Zulu Heart

by Steven Barnes

  Mahon gave a sleepy giggle and burrowed his head more closely into his father’s chest. “Da?” he asked, on the very edge of sleep.

  “Yes?”

  “Bring it back to me.”

  Aidan looked up at Sophia, who nodded her head.

  “I will, sweet boy,” he whispered. “Be damned if I won’t.”

  Sophia put Mahon to bed while Aidan enjoyed a generous pipe of Kai’s good hemp. His wife returned to the fireside, took an iron and stirred the ashes, and settled back in her chair, staring into the darkness.

  “I hate them sometimes,” Aidan said softly. “Every one of them.”

  “Even Kai?”

  “Even Kai,” he said in the darkness. “But I love him, too.”

  “The heart is complicated, my dear.”

  He looked at her strangely. “You don’t hate, do you?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t believe you could, and be the woman you are. You seem so … above it all.”

  “Not so far above,” she said. “I feel. I remember. But, no … I don’t hate.”

  “How?”

  “When I was a girl,” she said. “I thought that there was no one in the world stronger and more handsome than my father, and I prayed that I would find a man half so fine. Then I was sold away, and used, and taught that I was just a tool for men’s pleasure. I prayed that I might find a master who would raise me up and take me to wife. What his character might be, or his heart, hardly mattered, if I could just be free. What I couldn’t have known is that the slavers would eventually bring me to you, Aidan.” She turned and looked at him. “I don’t believe there are two in all the world like you. You fill me.”

  Aidan tried to speak, and could not.

  “I’d have walked the world around to find you,” she said. “And if the trials I endured on that path were horrible to the girl I was, the woman I am is glad that there was a path, however hard, that brought us together.”

  She sighed, and closed her eyes.

  “That’s the trick of it,” she said. “To find joy where you are, and if you do, then you have to make peace with the path that brought you there. If I’m going to love my life, I have to let the hate go.”

  The dying flames gilded her, as if she were a woman cast from bronze or gold, not the yielding feminine miracle he knew her to be. “So, then. Go, and find Nessa, and come back to me. The crannog will be here. The family will be here. And if I have given birth to your new child by then, then that increase feeds all our hearts. It will be hard … but it has been hard to know that half your soul was still in chains. There is only so much a wife or husband can do. Aside from that, we must each set ourselves free.”

  He reached out, and with the ball of his thumb wiped at the shining place upon her cheek.

  She took his hand and kissed her tear. “Go,” she said. “And free your heart. Then return to us.” She stood, and slipped another log onto the embers. “I will not let this fire die until you return to this house.”

  He was speechless as he looked up at her, struggling to fathom how she could be so strong after all she had endured. And failing. “And now,” she said, “that Mahon is asleep, I have a gift of my own to give you.”

  She undid the straps on her shoulders, so that her dress slipped to the floor. And she stood naked before his eyes, the gentle swelling of her belly reminding him that life continued. Whatever might lie ahead, life and love went on.

  He took her in his arms, and they led each other to their bed. And there, in a ritual as old as human life, they forged meaning from chaos, and strength from sorrow. Then, holding each other, they slipped away from a world of hard choices.

  And, together, they spent the night in their separate, hopeful dreams.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Blossoms exuded scents beyond numbering as the noon sun warmed their petals. Nandi knelt in her garden, trimming thorns, clipping weeds, and aerating the soil. IziLomo, whose name meant “Favored Courtier,” crouched contentedly at her side, occasionally sniffing at flying insects. The garden was a place of tiered irrigation networks of her own design, cultivating a hundred varieties of blossoms.

  At the moment she was working with one of her favorites, a Persian chrysanthemum. To an uneducated eye it resembled a daisy with large white, pink, and red flowers. Its leaves were fernlike, and exuded an insecticidal substance she hoped to extract and utilize elsewhere in the garden.

