Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “I don’t dispute that,” Willinghouse shot back. “I’d just like to know whether our enemy realizes the government has a Lani agent working for them.”

  “Your concern is noted,” I said, frostily, “but I can look after myself.”

  “My concern,” said Willinghouse, “is that if they do, in fact, know that the person who pursued their agent was Lani or, for that matter female, then your use value just went into a sharp decline, wouldn’t you say?”

  Fury got the better of me.

  “My use value?” I spat.

  “Your function as a government operative.”

  “You’re not the government,” I said, swinging wildly now. “You’re a member of Parliament in the opposition’s back benches.”

  “Who serves the interests of the city with the means available to him,” Willinghouse retorted.

  “Meaning me? I’m the means available to you?”

  “Meaning … no,” he said, stuttering to a frustrated halt. “I meant using my family’s fortune, a small part of which has been used to secure your services.”

  “And excellent services they are too,” inserted Andrews, trying to keep the peace.

  We both glared at him. There was a long silence.

  “I’ll also remind you,” said Willinghouse pompously, “that while my party is not currently in power, this is an election year and the Brevard membership has high hopes of—”

  “This Elitus place,” I said. “How do I get in?”

  Andrews frowned.

  “Miss Sutonga,” he said, “these people, whoever they are, have already demonstrated they are quite ruthless. Two people have already died trying to stop them. The documents are gone. The enemy have them, and nothing we do now will change that.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “That is confidential information,” said Andrews. “Even I don’t know—”

  “Plans for a new machine gun,” said Willinghouse.

  Andrews and I both gaped at him. I had seen a machine gun in use once before. I did not know how they could be made more lethal than they already were, but if someone had that knowledge, someone I had failed to stop …

  “The documents were stolen from the War Office,” said Willinghouse. “I was in a meeting across the street when the alarm was raised, which is why I was able to alert you to what was going on before the thief made his escape. The shadow secretary for defense spoke to me in the heat of the moment and was, you might say, unguarded in his speech. Something he now regrets. Anyway, yes, the plans are for a new machine gun, and word in government circles is that it’s the Grappoli who took them.”

  “Of course,” said Andrews. “They always suspect the Grappoli.”

  The Grappoli were the city’s colonial rivals, and they controlled considerably more of Feldesland, the continent of which Bar-Selehm was the jewel, than we did. Bar-Selehm had been established three centuries ago by King Gustav II of Belrand, a country on the northern continent of Panbroke: a process equal parts military conquest, barter, and legal sleight of hand. The city-state eventually became an industrial sprawl unrivaled in Feldesland, but pretty isolated from its neighbors. It had leeched parcels of land away from the indigenous Mahweni over the years, but Bar-Selehm’s total holdings still amounted to no more than a few thousand square miles. The Grappoli’s native lands were in southeast Panbroke, their people still white, but tending to darker hair and eyes than the Belrandians, and their expansion across the sea to Feldesland had been a more concerted effort to dominate the continent. They had taken over whole countries in the north and west and seemed to be perpetually looking to expand farther. It was one of those bitter colonial jokes that when anyone referred to the “Feldish,” they meant the white colonists from Belrand, not the Mahweni who had always lived on the continent and who had called the land something different. I didn’t know what.

  Willinghouse nodded.

  “I know,” he said. “But this time … the Grappoli are moving east, north of the Hagrab desert. They are claiming obscure legal precedent based on settlements made a century or more ago. Reports suggest that they are fuelling tribal conflicts that are driving the locals off the land, and the only modern military resistance they are encountering comes from local warlords who are fighting only to protect their opium fields. The people who live there are caught in the middle. We don’t know for sure what is happening yet, and there is no suggestion that the conflict might expand south toward Bar-Selehm, but it’s a mess, and a bloody one. Trade routes are being watched; sanctions against the Grappoli are being drawn up. Potential deals between Bar-Selehm and the Grappoli that might in any way augment their military capacity are being debated even as we speak. Some of my more hawkish colleagues are suggesting we send troops north to support the cartels, while others say that the drug lords are clearly the lowest of the very low, and that if we are to take sides at all, we are better lining up alongside the Grappoli. My party’s position is that the Grappoli’s current landgrab may not involve us at all, but we must ensure that Bar-Selehm does not support it, however indirectly. In the long term, the consequences could be dire.”

  “The long term?” I said. “What about the northern tribes whose land is being taken now?”

  “Miss Sutonga, let’s not make this a crusade, shall we?” he said. His eyes flashed to the now-empty raft surrounded by the coast guard, and I made the connection.

  “Them?” I demanded. “That’s what this is? You said they were illegal immigrants.”

  “They are!” said Willinghouse.

  “But they are also refugees?”

  “The lands north of the Hagrab desert are not Bar-Selehm’s concern,” said Willinghouse. “The people who live there have sovereignty over their own territory. Interference on our part would merely spark diplomatic discomfort. The results could easily escalate into trade sanctions, the closing of embassies, the collapse of international trade agreements—”

  “We’re talking about the Quundu, yes?” I said.

  “There are various tribal territories involved,” said Willinghouse wearily, “but yes, the Quundu, the Delfani, the Zagrel—”

  “Who all have their own sovereignty,” said Andrews.

