead.
“Shall we go in now?” one of the other men asked the lieutenant.
“No talking,” the lieutenant hissed. He had a red patch on his lips, a souvenir from drinking crude alcohol.
