A Novel (37 page)

Mnenga's among them.

The idea shocked me, but a part of me was sure it was true. The city blacks would revolt against the rich whites who were leading them into war, and the Unassimilated would come to their aid, bringing spears and hide shields to fight men with machine guns. For a second, I could see his face in the crowd, proud and open and strong even as the gunfire rang out.…

Sureyna looked anxious and checked over her shoulder as I approached. I spoke urgently, telling her what had happened at the warehouse, all I knew and suspected, so that she took out her pencil and started scribbling.

“You need to go to the police,” she said.

“That's your job,” I answered. “There are some things I have to do first, and not all of them are strictly legal.”

“Why am I not surprised?” said Sureyna.

I gave her a bleak smile. “I have no choice,” I said. “I have to end this before anyone else gets hurt. And, Sureyna?”

“What?”

“This is not about the Grappoli. It never was. Say so. Say it clearly.”

She nodded with grim understanding, then—as if remembering something important—snatched one of the newspapers from her stack and thrust it into my hands. “There's a follow-up piece in there you are going to want to read.”

I looked at the cover story. For a long moment, the headline stopped my breath and closed my eyes. It read:

SECRET LAND DEAL COALITION CROSSES PARTY LINES

And there were photographs.

*   *   *

BREAKING INTO THE HOUSE
on Canal Street was no harder than finding it. I entered through a third-floor window accessed via a downspout, emerging in a well-appointed bathroom. The house was empty of people, as I had expected it would be, and though I moved silently from room to room, I felt no sense of danger. The Lani decorations in the bedroom gave me pause, but I swallowed back any feelings of sadness and remorse as I rifled the office cabinets till I found the charts I had been looking for. The locations were scattered, but I knew what connected them because I had seen the same locations in the land deal records in the library. Each one was marked, the same topographical symbols circled on each map: a broken, wavy line that might have been a stream intersected by a slash mark, over crowded contours. The locations, however, were miles apart, scattered all around the bush north and west of the city. I needed to narrow my search.

In my heart I had suspected it would come to this, though I had hoped to find another way, and I climbed out of the windows and down as if carrying a great load.

Outside, a squad of dragoons was clearing the road. A curfew had been imposed on the city. The streets would be silent until I either unearthed the truth at last, or Bar-Selehm devoured itself in blood and fire.

*   *   *

IT TOOK ME ALMOST
an hour to reach the Lani temple on the edge of the Drowning. I did not think Mnenga would be there, would not blame him if he wasn't. And if he was, I had no time to discuss what was on his mind. So though I ran every step of the way, I dreaded getting there, and feared finding him almost as much as not.

He was there. He stood up when he saw me, and his smile was lit by relief, by hope. It broke my heart to see it, to know that I was breaking his, but I had no time to soften the blow.

“I did not come to take back what I said before,” I said. “I'm sorry. I came to ask you about something.”

“You do not treat me well, Ang,” he said, sad rather than angry. “Do you know this?”

“I know,” I said. “You are right. I know and I'm sorry. But I must ask you this.”

He looked away, his eyes squeezed shut as if he did not want me to see his face.

“Please,” I said. “I will ask nothing more of you after today.”

He turned back to me then, his face hot as if I had slapped him. “What about me?” he said desperately, hating to have to put it into words. “After today, what about me?”

I looked down and tried to find something to say.

“I see,” he said in a hollow voice. “Very well. Ask your question.”

“Mnenga,” I said, “it's not that I don't—”

“Ask your question,” he repeated.

I took a breath. “The old man,” I said.

“Ulwazi,” he said. “It is important that you call him by his name.”

“Ulwazi,” I said. “Yes. I'm sorry.”

“You said he was dead.”

“He is,” I said. “Where did he come from? Before he came to the city, where had he been?”

“The bush,” he said. “The mountains.”

“Yes,” I said. “But where. Show me.” I rolled out the maps.

He peered at them, then me. “What is this about?” he said.

