Everfair (47 page)

“
Sanza
teaches us all what we most need to learn. I know this. I know my wise queen. She did nothing I would have forbidden her to do.”

Tink nodded without breaking the king's gaze. “Nor have I.”

“Yet you neglect to do a thing I wish you would.” He pursed his lips. “Perhaps you have good reasons?”

Tink didn't answer. The king might think his reasons for leaving Everfair were good, or he might not.

But Mwenda persisted. “Tell me.” He raised his prosthetic hand shoulder-high, rotated it so its piston casings caught the quiet evening light. “For the sake of my lost flesh.”

Tink held his head high and steady. He refused to complain about his own loss. His love. “I will still be able to provide you with new versions from abroad.”

“But
why
?” Not a challenge, but a cry of confusion. Did the king feel more for Tink than either had realized? “Why must you go?”

He decided to offer at least a facet of the jewel of truth. “My people didn't come to Africa on their own. They were brought against their will.”

King Mwenda shook his head. “And so? Of course you may leave when you wish—no one's keeping you. The command put in the Conciliation is not that you have to stay where you don't want to be.”

They sat in silence a while.

“Well,” said the king, “you'll go, then.”

“But I would like the right to return here sometimes. As a favor.”

“That seems well within my power. You could come to me. You'd be an ambassador to my court.… Yes.

“And of course we will write each other letters.” The king seemed cheered by this thought—he smiled, at any rate, and leaned forward to rest both hands on Tink's shoulders. They were near in height, near in age. “We'll be friends.”

He had managed not to anger him. That was Tink's first ordeal over. The next morning, he went to the Poet's flat for the second. Rosalie had returned from England earlier that season. She opened the door at his knock.

“May I come in?”

“Mama's away.”

“May I come in?” he repeated. “It's to see you, not her.”

“I still don't want to marry you.”

“That's fine. I didn't expect you to change your mind. May I—”

“All right.” The door opened wider and she stepped aside. “You might as well.” He followed her into the next room. Beads, pelts, and feathers covered the top of a collapsible table.

“What are you doing?”

“Making masks. What do you care what I'm doing? I'm not her. Lily.”

“No. I know.” He had always known. “I'm sorry if you thought I thought you were.”

“Well, you did.” She made no offer of refreshment. Not even water. It would be impolite for him to sit unless she did. There were three chairs, but Rosalie ignored them, so Tink did too.

“I only came to tell you goodbye. I'm returning home with Bee-Lung.”

Rosalie looked interested. “Going to China? Macao? To live?”

He'd remembered her interest in his homeland correctly. “To live,” he confirmed. “But when I visit Everfair again, would you like me to bring anything back?” He saw her hesitate. “It would be done purely as business. You'd need to offer”—he tried to think of a suitable trade good—“herbs.” Bee-Lung could help with choosing those. “Or something else of value in exchange.”

“All right. I suppose. I've certainly heard of gems I want, minerals, techniques I'd like to learn. I could probably find the right items to … nothing personal?”

He was able to assure her of that.

The closeness the king seemed to crave for, Rosalie abhorred.

Winthrop and Albert took Tink and his scanty luggage to the airfield using a bicycle newly refitted with their latest experimental palm oil engine. As he had expected, the Poet was on duty there.

“Mr. Ho, I understand this will be your last flight out of Kisangani?”

“For some time to come, Mrs. Albin.” The formality was stupid, but better than her total silence for eight months after Lily's death. “My base will be in Macao, though I'll make regular trips here—once I've had a few seasons to establish stops along the route.”

It was nowhere near the ordeal he'd undergone facing King Mwenda or Rosalie. Things hadn't changed much between them since she'd decided to talk to him again.

Kalala II
reached Manono in just under twenty-four hours, counting their time in Kalemie. Bee-Lung didn't come to meet him at the airfield. He found her in her storefront, half the shelves still filled with stock.

“Maybe you'd better leave me here, Little Brother?”

“Ridiculous! Leave you here by yourself?” He took an empty basket from the stack by the back door and began filling it, winding dried grass around the more fragile-looking containers.

