“Of course, 1st Councilwoman.”
“But perhaps it is time to start considering how we can bring the Fish back into the fold, back into our community, and find a role for them when the Divine Undertaking is completed and we return to the comfort of the cave.”
“Perhaps, 1st Councilwoman.”
She took a hold of the Priestess’ hand. “Do this for me, 2nd Councilwoman, do this for all of us, so we don’t condemn them the way they condemned us.”
“Of course, 1st Councilwoman, we will care for the Fish, as the old saying goes, ‘Come hell or high water.’”
Rina coughed again. “Hell...hell, or high lava...1st Councilwoman...or high lava.”
The Priestess seemed to think on her metaphor for an instant and nodded. “Yes, Yes...Or high lav-”
A blast of wind cut the Priestess short. She shielded her face. When she turned back to the bed, Rina’s eyes were closed, her smile was gone, and just as she had predicted, so was everything that had been Rina.
She clapped her hands, the door opened onto a smartly dressed Beast councilman.
“Yes, 2nd Councilwoman?”
She pointed to Rina’s corpse. “It’s 1st Councilwoman now. See that the body is disposed of.”
“In the pits? As per her wishes?”
She thought it over and shook her head. “No, no, make sure that the proper rituals are observed and that she is recycled; such a great leader should be put to the Colony’s benefit, not thrown to the dragon.”
She walked towards the window as the Beast councilman had the body lifted onto a stretcher and carried out of the room. A freezing slither of wind cut through the growing storm, chilling her throat and chest.
“And Councilman? Make sure the Fish’s working shifts are doubled as of tomorrow, and that expeditions north are maintained until they can no longer swim; kill any protesters.” She looked towards the ocean and the storms that sung of endless ice. “Time is running short. One morning, soon now...”
Her voice seemed to linger on her tongue, like a caught snowflake.
“Hell will freeze over, Hades will rise, and we will return to the caves...”
Mame Bougouma Diene is a French-Senegalese American humanitarian based in Paris with a fondness for progressive metal, tattoos, and policy analysis. He is published in Omenana, Brittle Paper and Edilivres, and is in no position to win the Nobel Prize so he can write the hell he pleases until it all freezes over.
The Flying Man of Stone
Dilman Dila
1
He could not tell the colours of the trees. Rocks jutted out of the ground like pillars in the ruins of a prehistoric city, but he could not tell them from the flowers that grew wanton in the valley. Cold tears crawled down his face like maggots. His chest burned as though a fire bomb had dropped in it. He could not tell if it were wind whistling past his ears, or bullets. He could not hear his own footfalls, nor the sound of dead twigs breaking under his soles. The thunder of gunfire deafened him. He struggled to keep up with his father, Baba Chuma, who was nothing more than a shadow fleeing through the vague shapes that he thought were trees and rocks and flowers. They could have hidden in one of the many caves on the slope, but father believed they would be safer on the plateau, if the gunmen would not be bothered climbing a hundred feet to search for them.
The slope became a rock less than twenty feet high. From a distance it looked like an armchair set atop a hill. Kera had climbed it a thousand times before, but now his hands were slick with sweat and he could not find footholds. His father had to help him up. Grass and thorny trees grew out of seemingly bare stone. About fifty meters ahead, at the opposite edge, a grey cliff soared into the sky, forming the back of the chair. Two stone protrusions jutted out of the cliff from each end, hanging above the short trees, giving the illusion of the arms of the chair. They called this plateau Kom pa’Yamo, the seat of spirits.
Kera leaned against a boulder, winded. He squinted down the slope to check if the rest of his family— his mother, little sister Acii, little brother Okee, and elder brother Karama—were coming up the slope too. The tears still made his vision blurry, but he could make out shapes of people running between the trees, ducking into caves to hide. He prayed that some of those shapes were that of his family, though he had seen a grenade ripping his mother apart, though he had seen little Acii lying still on a pavement in a pool of blood, though he had seen Okee beside her, still holding her hand tight, he prayed that he had not seen it right and that they had also escaped the massacre. The prayers brought more tears to his eyes.
