The first one traced a few steps, changed the rhythm of its wing beats, and lifted three inches into the air before settling back onto its mound. When it was still, a second one took flight, streaking upward so quickly that Trey felt his stomach twist.
A moment later the wasp reappeared, plummeting toward the colobus, landing with an impact that came to Trey’s ears as a dull, dead thud.
The monkey’s eyes opened wide, and its mouth gaped as well. Its arms and legs flailed, as if it were trying to run, or fight back.
Moving on spiderlike legs, the wasp ran back and forth over the monkey’s back. Then, without warning, it lifted the skinny black tube of its abdomen. Its stinger slid out, as white and sharp as a needle made of ivory, and plunged deep into the flesh of the colobus’s neck.
The monkey cried out. Its eyes wide, its mouth hanging open, it grew still, and Trey wondered if the sting had killed it.
But then it stirred, the wasp still perched on its neck. Stretched its legs, drew in a deep breath, and slowly got back to its feet. It seemed, if anything, less shaky. Stronger than it had been. When it turned, Trey could see that red-tinged drool was dripping from its open mouth.
The wasp rose into the air, flew back to its mound, landed, and took a few seconds to clean its front legs with its mandibles.
Then it turned its head to look at Trey.
At that moment he realized that it had known he was there all along. All the wasps had. They’d just had more important business to conclude before dealing with him.
Trey stood as still as possible, but he knew it was hopeless. Wasps’ eyesight was much keener than humans’, and, unlike some lizards and other animals, they didn’t rely on their prey moving to be able to see it.
The wasp leaped in the air and flew arrow-straight at his face. At the same moment, the colobus snarled and, moving with startling speed, rushed across the clearing toward him.
Even though Trey’s brain was telling him he’d get trapped in the brambles if he didn’t plan his escape carefully, his body wasn’t listening. He recoiled and felt the thorns scratch the skin of his neck and arms and grab hold of his clothes. In an instant, he was trapped.
The wasp came on. Reared up. Hovered three inches from his face. Behind it, the monkey crouched to leap. Then it paused, silvery gaze on him, froth bubbling around its mouth, as if waiting.
Waiting for orders.
The wasp’s green eyes stared into Trey’s. Its thin abdomen, the sheath for that needlelike stinger, pulsed.
Any second, Trey expected to see the stinger slide out, expected the hovering wasp to swoop forward the last three inches, expected to feel the needle puncture him, expected . . . what?
Agony.
For five seconds at least, however, the wasp made no move toward him. Instead it stayed virtually still, swinging just a little this way and that in the air, its triangular head swiveling so that its multifaceted eyes never left his face.
Almost, Trey thought, as if it were figuring something out.
Making up its mind.
Then it did. Swinging upward, it paused for a moment at its apogee, then swooped down like a dart.
Trey closed his eyes.
And heard a crashing sound in the brush behind him.
He opened his eyes to see the wasp draw back. It swung away, made a big loop around the clearing, and vanished down its tunnel. The others, too, had disappeared. The colobus was clambering through the tangles at the farside of the clearing.
The crashing got louder. Now Trey could recognize it: the sound of a blade meeting wood. A moment later, he felt the brambles tear away from his hair and clothes.
A hand grabbed his arm and pulled. Half stumbling, he fought his way out through the brush, then stood there, his legs shaking.
A slightly built woman in black pants and a ragged, long-sleeved white shirt stood before him, machete hanging by her side. Its blade was stained with thick sap that pooled and dripped from its sharp edge.
She was looking away, toward the clearing, but when she turned her head Trey knew who it was. Mariama Honso, her eyes wide, her expression filled with alarm mixed with a kind of exultation.
Before he could say anything, she stepped forward and hugged him. Enveloped him in her arms for a moment before letting go.
It wasn’t a hug of relief, he knew, or affection, or any emotion he recognized. He didn’t have any idea why she’d done it.
He said, “What—”
But Mariama was listening to something else. Trey heard it, too: the humming of wings.
Her gaze found his.
“You fool,” she said. “Flee.”
FIVE
THE PLAN HAD seemed simple when Mariama hatched it. She’d go after Gilliard, that brave, foolhardy, strange American visitor. Arriving in time, she’d prevent him from getting himself killed, then bring him back. On the way, they’d stop someplace quiet, private.
Mariama had thought the Etoile Bar in Ziguinchor would serve. There her father, Seydou, would join them. Together, they would explain to Gilliard what it was he’d seen, and what it meant.
What it meant for the world.
Soon. If not this month, then next, or the one after. They were sure of this, Mariama and Seydou. It had already begun.
And then, once he believed, they would tell him what he needed to do.
And pray that he understood.
* * *
MARIAMA WAS YOUNG, but already she knew many ways that a seemingly foolproof plan could go wrong.
This one began to go wrong with the phone call. The call Trey had received after visiting the health clinic and seeing the dead soldier. Mariama and her father, still at work in the clinic, didn’t learn of the phone call for more than two hours. By then Trey was gone, heading on his suicidal mission to the forest.
