AK

by Peter Dickinson

  “You’re from Tsheba?” she said.

  “Best not tell anyone.”

  “Sure. But I’m …” She paused to think it out in Naga. “… Jilli’s mother’s cousin’s husband’s cousin’s wife. My name’s Efoni Doli. I’m part of her long family. I heard the soldiers had killed her with the others.”

  “What others?”

  “Everyone in her father’s house. They waited for her brothers and sisters to come back from the buffalo-pound and shot them too.”

  Paul stood, nodding slowly, while he drew a long, sick breath. War was like that. You thought you were used to it, you could see the worst it could be and not flinch, and then it took people who had nothing to do with it, hard-working farmers, a blind old grandmother…

  My mother, the war.

  “We saw them burning the huts while we were getting away,” he said. “They were looking for me and Francis and Kashka, I guess. I’m sorry.”

  She sighed. Her eye fell on the bundle Jilli had been carrying. Catching it as it fell Paul had let the cloth-wrapped parcel inside slither partly into view.

  “What have you got in there?” said Efoni.

  “Better not ask. We weren’t far from where I’d buried it when the war ended, so I went and dug it up. There’s somebody in Dangoum I’ve got to try and help.”

  “Nothing to do with me. We don’t want any of that in the market. You’ll have to get it out of here.”

  Paul looked at her, not understanding. Soldiers had come to the Strip and slaughtered a whole section of what she called her long family, and she thought fighting the government that had sent them hadn’t anything to do with her. There was no point in arguing.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got some friends in the Old Town, but I don’t know if they’re still all right. Mind if I leave Jilli and my other stuff here while I go and check?”

  “Sure. You can leave that, too, for a bit. Shove it in under the baskets. I just want to be sure you know the score. It’ll be okay till this evening.”

  “My thanks.”

  He tried to explain to Jilli where he was going, but she didn’t seem to hear him, so he took a long drink from the flask and moved off. He didn’t want to ask the way to Curzon Street—the less you told anyone the better—but there was a tourist office downtown with a map of Dangoum in its window, so he headed for the nearest of the wide avenues that radiated out from the palace.

  Apart from the flies over the piles of rubbish all Dangoum seemed asleep now. The houses of the Old Town, windowless and blind on their street facades, were silent, except for the occasional radio wailing in a dark inner courtyard. The heat was heavy and listless, more exhausting than the clean heat of the bush. Out in the avenue sleepers sprawled under the palms while the flies hazed over them or crawled across their skins as though they were rubbish too. For block after block Paul trudged on, not seeing a waking soul. Who was using Michael’s flat now, he wondered, with its air conditioning, and the stacked cold Coke in the fridge?

  Three blocks from the palace he heard a wailing noise behind him, an up-and-down note coming rapidly nearer. Far down the avenue pale discs were shining through a cloud of dust, headlights, motorcyclists, and cars rushing toward him. The procession swept past, outriders with sirens screaming, a light truck full of soldiers in purple berets, a long black limousine with a flag on its hood and blind polarized windows—it might have been the very one in which Michael had fetched Paul from Tsheba. Then a second truck full of soldiers, their weapons up and ready. Lashed to its fender was the body of a man. The dangling arm bore a corporal’s stripes. The lolling head was bare, its black curls soaked with blood. Paul had seen bodies like that before in villages where government soldiers had come through, picking out men at random and “executing” them. The corporal had been shot at close range in the back of the head.

  By Basso-Iskani himself? Gone down to collect his new toy? The railyard must be back that way. There was a corporal he’d sent to Jom-jom with orders to bring the car back safe, one of his own palace guard.

  Inwardly Paul shrugged. The corporal had boasted to the bridge guard about getting confessions out of the prisoners. He was enemy. His death was an accident, but he wasn’t like the farmer’s son who’d been killed when the mine blew up. He had chosen sides. Chosen wrong.

