Heart of Light (17 page)

He blinked. There was a woman standing in front of him. He blinked again and recognized Nassira, of the Masai.

“It was him,” Nassira said. “The creature.”

“What?” Kitwana said.

“The creature in that room, with the Englishmen.” Nassira spoke in a whisper, though surely one or two of the nearer Hyena Men could hear her. “It was the same as in our mind talk. The dragon thing.”

She was right. The presence he'd sensed in the room with the Englishmen was the same he'd felt in his talk with Nassira. The same dark, nameless thing had killed several Hyena Men already.

He felt the shiver return, clamping cold fangs onto his back like a hungry jackal. The problem was that if you tried to set a bind onto a creature—or a person—with a stronger power than your own, then you could find your mind emptied into the other's control. You could find
yourself
becoming a mind-slave. And the Hyena Men had almost touched the thing. This had been a foolish idea from the first.

Kitwana stood on legs that felt like water and turned to Nassira, whose mind must be very quick to have followed the same path Kitwana's had taken. She looked as frightened as Kitwana felt.

“Whose idea was it?” she asked. She was still whispering, but her indignation seemed to make the words boom and crackle in Kitwana's ears. “Who was so foolish as to try this magic while yet our enemy is at large?

Without speaking, Kitwana looked up, tilting his head imperceptibly toward the floor above, where Shenta had sat throughout the whole proceeding, directing the attack without ever allowing any of the men below—the subordinates and the new recruits—to learn his identity.

Did Shenta know what he was doing? If it all went wrong, would Kitwana be held responsible?

Kitwana thought of his father's village with a near physical craving. So what if it wasn't the center of the world? Kitwana knew it would still be his home if he returned, and he imagined climbing the ramp up the mountain slope, and walking past the boys who guarded the boulder that could be rolled to block the passage of armed enemies or sneaking malefactors. His father would come out to meet him, and his mother would cook him his favorite meal.

“Oh, Father,” he said in his native language, knowing no one would understand him here. He looked at the Masai woman. “You stay here,” he said. “You keep them here. I must . . .” He looked up.

He half expected her to argue with him. She seemed the kind to argue about everything. Typical, in fact, of Hyena Men, even a female member of the breed. But she nodded once, restrained and quiet. He pushed past her, past the other men. Most of them wore native dress—beads and shells and leather aprons and wraps and everything in between.

Kitwana felt very strange in his English clothes. Confined. The fantasy of wearing his native loincloth as he made his way up the verdant slope toward his village was so strong in his mind that he could almost taste his mother's cooking, almost smell the coal fires in the village hearths. He could almost hear his father's voice blessing him, and kneeling for that blessing and asking pardon for the harsh words he'd pronounced at their parting. Yet he knew it would not be
that
simple. His father had
expelled
him from the village for just cause. He'd angered his father as it shouldn't have been possible to anger peaceful Wamungunda.

There was as good a chance that Kitwana would be turned away yet again. Perhaps a better one. Particularly if his father ever found out about these mind-binds.

He pushed between men still dazed by the mind-work they'd done. And up the stairs, trying to go unnoticed.

“Where are you going?” a strange man asked, his hair tightly braided in myriad braids intertwined with colorful twine and beads. “Are you running away?”

Kitwana shook. The man reached for his arm.

They were probably the same size and age and evenly matched for muscle and strength. In the back of Kitwana's mind, not quite consciously, came the idea that he could punch this stranger. But if he punched this anonymous Hyena Man, what would it do? To the men in the room, Kitwana was the leader of the Hyena Men, the only leader they knew. Would they turn as ardently against the organization as they were now for it?

They all knew there had been attacks against them and that an enemy walked abroad, uncaptured and unpunished. They were all afraid. And no one gave them an explanation or an answer. Who could blame them for being suspicious?

Kitwana looked around the room and saw narrowed eyes, doubting looks.

“I have to go upstairs,” he said. “My head hurts. I feel I have overstrained my magic. Upstairs, I have some fetishes from my native land. I will go up and restore my power. And then I'll return.”

