A Novel

by A. J. Hartley

  I gazed after her wordlessly, unable to think, almost overwhelmed by the impulse to run crying after her, to beg that she take me with her.…

  The crowd parted silently before her once more, as if she were a benevolent queen visiting her subjects, and some of them peered at me, the nondescript girl who had been so unexpectedly touched by her beneficence.

  I pressed her card to my chest.

  She had said I could write to her. We would meet. We would talk. Everything would be all right.

  I watched her leave as the various well-wishers paid their respects to Berrit’s grandmother, though the old woman was probably wishing they were paying her with something more tangible. When it was my turn I pressed one of Vestris’s silver coins into the old woman’s hand as if I were my sister, elegant and wealthy.

  She didn’t thank me, but as I was turning away, she plucked me by the sleeve and pulled me back. “Let me see that!” she said. She stabbed with her bony index finger and I winced, expecting it to find my midriff, but it connected instead with the folded newspaper that was sticking out of my satchel.

  Baffled, I pulled the paper out and she ripped it from my hands, holding it so close to her face that it almost touched her nose.

  “That’s him,” she said matter-of-factly, thrusting the paper back at me. “That’s the chalker who came looking for Berrit. The one with the fancy shoes.”

  I looked at the image in the paper. It was the photograph accompanying the obituary for Ansveld, the luxorite dealer. I stared at it.

  So there is a connection.

  “Ang, sister mine,” said Rahvey. A summons.

  Berrit’s grandmother was already beetling away toward the barbecue fires. I turned to my sister.

  Rahvey waited for me to approach, her lips thin as she gazed out to where the pyre blazed and the sun set. “What did she give you?” Rahvey demanded.

  “Who?”

  “Vestris, of course!” she snapped. “What did she give you?”

  I showed her the remaining coins that I still had tight in my fist.

  She snatched my wrist and helped herself to one of the silver crowns. I tried to wrench away, but she dug in with her nails and hissed, “Call it back payment for services rendered.”

  I snatched my hand away, my fist tight around what was left of Vestris’s gift, then pocketed it. I drew the sleeping child carefully from my satchel and handed it to her. Rahvey swept it hastily under her mourning black and moved it to her breast with a cautious glance around, as if she didn’t want people to see. That bothered me.

  “What did the elders say?” I asked.

  “We have not spoken to the elders,” said Rahvey, eyes on the flames still.

  “What?” I demanded, incredulity raising my voice so that Rahvey gave me a sharp look. “Why not?”

  “Florihn said it was best we didn’t,” said Rahvey.

  “This isn’t Florihn’s decision!”

  “You are right. It’s mine.”

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “Nothing,” said Rahvey, looking away again. “It is already done.”

  I stared at her, aghast.

  “You will raise the child yourself, or you will take it to the nuns at Pancaris,” she said flatly. “I will help feed her when I can,” she continued, as if she were being more gracious than I deserved.

  “It’s your child!” I shot back.

  “Not anymore,” she said. “You took the oath. Sinchon says you are to do your sisterly duty.”

  I looked over to where Sinchon was talking to one of his tinker friends. He was holding a chicken leg in his hand, and as I watched, he laughed suddenly, then took a bite.

  Rahvey read the anger in my eyes.

  “So delicate, sister mine,” she said. “So unready for the world.”

  * * *

  RAHVEY, AS IF TO make a point, refused to take the baby with her. I looked for Tanish, but he had slipped away before the funeral ended. I did not know when I would see him again. The thought pained me.

  One by one, people drifted away, and the sun vanished beneath the silhouettes of distant towers and chimneys that were the city proper, until the only light remaining in the old temple came from the embers of the two fires. A few days ago I would have been able to see the Beacon like a star riding low over the city.

  Strange.

