After the Flare

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  Bracket thinking: That all we are?

  “Come!” the voice said to Seeta.

  “No, if I go, he comes too! We’re together. We go together.”

  Again, he heard a flurry of notes pass among the creatures, which he now knew responded to the people somehow, whoever they were.

  “Come,” they said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Come. Come.”

  Now the creatures started moving away from them, their soft light following them as they walked. Bracket could make out their surroundings better. They were in some sort of tunnel. They walked for a long time, twisting and turning in the seemingly endless branching tunnels, before he started to feel the air becoming fresher, and soon the tunnel opened into a room with a high, cavernous ceiling. The walls were covered with strange inscriptions. The creatures retreated to the edge of this space, positioning themselves defensively in what looked like another tunnel, and Bracket could dimly make out two figures lying on the ground.

  “Wale!”

  The scientist was crumpled up on his side.

  “My cane,” he muttered. “Help me find my cane.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “They took it from me. Those monsters took my cane.”

  “I don’t see it anywhere. Here, let me give you a hand.”

  “No, I need my cane. I won’t depend on someone to get around like an invalid!”

  “Let him bloody well help you up, Wale!” Seeta snapped. “We can find it later.”

  All this time, the creatures watched from a distance, observing their interactions.

  Bracket went over to Wale’s bodyguard. “Can you get up, Clarence?” He tried to turn the giant man over and felt warm fluid on his hand. “He’s injured.”

  “He’s dead,” Wale said softly.

  “What are you talking about? They killed him?”

  “I told him to drop the weapon when they came, but they were attacking me. So he fired at them. And, I don’t know, they stopped it. Then they swallowed him in one of their fields and when he came out again he was dead. The poor man. Clarence was only doing his job. Why won’t they give me my cane back? I need it to walk.”

  “We’ll get your cane back, Wale. It’ll be okay.”

  “It’s not dignified, to walk without a cane, to depend on other people to get around.”

  Seeta began humming to herself.

  “What are you doing?” Bracket said.

  “Join me.”

  “They’ll kill us, young lady. Don’t do that. They took my cane.”

  Bracket realized he’d never heard Seeta sing before, and was surprised at the raspiness of her voice, how she was slightly out of tune. He always assumed she could sing like a lark because she could describe music with precision and poetry. He followed her lead, trying to mimic the notes as best he could. He didn’t see any shift in the creatures this time, no change in their aurae.

  Soon their wavering voices roused Wale out of his stupor. He joined their motley chorus, but sang the notes truer and more forcefully until he began leading the song. One by one Bracket watched as the creatures wavered before his very eyes, and the blue aurae disappeared. The dirt skin flaked away from their terra-cotta forms and dropped to the earth in small clouds of dust. Before them stood five tall, elegant women holding dark stones in front of their chests like offerings. They stopped singing.

  Bracket recognized them immediately: the long, lithe bodies; the garb harkening back to another era.

  “You’re both tone deaf,” Wale observed. “That’s what happens when you don’t speak a tonal language.”

  “They’re from Kano,” Bracket said.

  “You’ve seen them before?”

  “They’re Wodaabe traders. They sell medicines at the market in town, and that one”—he pointed at the youngest of them, causing the others to crowd around her, protectively—“was at the suicide bombing.”

  “Her?”

  “I’m sure of it. She was singing a song like that at the bombing. She was singing it again just now, but it was different, more complex than before. She must have survived. I don’t know how or why. But they’re the ones.”

  Wale was leaning heavily on Bracket’s shoulder. “These aren’t the Nok,” he said, disappointed. “I thought we would find the Nok.”

  “It has to be them,” Seeta argued. “You saw what they did back there. This place is ancient. It’s surely the home of the Nok. Look at the inscriptions. That room where we arrived—those bones were hundreds of years old. These women must be related to them, carrying on their traditions.”

  “You’re right that this space is old,” Wale said, looking now around the chamber. “But the Wodaabe would rarely have come this far south. It doesn’t fit the evidence.”

