Everfair (13 page)

“I am”—she searched for the best way to summarize her non-Daisy thoughts—“concerned. We're near where we used to live, where they tried to kill us.”

Fwendi nodded knowingly. “Yes. The soldiers. The evil men.”

Indeed. Doubtless the selfsame evil soldiers who had murdered Fwendi's parents and given the girl her disfigurement.

The child crouched down beside the steam bicycle, slowly, as if lost in reflection. “You act as our guard?”

What an idea! That she should stand guard against Leopold's depraved thugs! Lisette shook her head.

Fwendi leapt up. “Then who—”

Lisette clasped the girl's bare shoulder, urging her to reseat herself. “It's all right. Men from Mwenda's entourage see to it. No need for agitation on your part.”

The girl subsided warily. Perhaps she wondered why, if all was well, Lisette sat vigil instead of sleeping. Yet she did not ask.

Silence. The bicycle gleamed softly where Lisette had burnished its clean, straight metal parts. White moths gathered, drawn by the firebox's dull red glow. Fwendi waved them away with her false hand.

Which whirred and spun entrancingly.

Almost against her will Lisette reached for the girl's glittering brass hand. Its many intricacies delighted her touch. “It is new?” she asked.

“Yes, and much better than the last Tink made to me. It moves—” Fwendi showed her the key for winding the mechanism contained in the prosthetic's long cuff, fat around the refugee's forearm.

Most of the motion the wind-up hand was capable of consisted of flapping up and down or rotating a full 360 degrees. Also, its four fingers and thumb could grasp an object with the flick of its wearer's wrist, and it maintained its grip when a locking slide was pressed into place. Showing off, Fwendi opened and closed her hand several times and swung it through the meager light, spooking more moths.

“What else can it do?”

Manipulate the hand into any desired position, set the lock and it became a tool—strong, hard-edged, impervious to pain—in fact, a weapon.

How had her mind come to think this way?

How many more of these things could Tink and his helpers make?

 

Kamina, Everfair, August 1897

Tink felt Lily's kiss on his dirty cheek as she handed him a basket full of ore. He kissed her back, aiming for a place on her forehead above a streak of reddish mud. No one else worked this seam. No one else would see what they were doing.

She grabbed him by his ears, lowered his lips to her own. Heat, tenderness—he felt himself open, like a leaf. So new, so green.… Tink had left Macao well before any uncle or older brother could be bothered to bring him to a teaching woman. Compared to even the prostitutes at home, Lily's face was ugly: nose prominent, eyes a peculiarly metallic blue. But her body radiated pure beauty. And her heart and mind—this feeling she brought over him was unlike anything he'd ever known.

He set the basket on the ground and stepped around it without looking. Hands free now, Tink stroked the back of Lily's head—the lightest of pressures, such as he had learned she liked. Feathering lower, his fingers caressed her soft neck, which no one but he was allowed to touch. Which he had not allowed himself to touch till the day after her sixteenth birthday.

Lily broke away from their embrace. “We have time?”

Reluctantly, Tink shook his head. “They'll check on us soon. The departure is scheduled—”

“Of course.” She gave him another kiss, this one brisk and sisterly, then handed him the basket once again and picked up the lantern. When she squeezed past him, her bare arms brushing his, her thinly covered hips nudging against his thighs, he regretted his choice. Surely two more minutes, or one, would make no difference?

But he followed Lily out to where Chester and the rest waited.

The wide, high cavern was nearly full of people and equipment: casks being emptied of hydrogen, hoses curling away from them to converge on the caves' hastily built exterior platform, curving to pass the gondola, which was growing heavier by the moment as the loading finished up. And the bag, unrolled so most of it covered the platform and the stony sill between it and the caverns' entrance. Most of it outside, but sticking a short way in. The bag squirmed and rose as its individual cells received their quotas of gas. When fully inflated, it would measure forty feet high and five hundred long.

Albert, one of Mr. Owen's Englishmen, approached. “Do you want all those bags of ballast we was discussing earlier?” he asked. Gone was any vestige of the doubt the older man used to harbor about Tink's abilities.

