“I think she looks like a kalla,” I said on impulse. “The flower over there.”
He glanced at the rich and fragrant blooms that hung from a gnarled tree on the edge of the temple grounds and beamed. “Hlengiwe in my language,” he said, adding “Kalla,” trying the feel of the word and liking it. “Yes.”
“I will suggest it to her mother,” I said, taking the bottle from him and continuing to feed her.
“Good,” he said. “I helped.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”
I remembered what he had said the last time we met and added, “You did not tell your brothers?”
“No,” he said. “They notice nothing. I could have taken half the flock and they would not see.”
“Did you find the two that were missing?”
“Yes!” he said, glad that I had asked. “They had not come this far. But we are still looking for the old man.”
I gave him a puzzled look. “Old man?” I said.
“The one I told you about who came from the cliffs.”
“Oh,” I said. “The one with the sunburn.”
“Yes,” he said. “He is still lost, and some of the tribe are worried, so we have to look. It is very foolish. I am glad I found you instead,” he said.
“So am I,” I answered. The child was still drinking, the habbit forgotten by her side.
“I will come again tomorrow with more,” he said.
“I may not be here,” I said. “I have work to do.”
He shrugged and smiled that broad, infectious smile of his, then got to his feet. “I will come tomorrow,” he said. “In case. And I will get more nbezu milk. I think it is sweeter than her mother’s.”
* * *
“I DON’T SEE WHAT you think I can do to help,” said Dahria. I had arrived at the town house unannounced, and she had reacted coolly, as if merely speaking to me was endangering her reputation.
I showed her the baby I had already begun to think of as Kalla, and she took a step back, her face an almost comic mask of astonishment.
“I’m in danger,” I said.
“If you are going to ask me to look after that—,” she began, appalled.
“I’m not,” I said. “But if I am going to continue my investigation, we need protection. Perhaps I could borrow one of your brother’s men.”
“I thought you were supposed to be working in secret?” she asked. “I hardly think being accompanied by henchmen and an infant is going to lower your profile.”
My face fell. For a moment, she just looked at me; then she made a decision and opened a desk drawer with an intricate key. She produced a long, hexagonal-barreled revolver and a velvet bag of ammunition.
“Do not tell my brother or, for that matter, anyone else in the world, that you got this from me,” she said.
“Can you teach me to use it?” I asked.
“You point it and pull the trigger,” said Dahria wryly. “Pull the hammer back after each shot, like this, and hold it tight. It will kick. There’s little more to it. That’s the great and terrible thing about guns. You don’t need a lot of skill with them to be lethal.”
“Then that should work out,” I said, taking the heavy weapon from her and hefting it less comfortably than I pretended.
“Just…” She faltered, eyeing both me and Kalla. “Be careful.”
CHAPTER
20
I SAW FEVEL ON my way to the Drowning. He was loping down the center of the road by the Westside Gasworks, gazing about him like a weancat, hunting.
For me, I thought, shrinking against the wall of the post office on the corner and peering between the drainpipe and the wall as he walked on, scanning. Less weancat, I decided, more hyena. I hugged the child to my chest, glad that she was sleeping.
When I arrived, Rahvey snatched the child from my arms so that she woke with a start and began to cry, silencing only when she found my sister’s breast. “It’s starving,” said Rahvey, shooting me an accusatory look.
It wasn’t, in fact. Mnenga’s nbezu milk had kept the child satisfied.
“What are you doing all the time?” she demanded. “You look terrible.”
I thought of telling her about Berrit, but Rahvey was the kind of person who thought that the difficulties of her own life—which were undeniable—rendered everyone else undeserving of sympathy.
“Does it matter?” I said.