Already almost beyond her reach, and very likely doomed.
Still, she had to try.
Too much depended on his staying alive.
* * *
THEN HER CAR, her beloved 1983 Peugeot 305, ran over a sharp stone on the Massou-Djibo Road and had a flat tire. Thirty miles from her destination. Listening to the flapping of the slack rubber against the washboard dirt as she guided the car to the edge of the empty road, she almost despaired.
In her mind, she saw Trey moving in his strange, catlike way through the forest. She’d followed him once, and thought he was quicker and quieter than anyone she’d ever seen, besides herself.
She’d even thought he might have spotted her, and no one ever saw Mariama if she didn’t want them to.
She imagined him now, following the hints, the clues he’d picked up these past few days. The dying forest. The dead man on the clinic table. The smell.
Using his unusual skills to race to his death.
And she wouldn’t reach him in time. It was hopeless. She knew that. She hoped his pain wouldn’t be too overwhelming before the end came.
But Mariama Honso had never given up on anything, hopeless or not. She was as hardheaded as a rhino.
All life was hopeless, but you kept living anyway.
She changed the tire, got the car back on the road, and drove.
* * *
SHE FOUND GILLIARD’S Land Rover where she’d thought she would: where some long-vanished logger had given up his foolish attempt to build a drivable track to the giant, immensely valuable hardwood trees that grew deep in the forest. The end of the road.
Mariama climbed out of her car, bringing only her recently sharpened machete with her. As she went past the Land Rover, she placed her palm against its hood. It was cool to her touch.
More evidence that she was too late.
She went on.
* * *
TREY HAD LEFT few signs that he’d passed this way, but still Mariama was able to follow. A broken branc
h, flower petals scattered where he’d brushed against them, half a footprint in a patch of mud. She knew where he was going, into the part of the forest that no outsider should ever enter.
And then, at the very heart of the forbidden place, she saw him. Standing there on the edge of one of the colonies, trapped in the thorns of the volor plant. But alive. Still alive. She was amazed.
As she drew closer, she could read his expression. A mix of fear . . . and fascination.
That was unusual. Most people, facing what he was, showed only pure, unadulterated terror.
She felt like shouting at him, but that was the worst thing she could do. He would jump, struggle, become so enmeshed in the volor that it would take hours to extricate him.
Worse, they would be startled by her voice as well. And when they were startled, they attacked. They bit and stung. Paralyzed or killed.
They. The thieves.
So, even as her brain screamed at her to hurry, to run, to yell, she moved slowly, carefully. Coming up behind Gilliard, she cut through the brush with her sharp blade. Clearing a path for him, if he would only take it, if he would only notice.
Beyond him, the thieves retreated. They knew her. They knew Mariama.
But this still might not be enough.
Finally he was free. Waking as if from a dream, he turned to look at her. His eyes were wide. She could see that he understood what had just happened, how close he’d come.
He took a couple of steps away from the colony. Mariama went up on her toes and wrapped her arms around him, just for a moment. He stiffened, pulled away from her, but she held on a little longer before letting go.
He had no idea why. Of course he didn’t.
It was one of the things she needed to tell him.
Only not now.
“You fool,” she said, to make sure he was listening, but also because it was what she thought of him. “Flee.”
When he was gone, she turned to face the thieves, hanging in the air, watching her through those green eyes that seemed to understand everything.
But then again, she did, too.
* * *
EVEN THEN, EVEN after Mariama had saved him, her luck was bad. She hadn’t thought to tell him to wait for her where they’d left the cars—and he hadn’t. She shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d already seen that this odd American spent as little time with other adult human beings as he possibly could.
Then a storm struck as she was driving back. The Peugeot had to fight through grasping mud, where Gilliard’s fancy Land Rover had undoubtedly plowed right through. It took her twice as long to get home as it had taken to reach the forest.
Still, Mariama wasn’t worried. There was plenty of time for Trey to hear what she and her father had to tell him.
Only there wasn’t. By the time she made it to Mpack, her white car now a spattered reddish brown from the drying mud, he was gone. Gone forever.
The village children were waiting to fill her in. When Gilliard had arrived, he’d been met by a group of soldiers who had flown down from Dakar. Soldiers and a woman, a skinny American woman who’d shown up burning with anger.
Standing where everyone could see them, she’d yelled at Gilliard. Her voice was as high-pitched as a fish eagle’s (she also resembled one, the children said), and she talked so fast that even those who understood some English couldn’t follow her.
When she’d taken a breath, Trey had turned and walked away from her. He’d gone into his hut. Five minutes later, he’d emerged, carrying his pack and some other things, and climbed into the car with some soldiers and the angry woman.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” the children asked. They liked Gilliard. He was strange and generous, two things they appreciated in outsiders.
“No, I’m afraid not,” Mariama said. “I think he’s gone for good.”
As she spoke the words, she felt a black space open in her chest, just around her heart.
* * *
“HAVE THEY PUT him in jail?” she asked her father that night. They were in the empty clinic. It was clean, scrubbed down, disinfected. You could only detect the thieves’ odor if you sat still and breathed deeply.
