The Lies of the Ajungo (Forever Desert #1)

by Moses Ose Utomi

THERE IS NO WATER in the City of Lies.

In exchange for water, the Ajungo demanded the tongues of every citizen of the City of Lies. It was a twofold price, a price of blood and a price of history: an untongued people cannot tell their story.

There are no heroes in the City of Lies.

And all came to understand: There are no friends beyond the City of Lies.

Tears are precious, his mama always said. Don’t waste them on your enemies. Save them for your friends.

He prayed for a little water. Not too much, but enough that he could keep going. The whole city needed him, after all. And the gods answered his prayer. They said no.

It had been so long since he’d had the freedom to cry. That’s what crying was—freedom. You could only cry when there were no more urgent responsibilities. Only when there was no one watching you who depended on your strength. Only when the people around you wouldn’t take advantage of your tears. Only when you had enough water in your body. Tears are precious

Tutu saw the Vulture hop down from his camel and raise his spear in both hands like he was preparing to plant a flag. Tutu saw the man’s fear. He saw his bravery too. He saw his sense of humor and his love of raising rabbits and his violent temper and how tired he was in the mornings and how restless he was at night. Saw his confusion over the order to kill another child in the desert. Saw his regret at killing innocent women, even ones who had attacked him. Saw his justifications for all those atrocities, his acceptance of the lies he’d been told and the lies he’d told himself. Lies and lies and lies stacked one atop another. A one-man city of lies.

Just then, everything Tutu had learned over the last six months came together with chilling clarity. “You have water, but need Eyes,” he said to the Blind Man. Then he looked at Asilah. “You have Eyes, but need iron. And I…” He looked down at the sand, ashamed of how young and foolish he’d been. “… I have iron, but need water.” “And yet all of us,” the Blind Man said, “are from the same place.” “The City of Lies,” Asilah said. The Ajungo had done it to three different cities: preyed on the people’s desperation, offered them a broken deal, then named them liars. But how? How much power did the Ajungo have? What else were they capable of?

“Seeing,” they told him at the beginning of every training session, “is conviction.” The power came from translating understanding into belief, from standing so firmly in one’s knowledge of the world that the knowledge itself became an armor—and a weapon. The more Seers knew, and the stronger their belief in what they knew, the more powerfully they could absorb and channel the energies around them.

But there was a cost to Seeing. Whatever damage he inflicted, he felt himself. A large part of a Seer’s training was numbing oneself to the sensations of the world—to joy and sorrow, anguish and euphoria alike.

“All power has a price, young Tutu,”

“Is this what the Ajungo hate so much?” she asked, wiping drip from her nose and sniffling. “All we want is to be happy. To enjoy those we love. Is this what they work with so much passion to take from us? Can their greed not be satisfied?”

“Young Tutu, I thought you were clever,” the Blind Man said sharply. “Have you ever seen Ajungo? Have you ever heard the drums of Ajungo soldiers in the distance? Have you ever smelled Ajungo fires on the wind? Of course you understand.” Funme put her arm fully around him, drew him close. “There is no Ajungo,” she said gently. “There has never been. Only our own obas. Only us.”

It taught me that life is filled with lies. There are the shallow lies that can be uncovered by a light wind. And there are the deep lies whose roots extend further down than the eye can see. Lies we don’t uproot because we are afraid of the emptiness they will leave behind.

He knew she didn’t understand. Seeing was about conviction. The better you understood the world and the more fully you believed it, the more powerfully you could See. None of the elites of the three Cities of Lies really understood the world. They knew the big secret, of course. They knew that all of history was a lie told to instill fear in those whose fearlessness could have rewritten it. They knew the only Ajungo were themselves. They knew power. But they didn’t know powerlessness. They didn’t know what it meant to have your gods stolen from you, leaving you blind to your own past. They didn’t know what it was to be deprived of iron, waiting helplessly for monsters to come ruin everything you loved. They didn’t know how it felt to live in a world with no friends, no heroes. A world of never-ending thirst. And their ignorance made them weak.