Lament for the Fallen (2 page)

‘Isaiah,’ he says, gripping softly and smiling down at him.

‘Father,’ and Isaiah grins, curling back into his shoulder. ‘Thank you.’

The day’s heat and humidity are easing. Soon it will be time to return home for the evening meal. For now they sit on the pipe beneath the deepening shade of a young obeche tree.

This side of Ewuru faces towards distant cliffs rising from the jungle and the cities to the centre of Nigeria. Joshua walks here every afternoon, sometimes around the periphery of the village walls, and sometimes along the path of the white dome-topped sentinel posts forming a cordon of sensors along the jungle border.

In the last year, as he has grown, Isaiah likes to join him.

Joshua notices Abishai and Daniel hurrying from the village gate.

A small group emerges from the trees, dragging themselves from the grip of their journey. Their clothes are torn and filthy. They are hauling a cart upon which are piled bags and what looks to be an elderly man. Children and adults lean on the cart as they walk. A young woman carries a baby. It does not move as she sags against the cart wheel. All look haunted and starved. Refugees from the water wars in the north.

Abishai is already greeting them, welcoming them and offering them the shelter of Ewuru. They will probably not stay. The quiet pace of the village is not for everyone, and most choose to move on towards Calabar.

Joshua stares at them, studying the distance and hardship of their journey told in the mud and pain stretched across their skin.

Isaiah, though, is distracted.

‘Father, what is that?’ pointing up into the sky where a white trail arcs down towards a black shape. Joshua looks up and shakes his head, shielding his eyes as he strains to make it out.

The shape is falling gently. They watch, transfixed by its peculiar slow-motion curve towards them.

Closer now and Joshua can see that its outer part is a blur around a small core. It looks like one of those winged seeds he remembers playing with as a child: flinging them up, watching them propeller down.

It is generating a wide funnel-shaped trail of condensation pointing directly along its path and visible for hundreds of kilometres.

They can hear it faintly: a range of notes from a roar to a whine, like a turbine.

The small black ball in the centre, which Joshua cannot help thinking of as a seed, appears stationary as the wing spins around it. It no longer looks black. The leading edge of the wing is grey-white and the ball, where it points at the ground, is similarly coloured. He sees occasional blue jets of flame from the pod, as it adjusts its position in the sky.

Others within the village and near the fields are looking up and shouting. A white arc, like a spear, aimed almost exactly at Ewuru.

Joshua lifts Isaiah on to his shoulders and runs down the path. ‘Abishai, Daniel,’ he shouts. From across the maize field, on Ikot Road, he hears answering calls. As he runs, he can see that the falling seed will pass over the village, but it will not land far away.

As he nears the north gate, a woman runs out to meet him. ‘Esther, take him. Prepare beaters, there might be fires.’ Isaiah drops to the ground and clings to his mother’s arm. She nods, leading him, running back, calling out.

The brief pause has been sufficient time for two people to catch up.

‘It is going to be seen,’ says Abishai, younger but almost identical to her brother.

Joshua nods. ‘We track it, then see how we can disguise whatever it is.’

Daniel is heavier, shorter, than the siblings. ‘It depends where it lands. What do you think it is? Debris?’

Joshua shrugs, his face worried. It does not look like debris. He glances up, estimates the path of the seed and starts running. The others follow. In the village, Esther is organizing volunteers. Fire cannot be allowed unchecked anywhere near the fields.

They follow the path as far as they can then turn directly into the jungle. The arc is easy to follow through gaps in the tree canopy.

A change of pitch and a sound of splintering wood tearing a way open through the jungle indicate that the seed has, at least, stopped getting further away. They quicken their pace.

Almost an hour later they reach the crash site.

Their first impression is of the unexpected light coming through the leaf canopy ahead of them. Clouds of insects have rushed into the empty space, agitated and hungry.

Joshua and the others can hear falling branches and smell fresh sap, but it is all much more contained than they expected. They slow.

‘That did not fall like debris,’ says Daniel.

