A Novel

by A. J. Hartley

  I inhaled raggedly, then stood tall as I could, reaching above me for handholds in the brick. I could feel where the shaft—about a yard across in the fireplace—stepped in. If it got much tighter, I wouldn’t be able to get through. There was nothing to hold on to, so I drew my knees up to my chest, one at a time, and managed to put my boots on the damper. I straightened again, boosting myself another three feet to where the chimney tightened like a python squeezing a springbok. I could see nothing. I could hear nothing beyond the thumping of my heart and the laboring of my breath.

  I reached higher and this time felt a ledge on the right-hand side, where the passage seemed to open. There was only one chimney stack on the roof, I reminded myself. That meant that every fireplace in the house connected inside and ran up to the top. Moving sideways might give me the option of dropping into another room, one that was unlocked, or that had windows.…

  I dragged myself up and found the shaft angling up and to the right, forming a square, uneven tunnel through which I could crawl. One of the sides of the shaft was now a roof, but one that dipped erratically so that I had to stay low to avoid skinning my forehead. I inched forward, brick after brick moving under my gritty palms.

  Stay focused. Keep going.

  Something moved in my hair, and I brushed at it with revolted feverishness, which banged my head against the shaft wall. For a moment, the darkness was flecked with light and color, and I had to fight not to lose a sense of where I was, which way was up. It was only noise from below that brought me to my senses.

  A click, like a door. Then hurried footsteps and the clank of the damper as someone tried to see up. I had left that shaft now and would be invisible to them, even if they had a light source, but it wouldn’t matter. They knew where I was.

  I picked up the pace, my bruised knees, back, and hands aching from the effort, and now I could hear raised voices, not just back the way I had come, but from all over the house, as every fireplace bore their voices up through the labyrinth of flues.

  Faster.

  Going down to one of the other fireplaces and slipping out of the house unnoticed was not an option anymore. I had to make it to the roof.

  The shaft stank, as chimneys always did, of carbonized wood and bitumen and old smoke. New smoke, fresh and sharp enough to set you coughing, was an entirely different thing, and I recognized it with a new thrill of horror.

  They couldn’t come up after me, so they were lighting the fires.

  I crawled another yard, moving so fast that I almost fell when the floor of my awful tunnel simply stopped. I reached blindly into the space in front of me and, finding only air, had to swallow down a sob of panic as I reached around and up. I was at an intersection, perhaps the biggest in the house, and as I decided whether to try to cross the abyss that had opened up in front of me, I caught the distinct movement of the smoke coiling up from below, thick and gray, smeared with a sulfurous yellow.

  I blinked. I could see the smoke. And that meant …

  Above me, the chimney flue narrowed to a square of bluish light.

  Sky.

  I reached across, testing for the far wall, then braced my feet against it and scrabbled for handholds in the brick. For a moment I was hanging over the emptiness of the shaft below like an insect, and then I was climbing, the smoke billowing about me, thick and hot. I coughed again, but knew that hesitation meant death. I fixed my eyes on that square of light and hauled myself up. Where there were no handholds, I used the strength of my knees and back, bracing myself across the shaft and walking up the flue as I had done at the cement works the day we found Berrit’s body.

  The temperature was rising fast. Too fast. I glanced back down and saw not merely the dense swirl of gray smoke, but flashes of orange too. Part of the unswept chimney had caught fire.

  Great, I thought. I’m going to die ironically.

  I swallowed hard and pushed my way up to where the breeze from outside was dragging the smoke and flames upward. I pushed the clay chimney pot clear, seized the mortar cap, and dragged myself up and out onto the roof. I had barely moved more than a couple of yards over the tile when the smoking chimney became a jet of fire, shrieking up out of the flue and scattering sparks. I moved as far away as I could, but my coughing doubled me up and I spat soot.

  I could hear voices, people running around outside. They would have guns, so I stayed low. But as I looked cautiously about, trying to find a safe way down, I realized that the smoke wasn’t all coming from the chimney. The sparks from the blaze were scattering all over the house, and in at least two places the lower thatch, Sohwetti’s concession to his Mahweni roots, was already ablaze.

  I moved upwind, toward the front of the house, going quicker than I would like, banking that the fire would take more of their attention than hunting for me. I reached the edge of the roof, found an ornamental buttress carved to resemble a buffalo head, climbed the first ten feet down, and dropped the last five onto a portion of thatch that wasn’t yet ablaze. I loped along, bent over like a monkey, then slid down a snake-shaped column, spiraling as I went, and hit the ground at a staggering run.

  I didn’t go down the road to the gate, but through the wooded parkland to the high wall of the estate, where—still coughing, still holding off my smoldering exhaustion—I pulled myself up. As I sat on top of the wall and risked a last look back at the house through the shrubbery and the great tower of yellowish smoke rising from it, a black weancat with a collar, its spots just visible in the sheen of its coat, gave me a long look with bright yellow eyes.

  I felt no fear, and was sure that even on the ground only feet from the beast, I would be in no danger, and not because it was a pet that looked dangerous only to people who didn’t know the truth. This, in spite of its collar, was a wild and powerful hunter, a creature of speed and stealth that would kill without hesitation. But it was also somehow, and in ways that made no literal sense, me, and I felt only an uncanny kinship with the creature.

