My face still burns from the sting of her regard.
Before she left, I felt compelled to inform her that, although my father was born at Karachi, I was born at Mombasa. I, too, am an African.
Mary's mouth twisted. "So is Kibugi," she said.]
7. Kiptebanguryon
A fearsome yet curiously domestic ogre of the Rift Valley. He collects human skulls, which he once used to decorate his spacious dwelling. He made the skulls so clean, it is said, and arranged them so prettily, that from a distance his house resembled a palace of salt. His human wife bore him two sons: one which looked human like its mother, and one, called Kiptegen, which resembled its father. When the wife was rescued by her human kin, her human-looking child was also saved, but Kiptegen was burnt alive.
[I am pleased to say that Mary returned this morning, perfectly calm and apparently resolved to forget our quarrel.
She tells me that Kiptegen's brother will never be able to forget the screams of his sibling perishing in the flames. The mother, too, is scarred by the loss. She had to be held back, or she would have dashed into the fire to rescue her ogre-child. This information does not seem appropriate for my employer's catalogue; still, I find myself adding it in the margins. There is a strange pleasure in this writing and not-writing, these letters that hang between revelation and oblivion.
If my employer discovered these notes, he would call them impudence, cunning, a trick.
What would I say in my defense? "Sir, I was unable to tell you. Sir, I was unable to speak of the weeping mother of Kiptegen." He would laugh: he believes that all words are found in his language.
I ask myself if there are words contained in Mary's margins: stories of ogres she cannot tell to me.
Kiptebanguryon, she says, is homeless now. A modern creature, he roams the Protectorate clinging to the undersides of trains.]
8. Kisirimu
Kisirimu dwells on the shores of Lake Albert. Bathed, dressed in barkcloth, carrying his bow and arrows, he glitters like a bridegroom. His purpose is to trick gullible young women. He will be betrayed by song. He will die in a pit, pierced by spears.
[In the evenings, under the light of the lamp, I read the day's inventory from my record book, informing my employer of precisely what has been spent and eaten. As a representative of Moosajee and Co., Superior Traders, Stevedores and Dubashes, I am responsible for ensuring that nothing has been stolen. My employer stretches, closes his eyes, and smiles as I inform him of the amount of sugar, coffee and tea in his possession. Tinned bacon, tinned milk, oat porridge, salt, ghee. The dates, he reminds me, are strictly for the Somalis, who grow sullen in the absence of this treat.
My employer is full of opinions. The Somalis, he tells me, are an excitable nation. "Don't offend them, Alibhai! Ha, ha!" The Kavirondo, by contrast, are merry and tractable, excellent for manual work. My own people are cowardly, but clever at figures.
There is nothing, he tells me, more odious than a German. However, their women are seductive, and they make the world's most beautiful music. My employer sings me a German song. He sounds like a buffalo in distress. Afterward, he makes me read to him from the Bible.
He believes I will find this painful: "Heresy, Alibhai! Ha, ha! You'll have to scrub your mouth out, eh? Extra ablutions?"
Fortunately, God does not share his prejudices.
I read: There were giants in the earth in those days.
I read: For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron.]
9. Konyek
Konyek is a hunter. His bulging eyes can perceive movement far across the plains. Human beings are his prey. He runs with great loping strides, kills, sleeps underneath the boughs of a leafy tree. His favorite question is: “Mother, whose footprints are these?”
[Mary tells me that Konyek passed through her village in the Year of Amber. The whirlwind of his running loosened the roofs. A wise woman had predicted his arrival, and the young men, including Mary's brother, had set up a net between trees to catch him. But Konyek only laughed and tore down the net and disappeared with a sound of thunder. He is now, Mary believes, in the region of Eldoret. She tells me that her brother and the other young men who devised the trap have not been seen since the disappearance of Konyek.
Mary's gaze is peculiar. It draws me in. I find it strange that, just a few days ago, I described her as a cold person. When she tells me of her brother she winds her scarlet thread so tightly about her finger I am afraid she will cut it off.]
