The American came during the time when the rains shunned us; when the grass withered, the drinking pools grew shallow and the Earth revealed its age.
He came in one of the fleet, five-footed Spiders that gleam in the sun. I have painted the day of his arrival on the wall of our sacred cave, where we return once a year to sing new songs to our ancestors. Like my father and his father, I visit Shadow Cave. There, beneath its vast ceiling and beneath the eyes of my dead fathers, I paint the cave walls with pigments of ground clay with eland fat.
My name is Qutb, which means “protects the people.” I am an old man now. My head holds my people’s story, which I paint on the cave walls. I draw natural things: animals hunted, raindrops fallen upon my face, the eternal walking circle of giraffe and antelope and lion north through what the white men call the Great Rift Valley since before their Great War, and we of the People call home.
It is difficult to draw the Spiders, because these are not of nature: rounded backs like silver tortoises, yet as big as a hut where even six people could sleep without touching. Five legs racing across the plain faster than a cheetah. White men use Spiders in place of their legs, or the boxes with wheels men rode when I was a boy. It is rare to see a white man walking.
But this stranger was not a white man. His face was shaped somewhat like mine, but he had orange-red dusk fire hidden underneath the night in his skin. He stood a full head taller than me, with a runner’s body, although our children could outrun him. He wore pieces of glass held by wire over his eyes, and a white shirt beneath a sand-colored coat.
He said his name was Cagen. It sounds like Kaggen. This is the Trickster. The Mantis of our stories, he who loves eland well. It is in Kaggen’s honor that I use the fat of his best beloved in Shadow Cave.
He did not speak the People’s tongue, a proper language. But he did speak the Swahili, the tongue of those who lived far to the east. I speak that and the tongue of the Kikuyu, who dwell in the great villages and valleys much closer to where People roam, so we were able to understand each other. Cagen’s head was filled with the place called America, and he called us his “brothers” because of the night in his skin, but to us he was just another white man. Our children laughed at him and with him.
He offered our children trinkets and sweets, the men tobacco and knife metal, gave my second wife Jappa cloth for a dress. He asked me if I had sons and I said that once I had, but they had gone to the great villages, and I had never seen them again. He said he wanted to learn our stories and knowledge of the plant people. He said his head was empty and he wished knowledge. Empty head! Our children called him Empty Head.
I laughed and he laughed, as if we had made an agreement. He wished knowledge. I wanted to paint Cagen’s story, so I said I would teach him.
I watched Cagen for many days from the corner of my eye. After I knew him for a time, I took him to Shadow Cave to see the paintings my fathers and grandfathers had made.
Shadow Cave is at the center of a wheel. My people walk the wheel every few years, moving from place to place for water and game. But the sacred cave is never more than a few days’ walk away. Although the entrance is taller than a man, and wide, we crawl when we enter the cave, a sign of respect. We are all children in the sight of the gods.
Once in, light a torch to watch shadows leap to the spiked ceiling. My heart always smiles to see the smooth stones, the empty rock streambed, and most of all the walls covered with endless paintings, some made when men still had tails.
“Ah, you have drawn the War,” Cagen said, pointing to my paintings of clouds and lights above a burnt horizon. His words gave me hope he might have a mind after all.
I told him we did not call it “war,” that Great War which white men suffered when I was a boy, fifty seasons ago. We called it the time of silent thunder. Thunder you hear with your body, not your ears.
“Not silent!” Cagen said. “Far from silent.”
Cagen said that beings from another sun came to this world, with strange, strong machines that made the white man’s knowledge useless. The machines destroyed the great villages of the world, some even larger than Dar es Salaam!
“And what stopped these creatures and machines?” I said as I inscribed the words Cagen spoke to me in my head and drew the story on the cave walls the way my father taught me. “Did the whites build their own great machine to fight for them?”
“No one knows,” Cagen said, and shrugged his shoulders. “Lots of guesses, but no answers. Some say disease, some that they fought among themselves. We crawled out from under the rubble, and there were these big metal things everywhere. All dead. We pried them open, and studied the machines. We learned from them. The machines changed everything.”
“Then they were gifts from the gods,” I said. Too often, humans do not give praise to the beings who watch over us.
“That’s as good an answer as any,” he said.
He told me that the world’s chiefs, who ruled the people with what he called governments, promised to protect their people from the machines and the sky men—if they were men—who built them. The governments traveled as far as the moon to build a great walled village with many guns. Such things are beyond my mind. I look up at the moon and see no village, so perhaps this is a lie.
“But in return for this protection, we’ve lost our freedom,” Cagen said, gazing at the walls of Shadow Cave. His sigh was as heavy as an old man’s. “Everything is so peaceful here. Not like out there.”
“Are there not sunsets in your land?”
He laughed, but the sound was not happy. “Yes. But things are . . . different now. That’s what the history books say.” He paused. “When you can find a history book. My father was a history teacher.”
