by Judy Croome
‘I—’ Lulu clears her throat, ‘I don’t want to intrude on your time with Dawud.’
‘Oh, he won’t mind,’ Jamila dismisses, confident that Dawud, ever aware of the Templeton’s status as patrons to the needy, won’t object to her good deed. ‘It’ll be a simple pasta and sauce.’
‘My favourite.’ Lulu accepts with a grin.
New spirit spurts through Jamila’s veins. With each beat, her lifeblood pumps its power into her. The same power she felt when she rubbed her old wooden Spirit King-mask and the same power she felt when Dawud made love to her, long before she had kissed the face of her ezomo.
She hasn’t felt this surge, this power that is greater than she is, for a long time and, as she lifts the telephone to tell Chuki Samanya that she’ll join her for breakfast after all, she breathes in all the joy she can.
Her Spirit King has returned. He is back and she has overcome her ezomo.
• • •
When she finishes her call, Enoch is in the office. His jeans are dirty, as if he’s knelt in them. He washes his tattooed fingers in the small basin near the coffee percolator.
His soap-covered hands swirl under the running water and Jamila watches as L-O-V-E covers P-E-A-C-E, and P-E-A-C-E covers L-O-V-E. The blue letters dance into one another and she doesn’t know where one begins and where the other ends, until she clears her gaze by scolding him.
‘You shouldn’t wash your dirty hands there!’ she says, startling him. ‘Pour some disinfectant down the sink when you’re finished.’
She pushes the old clothes she was sorting back into the black plastic bag. Today, she’s full of the Spirit King’s love; she wants to rain her happiness down on everyone she meets, so she can’t understand why watching his hands under the flowing water irritates her. She’s sorry that she snapped and gives Enoch a sunny smile, noticing that he has extraordinary eyes, as cool and as dangerous as the sea that looks up at the mansion in which she lives. Her smile quivers and almost falls off her face, but she has the old power in her, even without her Spirit King-mask pendant, even without Dawud, she has it back and she’s not afraid when she stares back into the heart of a stranger’s call.
‘Are you settled in yet, Enoch?’ she asks as she bends to unlock the cupboard under the sink. She reaches in and hauls out the yellow and red bottle of disinfectant, which she places next to the basin. ‘This city isn’t easy to adapt to.’
‘It isn’t,’ he replies. ‘But I’ve been here before.’
‘Oh?’
‘A long time ago, when I met Elisha.’
‘Elisha…oh, you mean Prior Ajani. It must have been a while back.’ In all her years in the court, she never heard Prior Ajani talk about him until he arrived just before the Pale One did.
‘We’re old friends,’ he replies, and his lips compress with a layered amusement that makes Jamila suspect she’s missed something. But when she stares at him, in his leather and tattoos, she can’t imagine what, so she says, ‘Oh,’ and dismisses him from her thoughts as she returns to her desk. ‘Lulu will give you a cloth to dry your hands on.’ The Pale One does so, and makes him a gruff offer of a cup of coffee.
• • •
Dawud doesn’t blink when he comes home and finds them on the veranda. Lulu stands at the edge of the stairs leading to the old rose garden and watches the sea.
‘Jilly’s told me about you,’ he says and shakes her hand. Jamila can’t detect any hesitation in Dawud and she wonders if it’s because, in the rays of the dying sun, Lulu’s skin looks almost normal, and her palpable pleasure injects life into its pasty sheen.
‘Ditto,’ Lulu murmurs and, with an awkward shrug, adds, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I’m here for supper?’
‘You’re very welcome,’ Dawud says. ‘Jamila’s friends are welcome.’
‘Lulu’s offered to go to the printer’s tomorrow.’ Jamila tells him why Lulu is there, adding with a hint of pride she can’t quite erase, ‘I’m joining Chuki for breakfast and Lulu will take the proofs in.’
‘Chuki Samanya?’
She enjoys his surprise and nods.
‘I’m glad that you’re making your own friends.’ He gives her an approving pat on the shoulder.
