The Power

by Naomi Alderman

  In that moment, he longed to be the one with his wrists clasped. He longed to kneel at her feet, his face buried in the wet soil. He wanted the fight over, he wanted to know who won even at his own cost, he wanted the final scene.

  She held the young man’s wrists.

  She pressed her forehead to his.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Yes.’

  And when she killed him, it was ecstasy.

  In the morning, Tunde still does not know whether it was a dream. His manual camera is advanced by eighteen pictures. He might have pressed the button in his sleep. He will only know if the film is developed. He hopes it was a dream, but that has its own terrors. If, in some dream place, he had yearned to kneel.

  He sits in the tree and thinks things through from the night before. It does look better in the morning, somehow. Or at least less terrifying. The report of his death can’t have been an accident or a coincidence. It’s too much. Moskalev or her people must have discovered that he’d gone, that his passport had gone with him. The whole thing must have been staged: the car accident, the charred body, the suitcase. This means one very important thing: he cannot go to the police. There is no more fantasy – he had not quite realized before that this fantasy still clung to the edges of his mind – that he can walk into a police station with his hands up and say, ‘Sorry, cheeky Nigerian journalist here. I’ve made some mistakes. Take me home.’ They won’t take him home. They will take him out into a quiet place in the woods and shoot him. He is alone.

  He needs to find an internet connection. There will be one somewhere. A friendly man who’ll let him use the home computer for just a few minutes. He can convince them in five lines that it’s him, that he’s really alive.

  He’s shaking as he climbs down from the tree. He’ll walk on from here, he’ll stay in the forest and head for a village he passed through four days ago with some friendly faces. He’ll send his messages. They’ll come for him. He shifts his bag on his back and sets his face to the south.

  There’s a noise in the bushes to his right. He whirls around. But the noise is on the left, too, and behind him; there are women standing up in the bushes, and he knows then with a terror like a springing trap – they’ve been waiting for him. Waiting all night to catch him. He tries to break into a run but there’s something at his ankles, a wire, and he falls. Down, down, struggling, and someone laughs and someone jolts him on the back of the neck.

  When he wakes, he is in a cage, and something is very bad.

  The cage is small and made of wood. His backpack is in here with him. His knees are pulled up to his chest – there is no room to stretch them out. He can feel from the throbbing ache in his muscles that he’s been like this for hours.

  He is in a woodland camp. There is a small campfire burning. He knows this place. It is the camp he saw in the dream. Not dream. It is the encampment of the blind woman, and they have caught him. His whole body starts to shake. It can’t end here. Not trapped like this. Not thrown on the fire or executed for some god-awful tree-magic religion. He rattles the sides of the cage with his legs.

  ‘Please!’ he shouts, though no one is listening. ‘Please, someone help me!’

  There’s a low, throaty chuckle from the other side of him. He cranes his head to look.

  There’s a woman standing there.

  ‘Got yourself in a fucking mess, haven’t you?’ she says.

  He tries to make his eyes focus. He knows the voice from somewhere a long way away, a long time ago. As if the voice were famous.

  He blinks and she comes into view. It is Roxanne Monke.

  Roxy

  She says, ‘I recognized your face as soon as I saw you. Seen you on the telly, haven’t I?’

  He thinks he’s in a dream, must be, can’t not be. He starts to cry. Like a child, confused and angry.

  She says, ‘Stop that now. You’ll set me off. What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?’

  He tries to tell her, but the story no longer makes sense even to him. He decided to walk into danger because he thought he was enough, and now he is in danger and it is clear to him that he has never been enough and it is unbearable.

  ‘I was looking for … the mountain cult,’ he barks out at last. His throat is dry and his head aches.

  She laughs. ‘Yeah, well. You found it. So that was a bloody stupid idea, wasn’t it?’

