Sefu the Immortal once lodged his makeshift spear under the edge of a rhinoceros gargoyle's skull-face. The athlete jolted his wrist and squelched that mask clean off— high against the blinding Sun.
He wore that horned trophy over his face until the day he died: one hour and twenty-four minutes later.
* * *
Fifty-three years on, there were still fans of Sefu Asiyekufa in the Encampment. No-name, some slave or other with a bum knee, was one of them. Surely that's why he started hobbling across that burning desert rock.
He and every other fanatic who worshipped Asiyekufa would at least get the satisfaction of leaving their harsh crater the same way their idol did:
No-name stopped his scalding march along the rim and stepped into the wide shadow of the tangled Barracks. He turned and looked down at thousands of himself— brothers, friends, and enemies— the same, from every country in the world. They scurried across the deep working grounds at the crater's base, black specks like gnats. No-name snapped his dark face back to the fat gargoyles perched along the outer walls, before that seductive hypnosis could hurl his body down the great steps of the pit. The beasts dared him.
'Throwing knives,' shrapnel which No-name had tried to balance. That was his gimmick, the trick that would leave him No-name the Immortal; No-name Asiyekufa.
He walked. The Superiors, with their great gargoyles, were lazy and efficient. Whether they killed him then or later, it ended the same; why waste the mile?
They'd wait.
For him and his 'throwing knives.'
No-name's carcass wouldn't be moved until two weeks later, when a wagon caught on it and splintered its axle.
On the working grounds six hundred feet below that cracked earth, Faraji and his son stood around a tall wooden drum. He was straining his eyes to look far up the slope of the pit's rocky terraces, the dance of heat-warped air laughing in his face.
"...Baba!" Fortus whined, tugging at his father's skinny shoulder. "Hurry! Do you want to end up just like him?!"
The middle-aged man blinked his jaundiced eyes a few times and raised a calloused hand to grate sweat off his forehead. Faraji was shaved bald, and his skin was still dark and full, at least in the parts where sweat cut across the red dust on his cheeks. Darker than he should have been. The Mchangan sun was strong enough in those days to even scorch the locals to a crisp; the foreign slaves died with half the skin they came in with.
"I'm worried about Hamisi, mwana," Faraji croaked. He dug his shovel into the last of the rocks. "I told that young fool not to go. 'Throwing knives'... Ehh yaani, I told him." He mumbled in that way a few more times.
"Faraji!"
He had been kneading his thick, wiry beard in his hands, like he wanted to rub out the white parts.
"Hebu, help us!" one of the other slaves whined.
Faraji crouched low to the ground and helped grip the bottom of the wooden drum.
The cylinders came from witch doctors in the capital, Fortus had heard. But then, he'd heard just about anything about everything. They must've, though, he always told himself. Nothing that fine was made anywhere else.
Each drum was seven feet tall, bigger than Fortus by a mile, and of a much lighter brown than he was. Their flat tops held grand radial tapestries, and waves of geometry ran around the sides of each cylinder. Every one had a different mask jutting out from its front— hatch-mark skin, cowrie shell necklaces, ibex horns sprouting out from where thought should sit, and all manner of strangeness.
But the faces were the same, too: closed slits for eyes, two mirrored bows for eyebrows, and always making some annoying expression like a big-lipped smile or inflated cheeks with a puckered 'O'.
As the men strained to lift the wooden fetish, Fortus directed them, clearing out leftover rocks so it could rest easily. With a collective grunt, the drum slammed into its place, dug a foot into the ground.
As soon as it left his fingers, Faraji whipped around and turned his back to the drum. A habit from Old Bhekizitha Ngubane. The faces scared the elder; he called them Amadlozi Amabi, 'evil ancestors.' Sometimes, Old Bhek would wail and cry, begging his Faraji to make sure he'd never become one once he died.
Fortus used to look away, too.
The men took a moment to sip from their waterskins. They picked at their tattered, dirt-caked tunics, trying to steal some airflow.
Each man took a breath and a half before someone barked, "Haya, come! The sun is on its way down! It is just a short walk back to the station, one more and we can take it!"
