“Wait…”
And the vision changed, and she was in another strange place, even colder than the last, snow everywhere. She had seen snow before, in the mountains, but never so much, lying everywhere thicker than the length of her arm, white where it topped walls and roofs, grey where it was churned by passing feet. The air was like metal in her lungs. To her right a building rose to a dome topped with a point, showing gold where it wasn’t covered in snow.
The same group of people stood with her—Frank had a bandage around his head, Gracie an ugly wound down her arm where something had ripped through layers of cloth—and there was shouting and the bellowing of terrified beasts and two horses were belting towards them, dragging behind them a sort of wagon that ran over the snow on wooden blades—the driver’s seat empty, a screaming fur-clad woman in the back clutching two screaming children, and something like a cross between a snake and a crocodile but huge, each great scaled leg as tall as Nalangu, that whipped along behind with appalling speed, and its head turned and she saw its eye, the slit pupil lit with unearthly fire, and Archimedes shouted now and the weapon bucked and roared in Nalangu’s hand…
And there was a place of glimmering light and buildings that stood with their feet in water, and cats everywhere, smaller even than servals, grey or striped or black and white like zebras. She and her companions were sliding along on the water, in a boat propelled somehow by a man with a pole, dressed in striped garments and a strange pale hat with ribbons trailing from it, and Frank, peering over the side, said, “Pretty place, but be glad we’re here in winter. In summer it stinks.”
Nalangu pulled her heavy coat tighter around her. The breeze whipping along the water had ice in its breath.
“Are there demons in the water too?” Gracie said.
“Only sewage, so far as I know,” said Archimedes. “Just don’t drink it or swim in it, or you’ll be longing for a demon to put you out of your misery.”
“Swim, in this weather? No thank you…”
Something caught Nalangu’s eye. “Look,” she said. An old archway, and a dozen cats bursting out, ears flat, tails puffed, streaking away in all directions, while passers-by cursed and laughed.
“Pull up here, thank you,” Frank said and they scrambled out of the boat while coins changed hands and the boatman’s thanks faded behind them.
“Yes, look, it’s left its prints on the sill there. We’d never have spotted them otherwise. You said to watch the cats,” Archimedes said, grinning at her, and Nalangu grinned back, and they went shoulder to shoulder into the tiny stone square where something writhed and gibbered and dripped…
And then the world sealed itself shut, like the closing of a mouth, its secrets told, and she was alone in the void for a moment before the voices of the Sisters were around her once more, cradling her, drawing her up, back to herself.
NALANGU OPENED HER eyes to the familiar darkness of the hut, and shivered all over, as the welcome heat of home seeped into flesh and bones that were still cold with the air of unknown places.
She blinked and looked up at the faces of her sisters in arms.
“The visions…” she said. Her throat was too dry for more.
Someone passed her a gourd of fresh milk, and she drank, and even as it soothed her, she could feel things she had understood sliding away. The names of those she had fought beside.
But she remembered enough to know her vision was wrong.
It had to be wrong.
It wasn’t just that the places she had seen were so completely strange, places that could never be reached by walking, far from any grazing ground the people had ever seen.
None of her people were there.
None of her Sisters were there.
When she could speak, Nalangu told them, hesitant, pulling the scraps together, scattered beads of a broken necklace.
And the Sisters listened.
“You saw nothing you knew,” Loiyan said.
“No. Even my clothes were different, because it was so cold.”
“But you were fighting demons,” said another.
“Yes.”
Then there was a long silence, and they sighed, and shook their heads.
“There is no doubt,” Loiyan said. “I am sorry, sister, daughter. You are my heart’s child, and you are a warrior. But there is no choice.”
“No!” Nkasiogi said. “No. There must be another way.”
“You know there is not,” Loiyan said.
“I have failed, then?” Nalangu said. She thought of the tigir, the silencing, and her stomach quailed. She looked at all their faces, feeling their warmth, their companionship, their bravery, desperately trying to brand her memory with their faces, so that once the tigir had been laid on her, perhaps she would remember how it had been to be one of them. They looked at her with no sign of disappointment, only with a compassion as deep as the earth. Apart from Nkasiogi, who looked both furious and miserable.
“You have not failed,” Loiyan said. “But your fate does not lie here. You must seek it out. You must travel to where it waits.”
“Travel?”
“Yes. You must find these lands and these people and stand with them, and not with us.”
“Why should she?” Nkasiogi burst out. “Why should she help strangers, instead of her own people? Even if they are there! Will you send her out alone to look for something that may not exist?”
“It is the custom and the law,” Loiyan said. “Nalangu, you must travel towards your destiny, carrying only your weapons and what will sustain you; and you must go today.”
Nalangu blinked. Everything had changed so quickly. She had been, she thought, prepared for failure. Perhaps even for success. But this… to leave everything? To leave her Sisters, her family and their cattle, her people, her land, to go among strangers in the cold…
“My mother?” she said.
“We will tell her you have died of the fever,” Loiyan said gently.
She knew that, of course.
“And where is she to go?” Nkasiogi spat. “No-one even knows where these lands are!”
