“Yes,” Kai said. “Praise Allah.”
She pretended to study the board carefully as she replaced the pieces to their starting positions. “There is one thing that surprises me.”
“And that is?”
“You have yet to mention Nandi.”
“Nandi?”
Her voice was teasing. “Yes. Daughter of Cetshwayo? Niece of Shaka Zulu? Princess, buffalo hunter, mischief-maker? You know, Nandi.”
Kai scratched at his chin. “I seem to recall the name, yes.”
“I am surprised to see that the great Wakil has but a single wife. Is it not shameful to so besmirch Bilalian manhood?”
Kai had no answer for that at all, shaking his head in confusion.
Elenya chuckled. “That aside, I imagined her people would have come to you by now.”
Kai turned away from her, suddenly finding it oddly difficult to speak. “I’ve heard nothing from them in three years.”
“Zulus have long mourning times.”
“We have all had much to mourn,” he said.
She finished placing the last satranj piece onto its square. “Then again”—she grinned—“they might have been respectful of the new marriage.” Elenya leaned forward. “I wager that Nandi steams by now.”
Allah preserve them both, these modern girls were a handful! The last of Elenya’s childish aspect was evaporating like yesterday’s shadow. Soon only the beautiful woman would remain. Already, it seemed she understood things that he himself kept from conscious awareness.
Doubtless there was humor in the situation, but he had yet to find a way to embrace it.
Time and patience, Kai, he thought to himself. Time and patience.
And with that thought, southern Bilalistan’s youngest Wakil went about the happy business of losing his game.
CHAPTER NINE
Kai navigated the merry chaos of two dozen guests as they milled through Dar Kush’s main reception hall: at the fireplace composing impromptu poetry in celebration of Elenya’s return, admiring the statuary, discoursing on the recent kite-fighting tournament, or swapping hunting tales. He spotted a willowy, silver-haired man of East African blood and picked out his patient, erudite voice a moment later: Maputo Kokossa, one of Bilalistan’s most celebrated inventors, and the father of Elenya’s dearest friend, Chifi.
“And where is my old nemesis Babatunde?” Kokossa asked, observing Kai’s approach. The inventor and Kai’s Yoruba Sufi master loved to butt heads intellectually. Kai regretted that the scholar was away. It was vastly entertaining to watch the two mental giants contest. He cherished the memory of a debate concerning the value of modern transportation. Babatunde never trusted anything that moved more swiftly than a man could walk, while Kokossa’s machine shop had produced gear prototypes essential to the production of the wheeled, cargo-pulling iron monstrosity known as a “steam dragon.”
“Gone to the capital,” answered Kai. “I will meet with him in some days. Do you miss your arguments?”
“I miss everything about him,” the inventor said. “It was he who wagered I would never get the gear shaft working properly—he owes me a supper.” Babatunde would indeed have to pay up. In the last months track had been laid east and north of the harbor, and even through a northeastern strip of Dar Kush.
Kokossa punctuated each word with a thump of his fist against the table. His braided hair gleamed in the candlelight. “Have you seen Chifi?”
“Here she comes now,” Kai said.
Chifi entered on Fodjour’s arm, followed by the customary serving girl/chaperone. Chifi was a slender girl whose jaw was too square, her nose too prominent for her narrow face. Nonetheless, she possessed animation and energy, and the sort of secretive smile that made one suspect unfathomed depths of heart and mind. Her hair, uncut since infancy, was knotted and braided together, hanging down her back in the fashion of unmarried Dagon women the world over.
Fodjour, dashing in his dress whites, led her to the banquet table, maintaining a continuous line of casual conversation. “Have you tried the goose liver? It enchants.”
“No,” Chifi replied. “I haven’t had the pleasure. Would you serve me?”
“My honor.”
Kai and Kokossa watched, tickled. “Ah! Young Fodjour again!” said the older man. “I have seen them speak several times. Am I an old fool, or do I sense a spark?”
“You’re no sort of fool at all,” Kai said. “And it would seem the most natural thing in the world for Fodjour to fall beneath her spell, Maputo. She is a prize.”
