The Vorrh

wilderness.
    Walking into the night, he was in control of his world. He would shape it with the gods and demons into an understanding of forces, each with their own price, marked in blood. He walked to the back of the compound, where his purloined motorbike skulked in the shadows, a puma skeleton of upright metal. He knowingly placed the Enfield in a brass scabbard on the bike. The rifle was named Uculipsa – ‘lullaby’ in his mother tongue. It sat snugly in the dull, scratched metal, itself scratched and dented by abrasion and impact, but with a dense slumber of non-ferrous richness which kept all moisture at bay. Uculipsa was safe here, the flesh of the wooden stock and the muscle and bones of the mechanism protected in the tight, resounding darkness that smelt faintly of metallic blood. He drove past the sentries and the thick wooden gate, out of a past home and into the darkness of his unflinching confidence. The tyres rumbled and bucked a regular pulse against the red earth as he drove towards his encampment and a task he would enjoy.
    He had no hatred of the white men – that would have taken energy away from his purpose. He just knew them all to be thieves and liars. When they made him a police officer in his early twenties, he was already an important visionary for his tribe, a neophyte priest waiting for greater manhood to achieve full status. The prized Irrinipeste herself had seen his value and praised his courage. To be noted by a shaman of such power was a great blessing. When she had asked for the headphones of his cousin, he had willingly given them to her.
    His cousin had died the week before Tsungali’s promotion, after the incident with the invaders. Many of the True People had worked hard to understand and adopt the new ways, converting the foreign senselessness into some usable part of the real world. His cousin had been one of those. He had watched their ways and seen the fetish that they held dear. He had made copies of the things they guarded and held in reverence, assuming that likeness would clarify everything, even make their words become clear, so that all could share the great wisdom. He made compressions of leaves and earth, bound together with spit and sap. He moulded them into the black steps that the white holy men called bibles. He even carried his own, pressed against his heart like the padre of the invaders.
    Yet they had responded badly to his dedication, and confiscated all of the imitations that he had given out. When he’d retreated into the forest and had started building the hut, they seemed relieved and glad of his departure.
    The hut was just big enough for him to enter. Above it, he had erected a very long stick, tying together a collection of the straightest reeds and branches he could find. From this rickety mast dangled a long vine that he had tied to its very top. The vine passed through the roof of the hut, where it was connected to two halves of coconut shell, joined together by a bent twig. This sat on the head of his cousin, one half held over each ear. He, like the whites, was listening to the voices of ghosts floating in the air. Like them, his mast caught them on its line and drained them, down to the cups and into his head. He sat there for days, his eyes tightly shut, concentration absolute. When the invaders found him, they laughed until tears ran pink out of their eyes. He had laughed too, and had given them the headphones, as they called them, to hear the voices.
    The officer had taken the shells, still wiping the laughter away from his eyes, and cupped them over his ears. His smile had dropped immediately and he’d thrown the things away, casting them from him as if they were a serpent. He shouted at the cousin, and told his men to burn the hut down. But the cousin refused to leave, saying that the spirits wanted it this way, and that the fire would pass through the wand, over his hut and into the air, where it would wait to enter the wand on the Whiteman’s hut at another time. He had burnt there. Tsungali had picked up the discarded headphones and watched with the others as the hut, and the spirit-mast above it, collapsed about the squatting figure in the smoke.
    Nobody had understood the incident then, even the invaders who said prayers for the fire and for his cousin’s soul. That understanding would take several years to fully ripen.
    It was after that debacle that they had made Tsungali a policeman. To balance things, he thought, and because