Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “That’s true,” I said, softening my voice. “Different is not necessarily better. But when what you see ahead is—” She shot me a warning glance, and I changed tack. “Sometimes a change is worth the risk.”

  No reply. She seemed to think about this as her gaze slid back to Kalla. She smiled faintly, like someone catching the distant strains of an old, familiar song.

  * * *

  THE CITY PROPER WAS packed with factories where the Lani girls could work one day. I was wary of being seen there, around my old stomping ground, and decided to cross the river using the incomplete suspension bridge. Under a sooty pall that hung over the riverbank like a shroud, I walked up to Dagenham Steps, almost directly across from the spot where I had been attacked the previous evening. I looked out toward the city side, scanning the bank with my pocket spyglass. The fog hadn’t thickened yet, but I could make out a pod of about fifteen hippos, one of which may have been the one that had menaced me the night before. Down by the jetty, the coast guard boats were moored and quiet. There was no sign of either the refugees or the makeshift vessel they had arrived on, and I wondered whether they had perhaps crossed over to this side. Considering this as I looked up and down the south bank shingle, I saw something out of place. Three pairs of water-stained sandals were lined carefully up on the shore, as if their owners—children, judging by the size—had just gone swimming. But no one was in the water, and the sandals each had a clutch of flowers in them.

  I wandered to where a lone, helmeted white police officer kept watch over the scene. He ignored me till I spoke.

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The people who arrived this morning.”

  “Friends of yours, were they?” he said. A joke, of sorts. “Rounded up and ferried over to this side and a camp in Blackstairs till the politicians decide who’s going to pay their transit back. Well out of the way so they don’t stink up the city.”

  “There was a woman,” I said, not sure how to phrase it. “She seemed … I think her child … Did any of them die?”

  He looked at me directly then and shrugged deliberately, defiantly.

  “Rusty pieces of kanti,” he said, daring me to argue. “What kind of idiot would think you could go hundred of miles at sea in those?”

  “I don’t suppose they get a lot of boat choices,” I said.

  The policeman flexed his back and tipped his head from side to side. His neck made a sharp popping sound while he thought of a witty comeback.

  “Should find better travel agents, shouldn’t they?” he said, smirking.

  I bit the inside of my cheek till I could taste blood.

  He glanced down at me. “What?” he demanded. “I don’t recall inviting them, do you? I don’t see why law-abiding citizens of Bar-Selehm should have to deal with the likes of them. Coming here,” he muttered scornfully, “taking our jobs, bringing their drugs, their thieving, hooligan children—”

  “Maybe if you knew more about what they were running from—” I began. He stepped toward me, one hand dropping to the truncheon he wore on a leather thong at his waist. “You questioning the judgment of a uniformed officer?” he asked with studied pleasantness, as if I was fulfilling something he had dearly wanted to do for weeks. “A Lani street urchin—or worse—with the brass to contradict a member of the city’s constabulary! Tempting fate, little girl.”

  “Is there a problem, Constable?”

  The voice—male, authoritative—came from behind me. I turned to see a black man in a navy blue soldier’s uniform trimmed with gold and crimson. He did not smile when he saw me, but that was because of the policeman. He knew me well enough. His name was Tsanwe Emtezu, Corporal in the King’s Third Feldesland Infantry Regiment, and we had had dealings before.

  “No, sir,” said the policeman, slightly discomfited. “This girl was being a mite impertinent, but I see no reason to pursue the matter.”

  “Really?” said Emtezu. “In my experience, Miss Sutonga has been nothing but respectful.”

  “You know her?” he said, his voice mixed with incredulity and a disdain for the soldier as well as for me.

  Emtezu’s chiseled face tightened as if he had bitten down hard, then flickered into the briefest and most knowing of smiles.

  “I have that privilege,” he said.

  The policeman’s smirk was barely concealed. “In my experience,” he said, “getting to know a Lani street whore doesn’t take much privilege.”

  Emtezu didn’t speak, and his face did not change. He took a single long stride and, with an extraordinary economy of movement, gripped the policeman by the throat with one hand and twisted his truncheon arm up behind his back with the other. The constable’s eyes widened like dinner plates.

  “That,” said Emtezu, his voice low and conversational, “was disrespectful. I believe you owe the young lady an apology.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I said, meaning it.

  Emtezu glanced at me, held the helpless policeman for one long second, then released him. The man crumpled, coughing, and when he looked up his face was murderous.

  “I’ll report you!” he hissed, backing away. “You see if I don’t.”

  Emtezu said nothing as the policeman finally turned from us and began a blundering retreat, massaging his throat.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

  “The name of the Glorious Third still carries some weight,” he said with a half shrug. “He won’t report me.”

  “I mean you didn’t need to do it,” I said, torn between pleasure at seeing him again and irritation at his high-handed defense of my honor. “I was perfectly fine.”

  “He was rude.”

  “If you arrest every man in the city who is rude to Lani women, you’re going to need a lot more prisons.”

  “True,” he said, adding stiffly, “I apologize if I overstepped my bounds.”

  I shook my head.

  “It is good to see you,” I said, beaming. “How is your wife? Your children?”