  For a time IziLomo worried at a bee, but then ceased such dalliance and came to alert, wheeling about with a welcoming bark. Nandi turned, knowing even before she did who the newcomer had to be.

  “Chalo!” she said sharply.

  The young warrior grinned. “Princess.” IziLomo sniffed Chalo’s hand, and then licked it. Nandi had to repress a smile: Chalo was the only male who had ever triggered such a response in the hound, and she had sometimes wondered if that had been a deliberate aspect of IziLomo’s early training.

  “You should not be here.” She looked rapidly to either side and saw that they were alone but for the watchful ridgeback. She felt both flustered and pleased.

  “I came in over the east wall,” Chalo said. “The guards will not see me.”

  “I have but to raise my voice—”

  “—and my life is forfeit,” he concluded. A bold rogue indeed!

  “So,” she said, meeting his eyes squarely. “What is it you desire?” She almost winced at the use of that word, knowing that she had chosen it with absolute precision.

  “Nandi,” he said. “I know that your father wants you to leave.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this what you wish?” He drew closer to her. Chalo was all steel sinew and high, well-etched cheekbones.

  “There is more at stake here than you can know,” said she. “I have known you for many years—”

  “And I have always loved you. I knew your father had promised you to this fop, and held my tongue.”

  Despite her affection for Chalo, Nandi felt herself bristle. IziLomo cocked his head, observing with renewed interest. “Kai may be many things, but he is no fop.”

  “Feh,” he sneered. “Say the word, and I wind his intestines on my spear. None would expect you to marry a corpse.”

  She shook her head numbly. There was no way Chalo could understand, and she dared not speak.

  “Tell me, Nandi,” he said. “Let me hear it from your own lips. Tell me true. Do you love him?”

  Her eyes flickered, and then held his again. “This is impertinence.”

  “Impertinence,” said Chalo, “is the least of my sins. Do you feel for him what you felt for me?”

  “We were children,” she said, and lowered her gaze. “We should not have played, even as we did. It was wrong. I am sorry if you thought it meant more than was intended.”

  She attempted to maintain a haughty expression, but beneath his burning gaze it wilted. By the ancestors, he was magnificent!

  He drew closer. “Then tell me it meant nothing to you.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I cannot.”

  “Say that I mean nothing to you,” Chalo said.

  She could feel his heat, smell him, dared not close her eyes for fear she would envision their intertwined bodies. “You must put me from your mind,” she said, declining to answer him. “No good can come of this. My heart is not my own—I must be who I am. We have our obligations, Chalo. If you care for me, help me have the strength to obey mine.”

  He took her by the shoulders, arms extended. “Very well. But if he hurts you in any way, I will open him. Know this to be true.”

  Her voice went husky. “I know.”

  Chalo nodded, apparently satisfied. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, and in spite of her best intentions her eyes fluttered closed. There was a small gust of air …

  She opened her eyes …

  Chalo was gone. IziLomo made a low, whining sound and pressed his massive head against her hand. She scratched him behind one
thick dark ear, comforted by his heat and strength, thanking her ancestors that both would be hers in the trying days ahead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  24 Shawwal A.H. 1294

  (Thursday, November 1, 1877)

  Batting flies out of the air and counting the minutes until evening brought his lustmate to his straw bed once again, Olaf One-Ear waited by the main gate’s great bell, and was startled to see a figure walking down the road, leading a gray horse. He squinted, not quite believing his eyes.

  “Sweet Allah’s angels,” he said. “It’s a vision.”

  “Very real, and slightly parched,” Aidan said. “Hello, Olaf.”

  The former slave brightened. “Aidan! Never thought to see you again!” Olaf embraced Aidan, slapping clouds of road dust from his shirt.

  “How’s your old mother?”

  The freedman managed a smile. “Oh, she’s got the miseries, but I swear she’ll dance a jig when she sees you!”

  And shuffling his own feet to an imaginary rhythm, Olaf began to ring the gate’s great iron bell.

