A Novel (33 page)

Sarah scanned the scribbled notes and charts. “You're sure about this?” she said. “You can prove it?”

“The original documents are sitting in the library, where anyone can check them,” I said. “Or they are at the moment. I would move quickly if I were you.”

She thought, but quickly, and then she was packing up her stall, hands quick and efficient, eyes wide with the thrill of risk and the gleam of determination.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked as she finished and stood ready to go into whatever adventure awaited.

There were lots of answers I could have given. I could have said she was my friend and I was trying to help her, or that a great wrong had been perpetrated on her people and it should be brought to light. Both were true, and there were other things—things to do with Berrit, and with Billy, and with the collared weancat—that I couldn't put into words but that were also true.

“Until this gets printed,” I said, “I'm a target.”

She nodded, turned, and broke into a run.

*   *   *

I FOUND MNENGA SLEEPING
in the old Lani cemetery beside a weather-beaten shrine decorated with clumsily carved monkeys. He opened his eyes, one hand flashing toward the short-shafted spear on the ground beside him, but he knew me before his long fingers had closed around it. He blinked, then smiled his radiant and uncomplicated smile. He sat up. He did not reproach me for how long I had been gone.

Before the conversation could go somewhere that made me uncomfortable, I asked the question I had been mulling since I left Sohwetti's house in flames.

“Why are you in Bar-Selehm, Mnenga?”

“I told you,” he began, “the nbezu—”

“Forget the nbezu,” I said. “Tell me about the old man.”

He grew still, his face setting. “Ulwazi,” he said at last.

He read the confusion in my face.

“The old man,” he said. “The one who is—” He gestured with his hands:
Gone, like smoke blowing away
.

“He is why you are here, and you fear he has come to harm at someone else's hands.”

For a long moment he said nothing, and I wondered if I should clarify my phrasing, but he understood me perfectly and eventually nodded. “I
am
herding nbezu,” he said. “But that is not all of the truth. The elders of my village sent me. Ulwazi said white men wanted to buy land from us, but he did not know why. He said he would find out, but then he disappeared. I have been trying to find him or learn what happened to him, but I do not know how to be in the city. My own kind—the ones who live here, the Assimilated—do not want to talk about old men from the bush. I did not mean to lie to you.” He shrugged, and his smile became bleak and knowing.

“Mnenga,” I said, deciding on impulse to trust him as I once had. “I'm sorry, but I don't think you will find him.”

His face tightened with doubt and wariness.

“I think he is dead,” I said. “I think I saw him.”

“Where?”

“At the Old Red Fort,” I said. “He may have been imprisoned there.”

For the first time since I had known him, the Mahweni boy's face hardened and his smile vanished entirely.

“You know the place?” I asked.

He nodded slowly and emphatically twice, and at the end of the second, he hung his head, teeth gritted and eyes closed.

“What have you heard about it?” I asked.

For a while, he said nothing. Then he opened his eyes and shook his head. “Bad things,” he said in a low voice, thick as the darkness gathered around us. “Old things about the war, but also new things. There is a man there, or there
was
. My people call him Tchanka, an old name for a kind of devil. He has the head of a jackal. Comes to your hut at the darkest part of the night, when the moon is down. Gets down very low on his belly and comes in under the door. He takes your children. Eats their souls.”

I swallowed. “Do you know the man's real name?” I asked.

Mnenga shook his head. “Only Tchanka. He was a soldier, perhaps still is.”

I thought for a moment, and an idea that had never occurred to me before spilled out. “If there is a war with the Grappoli, Mnenga,” I said, “would you fight?”

He frowned. “The bush tribes would not be forced,” he said. “Not at first. But we would be stupid to think that war between the Grappoli and the Bar-Selehm would not come to our villages in the end, and I think I would probably fight sooner than that.”

Something in his eyes gave me pause.

“How much sooner?” I asked.

