’Noot and Jackal both, not even hiding it. Just blubbering.
And then more moaning, from another three dozen there. Except for one.
And that one standing up, charging into the shen.
“Nobody here remembers what Brother Moon said?”
All eyes up and aimed. Him, swinging his face around the shen like a mace.
“Nobody? Huh?”
Jackal, softly. “Rap, dude, c’mon . . . . ”
Raptor, giving up nothing but a glare.
“What did he tell us?”
Behind and above him and the door frame, the wood bearing the laser-etching of Moon’s face, and beside it, impaled on four screws with the jackal-god Yinepu on the cover, Per-em-Hru, mis-titled in English, The Book of the Dead.
2.
“I know from having overheard some of you young Falcons,” said the man at the podium, sunlight streaming bright and cold above him through the high windows, “you’re thinking, you’re not supposed to cry. Am I right?”
Maãhotep. Again, put-together. A perfectly-pressed dark suit, shining cufflinks. But grey had stolen into his hair, or maybe he’d just stopped dyeing it.
Either way, during the early morning march towards the ceremony, Jackal’d called him—respectfully, affectionately—Old Man Maã. Already already other Falcons were calling him that, too.
“Because Brother Moon told you that, right?” said Maã. “He said, apparently, if you cry for me, I’ll reach up from the coffin and smack you. Right?”
Somebody somewhere chuckled. Plenty nodded somberly. Some threw on pride, like a suit jacket two sizes too large.
“Well, I’m here to tell you,” said Maã, “that’s bullshit.”
Two hundred Falcons ruffled their feathers, and hundreds of other community members shuffled in their seats inside the Africa Centre’s gymnasium.
Cursing bad enough—but actually contradicting Brother Moon at his own funeral?
And from Mr. Lawyerman, no less?
He answered their nonverbal objection by ignoring it.
In the first row, Raptor felt his mother’s shoulder and hip to his left. Shaking. Shuddering. Not even trying to dam. And on his right, Jackal’s eyes on him like fangs.
Jackal nudged him. Raptor, eyes forward, didn’t budge.
“They were friends longer’n most of us’ve been alive,” stage-whispered Jackal, but enough for everyone to hear. “Old Man Maã can say what he likes. Transform that.”
“Thank you, Brother Jackal,” said Maã. “Yes. Why shouldn’t people cry, especially when they’ve got every right to be sad? Tell me that. When someone they love and admire is gone. Dead. Is there any pain in the world worse than that?
“And you’re supposed to act like it doesn’t hurt? When you’ve got agony like a sharpened spear sticking through your spine?”
He gazed at Falcons’ faces, one at a time, making sure each one saw him- or herself being seen.
“I’ve known a few sisters who act like that,” said Maã, “but most of the time, as Sbai Seshat was reminding me just last night, it’s brothers who inflict this, this immiserating idiocy on themselves with this ‘I can’t cry’ and ‘I don’t feel sad’ nonsense.
“To the point they violate their spirits so much, they end up thinking only two parts of their bodies are allowed to feel anything: their fists, and their dicks.”
Again, ruffling and shuffling, but less this time.
“If Brother Moon said not to cry,” said the old man, his voice sandpapered and bloody, “it was because—and I’m not revealing anything that hasn’t come out by now—he remembered . . . what it was like . . . being severely depressed . . . when his when his marriage fell apart.”
Raptor, at last, put his arm around his mother. Felt her shuddering shake him to his core.
“And he spent a good year alone,” said Maã. “A bad year alone, rather. And by his own description, crying, pretty much every night. Brother Moon reached the point where he couldn’t leave his own apartment. That’s called clinical depression. When the, the spiritual immune system is so damn compromised it just can’t heal the soul anymore.”
More faces, more eyes. And then he locked with Araweelo, and with Raptor.
“He just didn’t want anybody falling into that kind of misery, especially not for his sake.
“Personally, he felt humiliated that he’d ever reached that stage. He shouldn’t’ve felt that way, but he did. Nobody wants to feel powerless, but he couldn’t forgive himself for it.
“But remember the Triumph Scrolls and the Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh: ‘I will not drown . . . ’ In what?”
Hundreds:
“‘In the Swamps of Death.’”
Maã: “That doesn’t mean simply booze, or drugs, or promiscuity, or television. It means whatever poisons you.
“And that’s like what Sbai Seshat said: for too many brothers, it’s refusing to acknowledge how we really feel. Afraid that if we do, it’ll make us soft. Weak. Turn us into punks.
“And the most lead-headed among us so are afraid of the world and of ourselves, we even say crying makes you a bitch.”
Let the brittle word shatter against the walls.
“Or a faggot.”
Another shocked shatter.
“Because, you know, they’re supposed to be weak.”
Silence, except for the hum and hiss of forced air heating.
“And here you are . . . in the Savage Lands . . . dying of heart disease and cancer in your fifties . . . dying by drinking yourself to death in your forties . . . or dying by booze-crack-or-chronic-induced violence in your twenties!
“Look at those words! A diseased heart. Or chronic, another way to say an illness that shackles you till the day you die. Crack—in your spirit. Some of us carry the Swamps of Death inside us. We turn ourselves into Destroyers.
