The Prophets(74)

He slept a sleepless sleep, eyes never fully shut, body never truly at rest. He couldn’t unprepare himself for the turmoil that could, at any moment, lie down next to him and everyone else like a dutiful lover.

“Elewa,” he whispered.

He lost track of him at the shore. They, the ghost cannibals, had burned everything: Semjula’s canes, Mother’s drums, Father’s blankets. The royal jewels and metals from the tips of spears they stole: adorned themselves in profane ways with them, carried them in their mouths, intended to melt pieces down to use as teeth. Gaudy displays of ignorance, no respect for the age of the items, how they had been passed down for hundreds of years from mother to son, father to daughter, each holding a piece of those who held them, blue, red, gentle, strong, shimmering once, but now stripped of their luster, debased in the grimy hands of thieves, victorious criminals who had crafted great vessels, traveled from the distant universe, but didn’t have the good sense to wash their hands before they ate. Shameless.

Kosii and Elewa had just stumbled, exhausted, out of the forest and were already separated by ten people between, in the line of joined iron collars. The skinless men had even put the craven devices on Semjula, whose neck was designed only for turquoise, shells, and a child’s embrace. People had to hold her up and still the cuts were deep.

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.