by Kwame Mbalia
Right now, if Alke was going to begin the process of healing the trauma caused by King Cotton and the iron monsters, we were going to have to lance a boil, and that boil was Bear.
But to do that, I had to raise another slave ship.
I needed to speak with the Maafa.
THE RAFT ZOOMED THROUGH PINK-TINGED CLOUDS AND THE COOL dawn air. East of us, the towers and minarets of the Golden Crescent began to emerge, shining like a bunch of Nana’s golden-tipped quilting needles had been plunged into the earth. The sight made my heart lurch, and doubt tried to creep back into my mind, but I forced it away. She’ll be all right, I said over and over to myself, clutching the scraps of her quilt tight to my chest. Bear had said my grandmother was safe—for now. But if the suspicion growing in my mind was true, it was possible that soon no one would be safe.
The grand palaces of the Golden Crescent began to appear, growing out of the horizon in all their splendor. Any other time and I would’ve gawked at the sight. They had never failed to amaze me before. This time I barely glanced at them. My eyes were fixed on the smear of blue to the west of them.
We zipped past the forest palace of the Mmoatia, the forest fairies who had healed many of those injured in the fight with the iron monsters. Ayanna had taken over, muttering something about flying without a pilot’s license, and we soared by Nyame’s palace, grander and larger than them all, with his giant golden statues that served as bodyguards. Repairs were still ongoing, and my eyes lingered just a bit as I sent good thoughts to John Henry.
Just hold on, I told him.
It seemed like I was saying that to everyone these days.
And then we reached the bay. Ayanna put on more speed, looking at me every so often so I could give her directions. We headed out over the still water, deep and calm. In the distance I could see a smudge of gray and glints of orange. MidPass, and the Burning Sea that surrounded it. Right now it appeared that the flaming waves were under control, but I didn’t want to risk staying out over the dangerous water any longer than necessary. I still remembered the bone ships and their haunting cries as they chased me and Gum Baby.
Finally, I took a deep breath. “Here!” I shouted.
Ayanna raised her eyebrows but brought the raft down slowly, until we were floating just above the sea. A gust of wind swirled around us, setting several white-capped waves ablaze.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, boy,” Anansi said. I clutched the SBP in my left hand. My right held the adinkra bracelet, and I rotated it slowly and made a fist every so often just to keep it loose. It still hurt, but not as much as before.
“I hope so, too,” I muttered.
So…how do you call forth the disassembled wreckage of a haunted slave ship?
On the phone, of course. Anansi and I had worked it out, and it turned out to be really simple.
“Here we go.” I opened up the Contacts app in the SBP, spelled out M-a-a-f-a, and then watched the icon of a small ship appear. It still tripped me out how the phone-that-was-absolutely-a-phone-and-not-a-magical-story-box worked sometimes. I tapped the icon, then sat the phone on the deck of the raft and clasped the imbongi bead I’d gotten from the Ridgefolk. “Maafa!” I shouted. “Maafa! I need to speak with you.”
The surface of the water remained still.
I took a deep breath, focused on a mental image of the ship lying in pieces at the bottom of the sea, and shouted again. “MAAFA! I know you can hear me. This is long distance, hurry!”
Gum Baby scratched her head in confusion. “What does ‘long distance’ mean?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, but Granddad always shouted that when someone took their sweet time getting to the phone.”
“Ohhh. It must be a threat. Gum Baby’s gonna use that. ‘These hands are long distance, thistle-head!’”
Before I could respond (everything was always so violent with that doll), the surface of the water bubbled a few dozen yards away. Then it started to steam, and fiery waterspouts began to form. I eyed our position nervously but didn’t move. This would all be over soon. Hopefully.
Whoosh!
A giant beam of rotted wood erupted out of the sea and shot into the air like a rocket. Streams of burning water fell from it as it crashed back down and sent a giant wave surging past us. If Ayanna hadn’t sent us shooting backward, we might’ve been roasted. I could feel the heat singeing my eyebrows. Another beam broke the surface, then another. Plank after plank rose out of the sea with eerie precision. Tangled ropes and slimy black seaweed snaked around them, knitting them into a strange jumble that began to look more and more familiar.