Everyone spoke that way during the day. Like it annoyed them you had two legs, like it annoyed them to pump their heart.
The group walked over to their final spot, and Faraji called out Mchangan to the pair arriving with the next drum. Just as soon as Faraji's planting team lifted the idol out of its wagon, the transporters started rushing it back towards the massive steps of the crater's slope. Their last load, too.
While someone reattached the head of their pick, Faraji spun his own again and again.
"Don't worry, Baba," Fortus whispered. He took his father's hand. "I'm sure Hamisi made it. In fact, by this point, Hamisi's probably all the way to the capital, sticking Mkubwa's head on a pike." He said it like he meant it.
Faraji glowered and smacked Fortus upside the head. "Don't mock him."
The boy boiled up some defense and let it die in his throat, "...He's a mjinga for trying to leave," he scoffed. "He could barely even walk anymore." Fortus took his hand back.
"Maybe we're wajinga for staying," the man sighed. But he was practical.
"Everyone thinks they're Sefu."
"Sefu Asiyekufa," Faraji corrected.
"That man got lucky before you were even born. Now we still die over it." Fortus was picking at his scabs. His voice wasn't biting anymore; it was small and stupid.
"...Yes," Faraji said in a breath. He put his hand on Fortus' head like the top of a cane and wobbled it around. "Come."
Three of the men formed a circle that was as second-nature to them as blinking, and lifted their pickaxes.
"Haya, Moja!" Faraji started, and the rest answered "Mbili!" and brought their pickaxes down together.
It was almost sacred, the way all at once they forced the ground to give up a perfect circle. "Moja!" and they lifted. "Mbili," and so on.
"Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!"
And the veiny rock of the earth became soil and sand.
"Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!"
Dust sprayed into their eyes.
Fortus coughed as he swung.
"Moja!" "Mbili!" "Moja!" "Mbili!" "Mbili! Moja!" "Mbili?" "Moja!" "Mbi–" "Tatu!"
"Mbi–Nne..?" A man dropped his pickaxe. "Faraji, what are you doing?!" The one-legged man looked ready to kill him.
Faraji was holding his pickaxe low, staring through his eyebrows at the scene past the amputee.
A Superior— in his rich, green, flowy agbada gown and folded fila hat, both of fine, embroidered aso oke fabric— was marching towards them.
He had his Scindreux blade drawn. It sparkled like sunset's water, and was crafted of a radiant, translucent green crystal, lively dancing on each of its geometric facets.
But what warned and called Faraji's name was something else: The blinding ray of white light sliding down the curve of the Superior's great plate-sized golden medallion, the eight-spoked split-sun of Shujaa Mkubwa's empire.
"...Watch the rhythm," Faraji mumbled, and nodded towards the Superior. The others turned to look, then snapped their heads back down. "We were almost singing it."
On a burgeoning rack railway track extending down from the lowest of the crater's stony tiers, a shink rang as Old Bhekizitha Ngubane slid his wrench around a strong iron bolt. An aishh as he twisted. Another. "There…" he'd gargle, as it tightened enough to hold.
Little Atiena watched his work with a dimpled grin.
Shink,
Aishh– Aishh–"There…"
Shink,
Aishh– Aishh– "There…"
Old Man Bhek caught the girl's bright eyes and started bobbing his scorched head along an imagined wire, up and down, in and out.
Shink,
Aishh– Aishh– "There…"
The wild-haired septuagenarian started humming a little, popping 'B's in his shriveled lips and wet gums until they matched. With his next bolt, he broke out:
"Ba-
hari ngiya-khu-le-ka!"
Atiena whipped her round face towards him like he was the greatest act she'd seen in all her seven years. Her sleepy, drooping eyes sprouted into big white globes with only a few stains in them.
"Thu-
me-la… a-" Bhek started shimmying his shoulders and kicking his dark legs out in a showy dance. "-ma-nzi a…-ngi…"
Clamor and barked orders joined Bhek's prayer. Green-cloaked Superiors were starting to emerge from their rock-hewn apartments— cut right into the tiered stone benches— to direct the slave migration back to their barely habitable Barracks. People got ideas around those sunset hours.
