Swords v. Cthulhu

St. Baboloki’s Hymn for Lost Girls L. Lark

The flowers come first, and then the monster.

This is the first thing Naledi is taught, even before her mother’s name. Four days after her birth, Naledi is carried to the mission church beyond the grove of marula trees. Young monkeys watch from low branches, cheeks stuffed with fruit. The church has battered white walls and a stained-glass window above the pulpit. A bare nail juts from the place where a crucifix once hung.

Ona, Naledi’s mother, drips rainwater onto Naledi’s eyes and tongue through a root, singing the hymns of St. Baboloki and the high god Midomi. She uses a cactus barb to prick Naledi’s finger and smear a dollop of blood onto the white altar cloth. It spreads through the fibers in the shape of a moth.

Ona wraps her palm around Naledi’s small foot.

“I hope you never see the flowers,” she says, while Naledi’s laughter bounces against the rafters.

Naledi grows too quickly for her skin. By the time she is thirteen, she can easily pluck hairs from the heads of the men of her village, but her body feels tight and too warm. Even her hair seems to grow in every direction, reaching like the limbs of a skeleton tree. Naledi’s size makes her feel formidable, even when migrating giants appear on the low plains. Once, she swung her knobkerrie at a bull elephant positioned between her and the well.

Naledi does not remember her father. Her mother claims she has none.

“I swallowed the seed of an ebony tree and you grew inside me. I carved your club from its branches. You and the knobkerrie were born together,” Ona says, showing Naledi how to polish the wood with palm oil. Ona teaches her how to fish and weave a basket and interpret the warning huffs of baboons, but Naledi speaks to the insects all on her own.

“Little darling,” Naledi says to a bee, running her index finger over its honey-yellow tuft. Static bounces between them. “Why do you sing so loudly today?”

Naledi is tending to the nets gathering tilapia in the river. The water is thick and filled with plumes of dust, but spiked dorsal fins carve through the current. Bees zigzag between the tall grasses.

“We can finally smell the flowers,” the bee says, and flies from Naledi’s palm.

The desert has spread to the edge of their village. Naledi can see a sharp designation in the ground where the water dries out, green and gold, like a world divided. Naledi does not venture into the desert. Its sky is low and colorless, and the insects are too quiet. There are centipedes beneath the rocks, but they only whisper soon soon soon.

In the orange fog of June, Ona wanders into the dunes and does not return. Naledi waits with her toes cresting the hard line of sand, but her mother does not reappear. Ona’s husband joins Naledi at the village edge, humming the song of St. Anthony, patron of lost things. After four days, Naledi realizes she will be alone forever.

Naledi flees into the forest. Overhead, monkeys toss fruit pits through drying leaves. She has heard the hymns of St. Baboloki sung by white missionaries, smashing mosquitoes against their arms, but Naledi has never spoken their words herself. She finds a quiet space beneath the ebony tree, and uses the knots in its trunk to guide her prayers like rosary beads.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” a butterfly sings above Naledi’s head. “Your mother will be spared.”

The following day, the flowers come.

The flowers are hardly the width of Naledi’s palm. She is learning how to pluck the feathers from a guinea fowl when they arrive. The midday sun has reappeared between low swaths of clouds, and the insects are warming themselves on exposed rockbed.

“What’s that?” Naledi asks, pointing to the red blossom atop her aunt’s thatched roof. Thaney is twenty. She does not have a husband, and seems to mistrust the men who bring her salted meat in leaf wraps. Once, Ona attempted to explain Thaney’s curse, but Naledi had been distracted by flies singing a conquest ballad over Ona’s beer jugs.

Thaney has cropped hair and three fingers on her left hand. Ripped away by a hyena, she claims, but Naledi watches Thaney sloppily sever the head of a bird and thinks otherwise. At times Thaney’s shadow appears as that of an enormous dog.

“You’ve been practicing with your knobkerrie?” Thaney asks, without looking to see what Naledi is indicating. This is normal. Naledi thinks that her gift of speech with insects does not extend to human beings. Words seem to fall from her mouth garbled.

“No,” Naledi says, because it is the truth. She has no idea what Thaney hears instead.

“That’s good, Nal. Finish with this bird and have some figs by the river.”

Naledi does, and takes the knobkerrie with her. It is a slender rod topped by a knob of ebony. Naledi has only ever used it to slaughter her aunt’s birds, but the right strike can fracture a man’s skull.