  Kai reclined in a great overstuffed chair in his study, reading a scroll by reflected daylight. He heard the bell tolling and rose, walking to the window and looking out toward the gate. A slow smile broke on his face.

  “Ar-Razzaq be praised,” he murmured.

  And the rest of the estate slowly awakened, and wandered out toward the gate to see Aidan O’Dere walking in from the road, and the master of the house of Kush walking out from the manse, their figures so distant and indistinct that when they hugged, it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.

  Seated in a canopied gazebo on Dar Kush’s front lawn, Kai and Aidan spoke. As they did the years dropped away like bubbles floating into the depths of a well.

  “Here I am,” said Aidan. “Back where it all began.”

  “Different this time, Aidan,” said Kai. “This time, you can set terms for your labor.”

  Aidan nodded, smiling. Tell me what you have planned,” he said. “What marital insanity have I agreed to?”

  “Painful but rewarding insanity,” Kai said. “First we will work your body as you have never been worked before. When your strength, wind, and flexibility are better developed, you will learn technique and a bit of philosophy. And after your conscious mind has absorbed this, when you are ready, there will be a special ceremony.” Kai smiled. “A sort of marriage ceremony. When complete, you will move and think differently than you do today. And we will be ready.”

  “How long?”

  “That,” Kai said, “depends on you. I will not lie, you will have little rest, and many pains. But when you are done you will have knowledge never before given to a white.” He paused. There would be those who would consider me mad even for trying this.”

  “Well then … I suppose we’re just a pair of lunatics. There are those in my crannog who consider me daft for trusting you.”

  “Come, let us sit like friends and negotiate,” Kai said. One would have thought they were planning a garden party, not speaking of espionage and mortal combat. Kai poured Aidan a cup of coffee.

  Aidan sipped, and groaned in pleasure. “I would be lying if I said I did not miss this. And you.”

  “And I you,” said Kai. “I do not know whether this world is cruel or merciful for we two to have found each other under such circumstances.”

  “Perhaps it is what we make of it,” Aidan said.

  Kai laughed. “You sound like Babatunde.”

  “High praise.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  They drank, peering out across the estate, at the distant teff fields, where slaves worked steadily, chopping and hoeing. Other servants passed between barn and Ghost Town, casting surprised and sometimes suspicious eyes at Aidan. Finally, the Irishman spoke. “Here are my terms,” he said. “I want your official protection of my village. I want your word as Wakil, and as my friend, that to the extent of your power and influence the rule of law will apply, regardless of race.”

  “Agreed,” Kai said, and Aidan nodded.

  “And that is true regardless of the outcome of my efforts.”

  Kai raised an eyebrow. “Regardless?”

  “All I am asking for is justice, and a chance for my family to grow as it should. If I enter into this, I must go with no attachments or regrets, or I will die.”

  “Well spoken,” Kai nodded. “Agreed.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” Aidan said uneasily.

  “Help me understand.”

  Aidan paused, seeming to gather his strength. Then he leaned forward and, one quiet word at a time, began to speak. “There’s a small, pale place in my head where I put all of the anger and pain and fear from my years in bondage. I think every slave builds a place like that, so that in the few moments he has for himself, he can be a man.” His hand trembled, and he set the cup down.

  “When I won my freedom,” he continued, “I closed that door as tightly as I could. If I could live in a world where I never saw another black face for the rest of my life, I would. I can’t.”

  He paused. “Sometimes in a black town, I can go five whole seconds without remembering that these people used to be able to buy or sell me. Or my wife. Or my son. And might again, if the law took my freedom away on a pretext—any pretext.” He leaned back and took another sip.

  Aidan leaned forward, a warm late-afternoon’s wind ruffling his golden hair. “I swore I’d never go back, Kai. No matter what happened. I’d die first. There is only one thing in all the world that could motivate me.”

  “Your promise,” Kai said.

