The Pirate's Daughter (36 page)

“You are right, Mr. Wilson,” Tulj said. “This is not the Mwtutsi, this is the Hilenga.”

“What happened?” Wilson said. “How did we get here?”

“You remember nothing?” Tulj asked. A green and red dragonfly danced around his head like a halo.

“Last I remember, those sons of bitches were supposed to skin me alive,” Wilson said.

“Yes, you are a lucky man,” Tulj said.

“Where is the Iwo?” Wilson said.

Tulj waved his paddle at the jungle. “Who knows?” he said. “Back with his own people. Might as well ask where the birds go when they fly into the air.”

“And are you a new man?” Colonel Saba said to Wilson. “Did the spirit medicine work?”

“I'm not sure,” Wilson said. He still felt a little thick. He watched Saba dip the paddle into the water and draw it out again. “Actually I don't remember a thing. We escaped from M'Gongo epo?”

“Yes,” Saba said, splashing him with water. “This river is real; it is not a yonopwe-inspired fantasy.”

“How did it happen?” Wilson said.

“In the usual manner,” Tulj said. “A little money, a carton or two of cigarettes. A single human life isn't worth much here, I'm afraid.”

“But you almost ruined the whole thing, Mr. Wilson,” Saba said. “You wouldn't shut up. Last night we had to tie a rag in your mouth to keep you quiet. You were ranting. Out of your head. Who is Curious George?”

“A friend,” Wilson said, then he turned to Tulj. “How did you find us?”

“I was waiting for news in Ulundi, as we had arranged,” Tulj said. “Then an Iwo brought word of trouble. I started upriver two days ago. That was a stupid thing you did back there, Mr. Wilson. You blew your cover. We cannot use you as an agent after this.”

“Couldn't wait any longer,” Wilson said quietly. “Not a single second.”

“Did you think they wouldn't kill you for what you did?”

“I don't know,” Wilson said. “I didn't think at all. I just went out and set them free, every Iwo I could find—” He couldn't go on.

Tulj nodded as if he understood.

An hour or two passed before Wilson felt lucid enough to help
with the paddling. He took the position in the prow, and the tired colonel went to sleep. The labor felt good, the muscles in his arms and shoulders working, the sun dappling his back through the trees. But it wasn't until twilight turned the river a deep shade of lavender that Wilson was struck by the singularity of the situation. He stopped paddling and turned around. A dustlike haze sifted through the canopy of leaves. Colonel Saba dozed, mouth open, hand dangling in the water. A soft snoring sound issued from between his lips. Wilson could barely make out Tulj's face in the jungle shadows.

“The two of you …” Wilson said.

“Yes,” Tulj said, and he smiled.

“He's an Anda, you're a Bupu,” Wilson said.

“Yes,” Tulj said.

“How come you're not at each other's throat?”

Tulj put aside his paddle and thought for a moment. “Last night, when I came to help you escape, I found an Anda officer and an Iwo in the dirt at your side. And I said to them, ‘Are we not all brothers here?' and I took their hands and led them away. Colonel Saba, he is weary of the war and all the killing, as I am weary. He has decided to resign from the APF, and he is joining a new party which I am starting with the support of certain friends of mine. I will call my new party the BUP. The Bupandan Unification party. And one day, when the slave trade is suppressed, we will put an end to this madness. Bupu and Anda will rebuild Bupanda as it was in the great days of Sequhue, when the countryside bloomed with flowers and the streets of Rigala were full of music and singing and there were beautiful women in every doorway.”

“Sounds lovely,” Wilson said.

When it was almost too dark to see, they paddled over to the bank and hid the dugout among the reeds. As a precaution Tulj did not light a fire. They ate a dark meal of cold pressed meat out of cans in the rustling silence of the jungle; then they made their bed in the reeds. Wilson could not see any stars, just the unfeatured blackness
of the leafy canopy, and he stared into this blackness and lay awake and listened to the sound of Colonel Saba snoring and the river hushing along from somewhere to somewhere, and he heard Tulj tossing and scratching himself on the other side of the clump of reeds.

“Tulj, are you awake?” Wilson said.

The man grunted.

“Where the hell are we going?”

“Down the Hilenga,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

“Where does the Hilenga go?”