“They say Mahweni stole your Beacon to sell to the Grappoli,” he said bitterly.

“They?”

“The white people in the city,” he clarified. “They say if there is a war, my black brothers in the city will have to decide which side they are on. They say it like the choice should be easy, but I do not think it is, and I think for the bush villagers, the herders, the
Unassimilated,
” he added, pulling a sour face, “people like me and my brothers, who the city ignores till they want our land, we will also have to make a choice.”

“You will stand with the city Mahweni even if they rise up against Bar-Selehm?”

“Rise up,” he echoed, liking the sound of it. “Yes. But not against Bar-Selehm. The city is many things. We would rise up only against parts of it.”

“You'd be killed,” I said. “They have better weapons, trained soldiers.… You wouldn't stand a chance.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “That is possible,” he said. “But the Grappoli also have better weapons and soldiers. If we are going to die, better it be for what we believe is right.”

The weight of the previous week pressed down on me, and I suddenly felt weary and sad beyond measure.

Again he shook his head, this time like a whinnying orlek, as if to clear it. “I am sorry about Kalla,” he said. “You would have made a good mother.”

“If you actually think that,” I said, “you haven't been paying attention.”

“Paying?” he echoed.

His confusion annoyed me. Even in the moment, I was ashamed of the feeling. “I wouldn't make a good mother,” I said. “I'd make a terrible mother. If I've learned nothing else over the last few days, I've learned that.”

“No!” he said. “You cared for her. You kept her safe. When things are calm and you have a good husband—”

“No,” I said, my voice louder and harsher than I meant it. “I climb chimneys. I hurt people. I put the lives of everyone I know at risk.”

“No,” he said. “You are a good person, Anglet. A beautiful person—”

He extended a hand to mine but I ignored it, getting quickly to my feet. I knew he was trying to be helpful, supportive, and though I could see something else in the way he looked at me that I didn't have time to reflect upon, I appreciated it. But the extent of my failure crowded in on me and made me bitter.

“I'm grateful for your help, Mnenga,” I said in a voice that showed no gratitude at all, “but don't think you know me. You don't, and it's better for you that way.”

He blinked as if I had slapped him, and though I was struck with sudden remorse, I could think of no way to mend the moment except by leaving it.

“I'm sorry,” I said, turning and walking away before I could change my mind.

*   *   *

THAT NIGHT AS I
was making my way back to the Martel Court for a few hours' sleep, I heard the sound of chanting and followed it to look. In Unification Square, a crowd of Mahweni had gathered, and I saw that among the Assimilated majority were men and women in the homespun weavings and animal skins of the tribal herders. They all sang, rocked back and forth like a basin of unsettled water, their voices full of suffering and anger. Earlier in the day, one of the white rallies had replaced the effigy of the Grappoli ambassador with the puppet of a black man with wild hair, broad lips, and staring eyes. They had burned it in a metal drum, but some of the Mahweni had recovered the remains and it was now the repurposed focus of their own protest. A company of white dragoons was watching the writhing, boiling fury of the crowd with growing unease, and when I saw one young officer nervously unbuttoning the flap of his pistol holster, Willinghouse's words came back to me.

The very brink of disaster …

 

CHAPTER

31

CORPORAL TSANWE EMTEZU LIVED
in Morgessa, the largely black area on the northeast side of the city, close to the Ramsblood temple, an orderly neighborhood of small, well-maintained terraced houses with tiny front gardens where roses and the sandalwood-scented heylas grew. Most of the people who lived there were factory workers and tradesmen. Their children went to Hillstreet School or, if they were religious, to Truth Mountain, which was run by Pancaris nuns. Most left at twelve, going on to apprenticeships or, like Sarah, straight into employment.

Emtezu's wife opened the door, cradling an infant only a couple of months older than the one I had left at Pancaris. She was black, though I had seen other wives and husbands in the neighborhood who weren't, and she looked me over, her face carefully empty. When she led me through into the back, she moved with unstudied economy, graceful as a dancer, and as we passed the foot of the stairs, she called up, stilling the movement and childish laughter that came from above without raising her voice.