“Ah. He held your people’s stories?”
Cagen smiled. “Yes. But by the end of his life, men like him had a hard time finding work. Where I come from, too many believe it’s better to forget the past.”
What would become of a people who forget their stories? Surely even white men have grandfathers and grandmothers who must be remembered.
“I think you tease me,” I said to him. “You are a trickster, like Kaggen, your name.”
“The Mantis,” he said. We had spoken of this before.
I took the torch and moved him down to the other side of the cave, and found an image I knew he would like. It may have been painted by my grandfather’s grandfather. It was a half-circle of men driving a giraffe over a cliff. Behind them was Kaggen, the Mantis, mighty arms spread wide.
“The Trickster.”
“Yes,” I said. “The hunters tricked the giraffe into killing itself. They ate well.” I paused. “The men from the stars . . . were they hunters?”
“We never found out why they killed us. Never.”
He stared at the painting of the men and the giraffe and the trickster god, as if his heart was close to an understanding too great, or too heavy, for his head. Then we left the cave.
Cagen and I spoke for many days, hours, and then moons. In times of drought, the hunters have less time to sit at an old man’s feet, so I enjoyed Cagen’s eager eyes, full of wondering. Cagen learned quickly, as if our grandmothers whispered in his ear. Tell him a thing but once, and he could recite it back to you even if you roused him from sleep in the middle of the night.
Among the possessions he brought with him was the small listening machine he called a radio. He would play it at night, strange talk and strange music from far away. Our children would try to dance to the music, but they always laughed too hard to dance long.
One afternoon, Cagen toyed with a scraggly red plant with white veins, growing at his feet. Like all things that lived in the earth during that time, the plant thirsted for water. “Is this bloodweed?” he asked.
“Your eyes have grown wiser,” I said. “I did not know if you would see it. Tell me what you would do with this.”
“Strip off the bark,” he said. “Boil it to make a paste.”
“And?”
“And . . . spread that on wounds to stop the blood.”
“After the wounds have been washed. After.”
We paused when we heard a whistling sound. Something glided through the sky, It looked like a wheels made of silver-blue metal. As it flew in front of .a cloud, it turned white. Against the blue sky a moment later, it turned blue again. Faintly, I could see snake-like tendrils trailing behind it.
Cagen flinched.
“Why should you fear?” I said. “Rejoice. Now they are the white man’s machines.”
“I’m not a white man,” he said.
“You are white on the inside,” I said, sorry to insult him so. He did not answer the insult, so perhaps he had not heard.
“They were left behind after the war,” Cagen said quietly. “They could make their own spare parts, and we used those parts to change our world. We started out using them. Now, I think, they’re using us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, hoping to learn something new for my cave from this strange young man.
He scratched his head. “Sometimes I think that our own government is turning into a bigger threat than the aliens ever were.”
“Why don’t you go to your elders and tell them that they are wrong?”
“I don’t even know who our leaders are anymore.”
“Your villages are so large that you don’t know your grandmothers and fathers?”
Cagen did not answer. He seemed terribly tired.
You go home soon,” I said to Cagen one night as we watched the moon. It was almost full. “I think you don’t want to go.”
Cagen sighed. Then his eyes brightened. “Can we go to Modimo’s Hand before I leave?”
Modimo is the Big God, the one who made all the others, who in turn made the mountains and clouds and animals and men. The place we call Modimo’s Hand is a clearing surrounded by four oblong stones jutting from the ground, two days’ walk south from where our people camped. It is sacred to all the People, and every two seasons all of the families scattered across the savannah meet there to trade and make marriages. It is a place of power.
I had spoken to him of Modimo’s Hand, how my own father had there given me my secret name, how I had met my first wife there, Nela of the bright eyes, who gave me two sons and a daughter before the fever took her.
Many times Cagen had asked me to take him. Always I had said “some other time.” We had no more time. I said yes.
“We pack food for four days,” I said, “It will be good to have this last time together.”
So we walked, out south across the grasslands. We would have seemed a strange sight, this black white man with his rifle, and an old man half his size, carrying the spear of his fathers. My bones groaned much of the time, as they often do now, but Cagen’s spirited walking carried my heart with him. We walked and talked, and at night, watched the stars.
“You say they are flaming gas,” I said, poking at the fire. “My grandfather said they were the eyes of the dead and the unborn.”
He chuckled. “I think I like your story better.”
“Mine does not explain all things.”
“Neither does mine.”
Far up in the clouds, another of those odd metal machines moved silently across the sky.
They flew. They walked. They changed color and shape like chameleon lizards. I wondered who the sky men had been, who came to destroy and kill those in the cities, and what bad thing had happened to them to make them worship death.
When I could no longer quiet the ache in my bones with ginger bark, I chose a path that would save us a half day’s travel. We climbed over rocks unseen since my boyhood, long forgotten now. Here, the grass thinned, brown sand and rock pushed through the Earth’s skin.
