Текст книги "Grace"

Автор книги: Calvin Baker

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

33

We were spooled under the warm covers, still deep in the transparent hour of sleep, when the breakfast bell rang. We rose reluctantly into the morning chill, and climbed down to eat. We were moving up into the highlands that morning, which would entail a day’s travel, so there was a full breakfast of hen’s eggs, fried bacon, pineapples, blood fruit, sweet bananas, ugali, and bread toasted in the fire then slathered with raw cream butter.

Sylvie was trying to give up meat, but savored the smell of frying bacon as we sat on the night-damp logs and ate around the morning fire. It was still before sunrise when we finished, and barely light when we climbed into the lorry with our gear for the long drive across the country.

Instead of taking the main road, which would have consumed most of the day and taken us first back to the capital, the truck cut crow-wise through the countryside, so that we would reach our new base camp, up in the foothills of the mountains, by lunchtime.

The massive wheels made short work of the dusty road, and it was impressive to see the sixty-year-old vehicle still so reliable. The high beams carved a path through the morning fog, as the wheels found the ruts of a desired path the truck had etched out on previous journeys over the trail.

“It will last another hundred years,” Ali boasted, driving with the genial self-possession of a man at ease in his world, as he began to tell the story of how he had driven the truck from Europe, across the top of Africa five years earlier, to get his start in life.

When he saw we were still full of sleep, however, and did not need to be entertained, he fell into an equally good-natured silence. I had thought him a buffoon when we met, but had grown to understand he was not even an extrovert, but a quiet man, wearing the mask the world required of him, and trying to make a virtue of that. When the world was not there he slipped his mask right back off, as easily as coming home from the office, and the man he was beneath did not suffer too great a harm from carrying the burden for the man he presented to the outside.

Sylvie rested her head on my lap, and I propped myself against the side of the truck, in a not too uncomfortable position, as we absorbed the juts and bounces of the road, until we eventually fell in the rhythm of our own breathing, and were able to fall back asleep.

I do not know how long we had been dozing, but time passed until we were roused by a violent jolt, bringing the truck to an abrupt halt. We had struck a cement barrier, hidden in the fog, and could see shadowy figures in the road up ahead, surrounding the lorry and speaking brusquely to Ali in one of the local languages.

I peered out the side rail, and was able to make out a group of men in military fatigues, brandishing a ragtag assortment of Russian, American, and Chinese rifles and machine guns.

“What is happening?” Sylvie asked, rousing from sleep.

Before I could answer, one of the men fired his rifle in the air, and pulled a dazed Ali from his seat. The rest of the bandits quickly streamed around back, where they trained their guns up at us, and began mounting the sides of the truck.

As the first of them boarded, Edward, who was nearest him, swung his pack like a shield into the soldier’s midsection, sending him sprawling to the ground.

From the road one of the others let loose a staccato burst of rounds, which struck Edward hard in the chest. His blood spattered, and all afterward was the high shriek of terror in the ear, snapping each of us aware of nothing else but our own mortality.

They climbed quickly inside the lorry then, dragging Ali up behind them, as the one up front took over control of the wheel. None of us spoke when the engine restarted. They trained their guns at our heads, before throwing Edward’s lifeless body down onto the plains, abandoning it in the dirt.

The vehicle gained speed, moving still in the direction of the mountains in the distance, above the cloud layer, as Effie shrieked in protest.

“We hereby requisition this vehicle in the name of the Army of the Revelation,” one of them said, nervelessly ignoring her cries. “If you do not resist, no harm will befall you. If you do—” He looked toward the body in the path behind us.

“You killed my husband,” Effie sobbed violently. “You killed my husband.”

“You have driven into our territory,” he replied.

Ali looked away guiltily, but dared not say anything.

“He was a good man,” Effie challenged with the authority of her grief. “We haven’t done anything. We are innocent.”

He laughed. “There are no innocents. Only those too ignorant to see.”

“We don’t even know what your bloody war is about.”