“I will tell you everything,” I said. “I promise. But right now, I just need to know where he was before he came to Bar-Selehm. Your people saw him after he had been sunburned and before he came to the city. Where was that?”

Mnenga scanned one map and shook his head, then considered another. “I do not understand these,” he said. “I cannot read them.”

“Look,” I said, trying not to sound impatient. “Here is the city. These are the mountains. The ocean is here. See? We are here, so the bush goes this way, away from the river.” I turned the map and pointed.

He nodded thoughtfully, then leaned over the map and put one dark hand over it. “Here,” he said. “There are … high walls of stone.”

“Cliffs?” I said.

“Cliffs, yes. And streams when the rains come with—” He gestured vaguely with his hands: something rolling down.

I gently pushed his palm aside and put the tip of my index finger on one of the circled topographical symbols, the stream, broken by a short line.

“Waterfall,” I said.

*   *   *

I TOLD HIM HOW
to find Sureyna and—on impulse—gave him the address of Pancaris. Perhaps with Willinghouse's help, the nuns would let him return Kalla to Rahvey so she could make one last appeal to the elders. I had to try. The orphanage was a terrible place, and I couldn't set off for the old freight line that snaked out of the Riverbend sidings without feeling like I had at least tried to save the girl from it. I may never get the chance again.

So I hopped on the back of a locomotive hauling a mixed cargo of coal and grain, knowing that I was asking too much of Mnenga, but that there was no one else I could trust.

Trust.

I reflected on the word miserably as the train slid its slow way north, leaving behind the weedy, soot-blackened brick of the railway yards, the signal boxes, and gravel access roads as we circled the city like an aging lion, then began the climb toward the mountains.

And who do you trust now, Anglet? Who, apart from the Mahweni boy you have rejected, will stand by you now?

I rode on the footplate because cargo can shift with the movement of the train, crushing those unwise enough to be sleeping between pallets. Not that I would be sleeping. The sun beat on my arms and face, sweat ran down my neck, and the noise and smoke from the rattling engine overwhelmed my other senses, but I had never been more awake in my life. I watched the increasingly wild and ragged bush, catching sight of a herd of black wildebeests and a loping group of rinx giraffes—the ones with the gray and yellow mottling—but no people.

I had never been comfortable outside the city.

Suddenly, strangely, I found myself missing Papa again, and I wondered if the day he died had been the day I stopped trusting anyone.

They would be ahead of me. I knew that the moment I saw the empty house. The police, and maybe a reporter or two, would be following, but my enemies were ahead of me.

Curious that people I barely knew could be my enemies, but they were, and not merely because they wanted me dead, something they would feel more strongly with every step I took toward the point marked on that map. I was more than an inconvenience to them, someone who would upset their plans. I stood for something. Or they did. I wasn't sure what those things were exactly, but I knew they were opposites, and that was why we were enemies.

The collared weancat prowled my mind.

I didn't study the map, but as soon as I saw the water tower, I started looking for a place to jump down where I was least likely to turn an ankle. There was no cover to speak of, just elephant grass and the occasional thorn tree, and no way to go but to follow the streambed till the slope became a cliff. If they were expecting me, they might pick me off with a rifle long before I got there, but I was trusting their arrogance and condescension. They didn't think me worth watching for.

I was fairly sure of my destination now, the only spot where Ulwazi's wanderings overlapped with the parcels of land sold by Sohwetti. The rest, I was sure, added up to little more than a ruse, a screen so that no one would notice the one location that mattered.

Well, I had noticed, and as soon as I was certain of all the details, they would answer for their crimes.

At the edge of the dried river, the grass had been beaten flat, and I could see the prints of work boots. Lots of them. Deep wheel ruts and hoof marks crossed the riverbed back toward the city, and under a wizened marula tree I found an abandoned water cooler and a helmet. A work team had been here recently.

I wanted to believe that they were all gone, but I knew they weren't. My enemies were here to bury their traces for the time being, and if I didn't find them quickly, they might still walk away rich and free. I couldn't wait for assistance—if it would ever come—from the police. I was on my own.