“In a father’s eyes, yes.” He leaned close enough to whisper. “In truth I worry for her. She cares more for the workshop than the parlor.”
Kai chuckled, made a polite excuse, and began to circulate. He glided between the guests, murmuring a greeting here, a compliment there, as his father had done on countless occasions.
He joined a line of guests in the preparation area between banquet hall and kitchen, where a few liveried servants offered a dessert of shaved ice. Through one of the front windows he could see Ghost Town, the village where Dar Kush’s white servants lived and raised their families. As a young man he had occasionally sported there, but since marriage and ascension to the office of Wakil, had rarely ventured past its wooden gates.
He accepted a cup of ice and honey-sweetened lemon, savoring the taste as it melted against his tongue. If material things were capable of conferring joy, Kai of all men should have been utterly content.
Kai’s life was good, but filled with specters. Regardless of his efforts, duties, and entertainments, a hole gaped in the fabric of his world.
Despite steadfast Fodjour and Kebwe, there remained a gap that only male relatives—or the most intimate of friends—could fill. Father, brother, and uncle were gone forever, and it was misery even to consider the depth of his affections for them.
But some who had touched his heart remained alive. In truth, the living human being he missed most was not family. Not even of African descent.
Truth be told, the living face he most longed to see was that of an Irishman named Aidan O’Dere.
Ghost Town’s denizens flitted about the estate, obedient and obsequious. He accepted their groveling but simultaneously found it oddly distasteful. Despite their protestations of loyalty he found himself wondering what truth lurked behind their servile smiles, burned behind their politely averted eyes.
“Olaf,” he said to the scarred, grizzled man shaving at a block of ice as tall as his hip. “How go things in the village?”
Olaf One-Ear was one of the district’s few free whites. A veteran of the Aztec Wars, Olaf had chosen to remain at Dar Kush despite emancipation, even maintaining a billet in Ghost Town. But as a freed man, Olaf had greater choice of duties than any servant, and sometimes sold his services to surrounding landholders, pocketing the profits.
“Oh, mighty well, sir,” Olaf said, bobbing his head. His left ear had been sheared away during the abortive rebellion that had cost Kai’s father his life. In point of fact, Kai had done the shearing himself, but that particular bit of history was never discussed or mentioned. “We be right happy these days.”
“What do they think about the grove’s replanting?” The prayer grove had been a sacred place to the servants, one destroyed in punishment following the uprising that had claimed Abu Ali’s life and Olaf’s ear.
Olaf’s smile was bright and glassy. “Oh, they happy, sir. Everybody thinks that just fine.”
Kai felt himself running up against a wall, but that merely motivated him to redouble his efforts.
“I heard from Master Berhar that you’ve been seen over at his estate, and not just handymanning about. Have you been visiting that woman Morgan again?”
Olaf hid a smirk, but looked down at the ice, refusing to answer.
Kai tried again. Once belonging to Dar Kush, Morgan had been sold to the Berhar estate years back. “Now, now … I heard she got married, or close to it. Is that really wise?”
; “Don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” he said flatly.
“Olaf,” Kai said in frustration, “after you returned from the mosque, for a short time it seemed that when I spoke to you, and you spoke to me, we really saw each other.”
Olaf’s expression changed not a whit. “Don’t know what ye mean, sir.”
“I think you do,” said Kai. “And month by month, I watched that slip away.”
For just a moment, there was uncertainty on Olaf’s face, a flicker of a different man beneath the placid mask, like a bird glimpsed flitting between palms. Swiftly sighted, swiftly gone. Olaf scratched at the stump of his ear. “Oh, ye know, sir. Day-to-day life just has a way of flowing in, coverin’ things up. But everything’s fine, sir. Fine as it ever was.” A beat. “Would that be all you’re needing, sir?”
“Yes,” Kai said, resigned. “I suppose it is.”
Kai looked out over to Ghost Town. Distantly, he heard the simple, pleasant strains of Irish music. A faint smile shadowed his face.
Olaf looked at his master—his employer—with concern. “Are ye all right, sir?”
“Yes. Fine. You’re a good sort, Olaf. It’s not fair to ask you to be something you’re not.”