  If the government couldn’t recover it they would probably put a gas lamp in its place, which wouldn’t be the same at all. Without the Beacon, I felt more than usually lost, stuck in this remnant of my past like a character in a discarded book, unable to move any further through the story. I wandered around the temple, cradling the baby, and found a newly carved statue of Cenu, the Lani goddess of prosperity. It had been cut from soft wood and had yet to be painted, but I knew exactly what it would look like when it was done because I had been looking at this image all my life: it would be brightly colored, an overflowing basket of yellow wheat on one arm, an infant in the other, and the woman herself—ample breasted and broad hipped—would have her head tipped slightly to one side, beaming stupidly at the world. The expression gave her the look of someone who had been smoking servitt through a water pipe, but she hadn’t been, because only the men of the village did that. She was drunk on her own beauty, on her usefulness to her family, on the Lani way.

  I felt the rising red tide I had managed to suppress as it burst the hinges of one of the doors in my heart. All the injustice and frustration I had been wrestling with streamed out like a jet of molten steel. I seized a rock and smashed it into the statue’s saintly face over and over till its features splintered into nothing.

  CHAPTER

  13

  THE CHICKEN WAS CHARRED on the outside but sweet and tender within. I had eaten nothing so good since Willinghouse’s goat curry, and I devoured it hungrily, the pleasurable relief of it momentarily quelling all my other frustrations and anxieties. I was still in the temple grounds, sitting close to the barbecue hearth, watching the dwindling flames as they shifted from orange and yellow to blue and green. I had moved away from the defaced statue of Cenu, feeling so stupid and ashamed that I left a few coins at its feet: more than enough to repay the carver for the work he would have to do over. Vestris’s coin I kept like a talisman.

  Down by the river a male hippo bellowed in the dark, and the females of the pod answered in turn. They wouldn’t come up into the temple grounds, but I would need to be careful when I returned to the Drowning in case they had left the water to browse. Their teeth were a foot and a half long and the power of their jaws could break a crocodile in half.… I touched the sleeping child and it stirred, animal-like, without waking, so that I smiled. I had spent so much time wondering about the baby’s fragility that I had not allowed myself to register how beautiful she was, how much a thoughtless part of me was glad to be close to her.

  Was this how Papa had looked at me, with the same wondering joy? Or had he seen in me the death of his wife? If ever the latter, he got past it or concealed it utterly, and I was grateful for that. Deliberate or otherwise, it was an act of love. I wondered if Berrit had experienced anything similar, or if his hawkish, grasping grandmother had set the tone for the whole family.

  I could make no sense of Berrit’s death. Why had Ansveld been to see the boy? If the luxorite dealer had wanted to steal the Beacon, it made a kind of sense that he would contract with steeplejacks, but Berrit just didn’t have the skills. The boy could have been part of a team, but if so, why was he the only one to die, and who had killed him? Ansveld was unlikely to have been the one hanging from a brace on the chimney ledge, assuming he had still been alive at that point.

  It had to involve Morlak. He would have been the go-between, the agent and manager, though I felt sure I would have heard if the gang leader had ever been seen with a gentleman as elevated as Ansveld. They could have met secretly, of course, but Ansveld had taken a rickshaw into the Drowning: not the action of a man who was trying to
be inconspicuous.

  Something wasn’t right.

  I wished I could sit down with Willinghouse and talk it through, but as soon as I thought of it, the memory of the pale man with the scar and the fierce green eyes unsettled me. I was no Vestris, shaking the shanty’s mud from her immaculate sandals as she made her escape—confident, exquisite, free of the place where she had grown up. She probably spent her life at balls and soirees, exchanging easy banter with the likes of Willinghouse, meeting those piercing eyes of his and holding them, confident, like an equal.…

  I would write to her in the morning. She would know what to do. Maybe I could learn something from her about how to deal with men like Willinghouse.

  Meaning how to impress them? said an insidious voice in my head.

  No. That was stupid.

  I thrust a branch into the heart of the fire. The remaining wood flared and spat sparks into the night. In the flickering light, something in the underbrush to my left shifted.