  “Well,” he said, stooping to brush a fine gray dust from his regulation boots, “Clara, my wife, is looking for work. That’s why I am here.” He paused and checked the stained clock on the tower of the Sarnulf paper mill. “She should be finished. Walk with me. I am sure you have many interesting things to tell me. I confess, I have looked for your name in the papers many times since we last spoke, but it seems you have managed to keep what they call a low profile. I doubt this means you have been inactive.”

  I just grinned at him, matching his measured step as we moved up from the river and into the street behind the waterfront factories, which was choked with wagons pulled by blinkered horses and orleks. The river at our backs vanished behind ungainly brick structures. Once red, now tar-black with ingrained soot, uneven, and marked with clumsy towers and eccentric cupolas, the whole thing looked like a landscape thrown together by a child with blocks.

  “I see,” he said, with a shrug and half smile. “I will let you keep your secrets. There is this,” he added, tapping the stripes on his shoulder. “Sergeant.”

  “Everyone’s getting promoted,” I said. He gave me a sidelong look, and I shook my head, smiling. “Congratulations. It was well deserved.”

  “Not everyone thinks so,” he said, “but it spares their blushes.”

  The commanders of Emtezu’s regiment had been involved in some shady business, which had reflected badly on the outfit.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Certainly.”

  “What do you know about machine guns?”

  He gave me a curious glance and another half shrug.

  “What do you want to know? We have four at the regiment. I do not like them particularly.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Wasteful weapons,” he said. “A rifleman knows he has one bullet before he has to reload, so he makes it count. Machine gunners think that since they can fire three or four times fo
r the rifleman’s one, they don’t need to be accurate.”

  “If someone was to make a better machine gun, what would they focus on?”

  “Speed of fire,” he said. “You could make the weapon lighter, more accurate, or with greater range, but to make it fire faster without overheating or jamming is what the soldiers want.”

  “Jamming?”

  “The cartridges go into a hopper above the gun,” he said. “You turn a handle to feed each round into the weapon, but the cartridges get turned around or go in two at a time.… They lock up the mechanism and make it impossible to fire. Wait here for one moment.”

  We were standing outside a great brick building with high windows and a tall, round chimney from which dark smoke drifted on the morning air, feeding the infamous Bar-Selehm smog. Emtezu had hurried to where his wife stood with another black woman, bigger, stronger looking. I watched the three of them talking, remembering that awful night when I had seen one of those hopper-fed machine guns in action, the noise, the deadly efficiency of the thing.…

  And then Emtezu was hugging his wife and waving me over.

  “She got the job!” he said. “Clara, you remember Miss Sutonga.”

  “I do,” she said, offering me her hand. “And this is our neighbor, Bertha Dinangwe. She arranged my interview.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, offering my hand to the woman.

  “What?” she shouted back.

  “I said I’m pleased to meet you,” I repeated.

  The woman looked vaguely at Clara.

  “She says she’s pleased to meet you,” Clara yelled. Turning back to me, she said apologetically, “it is so loud inside. I hadn’t realized it would be so loud. The machines. You can’t hear yourself think.”

  She ended with a look at her husband that was loaded with something more complex than the simple joy which had been there a moment before: resignation, perhaps, sadness? It was good that she had gotten the job, but she didn’t want it. Not really.

  “What does the factory make?” I asked, trying to bring something of her delight back.

  “Cloth,” she said simply. “Cotton cloth. In two weeks, I will be a weaver.”

  “What?” asked Bertha.

  “A WEAVER,” said Clara.

  “No,” boomed Bertha, smiling. “You’ll be a WEAVER.”

  “Yes,” said Clara, her smile tiring. “I will. It’s good to have work.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  I turned and caught Sergeant Emtezu watching me shrewdly, his eyes full of questions. He said nothing, but I knew he was thinking about machine guns.

  CHAPTER

  5

  I WANTED TO HEAR all Willinghouse had learned about the circumstances surrounding Darius’s theft of the machine gun plans, but I knew he would not be home yet, so I decided to do something I had never done before: see him at work. Discreetly, of course. It would do his reputation no good at all—as well as blowing my cover as a detective, spy, or whatever I was—for him to be seen whispering in doorways with a Lani steeplejack.

  The Parliament House stood at the end of the broad stone-paved and statued thoroughfare which was Grand Parade between Cannonade and Occupation Row and I arrived as an army of Lani street sweepers were being replaced by men in suits and a squad of ceremonial guardsmen. The building was 120 years old, built on the site of the old Administrative Center as the government had swelled to meet the demands of the similarly swollen, and increasingly independent, city. Bar-Selehm was just too far from Belrand, separated by too much ocean, Feldish jungle scrub, desert, and rival entities, human and animal. It had gorged itself like a leech, growing ponderous and unwieldy, so that though we remained a nominal part of Belrand, they acted less like the proud parent they had once been and more like an older sibling: stronger, wiser, perhaps, but without our vigor. If we hadn’t stopped paying our taxes into their administrative systems a century ago, we would, like most siblings, have surely come to blows. The Parliament House modeled the city’s curious separateness, its halls and towers shaped from a russet and pink local stone, but fashioned and trimmed in the old and fussy Belrandian style. The result, though dark now from the perpetual smoke of the city, was as unique as it was imposing, an architectural anthem breathing grandeur and formally restrained power.