“Why do you hide your face?” a butterfly asks, landing on a reed by Naledi’s side. Its antennae stretch toward Naledi, as she presses her feet into mud. Flower bulbs are pushing through the soil, but Naledi cannot see the scarlet of their petals yet. Her heart feels like a knob of rotting fruit.

“My mother is gone.”

“We told you, she is safe. The Adze will be with us soon.”

“What is the Adze?” Naledi asks, but the butterfly is captured by a draft and flung into the scrublands.

“Wait,” Naledi calls, but nothing responds. She can smell men returning from the plains with slaughtered springbok on their backs. It is a day like any other day, but her mother is missing, and the earth feels like it is bubbling with pressure, like a vein.

Naledi uses the end of her club to carve an X into the mud. Around her lines, the new plants quiver, but none sink back into the earth.

From the distance, Thaney calls Naledi’s name over the wind. By the time Naledi arrives home, flowers are blooming across their village like a flood.

Thaney sacrifices one of the birds that evening and spreads its blood over the door of their home. Naledi goes hungry, picking at strands of cooked pumpkin. A fly sticks to pulverized vegetable matter on their tabletop, but is too panicked to respond to Naledi’s questions.

“Stop buzzing, girl. I know your mother warned you not to speak to things that can’t answer back. You should be praying.”

“I did pray. When I pray, nothing talks back,” Naledi says, and Thaney stares as if Naledi has spoken a foreign language.

Naledi’s mother warned her of no such thing. Naledi’s mother had been able to tell the week’s weather by the flight pattern of pied crows over the field. Her mother had once transformed into a flock of sparrows to avoid an angry buffalo rooting through their garden.

“What is the Adze?” Naledi asks, scraping a tendril of pumpkin from beneath her thumbnail.

“Did you hear that word from one of the men? I’ve told you not to follow them into the bush anymore. It’s old hunters’ talk. There were other gods, before the saints came. To speak their names now is blasphemy. Eat your food,” Thaney says, although they have no more food.

In the village it is always hot. When Naledi wakes the next morning, her sweat leaves an outline of her body in the sheets. She had been dreaming of a single point of light weaving between trees. Outside, crocodiles belch up the day’s first meal. The breeze smells of stomach acid.

Naledi leaves the latrine to discover flowers are sprouting from cracks in the earth. Petals drop from tree branches. Blossoms are stacked atop other plants like a conquering army. The neighbors are standing in the path leading to their home, knee-deep in red. Their goats seem unfazed.

Thaney emerges from the house, carrying Naledi’s knobkerrie. She is wearing a white dress that ignites in the sun.

“Have you prayed today, Nal?” Thaney says, swinging her eyes back and forth, like a hunter who has heard a snap in the darkness. She holds the knobkerrie toward Naledi, and Naledi’s hand reaches out unbidden. “Go to the church where your mother baptized you. Spill some blood for Baboloki.”

Naledi stumbles onto the trail that connects their home to the mission church. The path is obscured by flowers so bright they seem to exude heat. The people of the village line Naledi’s trail, hands flattened across their brows, squinting into the vast plane of opened blossoms.

The chapel is, for the most part, unused, and blockaded by a sheet of climbing vines. Once, a reliquary containing St. Baboloki’s molars had been tucked into the niche above the altar. The crucifix and the relics are gone now, and Naledi does not know if the ground remains sacred with the source of its power missing.

Naledi pushes in the door with her shoulder, remembering that curses are always transferred through the palm. Inside, a man is seated in the northeastern pew, curved forward piously. He wears a pith helmet like the white men on the coast, but his skin is dark like the sky after lightning.

He does not unfold when Naledi takes a step into the building. The chute of light from the open door halves the interior of the chapel. She moves sideways into the darkness.

“Sir,” Naledi calls, but the man in the pew takes a long moment to turn. In the contrast of the chapel, his eye sockets are filled by yawning gulfs. Two flies knock against the bridge of his nose.

“You can come pray, if you like. Although, I’m afraid once the flowers bloom, it means the Adze is already on her way.”

“The Adze?” Naledi says, watching her bare foot move forward into the dust. The crown of her hair brushes the chapel’s ceiling.

“The Being of Light, the Six-Legged One. What’s that you have, girl?”

Naledi transfers the knobkerrie to her left hand, so she may wipe the sweat from her palm.

“My mother made it. It’s just a trinket.”

The man in the pith helmet stands, and Naledi sees that he matches her in height, with arms that seem to swing unhinged against his sides. She does not recognize his face, but his suit reminds Naledi of the European generals who pass through on their climb to mines in the foothills.

