Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “Nah,” said the writer. “Ignominious suicide after a bad review? That’s not a scandalous death that will lead to centuries-long infamy; that’s just a pathetic publicity stunt. And his former students and factory colleagues will be the first to defame him. It’s over. The hairballs will eventually shrivel up and die or get bought up by advertising agency execs to display in their foyers.” He added, “But only ironically.”

  “Ouch.” Unathi shuddered.

  “Yep. Should we get back? I don’t know about you, but I could murder some spaghetti.”

  “Early lunch?” Unathi checked her watch. It was only twelve. But then, hey, Tokyo was a fast city.

  They started walking away into the forest, back towards the bunker, the cat riding Haruki’s shoulder. Behind them, the artists were still engaged in violent in-fighting.

  One of them had extricated herself from the melee and was filming the carnage. It would make a great video piece.

  “So why did you leave Johannesburg, if I may ask?” Haruki said, heaving open the bunker door.

  “That city? Hayibo. That city is too fucking crazy.” She shook her head, ducking under the dangling foot of a suicide. “Hey, you have any idea when whaling season starts?”

  Amma

  Charles R. Saunders

  A soft strain of music drifts delicately among the familiar midday noises of Gao, capital city of the empire of Songhai. Softly it weaves its way through the shrill bargaining of market women; the intrusive importunings of tradesmen; the strident admonitions of adhana-priests to prayer and sacrifice at the shrines of the gods; and the clink and jingle of mail-clad soldiers strutting through the streets. The music is easily recognizable: notes plucked by skillful fingers from the seven strings of a Soudanic ko.

  There are other ko-songs that mingle with the general hum of the city, for the ko is popular, and Gao large. Yet some there are in the teeming populace who pause when the notes of this one reach their ears. By the singular quality of its melody, they know that this is no outdated local strummer of weary songs, nor love-struck youth seeking to impress the object of his callow affections. They know, these connoisseurs of the ko, that a new griot has come to Gao.

  Before the final notes of the song have faded, a crowd is gathered at the saffiyeh, a small square off the main marketplace where, traditionally, a newly arrived griot comes to display his talents. The stranger sits with his back against a whitewashed wall; his fingers dancing lightly across the strings of his instrument. More like hands hardened by the gripping of sword or plow, these, than hands accustomed mainly to the touch of lacquered wood and slender wire.

  Beneath the road-worn garments of a wanderer, the griot’s frame bulks large, yet strangely gaunt, as though once-massive thews have been reduced to the minimum amount required for physical activity. His sepia-toned face is solemn and middle-aged, webbed with lines scored by adversity. Large eyes, dark and luminous, seem fixed upon a point somewhere above the heads of his audience. Two tira, leather charm pouches, hang from beaded cords around his neck. Beside him rests a great empty turtle shell, upturned to receive the bronze coins and quills of gold-dust he hopes to earn from his listeners.

  The crowd stands quietly. There are turbaned men swathed in voluminous johos over cotton trousers, and turbaned women garbed in colorful asokabas that descend from waist to ankle, leaving the rest of the body bare. Children clad after the fashion of the adults squeeze between their elders’ bodies, the better to hear the ko of the new griot. The dry-season sun burns like a torch in the cloudless sky, bathing ebony skin in a sheen of glossy perspiration.

  The griot’s tune ends. His listeners stamp their feet on the dusty pave: a sign of approval. Even though no coins or quills have yet found their way into his tortoise shell, the griot smiles. He knows that a man of his calling is first a story teller, no better than second a musician. His ko has served its purpose. Now it is time for him to earn his day’s livelihood.

  “I am going to tell a story,” the griot says.

  “Ya-ngani!” the crowd responds, meaning “Right!”

  “It may be a lie.”

  “Ya-ngani.”

  “But not everything in it is false.”

  “Ya-ngani.”

  The griot begins his tale.

  Mattock resting on one broad shoulder, Babakar iri Sounkalo stood shaking his head in the midst of his charred beanfield. For the thousandth time, he cursed the Sussu, whose raiders had swept down from the north to despoil isolated border towns like Gadou, the one closest to Babakar’s ruined farm.

