The Prophets(75)

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.