Wizard of the Crow (104 page)

Mindful of Kamltl’s scar, they had to be careful. So they went about it gently, groping, searching, but when eventually they felt their bodies soar, they forgot about the scar and let themselves float on a river across a beautiful plateau. The river flowed slowly, smoothly, almost soundlessly, except for the gentle lapping and foaming of the waters against the banks. And after it, Kamltl felt as if all the rot that had stuck to his body and soul since they last parted had now been washed away by a new beginning. He became aware of the fragrance of fresh flowers. He looked at her with gratitude in his eyes, but it was she who came up with the words.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

Afterward, as they lay on their backs on the same riverbank, fully clothed, Kamltl turned to his right, faced Nyawlra, and, without any preparatory words, brought up the subject of his return to Aburiria from America.

“Why bring up painful memories so soon after our own landing from the clouds?”

“The sweetness reminded me of loss. You see, when looking for you I often felt tears over the many things I should have asked you but did not. The regret deepened as it increasingly appeared that I would never see you again. It is not often in life that one can say, I got a second chance. Now I don’t want this moment to pass me by”

Ask and see if it shall be given,” Nyawlra said.

“Don’t you think it is time we built a new home?”

“Rebuild the shrine?”

“I am not talking about a building. I am talking about tying the knot.”

Nyawlra turned over the proposal in her mind, but not for long, since this was not the first time that she had given the question some thought.

“Do you know that in all the time that Kaniürü and I were friends
and even lived together, I never once dreamed of having his children? But with you I dream about it every day, often trying to imagine how our children would look or whether they would have more of your features or mine. The dreams are still with me, even now as we sit here. In a way we are already married. Is there a knot more complete than the free union of souls? The rest is ceremony to bless the union, and we can do that whenever time and circumstances allow. Right now there is work to do to clear the rot and pollution that fell over the land, and clean the atmosphere.”

There was such finality in the tone that Kamltl did not press the issue further. She thought she had been a little harsh and now softened her tone.

“Nothing is for free, though. A task for you. Each time you have failed to make me out in my disguise, you always vow that you would not fail the next time?”

“I must say that I would never have recognized you as the Limping Witch,” he said in admiration. “But next time it will be different. I honestly don’t see how you can top that performance.”

“You want to bet?”

“It depends on the wager.”

“If you succeed in seeing through me, I will buy the wedding ring; and if you fail, you buy it.”

“I accept. Although it does not answer the question of when. Tell me more about the Movement for the Voice of the People,” he asked.

Caught by surprise, Nyawlra turned to her left and faced him.

“You know,” she said after a pause, “you don’t have to take a political stance just to please me. Even if we continue the way we now live, God willing, we shall have that home of our dreams.”

“I know, but hear me out. During our stay here I have been able to review the many issues that you and I have talked about since we first met. I now agree with you that the task of healing the land cannot be done by one person or by any number of people when each is acting on his own.”

“What do you want know? Where we stand on issues? Our view of the world is not much different from the vision you outlined at the People’s Assembly. In Aburlria there are those who reap where they never planted and those who plant but hardly ever reap what they planted. The first camp, even with its allies abroad, is small, and yet
it is able to lord over the second because it divides it along ethnic and sometimes gender and religious lines. Our movement wants to reverse that. We do not ask people what their tribe is but where they stand in the conflicting interests of the two camps. You have not a say in the ethnicity into which you are born, but you have all the say in the choice of associates. Biology is fate. Politics is choice. No, the life of even the least among us should be sacred, and it will not do for any region or community to keep silent when the people of another region and community are being slaughtered. The wealth of science, technology, and arts should enrich peoples’ lives, not enable their slaughter. We oppose the tendency to make women carry the weight of customs that have outlived the contexts that may have made them necessary or even useful earlier. The context is gone but the practice goes on,” she said.

“I am really asking, how does one become one of you?” “Ask or be asked. You were invited once. Your silence was taken as meaning that you were not ready or did not want to. With us, nobody is forced into the movement through trickery, oaths, terror, or bribes. Now you would have to ask to join.”

