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Authors: Nisi Shawl

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Daisy sighed and leaned back so her head rested in Lisette's lap. The luxury of silence surrounded them. Now Lisette stroked her temples, her forehead, smoothed her thick eyebrows. Now she swept the tips of her fingers along the semicircular edges of Daisy's ears.

All too soon the sound of Harriet's approaching feet ended the moment's peace. She brought a letter delivered with the last post, and Cook's request to serve them supper in the sitting room at eight. The usual time. Daisy nodded absently and opened the letter. It was from Laurie, finally. He had been gone a week. Only two pages; she read through them swiftly and swore in exasperation.

“What happens?” Lisette asked. “It is he?”

“Yes.” She scanned the pages again, hoping to have missed something, to have misread them.

“What happens?”

“Donors are interested in the Society's new colonizing project. Mr. Owen has asked him to go to Brussels again.”

“To see Leopold?”

“Yes. Here.” Daisy wanted to ball the poor letter up and toss it in the fire, but she made herself fold it neatly and hand it to Lisette.

“He does not say when he means to return.” Lisette stared at the two pages as if, upon longer inspection, more words might fade into visibility.

“No.” She stood and pulled her watch free of her skirt pocket. Almost eight. For Lisette's sake she forced a cheerful expression. “But I'm sure he'll be back as soon as he can. It's Lily's birthday on the twenty-sixth, and St. Valentine's in less than a fortnight—”

“He may easily mail us red ribbons and paper lace from abroad, and perhaps a verse copied out of some book.” Lisette folded the letter with an air of cool detachment Daisy knew to be assumed, and reinserted it in its envelope. “Shall we sup, ch
é
rie?” She took Daisy's arm in a formal clasp and they went down.

Harriet served. In her presence the subject was dropped. They discussed literature instead: Daisy's latest novels over the soup, then Lisette's own efforts with the ham and asparagus.

Lisette had become Daisy's secretary after conquering the Automatic Type Writer—Mr. Owen's attempt to get Daisy to resume producing columns for the Fabian Society's newsletter. The contraption had thoroughly intimidated her. Lisette, though, seemed immediately drawn to its shiny black finish and the insectlike complications of its inner workings. First she had helped with the overdue correspondence to Daisy's publishers and readers. Then came the girl's own manuscripts. They were … not like Daisy's ghost stories, nor like her adventures for children. Nor like anything else she could remember seeing.

The night before, Daisy had taken “The Creatures' Dialogue” to bed and read it as the candle guttered low. Now she tried to express to Lisette how strange it was, and how good.

“What made you think of talking animals?” she asked.

The girl raised her shoulders and tilted her head quizzically, fingers at her full lips. “But you, you do so all the time: your Phoenix?”

“Yes, but for children.” The “Creatures'” diction was not what one would employ with young people, and some of the subjects these Pussies-in-Boots discussed among themselves challenged even Daisy's quite advanced principles. They would not be at all suitable for the nursery set. “Will you write more?”

“You believe I should?”

Daisy reassured her on that head as enthusiastically as possible. Though she hadn't the slightest idea where to find an audience for these tales of cats and dogs sailing the skies in balloons and discovering imaginary lands, lands whose inhabitants participated in the most daring of sexual adventures. Who wouldn't want to read them? But who would risk putting them into print?

 

Kisangani, Congo, October 1893

It could be that his decision to ban all whites from the country had been a mistake. Young King Mwenda stirred on the creaking leather of his throne bench, restless as always with self-doubt he should not show. He held the creased barkcloth message loosely in one hand. He had read it. The runner waited belly-down on the packed earth of the royal courtyard for his word on this matter. So also waited his wives and counselors and the spies in their midst.

How he longed for the simplicities of life in the bush. The scent of sap, the sinking of the soft soil beneath his steps. But at the tender age of thirty-six seasons his role as leader denied him those sorts of pleasures.

He let the message fall from his hand and Josina bent gracefully to retrieve it from the ground. He grasped the haft rising from the sheath slung upon his left shoulder.

