Disaster Was My God Read Online Free PDF Page A

look! Of course. They forgetthe old lady. Instead, they are throwing down ropes. Ropes to take
him
out first, the great Arthur! Before even his poor sister!
    “Did you not hear me?” she cries. Before thirty witnesses, like a devil, it leaps from her throat. “Are you deaf in your ears? I said her first—
her
, not him.”
    Good, so she said it. Good. Then she looks down at him, helpless as a mouse squashed under her two black shoes.
    “Wait for heaven, Arthur Rimbaud—big shot, you! This time you will wait and like it, boy, just as I have waited on you.”

Book One   
Godlike Birds
    THE CARAVAN TOWN OF HARAR
IN ABYSSINIA, NOW ETHIOPIA, 1891

1The Bastard’s Last Day
    Every morning at dawn they emerge from the desert, black women with earthen red jugs, tall, thirsty jugs atop their heads, their hard-calloused bare black feet squeaking as they pound down the long, broken road, through the floury red dust.
    See them in the pulverizing sun. Wrapped in shawls of white cotton, two long and tremulous forms start up the mountain, their tall jugs making them look like giants in the distance. Miles they will walk up this mountain, then miles back through the volcanic desert, and all for one jug emptied upon arrival by begging children and fiery, wooly-haired men in raw cotton tunics carrying long black spears and heavy daggers—white-eyed warriors who snatch and gulp their fill.
    But today it is not just the water that brings the women out of the desert. It is the news, the gossip, which is juicy, like a burst mango, especially on this, the Bastard’s last day.
If
it is his last day, that is.
    On this point there is much debate, competing rumors, the biggest being that the Spice Woman, the very girl the Bastard dishonored, will at last confront him. Avenge herself. Humiliate him in some way. No one wants to miss
that
, the humiliation of the
frangi
, the foreigner.
    “Look at the sun,” says the taller of the two, a quick, sharp girl, pretty, with a wide gap between her front teeth. She slaps a vicious fly. “Come on. If we don’t hurry, he will slip away.”
    Then at the next pass, a third joins, then a fourth, then a fifth, this one carrying a basket piled high with juicy dates—dates with pits they spit,
pthu
, when they speak about him.
    “This is the day,” insists the date woman, bossy and a big talker but often right about such matters. “A woman from the caravan told me. Five men pulling twelve camels—
twelve.
” Her eyes grow wide with irritation. “Don’t you understand? The Bastard needs four camels
just for his gold.
”
    “Just once,” says the youngest, staring at the sky, “just once I want to see his face. Frangi devil.”
    “No,” squeals the oldest, a very beautiful woman, a real looker. Scared of the devils and jinns, she wears on her chest an ornate silver cylinder containing a message written by the sheik himself, abjuring any who might cast doubt upon her virtue with the evil eye. “I will not look! Never, at those eyes of his—of that
blue
. But please, if an evil urge makes me look, promise! Seize me hard by the hair!”
    Then everything changes. With just a few feet more of elevation, suddenly all is green and cool, jungle palms, date and banana trees and, on the ground, a small clan of the long-faced gelada baboons, several with babies clinging to their backs. Then, round the next bend, a bad omen. Hunkered atop a white-boned tree, four enormous vultures can be seen, slouching black heaps with absurdly tiny heads—white, like centipedes. Then the young woman squeals, ducks as they hear:
    “Pheeeeeeeeeee—”
    The great shadow swoops. Seizing the jug upon her head, she looks up, to see him silhouetted against the sun. Amazing, the creature is almost the size of a man, an angel with two pumping swells of wing. And higher, circling in the clouds, wings cutting like scimitars through the blue sky, dozens more of these magnificent birds can be seen—the great kites of Harar,