  “Yes,” I said. “You know what else they have? Spears. Shields covered with buffalo hide. Knives. While the Grappoli have machine guns. But let’s be sure not to spark diplomatic discomfort.”

  “You can’t take things like this personally,” said Willinghouse. “It impairs your judgment.”

  I watched where the police and coast guard were gathering the weary huddle of women and children together on the shore. Some of them had collapsed. How long had they been at sea? Days? Weeks? There were bodies on the raft that I had thought were sleeping, but they had not moved after the others disembarked. One wailing woman splashed through the water toward a small body, while a policeman pulled her back.…

  “How do I get into Elitus?” I asked again, turning back to Willinghouse, my tone neutral.

  “I really don’t think—” Andrews began, but I cut him off with a look.

  “How do I get in?”

  “If someone of my status can’t get into Elitus,” said Willinghouse, “how on earth am I going to get a full-blood Lani girl in?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But I can’t wait to find out.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  I WAS NOT ALLOWED in the Drowning, so after my visit to the hospital, I took my weekly meeting with my sister Rahvey at the old monkey temple where my father’s remains were buried. I waited for her under a sambar tree a few yards from where I had first met Mnenga, the Mahweni herder who, with his brothers, had saved my life only three months before.

  I had not seen him since. Though I had sat down to write letters to him twice, I never sent them. Where would he be? Would he even be able to read Feldish? His absence felt the way I imagined a much older, dearer friend’s would. My forced separation from the Drowning was doubly hard without him, and
underscored my isolation—something which normally suited my temperament, but now felt strangely disorienting. I had never been one to find much comfort in community, particularly when I felt constrained by it. Not long ago, I would have imagined my current independence from the gang and the Drowning as a kind of paradise. But perhaps because the Drowning was now forbidden to me, I found that, for the first time I could remember, I actually missed it.

  If so, I told myself, it is because you’ve forgotten what living there was really like.

  I breathed in, catching the edge of spice on the air drifting up from the shanty’s cooking fires—cardamom, I thought, and something sweet and woody like cinnamon. I frowned, considered sharpening my kukri, and cursed when I remembered that it had been lost in the river. I would need to get another.

  The summer seemed to be already upon us. The land lay under a dry, searing heat, which built as the day went on, broken only by afternoon storms that blew in like angry gods, railed and stamped for an hour or two, and then vanished. Nights remained warm, and the temple air held a sweet rankness that hung about the trees and flowers thick as incense. It smelled of life, which was quite an achievement for a cemetery.

  It was all very Lani: circular and timeless, balanced, bittersweet, and unchanging. Or rather, almost unchanging. I was not welcome in the Drowning because I had caused the death of my eldest sister, Vestris, and broken my blood oath: in the right light, the traces of that promise could still be seen scored into my cheeks. Rahvey had four daughters living with her now, and that had been my doing too. More balance, more tears blended with the laughter. I had wept for Vestris, even though she had tried to kill me and had killed others. I knew as I dried my eyes that I was really weeping for myself, for a version of my past, an image of the world which had turned out not to be true. Maybe grief was always like that. I had lost a sister, but Rahvey got to keep a daughter who would otherwise have been given up to the hard life of the Pancaris orphanage. I took that as a kind of victory, even if my banishment meant that I was now the orphan.

  Balance, I mused, one child finding a home while I was cut adrift, sent to stay in rented rooms paid for by somebody else, no longer even the steeplejack I had been in the gang on Seventh Street. For a moment, I almost missed that too. Not the place itself, dirty and teeming with noisy boys as it always was, but a sense of belonging and a corner of the old weavers’ shed which, however fiercely I’d had to protect it, I had called mine.

  Home.

  I brushed the thought away like a hogfly, seeing it for the absurdity it was. If I could get nostalgic for Seventh Street and the brutal life I had endured there under Morlak, I was getting soft and stupid.

  I spat into the dusty earth and rubbed the soot-speckled wetness in with the toe of my boot.

  Normally I would have done my Kathahry exercises as I waited, but just walking there had taken me twice as long as usual, and every part of me ached and throbbed. My shoulder, painfully wrenched into place by a burly doctor at the hospital, had been strapped up in a sling. It could have been much worse, they told me, as if I had won a prize, but it would be days before I could get rid of the sling and weeks before I got a full range of motion in the joint again. At any other time, I would have resented their diagnosis: I lived, after all, to climb, to test my muscles and sinews till I felt my blood sing. Yet the man with the pick and the smile had scared me. I had been utterly powerless, incapable of defending myself against someone so skilled and so deliberate, and I had retreated into my head. My body could not be trusted, and I was glad of the excuse not to use it. Instead, I lay on the dusty ground on my back, my right hand palm down, my left crossed over my chest, eyes shut, listening to the vervet monkeys chattering in the treetops and feeling the earth breathe.

  “Auntie Ang!”

  I opened my eyes and lifted myself up onto my right elbow. I tried to keep the hurt out of my face, but Jadary, Rahvey’s second-youngest daughter, gave my sling a shrewd look.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I had a fall, but I’m all right,” I said.