“But crying—at least for a while? That’s the way to drain those poison waters.
“Think Hru didn’t cry? Think Master Jehu didn’t cry? Think Queen Nzingha didn’t cry? Think Lumumba or Malcolm X or Sankara didn’t cry? Think again.”
Maa leaned back from the podium. Straightened his tie. Clamped each cufflink, one at a time. Spoke his last words.
“So be like Hru. And drain those Swamps.”
Finally Raptor stepped up to the mic.
“As you all know, I lived with Brother Moon. You know he was like a father to me. But . . . I also know he was like a father to plenty of you. And I don’t wanna take that away from any of you by saying, y’know, that he was all mine, like he belonged to me and just me. ‘My father.’ So maybe we should just call him ‘our father.’ Transformed?”
“Transformed.”
“Then say it with me. Father Moon.”
“Father Moon.”
“Speak it!”
“FATHER MOON!”
“Father Moon . . . was worth more to me than I could ever say. So . . . maybe instead of saying anything else . . . I’m hoping that a few of us could sing something for him, in his honour.”
And then, calling up Jackal, Senwusret and ’Noot, the four of them sang Raptor’s new lyrics to “Dée Moo Wóor.”
How far can a young falcon fall
When the hurricane conquers his home:
The palace of moon and sk-y-y?
Can he fly in a savaging squall?
Or’s he battered gainst mountain and stone
To be shattered and crucifi-i-ed?
On ground where the broken all crawl
Releasing their miserable moans
Will he heal or will he be deni-i-ied?
Then a falconer answers his call
Weaves his magic of feathers and bones
With his spirit that amplify-i-ies
And the falconer builds him a wall
Gives him arm he’s turned into a throne
Till his miseries all subsi-i-ide
Then he launches his falcon to all
Of the winds of directions known
/> So renewed, he can soar worldwi-i-ide
The falcon who flies above all
Will never be lost where he’s flown
For his falconer dwells insi-i-i-de . . . .
2.
Late October. But a warm afternoon.
Three rented buses ferried scores of Falcons out of E-Town, north to Athabasca, east to Amber Valley. Others car-pooled with community members.
Green grasses, yellow leaves. Big sky country and gently-flowing hills, living waves, eternal form.
Old farm on Sbai Seshat’s family land.
Atop a low rise, Seshat said to the youth, “Here, Maidstone, Breton, and down in John Ware’s country and a dozen other places . . . this is where my peoples came a hundred years ago.”
Maãhotep and Gamal arrived in a cube truck. Falcons and Alchemists unloaded the pieces of the obelisk, carried them as work gangs up the hill.
Rebuilding them under Maã’s guidance as if they were reuniting vertebrae into a spine.
“By the sunrise, I serve the cause of peace and cause of life,” they all recited, led by Sbai Seshat, the capstone to the Nub-Wmet-Ãnkh. “So may we raise the Shining Place eternally.”
Without a generator granting electricity, the obelisk would never light out there. But Seshat affixed a plaque:
A blacksmith of words is a victor in life.
The tongue is the shield and the sword of the Pharaoh.
Speech is the greatest martial art, for no one can overcome the skillful heart . . . .
Give your love to the world entire,
For a joyful one is remembered for the ages.
Pharaoh Kheti III
U. 6-9, 314-315
Sbai Nehet the archer armed her composite bow.
Fired one arrow to the south for the heart of the Nile.
Fired another to the east for the Sun.
Fired a third to the north where suffering turned to fields and mountains of ice.
Fired the final shaft to the west for the millions upon millions of ancestors who’d walked and breathed and laughed and birthed and grieved and come to wisdom and come to death.
Then all of them marched in a vast and silent circle a kilometre in circumference, around the obelisk’s hill, a slow and kinesthetic shenu inscribing the obelisk with forever.
3.
Gamal rode back with Seshat on one of the rented school buses. Raptor took his seat in the cube van.
Fields receded past their windows. Highway slid beneath them.
Maãhotep, hands on the wheel.
“Because your mother is legally Moon’s widow, we’ll be continuing his lawsuits on her behalf as inheritor of his estate. Obviously, it was easier for him to marry her than to, well . . . to adopt you, but you understand—”
“It’s okay, Brother Maã. I know how he felt about me. And he knew how I felt about him.”
“Okay.”
Driving past road-sign, reflecto-green and -white in the headlights: Edmonton 75 km.
“Moon’d be proud of you—I’m proud of you—the way you’ve handled all this organising. You’ve become quite the activist.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ve got something for you. Moon left it with me for safe keeping, in case . . . . Anyway, he wanted you to have it. I put it in the glove compartment there for you.”
Inside: Moon’s carved wooden box. The one he’d opened for him and Jackal during one of their first Alchemical lessons. He hadn’t remembered that the box was rubbed with amber, smelled of its citron-cinnamon essence.
Opened it up.
One hunks of lead, and another of pyrite. And Moon’s pendant, the cartouche in gold.
Stunned. To see how much he’d grown. Back then he couldn’t read the cartouche’s hieroglyphics, but now he couldn’t not read them.