“You are American,” he replied, not really caring what her nationality was. She was of the West. Effie was wise enough not to correct him. “You are in every war, and never know what they are beyond your own narrow interests, which you tell yourselves are justified that you are saving women from their men. Children from their way of life. One helpless brown body from another savage brown body. Isn’t that right? By the great, loving hand of democracy. This was the lie of colonization, and you never tire of believing your own lie, which you now masquerade in a different play. It is ever the same. First you divide neighbors; then you divide families. But before any of this you must divide the person from himself. One so divided would do anything to himself, or his people, as the leaders you have imposed on us have. But if a man enslaves his own people, it is because he is a slave himself. Now we are a country ruled by your slaves.

“You have your own politics and your own histories of the world, and with these you replace men and women. But your world has forgotten the truth Rome taught to you, and your progenitors certainly knew: The only way to colonize a people is absolutely and for all eternity. If you do not have the stomach for that you are only stirring mischief. Freedom comes only through the voice and will and blood of the people themselves. Everything else is jerry-built. But you do not care what happens anywhere, so long as your dogs do your bidding. We choose to be men. Free and alive in our own country, or else dead and free in the earth.”

“Fuck your bloody war. You killed my husband. You killed my husband!” She screamed in anguish of what only moments ago had been her life.

“If we have made a mistake, and your husband is collateral damage – I have lost many, so I know your pain,” he said in a tone all the more disquieting for seeming sincere, as he looked at her with an eerie compassion.

“Monster,” she screamed.

“Tell me what your custom is, and how much it will take to make you whole, or else, if you prefer, I will find you a new husband,” he laughed.

Her tears subsided after that, overwhelmed by the fear of his threat. Her breathing was still erratic, though, until it seemed she might come apart completely. His menace and the dead man had cowed the rest, so that no one else spoke, or made eye contact, or tried to comfort her, until Ali spoke up.

“I am sorry, ma’am,” he said. “It is my fault.”

“It is not your fault, Ali,” Effie answered, releasing him.

“My job is to get you there safely, but I got us captured. I was shortcutting. Now look what I have done.”

“You put your own road where there was none but you needed a road to be. They just ambushed us, is all.”

“Quiet,” they commanded from the rails of the speeding truck, where they had entwined themselves like malevolent vines.

In the commotion I slipped the bracelet I always wore from my wrist over to Sylvie’s, as we clasped hands. It was a string of different-colored wooden beads, I had picked up long ago, which she pressed her palm over, then began fingering like a rosary. Her head pressed tight into my chest.

“What is going to happen?” she whispered.

“We will be fine,” I held her wrist. “Try to stay calm. But if anything too bad happens, the center one opens.”

“What is in it?”

“A cyanide pill,” I said. “If anything unspeakable happens, and we are not fine, eat it. But only if things are so bad you think there is no other way home.”

34

We rode along silently as the drought-stricken plains turned to green hills, and the hills gave way to the gray mountain mist, with the peak of Mount Clarel, their last redoubt, poking up through the clouds. The angled light of the dying sun fell on us like their slanted guns, as our pulses tensed and beat faster in the cobalt air, and the soldiers watched like esurient hawks in the silence.

Our only measure of security was our value to them. We were their pawns and their insurance, to be dealt out and traded for safe passage in dire straits; sold for ransom, for food, for guns; or else deployed as shields to guard them, like talismans, from incoming fire.

Not that they believed they needed shields. They had other talismans, believing themselves to be protected from bullets by magical spirits, whose protection had been invoked with the ceremonial sprinkling of waters from the lake, applied to each soldier in turn by their commander when they first joined that army.

