The Prophets

by Robert Jones, Jr.

  Of his people, he saw only Semjula and, down the line, Elewa, who was battered and bruised. He committed to memory each place Elewa was marked for he would repay his captors in kind. He looked frantically for his family, for King Akusa, but saw only faces of neighboring villagers and others who must have been from remote and distant lands, stolen also. It didn’t matter. They were each leaving footprints on a shore he knew none of them would ever see again, and the womb water wouldn’t even give them the decency to leave their footprints untouched so that the land would always remember the shape of its children.

  Every time he turned to look at Elewa to reassure him, one of the strange skins would yell or strike Kosii. They were fortunate that they had chained him. But all chains were loosed eventually. Though he thought himself a forgiving man who sought solutions and camaraderie, these walking blights, these dead risen had done nothing to deserve his gentle nature. With each step he took, they earned only additional parts of his ire—and they seemed giddy at the prospect, as if they couldn’t imagine his ever being a threat, not so long as they kept a firm grasp on the armaments that clapped like the heavens.

  One by one, they were loaded onto one of the ships, larger than anything Kosii had ever seen in his life, somehow able to float atop the womb like they had no weight, some kind of powerful spell. They were led down into the dankness of the spell-cast behemoth where rodents chattered and ran about, and where it smelled of soul death. They would be eaten, he was certain. These revived dead had captured them as a food source, would replenish themselves and regain their spirit, vigor, and perhaps their color, by ingesting them. Maybe they wouldn’t even give them the honor of killing them first but would eat them alive as they watched themselves being consumed.

  He thought his eyes were accustomed to darkness, but this was a different kind entirely. This dark had nothing to do with inky night or ancestral shadows or the ebony of playmates and lovers. No, this dark lived inside the captors like a chasm that nothing could ever fill no matter what was tossed into it. But that didn’t stop them from trying, from inventing things to try. Not a bridge, though. They had decided at some point never to be so creative, that the tug downward was too strong, had caressed secret parts of them too flagrantly to give it up. So into the hole they pushed everything, sometimes even their own children, anticipating the sound that would indicate that a bottom had been achieved and they could rejoice in the fact that the dark did indeed have its limits, too. But that sound never came. What came instead was the whistling of things still falling, forever, without end.

  This was the kind of dark that engulfed Kosii now as he lay foot to head with the other captives, chained together, trapped in spaces where there wasn’t even room to raise their heads or excuse themselves to pass waste. To bend a knee meant knocking into the wood slats above or the person adjacent. Prostrate was the only answer; stillness the sole misery. The insects and rodents occasionally breaking the periods of thirst and hunger.

  Kosii thanked the ancestors that he couldn’t see himself. No lake or river to peer into to see his face reflected back. The things that made him smile now were too foreign to his nature to be talked about, much less gazed upon. People brought so low should at least have the privilege of distraction. Who could watch themselves being gobbled up and live to tell the children? All of the witnesses were dead; the testimony would end here.

  Why hadn’t word of the life-snatchers reached his village in time for them to mount a suitable defense? Perhaps it was because some of the other villages despised King Akusa. The Kosongo people had been one of the few to maintain the original order, and it vexed some of the other kings that a woman should call herself such. These men had been stripped of their memories as surely as if someone cut into their heads with malice and allowed them to be drained of all that had been passed to them, for millennia, through blood. And the shame of it was how easy it could have been retrieved if any of them had been willing to reclaim the stained sand just beneath their feet. But they were belligerent, which gave spite its sustenance.

  So it was spitefulness, Kosii concluded, that allowed them to be left wide open for anything to swoop in and grab them up, claws digging into their innards.

  He wished he could curse in all languages so that both the life-snatchers and the traitors who shared his chains would feel the universe’s wrath. He hadn’t even enough moisture in his mouth to spit.

  “Elewa,” he said as loud as he could with a parched throat.