  “Yes. My promise and the love for my sister bound into it. And damn you for knowing that. And bless you for finding her.” He paused. “I don’t think I much like the Wakil of New Djibouti.”

  Kai laughed uncomfortably. “It is possible our opinions of him are quite similar.”

  The friends shared laughter for a time, then settled back down. “So. If I do this, if I really do it, you can get us out of New Alexandria?”

  “Yes,” Kai said. “But despite my personal feelings, I cannot ask my … contacts to expose themselves for anything less than the machine. You understand that?”

  Aidan finished his glass. “Yes. Well, then, Kai—it appears that we have a deal.”

  They clasped hands and shook.

  For the first time in three years, Aidan walked past Ghost Town’s wooden gates. Olaf One-Ear now occupied the house Aidan had once shared with his mother, and then with Sophia. Without coercion, the older man was bundling his possessions, that Aidan might have his accustomed bed once again.

  Waiting and wandering the streets, Aidan found himself among old and painful memories, and did his best to dispel them.

  A slave approached him, a garrulous graybeard named … T’Challa. “Aidan! I swear, I never thought to see ye again! What happened?”

  “Gambling debts?” asked a second man, lean and perhaps eighteen summers. What was his name? Corrin! Yes. Corrin had been a boy when Aidan left Dar Kush. “I hear that they’ll clap a ’belly in chains in a heartbeat, he owes money,” Corrin said.

  “Did ye steal?” asked T’Challa. “Or talk sass to a royal? What happened?”

  “None,” said Aidan. “I’m here of my own will. I had a sister once.”

  Corrin scratched his head. “Name of … Nessa! Many’s the time ye spoke of her.”

  Aidan smiled wanly. “Yes, Nessa. In a few months, your master will take me north. If I can learn to fight like a lion, I might be able to win her free.”

  Corrin gawped. “Free?”

  “I swore,” said Aidan.

  “Free,” T’Challa mused. “What’s life like outside?”

  A half dozen of Dar Kush’s Irish had gathered, were staring at him, touching his clothes with wonder. Mean as his short robe and pants were, they were still better than any they had seen a white man wear, save for livery worn driving carriages and attending at parties.<
br />
  “Hard,” he said. “A man works, same as here. But we can’t be bought and sold.”

  “The Wakil,” said a black-haired, wide-hipped woman named … Fanya. Yes, Fanya. “He don’t sell us, nor allow messin’ with our women. We always got food. Yer pantry always full?”

  “No,” he admitted. “There have been hungry nights.”

  Fanya sniffed, and brushed a blousy thread of black hair from her face. “Don’t sound like freedom’s so much.”

  Aidan searched his memory. “Were you born a slave?”

  “Three generations, right here on Dar Kush!” she said proudly. “Belongs to me as much as the fockin’ Wakil.”

  “No.” Aidan shook his head. How could he convey the essence of what he had learned and experienced? Several of those most eager for freedom had died during the rebellion years before, the one that had cost Olaf his ear. Others had been sold farther south, to harsher berths, in punishment for their participation. It seemed to Aidan that those who remained more closely resembled sheep than men. “You don’t understand. I don’t know if I can make you understand, but I’ll try.” He collected his thoughts. “I wake up in the morning, and the day is mine. No man tells me where to go or what to do. I fish; I work in the fields. I trade in the town.”

  “And they treat ye like an African?”

  “No. But they treat me like a man. They are afraid of me, of what I might want, what I might do. They strike out at me … and I have the right to strike back.”

  At this, his audience gasped. He had exaggerated, but men needed inspiration more than facts.

  “I remember,” Corrin said, “the day ye thrashed the master. Right here on these streets, and ye lived.”

  Aidan nodded. “Because our … your master is an honorable man, who kept his word. He is better than most men, black or white. I have been in the world and seen. Life on Dar Kush is about as good as it gets for a slave. You have no way of understanding this, but you could have been in a thousand other households, where you might be starved, beaten, and raped. Your brothers and sisters are not so fortunate.”