The countess seems happy with his reply – she’d purring like a cat, blowing smoke out of her nostrils.
You two should get together, I say. A man of means, and a woman without protection. Together you could breed kingdoms of sadness.
Shut it, Knight. Get out of the way.
No, wait. Sorry. I want to help. Please don’t misunderstand. It’s just, I’m sad too. But I want to help. Let me go to the borders of the world, to the desolate mountains – to find those bandits who hold the Earl’s sons. Let me save them. I’m not a man who shies away from a challenge.
But first, Countess, fill up my pipe and let me lie down one last time. And you have maidens – twenty-four of them, you say? Let them attend to me with meat and drink and fire and a bath, and if they could saddle up my horse, I would be ever-grateful. When I wake I will be whole again, my flesh bright as what is brightest.
IV
I have been waiting for a sign from him, something to say he’s safe, that he thinks of us. And as if to answer me, last night the heavens opened up with a thunderstorm of such magnitude and fury, it almost rivalled the April storm that first ushered him into our lives.
Imagine – three women sitting on a stone floor, swaddled in blankets, looking through the window grilles at the sky, which has turned into a sheet of steel, and the rain coming down in sharp slices of hail like millions of tiny daggers falling to the earth. Begum, in the aftermath of her grief, is thinner, her hair overrun with grey. On either side of her Chanu Rose and I, who could be her daughters; one with her beauty, the other with her determination. We sit for hours, crouched in this way – Chanu and I with our big bellies and skinny legs propped over pillows, Begum between us.
It’s impossible to know whether to keep our eyes to the sky or the veranda outside, where hundreds of animals and birds have gathered to take shelter. There are the usual – cows and goats, rabbits and pigs, but there are also birds as I’ve never seen, huddled together in a flock – jungle-fowl, lapwings, egrets, kestrels, flycatchers, hoopoes, cormorants and Pariah Kites – each contributing its own startled cry to the collective.
They’re waiting for Rafi, who will not come. He sleeps outside most nights, keeping watch, but yesterday he went back to the forest. ‘I get my strength from the trees,’ he said. ‘I’m no good to you without my strength.’
At four in the morning there’s a sudden lull in the storm, a softening. Lightning no longer cracks open the sky, and the wind and rain has subsided from a mad howling to a whisper.
‘Come,’ Begum says, ‘Let’s go to the fountain.’
We ready ourselves in the dark, fending off the cold with layers of scarves and water-proof sheeting. I fetch Kedar’s pistol from the safe and slip it into the pocket of Begum’s skirt. Jenga whimpers in disapproval.
‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,’ Begum says, stroking Jenga’s furrowed head.
‘Torches?’
Chanu hands them out, one for each of us.
‘Okay, now keep close.’
Begum steps out, and immediately, there is a terrific screeching. Every bird on the veranda takes to the sky like a magic carpet of squawking feathers. It’s a wonder there aren’t any collisions.
We stifle giggles. ‘Heavens,’ Begum says.
We flatten ourselves against the wall. Ridiculous – a trio of gargantuan mummies.
Silence again.
‘Follow me.’
Outside our world lies in broken splendour. It’s as if giants had come out to play during the storm. Blocks of concrete and granite flung about like matchsticks. Hundred-year-old trees uprooted as though they were turnips. Main Street looks like a long, splintered backbone in the dark. Everywhere the smell of wet. Shuttered shops gleam like painted toenails, and all along the street there are clusters of tin roofs and thatch, leaves and branches. We move through the debris in single file. Jenga following at our heels, close as a ghost.
The greenhouse looks so ordinary and small in its abandoned state. Something about all this dereliction warms me, fills me with hope.
The Mainlanders believe that only from great destruction can things begin anew. In this, they understand something we can’t. Their gods are different from ours; they sanction a wilful subjugation to fate, to the idea of cycles, which necessitates that darkness and light are interchangeable. They are better equipped to deal with disasters because of their philosophy, and by that same measure, when others are suffering, it’s easier for them to look away.