  The silence that responded pierced him in odd places: the palms of his hands, the back of his neck, his temples. There was no point in licking his lips. Saliva ran dry. If only there was enough moisture for tears.

  “Why?” was the thing that needled its way into the small of his back and ensured his discomfort. He couldn’t think of a single treachery they committed that could explain this predicament. Why hadn’t the ancestors warned them? The skinless’s god was mighty, then, even in his solitary status. Kosii shuddered before the might of their three-headed god, who had managed to block out the ancestors as simply as a cloud could sit in front of the sun, eat up rays, and cast a shadow over everything. He took a little bit of comfort in knowing that clouds pass and the sun eventually regains reign. But he also knew that that took time and the plane on which this battle was being held moved at its own pace. What felt like generation after generation to him and his people was, to the ancestors, merely a blink. His certainty wavered. By the time they defeated the three-headed thing, would the ancestors even recognize the people they engaged in battle with Triple-Head to save?

  These risen-from-dead people; their lack of skin and their peculiar appetites scared Kosii. He never heard of such a people.

  No.

  Wait.

  That was a lie.

  As a child, his father told him of the Great War when the people came down from the distant mountains with torches, and bows and arrows.

  “They had skulls around their necks,” Tagundu said. “Human. No bigger than your own.”

  Tagundu tapped Kosii on top of the head when he said that. It sent a chill through him.

  “Their king was against it, so they killed her. Stabbed her with her own spear and burned her alive.” Tagundu looked away from his son. “They wanted to kill some of us, the men mostly. They wanted to make the women . . . tools.”

  “Why?” Kosii asked then. Tagundu looked at him. The upward arch of Tagundu’s eyebrows displayed his inadequacy to the task of explaining, revealed the guilt stemming from what he would leave out.

  “My son, some people’s hearts, they just . . .” He pressed Kosii’s hands against his chest. “They just beat the wrong way.”

  Kosii just stared at his father, unsatisfied, unable to make out the shape of things, even when they were right at his fingertips. He had never seen the mountain people, never heard the clank of the skulls around their necks, wasn’t pierced by their weapons, so he could afford to bury what his father told him, unfinished as it was. He was, after all, surrounded by people who had only loved and protected him. The only weapons he had ever held were for hunting or ceremony. The only fights he participated in were practice, playful. All of it misleading. His father knew better and tried to tell him, but he had left out the whole and thus the ends of Kosii’s small circle couldn’t touch. Inside it, there was no room for mountain people and skull necklaces, just joy.

  He wondered now if the people who built vessels big enough to swallow entire villages conspired with the mountains to destroy everything in between. The chains were proof.

  “Does anyone here speak my tongue?” he croaked.

  A man turned toward him but had no tongue in his mouth with which to speak.

  Kosii’s eyes widened. He lost his breath and tried desperately to find it. His chest heaved quickly and he closed his eyes tightly. After a moment, when his breathing became normal again, he opened his eyes and saw the man again.
/>   “I see you,” Kosii said, quivering. “I see you. I see you.”

  The man closed his eyes, lips mouthing what might have been his village’s prayer. Or maybe he was a mountain man double-crossed. There was no way to tell, no one to trust.

  Across Kosii’s mind ran images of his mother and father, and King Akusa raised her spear and chastised him for not letting the lion in him roam freely. And there was Semjula caressing him and telling him to pay the king no mind; her spirit was set for war and the ancestors had other plans for him. Beat your drum, Semjula said to him enough times that it had stretched itself over every hollowness like skin and clamored to be handled for its rhythm. He would need to be the keeper of memory so that everything Kosongo, down to the dust of the ground, would live on. Whatever far-off place they would be taken to, of skinless cannibals and land that despised all those to whom it didn’t give birth. Wherever King Akusa was now, if she had been cursed to survive the cannibal’s good aim, he hoped that some Kosongo were with her, too, and when she was removed from the vessel, they had sense enough to adorn her with red feathers and not let her feet touch the ground.

