by Manai, Yamen
In his hands, animals driven by instinct, and across from him, humans driven by free will. Among these creatures mired in clay, who were the true monsters?
He felt devastated . . .
He recognized Toumi, who was skirting his gaze, despite his neolithic beard and blood-splattered face. He was holding a dying soldier by the scalp. Sidi recognized him too. It was the guard who had spoken to him during his patrols. He wouldn’t be able to do so ever again. He would no longer address him as either haj or sir. Soon he would die, like his comrades, killed before their time, young lives sacrificed on the altar of the absurd.
His disgusted voice brought an end to the echoes of “God is great” still reverberating across the mountain.
“Was it God that asked you to do this, Toumi?” roared Sidi.
Toumi looked down, and the commander shouted at him, “You know this old fool?”
“Yes. I know him . . . Commander, he’s just a poor villager. Let him go,” he said weakly.
The commander pointed his weapon at Sidi.
“You hear that, old man? Hurry up and get out of here! We’re waging holy war. War in the name of God!”
“God doesn’t defeat the just, so war it is!”
With one assured motion, he smashed the nest on the ground and it split in two. Within seconds, thousands of hysterical giant hornets were everywhere. In search of vengeance since dawn, they had been waiting to be liberated to go on the attack.
Sidi undid his beekeeper helmet from his belt and protected himself from what came next.
Without warning, the giant hornets began to chase the men. In the blink of an eye, each found himself in the center of a cloud of beasts turned mad, enduring the lightning bolts of their fury. Electrified, the hornets charged en masse, covering hands and faces, latching onto tufts of beards and hair, diving into the folds of qamis and turbans, relentlessly stinging. The men found that the weapons they had thought so powerful were of no help to them. Run as fast as they could? Where could they go before they tripped, rolled to the ground, and succumbed to the attacks of thousands of unrivaled hunters?
In no time at all, the cries of triumph turned into cries of fear and horror, and the vanquishers were vanquished. The katiba was wiped out, all its members vanished in the brush, drowned in the cloud of its punishment.
Sidi brushed a few hornets off his helmet visor. He had seen enough.
He went back for Staka and took the road to the village, damning in his heart the commander, his katiba, and all the murderers and warmongers prostituting God to their ends. A God that could still console him for the cruelty of man through the gentleness of his bees.
33
Sitting in his garden, Sidi was watching Farah run between the hives, which swarmed with new generations of bees, amused by their festive dance. She was three now. She couldn’t speak very well yet, but her eyes were the most expressive in the world. She came to visit him often. When she laughed, it was difficult not to succumb to this call of joy and laugh over the elementary beauty of life along with her.
As Kisuke Ukitake promised, the surviving queen had proven to be hardworking and charismatic. He had named her Aya—“miracle” in Arabic, “wild beauty” in Japanese. When Jannet placed her in Sidi’s hands, in her tiny crate, he had been so happy that his eyes shone beneath a limpid veil. “Ah, my beautiful Aya . . . Welcome to your new home!”
Using gentle movements and his apicultural expertise, he had introduced her into a hive, where she was accepted. She soon produced several generations of forager bees and new promising queens.
But had she transmitted her knowledge? Would his bees be able to defend themselves from the monsters? He didn’t know.
Since their last face-off, he had captured a few hornets prowling around his colonies. But they hadn’t returned in number.
Nor had he gone hunting for their nests again. He had accepted that they were there, hidden, threatening. All he hoped was that his girls would be ready the day they reemerged from the forest.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © Delphine Manai
Yamen Manai was born in 1980 in Tunis and currently lives in Paris. Both a writer and an engineer, Manai explores the intersections of past and present, and tradition and technology, in his prose. In The Ardent Swarm (originally published as L’Amas ardent), his first book to be translated into English, he celebrates Tunisia’s rich oral culture, a tradition abounding in wry, often fatalistic humor. He has published three novels with the Tunisia-based Éditions Elyzad a deliberate choice to ensure that his books are accessible to Tunisian readers: La marche de l’incertitude (2010), awarded Tunisia’s prestigious Prix Comar d’Or; La sérénade d’Ibrahim Santos (2011); and L’Amas ardent (2017), which earned both the Prix Comar d’Or and the Prix des Cinq Continents, a literary prize recognizing exceptional Francophone literature.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © Pascal Michel
Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. Her translations include Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital (New Directions, 2018) and Zahia Rahmani’s France, Story of a Childhood (Yale University Press, 2016), as well as works by Mohamed Leftah, Joy Sorman, and Scholastique Mukasonga, among others. Lara is the recipient of two PEN/Heim Translation Grants and a French Voices Grand Prize and has been nominated for the National Translation Award.