Everyone in uniform but Raptor. Half of them hefting kung fu and karate weapons: sai, chain-whip, staff, three-section staff, nunchaku, sabres, sickles, and a Guan-Do battle-axe.
They split, Wa-Wa’s squad down the alley, Raptor’s down Khair-em-Ãnkh-Tawy.
Raptor, in position. His pocket buzzed. Twice.
Both teams stepped out, tightened their vise.
Lexus and Marley.
Surrounded.
Cut off from wherever their car was.
Eyes wild at the black-clad phalanx.
If they were strapped, they didn’t even flex.
Looked like they’d just shit themselves.
Raptor walked up, one-leg distance from the two killers, hands empty of everything but the power take life.
“You ever come back here, we’ll find you. And annihilate you.”
The Falcons opened a channel, let them run downstreet, hop in a broken-back-windowed Ford Escape and burn the fuck outta there.
Fists and weapons in the air, everyone chanting, greeting and blessing transformed into battle cry: “Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh! Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh! NUB-WMET-ÃNKH!”
When Moon came down and found them there, Raptor and Jackal glanced at each other, gulped, told him what’d happened while all the Falcons fell silent.
Moon’s stone face. Almost silver-black beneath the streetlights.
Suddenly shone.
“You . . . my kids . . . my young champions! What you did? It was dangerous, it was foolish, but kot-tam, it was brave!”
He glanced downstreet where they’d said the thugs had driven.
“You see that?” he said, pointing at the road like something was on it. “I think they left a trail of shit!”
Everyone laughed.
“Now,” he said, smiling, “get those weapons back inside the Street Laboratory before we all get arrested!”
Fifteen minutes later at the Lab. War stories already.
Door opened. Brother Moon. Two big boxes: books, CDs, DVDS, medallions and trinkets. Treasure for everyone like Pharaoh Ahmose rewarding his lieutenants after crushing the Heka Khasut. Or maybe just a Kemetic Santa Claus.
Moon, handing out his possessions: “Tonight . . . you all mighta just saved my life.”
“Brother Moon,” said Wa-Wa, “we’ve always got your back!”
“Listen, but seriously now, I aint gon live forever. So . . . when it’s time for me to go forth by day—”
Raptor didn’t like this. The depression, the books and DVDs Moon’d scattered round his place, and now this talk of “going forth by day,” which went over the heads of all the newbies.
Clutching their prizes, Wa-Wa, Ãnkhur, Senwusret, Joser, Imhotep, Taharqa, Jackal, Raptor and eight others gazed at Brother Moon. Their teacher smiled back. Calm. Faraway. Like he was sitting under an awning, smelling spring flowers on a warm breeze, or walking free of the hospital after a long illness, and heading home.
“So if anything happens to me,” he said, “just remember I don’t want anybody crying for me. Tell em if they let even one tear drop on my casket, I’m gonna flip open the lid and light em up right there, transform?”
Everyone laughed. Moon said it again. “Transform?”
“Transformed,” they all said. But magma flowed through Raptor’s intestines.
Araweelo, at the door, with a flat of food: sambusas, rice, stewed vegetables and meat.
“Mum, you cooked?” said Raptor.
Smiling: “Smartt ass.”
Everyone pulled up the gym mats, swept and washed up, and then dug in. Moon put on music—the Cubano-Senegalese lilt of Orchestre Baobab. Gave ’Weelo cash for the food he’d ordered, pulled her and Raptor and aside, away from everyone else’s ears and eyes.
“Uh-oh,” said Araweelo, joking. But maybe not really.
“Listen, you know, I don’t usually mix you two together if I’m talking about things that’ll affect the other one. I always talk privately with you one at a time.”
Raptor: “Yeah?” Anxiously, as in, just drop the axe already.
“And maybe I should be sticking to that policy, but what with everything—.” Took a breath. “Well, look. I love you both. And you both know that. And ’Weelo, it’s crazy, you spending all that money on your apartment, by yourself.”