“I understand. You see, even though I don’t know the inner workings of your movement, its leaders, or its program, I have seen the results. How the movement gave purpose and direction to spontaneous queues showed courage and dedication. Most politicians want to master people. But your people want to master themselves before they can master others. I want to work with you. I am now asking: can I join hands with the others?” Kamltl said decisively. “I will forward your request to the leadership.” “And now that I have healed, what shall we do?” he asked. “Go back to Eldares,” she said. “People are our best protection.” “Yes, and since the State has declared us dead twice over,” Kamrö added pensively, “they will not be looking for us. Should they, by chance, see us, they will think we are ghosts and run away.”

“Or kill us on the spot and bury us,” Nyawlra said somberly. “But we have to go back. We cannot leave the fate of the nation to the man-eaters.”

A week after their return, Nyawlra visited Maritha and Mariko. She found them grieving for their cat, crucified by the Soldiers of Christ.

“What does the cat have to do with religion?” Kamltl asked, pained.

Kamltl and Nyawlra had rented a place in the run-down but most populous area of Santalucia. There was no question about resuming their business in herbs—they would have to find other means of survival.

Nyawlra recounted what Maritha and Mariko had told her: the soldiers wanted Satan to feel the pain Christ had felt.

“These sects are turning their followers into fools. Adults, supposed grown-ups, killing a cat?”

“Actually it did not die,” Nyawlra said. “When the soldiers went back after three days, they found the nails still in the tree but not the cat. Maritha and Mariko were telling me that somehow the cat had survived and was once again in their keeping. And apparently the soldiers had realized that the cat they had crucified was the same one that used to follow Maritha and Mariko wherever they went. But instead of saying they were sorry for what they had done, they went straight to All Saints Cathedral and publicly accused the couple of being servants of Satan, declaring that even the victory that the couple had earlier claimed was no victory but defeat, and thus the two had lied to God. They demanded that Bishop Tireless Kanogori expel Mariko and Maritha because they were in league with Satan. When Bishop Tireless refused, they accused him of going to bed with the Devil. Citing occasions when the bishop had let Satan escape, once through the window and secondly through the door, they demanded
his resignation. The congregation, led by Vinjinia, however, stood behind their bishop. The warriors, led by three holy men, Sweeper-of-Souls, Soul’s Walking Stick, and Pilot-of-Souls, broke away and formed the Church of Christian Soldiers.”

“How did they come to accept the three as holy?”

“Numeral three was the sign. The sweepers, to whom Satan first appeared, were three. One of them has a walking stick with three small twigs at the handle. Into this mix bring in the Holy Trinity. Three then becomes a holy number. The Church even earned international visibility when the three holy men were invited to a Global Christian Right gathering in America. The holy men were to testify about their struggles against Satan that had paved the way for democracy in Aburlria. But the invitation was withdrawn because the Church of Christian Soldiers did not last a week before it split into three separate entities each claiming to be the true Church of Christian Soldiers.”

“Why?”

“They got into a theological dispute about the nature of Satan. Apparently, on the day of the smog, the three groups had different encounters with the vision of Satan. One group, led by Sweeper-of-Souls, claimed that Satan was a seven-bodied white American and that on the day of the smog, as they kept vigil on all the paths in and out of the State House, they saw him leave the palace in a hurry, after he had set explosions. A black man was chasing the hydra-bodied Satan. They joined in the chase at a distance. Afterward they swore in the name of Christ that they did see the hydra-bodied white creature enter the American embassy, from where, soon after, came the sound of a gunshot, and they saw the black man fall. Luckily for them, Jesus told them to run away. The second group, led by Pilot-of-Souls, said that Satan was definitely black. Pilot-of-Souls saw him on the platform during the Devil-sponsored People’s Assembly and heard him boast how he freely assumed human and animal forms and traveled inside time itself. The third group, led by Soul’s Walking Stick, rejects the claims of the first two and emphasizes the catlike quality of Satan, citing the incident at the cathedral when Satan entered a cat’s body and then lured the police to handcuff a shadow that later addressed the People’s Assembly while Satan himself was snoring within the cat at the ruins. They disagreed about everything except that once at a city dumpsite Satan did appear to them, with Soul’s

Walking Stick further claiming that when he was lost to alcohol, the same Satan had pursued him from bar to bar. He was at the Sell-Me-Death bar when he saw three hell-riders carry Satan away and so … what is the matter?”