A curving hull.
A broken mast.
Tattered sails.
Soon, the bloated carcass of a slave ship floated in front of me. A jagged hole the size of John Henry had formed in the hull just above the water line, and with two broken spars jutting out near the remains of the top deck above it, it looked as if the Maafa had gained a face.
A sneering, hungry face.
Plus, the slave ship was huge. I’d forgotten how large it was. It easily dwarfed some of the palaces back on land. Still, I had business to handle and two worlds to save.
“Can you bring us in closer?” I asked Ayanna.
She shot me one of her patented Are you serious? looks but used her staff to move us a teeny bit nearer to the ship.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Something heavy was moving through the wreckage. Even broken, the Maafa still had a deck that loomed over us, and we couldn’t float any higher because of tangled rigging and jagged wooden masts that curled down toward us like claws.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Whatever was up there sounded significant. I took a deep breath and prepared to face the worst thing I could possibly imagine.
“Ah, the Anansesem. Good. Good.”
I froze. I hadn’t imagined this. There, leaning over the edge of the deck and staring down at us with a sightless, featureless manacle head, stood a bossling. The overgrown fetterling, five times as big and ten times as vicious as the smaller, more common iron monsters, was a fearsome creature. I mean, four of them had succeeded in restraining the sky god at one point.
But even scarier—it was speaking.
“Are our stories being told?” the Maafa asked through the bossling. It was weird talking to a ship via its surrogate mouth, a giant iron monster. Then again, it was weird talking to a ship at all. So…
I squared my shoulders and put one foot back in a boxing stance. It gave me balance and stability and made me feel a bit more secure. I glared at the giant iron monster and spoke with a confidence I didn’t totally feel.
“I have told your story many times. In this world and beyond.”
The bossling tilted its head. “You kept your word. We are impressed.”
“You didn’t think I would?”
“Recent events have left us…displeased.”
That felt like an understatement. I could feel the hatred rolling off the ship in waves. Scuttling and skittering noises came from inside the giant hole, a maw of evil that looked ready to devour us, raft and all. I had to get my questions answered and skedaddle out of there.
“I’m sorry for whatever happened, but I have a question for you,” I said.
Before I could continue, the bossling rattled menacingly, the sound of its chains dragging on the deck earsplitting. The iron monster screeched, and to my horror, answering calls emerged from inside the Maafa. There were more of them.
“YOU DO NOT GET TO DEMAND ANSWERS FROM US!” the Maafa/bossling roared. “There was a bargain. You struck an agreement with us. The Anansesem tells our story, and we return to our slumber.”
I nodded. “Yes, that was the deal. So—”
“So tell us why our sleep was disturbed, our resting spot ripped apart and looted? Your agents of betrayal, with the disgusting tools of your gods, entered our domain and took things that did not belong to them. Is the deal off, Anansesem? Shall our children re
turn to punish those on land?”
The sound of hundreds of chains rattled in the darkness within the Maafa. A fetid smell, like swamp water and burning metal, rolled out of the submerged holds and nearly made me gag.
“No! The deal is still on. I am telling your story. And I don’t know who—”
I stopped, midsentence and mid-cough. I did know who. The Maafa had just confirmed my worst fear.
“The one who took from you,” I said. “What did he take? Did he…did he rescue King Cotton?”
The rattling stopped all at once. On the top deck, the bossling gave a final shriek and fell apart into a hundred fist-size chain links. I waited. This was a familiar routine. Sure enough, from inside the jagged maw of the Maafa came another set of heavy footsteps. A knotted wooden creature pressed forward, the light of dawn just falling across the monster’s face.
A hullbeast.
When it spoke, I could hear the buzzing undertone of brand flies waiting to be belched forth and unleashed on its prey.
“The poisoned one’s body,” the monster rasped, “was not taken. His limbs were ripped apart by the currents, the bolls of his flesh churned in the burning water of our home until they burned to ash. No, that body could not be taken anywhere.”
