The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  I turned myself to shadow, and slept.

  Somewhere in the night, my mother lay dead, her head hacked off from her body.

  In the morning until high-sun I tracked the chain-line until it arrived at a field.

  A farm. I’d seen a few before. But this one was huge. And here, there was screaming.

  Thousands of kids were there already, bending and digging and grabbing and hauling and sweating and struggling, while soldiers in the fields whipped them, and other soldiers sat in the shade gorging themselves on fruit, bread, and meat.

  By evening they wrangled the kids inside a corral with cisterns of water reeking like the Swamps of Death.

  After unchaining the kids from the line, they re-shackled them in pairs and gave the kids as much Swamp water to drink as they could take before their bellies burst.

  Then the soldiers hauled two pairs at a time into a central pen, backed out, and threw each pair one hatchet and one dagger.

  Without even being told to, the kids in the pen butchered each other.

  When the soldiers stopped cheering and passing each other glinting yellow metal nuggets, a guard unchained the surviving fighter and dragged out the three corpses. Teeth and an ear lay in the bloody sand. I don’t know which boy lost which.

  The guards threw the dead boys to their dogs who ripped the bodies apart in seconds.

  Then they chained the winner to a fresh kid. And they kept repeating this until they’d cut the numbers by three-quarters.

  They split the remaining quarter in halves, lined them up, gave them pikes.

  Then they were down to an eighth.

  Bruised, sliced, bleeding, raging and howling—

  The soldiers threatened the biggest ones, told them they’d kick them down and piss into their gashes unless they shut up, got back in their chains and went to sleep.

  And so they all backed down and lied down in a pile.

  I felt my mind splintering. Everything I looked at looked like fire. Living children looked like rotting corpses. My mother’s body was severed and strewn across the shadowed jungles of the Savage Lands. And children killed each other in front of me, and I did nothing, and I felt nothing any more.

  I found a hiding place and slept and dreamt of ripping open oranges and gorging myself on roasted rat.

  5.

  I woke up and immediately said to myself, out loud, “Nothing I can do for any of them.”

  I was spending too much time alone.

  At least I understood better how the Destroyer’s soldiers operated, and the size of his empire. It was time to go back to my nest.

  Hours into my careful march and hungrier with every step, I found a bunch of eggs on the ground, mostly broken. The insides of the half-shells were cleaned out, probably by rats.

  But there was one unbroken egg there, so I took it with me for a snack, or my whole meal if I couldn’t find anything else.

  When I thought of the roasted rat, oranges and watermelon, my belly let out a moan so loud it actually scared me, like an animal’d crawled inside my gut and was eating its way out.

  Then the egg cracked open.

  A chick wriggled slowly, painful inside. A falcon chick!

  It squawked at me: Hroo-hroo, hroo-hroo . . . .

  Beautiful, this tiny little bird. Without thinking I started to pet it, and the little bastard bit me. I dropped it in the peat, lifted my foot to stomp it—

  But it kept calling out, Hroo-hroo, hroo-hroo . . . .

  Was it cursing me for dropping him? Ordering me to feed him? Or crying for his mum?

  Just thinking about those choices almost made me cry. Not seeing all those kids murder each other at the soldiers’ command, no—but this little chick that’d just bitten me.

  I picked him back up. He tilted his head back squawking, beak way open. I pressed my thumb against the wound he’d torn in my finger, squeezed out a few drops of blood into his mouth, just like a mama bird feeding puked-up worms to her baby.

  “There you go, buddy,” I cooed to him. “C’mon. Eat your breakfast. More where that came from—”

  “Who the hell are you supposed to be?”

  I spun around, jumped up—

  Grinning at me was this crazy-looking kid, my size, hair mudded and twisted up and into two tall ears.

  Ringing him was a squad of jackals, big, deadly-looking black ones, each one like night on four legs, with moons for eyes.

  With Fang I could’ve probably gutted two of them, maybe blinded a couple of others, but the rest of them would’ve turned my face into dinner and kept my balls for breakfast.

  “Who the hell am I?” I threw back. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’ll tell you who I am, asshole. I’m Yinepu! The Hunter! And I aint no masterless kid, neither. I work for the Sorceress of the whole Savage Lands. Anything I hunt, I kill. And nobody hunts me.”

