Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  Should have set out earlier—

  Somewhere off to our left, a twig snapped.

  Mnenga stopped in his tracks, hefting the spear. I froze, the one-shot pistol in my hand feeling dangerous, like a badly trained dog as likely to turn on me as it was to protect me. For a long moment, we waited like that, feeling the standing heat of the day singing in the dry bushes, and then I caught movement in my peripheral vision, a slight and cautious shifting followed by a sudden stillness. I turned slowly toward it, feeling the sweat running down the back of my neck, and looked.

  It was no larger than a jackal, but stood on spindly legs, tan striped vertically with thin white lines. A nyala female, lacking the male’s powerful neck and intimidating horns.

  I breathed out with relief, and the nyala walked on, revealing, behind it, a motionless black boy who was staring directly at me. He was wearing a ragged, dirt-streaked smock, and his feet were bare. He might have been eight or nine, though his eyes were older. He was gaunt, the skin of his face tight so that the skull showed through, and he was watching me, not moving one iota. He stared as the nyala had, gauging the threat, poised to leap into sprinting retreat.

  Slowly I reached behind me and pushed the pistol into my waistband, bringing my empty hand back where he could see it, fingers spread. Following suit, Mnenga lowered his spear and raised his free hand in a gesture of calm.

  The boy still stared, eyes moving between us, then widening with horror.

  “It’s all right,” I said soothingly. “We’re here to help. Mnenga, tell him.”

  But Mnenga was processing what I had missed, that the boy’s terror was not about us. It was about what was behind us. With a surge of dread, I forced myself to revolve and look into the face of the clavtar that was stalking toward us through the grass.

  CHAPTER

  27

  IT WAS MASSIVE. ALMOST as big as a rhino. Its mane was the color of steel, and its eyes were a cool, uncanny blue.

  Mnenga lowered into a half crouch and raised his spear once more, but I had never seen anything so clearly futile. In that half second, in a moment of sudden and awful clarity, I knew that he was going to die and that it would be my fault. I reached for the gun in the small of my bank and drew it fumblingly.

  The clavtar sniffed the air, the muscles of its great silver shoulders shifting, its tail lashing gently from side to side as if it was languidly considering its options. I cocked the pistol, and the snap as the hammer locked in place stilled it, focused its attention.

  “Where are the others?” I breathed to Mnenga, my eyes locked on the clavtar. There were no rules I knew for how to survive the situation. Running was obviously pointless, but whether I should be staring the beast down, talking, or playing dead I had no idea. Presented with the size of the creature, I was suddenly sure that shooting it would only make it angry, though the noise might frighten it for a moment. Through my sweating terror, I heard Mnenga murmur in his own language and, seconds later, heard the boy respond in his.

  I only hoped they could understand each other.

  “Behind the temple,” said Mnenga. His voice was low and hoarse. “Back away slowly,” he said.

  Cautiously, my gaze still fixed on the clavtar, I picked up one boot and reached back, a long, careful step that moved me a couple of feet away from the huge lion. It lowered its head, tail swishing, raised one colossal paw and held it in midair as if considering taking a step. Or leaping into an attack.

  Still watching it, I took another step away. The clavtar blinked and set its paw down in the grass. I took another step, Mnenga at my elbow, spear pointed squarely at the watching animal. The evening seemed to be descending on us even as we stood there, so that it felt like we had been locked in place like this for hours.

  Another backward step, and the clavtar gave a low, coughing snarl. Another, and now I wanted to turn and run as fast as I could, even though I knew the beast would be on me in seconds. Mnenga was muttering to the boy again, and I thought I heard him move more quickly away. The clavtar’s ears flicked and it roused itself again, its head almost level with mine. The pistol was slippery in my sweaty hand, but I dared not try to wipe it off.

  “Keep moving slowly,” said Mnenga. “Go to the temple. Climb.”

