Africa Risen, page 19
* * *
“Abu-Ammar,” Sheikha Afrah said, “the prince of the Si’lat jinns of the Upper Egyptian Desert visited me in my dreams last night. He requested that you pay him twenty percent of any earnings you make from selling the artifacts from now on. You can bring the money next week when you visit me.”
“Do I look like a fool, Sheikha Afrah? Is it the jinns or you who want the money? I’m already paying enough, all those gifts and offerings I send you every week. What would a jinn do with all that money anyway, do they use it in the world of spirits?”
“Watch your words, Abu-Ammar. You can’t play with fire without getting burned. You’re the one who summoned the jinns, and now you have to pay the price.”
“Over my dead body. I’m the one who summoned the jinns, and I’ll be the one to expel them. I don’t need them anymore.” Abu-Ammar stormed out of Sheikha Afrah’s house.
* * *
In the deepest hour of a long winter night, a hasty small flame rolled out of the office room where Abu-Ammar kept the ancient maps and scrolls, before it got out of control and turned into a big fire that engulfed the whole house in a few minutes. By the time the fire engines arrived, the whole mansion was in ashes, including Abu-Ammar’s body.
Over the next fourteen days, thirty-three houses caught fire, all in which excavations took place. The special investigation unit couldn’t find the cause of the fire. In each of the thirty-three houses, only those who mated with the jinns survived, while the bodies of their spouses and children were consumed in flames.
Ein-Saba village became known as the village of the thirty-three widows and widowers, who, with the help of the jinns, burned their families down to ashes.
After the fire, all the villagers ran away in fear for their lives, turning the once bustling village into rubble.
The fire unearthed thousands of artifacts and ancient cemeteries that lay underneath the burnt houses. Every night, at the fall of the sun, looming at a distance, were the haunting shadows of thirty-three widows and widowers dressed in black, roaming the village, one house to the next, accompanied by an army of jinns, collecting artifacts, placing them in big straw baskets on top of their heads, and heading back to Sheikha Afrah’s house.
CLOUD MINE
by Timi Odueso
His dreams are filled with the smell of rain, an alluring redolence that painfully tickles his throat. The smell teases his thirst and his mind wanders to droplets sliding off smooth petals, his mind conjures the delicious aroma of petrichor, of wet earth, a forest brimming with so much green, it would take years before they could mine out all the juices from the soil. He dreams of humidity, his kaftan sticking maliciously to his skin, the air pregnant with moisture that makes his hair slick and shiny.
When the muezzin’s call rings out, he wakes abruptly to find that his singlet is not even drenched in sweat. He tries to remember the smell from his dreams, he tries to remember the abundance of water he had seen, but all his mind can reel out is an image of the wells in Da’if, large crevices with raised brick borders, filled only with the echoes of dried-up rivers.
He hears a knock on the windowsill and he is thrown out of his trance. The rapping sound comes thrice, an orotund sharpness that contrasts the muezzin’s silky voice.
“Dan Allah,” he replies. “I’m coming, Hyelni. If you keep making that noise, the guards will hear you and then they won’t let me go out.”
His brown kaftan slides over his body in a quick swoop and he slides the bottle of water left at his door into his pocket; for a short moment, he considers leaving his dadduma behind. When the second call comes, slinking behind the first, he decides against it and picks up the prayer mat, a special one his uncle had had woven with vivid purple and grey fabrics from Kano; Nothing but the best for you, the Sarkin had said.
He opens the door very slowly and finds the guard gone, the passageway empty but for the candelabra dangling from the high ceiling. He turns left and moves as fast as his ten-year-old legs can carry him, turning back to check behind him every now and then. When he reaches the gate, he finds it empty too. The sky is painted a light hue of violet, its edges rimmed by a deep orange that will bloom into yellow to illuminate the world. He turns to the head of the gate and finds the image of the jar that has been molded into the wall with crisscross lines of varying shades breaching the rim. The thought excites him and he stares at the image, imagining what the full jar means for all of them, enough money to afford one for the whole town. He shudders at the thought—their town drunk on joy and water; Da’if where the sands are wet with moisture, where ablutions are performed with cool liquid running down their arms, where he can drink as much as he likes without Hyelni’s scornful eyes jealously glaring at his throat as he swallows. He thinks of his uncle who has been gone for two weeks, on a trip to find a rainmaker to bring back to Da’if, and he thinks of what life will be like when the man returns with the rainmaker in tow.