  I froze.

  Hyena, I thought, getting quickly to my feet and edging even closer to the remains of the fire and the satchel where the baby slept. Once when I was a child and the summer had been particularly dry, a rogue hyena entered a hut on the edge of the Drowning where a mother and her three children slept—

  The snap of a twig, and my memories were blown away like smoke.

  I stared into the shadows where I had glimpsed the movement. There was a roughly plastered shrine, crumbling with age and overgrown with vines, little more than an altar within a miniature apse, wreathed by day in the smoke of a dozen incense sticks. The more I looked, the more sure I was that there was something beside it. Something that had not been there before.

  It moved fractionally again, though the trees behind it stayed quite still and I could feel no breeze. Whatever it was, it was alive and watching. I could feel its eyes upon me.

  But the darkness was the wrong shape for a hyena.

  The figure rose from its crouch and stepped forward, slowly, letting what was left of the firelight fall upon him.

  It was the Mahweni boy with the spear I had spotted when I went to see Berrit’s grandmother.

  He was young, close to my own age, clad in a simple drape that hung from one shoulder. He held the slender spear casually in one strong hand. His skin was black as the night itself.

  My eyes flashed to the satchel, but otherwise I kept very still. The Lani and the Mahweni weren’t enemies. The two peoples overlapped very little in culture, language, geography, work, or religion. Inside the city, the Mahweni were factory workers, laborers, market vendors, and street hawkers, like the newspaper girl. They dressed like white people, more or less, and did the same kinds of work, though usually for less money. They were what were called the Assimilated Tribes. But outside the city, the Mahweni were different. They were herders, hunters, and occasional traders, as they had been long before the whites came down from the north or the Lani from across the Eastern Sea. They were fiercely independent, a loose convocation of frequently squabbling tribes who held to ancient ways.

  The Mahweni and the Lani kept themselves to themselves, speaking little, sharing less. We weren’t enemies, but we weren’t friends either.

  The boy seemed to hesitate, feeling my eyes upon him. He looked at me, then bent at the waist, a graceful and stately bow that lowered his eyes for a moment.

  I couldn’t help smiling at the dignity of the gesture, and the smile moved through my body, relaxing the tension I had barely been aware of. The Mahweni nodded toward the fire, and his eyes widened a little in request. At this time of year, it could get quite chilly when the sun went down.

  “You want to sit here?” I asked in Lani, checking the satchel. It was quite still. “I suppose so. Yes.”

  I returned my gaze to the fire, marveling at the strangeness of my composure. Would I have done such a thing two days ago? No. I would have fled. But two days ago, I had not been a detective sitting in an abandoned temple outside the city to avoid a man who meant to kill me. It wasn’t that I was braver now. I just had bigger things to worry about.

  The Mahweni boy settled beside me, nodding and smiling but saying nothing. He had high cheekbones, and his head was shaved. He almost certainly spoke no words of Lani, but that didn’t matter; I was in no mood to talk.

  The boy unslung a pouch from round his neck and tipped some sorrel nuts into his hand. He offered them to me and I, more out of politeness than hunger, took one. He smiled broadly and watched me eat it. The nut was sweet and slightly fragrant, which meant it was fresh.

  “It’s good,” I said in Feldish.

  The Mahweni boy’s face lit up. “Yes,” he said in Feldish. “Good.” He considered me, still smiling, then added, “I am Mnenga.”

  “Anglet,” I said.

  He rehearsed the word in his mouth, enunciating it carefully till I smiled and nodded. There was a single chicken thigh left. I proffered it to him.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He took it and bit into the flesh, his eyes closing in the ecstasy of the moment. When he was done, he thanked me extravagantly. “Much better than nuts,” he said.

  I grinned in spite of myself. Normally around boys of my own age I got tense and silent, uncomfortable, as if my skin suddenly didn’t fit right. But his presence was strangely calming, and all the fears and anxieties of the day seemed to have curled up by the fire and gone to sleep.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  He frowned, trying to make sense of the question.