  He pointed at the ground with his rock dagger. “This is my territory. So I suggest you stay the hell out of here before I let my friends here do my convincing for me, understand, chick-boy?”

  Right on cue, the falcon squawked, Hroo-hroo.

  “You really wanna know who I am?” I said, suddenly crazy. I mean, I actually started laughing out loud, like I’d completely cracked. “I’m . . . I’m Hru!”

  Me laughing like that while I was outnumbered by him and his jackals, that stopped him. Probably made him shit himself. Good. That’s what he probably used to mud his hair.

  “So you work for a witch, huh? Big deal. I fought a whole platoon of soldiers—at night! I got swallowed by the Devourer of Millions of Souls and I ripped out his tooth and caused him so much pain he had to spit me out! I’ve still got it right here—see this? The deadliest sword anywhere in the Blackland or the Savage Lands! I rescued a bunch of kids in the Swamps of Death by splitting a whole army of gods-damned crocodiles’ heads in half! Think I’m afraid of some damn mud-head weirdo whose only friends are dogs? Try me! And try Fang!”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  We stared each other down for I don’t know how long.

  Finally we each backed away.

  When I was far enough away I turned around and started running, chick in one hand and Fang in the other.

  “Don’t be coming back here, you got me?” he shouted, pretty faint at that distance.

  “Don’t you be coming back here, you got me?”

  I needed to work on my come-backs.

  By the time I got back to my nest it was dark. I fed my falcon chick again, again with my blood, and sang him the only song I remembered, one my mother’d taught me about how lonely it felt to wander, and then we both went to sleep.

  The Book of Now

  1.

  Jackie Chan—screaming—face down on the floor of the basement.

  Mr. Ani’s knee jammed against his spine.

  Twisting JC’s arm. At that angle, only two more pounds of pressure and it’d snap at the elbow like a chicken bone in a pit-bull’s jaws.

  Couldn’t speak—just slap-spap-snappetty-slap-slapped the floor—

  Mr. Ani helped him up.

  “Dude!” big-smiled JC to Rap, rubbing his shoulder and arm. “You’ve got to try that! It’s insane! It’s crack-happy!”

  Rap looked at his friend brushing dust from his cheeks and missing all the dust coating his mini-dreads. Grey hair. Looked like the oldest teenager in the world.

  “Yeah, looks fun,” said Rap. His shoulders and neck were burning.

  The Hyper-Market was less than two weeks from being open for business. Signs declaring DATA RECOVERY, iPOD + SMALL ELECTRONICS REPAIRS, OVERSEAS MONEY TRANSFERS yapped at pedestrians from the window.

  But Raphael Garang, Jamal “Jackie Chan” Abdi and Mr. Yimunhotep Ani weren’t on the main floor. They were in the basement on gym mats under the low ceiling in the midst of their first lesson in jiu jitsu.

  “Your turn,” said Sbai Ani to Rap, beckoning with both hands and all ten fingers curling in: two crabs s
truggling on their backs.

  “Reach for me,” said the man in the long goatee and the black-and-gold skullcap. “Hockey-fight style—that’s what any knucklehead in the street’s gonna throw.”

  Rap held back. “I don’know, Mr. Ani. I . . . I’m feeling sick.”

  “Well don’t barf on me,” said Mr. Ani. “C’mon. JC’s already done the move five times now. Gonna hafta do it some time.”

  “I’m telling you, man,” JC told Rap. “Fuhgeddaboudit!”

  Rap scowled at him. This week it was Donnie Brasco. Last week Scarface. Next week probably Dolemite.

  “I’ll go slow,” said their teacher. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurtcha.”

  Rap sucked down a breath, sniffed, tried running the Numerical Alchemy in his head. Fire ripped down his back. Loosely held the right lapel of the man’s gi with his left hand, then slow-mo punched his right fist forward.

  “Hang on,” said the Sbai.

  Clutching Rap’s left hand against his own chest.

  Bringing up his right arm, fist face high.

  Rotating at his hips and sinking into a deep stance.