  In the early hours, the skinless had descended once more into the bowels, bringing with them salt and light, and also laughter and wilderness. They had the nervous, itchy hands of people who had no control over their passions, spitting into their palms and rubbing them together. That didn’t get rid of the dirt but merely moved it around, thinned it out, gave only the appearance of cleanliness, and the smell made that plain. But they walked about like men who believed their hands unsoiled nonetheless. Smiling even as they coughed, they turned up their noses and held their breath. This funk was of their own making, so their gagging garnered no sympathy.

  Slowly, they went down the line of chained people trapped in the rib cage, moaning and gasping for air. One of them banged on a person’s foot and then held it. The other one with the jangling metal in his hands came behind him and unlocked the shackles from the ankles, the hands, and the neck. They pulled the lifeless body from its unrestful place. They were mean about it, not handling the woman’s remains with any delicacy whatsoever. Ruffians about their task, they seemed to revel and complain at once about what they had been charged with doing. They carried her, uncovered, up into the light. One kicked the door closed behind him.

  The ship bellowed before it dipped down and then back up again, and things rolled from one side to the other. Kosii listened to the cycle. Something, maybe a cup, clinking then rumbling to the opposite wall and clinking again. Perhaps in another place, at another time, the noise would soothe him, be some sort of nighttime song into which he could dream. And in the dreaming, he and Elewa led the hunt, capturing grand and succulent pheasant, which they cleaned and made into stew. Uncle Ketwa had taught him how to season and so every bit of meat was sucked from the bones and there wasn’t a drop of stock left. They fed each other roasted banana, which Elewa liked smashed and mixed with mango and coconut water. They were too tired to clean up, so they left the mess for tomorrow and gazed at each other lazily, smiling like drunkards, until the darkness and the smell of impending rain had pushed them into each other’s arms.

  “What shall we do with the feathers?” Elewa asked.

  “Let us make you a crown.”

  But it was daytime and the light once again barged into the room and the two skinless men stomped down the stairs and surveyed the captives. They walked all the way over to the far end, holding their noses, walking uncarefully, not paying attention to whom they climbed over or stepped on. One of them moved ahead, into the far corner where the light couldn’t reach, where rats played, where there was human silence and the air of rot.

  Body after body hefted and carried out to be tossed aside like food gone sour. Not even the dignity of a pyre. He counted the bodies. Three. Eight. Twelve.

  Then number seventeen.

  And the words couldn’t leave his lips. Stuck in the crevices of his mouth and tying his tongue. He wanted to scream, but a lump lodged itself in his throat and the air couldn’t flow. He coughed until the tears, finally, from somewhere, somehow, ran and the saliva, too, leaked, and his face pulled itself into foolishness.

  Elewa’s body had managed to maintain its beauty. Aside from some bruises and his half-open eyes, he looked like he was enjoying a princely slumber. Had he been carried higher, above their heads, it would have taken on the character of a celebration—reaching puberty, the first hunt, the calling of the ancestors, the crowning of a king. Kosii stretched out his arms as far as the chains would allow before the rusty metal dug into his wrists and droplets of blood hit the floor. It was almost intentional, the arc the spilling blood formed. The perfect circles themselves forming a larger circle. Almost a head. Almost a tail. Almost infinity closing in on itself, just right there at the bottom, beneath all notice.

  They were jumbled when they came out, his words. Mixed in with his dribble, they were only clear to him.

  “A curse. A curse upon you and all of your progeny. May you writhe in ever-pain. May you never find satisfaction. May your children eat themselves alive.”

  But it was too late and the curse held no meaning because it was redundant. Kosii’s hands fell to his sides. Disaster, he thought. A pure, plain disaster. Not only because of what he had already lost, but also because of what he would have to lose.

  He had, after all, made Elewa’s seven aunts a promise.