‘No,’ says Joshua. ‘It almost looked as if it was being steered.’

They move carefully towards the edge of the clearing. There they stare, mystified.

An irregular circle has been punched into the canopy. The trunks of the trees are shattered and splintered, their upper branches wrenched off with great savagery. The space itself indicates that, for all the violence of its arrival, the seed has touched the ground with scarcely a bump. The black and grey pod lies in the centre of the clearing, silent and perfectly spherical.

From the pod a wing curves out about six metres, its outer edge cambered to the ground. Branches have fallen on to the seed, but there are no flames. There does not seem to be much heat at all. Behind them, in the forest, they can hear calls from villagers arriving.

Joshua shakes his head, balling his hands into fists as he tries to make sense of what he is seeing. ‘Abishai, keep the children away. You can send the beaters back, but keep a few spades and people to help. Daniel, shall we have a look?’

Abishai turns and runs into the trees. They can hear her shouting out the names of children as she sends them home. ‘Later, later. It is dangerous now.’

‘At least it is small. We should be able to hide this,’ says Daniel.

Joshua shakes his head. ‘It left too much of a trail. We will have to find something else as a distraction.’

He eases his way towards the outer edge of the wing. It is a smooth and shaped single piece of metal, like an aircraft wing. The leading edges are coated in hard translucent tiles. The entirety, for all its strangeness, appears to have been machined. He can see this being made in a workshop. Some military craft that wandered off course?

‘Careful’ – from Daniel, as Joshua crouches and hesitantly stretches out his arm towards the edge of the wing. He can see people appearing through the trees, also staring much as he must have done a few moments earlier.

He can feel only very slight warmth from the tiles. He touches one and, delicately, rests his hand on its surface.

‘It is not hot,’ he says loudly enough for the men all around the clearing to hear. ‘It is slippery. Like soap.’

The tiles look like blocks of smoke, indistinct where they end and fade into the air. Only where he touches them can he see the line along the wing. The tile has an unpleasant feeling, as if all the water is being drained out of his skin, and he quickly removes his hand.

Daniel edges into the clearing, keeping watch. Joshua walks cautiously towards the seed pod, along the curve of the wing and keeping a wary distance. This close it is slightly taller than the height of a man. On the top and bottom of the wing are a series of narrow cylindrical holes, each about the width of a fist, pointing in opposite directions. The metal around the edges is scorched blue.

Joshua clenches his jaw and places his hand firmly on the wall of the pod.

Everyone is silent.

Joshua smiles and half-turns towards Daniel. He shrugs and shakes his head. Nothing.

And then, just on the edge of the wing, on top of the sphere, a hatchway pops open. A man shouts, and everyone jumps.

A coppery smell like blood, or wet metal, floods out of the hatch. It is fresh and oddly clean against the vegetative miasma of the jungle.

‘Help him.’

The voice comes from inside the pod, metallic in the silence.

Daniel reacts faster than Joshua. The wing is easier to reach from where he stands, and he flings himself up, running to the opening. Joshua joins him and motions to Abishai, who he can see returning through the trees, to stay back.

The last light from the setting sun shafts into the cabin. Inside, caged between a series of metal rings, his limbs contorted and broken into a tangle that makes Daniel and Joshua instantly nauseous, is a man.

‘Help him.’

2

‘No, Griot, not again!’ Samuel laughs, his fleshy hands resting on his great thighs, his body shaking. ‘That is not a story. Every year you do this to me.’

He wipes tears from his eyes, soft folds crinkling his face, and squeezes the salt water from between his fingers.

There are groans and laughter from the others gathered to listen at the overnight camp two days upriver from Calabar: a ripple of explosive babble punctuated by flickering shadows cast by the rebuilt cooking fire. A few stand, stretch and head for the privacy of the trees. One man leans over the fire, grabbing the massive boiling kettle from amidst the coals with hard hands, and pours tea into proffered mugs.

‘Samuel, I know many stories,’ says the man in the ochre-brown boubou and matching kufi skullcap sitting with them on the ground, at the far end of the gathering. ‘What sort of tale would you wish for?’ His voice is lyrical.