  For a second, I thought that high ground would stop the clavtar’s advance, but while it was marginally safer, harder for the lion to attack us there, I was fairly sure that all cats but cheetahs were confident climbers. We were the interlopers here. This was the clavtar’s world, and no ancient relics of a dead human past would change that.

  I didn’t mean to move faster, but I couldn’t help it. I backed toward the temple pyramid, the gun waggling ineffectually in my hand like something whose purpose I had forgotten. Mnenga matched my speed, putting himself between me and the great cat, and I was dimly aware of footsteps behind me. Lots of them.

  I turned, startled out of my mesmerized eye lock with the clavtar.

  There were children pouring up the steps of the pyramid in a wild scramble. A dozen or more. There were young women with them, all draped in once brightly colored robes, now torn and filthy. They looked back to where the clavtar took a single bounding step, halving the distance between me and it.

  I fired without thinking, shooting over the beast’s head so that it winced away from the deafening report. For a moment, the clavtar seemed to shrink in on itself, then it took a wary step back, and in that moment, I bounded onto the foot of the pyramid and began my panting, blind, and blundering climb to the top. Mnenga brought up the rear, tracking the lion’s movement with his spear.

  I skinned my shins against the rock, and the great stone heads seemed to shriek my silent pain and fury.

  “Up!” I said to the children, gesturing clumsily, herding, corralling, and they stared at me, too desperate to feel the horror they ought to in the swelling gloom of the early evening. At the top was a vast stone basin, coarsely hewn from the rock and long since fractured by the elements. I looked down. The clavtar had skirted the base of the pyramid and was padding through the grass, gazing up at us. For a second, I thought it was leaving, but then it paused and turned back around.

  It was only a matter of time before it came up.

  I gave Mnenga a feverish look. He was dragging brushwood, dead leaves, and ancient, shriveled vines up the stone steps, and was babbling to the children to do the same.

  I knew what he was thinking, even if I didn’t see how we could do it fast enough to make a difference. I unclasped my satchel and pulled out the tin box containing a three-inch steel bar, a piece of flint, and a wad of cotton soaked in methylated spirit. My nostrils flared at the heady aroma and, somehow, brought me to my senses, focusing my attention as if I was looking through the folding telescope, all the details suddenly sharp. I made it to the stone basin in half a dozen steps. It was already half full of sticks and dead leaves. I added the cotton and struck the steel with the flint, making sparks fly. In three strokes, the cotton had begun to smoke, and in five it was ablaze.

  One of the boys fed twigs into the basin, and a girl dumped a handful of leaves, which caught and billowed with sudden flame. In the same instant, Mnenga cried out.

  The clavtar was coming.

  It reached the base of the pyramid in a bound as long as a coach and horses, and was halfway up before Mnenga could shout at the children to get back. He lunged with his spear, but the clavtar swatted it aside like it was a match. At my back I felt the flare of light and heat in the basin, and the clavtar saw it too, the orange glare reflecting in its pale eyes. It roared, a deafening bellow of sound that showed its knifelike teeth and a maw wide enough to take me headfirst, then winced away, and in that moment, Mnenga pulled back before it could strike him down.

  I turned and dragged the largest branch out of the basin and brandished it, its leaves blazing, smoke trailing in a long plume as I ran down the steps of the pyramid to meet the lion.

  “No!” Mnenga yelled, but the clavtar was wary of the fi
relight, and as I came at it, it turned and leapt down, loping away, head turned balefully toward us.

  For now, we were safe.

  “It will be back,” I said, watching the cat sidle into the underbrush, “and we don’t have much to burn.”

  “Thank you,” said Mnenga.

  “Least I could do.” I shrugged.

  His face wrinkled with confusion at the phrase, so I smiled and shook my head.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. I looked down. One of the children—a girl, no more than six or seven—had taken my hand and was gazing up at me wonderingly. I stared at her, embarrassed and unsure what to do or say. In the end I dropped to my haunches and smoothed her hair. When she hugged me, sobbing with what I took to be relief, I just squatted there. I had faced the clavtar with better instincts.