“Sidi?”
“Never mind, Olaf. Just a stray thought. Be about your business.”
That annoying blankness descended over Olaf’s face, and he turned to Fodjour’s half-brother Mada, the next guest in line.
Kai stepped out through the kitchen and through the back door. Evening had only recently fallen. The sun’s legacy still lingered in the air. The contrast between the lemon ice and the air’s warmth tantalized. Even the chills as the first cool breezes gusted from the west merely added to the agreeable sensations.
Life is good, he thought, but so is memory.
CHAPTER TEN
The same gentle moon that cast its reflected radiance on Kai shone over all Dar Kush. Its bounty did not stop there: those rays silvered the rolling hills and lakes and rivers, even those farther north.
It was the same partial moon that shone four hundred miles away, northeast over the mountains of Wichita province. Those mountains were a symphony of shortleaf pine, blackjack and post oak, downy serviceberry and winged elm. Little of it was currently under cultivation, but what there was had given bounty to the Ouachita tribes who had once flourished. Now these lands provided groaning tables for farmers black and white.
Here the influence of Africa and Egypt, of Islam and the sands of the Middle East seemed to wane. Here, the seeds of a distant, almost fabulous eastern isle blossomed and bore fruit.
Here, far from Dar Kush, Aidan O’Dere and his wife, the former Sophia de Meroc, had established a small village and begun their life together, with a dozen other formerly bonded families.
Similar to the village of Aidan’s youth, it was built as a crannog, a man-made island constructed stone by stone from the lake’s bottom. Although not fully complete, it was based on the same defensive concepts.
The completed section was craftily positioned, with good stout walls and rifle portals. A single wooden bridge connected it to the land, a bridge easily destroyed in time of siege.
There was good farming aland, but many of the former slaves busied their days with fishing or hunting.
White-hot from the furnace, steel rang against the anvil of the crannog’s smithy as he struggled to reproduce the fabled work of Damascus, if not aspiring to that of fabled Benin. In other roofed shops, freedmen carved, whittled, and nailed, constructing doors, cabinets, and the circular fishing boats called coracles.
The inhabitants were not all Irish: they were former bondsmen from across Europe. Any white man or woman with a strong back, freedman papers, and the willingness to build community was welcome.
A squat, tunicked German yellow-hair named Hans hefted his toolbox and headed off through the narrow road toward the forest.
“Hans!” another freedman called. “Off to see the black folks again?”
The little man bit his thumb, the universal symbol for money. “Need silver, Mfumi. Reckon to get a piece of land, other side of the lake.”
Mfumi chuckled. “I know ye. Ye’ll work five year and then lose it all on a throw o’ the bones.”
Hans replied to that with an appropriately obscene gesture and swung off down the road.
Many of the men had skills of wood or metalcraft. Some rented their labor to local black farms, or worked in the neighboring township.
Despite their sometimes precarious circumstances, the land that had once belonged to the Ouachita was truly a bountiful stretch of woods and mountains, streams and a silvered lake teeming with fish. Immediately west roamed tribes of red men, and farther west than that, more black homesteaders, but few black townships of any note. A thousand miles west or north the Nations began, the zone in which one found no blacks at all, and in which the various native groups who had once dominated this continent made peace or war with one another and lived their separate lives.
The natives were curious about the whites, but not hostile. Mixing of blood was inevitable when people of different races lived in proximity. Already a Ouachita brave had taken a Roman wife. More than one former slave woman had coupled with a native or black townsman, so that her children might enjoy the advantage of mixed blood. Pure-blood whites might never have real power in Bilalistan, but the slightest drop of dark blood opened doors. Women shaded and braided their light hair to make it seem more African. Men worked in the fields until the sun had broiled them, seeking to add a few precious shades of bronze. Sometimes they tinted or painted their skin to achieve the desired effect.
In their precious free time, the crannog’s males also practiced military arts under the instruction of Aidan O’Dere himself. The forest rang with their cries and the sharp clack of stick meeting stick as men barely accustomed to freedom pretended to have at it with pike and sword.