  She gestures around her. He’s at the edge of a small encampment. There are perhaps forty dirty tents and huts slumped around the central fire. A few women are at the open mouths of their huts, whetting knives, or fixing metal shock gauntlets, or staring blankly. The place stinks: a smell of burning flesh and rotten food and faeces and dogs and a sour note of vomit. To one side of the latrine there’s a pile of bones. Tunde hopes they are animal bones. There are two sad-looking dogs tied by short lengths of rope to a tree – one has an eye missing, and patches of fur.

  He says, ‘You have to help me. Please. Please help me.’

  She looks at him, and her face twists in an awkward half-smile. She shrugs. And he sees that she’s drunk. Fuck.

  ‘I don’t know what I can do, mate. I don’t have much … influence, here.’

  Fuck. He is going to have to be more charming than he’s ever been in his whole life. And he’s stuck in a cage where he can’t even move his neck. He takes a deep breath. He can do it. He can.

  ‘What are you doing here? You vanished the night of the big Moskalev party, and that was months ago. Even when I left the city they were saying you’d been bumped off.’

  Roxy laughs. ‘Were they now? Were they? Well, someone tried. And it’s taken me a while to heal is all.’

  ‘You look pretty … healed now.’

  He looks her up and down appreciatively. He’s particularly impressed with himself for doing so without being able to move.

  She laughs. ‘I was going to be President of this fucking country, you know. For about … three hours there, I was going to be the fucking President.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he says. ‘I was going to be the star of Amazon’s fall line-up.’ He looks right and left. ‘Think they’re coming for me now with a drone?’

  And then she’s laughing, and he’s laughing, too. The women at the entrances to the tents glance over at them balefully.

  ‘Seriously. What are they going to do with me?’ he says.

  ‘Oh, these people are bloody mental. They hunt men at night,’ Roxy says. ‘Send girls off into the forest to scare ’em. Once they’re scared and running, they set a trap – tripwire, something like that.’

  ‘They hunted me.’

  ‘Well, you bloody walked towards them, didn’t you?’ Roxy makes another little half-smile. ‘They’ve got some thing about blokes; they round up boys and let them be king for a few weeks and then stick antlers on their heads and kill them at new moon. Or full moon. Or one of those moons. Obsessed by the fucking moon. If you ask me, it’s cos they’ve got no telly.’

  He laughs again; a real laugh. She’s funny.

  This is the magic by daylight; tricks and cruelty. The magic is in the belief in magic. All this is, is people with an insane idea. The only horror in it is imagining oneself into their minds. And that their insanity might have some consequences on the body.

  ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Now we’re here … how hard would it be for you to get me out?’

  He gives the door of his cage a little push with his feet. It is bound fast by several twine cords. It would not be hard for Roxy to cut them if she had a knife. But the people around the encampment would see.

  She pulls a flask out of her back pocket and takes a little swig. Shakes her head.

  ‘They know me,’ she says, ‘but I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me.’

  ‘So you’ve been hiding in the woods for weeks, not bothering them?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says.

  A fragment of something he read a long time ago floats through his mind. A flattering looking-glass. He has to be a flattering mirror
for her, reflecting her at twice her ordinary size, making her seem to herself to be strong enough to do this thing he needs her to do. ‘Without that power,’ mutters a voice in his head, ‘probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle.’

  ‘That’s not you,’ he says. ‘That’s not who you are.’

  ‘I’m not who I was, my friend.’

  ‘You can’t stop being who you are. You’re Roxy Monke.’

  She snorts. ‘You want me to fight our way out of here? Cos … that’s not gonna happen.’

  He gives a little laugh. Like she’s trying it on, must be making a joke.

  ‘You don’t need to fight. You’re Roxy Monke. You’ve got power to burn, I’ve seen you, I’ve heard about you. I’ve always wanted to meet you. You’re the strongest woman anyone’s ever seen. I’ve read the reports. You killed your father’s rival in London and then put him out to pasture himself. You can just ask them for me and they’ll open the door.’