  Jamming his right forearm into the elbow of Rap’s grabbing arm—

  —Rap buckling and shooting forward chest-first like a toboggan on ice—

  Mr. Ani cranking Rap’s left hand and sliding his own right hand down along Rap’s arm, like strangling a snake at two ends, jamming his hand between Rap’s shoulder and shoulder blade until Rap was face-in-the-floor with Ani’s knee was in his back.

  “Get off me! GET OFFA ME!”

  Mr. Ani jumped off of him. Tried to help him up

  Rap scrambled up, back, his belly-skin crawling and his back, neck and scalp rippling flame.

  “Whoah, whoah—you okay? Did I hurt you?” asked the older man, eyes wide, hands up high in I surrender.

  Rap shook his head, tried to form words, failed.

  Ani: “Okay . . . . Maybe we should take a break upstairs.”

  Rap sniffed. Looked at the floor. Glanced glares at his elder and his peer. Hating him and JC and himself.

  Upstairs he shoved his feet in his sneakers and split without saying goodbye.

  2.

  Three days later. A hot, dry late afternoon.

  Rap came back.

  Mr. Ani met him at the door.

  “I was worried about you,” said the old man. “I left messages. You didn’t call.”

  Rap shrugged, looked up and down 111th Avenue broiling in the heat and the dust.

  He took a big breath. “The other day.” Sniffed. “I blew up.”

  Mr. Ani nodded.

  “I don’know what happened—I just—”

  “Young brother,” said Mr. Ani, “it was my fault. It was stupid of me!”

  He chinned towards the store next door. No more police tape, but the place was closed without even a FOR LEASE sign.

  “You two, face-down in the store next door on a midnight multiple homicide. And then twenty metres away, genius me, planting you like petunias. Okay, maybe . . . maybe we switch you to wing chun. Close-combat, but no ground-fighting.” Cleared his throat. “Think about it, anyway. Okay?”

  Rap. Forcing himself.

  “I’m just . . . . ” Shrugged. “Just not maybe into martial arts.”

  “Important to be able to defend yourself. As you well know.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But yeah, maybe it is too soon—”

  “I just, you know, enjoy talking with you about books. And learning the scrolls.”

  Mr. Ani nodded, smiled. He held out his hand. Rap shook it.

  Rap reached into his backpack, handed over a cardboard tube. His elder shook out the contents.

  A pen-and-ink of Wesley Snipes, motion-blurred, swords and limbs swinging.

  “Blade!” said Ani. “You did this?”

  Rap nodded.

  “Damn, that’s excellent!” Lots of teeth. Eyes sparkling like black quartz. “This is for me?”

  Rap nodded.

  Ani held his fist over Rap’s hand, dropped a dap.

  “Golden, bruh. C’mon in.”

  Inside they sat drinking Ethiopian tea and listening to Mr. Ani’s speakers spitting hip hop. Cloves made the inside of Rap’s mouth pucker, so he ripped open a half-dozen sugar packets and pocketed the other half-dozen.

  Mr. Ani returned from the other room and handed him a lender, an oversize trade paperback with no picture on the cover, just text: World’s Great Men of Colour by J.A. Rogers.

  Flipped through over names that didn’t mean anything to him: Imhotep, Akhenaton, Aesop, Pushkin . . . .

  “Keep learning your scrolls,” said Mr. Ani, while the two of them waited for JC, “and maybe one day you can write a book like that. Or,” he winked, “be in one.”

  Rap chuckled. At the joke, yeah, but more at the wink. Mr. Ani was the only person Rap’d ever met who winked. Something about winking seemed so . . . undignified.

  All the more fun coming from the most dignified man he’d ever met.

  Rap’s eyes drifted over the names on Mr. Ani’s latest reading list, which he said was also a playlist: Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, LKJ, the Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, Mzwakhe Mbuli . . . .

  Suddenly the lyrics out of the speakers crystallised inside Rap’s brain—he knew this song, this verse by Mr. Lif about how poor people taught their kids to work so they die from stress, but the rich taught theirs to invest.

  “Man!” said Rap, his guard not just dropped, but shattered. “You listen to the Perceptionists? I thought you were only into PE and Kris or whatever—”

  “Oh, you mean, old-timers?”

