Our Memory Like Dust Read online

  Also by Gavin Chait

  Lament for the Fallen

  For more information on Gavin Chait and his books,

  see his website at https://gavinchait.com.

  OUR MEMORY LIKE DUST

  GAVIN CHAIT

  Qwyre.com

  QWYRE PUBLISHERS

  8c High Street, Southampton, SO14 2DH

  qwyre.com

  First published in 2017

  Copyright © Gavin Chait, 2017

  Cover image © Francesco Ciccotti

  The right of Gavin Chait to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This author supports copyright. Copyright gives creators space to explore and provides for their long-term ability to sustain themselves from their work. Thank you for buying this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it without permission. Your support will contribute to future works by this author.

  This is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

  ISBNs 9780993191459 (ebook)

  9780993191466 (TPB)

  https://gavinchait.com

  For those we forget.

  For those we remember.

  For the wings and tail.

  But most, for her.

  Table of Contents

  Also by this author

  Title plate

  Copyright

  Dedication

  _

  I WHEN THE GODS MISSPELL WRATH

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  II OUR MEMORY LIKE DUST

  17

  Tales from Gaw Goŋ: Casamance, l’homme qui mourut deux fois

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Tales from Gaw Goŋ: Baana, le génie des eaux indomptables

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  Tales from Gaw Goŋ: Dragon, la brèche dans le mur de la honte

  32

  33

  34

  III FROM FLAME MORE THAN HEAT

  35

  Tales from Gaw Goŋ: Harmattan, la mémoire comme de la poussière

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  EPILOGUE

  52

  _

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Amongst those of the Ghimbala of West Africa, the river genii are neither angels nor demons but – like them – have the capacity for good and evil. The priests of the genii, known as the gaw, sing their songs and lead their ceremonies, inviting the genii to enter their bodies so that they may speak with these spirits and learn what is hidden or ask that they intercede in complex matters. This is dangerous, for the genii have great power and can overwhelm those who lack the will to master them. Get too close and they may change the narrative of the world in unpredictable and destructive ways.

  For stories are not only told, they listen and gather the memory of those with whom they are shared. Names, places and experiences may reappear but be utterly transformed, creating new stories carrying an essence of what it means to be these characters, while telling of lives and paths which may differ entirely.

  This is the story that Goŋ, the greatest of the gaw, told me many years ago, and now I tell it to you.

  I

  WHEN THE GODS MISSPELL WRATH

  There is an arc of fire burning across Africa, its flames now scorching the beaches of Europe. Will we recognize the suffering and hope in the journey of these refugees? Or will we raise a wall of steel and drown their faith in the waters of the Mediterranean?

  Dr Ettien Enkido, Special Rapporteur to Federation of European States, March 2055, closing remarks at emergency spring summit

  Of course I ordered the boats destroyed, and of course it isn’t a solution. But we cannot allow a marauding swarm of illegal migrants to break into our country unchecked. We need time to prepare. There are over six million people trying to get across, and this is only the beginning. We need time.

  Glenn Thibault, Minister for State Security for England and Wales, December 2057, in answer to a heckler at a community forum

  The genii are not testing our faith or punishing us for some historical wrong. It is worse. It is as if they have absent-mindedly forgotten their role in our lives and – in writing the future – have misspelled wrath and enjoy observing the chaos this brings.

  Sidiki Cissoko, parliamentary candidate for Parti Démocratique Sénégalais, campaign speech, 2064

  1

  Sticky, chalk-like dust coats the naked man as he lies curled tightly on the cave floor. There is no light, no sound, merely continuous heat from the rock sweating all around him, and the distant plink of water dripping from the calcified ceiling.

  With each drop he imagines waves rippling across the unendurable blackness and rasping against his skin: relentless sensations haunting his sanity.

  He crawls towards where he knows the bars of the cell to be, finding the bucket of water and drinking sparingly. There is no regularity to when his captors replace it. No way of knowing how long it must last or how much time is passing.

  He had howled and wept the first few days here, demanding they listen, offering any ransom. They kept food from him until he became silent. He tried calming himself, but his fear is crippling, stalking him, restless in the desolating dark.

  Relieving himself in the soil bucket he returns to the rear of the cave where he can feel the smoothness of the wall against his back.

  Something warm and furry brushes against his legs and he flinches, pulling his knees in and holding his ankles. His keening mewl rattles along hidden passages, echoing, haunting and feral.