  Mnenga spoke to her, then to the others, experimenting with dialect words till he found what was closest to their own language, and I busied myself feeding sticks into the fire and watching for the clavtar as darkness fell on the bush. We had wood for maybe an hour. After that we’d have to go foraging on the forest floor which, as night fell and the clavtar continued to lurk close by, was suicide. I caught Mnenga’s eyes flicking to the woodpile and knew he was thinking the same thing.

  But somehow, somehow, he had the children laughing. First two little boys who looked like they had been through hell, and then three more, till almost all of them were talking loudly and happily about the horrors of their journey through the bush. I don’t know how he did it.

  But it wasn’t all of them. One of the women, rail thin and wrapped in a swath of coarse fabric that might once have been sailcloth, was weeping inconsolably even as the rest came to life, sitting very still and staring at her gnarled fingers as if looking for something. She wasn’t the only one. Reluctantly they gave up their stories to Mnenga, who nodded solemnly and smiled with understanding and compassion as they quietly, matter-of-factly, rehearsed the horrors of their journey and all they had lost, so that—selfishly—I found myself glad that I couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  The girl who had taken my hand sat beside me, staring at the fire as I scanned the shadows of the trees for signs of the clavtar.

  “Her name is Ife,” said Mnenga. “She has no family here. Her mother was lost, I think, but I do not know how. They are Quundu, and their language is like Sanweeti, which I know pretty well, but not quite the same. I do not understand everything they say.”

  I smiled at the girl, and she linked her arm through mine in silence, the firelight flickering on her face. In the glow I saw pink and glistening blisters on her cheek and neck, which I had not noticed before. For a second I wondered if she had fallen into the stone brazier, but these were not new injuries, though they were not old either.

  “How did this happen?” I asked.

  She flinched, turning away as if embarrassed, but said nothing.

  I looked to Mnenga. “Ask her about these burns.”

  He squatted next to her, considering her injuries and then whispered smilingly. At first she just grunted in monosyllables, before uttering a phrase which clouded his face and made him turn to me in puzzlement.

  “She did not just arrive with the others,” he said. “She has been here a month.”

  “A month?” I repeated. “Doing what?”

  More whispering and then he nodded.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Later,” he said.

  I held his gaze, read the concern for the child, who looked suddenly distraught, then nodded. I reached for the thickest branch I could see, and shoved it into the fire. The sun was down now, and beyond the stone basin of flame, I could see nothing. Somewhere in the bush, the clavtar roared, and the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, so that the children’s laughter died and everyone huddled closer to the fire.

  I shot another glance at Mnenga and saw the concern in his face before he snapped on his grin for the children. Someone asked him a question, and he made soothing noises, deliberately avoiding my eyes. I patted the girl he had called Ife on the head and stood up, climbing to the highest point of the step pyramid and turning my back on the fire. For a moment, I closed my eyes tight in the hope that I’d see more when I reopened them, but I could make out nothing beyond the difference between the blue-black of the horizon and the deeper shade of the trees.

  I turned to face the river and caught my breath. There were two pricks of soft light out there on the water. Lamps. I kept my eyes on them until I was sure they were moving, coming closer.

  Boats.

  I called to Mnenga, pointing.

  “Get everyone down to the river,” I shouted. “Now! Take some of the burning sticks.”

  In fact carrying burning sticks was harder than it sounded. They tended to go out as soon as you started to run with them, but they smoked and glowed, and maybe that would be enough to make the clavtar wary. In seconds, we were at the base of the pyramid and picking our way through the reedy wet ground at its base, eyes flashing around for animals.

  The lights from the boats were nearer now, and I could see oarsmen pulling against the water, backs taught. Lani men. Only one per boat, which meant they had come to get us.