“What is there to keep you here?” he asked.

“What is there in Macao to fetch me back?”

Tink could think of a hundred things he missed: the freshness of sea-touched air; the pipa player at the entrance to Camoes Garden; the hill of A-Ma's temple, where they handed out fistfuls of fizzing sparklers on festival day—the childhood from which he'd been stolen. “Our family.”

Bee-Lung straightened and held her hands against the low part of her back. “One needn't see Min-Cheng every day. He doesn't change.”

That was true. Ever intelligent, but never
too
intelligent, and always supremely successful; their brother had been correctly named.

Scooping a pile of scrolls from a tall stool, Bee-Lung began to bundle them together with a piece of twine. “Really, why do you want to leave?”

“I've found something out about myself. I can't bow to another man.”

“Of course. You're Metal Dragon, aren't you?” She set the bundled scrolls in the lid of a grey trunk. “Never mind. I'm going with you, as you see. You go get some dinner in you and leave the rest of this to me.” She herself was Earth Dragon, and would prefer to organize her belongings her own way, no doubt.

Tink had his own packing to take care of, too. His house here contained more than the apartment up in Kisangani, but he would take less. Many of the furnishings had been left behind by the Tams. He had no attachment to them. He had asked Mkoi to distribute them, and some things were already gone. His folded clothes had been removed from the wall basket and stacked neatly on the bench holding his notes and drawings.

Those he took. Almost everything else—even his hammock, even the dishes he ate out of that night, he left behind when they boarded
Omukama
the next morning.

Leaving things behind was easy. There would always be more things.

There would never be another love like the one he had lost. And now he was going on not only without her, but without his allegiance to Everfair, the land for which she'd given her life.

Once again, he shared a cabin with Bee-Lung. Once again she stowed many of her precious remedies in their shared quarters. But on
Omukama,
they were located along the aircanoe's starboard side rather than its stern. So for a parting sight of Everfair, Tink went into the common lounge.

The final ordeal. They flew the express to Alexandria. There would be no stop in Kalemie—no stopping till Kampala, unless drums called the vessel down as they'd done at Manono. Only a few hours into their journey, he watched the town and the coastline of Lake Tanganyika recede.

Roofs: thatch, tin, and tile. Then walls, doors, and windows, a patchwork of dull colors and shadows that fell swiftly behind them, becoming at last a dirty blur on the horizon. That was all there was to see. Nothing beautiful, and not a single dream.

 

Kalemie to Kalima, Everfair, July 1919

Mornings and evenings, Lisette's rooms let the river's breeze blow through windows on their east and west walls, waking her with its freshness or lulling her to sleep with the sweetness of the intervening garden's jasmine and rose. The school building occupied a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the Lukuga River; no matter which direction the wind came from, it carried a memory of water. And, though quiet, her apartments were never still.

Her bed lay in a small, lilac-shadowed room overlooking the building's courtyard. The largest room, facing the street, was where she received guests and taught, as well as where she wrote and spent most of her day. Her desk did double duty: it held her typing machine and ordered manuscripts, but also her lessons and bell. It had no back: when teaching, she sat at it facing away from the balcony, and when writing, facing toward it.

She closed the balcony doors' white curtains to soften the early sun. They fluttered as if whispering secrets to each other. The heavier cloth covering the dining table to be used in today's exercise stirred only a little.

The last of her students for this class mounted the stairs in the room's center: Nadi. All five had come early. Lisette surveyed them critically as they rearranged themselves on her sofas to accommodate their fellow: suitably coiffed, suitably dressed, suitably restrained in their comportment. So eager! though they did their best not to show it. She remembered how that was.

“Questions before we begin?”

The youngest raised a timid hand. “Will we really be eating these foods?”

“Why not?”

The girl looked to either side. Her companions on the settee didn't meet her gaze, keeping their elaborately styled heads facing forward. She was brave—or Fwendi wouldn't have admitted her—and answered Lisette without their help.

“I've heard the Europeans' food is—unclean. Nasty. Full of illnesses.”