They were seven hundred Superiors and fifty gargoyles across seventy thousand slaves. One herding dog across two hundred sheep.
"...ni-
ke a…-ma-" Bhekizitha's phlegmy song didn't falter, but his eyes left Atiena and caught a green man approaching. Minutes.
…-ndla…" Old Bhek forgot where he was planning to go from there. He was feeling for the dagger strapped to his caramel stomach.
Bhekizitha's unburned waist was sunken beneath each of his visible ribs, following the same hunch as his ruined spine. His arched back seemed determined to stab vertebrae right through his rough old skin.
The Superior was broad.
"Hm, mhm-mm," Atiena hummed.
Old Bhek whipped his face back towards her, savage eye still bulging and a tense vein snaking down his forehead. His face was almost permanently frozen in that gnarled squeeze, one eye always bigger, and his bottom lip chomping on the top; but Atiena could tell when it softened. His balled hand was not for her, nor his fingers upon his dagger.
The girl giggled and went on in her mousy way, "Hmm, Ba-ha…ri."
Bhekizitha made a face like he had seen god, and the girl giggled with her tongue between her missing front teeth. She always did. "I like your song, Baba. Is it in your language?"
The Superior raised his hand to call Old Bhek forward.
The elder clamped Atiena's shoulders and marched her off the tracks, towards a crowd of drum-laborers on their way back. He brushed the spare bolts out of her palm.
"What? Yes, Atiena. Yes, mwana. But…" he looked back twice, then a third time. On the last, he saw the Superior run towards a fight which had broken out. Bhek started rushing them towards the crowd, bouncing with each step like they were still playing.
Finally, Bhekizitha could breathe, think.
He looked down. "...But the song doesn't like you, Atiena."
"What?!" she cried, yanking at the bonnet tied over her slicked-back, bushy hair. "Baba, why?!" she whined, almost crying in that young way.
Old Bhek shrugged like there was nothing he could do. "Well, umntwana wami—
Faraji! Mwana!" The old man threw his hands up and smiled, wide and gummy.
Faraji took the elder's hand and squeezed it tightly. He laid his palm on his heart and bowed his head a bit, saying, "I am so glad to see you still among us, baba."
"Bah!" he cried, shooing away his son.
Fortus and Atiena locked eyes as their fathers greeted, and he scrunched his nose at her. She stuck out her tongue and put a finger on her forehead.
With one hand still in Faraji's, Bhekizitha took Atiena's and started towards one of the gabion staircases along the walls of the stone terraces. Old Man Bhek slowed those two down, hobbling under a hunch so extreme it built a sun visor out of his spine, though not one good enough to fend off the army of age spots.
Fortus went over to Atiena's side and started hovering his finger above her eye. She whined and slapped him away, but Old Bhek never paid much attention to anything while he talked.
"Nothing in an afternoon is going to kill me that hasn't over the last fifty years, mwana. However— Fortus!" Bhekizitha slapped him on his ear. "Stop bothering the child, please! You are too old! Weeeh, this boy, Fara. —However, I have only just become old enough to have seen everything, mwana."
Faraji smiled, a handsome smile with strong teeth; it was a shame that they were yellowed and caked. "Tell me, baba, what have you seen?"
"A boy was born Blessed, Fara."
"Many are. Not us, baba."
"Basi, fool!" Old Bhek slapped him, too. "Still blind, still a boy, Fara!
"Yes, 'us,' mwana! He was born here, in the Encampment!"
"What is he, a little Muumba, baba?" Faraji talked seriously, but he looked over Old Bhek's short frame to catch Fortus' eyes in his, and held back a laugh as he smirked. "Maybe a small Ithunzi, with a baby gargoyle to match?"
A treacherous laugh snuck out of Fortus, and almost as soon as he lost that single hiccup, he drew it back in. Too late. Old Bhek started beating on the boy's patchy balloon of coils like his matted head was a set of old drums, and Fortus squeaked:
"Ah– Babu— Wait— I—"
"Fool! Fools, all of you! Sometimes I think you only know dirt and metal! Not you, Atiena," he said with a wink, and pinched the girl's cheek. "We trifle with a giant, Fara, you should have more…responsibility. You know better than that faithless boy, better than to mock."