“No one has ever told you about the Adze? Insects love to gossip.”

“I’m just here to pray, sir. You should leave out that window.” Naledi says, thinking of the way Thaney flinches at the sound of shouts in the night. Naledi wonders if the flowers are blooming inside them too, like a bundle of poison in their bellies.

“But you’re here to pray to me, aren’t you?”

“Don’t play,” Naledi says. “Out the window, please.”

“Your choice, little seed,” says the man in the pith helmet. He disappears a moment later, but it is as a swarm of flies that hum radiantly in the pink light of the stained-glass window.

“Wait,” she calls, watching the pith helmet drop between the pews and roll full circle. The flies briefly hold the shape of a man before being swept away. The knobkerrie feels heavy. It drags Naledi sideways as she moves toward the altar, shoulder pressed against the chapel wall.

Naledi retrieves the pith helmet. Two flies have been flattened against the rim. She scratches her forearm, unsure of whether or not she feels the swelling lump of a bite beneath her nails. Outside, a herd of springbok grunts in alarm, and flowers tumble in through the open window.

Naledi puts the helmet on, so she can use her hands to pray.

The Adze arrives before Naledi can finish her affirmations. Naledi knows this because the calls of the springboks are briefly silenced, and then the roof of the chapel breaks open.

Or rather, it is knocked away by a hooked claw at the end of an enormous leg. Naledi glances up to see a phosphorescent blue underbelly, protected on three sides by a thick carapace. She ducks beneath a pew and watches the segmented body slowly pass, as splinters of the chapel tumble down. A support beam grazes the edge of her helmet.

Naledi waits for the chapel to stop trembling before pulling herself toward the knobkerrie, which has rolled to a stop against a leg of the altar. Naledi’s limbs feel poorly constructed, as if their connective tissues have snapped. Her breath sounds like a rock tumbling down a well.

“She’s here, She’s here,” two wasps sing, as Naledi climbs over the ruined chapel wall. The great thing has started downhill, and Naledi can no longer see its arched back over the summit.

“What was that thing?” Naledi says, surprised by the sound of her own voice.

“The Being of Light. The Great Pollinator. Eater of Flowers.”

One of the wasps settles upon Naledi’s shoulder, but she swats it away before it can sting.

“Why did it come here?”

The wasps move around each other counterclockwise.

“You should have let Baboloki tell you,” they say in unison.

In the valley below, there is screaming.

“You can talk to the saints,” Naledi’s mother tells her, four days before she flees to the desert. “They listen, even if they don’t always answer.”

“Why won’t they answer?” Naledi asks. She is hammering goat meat with a mallet while her mother stirs vegetable relish. Earlier, Naledi had been plucking pods of tamarind from their neighbor’s tree. Tomorrow morning she will wake early to soak the lentils for supper. Naledi’s life revolves around food. Her hands smell of earth, always.

“The saints were once human too. They have their own whims. They are distracted easily. One might argue it’s not in one’s favor to attract too much of their attention. But sometimes, if they’re feeling helpful, you might be able to bribe them.”

“With blood,” Naledi says, staring into the mottled meat below her.

“Blood, sometimes. Gold. Herbs. But women like us, we can be more — creative.”

Naledi wishes she had asked her mother what she’d meant, but she’d been served a basket of fried bread, and her mother had let her taste a glass of home-brewed beer. Naledi had fallen asleep drunk, with a pleasant effervescent feeling in her stomach.

“Baboloki! I have your helmet,” she cries now, because she can think of no other offering. The Adze has left behind a trail of trees like broken fingers. A springbok lies flattened along the riverbank. She runs in the direction of the village, following enormous claw-shaped footprints.

“I have the knobkerrie. I have blood. Answer me.”

The swarm of flies floats above her head, unimpressed.

“I can bring you fish. I can bring you a goat. I’ll bring you the Adze, if you just answer me.”

The flies grow in density until they are able to form the silhouette of a human. After a moment, Baboloki’s features emerge from the mass.

“Did you say the Adze?” buzzes St. Baboloki.

Naledi did, but she does not admit it. There had been long, oiled hairs jutting from the Adze’s legs. She cannot remember if she had seen its hooked jaws or only imagined them, strong and sharp like those of a dung beetle.

“Do you want your hat or not?”

“No, no. It looks better on you, and the Adze is the only thing this village has worth offering,” Baboloki says. His body has mostly reformed from the swarm of flies, but his hands still dissolve into humming points. “Sacrifice the Adze, and I will bless this land so that flowers may never grow here again.”