  “Then how do they know how to use the meteorites?” Bracket asked.

  Finally, the eldest among the tall women stepped forward. The others transformed themselves again, building up their aurae as they walked, so that it was clear they would protect her if the scientists tried to harm her. Bracket had learned his lesson and stayed put.

  Like the others, the woman had a long, thin nose and braided hair that fell to her shoulders. She wore three rows of looped rings on each ear and had a leather necklace festooned with blue beads and cowrie shells. She had a brightly colored orange wrapper and shrewd light brown eyes that observed them closely. She might have been forty or even fifty, but her smooth bronze skin made it difficult to tell.

  “As-salaam alaikum,” Wale said.

  The woman paused, and then said: “Alaikum salaam.”

  She began speaking rapidly in a language Bracket didn’t understand.

  “What is she saying?” Bracket whispered.

  “I don’t speak Fulfulde,” Wale said. He responded with a few words in Pidgin, and soon they were talking back and forth.

  “What’s she saying?” Seeta asked.

  “My Pidgin is a little out of date. I haven’t spoken it for twenty years.”

  “Well?”

  “Don’t be so impatient, young lady. These things take time. I can try to translate.”

  The woman was watching them closely and repeated whatever phrase she’d said before. “My name is Durel. How did you find us?”

  Wale explained to her, with a lot of gesturing, how they’d found the location through the use of the meteorite they had found.

  “You found a Songstone,” Durel said. “It belongs to us.”

  Wale clutched at the pocket of his suit and said something.

  Durel recoiled at Wale’s words, and the other women moved in closer, their aurae building around them.

  “What did you say, Wale?” Bracket asked.

  “I told them we found a monomict brecciated eucrite. It belongs to the Nok, to learned people who can read and write, not to ignorant murderers.”

  “Give it to them, Wale,” Seeta ordered.

  “Why should I? It’s not theirs!”

  “Don’t be absurd. Who else does it belong to?”

  Bracket grabbed the stone from Wale’s pocket as the scientist leaned against him.

  “Don’t you touch that!” Wale protested.

  Bracket held out the stone in his hand for Durel, but before she could grab it, Wale stepped in front of her.

  “What the hell, Wale, do you want to get us all killed?”

  “They’re traders,” he said. “You don’t just give things away, even if you think that it belongs to them, which it doesn’t.” He spoke to Durel again directly, who watched him and nodded.

  One of the women left the group and retreated down one of the tunnels. She came back carrying Wale’s cane. Durel handed it to him, and he reluctantly gave her the meteorite. Wale continued translating in his broken Pidgin.

  “Have you awakened it?” Durel asked.

  “What does she mean by awakened?” Seeta asked.

  “She wants to know if you were able to provoke a response,” Bracket suggested, “to
get the meteorite to react in some way.”

  “We were able to get a reaction between two thousand and twenty-two hundred hertz,” Seeta said. “If you’ll give me back my recording instruments, I can show you.”

  “You mean the electronics we found with you,” Durel said. “We can’t allow you to use them again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can tell people where we are.”

  “Ask them how many of these Songstones they have,” Bracket said.

  “They’re not Songstones,” Wale said, “they’re meteorites.” Clarence’s death seemed to have brought out the curmudgeon in the old scientist.

  “Ask her, Wale. Get off your high horse.”

  “Fine, but it’s inaccurate. Durel, how many Songstones do you have?”

  “We have eleven stones. With this one, we now have twelve.”

  The idea crept up on Bracket slowly, and then became a burning question. “Did you find one of the stones in a cracked vase?”

  Durel seemed startled, her eyes narrowing. “Yes, we did. What do you know about it?”

  “We found it at Naijapool—I mean where I work. One of my workers stole it and disappeared in the same area where we were searching for you. When we got close enough to stop him, we only found blood.”

  “Yes,” Durel said evenly. “We found a stone in one of the tunnels.”

  “You didn’t find anyone with it?”

