When the Villian Comes Home

by Gabrielle Harbowy

  I glare at the folded newsprint as if it were a rat snuck into my cell. The Times of London, a respectable and credible outlet. The lead story concerns ongoing negotiations over changes to fishing rights in the North Sea. Apparently the cessation of lunar tides continues to exert significant effects on marine life, as does the changing rotational period of the Earth in the absence of lunar drag. Fish stocks have shifted catastrophically time and again in the decades since my master plan came to fruition.

  At this I can only laugh. Long dormant emotions are beginning to stir within me. To be in the world, to walk under an open sky as I have not done since the last day of my so-called trial. Why, once more I can do anything.

  I give vent to a rising bubble of glee. Even with my eyes closed, I could measure this cell to the centimeter. My voice echoing off the walls gives me an aural map just as accurate as my visual observations and memories.

  5

  The process of my release takes several more weeks. The newspaper left nightly with my meal mentions nothing of me or my fate, though I do learn much about the state of the world. Many of those things are incredible, even to me who mastered electricity, magnetism and gravity in the days of my youthful ascendancy. It took a combined Anglo-German army reinforced by numerous battalions of African askari to bring me down, in the end. Still, I had not anticipated the development of aeroplanes or thermionic valves or electronic switches. My world once consisted of iron and brass mechanical behemoths motivated by the pressure and heat of steam.

  The colonel still comes on Tuesdays, but now I also have other callers. A milliner, to clothe me fit for today’s street, at least its European variety. An alienist to discuss with me how people might be expected to behave. A geographer to inform me of the current state of empires, colonies and independent kingdoms in the West Africa of my birth and upbringing, and the East Africa of the years of my power.

  “Kilima Njaro is preserved by the Treaty of Mombasa,” the small, serious man with the Austrian accent informs me.

  “Preserved?” I ask.

  “Set aside by multinational acclamation as a natural area to maintain its beauty and bounty.” His voice is prim, though he rattles off those words as if he does not quite believe them himself.

  I smile at the geographer. Already I know this unnerves him. I am history’s supreme villain, after all. My deeds rewrote the night sky, triggered floods and famines that altered the fates of entire nations of people. Self-satisfied white men such as this fussy little lavender-scented Herr Doctor Professor have trouble compassing the idea that a woman born of Africa could have accomplished such mighty perfidy. Even the prosecution at my trial at one point advanced the notion that I must have been a stalking horse for some unknown evil genius of European or American origins.

  So my smile, coupled with the power of my personality that has faded so little with age, disturbs this man. Much to my delight. I ask in his native German, “And this Treaty of Mombasa was signed shortly after my capture, I presume?”

  He sticks to the English that my jailors speak. “Ah, in fact, yes.”

  “So what they are preserving is the ruins of my stronghold. Lest some malcontent unearth the secrets of my strength and turn my lost machines against the Great Powers.” I lean forward, allowing my smile to broaden further. “Or perhaps worse, prevent European scientists from successfully publishing my research as their own?”

  Now the little geographer is completely flustered. I know I have struck home. So it goes.

  5

  The last time I see Colonel Loewe, he speaks more frankly than anyone ever has since I was first subdued and captured on the slopes of my mountain, fleeing my besieged stronghold. It is a Tuesday, of course. Some things do not change. I, who am about to see more change than I have in decades, choose to interpret this as courtesy on his part.

  “Madame Mbacha.” He once more offers me coffee.

  “Colonel Loewe.” I nod, grant him that same broad smile I have used to upset some of my other visitors.

  His voice grows stern. “I must inform you that as a matter of personal opinion, I am not in favor of your parole.”

  Interesting. “Thank you for your honesty, Colonel. Why do you think thusly?”

  “These people at the League of Nations do not know you as I know you.” His fingertips drum briefly on the table. “They barely know of you, except as a rumored evil slumping into your dotage.”

  Dotage!? I will show them dotage. I hold my tongue, of course.

