Everfair (22 page)

Jackie leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together. “Fwendi, did you indeed see the attacker—the presumed attacker—you chased? Can you swear—can you say under oath it was not Mademoiselle Toutournier?”

A swift, unreadable look from the girl. “No, sir. I cannot. But—”

“But she treated your wound! She—”

“She was most providentially present only moments after the attempted assassination.”

Jamison stood up out of his chair. “Because you had invited her!”

Toutournier made an inelegant sound, half-sniff, half-snort. “Do you really believe me innocent, Matty? I can assure you that your position on the matter will be a lonely one. What passes for justice here will easily find me guilty.”

Apparently she was no longer giving vent to her mood. Or her most violent feelings had receded. She sipped her cocoa and delicately set her cup in its saucer. “So you'll call the tune to which I dance.
Bien
. Where first must we go?”

“You may begin coaching Fwendi in how to give her lectures here, in Alexandria. In a fortnight or so we will sail north and west, to Europe, before the worst of the winter storms.”

 

Kamina, Everfair, January 1904

“Bury him.” Thomas pressed his forehead with the heel of one hand, leaned back in the throne they had made him assume, and closed his eyes. A true Christian would not have pronounced that sentence so easily.

He couldn't close his ears, though. There was no escape from the prisoner's pleading as the pagan congregation's ushers dragged him to the pit they'd previously dug. Blessedly, Yoka refrained from further translation, but the captive's wailing cries were obvious in their meaning. As was the hiss and slap of gravel being poured over his legs, body, and arms.

He comforted himself with knowledge born of earlier trials: the prisoner's head would remain aboveground.

One of Thomas's new congregants helped him rise so the folding throne could be moved to a better vantage point. He had to open his eyes again to walk to the fast-filling pit. Shadows cloaked the cavern's walls. How had his noble-hearted intentions come to this? Currents of damp air bent the smallest lamp's naked flame, and made the tiny golden points cast by the larger, shielded lamps shiver.

Behind him, muffled clucking announced the arrival of a speckled hen. Its handler gave it to him to hold while priests—
other
priests—his
colleagues
—traced symbols in the packed earth now spread round about the prisoner's neck and head. Over this, the youngest of them, a mere boy, threw kernels of dried corn.

Thomas resumed his seat. Best for all to begin and end this as quickly as possible. Afterward he would pray for God's forgiveness. Again. Perhaps someday he would receive an answer.

Surely he was yet deserving of one, despite listening to the priests' entreaties over the last several years to commit himself to their heathenish cult. His fits, they asserted, marked him as fated for full initiation. The throne was one of many compromises he'd agreed to, hoping them harmless.

He returned the hen to its handler, rolled back the cuffs of his sleeves and removed a clinging feather from the red sash they had insisted he wear.

“What were you doing on the slopes above Mwilambwe?” he asked. Yoka rendered the question into Bah-Sangah and then Lin-Gah-La, then the prisoner's response into Bah-Sangah and English. The young man was good at his task.

The buried captive claimed he had been doing nothing, nothing, he had simply become lost and was wandering innocently when King Mwenda's men found him near their camp. With a nod Thomas signaled that the hen should be allowed to peck. The captive regarded it with dread, his words failing. It freely chose the corn nearest the character for “big lie.”

The buried man began to shout, repeating the same phrase over and over.

“‘Don't kill me! Don't kill me!' he is saying,” Yoka told Thomas. “Some peoples do similar ceremonies to accuse a person of practicing magic. Then they execute him. Shall I tell the prisoner he's safe?”

“No.” For, in fact, he was in danger. Perhaps even a Christian court would have treated him no better.

The handler picked the bird up. No witch could keep such an animal as a familiar—all history, all church tradition ran counter to the idea. Cats, dogs, toads, rats, lizards, yes. But not roosters. Not hens. They were too cleanly, too righteous, too irretrievably associated with the Lord.

“Who do you work for?”