  The Sussu had, as always, been driven back to their barren mountains by the soldiers of Songhai. Babakar himself had taken up lance and shield to join the forces of Kassa iri Ba, the invincible general from Gao, and the blood of more than a few Sussu had washed his blade.

  But now, as he surveyed the burnt acres of the field that had been in his family since the first stone was laid in Gadou, the taste of triumph had faded for Babakar. His wassa-beans had been reduced to a mere blackish stubble, and though he knew the next crop would grow even faster in the ash-enriched soil, alone he could never replant his beans before the wet season ended.

  Alone … again, the bitter memory seared across his mind: the memory of his wife and two daughters butchered by the swords of the Sussu, who had nearly destroyed Gadou in their treacherous attack. Sussu lives had paid for the loss of his family. Kassa iri Ba himself had praised Babakar’s ferocity in battle.

  Now, though, Babakar faced only a grim choice as his reward. He could re-till his field in the hope that the wet season would last long enough for a new crop to rise, saving him from starvation. Or he could join the many others already in flight southward to the provinces untouched by the border war. The idea of abandoning the land still nurtured by the spirits of his ancestors remained unthinkable to Babakar.

  “You’ll accomplish nothing standing here in self-debate,” Babakar chided himself.

  With a gusting sigh, he raised his mattock from his shoulder and swung it down into the soil. It was then that he saw her, walking gracefully down the road that separated his field from that of a neighbor slain by the Sussu.

  The mattock nearly fell from Babakar’s hands. For it was from the west that she came, and Babakar knew that only the semi-arid wasteland called the Tassili lay west of Gadou. The woman couldn’t have come from there … she must have run off in that direction to escape the marauders, and was now making her way back to more habitable terrain.

  As the woman came closer, Babakar saw that she was, though disheveled, beautiful to behold. Although she was not tall, a willowy slenderness lent her an illusion of greater height. The tattered condition of her asokaba contrasted with the neatly folded turban that clung closely to her head. Between the two garments, a pleasant expanse of bare black flesh was filmed with a thin layer of road dust, reminiscent of the coating of ashes young girls smeared on their bodies before their puberty dances.

  A look at the way her conical breasts jounced with each step convinced Babakar that the stranger had passed beyond that age, though from the tautness of her skin she could not be much older than twenty rains. Her face, withdrawn and pensive, would not have been out of place at the Court of the Hundred Wives of the Keita, the Emperor of Songhai, who took only the most beautiful women of the Soudan to his golden love-chamber.

  Of possessions besides her clothing, the young woman had none save a few neck and arm ornaments. Babakar was just asking himself if he should call out to the stranger when she caught his glance, smiled and came toward him.

  That smile stirred something in Babakar that had remained sullen and dormant since the day—over a month past now—when he had returned from his field to discover the Sussu-violated corpses of his wife, Amma, and daughters in the smoldering ruins of their home.

  “Does this road lead to Gadou?” the stranger asked.

  Her very voice reminded Babakar of the beloved tones of another, long stilled by the slash of a Sussu sword.

/>   “What’s left of it, yes,” he replied. Then, on impulse: “Where do you come from? Only lizards and gazelles dwell in the Tassili.”

  The woman dropped her gaze.

  “I was taken by some deserters from the main body of raiders,” she said. “They weren’t even Sussu, but renegade Nobas who had joined the Sussu for the plunder. There were five of them. They swept me onto one of their horses and took me away to the west, and they found a patch of bush, and they … they ….”

  She choked, unable to continue.

  This time, Babakar’s mattock did drop to the ground as he crossed quickly to the woman’s side and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “War makes victims,” he said. “Loss is the lot of us all. My wife, Amma, and my two daughters were slain by the Sussu. You, at least, still live.”

  The stranger’s head came up sharply. Her eyes met Babakar’s.

  “Amma?” she said. “I, too, am called Amma.”

  Babakar’s hand tightened on smooth skin. The pressure was gentle, though, and she did not flinch as she well might have at the touch of a strong man’s grip.