“I don’t know how to kill it,” Naledi says.

“You and the knobkerrie were seeds together. Do what a seed does,” says Baboloki. For a moment, his dark eyes reflect the volcanic red of the blossoms. Naledi had been afraid of the Adze and its long, clicking limbs, but there is something dark and nasty in the hollow of Baboloki’s smiling mouth.

“I will extend the protection of the saints,” Baboloki says, before he tips Naledi’s pith helmet over her eyes, knocks a knuckle against the forehead, and then scatters, droning.

It is not difficult to catch up to the Adze. It moves slowly, pausing to slurp up great mounds of earth. The long barbs on its tongue spear through flowers in the soil. Naledi watches it crush the first three huts at the edge of the village. The air is filled with the snap of wood and bones breaking. Naledi’s knobkerrie feels heavy in her hand, and electrified, like the wetlands after a lightning strike.

“Wait,” Naledi calls after it. “Listen.”

The Adze blinks. Its eyes reflect every facet of the landscape, and for a moment Naledi is filled with vertigo.

“Um, hello,” Naledi says, noticing the soft patch between the Adze’s armored chest and head. She thinks it is very likely that she will die today. Naledi pictures her mother stoking fire over a fallen tree, and wonders if death is the same as wandering into the desert.

“Hello,” says the Adze, as it scoops up more flowers and several goats with its tongue. A hoofed leg slips from its mouth. Around them, men and women with bundles in their arms disappear into the bloodied dust.

“I was wondering if you could answer something for me.”

The Adze drops an antenna toward Naledi’s face and tips the lid of her helmet. Naledi feels as though she has been pushed backward out of her body. The Adze’s buzzing vibrates her teeth.

“If you hurry. The flowers will not be at their ripest for long.”

“Why did you come here, large one? We’ve never seen anything like you before.”

“I go where the flowers go,” says the Adze, and steps forward, trampling a garden. Yams pop up from their tombs.

“There must be flowers elsewhere,” Naledi says. The Adze’s throat wobbles in the soft gap between plates.

“Not as lovely as these,” says the Adze, and it plunders forward into the village.

Naledi lunges after it. Her arms link around the Adze’s fifth leg. She scrambles up, using the hooked rungs of its exoskeleton. The knobkerrie swings from her belt, and she can feel bruises forming before realizing her hip is being struck.

“Stop it. You’re itchy,” the Adze says, as Naledi pulls herself toward its head.

Below them, villagers flee their trembling homes. Naledi sees an arm crushed beneath the Adze’s forked claws.

“You stop it. You’re destroying my home,” Naledi says. They are still a mile from Thaney’s house on the hill, but the flowers have grown heavy and tall, and they droop onto the rooftops. The air is dense with yellow pollen that clogs Naledi’s throat. She imagines it settling in her lungs, and flowers bursting from her open mouth.

Naledi attempts to wedge the knobkerrie into the soft stretch of tissue that connects the Adze’s body to its head. It rears, sending her sliding along the ridges of its abdomen. Nectar pours from the gap between the Adze’s jaws.

“Please don’t do that,” the Adze says, as Naledi scrambles to deliver another blow to its neck. The knobkerrie bounces as if hitting rubber.

The calluses on her palm feel as though they’ve been whittled away. The Adze flicks an antenna in her direction, but Naledi only feels the rush of air that follows. A plan forms in her mind, whole but vague. All hunters attack at the throat, Naledi knows, and she has seen the Adze’s soft trachea expanding and contracting from the ground.

“Listen,” Naledi calls, scrambling toward the Adze’s head. One of the antennae slices through a cloud. “You’re going too fast. You’re going to run out.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, small thing. The flowers always come back,” says the Adze. It flings its antenna back again, and this time Naledi is able to wrap her arm around it. Sensory hairs scrape Naledi’s stomach. What pollen shakes into her mouth tastes like fruit rind, neither sweet nor bitter, but unquestionably unpleasant.

The Adze wags its head and Naledi falls backward. The sky and flowers briefly mix into a shade of violet. The knobkerrie is bound to her hand tenuously, as if a static charge is all that keeps the wood against her palm. She swings anyway, hoping that if Baboloki has blessed her, then he has also blessed her hands, and they will move against an enemy as if magnetized.

She delivers a blow to the Adze’s throat, but it doesn’t react, except to say, “You’re still around? I thought we had parted ways.”