It’s their fate, they say, so they must withstand it.
Funny, Begum, who was always such a big believer in destiny has stopped talking about it. But I suppose when we imagine our lives in the future, it’s natural not to think of the ways it can unravel, to focus instead on all the luminosities we feel we are deserving of.
Chanu and I hold hands, our boots crunching across the gravel. We have no more need for torches as our eyes have grown accustomed to the lack of light. Everything comes alive in the shadows. The alder tree has lost every one of its leaves. It stands bare and proud, like an enormous inky thumbprint against the dawn. Begum is clearing the mess away from the marble slab, her body stooped over from the waist, sweeping. She picks up the silver cup and pours water over the slab, wiping the dirt away with her hands. All around her, a soggy rug of leaves and twigs.
‘Come,’ she says, gesturing with one hand, ‘Drink.’
Chanu and I kneel gently in the mud with our hands cupped, letting the cool water stay enclosed in our palms for a few seconds before bending our necks backwards like swans to drink. We drink and we drink the sweetest water we’ve drunk in weeks.
‘I’ve decided to make a deal with Marra,’ Begum says. ‘It kills me to do it, but you’re right, Luna. If we want to save the fountain, I can’t see any other way.’
Chanu nods slowly.
‘Kedar would have wanted it,’ I say.
‘Perhaps. I don’t know if I can think about that anymore. Some days I just want to be done with it all. But I have you two to think about, and the two you’ll bring into the world, and all the women and men of Fountainville who have come to me and told me their dark fears, begging me to bargain with this terror of a man, so they can pick up their lives and go about their days as they used to.’
*
We make our way back at daybreak. Nothing stirs. Not Marra’s men, nor the townsfolk. Where is everyone hiding? In the far fields that lie outside Fountainville, there are farmers out with their ploughs thanking God that they are poor and unworthy of Marra’s attentions. They have nothing to give, and so they have been allowed to carry on toiling through their difficult lives. Now, with the sun rising over the eastern ridge, the wreckage of Main Street is more visible. The sign for the Ambition Computer Centre lies in a heap outside the building, the windows are smashed and most of the roof has caved in. The Glory Hallelujah is a ruin of blue shutters and wooden tables. The entire street, from where we stand, looks broken, like a scene from one of those war-ravaged cities we will never visit, but know intimately because of its degradations.
As we labour our way up the hill, Jenga suddenly sprints forwards with renewed energy. Rafi is back. He’s standing on the veranda with his usual menagerie.
On the stoop, there is a stranger. He’s smoking with his legs stretched out in front of him. I can tell it’s not him, even from this distance. Even if there’s something familiar about the way he locks his legs, there is nothing of Owain in this man. No matter how badly my heart needs this hope, my eyes will not give it.
This man is stocky and dishevelled. I walk faster, striding past Begum and Chanu Rose, so I can see better. He has long blond hair tied low in a ponytail, and a beard of many days. Who is this lump of a man wearing a ridiculous camouflage outfit? I quicken my pace, panting. Now I am within direct sight of him, I see he is beautiful. Shockingly so, with deep green eyes and golden skin.
‘There you are,’ Rafi says, casting his one good eye over our mud-s
pattered clothes. ‘You won’t believe who I have here. Come from the Mainland, if you please, with a driver and an SUV, asking for the world-famous Fountainville Clinic. They were lost in the forest. Would’ve been dead by now, if I hadn’t saved him. Damn nearly stepped on a monocled cobra! Although, that might have been preferable to one of Marra’s men.
‘Go on,’ Rafi says, prodding the stranger’s back with his walking stick. ‘You better tell them.’
‘I’m Leo,’ the stranger says gruffly, standing up, extending his hand.
When he stands he’s transformed – not the crouching figure he was a moment ago, but broad-shouldered, powerful, almost menacing.
