Chapter VIII: The Scattering

A Note on This Chapter

The Atlantic slave trade was built by human beings, for human profit, and it was carried out by human beings at every level. Nothing in this chapter changes that. In the Knightverge, the Children of Apep did not cause the trade and did not drive it. They did what they have always done: they found a place where suffering was easy to hide, and they went there to feed.

The Pride did not stop the trade either, and this chapter does not pretend it did. What the Maahes of this age did was smaller, harder and more human. They saved who they could, hid who they could, kept the old songs alive in the dark, and refused, for four hundred years, to stop.

Overview

For four hundred years, the Maahes held the mantle on the wrong side of the ocean's edge, and then on the far side of it. They lost their groves, their caravans and most of their stores. They lost their regional arms to war, to fire and to the sea. They lost the copy of the written Roll that had hung in Timbuktu. Eight of the twelve held the mantle without any resin at all and lived ordinary lives, which meant that most of them died young.

And still the mantle kept being passed. It passed to a woman from a queen's household in Matamba, to a woman running a secret road from a slave fort, to a man chosen in the hold of a ship. It crossed the ocean in the dark, and it went on being carried by the people who had been taken, because the people who had been taken were also the people who kept the old songs. By the end of the age, the Pride was scattered across two continents and the islands between them. It had been broken into pieces, and every piece was still alive.

The Shape of the Age

I. The Warning (c. 1492 to 1620 CE)

Four Maahes met the first ships. Mbemba-Nlaza saw what they carried and sent the warning to every arm of the Pride. Nsaku-Kinu and Nkanga-Mvemba both died fighting a brood that fed at the trading posts. Luzia-Mbanza held the new port of Luanda, and hunted among the ships.

II. The Darkest Centuries (c. 1622 to 1728 CE)

Three Maahes carried the mantle through the worst of the trade. Nzinga-Maahes held it for 55 years and saved thousands. Kuvu-Matamba took the oath of the Matamba fighters. Efua-Nana ran a secret road out of a slave fort on the Gold Coast.

III. The Crossing (c. 1730 to 1830 CE)

Three Maahes carried the mantle across the ocean and into the new world. Quamina-Ayo was chosen aboard a ship and became the first Maahes of the diaspora. Adwoa-Kokou stood with the maroon communities of Jamaica. Marcelin-Kouassi hunted a brood in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution.

IV. The Return (c. 1832 to 1910 CE)

Two Maahes began to sew the Pride back together. Sekou-Abiola reconnected the severed cells across the Atlantic. Tunde-Balogun rebuilt the coastal watch under the growing weight of colonial rule.

The Lion's Tears in This Age

There was no resin. The groves of Punt and the escarpment, the Salt Run and the caravan chains across the Sahara, all the roads that had fed the Pride for four thousand years, were cut, seized or abandoned in a single century. Eight of the twelve Maahes in this age held the mantle without any steady supply, and they lived and died as ordinary people.

Three held it at Partial, and each of them did so by finding a small, hidden store. Nzinga-Maahes lived 55 years on a reserve of sealed jars that Amina-Gao's Great Circuit had left hidden in the hills of Matamba, which she used a spoonful at a time. Adwoa-Kokou held the mantle for 44 years on resin smuggled across the ocean in small shipments by Pride cells that had hidden their own stocks. Sekou-Abiola lived to 46 years in the mantle by finding the last stocks that survived in the old cells on the Atlantic coast.

When the resin returns, in the next age, it will be a new supply and a new road. These three kept the Pride from starving in the meantime.

The Children of Apep in This Age

The brood had never had a better age. Before the ships, it had to hide itself carefully, in courts and weighing-houses and the quiet corners of trade. After the ships, it had a ready-made road, a ready-made ledger, and a trade that counted people as goods and never looked at what happened to the ones who went missing.

It learned fast. It travelled across the sea in the holds and the barracoons. It settled in the ports at both ends of the voyage. It fed on the pens, and it kept its distance from the people who did the selling and the buying. It did not need to run the trade. It only needed the trade to exist.

The Pride's old methods did not work. The brood was not in one court or one city. It was in a thousand harbours, moving in and out with the tide. The Maahes of this age fought it one ship, one fort and one island at a time, and never had enough hands. It was not until the trade was ending that the Pride began to see the whole shape of what it had been fighting.

Why This Age Matters

The Scattering is the hardest chapter in the Roll, and the most important to get right. It is the age in which the Pride lost almost everything that made it a Pride: its roads, its groves, its books, its seats. It is also the age in which it proved that none of those things were the Pride.

The written Roll that Mansa-Idris made in the age of gold was scattered by fire and conquest, and the Timbuktu copy was lost outright. The oral Roll that he had refused to let go of survived the crossing in the voices of people who were not allowed to carry anything else. His compromise, the book for the names and the mantle for the voices, was vindicated in the one way no one would have chosen.

It is also the age that made the modern Pride. The Second Circuit, the maroon alliance and the Back Gate Road are the roots of the network that spans two continents today.