Raptor, his mum still hanging onto him, shuffled to the stereo and hit Shuffle. First song up: jangly bass, strutting drums, Motown style. “100 Yard Dash.” Raphael Saadiq.
Spent the whole morning eating, dancing, drinking tea and talking and laughing about whatever they felt like.
37.
Strolling mid-afternoon, free from the Hyper-Market.
Blazing sun and crazy-named new beverages meant blossoming business, enough to pay for the new staff member and every weekend off for Moon.
The three of them, walking, smiling, nodding, whassupping and dropping Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh to anybody who knew what time it was.
Announcing their presence for all of Kush to see and bless.
Rap, no earphones, but his internal soundtrack rolling pure Senegalese gold: Orchestre Baobab’s “Dée Moo Wóor.” And just like in the video, strutting and strolling in hot summer sunshine like the world was one giant welcome.
And then the red tabloid newspaper box, and the headline:
Somali body count hits 7
Coins into slot. Crowding round.
Far west side of Kush, a body found in a synagogue’s Dumpster, of all places, by a homeless man scrounging for food. Stabbed and shot, but no blood on the scene. Junked there, while Kush had been jamming reggae beyond midnight.
Seventh one in seven months.
Leadmonton indeed.
38.
After the shock, after supper at Habesha, after silently feeding ducks and loons in the landscaped lake of Hawrelak Park.
Trying to forget and failing.
Watching the stars whisper into existence.
Moon sailed them in his shining gold-black Sunfire back to Araweelo’s walk-up, Al Hambra. Pulled up in front, on the street. Walked up the sidewalk—
“What the FUCK is going on here?”
All three spun.
Parking lot: shambling towards them, jacket and tie on despite the summer night-heat, disaster in wing tips and lifts.
Doctor Liberia.
Moon, both hands out: the reassuring take it easy, fella gesture, but Raptor decoded it. A defense posture, ready to transform ribs into lung-cutters.
“Jacob!” cried Araweelo. “What are you doing here?”
Almost on them, and the fumes rippling off his body like a force field, eyes so red even street lights couldn’t hide it—
“I’M asking the fucking questions, you goddamn whore—”
Liberia’s hands burst into fists—
—and then he was doubled over, then swishing back up and his head snapping right and he was on the walk-up’s lawn like two sacks of shit stuffed in a suit.
Raptor overtop him, replanting his talons on the grass, standing just outside of grabbing range, panting.
His mother, clutching her hand over her mouth.
Moon, collecting the man’s tooth and mangled glasses.
One of them cell-phoned 9-11.
A few curtains opened, shut again just as quick.
39.
Flying, whirling, streaking among Jupiter’s rings and moons and above its massive ujat.
The bloody hurricane, bigger than three earths, reaching out into space like a giant lamprey mouth, and sucking him down into storm, darkness, and invincible gravity.
Assault on the
Golden Fortress
Eight:
Righteousness
& Mastery
The Book of Then
1.
I stayed out in there in the wilderness. I didn’t go back to the compound. With the trees I brought down, I built a new nest, almost a warren, one even foolish crocodiles couldn’t penetrate.
I needed to stay close to my work, live in it, sleep in it, without interruption in my sacred labours.
Draining the Swamps of Death.
When I slept, my Shining Eye showed me the path. The River Eternal flowed from high up in the cradle, past Ta-Seti, born in mountains among living jade and emerald.
But the miseries of the occupied Blackland, the filth and pain seeping into the River, turned it choking-thick and deathly. By the time the poisoned River reached the Savage Lands, its waters curdled into the Swamps of Death, vile and bubbling.
I’d set the waters free to find the Great Green Sea beyond the Savage Lands. Because if waters move where they desire, they’re free.
And in that freedom, they can purify themselves and become a source of life.
2.
“I’m astonished,” said Master Jehu, surveying my work.
It was fogged-out sunrise three months into my labours. He stood on the bank above me. “And just one man.”
I was up to my waist in the Swamp, sweating, mud-caked, scaled with leaves. My hands were armoured gloves of callus. I was covered in bruises, cuts, and gashes, glorious in my rubies of crusting blood. Breathing deeply from my morning work.
I was light and free.
“Master, I’d like to request help now.”
“Good,” he said, smiling. “I thought it best to wait until you asked.”
I bowed. “Thank you, Master.”
“I’ve kept your project secret. Nobody except Yinepu knows you’re out here. But when the youths find out what you’re attempting—what you’re doing—they’ll be lining up to fill your work-gangs.”
I smiled, looked up at a gnarl-footed trunk on the bank. I’d shorn off its trunk my first day. I glanced at leaves and lily pads swimming past me.
Just a sunrise before, this entire region was submerged up to my heart in rancid, murderous, scumthick sludge.
Now I’d smashed the dams of muck of filth and turned the wound into a vein. Waters flowed around my hips, found the gate I’d cut and the cascade beyond, fell to bubbling rapids down below.
3.
At moonrise, Master Jehu returned. He was afraid.
He said, “War’s coming.”