  Caught. Rap could feel his own eyes form an oops.

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  Ani walked behind a counter, reached into a drawer. “Boy, I’ve been listening to hip hop longer’n you’ve been a live. I am hip hop.”

  Pulled out some tacks and pinned up Rap’s Blade picture. Right where all the customers would see it.

  Grinding his teeth so hard they almost hurt, Rap suppressed his smile down to a smirk.

  3.

  Two days later. Mr. Ani’s training basement.

  Mr. Ani, standing back, surveying the boys’ wing chun skills. Arms sliding back-and-forth in punches and blocks as if magnetically attached. Whenever the boys lost contact, Mr. Ani nudged their form.

  “Not about strength,” said Mr. Ani. “It’s about the U-T of N.”

  “Universal Truth of Nature,” said both boys, arms still clockworking.

  “It’s about the P of P-physics and P-physiology.”

  “Power,” they said.

  “The application of P along the correct G.”

  “Power-Geometry . . . .”

  “Good. Now, JC, you and me, let’s try that take-down I showed you a few days ago. I’ll do it to you, and then you try to do it to me. Then we’ll stretch out.”

  JC tried the technique once, butchering it.

  Mr. Ani told him, “Not bad. We’ll fix it later.”

  Switched to stretching. At each stretch, it being their third lesson, Mr. Ani recited the question for each line of the third chapter of The Book of the Golden Falcon.”

  “After the first battle of the Swamps,” said Ani, on question #6, “where did the boy go?”

  Straining lower back muscles for forward stretches on the floor, trying to hiss out the pain. Teeth gritted. Rap and JC recited.

  “And the boy . . . abandoned and alone . . . fled the Swamps of Death . . . and returned to his nest in darkness.”

  The seventh question: “What did the boy find on his first foray?”

  “When next rose the sun . . . the boy emerged to forage and to range . . . and from a distance spied the lifeless march . . . of bound and fettered children . . . by the thousand.”

  They got up for wall stretches.

  Standing with his back to the exposed brick, JC lifted his right leg. Mr. Ani ducked under, caught JC’s foot on his left shoul
der and slowly rose. JC winced when his toes got to eye-level, tapped out. Mr. Ani held position.

  “Who led the lifeless children, and to where, first?” The eighth question.

  “Witnessing their damnable . . . procession from cover,” said both boys, “he saw their brutal guardians . . . break the bones of some for grim amusement . . . before casting dozens into mines . . . of lead and pyrite.”

  “Where was the second group of lifeless children taken?” Ani raised JC’s leg again until the tap. JC’s toe was now above his head.

  “Still others,” said the teens, “chainsmen led to fields . . . so as to join . . . the sun-whipped toil . . . of ten thousand others . . . digging, planting, pulling . . . in the rock and sand and soil.”

  Continued through each line of the “Triumph” chapter of The Book of the Golden Falcon,

  repeating the entire cycle until Rap and JC had stretched each leg front and side, including bent-leg extensions for roundhouse kicks.

  Breakfalls and rolls again and again until Mr. Ani was satisfied, and then he flattened JC with a fist-catch/arm-bar/takedown. Showed Rap three times. Didn’t touch him, but broke it down so Rap could repeat it on JC. Then vice-versa.

  Ani’d shown them this takedown at the beginning of class. That was his method: show them the best part first, then make them sweat and strain for it. “Shining Eyes on the golden prize,” he’d say.

  4.

  At the end. Sitting on mats in the centre of the room. Mr. Ani, at the side, activating his docked iPod.

  Music, cosmic and spectral, Saturn-ring strings and meteroic horns. Rap and JC knew the artist well, now: Alice Coltrane.

  Mr. Ani didn’t call it jazz. He called it supreme. Said jazz was old slang for sex, the “exotic, forbidden sex wealthy White men slumming in Black music halls went looking for with poor Black women.”

  Supreme, he said, “wasn’t about degrading the body, but elevating the mind and the soul.”

  “Galaxy Around Oludumare” was the song. Ominous. Drum rumbling. Soundtrack for Judgement Day. Rap loved it. Suited his personal sense of drama.