“Half of them. Let's see how she lofts.” The gasbag's rubber-coated barkcloth was heavier than the silk Albert and many of the other workmen knew. And the Littlest Heater weighed a lot. But the fuel for it was less bulky by far than for more conventional boilers.

Besides, there'd be other things to throw overboard.

Chester signaled the crew stationed at the gondola's bow to begin attaching the lines that would tie it to the quickly filling bag. Those secure, they hauled the gondola over a bed of rounded river pebbles and out through the caves' mouth. The narrow shelf between the mouth and the platform overflowed with workers. Tink took his post in the gondola alongside Yoka, Winthrop, and Lily. He had been unable to argue her into staying here.

Brown and green and crimson, the bag inflated till it tugged at its lines, bobbing in the misty rain. Tink nodded at Chester, standing now in the caves' entry. Beside him Winthrop nodded too. His brother gave the signal and they cast off.

The mountain fell away below them. Mists covered the crowd who had gathered to see the launch. This was not the first voyage of
Mbuza
—the name Yoka had selected for the vessel in memory of his country's best king. Three times previously they had flown some version of her, using half-built engines, temporary gondolas, larger cells within her bag.

But never before had she carried a cargo. Never before had she had a destination.

On the platform projecting from the stern, Lily slid away the barrier between the two earths powering
Mbuza
's Littlest Heater, allowing them to interact. Soon the pressure grew high enough. She engaged the propeller and they darted forward. Winthrop held the wheel steady, steering them north and west while depressing with one foot the lever that angled the gasbag's tail and vanes.

The plan was for them to sail south after navigating northward to the lowlands. South, then west to the coast, to Luanda, a stronghold of the Portuguese, and the nearest friendly city where they might find outlets for the colony's produce. Sample stocks of nuts, oils, ores, roots, woods, and wild fruits formed part of their freight.

Even had he intended to follow this course, Tink would have passed so close to Mbuji-Mayi that he would have felt obligated to see how it fared. They had left midway through the morning, taking advantage of sun-warmed updrafts. Yoka and Lily consulted together on landmarks, but that first day
Mbuza
just stuck to the course of the Lomami River, making sure not to turn up one of its many tributaries. Around sunset they lowered the gondola to within a hundred feet of the ground, anchoring fore and aft in tall trees at a big bend in the river. Too anxious to sleep, too exposed in the open gondola to take advantage of the absence of Lily's overwatchful mother, Tink huddled with her and the others as far as possible from the Littlest Heater's platform. The Bah-Sangah priests advised against spending much time in its vicinity.

In the morning, after relieving themselves over the side, they gained additional height by tossing out a quarter of every sample the colonists had supplied. They turned west, Lily and Yoka counting the river valleys they crossed and naming them.

They reached the former town site at noon.

Everything had been flattened and burned. In the empty clearing Leopold's men had planted rubber vines. Not even smoke rose from the deadened earth—only too-even rows of curling green stems.

Lily went out to cut the Littlest Heater's fuel compartment in half with its fitted slab of rubber. The engine slowed and stopped. Winthrop maneuvered so that the barely noticeable west wind pushed them back over the empty spot where Mbuji-Mayi had been.

Yoka said something in the tongue of his faraway home, sounding sad. Tink remembered his first welcome sight of the settlement, the lights just starting to show through open doors as night descended, falling as swift as any time during the workers' journey there, but no longer so frightening. Because they had finally gotten where they'd wanted to. Safely.

In silence, Tink felt
Mbuza
drift further east. A sudden increase in the light to his left drew him to the gondola's side. It came from below. Looking down he saw the river again, the Sankuru, bright with the pale brass of the day's last glow. To the north, in the distance, a boat sailed smoothly, steadily away. It vanished around a bend before he could bring his binoculars to bear. But its movement—swift, even—was that of a large motor-driven craft rather than a small canoe. One of Leopold's vessels. Carrying what? Thieves? Murderers? Spies?

Lily moved beside him, her welcome heat bridging the cool, careful gap of air between them. “Can we catch up with it?” she asked.