Checking with Thomas, the handler set the bird back down. According to Yoka, the captive said he worked for no one, no one, unless they would hire him, of course, in which case—but Thomas stopped attending to the man's words, for the hen had resumed its feeding. With three precise movements of its head it indicated that the prisoner was in Leopold's employ.

As they had naturally suspected when he was found creeping through the army's perimeter guard. Validation, the first step, had taken place. The Urim and Thummim, so to speak.

Now for the difficult part. Thomas preferred a white cock for the latter portion of these interrogations. The handler took the hen away and relief filled the buried man's face.

“What services do you offer us? What will you do?”

A torrent of eager words poured out of him. “He will work hard for us in any way we require,” Yoka told Thomas and the Bah-Sangah priests. “Digging in the mines, gathering rubber, paddling a boat, even cooking like a woman.”

As the response, and Yoka's translations, continued, the handler returned with a rooster. It was the right color. The buried man talked faster, seeming eager to say everything at once. As the rooster was set down, it flapped its wings, disarranging the careful, even distribution of dried corn.

But not the symbols incised in the packed soil. Calming down, it pecked this area, that area, another, another, watched carefully by the Bah-Sangah priests. Two made notes on lengths of bark. Apparently finished with its meal, the cock left the corn to climb the little pile of stones left from the pit's excavation.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,
Thomas remembered. Exodus 22:18. But what of Endor? Hadn't she, though of course cursed, revealed Jehovah's will? What if his association with the Bah-Sangah religion was foreordained?

“What does the oracle teach us?”

The recording priests consulted with their apprentice, Yoka, who said, “The most likely outcome is for him to betray us to Leopold.”

Executing the prisoner would be a mercy, then. Would save innocent lives. Yet Thomas couldn't bring himself to condone killing him in cold blood.

He thought a moment more. Doubtless Leopold had threatened the spy with a family member's death in order to get him to act in the tyrant's interests. To turn that monster's own tool against him—that was what would hurt him most; not to let him sacrifice his pawn.

“The final question.” Which, according to the instructions he followed, was never directed at the prisoner. Thomas lifted his eyes and held out his hands, palm up, to receive the righteous knowledge of Heaven. Though he wasn't sure it would come.

All other eyes, he noticed, were lowered.

The handler retrieved the rooster and tucked it under one arm. A knife glinted in the opposite hand. Yoka faced him, holding a large gourd.

“How can we further the highest good of all involved?”

The cock died swiftly, silently. Only the knife's flash and the hiss of life pouring into the bowl told what had happened. A few kicks contained by the handler's hold and the bird was meat.

A different gourd, covered, was carried forward by a different young apprentice. Thomas had seen its contents before: rough and rounded stones, brass implements, figures of wood and glass and gems. Yoka spilled into it a measure of the hot liquid—the blood—within his own gourd. Then he approached Thomas.

Thomas had twice already drunk such offerings. On the first occasion, he had—much to his shame—done so out of fear of death at his congregants' hands. On the second he'd feared to offend them. A third instance would, he thought, impel him that much closer to his fate. If this trend continued, he'd soon be a full-blown heathen—worse, an apostate.

Wanting to rescue these brands from the burning, Thomas had caught fire himself.

He took the gourd from Yoka. Guiltily, he sipped. Salt ran over his tongue, down his throat, like a thin gravy. As he passed the bowl to the eldest of the Bah-Sangah priests the remembered vertigo assailed him.

He meant to stay seated, but the world whirled and he was on his feet, dancing. Glimpses of his surroundings penetrated the glowing fog of his ecstasy: swirling stars—or were those the myriad little lights the lamps cast through their shades? Wise faces—his friends, his brothers—went and came, bobbed up before him and twisted away. Out of an opening leading deeper into the caves poured music, waves of horns and harps and bells and drums. Stamping down! down! he gloried in the strength of metal, the knife and the hammer he'd been given spinning in his nimble grip. Round and round and round and round and then he reached the place just right.

The center. A vision. He could see …

See them sweeping over the forests like a scythe, blazing above the river surface, fire reflected in the waters' steel, going there! There! In chains, iron's perversion, children stooped to tend rubber plants, the vines-that-weep. Whipped and starved—they must not die. Attack! Attack!