For some this magic seemed to work. They were not dead. The soldiers guarding us were the last of these, the final survivors from the bedraggled group of insurgents who had been in the field near three generations, as the men whose talismans failed them were used up. The wants of the war morphed with each successive generation in the field, and the war they inherited from their fathers’ fathers was as different as their allies from outside, until they had no allies left, only themselves, and their reasons for fighting were no longer coherent, only the pent-up emotions of three generations of war and bloodshed and betrayal and still no satisfaction for their claims. They had been fighting since before any other part of the continent rebelled, and before the larger world rolled itself into the tumult, like dice, to find vengeance or oblivion in the chaos. Land to feed themselves, cloth to cover themselves, materials to build the machines of their desires and destinies, new dogmas to soothe their complaints, new ideology they might seduce themselves into believing to replace the ones that had come before, all were slaughtered when the magic of their talismans failed. They would fight from that mountain until the last talisman of the last man flickered out and perished.

Their first leader had been a notorious man, called Achilles Asha, who was taken from his village as an eight-year-old by priests, who came and snatched all the first-born children from that part of the country, after a minor rebellion led the colonial rulers to send the priests to help extinguish it.

There were no birth records and Achilles, second of twelve, was home while his brother was at pasture with the herds. His parents put him forth for sacrifice instead.

The children they abducted were then dealt out in the capital like playing cards, and Achilles ended with a group of Jesuit missionaries, where he was trained to someday return to help convert the others. By eighteen he had accepted this fate, until one night, as he read in the library, he found a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, and it was like speaking to like; self communing with self without interdiction. Corpus and spiritus joined. Song of his own song. What was boy became warrior.

In the morning all the priests were found slaughtered. The boys were forced from the grounds, and scattered before the wind like seeds. “We are natural men, who have been spirited into an unnatural world, let us live as we were meant to again and forever. Return to your villages and bear witness to what happened here,” he declared in his sermon that morning at Mass, before setting the campus ablaze.

When the fire was high enough that it glowed in the black of his eyes, he saw inside at the windows three novices who had not evacuated, but hidden in the dorms for fear they were dead to their people and would not be accepted back.

They escaped the inferno in time. Shadrach, Mesach, Abednego, as he called them when he enlisted them under his command, and set out with his army of ninth-graders to cleanse the world.

First they set out to rid the country of churches. Next they set upon government, then schools, jails, corporations, institutions of any sort.

Those who did not question on this first campaign, who did not buck, did not break, did not die, were elevated to be Achilles’ lieutenants, as he himself was God’s lieutenant on earth, holding court in lieu of the Almighty.

“Under what authority do you serve?” A new recruit once asked, challenging their leader’s command, after his own village had been put to sword.

“The Society of the Virgin,” answered Achilles. “She came to me in a vision, and revealed that I am the son of Christ. The Holy Spirit, it works through me.”

“Which Virgin?”

“The Black Virgin. Mother of the Blessed. Protector of the Lost.”

Sometime after that they were on maneuvers in the mountains, and he was pinned down by enemy fire, and Achilles knew he had been betrayed. They had just passed through the village of another of his lieutenants, and that man-child had sold out his brothers-in-arms in favor of the mother who first birthed him.

They fought through the night, outgunned and losing soldiers by the score, then the hundreds, between the edge of the jungle and the mountain’s sheer rock cliff. He was a leader who, since he first understood his call, had known no doubt, but he meditated all that night on the fault of his ways, and made a vow before sunrise. If he emerged from that deluge he would purify and rededicate himself to his cause.

By miracle, they claimed, they lived to see the next day. His entire regiment had been decimated, save five others, four who were loyal and the one who sold him from weakness. They gave thanks nonetheless that morning, and in observance he bestowed on each survivor a new name, as the sun sprang its first pink knuckle from its nighttime grave, and the dew of first day seeped through their gear, chilling their skin.

Isaac he rechristened Jeremiah. Who was Esau became Obadiah. An albino boy, also called Isaac, he baptized as Isaac once more, and Isaac went after that by the name II Isaac. The fourth and most faithful he blessed with Daniel. These were the prophets of suffering, and the leaders of the First Army of Innocence, as they were then called.