But then, you always are, aren't you? However much you pretend that isn't true, you will always be alone. You are the blind and blundering rhino, hornless, staggering about alone, lost, waiting for death, incapable of protecting those dearest to you.…

I thought of Tanish and for a moment my body tightened, eyes clenching and stomach cramping so that I bent my knees and hunched my shoulders against the sun, hands drawn to my chest like a nun in prayer. A scream of anguish fought to come out, but I bit it down and shut it back inside the dam.

I inhaled, opened my eyes, and straightened up. There would be time for such feelings later. Perhaps.

The rhino had been mutilated. I was whole. I was strong. And the collar was a collar of the mind.

I tied my hair back.

There was a thin trickle of water in the base of the creek bed, but the torn-up grass on its banks thirty yards apart suggested that not so very long ago, it had been a torrent. Then it would have hummed with insects, but now it was silent, and I saw nothing but a pair of dassie watching me absently from the rocks. Nevertheless, I walked carefully, eyes down for hibernating snakes and the giant crab spiders that lived in these parts, picking my way between boulders strewn by the flood the river barely remembered. As the climb became steeper, the river divided like the fingers of a hand, each digit pointing a different route to the high ridge above. I considered it, caught sight of startled crows circling, but could not see what might have dislodged them. I checked the map, squinted into the sun, and chose the middle tributary.

Within ten minutes, I was using my hands occasionally, and within twenty, I was climbing, being careful not to dislodge the scree, which would crash into the valley below. It was hot work, and I cursed myself for bringing no more than my usual water flask, which was already half empty. Sweat ran in my eyes, making them sting, but I could not pause. Not yet.

I have never been so ill at ease climbing. I'm used to smooth brick and concrete, iron and stone, and I know their textures and their natures, what will yield to pressure, what will crack or splinter, how much weight they can bear, and where I might find places to hook fingers or toe caps. For the most part, the rule of these materials is regularity, and it is the breaks in that regularity—the chinks and nooks and crevices—that I know how to find and that keep me up. But cliffs are all irregularity, and while that means more handholds, more places where I can brace myself with knee or foot, the materials are unknown to me. I found that I had no idea what would crumble in my grasp, what might dislodge and fall beneath me, what might tear out as soon as I put weight on it.

I stopped, nestled in a crevice, and shrank into the shade, where I could breathe and slow my heart. Every joint and muscle seemed to ache. If I survived the day, I decided, I would lay my battered and exhausted body down and not move for a week. One way or another, it would all soon be over.

A breeze I had not noticed seemed to funnel up the cliff wall, and I turned into it so that it chilled the sweat that streamed down my face. As I did so, my eyes fell upon a darkness in the cliff above and to my right, no more than twenty yards as the crow flies.

An opening.

It wasn't the source of the dried-up waterfall, which came from higher, but it had probably been screened by that cascade throughout the rainy season. Now it was dry, a curtain had been lifted, and what it showed was a cave—and a new one, at that. There were others in the cliffs, mere natural apses, little more than hollow pocks cut by wind and spray over time, but this was different. Its edges were hard and bright, and below, I could see shards of fractured stone the size of a one-horn. The waterfall had eroded the cliff till part of it had given way, but no one had seen the opening till the torrent dried up.

No one, that is, except an elderly and eccentric Mahweni herder, who had then come down the mountain with tales to tell and fortunes to make.

I flattened myself into my alcove still further. If they were keeping any kind of watch, they would be close by. I checked my satchel. I had a knife with a long blade, as well as assorted chisels and a hammer, but my revolver was still empty.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I shook the thought off, but before it had faded from my mind, I thought of the machine gunners I had cut down, and of Tanish, bleeding in the warehouse. It hadn't been my enemies who shot him, not directly, but his blood was on their hands nonetheless. I tucked the pistol into my belt in the small of my back. Then, once more, and with a sense of looming finality, I did what I always did.