The Alchemists of Kush

by Minister Faust

  We listened silently while the sun rose. Even the jackals were still.

  When the baboons stopped, the old man came over and crouched on his haunches.

  “Now you two listen to me. I’ve been watching you both for quite some time. You’re both resourceful. You’ve survived the death-traps out here all on your own. You were each smart enough not to drink the Swamp water. And you’re excellent rangers.

  “But for smart kids, you’re both pretty stupid.

  “I’ve seen you both spoiling for a showdown. More times than you can dream, I led one or both of you off course at the last moment.”

  He snorted, spat, then went on. “But I can’t be everywhere in the Savage Lands, and I won’t always be able to stop you two little brutes from ripping each other into bloody bits. And you’ll both die. You know it and I know it.”

  Then he pointed out to the horizon and whispered.

  White mountains appeared there, tall enough to scrape the sky’s skin, with sides as straight as sunrays.

  The Savage Lands were gone.

  No horror-jungles filled with bandits, slavers, soldiers and murderers. No Swamps of Death clogged with crocodiles and clotted over with scum. No children marching or farming in chains, and no burnt-eyed kids gripping hatchets or drowning each other or beating each other to death.

  Instead I—we, because I saw my enemy seeing what I saw, and his face looked warped and bizarre to me, and then I realised what it was, that he was happy, and I hadn’t seen a happy face in longer than I could remember—we looked out onto the purified Blackland of lotus flowers and straight paths banked by trees all exactly the same height, and saw people by the millions, baking bread, carving statues, reciting poems, painting walls, setting broken bones, cuddling babies, sailing boats, sewing clothes, lifting stone, sleeping soundly without a fear . . . .

  “If you two can forget about your little war, when out in the Savage Lands it’s nothing but war,” said the old man who’d turned the horizon into the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, “I’ll teach you both what I know. So you can make our brutal world die and bring that one,” he gestured, “to life.”

  We looked at each other, my enemy and me. For the first time, without glaring. Just looking.

  We nodded at the same time.

  “Good,” said the old man. “Then come back with me to my house. I’ve got food and clean water that won’t poison you.”

  “Sir?” said my enemy.

  I glanced at him. So polite, all of a sudden. Like maybe underneath all that mud, he wasn’t a born savage.

  “I work for this sorceress, and, uh, I don’t think . . . y’know . . . that I should just quit like that. She wouldn’t—”

  “Trust me,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Uncle?” I said, because back in my day, that’s how you showed respect to an old man if you didn’t know what his title was. And “warlock” didn’t sound appropriate. “I have this animal I take care of. A falcon. I, I need to get him.”

  “You mean this one?” said the man.

  Right there on his shoulder—I don’t know how I missed it, but there was Falcon. Perched there as happy as could be. The old man gave him a nut, which he crunched and swallowed. “Hroo-hroo,” said Falcon.

  “Um, all right, then,” I said, impressed. I didn’t know Falcon knew how to fly. How did this old man . . . ?

  We moved out.

  4.

  His place wasn’t much. A hut. But it was dry. And he wasn’t lying about the food and water—he had plenty of each. Even enough for the jackals, Falcon, his own big black bird, and the occasional baboon who came around.

  I finally realised the baboons were just like the bird: black with gold eyes.

  The Savage Lands was like that. Everything was weird.

  The Master—that’s what we ended up calling him—taught us a bunch of stuff neither of knew about, like how to make bread and how to make bricks.

  When he tried my first bread, he said, “We’ll use this for bricks,” and laughed. I must’ve looked hurt, because he said, “I was just kidding.”

  “I wonder why he’s got that big old bird with him all the time,” I said to Yinepu one day when we were drying bricks. “The one with the curved beak.”

  “It’s called an ibis, stupid,” he spat, shaking his head and laying a line of bricks. “Don’t you know anything?”

  Maybe we weren’t enemies anymore, but he was still a jerk.