  The procession slowed to twist through the gap between a double rampart of sandbags that crossed the avenue a couple of hundred yards short of the palace. Roadblock. That hadn’t been there on Paul’s previous visit. The guard, alerted by the sirens, turned out to salute the limousine. Paul was out of the Old Town now, moving up the roasting canyon between the high rises at the centre of Dangoum. The tourist office was over to his right, he thought, two radial spokes away, so he turned along one of the connecting side streets to work his way around. Another roadblock had been built across the next avenue, and two soldiers were asleep in the strip of shadow cast by the sandbags. The roadblock on the next avenue was incomplete and unguarded. He walked past it and found the tourist office.

  It was closed, and by the pile of rubbish in the doorway looked as if it had been like that for a couple of weeks, at least, but the map was still in the dusty window. Curzon Street turned out to be the avenue he had just crossed. Now that he was past the roadblocks the temptation was to go on up to the palace and at least do a recce, see if he couldn’t spot some weakness, some culvert, the pipe that fed the moat, perhaps, where he could creep in with his AK … It was nonsense, a fantasy, he knew that. As Sophia had said, the chances were that Michael was being held somewhere else, in one of the DDA secret prisons, not in the palace at all, but the dream Paul had had on the train came strongly back into his mind, the bleeding hands on the door grilles, the dim lights of the pumping hall …

  What could one boy do, with an old gun and eighteen rounds? You’d need friends, allies, thirty or forty men working together in a surprise attack, explosives to blast your way in…And meanwhile Michael was lying somewhere in the stinking dark, listening to the moans from nearby cells, waiting for the torturers’ return.

  Enough of dreaming! That was no help. Paul turned back past the unfinished roadblock, walked on a hundred yards, took a side street, and came out into Curzon Street well down from the roadblock where the soldiers slept. The address Michael had left in the package with the money had been 300, but few of the houses had numbers. He needn’t have worried; 300 had been some kind of bar, and the owner had been proud enough of his number to paint it in enormous yellow figures across the front of the building. But it was shut—not just shut through the midday heat but shut for good. The door had been smashed in and roughly boarded across. The nail-heads in the planks gleamed rustless, so they’d not been there long. There was no sound or light from behind the broken door, no windows on the street. Paul turned away and walked on. He didn’t like the look of it. Best thing would be to carry on a couple of blocks and then work around and up the other side of Curzon Street. He could lie in the shade under one of the palms and pretend to be asleep while he watched.

  Forty yards on a car was parked, a green sedan which had looked empty, but as Paul got nearer turned out to have a man in it, lolling in the backseat, apparently asleep, though he was wearing dark glasses which made it hard to tell. As Paul was about to pass he sat up, opened the door, and slid out. He was tall and thin, his skin purply-black like Kashka’s, though he didn’t otherwise look Baroba. He wore a pale fawn suit with a clean white T-shirt beneath the jacket.

  “You,” he said.

  “Please?” said Paul.

  “What are you after?”

  “Find a place I can get a drink. They said there was a bar down this way.”

  “Closed down. Come over here.”

  Paul put his hand to his belt and stayed where he was. At the man’s first step toward him he drew his knife. The man stopped, slid a hand into his jacket pocket, and produced a c
ylinder of black wood. He flipped a catch and a lean blade shot up. He smiled.

  “Makes two of us,” he said. “Where did you steal yours?”

  “Fought another boy for it. He took it off a dead soldier.”

  “Uh-huh. You’d need cash for a drink.”

  “Sure.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  Paul shook his head. The man hesitated. If they fought he’d win, of course, but Paul might get a thrust in and he had his sharp fawn suit to think of. He slid the blade slowly back into its handle and put the knife away. Paul lowered his guard.

  “Okay,” said the man. “Too hot for work. But you can clear out and not come back, not unless you want the Deathsingers paying you a visit.”

  “I just want a drink.”

  “Find a stand-pipe,” said the man wearily, and turned back to the car.

  Paul made his way back to the market by side streets, feeling deeply depressed. Michael’s safe house had been raided, and was still being watched, watched by a man who had something to do with the Deathsingers—Michael told him they had worked with the secret police, the DDA. The man in the fawn suit might be from the DDA. Sophie had said the DDA were probably holding Michael and the other prisoners. It was all very, very bad.