“Whatt are you—”
“I’m asking you to move in with us.”
Beamed at him, then: “Aboutt bloodty time!”
Hugged him, kissed him on the lips in front of the whole room, but everybody was too busy stuffing their faces.
“Raptor,” said Moon, “sorry for blindsiding you like this, but I’m hoping—you okay?”
Released his breath. “I thought you were gonna . . . well, you’ve been so down, you were giving away all your stuff, you had all those books out—”
“What? What books?”
Awkwardly, in front of his mother, Raptor named them.
Moon laughed. “Your mother just wanted to borrow them, so I pulled them out! What, you thought I was gonna go suicide bomb the cops or something? And I was giving away stuff because—”
“—because you were making room!” Raptor let out a long, loud sigh. “Yeah, now I get it.” And they all laughed together.
18.
1 AM, and Raptor and Araweelo were driving back from Al Hambra apartment in Moon’s borrowed Sunfire packed with Araweelo’s belongings. Neither one of them said a word when two fire engines sirened past them down Khair-em-Ãnkh-Tawy. So what?
But crossing 97th Street, they couldn’t deny their terror any more. Same two engines and then a third and a dozen scrambling fighters attacking the inferno: The Hyper-Market. And above it the Palace of the Moon.
Pulled over across the street. Both of them stabbed their cell phones—her calling Moon’s cell and Raptor calling the Street Laboratory. Both got Moon’s voice. On voicemail.
Lit by raging red and white and yellow, they stood before the furnace, held each other, sobbing.
Nine:
Create~Supreme
The Book of Then
1.
As if. . .
As if . . . I’d been chained to a live boar and dropped into the muck and strangling weeds of the Swamps of Death . . . thrashing, bleeding, wailing, drowning—
I remember choking, trying to scream and being unable to, my arms and legs straining, darkness—
. . . mist . . . fog . . . grey light. . .
. . . giant black spiders crawling upside down . . . .
. . . cold hands on my burning forehead . . . .
2.
I sat upright in the tent, weak. It was dark.
I was dizzy. My eyes were throbbing. Outside, crickets screeched in chorus.
Arrows. A spear. A hammer.
Master Jehu.
My ribs, my throat, my skull . . . ached as my chest heaved and my face slickened.
The tent flap lifted up, fell back in place with her on my side of it.
“Mum?” I blubbered.
“Hru . . . .” She held my head against her breastbone, tucked beneath her chin.
“My son.” She sat behind me, rocked me back and forth, one hand on my cheek and another on my shoulder. “At last. You’re awake. You were burning up.”
Yinepu lifted the flap. His eyes went wide on me.
“Thank gods!” he said.
Ducking back outside, he returned with a gourdful of steaming soup.
My trembling hands accepted it from him. I drank the broth, chewed bits of goat and carrot, lemon and onion, between my soft teeth.
“Thanks,” I said between sips.
My mum told him, “Bring the medicines.”
3.
At dawn, when I stood—for the first time in a week, my mum said—I asked Yinepu what happened after I was beaten into darkness.
“I went back, like you told me to,” he said, “to get all the children. Your mother’d trained them well, so the sentries’d already roused them the moment they saw the raiders appr
oaching. Almost all of them slipped away to our hiding spots.”
I leaned on my cane. It was a far cry from Fang, which the raiders must’ve taken . . . if not that gods-damned Destroyer himself who’d . . . who’d . . . .
I put a hand on my brother’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry about your puppies, Yin.”
“Me too,” he said. “Thanks.”
“What’d you, you know . . . .”
“Do with the Master’s body?”
“Yeah.”
“When it was safe to come out of hiding, I took him. Anointed him, and the children who didn’t make it, including some who died in the fire. Wrapped them in linens we had stored in jars in the secret caches.
“We took them down to the sacred cavern, in the outer chambers before your father’s throne.”