I sighed. That was a relief. Bear must’ve just salvaged parts of iron monsters from the sea floor to build his magic armor. Okay. I could deal with that. Defeating him would still be tough, but if they worked together, the gods of MidPass and Alke could—
“But…” continued the Maafa.
I froze as hundreds of fetterlings crept around the hullbeast, rimming the hole in the Maafa’s hull like hungry fledglings waiting for their parent to bring them dinner.
I refused to be on the menu.
“But what?” I asked, shooting a glance at Ayanna. She gripped her staff, ready to zoom us away.
“But the angry one did take something.”
The angry one. Bear.
More fetterlings began to cover every available surface on the Maafa. They leaned over the top deck, slithered around the broken mast, and clung to the tattered sails like rusted leeches. Gum Baby, unusually silent up to this point, tugged on my shorts leg.
“Gum Baby ain’t afraid of nothin’, don’t misunderstand, but Gum Baby forgot to bring her beat-down boots.”
“You don’t wear boots,” I whispered back.
“Because Gum Baby forgot them. Now seems like a good time to go look for them.”
Ayanna glanced around nervously. “I agree with Gum Baby. Let’s get out of here.”
“Sounds wise to me,” Anansi whispered.
The ship rumbled ominously. I stood and shouted, “What did Bear take?”
“Oh, we think you already know what it is. You just want someone else to speak it out loud, to take on the responsibility you so desperately try to avoid. It makes no difference to us. After we swallow you and the spider god whole, we will crawl forth from the sea again to the burned ruins of the angry one’s lair and consume him as well.”
“What did he take?” I shouted again.
“The mask of King Cotton.”
Those five words didn’t fade away. Instead, they combined with the thunder of the approaching storm and the howling wind. The Maafa suddenly lurched forward, spilling iron monsters over the sides like rats jumping out of a sinking ship. I’d been waiting for something like that—you don’t enter the presence of evil and not expect to be betrayed—but still, the speed at which the fetterlings attacked nearly overwhelmed us.
Ayanna yanked her staff to the left, sending us swerving forward—straight into the Maafa’s damaged hull. I don’t think any of us expected that, not even Anansi or Gum Baby.
“Ayannaaaaa!”
The raft dodged monster after monster. We ducked around tight corners, just barely avoiding leaping fetterlings and a massive swing of two of the hullbeast’s four arms. Forward, into the darkness, into the damp rotten stench. We rocked left and right, the terrifying moans of the Maafa raising the hairs on the back of my neck.
At last I saw where Ayanna was taking us. An opening in the ceiling of the hold, and the deck beyond, and the freedom that was the morning sky. She angled the raft upward and I scooped up the SBP as it slid down the raft toward me.
“Hang on!” I shouted to Gum Baby, only to look back to see her firing sap balls at fetterlings that got too close.
“Sap attack!”
“You ain’t got the reach!”
“Triple sap attack!”
We shot out into the air as the Maafa began to crumble around us. Fiery waves seemed to reach out, barely missing the raft by inches. Once we were about fifty feet in the air, we slowed and floated, watching as the ancient slave ship sank beneath the Burning Sea for the second time. My lungs were aching, and I realized I’d been holding my breath. Exhaling shakily, I collapsed to the floor of the raft and sat with my head in my hands.
“We made it,” Anansi said, his muffled voice coming from my shirt pocket.
“Some help you were,” I muttered.
“So what now?” Ayanna asked.
I didn’t answer. Not at first.
The mask of King Cotton.
In our battle with the evil haint, Gum Baby had unleashed a furious barrage of sap attacks against King Cotton. The sticky amber stuff had covered King Cotton’s head in a lumpy resin, and it had formed a mask. That’s all that was left of him when the rest of his body drifted away, and that’s what Bear had found at the bottom of the Burning Sea. While stealing iron-monster parts from the Maafa for his armor, he must’ve stumbled across the relic.
But I remembered the first time I’d seen the haint.
He was a slinking, oily shadow that had escaped from a bottle on the Bottle Tree.
