Black Pearl (2 page)

The gorillas went first. The huge hands of their leader were sold in the great Ahia market of Cite La Bas as ashtrays. His hide became a rug, his head a massive paperweight. His flesh was smoked and eaten along with that of the rest of his troop. The murderous chimpanzees were worth nothing as ornaments in The Ahia so they too were smoked and sold for food. The black panther's snarling head ended up on the wall of the minister of the interior in his offices in faraway Cite Matadi before even that great folly fell to ruin. His midnight-coloured pelt graced the floor of a Lebanese diamond trader in Granville Harbour. His bones were sold as tiger bones and followed Mizuki's colleagues back to Japan.

As the turn of the millennium came, the last of the creatures in the high canopy were blasted out of existence, either by random gunfire from below or by strafing runs from above as warplanes and attack helicopters sought to terminate the uncontrolled comings and goings of the armies, to bring an end to the anarchy that followed so destructively in their wake as their names went into nightmare folklore: Simbas, Interahamwe, Boko Haram, M23, Lord's Resistance Army, Army of Christ the Infant.

The rainforest became empty and silent, as did the whole country, from the volcanic chain at its heart right the way down to the delta. Even the mosquitoes and butterflies died out, for there was no blood for them to feed on. Moreover, the natural breeding ground of the mosquitoes in the warm, still waters of Lac Dudo were forbidden them by another form of invasive plants. Water hyacinth spread relentlessly upstream from the delta and managed to cover the obsidian surface of the lake in great mats thick enough to keep even mosquitoes at bay.

Eventually there was nothing living on the western slope of Karisoke above Cite La Bas and the black lake except the water hyacinth, the gigantic plant life of the virgin rainforest and such creatures as could find food in the plants but could not furnish sustenance for the endless succession of starving armies. Who then began, in the time-honoured tradition of the place, to eat each other.

The scarred man who cut off Dr Koizumi's head was called Ajani, which is Matadi for ‘
he fights for what is his
'. In some ways the three decades after the massacre by Lac Dudo had been kind to Ajani – he was alive and relatively wealthy; he had a job and a shanty to live in. In other ways they had not – he was crippled and in constant pain, doomed to eke out the last of his days working as a cleaner in the main hospital in Cite La Bas. Unable to apply for what little social help there was – not with a past like his – nor able to afford the drugs he saw dispensed around him, he eked out his meagre wages by a little pilfering. Which saved doctor's fees as he healed himself, and allowed a little extra income from street trading what was left over in The Ahia, where anything could be bought and sold. That was where he had bartered his battered AK-47 and rusty machet when he had finally escaped from the Army of Christ the Infant after twenty-five years of brutal service.

Although he was only in his early sixties, Ajani moved like an eighty-year-old, pushing his broom along the corridors with a stooped back and an unsteady gait. Increasingly regularly now he reeled and staggered as though the floor was heaving. Sometimes this was because of his pain but more often it was because of an overdose of self-administered painkillers.

Ajani was staggering badly as he began the last hour of his life. His legs were hurting unbearably. He had swallowed several handfuls of high-dose Keral tablets stolen from the already ill-supplied pharmacy. He was light-headed and thought his sense of balance must be failing him. But, in fact, the ground was quaking, an effect emphasized by the fact that Ajani was working on the topmost floor of the hospital, twelve stories above street level. The corridor he was sweeping so unsteadily ended with a panoramic window looking north across the city towards the volcanic caldera of Mount Karisoke. Ajani noted dreamily that the unsteadiness beneath his feet seemed to be matched by a disturbing amount of activity up there. He saw much more smoke than usual issuing from the massive crater, but there was no eruption. Karisoke often fumed and smoked – she had done so right throughout Ajani's entire life. However, she had never yet erupted. He was not unduly disturbed.

But Karisoke was playing a trick on Ajani and his fellow citizens in Cite La Bas. She was not erupting – she had not done so this century. Instead she had been quietly filling the huge caldera on her crater with a lake of molten lava, some seven hundred and fifty million cubic metres in volume, fed by a magma chamber nearly twice as large below. The lava was largely composed of melilite nephelinite – light rare earth elements which made the molten rock almost as liquid as water.