Faraji nodded quietly and offered to carry the elder's knapsack.
The first of the trains returned to the base of the pit empty, and immediately its debris carts were swarmed, unhooked, and switched out for five double-decker personnel carriages. Given sixty carriages across six distinct funicular railways, both all the drum workers, all the shovelers, and everyone in between, could go up in less than an hour, and not even be too cramped. But people seemed to forget that daily, and the chaos of rushing to board first was best avoided. As such, Faraji and his family meandered, trying to preserve the day's only quiet ambiance over the shouting crowds.
Fortus always looked up when he wasn't looking down. The Encampment had no ceiling, and so through the dust, he could see the nightly balm of purple-orange skies as he waited to board.
In every other direction were stacks of fifty-foot steps radiating from the center like an amphitheater, twelve on top of one another. Everywhere Fortus looked, dirt and rock, like moles living in the earth, six hundred feet interred.
So he looked up.
This massive spiral into the crust was, unfortunately, one of the most impressive and unimaginable projects ever undertaken across the known ring of major continents called Ihlok Vartul; one of four such endeavors.
Fortus dropped his eyes to the repulsive red clay. Better than catching the attention of the Stone Ravens, circling in the crater. Evidently, the smell of blood and weakness on the crater floor was tempting enough to drag those scavenging corvids six hundred feet below ground. Fortus watched their empty sockets as they cocked their heads to stare him down. The wound on his ankle wafted through their nostrils.
One dove for him, and he swatted it with his pick. It squawked a harsh whine and flew off.
He hated them. The sandy-scaled Ravens reminded him of one thing: the slaves really were bugs in an anthill, crawling desperately from hungry birds.
Fortus let out a long sigh and dropped to the ground. He leaned onto a polished granite orb, one of tens of thousands coating every inch of the Encampment. It was big, like a dog. Fortus tossed his weary body across it. These Eyes of Máti chewed up soot, smoke, dirt, and toxin, and pumped out air. Good, cold, delicious air. Atiena chomped on the icy billows and laughed.
The good magic of the Eyes of Máti was cool enough to fight the heat of the world's core, powerful enough to kill the smoke of engine houses and the dust of three thousand feet.
But just enough.
Not enough.
Everyone still died from their chests.
And too…
They watched.
On the front of each was carved an almond eye, its lids secure and permanent. A crescent for a pupil, Orosian granite. Permanent.
They stared with the sacred Eye of Máti.
They watched.
A gift from the massacred cities of the Blessed Visums.
But they pumped out air.
Good, cold, delicious air.
Fortus hugged it close, like a dog.
So did everyone.
A tall man coming back from across the working grounds shouted excitedly, "Hee jamani, ndugu zangu!" and threw his arms out with a charming white smile. Fortus snapped back to the present.
"Family! Glad to see there's still five of us!"
He chuckled by himself and jogged to catch up with them.
"Samir!" Faraji greeted, taking his hand as he did Bhek's before yanking him in. "You preen too much to survive this long."
The strong man laughed and slammed his friend's shoulder. "I preen so much so I can survive this long," he joked. "The Superiors think I'm pretty, you know."
He was. Samir Ben-Ayyur had sunburned, mostly pale, Kaskazani skin, dark kohl around his light eyes, fine, long hair wrapped in a wide turban, full lips, a hard nose, and most striking of all: strong white teeth.
He was ritualistic in his grooming. Samir worked on his rest days to get oils, miswāk, and fresh clothing.
He was born outside, like Bhekizitha— in far off Kārum.
Fortus liked him; he smelled nice every day.
Faraji shook his head and laughed as he put a hand on Samir's back and started leading his family towards the station.
"Fara," the man started. "Fortus, Atiena, Mzee Bhekizitha.
Come, hear this also."
Samir began whispering, walking backwards up the stairs so he could catch each and every one of their reactions.