  The colonel continues. “I am well aware that even I barely know you. Always you have guarded your tongue as jealously as any citadel’s sally port.” After a moment he adds with further reluctant candor, “Though for many reasons I wish matters were otherwise, I cannot help but admire your strength of character.”

  I am near to being enchanted by his words. Flattery is one unction that has been denied to me in the more than four decades since my capture. “Do go on,” I tell him in a throaty whisper which even at my age can distract all but the most determined men.

  “You and I both know full well you are slumped into nothing, especially not dotage. Age has not dimmed your fires, only brought you to a preternatural discretion. I have noted this in my reports over the years. In my judgment, you are still by far the most dangerous woman on Earth.” Another drumbeat of the fingertips. “The most dangerous person of either gender, in truth.

  “It is hoped,” he continues, “that four decades of incarceration have mellowed you, and that what prison has failed to accomplish the inevitable withering of time will have managed. Your release is seen as a humanitarian gesture, proposed by some of the new regimes in the tropical lands that are slowly emerging from colonial patronage. You are a hero in the tropical villages of Africa, of Asia, and of South America, Madame Mbacha.” He clears his throat, sending his moustache wobbling. “But we also both know you are still the greatest villain who ever lived.”

  I wait a long, polite moment to see if the colonel was finished speaking. Then I take pity on him, for he is flushed and perspiring, obviously uncomfortable with himself.

  “They are not far from wrong,” I tell him. “My years here have made of me an old woman. I do not have the funds or the equipment to embark on grand ambitions. Nor, frankly, the years.” I take brief joy in imagining his precious London burning, choking in clouds of toxic chemical fog, assaulted by clanking monsters rising from the bed of the Thames. “Whatever is in my heart must remain there, hostage to age and penury, not to mention the watchers you and yours will surely be setting to dog my every step between the door of this prison and the grave I eventually find.”

  “Fair enough.” His eyes flick down to his hands as if his fingers were an unexpected novelty. Then Colonel Loewe meets my gaze once more. “If you will, for the sake of all that has passed between us these dozen years, please indulge me with the answer to one final question.” He raises a hand to forestall my answer. “This is my own curiosity. Not for any report I shall write, nothing to be used against you.”

  I wonder what could be so important to him now, though it would not be too difficult to guess.

  “With all the unimaginable power you commanded, why did you lay waste to the moon? If you’d wanted to free the nations of the tropic world from colonial bondage, why not destroy London or Paris or Berlin, or sink the fleets of the world powers?” He sounds almost apologetic.

  The question makes me laugh. A full-throated laugh, the delight I’d once taken in powering up a new machine, in uncovering a novel physical principle of material progress and destruction, in arranging a particularly baroque and painful fate for some interloping spy or traitorous servant. I’m certain it makes me sound mad to him, but what do I care now?

  Finally I regain control of my voice. “Believe me, Colonel, once I’d perfected my gravitational gun, I considered those other targets and more. I could have altered the balance of th
e Great Powers in a single moment. But for every city destroyed, every ship sunk, every army brought to its knees, three more would have sprung up in their place. You Europeans are like the god Eshu, sly tricksters who make a lie of the world with the strength of your guns and gold. In a dozen years, you would have rebuilt and remade and convinced yourself my strike against you had never happened, or had been of little consequence. But who can deny the loss of the moon? So long as men and women live in the world and lift their eyes to the night sky, you will be reminded that at least for a while, there was a power greater and more fearful than even your own.”

  “In other words,” he says quietly after a thoughtful silence, “you destroyed the moon because you could.”

  “Well, yes.” I smile again. “And if my gravitational gun had not imploded, I might well have gone on to destroy London and Paris and Berlin. I chose my most lasting target first.” I lean against the table, almost pushing it in to him. “I will be remembered.”