The tremors that Ajani felt as he staggered towards the panoramic window and looked north up the vertiginous ten-mile slope towards the volcano's rim were the effects on the lower slopes of a massive collapse in the southern wall of the caldera. The effect of the collapse was that of a dam bursting. Molten lava sprang out in a red-hot river more than two kilometres wide. The boiling rock was at a temperature in excess of one thousand degrees Celsius. Because it was so liquid, it ran like a tidal wave, guided by the heaves and folds of the mountain side round the eastern end of the lake and down through the blazing jungle towards the city below. It came down the mountainside at one hundred kilometres per hour. And that was the speed it was still going when it came flooding into the eastern suburbs of Cite La Bas.

On the twelfth storey of the hospital, Ajani was too high above the streets to see individuals. The window was double-glazed and the air-conditioning fitfully alive, so he heard nothing of their panicked flight southward. All he really saw was a wall of flame-footed smoke that swept incredibly rapidly into the city on his right. He reeled unsteadily, fighting to take in what his eyes were revealing to him in a kind of drug-enhanced slow motion. Fire ran relentlessly through city blocks. Vehicles of all sizes were swept aside, burning, exploding. Buildings reeled, collapsed, ignited. Petrol stations detonated as though hit by bunker-buster bombs. Power went out. The air-con choked – then the back-up generators kicked in and gave it the kiss of life. Ajani bashed his forehead against the glass as he strained to see more. He watched, unbelieving, as the red flood swept through the airport, covering the runway and sweeping at last into the massive avgas storage tanks. The explosion as they blew apart shook the hospital more forcefully than the collapse of the volcano wall had done.

Ajani fell backwards and hit his head on the floor. He pulled himself erect and reeled to the little cubicle in which he kept his equipment. Here he vomited so forcefully that the whole world seemed to shake and swirl. He passed out into a coma deep enough to block out the shrilling of the hospital's fire alarms and the bustle of rushing feet. During the time he was unconscious, the building was evacuated. All the patients assembled, in beds and wheelchairs as necessary, in the car park outside, well away from every danger of the molten lava except for the sulphurous stench of it. Here they waited expectantly for help. But the flawlessly executed procedure proved useless. For Karisoke was joined by Lac Dudo in another grim little joke.

The floor of the lake, like the floor of the caldera high above it, was hollow. Beneath a thin crust on its southern side was a chamber, sealed for centuries. This did not contain magma but a range of gases, mostly consisting of carbon dioxide but also hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide. As the caldera emptied, pouring lava past the lake's eastern shore, so the bubble burst. The southern section of the lake – far away from Dr Kuozomi's oyster beds – boiled fiercely for several minutes as millions of cubic metres of gas burst up into the air. It rolled in an invisible cloud down the hillside beside the lava, also guided by the various folds of the mountain's topography – and, indeed, that of the valley at its foot where the city lay trapped in a deep depression. It flooded into the western suburbs of the city that the molten rock had left untouched. Heavier than air, it swept into the streets and buildings in an invisible wall five stories high. It filled rooms, apartments, corridors, ventilation systems and lift shafts. It flooded into basements and tunnels. It filled the city's once-vaunted underground train system. It washed through the south-western suburbs and out on to the farmland that clothed the foothills of the next mountain range, then, dammed there, it washed back and settled. It filled the streets and parks, the gardens and the open spaces. It filled the car park where the patients, doctors and nurses were waiting and smothered them all in moments. Everywhere it went it snuffed out life as efficiently as if the entire area had become one huge shower stall in Auschwitz.

So that, although he never knew it, Ajani was the last man left alive in Cite La Bas when he came staggering out of his tiny cubicle and started to look around. The fire alarms were still ringing. The air-conditioning was still wheezing. The lights and signs were all still illuminated. Ajani knew the procedure well enough. If the alarms were on, the lifts were out of bounds. But the thought of going down the twenty-four flights of stairs that would take him down twelve stories was more than the staggering man could contemplate. He hit the button on the nearest lift, therefore, and leaned against the wall, listening as the car wheezed asthmatically up towards him. Apart from that mechanical gasping and the shrilling of the alarm, the whole place – the whole city – seemed silent. Ajani decided that as soon as he reached the ground floor he would check out the pharmacy. With any luck he would be able to get his hands on more drugs. From the look of things there would be a ready market for anything he could steal. Though The Ahia was, like the airport, somewhere under whatever had come blazing down the mountainside.