“It brings back memories,” Kamltl said somberly. He told her about his dealings with the cat after first encountering it at the burned-down shrine, how it kept him company when he spent the night there as a homeless drunk and it did the same thing recently, at the church basement. Whenever the cat was around, he felt less lonely. “But it is not only that,” he continued. “It’s true there were times when I felt pursued by unseen eyes and people were running away from me. Did you ever hear rumors of a man who came back from the dead after burial at a dumpsite?”

“Yes, there was a time when rumors of souls of the homeless being taken away were rampant, but I never took them seriously. I thought it was the folks’ way of explaining the fact that people were dying of hunger and disease.”

“Well, that person was me. The holy men are referring to that incident. It was the same day that you and I met at Tajirika’s.”

“But was it true? Did you fly out of yourself?”

“Yes, and it was not the last time. Sometimes when alone, I feel out of myself—I mean, out of my body—and I float in the sky in the form of a bird. That’s exactly the experience I once had. I never told you this—I thought you might think me out of my mind.”

He briefly narrated his flight over Africa, the Caribbean, and South America and back to Manhattan, New York.

“Most of what I was trying to tell the People’s Assembly was a slice of what formed within me during my global journey in search of the source of black power.”

They fell silent, with NyawTra wondering how to undertake the whole thing and KamTtT how she was taking it.

“And the source? Did you find it?”

“Yes, in the unity of our blackness.”

“Unity between us, the Buler, and Tajirika? They are black; we are all black.”

“Stop the sarcasm. You cannot keep on detecting classes and class struggles in everything. Bace also matters.”

“I don’t mean to be sarcastic,” NyawTra hastened to say. “I don’t discount the fact of blackness when used to forge a sense of community
across nations, territories, and continents in the quest for equality, social justice, and the fullness of life for all. But too often the appeal to blackness glosses over the valley between opposing positions. Even the extreme black rightists with anti—working people’s agendas are now claiming their share of victimology. As you so clearly said in the assembly, it is from our midst that there arises those who sow discord, the seeds of our defeat.”

“Yes, I saw them, half beast and half human …” said Kamltl.

“As a figure of speech?” Nyawlra asked.

“They were real,” Kamltl said emphatically. “The ones I saw when in my bird form were real.”

Unable to take his wanderings as a bird with a straight face, Nyawlra interrupted: “When Maritha and Mariko were telling me about the Soldiers of Christ believing in a Devil who resides in a cat, I felt like laughing but did not. Do you know why? The Soldiers of Christ remind me of my maternal great-grandmother. She was among the first or second generation of those who ran away from what they saw as savagery and sought refuge in the new Christian mission centers, though in her case she was also running away from a marriage forced on her. Do you know that my great-grandmother, to her dying day, when she was more than ninety years old, believed in the physical reality of devils and angels? That they often walked the earth? God was also real, and she described him as an old man with a white beard and long silvery hair reaching down to his feet. That was her explanation for why nobody could tell the gender and color of God. But what am I supposed to think when the one I love, whose judgment and insights I trust, tells me that he has been a bird and seems to believe it? If the soldiers remind me of my great-grandmother, you remind me of Gacirü and Gaclgua—you know, Vinjinia’s kids. When Tajirika was stricken with white-ache and Vinjinia came to work in the office for the first time in her life, she often brought her children with her and I told them stories. They loved the Marimü stories about the two-mouthed ogres, with one mouth at the back of the head and the other in front …”