Touch Not The Sacred

Anyi and his father stood at the head of the road, hands on their hilts, eyes fixed on the distance. The grasses were more like shrubs, barely rising above the knee, save for a few blades of elephant grass that poked out much higher. The trodden path was so narrow it seemed there was only room enough for them to walk in a straight line.
‘Hmmm…’ Nnanyi swept the field for enemies as he squatted to inspect the sand. Anyi had heard that in old times, when man was still much in tune with little details, footprints were enough of a marker to identify someone. In fact, they were enough to identify even animals that had been left poisoned, knowing that they would wander and eventually die. However, he suspected his father had something else in mind.
‘There are a lot of prints here, too many different sizes. I can’t make any sense of it. And they aren’t that old either, or the wind would have covered them.’ Nnanyi rose to his feet and stared behind them as if he expected to find someone coming. Anyi’s eyes followed the older man, the lingering feeling of something ominous swelling in his chest. Perhaps a figment of his imagination or a foretelling, he could swear he had seen the pig-man from earlier coming up from the horizon.
‘Draw your weapon.’ Nnanyi pulled his blade out of the skin-crafted scabbard, the blackness of the steel glowing in the sun. Anyi followed with his long knife.
‘Stay vigilant. If you have to, do what you need to. Do you understand?’
Anyi nodded, his stomach churning and his grip tightening on the already suffocating hilt.
The pair moved along the path, ears turning from left to right, hoping that where the eyes failed, the ears would succeed. For at least a mile, there was nothing. Nothing but wild grass that grew wilder, a sun that felt like literal fire, and silence save for the occasional gust of wind. And then, all of a sudden, thunder. This was no gunshot. Nnanyi knew that sound better than Anyi, but even Anyi knew this was something else. The explosion didn’t just crack and die like gunshots did. This one roared, growled, and died in a muffled hum, like real thunder. Soon enough, smoke followed. Like a cooking pot left too long on the firewood, black smoke sprang from the ground and into the sky. And then, another thunder rang out. Like the first, it roared, growled, and then slowly muffled into silence. As with the one before it, smoke began to emanate, but clearly, nothing was being cooked.
‘Go!’ Nnanyi screamed.
Anyi was not sure whether to run towards the smoke or away from it. Yet his confusion lasted only until his father broke into a sprint. All he had to do was follow, and even that was a task. With strong legs practised in wrestling and hunting, Nnanyi ran and ran. Anyi followed as if in chase, and they did not stop, even through more explosions that sounded on their approach.
Soon enough, the ground grew flatter and their vision stretched further. Before them lay a sacred field with more stones than one could count, now partly in rubble. The field itself was empty, but at its entrance Anyi counted at least ten men. He turned to see Nnanyi frozen, tears glistening in his eyes. Anyi knew little of the stories these exploding rocks told, but he knew their destruction would wound his people in the same way they now made his father weep. Tears on Nnanyi’s face—Anyi did not know what shocked him more: the shattered stones or his father’s tears.
‘Abomination, alu!’ Nnanyi screamed at the smoking field, where stones now lay in fractured fragments, far from the once polished dome-shapes the builders of old had fashioned them to be. One of the men standing by the corner pushed something down—a metal bar. As it collapsed into the box it protruded from, another thunder crackled.
‘Nooooo!’
Before their eyes, more stones exploded into a hundred pieces. The sight of it all forced Nnanyi to his knees.
‘What are these people doing? Do they even know what these stones speak of? The histories, the prophecies, the codes we have not even unlocked? Who are these people? Who are these beasts?’
With that last question, a stronger resolve seized his mind, and with it he raised his head again, his eyes burning with anger. He pulled himself up and began to move, not even looking towards his son. Anyi was quick to follow, his long knife still tight in his grip.
The area of occupation was about one or two hundred paces from the stone library. Anyi counted only two pig-men, though the natives were all dressed in the blue pig-men uniform, with badges to mark their ranks and rifles to enforce their power.
‘What is this about? Do you not know Onicha is a custodian of this treasure, not its owner?’
Nnanyi’s rage was heavy on his tongue, and the grip of his blade must have frightened the pig-men, who now aimed at the pair—one at father, the other at son. Nnanyi did not hesitate to move. He threw himself straight at the blue-eyed pig-man aiming at Anyi. Before the soldier could take the safety off, he was on the ground with Nnanyi on top of him. The other pig-man, a junior officer with grey eyes, either did not have a clear shot or hesitated, fearing Anyi would stab him as soon as he shot his father.