  Something grunts in answer in the darkness. An outline, squat and with rounded shoulders glowing like dust in a shaft of light. The prisoner no longer trusts his mind and holds up a hand to ward off the growing brightness, doubt and terror clouding his senses. His arm is a silhouette without feature against the gathering shape.

  The beast takes form, a burst of olive-grey fur surrounding a long snout, the canines curved and hugely terrifying. The baboon’s eyes are brown, warm and filled with curiosity.

  Even in his mental anguish, the naked man notices that – though the baboon appears as brightly as if standing beneath the desert sun – he can see nothing else. No light escapes to cast aside the blankness of his prison. His throat is raw with his shrill wailing, and he cringes back against the stone.


  The baboon grips a two-headed metal stave in one hand. He advances on the naked man, who cowers and presses further into the wall, gesturing with his other as if stirring a pool of water, searching in the rivers of memory that coalesce on this place here in the heart of the ancient watercourses of the genii carved through the bony chitin of the earth.

  A fragmentary image of a man with strange blue eyes, and the naked man moans in tepid outrage. The baboon presses at the moment, like a wound, and follows the liquid thread towards a thin, silvery track like a river in the vastness of the Sahara.

  -

  The dust trail of the vehicle ahead lingered in the air, and it was easy to follow behind. The five seekers – two men, two women and a small child of indeterminate gender – clustered in the vehicle with him believed that he would take them to Nouadhibou, and he intended to, but first there would be a reckoning.

  They travelled for hours, always roughly northwards, with the clatter and smash of stones on the undercarriage the only sound, and the sun was beginning its descent when the dust source ahead began to near. There was nowhere to hide amidst the rocky desolation of the hamada, and he simply ordered the vehicle to park alongside the stationary Haval.

  Its occupant had been sitting inside waiting. Now he stood and walked towards them, surprise and unmistakable anguish on his face.

  ‘What are you doing here, Oktar?’ he asked, his strange blue eyes bright, even compared to the clarity of the sky.

  ‘I might ask you the same thing,’ said Oktar Samboa, triumph in his thin smile.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here. You’ll get us all killed,’ said the man, glancing into the vehicle where the seekers were equally confused and uncertain.

  ‘They know where the planes are,’ said Samboa, nodding at the seekers. ‘They stumbled on them the first time they tried crossing the desert. Now we’ll see how much your information is worth to Ansar Dine.’

  A shimmer, and twelve jihadis set aside their invisibility cloaks. They had walked unnoticed over the nearby dunes. They were black-clad and inscrutable inside their turbans and djellabas. By their bodies and posture, though, they appeared to be young, and they held their weapons nervously.

  They began shouting, pushed the blue-eyed man aside and dragged the seekers from the vehicle. The child screamed in terror; the women were sobbing.

  Clearly, they were demanding to know who all these people were. Why was he not alone as agreed?

  Blue-eyes sought those of Samboa and, even here as the prisoner sees this once more, he struggles to understand the expression on his face. Of grief and loss.

  -

  Samboa trembles and shakes, his body prone upon the cave floor, the moment swirling before the gleaming eyes of the baboon. He had felt so certain the jihadis would listen to the seekers and then depart, leaving the blue-eyed man with nothing. Instead he cannot tell who is more panicked: the seekers or the jihadis.

  -

  The blue-eyed man began to speak quickly and firmly; he stepped between one jihadi and the tallest of the seeker men. Smiling, he grasped the man by the arm, as if they were old friends, speaking all the while.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Samboa shouted, willing himself forward as the blue-eyed man’s rims translated loudly.

  The jihadis were more insistent, shoving again at the blue-eyed man, pushing one of the women to the ground.

  The blue-eyed man put up his hands, continuing to smile warmly.

  Samboa was close enough to hear him speaking under the translation. To hear him say, ‘This is Oktar Samboa, a colleague, and these are our guides. You would not expect us to find our way here without the support of the Senegalese military?’ A statement that condemned them all.

  Gasping. A moment frozen as the jihadis reacted.

  The shooting did not stop, even after one of the seekers managed to climb inside the Haval, hammering on the controls until the vehicle lurched and drove south, back along the track. His legs jammed between the seats and his torso hanging limply out where it dragged in the dust.

  ‘What did you do?’ shouted Samboa as the jihadis grabbed him, tore his rims from his face and shoved him to the ground. ‘Simon!’ screaming his name. The blue-eyed man looked down at him in sadness before he too was thrown to the dust.

  -

  The baboon places his hand close to the face of the naked man, stifling his scream, digging deeper, following the path into the lives of others, seeing shapes flying over the desert, pressing at the horizon and casting shadows against the sky.

