Salt, Sand, and Blood
Salt, Sand, and Blood
MarQuese Liddle
Copyright © 2020 MarQuese Liddle
All rights reserved
ISBN-13: 9798643479093
cover art designed by M.Y. Cover Design
“While many can pursue their dreams in solitude, other dreams are like great storms blowing hundreds, even thousands of dreams apart in their wake. Dreams breathe life into men and can cage them in suffering. Men live and die by their dreams. But long after they have been abandoned they still smolder deep in men’s hearts. Some see nothing more than life and death. They are dead, for they have no dreams.”
— Griffith of the Band of the Hawk
from Berserk by Kentaro Miura
Table of Contents
Opening Invocation
First Verse
Second Verse
Third Verse
Fourth Verse
Fifth Verse
Sixth Verse
Seventh Verse
Eighth Verse
Ninth Verse
Tenth Verse
Eleventh Verse
Twelfth Verse
Thirteenth Verse
Fourteenth Verse
Fifteenth Verse
Sixteenth Verse
Seventeenth Verse
Eighteenth Verse
Nineteenth Verse
Twentieth Verse
Twenty-First Verse
Interlude
Twenty-Second Verse
Twenty-Third Verse
Twenty-Fourth Verse
Twenty-Fifth Verse
Twenty-Sixth Verse
Twenty-Seventh Verse
Coda
Opening Invocation
“Day Dreamer,” droned J’bar from overtop of me, his voice half-muffled by the trickle of warm rain on my face. Only, I didn’t recall falling asleep outside, and the yurt had not leaked since my mother stitched the roof with goat’s skin. That was a decade ago, the year I turned ten, the year my mother took another man and moved into his yurt—a year since the slavers came who traded father to some far-away place. I used to dream of their faces, their squinted eyes and scarred cheeks, and silvered teeth like stars between black cavities. I never told my mother that it was I who poked those holes in the roof so I could see their faces in the sky over Umlomo Village.
It was not until I tasted salt that I opened my eyes—then shut them against the fiery stream of my half-brother’s urine. He started again, “Come on, Day Dreamer, it’s time to wake up,” and I lunged, half-blind, toward the sound of his laughter as he danced outside the door flap. “What you get, Kashim! Leaving me and Baba all of the work!” I wanted to chase after him, hack into his head with my matchet. Instead, I stood there, cursing his name while trying to wipe the piss from my eyes. He’s only ten, I reminded myself.
The years were easier to forget than those faces in the stars that shone over the twinkling beach at twilight. But so too was time like sand. Hands could not contain it no matter how tightly they clutched. Soon enough, J’bar would grow to be his father’s son, long and strong and dark and stupid. There was no wondering why my mother chose his old man. He was responsible, after all, reliable—one of a hundred fisherman of the thousands to ever sail Umlomo’s sea. She knew his seed wouldn’t be another lowly singer’s dog. Useless. A thing to piss on.
I mopped my eyes with the driest fibers of my mattress, yet the rubbing only worsened the sting. So I stumbled from the humid shade of my yurt into the blazing summer sun and groped with my toes toward the lapping of the ocean. A dozen steps and the beach softened underfoot where I crawled like a babe to the water’s edge, scooped as much sea as would fit my hands—scrubbed salt with salt till the water rubbed like sand.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Kashim the Dreamer. His unkempt curls and hollow cheeks were warped in the ocean, and in the foam, his teary eyes swirled red and white with their native brown. That was down in the depths, but on the face of the water, J’bar and his father had already found their niche among the hundred-or-so identical boats. Same place every day. The old man called it his lucky spot, but every fisherman thought that of where he cast his net.
I kicked my reflection and turned for the village. A short walk, a hundred steps west till I spot the others, people packed around yurts and cookfires, urns of boiling ocean or salted fish. Women mostly, wrapped in their family legacy: sheets dyed violet of a thousand crushed seashells wound about their waists, their bloated breasts left bare. Staring at the stretch-pocked bags, I renewed my oath to never grow so ancient.
Our ancestors never grew old in the stories. I don’t mean those who burned their sires bones, but their forefathers. They were the ones whose souls lived forever in tales told during cold nights with only the light of the moon to guide them. They were the ones who stole sheep and goats from the rocky hills, and reeds, fish, and shells from the sea. They didn’t inherit the banners sewn to each family’s door flap. They made them. They painted the spotted cats and cackling hounds, the sea hawks and deep turtles, the sharks and reefs, and the faded waves that decorated the elders’ yurt dead center Umlomo Village.
“In the beginning, all of Umlomo lived under one roof as one family,” Elder Kato had told me on my first day serving the singers. The elder’s words were easier to believe when I was but nine. Their yurt spanned several times the size of the others, and back then, even our paltry watchtower seemed taller than the wool tent it was meant to oversee. I hated that hideous mound of clay, and whoever thought to paint it black—as if we’d no pride of our own, that we had to match the northerners—deserved to have his throat cut. I used to swear that I would tear it down if the slavers ever let us be, as if my hands could have even scratched the pigment.
Young Ishmael was sitting up there when I arrived. Blinded by boredom, he must have had watch all morning given the way he rapped the conch slung around his neck. Didn’t even see me pass beneath his feet and into the elders’ yurt, though I hoped he at least heard me cough as I swallowed plumes wafting from the spirit pipes. The smoke stunk of bowels and ash, yet the seven singers huffed away in