10. Mbiti
Mbiti hides in the berry bushes. When you reach in, she says: “Oh, don’t pluck my eye out!” She asks you: “Shall I eat you, or shall I make you my child?” You agree to become Mbiti’s child. She pricks you with a needle. She is betrayed by the cowrie shell at the end of her tail.
["My brother," Mary says.
She describes the forest. She says we will go there to hunt ogres. Her face is filled with a subdued yet urgent glow. I find myself leaning closer to her. The sounds of the others, their voices, the smack of an axe into wood, recede until they are thin as the buzzing of flies. The world is composed of Mary and myself and the sky about Mary and the trees about Mary. She asks me if I understand what she is saying. She tells me about her brother in the forest. I realize that the glow she exudes comes not from some supernatural power, but from fear.
She speaks to me carefully, as if to a child.
She gives me a bundle of scarlet threads.
She says: "When the child goes into the forest, it wears a red necklace. And when the ogre sees the necklace, it spares the child." She says: "I think you and my brother are exactly the same age."
My voice is reduced to a whisper. "What of Mbiti?"
Mary gives me a deep glance, fiercely bright.
She says: "Mbiti is lucky. She has not been caught. Until she is caught, she will be one of the guardians of the forest. Mbiti is always an ogre and always the sister of ogres."]
11. Ntemelua
Ntemelua, a newborn baby, already has teeth. He sings: “Draw near, little pot, draw near, little spoon!” He replaces the meat in the pot with balls of dried dung. Filthy and clever, he crawls into a cow’s anus to hide in its stomach. Ntemelua is weak and he lives by fear, which is a supernatural power. He rides a hyena. His back will never be quite straight, but this signifies little to him, for he can still stretch his limbs with pleasure. The only way to escape him is to abandon his country.
[Tomorrow we depart.
I am to give the red necklaces only to those I trust. "You know them," Mary explained, "as I know you."
"Do you know me?" I asked, moved and surprised.
She smiled. "It is easy to know someone in a week. You need only listen."
Two paths lie before me now. One leads to the forest; the other leads home.
How easily I might return to Mombasa! I could steal some food and rupees and begin walking. I have a letter of contract affirming that I am employed and not a vagrant. How simple to claim that my employer has dispatched me back to the coast to order supplies, or to Abyssinia to purchase donkeys! But these scarlet threads burn in my pocket. I want to draw nearer to the source of their heat. I want to meet the ogres.
"You were right," Mary told me before she left. "I did go to a mission school. And I didn't burn it down." She smiled, a smile of mingled defiance and shame. One of her eyes shone brighter than the other, kindled by a tear. I wanted to cast myself at her feet and beg her forgiveness. Yes, to beg her forgiveness for having pried into her past, for having stirred up the memory of her humiliation.
Instead I said clumsily: "Even Ntemelua spent some time in a cow's anus."
Mary laughed. "Thank you, brother," she said.
She walked away down the path, sedate and upright, and I do not know if I will ever see her again. I imagine meeting a young man in the forest, a man with a necklace of scarlet thread who stands with Mary's light bearing and regards me with Mary's direct and trenchant gl
ance. I look forward to this meeting as if to the sight of a long-lost friend. I imagine clasping the hand of this young man, who is like Mary and like myself. Beneath our joined hands, my employer lies slain. The ogres tear open the tins and enjoy a prodigious feast among the darkling trees.]
12. Rakakabe
Rakakabe, how beautiful he is, Rakakabe! A Malagasy demon, he has been sighted as far north as Kismaayo. He skims the waves, he eats mosquitoes, his face gleams, his hair gleams. His favorite question is: “Are you sleeping?”
Rakakabe of the gleaming tail! No, we are wide awake.
[This morning we depart on our expedition. My employer sings – "Green grow the rushes, o!" – but we, his servants, are even more cheerful. We are prepared to meet the ogres.