The sun came up. Yin’s eyes flared like dark honey, like brown amber.
His voice was small. “We buried them all down there like seeds.”
4.
That night, the longest night of the year, my mother convened a war council in the largest tent with the eldest among us.
She unrolled for us the tapestry of combat she’d spent years in weaving.
Finally she said, “Of course, we’ll need arms. And armour.”
“My protégés,” I said, using a word I’d once hear Master Jehu use for Yinepu and me, “will steel all our hands and bodies.”
I nodded to them, these young men with clever fingers and manifold scars and burns of labour. “My Mesnitu: Duamutef, Hãpi, Qebehsenuef and Imset. They’ll work their metal magic to transform us all.”
They smiled, nodded back, gave their oath: “By the sunrise, we will.”
“We need guardians,” said my mother, “for the sacred cavern. So General Set cannot blaspheme against my resurrected Lord.”
“There are three young warriors I can think of,” said Yin, smiling grimly. “Three of the sneakiest, nastiest, hardest, deadliest boys who ever walked or hunted anywhere in the Savage Lands. Gods-damn, these kids are so dangerous they scare themselves!”
Everyone laughed. I smiled.
“Good, then,” said Mum. “I’ve begun the training of our legion, Jehu’s orphans, continued it in their warrens in the wilderness.
“And I’ve appointed deputies from my secret army I’ve spent fifteen years assembling, plus three dozen sorceresses and warlocks to continue training Jehu’s young miraclists. They’re spread out, but our forces number three thousand.”
“Three thousand?” Yin’s sneer showed shock and fear, not only disgust. “That’s it? After fifteen years?”
“Since the war begun a decade and a half ago, Yinepu,” spat my mother, “we’ve lost twice that to the Destroyer! There are limits—”
“My father,” I raised my voice, “is the Lord of Limits.”
All eyes fell on me.
“Three thousand?” I said. “If it were only three hundred, or three dozen, the task would be the same. You saw what we did with the Swamps. Removed the dams. Set the water in motion. When it gathered speed, nothing could stop it.”
I stood up, my head warping the tent’s cloth sky.
“It’s time,” I shouted, “for us to burst the dams!”
My mother and Yinepu looked at me like they’d never seen me before.
Then Yin nodded to my protégé, Qebehsenuef. Master Jehu’d once said he looked like a younger version of me. Something about his nose and his eyes.
Qebehs presented me with a rolled-up hide. I unfurled it.
Shining there, a ray of the sun made solid.
Fang.
“I thought it was . . . ” I whispered. “How . . . ?”
“You must’ve thrown it just before the raiders took you, so they wouldn’t get it,” said Yin. “One of my pups, Genmi, grabbed it. They put four arrows in him when he was running to find me. By the time he did,” said Yinepu, clearing his throat, and again, “he was just blood and fur.”
“Gods bless that pup.” I put a hand on his forearm.
“I cleaned him, anointed him and wrapped him up, him and my other dogs.” He snuffled. “Planted them with all the other kids.”
“In the cave of martyrs.”
“With your father, and the Master,” he said, his eyes like two moons. “Yeah.”
Mother snapped: “How long until you can arm and armour all our legions?”
I nodded to my Mesnitu. Duamutef answered, “Working at the four secret forges of the Master, we’d need a year.”
“We can’t wait a year!” said my mother. “If Set could find your compound, he’ll soon find the other hidden bands—”
“Didn’t anyone hear me? Didn’t anyone understand what I just said?”
Again, all eyes were on me. Light flashed into my eyes, not from the torch, but from the golden blade now reunited with my hand. I shook my head.
Fang no longer suited it, now that it was like the beaming sun . . . .
Ray.
“It’s time,” I said, “to smash the dams.”
And so began two hundred moons of war.
5.
I attached my mother’s martial tapestry to my own loom, wove in colours she had never dreamed.