Seydou Honso shook his head. There might even have been a glint of amusement in his eyes.
“No,” he said. “The government has no interest in keeping him. They just want him out. The soldiers were the lady’s idea.”
“That was Kendall? The one who was always calling?”
He nodded. “I think she believed the only way to get him to listen was to bring men with guns.”
Mariama said, “That was probably true.”
They sat in silence for a while. Now there was no expression on Seydou Honso’s face except for a kind of grim certainty.
“I fear we have missed our chance,” he said.
Mariama had known he would feel this way. She said, “No.”
“But who else will listen? Who else will understand what is taking place?”
“There are others,” she said. “But Gilliard is the one to tell them.”
She thought about his expression when she found him in the forest. Yes, he would understand.
“But how?” Her father turned his palms up. “He’s gone, and he won’t be welcomed back. Ever.”
“I know,” Mariama said.
“And calling him on the telephone won’t work, no more than it did for that Kendall lady.”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I will go see him,” she said.
Seydou’s eyes widened. “But how? You have no passport.”
This was a fact. Mariama’s outspokenness had led to her losing her right to travel anywhere outside Senegal. She even required permission to leave the Casamance region.
Legally, that was.
“You know how,” she told her father.
He stared at her. Then he said, “You cannot.”
“I can. I must.” She reached out and put a hand on his strong arm. “Papa, I have no choice.”
He argued with her. Finally, almost breathless, he said, “You’ll die.”
She smiled. “Perhaps I won’t,” she said. Then, “Or perhaps I will. You know I have never feared death.”
Nor had he, not for himself. She knew that. Every day he risked malaria, dengue, river blindness, and a hundred diseases that had no name, in order to treat the clinic’s patients.
He had no fear for his own life. For hers, though, yes. Of course.
Mariama said again, “I have no choice.”
In the end, he knew it was so. “But not right away,” he said. “There are people I can talk to, people who will help you.”
She nodded. Though she didn’t speak, she knew he understood her gratitude.
“If I’m lucky,” she said, “how long will it take to reach him?”
“Weeks.” He grimaced. “If you’re very lucky.”
“Will they get there first?”
He flicked a hand eastward, toward the vast rain forests of Central Africa and the savannas and deserts beyond them. Then west toward the Atlantic Ocean and the New World.
All the places the thieves had already reached, or soon would.
“First, second,” he said. “Does it matter?”
Mariama said, “I have to believe it does.”
Seydou Honso smiled at his daughter, his expression full of love and grief.
“I know you do,” he said.
SIX
Ujiji, Tanzania
THE FIRST THING Sheila Connelly’s gaze always sought out, every time she rode the Lake Tanganyika ferry from Kalemie, Congo, to Ujiji Port, was the mango avenue beyond the marketplace.
The mango trees had been standing for two centuries or more. By now they were bent and twisted, their branches hung with weaver bird
s’ nests, their trunks riddled with holes where the ravages of time and weather had rotted them out. But still surviving, still flowering each year, their boughs still heavy with fruit in the right season.
Ujiji’s mango avenue had long provided shade for the caravans of goods that crossed the lake from the vast, untracked forests of Central Africa and headed east. Sculptures and tapestries and weapons of many kinds, and foodstuffs, and slaves.
Countless thousands of slaves. Men and women captured in the forests of the Congo, carried across the lake in the bilges of ferries like the one Sheila was riding now, then driven on a death march across the plains and deserts of East Africa to their ultimate destination: Arabia.
Sheila wondered if the captives had known, as they stumbled, bound and whipped, past the fruiting trees, that these mangoes would be the last reminders of their tropical home they would ever see. Did any of them ever reach up and pluck a ripe, sun-warmed fruit as they passed, or had they been too terrified that they’d be punished if they did?
The hulking steel ferry, the Uhuru, let loose with a blast from its horn and, spewing dirty white water, approached the wharf. Sheila dragged her eyes and thoughts back to the present and scanned the harbor area. There were plenty of people there waiting for the ferry, but her mother didn’t appear to be one of them.
This was typical. Undoubtedly Megan Connelly was somewhere in the crowded marketplace, haggling over something she’d decided she had to own, picking up some last-minute supplies for Sheila’s visit, or merely shooting the breeze with vendors she’d known for years.
Sheila couldn’t blame her. The markets were still the lifeblood of a port city, of a society. Even now, you never knew what you might find: bins full of tiny bananas, totems wrought of rosewood by artists from some barely known rain forest tribe, wooden spears with stone points.
And, instead of slaves, disease. Mystery pathogens. Unnamed viruses and bacteria brought on the ferry from their birthplaces in the heart of Africa.
Sheila knew more about the diseases than anything else at the Ujiji Market. She was a physician, out of her residency just five years, who’d signed on to work in the overflowing refugee camps of the war-torn countries of Central Africa. She’d thought it important to repay some of the debts owed by the world’s wealthy societies to those who’d been dealt a worse hand.
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