spirals, lines tangled into knots.
Danny reached out to touch one—then the sorcier himself stood up from the shadows near the far wall. Danny bit off a startled cry as the lithe old man glided forward. The sorcier was tall and rangy, but his skin was a battleground of wrinkles, as if someone had clumsily fashioned him out of papier maché .
“Pardon,” Danny said. The wrinkled man had been sitting on a low stool, putting the finishing touches to a new drum.
Fixing his eyes on his visitor, the sorcier withdrew a medium-sized drum from a niche in the wall. Closing his eyes, he tapped on it. The mud walls of the hut reverberated with the hollow vibration, an earthy, primal beat that resonated in Danny’s bones. Danny grinned with awe. Yes! The gaunt man’s drum had not been a fluke. The drums of Kabas had some special construction that caused this hypnotic tone.
Danny reached out tentatively. The wrinkled man gave him an appraising look, then extended the drum enough for Danny to strike it. He tapped a few tentative beats, and laughed out loud when the instrument rewarded him with the same rich sound.
The sorcier turned away, taking the drum with him and returning it to its niche in the wall. In two flowing strides, the wrinkled man went to his stool in the shadows, picking up the drum he had been fashioning, moving it into the crack of light that seeped through the windows. Pointing, he spoke in a staccato dialect, which Anatole translated into pidgin French.
The sorcier is finishing a new drum today, Anatole said. Perhaps they would play it this evening, an initiation. The chief’s baby son would have enjoyed that. From the baby’s body, the sorcier had been able to salvage only enough skin to make this one small drum.
“What?” Danny said, looking down at the deep brown skin covering the top of the drum.
Anatole explained, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, that whenever one of the chief’s many sons died, the sorcier used his skin to make one of Kabas’s special drums. It had always been done.
Danny wrestled with that for a moment. On his first trip to Africa five years earlier, he had learned the wrenching truth of how different these cultures were.
“Why?” he finally asked. “ Pourquoi ?”
He had seen other drums made entirely of human skin taken from slain enemies, fashioned in the shape of stunted bodies with gaping mouths; when tapped a hollow sound came from the effigy’s mouths. He knew that trying to impose his Western moral framework on the inhabitants of an alien land was hopeless. I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to check your preconceptions at the door, he thought jokingly to himself.
“ Magique .” Anatole’s eyes showed a flash of fear—fear born of respect for great power, rather than paranoia or panic. With the magic drums of Kabas, the chief could conquer any man, steal his heartbeat. It was old magic, a technique the village wizards had discovered long before the French had come to Cameroon, and before them the Germans. Kabas had been isolated, and at peace for longer than the memories of the oldest people in the village. Because of the drums. Anatole smiled, proud of his story, and Danny restrained an urge to pat him on the head.
Trying not to let his disbelief show, Danny nodded deeply to the sorcier . “ Merci ,” he said. As Anatole led him back out to the courtyard, the sorcier returned to his work on the small drum.
Danny wondered if he should have tried to buy one of the drums from the wrinkled man. Did he believe the story about using human skins? Probably. Why would Anatole lie?
As they left the sorcier’s homestead to begin the trek back to the village, he looked westward across the jagged landscape of inselbergs. At sunset, the air filled with hundreds of kites, their wings rigid, circling high on the last thermals. Like leaves before the wind, the birds came spiraling down to disappear into the trees, filling them with the invisible
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