Heart of Light (56 page)

GOING HOME

“Are you sure the eye shows that mountain?”
Kitwana asked Emily.

The three of them—Emily, Kitwana, and a fast-recovering Peter Farewell—stood near the magic-tamed elephant: an impressive beast with a mean countenance that, after Kitwana's and Emily's magical taming of it, had proven itself gentle and kind. It even let Peter ride it, though it never seemed to take to him.

They huddled around the glowing green globe, while the elephant—which Emily insisted on calling Samson—stood nearby, tearing up and eating large tufts of grass. And the globe showed a nearby mountain—an odd mountain, steep and rocky, and surmounted by an almost flat top so large that several crops and an entire herd of cattle could be kept on it. Enough to feed the a modest village.

“Certainly,” Emily said, frowning slightly. “Or at least, we're close enough that, surely, if it meant for us to go around, it could point slightly away and then correct.”

“But the mountain is such a small area,” Kitwana said, his heart contracting as he looked for a way to evade the inevitable. “If we must climb that mountain, then the ruby must be on it.”

“Or in it,” Peter Farewell said, lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. He'd lost his cigarette case in the confusion of the camp, but he'd found several packs of his cigarettes and he retained his lighter. The vaguely minty tobacco smoke wreathed around him as he exhaled it, blue and gray into the morning air.

“But it can't be,” Kitwana said, exasperated.

“It can't be?” Emily asked. “Why not?”

“I know this mountain,” Kitwana said, hearing his own voice too hollow and remote.

The others waited for him to explain, and after a long while Peter clicked his tongue against his teeth and said, “I wonder what you mean by that.”

At the same time, Emily said, “Do you mean there's no path up it? It looks very steep.”

“Oh, there's a path. It's narrow, and it winds between scrapy rocks. It's only broad enough to take a boy and a herd at a time, and it can be wholly blocked by rolling a large rock across it, something that sentinels will do if the party approaching is at all suspicious.”

Peter's lips elongated in a slow smile, and he looked away from Kitwana, as though he had already glimpsed something indecent.

Emily simply blinked and looked at Kitwana, uncomprehending. “How do you—”

“That,” Kitwana said, “is the place I grew up. My home village.”

“Oh,” Emily said, and then, suddenly brightening. “Oh. But that means you'll be welcome.”

Kitwana's bitter bark of laughter was echoed by Farewell's amused chuckle. For a moment—for just a moment—man and dragon-man looked at each other in perfect understanding. Yet Farewell could not know. “Why do you laugh, Peter?” he asked. Ever since the mind-merge and through the day after, when Kitwana had used their magic, jointly, to heal Peter's wounds and since Peter had removed his eye to lead them here, they'd called each other by their first names.

Kitwana was not too sure what each of them knew about the other. While healing Farewell from his eye injury he'd gotten enough—a feeling, a remnant of sensation—to realize that Peter was one vast hurt, barely covered over with the scabs of pride and self-possession.

He felt a certain compassion for the man, though he disdained the pretty lies with which Peter covered his desire to get revenge on the world at large. He understood the anger and the desire to lash out at magic and those who held it. But he thought it unworthy of the intelligent and urbane man to lie to himself about it and say he wished to do it for others.

Now Peter smiled at him. “I think we are kin, you and I,” he said, and before Kitwana could bridle at the idea, he added, “You and I were thrown out of the places where we were raised, out of the destiny we thought should be ours.”

Kitwana bit his lip, but looking at Emily's intent gaze, could only sigh. “He's right, in a way. That mountain,” he gestured with his hand, “is where I grew up, but I don't know if I'll be allowed up the path and to the village itself. They might roll the stone across the path.”

“Why?” Emily asked.

He couldn't have told it to anyone, but she'd been in his mind and he in hers. Between them there was a bond stronger than anything that he'd ever shared with anyone. So he spoke simply, confident it would not change her opinion of him—because that could not change, any more than his feeling for who he was could change. “Because I killed a man.”

She started just a little, then said again, “Why?”

“Wamungunda, my father, is a strange man,” Kitwana said slowly. “Though now that I've been in the world and seen how things are, I've come to believe perhaps it is the world that is strange and not my father.” He paused and sighed. “Africa has been a land of carnage for his whole life. And my father will allow refugees into our village, no matter who they are—the despot or his victim. All are allowed to come and live with us, provided they will harm none while they're there. One of those men . . .” Kitwana shrugged and felt his cheeks warm. A month ago he'd have told this story more assuredly, more certain that he had done the right thing. “One of them was a chieftain from the Congo who sold his entire people into slavery to the white invaders and retired on the profits. He still bragged about it, and it seemed to me that he intended to do the same again, in my village. I didn't . . . I can't say I intended to kill him, as such. I was thirteen and I was very upset. I confronted him and told him I wanted him out of our village. He taunted me. He said not only would he not leave, but eventually he would be the chief of the village, after my father and I died. Since he was my father's age, and so much older than I . . .” He let that sink in, and sighed. “I threw a rock. It hit him on the head and he died. And my father . . .” He paused again to collect himself. “My father sent me away to live with my mother's brother, among the Zulu. He said I might be happier in the rest of world.”

