CAITLAN:
900 years the English trampeled us 'neath their natty boots. I canna abide cruelty. I canna stand blasphemy. And I'll nae stand for the bloody stupidity that hands it down from the powers above.
I dinna ken why the fey chose me. I still search the holy book, and still I hear the we'ens cry. I know we're nae immortal. That gives me some comfort. And while I'm here, I will help.
FONG:
I had it easy. I was just a mall brat. But my grandpa fought in the big war, and he got my folks out of China when Mao marched into Peking.
He didn't deserve to die in a plane crash. Sometimes I still have nightmares. I'm not smart, but I've been called, I guess. Grandpa fought all the hard battles, so I'm gonna make him proud. I'll save everybody. After all, I'm gonna be sixteen forever.
GRANNY:
Listen. Can you hear? The silence. When one is old one longs for the security of family. More than that, one longs for meaning.
Power is nothing, you know. Without activity the mind withers as any other muscle would. You have to keep yourself engaged. If the mind goes, the body soon follows.
I hadn't had any meaningful purpose in a long while. Here I can serve. And I don't want to be alone.
QUENCH:
There was never any question about me going into the service. Our fathers did and their fathers before that. It was just what people did. My generation just had the bad luck to be handed a war based on deceit--like the one we're in now, know what I mean?
Fires are a cleancut kind of battle...guess that's why I took up firefighting after my last tour of duty. There's no ambugiuty, it's between you and the flames. In 1985, the flames won.
I died, and I was brought back. I thought I'd seen the last stupid war in my lifetime. I was asked to provide my expertise, to make this team work with a minimum of bloodshed. I get that. This time. we're gonna make things work.
________
New Fiction--
DRU's STORY
The Ummah Islamia is supposed to recognize the brotherhood of all mankind, and Mohammed was given the divine mandates to make certain that justice was done. I remember Mother reading me the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. There were a lot of points that left an impression on me. 'Human life is sacred'--'Man is born free'--'There is no compulsion in religion'. Father explained that with these rigths came the obligation to carry them forward. Our Preamble even says, 'slavery is abhorred'.
So imagine how outrageous it was to read in the Christian media that slavery was alive and well, and what's worse, it was being practiced by my Islamic brothers, against my Islamic brothers. I was 14. My parents refused to believe, but the stories trickled in over the coming years.
The stories I heard about this place called Mauritania seemed to come right out of Queen Victoria's time. It's easy to ignore one report, but when they pile up, year after year...What could I do? How could I prove it wrong?
When I died I had the opportunity to discover the truth for myself. I didn't require any special powers; I'm not sure it'd have been right for me to have any. Allah has no partners. So when my sponsor asked me what my fondest desire was, Mauritania was where I wanted to go. He asked if I was sure--really sure!--but I insisted.
"Very well," he said. We traveled to the shores of the Senegal River in West Africa. I asked when we could begin, and he said "Right now." That's when I got clocked in the back of my skull.
I was dragged behind a droopy camel to a stone house near a village mosque. We followed a short tunnel in the main wall which opened onto a two-tiered courtyard. The house was dark red on account of the mud and dung coating the outside walls; this I learned from personal experience. The upper level was built like a terrace where the two main rooms of the house met, and every window looked out on the courtyard.
Mauritania I've learned is this backwards country with few natural resources. The people are mostly nomadic, which is probably for the best. The land is mostly Sahara with some villages scattered in the sands. Now the seacoast's got beaches you wouldn't believe, and the fishermen at Nound work with dolphins to score whole shoals of fish. I didn't see that until later, either.
My, umm, escorts thrust me into a sitting room where my new Master introduced himself. He explained my duties, or tried to before I interrupted and said he was mistaken, I too was a Muslim and therefore could not be his slave and since we were brothers in Islam--
Man! I didn't think the very idea of our being brothers could be that offensive. He shot off those cushions and beat me bloody with his cane. That night, and all subsequent nights I spent tucked in a pen on a corner of the stone house. I shared this accomodation with his dogs and camels.
For the next several weeks that was my life, caring for his sheep and other animals, and cleaning up after them. My food was brought to me by another slave. I'd eat with the animals, drink the same water and share the same sleeping space. I'd learned that was all I amounted to for them--just another animal.
It wasn't all bad. Days began with the arrival of swifts over the courtyard. Around midday russet colored sparrows came down there for the shade. Yeh, bugs came too, right on time for supper, when the Martian-like mists covered the village and the owls made a couple passes overhead. The bugs usually vanished with the fall of night.
The other house slaves didn't believe when I told them they'd been emancipated under the law, that the Islamic Delcaration forbid slavery. Why are we not free then? they'd ask. And I got beaten. A lot.
It didn't help that the Master's children were brats. It was like Cinderella and her sisters--fetch me this, dress me, clear my place. I worried most about Ibrahima. She arrived from Senegal via the kidnap express four weeks into my stay. She was like a mouse, hardly muttering a peep besides 'Yes Master' or 'No Master'. She became the newest plaything of those two brats' abuse as a consequence, and the cause of my first encounter with the Camel treatment.
I heard the dishes clatter, followed by childish sneers and cries of "Faaather! Ibrahima broke my favorite dish--on purpose!" We scrambled to pick up the fragments, but the head slave shoved me to one side. He ordered me to finish cleaning while he dragged Ibrahima towards our waiting Master. I winced with every fresh crack of that cane into her back.
She was barely alive when a fellow Celestial and I broke into her shed. The bloody welts were raised across her back like an offset checkerboard. Shreds of her blouse clung to the dried strips of back flesh. My friend carried her sleeping lump through a Celestial sinkhole to safety. The unholy shriek of that thing must have woken the entire house, but when the Master arrived they only found me.
In answer to his bellicose conniption I told him, rather stupidly, "I got her out of your clutches, you lazy assed cocksucker."
While the other slaves were gathered from round the house, the head slave and two others dragged me to the courtyard and hoisted me across the back of a skin-and-bones camel. My ankles they strapped together tight beneath its belly. While every house slave watched, they led that innocent camel to a trough and let it drink.
As cold as the night was, sweat dripped down my spine as its belly began to swell. My ankles popped first. Then the knees popped in their sockets. The crack of bones rocked me; I didn't stop shuddering from that point on.
Yeh, I screamed. I couldn't stop, not while my thighs and groin were distended. Finally the hip sockets popped. Every wrench of cartlidge and tendon brought fresh jerks in my limbs, and fresh screams.
They left me--they LEFT me there, for all the slaves to see. My 'Master' did nothing to alleviate the agony, though he did remark that it was a waste. Now he'd have to replace two slaves.
They could have left me there for three days chafing my legs. After a day and a night, though, even with all the regenerative powers at their disposal, my sponsors decided that enough was too much.
I remembered the rescue like it was a dream, woozy images of the head slave falling unnaturally fast in my mental fog. Two of my brother Celestials cut the bloody straps that had swollen around my ankles. Then they gently bundled me in a quilt, and for good measure they blindfolded that poor camel and took it into the wormhole with us.
I suppose you're wondering why we're in the Sudan and not in Mauritania. Say it's a judgement call. Mauritania is a lost cause; it's what the Sudan could become if the present government doesn't change its genocidal ways. There's still hope for the Sudan, false-President Bashir and company notwithstanding. I have an obligation to try, for all my African brothers, Islamic and otherwise.