I squinted my eyes against a sudden flash of light.
“What is it?” Cagen asked.
Not ten steps away, behind a fever bush, the light sparked again, and then died away.
“I do not know,” I said.
The light was wrong. Too much brightness where an overhang should have left only shadow. From this odd angle I saw the glimmer again, more brightly.
The rocks shimmered as they might in great heat. This, at a time of day when the sun was too young to be so boastful.
“What in the hell . . . ?” Cagen said.
I do not believe in Cagen’s Hell, and in other times I might have scolded him for speaking of devils so close to our sacred grounds.
We moved rocks away, revealing metal, unblemished but dull with dirt. Limp metal snakes as long as two men, as thick as my body, coiled at its side.
This was a sky machine. Cagen said that this one had come from above, not one built by white men from odd pieces. Begging my grandfather for protection I backed away, making the secret signs he taught me to banish demons. How long had it crouched here in the earth, so near our sacred grounds?
When I backed away, the thing appeared to be gone, hiding itself among the rocks with nothing but the shimmering to show where it lay. Two steps to the right . . . and it became whole, sitting as if it had been planted there by the gods at the dawn of time. A man could have stood right next to it, and if the sun was not just so, and your eyes attuned just so, it would not be seen.
I backed away. An evil smell hung in the air. Burnt, choking, sudden and strange. It caught in my throat and made me cough.
“This is a bad thing,” I said.
Fire seemed to dance on Cagen’s face. Instead of stepping away from the thing, he moved toward it like a man walking in sleep. Instead of preparing himself for struggle, his arms lay limp at his sides.
“I’ve seen them in museums, but never been this close . . .” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
He took another step toward this metal thing.
The machine was tilted, like a silver tortoise shell lying half against a rock wall. Had it carried something alive, and somehow wounded? Had its own metal arms tunneled into the earth to hide from its enemies, or to find a place to die at peace? Cagen thrust himself against one of the largest rocks. He grunted, strained, and sweat burst out on his forehead. The rock groaned, then slid down the silvery metal and was still.
The machine made a sound like angry bees. Then, a door as high as my shoulder slid up with speed I had never seen, as if the open space it revealed had always been. Inside, blackness stared back at us.
“Hide yourself!” I said to Cagen, but he seemed not to hear me. “Is something still. . . alive?”
“Fifty years?” he said. “No, it’s dead.” But his voice as not certain.
We watched the open doorway for several minutes, and no sky creature moved inside the machine, nor any man. The smell from inside was an old smell, like dirt and dust and old dead flesh. The evil burnt smell had faded. The door seemed to invite us closer, like a sweet voice in our ears, although it was silent.
“I’m going to look inside,” Cagen said.
I meant to tell him he was being foolish, but I said nothing. Instead, my feet surprised me and trailed behind his on the rocky soil.
Cagen’s arm clung to the thing’s doorway, perhaps so he could pull away if a sky-beast tried to yank him inside. I stooped beneath his raised arm to see what his eyes beheld, telling myself that even if the machine roasted me, or somehow stole my breath, it would make a worthy last sight to bring my grandfather.
In the next breath, my courage was rewarded.
There, on the floor just inside the doorway, lay something dead. It was not human or animal. Although it was curled like an infant, the creature had once been as tall as a man, or taller. The bones made me think of a wasp mated to a crocodile, and its bones were splintered just as mine would have been. It was good to know these creatures were mortal, not gods. Cagen grabbed my hand, squeezing my own tender bones hard. I knew why: we were men of two legs, born beneath the same sky, who had seen a creature from beyond the sun. It looked like a cousin of our world; a creature that might walk here, or could have walked here long ago, in the old days when gods and giant beasts ruled the earth. I will call this thing a sky lizard.
As I stared at that thing in the ship, Cagen’s stories became real in my mind. Now I could see the horror of the flying machines, killing all people with fire. Compared with this sky lizard, even the oddest white man and I were brothers.
“We must leave here,” I said.
Cagen held his hand up in a gesture to silence me. This is a great insult to an elder, but I knew his intent.
We waited in a long silence, and no army of demons swarmed from within the machine’s belly. Perhaps we would not be killed after all.
Cagen knew the ways of white men who could salvage broken machines and learn to make them fly in the air. The lands I knew were behind me; and in front of me was Cagen’s world. One at a time, we bent and entered the door. It remained open behind us, but the walls themselves began to glow, enough pale red light to see everything within.
Walking farther inside this machine was like entering an animal’s stomach, all dark red walls, cords and membranes. The floor of the machine held three nests of woven vine-like cables, each nest large enough for a small man.
Cagen stared at the nests. I could hear his mind telling him to lie down. I saw it in his eyes.
“Do not do it,” I begged him.
He did not listen to me, and lowered himself into the vine net.