And now that shadow was trapped in the amber mask.
King Cotton had gotten his hooks into Bear.
THE ENCHANTED RAFT FLOATED ABOVE A BURNING SEA, MIDWAY between a coastal city of golden splendor and an abandoned smoking ruin of an island. On that raft sat a doll covered in sticky gum-tree sap, a magical phone with a trickster god trapped inside, and two exhausted rising eighth graders. At least, I think Ayanna would be in eighth grade. Did Alke have middle schools? Regardless, two worlds depended on their next move.
“Tristan, why are you talking in the third person?”
Anansi’s question pulled me from my thoughts. I looked around. Gum Baby was shaking her head as she watched me, and the spider god peered out of the phone, a look of concern on his face. Ayanna had one eyebrow raised. Had I been speaking out loud without realizing it?
“What?” I asked.
“You were mumbling to yourself again,” Gum Baby said. “And Gum Baby know she didn’t hear somethin’ about a doll.” The glare she fixed me with could’ve started a fire.
I shook my head quickly. “No, of course not. I must’ve…I must’ve sneezed. That’s it. I have weird sneezes. They’re more like cough-sneezes, so they can sound like words. I guess.”
She looked slightly appeased, and I hurriedly turned back to Anansi, who had opened up another app on the SBP. It was Alke Maps, one of the first applications I’d seen when Nyame converted the Story Box into a phone. It was supposed to show every region in Alke. I studied it along with Ayanna. Gum Baby scrambled up onto my shoulder and peered down as well.
“So,” Anansi said from the corner of the screen. “We need a plan.”
I nodded and waited, but the spider god just kept looking at me expectantly. My jaw dropped. “You want me to come up with a plan? What about you? You’re the god—can’t you do something?”
“What, from my advantageous position inside this silly device? Sorry, my boy, but you’ve got to take the lead on this one. And everyone’s counting on you, so, you know…no pressure.” He flashed his easy smile, and I glared at him. He was enjoying this.
But maybe he was right. Oh, I’m sure he had some grand design, some scheme he was cooking up. At the moment, though, I couldn’t
see what it was. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do except offer advice if I decided to confront Bear again. And…to be honest, I wasn’t sure I was ready to do that quite yet. The knowledge that King Cotton was out and about—even if he was trapped in a sap mask—terrified me to the core.
I pushed the fear aside and tried to concentrate. Think, Tristan, think.
“Bear wants to go beyond punching a hole in the sky,” I said slowly. “He said he wants to make it so no one, not haints or people or creatures or anything, could slip between the worlds again. But what does that mean? Is he out to destroy the tools of the gods, like John Henry’s hammer?”
Anansi shook his head from his perch in the top corner of the SBP’s screen. “Destroying a god’s symbol, their essence, requires a massive amount of power and strength, and even Bear isn’t that strong. No, he has to be doing something with them.”
“And why kidnap Tristan’s grandma and Mami Wata?” asked Ayanna. “Just to make us upset?”
The question hung in the air as the four of us thought about it. Well, Anansi, Ayanna, and I thought about it. Gum Baby had scrambled down from my shoulders and was hurling sap balls at the Burning Sea, watching little puffs of flame shoot up from the water’s surface. I was tempted to nudge her off the raft to see what would happen, but I didn’t. It was just a thought! I would never….
Anyway.
I sighed. “Whatever his plans are, we need to stop them, and that means finding where Bear has hidden Nana and Mami Wata. They could be anywhere. An abandoned palace in the Golden Crescent…Maybe in the foothills before we get to the Ridgefolk’s territory…Anywhere!”
Anansi nodded. “We have to be strategic. Narrow down the possibilities and be smart about where we go and in what order.”
That made sense. I tried to think while keeping an eye on Gum Baby, who was making bigger and bigger sap balls to generate larger flames on the sea surface. As I watched, the tiny terror rolled a sap ball as large as a melon, taking great care to make sure it didn’t stick to the raft. She lifted it above her head, ready to cast it down as the ultimate sacrifice, when something wormed its way from the back of my mind and punched its way clear to the front.