My Soul to Keep (African Immortals)

by Tananarive Due

  He knew it, he knew it, even then he knew it. The music they made was new, it was an invention of sound, an American-born hybrid; it was going to take hold of the world and not let it shake loose. From the moment he’d heard it, from the instant he’d picked up a clarinet or a saxophone or sat at a piano to imitate it, he knew it.

  Seth was the name Dawit lived under then, left over from slave times. He found the name Tillis in a book—no way he’d go by Ole Master’s vile surname—but Tillis was as agreeable as any other American name.

  “How come they call him Spider?”

  “Don’t ask, just watch his fingers move.”

  He lived for that music. Lived for it. It woke him up in the mornings and would hardly let his brain go at night. For the first time in a century, he’d been happy to be alive, very nearly giddy, because the music was something fresh every time he played it. And it became something else again when the boys in his new band joined in, every voice distinct, their instruments conversing.

  “Pumpkin seed, what are you doing in here?”

  “Mama said I could watch you play, Daddy.”

  Rosalie.

  The music stopped. The record had finished, and the only sound in the room with Dawit was the overloud popping and hissing from his speakers. The noise swallowed Dawit. His hands, suddenly fumbling and feeling too big, shook around his clarinet.

  Rosalie.

  She’d been at home in their apartment the whole time, she and Rufus, and his wife, Christina, while he was at the club making music. Then he’d left after the Searchers came. Just left, unquestioning, the way he’d been instructed long before, after taking his vow of Life.

  And he’d killed her. Killed Rosalie. Crushed her face. Pressed the pillow hard even when her instincts willed her to fight against him to breathe. He’d killed her just as he’d killed so many before her, and would surely kill so many after.

  Dawit howled and sobbed. The clarinet fell to his feet, the mouthpiece breaking loose. He nearly sank to his knees, but he lurched against the sofa and leaned against the armrest as he cried.

  Were the Searchers watching him even now, in this state? Dawit, the fearless soldier, reduced to this?

  The telephone rang on the coffee table beside him, and Dawit jumped. He let it ring three times, hoping that when he picked it up he would hear her voice, the voice that was his salvation.

  Yes, it was her. The first word she spoke was his name, the name he’d told her, the Hebrew variation of the name his mother had given him in his first language, so long ago. She spoke it like a melody.

  “David? It’s me.”

  “Hey, baby,” Dawit said.

  “What’s wrong? You sound awful.”

  “I was sleeping,” he lied. He hated the lies. Everything he said or did was an utter, complete falsehood. Everything except what was in his heart, at its core. “What’s up?”

  “Uhm … there’s been a development. Peter’s agent has already talked to somebody who’s really interested in our book.”

  He couldn’t help pausing before he spoke. “You’re kidding. That’s wonderful,” he said cheerfully, ignoring the vise wrapped around his chest.

  His words, it seemed, had stunned her. Her end of the line was silent for a few seconds. “Really?”

  “Jessica,” he said, “I’m sorry for the way I’ve behaved. I’ve been an ass. There’s no excuse. You’re publishing a book, that’s your dream, and I would be a fool not to be thrilled. I’ll run to the store before school lets out to pick up some steaks for a special dinner. Does that sound good?”

  She made a sound like a gasp. “Are you sure you’re David Wolde? My husband? The voice is familiar, but …”

  “Just hurry home. We’ve endured enough unhappiness in this house. It’s time for a celebration.” He knew he had found the right things to say. He wanted so much to be sincere in sharing her elation that he’d nearly fooled himself. She deserved happy words. She deserved all he could say and more.

  “David, I love you,” Jessica said.

  Dawit closed his eyes. The vise, for that instant, was gone.

  Lalibela, Abyssinia (Ethiopia)

  SPRING, 1540

  Two men on horseback gallop away from the colorful tents of a caravan of nearly two hundred merchants and their families, a traveling village. The sound of babies crying floats from inside a few of the tents. The caravan is flanked by dogs sniffing for scraps, camels, cows, and bleating goats, but the combined noises fall rapidly behind the men as their horses take them up the grassy hillside toward the stone city hidden in night’s darkness. The rainy season is near, and cold droplets spray their faces.