We ascended through the night-mists, him as ibis, me as falcon, back to the compound I had not seen in a lifetime.
I’ve been sending rangers out into the Savage Lands to assess the strength of General Set. One after another has returned with news: He knows about our compound and sees us as a threat to everything he clutches. He’s planning to annihilate us, if need be by burning down the Savage Lands and making it a desert.
But why? I asked. Since before I was born, why this mission of destruction? What threat could we possibly pose to him?
Anyone who shows he can survive outside the realm of Set, proves it can be done. That another, better world is possible . . . there is no greater threat to a tyrant than this truth.
From on my wave of wind, I looked below to see campfires inside our compound’s walls.
What’s your plan, Master?
Your mother wants to—
My MOTHER?
Yes, your mother—
But I . . . she’s—
My son, I healed your mother, don’t you remember? With your brother Yinepu assisting me in her anointing. You were there with us, wrapped in shadows! After I’d returned her to life, she raged at me and claimed I was your captor and you my slave.
I couldn’t see, Master, when I was wrapped in shadows of such depth. I could barely hear . . . . I thought I’d dreamed it all.
No. Your mother is alive.
So all these months, she’s been in the compound with you?
Yes, my son. Come see her!
I . . . but after what I did to her—
Come!
Down we soared. I became a shadow. Master Jehu, understanding, let me.
I perched on the wall. My mother—returned to my life a second time—could not or did not see me. She argued with Master Jehu, angrily as ever.
“We’ve scored victories, but my forces are isolated, hiding in pockets.” She stabbed her finger at the ground. “This war’s coming to us sooner than my oracles foresaw. I need your children. Now.”
“What?”
With her hand she swept across the sleeping areas of our compound
, now two dozen times the size when Yin and I had laid its first bricks. Hundreds of youth and children slept here, unaware of my mother’s plans for them.
“We need armourers,” she said. “Weapons-makers. Soldiers. Sorceresses. With the power of the Measurer behind us . . . that’s what we need to tip the balance!”
“You mean to snap the balance in two,” said the Master. “To smash a measuring-rod into two killing-spikes.”
She aimed a finger in his face. “I informed you, Jehu, as a courtesy. I need neither your permission nor approval.”
She uttered words-of-power, and in moments, the hundreds of the Master’s pupils assembled in perfect regimentation.
Each held a pike, or a knife, or a rock.
But their eyes were closed.
“What’ve you done,” he yelled, “to my children?”
“Prepared them.”
“Prepared them to be slaughtered? To be trampled under the feet of stampeding men with swords? To suck knives into their throats, and arrows into their lungs? To scream themselves to death?” He stamped forward and swept up his arms like a ka. “I’m training them to civilise the world!”
“You’re a sad, lonely, pathetic, crazy old wizard.” She sneered. “How long has it been since you’ve been with a woman? Hm?” She laughed hatefully.
“Listen, dreamer, hiding in the Savage Lands, afraid—who’s going to build this world of yours after Set’s men have ripped through your orphans like boars feasting on chicks? Have you thought of that? At least my way, they’ve got a chance!”
“A chance to serve your revenge.” He clutched the golden chain that circled round his neck. I saw his chest drawing air. “You think I’m blind? I’ve seen the wastelands left by soldiers in the villages, the devastated crops and knackered beasts, the starving, sobbing orphans, everywhere Set’s armies have been and gone . . . and all those towns and farm-homes in the hinterlands that offered food and rest to Set’s forces rather than be murdered by them.
“I’ve seen what’s left of those people, their lands, their animals. Their children. So tell me, Sorceress . . . who was the Destroyer then?”
Who was the Destroyer?
I fluttered down from the compound wall, became a man again, revealed myself from shadow for the wall of sleeping children waiting for my mother’s march to war.
And my mother saw me.
I’d begged the gods—when once I’d cursed them—for a second chance, to erase the crime I’d done, to strip me of my sin.
And now I faced my mother.
Me, the son who’d murdered her, and she, a murderer of a multitude beyond measure.
Neither of us spoke. We didn’t move towards each other. We did not embrace or cry.
Ten million things that could have been were strewn in space between us, that two nights of knives and fire had killed three lifetimes ago.
I offered, “Milady.”
“Jehu’s . . . apprentice.”
“Mother,” I tried again.
“Hru,” she accepted.
“Please . . . I know you want to avenge my father. That you want to stop my uncle. I’m asking you . . . begging you, to join me in a mission that’s bigger than . . . than even defeating the General.
“We’ve both seen—I’ve seen, to my shame—how much easier it is to destroy than to create. I’m asking you to help me finish what I’ve started. I’m draining the Swamps of Death.”
“What?”
She stood, staring. I waited, silent.
“You’re—you’re serious? You. The entire Swamps?”
“Yes.”
“Are you—” she sputtered. She turned to the Master. “What’ve you done to him? How’ve you twisted him like this?”
“You haven’t seen what he’s done already, by strength of arms and will alone. By himself he’s transformed a field that used to be up to his chest in water. Now it’s down to his loins.”