  It was an animal out of place, separate from its kind, fatherless, uncertain of who it was, who it could trust, knowing the collar was there but knowing also that it was a collar of the mind: when the moment was right, you could refuse to believe in the collar and it would go away. And that was essential, because all the cat had was itself: muscle and sinew, claw, tooth and bone, senses, experience, skill, instinct and roaring, blood-pumping animal need. Nothing else, not the wall, not the strange people, not the food and water meted out at regular times daily, and not—most certainly not—the collar, none of it mattered one iota.

  I dropped onto the other side of the wall and ran.

  CHAPTER

  30

  “WHAT’S THIS?” ASKED SARAH, considering the sheaf of papers I had pushed into her hands.

  “Your first story,” I said.

  It had taken me over an hour to get back into Bar-Selehm through the orchards and gardens behind the oceanfront mansions, twice as long as it had then taken me to cover the familiar streets to the newspaper stand on the corner of Winckley and Javisha. I had paused only once at a fountain just south of Tanuga Point to wash the worst of the soot and smoke from my clothes and hair.

  Sarah scanned the scribbled notes and charts. “You’re sure about this?” she said. “You can prove it?”

  “The original documents are sitting in the library, where anyone can check them,” I said. “Or they are at the moment. I would move quickly if I were you.”

  She thought, but quickly, and then she was packing up her stall, hands quick and efficient, eyes wide with the thrill of risk and the gleam of determination.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked as she finished and stood ready to go into whatever adventure awaited.

  There were lots of answers I could have given. I could have said she was my friend and I was trying to help her, or that a great wrong had been perpetrated on her people and it should be brought to light. Both were true, and there were other things—things to do with Berrit, and with Billy, and wi
th the collared weancat—that I couldn’t put into words but that were also true.

  “Until this gets printed,” I said, “I’m a target.”

  She nodded, turned, and broke into a run.

  * * *

  I FOUND MNENGA SLEEPING in the old Lani cemetery beside a weather-beaten shrine decorated with clumsily carved monkeys. He opened his eyes, one hand flashing toward the short-shafted spear on the ground beside him, but he knew me before his long fingers had closed around it. He blinked, then smiled his radiant and uncomplicated smile. He sat up. He did not reproach me for how long I had been gone.

  Before the conversation could go somewhere that made me uncomfortable, I asked the question I had been mulling since I left Sohwetti’s house in flames.

  “Why are you in Bar-Selehm, Mnenga?”

  “I told you,” he began, “the nbezu—”

  “Forget the nbezu,” I said. “Tell me about the old man.”

  He grew still, his face setting. “Ulwazi,” he said at last.

  He read the confusion in my face.

  “The old man,” he said. “The one who is—” He gestured with his hands: Gone, like smoke blowing away.

  “He is why you are here, and you fear he has come to harm at someone else’s hands.”

  For a long moment he said nothing, and I wondered if I should clarify my phrasing, but he understood me perfectly and eventually nodded. “I am herding nbezu,” he said. “But that is not all of the truth. The elders of my village sent me. Ulwazi said white men wanted to buy land from us, but he did not know why. He said he would find out, but then he disappeared. I have been trying to find him or learn what happened to him, but I do not know how to be in the city. My own kind—the ones who live here, the Assimilated—do not want to talk about old men from the bush. I did not mean to lie to you.” He shrugged, and his smile became bleak and knowing.

  “Mnenga,” I said, deciding on impulse to trust him as I once had. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think you will find him.”

  His face tightened with doubt and wariness.

  “I think he is dead,” I said. “I think I saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Old Red Fort,” I said. “He may have been imprisoned there.”

  For the first time since I had known him, the Mahweni boy’s face hardened and his smile vanished entirely.

  “You know the place?” I asked.

  He nodded slowly and emphatically twice, and at the end of the second, he hung his head, teeth gritted and eyes closed.

  “What have you heard about it?” I asked.

  For a while, he said nothing. Then he opened his eyes and shook his head. “Bad things,” he said in a low voice, thick as the darkness gathered around us. “Old things about the war, but also new things. There is a man there, or there was. My people call him Tchanka, an old name for a kind of devil. He has the head of a jackal. Comes to your hut at the darkest part of the night, when the moon is down. Gets down very low on his belly and comes in under the door. He takes your children. Eats their souls.”

  I swallowed. “Do you know the man’s real name?” I asked.

  Mnenga shook his head. “Only Tchanka. He was a soldier, perhaps still is.”

  I thought for a moment, and an idea that had never occurred to me before spilled out. “If there is a war with the Grappoli, Mnenga,” I said, “would you fight?”

  He frowned. “The bush tribes would not be forced,” he said. “Not at first. But we would be stupid to think that war between the Grappoli and the Bar-Selehm would not come to our villages in the end, and I think I would probably fight sooner than that.”

  Something in his eyes gave me pause.

  “How much sooner?” I asked.

  “They say Mahweni stole your Beacon to sell to the Grappoli,” he said bitterly.