‘This ugly giant tells me you were the last ones to see my boyfriend.’
V
She comes everyday and I can do nothing to make her go away. What is her name? I knew it once. She comes wearing a dress of yellow brocaded silk, riding a bay horse with a mane that touches the ground, and a saddle of gold. She asks what kind of man I am. I try to speak, tell her the journey I’ve been on, but she silences me.
Shame, she shouts. Shame, shame for deceiving us.
Give me back my ring, traitor!
I tell her it’s the only thing I have left in the world.
You don’t deserve it, she says, turning away on her horse. You don’t deserve a good thing for all you have deceived us.
I try to get my friends to speak up for me. We are friends now – the Earl of Sadness and the Widowed Countess.
Why don’t you tell her what kind of man you really are?
What should I say? That I’m the worst kind – arrogant, afraid, always seeking someone who might get the better of me, or I the better of him. The kind of man who proves himself in showdowns and useless acts of prowess.
The weaker we are the more we must do it. Can’t you understand? I was doomed from the start because of my father, and his father before. But one day I arrived in a strange land, on the day after a miraculous storm. And a man, who was no smaller than two men of this world with one good foot and the other lame, one good eye and the other blind, led me to the fountain. Near the fountain was a house of twenty-four maidens who were lovely, and who laughed at everything I said. And when I saw them, I coveted all that was not mine, and could never be mine. I wanted the impossible. I thought I would die from the wanting.
It was only when she came and rescued me, whispered in my ear, There’s a way, there’s always a way. She saw every good thing in me and magnified it a thousand times. When I was with her I wasn’t myself. Or rather, I was the best version of myself. She led me to the fountain to drink, and the fountain changed me.
VI
‘You can’t be serious.’
This is what Leo repeats again and again.
‘Nothing about me? He didn’t mention me once? And yet I know everything about you.’
He looks pityingly at me and Chanu Rose, at our swollen stomachs.
‘Tell me what did he say? That his dad was a horrible man? That he needed to change his life? That he got tired of waiting for the right person? It’s all bloody Cei and Cynon’s fault, parading Neneh around like the latest accessory. First it was marriage vows, now it’s family and children. It’s all going terribly wrong for us.’
We are in Begum’s drawing room drinking tea. This is not the man I had imagined for Owain. When he revealed his secret to me – months ago, during one of those rambling teatime rituals – he’d stumbled through the story of his confused sexuality, from boys to girls to boys again, blushing and blustering. I had placated him, told him I’d always known, that it changed nothing. But I had expected a different kind of lover, someone intelligent, urbane, soft. Not this opinionated ruffian.
‘We broke up because I didn’t want to have children. Sorry, but two men cocktailing their sperm and getting some unfortunate woman to bake it in her oven, I don’t understand. What’s the point? When we first met he wasn’t like that at all. He just wanted to travel, to live. I don’t know what happened. Societal bloody conformism, is what. All of a sudden it was let’s cut out dairy products and hire a life coach and invest in third world micro-credit basket-weaving. Really! His problem was the desire to be nobler than he actually was. I was the only one who saw him for what he was, and I said it straight. But he had grander ideas for himself, stupid bugger.’
I know what Begum is thinking. So, it’s true. It’s all true. The rumours of Owain going off with young men in town, the experiments with opium. The reason why he disappeared for days at a time without offering any explanations. And if that was true, then what else was?
‘Mr Owain left Fountainville after my husband was murdered. His involvement in the murder was initially suspected by some, but now the general consensus is that he was a coward who ran away when things got tough.’
I interjected. ‘He left because you demanded it.’
‘I think, given my state at the time, and the evidence, I can be excused for wanting him out of my sight. But to disappear for so long? When you’re in this condition? What kind of a man does that?’
‘I thought he’d have gone home. We haven’t heard a thing from him since he left. I thought he would have sent word, something.’