“And were you?” Peter asked casually.

Kitwana shook his head slowly. Right now, it seemed to him the most foolish thing he had done. He longed to greet his father, to hug him, to confess his misdeeds and to be absolved. To be at peace again, in a place of peace.

“The problem is,” he said, shaking himself. “If the ruby is in the village, wouldn't I know it?”

Peter took a deep pull of his cigarette. “Who knows?” he said. “Perhaps it's hidden in the ashes of your grandmother's cooking fire. It's been done. I say we get on Samson, go up and find out.”

“Assuming they let us up,” Kitwana said.

THE GUARDIAN OF THE PATH

Sitting astride Samson, they climbed up the path, be
tween boulders, as Samson set his feet daintily, like a well-trained ballerina. At the top of the path, where it narrowed, Emily could catch glimpses of a field filled with some green crop. She could also hear the lowing of the cattle, and a woman's voice singing something high and sweet that sounded like a lullaby.

Kitwana sat astride Samson's neck, with Emily behind him, leaning into him, and Peter behind her, somehow holding on to the elephant while managing to smoke.

For a long time they climbed, higher and higher on a gentle spiral, till at the top a youth stepped onto the path and looked curiously, but without alarm, at the elephant. And Emily remembered Kitwana had told her that in his youth, men on horses had come up here, along with entire scouting detachments, on foot, fully armed.

Now the boy stood. He was dressed in what could have passed for a short toga, dyed in vivid red, and his features, like Kitwana's, were an amalgamation of all Africa with nothing predominant. He was darker than Kitwana, and his nose was straighter.

Emily remembered Kitwana saying his people were an amalgam of a thousand different migrations and of refugees. Isolated, atop their mountain, they spoke a language that time had forgotten, and they accepted all who came in peace.

She wondered if that would mean they, too, would be accepted, and sighed as she felt Kitwana's shoulders tense under her hands.

The boy asked something in a defiant tone, rapidly followed by something in a different language, and finally in English—with a look at Peter and Emily—“Who comes here?”

Kitwana answered in his own language, his shoulders more tense than ever. The boy looked confused and turned to shout something at someone hidden from them by the turn of the path. There was a sound of surprise, and then the sound of sandaled feet running.

“What did you tell him?” Emily asked.

“That I am Kitwana, son of Wamungunda, and that I come in peace and to speak to my father,” he said, and took a deep breath as though steealing himself for an ordeal. “If there's a jewel here, anywhere, my father will know. He and all my male ancestors, back before anyone can remember, were priest-kings of this village.”

“Priests of what god?” Emily asked curiously.

“Oh, it's not that clear,” he said resignedly. “They worship him who created all and they protect his creation. At least that's what my father said. This sometimes involves fighting demons. Particularly demons that control sorcerers and deposed despots,” he said.

She nodded, though she knew he couldn't see her. They were so quiet that, behind her, she could hear Peter drawing deeply on his cigarette.

Then the path in front of them exploded with noises and voices. Excited voices. Emily felt Kitwana tense again, and tensed with him—until two people appeared on the path, a middle-aged man and woman. The man was shorter than Kitwana, and stockier, but the woman was a tall graceful beauty who, except for her gender and the strands of white in her hair could have been Kitwana's sister. As it was, Emily could only assume these were his parents.

There was parental anxiety in the eyes turned up to him, and a smile that only parents can give a long-lost child, and they were both talking at once, anxiously.

She felt Kitwana relax, and suddenly found him speaking English. “And these are my friends,” he said. “Emily Oldhall and Mr. Peter Farewell.”

“Ah, you bring us a bride,” his mother said, her English heavily accented and oddly intoned. “You fulfilled your quest, then.”

Kitwana sighed. “My . . . quest? No, we come . . . Father, we must talk to you.”

His father said something that they couldn't understand, in a liquid language. Kitwana frowned. “He says he knew I would be coming, and we do indeed need to talk.”

With such cryptic words, Kitwana's father turned and led them, Samson walking sedately, up the path. Suddenly it became a level road, which then became a vast expanse of fields and houses. The houses were stone, Emily noted. Stone houses, thatched, almost Mediterranean. And amid the fields and the houses were the most beautiful people Emily had ever seen. They didn't all look the same, but they all looked happy and well fed and . . . contented. The word came to her like a revelation.

When she was little, her religion book had a picture of the Garden of Eden. It had very little to do with this, being just a mannered garden, with rosebushes and, among them, a blond Adam and a blonder Eve. Yet that picture and this scene had the same feeling. Here, on this cloud-wreathed peak in Africa, there was a feeling of a place where one could belong. A place away from the cares of the world and the sometimes confused loyalties of life in a time of empires and wars.