Burning Embers

by Hannah Fielding

  Coral hesitated for a few moments and then, making her mind up, she turned to Aluna. “Tell the boy I’ll go with him. You’d better come with me to translate; though I have a feeling this mishiriki speaks our language well enough. Besides I’d rather not go alone.”

  They went by car up to the Ngomongo village outside Mombasa and left the vehicle at the edge of the forest. From there, the two women and the Masai boy carved their way on foot through long grass and bushes into a varied countryside, climbing through belts of bamboo and crossing stony ground where the rocks had been worn smooth by the passage of feet. The path began to slope steeply downward until they reached a cunningly concealed clearing in a hollow of the grassland where there stood a magnificent giant banyan tree. Coral had never come across a banyan tree before but had seen pictures of them. It had large prop roots growing laterally up out of the soil making them almost indistinguishable from the main trunk, while its branches grew downward into the ground. They looked like woody pillars forming strange galleries one could walk through. This banyan was particularly grand, and Coral imagined what a wonderful photograph this would have made for her article. The young messenger patted the tree as he went past and said something in Swahili that Coral did not understand.

  “Aluna, what did he just say?” Coral whispered.

  “He was greeting the tree spirit. It is like a prayer for good luck. Each time a villager passes this sacred banyan, they say it so that the tree spirit will continue to give its medicine to the mishiriki and the village.” Aluna was looking racked with anxiety, and she held tightly onto Coral’s hand. The boy turned, smiling and nodding to them to follow him.

  The mishiriki’s hut stood a few paces away from the tree. It was squat, round, and quite wide, and was made of woven branches with only a hole for its entrance. Coral and Aluna crawled into it behind the messenger boy. It was dark inside save for a fire that blazed on a primitive hearth built with three large stones. The hut was surprisingly large, and they found they could stand upright as soon as they were inside. The curved wall was dressed with strange animal skins that appeared to be from red eagles, iguanas, great anteaters, and boas. The earth floor was strewn with chips of shells and debris of other marine creatures. Coral noticed with a shiver the skull that was suspended over the hearth by a few sprigs of sisal. She glanced at Aluna — the poor woman looked terrified. There was a vague smell of decay mingled with the balsamic odor of precious woods and resin that the witch doctor was burning. She was mad to have come here. This was a very isolated spot; nobody would ever find them. What had she been thinking?

  The mishiriki was sitting on a seat that looked like a throne shaped from the bones of giant buffalos’ heads, where the horns had been turned down to form supporting legs, surrounded on the floor by pebbles of many colors and sizes. The shaman looked even more haggard than he had at the Masai village, with lines of a long life written on his face, deep-set deadened eyes, and sunken cheeks. The skin stretched tight across his chest showed the outline of his ribs beneath, and his hair was painted red with clay. He signaled to the two women to sit, and then he spat in a large, iron pot that held a thick red liquid before placing it on the hearth. Scooping up some pebbles, the old man threw them into the pot together with a handful of powder. A loud, wild cry went up from him, and immediately the skull that hung from the ceiling started to rotate slowly.

  The sorcerer then beckoned Coral to come closer and crouch beside him. Reluctantly she obeyed and found herself compelled as if by some strange power to look into his face. The dead pupils of the old man seemed to suddenly recover their sight as he started to chant an incantation with a strange, guttural murmur. The skull resumed its gyratory movement in reverse and finally stopped to face Coral.

  Coral held her breath. What was going to become of her? She was conscious of a cold numbness in her body as a fear greater than she had ever experienced seized her. Her instinct was to run blindly out of the hut, but she was frozen to the spot. The old sorcerer drank some of the infusion he had concocted in the pot and gestured to her to open her mouth. As she did, she tried to force her terrified mind to think. Was he giving her poison? Mesmerized, she felt the question evaporate and watched as, with the help of a hollowed-out bone, he trickled some of the liquid onto her tongue.