  5

  When I walk out of the prison, the daylight is blinding. I have not seen the sun in over forty years. I stumble against the physical pressure of its brilliance. Guards flank and support me, corporals in the same uniform that Colonel Loewe wears.

  I’d never known where my prison was. They had brought me here by night after my trial in a secret courtroom in Brussels, the capital of that mad despot King Leopold. Now there was a city I should have destroyed. I was brought not just by night but also blindfolded, as I’d been moved from armored omnibus to sealed railway carriage to a cabin on a boat or ship.

  England, almost certainly, for where else would one take ship to from Belgium, at least for a short voyage? And English had always been the language of my imprisonment. Still, I am surprised to find myself on the verge of a busy city street amid scents of petroleum and cooking oil and hurried, unwashed people. Gleaming horseless carriages careen past with a clattering of engines and a blaring of claxons. Men and women wearing unfamiliar fashions throng the pavements alongside the roadway. Airships and aeroplanes dot the sky.

  My breath grows short and hard as a headache stabs through my eyes to interrupt my thoughts with vicious distraction. Dizziness threatens, and despite my best efforts, I feel perspiration shivering on my face and about my person.

  “’ere you are, missus,” says one of the guards. He presses a cheap cardboard suitcase into my right hand. “They’ve put your walking money inside. I’d be careful of snatchers.”

  With that, I am alone and free for the first time in more than half my life. I take a deep breath, look up into the harsh, brilliant sky, and see a silvery band stretching from horizon to horizon. The Ring of the Moon, they call it. My signature upon this Earth.

  Even amid the pain and panic of the moment, my smile returns a thousandfold. Then I set out to find my way home.

  5

  The borders around the Kilima Njaro Preserve are secured by soldiers from a number of European states. It seems that Africans cannot be trusted to protect our own. There is a wall, as well, topped in places with electrical wires and brass light pipes through which guards might spy on distant locations. Still, it is not hard to find men among the Kikuyu who know how to slip through the animal gates. They poach, and gather from the forests on the lower slopes of the mountains, and generally show the white men their asses.

  These are not my people—I was born half a continent away—but they and I are of one mind when it comes to British, Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians, Russians and others. Joseph, my guide, has been engaged for a quantity of silver rupees I earned through various chicaneries and the sorts of petty crimes open to a woman of advancing years. Once I’d gained my needed funds, it had not been so challenging to slip away from Colonel Loewe’s watchers in Mombasa, where I was but one among many thousands of old African women.

  I have not told my guide who I truly am, and I am certain it has not occurred to him to guess. If nothing else, he was not even born when I shattered the moon. Tales of Madame Mbacha and her gravitational gun are surely just as legendary and improbable to a young man as are his parents’ stories of the days of their own youth.

  Still, whether he thinks me mad or simply lost in the world does not matter. Joseph smiles easily, his teeth gleaming in the dark. His ragged canvas shirt and duck trousers are sufficiently reddened with the ground-in dust of the savannah to keep him unobtrusive in these grasslands below my mountain. I myself am equipped with tropical weight camouflage which Joseph finds an endless source of amusement.

  “You are an old woman,” he declares, his Kikuyu accent inflecting his English in a way I had not known I’d missed during the years of my imprisonment. “Why do you want to look like a German bush ranger?”

  “For the same reason German bush rangers dress like this. To not be seen.”

  He shrugs eloquently. “You do not come to fight. There is nothing to see here except what is here.”

  True, I carry no firearm. I never have. There were always others to do the shooting for me. Joseph has a rifle, an old bolt action Mauser that I suspect is more dangerous to him than to any lions or soldiers he might shoot at. “Sometimes seeing what is here is enough,” I tell him.

  He does not need to know.

  We take our time, moving by night and sleeping by daylight against clay banks or hidden in low-lying hollows. The guardians of the Kilima Njaro preserve fly overhead periodically in small aircraft that drone like wasps. Twice we hear the chuffing clank of European steam walkers and even catch the scorched metal scent of their boilers, though we never actually see the machines. Neither do they see us. Joseph and I are small and hard to find, as if we were beetles on a banyan tree.