The child called Chausiku at home and Uriah at school, he sprinkled with water from the lake, kissed him on the mouth, and called him brother. When he administered the sacrament he gave to him the new name Jude. The outfit that before had been the Army of Innocents was innocent no longer, and became thereafter the Army of Revelation. He himself he crowned Job, because he was come to suffer. Where they had been confused before, they knew exactly what they did now. They set out to reveal.

“Jesus forgives your sins, Jude, my brother,” Job said softly. “They were caused because you love your mother and are a mamma’s son. You thought the village mothers could save you from the wrath of the Father. Only repent and renounce Satan, who misled you, and all his Works, once again, and from this day forward.”

“I renounce them,” Jude said. “Satan, and all his works.”

“Amen. But before you can sin again you must leave the earth for the kingdom.” He dispatched him then, sending his friend to meet his Maker in a state of purity. “Here on earth I alone make peace. I alone create evil. I am judge of men, and judge of judges, and judge of kings. You I deny.”

He no longer trusted those local to the region after that, and put out the call for recruits and comrades in all parts of the world, who would come into that jungle Eden with him, and reclaim it from wickedness. “The earth has become unnatural, and it is time for us to live again according to the laws of nature, and not Satan in the halls of power.”

They heard his call, and came to him from all over the world. And he looked through the clarity of each eye, down until he could see the silver mark on every translucent heart; read the prayer engraved on each numinous, golden soul. Some he enlisted and others he sent away. Those he drew to him were culled from every war zone and every refugee camp and every ghetto, every occupied land and every crippled way of life. Whosoever was put upon. Whosoever was misunderstood. Whoever was wretched, and whose idols had been smashed, clung to him, to help pull down their oppressors in a cataclysm they said would equal the first fall.

They were all young as he, all veterans of other wars, and all saw visions of a new world, perfect and pure, to which they were devoted even beyond life.

In the most lawless stretch of the interior they laid hold to a city-state the size of Acadia, protected by the jungle, that in turn grew into a country the size of the Louisiana Purchase, in which they destroyed all roads, all telephone lines, all power cables, tax collection, any instrument of the modern world, to cut off contamination.

In the new land they fashioned fishhooks from bones, and medicine from tree barks and herbs native to the soil. They wove their own clothing, cooked their food in stone pots they carved from the mountain. There was no science beyond warfare, which they waged without cease on the corrupt world beyond their borders. Inside the republic they lived free and unstained.

From the center Job sent deacons south, west, and north to cleanse all corruption, while he himself held the eastern country absolute as the sun. “I am the sun,” he would declare one day, as the rebellion began to unravel from within. “I will bring light to evil, and wash away sin with perfection.”

He was thirty-two then, and had never known a woman’s embrace, and made virginity a requisite for all his soldiers. Only those who were not stained by sins of the flesh could be pure, and those who were not pure existed to be cleansed.

He put his stone knife through those who were not pure, one by one, so they could die pure in the jungle Eden. “You go to heaven now,” he proclaimed, in a madness so broken and scrambled it began to make a new sense. “Here I am ruler, and will commit this crime so that the next generation will abide no impurity.”

Only the children were granted reprieve, to become the base of his new army and his new world. The adults he captured were put to work in mines, toiling ceaselessly by day to harvest ore, iron, copper, gold, coltan, and by night to produce soldiers.

“All good is built upon wickedness. From the broken world we forge a whole one.” From the fertilizer of death sprang the new crop of purity.

To his army of orphans he gave the steel of arms to defend the new world, promising none should ever lord over them again. He was their Lord, permanent as the sun.

Five years more they raged through the jungle under his command. The more they succeeded, the greater the resistance from the outside became, until he needed stronger guns to defend against stronger enemies. These he acquired from what he could pay in gold from the mines, and all were eager to deal with him.

“Colonel,” asked one of his lieutenants, who would become the head of the first breakaway faction, “does this mean we have come to accept the tenets of capitalism? Is it not an unnatural way to be?”

“War costs. We are only trading rocks from the ground that have no meaning to us, for guns that do. This one thing to Caesar, until he too can be cleansed. As for the capitalists, they are only babes, suckling in their nannies’ arms, who would not survive a season here in the mountains.”