We catch one another's eyes and smile. All of us sport necklaces of red thread: signs that we belong to the party of the ogres, that we are prepared to hide and fight and die with those who live in the forest, those who are dirty and crooked and resolute. "Tell my brother his house is waiting for him," Mary whispered to me at the end – such an honor, to be the one to deliver her message! While she continues walking, meeting others, passing into other hands the blood-red necklaces by which the ogres are known.
There will be no end to this catalogue. The ogres are everywhere. Number thirteen: Alibhai M. Moosajee of Mombasa.
The porters lift their loads with unaccustomed verve. They set off, singing. "See, Alibhai!" my employer exclaims in delight. "They're made for it! Natural workers!"
"O, yes sir! Indeed, sir!"
The sky is tranquil, the dust saturated with light. Everything conspires to make me glad.
Soon, I believe, I shall enter into the mansion of the ogres, and stretch my limbs on the doorstep of Rakakabe.]
Art by Janet Chui
The Oud
by Thoraiya Dyer
* * *
1633
The Shouf, Ottoman Empire
My dead husband’s demons are seeking to sink into my daughter’s bones.
Inside our stone hut, Ghalya is yet to wake. Outside it, the pine forest also. Sunrise catches dewdrops hanging from dark needles. Gazelles slip through shadows and wildcats settle silently in tree forks to sleep.
But pebbles roll where there are no feet, human or animal, to disturb them. Cracked shapes shift, breaking free of their concealment against scale-patterned bark.
The morning steals the feeling from my fingers as I pluck the strings of my oud with a risha of smooth bone. The music of grief emerges, keeping the demons at bay. Legend says that the ribcage-like shape of the instrument was inspired by the bleached, hanging bones of a grandson of Adam. The dead boy’s father constructed the wooden skeleton of the oud in imitation of the terrible source of his mourning.
I have not worn mourning colours, for the Christian villagers must not know that my husband has died. They would send another family to take my place in this part of the wood. That family would collect the unopened cones of the wild pines, extracting the nuts when the dried cones open, cutting the dead wood to keep the forest healthy. It is food, it is income, it is safety for a larger family than mine – now just Ghalya and me – but they do not know of the dozen others I must feed and keep hidden.
They do not know that the secret cave where a Druze leader died is now a refuge for his defeated son.
At last, the demons lie still. Rays of light touch the tree bark and it is only bark, again. I hold the instrument in the moment of quiet before the birds swoop in, to quarrel and to sing, now that the sense of unease that warns them of demons is lifted from their thin, feathery skins.
I can keep no tame fowl in the forest. The goats, in contrast, never shrink from looking a demon in the eye. I pack the oud away in its leather case and sling it across my shoulder as I move to unlatch the gate of the goat pen. As time goes by, as my grief fades, the song becomes less powerful. Sometime soon, maybe even now, it will not last a full day.
The oud must be within arm’s reach when that time comes.
Inside the hut, bags of straining yoghurt make the same milky drip, drip, drip as the limestone daggers of the cave. It makes me shiver in foreboding but I cannot falter. I pack my hand cart with flat loaves of bread, pastries stuffed with goat meat and pine nuts, soft cheeses, cucumbers, sesame seeds, and olive oil.
When the Janissaries raid the village, they take great casks of wine. Those elite infantrymen serve the Ottoman Sultan, Murad IV. I do not take wine with me, to the place where I am going.
“Time to wake, little squirrel,” I whisper into the soap-soft scent of my sleeping child. Ghalya frowns and tries to turn her back, but I shake her shoulder until she’s awake enough to ride on my back without falling, her five-year-old fingers knotted around my neck.
We set off with the goats trailing after us. If any early risers from the village of Bkassin see us, they will think we go to the base of the terrible north-facing cliff to fill waterskins from the mineral waters. Or to let the goats find what nourishment they can from the mosses growing in the southern end of the valley. It is perpetually in the shadow of the mountain, pounded by waterfalls in spring when the snow melts.
