The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (30 page)

It was called the Invalid's Room.

It had been a mistake, the Mellower's mother explained as she led Tendai and Rita into the dark little chamber. "Long ago, my great-great-grandfather — Vice-president Dashwell Horsepool — you
must
have heard of him — built this house with his own hands. Somehow he left a space at the center. Perhaps it was where he rested his teacup when he was working out the plans. At any rate, when all was done, this space was left. It was too big for a closet and too small for a proper bedroom.

"This chamber" — she lowered her voice — "is where all my relatives have died."

"No!" cried Rita.

"It makes an excellent Invalid's Room — warm and quiet — cozy, you might say. Anyhow, no one else cared to be without windows."

"Sick people wouldn't like it either," Tendai said.

"Fiddle-dee-dee. It's just the thing. No nasty germs drifting about. For a reasonably bright boy, you show a distressing lack of intelligence. Quite a few of my relatives
recov
ered here."

"You sound disappointed," observed Rita.

"For that bit of impertinence you may polish the coal stove tomorrow. This room is the perfect place for a noisy, I might say badly spoiled, little tyrant to have his sulks in private."

The worst part, however, was not the room but the cot. The normal, adult bed — "in which my late husband breathed his last," said Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham — was moved out. Rita and Tendai could hardly bring themselves to touch it. A new, sinister child's cot was rolled in. It was like a cage on wheels. The sides were steel mesh, and a lid with a padlock fitted over the top. It was called a Kiddie Koop.

"Anthony used to get the sulks, too," said the Mellower's mother. "This soon put him right. Why, after a while all I had to say was 'Kiddie Koop,' and he stopped fussing at once."

Tendai could believe it. The sight of Kuda in a cage in a dark airless room made him sick. Rita wept and threatened, but nothing
  
could
  
change
  
Mrs.
  
Horsepool-Worthingham's resolve. She unlocked the Kiddie Koop several times a day, to allow Kuda to go to the bathroom. She certainly fed and bathed him, rubbed him with olive oil and gave him medicine. His physical needs were met, but Tendai believed his brother's illness was worse because he was so unhappy.

Rita and Tendai were banned from the Invalid's Room after Kuda was moved in. They went there anyway, whenever the Mellower's mother was busy. Right now, Tendai could count on her to retire for half an hour. Kuda was sitting up in the Kiddie Koop. His face was shiny with sweat and his eyes glittered with fever, but he was still General Matsika's son. He had kicked at the steel mesh until it was covered with dents. "Get me out!" he screamed when Tendai entered.

Tendai pressed his hands against the mesh, and his little brother pressed his hands on the other side. "I want Mama!" he yelled. "I hate you! I hate everybody!" Tendai wasn't hurt by Kuda's outburst. He knew it was a righteous anger at being caged and not really directed at him. He began to sing a lullaby he learned in Resthaven:

“Shiri yakanaka unoendepi?

Uya, uya, uya kuneni,

Ndiri kuenda kumakore

Kuti ndifanane nemakore."

Beautiful bird, where are you off to?

Come on, come to me.

I am going right into the clouds

So that I can be part of them.

He sang it again and again, as he had seen Myanda do with Garikayi's small nephews. The thought of Myanda made him heavy and sad. Kuda lay down on the mattress and watched him. He sucked his thumb. Presently, his eyes closed, and he went to sleep.

The thing that worried Tendai most was the almost certain presence of dead spirits in the room. The souls of Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham's relatives might be looking for someone to possess. It wasn't bad — usually — to be possessed: the Mellower had a
shave
for storytelling. A
shave
was a friendly spirit with a skill to bestow. But sometimes people died full of anger. They had unfinished business with the world. Their spirits became
ngozi,
and they did terrible things to their hosts.

Tendai took off the
ndoro
and laid it on the Kiddie Koop. He spoke to the unknown ancestor, explaining that this was one of his
children. "Please tell the
ngozi
to stay away. This is a Shona child. Please ask them to wait for an English person." Such as Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham, he thought. He stood with his hands on the
ndoro,
and it seemed to grow warm beneath his fingers. Kuda sighed and turned over on his back. It might have been his imagination, but Tendai thought his brother looked a little less feverish.

Finally, he had to go. He wanted to leave the
ndoro,
but Mrs. Horsepool-Worthingham would take it if she thought it had any value.

Twenty-nine

Arm stood in front of Resthaven Gate. It was as silent and immovable as the stones in the rest of the wall. No one answered its bell. No news, for good or ill, passed out of Monomatapa's country. "Can you hear anything?" he asked Ear.

Ear listened at the door crack. He shook his head.

"It could mean anything," Eye said. "We heard them piling boulders up on the other side. They've decided to ignore the outside world for a while."

"Or they could be sick or starving or killing one another off." Arm laid his sensitive fingers on the gate, but even he could detect nothing.

"Mrs. Matsika said it happened before. Once, about a century ago, they remained silent for fifteen years."

"I just wanted to tell Myanda that Sekai is all right."

"I think we could only do her harm," Eye said gently.