“Are we in that case with the Communists?” A new recruit asked, bewildered.

“We are free, and beyond isms. To show how free I will baptize the souls of a thousand slavers, and we will have a feast to celebrate their ascension.”

He could afford his magnanimity. By then he commanded a world larger than Charlemagne’s Reich, and there was not an army on the continent the equal of his. He was thirty-seven then, the age we will all be in heaven, and he was at the height of his power.

When he died in that jungle his commanders found his plague-stricken body, and eulogized him, realizing how little they had known him. They did not even know what name to write on his grave. Some argued for Achilles Asha, others for Job, and another faction argued that though he had changed his name and changed it again, these were merely the fictions he had lived by in the world, and he also possessed a secret name. This died with him. And in death, as in life, he was powerless to change it. His true name.

While he lived the army went undefeated, but two generations after independence, what remained of the three armies that succeeded him was a single regiment, scattered piecemeal through the jungle, oblivious to borders, but reunited on the mountain where Achilles had made his first miraculous stand, and where they would make their last if need be – supported by a single mine, of copper not gold, and whence they would set forth again to claim and purify the earth.

They were virgins, and so long as they knew not the sins of the flesh God would be on their side, and their struggle was permanent as the blood red sun.

These were our captors.

“How do you live with yourselves?” Effie asked, as we neared their mountain in the late afternoon light. “Why do you hate so much?”

Their officer looked out over the receding jungle with the disquieting calm and self-command of those inured to death. “I do not have to answer this insolence, sister. But I will share with you a secret. Death is natural. Yours, mine, everyone’s. I do not hate you, or anyone, even those I kill. All must die. Perhaps our enemies hate us, but to our view, the missionaries and colonizers – who came and stole the land from the old generation and then stole a new generation from the land – acted according to nothing but the perfection of their own purpose. To the extent they succeeded at that we salute them. They were excellent slavers, and excellent missionaries, doing whatever they thought was required of them to further their own way of life. We intend the same, according to a new purpose, to unwind history by our own thread. It is not personal. In another context I would be the implement of your desire – you would order me as you willed, Lord I Peter, stop blaspheming and fetch me a Tusker – so it is a question of subject and object. Who and Whom. ”

The truck bounded over the broken road as our guards fixed their ears on their leader and their hardened stares on us. We continued up the mountainside, powerless, toward their camp.

“Why are you with the missionaries, eh?” their leader asked, picking me out from the others.

“I am not with them,” I said calmly. He was nothing more than another sociopath, and I did not want to give him anything to seize on. “I am only with her.”

“She is a nun,” he laughed, looking at Sylvie with his red-rimmed eyes. He had spotted the bracelet on her wrist, which he now took in his battered hands, as a look of abject terror inched across her face.

“Why is she wearing the rosary?”

“It is from me,” I said.

“A present must be of gold,” he laughed. “It is a rosary.” His voice contained a preternatural calmness. He was in his element, and it was nothing for him to kill. He only needed a reason, and he would take a life as simply as blowing out a match. Or no reason at all.

“It is just a bracelet.” I feigned indifference, which I had for myself, but not for her.

“You are not a Christ bride, sister?” he asked.

“No. She is mine.”

“You are a race-mixer, my brother,” he grinned a demented grimace.

I did not want to give him fodder for his lunacy and stared straight ahead.

“The chief spoke to you. Answer him,” one of his minions threatened.

“What you call race is a lie,” I said.

“Ah. You are a white man.”

“I am black as you.”

“You are impure.”

“Purity is a worse lie.”

I did not want to debate the eighteenth century, and especially not with an armed madman. To my relief, though, he let go of her wrist for the moment, but as he turned away his eye caught mine in a different way. I saw him registering something as a flickering passed behind his thoughts. He saw me then, and that I was not afraid of him. I knew we were marked. He had released her wrist and the bracelet, though, for the time being, as we continued up the mountain, ascending to their base.