Muezzinland (33 page)

Chapter 25

It was almost as if Sajara knew what they had done. He wanted immediate  revenge.

They heard crashing through the wood, and they knew what evil face would appear between the trees, because the sound was so similar to that which they heard before being captured. It was the careless flight of an artificial creature riddled with inconsistency, supporting a nightmare within his hierarchy of software, in the form of Gmoulaye's mmoatia.

"This is it," said Nshalla. "What do we do?"

Instinctively, she and Gmoulaye looked at Mnada, as if for a solution to the dilemma. Mnada was—perhaps—godly. She must have an answer.

For a moment Mnada said nothing. Then, "Get behind me. Do what is instinctively right."

Nshalla did as she was bid, but bumped accidentally into Gmoulaye as she did. She struck out. Gmoulaye swore in some unknown tongue, and glowered back. Nshalla looked away, the thought of apology not even in her mind.

Sajara appeared from the wood. To Nshalla's surprise he stopped a hundred metres off, then spoke. "You three! What are you doing?"

"Don't answer," hissed Nshalla.

Gmoulaye was performing another rite, waving her hands slowly before her face and muttering.

"Stop that!" Nshalla insisted. "You'll provoke him."

Gmoulaye ignored this advice, but Nshalla had no time in which to deal with the matter, for Sajara again called out, "Who are you? Answer me."

Mnada made to reply, and she grew tall and dark as she did, causing Nshalla to grasp her sister and hug her; for she knew that a transformation could cause her to leave her humanity behind. Mnada stabilised. "We are just three travellers," she said. Her voice had the distant thrum of thunder, a bass tone almost inaudible. "You may leave us alone."

Sajara, although modelled on the python form, raised himself like a cobra and swayed from side to side, tongue flickering as he transfered scent data to his input buffers, eyes flickering azure, grey, then back to azure. Nshalla shook her head. It was as if she had almost reached that hypnogogic moment before sleep. Sajara had partially hypnotised her during the information transfer.

"Don't fall under his glamour," she said. "He almost got us."

"I am protected, so he can't get me," Gmoulaye remarked.

Despite the situation, Nshalla's anger boiled over. "He can't get you? Are you a god? Do you have some fantastic power—"

"Shush!" Mnada said. The ground vibrated in response to her words.

The time for mesmerism was over. Sajara was attacking.

Nshalla quailed, her small reserve of courage evaporated by fear, like a whiff of sweat. She huddled behind the storm-swathed form of her sister. Gmoulaye vanished, she did not know where, nor did she care. Only she and Mnada mattered.

Mnada took the brunt of the first attack. Sajara grew until he was vast, blocking out half the sky as his head was raised, his coils a rainbow mountain range behind him, his eyes so bright they brought pain, like the sun. Nshalla collapsed. But Mnada grew into a storm, the guise of all willful wanderers in Aphrican lands, and with winds and lightning defended herself.

Sajara was temporarily blown back. But he might have been created in a wind tunnel, and after a reorganisation of his body he advanced once more, head low to the dusty ground, his eyes now only gleaming, as if the atomic energies within served a more serious purpose. The lightning bolts emanating from the lower levels of Mnada's body—now bank upon bank of roiling clouds with nothing except a hint of pink to suggest her human origin—struck Sajara repeatedly. Nshalla saw his rainbow hide flicker and dance like an oily pool, as the application hierarchies in his software structure arranged and rearranged themselves in response to Mnada's electrical barrage. There was only so much this software could take before it crashed. Nshalla prayed to her god.

But she forgot Sajara was a sky-god.

Now came the awesome battle of a divine pair. As Sajara forsook his terrestrial form and sprang into the sky to become a rainbow river, arcing from horizon to horizon, Mnada took on the form of a tornado whirling down from impenetrably dark clouds, illuminated from below by the ring of sky remaining at the horizon. The rainbow, curved and rippling like a sidewinder speeding across the desert, fought this tornado by squeezing it, trying to cut off the vortex from the icy clouds that powered its motion, and this struggle of darkness and colour created firestorms, each individually tinted like laser globes at all angles, each bursting out of the sky with a crash of thunder, and a supersonic wave of ozone that made Nshalla feel she was suffocating. She sneezed, then hid her head, scared Sajara would hear, see, then kill her.