Fingers wrap themselves around his mouth and he is startled back into reality by fear. He almost screams but the dainty fingers stained with swirls of henna close his throat up.
Hyelni’s brittle voice fills the air around him. “Salim, were you scared?”
Salim swivels to face her, a pixie-ish girl with a heart-shaped face, kohl lining her almond eyes, her dark brown hair tied up with wool. She stands a few inches shorter than he is, but her shoulders are hoisted by a confidence he has just begun to build.
“You shouldn’t be sneaking up on me like that. What if I screamed fa?”
“Then they’ll catch us, my mother will scold me and the whole village will report to your uncle that you’ve been sneaking off to the mines at dawn. With a girl,” she answers with her left hand askew as he quickly casts his eyes on the floor, his lips struggling from curling into a smile. In her right hands, Hyelni holds a device with a sharp-ended metal prong on one end and an open-ended horn at the other, all connected to a rectangular body with buttons on one side. White flecks of paint dot the body of the portable Cloud Mine with brown-gray of rust peeking from beneath.
He ignores her taunt and gestures that they should leave. “Why did you bring the mat?” she asks. “You know we can’t go to the mosque, if they see us we won’t be able to explore today.”
She points in the direction of the mosque, the only place in the town with electricity other than the mines.
“I don’t want my kaftan stained. All my trousers are stained with dust and I don’t want washers to notice. We can sit on it while we search,” he replies.
They walk past the houses in a quick haze, slowing down only when they reach the edge of town where the interlocked tracks lead to the old water mines. They walk till the tiny town of Da’if appears like a blimp in the horizon, a tiny splatter on the desert’s large easel. They stop two miles from Da’if, when they reach the mine where the baobab plant they found days ago lies, where a large Cloud Mine has sunk into the sandy ground beside a large black empty water tank. They should be done with asl, he thinks. The guards will have returned from prayer to find the Sarkin’s nephew gone, again; their eyes spending the next hours darting around the town.
He finds the empty white jerry-can where they left it, and spreads the mat down a few metres from the plant. He beckons to Hyelni and takes the portable mine from her, pushing the metal prong into the soil beside the plant, leaning hard till the whole length of the prong sinks deep in the soil. Hyelni picks up the jerry-can and places the mouth beneath the horn, before thumbing the button on the mine. The floor is illuminated in a bright red light as the horn flares up with a whirring sound that makes the ground around them vibrate.
“You never wait,” Salim starts. “We should always wait till it turns blue. What’s the point of putting the jerry-can there when it hasn’t even found water?”
Hyelni ignores him as he collapses on the dadduma, stretching his legs far out so his calves sink into the sand. She looks up at the sky which has now turned a watery orange and says, “What if we doze off and water starts rushing, ehn, it’ll just waste away. You’re only talking like that because you rich people don’t have to worry about water. That’s why you can drink as many cups as you like.”
Salim smiles sheepishly as she settles in beside him. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s just until my uncle returns with a rainmaker. Then, everyone will have enough.”
She grunts, her eyes trained on the vibrant redness of the mine. “What if he can’t find one? Mallam Shafi’i says they’re as rare as they’re expensive,” she says.
“Well, we have the money. Everyone has given enough; we’ve been saving up all these years, didn’t you see the community jar, how full it is, Allah will reward our hard work. And it’s my uncle we’re talking about, the Sarkin never fails.”
“What if it’s not a powerful one, like the one they have in Kajuru?”
He remembers tales they’ve heard of the rainmaker in Kajuru, how only short drizzles that dampen the atmosphere drop from the sky, how long it takes for the rainmaker to recuperate. “Even then, it will be a blessing. Drizzle or storm, as long as it’s rain, Da’if will be better for it. And my uncle went to Abeokuta for it, that’s where the best rainmakers are made.”
