Everfair (27 page)

“So you figure they alive?”

Fwendi knew well how to take care of herself, and Matty was much the shorter of the two—

“Lisette!” Daisy walked toward them quickly, almost running. “I— Come. Please—quietly? Please. Ekibondo was right; I'd have missed this if he hadn't told me where to look.” She whispered the words, leading them away from where a ladder clung to the west wall, away from all the walls, to the building's center. Here, bricks had been set in the tamped-earth floor to form a rectangle filled with irregular diamond shapes. At its center gaped a large golden hole.

Lisette knelt and peered down into a room brimming with light. Slowly, as her eyes adjusted, the glow resolved into bales of glittering hay interspersed with splintered glimpses of something else, a shining substance—glass?

“They bring it down from the Ruwenzori Mountains and store it underneath, here—there's a larger entrance outside—”

“Bring
what
down from the Ruwenzoris? Store
what
underneath—” asked Lisette, struggling to comprehend the scene before her—below her—

“Ice,” said Rima. “They keepin it frozen in the ground and then ship it over to Kisangani and where people need it. You an me seen the same thing up North in America, ice cut in winter for usin in the summer.”

Lisette wondered what any of this had to do with Matty and Fwendi's absence. Then she saw them off to the room's left, stretched out on a bank of yellow hay, wrapped in a single blanket. They were sleeping. Fwendi's brass arm reflected the light of the lamp hanging on a post at their heads—no sleeve covered the join between her brown skin and the metal levers, screws, pumps, and pistons. As Lisette looked down, enthralled, the blanket slid further off to reveal Fwendi's shoulder, ribs, and strong, scarred back. With half-conscious fingers she stroked Matty's smooth-shaven cheek, then reached for the blanket, which eluded her several times. To make sure she caught it, she opened her eyes—and saw them watching.

Lisette blushed. “'Jour,” she said, managing to sound casual, as if encountering Fwendi on her way to breakfast. In response she received the most extraordinarily joyous grin.

The covering for this revealing hole must be nearby. Lisette lifted her dazzled eyes to search for it in the dark there above.

“You are awake, my dearest?” With feelings of extreme awkwardness Lisette heard Matty address Fwendi in quite intimate terms. Evidently he had no idea of his audience. Daisy held one edge of a large wooden square in her hands. She tilted it forward. Rima leapt to help. The two of them lowered it over the hole and scraped it into place.

“Who—” asked Matty, cut off mid-question.

“I agree we ought to keep this affair quiet,” whispered Daisy, as though Lisette had said as much. “Of course I wouldn't dream of speaking of it, or showing anyone else. Only you—I wanted you to see proof of what I've found out. Now how can we prevent a scandal?” She rose from her knees with enviable ease. “We'll discuss it between us, privately.”

Rima assisted Lisette to stand, squeezing her hand tightly a second before she let it loose. “Without them? Ain't you think they got somethin to say?”

“No, you're right. The way down— According to Ekibondo, the real door's outside. That trapdoor's only so one may lift out a block or two at a time.”

To the building's north they found the ice cellar's entrance, disguised by a low hill. As Rima put her hand on the latch of the double doors set in its side, they were already opening. Out stepped Matty, shirt collar slightly askew, one telltale end of a grass stem caught in his tousled hair. “Good—you received my message.” He looked pointedly at Rima.

“I did?”

“About moving the rehearsal.” The Scotchman's face reddened. He was surprisingly bad at lying, considering his career. “Didn't realize the dock would be so busy,” he lied again, and turned to Daisy. “Glad to see you, too.” Another lie. “This way.”

The dirt ramp was short and shallow, ending in a stone-floored room that didn't look like the one into which Lisette had inadvertently spied. It was wide, yet not deep, and would not have reached the warehouse's center. It ended in a wall bristling with palm fronds, their points stabbing outward.

Fwendi greeted them as she slipped between two posts that framed a gloom in which Lisette could distinguish nothing—not with the lamp Fwendi carried glaring at her. She was more neatly clothed than Matty, having had, Lisette supposed, more time to arrange herself.