  She shakes her head. ‘You’ve got to have something to offer. Something to trade,’ but she’s thinking it through now, he can see it.

  ‘What have you got that they want?’ he says.

  Her fingers dig into the wet earth. She holds two handfuls of soil for a moment, looking at him.

  ‘I told myself I’d keep my head down,’ she says.

  He says, ‘But that’s not you. I’ve read about you.’ He hesitates, then chances his luck. ‘I think you’ll help me because it’s nothing to you to do it. Please. Because you’re Roxy Monke.’

  She swallows. She says, ‘Yeah. Yeah, I am.’

  At dusk, more of the women return to the camp, and Roxanne Monke bargains with the blind woman for Tunde’s life.

  As she speaks, Tunde sees that he was right: the people in this camp seem respectful and a little frightened of her. She has a small plastic bag of drugs that she dangles in front of the leaders of the camp. She asks for something, but is turned down. She shrugs. She gestures her head towards him. Fine, she seems to be saying, if we can’t make a deal this way, I’ll take that boy instead.

  The women are surprised, then suspicious. Really? That one? It’s not a trick?

  There is a little haggling. The blind woman tries to argue. Roxy argues back. In the end, it doesn’t take too much to persuade them to let him go. He was right about how they see Roxy. And he is not particularly prized. If this woman wants him, let her take him. The soldiers are coming anyway; the war is closer every day. These people are not mad enough to want to stay here now that the soldiers are close by. They’ll take up their encampment in two or three days and move towards the mountains.

  They bind his arms tightly behind his back. They throw in the bag he was carrying for nothing, just to show her some respect.

  ‘Don’t be too friendly with me,’ she says as she pushes him to walk ahead of her. ‘Don’t want them to think I like you or that I got you cheap.’

  His legs are cramped from his time in the cage. He has to take slow, shuffling steps along the forest path. It is an age until they are out of sight of the camp, and another aeon until they cannot hear the noise of it behind them.

  With each step, he thinks, I am tied and I am in the hands of Roxanne Monke. He thinks, She’s a dangerous woman at the best of times. What if she’s just playing with me? Once these thoughts have flashed across the mind, they can never be put back. He is silent until, a few miles along the dirt-track, she says, ‘I think that’s far enough,’ and takes a small knife from her pocket and cuts his bonds.

  He says, ‘What are you going to do with me?’

  She says, ‘I suppose I’ll rescue you, get you home. I’m Roxy Monke, after all.’ Then she breaks into a laugh. ‘Anyway, you’re a celebrity. People’d pay good money for this, wouldn’t they? Walk through the forest with a celeb.’

  And this makes him laugh. And his laughter makes her laugh. And then they are both standing in the forest, leaning against a tree, hooting and gasping for breath, and something is broken between them then, and something is a little easier.

  ‘Where are we heading?’ he says.

  She shrugs. ‘I’ve been lying low for a bit. Something’s rotten with my people. Someone … betrayed me. I’m all right if they think I’m dead. Till I can work out how to get back what’s mine.’

  ‘You’ve been hiding,’ he says, ‘in a war zone? Isn’t that a “bloody stupid idea”?’

  She looks at him sharply.

  He’s chancing something here. He can already feel the prickles across his shoulder where she’d jolt him if he pissed her off. He might be a celebrity, but she’s a mugshot.

  She kicks at the stone-leaf mix on the path and says, ‘Yeah, probably. I didn’t have much option, though.’

  ‘No nice compound in South America to jet off to? I thought you people had it all worked out.’

  He does have to know how angry he can make her; this is clear right through to his bones. If she’s going to try to hurt him, he needs to know that first. He’s tensed for the blow already, but it does not come.

  She sticks her hands in her pockets. ‘I’m all right here,’ she says. ‘People keep their mouths shut. I’d left stuff for myself just in case, you know?’

  He thinks of the little plastic packet she held in front of the women in the camp. Yes, if you’re using an unstable regime to smuggle drugs, you probably do have any number of secret supply-dumps, just in case of trouble.