Has the way she clung to him, cleaved to him, been a burden for Dawud? Has she done all she thought he wanted, when all he wanted was for her to be what she dreamed of? What a waste if she replaced Jamila Johnson with Jamila Templeton and he didn’t even want the sacrifice she made!
Later, after she placed the meal in the cooker and made the salad, she sits and listens to the murmur of easy conversation between Dawud and Lulu. A novel idea washes over her as the smell of the ocean washes over them, carried on a light breeze that chases away the ordinariness of the day. She resists the audacious thought until she can resist it no longer: had she, through all the long years of her unhappiness, held the key to her own redemption?
Chuki Samanya’s casual words at breakfast showed Jamila that secret, and the revelation breaks the barriers that trap the real Jamila in guilt and shame.
She needs solitude to savour this enlightenment, so she stands, startling the other two with the squeal of the chair over the slate floor. ‘I must check the food,’ she says and rushes to the kitchen.
As she bends over the rich meaty lasagne, the cheese crisped the way Dawud likes it, she overflows with a newfound security. A peace, even, that soothes away the long nights of memories and the days of secret shame. It’s a gift from her new friend Chuki Samanya, and it smells even sweeter than the heavy scent of the white roses Lulu picked, when she showed her the old abandoned rose garden at the bottom of the long curving driveway.
• • •
Later, when Dawud returns from driving Lulu home, Jamila is already in bed. Dressed in a lacy black nightgown, a gift from him that she wears for the first time tonight, she waits. But he doesn’t see that tonight will be different. More like when they were in love and she had loved him without the shadow of her ezomo always staining her with contrition. Instead, he says a quiet ‘Hello,’ and disappears into the bathroom.
When he climbs in next to her, he tosses and turns. It doesn’t help, so he sits up and pummels his pillow.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asks.
‘Nothing,’ he replies. He shifts and wriggles until he says, ‘Everything.’ He sighs. ‘Did you hear the news tonight?’
‘I was busy with Lulu,’ she says. ‘Why?’
‘There’s been another escalation in The War.’
Relieved that that’s all, she turns to him. She hopes he’ll notice the nightgown and the tempting disarray of its satin ribbons loosely tied so that a hint of her cleavage shows. Will he guess what it offers? ‘They’ve been at war for years,’ she says and shifts closer to lay her head on his shoulder.
She wants to reach down and fondle him, cover him with the passion Samanya drew from her all those years ago, and which she is now free to share with Dawud. But the habit of years is hard to break and she is not yet able to release the fear that locks all she could be deep inside her, where the Spirit King and the Levid can smell it and fight over it. When Dawud distractedly lifts an arm and cuddles her, she harnesses her desire, her ezomo, and asks, ‘Was it bad news?’
‘They’ve begun a massive offensive,’ he says. ‘Thousands are already dead. There’s a general call out for extra volunteers.’ He picks at the lace trimming on the bedspread and his short, practical nails unravel a loose thread as he frowns at his thoughts. ‘Do you think Granny Zahra’s right?’ he asks. ‘About my parents’ deaths?’
She tells him what he wants to hear. ‘They died for a good cause,’ she consoles him. ‘When people die for what they believe in, how can that be a waste?’
‘At least they did something,’ he says. ‘Something real, something heroic.’
‘Of course they did,’ she agrees. ‘They were heroes! You can be proud of them, no matter what Granny Zahra says.’
‘Ah, Jilly love,’ he sa
ys. ‘You do understand!’ He encloses her in his arms and the fire leaps up as it did on that moon-dappled balcony. ‘Will you come with me when I tell Granny Zahra?’
Fear devours the flames of her passion. ‘Tell her what?’ she asks.
‘I’m joining the army as a volunteer,’ he says. He rubs a hand over her shoulder and his tremors shiver into her bones. ‘For a six week tour of duty as a medic. Like my parents.’
Grasping through the rush his words invoke, the vortex sucks her in, holds her tight, and gouges out all the peace she found today. Holding back the hiss of a nameless dread, she tells herself that her ezomo no longer has a face she need fear.
She will be safe in this old city, even without Dawud, she comforts herself. Her hand creeps up to tangle with the gold necklace she wears around her neck. The Spirit King has returned to her. She is stronger, wiser, than before, when she arrived in this old city, and her ezomo no longer holds any danger.