Inside the elongated shen -ring. Up top, from leaf to waves, the god whose name meant “the mysterious or unknowable. Below, three characters reading “is satisfied,” which also meant “peace.”
Yimun Hotep.
He put on his talisman, hanging from its golden chain.
Dark. Pulling into E-Town.
Maãhotep, telling how he and Seshat arranged through a third party to buy the partly-destroyed Street Laboratory from the City “at a fire sale price.”
Raptor, smirking, shaking his head. “Ouch.” Maã chuckled. They both talked: how they’d rebuild, what they’d change, how they’d raise their Shining Place forever.
Then Maã, without segue: “So, after you finish upgrading, any thoughts on a career direction?”
Raptor gave his answer, smiled seeing how his answer made Maãhotep jump, even trying not to.
“I want to be a public interest lawyer.”
4.
That night, Sbai Seshat’s for dinner. Jackal, Araweelo and Raptor and ’Noot, Ãnkhur and Senwusret, Maãhotep and Gamal.
Plus, for their final night in town, Kiya and Ptah.
Dinner. Delicious, but alien to everyone except Seshat and Ãnkhur: baked macaroni, collard greens, homemade deep-fried chicken, German potato salad with tofu dogs. Before anyone dug in, glasses raised, and together they said, “May we drink from the River of Life.”
Raptor served ’Noot’s and his mother’s plates. Araweelo was quieter than he’d ever seen her. He kept giving her side hugs. Even—and this was totally new to him—kissed her on the cheek, in front of everyone.
Nobody said anything about it. But each time he kissed her, she looked up and touched his face as softly as if she were cradling a newly-hatched chick.
Dessert: bean pie with marbled butterscotch ice cream, and over coffee and tea, conversation. Philosophical, almost theological.
Because Moon hadn’t lived long enough to teach the Originals the Peace-Life-Eternal Scroll, none of them could transform the paradox of the Destroyer’s fate in The Book of the Golden Falcon.
“Yeah, I mean, fuh real,” said Jackal. “Dude killed his own brother. Raped Hru! He was a warlord, he enslaved people. How’s that punk end up getting to stand beside Lord Usir in the House of Stars?”
Seshat, leaning back and sipping coffee so pungent it woke Raptor up just smelling it. “Any of you know the Gospel story of the landowner who offered the same wage to everyone? Whether they worked from sunrise or only showed up just before quitting time?”
Ãnkhur knew it, everyone else: blank eyes.
Seshat, in a wide arc: talking rapists and rape survivors, murderers and murder victims, the Ubuntu philosophy of I am we, even the idea that Set himself had probably been raped in war, or as a child.
“You know, some people set their whole lives on getting payback, and they still never get it. Imagine that—their whole lives, everything they do, for nothing.
“Years spent nursing that misery and hate and loss when they should’ve been nursing sick people, or nursing babies. Transform?”
Maãhotep, snatching from his plate the final crust and crumbles of his bean pie. Nodding worth a thousand words.
“What about us as a people?” said Seshat. “For the Maafa? For the first fifty million taken, and for the billion born into the hell that came? When’s our payback? Even if we could force them to give us reparations, it’d take three planets and ten thousand years. And what about the ancestors already gone?”
“Yeah, Sbai,” said Jackal, “but forget about reparations for the victims a minute. I’m saying, rewarding the guy who committed the crime in the first place?”
Plenty of nodding around the room, and Raptor leapt in: “Exactly! In the tenth ãrit, Set’s standing right there, next to the greatest mind in the world, free as free can get, and no shackles on his arms and no sword at his neck?”
“I know. I hear you,” said Seshat. “It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Offensive, that someone so sick and twisted-evil not only doesn’t get punished, he gets to be, what, forgiven? Gets to keep his status? Be rewarded by sitting beside the Lord of the Limits forever?”
She wiggled the coffee pot toward
s Araweelo, who accepted a mugfull. Maã got up. “I’ll make tea. Keep going.”
Seshat:“The tenth ãrit of The Book of the Golden Falcon lays it out straight: the guilty, the guiltiest of history, ain’never gonna get what they deserve.”
“What about,” said Ãnkhur, singing Marley’s melody to Haile Selassie’s words:
We Africans will fight
If we find it necessary
And we know we shall win
For we are confident
In the victory
Of good over evil
Of good over evil, yeah!
Kids snapped on it, slid skin at Ãnkhur’s smoothness. Seshat: “Where’d y’all learn to slide like that?”
Sen said, “Father Moon.” Seshat smiled and went on.
“C’mon, now. You know I’m right. Look at history. How many butchers got butchered? How many super-thieves paid back the people they ripped off and then set the people up in mansions? And how could anybody ever pay you back for taking the life of someone you loved?
“So Golden Falcon prepares us. Says, ‘Forget payback. Forget ‘good triumphs over evil. Ain’gon happen. South Africa after apartheid? Right. Got millions who can’t even count on water or electricity.
“So the story shoves our faces right in it: what it takes to turn people into the Destroyer. That if we keep lusting for revenge cuz justice is denied, we will become Destroyers. Probably of everything we believe in and everybody we care about.”
The Alchemists of Kush Page 43