"A Muumba was born, ndugu zangu. Blessed by Lord Mbombo, here in this camp." He smiled and darted his eyes wildly across their faces.
He frowned when nobody seemed much surprised.
"Baba…" Faraji started, like he was talking down a lion.
"Hawu!" Bhekizitha screamed, coughing up laughter in his raspy way. "Didn't I tell you?! You are the most insolent, irreverent, disrespectful, unruly, foolhardy—"
"Baba told us this tall tale already, Samir. The story is in poor taste."
Then the light rushed back into Samir's eyes, and he looked into Faraji's with utmost severity. "Akhi, Nandi knew the mother… I had met her child during worship. She covered his eyes with a cloth, said he was blind."
Fortus sighed and dropped his face into his hand. There was always an angel visiting in the night, a god speaking to someone in their dreams. And every day they woke up in the Barracks.
Faraji stopped altogether and halted his family along with him. He stared at his Samir with his mouth open. He was ready to cry.
"Fara…they say he could already make rock whirl. He was just three."
That made the tears fall.
The man smiled and split his beard from end to end with laughter. He grabbed Samir's shoulders and shook him like they'd finally conceived.
Fortus saw his father's faith, beautiful and stupid.
"You're serious?!" Faraji screamed, louder than he meant to. That haunting echo of the crater boomed it to every slave from there to Kāpura. He rushed back to a whisper, "Where's the mother now? If she has more children, maybe—"
Samir swallowed and pursed his lips, looking up at Faraji through his eyebrows. He cleared his throat and shot a glance at Atiena.
Faraji followed, and his eyes went wide. Then they crinkled under furrowed brows as the sides of his mouth pulled into a frown. He looked like an infant, just as he decides he is going to sob until he can't. He turned his head to one side, away from the rest.
"Atiena!" he called from over his shoulder. "Are you excited for the end of my story tonight?" He turned to face her, wiping his cheeks.
"Mjomba, your stories make no sense," she teased, laughing with her tongue between her teeth.
Each of the six funicular railways consisted of twin tracks for twin trains, chained together by a braided iron cable thrown over a massive wheel, like a pulley. As one went down, its weight dragged the other up, and so on, so the tons and tons of debris and body would mostly handle themselves. But gravity alone was not enough, and every three benches engine houses the size of museums moaned day and night to generate enough power to overcome the difference.
Joining the constant flow into newly emptied carriages, Faraji and his family finally boarded one. Fifty slaves on the bottom level, fifty on the top. Two minutes in, they reached the first engine house, roaring like a hellmouth with steam and creaking metal. It swallowed them whole, and slid them upon a traverser to the next track in the relay. Two minutes later, the carriage was on the next track, and a new chord whined, pulled by the second engine house. The same; Again and again.
Fortus watched the dark cable hum in a trance as it hauled him. Two minutes. Another engine house. Boiler fire forced hot metal and thick grease down his lungs. The boy turned away from the monster's fiery maw. He hated those short minutes on the traverser, so deep in the belly of the beast that its demonic heartbeat stole his own. It was the only sound in the world, the thick CHUFF-CHUFF-CHUFF of a great steam engine. He felt the vibration in the corner of his jaws, in the dip behind his ears— CHUFF-CHUFF-CHUFF.
CHUFF-CHUFF-CHUFF.
Yes, Fortus turned away from the monster's fiery maw. He watched instead the packed faces of his people. The full carriage was a bamboo forest of dark skin, sweat, and blood, but he could always see the faces. They never saw him, anything. They hung onto each other and swung, chewed on their lips, and stared into Fortus' eyes. And they never saw him, anything. Sand dripped from their dying bodies like drizzle.
10 ore carts. 2.5 tons each. 25 tons a train. 150 tons, at a time.
5 carriages. 100 slaves each. 500 slaves a train. 3,000 slaves, at a time.
Numbers. Cargo.
Mbombo would never bless us—
Would never save or soothe the people drilling over his head.
Fortus knew it then more than anything. That rickety, whining ride was life for the last fourteen years. He had earned it, he was sure.