  “They used me until I begged to die,” Amma continued tightly. “And they might have taken me back to their own country if they hadn’t been pursued by Sussu who were angry at the Nobas’ desertion. There was a fight … I escaped while they killed each other for the gold the Noba had stolen along with me.

  “I walked through the waste, taking food where I could find it. When I left the Tassili, there was death all around. I took these garments from the body of a woman who no longer needed them. I thought I might find something in Gadou. But there is death there, too, you say.”

  Again she looked down. Babakar took his hand from Amma’s shoulder and clenched it as if he were gripping the hilt of a sword.

  “Yes, there is death,” he said bitterly. “With this hand, I killed as many Sussu as I could see. But in the end, I have only this burnt-out field. My family is still dead, and there is no one to help me replant my crop before the rains pass.”

  They remained silent for a time, each adrift in reverie. Then Amma said: “There is nothing for me in Gadou, and I am weary of walking. I will stay here and help you with your crop.”

  Astonished, Babakar could only respond: “I have but one mattock.”

  Amma laughed, her smile rendering her face even more attractive than before.

  “I’ll use this,” she retorted, bending down to curl her slim fingers around a fire-blackened stake that had been part of a fence that once guarded Babakar’s field.

  Without further words, Amma began to thrust the jagged point of the stake into the soil. Fresh earth emerged as she twisted the stake in a digging motion. Only for a moment did Babakar watch her. Then he picked up his mattock and proceeded to work at Amma’s side. A cloud appeared, in the sudden fashion of the wet season, and a hot, misty rain soon washed down on two dark, naked backs bent to the soil.

  Day followed inexorable day, and newly turned earth progressively supplanted the charred remnants of Babakar’s field. The rains fell with perceptibly diminishing intensity. Working against the advent of the day they knew the rain would cease, Babakar and Amma toiled from the rising to the setting of the sun. With grim determination, they struggled to prepare the field for planting while there was still time for another crop to grow.

  Work they shared; work in plenty, along with the thatch-roofed house Babakar had erected on the side of the one the Sussu had destroyed. They shared meager meals of millet and beans bought only after tiresome haggling with the near-destitute merchants of Gadou. The people left in the town paid little heed to Babakar’s new companion; she was but one of many refugees from the desolate countryside.

  At night, they shared the sleep of the exhausted, their bodies touching only by chance on Babakar’s single sleeping-mat. For, by unspoken agreement, they did not share each other: not in the way of a man and a woman.

  On occasion, Babakar’s gaze would linger on the smooth play of muscles beneath Amma’s skin as she toiled beneath the sun. Such gazes did not last long, for the memory of the first Amma remained a shadow of sorrow in his mind. And he remembered how the Noba had ravished the second Amma … was he, a countryman who had offered her shelter, to offer her similar abuse?

  If Amma noticed such moments of quickly suppressed passion, she showed no sign. Indeed, she seemed more determined than Babakar to succeed with their late-grown crop. She demanded nothing of him beyond the food and shelter he gave her.

  Once, at sunset, they were visited by Kuya Adowa, the local tyinbibi, or diviner. Despite her advanced years, Kuya stood proudly erect, and her eyes smouldered beneath her turban like the embers of a fire.

  The words she spoke were addressed to Babakar. But her dark, portentous gaze never left the eyes of Amma.

  “The dyongu, the spirit-cock that embodies the luck of Gadou, died yesterday,” the old woman announced ominously.

  Babakar stiffened. The death of the sacred black rooster always presaged a period of ill fortune. When the predecessor of this last dyongu had died, the invasion of the Sussu had followed. What new calamities the death of Kuya’s bird foreshadowed, Babakar did not care to contemplate. His concern was why Kuya Adowa had chosen to come to him to speak of the matter.

  “War brings destruction not only to the lands of men, but to the world of the spirits as well,” the tyinbibi said. “The kambu, the spirits of power, manifest themselves in our world, and the tyerkou shed their skins at night to wander the land and drink the blood of the unwary. Beware, Babakar iri Sounkalo. Beware.”

  Only after the second “beware” did Kuya shift her gaze from Amma’s eyes to Babakar’s.