  I pushed my way to the front, babbling thanks as I splashed into the shallow water, but stopped abruptly when one of them turned and I recognized Rahvey’s husband, Sinchon.

  “How many are there?” he said in Lani without preamble.

  “About fifteen,” I said.

  “We’ll have to take two trips,” he said. “Youngest first.”

  Even in the panic of the moment, listening for the clavtar’s approach and trying to herd the children aboard the slender boats, I found myself humbled and amazed. I had never thought much of Sinchon.

  “Keep the rest here,” he said. “We’ll bring one more boat when we come back.”

  “Thank you,” I said, but he was already pushing off and clambering in, so I was not sure he heard.

  The river was wide, and the boats were overloaded and undermanned, so their crossing seemed painfully slow. At least with the lights on their prows we could track them, and though we returned to the brazier on top of the pyramid for a few minutes, it wasn’t long before we were back by the river and sloshing through the water as the boats returned. I was the last aboard, and we had just pushed off when I heard the roar of the clavtar close and echoing off the stone. Turning, I saw it pacing the upper tier of the pyramid, the dying flames from the stone basin painting its sleek gray hide with amber and gold. It looked like a feral king, an ancient and terrible force that might have been there for a thousand years, and I privately decided that Mnenga was right: this was no place for the living.

  CHAPTER

  28

  FLORIHN, THE DROWNING’S MIDWIFE and the closest thing I had to an enemy who was still alive and at liberty, met us at the shore of the Drowning. Her expression when she saw me was rigid but unsurprised, and I knew why. The rescue of the refugees was Rahvey’s doing. She had known I was here and why, and when someone reported seeing the fire on the temple, she had realized I was in danger. When I saw my sister giving cups of water to the children, bustling about with the other mothers who were loaded down with blankets and pots of curried dal or rice, I rushed to her and threw my arms around her.

  “Thank you,” I whispered into her hair. “Thank you.”

  “You thought we would leave you there?” said Rahvey, separating herself from me and giving me a hard stare. “We are not monsters.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think.… Thank you.”

  “Help me with the food,” she said, matter-of-factly. “There is naan in the basket over there.”

  I did as I was told, avoiding the way Florihn watched me with that supercilious smile on her face, as if my return in the company of a Mahweni herder with a horde of homeless black children was no more than she had expected.

  “You can’t stay here, you know,” she said. “N
either can they. We will feed and clothe them as best we can, but in a few days, they will have to move on. You will have to go sooner.”

  “I know,” I said. “I appreciate your help.”

  She stared at me then, as if trying to decide how much to say, all the things she had stored away since our last meeting when the rules of the Drowning about fourth daughters had changed at my insistence and in spite of her objection. In the end, she just nodded curtly and walked away.

  I turned to see Tanish coming into the shanty with Bertha at his side, a shawl drawn around her shoulders and a hat with flowers on it, as if she was on her way to church.

  “We heard,” she boomed, smiling. “We came to help.”

  Tears of joy and gratitude started to my eyes as, for once, the world turned out to be the way I had always hoped.

  * * *

  MNENGA MADE ALL THINGS better. The children flocked to him, forgetting all they had been through in their delight in food and firelight and his infectious company. He taught them old Mahweni songs and told them stories of life in the bush, and though they did not understand everything he said, they felt his warmth, his compassion, his spirit. Even the Lani who generally kept a safe and suspicious distance from the Mahweni seemed to take to him. The women brought him food, and the men—Sinchon included—brought him drink. I watched, smiling, confused by old, uncertain feelings and by the surprising and inconvenient wish that it would all go on forever and that I would be part of it.

  I slept for a few hours on Rahvey’s warped and creaking porch and said my farewells an hour before dawn.

  “When will you be back?” asked Mnenga.

  “Soon,” I said. “I promise. If the authorities find out the children are here, they will be shipped back.”

  “I will send a message to my village,” he said. “We will help as much as we can.”