He tried to look across the valley to the ledge on which their town stood. He could only see black smoke spewing from burning houses, rolling over the trees and flowers and the beautiful rocks. He closed his eyes and saw the valley as it had been just the day before, as it had always been since the beginning of time as far as he knew. A place he had visited every single day for the last three years since the war forced him out of school. An enchanting place full of boulders, some five hundred feet tall and covered with vegetation, most ranged from the size of a bull to that of a house. Many resembled household goods and animals. One gave the impression of a granary, another looked like a sleeping goat with a pot beside it. There were hundreds of such sculptures. To some people it was a wonder of nature, especially after a group of archaeologists had failed to find evidence of a long dead civilisation, or refused to believe that a civilisation in Sub-Saharan Africa could have had the technology and aesthetics to sculpt giant stones. The locals believed it was the artwork of spirits. Nobody lived in the valley, partly because it flooded for six months during the rainy seasons. Mostly, because they believed spirits lived there, and so they called it Gang Yamo. Shamans had shrines in some of the caverns, and people came from distant districts to worship their ancestors.
When Kera opened his eyes, the tears had cleared and he had recovered some of his vision, but he could still see the nightmare that had befallen his town. Two tanks were rolling down the ledge into the valley, in pursuit of civilians. One turned its barrel toward him, and fired.
Kera saw the missile coming. He fell flat, and an earthquake shook Kom pa’Yamo. He kept his head pressed into the ground, buried under his hands, as pebbles and dust showered him. The world went totally silent. He lifted his head. He could see the grass. He could feel the stones on his skin, the dust in his nose, but he could hear nothing. The two tanks were still on the ledge below the town, their barrels exploded whiffs of smoke every few moments, but the world was silent.
“Baba!” Panic gripped him. He could not see his father. He scrambled to his feet, and ran about, searching the tall grasses, behind boulders, frantic. For a brief moment he feared the shell had obliterated father, just as that grenade had ripped Mama to bits. When Baba Chuma stepped out from behind a boulder, Kera lost his vision again as tears clouded his eyes. “Baba,” he cried.
His father said something, but Kera could still not hear.
Baba took him by the arms and dragged him through the tall grass, to a cleft in the cliff that was wide enough for them to hide in. They could cover its entrance with a shrub, which would hopefully conceal them in the event the soldiers came up onto the plateau.
As they neared the cliff, they saw the mouth of a new cave. The tank round had punched a hole in the rock surface opening up a grotto. Kera had never imagined Kom pa’Yamo as a hollow place. He had played on it from the time he had learnt to walk. They had kicked balls against the cliff and chiselled their names on its surface, but not once had it betrayed its hollow secret.
Baba sped to it at once. Kera followed, also seeing it would offer a better hiding place than the open air cleft. They ran over rubble and slid down into the cave. Sunlight fell around its mouth, but the rest of it remained in pitch darkness. Something on the walls made him frown. It looked like charcoal drawings, but it could have been shadows dancing. He took a step back.
Before he could flee, a sound erupted, like the scream of a c
ricket. He had regained his sense of hearing. He once again became aware of the sounds of soldiers massacring civilians, the rattling of automatic rifles, the thunder of tanks, he thought he could hear a scream.
“Get in!” His father grabbed his arm again, and yanked him into the darkness.
The chill confirmed that something was not right. It was not the kind of cool he enjoyed under a tree in the middle of a scorching day. It was the kind of cold that gripped him whenever he had malaria. He jumped out of the darkness, back into the sunrays, which stopped just inside the mouth of the cave, and he could feel the warmth falling on his skin like something solid.
“Don’t be afraid,” Baba said.
“It’s cold,” said Kera.
“Yes. The sun has not touched its inside since the day it was created. Come. We’ll be safe in here.”