There was an empty second or two, and it seemed Tulj would not answer. “To the sea,” he said at last. “Sooner or later all rivers go to the sea.”

“Tulj …” Wilson said.

“We are going to meet friends of mine at a certain spot in the delta in three days' time. They want to talk to us, and they very much want to talk to you. They want to know everything you have learned about the evil men who deal in slaves. Will you tell them?”

“Sure,” Wilson said. “Who are your friends? Tell me now so I can know what to expect.”

“No. It is not wise for you to have any more information at this point,” Tulj said. “What if we are captured? Be patient. Wait and see.”

They paddled along for three days without setting foot on dry land. The river became the vast swamp of the Hilenga Delta. The sun of noon barely penetrated the dense leafy cover overhead. Mosquitoes hung thick in the thick air; Wilson covered every inch of exposed flesh with a citrus-smelling insect repellent.
Orange monkeys hung lazily from half-submerged trees. Aquatic snakes and muskrats the size of collies swarmed among the monstrous roots of the baobabs. Flocks of azure macaws clouded the uncertain distance.

Once Wilson let his hand fall into the green water and pulled it back covered with leeches. He pried the valuable little creatures off his flesh and repatriated them carefully in the muddy water.

At dawn on the fourth day, Tulj led them to a small island completely obscured by the tangled roots of mangrove trees. In a clearing at the center a lean- to covered with canvas tarp and fronted with mosquito netting sheltered crates of canned food and plastic barrels of freshwater. Wilson washed his face and his neck in the water, put on another layer of insect repellent, and broke open an aluminum package labeled “Yorkshire Pudding,” with the expiration date of 10/30/2037. Inside, he found a gelatinous substance covered with viscous liquid, a yellow and brown mess that was surprisingly edible despite its disgusting appearance.

When Wilson finished eating, Tulj took him to the west side of the island and pointed to a break in the trees. “This is a good place from which to watch,” he said. “My friends will arrive sometime late today, possible tomorrow.”

“What am I watching for exactly?” Wilson said.

Tulj gave a short laugh. “You will know when you see them,” he said, then he went off to take a short nap behind the mosquito netting of the lean-to.

Wilson watched the river for the next few hours.

The green light of the jungle didn't seem to change. He had no idea what time it was. His old illuminated digital watch had stopped working way back during the rainy season at Quatre Sables. Just below, the river broke out of the clotted channels into a wider stream. Wilson thought he detected a breath of fresh air on his face, a slight briny tang that made him think of sea. He turned away for a half second at a snapping sound in the trees and, when he turned back, saw that the channel had undergone a remarkable transformation.
The sun, now risen directly overhead, shone down in thick, smoky columns of light through breaks in the canopy of leaves. The effect was spiritual, like light shining through stained glass windows. White birds lifted off the water and flew in an upward arc through the smoky light. A few minutes later Wilson saw a vague something on the river in the distance.

Another hour passed before he could make out the approaching craft. It seemed to be coming along very slowly, but distances are deceptive in Africa. The craft grew no larger in perspective for a long while, then Wilson heard the steady burp and splutter of an old inboard, and it was right there, coming through the muck of the channel around the island, and he could hardly believe what he saw: In an odd, wide-bodied turquoise boat stood three naval officers wearing spotless white uniforms straight out of
Madame Butterfly
. They were stiff as statues; the humid breeze did not ruffle their short hair. Behind them, sitting on two rows of padded benches, a half dozen marines in dress tunics of blue and red. From the stern, the white ensign of the British Royal Navy flapped in the breeze.

Wilson watched until this strange vessel came up past his lookout. The flat keel of the thing seemed to be made of glass. Beneath the feet of the officers, monstrous carp swam along, their scales ancient as granite flashing in the green river. In the next minute the boat disappeared into the reed-choked channel.

Tulj and Colonel Saba squatted in the clearing in front of the lean-to, throwing dice across a stained bit of canvas.

“A bad habit I picked up in the army,” Tulj said, glancing up as Wilson came out of the trees. “But common to all soldiers, everywhere. Think of the Roman legionaries dicing for Christ's clothes—” Then he saw the look on Wilson's face and stood up. “Well?”

“This is going to sound ridiculous,” Wilson said, catching his breath. “On the river, a turquoise boat with a glass bottom full of naval officers in white dress uniforms.”