She will be safe.
She should be safe.
Chapter 18
Zahra (The Past)
“Nought’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content.”
After Grace died, I staggered out of her room, calling, calling for someone to help. Enoch had already gone. He had gone without saying goodbye; he must have left as Grace breathed her last and, until Prior Ajani bustled into the room, dragging another man behind him, I was without help.
‘Enoch called me. He said I must hurry and bring a doctor,’ he said as he took my arm and helped me to a chair. He pointed the doctor in the right direction and stayed with me until he returned.
‘She’s dead,’ the medic declared importantly. ‘Her heart killed her.’
I wanted to scream I did it! I did it! I murdered her!
But I was crying too completely and my throat was tight, as if the hand of an Eidolon Warrior was holding it closed and choking my disclosure. Prior Ajani gripped my shoulder, a silent warning to calm down.
‘She’s distraught with grief,’ someone said later.
They all said it, the day we buried Grace’s ashes in the Garden of Remembrance at St Jerome’s. They circled around Barry and I, faces dimmed with the loss of their light, their Grace. They patted me on the shoulder and on the arm and consoled me even as they whispered in surprise, ‘Who would have thought Zahra Templeton loved our Grace so much?’
The fools! The fools!
Could they not see a living ezomo when it was before them?
I did not set foot in the Court of St Jerome again for a long, long time.
Chapter 19
Lulu
“Ye have angels’ faces, but heaven knows your hearts.”
My thoughts turn to Jamila and to the man standing next to me on this deserted beach. Jamila’s friendship, her promise to include me in her all-important wedding day, is enough. I’m not interested in whatever Enoch offers. As unbelievable as the small attentions, the little touches are, it becomes more obvious every moment we stay and watch the ocean that he offers a real relationship.
I cannot look at him so I keep my gaze on the water. After a decade of staring at the bleakness of prison walls, the sea stretches into an infinity I cannot grasp. The waves rush to greet us. As they come close, the waters slow to a cautious dribble and touch my toes. They, too, are afraid of my difference and scurry back, leaving seaweed clinging to a broken piece of driftwood. Battered and torn, its green arms unfurl and then droop with despair as the ocean abandons it to face the harsh world alone.
It touches me with its loneliness, that lost piece of seaweed, and my urge to save it is intoxicating. I long to pick it up and throw it back into the safety of the ocean, before the relentless sun leeches it of its colour and destroys it forever, as the Spirit King leeched me of my colour and almost destroyed me.
Before I can move, Enoch steps forward. He stoops from his great height to pick it up and tosses it unerringly back into the ocean from whence it came.
‘You’ve wasted your time,’ I say.
He smiles, shakes his head, and stays where he is until the next wave comes. It laps at his black biker boots, baptising the bottom of his jeans in salt water, then begins its fated retreat. This time, though, all that’s left on the sand are a few flecks of foam, soon soaked away into the faint hollow of his footprints.
‘Look,’ he announces as he walks back to my side. ‘The ocean hasn’t thrown it back out.’
He places a casual arm around my shoulders. Such is the day that I don’t even flinch. I leave it there, tempted even to lay my head on his shoulder. But that would be too dangerous. It would remind me too much of the soft and hospitable bosom of Sub-Prioress Dalia.
‘Not for long,’ I say. ‘It’ll spit it out on some other beach where people don’t care. They’ll leave it to rot.’
His eyes flicker with mystery. ‘Not everyone would,’ he replies.
Somehow he has sensed I’d been about to do what he has already done. My answer is to shrug myself loose from his hold. I turn away and head back the way we came. ‘I must return to the office,’ I say. ‘Jamila will worry about me.’
‘Jamila worries about herself,’ he says. ‘Not anyone else.’ There’s an ominous thread sewn into his observation that annoys me.
I swear at him, a harsh word and ugly. ‘Jamila is my friend!’ I snarl, and stretch my legs in an attempt to outrun his provocative presence.