  “I mean,” I said, “why are you in this place?”

  “Oh,” he said, the brilliant smile snapping back into position. He had large black eyes, bright with curiosity and seemingly always on the point of laughing. “I have a…” He hesitated, looking for the word. “A flock?… Yes, a flock of nbezu, that way.”

  Nbezu are something between a goat and an antelope, with tall straight horns that spiral to a point like the cone-shaped shells I sometimes found by the docks.

  “Two of them came this way.”

  “I haven’t seen them,” I said. “You left the flock alone?”

  He laughed at that, a delighted bark that threw his head back like a shout into the sky. “No, no,” he said. “My brothers are there. Otherwise—” He gestured with his hands, fingers splayed, palms pushing quickly away from his chest: They would scatter.

  “I see,” I said, shielding the satchel with my body and surreptitiously checking to make sure the baby was still asleep. I didn’t want him to see it. “I hope you find them. There are hyenas here.”

  He considered that and sniffed the air, tipping his head onto one side as he said, “Not tonight, I think. Not unless they are very clever.”

  He grinned at the idea, then blew out a breath so long that I wasn’t sure if he was joking.

  “I don’t worry about hyenas,” he said, overenunciating so that his lips flexed. “I worry about the sun. We have to find water and shade. Even my people, who should know this, stay in the light too long and get burned. Three days ago, an old man, half-crazy from the heat, came down from the cliffs so badly sunburned, he could barely stand up! Sixty years old! Lived every day of his life out in the bush.”

  I grunted my agreement, and silence crept over us for a long moment. We watched the last of the fire, the ashen branches forming smoldering, shifting caves that throbbed with orange light, then dulled to gray and crumbled. I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to leave me alone or not.

  “I saw you in the … the Lani village,” said Mnenga.

  “The Drowning,” I said.

  “Drowning, yes. I was up here.”

  “I saw.”

  He smiled, pleased, as if this meant more than the literal meaning of the words.

  “Will you move on tomorrow?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject.

  “The nbezu are stubborn creatures,” he said. “When they find the grass they like and a little water, they do not move. Als
o, soon we may not be able to come here, so we use it while we can.”

  “Why not?” I asked, surprised by how much his inconsequential words soothed me.

  Mnenga shook his head. He was still smiling with his mouth, but his eyes were troubled. “We have always been able to use this land,” he said. “But our leaders say it will perhaps be traded.”

  “To who?”

  “White men in the city. I do not know their names.”

  “For what?”

  “I do not know. ‘Development,’ they say,” he added, poking the dusty earth with a stick.

  “Out here? Development of what?”

  He shrugged. “Not just here,” he said. “All over. Pieces of land our families have shared for generations. They will be fenced. We will not be allowed in.”

  “Does this involve the Grappoli?” I asked.

  He pulled a quizzical face. “Why the Grappoli?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shrugging with a sudden sense of defeat. “Just something I heard. Are you being paid for the land?”

  He smiled mirthlessly. “Some people will be paid,” he said. “Some of our elders say we will get iron tools from the factories. They say it is good for us, that most of the land is useless mountain slopes, not good for grazing. Perhaps they are right. But no one is asking us. The tribal leaders make deals in the city and then tell us afterwards. It is not good.”

  “You have representatives in the government,” I said. “You can’t talk to them?”

  “We talk through our leaders, but in the end, we must go through Sohwetti, and he wants to sell.”

  Farrstanga Sohwetti was the chief of the Unassimilated Tribes, the most powerful Mahweni in the country.

  “He won’t talk to your elders?”

  “Oh, he will talk,” said Mnenga knowingly. “He is very good at talking. But I do not think he will listen.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know where he lives?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not in my village,” he said. “Not in any village. I have a beehive hut,” he added proudly. “One day, I will have a family there.”