  He found the market coming to life. Customers were moving between the stalls. The voices of traders—calling wares, haggling, mocking competitors—wove in with the drumbeat from the sound system. As he approached the Fulu section the clatter of the coppersmiths’ hammers drowned out most other sounds. Efoni was rearranging her baskets.

  “You find your friends?”

  He shook his head. She looked displeased but said no more. Jilli had pulled herself together from her grief, buried it somehow inside herself, and was sitting cross-legged by a sheaf of reeds beginning to weave something. He squatted down beside her.

  “Jilli, I’m sorry. All this happened because you helped me.”

  She looked at him, her small head poised proudly on her long neck.

  “I’m a Warrior,” she said. “Now I know what that means. I know why I’m a Warrior. Same as you, Paul.”

  He nodded and stroked the back of her hand with his fingertips. It was worse for her, different. He never thought about his own family, or what had happened to them. He couldn’t remember any of that. Jilli could never forget.

  “What are you making?” he said.

  “Basket for your gun—like a head basket, only longer. You can buy some cottons to hide it. I’ve seen a lot of people walking around like that.”

  Paul had too. The narrow Fulu head baskets were popular in Dangoum. Mostly you saw women carrying them, but men and boys too. There’d be nothing odd about a boy with a basket containing a few rolls of cloth.

  “My thanks,” he said. “That’ll be just right—Efoni told me to get my gun out of the market. I’ve got a problem, Jilli. The house my father told me to go to—it’s boarded up, and there’s a man watching it, from the DDA, I think. That’s the secret police. They’re bad. I don’t know what to do next. Efoni said she didn’t want me here.”

  “Oh, she can’t say that! I’ll talk to her!”

  Jilli jumped to her feet, and went off to argue with Efoni. Paul swigged some water and tried to think. He wasn’t really bothered about shelter—it was the dry season and he could sleep in the open. He had plenty of money for food. Jilli seemed to have solved the problem of the AK. All that was unimportant—what mattered was helping Michael. There was no way he could do that alone, so he had to find allies. Who? There must be other people in Dangoum, lots of them, who had supported Malani and would fight again if they got the chance. Surely there must be groups and cells already planning revolt. How could he find them, join them?

  Perhaps the one-armed man who’d sold him the porridge might have a contact—he’d been a Malani fighter

  Efoni came around the pile of baskets shaking her head, but smiling.

  “Jilli says I’ve got to keep you on,” she said. “Won’t take no for an answer.”

  “My thanks. What about that?”

  Paul jerked his head to where the gun was tucked away.

  “Provided you get it good and hidden, and don’t go waving it around. Okay, you can sleep here—at least it means I don’t have to carry the whole lot home every night. Jilli can sleep in my hut, but I haven’t got room for you. Okay?”

  “That’s fine. My thanks, Efoni. Anything I can do?”

  “You can go and fill my water jug if you like. The stand-pipe’s down by the music trees.”

  “How much to pay?”

  “Still free in the market. There’ll be trouble if anyone tries to change that.”

  Efoni and Jilli left a bit before midnight, each stalking off under a tower of Efoni’s best baskets and moving away between the butane flares that lit the stalls. Tired though he was after the effort of the last two days and the almost sleepless night between, Paul stayed awake another hour, digging a shallow pit at the back of the stall with his knife, laying the AK in it, smoothing it over, and covering the place with a pile of baskets. Then he slept.

  The market stayed noisy all night. Though the big speakers went off at midnight there were liquor stalls at the farther side, where the prostitutes came and went, and smaller sound systems played on, and voices rose in singing and quarrel. The habits of the bush kept Paul sleeping light as a deer. If footsteps strayed up from the liquor stalls he would be instantly awake, with his hand stretched out under the baskets ready to push down through the loosened earth to the AK. And he was aware of its presence even in his dream, the same dream coming and going, himself not on the train now but crawling up some kind of water tunnel with the gun slung beneath him, then looking out into a room where a band was playing, tall thin men in T-shirts with notes of music on them. Cells around the room, the grilles, the blood-stained fingers. The whole attack timed, Kashka and the Leopards ready to set their mine off against the far wall of the palace, and then the lights would go out and Paul would dash from his hiding place and slide the gun through the bars of Michael’s grille … if he could work out which one it was, if the man in the fawn suit, knowing about the attack all along, hadn’t begun to turn the big wheel which would let the water come roaring out of the sluices and wash him, drowning, down into darkness.

