Ancestor Stones Read Free Page A

and called for him to come back. That was when she took my name away from me and gave it to him. If only he would come back, she promised, he would be the firstborn. She traced his features with her fingers. The baby opened his eyes, black eyes. He stared back at her. And he decided he wanted her. That was how it all began. This thing between him and me. Because his first deed in this world was to take from me what was mine.
    We were twins. People thought we were lucky. They used to touch our heads as we passed by. Tap, tap. Stall holders called out to us: ‘Eh,
bari!’
Twin! And they offered us delicacies to taste and gave our mother their best price without the bother of haggling. Women bending over their cooking pots lifted the lids and called us over. One month after our birth, our mother made an offering at the house of the twins: chicken eggs and palm wine, foods the spirits like to eat.
    When I had three teeth my brother still sucked with his gums. My mother gave me a wooden spoon and a bowl of rice pap. I followed her wherever she went, holding my spoon. One day she sat on her stool and I leaned against her knees. A duck passed us with tiny ducklings trailing in her wake, like porpoises following a fishing boat. Wherever the mother duck walked her babies followed, attached to her by an invisible thread. She stroked my hair: ‘So who is my duckling?’ she asked. Me, I would have cried, if I had known how to speak. She bent down and caught a baby duck in cupped hands; she let me stroke the downy feathers before she released it. The duckling raced, wings flapping, towards its mother. I laughed. But when I saw my brother on my mother’s lap, still suckling with his old man’s gums, stroking her breast and squeezingmilk from her nipple, I felt jealous. I wasn’t so pleased to be her baby duck any more.
    The women who had witnessed my birth called me Nurr too — because I was the true firstborn, because they had already left the chamber when my brother arrived and didn’t hear my mother make him her promise. They thought maybe I would return. Because that’s what the first child often does. They had forgotten that my mother had children before, when she was married to another man. That happened in another place. They could only see what was before their own eyes. So they called me Nurr, a thing to be discarded, slung on the heap. That’s how people thought then. The bodies of children who wasted their mother’s tears they threw on the rubbish mound outside the town. Nobody would bury such spirits next to their very own relatives under the flamboyant trees.
    I could walk first and even carry him. My brother barely bothered to learn to use his own legs; he knew I was there to bear his weight. One day our father informed his uncles that he had decided to leave the place where we lived to start a plantation. The land was there, you see. And so we left to found our own village. Outside the town, beyond the ring of light and into the elephant grass we went. I trailed my hands across the towering stalks, as thick as bamboo poles, grazing the tips of my fingers. And then we entered the darkness. High above us the monkeys cavorted and screamed our names. The crows laughed at our foolishness; a woodpecker darted ahead of us, rapping out a warning as it went; orchids dripped nectar on to us and it slid down the backs of our necks; we skirted great boulders and waded across pools of black water as the path closed up behind us. I looked up the dizzying trunks of the trees stretching far, far into the sky. I tried to see the sun.
    Single file, we went. At the front the snake man with a long stick and a pair of dogs. After him my father and the diviner who led him to the new land. My mother walked a respectful distance behind them. My father had new wives by then. They walked behind my mother. I’ll tell you the rest of their names when the time comes, not now. Then I had eyes only for my