‘We met you in the forest!’ Anyi shouted in snake-speak, angry that he knew no pig words.
‘We met you in the forest!’ he repeated, until it triggered something in the man, who swung between aiming at him and his father. On the ground, Nnanyi did not relent, choking the Anglon soldier as he pressed the man’s own gun against his throat. The natives had now drawn their rifles too, but they did not know who—or even what—to point at. Their untrained hands shook with the power of death in their weapons, and their loyalty seemed to break, or at least crack, under the pressure.
‘Seize them!’ the blue-eyed pig-man barked from the ground. Anyi realised then that this was the one leading the demolition.
At least it was a much easier task than a kill order: the confused native soldiers moved to pry Nnanyi off the pig-man, while two others went to hold Anyi.
‘Don’t touch me!’ Anyi waved his knife at them to keep a distance, but he knew that they outnumbered him—that they outnumbered them both.
‘We don’t want to hurt you. Please, do not make us. You are still a child.’
‘Don’t you call me that! I am a man; I have been through the rites to satisfy all customs.’ He waved the knife with hysterical swings.
‘Do not make us use force!’ One of the native soldiers flipped his rifle so that the butt stood where the barrel should. In a short parry, he drove the weapon into Anyi’s chest, the pain sending the boy’s knife to the ground and his body to its knees. Nnanyi watched all this from the ground, where five men had him pinned—one for each limb, and another with a knee on his back as his cheek pressed into the earth. Anyi, who was facing him, could not see what the older man stared at. But he could imagine it. What else would bring so much pain to the eyes of a warrior that it spilled from them? The smell of smoke, mixed with other odours unfamiliar to him, filled Anyi’s nostrils with a sulphuric itch. He tried to move, but the pain was too much, as was the grip of the men who now held him.
‘Gringa, what are these things worth to you—that you would give your life, and even that of your son, for them? Juju stones with no meaning?’
That word was not entirely new to Nnanyi, but Anyi had never heard it uttered before. The grey-eyed pig-man’s use of Igbo was still dull around the edges, his accent tying his tongue, but it was better than Nnanyi’s grasp of Anglon-speak. It might have been impressive, had he not used it to belittle the very people it came from.
‘Juju?’ Nnanyi spoke. ‘You reduce all our ways to a single word beneath truth, as you reduce our being to a single word beneath human. I am not your gringa, and what we practice is not juju. You will not feed us stones and call it pounded yam. The taste will always reveal the truth.’
By now the native soldiers had propped up Nnanyi’s body. His blade had been confiscated, and his arms were fastened behind him in a sailor’s knot. Anyi had long ceased any form of resistance—if not for anything else, then for the safety of his father.
‘These lands now belong to Her Majesty, Queen Bethany Liz II of Anglonland. It is by her decree that all that is ungodly must be destroyed, purged with fire and steel. We are working with the Obi, so your intrusion is actually a crime.’
Nnanyi watched the reddened pale man rattle on about how a new world order was upon the Ogbis and the black-skinned race at large. He spoke of the birth of civilization and used words like modernity, which meant little to Anyi and his father. When he had exhausted himself singing praises of the Queen and his faraway land, Nnanyi replied.
‘These lands cannot belong to anyone. You see, we know that even we who live on it do not own it. We are mere visitors, custodians, born of the land itself. It is only the lost child who claims to have mothered his father.’
The junior officer was silent for the first time, a void of contemplation in his grey eyes.
‘I understand that you are merely a soldier—a hand that wields a sword, or in your case, a gun. But one day you will find that you are much like me, and my son: a man.’
Nnanyi turned to his son and found fear in the young man’s eyes. He spoke only with his stare, but it was enough for Anyi.
A head poked above the horizon, and immediately Anyi and his father knew that what was already a bad situation had turned for the worse. It was the pig-man from the palace, carried on a royal chair by natives so he did not have to walk. With him were three other pig-men, all strapped with rifles. To their left and right, more natives in service guarded with swords and pistols that sat in leather holsters at their waists.
‘What happened here?’ He turned to Nnanyi after he was set down meticulously so he would not fall out of the chair. ‘This one is a real troublemaker, isn’t he? With his little brat of a son.’
‘He understands our language,’ spat the blue-eyed pig-man, barely recovered, anger seething in his voice.
‘I know, and I don’t care. He must be dealt with, this one.’ The palace pig-man walked up to Anyi and squatted to level his gaze. ‘And this one,’ he turned his gaze to his men, ‘we will make him a blue. One day we will.’