Kera pointed to the walls. He now got the impression that the drawings were wriggling, like earthworms when cut into two, maybe in pain, and he thought they were trying to get away from the sunlight, to slide into the darkness. They were strange patterns, circles that looked like triangles, he could not be sure for the lines shifted endlessly, but it reminded him of the rock art he had seen in Nyero when his school visited pre-historic sites. In the shapes he started to make out animals, strange animals, stranger birds, people hunting, a woman giving birth, a child fishing. It was like watching a silent video, the characters repeating the same actions in an endless loop of agony.
“This is evil,” Baba said.
They scrambled over broken stones, climbing out of the cave. Then, a strange sound came from deep behind. It sounded like the hiss of a punctured tire. Kera kept scrambling out, but Baba stopped, and was squinting into the darkness, trying to see the source of the sound.
“Don’t stop Baba!” Kera said.
Then he saw it, a shape blacker than the darkness, a human-like creature with a tail. It looked like one of the drawings had come off the wall.
“Baba!” Kera screamed.
Too late. In a split second, the tail shot forward, wrapped itself around Baba Chuma, and yanked him out of sight. The hissing stopped all of a sudden.
Kera froze, wondering if it was all a dream.
The day had started like any other. He woke up to take goats into the valley to graze. His mother was already baking samosas to sell in her kiosk, his little brother Okee and his little sister Acii sat beside her eating porridge. His older brother Karama had left to hoe the gardens. His father was at his garage, forging metals into works of art. They called him Baba Chuma, the father of metals, for he was a gifted artisan.
The war was far away from their town, and there was no hint it would ever come to them. With a population of only about four thousand, stuck in a sea of ancient rocks, they had nothing to offer the warlords. Then, soldiers came for recruits. When no one volunteered, they shot the women and kidnapped the men. Kera had watched a grenade rip his mother apart. He had watched Okee and Acii running hand in hand until bullets sent them crashing onto the pavement. He did not know what had happened to Karama. Maybe he was dead too. Now something that looked like a charcoal drawing had taken the only family he had left.
“Baba,” he said, barely able to hear his own voice.
No response. Only a silence. Baba Chuma had not even yelled when the thing took him.
Then he heard the hiss again, like a whispering of wind, like the singing of leaves, and he saw drawings moving in the darkness, like smoke dancing. He fled from the cave. He stumbled over the stones on the plateau. He fell, scraping his knees, but he ignored the pain and ran fast down the slope. It was true, after all. It was not just another fairy tale, not just another superstition. The valley was a home of spirits. He had seen them. They looked like charcoal drawings and spoke like wind.
The tank cannons still pounded away from across the valley, there were still soldiers prowling about, but Kera did not stop to think about that. He would rather end up a captive of soldiers than of that charcoal thing. He sped, aware of the dangers of running fast down a slope, but he could not slow down. Evil drawings had taken his father. Evil drawings wanted to take him too. He stepped on a lose rock, slipped, fell, and went tumbling down the slope, down, down, down, until he crashed against a tree trunk. He struggled to his feet, ignoring the pain that blazed through his body, but he could not continue running for something grabbed him, and pulled him into a cave.
He screamed. A hand clamped on his mouth. He fought, struggling to get away, screaming, even as his brain registered that it was human hands, not a tail, pinning him to the ground.
“Quiet!” someone growled. “The soldiers will hear you!”
He could not stop screaming. He could not stop fighting. Shadows loomed over him. The drawings. The evil spirits. His legs kicked out. His hands broke free, and he threw a punch at a shadow. He tried to wriggle away, but then a rock smashed into his head and the world turned into darkness and silence.
And dreams.
He was with his father in a place without light, yet they could both see, the way cats see in the night. Living pictures materialised on the ragged walls, telling stories of an ancient people, of a magic world where gods still lived with humans. The drawings rippled over the rock face like water. He got a strange feeling that he too was a drawing, a work of charcoal, that he too was made of smoke, not flesh and bones, and that he was living in an ancient world which held the secrets of the universe. It might have been a sweet dream, for this world was a paradise where he could fly, but human-like creatures with tails hissed all around him.