“Well, what if—”
His fingers grasp hers as he stops her. “Nothing will happen, Hyelni. The rainmaker will come and she’ll bring more water than the wells of Da’if can hold.”
For a short while, as their fingers are intertwined, he wonders if her chest burns too when their skin touches, he wonders if her heart vibrates like the mine.
“It,” she replies with brows furrowed.
“What?”
“You called it she again. The rainmaker is an it, you must remember what Mallam Shafi’i said. We mustn’t think of it as a person, it will feed off our emotions. If we give too much, it will drown us in an instant. Remember what happened to Funtua? They gave too much and it—”
“I don’t think that’s true, Hyelni,” Salim interrupts. “How can being kind bring destruction? I think Mallam Shafi’i was just trying to scare us. The same way he scares us when he shows us that picture book of how Southern cities make their rainmakers work so well.”
“He’s not lying. You know Mallam Shafi’i grew up in Eko, and people say that’s the biggest, most beautiful place in the world. And it’s all because they treat their rainmaker the right way.”
His fingers release hers and he ignores her words, thinking that perhaps there are things Mallam Shafi’i can be wrong about. He cannot imagine anyone wasting water on drowning people when they can simply wait for them to shrivel to death from thirst. He knows what his people think of rainmakers, but he finds the only difference is that rainmakers don’t have to use Cloud Mines to get water since their prayers reach the heavens faster. He thinks everyone should be grateful, happy even, for a person that prayerful, a person who has direct contact with the heavens.
It is why he has taken time to clear the room adjacent to his, where he will convince his uncle to let her stay. He imagines sitting with her, what she will be like. He imagines what to teach her, if she would like to learn Hausa, if she’d explore the wells with him and Hyelni, if she’d follow him to Mallam Shafi’i’s house to learn history, to learn about times when Da’if was called Zaria. His thoughts lead him down a road that steals his consciousness and he dreams that he is in one of the wells, now filled with water, swimming with Hyelni and a faceless girl as they swirl in the pool of water and laugh the aridity away.
Hyelni watches the Cloud Mine, waiting for its color to change. She imagines what shade of blue the light on the Cloud Mine will be when it finds water, a wispy light one like the sky, or a deep one, like the hues of faded henna on yellow skins? They’d been at it for almost two weeks, since the Sarkin left for Abeokuta, running off at sunrise to search for pockets of water for her family, and in all that time, the machine remained the same color. She wonders if she should ask Salim, this was his idea after all, but one look at him, eyes closed with a smile on his face, and she decides against it; she lets him stay that way, asleep, till the sun is directly overhead, biting hard. She prods him awake and he opens his eyes to find that the horn is the same shade of maroon. “We have to go,” she announces. “It’s past noon and I have chores before I can come to the Islammiyya. I almost got in trouble last time we stayed late.”
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” he says, digging out the mine. “There’s a plant here so there’s surely water somewhere close by.”
They walk back in silence till Da’if looms in the distance, knowing that speaking will permit the sun to lap up what little saliva their tongue creates. The image hits them before they realize what it means for their thirst. They had read of clouds in Mallam Shafi’i’s books; they had seen illustrations on Cloud Mines, ashen silhouettes that looked like misshapen balls of gullisuwa. They’d even seen clouds once or twice, the light fluffs floating lazily across the sky as people trooped out of their houses to watch traffickers siphon away what little water was stored inside. They had never seen anything like this though, the clouds they’d seen were white, almost diaphanous, and his uncle always said they were weak clouds: “Those ones can’t fill a single jerry-can even.” The ones over Da’if, now, crackle with energy, lightning bolts zipping in between the swirls as if in a race. They are the color of henna, the color of his own skin, a deep blue black that excites and scares them.
Salim breaks into a sprint towards the violent dark clouds that now settle over Da’if.
