AfroSFv3
Page 25
And they played.
The ground shook, and they dreamt of their families and their homes, and they played.
The melody shifted through rhythms before there were kings. Ogotemmeli hammered at the liquid strings, his voice gliding over the changing tones, trying to fall in line with all the broken notes of broken epochs.
Focus. Kiania thought. They are only one song.
He kept playing.
I am not going to last much longer, she said, feeling the last of her energy riding the tide of keys. I’m almost there. Hold on. I’m close. Just a moment, he answered,
He saw themselves play. A cascade playing a cascade, and dived back into his body, strong with his own soul and Kiania’s, and the waterfall peeled away from the head of a bald man in a blue boubou with brown skin and deep-blue almond shaped eyes, playing a kora of bones and strings of streaming blood.
They were riding the melody now, the rising ground wasn’t random at all, the streaming clouds overhead did so because they sang, and they sang because they streamed.
A halo of all their forces enveloped the griots. The earthquakes stopped. Kiania disappeared.
They all looked at each other, one with the vibration.
‘The battle is won,’ Ogotemmeli said. ‘We can go now.’
They vanished into the atmosphere.
The ice giants melted into the ground, plunging through the cracks in the rocks, where they bubbled into a geyser, crashing to the ground, and spreading towards the dried-out ocean floors and filling them.
Afalkay, Maitera, and Karamata, merged into each other, creating matter and minerals that dispersed on the air, and where the geyser landed, small seeds grew into bushes, ferns, and lianas. Their combined elements drawing from the air and the ground the substance that would renew all that had been destroyed.
Ogotemmeli’s eyes danced with all the elements of the universe, neither flesh nor soul, just music.
He struck a final chord and let the bones fall to the ground. He sung one final note, and let his arms and legs dig roots, his chest and neck thicken and elongate, the crown on his head turn into a thousand, thousand branches, and a baobab stood where Ogotemmeli’s song ended.
#
‘You need another Griot, Ishimwe,’ Tiwonge said, looking at the Earth change before their eyes.
‘So do you,’ Ishimwe retorted.
‘Do I?’ she asked. ‘And have a man argue my decisions in rhymes? No, thank you.’
Just as she said so, an Akwesidan appeared in a solar flare, radiating mid-summer warmth.
‘You’re late for the fight Eshu,’ the Okyin Yaa said disapprovingly.
‘You wouldn’t want us to join, believe me,’ he answered with a grin. ‘Where will you be going? We’ll keep watch here, as we have before.’
The Okyin looked at a star glowing brightly beyond the solar system.
‘Sigui Tolo.’ She said. ‘We used to believe we came from there once. Well, we’ll make it our home now.’
And just like that, they were gone.
Mame Bougouma Diene is a Senegalese-American humanitarian living in Brooklyn, and the francophone/US spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society. His collection of novellas Dark Moons Rising on a Starless Night came out August 2018 at Clash Books. Google him, he's got some fun stuff out there.