The pink tongue again unrolls from the Adze’s mouth, as it moves beyond the shattered remains of the marula grove. An escaped bird collides with the Adze during panicked flight. Feathers stick to the nectar on Naledi’s skin.

She lunges for the tongue as it returns to the Adze’s mouth. Naledi is dragged up, catching a protrusion of the Adze’s lower jaw. There is the red of the flowers and then there is darkness that stinks of compost.

We began as seeds, Naledi thinks. She swings thoughtlessly into the softness of the Adze’s mouth, even as suction pulls her downward. The club connects with something spongy, and a moment later daylight thrusts in. Naledi drags herself toward it, but the knobkerrie falls from her palm and tumbles into the darkness of the Adze’s throat.

The Adze retches, sending Naledi rolling forward. Her body swings toward the Adze’s eye, fist ready. It connects, sending octagonal lenses flying from the center of the impact. The Adze stumbles and Naledi falls with it.

Flowers tumble from the sky continuously, like raindrops.

The great creature drops sideways onto the riverbank, and the baboons screech with their heads thrown back. Naledi lands atop its neck. Something viscous and pink splatters against her cheeks. The buzzing briefly lulls, and the world falls silent, aside from the creak of swamp grass bending in the wind.

Then something spears through the Adze’s carapace from the inside. They are branches, growing in intervals as though obeying the pulse of a heart at their center. Their bark is black as the knobkerrie, black as Naledi’s corkscrew hair, and they spread across the Adze’s body, sending fractures through its shell.

“Are you there?” Naledi whispers, watching flowers spill from the Adze’s mouth. Her hands are still attached to eyelashes, but her feet wobble with the Adze’s labored breaths. The branches grow, and their shadows spread across Naledi’s skin like fissures. She does not know if the knobkerrie has grown roots as well, but the Adze’s body feels anchored to the ground and steady, as Naledi’s never will.

St. Baboloki is hovering over the water. His swarm weaves through the reeds in three strands, like a braid. Naledi thinks the sun might be setting. The light in the sky is orange and searing, and the Adze’s shattered eye looks like it has been set aflame.

“Baboloki!” Naledi calls, as the flies settle upon her bare arms to examine a patch of dried blood shaped like a butterfly.

“You did it,” hums the swarm. “I’m impressed. I’ve never seen anyone attack the Adze before.”

“It’s just an insect. It’s just — it was an old thing, wasn’t it? It only wanted the flowers.”

The Adze’s limbs reach for something that does not exist. After a moment, Naledi feels it still beneath her feet. She looks up to see vultures gathering atop the newly formed tree. Hyenas chatter and bark in the bush.

“You destroyed a thing which destroyed. Have you done it in my name?” Baboloki says, drawing back from Naledi and forming itself into the shape of a man. It plucks the pith helmet from her head and drops it atop its own.

“I suppose,” says Naledi. She pictures her mother, mashing lentils with a round stone. The image comes unaccompanied by context or emotion. In the memory, Naledi’s mother sings the hymns of Baboloki, but Naledi cannot recall the words. She nods. Her arms weigh like roots burrowing into the earth. “She always said the flowers would come, and then the monsters.”

“It is a lovely sacrifice, I must say. One of my favorites.”

“Take the flowers away now.”

“Of course,” says Baboloki.

“You go away too.”

“Unfortunately, as a saint, I am always very much here, in the same way I am not here.”

The Adze is still now, but exudes heat like a ghost pulling itself from a body. Naledi does not understand Baboloki’s statement.

“My mother said the flowers would come first, and then the monsters. The Adze was only hungry. You are — ”

“A saint, I assure you,” Baboloki says, and Naledi watches his dark skin fracture into insects once more. They drop the pith helmet atop Naledi’s head and prick her arm twice before dispersing into the flowers. Twin bubbles of blood grow in increments with her pulse. The flies devour the flowers in great swarms, but also the still bodies of trampled springbok and people. Thaney’s home on the hill is untouched, but Naledi does not see people emerging from their closed doors. There are only baboons, stealing vegetables from abandoned gardens and screeching into the windless afternoon.

Naledi scrubs her arm with a closed fist to keep the smell of the flowers from lingering. Her blood joins the Adze’s.

After a moment, Naledi adjusts the pith helmet to block the barbarous sun of late afternoon. She breaks a length off the knobkerrie’s tree and swings it into the palm her of left hand. Alongside the Adze, moths appear to sing a funerary ballad. Naledi started as a seed, but now she is a branch marked by ruts and crosshatches.

Naledi follows after Baboloki, like a hunter tracking the herds.