  I stood in the blacks and coloreds line for the public entrance under the watchful eye of a half dozen armed dragoons who took our bags and gave us reclamation tickets. They operated with an officiousness designed to make us feel small and irrelevant, as if the great stone portico alone was insufficient. They counted us in to the public galleries which, combined, amounted to less than a quarter of the space allocated to the whites’ section, and then divided us into male and female. I was the only woman in the colored section: a solitary bench at the back of the gallery.

  I should have felt outraged, I supposed, but I could not quite escape a sense of confused awe, which filled the air like cigar smoke, heady and aromatic. The staircases and hallways were lined with monumental oil paintings of both heads of state and abstract ideas personified: liberty, justice, and fortitude, all modeled by women with spears and shields, their white nakedness discreetly draped with swaths of fabric like curtains or flags. The galleries looked down into the parliamentary chamber. Three hundred seats were arranged around a podium and desk where two men sat, one with a stack of large leather-bound books, the other beside a stand holding a ceremonial gold-hilted sword. The seats showed their party affiliation with a braided cord: Red—the most numerous—for the ruling National party, led by the prime minister, Benjamin Tavestock. Blue for the Brevard opposition (Willinghouse’s party). There was a handful of silver, which stood for an affiliation I did not know, and a solitary green cord for the recently appointed leader of the Unassimilated Mahweni Tribes, the only black man on the floor. I did not know his name and wondered suddenly if Mnenga had been involved in his selection.

  You should find him and ask, I thought.

  I had first thought Mnenga just a stray villager with a flock of nbezu to tend, but it had become clear that he had been sent to monitor events affecting his people. I never found out how he had been selected for that task or whether he might one day be more than the herder I had taken him for.

  You never found out, a bitter voice in my head reminded me, because you never asked.

  I frowned at the truth of the observation.

  The man sitting beside the sword got to his feet and called for order, banging a little wooden hammer on the desk until the burble of conversation dropped to nothing. He consulted his notes and announced, “The Honorable MP for Eldritch North, Mr. Norton Richter, Heritage party, to present Bill 479—the so-called Bar-Selehm First Act—for final debate and voting.”

  I watched as a slim, middle-aged man got out of one of the silver-trimmed seats and approached the podium, taking a pair of spectacles from his pocket and slipping them on.

  Heritage party.

  I realized that the gray suits they all wore were curiously similar, less, in fact, like suits and more like uniforms with silver buttons and black trim. They wore ties with enamel shield-shaped pins in red and silver, though I could not make out the details.

  Norton Richter, the Heritage party leader, cleared his throat and read from a sheet.

  “Thank you, My Lord Secretary,” he said. “The third reading of the bill having met with sufficient support to merit a general vote, I hereby present Bill 479 for the House’s consideration. The bill’s summary—the full text of which has been circulated among all members—reads thus: ‘That in response to the dramatic increase in foreign immigration into Bar-Selehm, much of it illegal; to race-related protests, often violent and destructive; and according to a time frame to be decided by the House, all people living within two miles of this estimable House shall have ancestry demonstrably rooted in Panbroke, and that those failing to prove such ancestry shall be relocated outside the city walls or to the south bank of the river Kalihm.’”
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  He lowered the paper and whipped off his glasses as a murmur went round the chamber.

  The man Richter had called “My Lord Secretary” looked up and said, “Bill 479 is now open for final debate, which will be limited to one half hour before voting commences.” Several men left their seats immediately, but in the shuffling that followed, the lord secretary identified one in the Brevard ranks who had raised his hand.

  “The Honorable MP for Tulketh Brow, Jeromius Truit, Brevard,” said the secretary.

  “I wonder,” said Truit, “if the honorable gentleman from Eldritch North has looked at a map of the city lately. If he had, he would realize that much of the district he has specified contains the abodes of citizens of Mahweni and Lani origin, many of whom work locally. Far from being an anti-immigration bill as he suggests, this would seem to be an attempt to create an all-white enclave within the city.”

  “Your question?” prompted the secretary.

  “Certainly,” said the MP. “Did the honorable gentleman think we wouldn’t notice?”

  There was much chuckling at this. Richter smiled knowingly, and replied in the same measured tones. “I can’t say that I had noticed that particular implication,” he said, to much laughter and jeering from the Brevard side, “though I think we might consider it a happy accident. Bar-Selehm is a thriving city with many places of employment outside the recommended limits should the current factories prove inconvenient for those required to relocate.”

  More laughter. I glanced around. Richter’s companions in the silver braided seats looked pleased with themselves, which was—I suppose—to be expected, but I was alarmed at how many in the red seats seemed to find the matter jolly amusing. I looked up and scanned the faces in the public galleries. The whites were divided in their mood, but the black and colored were all watchful and somber. A handful of Lani men I did not know—one was dressed as an elder—sat motionless on the other side of the divide from me, faces set, eyes boring into the chamber below us.