The centre of the storm split to reveal blue sky, and in an instant the tornado was cut from its source. It flattened, belled out, then disintegrated. Debris flew in all directions. The rainbow river dripped like oil from the sky, then assembled itself into the coiled form of the serpent deity.

Mnada, so far as Nshalla could see, had either been defeated or killed. The clouds dispersed. Sunlight warmed her skin. Cumulus vanished in seconds. The air was clear of tension, almost still, and hot once again.

Nshalla stood. Sajara had seen her. In desperation, she looked around for Gmoulaye, who stood nearby. Imperiously Nshalla waved at her, demanding her attendance. Gmoulaye ran over.

"We'll have to make a final stand," Nshalla said.

"Yes. Here, Sajara is an awesome deity."

Just time for a final sneer. "And you said you were protected?"

Sajara let his head and body fall to the ground, and the shock wave caused an earth tremor that knocked the defenders to the ground. Nshalla jumped to her feet and adopted a crouching stance. Seeing this, Gmoulaye laughed.

Nshalla kicked out, catching Gmoulaye in the back of the knee, so that had she not held on to a sapling she would have fallen. Sajara was almost upon them. Nshalla sprang away from Gmoulaye, unsure whether to defend herself against Sajara or Gmoulaye. For a second the absurdity of her antagonism for Gmoulaye was clear, but then Sajara was upon her, and Gmoulaye was nothing.

Sajara struck her, but she did not move. The serpent was so tall she could see nothing over his uncoiled body except sky. Yet she was strong, like native iron. She stuck out of the ground like a simple nail. Remembering her earlier special abilities, she decided she would defend herself; she
would
prevail. Sajara seemed to sense this. His oscillating motion slowed, and his head curved around to fix her in his stare.

Nshalla mocked him. "You think you can mesmerise me, but you can't." She pointed at the tick still embedded in his neck. "Look at the mmoatia. You are weak. It sucks your essences."

"You too are weak. You are only human. I could leave you here, and you would shortly die."

"I would not. I can do anything I want here.
I'm
the daughter of the woman who created Muezzinland."

The distorted sound Sajara uttered might have been a laugh, but it was difficult to tell. It sounded like a battery of buzzing speakers. "Only gods may live in Muezzinland. Give up now."

Nshalla drew sudden strength from this. Sajara would only say such a thing if he saw a possible defeat. Nshalla's confidence towered over her physical form, so that she seemed to grow to the height of a mountain. When she smiled in triumph her teeth shone and her eyes sparkled with delight. With a laugh she said, "You know you are weak, Sajara. Muezzinland failed to capture your imagination like the others because you aren't whole."

"Nor are you. Your equal, Gmoulaye, stands here now, grinning at you behind your back because you are petty like a schoolchild."

"
What?
"

Nshalla turned to see Gmoulaye. The smile was not there. But it must have been, since Sajara said he had seen it.

Nshalla grabbed a stick and lunged at Gmoulaye. Gmoulaye ran off, shouting incantations, and in moments Nshalla was caught in a web that seemed to emanate from the tribal woman. Shocked, she stopped; then remembered the divine serpent just a few metres away.

"Sajara's hypnotising us!" she said.

"No he is not," Gmoulaye retorted. "I am a wise woman of Al-Uzza. There is nothing I do not know. A mere Songhai god cannot overcome the natural force of Al-Uzza, greatest of the Goddesses of old."

"Gmoulaye, you fool," Nshalla cried, as Sajara stared at them both. "He's going to kill us. Do something!"

Gmoulaye took the stick and struck Nshalla on the side of the head. "That's for all your petty insults, you ignorant city-woman. Grow up!"

Then Sajara beat the ground with his coils, and Nshalla fell over as the shock wave passed. His great head was above her, about to fall. Nshalla wriggled as it fell. The earth sent up clouds of dust as another shock wave passed, and she was sent rolling to a crack in the ground. Just in time she caught the roots of a tree.

Gmoulaye ran over, and Nshalla reached out for rescue.

Gmoulaye looked at her, then walked away.

Infuriated, Nshalla called on all her internal abilities. She did not know what they were, but she knew they were there, and she knew they were rooted in overpowering anger. For years she had denied she was a violent person. The emotional straitjacket of her upbringing had left her emotionally illiterate, cold or hot, nothing in between. Now she was furious. She was violent.