  5.

  We were building a wall.

  It was to surround the Master’s hut and storage areas. While we built it, he taught us about numbers and measurement.

  “What’s all this for?” I asked him.

  “You’ve seen all those children out there.”

  “Yeah? I mean, yes, Master?”

  “You’ve seen how they’re being treated.”

  I felt my heart pounding. My neck went hot. I felt the cold anger of my blade Fang in my hand even though I’d left it back in the hut. I heard Falcon make the cry he makes when we go hunting.

  I almost said the words, Are we going to rescue them?

  Yinepu looked like he was thinking the same thing.

  The Master said,

  “‘The ancestors scatter their wisdom like a sower his seeds, and those who would feast must first sweat beneath the sun.’”

  I didn’t get it. By his face, neither did Yinepu.

  It definitely wasn’t what I wanted to hear: a battle plan.

  We went back to laying bricks.

  6.

  So we didn’t mount any rescue missions. No storming the mines or the farms, me with Fang and Falcon, Yinepu with his gang of jackals, and the Master with his army of rip-teeth baboons, gutting chainsmen and taking their ears for our necklaces.

  But when we were foraging for supplies or checking our traps, sometimes we’d find stragglers who’d run away or gotten lost.

  They were always sick and hungry and looked like hell. We’d try to convince them to come with us, but you can’t always talk sense to people. And some of them were still crazy from Swamp water.

  The Master took in whoever we brought back, and I was glad we’d done all that work on that wall. We had a defensible area with enough space for sleeping, and on papyrus reed mats—we didn’t have to sleep in piles like dogs.

  We had food trees inside the wall, and the Master ground up seeds and boiled leaves and bark and made all kinds of medicine to make these kids we found right again.

  7.

  A lot can change in three years.

  I got strong. Became a good fighter. So did Yin. We’d stopped being idiots, for the most part, anyway. Really, him and me, we were good partners. We never talked about it or anything, but we worked well together and laughed a lot about whatever.

  But we never talked about our parents.

  I knew my mum was dead. If she weren’t, she would’ve found me. She had her own words-of-power, plenty of them. And she loved me. She’d never abandon me. So she had to be dead.

  And like I said, I never asked Yin about his folks.

  But some of the kids we brought in stayed pretty savage. You could take their heads out of the lead mines, but you couldn’t take the lead out of their heads.

  One day I saw Yin whistle to his jackals and take off like he was really angry.

  I grabbed one of the older kids (Yin and I were the oldest), a girl named Nef. “What’s wrong with him? What happened?”

  “I don’know,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me ‘I don’know.’ I saw you over there with him. What happened?”

  “Aw, he’s just mad again. He’s always mad.”

  “That’s not true. He’s great with you kids. The good kids, anyway. You say something to him?”

  “No. It wasn’t me. It was the other kids. Baq and them.”

  “Stop making me drag this out of you! What happened?”

  “Well, Yinny was saying something about his witch, and, well, none of us had ev
er seen her, and—”

  This again. I’d tried to gently tell Yin to shut up about his “sorceress,” but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so . . . .

  “Great. Great work, Nef.”

  “It wasn’t me, Hru! It was Baq!”

  “Did you tell him to stop? Gods! Yin’s your older brother. You kids are supposed to treat him with respect. And after everything he does for you!”

  She started crying.

  “Well, maybe you should cry,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. I probably should’ve apologised or given her a hug, but instead I went to yell at Baq and his little pack of creeps.

  Yin was going to be gone for a while. He was sometimes gone for a couple of days at a time, but the Master always said it was fine, that he had work to do and lessons to learn. But this felt different this time. It felt wrong.

  8.

  That night, after I’d put the little kids to sleep, I sat up with the Master, two of his baboons and his black bird watching the camp fire.

  Inside the walls, the light didn’t carry, so we didn’t have to worry about bandits or raiders. And devils only came for bonfires, not campfires.