Matty opened his jacket—to which a few yellow strands still clung—and removed a sheaf of papers. Flipping hurriedly through them, he divided them into three groups. “Fwendi will read the lines of The Elephant Queen, and I will do the other animal ambassadors.”

“They's more animal ambassadors? From other realms, like the elephants?”

“The action takes place after what was the play's last scene. Wendi-La and the other children are celebrating their victory over the monsters; their parents miraculously restored, you know, the elephants joyfully dancing. Then representatives of these other magical lands approach—the Realms of the Giraffes, the Lions, the Crocodiles—and ask for help against the monsters now invading
their
homelands.”

Lisette thought she saw what Matty attempted. Listening to the stirringly martial tone of Wendi-La's new speech, she was sure. If this coda in which their national heroine pledged war against others' enemies influenced the Mote more deeply than the pleas Daisy would make on the behalf of true neutrality, Matty's Entente friends could well triumph.

“Now you climb up on the gaol roof—will one of you bring out some hay bales for her to stand on?” Matty had forgotten where he was, who was with him, all but the world of make-believe. Lisette left, but not to fetch him his precious hay. Let Fwendi handle the properties—she loved the man. Evidently.

Aboveground, warmth stroked her face lightly, a promise of overpowering heat later in the day. She paused at the ramp's top to wait for Daisy, who seemed to have also chosen to abandon Matty to this ruse of a rehearsal.

One glance at her lover's face and Lisette knew the day's troubles had only begun. That smile, so slight, so distant. She must be worried … Could Lisette in some way help?

As it transpired, Daisy wasn't all that concerned about Matty's influence on the Mote. “My approach is direct. I will say exactly how I believe we ought to act. They'll hear and understand me clearly, no mistake. And I have a vote.” Only one vote, but one more than Matty possessed.

They arrived at the loading dock just as
Mbuza
untied. Its giant shadow shrank, second by second. They watched it climb the softly straying winds. This ship's outsized airbag was a mottled green.

“So, then, what is the matter?” Lisette would not let silence divide them. Not any longer. Nor distance—Lisette would retire, cease touring. The better to compose her novels. She and her lover would be always together. Not parted by time. Not by that man's ghost. “Come, sit.” She led Daisy to the bench beside the mooring pole, deserted now that the aircanoe had gone.

“It's the prospect of their marriage,” said Daisy, looking back at the warehouse. “If the scandal their connection brings about can't be quashed. Neither you nor Rima seems to take that seriously.”

“But my dear, I grant you've lived in Everfair longer, more continuously, so you no doubt have a better idea of what is and is not acceptable. But surely their ages don't signify so very much—”

“No! Not that! Only think—Fwendi will want to have a baby—several!”

Lisette didn't want to understand. But she did. “Their races.”

“Oh—not that alone. For themselves it would be fine. In God's eyes we are all equal. But think of the consequences, the miscegenation. The children.”

Lisette could say nothing. She wanted to rise up, to walk away. By the numbness radiating out of this moment, she knew the pain, when it came, would be bad.

For a while she was unable even to move. Her face must have shown something of what she was realizing.

Daisy took her limp hand. “Why should any of this matter to us? It shouldn't. We're not— There's no way we could have children with one another, ch
é
rie. We can't cause those sorts of problems.”

She should forgive Daisy her preoccupation with an issue that could be said to have forced itself upon her notice. More than once. Lily's death was all that had prevented the green shoots of her attachment to Tink from growing to the point of bearing fruit. Because the girl was murdered by Leopold's men, the mother's prejudices had not been put to the test in that instance. “But George and his wife, they might have caused them.” Though there'd been no issue out of his marriage to the Negro missionary.

“Yes. You remember how upset I was, ready to disown him? Who'd wish such a burden on anyone, especially a poor innocent: to be part of neither world, not black, not white, an orphan even though both parents live—”

Le Gorille,
Grand-p
è
re, had wished such a burden on Lisette's mother. This miscegenation of which her love spoke so contemptuously? Of that, of
those sorts of problems,
Lisette herself had been born.