‘Oh, but, Father, I love it,’ says a young man sitting alongside Samuel.

‘Of course you do, Peter,’ says the elder. ‘I would have too when I was your age, but they are not proper stories. Griot, you know the stories I mean.’

The man here called Griot – in other places known as Marabout, or Balladeer, or the many other names given to him on his journeys – chuckles, the sound the delight of small pebbles being tumbled in a fast-flowing stream. ‘These are my stories, Samuel, and I have no wish to tell you ones you already know. They are my gift, and I never give the same gift to the same person twice.’

There are many men gathered around the fire. They sit on the packed earth in a semicircle upwind of the flames, focused half between it and the Griot. The breeze is consistent from the south-west, and they have left a small space for the smoke to drift out and into the bracket of palm oil trees surrounding them.

Peter holds out his mug to the man carrying the kettle. He fills it with steaming tea so overly extracted that the tannins have become astringent. Tea which strips the outer layer of a teaspoon even as it recoats it with a dark-bronze patina.

Peter offers the mug to the Griot, who accepts with a grin.

Every year, after harvest, the remaining villages of the southern delta gather their surplus grain, and traders paddle along the network of rivers towards Calabar. There they trade for the printed goods they cannot produce at home. Samuel’s people have always planted and harvested early to beat the other villages to the city and so take advantage of higher prices. They are not a wealthy people, being too small and distant, but they prefer the safety of their isolation to the dangers of the more populated parts of the region.

Their boats are drawn up on the banks just outside the reach of the firelight. The barges, burdened with maize, soya and sorghum, are anchored midstream. It is slow work dragging them to the city.

Insect traps glow on tree trunks, reducing the irritation of mosquitoes. Cooking pots hang, cleaned, over the informal kitchen. Hunger is at bay till morning, and the men pass the evening around the fire as travellers have done for thousands of years.

Unusually, no men guard the riverbanks or the barges from animals or looters. The Griot is here.

This is Peter’s first trip with the men to trade, and he is excited at the newness of the experience, soaking up the laughter and fellowship. He looks up at his father as the man clamps his hand over the youth’s shoulder.

‘I am pleased you are here, Griot.’ He smiles, nostalgia in his voice. ‘I remember when I was this boy’s age. My father taking me on my first journey to Calabar, and you, telling me stories. I cannot say I always understand you, but I always enjoy the way you make me feel.’

He is momentarily silent, feeling the ache in his joints, the stiffness of his fingers. ‘This will be my last journey to the city, and my sons will continue after me.’

‘You are not so old, Samuel.’

‘It has been fifty years, Griot. Fifty years. You may not age, but, for myself, that is my lifetime. Imagine. I have five sons and three daughters. They have granted me eight grandsons and eleven granddaughters. Each year we follow the harvest, you meet us along the way, we reach the city, we trade, we return. Each year continues as before. And now I hand over this cycle to my sons.’ He nods. ‘But you, Griot, you still tell stories of change and there is still nothing new in the world,’ laughing.

Peter remains silent, a clutch of anxiety. Those setting out in the world for the first time have no wish to learn that there is nothing left to be discovered. It is given to youth to wonder at what can be different and age to marvel at how much remains the same.

The Griot, his teeth a white disembodied smile in the darkness, considers carefully.

‘I journey far, Samuel. Would you wish to hear stories of the north, of the struggle there and of the devastation left behind?’

Samuel grimaces.

‘No, and I would not tell you. My ways are not to carry burdens from one place only to deposit them in another. There is much suffering, but there is hope also.

‘It was not always that you feared the unknown. There was a time you used to travel with your sisters to Calabar,’ says the Griot. ‘None of your daughters have ever visited the city.’

‘And they never will. The only changes I have seen have not been good ones,’ says Samuel.

The Griot smiles gently. ‘I do not mean you discomfort. You understand, though, my experience is different? The water carving through rock has little to show even for half a century, yet few would say that rivers remain forever unchanged.’