  “They?”

  “The white people in the city,” he clarified. “They say if there is a war, my black brothers in the city will have to decide which side they are on. They say it like the choice should be easy, but I do not think it is, and I think for the bush villagers, the herders, the Unassimilated,” he added, pulling a sour face, “people like me and my brothers, who the city ignores till they want our land, we will also have to make a choice.”

  “You will stand with the city Mahweni even if they rise up against Bar-Selehm?”

  “Rise up,” he echoed, liking the sound of it. “Yes. But not against Bar-Selehm. The city is many things. We would rise up only against parts of it.”

  “You’d be killed,” I said. “They have better weapons, trained soldiers.… You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “That is possible,” he said. “But the Grappoli also have better weapons and soldiers. If we are going to die, better it be for what we believe is right.”

  The weight of the previous week pressed down on me, and I suddenly felt weary and sad beyond measure.

  Again he shook his head, this time like a whinnying orlek, as if to clear it. “I am sorry about Kalla,” he said. “You would have made a good mother.”

  “If you actually think that,” I said, “you haven’t been paying attention.”

  “Paying?” he echoed.

  His confusion annoyed me. Even in the moment, I was ashamed of the feeling. “I wouldn’t make a good mother,” I said. “I’d make a terrible mother. If I’ve learned nothing else over the last few days, I’ve learned that.”

  “No!” he said. “You cared for her. You kept her safe. When things are calm and you have a good husband—”

  “No,” I said, my voice louder and harsher than I meant it. “I climb chimneys. I hurt people. I put the lives of everyone I know at risk.”

  “No,” he said. “You are a good person, Anglet. A beautiful person—”

  He extended a hand to mine but I ignored it, getting quickly to my feet. I knew he was trying to be helpful, supportive, and though I could see something else in the way he looked at me that I didn’t have time to reflect upon, I appreciated it. But the extent of my failure crowded in on me and made me bitter.

  “I’m grateful for your help, Mnenga,” I said in a voice that showed no gratitude at all, “but don’t think you know me. You don’t, and it’s better for you that way.”

  He blinked as if I had slapped him, and though I was struck with sudden remorse, I could think of no way to mend the moment except by leaving it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, turning and walking away before I could change my mind.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT AS I was making my way back to the Martel Court for a few hours’ sleep, I heard the sound of chanting and followed it to look. In Unification Square, a crowd of Mahweni had gathered, and I saw that among the Assimilated majority were men and women in the homespun weavings and animal skins of the tribal herders. They all sang, rocked back and forth like a basin of unsettled water, their voices full of suffering and anger. Earlier in the day, one of the white rallies had replaced the effigy of the Grappoli ambassador with the puppet of a black man with wild hair, broad lips, and staring eyes. They had burned it in a metal drum, but some of the Mahweni had recovered the remains and it was now the repurposed focus of their own protest. A company of white dragoons was watching the writhing, boiling fury of the crowd with growing unease, and when I saw one young officer nervously unbuttoning the flap of his pistol holster, Willinghouse’s words came back to me.

  The very brink of disaster …

  CHAPTER

  31

  CORPORAL TSANWE EMTEZU LIVED in Morgessa, the largely black area on the northeast side of the city, close to the Ramsblood temple, an orderly neighborhood of small, well-maintained terraced houses with tiny front gardens where roses and the sandalwood-scented heylas grew. Most of the people who lived there were factory workers and tradesmen. Their children went to Hillstreet School or, if they were religious, to Truth Mountain, which was run by Pancaris nuns. Most left at twelve, going on to apprenticeships or, like Sarah, straight in
to employment.

  Emtezu’s wife opened the door, cradling an infant only a couple of months older than the one I had left at Pancaris. She was black, though I had seen other wives and husbands in the neighborhood who weren’t, and she looked me over, her face carefully empty. When she led me through into the back, she moved with unstudied economy, graceful as a dancer, and as we passed the foot of the stairs, she called up, stilling the movement and childish laughter that came from above without raising her voice.

  “When I come up there I expect you to be ready for school,” she said.

  She led me into the kitchen, where her husband was sitting at the table, staring at a newspaper. He did not seem surprised to see me.

  “I suppose I should be glad I’m not being arrested for the way I took you to see Sohwetti,” he said. He glanced at his wife, who was fussing by the sink, and I could tell his casualness was feigned. “Am I likely to be?”

  “No,” I said. “You didn’t know what you were leading me into.”

  “It seems I had our leader’s priorities wrong,” he said bitterly.

  The front page of the Morning Star on the table in front of him blared, SOHWETTI SIGNS SECRET LAND DEAL!

  “What will happen to him?” I asked.

  He sat back and folded his arms. “It’s not yet clear whether what he did was illegal or not,” said Emtezu. “It will cost him his political position, of course, and probably a lot of money, not least of which will be in refurbishing the state residence for his successor. It seems there was a fire there after I left.”

  He said it carefully; a statement, not a question.

  “Apparently so,” I said, considering the competing images on the front page, a formal portrait of Sohwetti and a rushed, blurry image of the burning villa. “I was lucky to get away unhurt.”