  ‘Here,’ she says. ‘You’re not going to write about this, are you?’

  ‘Depends whether I get out alive,’ he says.

  And that makes her laugh, and then he’s laughing again. And after a minute she says, ‘It’s my brother Darrell. He’s got something of mine. And I’m going to have to be careful how I get it back off him. I’ll get you home, but until I work out what to do, we’re lying low, OK?’

  ‘And that means …’

  ‘We’re going to spend a few nights in a refugee camp.’

  They come to a tented muddy field at the bottom of a gully. Roxy goes to claim a space for them; just a few days, she says. Make yourself useful. Meet people, get to know them, ask what they want.

  At the bottom of his rucksack he finds an ID card from an Italian news-gathering service, a year out of date, but enough to encourage some people to talk. He uses it judiciously, wandering from tent to tent. He learns that there has been more fighting than he’d heard, and more recently. That, in the past three weeks, the helicopters don’t even land any more; they drop food and medicine and clothes and more tents for the slow and steady stream of stumbling people arriving through the woods. UNESCO is, understandably, unwilling to risk its people here.

  Roxy is treated respectfully here. She is a person who knows how to get certain drugs and fuel; she helps people with the things they need. And because he’s with her, because he sleeps on a metal bed in her tent, the people here leave him alone. He feels a little safe for the first time in weeks. But of course, he is not safe. Unlike Roxy, he could not simply walk into the forest in this place. Even if no other forest cult caught him, he is illegal now.

  He interviews a few English-speaking people in the camp who tell him the same thing over and over again. They are rounding up the men without papers. They go away for ‘work detail’ but they do not return. Some of the men here, and some of the women, tell the same story. There have been editorials in the newspapers and thoughtful to-camera pieces on the one working black-and-white TV in the hospital tent.

  The subject is: how many men do we really need? Think it over, they say. Men are dangerous. Men commit the great majority of crimes. Men are less intelligent, less diligent, less hard-working, their brains are in their muscles and their pricks. Men are more likely to suffer from diseases and they are a drain on the resources of the country. Of course we need them to have babies, but how many do we need for that? Not as many as women. Good, clean, obedient men, of course there will always be a place for those. But how many is that? Maybe one in ten.

  You can�
�t be serious, Kristen, is that really what they’re saying? I’m afraid it is, Matt. She puts a gentle hand on his knee. And of course they’re not talking about great guys like you, but that is the message of some extremist websites. That’s why the NorthStar girls need more authority; we’ve got to protect ourselves against these people. Matt nods, his face sombre. I blame those men’s rights people; they’re so extreme, they’ve provoked this kind of response. But now we have to protect ourselves. He breaks into a smile. And after the break, I’ll be learning some fun self-defence moves you can practise at home. But first, the weather on the ones.

  Even here, even after all Tunde has seen, he can’t really believe that this country is trying to kill most of its men. But he knows that these things have happened before. These things are always happening. The list of crimes punishable by death has grown longer. A newspaper announcement from a week-old paper suggests that ‘surly refusal to obey on three separate occasions’ will now be punished by ‘work detail’. There are women here in the camp caring for eight or ten men who all huddle around her, vying for her approval, desperate to please, terrified of what might happen if she removed her name from their papers. Roxy could leave the camp at any time, but Tunde is alone here.

  On their third night in the camp, Roxy wakes a few moments before the first tang and crackle of the power blows the lamps strung along the central pathway of the camp. She must have heard something. Or just felt it, the way the nylon is humming. The power in the air. She opens her eyes and blinks. The old instincts are still strong in her; she has not lost them, at least.

  She kicks Tunde’s metal-frame bed.

  ‘Wake up.’

  He’s tangled half in and half out of the sleeping bag. He pushes the cover off him, and he’s almost naked there. Distracting, even now.

  ‘What?’ he says; then, hopefully, ‘Helicopter?’