They went down into the subway. Each time they came — and this would be the eleventh or twelfth visit — they found more disturbing evidence of the Masks. DON'T LOOK BEHIND A MASK was freshly sprayed on the gray walls. A train had recently plowed into the platform, after which the driver was discovered with his throat cut. The far end of the walkway had crumbled away, but still people crowded into the remaining area.

Ear, Eye and Arm had little trouble walking because people edged away from them. Arm could see over their heads, but unfortunately his eyes were no keener than the next man's. He thought he detected an unusually large woman shouldering her way through the crowd.

"It's her! It's her!" Eye suddenly cried out, clutching Arm's sleeve.

"Who?"

"The She Elephant!"

Arm drew his Nirvana gun, and an immediate hole formed around him. "They've got guns!" someone yelled.

"It's the Masks!" someone else shouted. People dove for cover behind benches. Men skidded along the cement; women screamed. They threw themselves on top of children to protect them. The children yelled even louder as they were suddenly squashed by falling mothers, grandmothers, aunts and older sisters. At the same instant, two trains thundered in, one on either side of the platform. People whisked into the cars like flies disappearing into the mouths of frogs. The doors clanged shut. The trains lurched off with the guards watching anxiously from the windows. In a moment, the platform was deserted.

"Well, that was clever," said Eye.

"You're the one who yelled about the She Elephant." Arm stuffed the Nirvana gun back into his shoulder holster.

"Don't blame me. I didn't charge down the platform like Shaka Zulu and his troops."

"Oh, sure! You shout, 'Fire!' in a crowded theater and wonder why people get hurt!"

"Comrades! Comrades!" cried Ear. "It doesn't do any good to fight. The point is, what was the She Elephant doing here?"

Arm and Eye stopped squabbling at once. They looked up and down the tracks. A few people were descending to catch the next train.

"The General caught Knife, Fist and Granny, but there's an all-points bulletin out on her. You'd expect her to lie low." Ear folded his ears as a small boy began to throw a temper tantrum by the candy machine.

"Look at that. She's buying him candy," said Arm disapprovingly as the boy's mother fed money into the machine. "I'm not going to let Sekai get away with things like that."

"Go on. She wraps you around her finger like wet spaghetti," Eye said.

"Pay attention," said Ear in exasperation. "The She Elephant was down here. Do you suppose
she's
looking for the children?"

"I never did trust the report that ex-gang member gave the police. She was lying through her filed teeth." Arm frowned as the boy screeched and tipped over a garbage can. "Sekai would never do that. She's too refined."

"She's only three weeks old," said Eye.

"Keep your mind on business! The gang member might be working for the She Elephant — or the Masks. I think the She Elephant might have some idea about where the children went. At the moment, it's our only clue. I wish we knew which train she took." Ear opened his ears to their full extent and waved them at the little boy. He squealed in terror and buried his head in his mother's skirt. "That hurt, but it was worth it."

"We do know where she went," said Eye. He, of course, was able to read the subway schedule in the shadows at the far end of the platform. "It's rush hour, and practically everyone is heading out. At 4:51 both trains were going to Borrowdale, so it doesn't matter which one she took."

"Well, well," murmured Arm. At 5:02 they squeezed into another car loaded with glum passengers. They rattled and swayed in unison until they reached Borrowdale. Then they walked up and down the platform, as they had done on almost a dozen other occasions, and waited for something to happen.

"Borrowdale is mostly English," said Ear, who was mostly English himself. "Does the General know anyone here?"

"We went over that. There are members of the English tribe in the army, of course, but none of them is a close friend of the Matsikas," Arm said.

"We're overlooking something," Eye muttered. He went to the end of the platform, kicking aside the litter the cleaning robots hadn't got to yet. "Hello! What's that?" He knelt at the edge.

"Be careful! The rails can kill you!" Ear held on to his friend. The air around the magnetic rails shivered with lethal coldness.

"I can see a little bag —"

A train rumbled out of the tunnel. It glided to a stop a few inches over the super-cooled track. Ear, Eye and Arm waited for it to depart. The commuters glanced uneasily at them before scurrying up the steps.

"I can't reach it," said Eye when the cars had moved on. So Arm lay on his stomach and stretched his long arm toward the little bag. He felt a mist of ice crystals settle on his fingers. If he touched the rail, his hand would freeze and shatter. He inched forward a fraction, touched the cloth and felt the cold bite into his fingers.

"Careful," whispered Eye.

Arm found the loop of string with which the bag was tied. He hooked it around a finger and jerked it up. A second later, he was rocking back and forth on the platform. "It hurts!" he cried.

Ear quickly fed a coin into a machine and plunged Arm's fingers into a steaming cup of coffee. Arm groaned as the heat fought with the extreme cold. "Ahhh. That's good," he sighed at last.

"I learned to do that from a City Scout manual," said Ear proudly. Then they set about examining the little bag. It had been frozen solid, but the ice crystals were already melting.

"It smells, you know,
ripe"
Eye remarked. "It reminds me of the village where we grew up."

"Chickens," said Ear.

Arm turned the bag over in his hand. The contents were surprising, but the cloth was even more so. It was a scrap of ancient bark material tied with a twist of sisal. Arm had never seen anything like it outside a museum. "This came from Resthaven, I think."