‘Alu!’ Nnanyi spat on the floor. The blue-eyed pig-man gave a curt nod to one of his men, and immediately a rifle was smashed into Nnanyi’s temple. On impact, the big man wobbled and then collapsed, blood from his injured scalp leaking onto the clay earth to form a puddle around his head.
‘We should just shoot him here.’ He now aimed his rifle at Nnanyi’s resting body, and the horror of what he was about to do spread across the natives’ faces. Even if they had somehow been spellbound into the ways of the pig-men, Anyi could see that they did not completely agree with this. At the very least, they must have known his father was a titled man, given the marks on his body and the leopard-tooth necklace he wore.
‘But this is murder,’ the grey-eyed officer protested. ‘We are a people of law, not savages like them.’
Anyi found confusion in all the eyes—the pig-men who muttered among themselves and the native soldiers who waited for orders with trembling hands. He wanted to tell them that they were more than the enemy, that right here and right now they could turn the tide. But he knew too many pig-men now spoke their tongue, and he guessed even more understood it. So instead of speaking, he willed his mind to reach them. Soon, he realised it was nothing more than a desperate attempt.
‘There is nothing lawful about what we have come to these lands to do. Naming rivers these gringas have been fishing and bathing in and claiming discovery. Trampling on lands they have inhabited since the beginning of time. Cursing their gods so as to elevate ours. What part of this is civil?’
The grey-eyed officer paused, shaking his head as if confronted by something new, though it was clear that nothing he said was truly novel.
‘At the very least, we do these things to instil a better society. A more moral and optimal civilization,’ he continued, unsure whether he was comforting himself or justifying the Anglon position.
‘Spoken like a true grey-eye. You would believe it if the priest told you the clouds were made of mashed potatoes, wouldn’t you?’ The blue-eyed soldier moved closer to the grey-eyed officer, the badges of rank that separated them becoming more evident to Anyi as he watched. He desperately wished he understood even a little Anglon-speak.
‘If we had come to this place to instil a great civilization, we would do for them what the Murs did for us to end the Dark Ages. We would teach them about Platu, Davis Hum, and El Cant. We would be bringing enlightenment philosophy, not religious shackles sure to bind their minds in darkness for the next few hundred years. We are here because the continent of Solaris is sick of internal conquest and must now branch out. We are here because the new world we hope to build requires resources. And because we are their betters, they must serve us.’
The grey-eyed pig-man seemed stunned by the palace pig-man’s words, though it meant nothing to Anyi, who understood none of them.
‘I just don’t know that we should shoot a man in front of his son like this. Not while they are all watching.’ It was the grey-eyed officer’s last submission, and the finality was clear in his tone.
‘Well, I guess you are right about that.’ The red in the palace pig-man’s face had now given way to something paler as the anger he had arrived with simmered to a stop.
‘Bulu ozu ya.’ He instructed the natives with him, and they moved to carry Nnanyi’s limp body from the ground. Anyi, who spoke fluent Ogbi, knew that the word ozu was strictly used for dead bodies, but he made no attempt to correct the pig-man. Ahu would have been more appropriate, but what did it matter? Three men tried to lift Nnanyi’s body, but it was no longer necessary. His body moved to raise itself from the ground, though blood still dripped from his head. From the looks on the native men’s faces, it was clear they were relieved not to have to carry his massive bulk back to the city.
‘Where is my son?’ Nnanyi asked, even before both legs were planted firmly on the ground.
‘I am here,’ Anyi answered.
‘Good,’ the blue-eyed pig-man chimed in. ‘Now you shall face judgement for assaulting a guard and emissary of Her Majesty and for interfering in Anglon state affairs.’
‘This place is not Anglon, and it never will be. Death is yours, as it is your Queen’s.’
The blue-eyed soldier pulled out a pocketknife and drove it into Nnanyi’s side. With his lips pressed close to the warrior’s ear, he whispered, ‘You think you are something special, gringa? Some kind of hero? But you are just another gringa. We have killed many of your kind. And if you continue to stand in our way, surely, we will kill you too. We will kill you, and we will take your son.’
He pulled out the knife and Nnanyi gasped, clenching his jaw against the pain and pressing his hand over the wound to slow the bleeding. Through it all, Anyi had been screaming: ‘Leave us alone! Go back to where you are from! Leave us alone! Go back to where you are from!’