  2

  ‘Can you see anything yet?’ asked João, peering over his co-pilot’s shoulder.

  They were flying low over the desert, the moon painting a blue line on the crests of the shadowy bruise of the erg almost brushing the fuselage below. The A380 was an ancient carcass salvaged for this one flight. At forty years old, it was still younger than any in the convoy flying behind them.

  Vitor, his eyes hidden behind the disposable visor incongruously wrapped around his temples, flicked his eyes instinctively out to the horizon. For a moment, it was almost as if the face of a beast, with a burst of fur surrounding a long snout, stared at him from the dark sky.

  He shook his head, glancing down at the flat console stapled over the cockpit controls. A clutch of wires snaked from it and into the control panel, rewiring the obsolete systems into its more modern computer.

  For the last hour, their concentration on navigation had given way to a strident fear. They were almost out of fuel.

  ‘Either that transponder has a really short range, or we missed it,’ said Vitor despondently.

  João opened a bag of chocolate biscuits from the pile behind his seat and chewed on one. If they missed the landing zone, they would have to ditch the planes well beyond any chance of rescue.

  ‘Two days’ work and retire forever,’ said Vitor bitterly, repeating the pitch which had led them there.

  The Caracas Cartel had been shedding its pilots as it transitioned to entirely autonomous drones. Offered the choice between flying model planes at amusement parks or a one-time suicidal freight delivery, there had been more than sufficient volunteers from amongst those laid off.

  Five Airbus A380s, average age forty-five, had been acquired. Their seats and fittings had been torn out and their control systems patched. Ten pilots were needed to fly the planes, masked and damped to prevent remote observation or interference, to a specific region in the Sahara, wait for a transponder signal to locate a temporary runway, and land them there. The pilots were then to be smuggled to Dakar and flown back to Brazil on a commercial flight.

  Their pay from this one job would be sufficient to allow them to enjoy a wealthy retirement.

  The catch was that they would be carrying five hundred tons of weapons and one hundred and fifty tons of synthetic heroin destined for Europe. A convoy of planes worth $75 billion would be hunted by both law enforcement and any of the other criminal syndicates. And the planes would be landing in the middle of the world’s most violent and hostile failed state, deep within an aggressively policed no-fly zone, to be met by its most violent and hostile occupants: the jihadis of Ansar Dine.

  ‘You worry too much,’ said João. ‘We’ve done this hundreds of times. Remember when we ditched an entire convoy in the Atacama when that Yanqui corvette caught us offshore?’

  Vitor stifled momentary nausea. They were not inside those planes when they crashed but had been safely piloting them from a distant control room. What had the man said?

  ‘You will be flying blind, without anything but the most basic navigation, low and at speed to avoid pursuit, and no one can help you until you land where you’re supposed to.’ The words delivered in a quiet staccato by the stranger in the Panama hat who had arrived the day before they were due to leave.

  ‘Be sure, they will be listening,’ he had told them, his face obscured in the twilight of the room, and his strange blue eyes hidden beneath the white of his brim.

  ‘
Who?’

  His smile had been wicked. ‘Everyone.’

  In the darkness, each plane followed the lights of the one before and hoped that their leader knew where he was going.

  At a specific time, and for a specific duration, a small short-range transponder was supposed to be turned on to guide them to the landing site. That time had passed and, almost two hours later, they had not yet heard it. In ten minutes, their agreed landing window would end, the transponder was due to be switched off, and they would be lost.

  João reattached his visor, and the augmented-reality display flickered. He could see Vitor holding his virtual controls. He nodded, and authority was handed back to him. Vitor busied himself searching through the aether for the transponder signal.

  As time ran down, they unconsciously began preparing for the inevitable. There was no way to let the other pilots know what they were about to do and, without a prepared runway, these vast planes would be difficult to land.

  ‘How far do you want to fly? It looks like we have about thirty minutes of fuel left,’ said Vitor.

  João shook his head. ‘We’re getting further away from the transponder zone, and we’ve already risked too much. I’d rather land and hope they find us than be shot down by drones.’

  ‘And that box?’

  Vitor had happened to observe as their bosses arrived to inspect the final cargo load. Saw them usher the man in the Panama hat up the ramp for a brief secretive visit into the hold. He was carrying a small square case when he arrived, and he left without it. Vitor hunted amongst the bales of heroin and crates of small arms. He could not find it.

  ‘It’s still better than being shot down by drones,’ said João.

  ‘OK, the others will have realized we’re lost by now,’ said Vitor, his hands numb with fear.