“Hai!” Old Kanna cried out in alarm and pointed at the copper shongo shining in Mwenda's hand. The sharp curves of its edges glinted quietly in the courtyard's cloudy light. He held a weapon. No matter that this was a ceremonial knife, highly decorated. The king had drawn a weapon. Mwenda knew he would be expected to use it somehow before he returned it to its sheath.

Another ingot on his back. Why had it been necessary to pick up the burden of conquest? Why?

Because four seasons ago his spirit father had bid him do so. To turn aside from the joys of youth. No other, said his father's oracle, was so well suited to unify the nations' power. No other could satisfy the land's needs.

To satisfy his court's expectations would mean killing someone. Whom? Soft-armed Josina, still stooping with her head bowed and afraid now to move? Another wife—one less favored?

He had taken up his shongo to gaze upon the world's reflection in its surface. Metal had many uses besides killing the unjust. Let his watchers wait for death to be dealt.

In the shongo's largest copper blade he saw his face, skin reddened with the protective powder of the cam tree. He strove to make his mind quiet, to shift his focus deeper into the dull glare.

Had he misunderstood the directions that had brought him to his earlier decree? It could indeed be that his decision to ban whites from the country was a mistake. Those absent ones who honored his wishes were the very sort he would prefer to deal with, while the rest remained and behaved as written in the plea for help from his land's southwestern frontiers brought by the runner prone before him.

The terrible words on the barkcloth had turned in his mind to screams as he read them, keening now through the silence he sought within. “The whites have taken away all the women, and all children below the height of eight fingers,” the message cried, “to be killed unless we deliver to their encampments huge quantities of the hardened tears of the vines-that-weep. By way of showing they truly mean to do this evil, they have sent to us, your captains, the severed heads, hands, and feet of our mothers.”

Mwenda the warrior wanted only to fight and kill these barbarians. Mwenda the new king knew he must contain his raw heat. Months earlier, his spirit father had warned him there would be bad consequences to leading a direct conflict against the whites. Along that path lay sorrow.

At times his spirit father spoke in pictures shown upon the shongo's blades. Pictures for Mwenda's eyes alone, he understood. Never before had he attempted to see these visions in the company of other human beings as he now did. Was it even possible?

Perhaps. Perhaps the clouds parted. Perhaps the sun struck dazzling sparks from the copper's surface. Perhaps these sparks entered the silence and darkness within Mwenda's mind and lit fires there, flames that shaped themselves into answers. Not the answers he sought. But the answers he would need.

Mwenda lowered the knife and blinked. All was as it had been before he became blind to his surroundings. Josina still stooped, only the heaviness of her breath betraying the effort it took to remain in this position. The runner lay at Mwenda's feet, in Old Kanna's rapidly fading shadow.

The king stood. Cocked his strong right arm and threw the shongo as hard as he could, over the heads of the startled court. A heartbeat passed. Then he heard the
thok
of a sharp blade burying itself in the thick trunk of the tree planted beside the shelter of his ancestors.
Satisfactory,
he thought, but without a smile. The shongo's resting place indicated that the country's defense was in the ancestors' management. His heir-to-come would retrieve the ceremonial knife when this affair was over.

For now he would follow his spirit father's instructions. Aloud, he said, “We will surrender.”

The shocked silence held, but fear and astonishment filled the royal courtyard like a cooking smell. “Bid the runner rise,” Mwenda told Old Kanna. “Take him to your home and feed him and give him a place to rest. We will send another to our captains Renji and Tombo with full instructions, and to our other captains elsewhere.”

He turned to Josina, who was erect now, as enticingly pretty as ever. “Your cousin.”

“Alonzo?”

“Yes. He speaks the whites' language?”

“They have many, just as we do, and Alonzo is conversant in several.” Josina couldn't help showing how proud she was. “The Portuguese, in which tongue I am alike fluent, naturally”—naturally, since she and her cousin both hailed from beyond the frontier, from Angola, a land the Portuguese tribe had settled in great concentrations—“and the French, too, of course, but also the Spanish, the Dutch, and the English.”

