Lionboy (6 page)

The angle at which the little boat was tethered made it impossible for Charlie to face the direction of the
Circe
for long, as all the blood was going to his head, so he turned himself around and watched the last of the city disappear along the banks. By now they were way beyond the tall, shining buildings of the office district. The wharves and warehouses and stone quays of the big dockyards were giving way to the smaller ship-repair yards, the houses on stilts where the wharf workers lived, and finally the wide, empty mudflats and saltmarshes, where the light hung like gauze, and the silvery grasses rippled, and the tiny voices of hundreds of invisible birds carried over the water, mingling with the rush of the river beneath the little boat’s hull. Charlie thought it must be rather nice to live there in one of the stilt houses, with the veranda looking out over the river, and the water slapping underneath. You could fish for your dinner out of your bedroom window, with the great expanse of sky and water all around you, and the sea sliding in beneath your home twice a day. He wondered why they didn’t have stilt houses in the west of the city, farther inland, where he lived; why instead people there lived in housing towers or yard houses like his.

He didn’t want to think about home. He could feel the presence of his mother’s phone in his bag, and suddenly thought—Mum may not have her phone, but what about Dad?

He pulled out his own phone and swiftly dialed in his dad’s number. His heart beat fast and his hands were shaking. His dad might answer. He might.

The phone rang in a dim empty distance. Rang too long. Then—his dad’s voice. His recorded message: “Hello, this is Aneba Ashanti, leave me a message and I’ll be in touch with you soon.”

His dad’s voice. Charlie felt it deep in his heart.

He wished he’d thought what to say—what was safe to say. If
they
—whoever they were—were going to listen to the message, he didn’t want to give anything away. But he wanted his dad to know—what? And he had to leave the message now, because what if he couldn’t get through again? He couldn’t waste this opportunity.

Suddenly he knew what to do. He’d leave a message like his mum’s note. Clear to them, but not revealing anything.

“Hi, Daddy,” he said cheerfully. “Charles here. I’m being a good boy like Mummy said and I’m at Rafi and Martha’s, but I’m going out quite a lot and I really hope I will see you soon. I’ve been sailing on the river today and I hope I’ll do some more tomorrow! Ring me soon, I’ve got my phone on all the time. Lots of love to Mummy. Bye!”

He was really pleased with himself. If Dad got that message he’d understand immediately that Charlie knew what was going on. One: He never called him Daddy, or Mum Mummy—so they’d know he’d picked that up from Mum’s message. Plus the “being a good boy” reference and calling himself Charles. “Going out quite a lot” and “sailing on the river” was pretty clear, and the
pièce de résistance
—the best bit, which had come to him even while he’d been talking—was to say that he had his phone on all the time. Of course he had to turn his phone off during lessons—so now they’d know he wasn’t going to Brother Jerome’s, and they could put that together with the sailing and the “really hope I will see you soon” and know he was coming after them.

Bother. He should have said something about the cats. If Mum and Dad knew the cats were watching out for them, they could maybe send a message . . . Oh, no. Mum and Dad, astonishingly, couldn’t understand when cats talked.

 

When they were living in Africa, when Charlie was little, Aneba Ashanti used to go frequently into the great forests, looking for plants and mosses and funguses for his research. He would go for several days, deep into the dark areas; he would climb the huge trees with the roots tall enough to build houses between, and he would spend days on end in the canopy of the forest where the monkeys and butterflies live, sleeping in his hammock hundreds of feet above the ground while the elephants rooted below looking for big seeds to eat. Sometimes he would take the little toddler Charlie with him, strapped to his back.

One hot, humid day, very early in the morning, Aneba was very carefully scraping samples of bark from a lustrous green creeper way up in the canopy, with Charlie sleeping on his back. Because he was concentrating so hard on getting a good clean sample, and trying not to cut himself with his recently sharpened knife, Aneba did not notice a leopardess down below on the forest floor, making her way delicately toward a waterhole nearby. Nor did he notice the strong, pudgy little cub following her. Nor, of course, did he notice the tiny emerald green snake on which the cub trod in the dimness of the undergrowth.