“How do we know?” the man asked. “How do we know you won't be gone for good, gone to use the keys of our power, which you must have obtained in this ritual? How do we know you won't enslave all of us and make yourself our king?”

Kitwana sighed. He couldn't blame the man. All of these things had been done throughout the ages, in Africa and elsewhere.

“I wouldn't be king if you made me one,” Kitwana said tiredly. “Slaves have more freedom than great kings in their palaces.”

Still he read only suspicion in the man's eyes.

“He'll come back,” Nassira said. She was the only woman in the room. Her gender and youth and straight-backed grace made her stand out.

Males around the room widened their eyes in shock that a woman would have the courage to speak before them.

And the woman, who had not known him for more than a day, the woman who Kitwana was sure didn't like him, stepped up, regal and straight as only a Masai could hold herself. She stood at the foot of the stairs, between Kitwana and the man.

“He'll come back. I'll stay as surety for him. I swear to the truth of what he says.”

His head did hurt and he did want to use his native fetishes. He also wanted to talk to Shenta. To ask him to stop this madness. The
enemy
was with the Englishmen. The enemy might, indeed, be an Englishman, linked to this mission by his white empress. If they tried magic again, of the type they'd used last night, it would backfire and they might very well die. Or worse.

He nodded to the woman again, an insufficient thank-you for her intervention, but it was all he could afford in front of all these others. And then he ran. Up the stairs, down the dark hallway and to the door at the end. He opened the door without knocking, because knocking would have told these other men that there was someone else up here. It would have violated the secret of the Hyena Men.

Shenta looked up, startled, as Kitwana entered. He sat at a round table, still wearing only the dingy shorts and old shirt he'd worn earlier in the day. His hand rested on the table and held a glass. Beyond the glass was a big bottle filled with amber liquid. His other hand rested on a small dark wooden box. Probably a box of fetishes from Shenta's homeland, designed to increase his magical strength.

Shenta looked rumpled and creased, as though his skin had been worn too long and not tightly pressed.

He was drunk, Kitwana thought, as his headache overwhelmed him. Shenta was drinking alcohol. The worst thing you could do after collective mind-work, while your shields were still frail, your mind still confused. Most people used fetishes or magic to cleanse their mind. Shenta used fetishes and alcohol—together. It was ridiculous, scary. Yet it made Kitwana think better of the man. If he resented this dark magic he'd ordered them to perform so much that it caused him to drink to erase the memory, then he could not be a bad man. He could not be totally devoid of a conscience. Only a wounded conscience could demand appeasement in the coin of forgetfulness and blurring.

Kitwana closed the door carefully behind himself and spoke in a voice just slightly above a whisper. “Shenta, the enemy was there. In the room with the Englishmen. Did you feel it?”

Shenta nodded, lifting his glass of amber liquid and draining it at one go. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“We must stop now, Shenta,” Kitwana said. He kept his words gentle. The last thing he wanted to do was make Shenta lose control of his powers of telekinesis—as he did when annoyed. Too much smashing of things up here, and people would come running and all would be over. They'd know about Shenta, sure, but they'd also know there was dissension in the upper echelons of the Hyena Men. The whole organization would collapse.

Something Kitwana had learned, in his brief time climbing the structure of the secret society, was that those at the bottom should never know about doubt at the top.

“This must stop,” he said as kindly as he could. “It has gone too far. If that thing had touched us, we could all be dead.”

Shenta shook his head. “Not all. We'd have overpowered him in the end.”

Had that been the plan? Kitwana stared at Shenta. Perhaps that was why the man was drinking. To forget the deaths he'd almost caused.

“I didn't know,” he said in response to Kitwana's horrified, wide-eyed look. “Didn't know it was there. And I'm glad it didn't touch us.”

“Right,” Kitwana said. “But it stops now, you see. We disband before more deaths occur. I'll go back to my village tomorrow.” His skin itched to shed Western clothes. If only his father would let him back home. And even if he did not, Kitwana would never use dark magic again. “To stay together will only invite greater attacks. The thing will find the current of our power and take us one by one, like a man spearing fish by the stream.”