Rahvey turned to look at the baby she was nursing, and suddenly it was like we were girls again, waiting for Papa to come home. I think I always knew that Rahvey resented the attention I got from Papa, attention she saw as stolen from her. I remember one time when Vestris was reading the tale of Shantali the hunter as we all ate together, and Papa was so caught up in it that his food went cold as he listened, spellbound. The next day I made a clay model of Shantali and the elephant he killed by mistake as a gift for him, but Rahvey broke it. She said it was an accident, but I didn’t believe her, and I was still crying when Papa got home. Vestris took him out of the hut to tell him what had happened, and when he came back, his face was tight with anger. He never shouted except in delight, so his silence was terrible. He told Rahvey she had done a disgraceful thing, and Rahvey wept, protesting her innocence till even I wasn’t sure whether she meant it, or whether she had just started to believe her own lie. Children do that sometimes.
That night as we lay quiet in our beds I had seen Rahvey’s face in the lamplight as Vestris stroked her hair, and she had looked beyond anger and grief. She looked lost and without hope. And then it was like I was seeing myself from her bunk, and I was an interloper, someone who had appeared when no one expected it, stolen her father’s love from her, and captivated her beautiful elder sister.
Had I given her cause to hate me? I didn’t think so, but maybe what I thought didn’t really matter. It occurred to me that the soup my father had allowed to go cold while listening to Vestris’s story would have taken Rahvey most of the afternoon to make.
“Morlak’s boys came for you, Anglet,” Rahvey said now, without looking up from Kalla’s face. “Found Sinchon at his work. What did you do?”
And that was also Rahvey. No concern for me. Just the assumption that her idiot sister had messed up in ways that would incur a punishment she probably deserved. If there was any other emotion, it was irritation that my problems had somehow involved her.
“Please just feed Kalla,” I said, weary.
“Kalla?” said Rahvey. “Who is Kalla?”
I flushed a little. “It’s what I call her,” I said. “The baby.”
Rahvey drew herself up still farther, like some bush lizard flexing its crest to ward off predators. “There has been no naming,” she said in a leaden voice. “When there is, I will name the child, not you. And it will not be called Kalla.”
“She,” I corrected. “Not it.”
Rahvey glared at me, but I held her eyes, and for once, it was my sister who turned away first. “And I would appreciate it if you didn’t bring your sordid city friends out here,” she added.
I tensed. “Believe me,” I said, “I have no interest in talking to Morlak.”
“Not just Morlak!” she snapped. “There was another. Said his name was Jennings.”
“Billy?” I said. “What did he want?”
“Says he has to tell you something. Something he saw. Wants you to meet him tonight under the statue of Captain Franzen at eleven.”
I frowned. Cleaning that statue had been one of Tanish’s jobs, and though it was in the heart of Mahweni Old Town, it was only a stone’s throw from the Martel Court. It was also where Morlak had attacked me. The coincidence made me uneasy. If Morlak had gotten to Billy, this was a trap.
“How did he seem?” I asked.
“What?” said Rahvey, as if I were speaking another language.
“Did he seem like he was hiding something?” I said. “Or like he was scared, nervous? Did he mention Morlak?”
She shook her head. “Morlak,” she sneered.
“These city Lani. You can’t trust any of them.”
* * *
I RETURNED TO BAR-SELEHM before the lighting of the streetlamps and got the baby safely tucked into her basket in the clock tower before making the cautious climb down. I had the pistol in my belt under my charcoal gray jacket. I did not know what to make of Billy’s sudden decision to be helpful, and I wanted to be ready for anything.
Old Town was the most respectable black district in the city, made venerable by age if not by space. The houses were small, the streets smaller, though their inhabitants kept them meticulously clean. In the square at the end of Range Street, under a pair of blue-tiled minarets that rose like lighthouses above the uneven rooftops, a group of Mahweni protesters were clearing up what was left of their rally, gathering up handbills so they couldn’t be done for littering. I thought of Mnenga’s stories of suspicious land deals, and the image of his face and his gift of the nbezu milk made me smile. I remembered the touch of his hand, the surprise in his face, and the pleasure that had followed it.