The moment he touched them, the vines moved, fifty years may have been enough to kill men from the stars, but the machine itself still lived Cagen screamed and struggled, but the vines snatched him backward as a mother might an infant. Cagen’s arms were pinned. Metal snakes darted from the ceiling, burrowing into his flesh as he howled and bled. First his arms. Then his legs. His head. He writhed, screaming an English curse. Afraid, we always speak our first tongue.
But the next language he spoke was not English. I had never heard it before. His words no longer sounded as if they came from a human throat.
I grasped Cagen’s wrist, and the chair swallowed me too—but not in the way it swallowed Cagen, with tiny spears. The machine swallowed my mind. My thoughts were no longer my own. I felt as if I were drowning in someone else.
All the world shattered into pieces. Great villages burning. The shadows of flying and walking machines plagued the land, as the metal tortoises slaughtered the fleeing. Rivers boiled with blood. Screams and running and endless death.
Above, the pitiless stars.
I screamed prayers, and quickly reached for my medicine pouch. I shook powdered frog skin on Cagen three times, begging the gods to help him. Still, his body convulsed, eyes bulged, hands clutched at the vines. He screamed again.
And bucked.
Then . . .
The machine rocked. I lurched and caught myself. . . then realized that the tortoise-shell had heaved in time with Cagen’s motion, just a beat late.
I understood: Cagen had made the machine move.
I did not know how that could be so, but I had felt the humming beneath my feet from the instant Cagen was trapped in the chair. When he moved, the vibration grew stronger.
The machine was feeding on him. The machine was a hunter, too, like its long-dead master. A dog will hunt with a man, will follow his orders. This thing obeyed like a dog . . . but it was no dog.
I pulled at the cords binding Cagen. One came loose from the back of his head, and the others dislodged as well. I pulled him from the chair. He was babbling as I dragged him from the ship.
The door closed behind us.
I pulled him back only a few steps, but the machine was gone when I glanced behind me. A chameleon. Unless you were very lucky, or unlucky—or the machine wanted you to see it—you would pass by and not notice where it lay. The machine might have been there when I was a boy, but spared me.
I pulled Cagen as far as I could, but the rocks made our journey difficult.
He was gasping for breath, eyes wide and staring wildly. I understood: The machine might be chasing us, hiding in the wind.
“Ohhh . . . he finally groaned. “My head.” He cursed in English again.
“What happened to you?” I said to Cagen.
“I don’t know,” he said, and cursed in English again. He brought his knees to his chest and rocked, mumbling to himself. More curses? Prayers?
The vines had entered his arms, but the wounds had already stopped bleeding, as if someone had held fire to them. Strange.
I could not leave him. If the machine came for us, we would die together. But darkness took mercy on us, and when the dawn sun awakened we breathed still.
The next day we began our trip back to the People’s camp.
“I think it might be best if we didn’t tell anyone about this,” Cagen said, limping as he walked. “I can’t think of any good that would come of it.”
“My people will not understand,” I said, although it was my duty to report the discovery to the elders. “It will make them afraid. Fear and drought are too heavy on us to carry at once.”
By the time we returned to the camp, we had agreed on silence. Cagen, returning to the white man’s world, would say nothing. I would not offer it even to my ancestors on the wall. I am ashamed to admit I was afraid.
A Spider came from the sky for Cagen, driven by a soldier. Air shooshed from each of its five legs, sending dust over everything. Most of my people had only seen a Spider once. Now, it was twice. But despite their curiosity, they turned their faces away from the thing, pretending not to see Cagen as he prepared to leave us. It is a great sign of affection—as we say, My eyes would hurt too much at the sight. The People live and die together, so we do not have practice saying goodbye.
Except, once in a while, we lose our sons to the great villages. This pained me as much as when my own sons left.
Cagen came to me, and gave me his radio. He shrugged. “Not like there’s anything out there for you, but . . .”
I took the gift with tears of gratitude. “You are my friend,” I said.
I was brave enough to watch him leave; my eyes were stronger because of what Cagen had seen with me on the rocks. He alone had shared the sight. I could not turn away.
As the Spider flew into the sky, two old women wailed funeral songs. The youngest children cried, chasing behind the Spider’s shadow as it glided through the dying grasses.
“Bring him back!” the youngest children screamed to the metal beast, throwing rocks. “Bring Empty Head back!”
Their mothers called to them, clucking. Their fathers laughed and tried to explain that the Spider wasn’t going to eat Cagen for dinner.
They were right, and they were wrong.
I do not know much of these man-made Spiders. But the other machine, the one from the stars, in the rocks, had eaten Cagen already.
Warm water from the clouds meant that the drought had finally ended, but the rain gods were no happier with us than the sun gods. The pools stayed muddy. For days, hunger pinched our bellies. The hunters traveled long distances for small game.
Times were bad in the big villages too.