“Who told you that? It's nonsense. I myself have eaten with Europeans—I was raised on their food—and I'm fine! And Americans are much the same. Later I'll teach you how to cook for them, since many of you will be hired as domestic servants.

“Now.” Lisette nodded at the dinner table set for six. “Take your places. We will assume for the sake of convenience that you've been escorted in properly by gentlemen.” She watched approvingly as her students found the cards with their names and waited behind the corresponding chairs. “Mwadi and I will help you to be seated.” She rang the brass handbell and her assistant appeared from the closet beside Lisette's bedroom. When teacher and students were seated, the princess assumed the role of parlor maid, ferrying prepared dishes from the closet to the table, pouring grape wine, removing crumbs, remnants, soiled crockery.

The lesson went well. At any formal dinner to which they were invited, these spies would know how to conduct themselves. They left, and she had an interval before her next session. Not long enough to walk to the Lake and back; she could tell so much by the power plant's whistle.

She sat facing the balcony and scratched down a few notes about her latest story: children granted wishes at the whim of a homeless djinn in return for help finding his lamp. Full after the mock dinner, Lisette ignored the summons to luncheon, but then decided to go down anyway—not to eat, but to talk with Fwendi.

No sign of her in the hall—she, too, must have chosen to skip the meal. After checking her office, Lisette found her in the outbuilding housing the school's laundry.

The twin washing machines were silent, though steam rose from one, winding through the grey air to the open skylights high overhead. Empty rods crisscrossed the cathedral-like space, drying racks unemployed outside the long rainy season.

Fwendi sat on the edge of the machines' platform, legs dangling, chin propped on her left fist. Her right hand, a mending set, held a swathe of fabric pinched into pleats against a smooth band, but was idle otherwise. At Lisette's entrance, she started guiltily. “I'm sorry—were you looking for me? I've cleared your schedule for tomorrow, too. Of course you may go. As if you had to ask.”

“Naturally I must ask. This is your school, your enterprise.” Lisette climbed the short staircase and leaned to look inside the open machine. A dark mass was sunk deep in the sudsy wetness. Not sheets, then. Uniforms, like the one Fwendi now bent to guide between her stitching fingers.

The whir of the hand's gears started and stopped, started and stopped. “You'll admit, though, that it's because of you the queen gives her support.”

Lisette admitted nothing of the sort. “It is in her interest.”

Finishing the skirt's new waistband, Fwendi got up and put it in the machine. She shut the lid and engaged its plunger to the power shaft. Lisette listened affectionately to the
chunk-chunk-chunk
ing of the washer's operation. But she watched Fwendi, who watched nothing, simply standing at the control panel when she was done with her task, empty hands hanging at her sides.

“You miss him, don't you?” Lisette asked.

“I wish I was Mwadi. I would fly to him tonight.”

“He'll be back soon. It's only three hundred miles.”

“Three hundred and fifty. Twelve hours for the flight.”

“You could have gone with him.” Lisette was fairly sure Matty had asked his wife to come with him for
Wendi-La
's Mwanza premiere. She understood, though, that Fwendi felt she couldn't leave midterm.

Not so, Lisette.

Before dawn she waited below the mooring mast for
Fu Hao
. According to the drums, the aircanoe would arrive practically on time. Soon the drone of its engine throbbed through the weakening night.

The mast was short. When tied up,
Fu Hao
floated very near the ground. A solid-seeming rolling ladder bridged the gap between the airfield and the new, enclosed gondola for her. As she walked the narrow corridor leading to her cabin, she had to grasp its walls for balance, the floor leaping below her sandals as the vessel dropped its freight.

The cabin was unnecessary; she'd be in Kalima by evening. She could easily have sat with her fellow passengers in the common lounge. The increasing light would display the countryside's rushing mountain streams and verdant orchards—but Lisette had seen them many times. In truth, the trip itself no longer thrilled her—only its end. If she learned to pilot one of the new craft, the aeroplanes fueled by fractionated palm oil, perhaps then her excitement would revive itself. She would be inside the thing's thrumming hull, separated from its motor by only a thin barrier of steel.