  Rahvey looked me up and down, refusing to give away any sign of concern as she cradled Kalla in her arms. I got to my feet.

  “Let me see her,” I said, stooping to the warm bundle and kissing the child on her forehead. She squirmed vaguely in her sleep. She wasn’t a person yet, or at least not one I could see, but she was also not the helpless infant she had been during my erratic and incompetent “care.” Before, she had been all fragility and potential. Now, she was a stirring, curious awareness that seemed to age and mature before my very eyes. Her growth was beautiful and terrifying and felt both right and sad, in the best Lani tradition. “And the rest,” I added, going from daughter to daughter and kissing them each in turn. Lastly, on strange impulse, I did the same to my sister, who stepped back with a quizzical look.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, shaking my head at my obvious injuries, and pushing away the image of the weeping black woman straining to get to her dead child on the raft. “I’m just glad to see you all. Here.”

  I fumbled in my pocket for the purse of coins I had brought, but Rahvey glared at me and shooed the three older girls away.

  “Go and play,” she said. “See who can find the oldest grave.”

  “What?” I said, as soon as they were out of earshot.

  “I don’t want them to know you are giving us money,” she said, still frowning as if I had done something wrong. “I don’t want them thinking they are living off charity.”

  My turn to frown. This was typical of Rahvey. She didn’t want handouts, but neither would she acknowledge that her husband was shiftless and qualified for nothing that would put food on the table.

  “This was part of the arrangement,” I said. “So no one can complain that a fourth daughter is too much of a drain on your household.”

  “You don’t have to wave it like a flag,” she shot back. Her pride was stung.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe one day the girls will find work of their own and you won’t need my … whatever I can bring.”

  Rahvey harrumphed and sat on the ground beside me, gathering her skirts. Maybe her annoyance wasn’t really about the money. I saw the way her eyes lingered on my sling.

  “Doing what?” she said, as if to make sure I hadn’t guessed she was concerned about me. “I had thought that Radesh might find a place at Sorenson’s, but they are saying that no child under ten can work there anymore. Is that true?”

  It was. The law was newly passed, pushed by a bipartisan committee on which Willinghouse sat. He said this was a breakthrough in labor law designed to prevent the exploitation of the poor. I didn’t know about that, but a lot of families in the Drowning counted on the meager income from positions that would now be closed to them. I shifted in my seat and just said, “That’s what I heard too.”

  “Mrs. Singh’s girls both lost their jobs,” said Rahvey. “They don’t know what they will do. You can’t blame Sorenson’s. They have always been a good employer. It’s the government.”

  “Weren’t the children being paid a fraction of what adults would get for the same work?”

  “So? They were being paid. That’s the point,” said Rahvey. “Now they have nothing. Mr. Singh hasn’t been able to work since the accident, and Mrs. Singh was already working at the fruit stall on the Etembe market and cleaning houses. In Morgessa,” she added, as if that showed the full indignity of the situation. Morgessa was a respectable working-class district in the northwest corner of the city, but it was also largely black. “And her with mouths to feed and a house to keep. It’s scandalous!”

  I watched a red hornbill, its beak as long as its body, take flight across the cemetery and alight on a roughly carved grave marker. I didn’t know what to say to Rahvey. The thought of trying to talk to her about the city’s various ills wearied me. But there was something I wanted to discuss and now seemed as good a time as any.

  �
�The other part of the arrangement,” I said, “when I brought Kalla to you, I mean, was that she would one day go to school.”

  Rahvey was immediately on her guard. She turned to watch the laughing children as if suddenly concerned for their safety.

  “Yes,” she said. “So? Not now.”

  “Well, obviously,” I replied, “but maybe, since the older girls can’t work, it might be worth considering for them.”

  “Send Radesh to school?” she repeated, incredulous. “Where?”

  “Hillstreet or Truth Mountain,” I ventured.

  “Black schools,” said Rahvey dismissively. “And Truth Mountain is run by Pancaris. I thought you didn’t like them?”

  It wasn’t a real question. She was merely throwing up roadblocks.

  “If the girls were educated, they would have more options when they are old enough to work,” I said. “In the process, they are off your hands, learning about the world, learning to read and do math—”

  “They can learn about the world right here,” said Rahvey, her faced closed. “Or is that not the world you want them to learn about?” I couldn’t think of a response to that. Rahvey nodded thoughtfully as if I had said something hurtful. “Right,” she said. “You just keep the money coming, doing … whatever it is you do, and I’ll look after my daughters.”

  “I’m not trying to take them away from you, Rahvey,” I said.

  “You couldn’t,” she snapped back.

  “I know that,” I said. “You are a good mother. I’ve told you that before.”

  “Then why do you always question the way I raise them?”

  “Because you are too much a slave to habit,” I said, my anger blossoming suddenly. “Because you still assume the old ways are the best even as the world changes around us. Some people travel halfway across the country to be in the city specifically so they can send their children to school and build a better life for them—”

  “Different,” said Rahvey. “You don’t know it will be better.”

  Something in her tone stripped me of my fury. She looked down at the sleeping baby in her arms, and her face held not defiance, but doubt and fear.