Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (14 page)

At some point Gad fell behind. When I looked round, he was perhaps a hundred feet back. I’d been aware that he was flagging, but not that he had completely run out of steam. I yelled at him to keep up. All I got in return was a bleak, weary shake of the head and a beckoning gesture.

“Need you,” he gasped. “Think I’m in trouble here.”

Ignore him. Go on
.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t just leave him. So I ignored Anansi instead and turned myself round and toiled back through the path I had churned in the mud until I was by Gad’s side.

He was in up to his crotch.

“Real soft patch,” he said. “Stuff’s like quicksand here. I can’t lift either of my legs.”

“Try.”

“Can’t. You gotta pull me.”

I could feel the mud dragging on my legs, urging me down. It was a sickening sensation.

“Come on.” I held out an arm to him. “Grab on. I’ll do what I can.”

He grabbed. We strained and heaved as one, but it was no use.

“Only one thing for it,” I said. “I’ll go on. Get to the truck. Fetch help.”

Gad nodded.

I tried to turn round again.

I couldn’t.

The mud held me fast.

I writhed. I squirmed. I fought to free myself.

I couldn’t.

It was above my knees, clawing my thighs. It gripped like a vice. And I was utterly worn out.

I allowed myself to rest for a moment. I would gather my strength, get ready and then exert myself again.

Next thing I knew, Gad was telling me to wake up. “This ain’t the time for napping, Dion. We gotta figure out a way out of this.”

I opened my eyes and started battling with the mud once more. Somehow, though, I ended up embedded even further in it.

“This is stupid,” I said. “Absurd. It can’t be happening.”

But it undoubtedly was.

Gad and I had managed to trap ourselves in the middle of a mud plain. No one knew we were there. Our chances of getting rescued were negligible, possibly even nil.

T
HE SUN CONTINUED
its inexorable, blazing ascent to its zenith, and as the air grew hotter, so the mud hardened and set. Talk about adding insult to injury. Gad and I weren’t just stuck, we were being cemented in place. Soon the ground around us had become concrete-solid, and it was then that Gad began to laugh.

“Shut up,” I told him. “How the hell can you laugh at a time like this?”

“’Cause it’s funny.”

“We are going to die out here!” I exclaimed. “In what conceivable way is that amusing to you?”

“’Cause it’s my fault.”

“No argument about that. We wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t stabbed Solveig.”

“Yeah, but that’s not what I meant. Don’t you see? Look at us. Anything about our situation at all familiar to you?”

“No.”

Yes
, said Anansi.

“Anything about it strike a chord?”

“No.”

Yes. Oh, you cunning bastard, Coyote. And how dare you. That’s
my
story. Mine!

“The tar baby,” said Gad.

The sticky gum doll
, said Anansi.
The one I caught Mmoatia the Dwarf with
.

“The tar baby that a farmer set up to catch a rabbit with. The more the rabbit struggled to get free of the tar baby, the more stuck he became.”

My story! I carved a mannequin out of wood and covered it with tree sap...

“Then Coyote came along, and the rabbit, who was a sly one, explained that the farmer was punishing him for refusing to eat his melons, but he’d promised him a nice fresh chicken if he just stayed there a while.”

And I put a yam in a bowl in front of it...

“So Coyote offered to swap places with the rabbit, and he pulled the rabbit free and stuck himself to the tar baby instead.”

And Mmoatia saw the yam and ate it, and thanked the doll, who didn’t reply, so Mmoatia got cross and hit it...

“And when the farmer came back, he didn’t have a chicken, of course, but he did have a big stick.”

Her fists became stuck in the gum...

“He beat Coyote within an inch of his life.”

And I’d caught her and was able to take her to Nyame, the last of the four gifts which bought me ownership of all the world’s stories
.

“Tricksters get tricked,” said Gad. “Happens all the time. Goes with the territory.”

“This,” I said, incredulous, “this was all designed to trap me?”

“Bingo.”

“Everything? Solveig included?”

“Hell of a plan, right? Suckered you right in from the start.” Gad wasn’t gloating. If anything he was rueful, which, given our shared predicament, was understandable. “Gained your confidence, strung you along... It just went wrong here, at the very end. The
coup de grâce
– me playing the ‘tar baby’ – it was always gonna be the hard bit to pull off. Guess I shoulda known it might backfire. Didn’t exactly work out so well for Coyote, did it?”

“And letting me think I’d won the contest?”

Gad gave a half-hearted shrug. “A lie.”

“But I
have
won!” I declared.

“You honestly think so? Take a look at us. At yourself. This look like winning to you?”

My own trick, used against me
, Anansi fumed.
The stories are similar, but even so. I did it first. Coyote stole it from me.

“Enough!” I yelled at him, clutching my head. “Enough! Get out of my thoughts. Get out of me. Go. I’ve had enough of you.”

“Spider giving you grief?”

“Look at what you’ve done to me, you bastard. Look how I’ve ended up. All in the name of your stupid, pointless contest. Go!”

“You tell him, Dion. Go for it.”

“Leave me the hell alone!”

I didn’t even know who I was shouting at any more. Anansi? Gad? Myself? What I did know was that my voice sounded hopelessly small and faint in that heat-ridden wilderness, a whisper lost in an ocean of sky.

“Anansi?”

There was silence, inside me and outside.

Not a sound except the faint scuttling of tiny legs, dancing off into the distance.

L
ATER, SOME TIME
later, I have no idea how much time later, Gad said, “You ever wonder, Dion, if there’s actually been a trickster god inside you at all?”

“Huh?”