“North,” Nalangu said. “I must go north.” And with those words, she knew she had accepted it, even as her heart was breaking.
AS NALANGU SET out on the road, she did not look back; she did not dare, for fear she would never be able to go on. The Sisters had all wished her well, given her gourds of milk and meat and blood and herbs. Except for Nkasiogi, who had stalked from the hut as though if she stayed she would kill someone. Nalangu tried not to let it hurt her too much, but that was the bruise she thought would last the longest.
Then as she passed out of sight of the enkang, beyond the trail that led to the cave of the leopard-people, Nkasiogi was there, standing by the side of the road.
Nalangu stopped. Nkasiogi glared at her. “Well,” she said.
“Well.”
Nkasiogi held out her best seme. The blade gleamed in the sun. She had never let Nalangu use it. “This is better than yours. Take it. Do not shame it, or me.”
Nalangu took the seme, and gave hers to Nkasiogi. “I will not shame it, or you.”
Nkasiogi looked her long in the face. “No,” she said. “I do not think you will. Travel well, Sister.”
“Fight well, Sister,” Nalangu said.
And Nkasiogi clasped her arm, hard enough to mark, and Nalangu did likewise, and then Nkasiogi walked past her, back towards the life that Nalangu was leaving.
Nalangu did not turn. She did not watch. She slung the seme, and kept walking.
The sun set, red and shimmering, and Nalangu kept walking. The dark came with the whispering song of insects and the coughing grunt of a lion, and Nalangu kept walking. Once a leopard cried near her in the night, and once something whipped across the path too swift to make out, and Nalangu kept walking.
The drug, the fight, the visions, the leaving had left her light and hollow as an empty gourd, and there was so little left of her that it hardly seemed any troubl
e to just keep going, as the night ended and the sun rose again, painting the land bright.
But eventually her body gained weight and substance and need, and she stopped and made a rough shelter, and built a fire, and ate.
And so the days went on. Twice she saw leopards. They did not attack her, but only watched, and she thought they might be of Crocodile Dancer’s people, for what other leopards would stand so and let themselves be seen, watching? The thought gave her a strange comfort, and she nodded to the leopards, who flicked their ears and stared with their green-golden eyes. Nalangu walked on.
Once she crossed the trail of a demon, but it was old and faded, so she walked on.
And one morning she saw something strange in the sky, some terrible new demon, out in the waking world, bold and fearsome, a great noisy thing that floated on the air, with bulging sides and fluttering limbs.
Nalangu saw it turn towards her, and begin to descend, and gripped her spear and Nkasiogi’s seme. The demon was huge, but it was slow.
And if she did not survive this, then she would at least die following her fate.
But as the demon drew nearer and lower, she could see that it was a thing, a built thing, a great long swollen bag with something slung below it. Something that reminded her of wooden buildings she had seen in her vision.
And she could see people, leaning out and pointing at her.
She did not put down her weapons, but stood, waiting. Her heart panted in her chest, but she was not afraid.
The thing came down in the road, scraping and roaring and sputtering and sending up great clouds of dust, and a figure emerged, coughing, and Nalangu knew it was not a demon; for whoever heard of a demon that coughed at the mere dust of a road?
The figure came towards her, and its clothes were strange and it wore a hat that shaded its face, and then it pushed back the hat, and there was a face she recognised. A man, pale as dust, who looked into her face, and smiled, and said, in clear but strangely spoken Maa, “Hello. We have been looking for you. What is your name?”
“Nalangu,” said Nalangu.
“Nalangu. I am Archimedes,” said the man. “You look well prepared.”
“Not for this,” Nalangu said.
“None of us were,” said Archimedes. Then he said something over his shoulder, and the rest emerged.
She knew them, they were utterly strange and yet she knew them, though only one name came back to her. “Frank,” Nalangu said, pointing at the man in the scarlet jacket.
He blinked, and laughed, and held out his hand. She put the seme away and reached out, and he took her hand in a brief light clasp.
And one by one they took her hand, and with every clasp it was a little less strange. And there was the woman, Gracie, and that helped a little too.
They waited as she readied herself to step into this thing, this demon-bodied craft, feeling the earth beneath her. Home. A little step, and the land that had borne her would no longer be under her feet. She took a breath, and stepped.
Nalangu watched, as it all fell away. How strange everything looked, so far and small. She turned away from the window. “Where is the demon?” she said. “Do you know its weaknesses?”
Archimedes translated, and there was laughter. “They think you’re going to fit right in,” he said. “I have to say I agree.”
Nalangu looked at her new companions. They were not the Sisters. They would not ever be the Sisters. But they were warriors. They were the fence around the people, all the people. The enkang had been her world. Now the whole world would be her enkang.
“Show me what we hunt,” Nalangu said.
Nobody can say he is settled anywhere for ever: it is only the mountains which do not move from their places.
Maasai Proverb
Where You Bury Things
Guy Adams
THERE IS A quality to the light of a Calcutta sunset that is quite the most delicious thing. One could almost imagine the buildings to have been bathed in syrup.
“Mr. Bey?”