  Dawit’s horse is swifter, pulling ahead. A convert to Islam, Dawit embraces the beliefs and language to trade silks and clothing from India. But he refuses to be called anything except Dawit, the name of the great emperor, the name his parents gave him. Dawit’s allegiances are fickle. In battle, Dawit has killed both Muslims and Christians. Muslims kidnapped him and slew his father when Dawit was a child, selling him to a silk-draped Christian nobleman, yet Dawit has now befriended Muslims. When Dawit and Mahmoud’s travels thrust them into unfriendly lands or the midst of skirmishes, they slay Christians from their horses. Both are good soldiers, but Dawit’s spear is more sure. He kills, others say of him, without blinking his eyes.

  Dawit earned his freedom because of his skills with a knife and spear protecting his nobleman’s lands, and he has been free as an adult to travel and trade as he pleases. Many of his new Moorish companions are slavers, but Dawit refuses that trade, despite the rewards. After all, he’d been a slave himself, though lucky to be treated mildly by the man who’d bought him for a bar of salt. Dawit had been a child then, shamefully helpless, so that was his lot. The strong always overtake the weak, Dawit knows. But by their own laws, Christian merchants are forbidden to trade in slaves, and Dawit has come to agree with their thinking. Can people be considered cargo, like a bar of salt or a fabric?

  Mahmoud, who rides three paces behind Dawit, is a skilled negotiator whom Dawit considers his brother. Dawit married his sister, but the pretty thirteen-year-old died with their baby during childbirth. Dawit’s shared grief with Mahmoud over Rana’s death sealed their bond. Tonight, they are bonded by a much stronger power they do not yet understand.

  Lalibela is a city of priests and rock-hewn churches, so Dawit and Mahmoud hear chants in Ge’ez from dark corners as their horses’ hooves clop across the rocky path toward the market square. Three hundred years ago, this was the capital of the country. Dawit and Mahmoud enter this Christian city with arrogance; they ride in silence until they reach a small garden behind a castlelike monastery, where they dismount and tie their horses. They walk barefoot to a stone stairway leading into the earth, but they wait before descending into the dense dark. Dawit calls down, and only his echo responds. The others have not yet arrived.

  “We should not have come,” Dawit says. He and Mahmoud wear nearly identical clothes, breeches with silk tunics. Dawit has a sheepskin slung over his chest as well, in the manner of his long- dead peasant father. Their scalps are covered with skullcaps.

  “Are you losing your courage?” Mahmoud asks. He is from Arabia, younger and more fair-skinned than Dawit.

  “Not my courage. It’s my reason I’ve lost,” Dawit says. “We should not have come to him again. This man is a trickster.” Dawit notices the cross sculpted into the stone window of the church, meant to ward off evil. They might need its power tonight.

  Mahmoud laughs, biting into an apple he has brought. “He has swallowed the blood of Christ,” he chuckles.

  “A lie,” Dawit says, annoyed.

  “I only repeat his claim.”

  “That is blasphemy to all of us, whether we follow the laws of Muhammad or Christ.”

  “Or both?” Mahmoud teases.

  “Why do you mock me? I answer to Allah only.”

  “Today it is Allah. And tomorrow?” Mahmoud laughs, and Dawit must smile de
spite his anger. Mahmoud knows his heart; Dawit is drawn to the strong. Perhaps he has not given his heart to God at all, but only to the armies of warriors who cry out God’s many names.

  Mahmoud kicks pebbles from beneath his feet until they bounce loudly down the stairs. He feeds the rest of the apple to his horse. “Well, something brings you back here, Dawit.”

  Dawit sighs, examining the mysterious expanse of starlight above them through breaks in the clouds. The lights beckon him in the patterns of constellations he has now learned to see. There is the one that resembles a ladle! He sees it readily. “I’ll tell you why. I like the pictures he shows us in the sky.”

  “And the symbols on a page he can read as words. That, too. We can learn to write, like the royalty. And the clergy.”

  “He is a good teacher,” Dawit admits.