  “What do you mean by that, Kuya Adowa?” Babakar demanded. “Are Amma and I in danger of some kind?”

  The old woman wrinkled her nose in disdain.

  “I leave that interpretation to you,” she said. “I must go and seek the black hatchling that is to be the new dyongu.”

  With that, she turned her bare, bony back on them and stalked down the dusty road to Gadou.

  Troubled, Babakar turned to Amma—and was taken aback by the hatred in her eyes as she glared at the dwindling figure of the departing tyinbibi ….

  The morning came when the first seedlings of wassa poked boldly through the soil. Overnight, the seeds had sprouted several inches, in the typical manner of the first growth-spurt of this type of bean plant.

  A smile of satisfaction crept quietly across the face of Babakar. It was the first such smile his features had worn since the coming of the Sussu.

  Then he looked at Amma … and his smile disappeared, replaced by an expression of utter bewilderment.

  In an attitude approaching reverence, Amma knelt near a cluster of seedlings. One finger stroked the fragile green stems with the delicate touch of a priestess conveying a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility. Her head inclined so far forward that her face hovered only a hairsbreadth from the tops of the plants.

  Tentatively, Babakar touched the shoulder of the kneeling woman. The effect of the brush of his fingers against her skin was at once instantaneous and disconcerting as Amma sprang into the air like a frightened animal. Yet for all the suddenness of her leap, she landed lightly on her feet, facing Babakar in a tense, quivering half-crouch. Her eyes, fixed glassily at something beyond Babakar’s head, bulged wide in fright.

  A tremor shook her slight frame. Then the glaze faded from her eyes and she suddenly pitched forward.

  Quickly Babakar reached out and broke Amma’s fall, saving her from a bruising impact. For a moment she lay limp in his arms. Babakar became conscious of her sleek body pressing closely to his, and this time his thoughts did not stray to the Amma he had lost, or the outrage committed by the Noba deserters.

  “Amma,” he murmured into the tight folds of her turban. “Amma, what is wrong?”

  Her head tilted upward. Never before had Babakar been so aware of the true beauty of the strange woman’s face. It was a
s though he were gazing at a sculpture carved from polished black pearl, streaked with tracks of diamond where the sunlight caught her tears.

  “I am sorry,” she said softly. “It’s just that I was remembering the last harvest my family had … before the Sussu came.”

  “The Sussu are gone!” Babakar said fiercely, his hands tightening on Amma’s arms.

  Silently, he repeated what he had said. The Sussu were gone … as was his first Amma. Sorrow was there; it always would be. But the woman he held in his arms was no memory. She was warm. She was real. He loved her.

  Babakar’s face bent toward Amma’s. Their faces came together slowly, and when their mouths met, Amma’s arms encircled Babakar’s shoulders and clung to him with gentle strength. Warm as the sun that nurtured the land with this, the first embrace of his love.

  “My Amma,” Babakar whispered when their lips parted.

  “Your second Amma ….”

  “No,” Babakar said firmly. “I have only one Amma. And I want her to be my wife.”

  “You do not ask this only out of gratitude for my help with the crop?”

  “How can you say that?” Babakar demanded. “It is as a woman that I want you, not labor to be bargained for. What is mine is yours—even my life.”

  Exerting a soft but insistent pressure, Amma’s arms drew Babakar’s head downward, and their mouths met again. Long moments passed before their lips parted. It was Amma who spoke first.

  “When the next wet season begins, will we go to the adhana to be mated at the shrine of the Mother of Earth?” she asked.

  Without hesitation Babakar assented, and he pressed Amma close to him. He never realized that Amma’s gaze was cast downward, fixed with strange avidity on the wassa sprouts pushing their way through the soil ….

  Night had fallen swiftly, as always during the waning weeks of the wet season. The glances that passed between Amma and Babakar were no longer fleeting or hastily averted. As they walked from the field to Babakar’s dwelling, Amma’s hand clasped his for the first time. The soft half-light of the stars cast a shaft of muted illumination through the house’s only window, and outlined the contours of Amma’s half-nude form as she reclined on the sleeping-mat. Her arms opened to Babakar as he moved toward her.