“Coyote’s voice. I don’t hear it no more. And now he’s not talking to me, I’m asking myself, did he ever?”

E
VEN LATER, WHEN
our lips were parched and blistered and the sun was searing and we were still planted in the ground like half-buried statues...

“Maybe,” Gad said, “we’re men who thought they were gods. We wouldn’t be the first.”

“Stop talking. Please stop talking.”

“Or men who know too many stories. You think that’s possible? To know too many stories?”

“I can’t listen. My head hurts.”

“Maybe the tricksters’ biggest trick of all is that there is no contest. Right now they’re laughing their asses off, all of them, over the huge hoax they’ve pulled. It’ll be a heck of a tale to tell all the other gods, how they fooled a bunch of humans into hurting, even killing one another, for nothing, no good reason whatsoever.”

“For Christ’s sake, Gad...”

“Never trust a trickster. Never trust a motherfucking trickster. That’s the moral of the story.”

W
E WILL BE
here forever. They will find our bones, bleached, picked clean by vultures and, yes, by coyotes.

We will be rescued. Someone will miss us and send out a search party. A helicopter full of paramedics will descend from the blue like a roaring angel and bring us salvation.

We will die.

We will live.

O
H,
N
ANABAA
O
BOSHIE
, you taught me how to begin a story and also how to end one. Let me end this one with the words that end all tales.

“That was my story which I have related. If it be sweet, or if it be not sweet, take some elsewhere, and let some come back to me.”

This is my Anansesem, my Anansi story.

I am Dion Yeboah, and I wish with all my heart that it did not end this way.

1968

T
HE SCRUM COLLAPSED.
Guy, in the front row, went down with what seemed like the full weight of a dozen boys on his back. He couldn’t rise, couldn’t move. He was trapped.

Then a rugby boot stamped on his outstretched hand. Steel cleats ground his knuckles.

Guy screamed. He tried to pull his hand out from under the boot, but the boot’s wearer only bore down harder, crushing the hand deeper into the grass. He felt the sweaty, suffocating press of bodies on top of him. Guy’s nose was squashed into the turf, and the pain from his hand was excruciating. It felt as though small bones were fracturing.

Mr Stevenson the games master gave up frantically and uselessly blowing his whistle and prised apart the tangled human knot with brute strength. Guy was one of the last on either team to see daylight. He rose to his feet holding his hand out limply in front of him, like something which no longer belonged. It was reddened, raw, beginning to puff up. Mr Stevenson despatched him to the sanatorium to have it looked at.

As Guy stumbled off the pitch, a boy on the opposing team hissed, “That hurt, Lucas? It was meant to. Fucking choccie poof.”

T
WO DAYS LATER,
in the dining hall, Guy was carrying his lunch on a tray, searching for somewhere to sit. His hand was thickly bandaged. Matron had given him a chit absolving him from rugby for a week. Instead, he had to go on a five-mile run with Mr Jacks’s upper-sixth cross country squad every afternoon. The running was exhausting and made his hand ache, but at least there was little chance of it getting injured afresh.

Guy did not see the foot lash out from under a nearby table, catching his ankle. All he knew was that he was suddenly sprawled flat out and his tray had disgorged its contents across the parquet floor. Pork chop, scoop of mash, diced vegetables, ginger pudding and custard – all of it went flying, mingled with shards of smashed plate and bowl.

There was silence after the crash.

Then the entire dining hall erupted into jeering laughter. The sound ricocheted off the linenfold oak panelling, scurried up past the stern-faced portraits of former headmasters, and lost itself amid the high, solid roof beams.

Everyone was guffawing. The entire school, all three hundred boys. Even the teaching staff up on the top table couldn’t hide their sniggers.

Guy painstakingly gathered up the spilled food and broken crockery onto the tray, then hurried out of the room.

T
HAT NIGHT, AFTER
lights out, they came for him in the dormitory. There were three of them. They dragged Guy from his bed and frogmarched him to the bathroom, both arms twisted up between his shoulderblades almost to the nape of his neck. The boys in the other beds were quiet, those awake feigning sleep. They didn’t want to know.

A stall had been made ready for him. A freshly laid turd bobbed in the toilet bowl. His three tormentors forced his face into the water. Guy struggled, fought like a cat, but it was no use.

Someone pulled the chain. Water gurgled and churned around his head. Guy strained to keep his lips above the surface so that he could breathe. Lumps of faecal matter buffeted his cheeks and ears.

As the tumult of the flush died down, Guy’s tormentors let him up. He sagged against the stall partition, spluttering and gagging. He retched into the clean bowl.

“You were shit brown before, you choccie cunt. You’re even more shit brown now.”

G
UY CLEANED HIMSELF
up, dried himself off, and crawled miserably back into bed.

He had been a boarder at Scarsworth Hall for a little over a fortnight, and already he loathed the place with a passion. It wasn’t just the bullying. It was also the food, the hard mattresses, the ever-present stink of linoleum polish, the sarcastic, hectoring teachers, the relentless bells and countless rules. The weather, too. Until now, Guy had known only the tropical climes of south-east Asia, where everything was a perpetual swelter relieved by the occasional warm torrential downpour or air-clearing thunderstorm. His father had been stationed all across the region – Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Laos – serving as consul at various British diplomatic missions. For the first fifteen years of his life Guy had gone about in shorts and sandals, often shirtless, baking his skin to the colour of mahogany in the sun. If asked, he would have told you he was English, but he had never actually been to England, not until his first term at Scarsworth Hall. He had never before experienced chilly grey skies, drizzle, breezes that nipped and pinched, a sun so pallid you could almost look directly at it even at noon.