The first prize we seized with axes, arrows, and blood was a treasury of a thousand talents. Our survivors hauled away the gold to all our blackhouses where the Mesnitu alloyed the sacred metal, hammered shining spades and shovels, five thousand times the Labourers in our legion.
And every village of the enslaved we found and freed by force, we planted in each open hand a golden implement, and Instructed them in draining of the Swamps.
They smashed their dams and turned their redlands black, and after exodus of crocodiles, the Eternal River gathered strength on path to Great Green Sea.
6.
In the eighth year of our revolution, our force had grown to fifteen thousand, recruiting as we went by virtue of the golden-alloyed tools we granted.
We held entire regions, intensified and purified the river’s flow, reclaimed the souls of all who’d drunk the poisons of the Swamps of Death.
Our ranks brimming, we mounted battles and waged mischief, dividing the Destroyer’s thunder-fists into whisper-fingers, slipping among them to take what we desired and leaving only bleeding wounds as payment.
At Min-the-Beautiful, we smashed the gates, descended to the mines to free those in the slaving tombs. They offered us the treasures of their labour, thinking we expected ransom.
None of them believed me when I said, “You cannot buy your freedom, and we cannot give it to you.”
I sat beneath an acacia tree, eating salted fish and dates while waiting for the ambassador of this mining nation.
Finally they brought forth their foreman so I could tell him that his men were free to work at their own choice, not under the Destroyer’s command, nor under ours.
“Hru?” said their foreman, blinking at me. “Is it really you?”
I almost didn’t recognise him. He was older, but the years of slavery had beaten him like the sun would out in the open desert. Upon his chest a vest of welts, upon his legs an apron of scars, and his left eye misted-over like the fog above the Savage Lands.
All those many years ago, when we were running from the night-raiders, he was the fisher who fed us all and taught the rest to harvest from the river.
“Jedu, little brother! What happened to you?”
“Set happened,” he said. “The Devourer spat us out into the Swamps of Death . . . and we got separated, and Raiders grabbed us, a few at a time. Some of us, they sent to farms, others to mines. Some . . . some they forced to fight for him.”
Crying, he choked out, “I thought . . . Hru, thought I was the only one who survived.”
I held him, rocked him, remembering him as he was, a child waist-deep in the river’s embrace, hauling fish from nets he’d made from vines, dancing in the river’s swirls, singing songs he must’ve learned since before our men were murdered, songs o
f longing for a beautiful girl or seeking her forgiveness for a foolish blunder, songs he’d memorised too young to know the meaning of the verses. Like all of us who ran or fought so we might simply live.
I wondered how long it had been since he’d sung about anything.
He cried in my arms, shaking, shuddering. I didn’t stop him.
When he cooled, I fed him.
“Yin is still alive, too,” I whispered. “And my mother. Maybe she can heal your eye.”
“I don’t care about the eye!” he said. “Because of what this other eye has lived to see today!”
I smiled, helping him up so I could take him to my mother.
“Hru?”
“Yes?”
“Are you . . . are you the one they call ‘The Master of Ten Thousand Spades?’ And ‘the Golden Blacksmith?’”
I hadn’t heard the first of those titles before, but I’d heard the second. I knew that everywhere we severed chains, I gained new names.
7.
We fought. And bled. And died. And killed.
For fifteen years.
Together with the fifteen years that I had been a fugitive, both as my Master’s pupil and as my mother’s son . . . I’d spent my entire life at war.
8.
And finally our revolution encompassed Behudet, the Forge City, and when we liberated it, we gathered on the bank of the Eternal River, where we gazed across at all the butchers and betrayers of the Blackland, the swarming slaughterers who served the Archfiend, the Usurper, the murderer of the Lord of Limits, the Great Defiler: Set the Destroyer.
The skies roiled with red and purple clouds. Lightning raced, sparks from the hammer of the god Ptah, the original Mesnit who’d shaped all things. Thunder echoed from where the hammer struck unto the ends of the universe.
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