  After he and his animals finished a quiet song, I asked him, “Master, why are you bothering with all these kids, anyway?”

  I was still mad about Nef and Baq, and I’d told him all about it over dinner.

  He looked sad. “Well, Hru . . . they’re just kids. You and your partner were both pretty rough when you first came here. I know you remember that.”

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, Master.”

  “And we’ve both seen a lot worse that that behaviour.”

  He stared into his hands, like he held secrets there.

  “But as for me . . . I was just like any of these kids, when I was small. Lost out there, alone, no parents. Hunted. And then my Master found me. And he was the same, you understand?

  “And that’s the chain of us, the golden chain going all the way back to when the First Mountain pushed its way out of the ocean.” (He’d told me about the First Times already, so he didn’t need to explain.) “When our ancestors want us to know something, they send somebody to teach us. My Masters are me, now. And I’m them.”

  I tried to absorb all that. I figured it would take me a while, so I just said, “I will understand, Master.”

  He smiled. Gold glinted in his black eyes from the campfire.

  All the kids by then were asleep, not just the little ones, so I felt safe asking him something else.

  “Master, why did the Destroyer attack us in my camp when I was little? Why’d he kill my mother—”

  “And your father.”

  I was shocked. This, I’d never heard before.

  “The Destroyer killed my dad, too?”

  “Yes, son. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t ask him how he knew. He knew things.

  “Why’s he doing all of this? Enslaving these kids by the thousands? Fighting this endless war? Butchering people and making us so afraid of everything and everybody that we all hate each other?”

  Again he was quiet for a long time.

  Finally, he said quietly, “‘The truth is like the sun: with the same rays a bringer of life and yet a champion of death. Sustainer and annihilator, it grows the one plant full and sweet, while it shrivels the other one into crackles.’”

  I shook my head without intending to. Sometimes I loved the way the Master said things in such a pretty way, with words as beautiful as a frog’s eye or a snake’s scales in the sunlight. Sometimes what he said was so perfect I just had to memorise it.

  But other times I just wanted him to give me a straight answer because it made my head creak and crack just hearing him.

  He must’ve seen how upset I was, because he said, “Hru, you’re not ready yet. If I told you now—”

  I got up. “Good night, Master.”

  Finally he said good night to me, too.

  I marched off to my mat and lied awake for a long time, looking at three bright stars in a row, wondering about my slaughtered parents, wondering about my friend out there in the Savage Lands alone, wondering about the Destroyer whose Empire was out there, in everything, in everybody.

  The Book of Now

  1.

  “Now you see why I told you to get here so early,” whispered Brother Moon.

  Seven teenagers were huddling beside him on the rooftop.

  Across from them, falcon chicks were chirping at the rising sun.

  Rap loved watching these peregrines. When he was six and sneaked outside the boundaries of his refugee camp in Chad, he’d gazed for what felt like a day at a hawk flying sorties back and forth to its high nest in the rocks with food for its babies.

  But what stunned him even more was six teenagers other than him forklifting themselves out of bed and across town just because Brother Moon said so during their last shenu: “Be here by 6:45 tomorrow morning. I wanna share something with you. A moment of perfect beauty.”

  For him it was no problem. He almost always rose early. But other kids? Other kids in the community?

  JC whispered, “Snuh-a-a-a-p.”

  On the other side of the Hyper-Market’s second-floor gravel roof, next to the vent, a pair of peregrine falcons had transformed an abandoned crate into their nest.

  Their four hatchlings, snowy, fluffy chicks with grey beaks and black eyes, chirped and squawked to each other while waiting for their parents to return with breakfast.

  “They’re so cute!” squealed Kimmy Greenfield, the niece of the social worker Seshat.

  The other kids immediately shushed her to avoid scaring the birds.

  “Sorry!” she giggled, then muted herself. She was a vivacious girl who’d taken the Kemetic name Ãnkhur two days after perfectly memorising the Resurrection Scroll.