  A bad night.

  Efoni and Jilli came soon after dawn, bringing him breakfast, black beans with a few shreds of chicken for flavour. He thanked them, told Efoni what he’d done about the gun, and left. He’d have liked Jilli to come too. She’d said nothing more to him about the massacre of her family, but he could sense her grief and desolation. In the war you learned about things like that, the strange guilt survivors feel, when all their friends have perished. Helping him look for allies against Basso-Iskani might have put fresh images into her mind. But it turned out she was determined to finish the basket to hide the AK. Well, perhaps, he thought, choosing the cottons to cover it might help in a different way. He gave her some money and left.

  The one-armed porridge seller was no use. He just shook his head and said those times were over. No, he didn’t know anyone.

  Paul turned away sighing. What now? His mind was still full of his dream. The idea of the palace seemed to call to him. Maybe Michael wasn’t there. Maybe there wasn’t a water tunnel, or anything like one, though the moat must be fed somehow. But at least he could go and watch. He might learn something.

  This time he made his way up by a different route, deliberately choosing the road that would take him past Michael’s apartment. He walked steadily at first but long before he reached the downtown towers began to mooch and loiter, gazing into shop windows, or standing and staring when the occasional sleek Mercedes purred by. He was a boy in a big city, loafing around because he had nothing better to do.

  Nothing better to do than stand for a while outside Michael’s apartment bui
lding watching who came and went. If Peter showed up he would follow him, but he didn’t. The one interesting thing he saw was a cream-coloured convertible driven by a fat middle-aged man smoking a cigar. Two young women in expensive-looking clothes sat beside him, laughing and waving their arms about. When the car stopped the women kissed the man, got out, and strutted into the building on high-heeled shoes, still giggling and showing themselves off. The man gazed around with a grand, self-pleased look, noticed Paul, and tossed his half-smoked cigar in his direction. Paul pounced and grinned his thanks, as he was expected to, and the man drove on.

  Soldiers were working at another uncompleted roadblock at the top of the avenue. Paul strolled toward them, scuffing a bit of melon slice along the ground and glancing up casually to see if there was an unwatched gap where he might slip through. It took him a moment or two to realize that the men were not building the roadblock, but demolishing it, loading sandbags and poles into trucks which then drove away. A soldier with an AK was lounging under a palm tree, watching. Paul had never seen a man look so bored, but as Paul scuffled his bit of melon past the remains of the barrier he glanced around.

  “Where are you going, son?”

  “My granddad told me to come and look at the palace. He said I’d got to build him a house like that.”

  “Hopeful. What’ve you got there?”

  “Bit of cigar a man gave me to show how rich he was. Do you want it?”

  “Sure. Thanks. Got a light?”

  Paul got the matches out of his satchel and passed them over. The soldier lit the cigar butt and sucked the smoke luxuriously in. He didn’t give the matches back, of course, but he looked fairly friendly.

  “What are they doing?” said Paul.

  “Don’t ask me. Put it up last week, take it down this— that’s the army.”

  “Can I go and look at the palace?”

  The soldier shrugged, and Paul mooched on.

  The broad road that ringed the palace was called the Circus. On its outer side the pavement was shaded all the way around by a double row of acacia trees, but the inner pavement was open to the sky. Paul studied the problem as he lounged along under the trees. He had seen the palace before, of course, but now he was looking at it with different eyes. Then it had been almost a joke, the last leftover of Boyo’s crazy rule. Now it was a target, a fortress held by an enemy, a place he had somehow to attack by guile or force.