And then, as if the memory had conjured him, he was there. He was huddled among the remaining protesters in his Unassimilated garb, so he stood out among the coats and collared shirts. With the spear in one hand, he looked fierce and out of place. He was talking animatedly to one of the protesters, his face earnest, angry even, and as I watched, he gestured dramatically, his forefinger stabbing from his clenched fist so that the other man, who was dressed as a factory worker, shook his head and took a step back. I did not call to Mnenga, and not only because seeing him here in the city was so jarringly strange. He suddenly seemed quite different, his manner, his very presence here hinting at something I had not seen in him before, something he had kept from me.
What was he doing here? There was clearly more to him than the humble nbezu herder he had claimed to be. Were there even any nbezu? He could have bought that milk anywhere.…
Whatever the truth was, however innocent it might be, it was clear as luxorite that while I had trusted him with my private thoughts, I did not know him, and his appearance in my life suddenly seemed more than convenient. It was suspicious. I turned quickly away, so he would not see me, and kept walking. A policeman gave me a look as I rounded the corner, but—since I was neither friend nor obvious foe—went back to monitoring the protesters in the soft glow of a gas lamp, Mnenga among them.
I picked up my pace.
This time of year, the night came early, and as the temperature fell, the city became an entirely different place. The district around the Martel Court, where I had left the baby and which thronged with people in daylight, was deserted now, and its statues of old justices, brushed with the pearly light of the streetlamps, became ghosts of a forgotten world. It was only a couple of blocks to where the statue of Captain Franzen stood on his triumphal column, gazing forever out toward the coast with his bronze telescope.
A sound behind me. Footfalls, or just the echo of my own feet on the stone?
I faltered and they continued for a moment, then stopped. I turned and looked back the way I had come, but the mist that blew in from the river on cold nights had blended with the city’s persistent pall of smog, and I could see no more than twenty yards, even where the street was open and well lit.
I began walking and almost immediately, I heard the steps behind me start up again. They were uneven and punctuated with a rhythmic tap, like someone using a cane, someone very slightly off balance.…
Morlak.
I quickened my pace, dimly aware of Captain Franzen’s column looming out of the fog ahead, its shape cluttered with the scaffolding Tanish had been using. My pursuer matched my speed.
I reached for the pistol in my waistband but did not draw it. Not yet.
As the square opened up, I could see the base of the column clearly, with its four massive bronze rhinos turned outward as if guarding. A figure was sitting on the steps at the foot of the column itself.
He was slumped over sideways. Unmoving.
A puddle of blood was thickening around him. There was a wound in his chest. One I had seen before.
It was Billy.
CHAPTER
21
HIS EYES WERE OPEN, but when I stooped and touched his throat, I felt no pulse, though the body was still quite warm. I closed his eyes with one hand and sat on the stone flags in front of him in numb shock. I adjusted his jacket, which had rumpled, smoothing the front as I thought he would have liked, and I felt the bulge in his breast pocket.
Two purses and a quarter sheet of newspaper, carefully folded.
I took it all, but did not read the cutting. My mind would not process what had happened. I had doubted him, but he was true, and in trying to help me, he had died. Shock and grief and guilt threatened to overcome me, and I stuffed the newspaper into my pocket without another glance.
Two purses, one for the ring he will never buy …
I heard the footsteps. I don’t know how I had forgotten them, but I had. They were closer now, more careful, but they were the same ones I had heard earlier. I heard the tap of the cane, and suddenly I was sure that whoever was following me had been here already. He had known I was coming and who I was to meet. One half of his job was done. I was the other half.
Morlak hobbling on his stick.
Or Mnenga with his spear?
The thought horrified me, but would not go away. I had seen the Mahweni boy only a few blocks away, in a place he should not be, and armed.…
I spun around, trying to locate the source of the sound in the eerie glow of the gaslit fog, and as I did so, I snatched the heavy pistol from my belt and pointed it into the shadows.
Another careful footstep.
“Who’s there?” I demanded. “Step into the light. I’m armed!”
Silence. Then the distinctive ring of steel: a long knife or sword sliding from its sheath.