Two minutes.
CHUFF-CHUFF-CHUFF.
Black billowed out of smoke stacks atop the third of four engine houses. One left.
But something happened. An emergency.
And a powerful steam whistle pierced the air.
Its hiss sprayed out into a mournful wail, burning steam screaming.
Screaming.
Fortus shut his eyes as hard as he could and buried his face in his chest. He swore he wouldn't cover his ears.
Again, it screamed, the call rushing up the slopes and reverberating through the deep pit in a metallic choir. That steel cry pressed on Fortus' young chest like an adult's boot, until it cracked his ribs and dirtied his heart. He shook, sniffled as every drop of running sweat ran a razor past his eyes.
CHUFF-CHUFF-CHUFF.
Samir put his hands on Fortus' shoulders and kneaded, mumbling prayers over his head.
When Fortus was seven and working the tracks, Sehrish chatted with him, mother to his best friend Tariq.
He remembered the joke.
CHUFF-CHUFF-CHUFF.
She said girls chased Tariq like Ravens, and Fortus laughed. He wasn't looking. He pried off an iron tie, a bolt rolled down, and Tariq slipped.
Fifty feet, and broke his back.
Sehrish yelled his name, ran to the edge, and saw her young son ripped. After that, Fortus couldn't remember: not the Superiors, not the crowd. He remembered Sehrish— snot and tears running down her face and filling her mouth— folded over herself, rocking that little girl behind her eyes back and forth, and screaming like the Ravens.
Screaming.
CHUFF-CHUFF-CHUFF.
The engine house workers finally dislodged a grinded arm from the gears, and the whistle wailed a final time.
CHUFF-CHUFF-CHUFF.
Fortus crushed his ears in his palms.
Bhekizitha hobbled out at ground-level, colorless air and foreign coolness. Stars, then, no haze. He conducted his familial train off to the side of the Barracks, to one of hundreds of entrances, exits, alleys, and holes left over from the uneven reconstructions. Only the closest entrances to the station were fully opened— just enough to herd slaves through a few wide doorways. Creative thinking a mile from the walls was to be avoided. The official channels took half the night, and too much weight collapses haphazard bridges.
"Slave!" a Superior barked. Bhek turned to face him, and Fortus dropped his gaze immediately. The soldier's eyes were wild, excited. "Do you think yourself greater a designer than Shujaa Mkubwa?! Why are you out of line?!" He spit as he talked, and Old Bhek stuck a hand into his shirt, scratching an itch where his dagger was tied.
As it dropped to the ground, Bhekizitha kicked up sand and threw up his hands, yelling, "Superior!" in Mchangan.
Samir and Faraji's eyes landed on the dagger. The darker man immediately threw up violent coughs, keeling over and rubbing sand out of his eyes. He curled into a gargling ball and flipped the dagger up against his wrist.
"You will not speak your sick language on civilized land, slave." The Superior spun his sword in his hand as he stalked towards the once toffee-skinned man, speckled with black spots.
"Civilized? My apologies. I had mistaken the giant dirt hole in the ground for a mess." Muscle and tension wriggled up Bhek's emaciated old body, and though his eyes were paralyzed in one and the other half shut, he felt electricity pound in his heart. He smiled, almost laughed. His good eye grew wild, excited.
Atiena.
Passion died in him altogether, and he looked towards Faraji, making his way inch by inch towards the edge of the crater.
"You!" the Superior hissed. Faraji froze just before the edge. "What are you doing?! What are you hiding?!" The deep glow of his verdant sword still bathed Bhekezitha.
Faraji looked at the old man, his wild hair whiter than when they met. He swallowed and responded, "Mi…" He sucked in a breath and started tapping his foot to a made-up rhythm and clicking his tongue: "Mi–mi, ni wa jiwe! Mi–mi, ni was ardhi!"
Faraji looked up at the green-garbed man and laughed to himself. He was almost disappointed, but not surprised. He looked Fortus in the eye and winked. After a breath, "...None shall touch me! Mbombo vomited — the world as well as I!"