  “We found a thief.”

  So it was true. The flattened, compressed skin, squeezed of any life—they had killed him, a man whom Bracket had worked beside for months. If they could kill Abdul Haruna so dispassionately, they could easily kill them too.

  “We were protecting ourselves from him,” she continued. “We can use the stones to find other stones. They respond to each other. That is how we knew there was a stone at the spaceport.”

  “The spaceport?” Bracket said.

  “That’s why we went there. We did not intend to hurt anyone. We didn’t know that you would learn how to use it.”

  The other women began speaking to Durel now in their language and she suddenly retreated.

  “Wait!” Seeta said. “Please tell us more. You’ve been here for hundreds of years. Where are the rest of your people? Where are the men? Where are the children?”

  Durel finished conferring with the others, who began singing in low voices. Soon they were surrounded by their aurae again, and their faces were not friendly. They enrobed the three scientists in one of their songs, ushering them through the tunnel for several minutes until they arrived at a large chamber lined with stone humanoid statues that towered over them. Here, the walls were also covered in inscriptions that Bracket couldn’t make any sense of. The heads of the statues looked partly like birds, with beaks that wrapped around them like a phallus or a snake. All the sculptures were hewn from the rock, and he could see depressions where there might once have been inlaid stones or jewels. Wale marveled over the stretched, wiry limbs and stylized, elongated necks.

  “Magnificent.” He scurried about reading the text, which looped and circled and seemed to follow no logical pattern. “There should be enough script in here to decipher their language entirely. This structure must have been carved from sound: either by the meteorites themselves, or some means of amplifying their energy. If you look closely, you can see no evidence of scraping or chiseling.” He began waving his cane over the inscriptions, presumably snapping images. “I’m going to record this moment. This is a major discovery. Possibly the greatest discovery in African archaeology.”

  Bracket carefully removed his Geckofone from his pocket, checking for a signal. But nothing was getting through the tons of magnetite above them. “I don’t think we’re under the spaceport anymore. It says we’ve walked two kilometers since we’ve been underground.”

  “But why would they build this underground in the first place?” Seeta asked. “It’s like a hidden cave. If the civilization was as powerful as Wale suggested, it wouldn’t need to hide.”

  “The seat of power of many Nigerian cultures remained hidden from view in order to imbue their leaders with spiritual strength,” Wale observed. “Even in Europe, ordinary people rarely saw or spoke with royalty. Of course, it may not have been hidden. You saw the dust storm outside. Over a thousand years of Harmattan winds, it’s possible the structure was buried. It may also have served as a defense of some kind—you can tell from the moisture in the air that there is a natural spring here, a source of moisture, which would have been valuable. It’s difficult to be sure without exploring the structure. I think the inscriptions might tell us more.”

  “This isn’t the time for that,” Bracket said. “We need to get out of here.”

  “You got us into this trouble, Wale,” Seeta added. “They could tell what you thought of them, and now we’re stuck here.”

  Wale turned from the wall, suddenly angry. “They killed Clarence. I don’t owe them an apology. He has a family back in Cape Town, now a family without a father. They should apologize. And they should give those meteorites back before they do any more harm, not just to us, but to themselves too. This is no place for amateurs.”

  “How are you so sure that they’re not the Nok?”

  “I know Fulfulde when I hear it. They carve calabashes and wood, not stone.”

  “But they know how to use the Songstones—”

  “Meteorites.”

  “—someone must have taught it to them.”

  Wale grunted, conceding this point. He scraped at his teeth with a toothpick he’d produced from somewhere. As they sat there thinking through their predicament, one of the women returned with two calabashes of millet porridge and a tin cup full of water. It was the same girl Bracket had seen in the market, and she’d stuck a large silver hairpin into her braided hair. She wore a necklace of talismans, little leather pouches and twisted amulets with crisscrossing stiches. Bracket realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast and reached for one of the bowls, slurping it down. Wale waved away the bowl but sipped at the water.