‘Well I haven’t heard either,’ says Leo. ‘I was trying to play it cool, keep my distance. But it’s been six months and no missives of misery-me confusion, so I thought I’d better take a few weeks off and come see what’s going on.’
Rafi, who has been pacing up and down the veranda with his walking stick, enters now, struggling to fit through the frame of the door.
‘He hasn’t gone very far. If my spies serve me well, he’s nearer than we think. Mr Leonard, you may have noticed we are going through difficult times. There’s a lot of work to do, so I’ll be asking if you could set aside the issue of your vulnerable heart, and Luna, this goes for you too.’
‘Yes, well, it’s all been a bit rock and roll for me as you can imagine. I need half an hour to sort things out at work. I’ve sort of abandoned them in the middle of an important case.’
‘What is it that you do?’ asks Begum.
‘Oh, this and that. Mostly I’m a barrister for human rights and war crimes. If I didn’t have to support that tosser, I’d like to give it all up and do fashion photography.’
*
I am given the task of holding the video camera and training it on Leo while he puts on what he calls his posh voice and speaks about the fate of Fountainville and the neighbouring border towns. Before we begin, he unties his ponytail and releases a mane of raggedy blond hair, gives it a swift brush with his fingertips and scrunches it up and out of sight again. He catches me staring and grins.
I sweep the camera across the house capturing Begum and Chanu in the corner with a few other townswomen looking frightened, the Ridge in the distance, then moving to the courtyard where Leo is hunched, as if awaiting a missile, still wearing his ridiculous camouflages.
I’m here in the midst of a dramatic unfolding.... His words blur as he speaks.
The town of Fountainville in the far northeast, struggling for its autonomy since 1947, making it the longest running insurgency in the country.... The remarkable story of Begum Azad, whose husband, Kedar Azad, was overthrown in a bloody coup seven months ago... once flourishing economy, a multi-million industry of outsourcing pregnancies lies in tatters... the town is in control of rebel forces... Marra’s Army of Liberation... people barricaded in their houses... the fountain, key to the town’s welfare, is under their control... impasse for these people who have too long been forgotten by their own government and the world... this is a plea to the international community... they need your help...
Listening to him this way, through a magic lens, which distorts people into different beings, I begin to see how it must have been for Owain to love this man. There is no space for doubt in Leo’s body. At every joint and sinew he is compressed, tightened, ready to jump and roar in defence. He is not someone who oscillates between desires. One
of those strange beings of the world who seem to have entered it complete, with opinions and ideals in place. When he speaks, it is without the slightest trace of humility, no fear of ridicule, no faltering. How hard to be noble compared to that.
‘All right, Luna?’ Leo asks, stepping over to take the camera from me and replay what I’ve just shot. ‘Not bad. This should do it. You’ve got a steady hand.’
Leo’s duffle bag is bursting with technological toys, each one of them tiny, precise, and capable of things I never thought possible. A satellite router, pen camera and handheld GPS system.
‘Pretty amazing, huh? Proper secret agent material. Never leave home without it.’
Within a few hours it is all ready to be dispatched: press releases, videos, photographic evidence, testimonials. All of it sent across cyberspace. Click click click. Gone. Our news in their inboxes.
We have an hour before darkness sweeps in.
‘Can’t you stay, Luna?’ asks Chanu. A rare request. ‘Let them go. It isn’t safe.’
It’s only a half-hearted plea. She knows me too well. Rafi will lead Leo and I past the Northern Forest Ridge, in the direction of Somaville, where he believes Owain is being sheltered. We don’t know what to expect. The worst, obviously. Amnesia, madness, near-death.
Begum packs a selection of ointments for me. ‘You’ll know what to give him when you see him.’
*
We walk for two hours using the inner routes, away from the river and road checkposts. I lift my legs up and down like a wind-up toy, propelled forward by the thud thud sound of Rafi’s boots ahead of me, and Leo behind. We are like three bats in the forest. All around the dark night: ravines on either side, trees that arch up like demons and fill the sky.
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