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By
Minister Faust
My brother hated me; do you understand that? He’d spent his entire life humiliating me, poisoning my name before the gods and our people. And people sing about me like I’m the villain? Like I didn’t have every right to crawl out from underneath his heel? What would you have done?
I couldn’t help being disfigured. That wasn’t my fault. “Two-tone ebony wood.” Some people said it was the curse of Rã, or Ptah was drunk the day he slapped me together on his potter’s wheel.
That’s hippo shit. Some people are just born certain ways. It doesn’t mean anything else. Not unless people make it mean something. Hell, some people are born stronger, smarter. Isn’t that good?
Now, my brother, gods. He was the golden boy. “Skin like loam. Eyes like fire.” Can you believe that? People actually talked that way. He didn’t have “fire eyes,” whatever that even means. He had eyes.
We couldn’t remember our parents. Maybe that’s weird. I don’t know if it was or not. We came from the highlands where the soil was like wet coal, came down the River Forever in a boat we’d made ourselves. Felt like a man when I built it. Him, he barely had crotch hair. Back then I was the one teaching him.
I don’t know why he hated me. Didn’t we have a good time during those raft days? I taught him how to sail. How to spear fish when you’re moving faster than they are. How to save yourself when you get knocked overboard. I showed him those girls at Throne Rock. He wouldn’t even’ve seen them. But that stupid bastard—
I was trying to feed us, get us wives, form a clan. All that idiot wanted to do was make up boring, preachy songs. “Do this. Don’t do that. This is how you fish. That’s how you save firewood. Don’t use women for lambs. Never turn your back.” Blah-blah-blah . . .
Don’t know how long it took us to come downriver as far as Min-the-Beautiful. Sixty moons? Because we stopped all the time. Sometimes we built a hut, stayed a while.
And every time we did, whatever I tried teaching him, he always turned it into one of his stupid songs. And we’d go out hunting, and he’d be singing, making it up as he went, changing his lines and singing them again and again so he could memorise them until all I wanted to do was strangle him. Him singing and scaring away all the rabbits and rats so we’d end up hungry. Again. Singing: “Don’t sing when you’re hunting—you’ll scare away the game.”
What he didn’t scare away was people. Gods. I was trying to keep us alive out there, keep us away from lions and jackals and men who wanted to rope us or fuck us, and he’d be singing up a sandstorm!
Once I woke up next to our raft—we were hidden down in the reeds—and this moron must’ve gone out singing up and down the riverbank because there had to’ve been three dozen people there when I got up, all of them gazing at my golden little brother, whooping after every song like he was growing wheat out of his ass.
Those idiots. They brought him bowls of fruit and maize, piles of bread, even meat. I mean, they cooked it all right there in front of him, like he was the son of Noot or something.
And so, in the sixty moons or whatever it took us to get down to Min-the-Beautiful, this kind of stupidity just grew. Spread like a disease. Because those fools started telling everyone they met about the golden boy, so when we’d arrive at our next spot, they’d be waiting for us.
Not for us. For him. I was just his older brother. His donkey. Carrying their offerings back to our raft.
I don’t know where he got his words-of-power. To me, his singing was what a cat sounded like when you kicked it till it bled musk, or when you strangled a monkey till its neck snapped. What I’m saying is, it couldn’t’ve been his voice that roped people.
So his words-of-power, I don’t know. Maybe he’d found an ujat or something and swallowed it? Because I looked, I don’t know how many times, and I never found it.
Maybe he’d made a deal with devils. Up the west bank, past the cliffs, over in the mountains of Manu where the Sun Boat disappeared every night—there were devils all over there. Infesting the whole area. “Beware the Mountains of Manu and the Land of Death, where devils dance and never rest.” Yeah, yeah.
So, by the time we got to Min-the-Beautiful, there were crowds—thousands of people, at least—waiting for him. Jumping and whooping and waving palm fronds, begging him to sing.
So naturally he said we had to stay.