At night, lying beside Jappa, I saw bright lights on the western horizon, like the times I remember from childhood. Silent thunder; thunder you heard with your body not your ears. But my inner eyes, this time, were wiser: I imagined the flying machines swooping in the air, trailing their metal snake-legs behind them. I saw fire shooting from their mouths. When the wind shifted, I thought I could smell burnt flesh.
Had the sky lizards returned to wage another Great War? Or had men turned themselves into sky lizards the way the machine turned into a chameleon against the rocks?
The death that had killed the cities when I was a boy could now come for us, and there was nothing we could do. I feared for my sons, whom I might never see again. For my daughter, with her husband and family a moon’s walk to the north.
I feared for my friend Cagen. If he was not dead, I knew he would come to us again, to tell his tales. He would come to paint his wall.
If he was not dead.
I heard the shouting before I saw him. It was nearing dusk, four moons after Cagen left us. Four of the young herders ran in to us, calling for the men. A dozen men went out, were gone until the sun set, and then returned carrying Cagen.
He was half dead with starvation and thirst, and there were cruel wounds on his back and legs, like healed burns. He wore tattered gray pants and shirt, painted with white men’s black numbers. We gave him water, meat, and herbs, and heard his story:
He told us he went to the greatest city in the world, Dar es Salaam, to the un-i-ver-si-ty, a great school run by elders.
This land around you is a nation, and that nation is called Tanzania. Because past relations have keen so poor between black nations and white, Tanzania and several other nations in this continent called Africa wish to break free of a gov-ern-ment called “United Nations of Earth.”
The white nations did not want this to happen, because much of Africa, while poor, is rich with treasures the white nations hold dear. When their petition to separate was brought to court, this UNE retaliated with force. Rebuilt alien war machines rained from the skies, flown by men who had learned to master them. Dar es Salaam was reduced to rubble. Untold thousands of people died in the fires, and thousands more were taken to camps.
The camps were shantytowns surrounded by barbed wire and vicious dogs. I was in one of those camps, but I escaped, came here.
I did not know where else to go.
I took Cagen to my hut, and he slept where my children slept before they were grown. My wife Jappa served him hedgehog and the ant larvae he called “Bushman Rice.” Cagen had walked to us out of a bad dream. A man who has walked away from a dream should be an honored guest. Most men who live too long in the dream never return. But Cagen was not as other men.
Over the next days, as Cagen healed, he told me more of how men, not sky lizards, slaughtered other men.
I’m an American citizen, which used to mean something. Not anymore. Because I was a student at the university, I was arrested as an “unaffiliated intellectual” and thrown into a camp. It was a place of hunger and fear . . . and pain. Men and women were beaten and tortured if our captors believed they were lying, or thought we could give them information about Africa’s leaders. We lost everything—even the clothes from our backs. We were clothed in prison gray. Criminals, accused of no crime.
And it was in that terrible place, for the first time in my life . . . I fell in love. As he spoke of love, Cagen gazed toward my wife, who was listening from the folds of the hut so she would not appear to intrude on the talk of men. All women listen—but Jappa is the queen of hiding herself.
Fat, laughing Jappa is the queen of all.
Cagen looked at my wife as if he knew stories that had never been spoken between us. He smiled, and sunlight glowed from his face.
Yes, I found the woman I want. A medical student from Kenya—Chanya. Even her name is music. She is everything to me.
She is the only reason I remember how to smile.
She alone gives me hope there is a God.
Many gods, I corrected him with a laugh. Love for a woman has made many men forget much more than how to count or to thank the gods. There are men who grow insane from a woman. But Cagen was not that kind. She did not bring war to his heart; the woman he had found brought him peace.
We comforted each other as people have since the beginning of time. Without her, I wouldn’t have survived. I saw people sit in the corner and will themselves to die. Their families were lost to them, and we had no way to contact them. We knew people were dying when the beatings went too far, and that troops could pull anyone from their beds any time of the day or night. I wanted to die, too.
But Chanya kept my soul alive.
It is dangerous to find love in such a hard place.
“Your heart is strong as well,” I said. “Seeds do not grow without fertile soil.”
“The mustard seed . . .” he began, like a prayer.
“All seeds need soil. And rain.”
We had plenty of rain.
Just not enough shelter, except for each other. But it was all right for a while. All we needed was to clasp each other’s hands to get through the day.
But I knew our time together would not last.
Foreigners who were not from Africa were being taken for “questioning,” but did not return to report the questions. Whispers began: Foreigners were being sent home, or they were being killed. No one knew which.
I was a foreigner, so I knew that soon this question would be answered.
Someone who worked with the guards whispered to me that they would come for me at dawn. I saw in his eyes then that he was only a desperate young man trying to live, and to protect his family, but he wanted to do good.
I found Chanya, of course. Had the guard not told me, I would not have risked sneaking out of the men’s barracks to find her in the women’s tent. Any of the women there would have told what I did for extra bread and rice for their children.
That night, I held my beautiful Chanya’s hands, looked into her eyes, and told her to find a way to survive.