  The mishiriki got up from his throne and lay himself down on a lion’s skin that the young boy had spread on the ground and appeared to drop off into a deep sleep. The boy covered him with a kind of white cloak and, crouching next to him, began to hum a sort of litany, punctuating this funereal chant with the hypnotic swaying of his body from side to side. Soon the movement accelerated. His chest streamed with sweat, and his turned-up eyes seemed lifeless. Coral began to feel strange as the room grew darker; the walls first faded into a blur and then disappeared altogether. She fell into a state of semi-consciousness.

  Time went by. Suddenly the young boy ceased his chanting and gave a great cry as he uncovered the witch doctor. The mishiriki sat up, and Coral seemed to recover her senses all at once. The mishiriki turned toward her. “You have come to find out about the Frenchman,” he said in perfect English. “This man has come to this land with hatred in his heart to take back by force what he feels is rightfully his.”

  Coral’s mind was now alert. The numbness had subsided from her body, and she felt refreshed as if she had awoken from a long, deep sleep. “What do you mean?”

  “The Frenchman’s mother angered her father when she ran away with her French lover. The father owned Mpingo. He disinherited her and then sold Mpingo to the White Pirate, your father. The Frenchman came to this land to take back his inheritance. He had all of his wife’s money after she died and then tried to buy Mpingo, but your father refused to sell to him. So the Frenchman wormed his way into your father’s house like a jackal, and he took the White Pirate’s wife as his woman. Now you have returned, and the Frenchman wants to enslave you using his black magic so you will surrender to him and he can take back Mpingo as his own. He is the devil! Run from him, run or he will destroy you, drown you as he did his wife, as he drags you down into the underworld from where you will never return.”

  A mighty roar vibrated through the hut, and in that second, Coral met the sorcerer’s stare; she saw a rage and hate that filled her with horror. The corners of his mouth were turned down in an expression so savage it appeared inhuman and evil. Coral felt like she was staring into the eyes of a monster.

  Taking the spear that the young boy was now handing him, the mishiriki lifted it and, holding his breath, flung it toward the suspended skull, landing it in the middle of the eye sockets and shattering the death head in two. As he did so, the ground seemed to tremble under them and the walls shook. The mishiriki then rose from his seat and, bobbing and bending, hobbled out of the hut without looking back. The young boy signaled to Coral that it was over and said something in Swahili to Aluna who had cowered as close to the hut’s mouth as possible, totally petrified. Approaching Coral, the boy beckoned her to follow him.

  Aluna babbled unintelligibly in the car all the way back to the house. “I warned you evil was coming, Missy Coral. You would not listen to old Aluna. The Frenchman, he is the devil in disguise. Now what is to happen to my little malaika? Yes, yes, run from him, yes, run from him!” The African woman hugged herself and swayed from side to side, muttering odd words of Swahili.

  It was dark when they reached Mpingo. Coral went straight up to her room, sending Aluna off to her quarters. She realized it would take the poor woman a long time to recover from the terrifying experience. Coral felt guilty and sorry for the yaha who had loyally followed her little malaika on her unreasonable expedition. Still, she did not regret what she had done; the story she had been told was an extraordinary yarn, but at least she had some sort of answer to most of her questions, even if they did seem rather amazing. Coral wondered how the newspaper cutting had come into the mishiriki’s possession in the first place, but then she remembered her mother had once told her
. “These witch-doctors are no fools,” she had said. “They are powerful and dangerous men if you get on the wrong side of them. They have spies and informers all over the place — it’s how they keep their people under such control.” Coral decided she would verify the mishiriki’s words by visiting the Mombasa Gazette offices in the morning and checking their archives for old newspaper articles.

  Back in her room, Coral went about in a daze. She hung up her clothes, had a hot bath, and got into bed. Only then did she react to the information she had just learned. Her body went icy cold and started to tremble as if she had fever. Pulling the sheet toward her, she lay curled up like a sick animal, hugging herself protectively as a tide of misery washed over her.

  How could her intuition have been so wrong? The painful truth dawned: Rafe had fooled her utterly, every step of the way. He had used their physical attraction to lure her into loving him. She did not know who she hated more: Rafe, for being unscrupulous and Machiavellian, or herself, for being not only gullible but so wanton. Desire is something for which one always pays a high price, Morgana had said to her, and so very right she was. How Rafe must have laughed at her naiveté.