“Your uncle must be back with it,” comes Hyelni, who follows in the rapid dents his feet make in the sand. He doesn’t reply, he can only imagine the town, the people drawing out several containers in anticipation of the rain; black drums that haven’t seen water in years, clay pots molded by old hands, jerry-cans with their mouths wide open. He imagines the happiness on their faces, he imagines the rainmaker too, watching them happily as her prayers call thunder and lightning to suck clouds down onto the earth. They reach the edge the same moment the rumbling begins, the sky making sounds like a large man with indigestion, the air filled with shouts of the people as they wait in anticipation. They find no one in their homes and their feet trail the roads to the mosque where the people have gathered in a circle, eyes wide opened, mouths chattering at the promise of rain. Everything is as he thought it would be. He hears Hyelni calling his name as they breach the crowd but his excitement sidelines his loyalty. He pushes through the people who are tightly packed in the circle, dodging swaying hips and diving to avoid swinging arms. He hears ululations, Alhamdullilahis and Masha Allahs ringing out from space he manages to squeeze into. This is perfect, he thinks. Da’if will finally be a perfect town: prayerful people, a booming trade and now, modifiable weather, all with his uncle leading them.
His imagination is broken when he reaches the middle. The rainmaker’s skin is an ashy teak with lines mapped across her skin the shapes of swirls and waves; her hair is electric, a light blue that gleams with the sharpness reserved for whetted blades. His eyes find hers, upturned holes with irises matching the clouds above them, eyes that hold more water in them than he has ever seen, eyes that burn the rest of his happiness away and bury fear into him. Whips bite into the rainmaker’s skin and the chains wrapped tightly around her jingle in symphony with her cries. The music she makes—the jangling of her chains, the thunderous blaring of her cries—are smothered by the people’s excitement.
Salim turns away and finds the Sarkin beside him. His uncle wears a yellow babanriga, the rims of its edges embroidered in white. “Where were you?” the man shouts with a smile. “We’ve been back awhile. The guards tell me you’ve been frolicking around with some girl, eh?”
Salim watches his uncle’s gleaming eyes, the curve around the edges of his lips, his nose twitching with amusement at his nephew’s escapades. The boy points to the rainmaker, shuddering from the fear welling up inside. “Why?” he asks.
“What?!” his uncle yells.
“Why?!” he repeats as loudly as he can. The crowd still roars around them and the jangling melody of the chains lends an air of festivity to the event.
The Sarkin takes Salim’s hands in his and leads him out. The people part like sand flecks being washed away by a pulse of water. The two walk till the sounds are dim, till he hears the jangles no more, till the shouts are like murmurs from an angry people.
“But Mallam Shafi’i should have taught you this. You know rainmakers, they’re like flames, Salim,” the Sarkin says. “You feed them only what they need to survive or they’ll burn everything to the ground.”
“But you’re not feeding her anything. You’re whipping her as if she’s one of the cows. How will she give us water now when you’re being wicked to her?”
His uncle laughs and squeezes his hands tight. “There are ways of making people do whatever you want them to do. And for rainmakers, it really isn’t a choice, they have to let it all out or it’ll drown them from within. It looks like we’re being cruel to her, I know, but we’re really helping her.”
“But—”
“Aren’t you happy for us?” his uncle says with a darker tone. “Do you think that Eko got to where it is by feeding its rainmaker milk and honey, ehn? Do you know how much more successful Kajuru can be if they flicked their whips at that sorry excuse once in a while? I’ve been to Eko, Salim. I’ve seen just how prosperous our people can be. We can be bigger than Kajuru, we can be the Eko of the North. Don’t you want that for us? Don’t you want to see your people smile?”
Salim keeps mute as his uncle takes a different route. “This is good for you too, you know. Just imagine how big the herd will grow when the harvest starts to flourish. Your friend, Hyelni, will stop fighting you because she’ll have water to drink. I’ll also be able to take you on my trips since we’ll have enough water to last us the journey. I can buy you anything you want from Kajuru, or Eko. And when people start coming to trade with us instead of going to Kajuru, we may even find something very special you’ll like.”