Find kindness, I told her.
Find mercy.
Give whatever you must.
I made Chanya cry.
And then Cagen wailed like a woman. The children stared: They had never seen a man cry so. So that Cagen would not shame himself, my wife and I took him back into our hut and gave him a bed.
“He has lost his wife,” I explained to the children who waited outside. But they did not understand. How could they?
Children have yet to lose anything.
Children have not seen the world’s end.
When they came for me, I was on my feet. No fear. No more crying, trembling.
Many of the soldiers were boy-children. They were hopped-up on drugs, full of childlike glee as they beat us or took women to be raped. These boys had chosen to be called Executioners, and they enjoyed their work. Easy to delude children. They themselves were servants of the black stooges who were enriched and controlled by whites in the UNE, and so once more in Africa, black people brutalized their brothers and sisters.
The boy soldiers stood me up in a line of other men and women waiting to die, standing atop a trench that was already lined with corpses. We were that morning’s chosen. I wondered if your sky lizards, against whom all mankind had once united, destroyed themselves like this—or was it only man who murdered his brother?
A few of us in line held tightly to our captor’s lies that we’d be ransomed home to the U.S., Canada, Saudi Arabia . . . wherever. Once we were in the line, no illusions remained.
Those who were not crying did not meet each other’s eyes. We were all lost inside ourselves. Even when you die together, you die alone.
The boys had made a counting game of the executions. One boy wearing a general’s cap too big for his head raised a baton and counted “Moja, mbili, tatu!” One, two, three. Three machine guns chattered, and ten bodies crumpled back into the ditch.
They brought the next ten of us forward. I stood there in front of the ditch, smelling the blood and stink behind me, and knew that these men and boys, the ragged line of distant mountains, the smell of dead men’s shit in the air . . . that this was what my senses would hold in the last moments of my life.
When I heard the boy count “moja,” I began a prayer I knew I would never finish. I heard “mbili.”
There was no “tatu.”
Before he could speak that word, gunfire exploded all around me. I watched the guards, my executioners, flinch in horror to realize that they were the targets. From around us, hidden behind rocks and in pits covered with cloth and sand, leapt a dozen desperate men and women, all armed, all firing at the guards. Rebels, who had waited at the execution spot, probably avenging loved ones.
The children screamed and ran, dropping their guns.
If the rebels had arrived a breath sooner, the previous ten would not have died.
If the rebels had arrived a breath later, the bullets would have taken me. My nightmare would be over.
The rebels came too late.
The rebels came too soon.
What I did know was that I was still alive. I ran east. I knew where I could find the People, and I came to you.
I was blessed again. I met Sinas, a goatherd whose family camps two days’ walk from here. He knew your people, Qutb.
He knew how to bring me home.
A moon after Cagen came to us, white and black soldiers arrived in three Spiders and asked questions about him. They showed us his face on paper; a pho-to-graph.
Cagen hid in my hut, a blanket over his head, but even if they’d caught a glimpse of him, they might not have known who he was. He did not look like the black-skinned white man in the photograph. His hair grew longer, a regal mane. He was learning our ways and language, was dressed as one of us, and he had lost the disgusting fat that whites wear like a second and third skin. We laughed when the soldiers were gone.
Cagen was safe.
But were we?
Soon Cagen built his own hut, but with no wife to share it, it must have been a lonely place. Marriageable girls tried to catch his eyes and gave him secret smiles, but Cagen rejected them with kindness and kept his own company.
I began to teach him again, and his sadness touched me. I taught him things I had withheld from the other men who had come to me, because it would be too much knowledge for an ordinary man to keep.
This is how Cagen, an outsider, became my apprentice. He was more interested in the old stories than my own sons. This went on for moons, and then one night when four of our boys had reached manhood, I performed the Starlight ceremony for them all. I invited Cagen to join.
We walked out into the tall grass, where each man created a circular clearing for himself in the stalks. The boys, and Cagen, each took their Go: a handful of cactus and nettle grindings, chewed until it was mush in their mouths, then spit out. This has been the Way for all of time.
Then, they all lay on the ground, in the midst of their circles. The first time passes in silence. Then, they all thrashed and made animal sounds, barking up at the moon and speaking in the unknown language. The Go plants take away the human, awaken the animal self. The man who returns from this journey knows his totem animal, and thereby earns a name.
When dawn was nearly upon us, and I knew that each of them had seen their animal selves, I gave them Return: a ball of cactus root and a moss that grows only beneath the poison grub plant. I pushed one thumb-sized ball into each of their mouths, so that they would come back to the world.
Cagen rolled over, vomited, and then sprang to his feet. His eyes were alight while the other boys still moaned. Only the strongest warriors wake with fire.
“I saw,” Cagen said, an excitement in his voice that I had not heard since his first days among us. “I know what I have to do. We have to go back.”
“Go back?”
