Calvin Baker - Grace

“What is happening?” Sylvie asked, rousing from sleep.

Before I could answer, one of the men fired his rifle in the air, and pulled a dazed Ali from his seat. The rest of the bandits quickly streamed around back, where they trained their guns up at us, and began mounting the sides of the truck.

As the first of them boarded, Edward, who was nearest him, swung his pack like a shield into the soldier’s midsection, sending him sprawling to the ground.

From the road one of the others let loose a staccato burst of rounds, which struck Edward hard in the chest. His blood spattered, and all afterward was the high shriek of terror in the ear, snapping each of us aware of nothing else but our own mortality.

They climbed quickly inside the lorry then, dragging Ali up behind them, as the one up front took over control of the wheel. None of us spoke when the engine restarted. They trained their guns at our heads, before throwing Edward’s lifeless body down onto the plains, abandoning it in the dirt.

The vehicle gained speed, moving still in the direction of the mountains in the distance, above the cloud layer, as Effie shrieked in protest.

“We hereby requisition this vehicle in the name of the Army of the Revelation,” one of them said, nervelessly ignoring her cries. “If you do not resist, no harm will befall you. If you do—” He looked toward the body in the path behind us.

“You killed my husband,” Effie sobbed violently. “You killed my husband.”

“You have driven into our territory,” he replied.

Ali looked away guiltily, but dared not say anything.

“He was a good man,” Effie challenged with the authority of her grief. “We haven’t done anything. We are innocent.”

He laughed. “There are no innocents. Only those too ignorant to see.”

“We don’t even know what your bloody war is about.”

“You are American,” he replied, not really caring what her nationality was. She was of the West. Effie was wise enough not to correct him. “You are in every war, and never know what they are beyond your own narrow interests, which you tell yourselves are justified that you are saving women from their men. Children from their way of life. One helpless brown body from another savage brown body. Isn’t that right? By the great, loving hand of democracy. This was the lie of colonization, and you never tire of believing your own lie, which you now masquerade in a different play. It is ever the same. First you divide neighbors; then you divide families. But before any of this you must divide the person from himself. One so divided would do anything to himself, or his people, as the leaders you have imposed on us have. But if a man enslaves his own people, it is because he is a slave himself. Now we are a country ruled by your slaves.

“You have your own politics and your own histories of the world, and with these you replace men and women. But your world has forgotten the truth Rome taught to you, and your progenitors certainly knew: The only way to colonize a people is absolutely and for all eternity. If you do not have the stomach for that you are only stirring mischief. Freedom comes only through the voice and will and blood of the people themselves. Everything else is jerry-built. But you do not care what happens anywhere, so long as your dogs do your bidding. We choose to be men. Free and alive in our own country, or else dead and free in the earth.”

“Fuck your bloody war. You killed my husband. You killed my husband!” She screamed in anguish of what only moments ago had been her life.

“If we have made a mistake, and your husband is collateral damage — I have lost many, so I know your pain,” he said in a tone all the more disquieting for seeming sincere, as he looked at her with an eerie compassion.

“Monster,” she screamed.

“Tell me what your custom is, and how much it will take to make you whole, or else, if you prefer, I will find you a new husband,” he laughed.

Her tears subsided after that, overwhelmed by the fear of his threat. Her breathing was still erratic, though, until it seemed she might come apart completely. His menace and the dead man had cowed the rest, so that no one else spoke, or made eye contact, or tried to comfort her, until Ali spoke up.

“I am sorry, ma’am,” he said. “It is my fault.”

“It is not your fault, Ali,” Effie answered, releasing him.

“My job is to get you there safely, but I got us captured. I was shortcutting. Now look what I have done.”

“You put your own road where there was none but you needed a road to be. They just ambushed us, is all.”

“Quiet,” they commanded from the rails of the speeding truck, where they had entwined themselves like malevolent vines.

In the commotion I slipped the bracelet I always wore from my wrist over to Sylvie’s, as we clasped hands. It was a string of different-colored wooden beads, I had picked up long ago, which she pressed her palm over, then began fingering like a rosary. Her head pressed tight into my chest.

“What is going to happen?” she whispered.

“We will be fine,” I held her wrist. “Try to stay calm. But if anything too bad happens, the center one opens.”

“What is in it?”

“A cyanide pill,” I said. “If anything unspeakable happens, and we are not fine, eat it. But only if things are so bad you think there is no other way home.”

We rode along silently as the drought-stricken plains turned to green hills, and the hills gave way to the gray mountain mist, with the peak of Mount Clarel, their last redoubt, poking up through the clouds. The angled light of the dying sun fell on us like their slanted guns, as our pulses tensed and beat faster in the cobalt air, and the soldiers watched like esurient hawks in the silence.

Our only measure of security was our value to them. We were their pawns and their insurance, to be dealt out and traded for safe passage in dire straits; sold for ransom, for food, for guns; or else deployed as shields to guard them, like talismans, from incoming fire.

Not that they believed they needed shields. They had other talismans, believing themselves to be protected from bullets by magical spirits, whose protection had been invoked with the ceremonial sprinkling of waters from the lake, applied to each soldier in turn by their commander when they first joined that army.

For some this magic seemed to work. They were not dead. The soldiers guarding us were the last of these, the final survivors from the bedraggled group of insurgents who had been in the field near three generations, as the men whose talismans failed them were used up. The wants of the war morphed with each successive generation in the field, and the war they inherited from their fathers’ fathers was as different as their allies from outside, until they had no allies left, only themselves, and their reasons for fighting were no longer coherent, only the pent-up emotions of three generations of war and bloodshed and betrayal and still no satisfaction for their claims. They had been fighting since before any other part of the continent rebelled, and before the larger world rolled itself into the tumult, like dice, to find vengeance or oblivion in the chaos. Land to feed themselves, cloth to cover themselves, materials to build the machines of their desires and destinies, new dogmas to soothe their complaints, new ideology they might seduce themselves into believing to replace the ones that had come before, all were slaughtered when the magic of their talismans failed. They would fight from that mountain until the last talisman of the last man flickered out and perished.

Their first leader had been a notorious man, called Achilles Asha, who was taken from his village as an eight-year-old by priests, who came and snatched all the first-born children from that part of the country, after a minor rebellion led the colonial rulers to send the priests to help extinguish it.