  They hear the shuffle of feet, and soon they are joined by others at the top of the stairs; blacksmiths, carpenters, Christian traders, even two or three monks. One of the monks is responsible for their entry to this church tonight, Dawit knows. Soon, they number more than fifty, the youngest a boy of twelve. None of them wants to meet the eyes of the others near them. They are ashamed of their loose fellowship, seeking the voice of this mysterious man who speaks all tongues and calls himself by a Muslim name, Khaldun—meaning eternal.

  Dawit gazes scornfully at the monks, who wear brass crosses on chains around their neck. They, like him, are hypocrites to seek audience with such a false prophet. “We should all be damned,” Dawit mutters.

  “Speak softly, Dawit. He comes.”

  Khaldun always walks with a torch, so he is visible from a distance. None of them can ever say with certainty from where he has come. His torchlight seems to appear at will in the night, traveling toward them in flickering orange that paints the bearer’s form against the walls in a monstrous shadow. He wears a splendid white robe that drags in the dirt. Dawit’s heart quickens.

  Soon, Khaldun is close enough for them to see his face and the bushy black beard that hangs to his breastbone. He is a black African, not mixed with lighter bloods, though he has never told them which people are his. His strangely translucent eyes travel from face to face and he walks past, studying them. “You thirst,” he says to each one after a gaze. “You thirst.” He stands before Dawit, bearing into him with those soul-seeing eyes. Dawit struggles to meet his gaze, but loses his nerve and casts his eyes downward. He is a coward!

  “You thirst,” Khaldun says, rubbing Dawit’s wrist.

  In a silent line, they follow Khaldun down the stairs into the magnificent sanctuary carved from stone. Khaldun has told them how men broke their backs bringing the stone down from the Lasta Mountains under the reign of King Gebra Maskal Lalibela. Khaldun knows all that has come before. Dawit gazes at an archway as they pass beneath it, and he sees birds painted above the chiseled stone. Artists have covered the walls with images of saints and Christ, all of the figures’ big brown eyes wide and full of piety.

  In a corner of the church, they find seats in the rows of flat wooden benches. Khaldun mounts his torch in a hole carved in the wall and sits before them on the floor, his legs folded beneath him. They seem afraid even to stir as they wait for Khaldun to speak.

  “My pupils,” Khaldun begins in the voice that sounds ancient though his face is not much older than Dawit’s, “your thirst for knowledge is the magnet that brings you to me. It is your brotherhood. You seek all knowledge, and all knowledge you shall attain. But to walk this path, you must follow with your heart as well as your mind. You must follow without fear, without doubt. This is a path from which no mortal man returns. There are no visitors to this home. Once you enter, it is yours to dwell in for all time.”

  They sit before Khaldun as if statues. His lessons do not usually begin this way. Dawit had hoped Khaldun would bring them the hollow bamboo instruments he is teaching them to blow to produce pleasing music, or that he would tell them more tales from African kingdoms. What is this he speaks of tonight?

  Khaldun’s voice floats between Dawit’s ears like a magic balm. Dawit wants to move, yet he cannot. The voice fills his veins, seducing him. He knows he is hearing a sorcerer.

  “You Christian brothers … remind us why Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit,” Khaldun says. “What was it they sought? Was it riches? Was it sins of the flesh? What did they seek?”

  “Knowledge,” one of the monks answers him.

  Khaldun’s face breaks into a smile of perfect teeth. “Yes. Knowledge. Knowledge, in the end, is the only prize.”

  “You drank Christ’s blood?” Dawit blurts, interrupting.

  The eyes of the others fall to him. Khaldun, instead of appearing angry, continues to smile. “Dawit … yes … the inquisitive one, the new son of Islam. What can I tell you of Christ’s blood? There is more than you learned in your Scriptures. There is more than what you find in the Bible, or in Muhammad’s Qur’an. There is much more. Did you know that precious ounces of Christ’s blood were stolen from the fresh corpse, drained into a leather pouch? This is true. I was there when it was done.”

  “For what purpose?” Dawit asks, his mouth dry.