Tulj nodded gravely. “They are a little early,” he said.

From the deck of the big motor launch, Wilson looked back to the place where the brown waters of the Hilenga met the ocean's choppy blue. The last African mud stained the surface red more than three miles out, then fell off as sediment across the continental shelf. The afternoon sky was touched at the horizon with pale, scraggly clouds. Seabirds wheeled overhead. Africa lay in the wake, incomprehensible, vast.

Only now did Wilson allow himself to think of what he was leaving behind. He thought of Cricket, and he thought of the dark interior of the jungle, those sunless glades where no white man would set foot, and he thought of the Iwos living hidden away from the world with their strange language and arcane knowledge—then he set his heart against the past and took a deep breath of salty ocean air and turned to face the great ship riding the waves just ahead.

She was HMS
Gadfly
, a new compact cruiser of the Somerset class. Smaller than a traditional destroyer but larger than a minesweeper, she carried two turrets of 118 mm marine guns, a full complement of Stinger surface-to-air missiles, and a large platform at the stern to which were fixed three Sea Harrier jump jets, their wings folded like sleeping birds. A radar dish turned steadily from the top of the superstructure, and Wilson could almost see invisible signals darting through the atmosphere a million times faster than the Great Carew's carrier pigeons. The white ensign and the captain's pennant—a yellow sea horse on a blue ground—flew at half-mast from the topgallants.

Wilson turned to the nearest officer, a blunt-faced sublieutenant whose nametag identified him as Bunsen.

“Something happen?” Wilson said, pointing to the flags.

“Sir?” the sublieutenant said.

“Half-mast,” Wilson said.

“I'm not at liberty to say, sir,” he said stiffly.

“Oh, what the hell, Bunsen. He's one of us.”

It was another lieutenant whose tag read “Navigating Lieutenant Peavy.” This one had straw-colored hair and startling blue eyes like Peter O'Toole in
Lawrence of Arabia
. He came forward, shook hands, and offered Wilson a cigarette.

“No, thanks,” Wilson said, then he changed his mind. They were Westminster Navy Cuts, in the gold tin. Lieutenant Peavy held out an old flint and fluid lighter, and Wilson lit up. The cigarette was strong, but with the characteristic flavor of Turkish tobacco. Wilson was becoming a smoker. He blew smoke into the sky over his shoulder. It drifted off over Africa.

“You see, it's our captain,” Peavy said, and he lit his own cigarette and unbuttoned the top button of his dress collar. “The poor man died last week, right in the middle of the mission.”

“What happened?” Wilson said.

“The same thing that's been happening to Englishmen for centuries in this miserable part of the world,” Peavy said. “Some kind of fever. He went ashore at Zanda and caught something. No one knew he was that sick. One morning he didn't show up for breakfast and we went into his cabin and he was dead.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Wilson said.

Peavy shrugged. “Staff Commander Worthington's our acting captain now. He's a good man. You'll be chatting with him soon.”

Lieutenant Peavy touched hand to cap and turned aft but Wilson called after him. “I've got to ask you something,” Wilson said.

The officer turned back.

Wilson gestured to the turquoise glass-bottomed boat suspended like a dinghy from the hawsers at the stern. “The blue boat, the white uniforms. Do you people usually invade Africa like that?”

Lieutenant Peavy gave a tight smile. “We're not exactly invading,” he said. “Sort of reconnaissance. It's acting captain's orders. We're more or less covert here, poking around without authority from the local government. Of course there is no local government,
just a parcel of bickering tribes, but if we're captured wearing our uniforms, it will be that much harder to shoot us for spies. As for the boat, it's the Hilenga, you see. We can't go up that damned river with anything of ours—too shallow for the launch and too full of nasty stuff for the rubber boats. We found about a dozen of these glass-bottomed numbers abandoned in a warehouse in Port Luanga last year. Brought over from Disneyland in America in the 1960s for some sort of aquatic safariland scheme, apparently the idea of a millionaire from Texas. Problem is, the Hilenga's too muddy to make out much more than the occasional carp, so the millionaire went bankrupt and flew back to Texas and left his boats behind. We had our engineer fix up a couple of them for our own purposes. Quite stunning little tubs really. Lovely color.”