But he noticed the yowl of pain from the cub as the hot poison sparked into its little body, and the howl of distress from its mother as she realized what had happened. In an instant Aneba swung down from the canopy, his knife in his teeth, and landed not far from the leopards. The snake disappeared: It zipped into the vast green forest and was gone. The leopardess stayed. She stared at Aneba, and for a moment he felt a shot of pure fear. But the animals hereabouts were used to Aneba. They knew he wasn’t a hunter, that he just hung around in the woods picking flowers and leaves and digging roots. So she didn’t immediately pounce on him and kill him. She just stared. And he stared at her.

The leopard cub’s yowling had started Charlie yowling too.

The two cubs yowled. The two parents looked at each other.

Aneba’s heart was torn. He desperately wanted to help the baby leopard, and he had in his backpack the antidote to the snake poison—he took it with him everywhere in case he or the child were bitten. But he would have to get it to the cub swiftly—and how to make the mother let him?

Her eyes were expressionless. Aneba’s face too was a mask.

There was only one thing he could do.

He was very scared to do it.

Slowly and gently, Aneba unwrapped Charlie from his back and sat him on a flat rock behind him, well away from the leopardess. He didn’t take his eyes off her while he rummaged in the bag and found the syringe containing the antidote. Then, holding the syringe up like a totem, so that she could see it clearly, he asked her: “May I help your child?”

She stared.

Charlie, on the rock, yowled a bit more quietly.

The cub was whimpering.

Aneba moved away from Charlie, gently toward the cub.

The leopardess narrowed her eyes. Her ears were perked up, her whiskers twitching. In a swift movement, she dropped her head and moved—away from Aneba, away from her cub, away from Charlie. After ten paces, she stopped, and turned, and sat, staring again at Aneba.

He fell to his knees beside the cub, and swiftly, surely injected the life-saving medicine into the cub’s fat back leg. As he did so—

“Baby one!” cried Charlie, who had tottered up to Aneba’s side and was now reaching out to pat the cub, who squirmed away from the needle. Aneba gasped, the syringe fell, and a few small drops of blood appeared on the fur. Charlie laughed. The cub, alarmed, put out a claw and scratched, hard. Drops of Charlie-blood were on the cub; drops of cub-blood were on Charlie’s bleeding arm.

The leopardess and Aneba looked at each other. The cub and Charlie yowled again: in unison.

Each parent grabbed its child and ran—the cub hanging from the leopardess’s tender jaws like a kitten, Charlie tucked firmly under his father’s arm.

“Ab ab ab baby one!” cried Charlie happily.

“Mrrrrow!” scrawled the leopard cub.

“Mrrrrow!” called Charlie.

And after that, Charlie talked with cats as much as with people. He was mystified by their constant feuding. Though he understood their language, he didn’t exactly understand their feelings and their mysteries, but he loved them and they were his friends. His parents studied him endlessly: They knew what must have caused it, but they couldn’t work out why.

“He’s modified himself,” said Magdalen. “Here’s everybody fussing about genetic modification methods, and young Charlie here’s done it to himself.”

“And can the leopard cub talk English now?” Aneba wondered.

Another thing—he wasn’t allergic to cats, when so many other kids were.

“Fascinating,” said his parents, over and over again. This was after Magdalen had shouted at Aneba for three days about getting their child into such danger.

 

Charlie had been really happy to be more clever at something than his parents were. But now—well, it would have been useful if they’d had that particular knack too.

Before the afternoon sun grew too low, Charlie set up his solar panel to recharge his phone. He’d recharge Mum’s as well if there was time. There might be messages on it. There might be something to give him a clue.

Clue!

For goodness’ sake, thought Charlie. I
have
a clue. His mum had given it to him herself. He reached into his bag and there it was, carefully folded.

Charlie had a bit of a feeling in his chest as he took it out.

This was her blood.

So what had she written?

Oh.

Letters and numbers. Some in brackets, some not. Mostly normal size, some little tiny ones up at the top of the bigger ones.

