Eight
Three black men stood around a small fire in the center of a field of tall grass. The orange flames challenged the brightness of the moon, and cast dancing shadows on a crescent-shaped outcrop of pale rock beyond, and nearer on the three brown bellies. Cinched tight under each distended abdomen, a greasy leather ligature held in place a small drape of animal hide, and a pouch. They were otherwise naked.
The three stared intently toward some latent image in the darkness, beyond the light of the fire. The sound of labored and methodical plodding through tall grass reached their ears, and their faces wizened expectantly. A bobbing black movement became visible. It eclipsed the deep blue of the night sky, like a tiny, opaque flame at the horizon, lapping at the star-peppered heavens. The flame of shadow swelled, and took on the rough silhouette of a man. Then a fourth man emerged from the darkness into the circle of fire-light. He cradled a large burlap sack in his arms. His size was small, and he had the same skinny legs, and taut balloon stomach as the other three. The deepness of the furrows in his face, and the exigency of his expression, bespoke his greater years and titular importance among the people of his tribe.
The thing in the sack squirmed as the Elder laid it down beside the fire. Silent and solemn, each of the three younger savages began to busy himself with the contents of his own hip pouch. Two savages laboured together; the third arranged an assortment of small gourds on the ground. Meanwhile, the Elder sat cross-legged, rocking gently, hissing a deep chant that hung over the proceedings like storm clouds, like imminent foul weather.
Despite being individually focused, a fusion of purpose encircled all of the men. The barely audible whisper from the center of the old savage seemed to collect together and funnel whatever was contained in the ring of fire-light, transporting the four men to a place of conscious otherness. Orange flames wavered and struggled against the night breeze, which blew more stoutly now across the grassland. In the inconstant light, the faces of the four savages flashed alternately with a streaked fierceness, and with the glow of true, ancient wisdom.
The two savages who had been laboring together, assembled a skewed tripod from some stout sticks and twine. The third savage had mixed the colored contents of some of the gourd bottles, and was presently directing his attentions to the tied end of the sack. As he hoisted up, a glistening black mass slid out and settled in a writhing heap. A Wildebeest calf, still wet from its birth, bleated in a hopeless struggle against the bindings round its legs.
The wooden tripod had one short, thick leg, and two longer legs of roughly equal length. It was an odd assemblage of sticks and twine that stood off the ground to about knee-level, and had the unlikely appearance of a recumbent skeleton’s severed legs. The third savage laid the animal into the space between those parted wooden legs. It let itself be touched and moved with a strangely tranquil resignation to the external will of a person. Soon after, the calf’s bleating subsided to a low, raspy purring, like the sounds of trusting contentment it might have made at its own mother’s ministrations. The front legs were pulled over the animal’s head and tied together to the short, vertical stick. The rear legs were spread apart and tied, giving a drape of new flesh to the wooden skeleton beneath. Even as the savages arranged it for their purpose, and filled the air about it with their invocations to the night, the calf blinked at them from a different plane, beyond harm. The young animal, so new in the world, still held tremblingly around itself a sense of womb. Somehow, having experienced so far only a few, short hours of life, it had not yet been stripped of its faith in the utter sanctuary of warm darkness. That particular misunderstanding would never flash its panic across the calf’s mind, however. All that prevented the calf from struggling free of its captors with all of its might was the fact that it had no understanding of physical peril. Innocence made it a prisoner.
All at once, the preparatory stillness was shattered. The present mood, woven airy and seductive by the old man’s voice with the fibers of night, fire, and wind, was displaced by a heavier, more inexorable tempo. The Elder stood suddenly from his place beside the fire, and began pounding a fist into his open palm. An angry tirade coughed and sputtered out of his throat in the primitive, quasi-formed syllables of his tribal language. The darkness swallowed the sounds, like an abyss yawning open illimitably. Standing in their tiny, wavering ring of fire-light, the four savages seemed as if they themselves might blink out, smothered in a fold of wilderness, or swept away by the hot, black breath of Africa.
Heeding some inner insistence, the men fell back to their still unfinished work, as if hastened suddenly by the imminence of a great materialization. The night had been stirred awake by the Elder’s shouts of defiance. And from every corner of the savanna – from within every dark crevice in the rocks, where a man would never dip a curious arm, from those places of killing left empty, and stained with blood, where even the hunter cats won’t have their meals, from the black, impenetrable center of wildness – came rumbling a response.
It came at them. Thunderously through the veldt it moved, with great, displacing strides. They all felt it coming. It made them labor more quickly, made them frenetic. The four men hurried and reeled in the ring of fire-light, like droplets of water in a hot skillet, dancing on the verge of evaporation. The Elder hissed and spat, and beat out his rhythm with a fist. It was taken up by the other three involuntarily, as a pulse throbbing in their temples.
With his yellow, blunted incisors, the old man bit the tip off a cigar stub, and lit the ugly, black thing in a lick of fire as he danced. In the rolled, consecrated tobacco, magic and terror resided. He drew it in, his pygmy chest rising with contempt, and with the hot gas of an un-vented scream. The smell of the summoned thing blew rot and sulfur across the savanna, and made the flames leap wildly. As the old man called out to the sea of darkness, the three others waited in a huddled cluster, kneeling round the humiliated calf. The fire sighed its mounting appetite, and a fresh piece of tinder was offered in. It burst aflame and the island of light swelled suddenly, fountaining tiny, glowing ashes into the sky. For a moment, fronds of shadow beyond the light, stirred at the threshold of visibility, threatening to coalesce into an image. But the light retracted, before the three young savages could register any semblance beyond the certainty of the light-ring that could dispel a mounting fear of the unknown. They huddled together, steeped in awe and purpose; they watched the old man stomp the perimeter, spewing his plume of gray smoke.