His fingers dug into my shoulders so strongly that I thought the cactus was still upon him. “What Go did to me . . .” His fingers dug into my arms. “Was what the machine did to me. Qutb, you’ve shown me how I can hook in and stay sane.”
I stared. “Your mind is still sleeping.”
“No,” he said. “My mind is awake, for the first time in my life. My heart. I’m going back, whether you help me or not. But if you love me, you’ll help me . . .” He paused, tongue flickering across cracked lips. “Give me Return.”
We two stared at each other. I knew what he wanted, and why.
At long last, I nodded.
I would take him to Modimo’s Hand again.
Although the machine hid from us, we knew where it rested. We would never forget the place; not until our sleep at life’s end, when everything is forgotten unless your grandchildren call your name and sing you stories.
We stood just outside the metal tortoiseshell, and I reached into my medicine bag to pull out the ball of mushrooms and moss called Return.
“I give you this, and you take it of your own free will,” I said. I did not want to give him false promises. “I cannot protect you, but perhaps our gods can.”
Cagen took the ball. As he chewed, we sat outside the machine, in its wavering shadow. Within minutes, Cagen began to sway. When he stood and walked, his step was unsteady. I almost reached to help stand him upright, but I did not move. Like all men, Cagen had to learn to walk by himself.
Cagen did not look at me. Instead, his eyes saw only the ship’s open door. He crawled inside.
I thought of my wife waiting. My cave, and the unfinished pictures.
Cursing myself for a fool, I climbed into the machine behind Cagen. The door closed as soon as my foot was inside, leaving no time to consult the gods. No time for wiser thinking.
I stared at the floor beneath my weathered, cracked, sandaled feet as I stood in that machine, to be certain I was really there.
Cagen did not hesitate before he lay in the net. He flinched, but did not scream when the metal snakes chewed into his flesh, into the back of his skull.
He closed his eyes and cried out, his lips curled.
And he waited.
Cagen jerked his body forward slightly, and the machine lurched like a waking snail. Cagen’s eyes remained closed, as if he were sleeping, but his lips curled in the coldest smile I have ever seen.
A great humming sound surrounded us, like a swarm of bees large enough to cover the clouds.
Lurching again. I heard rocks slide off the metal shell. Felt the machine rise up beneath me. I sat on the floor between coils—I would not lie in a net, no!
The machine tilted left and then right. Then leveled.
Then the floor of the machine vanished from sight. I saw the rocks shadowed beneath us. The humming quieted. The rocks fell away from our feet. We rose up.
I stood on the sky, and I from there I saw the hunger in Cagen.
Cagen hungered for love. But more, he hungered for the kill.
And as the machine flew, I am not ashamed to say that I was afraid. I could feel the floor but not see it. I was looking down on the ground far below us, as high as birds fly, my stomach flipping all the while because it thought I was falling from a great height. It took all my strength not to spit up like an infant.
I sat on the floor between the coils and chanted.
The machine flew and flew. We entered a cloud, and all about us was whiteness.
I had sat in a cloud! This was a story my grandfather would love to hear.
Cagen’s eyes were wide, and filled with blood and fear, but the machine flew on.
And then it came down near a great nest of barbed fences. The machine brought us to rest on the earth softly; this time, I did not sway from side to side.
The door suddenly opened, and I knew it was my time to get out. I tried to hold Cagen’s gaze, but his eyes were sightless as they stared out from the head-piece of twisted metal vines.
I left the machine, and the door sealed Cagen inside.
Outside, for the first time, I saw the machine standing, alive and terrible. Standing high on three unfolded legs, with two snakes reared up to make bent arms, the machine looked less like the Spiders and more like a mantis. The Trickster, Kaggen. Mantis, who aided the People since the People came onto the Earth.
The Mantis took long steps toward the webs of fences. Behind the fences, enough people to fill many villages stared and screamed. When they ran in a frenzy, I could almost hear the bones breaking as the weak and small were trampled by those who were quicker, and more able. Such is always the way.
Soldiers screamed as well, but with better cause: A river of fire shot from the Mantis’s mouth, and snakes of fire wove themselves through the lines of soldiers, touching one and then the next. In an instant, a dozen armed men died. As they did, the machine’s skin rippled. Cagen’s face appeared, an unimaginable size, twisted with pain and thoughts I could never dream. It was a horror, but still the face of my friend. The eyes were vast and empty. His mind was gone. Cagen’s insane face howled, and the metal disk belched fire once again.
The scream of an alarm filled the air. Cagen slaughtered those men, so that I had to turn my eyes. With the guards dead or fleeing, the prisoners tore the fences and fled in every direction.
I think I saw the woman at the same moment Cagen did.
How did I know she was the one?
Because where so many others were running away, this woman stood watching the machine despite her fear. It towered above her like a walking god, but she did not waver. She looked up into the face, and knew what he was.