  My only complaint, which of course I do not voice, is the heat. I, who once worked with great gouts of steam and the fires of a foundry to build my ambitions. I, who was birthed amid the parched plains of western Kamerun. Slowly I come to admit that the years spent entombed in cold British stone have sapped my bones of their youthful fire.

  After four days we gain the slopes of the mountain. I am on my home ground now, and have begun to see traces of my old roadways, the supply lines that brought game meat, grain and other supplies from the surrounding countryside up to my stronghold. The heat seems more bearable up on the slopes, where the breezes can more easily reach us and trees spread shade from time to time.

  “There is nothing here,” Joseph says uneasily one evening as we break our camp. A collapsed, fire-scarred stump of one of my watchtowers stands close by. “I do not think we should go on. Haven’t you seen enough?”

  “I can find my way from here,” I say politely. Back in my day, I would have had him whipped for cowardice and sent to take a turn stoking the fires of my industry. Now I must rely upon this man to stay alive. I press another sack of silver rupees into his hand. “Give me a water gourd and wait in this place for two days. If I do not return, make your way home and forget you ever saw me.”

  “There are ghosts here,” he says uneasily. Then: “I will wait.”

  Perhaps he will, perhaps he will not. I tell myself this does not matter, that I am almost home.

  5

  I hike the last few kilometers alone. Even in the evening, the heat persists in bothering me, so to put my mind at ease I review the triumphs of my life. The moon, of course, first and foremost. But also how in my youth I bested the chief’s son in my home village and left him crying for his manhood which I took away in a muti pouch. How I’d learned the physics and chemistry and mathematics of the Europeans while working as a cleaner in the universities at Heidelberg and Cambridge. How I’d carved out my own domain in the savannahs of Kenya and Tanganyika, laying the foundations for what would become my stronghold on Kilima Njaro.

  Madame Goodwill Adeola Mbacha, scourge of the white race. When my resolve falters or my memories fade, all I need do is lift my eyes to the Ring of the Moon and I am reminded of all I have accomplished.<
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  I come across the outer gates by starlight. They are shattered, their tumbled ruins covered with cloying flowers and acrid-scented shrubs. Vividly I recall the cannon fire that laid waste to my defenses. I walk past a row of nearly vanished graves, surely guards and servants of mine buried where they fell.

  Ahead, where the walls of my stronghold should have risen, there is only a larger, night shadowed heap of rubble. No flowers there. I wonder if my enemies salted the ruins to keep them barren. Slowly, still sweating profusely, I make a deliberate circuit of the destroyed fortification, taking four thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven paces to do so.

  It is all gone. My laboratories, the refineries. The little railroad that brought in wood and ore for my smelters has been ripped up completely and the bed trenched so it would erode.

  Somehow, I’d thought there would be something more of home here. A doorway, a room, a place to start again.

  My aching bones and shaking hands tell me that I am old. The heat tells me this is not a place to rekindle forge fires and drill anew for steam vents. The dusty, bitter air tells me I do not belong here.

  For a while I sit on tumbled, fire-blackened stones and weep. I, who have not wept since earliest childhood, let the tears flow unchecked. Even the Ring of the Moon seems a mockery, my lost power glimmering in the sky day and night as the world rearranges itself around missing tides and deeper nocturnal darknesses.

  5

  In the morning I walk back down the mountain to where Joseph should still be waiting. I bid the graves farewell as I pass them. The slope is hard on my hips and knees. My mind should be awhirl with plans and possibilities, but I cannot summon the energy. It is too late in my life to start over.

  I just want to go home. Is that giving up? The world lives with my mark. I’ve accomplished more than they can ever take away from me. Now I can return to Mombasa and allow Colonel Loewe’s agents to find me. Having broken my parole, they will remove me once more to my cool, stone-walled room in the depths of London.