  If only she could stop thinking about him…But no matter how hard she tried to drive his image from her thoughts, it was no use. She felt guilty and ashamed, but she could not deny it. Rafe had gotten under her skin; her love for him ran in her veins. But how could she love someone she held so much in contempt? Warm tears ran down her cheeks, and she sobbed in desperation as her soul shattered into a million shards.

  * * *

  Early the next day, Coral set off to verify the witch doctor’s words at the Mombasa Gazette. The offices were in a drably colored midget skyscraper that many towns in Africa, despite the enormous open spaces around them, put up as an indispensable proof of their commitment to progress. The employees were kind and helpful. An old Indian man behind an imposing desk seemed to recall the incident.

  “Yes, yes, I remember. I was still a lad,” he said. “The story made a lot of noise at the time. The year escapes me now. Close to forty years ago, it must be. Her father was a well-known settler. She was a beautiful woman, not young, mind you, in her thirties, but still very beautiful. Very proper lady. No one would have imagined. It just goes to show, still waters run deep. I think it was a shock not only to her father but also for many people too.” Having supplied the information, he waited and gave Coral a slanting look. “Why d’you want to know? Is she a relation?”

  “Oh, no, no! I’m writing an article on society scandals in Kenya,” Coral replied casually. “Would you keep articles of this kind in your archives?”

  “We keep all articles, and we are very well organized,” he answered proudly.

  The clerk gave orders to two young kikuyus who came running to answer his request and brought over to them mounds of files and boxes. All morning, Coral plowed through the archives, painstakingly pouring over dusty, bound copies of newspapers, each year made up of three hundred and sixty issues. Finally, she found a series of articles and photographs that told the whole story. Indeed, Carol Stevenson Wells had been a beautiful woman, strong and charismatic. Obviously her son had not only inherited the deceptive side of her character, but also her looks. They both had that kind of devastating attraction that few of the opposite sex can resist, usually leaving disaster in its wake.

  The mishiriki had not lied. George Stevenson Wells, Rafe’s grandfather, had in fact disinherited Carol, his only daughter, for eloping with her lover Dr. Paul de Monfort, a scientist working for the Pasteur Institute in French Guinea. A harsh punishment, Coral thought, but in those days, she supposed, codes of conduct were much stricter. However, a few years later, Carol’s father sold Mpingo to a new English settler, Walter Sinclair, and had gone back to England immediately afterward, never to be heard from again. Rafe was thirty-six now, which meant Carol Stevenson Wells had been pregnant when she left Mpingo. Coral pitied Rafe. In some way, she could not blame him for wanting his inheritance back, but why the underhanded manipulation? Maybe if he had told her the truth, they could have come to some arrangement, she thought as she drove glumly back to the house.

  The next morning, Coral awoke to the sound of voices outside her window. She had spent a fitful night and now felt the stinging lack of sleep. She climbed out of bed and went over to the window to see the postman handing her stepmother a letter. Rubbing her eyes, Coral slipped into her dressing gown. Perhaps there was a letter from her mother. Angela Ranleigh wrote to her daughter regularly, and usually her letters, though full of gossip about their Derbyshire village and people that Coral hardly knew, were often entertainingly indiscreet and read like an English soap opera. Today, Coral could do with something to cheer her up, and news from her family would make her feel less far from home.

  While Coral was running down the stairs, she saw Cybil standing in the garden. She had torn open the letter and was engrossed in the contents, her face slightly pale.

  “Anything for me?” Coral asked. Her stepmother’s head shot up, and she hastily stuffed the letter into the pocket of her dress.

  “No. Nothing for you. Just a letter for me from an old relative,” replied Cybil. Her hand was on her throat, and she seemed to regard Coral almost with shock.

  “Is there something the matter? Are they ill?” asked Coral, not exactly feeling sympathy for Cybil, but there was something very odd-looking about the expression on her stepmother’s face, and she was gripping the letter tightly in her pocket.