It looked like very complicated math. It made no sense whatsoever to Charlie.

He looked at it for a moment, wondering if it was a code. He’d played code games with his mum before, and if it was a code, he’d like to think he could work it out.

But nothing they’d ever done had had all these brackets and tiny numbers.

“I know what this is,” he said to himself after a while of staring. “This is a formula.” He knew what formulas were because scientists use them all the time.

So it wasn’t nonsense. But it was nonsense to him, because he hadn’t learned nearly enough science yet to work it out.

He folded the paper up and put it away again. He’d learn what it was about. He would find someone who would tell him. He’d be careful whom he asked, though. It didn’t seem like something he should show to just anybody.

And in the meantime, it did him no good at all. He still didn’t know why his parents had been taken. Apart from him, who would want them?

He thought about it for a bit.

He ran over in his mind the phrases that had come up.
New job . . . Work business
. He knew that the most valuable thing about his parents to other people was their intelligence, and the work they did.

Charlie’d read enough stories.

“Somebody’s after their brainpower,” he said. “After something they know, or can find out.”

He felt happier then. Just having worked that out made him feel he had something to go on.

Plus he had that piece of paper.

 

The reasons why Aneba had not answered his phone were: 1) because there was no reception under water and 2) because skinny snivelly Sid had swiped it from him while he was asleep to play Snake, and had run the battery down.

Aneba was annoyed about this. Lying back on the lower bunk with Magdalen dozing on his shoulder, he was staring right at the two-way mirror at the spot where he felt Sid and/or Winner would be.

“Berma, mu ye kwasia eni mu ha ma jwi,”
he muttered. He stared from under his hooded eyelids. His mouth was hard. He hadn’t moved for an hour and a half—not a twitch, not a blink, only the tiny movements of his lips, and they were scarcely visible. Basically, he was letting himself look frightening, and he knew perfectly well that he could look very frightening indeed.

“Wo ho ye ahi paa,”
he murmured. On the other side of the mirror, Sid and Winner didn’t like it.

“What’s he saying?” said Winner. “What is that?”

“Wo ho ye ahi paa.”

“What language is that?” demanded Winner. “What’s he saying that for?”

Aneba carried on muttering, and staring, like a block of obsidian possessed by an evil voice.

“I hear he’s some kind of wise man, some kind of, like, one of their wizards, isn’t he!” said Winner, who couldn’t really tell the difference between a wizard and a university professor.

“Yeah,” said Sid.

They didn’t like it at all.

“He’s putting a curse on us,” said Winner. “He’s putting a hex on us.”

Slowly, weirdly, the block of obsidian cracked. Aneba smiled, a long, scary smile. It was working. All he was saying was “you stupid little irritating men, you’re beginning to annoy me,” but if they wanted to think they were being cursed, that was fine with him. Fat and Skinny, as he called them, were already scared of how huge he was. Skinny had said that he didn’t want to go into the cabin anymore.

Suddenly a voice burst over the intercom from the other cabin.

“Stop cursing us!” it cried. “Stop it!”

Aneba lifted his head, flashed his eyes, and gave them a huge grin. The effect, after the hours of motionlessness, was electrifying. Sid and Winner jumped.

“Certainly,” said Aneba politely. “When you give me back my telephone, recharged, and tell me where you are taking us, and why, and on whose instructions.”

Magdalen rolled her head in her sleep and tried to shift, but there was no room. The ship’s cat, a lazy-looking marmalade, fell with a yowl from her lap, where he had been lying, and gave her an irritated look. She half woke.

“Charlie?” she murmured.

Aneba touched her head. He very much wanted to leap up, break the glass, throw the two guys overboard . . . He probably could have too. He was, after all, extremely big and strong. But there was something else he wanted more. He wanted to know why they had been kidnapped, and by whom, and what for. More important than escaping was learning what was going on.

He stroked Magdalen’s head, then turned his gaze to the two-way mirror and started muttering again.

“Wo hairdresser nye papa,
wo maame ye kwadu,
wo gyime ye sononko,
wo hwene kakraka.”