And we couldn’t’ve been there more than six moons before he’d sung them all his old songs and a whole bunch of new ones, preachy as all hell, every stupid thing he’d learned down the river or heard from his adoring apes at every stop, when these losers wanted to make him their king.
Their king!
And who was there waiting for him in the front when they asked him, but those two girls I’d pointed out to him at Throne Rock! The ones he said to leave alone. The must’ve followed us!
Sisters. Both hoping to be his wives. Gorgeous as year-calves, begging him to be their bull. And dozens more like them.
He wasn’t interested in all those hip-swayers in the crowd—old ones, young ones, skinny ones, fat ones, widows, virgins—but those two girls: he took the taller one. Had her hair mudded up into two braids, out and up like a cow’s horns. He sang her some line about how she had eyes like a cow’s. She was wet for him on the spot. I could smell her. Like a netful of catfish. I accidentally drooled on myself, but nobody saw.
Then in front of all those crackpots he treated me, his older brother, like his boy. Told me oh-so-generously I could have the other one. Just had to be nice to her was all, not scare her, and not take any other wives. Who the hell did he think he was? He actually made me promise to be nice to his giveaway calf in a herd of one? To keep me poor?
If only I could’ve found that ujat of his. If he’d swallowed it, if it was lodged in his gut, I could carve him open like a hare. Then everything he had would be mine: those adoring morons, their houses and crops, his Throne-girl with the hair-horns—gods, I wanted to bull her till she screamed my name to the stars!
So, I took his leftovers. No point letting it go to waste. Kept her in the house they gave me, brother of their new king. House-Lady. That’s what I called her. Had to keep her roped in there so she wouldn’t sneak out and hop my brother’s face till he choked on her crotch.
And he must’ve been using that ujat on me because for a dozen-dozen moons, House-Lady didn’t give me any sons, not even daughters, no matter how much I speared her. But the damned thing must’ve been faulty, poisoning his Throne-girl, too, because she didn’t give him a litter, either. At least I had that. Idiot.
Then one day the golden man got bored with all his morons. Said he had too many songs now. Had to share them with the world. “Journey to the corners . . . so that all may grow from wisdom’s words.” Whatever. Put his Throne-girl in charge. Over everyone. Over me!
Said he’d be back when the world was wise.
I didn’t believe any of his shit.
But the second he left, I caught her looking at me. Why not? They need a good spearing, regularly, or they go wild. Like hyenas. Tear down everything around them and piss on it all.
But that one, she liked to play games. When I went to her hut that night, like her eyes’d told me to—I don’t know if he’d given her another ujat or if he’d just taught her his words-of-power—she sprouted wings from her arms, her fingers were talons, and she had a voice like a falcon. The whore nearly ripped my eye out.
But that’s how she liked it.
She called her menfítu. They stood like fangs around a tongue. Didn’t matter. When I was ready, I’d be back, and they’d never be able to stop me.
All I needed was an ujat.
I rafted across the river to the west bank. Above me on Noot’s dark blue belly and breasts, two blades of a quarter moon. Stars like a million arrowheads.
I was walking towards the Mountains of Manu.
I’d never been out there before. Further I went, the weirder it got. Stone pillars like melted men. Trees like ape skeletons. I swear to gods, a giant lion with a human face.
When the sun came up, I hid under a rock’s shadow. Slept. When the sun went down, I woke up thirsty enough to suck a snake’s blood.
And then the sandstorm hit.
But it was like no sandstorm I’d ever seen before. Like an elephant’s trunk, wider than the River Forever and straight down from the sky. Came right down on top of me, me at its centre, with nowhere to run.
How long was I there? No way to know. Felt like years. No food. No water. The only light came from lightning.
And when it cleared, dust scrubbed out the stars, the moon was dead, and I suppose I was, too.
I don’t know where I was . . . but it wasn’t where the storm had jailed me.
Vines. Choking leaves. Shadow-trees like upside-down spiders, lit by swamps glowing like a moon drowned in piss.
Tried to drink the swamp water. Puked until my stomach nearly tore itself off my spine.