Then he was back on the folding stool Yoka called his throne. No music. He couldn't remember when it had stopped. Now he heard only the soft murmurs of the priests discussing what he had told them in Bah-Sangah. What he had told them using a language he didn't in the least understand.

Sickness filled his stomach and threatened to overflow it. Yoka gave him a cup of water. Four women entered. They often arrived after such ceremonies, though how they knew the proper time he had no idea.

Two of the women squatted before him and patted his feet with a white powder like talcum. The first time this happened, he had balked. Then he'd remembered how, initially, Peter had refused to let the Lord perform a like service. Jesus had rebuked Simon Peter, and the disciple had come to accept the Christ's anointing.

It was obvious by now, though, that that was not what he, Thomas, had accepted.

He wished he could be alone and think about what he was doing. He wished he could lie down and sleep. But Yoka reminded him that there was no time. The Mote, he said, was scheduled for that very evening.

He let Yoka guide him to the Mote's tall-ceilinged cave, let the apprentice “light” the already-burning wick with their shared lamp's flame. As always, they were among the earliest arrivals. Only Albert, Tink, and Winthrop preceded them, though Mrs.Albin's stool awaited her. Beyond it stood another, higher and more elaborate.

Lately Thomas had been leaving the space on Mrs. Albin's right for Old Kanna to take. And the space on her left—with the better stool—was filled these days by Queen Josina, who had replaced her cousin Alonzo as Yoka had replaced Loyiki. These substitutions were for the same reason: the work Alonzo and Loyiki did away from Everfair. The work of war, which he was to join in again on the morrow.

Yoka sank onto the central mat, out of the way of the entrance, and Thomas knelt beside him. His attempt to pray silently was interrupted by plump Mrs. Albin's bustling entrance. Her young husband accompanied her, and though Thomas tried to ignore the man's solicitous stare, he felt it even with his eyes reverently closed. Queen Josina came in next, with Old Kanna and Nenzima in her wake. The new chair was, of course, hers. As usual, the Poet, Daisy, was last.

Winthrop had lists of weapons they'd made, and in what quantities. Queen Josina had one list—a short one—of African allies' promises. Daisy was able to supplement that with news from Europe courtesy of Mademoiselle Toutournier. She also gave totals of funds available from white supporters to be spent on necessary supplies, “
not
squandered on useless religious paraphernalia—”

“Bibles? Hymnals? Those are hardly
useless
!” Mrs. Albin's indignance was plain in her raised voice, her narrowed eyes. Poor George Albin had no hope of reconciling his mother with his wife. Their quarreling drowned out his attempts.

Mrs. Albin turned to Thomas for his agreement, as he had expected she would. But despite her effectiveness in hushing up the scandal associated with his frequent episodes of—possession—by demons? gods? unchristian spirits of
some
sort—he didn't think he ought to side with her any longer. Eventually, she'd be contaminated by his reputation as a madman subject to fits.

“I defer my vote,” Thomas said. “We haven't yet heard all the reports, have we?” Including his own.

Tink's only concern since the death of Daisy's eldest daughter Lily was the invention and refining of artificial limbs. As if one of his clockwork prosthetic legs could somehow retroactively replace the fatally wounded one. Thomas scarcely listened to him. Albert was marginally more interesting to a military mind: he discoursed first on improvements to the engines powering their aircanoes and the resultant higher speeds and carrying capacities, but then he switched to the much duller topic of making Kamina's caverns more habitable.

At last it was Nenzima's turn. Queen Josina had remained silent for all sixteen of the fortnightly Motes she'd attended—after all, she was not technically a citizen of Everfair, but the favorite spouse of its closest ally. But Thomas thought Nenzima said what the queen would have said if she were not quite so discreet.

“King Mwenda is within sight of victory. He has lured Leopold's soldiers high, high up the Lualaba River. Soon they will be trapped in the swamplands and ripe for defeat.”

Thomas cast his mind back to Nenzima's last speech, during the last Mote. “In Kibombo?”