“Baba!” he screamed.
And he woke up, strapped to the ground, supine. Red sun beams fell into the cave, onto roots that had broken through the stone surface and hung suspended like the disembodied fingers of the hissing creatures. He screamed again, but not a sound came from his mouth. He was gagged, the cloth tasted of mud.
“He woke up,” someone said. He knew the voice, the man Lafony everybody called Teacher, for he had taught in the primary school for forty years.
“Kera,” another voice said. It belonged to Asiba the mayor “Are you okay?”
“Thank God,” someone else said. “I feared he’d never awake.”
There were about twenty people crowded around him. He recognised them all. He listened for the sound of gunfire. Nothing. A few birds made a racket, a monkey squawked. The sun was going down. He had been unconscious for the whole day, for it had been morning when the soldiers attacked. Darkness would soon come down, and then what? Would the drawings come out of their cave?
Kera fought his bondage, but it came to him that if he wanted to flee he would have to convince the refugees to untie him. They were not the enemy. They kept him tied up to ensure he did not give away their hiding place. He held his breathe for several minutes, gaining control of his nerves, and then lifted up his hands in a gesture begging for them to untie him.
“Will you stay calm?” Teacher asked.
Kera nodded. Teacher removed the gag.
“There are spirits,” Kera said, slowly, fighting to contain the panic that threatened to overwhelm him again. He wanted to say more, to tell them that the valley was indeed a home of spirits, that soldiers had knocked open the door of hell and that demons would soon be swarming the place. The only words he could manage were those three.
Someone chortled. Teacher frowned at that person and the laughter died out. They had not seen it. Though they called the valley Gang Yamo, no one really believed that spirits lived there. Even Teacher, who openly denounced Christianity and Islam and championed indigenous African faiths, had once said that just as God and Allah did not really live in churches and mosques, the valley was merely a symbolic place of worship.
“I saw them,” Kera said. “They took Baba.”
This time, more than two people chortled. Teacher smiled at him. “Why are you are scared?” he said. “If you saw spirits then you saw our ancestors. You shouldn’t fear them.”
Kera’s jaws
tightened. It would be pointless to argue, pointless to tell this man about the drawings, so he stayed quiet as Teacher untied him.
“I blame the mzungu,” Teacher was saying in a low voice. “He has made us afraid of our own ancestors. Maybe this boy has seen spirits, but why should they scare him? I’ll tell you why. Christianity has made us so stupid that we think our ancestors are demons. The sad thing is that this stupidity ensures the mzungu continues to rule us. You think this war is because one tribe wants to rule the other? No! It’s a direct result of his greed. He created hatred between us so instead of working together we fight each other. The chaos allows him to control the diamond mines and the gold mines and the oil fields. That’s what this war is about. We are too stupid to see it. We’ve become so stupid that we think our ancestors were Jews, and we think our true ancestors are demons.”
Now free, Kera rubbed his wrists where the rope had bitten into his skin and examined the entrance. He could not dash out for he was at the back of the cave and there were people between him and the mouth. They would stop him, and tie him up again.
“I have to pee,” he said, his voice hoarse with thirst.
The cave was too small for him to use any part of it. They would have to let him out. No one heard his request because Teacher was still going on about wazungu and the war. Kera then stood up, and that got him attention.
“I’m dying,” he said. “I have to go.”
A man parted the leaves that they had used to hide the entryway and peered out checking for signs of soldiers. The sun had gone down. Smoke from the town tinted the blue of dusk with a black mist.
“Stay close,” the mayor said. “Don’t scream if you see a yamo.”
A few people chuckled, Kera ignored them. Once out, he ran fast down the slope. They shouted at him, but only briefly, for they were afraid the noise would attract soldiers. He knew they would not follow him. This time, he watched his step, and he ran with care. Soon he was off Kom pa’Yamo and running on flat ground, through waist-high undergrowth in a small forest. Though the trees did not grow thick, their shadows made it dark.
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