If they did, they would have to destroy it and kill every passenger. “No. Let it go.”

“But our weapons!” she protested.

“Oh yes. We'll be using those.”

They rejoined Winthrop. “Rest,” Tink told him. “I have skill enough to keep us over the water till dawn. Tomorrow, we'll need you piloting.”

“You'll keep us over the water going which direction?”

“North.”

“Toward the Kasai and the Kwango rivers?”

Tink nodded. As if there had ever been any doubt. Too many pacifists sat on the council to talk about it openly, but
Mbuza
had never been meant for anything else. “We take the back way to Kinshasa.” If they made it home afterward, they'd be considerably lighter. By fifty bombs.

 

Bankana, Everfair, to Kinshasa, Congo, August 1897

The smoldering wood of fires in the nearby village scented the dark, quiet air around them. Mwenda fought against the feeling of comfort it brought. Here on this high, barren hill, he and his warriors were exposed. Shortly, when the sun rose, the others would also realize this. Sunrise would allow them to see their surroundings—and to be seen by anyone looking for them. Such as their enemies, the invaders.

Also, of course, their allies. He hoped and expected these would arrive first.

“King.”

Mwenda had allowed his camp no lights, not wanting to give away their position while they waited. In the dim shine of the waning moon he couldn't make out the identity of the petitioner facedown before his throne, but he judged the voice as belonging to Loyiki, who now served as Josina's messenger. Loyiki, who had brought Mwenda word of this arrangement.

“You have news?” he asked. “You may rise.”

Shifting to squat in the damp grass where he had prostrated himself, the man shook his head. “I apologize, but no, it is merely a rumor from”—he hesitated—“those in the town we go to.”

Kinshasa lay over two days to the east, but Mwenda had heard the drums. Though he knew only the simplest of the codes they carried. “Relate it to me.”

Skirting past vaguenesses obviously intended to disguise his sources, the burden of Loyiki's report was that Leopold's half-built railroad had at last been completely abandoned. Naturally the inhabitants of the town assumed that they, too, had been deserted by him.

They would probably fight weakly, then. He would be foolish not to take advantage of that. Mwenda thanked his spy.

Color crept into the sky, blue soaking through the black. Then the sun appeared to rise out of the east—at first silently, but soon accompanied by a faint, droning hum. Louder, louder. Blinded by the dawn, they couldn't see the aircanoe until it had come so near that many of its details were also suddenly visible: brown mottling the swelling red sides of what looked like a giant gourd; lines connecting that thing to an elongated nestlike construction below; faces above the nest's high sides—two as pale as Europeans'—attitudes showing clearly that they turned their gazes Mwenda's way; dangling vines or ropes hanging down, sweeping the hillside's stunted trees.

The growling of the aircanoe's engine had grown to a roar like a waterfall. It was matched by the astonished cries it provoked from his local subjects as they poured from their homes and out over the countryside. Above all that noise came shouting from the flying boat, indistinguishable words. Then the device's sound was somehow dampened. The shouts could now be understood: “Grab hold! Pull us to you and hold us still!” Quickly Mwenda commanded his people to do this. Other young men jumped high and caught the ropes and hauled the aircanoe to where he sat.

A wood and fiber ladder was lowered. As his warriors climbed, the aircanoe sank, so that by the time the king mounted it, several rungs lay on the ground. He had only five hands of steps, five steps per hand, to take upward before his fighters pulled him carefully over the boat's rim.

It truly did resemble a nest, he saw, looking around. Its thick walls were woven, though the shape overall was like an enormous dugout. Two of his soldiers stood in the far end next to a tall, prosperous man clothed in shirt and trousers. The others gathered together around their king, on guard. A final follower reached the top of the ladder and threw a bundle over the nest's edge: Mwenda's collapsed throne. Then that one, too, took a protective position.

There were three other passengers already aboard. Motioning aside those who got in the way, he studied them. A man with a golden arm. Another man who looked like he was squinting—but Mwenda marked that the muscles around his eyes were too relaxed for that. So this was one of the Mah-Kow who had deprived the tyrant of his iron road to the interior.