  “Yes. Yes, that’s right. There’s an illness in my family. An old aunt.” Cybil was now distractedly fiddling with the tight bun of hair at the back of her head, and her gaze flitted away from Coral. “Inevitable, really.” Her stepmother barely smiled as she walked past, leaving Coral to wonder what kind of dear old aunt could make a woman like Cybil look so upset.

  The next few weeks went by at a snail’s pace, with bitter-sweet thoughts of Rafe threading through Coral’s brain. Her waking hours were a torture of days as her mind went to and fro, trying to understand conversations, rumors, and her own feelings. Her nights were just as painful, with periods of sleep broken by unpleasant and vivid dreams.

  Where had he been all this time? She needed explanations from Rafe, and the waiting was driving her to distraction. As soon as he returned from his travels, she would insist on talking to him. Still, a voice inside told her that these were only excuses to see him again, feel his arms around her, the warmth of his body against her, the melting sensation that drenched her limbs whenever he was close…No, she must try to control these feelings; otherwise, they would destroy her.

  Coral had to be inventive to keep herself busy. Her articles were mostly in their final stages. They needed brushing up, but it was difficult for her to concentrate when secretly her mind, her body, and her heart were always with Rafe. The Mpingo estate almost managed itself. Robin Danvers was doing a wonderful job and did not seem to need her input. She hardly saw Cybil nowadays. Her stepmother kept pretty much to herself, and when they did meet, they both made an effort to be civil to each other. She often wondered if Cybil had any news or any inkling of Rafe’s whereabouts. She searched in her mind for some lame excuse to bring up the subject but still did not dare to ask, and anyhow, she was sure that her stepmother would not disclose any information even if she did know something. Coral spent a lot of time on the beach and taking solitary walks through the countryside. Once or twice, she found herself ambling in the direction of Whispering Palms in the hope that Rafe had returned, but she did not venture too close to the house in case she bumped into Morgana.

  Time passed, and today, for the first time in weeks, Coral was less broody. She lazed in a hammock under a flame tree, listening to the cicadas’ ziz and churr, and enjoying the cheerful glow the sun shed over the garden. The air was hot and still. Glimpses of calm, blue sky interlaced the topmost branches of the trees, and the heavy scent of ripe fruit from mango and papaya groves floated around her.

  Most
afternoons, Coral tried to take a nap, but she was unable to really sleep, just dozing and daydreaming or reading quietly on her bed. This afternoon, her room felt rather stuffy, so she set herself out on a reclining chair in the shade on the veranda. The heat was intense, and the garden was filled with a warm haze and the soothing drone of bees. She could hear the murmur of the palms and the sea surf in the distance, and they lulled her to sleep.

  In her dream, she hurried along the path of an eerie garden, through avenues of palm trees like sleeping giants on either side, past clumps of flowering shrubs, the blooms drained of their color by the night. Waxen and phosphorescent in the moonlight, their scent impregnated the air. Where was she going in such haste, a night nymph, her flimsy white dress flowing behind her in the breeze? Suddenly, she knew she was running to Rafe. She could hear him calling her in the distance as he struggled to rid himself of his three captors. She saw him clearly now, surrounded by Cybil, Morgana, and the mishiriki. Rafe’s arms stretched out toward her, but her legs seemed held to the ground, treading the same place, not moving forward. Her heart thumped hard against her ribs as she tried to quicken her step to reach him, but to no avail. Then the mishiriki’s face grew larger and larger still, his devilish black eyes turning red, inches away from her own, as he gave his blood-curdling cry. A hellfire erupted around the small group, engulfing them all in its flames, while Rafe’s voice resounded in her ears, calling her again and again. Coral screamed out his name. She could still hear her scream as she woke up, shaking, her hair clinging to the back of her neck, a heaviness pressing down on her chest like a big stone stopping her from breathing.

  * * *

  It was almost twilight when Coral awoke. She showered and walked down to the beach. The herbaceous borders in the garden were humming with multicolored hawk moths, hovering in front of the flowers, their wings fluttering so swiftly that they seemed invisible. Blue shadows climbed the walls, and cactus and gray-green spears of aloes shot out above them between the tall, sparsely growing palm stems.