  Paul

  Paul was just a boy, no more than seven or eight, when his father, Jonah, led him into the middle of everything and exhaled. Jonah made a full spin and spread his arms open wide. Then he laughed. He laughed and laughed and then patted Paul on the back before resting his hand on Paul’s shoulder.

  “See, boy? Look,” Jonah said, pointing.

  Pointing to what? Treetops? Tall grass? A deer that stood frozen in his gaze? All of it, Paul figured. Yes, Paul saw those things. But what he saw most readily was his father’s hand on his shoulder. It was warm and firm and sent a charge through him. Had his father forgotten himself? This was their first intimacy, and Paul had, for the first time, felt like the blood of his father’s blood: his living, breathing offspring: his son. Paul looked at his father and his father looked back at him and smiled.

  “This is everything,” Jonah said, looking out at the land that was his because—because God willed it.

  And Paul had watched as the very land turned Jonah from a miserable man—who barely spoke, who was spiteful and covetous, not even softened by the forgiveness of his wife, Paul’s mother, Elizabeth—into the father Paul had always hoped would show up. How, then, could it not be worshipped? In their joined grasp, not unlike hands pressed together for morning grace, it had been razed. Yes, raised up in their very hands, together. The most important thing now, his father told him: Grow. Gather. Keep. Because then, in the echoing halls, and even in future whispers, they will build monuments in your honor and you will be remembered not for your failures—not for your stumbles or your transgressions or your kills—but for only your greatest triumphs.

  Paul didn’t doubt that this was true, but it was Elizabeth whom he watched till the fields until her body could take no more. When she took ill, laid up in her bed, almost motionless if not for the smile that rose across her face whenever he came in to see her, Paul had never before lost anything, and the thought that he could lose his most precious thing—the one who had given him everything: life, milk, and a name that was her father’s—made something inside him crumble.

  By the time Elizabeth began to tremor and bleed, not respond to Paul’s or his father’s voice, and soon, not respond at all, both boy and man silently agreed that the only way to honor her was to name everything that belonged to them after her, which was another kind of immortality. Jonah called it the Elizabeth Plantation. He committed himself to it—accumulating slaves, hiring hands, raising animals, and planting cotton damn near to the horizon—as though the
“plantation” part of the name was merely a formality.

  Then, when Jonah became as tired as Elizabeth had, when his hands wouldn’t stop twitching and fevers had left him parched and drained, he, too, offered himself up in tribute to the land that was his by legal right, if not by the blood fact that it had already claimed his wife.

  Paul liked to think that his mother and father were both looking down on him, protecting him, magnifying his favor in the eyes of God, because look at what he had done: he had built upon the foundation they left to him and had gathered the enormous wealth that they had twisted their bodies seeking. His parents were comfortable; they had provided him a decent life and he couldn’t remember a single hungry day. But they were never this, not even with full access to the law of the land—and beyond the law, the very ethos of it—that said, No one can stop you; take as much as you damn well please!

  As God had passed destiny down to his father, and his father down to him, Paul saw it as his duty to ensure that Timothy also received this Word. For in the beginning, before all else, there was the Word and the Word wasn’t merely with God: the Word was God. The first utterance, the primary incantation, the initial spell that willed itself into being from nowhere, turned nothing into everything, and had, itself, always been there in its potential, needing only to express itself through action for existence to exist. A power so grand that all it took was a breath to make the unreal real and pull the seen from the unseen.

  When Timothy first came back home, Paul had brought him out to the same spot his father took him to, pointed to the same treetops, smiled at the same horizon, spun with the same openness. And when his hand landed on Timothy’s shoulder, Paul felt the same unexpected giddiness that he was certain was the thing that took Jonah from choke to laughter. But when Timothy looked up at him, the boy’s eyes were blue with worry and there was no awe. There were no jolts of joy reverberating between them. There was only the distinct scent of cotton blossom heavy in the air and the wind blowing at the tops of both of their heads.