The Superior rushed the man with a roar, and Samir yanked Atiena away and forced her into the Barracks. Faraji flinched wildly, like an explosion before his face, but all the while stayed focused, staring down each step of the Superior.
The soldier lunged, swiped, and Faraji dropped. The athlete rolled to his right and stabbed Old Bhek's dagger into the Superior's stomach, shooting up and shoving him off the ledge.
Faraji fell back and tried to wrestle his breathing to the ground, staring over that high cliff and running a bloody hand over his shaved head. Fortus ran to lift his father, yanking him into his arms as soon as he stood.
"Baba!" Fortus scolded, eyes burning hot. "You always—"
"I know, I know," Faraji hushed, pulling him closer and kissing the boy's head. "We're safe, mwana, I promise."
Bhekizitha looked over the cliffside and stared down. The man was ripped about in two, except for a few stubborn joints he could see. His pulsing crystal blade was buried in the rock down to the hilt, cut through like it was warm butter. No substance in Ihlok cut like Scindreux.
Old Bhek laughed scornfully and mustered dry spit to bury him with. "The idiot is killed, Fara."
Faraji nodded once, and again for himself. Again for Fortus. He pursed his lips with resolve.
"Good," he said, right to his son. "Leave the blade," the same way. "We don't need a reason to be followed."
Samir re-emerged, handing Atiena off to the old man. "Won't you stay for the implosion, Mzee Bhekizitha?"
"Bah!" he cried, waving him away like a pest. "Those demons." He turned up his nose and hurried in with Atiena.
Faraji went with them, tapping his friend's shoulder, and beckoned Fortus.
"I'll stay with Samir this time, baba," the boy blurted, staring at the edge. "Can— Can I stay with you, Amu?" A bright smile brushed aside Faraji's wiry dark beard, and he looked at Samir as if to ask how he had drugged him. The man shrugged, and Faraji laughed.
"Sure, Fortus. Come back as soon as he finishes."
Fortus went closer to the edge and sat next to Samir.
"You any good with 'demons'?" Samir dared.
Fortus swallowed. "No…"
"Me neither!" he laughed. "Holy beings, in those drums."
The northerner started brushing aside any and every small pebble, stick, and, especially, insect, out of his small area, then knelt in it. He breathed into his folded hands and waited for his command.
Fortus watched.
Then, like gossiping schoolgirls, the wooden drums started whispering to each other, and their voices drifted like storm winds up the slopes. Samir started droning prayers and unwrapping his turban slowly and methodically. His shoulder-length hair fell with a shine and blew over his back.
Five-hundred drums, packed perfectly like honeycomb into the last bit of solid rock on the working grounds. They radiated like art. Their chuckling gossip started to build into the choking laughter of hyenas and vindictive birds.
Fortus turned away a bit, facing Samir.
The laughter built until bolts tore free from their sockets. Slaves fell from the Barracks staircases. The carriages carrying the night's shift down rocked back and forth. The home of Mbombo shook.
The drums' masks started to seep a rich, blood red, dark, and still brighter than the sun. The rounded lips poured that red glow like water jugs, the eyes cried it, the radial patterns spun it, until crimson pooled into circles of twenty feet all around the drums. The light of that thin scarlet film bled softly up the steps and across Samir's face. Wind like soaring dragons rushed with it, and Samir's clothes flapped with so much fervor, his hair whipped with so much life, that it seemed he might die of ecstasy, his tears blown away before he could cry them. He hummed with their dissonant song.
Fortus struggled to stand without blowing away, and kicked his legs forward one at a time, using all his strength, as he marched towards the edge. The layered discordance of the crater's hellish echo and the scornful laughter of hyenas crept like long gray fingers through Fortus' hair, down his back, and around his heart.
Fortus leaned with all his effort and saw the Superior. His dark jaw was cracked apart, more than meat, and less than a man. Fortus met his eyes and traced the brain matter in the pool behind his head.
The laughter grew until it conquered the sky; the red, until the line between the boy's finger and the sand was gone.
Fortus crushed his ears in his palms and ran inside.
The section sank two feet. Samir rocked until the last smoke plume faded.