Now, it was near. The old savage was unsteady on his age-abused legs. Weariness from the dance, combined with the looming proximity of the summoned thing, had beaten him down to a sort of drunkenness. The thing needed him vulnerable, in mind and in flesh. He turned, eyes closed, to face the squatting trio, nestled round the mindless calf. With a gusted sigh, the old man fell, and invisibly it took him over.
A great, violent shudder seized through him, squeezing the breath noisily from his body. The thing had a will, and the strength to follow it with action. It took the old man where he sat and made a horse of him, then the horse was straddled and subjugated. An ancient presence hunkered down inside the old man’s body, pressing, making his fingers flicker at the ends of his outstretched arms, and making his eyes roll back to expose their yellowed and veined under-bellies. The throes of possession erased all the identity from his face. For a time, he just hung his arms out at his sides as if falling a great distance, his mouth frozen in that groundless moment. After the thing was inside him, the old man’s features were left a blank stare, still twitching from the force of the invasion.
Somewhere deep in the cellar of his own mind, the Elder savage now slept a dreamless sleep. The upper levels of consciousness were firmly and wholly occupied; the reins of motor control and of speech were now in the hands of another. The other was an invited guest, and he breathed a deep sigh of awakening with borrowed lungs, and spoke:
“My children, you are brought before Oshosi…” it said in the tongue of its attendants.
The voice strained out, almost in pain, as if it were the resultant trickle of a great volume being forced through a narrow opening. The speaking was from another world. The words ground out of the mouth with such effort and authority that they redressed the impression of absence created by the closed eyes, passing along in hushes all the intensity of shrieks from hell. The sound of that unearthly voice left no doubt that the old man, at least for the time being, was simply elsewhere. Nor in the movements was there any sign of the old man’s human frailty. Instead, Oshosi was an impressive and vigorous presence, that held every eye on him, as if by sheer will.
At hearing Oshosi declare his arrival, one of the young savages had produced a black and white cloth from his pouch. Now he fed it into the presciently reaching hand. Oshosi took the colored kerchief with great flourish, and blew magic smoke into it. With the smoldering black nub clenched in his teeth, he wrapped the cloth round his head, and knotted firmly above each ear. The act was a stamp. It gave a finality to the spirit’s penetration of the corporeal realm that solidified his hold on the attention of the three men, and even seemed to subdue the wind about them.
More of that hypnotic speaking poured from behind the closed eyes. It wasn’t an empty, somnolent rambling, but the clear and potent words of a being with no need for the organic apparatus of sight. Oshosi rose to the five-foot stature that the Elder’s body allowed him. But the flashes of orange fire-light across his dark, taut skin and deeply-wrinkled face made him enormous with fierceness. He spoke deliberately at one of the crouched savages, and produced in him an instant and reverent reply. Oshosi nodded and accepted what was told him. He moved to the perimeter, where the light died quickly away into absolute darkness. He turned his blank, craggy face, with eyes closed, out to the inestimable vacuum of the night, and began an absurd pantomime. One after another, Oshosi sent flying his invisible arrows. Seven points along the circle, seven outward directions, and each flinging made with a great pompous drawing back and release of the bow-string.
Thus the circle was properly defined. It stood out brightly in the black sea of the night veldt as the only island of scrutable activity. Elsewhere and unseen, the night was filled with restless animals carrying out their most secret behaviors. In the ring, Oshosi himself set to working. He kneeled before the calf and with a long puff gave it a blanket of gray smoke. Then with a dark metal blade and a quick struggle, he took away the dignity of its head. The motion was so rapid that the blood gushed out before the animal could make even a faint protest. One of the attendants quickly placed a small half-gourd beneath the neck to collect the copious red flow. Oshosi made another cut, shallow this time, from the jagged edge of skin where neck had met head, down to the animal’s penis, then around it in a circle of gray, wrinkled skin. The skin was peeled away revealing ribs and an unpenetrated visceral sac. Oshosi ran his hand over the glossy, pink tissue and motioned for another object to be handed to him. He took one of the gourd bottles with a narrow neck and poured a thick, milk-white liquid over the pink, skinned area. Then with a slow, circular massaging motion he spread the thick milk out in deliberate strokes, making the animal’s splayed middle, and his own right hand, resplendent and other-worldly in the fire-light.
All the grisly manipulations were carried out with such efficiency and briskness, that the calf seemed more likely to have been untied and let wander off, than to have been so easily and so quickly transformed to its present condition.
Oshosi continued, after the passage of several long minutes. Minutes that were made to seem even longer by the silence and by the way the flickering flames fought the wind and swelled, flashing over the slaughter, cauterizing time, causing exploded images to linger horribly in the mind of any observer. The wait had permitted the white milk congeal somewhat, making it a glutinous layer over the warm gut sac. When it was no longer tacky to the touch but powdery, Oshosi plunged his one gleaming hand through the barrier, into the hot pulp beneath. As ably as he saw in the world through the old man’s shut eye-lids, so did he see into the animal’s dark, moist interior. So that when the hand - which no longer gleamed but now dripped with the dark innards juices - was withdrawn, it brought out the one blue-green, finger-shaped organ it had been specifically seeking. The gall bladder came out, trailing from its end an umbilicus, a remnant of the tissue that had anchored it to its place of utility within the calf’s gut. Then with a neat snipping sound, Oshosi bit off the web-like tendril, and held up the slimy, blue-green treasure so that some of the orange light fell on it and made it into an object of magical adoration.