I took a last sip of my brandy—if I have a credo in life, it is to always enjoy the moment—placed the glass on the table next to my armchair and feigned the sort of relaxed indifference people rightfully expect from an old Etonian. If I learned one thing in that noble establishment, it was the art of insouciance.
“Miss Collins,” I replied. “What a charming surprise. I was led to believe you were dead.”
She fluttered like a moth searching for an open window. It was positively draining keeping an eye on her as she gadded about on the rug before me.
Her behaviour was antagonising some of the other residents. Those who stay at the Auckland Hotel do so with the specific wish to avoid excitement. It is a little piece of England dropped here in the heart of a bustling city. That is to say, a place where a certain kind of traveller can pretend to have enjoyed a city without actually having experienced it.
At the far end of the room, a brutish pianist was doing unkind things to Beethoven. To my left an old soldier snored, his nasal rumbling a memory of barrages gone by. To my right, a dowager of some distinction was complaining to her companion that the heat was proving disagreeable to ‘Sir Henry,’ said person being—horrifically—her Pekingese dog. Beyond her, a pair of young sisters stared out of the window, horrified that they were no longer looking out at the reassuring, aseptic vistas of Eastbourne. Earlier, one of the staff had dropped a tray of Chai and the resulting noise had sent the room into the sort of panic one might expect to result from a stick of dynamite being hurled through a window. One elderly couple had actually retired early to their room following the incident, ‘darling Nigel’s nerves not being what they once were.’
In short, this was not a room in which exuberance should intrude. Miss Collins may have only been pacing—if rather erratically—but her presence was as unwelcome as the sudden appearance of a marching band. I should had invited her to sit, but I didn’t.
“Dead?” she said. “Whatever made you think that?”
I could have mentioned the considerable quantity of blood on the rug in her bedroom, or the dainty, severed hand sharing pot-space with a decorative aspidistra; but, frankly, either seemed vulgar.
“Confusion on my part, I’m sure,” I replied, shifting slightly in my seat, slipping my hand down the side of the cushion to retrieve the object I’d hidden there.
“Clearly, I am not dead,” she insisted.
“Clearly.”
She stopped pacing and smiled. She was the most remarkably beautiful young woman, but then, I was always sent weak at the sight of auburn hair.
Such a shame I was going to have to kill her.
I HAVE BEEN all over the world, and there are only two places I would avoid returning to: Aberystwyth and central Australia. I have no problem with rough living; I have endured in jungles, deserts, ice floes and English market towns, and can make my peace with the absence of most simple comforts. But certain parts of Australia really do take frugality of pleasure to bloody-minded extremes.
“What are you doing?” asked Nowra, my aboriginal guide, a young man so sharp I could have used him to chop an onion.
“I am sitting in the river to cool off,” I explained.
“Idiot,” he said, demonstrating, as he frequently did, how encouraging one’s staff to ignore social protocol and speak their mind can lead to irritation. “That’s Lhere Mparntwe, what you call the Todd River. It’s dry.”
“If you ask me,” I replied, tossing a handful of dust into the wind, “the responsibilities of a river are generally light. Being wet might be considered the most basic requirement.”
“It floods at some points during the year.”
“What with? Rocks?”
I stood up, deciding it would be quicker to walk rather than swim.
“The white settlers made the same mistake,” said Nowra. “They set up their telegraph station here because they thought it was a watering hole. That’s why they called their town Alice Springs.”
“One can hardly call it a town.”
“They do.”
“They’re excessively ambitious. It’s another white man’s trait. We do love putting up buildings and owning plots of dirt.”
“It makes me laugh.”
“No Englishman will tolerate being laughed at.”
“Then they shouldn’t be so funny.”
“Define ‘funny.’”
Nowra pointed at my equipment. “Messing about in the dust, trying to find gold.”
“Gold, diamonds, anything of value, Nowra; one cannot afford to be picky. In fact, one cannot afford much at all, which is precisely why I am doing it.”
Nowra sniffed; one presumes it was derision rather than catarrh. “White man and his money.”
“Watch who you’re calling a white man, I’m half Egyptian.”
“You cannot tell.”
“Is that an insult?”
“It is whatever the white man wants it to be.” Nowra smiled. He really was most tiresome. “When white men need money, do they not normally get a job?”
“Like leading idiots around deserts in Australia, for example?”
He nodded. “Idiots are easier to find than diamonds.”
“I have other reasons to avoid the civilised world at the moment. I needed somewhere remote and unpleasant to escape to. I chose your home.”
“It welcomes you and the little money you have. What is it you’re running away from?”
“That, my dear chap, must remain my business.”
I HAD BEEN here for two months now and was finding it increasingly difficult not to consider it a prison sentence. The Australian desert had no need for iron bars, as there was nowhere to escape to. I am a well-travelled man, as I trust I have made clear, and rarely while marching across the soil of the world did I find myself hankering for the comfort of Piccadilly, or Regent Street. While London may well have become my home, it is not somewhere I ever wanted to stay in perpetuity. My Mayfair flat was a place to store my books; all decent men require a library, but few choose to live in it. London is a place to start from.
The True History of the Strange Brigade Page 13