And when I finally finished and wiped my eyes, I saw them.
Statues of me.
Gorgeous ones! Turquoise and gold, with sapphires for eyes. And fires with whole cows roasting on giant spits. Bowls full of sauces and beer and fruit and lotus, laid out on rugs like virgins for a raider-king. Men and women from up and down the river and across the Great Green Sea, dressed like rainbows and sunrises. Kneeling. To me!
Then gone.
And on the other side of the swamp from me, I saw the crocodile.
Bigger than a hippo. Than an elephant. White like a hill of skulls at noon. Fangs like pikes.
If I’d had any shit left, I would’ve shit myself.
Couldn’t run. Couldn’t swim. Couldn’t jump. Didn’t have any ujat or even words-of-power since that son-of-a-bitch never taught me any!
And then I understood. Understood it like when you know the moon is going to rise just before it does. Understood it like the second before your axe hits a neck, the shock that’s going to run up your arms.
I knelt down and let him come take me.
Felt myself becoming bone splinters and blood spray. Felt my screams turn to gurgling until my eardrums burst like boiling eggs. Felt myself falling down that throat, longer than the River Forever, until I hit the rock-spikes in his gut.
And I stayed like that, impaled inside his darkness.
Thinking.
Seeing.
Feeling.
Tasting.
I saw everything, the next hundred moons, like a single day.
My brother out there, sailing across the Great Green Sea, landing and walking home. My wife, House-Lady, with him. Pregnant. Me, tracking her like she was a quail. Taking her when she was out alone gathering eggs. My thumbs on her windpipe, holding her under the piss-waters of the swamp till her last bubbles burst. Me, getting back to Min-the-Beautiful before him. Gathering my own men with minds like daggers, speaking softly as shadows because my returning brother would have new words-of-power and ujatiu whose fires I couldn’t even guess. Me, at my most careful, because my brother could send his souls into animals: fish, birds, hares. Gathering pyrite to stop the golden man, because of warlocks telling me that only a talent of pyrite could stop souls of gold. Me, finding a way—what way?—to trap my brother inside pyrite to stop him from recreating and avenging himself. What way? What way? What—
Me, my smiths, forging a royal bed, walled on the sides and top and bottom in pyrite. With a glittering pyrite lid removable for sleep. Me, planning a victory banquet for our king-come-home, our lord-of-the-limits, our beautiful being, the Instructor of the world, triumphant!
Presenting him his gift. Flattering him to lie down inside it, and bolting down the lid with molten pyrite seals. And my dagger-men pouncing, gutting all his menfítu, seizing their spears and ripping out the spleens of all the idiot subjects who rushed to stop us.
And in front of all the survivors, taking his Throne-girl and mounting her until she came in silence. And every day, again, and every night, again, in my kingdom without limits.
But there I was, impaled down in darkness inside a world-crocodile’s gut, and dreams did me no better than trying to cook with a pissed-on campfire.
So, I grabbed onto those stone spikes and pulled.
My own screams, like lightning.
I humped over the rocks. Writhing in my own blood. Shattered bones splintering even more.
Wriggling and slithering forward till I joined a river of shit. Felt myself falling, then clutched by throbbing muscles from my skull to toes, pressed and squeezed towards a crack of dim, thin light.
And when I got there, assholed out and dropped steaming in the dirt.
Shivering in the flat pale light of a dust-choked day.
No sign of the beast. Not even a tail-swish in the swamp grass.
I agonied myself over the rocks and through the reeds towards the swamp.
And lapped.
And stood up on new bones, solid as pyrite.
All I had to do was close my eyes to see my brother, a hundred brothers, ten thousand of them for ten thousand years in ten thousand lands, and me sealing each one in a pyrite coffin, and if even one escaped, carving him like a pig and scattering the pieces so far from each other no Throne-girl, no words-of-power, no ujatiu could ever sew them back together.
All I had to do was walk. Walk out there and find my wife and set my life in motion till I was the master of the world.