  “Now you know why I had you do that research,” whispered Brother Moon.

  “What’re they doing here?” asked Almeera Nur, the Somali girl who cracked up Moon by regularly wearing both hijab and a black hoodie emblazoned with a rhinestone Playboy icon. “I thought they only liked high places, or near water.”

  “That’s why it’s so strange,” whispered Brother Moon. “I just found em up here yesterday morning because of all the noise they were making—sh!”

  Everyone looked up where Moon was looking, expecting two parent falcons hurtling talons of vengeance down on them for this home invasion.

  “Sorry,” said the older man. “Thought it was them. Anyway, what can you tell me?”

  Abdishakur “Sixpac” Jowhar, JC’s Tupac-loving eighteen-year-old second- or third-cousin, said, “The chicks are called fledgings.”

  Ahmed Samatar, fifteen with an Afro like the planet Jupiter, said, “Naw, it’s fledglings. Fledging’s when they learn to fly.”

  “My bad,” said Sixpac.

  “What else? Jorrel?”

  “There’s about sixty cities in North America that have, like, pairs of falcons living downtown or whatever,” said Jorrel. His voice had just a hint of Kingston and Brixton, like the tang of lime in a glass of ice water.

  Rap, who’d never been much of a smiler, couldn’t stop grinning. Moon saw, winked at him. That made him grin all the more.

  In any of his high school classes, African students hardly answered even direct questions, let alone volunteered responses. Only time he could remember any of them talking was when goofs’d cut up, fool around or drop all the New Yorkisms or Jamaican patois they could sample from hip hop and dance hall downloads.

  But up here on the roof . . . with traffic noise nothing more than ambient hum in the cool, sweet air of an August morning, with the sunrise transforming everything into copper, bronze and gold . . . things were different.

  They were, thought Rap, the way they were supposed to be.

  Crystal Bizimana, the Rwandan girl with the cute French accent, mumbled something in her perpetually quiet voice. The rooftop morning breeze sipped up her words like tea.

  “What?” said JC.


  She whispered slightly less imperceptibly. “Zeir diet is moostly uzzer birts, such as pidgey-ons and daafs.”

  “Peregrines’re endangered,” added Rap. He smiled even more because Crystal’s accent reminded him of the nutty French woman from Amelie, the DVD he’d just borrowed from Seshat, along with Lumumba. “Well actually here they’re just threatened, but that’s close enough. There’s only sixty pairs in the whole province.”

  “Why so few?” asked Brother Moon.

  “Because of pesticides. All their prey’d soaked up the chemicals in their environment, so they got it in concentrated form.”

  “So they’d become poisoned-animal eaters.”

  “Yeah, exactly. Everything they ate to stay alive was killing them and their babies. Their eggshells got so soft that between 1950 and 1970,” rapid-fired Rap, “they almost went extinct.”

  “So what happened to them?”

  “People started, like, realisin,” said JC, “that if they didn’t do suh’m quick, there weren’t gonna be any more. So they changed laws, made DDT illegal, which was great for some birds like eagles, but that wasn’t enough for peregrines. They didn’recover much.”

  “So?”

  Rap: “So scientists had to make special habitats for them on skyscrapers. And they fed them using falcon-puppets.”

  “Get outta here!” said Ãnkhur. “Is that true?”

  “Yeah,” said JC. “Otherwise they’d, like, what’s that called? Bond or imprint or whatever on the humans an not be able t’take care of emselves.”

  “Then they ‘hack back to the wild,’” said Almeera. “That’s what you call it when they finally learn their natural ways.”

  “To survive and thrive,” said Ahmed.

  “And when they live in the city,” said JC, “they call em ‘street peregrines.’ But I call em ‘street falcons.’ Sounds more gangsta.”

  “Street falcons!” squealed Ãnkhur. “That’s what we are! That’s what we should be called!”