I cocked the gun’s hammer and aimed the long barrel into the gently swirling mist, but there was nothing to see. How close might he get before presenting me with a target? Ten yards? Five? The fog seemed to confuse the sound so that I wasn’t sure which way I was facing, and when a distant train blew its whistle, the sound seemed to bounce from all directions.
My gun hand trembled. I had just enough presence of mind not to shoot blindly. Some of the buildings around me were residences. A stray bullet could go through a window.…
I pointed the revolver’s barrel into a patch of exposed dirt where a fractured flagstone had been removed, and fired once.
In the silence, the sound was a cannon blast, and its reverberation slapped around the facades of the square like thunder. My ears rang, and for a moment the world seemed muffled. I heard a window open somewhere to my left, and then the distant but unmistakable shriek of a police whistle.
From my attacker, the man I assumed had already killed Billy before turning his attention on me, there was no sound.
Then there were footsteps again, coming toward me. I turned, seized the lowest bar of the scaffolding, which crisscrossed its uneven way up the column to the bronze pirate on the top, and began to climb, my hair swinging in my face. The pistol was still in my hand, but the last I saw before the fog swallowed the ground beneath me was the shape of a man moving to Billy’s body, hesitating, and looking around as the shrill blast of the police whistle sounded once more.
I could not see who it was.
I climbed higher, faster, hoping against hope that I would not be trapped at the top of the column. The earth fell away beneath me. The fog swallowed me up. And still I climbed. At the top, a set of four gas lamps gave a faint opalescent aura to the bronze figure, but the column itself was utterly dark, so that the statue seemed to float like a specter above the city. It was not till I reached the top that I found what I had hoped for: a slim and rickety bridge made of ladders and cable, which the cleaning crew used to bring supplies from the roof of a nearby building.
It sloped downward, creaking when I put my feet on it, and it had never bee
n designed to be used in the dark, but I could hear voices below, muffled by the fog. The police? Billy’s killer? Perhaps both. I took my first unsteady step onto the slim bridge and felt it wobble under my weight.
There was a single cable at waist height, which served as a handrail, on the right. There should have been one on the left too, but it was missing. I pocketed the gun, gripped the cable with one hand, and holding the other out for balance, pressed on, eyes front, feeling my way with the soles of my boots. The fog was too dense to see where the bridge ended.
The voices from the square were louder now but less distinct, and for a moment everything seemed to fall away, even my horror of Billy’s death, so that it was just me up there in the night sky, trusting to hands and feet and instinct.
Below me, someone screamed. It was a strange, disembodied sound, and for a split second, I wondered if it was me, if the feelings I kept locked behind the dam had somehow broken out without me realizing.…
The bridge ended on the ornamental roof of an office building. I used a discarded ladder to cross onto the Merchant Marine headquarters next door, and then dropped onto the fire escape of the Dragon’s Head. I covered the next block and a half on rooftops and one decorative ledge, reaching the League of Magistrates’ chambers, and finally the south entrance to the Martel Court.
I scaled the clock tower as quickly as I could, shut myself in, and rushed to the child I had left there. The only good thing about the night was that she had not been with me, and the idea that being near me was likely to get her killed settled in my gut like a stone.
The baby was sleeping soundly. The strangeness of her peace after what had happened first shocked, then calmed me, and I lay with her, feeling her breathing, her heart, as I stared wide eyed into the blackness, the habbit clutched tight in my hands. Her safety was, I saw now, an illusion—something I had wanted to believe in but which was clearly impossible to achieve. I could maintain the pretense no longer.
* * *
I MOVED BEFORE DAWN, giving Captain Franzen’s square a wide berth and reaching the orphanage called Pancaris, the place I had vowed never to revisit, just as the city came to life. I laid the basket on the steps. In it, the girl I called Kalla slept. The nuns would give her a new name, I thought, as I rapped hard with the knocker three times, walking quickly away before the door opened. If I saw her again years from now, I could be introduced to her and still not know her. She would, of course, not know me either.
A Novel Page 17