Shenta looked at him with dull eyes that appeared scratched and worn, like a much-handled spear or a pebble tossed by a great river. “But then the Englishmen will win,” he said. “If they take this last jewel, they will have all the power. They already took it from us once, and now they'll take it again. And this time it is possible that they'll suck out not only the power of Europe, but of Africa, too. That it will all be gone. Then the king of the whites will be our king forever. Our forests, our lands, our cattle and our beasts, our sons and our daughters, all will be theirs.” He raised his eyebrows. “Can you allow that to happen, Kitwana? And sleep at night?” Slowly Shenta stood and removed his shirt.

“There is a vine in my land. The Europeans crave the sap, which they call rubber. They came into my land and demanded that every able-bodied man go out and collect this. When we tried to resist, they took our women and our children. They . . . tortured them . . . Killed them, till we obeyed. They . . .” He turned his back on Kitwana and showed a network of pale-pink scars covering the space between his shoulders. “Those of us who brought in what they deemed too little rubber were whipped with a rhinoceros-hide whip. Many died. I was one of the lucky ones. Or not.

“I escaped. I organized a group to harass the whites. I hoped they would give up on torturing us, give up on the rubber. We burned a few rubber-collection stations. They . . .” Shenta's lips trembled and tears rolled down his face. “They found out who we were. They went to our villages.”

He stumbled to the table, opened the box upon it, then carried it to Kitwana with the reverence of a man transporting sacred relics.

Inside, to his horror, Kitwana saw three mummified hands—an adult's and two small ones.

“My wife,” Shenta said. “And my daughter and baby son. The children died of the infection after the whites cut off their hands, my wife in the famine because every man was out hunting for the ever-scarcer vine. No one hunted for food. No one grew food.”

Shenta caressed each of the hands with a gentle forefinger, then closed the box softly. He put it back upon the table and sat down. “Should we quit now, Kitwana?” he asked. His eyes welled with tears. “What can this creature, a . . . dragon do to us that the whites won't? And is it not the duty of every warrior to stand between death and his loved ones, even if he dies for it?”

The shiver was back, creeping down Kitwana's back. How could he compare his longing for home to this man's desire to protect others from that evil that had befallen his family? How could he preach his father's avoidance of violence to a man upon whom violence had been visited in such a horrible form? He'd joined the Hyena Men so that Africa could be free.

He took a deep breath. “But we can't do more magic,” he said. He'd thought it was a reasonable statement, but it came out sounding something between a groan and a whimper, a protest of the soul, not just the mind. “Not until we know the creature won't touch us.”

“We don't need to do magic,” Shenta said. He brightened somewhat, as if a new idea had only just occurred to him. “You know the bind will tell us where they are. We'll follow them from a distance for now. Sooner or later, they'll want to hire guides and carriers to go into the jungle. The woman says they brought many trunks. Surely you don't think they'll carry all of those themselves? They'll want to hire natives. We'll just make sure we're those natives. And then we'll be with them. Right there. We won't need to use magic.”

“But,” Kitwana said, “that was what this magic should have prevented—the need to be with them. The need, and the risk to us.”

Shenta inclined his head to one side. “Yes, but it won't be possible after all. We must do as we can do, Kitwana. The other choice is to let the ruby go, and all the power and freedom of Africa with it, into white hands. Forever.”

Kitwana groaned. Shenta watched him, head tilted slightly to one side, like a bird spying an insect. “I have spoken,” he said. “And it must be.”

It sounded like ritual, and for just a moment Kitwana wondered if Shenta had been a tribal chief as well as a medicine man before he joined the Hyena Men. And if he intended to be the same again. Or more. To be the king of all Africa.

“Just tell all of them to be back here tomorrow,” Shenta said. “We'll pick a group to follow the whites.

And then, when they get ready to hire carriers, we'll be ready.”

From downstairs came the noise of too many men in uneasy confinement, asking too many questions. He heard Nassira's voice giving a curt answer.

He didn't like what they were doing, but he had no choice.