When we reach it, I pay no attention to the goats as they scatter. They know how to find their way home. A thin spray of water from the stream, which winds its way through the village of Jezzine and then falls off the edge into emptiness, seeds my shawl fringe with diamonds and rouses Ghalya.
“Are we there?” she murmurs. “I don’t like the men. They smell bad. I don’t like the dark.”
I wish I could leave her at the base of the falls. I wish I could trust in the song. If the demons come when I am not with her, they will sap the strength of her muscles, as they did with Hisham, so that he could not rise from his bed.
They will take her mind, as they took Hisham’s, so that he could not recognise anyone. He screamed Satanic songs until his eyes bulged and his lips turned blue.
Ghalya is heavy. Healthy. Strong. But her legs aren’t long enough to cross the broken gaps in the mountain path. I hitch her up higher; I must carry her, despite the ache in my back and the burning in my thighs. The cart I hide in its usual place behind the bushes.
“Not yet, little squirrel. Hold on tight. Don’t let go until I say.”
Only I can see the firebirds, with their great hooked beaks and flames for feathers. Each one is ten times the height of a man. The pair are petrified, part of the cliff face, one on either side of the waterfall. They are the guardians of Jezzine. Mother warned me they could be woken by my sorrow.
The song I am giving to you, she said sharply. You must never sing it near the firebirds. It is for holding back the stone demons. The bone demons. Not for holding back the Ottomans. Not for setting the firebirds against the Sultan. You understand?
What did I care about Ottomans? I had cradled the oud as if it was Hisham’s sweating brow, and cried and cried under the critical, dry eyes of my mother. Her face was framed by the fall of the black veil from the inscribed silver tower of her tantoura and her robes were belted with silver, too. She had risen far in the ranks of the Knowledgeable since I had disobeyed her and fled the foothills to marry a Maronite Christian.
If this can keep the demons away, I sobbed, why didn’t you bring it while Hisham was alive?
He was not my blood. She shrugged. He was not mine to save. In a dream, I saw my hands putting the instrument into your hands. Your father taught you how to play. You haven’t forgotten. All you need is the right risha with which to pluck the strings.
You didn’t have a dream! Admit it. You wanted him to die because he was not a Druze. You sent the demons!
Silence! Her voice was an avalanche. Your false baptism was blasphemy enough without such accusations. And do not let me hear this word, Druze, pass your lips again. We are the Muwahhidun. Ad-Darazi was a heretic. Do not call us after him. He interpreted the Koran poorly. We do not need the sword to spread the faith.
No, I whispered. Only to cut off y
our hands and feet when they do not obey you.
You cut yourself off, Zahara. From me and from God. For now, your grief will keep Ghalya safe, but when you finally forget your husband – and you will forget him, forget his smile, forget the sound of his voice, forget the shape of his face – then you must come home to us, to forge a new sorrow with which to fight.
I do not wish to forge any new sorrows. I have had enough of them. Instead, I will borrow the sorrow of others. I am not as ignorant as Mother thinks. It is not because I care, as Fakr-ad-Din does, about my country becoming united – Sunni Muslim, Christian, and Druze – that I feed the fugitives in the cave. Nor do I feed them in order to defy the Ottoman Sultan, nor the Pasha from Damascus who rules with the Sultan’s authority.
No. I feed them because Fakr-ad-Din’s son has been recently killed. His grief is raw. His grief is new.
Hisham’s demons are old. They were his mother’s. I don’t know how long they have been in his family and I don’t know any way in which they can be destroyed. All I know for sure is that my song of grief has lasted almost three years and is beginning to fade. Might the song of a prince, even a prince defeated and in hiding, not last for thirty years, or more?
God loves Fakr-ad-Din, I think, or he could not have been the prince. He could not have conquered from Palmyra to the sea, built mighty castles, or beaten the armies of Damascus.
“It is the woman,” calls a low voice from the mouth of the grotto.
“Weapons away,” another voice murmurs. “It is only the woman. Come. We will go down to the valley and unload the cart.”
Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History Page 2