“Good. He will go.” His wife looked troubled, but didn't protest. “Find him and bring him here.”

Mwenda dismissed most of the other courtiers, sending one to fetch back Old Kanna. When Josina returned with Alonzo, she knelt down a bit away from the circle gathered about the king's throne. She made no move to leave again. He let her stay. Mwenda knew she spied on him for her father. But what her father didn't know was that she also informed Mwenda about
his
doings. Understanding Josina and her ways made the king feel comfortable. He was judicious in what he allowed her to find out. This was a much better arrangement than one based on mere trust, in his opinion.

“Alonzo, you will bear our commands to the southwest.”

His wife's cousin looked up from where he crouched. He had the face of a beautiful woman: high cheekbones, large eyes framed by thick-lashed lids. “Yes, my king.”

“Renji and Tombo will tell those they protect to disappear.”

One gently curved eyebrow arched higher than its mate. “To disappear?”

“To vanish as they did when we invaded. Abandon their crops and fields and homes. Even the towns, their workshops and markets. Disperse.”

“Disappear. Yes.” Alonzo nodded thoughtfully, gazing downward.

“Also, the terms of our surrender.” At this, all in the courtyard looked alert. Even, despite herself, Josina. “There are to be none. No conditions. We will tell the whites our surrender is complete.” Mwenda paused. None spoke, though Old Kanna hummed worriedly deep in his throat.

“And that it will go into effect”—Here he paused again. The images shown him by his spirit father required careful translation into the language of living humans—“when the dance of the sun and earth repeats the steps now taken.”

Frowns all around him as Old Kanna and the other advisors attempted to understand why he had used these words. Only Josina met his gaze steadily. He nodded to her his permission to speak.

“The French mark the sun's movements also,” she said. “They call one pair of seasons by the word ‘ah-nay.'”

Mwenda nodded. He had not known the foreign term, but even whites must have a way to express a basic idea like a season pair. But why had his spirit father framed it so?

“Aha!
Sanza!
” Old Kanna proclaimed, and at once Mwenda saw him to be right. The counselor's aged wisdom illuminated the haze of the king's inexperience. He would engage in a game of
sanza
with the whites, a game the Europeans would fail to realize that they were playing.

To tell the truth in a manner that made it impossible for his enemies to comprehend it; to force them to believe what he had never said; this was
sanza
. The surrender he offered would be accepted, but viewed with suspicion, and rightly so, for his people would give up their lands by simply abandoning them. For a time.

Further, the wording of his stipulation for when the surrender commenced—repeated exactly as given by his spirit father—would be heard as a stupid child's poor attempt to understand their concept of ah-nay. Thus the whites would underestimate Mwenda's intelligence.

In reality, as most people knew from those who lived in the sky-watching countries to the north, the sun danced with other suns as well as with the earth, in complicated maneuverings never to be exactly repeated. The dance would proceed in this fashion till long, long after Mwenda's reign, till long after his life had ended, long after the ends of the reigns and lives of all his heirs. The next of whom would retrieve the shongo from the tree where Mwenda had buried its blade, after the sham truce had ended. After the war they would not need to fight was won.

He would make his surrender and it would be accepted, though Mwenda would still be safe to wage war from the bush without breaking his pledge. This was his spirit father's plan. Or all of it Mwenda needed to know for now.

 

Londonderry, Ireland, November 1893

“All right.” The Reverend Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Wilson laid his hands on the deal table between them and looked at Mr. Owen with a gaze as expressionless as he could manage. “Let us see the deed of sale, as you assure me the land is to be ours.” He kept his hands flat so that the pine boards of the table stayed them from their trembling, trying his best to remain calmly seated in this workaday kitchen, though he felt himself to be at the gates of Heaven.

Liberia, a colony founded in violence and funded by Southern slaveholders, was at the moment the sole safe destination for Negroes returning to their ancestral home. The Fabian Society proposal Mr. Owen presented would change this. His people had a chance to save themselves—and simultaneously to uplift their savage kin. The sun of redemption would dawn soon over the Congo Free State. He would live to see it.

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