She was stunned. And silent.
“Mother, help me,” I said. “Without the Swamps poisoning the Savage Lands, giving monsters home to swarm and breed and slaughter, enslaving children with curséd water, providing Set a quagmire he can always hide in and keep anyone from mounting an attack against him, he’ll rule forever. You know that this is true.”
“He’s coming anyway,” she said to me finally. “No matter what your plans are. And you know this is true.”
“Either way, we fight to kill,” I told her. “Only in one way do we fight to live.”
4.
It was not yet dawn. The final stars glittered, a spine of light on the indigo skin of Noot.
I was sitting beside Yin inside his ring of sleeping jackals when he woke.
He looked afraid—not of what I could do, but of what I would say.
“Thank you,” I told him, “for saving my mother’s life.”
Hugging him tightly, my cheeks and nose wet, I felt his breath escaping his chest raggedly, in clouds of pain, released up into the night.
He asked me about where I’d been and what I’d done. I told him.
He looked at me in awe. “You’re so different, Hru.”
“What do you mean?”
“You, you look so much older. Taller. And you don’t talk the same. You sound just like, well . . . . ”
“What?”
“Like the Master.”
I thought about that.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “about my father. And yours.”
I understood the question he didn’t speak. “Yin, you will always be my brother.”
5.
“Over here,” yelled Yinepu. “We need ten diggers here, and another twenty over with Hru. Who’s going where?”
We were the foremen of the labours.
It was the fourth week of the compact between my Master and my mother. Master Jehu let her teach our school her arts of war, on condition she used her vast and secret lexicon-of-power to teach us arts of healing and creation.
Master Jehu instructed a measuring magic I’d never known existed, a number code revealing all the known and unknown lines inside the universe, how they converged, how one group of lines could teach us of many others. He called this magic geometry.
With it, we elevated grunting, slashing, heaving and shoveling to a number art that revealed Maãt in every segment of the world, letting us transform the low into the high.
We felled dead trees by thousands. We grew the channel, deepened it, directed it through lower lands and on towards the Great Green Sea.
Our tools were shining metal, hatchet-heads and spades, scimitars and shovels, forged from Master Jehu’s fire-magic and hammered true by four apprentices of mine, sturdy boys named Duamutef and Hãpi, Imset and Qebehsunuef.
They armed us all so that the work that sheared our bones went faster, this geomancy that remade the world.
Some waters we diverted to the sandlands, where trickles from the Swamps of Death could do no harm, indeed, where power of the sun-fired sand could kill the water’s curse, and with the flowing silt and mud, transform the orange zone of death into loam-fields where one day—one day—new life would grow abundant and eternal.
6.
And on the eighth week of training soldiers and geomancers, the water of the poison-bowl where I’d begun my work had sunk so low that we now stood inside a valley, and at the bottom, beside where dark-clean water now flowed swiftly, there was an entrance to a cavern beckoning me.
I called my mother and my brother.
We descended. Inside, stalactites and stalagmites, great monster’s fangs, guarded throat beyond. We slipped among them down towards the heart.
With my Shining Eye we walked in darkness to the belly of the cave, found the cedar-wood vessel sunken there by weight of bolted pyrite bas reliefs.
With trembling hands but strength of hundred-and-a-hundred moons’ anticipation and rehearsal, my mother pressed her fingertips against the pyrite-ingot seals that kept the lid shut tight, turned them molten, let them boil away,
flaring yellow in the dark, dripping down to kiss the floor.
Together we hefted the cover.
Inside, my father’s skull stared back at us.
And my mother wept.
7.
It took four days for Yinepu and me to retrieve the pieces of my father that Yinepu had found for her, embalmed and sealed inside her secret, hidden shrines across the Blackland and the Savage Lands.
My father’s killers, fearing she would find him and revivify him, must have smashed apart the metal seals they placed, and carved him like a sacrifice, scattered him like dung, believing no one could unite the many into one.
Without Yinepu, she never would have found them all.
The penultimate piece retrieved had been my father’s manhood, which, said Destroyer’s soldiers captured by my mother and persuaded into testimony, had been thrown into Eternal River where a fish had gulped it down and swum away. Even that one, Yin had located, undecomposed inside the fish it that had choked to death.
The only body-chunk they’d left, resealed inside the box, was the one we’d found, the final one. The skull.
With the gold my four Mesnitu blacksmiths smelted and kept liquid, and with the guidance of Master Jehu in our circle, we descended to the sacred cavern, aligned the severed members, skull and trunk, welded them together with our molten gold and obsidian words-of-power.
And he rose.
Black-skinned, eyes rimmed golden, the Great Instructor, the Lord of Limits, the Being Beautiful.
And the cavern floor birthed a throne of turquoise shining from ten thousand years of darkness.
And he sat upon it.
My father!
Return, he Instructed, to world of tears in righteousness and mastery, to make stand those who weep, to reveal those who hide their faces and to lift up those who sink down, so all the world might rise nearer to Supreme.
The Alchemists of Kush Page 33