‘Did you learn that in prison?’ he asks with mild interest. He’s right next to me, keeping pace with me, no matter how fast I power myself away over the tenacious sand. ‘It couldn’t have been the Controllers who taught you.’
I stop and turn. ‘What do you know about me?’ I grab his arm and twist my lips at him, not a mask now, for I am furious. And somehow shamed that this man, of all men, knows I spent the last ten years locked in a prison.
She’s capable of murder, they said. She’s dangerous. She stabbed Taki in the leg, they remembered, and forgot all the good I’d done in the holding camp from the time Dalia loved me. In the end, they called it accidental manslaughter, but every time I think of Dalia, who let them lead me away, I call it betrayal.
Enoch shrugs, but not hard enough to dislodge my grip. ‘St Jerome’s is a small court,’ he says.
A rush of the old, old anger destroys the contentment of this day, which had almost restored my hope. I am safe here, amongst these court people, and yet this man’s insight into that which should be secret threatens me. These days, however, I no longer let the rage master me. I learnt, that day Sub-Prioress Kapera died in a pool of blood, that rage can sometimes be cold. And the colder it is, the more I can use it.
I calculate how much force would hurt him without breaking his skin. Digging my fingernails into the small tattoo that blares “Faith & Hope & Charity,” I step close to him. Close enough that I notice the way his beard nudges through the pores of his skin and darkens his chin with stubble as black as his hair. He is beautiful, so beautiful an ache begins within me. I have to crush his face from my vision: I look inward, into my anger, into my loneliness and into my fear.
‘Who told you?’ I shake his arm and dig deeper. He doesn’t flinch. ‘Who?’
He shrugs. ‘It’s a small court,’ he says, ‘I hear what I need to hear.’ He looks at me, his gaze acute, until the anger trickles out and I am faint with I know not what. The beach; the sea; the cacophony of gulls, all fade. Soon, all that is left is him and me, and he whispers, ‘When will you be free, Luyando?’
‘I am free,’ I whisper back, even though I want to shout the words. ‘I am free!’
‘You’re out of prison,’ he says, and prises my nails out of his arm with an ease that startles me. ‘That’s all.’ His eyes, as grey and opaque as the ocean when the unknowing clouds obscure the sun, fill with tears and I can’t stop the fall…
…down I go, down into his vision. There is a poor, terrified creature, trapped in an old kraal. She shivers as the sounds of the mob that howls
for her blood fade into the night.
She shivers as I did, that day the holding camp girls, with their kicks and snarls mobbed me before my rage emerged and they began to fear me more than I feared them. I want to kneel next to the old crone and wrap her in my arms, for she is such a pathetic bundle of rags. But her face: her face is lined with wisdom and pain, for all that is best in her is all that makes the others hate her.
I gasp out my sisterhood with her; a sisterhood forged in the alienation from all that is normal. The Sky Palace alone can help those who fall outside that scrupulously guarded border of the land called Normality, for the citizens of that land will want to conquer; they will want to invade and consume and devour until there is no difference left, for their safety lies in their sameness. Safe for them, at least. Not for those like this sad, scared being and me. For the Sky Palace, with its Spirit King and all its angels, hasn’t ever helped either of us. We are the lost ones, and our greatest danger rests in our deviation from what has been decided is the norm.
She shifts, and tilts her head to listen, as if she hears the small sound of despair I make. She pulls herself upright; exhausted, she holds fast to a branch of the gnarled old bladdernut tree that overhangs the kraal. Looking into the threatening darkness, she arranges her face in a snarl that would make her fearsome if I hadn’t recognised the loneliness that lurks deep behind the ugliness. I’ve practised that grimace myself, in the small mirror above my bed in the cell that was my home for so many years.
‘Will they come back?’ she asks in an ancient tongue I’ve heard before, but only now understand.
‘The innkeeper is a good woman,’ someone else says in the same language. ‘She’ll lead them away and you’ll be safe.’
‘Will I?’ she asks and, tired of the struggle, tired of the dangerous alienation from all that is ordinary, she sinks to the ground. ‘Will I ever be safe?’
‘Trust me,’ he says from over my shoulder…