  The flame’s dance alters Khaldun’s face slightly, shifting him into shadow. “Once, in my travels long ago, I joined a group of shepherds. We met another traveler—in the random manner in which all of you met me—who told us of a dream. He asked if we knew of this man called Jesus. We did. We had all heard stories of his claims. The traveler said he did not follow this man’s teachings, yet in his dream he learned that Christ was among the prophets chosen to rise. The traveler told us of a plan. And we listened.

  “Our hearts were not ready for faith, but we were greedy for life. The dreamer took us to Calvary, where Christ was nailed, and we stood among his followers to watch him suffer and die. His death was not so serene as these paintings you see all around you. When the corpse was brought down, I watched my companion help clean his wounds and steal blood from Christ’s own veins. We sat vigil for two days over the cold pouch. Then, not long before the reports of the empty burial cave miles from where we sat, the blood in our pouch grew warm. We could feel the heat when we passed it between us. The blood lived.”

  With Khaldun’s words, the room fills with gasps, murmurings of wonder. Khaldun silences them by raising his arm above his head. His voice grows as heavy as the rain pounding on the roof of the church.

  “Our friend learned an incantation in his dream, a Ritual of Life for the Living Blood. He held up for us a vial of poison. Only through death, he said, could life return. He instructed us to drink the poison. At the instant of death, he told us, he would inflict a small wound and pour the Living Blood into our own veins to perform the Ritual of Life, repeating the words from his dream. There were six among us. One by one, we drank.

  “Only I survived the Ritual. This, I believe, was in keeping with his design. The dreamer, who had not taken the poison, needed only one of us for his purposes. By morning, when I awoke, I cursed him. I thought him a devil, and a devil I now know he was. He asked me to perform the Ritual of Life on him, as I’d seen him attempt on the others, but my heart was overcome with fear. I had a vision that he would become a monster, perverting the blood to harm scores of men and make himself a god. After he drank the poison, I stood over him with the pouch of Living Blood in my hand, but I gave him none. I allowed him to die. Does that answer your question, Dawit?”

  Dawit nods, transfixed and silent. “Why do you tell us this?” whispers Mahmoud. His voice shakes.

  Khaldun studies their faces a moment before answering, his head turning from one side of the room to the other. “I have learned much in my years. I have been alone too long. I need obedient pupils who are willing to journey with me in Life for the purpose of knowledge, and knowledge alone.”

  “Do you have the blood still?” Dawit asks.

  “The Ritual of Life awakened me from the dead, and I drank what little blood remained. Its saltiness coated my throat. The
Blood of Life is inside me. I have lived much like a hermit for many years, asking God to forgive me. But He does not hear my prayers because I have stolen from one of His favored children. So, I no longer seek redemption. I seek knowledge instead, because knowledge is infinite. And I seek pupils. Two hundred years ago on this night, I found a lame dog. I poisoned his food and performed the Ritual of Life as I remembered it, emptying blood from my veins into a wound I made in the animal’s flesh. That dog is with me still, and he has never been lame since. He guards me when I sleep.” He paused, shrouding his voice in a near-whisper. “I can do the same for a man.”

  Another gasp fills the dank room. The men stare at one another, their eyes wide. Excited, Mahmoud squeezes Dawit’s knee hard, peering at him with wonder. Dawit brushes his hand away, leaning close to Mahmoud’s ear. “He lies,” he whispers. “He says he has a dog. Where is the dog, then? What proof could we have of its age? He is a storyteller. These are Christian lies.”

  “Silence,” Khaldun instructs, and they obey. He drops his robe past his shoulders until his hairless chest and abdomen are exposed. Then he pulls from his belt a long knife that gleams in the torchlight.

  “Before I do what I must to show you the miracle of the Living Blood, you must promise to remain here the night, no matter what you see. You must wait as we waited. In the morning, all will be clear to you. Then you may choose to follow me.”

  They promise aloud, one by one, to remain the night.

  Satisfied, Khaldun grasps the dagger so tightly that the muscles in his slight arm quiver. He closes his eyes, his face turned upward. Then, he plunges the knife into his own side. His mouth agape in a soundless scream, he drags the blade across his belly, leaving a yawning wound in his flesh. A river of blood gushes forward, releasing his coiled insides.