She glanced skyward.
Mbuza
was yet visible, its gondola a swaying trinket attached to the balloon by silvery chains. She had memorized the schedules. It would return at midnight to depart for Kisangani again at dawn.

Daisy would have to be on board in order to attend the Grand Mote. So would Matty. And so would Fwendi and Rima and Lisette.

She would have to go. But not as Daisy's lover. Not yet. Perhaps—perhaps not ever.

Fortunately, she had other options. Rima was young and inexperienced, unskilled, but had so far avoided giving her this particular injury.

Gently, Lisette removed her hand from Daisy's grasp. Slowly, she stood up. Daisy was asking questions she couldn't answer. Without another word, Lisette returned to the hotel. Locked in her room, she drew down the barkcloth shades, suffusing the walls with a rosy twilight, and did her best to rest. When that proved impossible, she got up again and packed.

 

Kisangani, Everfair, June 1914

King Mwenda's capital Kisangani was now also the capital of Everfair, as the whites called this country. And it was a city: Kisangani had become home to many, many people, a hand of thousands. He could remember it holding fewer than a hand of hundreds.

During his time in Alexandria he had learned the European mode of counting. It was one of many pieces of knowledge he had brought back with him from Egypt. Another was the whites' calendar. According to this, the war against Leopold had ended in 1904, though weak resistance remained for a while in some areas. He'd dealt with the last of that in 1906. Soon after he'd gone to Alexandria's Fouad University to study for eleven seasons. From 1907 to 1912: six years of self-exile, of trying to master the whites' ways and prove himself their rightful ruler.

Six years without good connection to his spirit father. No, longer: almost eight. He hadn't made a serious attempt since his return. He had never seemed to find the right place, the right time.

Despite having lived almost eighty seasons, thirty-nine “ah-nays,” he questioned his own fitness to serve as king. Despite having won.

The war's end had changed many things, but one thing was the same: King Mwenda had no peace, even here, at home. The steady, soothing roar of the river's cataracts had been drowned out by the hiss of pumps, the chugging of bicycle motors, the rumble of traction engines, the noisy steamboats coming and going and endlessly singing through shrill pipes. The beats of drummers' messages and shouts in many tongues surrounded him as he walked now at the head of his retinue. The shouts came from the Mah-Kow laborers erecting steel frames for Kisangani's high new houses; from the Zanzibari traders crowding the city's wide streets and increasingly rare open lots. Also he heard the chatter of returning whites—not as loud, but unavoidable, since they'd decided their lives were no longer in danger. From allies they and the Americans had somehow become something more.

Rain still dripped off of the overhanging beams of unfinished buildings and the leaves of trees. It had ended late that morning, as it often did this time of year. Nevertheless, king and courtiers walked the relatively drier paths heaped up in the streets' centers, raised beds of shells and pebbles rearing out of the mud. With Mwenda came Old Kanna, Alonzo, and his favorite queen's favorite ladies, Sifa and Lembe. Josina had spent several days outside the royal compound, staying with the Poet and her remaining daughter, Rosalie. He missed her.

Just past a freshly painted corner shrine to the Bah-Sangah's sacred earths, they came to their destination. Of course the Poet's home was in Kisangani's modern style, compounded of foreign and traditional influences. A short stairway of river stones led from a three-sided work yard to a porch running around its sides.

He climbed upward. Oiled bars of metal stood in place of wooden supports; the mats attached to them were much the same, however. The same sort of space was left open between the roof and the strangely flat walls, too. And the roofs and walls of the buildings resting on top of it.

The stairs paused at a door set in the house's narrow end. The king nodded, and Old Kanna came forward to knock on it.

The door was of fig wood, with iron cross-braces. A brass hook set toward one side of it turned and it opened, swinging outward—a mistake if this home ever needed defending. It was Rosalie rather than the Poet herself who had answered Old Kanna's summons.

“Here you are,” she said. “We worried you might come late.” She showed them where they could leave shoes, shawls, umbrellas, or whatever they'd carried here but no longer needed, then took them through an opening in a wall as flat as those outside. The floor creaked beneath his feet: wood lined with undecorated mats.