“When I come up there I expect you to be ready for school,” she said.

She led me into the kitchen, where her husband was sitting at the table, staring at a newspaper. He did not seem surprised to see me.

“I suppose I should be glad I'm not being arrested for the way I took you to see Sohwetti,” he said. He glanced at his wife, who was fussing by the sink, and I could tell his casualness was feigned. “Am I likely to be?”

“No,” I said. “You didn't know what you were leading me into.”

“It seems I had our leader's priorities wrong,” he said bitterly.

The front page of the
Morning Star
on the table in front of him blared,
SOHWETTI SIGNS SECRET LAND DEAL!

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

He sat back and folded his arms. “It's not yet clear whether what he did was illegal or not,” said Emtezu. “It will cost him his political position, of course, and probably a lot of money, not least of which will be in refurbishing the state residence for his successor. It seems there was a fire there after I left.”

He said it carefully; a statement, not a question.

“Apparently so,” I said, considering the competing images on the front page, a formal portrait of Sohwetti and a rushed, blurry image of the burning villa. “I was lucky to get away unhurt.”

His eyes held mine for a moment, then he nodded. “So yes,” he said. “Sohwetti is finished, and rightly so, though his fall will please some a good deal more than the Mahweni he represented, and that is less good. He was not a great man. He had his weaknesses, but he served my people as well as himself, and his disgrace reflects badly upon us.”

“He will be replaced,” I said.

“Yes. In time. And after a good deal of squabbling, all of which will allow our political enemies to regroup and consolidate. Until then, the unrest will build. Bloodily. If we are forced into a war with the Grappoli over the stolen Beacon, men like me will have to play riot policeman to thousands of my people who do not want to fight and die for a mineral they could never afford to buy and are not allowed to touch. Then I will have to decide which way to turn my rifle, and that is not a day I look forward to. I am glad to see you well, Miss Sutonga, and I mean you no harm, but your appearance has not been good for me or my people.”

“I understand that,” I said.

Emtezu's wife pushed a ceramic mug across the table toward me, then returned to the sink. The baby she was cradling in one hand was asleep. I sampled the drink. It was cool and fragrant, a sweet wine made from flowers.

“So what can I do for you, Miss Sutonga?” asked her husband. “I assumed matters were concluded, but your presence here suggests otherwise.”

“The missing Beacon has not yet been recovered,” I said. “And I don't think the Grappoli have it.”

Emtezu just sat there, head tipped slightly on one side. When I matched his silence, he eventually shrugged. “I'm sorry,” he said, “are you accusing me of something?”

“No,” I said. “I'm trying to make a connection.”

“Between what?”

“Between the disappearance of the world's largest piece of luxorite and the death of an old Mahweni in the Red Fort.”

He waited for more, then just shook his head. “I can't help you,” he concluded.

“What do you know about Archibald Mandel?” I asked.

He sighed, then shrugged. “Not much more than you, I imagine,” he said. “His command was only nominal, particularly since he became a politician. I barely saw him.”

“So the running of the fort fell to…?”

“Sergeant Major Gritt,” he said.

He spoke the words carefully, without inflection, but I felt the sudden stillness of Emtezu's wife. It was as if a cloud had crept across the sun.

“That's the man with the cane,” I said. “The sword stick.”

He said nothing, but looked away for a second. His wife had still not moved a muscle.

“What are you driving at, Miss Sutonga?” he asked, unfolding his arms. “You come into my house with no authority—”

“Exactly,” I said. “I have no authority. Nothing you say to me has any legal weight. Everything is off the record.”

He stared at me, and there was doubt in his eyes.

“Have you heard the term ‘Tchanka'?” I asked.

The static charge in the room seemed to leap. Emtezu's eyes widened, but he shook his head.

A lie.