The door hissed open. Ajani stepped in and hit the ground-floor button. The door slithered closed. Ajani looked at his reflection in the mirror on the back wall. His eyes were watering, he noted with some surprise. Then he noticed that his adenoids were burning. His nostrils twitched strongly enough to make the scars of his tribal Poro initiation writhe like snakes beneath the skin of his cheeks. Abruptly it seemed as though the whole area behind his nose was prickling uncomfortably. He sneezed; dragged his hand down over his face. Sneezed again and gasped. Abruptly, he realized his throat was hurting also. He frowned, shaking his head. Perhaps he had picked something up, he thought. The other cleaners were always getting infections from the wards and the patients. Ajani never had – perhaps because the medications he took were strong enough to keep everything else at bay, along with the pain. He looked over his shoulder. The lift was at the fifth floor. Not long now, he thought dreamily. But the pain in his throat had spread with unexpected swiftness into his chest and he was suddenly finding it hard to catch his breath.

Then, between floors five and four, the lift stopped, so abruptly that Ajani fell to his knees.
Damn
, he thought.
Now I'll have to call for help. That means I won't be able to get to the pharmacy so easily
. He reached up for the alarm button but he couldn't quite reach it. He took firm hold of the handrail which ran at waist height round the car and started to pull himself up. Only to find, with some surprise, that he no longer had the strength to do so.

A sudden realization stabbed through him. He might be in really serious trouble here. He sucked in a good lungful of air to call for help, but all he could do was cough and choke. He gathered his knees up to his chin and hugged them as hard as he could. The whole of his torso seemed to be on fire. Like the volcano Karisoke, burning wildly on the inside. He never really understood that he was being smothered by poison gases. Hardly even registered, in his dreamy, drugged-up state, that he was dying. The lights went out and a huge, dark silence seemed to close over him like the waters of the strange black lake so close to where he had slaughtered the Japanese workers so long ago.

Then, a decade later, the rains came. Torrential, unrelenting, month after month. In a vicious meteorological irony, all the areas of East Africa where huge populations tried to scratch a living were almost totally destroyed by drought. But on the empty and forsaken forests surrounding the Central African mountain chain that is the headwater of the great River Gir – which fed the black lake – five years' rainfall tore down in less than a month. There were mudslides on Karisoke's upper slopes powerful enough to tear down even the deserted virgin jungle. More huge trees joined the monster beside which Mizuki's bones lay. The wide black path of the lava flow – as slick as a highway two kilometres wide even after a decade – was transformed into a wild torrent. Great rocks tore the lower sections into a black moonscape. The deserted, half-buried ruin of Cite La Bas was briefly flooded. And Lac Dudo burst its banks.

As well as his precious orchidarium, Dr Koizumi had overseen the construction of a series of dams and sluices to protect his priceless oysters and the black pearls he hoped they would bear to enrich the ill-fated Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company, which had employed him and sent him and his little team out here to seed the black lake with Japanese Biwa oysters. But they were no match for floods such as these. As the lake burst free of its natural boundaries, so it burst out of the doctor's system as well. The raging torrent tore away the reed bed through which Mizuki had fled, and uncovered the grinning skull which was all that was left of Dr Koizumi. The flood rolled the skull like a boulder into the ruined orchidarium where the precious plants had continued to blossom untended through all those years. It swept them on to a black-foaming crest and washed them on to a bed of water hyacinth.

But the power of the deluge was so massive that it ripped away the floor of the lake as easily as it tore free some of the plant-choked surface, so that Dr Koizumi's skull was joined on the floating bed of hyacinth not only by his beloved orchids but also by a dozen or more of his huge black pearl-rich oysters. And that bed of hyacinth, a thickly woven mat of stems and roots almost as big as a barge, stayed coherent as it was swept down into the river system that the waters from the black lake fed. Miraculously, the orchids, the oysters and the skull remained wedged in place as the hyacinth barge slid over waterfalls and cataracts, through races and rapids until it sailed safely out on to the broad stream of the main river. The river that was the life's blood of Benin La Bas, the great River Gir.