Aidan O’Dere was a rugged, long-limbed, yellow-haired Irishman. His bright blue eyes gave little hint of the terrible price he had paid for his dangerous skills. It was a rare night indeed that did not include the horrid visitation of old and dire memories, phantasms of his homeland’s destruction. A thousand nights he had awakened screaming, and ten thousand times he had sworn that no such slaughter would ever happen again.
“Hold that stick tight, Mbuti,” he roared to one of the smaller, slighter men in the skirmish line. “Dammit, hit! Hit!”
“I ain’t ready for this,” the little Scot squealed, the cudgel wobbling in his hand. “It’s all too damned strange.”
Aidan came close to him and whispered. “Mbuti, listen close now. Yer not just fightin’ for your own miserable arse. It’s your wife’s. Yer daughter’s. Already, your eldest swings her hips at the shadows, dreamin’ of easy silver. Nothin’ easier than layin’ on her back, ya? If her da is weak, she’ll cross that focking line. Do ye want that?”
The tears welled from Mbuti’s eyes and ran in rivulets down his pale cheeks. “I just can’t.”
“Yes,” Aidan said patiently. “Yes, ye can. Not a human bein’ on this planet doesn’t have the urge running in its blood. The bastards worked hard to rip it out of ye.”
Weeping, Mbuti turned his back. Aidan grabbed his shoulders and swung him around.
“Face me,” Aidan roared. “Face me!” He had seen this dysfunction again and again: the longer a man had been in bondage, the harder it was for him to imagine ever fighting back. Mbuti was a third-generation slave.
“I cain’t,” Mbuti blubbered. “Jus’ cain’t. Is all easy to you, with yer black man’s clothes and yer shadow talk. Cain’t fit all that in me head!”
Some of the other men had begun to stare. “What are ye looking at?” Aidan snapped at them when they stopped to stare. “Which of you is stronger or faster than this man? Back to your practice.”
The others gawked, but then got the message and left them alone.
“You pick that stick up, boyo. You do your best. Be a man, dam
n ye.”
The freedman did as commanded, then wandered back to the line. Wiping the water from his eyes, Mbuti again commenced the business of thrusting and parrying.
A sharp, familiar whistle from the sidelines snapped Aidan around. To his pleasure, the whistler was his wife and love, Sophia.
Although her olive skin betrayed Africa’s grasp upon Andalus, most of Sophia’s heritage was European. She had suffered years of training in one of the world’s finest slave houses: Egypt’s Dar Hudu, the House of Submission. Every sensual art was hers to command. In Aidan’s considerable experience, her mastery of those arts was sublime.
Tall, graceful as the dancer she was, with full, promising lips and dark eyes. Though of Andalusian blood she was dressed as a good Irish woman: a rope-cinched dress of raw, unbleached cotton, and a thin woolen shawl about her shoulder. She wore none of the elaborate brooches, armlets, and necklaces in which the women of his childhood home had delighted. One day he hoped to provide her with those pretties.
Her belly was swollen with their second child. He rested his hand on the gentle convexity, mirroring a gesture his father had made to his mother long ago, in another existence.
“Kettle’s got a good boil,” she said. “Been cooking most of the morning. By lunch, I can promise you a feast.”
“Oh, darlin’,” he sighed. “You know just what I need to hear.”
“How goes the training?”
“Slow.” He rested a hand on his chest. “But you put fire in my heart, darlin’. And that makes it all aright.”
Later, as the day cooled, Aidan, his firstborn son Mahon, and his friend Donough Born fished the lake in their handmade coracle, the round woven-walled fishing boat of distant Eire. In peacetime Donough was a mild-mannered giant. In war he transformed into a screaming crimson whirlwind, a colossal veteran of the action at the Mosque of the Fathers. He was also Aidan’s oldest friend, the only denizen of long-lost O’Dere Crannog he had ever met in Bilalistan, and therefore a precious reminder of past happiness.
Mahon was quite another matter. Four years old, the boy might have been the mirror of Aidan’s own youth, impossibly long ago in another world. Pale-haired and freckled, of boundless energy and curiosity, the very sound of the boy’s high, thin voice evoked memories of a better, simpler time.
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