But Sajara got the better of her. She wanted to attack Gmoulaye, but Sajara lay coiled up in the way, and it was this obstruction that gave her strength. Like a god she rose up before him and acquired the attributes of her character; the spear, the flashing eyes, fingernails like claws. She was no particular god, she was her own godly self. She would kill where she wanted to kill. Nothing, no blood, no flesh, not the deepest moral principle in all Aphrica was as important as Nshalla.

Wrestling Sajara to the ground, she bit out first his left eye then his right, spitting them kilometres away on a geyser of sputum. Sajara tried to throw his coils over her, but she wriggled and danced, so that she was able to hold him down, then reach into his mouth and his stomach. A few seconds later, he was disrupted, organs ruined. His skin went dead.

In the real world outside, a global hierarchy of software crashed and a billion billion lines of mysteriously generated code erased themselves for all time from machine after machine after machine.

She had won!

Somebody pulled her to her feet, then threw her across the plain and into the desert. A tribal figure, almost as tall as she. Gmoulaye.

They faced one another. Now Gmoulaye's true personality was made plain. She was covered from head to foot in primitive, finger-painted tattoos, and the wisdom of Al-Uzza was all about her, sutras like a cloud of flies, concepts and images like tiny drops of molten metal. This was Gmoulaye the kahina, enjoying a direct line to her deity, Gmoulaye the primitive, who demanded stone-age principles and rejected the slick knowledge of the city. Nshalla stood up to her, a spear in her right hand. They towered over the land, trees like matches at their feet.

"You can never beat me," Nshalla told her enemy. "It is an immutable law of humanity that moral and intellectual progress occurs in the urban environment. Nobody ever devised a groundbreaking theory sitting inside a mud hut with a can of rice boiling over a fire. You represent the past, the earlier ages of human culture, when all was green and simple. I represent the future, and the future will always be stronger than the past. You can't resist human progress. You're a throwback, a loner, a fool."

Gmoulaye replied, "And you are nothing but a husk, devoid of humanity through your appalling upbringing, made worse by your inhumane environment. As you told me in the Sahara desert, you are fragmented, without identity—"

"No!"

Nshalla lashed out as the words left Gmoulaye's lips. She dared not allow her own words to be used against her; that would be too painful. But Gmoulaye jumped back like a gazelle, and Nshalla was left with just a hint of the power she now faced.

Yet she would prevail.

Nshalla had fought before. She knew tricks. She closed, then lunged. Gripping each other, the pair tumbled across Muezzinland, struggling hard, hands on throats, kicking and biting each other, smashing aside woods and levelling hills. Nshalla called upon brute force and that fierce violence engendered by her hatred of her mother, while Gmoulaye uttered spells, calling upon Al-Uzza, drawing strength, feeling hope.

Nshalla began to feel outclassed. As the possibility of failure loomed, she redoubled her efforts and forced Gmoulaye into an arm lock, but Gmoulaye slipped out, and even began to grin.

Nshalla stepped back a little. Her toe dammed a river. The sky seemed to crush her, like a vast hat forcing her into the earth. She was too big.

She ran from Gmoulaye, unwilling to risk defeat.

A rope caught her, and she was dragged back. She lay inert, looking up at the silhouette that was Gmoulaye. The sun was blotted out. All she could see was brown skin darkened by bright sky. She shivered.

Gmoulaye took a knife and honed it against her front teeth. The sparks flew.

"Mercy!" Nshalla cried. She was shrinking, her power already leaking back into the fabric of Muezzinland. "Have mercy on me. Aren't we friends?"

Gmoulaye brought the knife to Nshalla's throat. It lay a finger's breadth above her skin.

"No mercy," said Gmoulaye.

Nshalla could not move. Gmoulaye would slice her flesh.

Gmoulaye nodded to herself. "The time for mercy has long gone."

"Mnada!" Nshalla cried.

Gmoulaye waited, then, with almost theatrical presence, looked around Muezzinland, knowing Mnada would not appear, yet pretending she might. Then the knife touched Nshalla's skin, and Gmoulaye breathed in deep before making the fatal wound.

A deep voice shouted, "
Stop!
"