  “Wait!” Seeta said. She pointed at the girl’s belly. “Baby. You’re having a baby. Tell her, Wale.”

  “I’m sure she knows that already.”

  “Translate it!”

  Wale reluctantly translated. The girl stepped back, pulling out a Songstone and dangling it before herself on a chain. She sang quick notes, sharply and perfectly on pitch, and the dirt clung to her aura and shrouded her from view.

  “Where are the men of your group?” Seeta insisted. “Where are the rest of you?”

  The girl, almost hovering, swiveled and left the room too quickly for a human to walk, leaving the three of them behind.

  “We need to find something to trade them,” Wale declared.

  “Oh, quit it with your Nigerian prejudices.”

  “We have been dealing with other tribes for thousands of years. What we say about the Wodaabe, we learned by dealing with the Wodaabe.”

  “Everything you learned about them is negative.”

  “No, the Wodaabe are excellent herdsmen and bush doctors. They make the loveliest calabashes.” He pointed to one of the calabashes of millet, which was intricately carved with starlike patterns. “They’re experts in awl-carving. Also their camels are top-notch.”

  “When did you ever buy a camel?”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  “Missing something,” Bracket muttered. He spent the time searching the capacious chamber for another exit, but the room seemed to have only the one entrance. It was easy for him to imagine that it had once been a place where rituals were performed, owing to the fire pit, and the smell of woodsmoke, and the cold, secret damp, and the reverent feeling the statues instilled in him. Wale continued examining the inscriptions and rooted through the shards that had fallen from the base of the statues, grumbling to himself. Seeta seemed to be trying to figure out where she went wrong with the girl and softly tried to imitate the song she had been singing.
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  After some time, Wale grew tired of snapping images of the room, bundled up his blazer as a pillow, and took a nap, laying his cane over his chest. Bracket poked around in the fire pit to see if he could find anything of interest, watching tiny clouds of ash rise up and spill back to the ground. Time passed slowly. The girl returned to fetch their calabashes. She lingered about, watching them.

  “Where do you come from?” the girl said in English.

  Wale jerked awake and repeated what he had explained before, telling her about the meteorite and how they came from the spaceport.

  “But this white man isn’t from Kano. The woman isn’t from Nigeria. Where do you come from?”

  “I’m a Yankee,” Bracket corrected. “I’m from the United States.”

  The girl watched him closely as he spoke, out of curiosity or revulsion, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t read anything in her dark brown eyes.

  “I’m from India,” Seeta said. She pointed at the brown patterns covering the girl’s hands. “We have henna like that in India.”

  The girl nodded but kept her eyes on Bracket. “I’m Balewa,” she said, and left.

  “Well, that was bloody obvious,” Seeta said.

  “What was obvious?”

  “Did you see the way she looked at you?”

  “No.”

  “God, you’re thick. She was all over you.”

  “Nigerians don’t go for my type.”

  “The Wodaabe love a long, thin nose and white teeth,” Wale said from his pillow, half asleep. “Also light skin.”

  “But I wasn’t using my Wodaabe identity,” he said.

  “Keep your pants on,” Seeta said. “We’re still prisoners here.”

  “It’s just—well, huh.”

  “Stay away from Wodaabe,” Wale advised. “They’re not worth the trouble.”

  “Next time they come back, Wale, let Kwesi ask her what they’re doing here.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because she’ll listen to you.”

  “I think you’re blowing this out of proportion. She didn’t make a pass at me. She’s pregnant.”

  “Try it.”

  Bracket dug around in the fire pit some more and found what looked like a fossilized chicken bone. He felt like he was wallowing in a nightmare and out of it might erupt a vision of a lady in a lake or a monster from the deep. He twirled the chicken bone until he started thinking it looked more like a finger than a drumstick. And it bothered him that the bone was warm to the touch in this cold purgatory. He peered down into the fire pit, thinking that it wasn’t meant for fires at all, scratching until he found more small bones flayed out like a wing. Steam rose up the deeper he dug.