She jumped as if waking from a dream and screamed. She stood in a corner against walls made of brick, afraid to run. Suddenly, a soldier ran to the woman. He was a young man, with a hunter’s strong body, and a good face. Screaming in Kikuyu, he howled up at the machine, putting his own body between it and the woman. All the while he screamed at the machine, tears watered his face. He believed he would die for her.
The machine paused, and Cagen’s eyes—the things that looked like Cagen’s eyes—blinked. Its legs folded, so that its face came closer to the woman.
She pushed the soldier back, came to stand between the soldier and Cagen. She spoke up to him, but I could not hear her words. She seemed strong and beautiful.
I finally made out one word. “No,” she kept saying. But instead of screaming like the soldier, she spoke as gently as if he were standing against her ear. “No.” And then I made out another word. “Cagen. No. No. No.”
She knew Cagen. And she loved another.
The machine sank to its knees. He saw what I saw: his woman had survived, as he had begged her to. But in doing so, she had lost her heart for him.
Cagen did not have time to grieve for his woman. A second machine approached.
This one was like Cagen’s, not like the little Spiders that carry men across the grass and through the sky. It was a metal disk, and then a white man’s face appeared across the curve of the shell. The white man looked . . . twisted. The muscles in his face strained. The eyes inhuman with bloodlust. Whatever the machine had done to this man, I prayed that Cagen could resist.
The two machines circled like angry baboons. Guards and prisoners alike fled as the two machines came to grips, like our men’s dances when they are inviting one another to wrestle.
As their snake-arms entwined, their metal skins glowed, and the air around them sizzled with their energies. I fled, knowing that this sight was not for mortal eyes. It was the battle of gods, something that no man should witness.
Before I ran, I saw Cagen’s woman and the guard flee with their hands clasped.
It took me ten days to return to the People. After a time, when I was ready to see that day again in my memories, I told my people what I had done, and seen.
We were in danger, and we knew we must move on and find a lonelier place to camp. We could afford talk of nothing else. The days were long and hard.
Some nights, I heard distant explosions, or the sounds of gunfire. Sometimes, screams drifted in the wind.
And then one day, the Mantis appeared.
It stumbled as it walked. At first, I believed I had not yet shaken sleep from my eyes. Many nights, I had dreamed of Cagen’s return. Sometimes, in my dreams, he was a friend. In others, he brought fiery death to my people. After all, as everyone knows, a Mantis will sometimes eat its young.
The machine I saw that day was not like the one that came in my dreams. It moved as if it was confused. The machine rocked, stopping.
Suddenly, liquid fire spat out. A goat bleated, eaten by flames. Boiling blood and steam filled the air. My people hid themselves, terrified. Had my nightmare come true?
It was Cagen. I could not see his face on the machine the way I once had, but I knew. So afraid I could barely walk, I went out to the machine.
The metal curve of the machine shifted, and finally Cagen showed himself to me. And then it looked like me, Qutb. He made me look older than I think of myself, but it was me. Then it was a metal disk again.
It sank to the sand. And opened.
Cagen crawled out, his naked body covered with fresh scars. He looked thinner than the frailest of us, as if he had not eaten in at least a moon.
He crawled to me, and rested his cheek upon my sandaled foot.
We dragged the machine to Shadow Cave. Grass ropes and men and boys pulling for three days. There, deep within the rocks, it will never be found. The ancestors stand watch over it for us.
We use Cagen’s listening machine, and I hear men talking in Swahili and Kikuyu about the strange events. They say the slaughter in Dar es Salaam, in this place around us Cagen called Tanzania, was stopped by a machine. The machine is talked about again and again. It did not rest after Dar es Salaam, fighting in other places whose names I had never heard. Again and again, I hear them give thanks to the unknown hero.
I smile as I listen. And I cry an old man’s tears of gratitude.
After the first nights, we moved Cagen to a hut outside the camp so he would not frighten the children with his screams. I do not know what he sees and hears. I think he dreams of the spaces between the stars.
I never fully understood this American with brown skin, and now he does not understand himself. He stares into the night with sightless eyes. He cannot feed himself. But we drum for him, and feed him herbs, and walk with him, and slowly, he returns.
And I know that if the soldiers ever come to hurt us, he will remember who he is. He will remember what the gods made him and why they gave him to us, and to all men who only wish to walk in freedom. I remember praying that we could stay away from the madness that came from beyond the sun. Or that if it came to us, as it had to Dar es Salaam, there would be a way to survive as we have survived droughts. Then I saw the true madness: not from the sky lizards, but from other men. And prayed ever harder.
The gods heard. They sent us Kaggen, the Trickster. And as Trickster, he came masked as a student, that he might reveal himself as teacher. He is Cagen, my friend. When he is healed, I may ask him if he will take my name. He has no father. It would be good.
My name is Qutb, which means “Protector of the People.” The name is more true to Cagen.
A hero, who stands between the People and the sky.