Song Beneath the Tides

by Beverley Birch

  Too close, too loud, something crashed through foliage. There came a sequence of sounds – a rasping, grating hiss, rustling, crackling . . .

  Then quiet.

  ‘Koho,’ grunted Jela. He moved cautiously towards the noises. A burst of new sound – wings, in a heavy, stuttering flutter. Then silence again.

  Everyone followed, moving delicately, and Ally reluctantly, afraid to be left alone, dreading what they’d find. Koho – the bird that eats dead things, Huru’d said.

  ‘Aren’t we near Fumo and Zawati’s place?’ she whispered, but caught the alarmed flight of a large bird past a pillar of stone, and knew.

  Jela and Saka and Thimba were bending over a glistening mound, an enormous reddish bulge on the ground that her brain recognized slowly, and with a deep, hot jolt of shock, as the bloody carcass of a very large animal.

  But unrecognizable. It was skinned. Headless. It had no feet, no tail. And half its side was eaten away.

  She helped slide the ngalawa into the water in an effort to erase the mutilated dead thing from her head. But it kept reclaiming space, and with it came the battered faces of Collins and Dedan and their talk of cages. And animals.

  Jela hauled up sail and the boat took the wind, set course for Shanza out of sight beyond the curve of Kisiri’s shore. Fighting the out-running tide, it would be more than a half-hour to reach it and give news of the dead animal, maybe an hour before anyone came back. Jela’s voice carried across water, calling to patrolling canoes that responded and turned in to the island, Saka and Thimba wading to meet them. They hauled the boats up the beach and all disappeared into the forest towards the carcass.

  Nothing to do but wait. Ally walked away fast. Anything to get distance from the stain of that poor animal’s blood in Fumo and Zawati’s place. She went towards Leli. He was wading along the water’s edge, kicking up spray angrily, drenching himself, didn’t look at her.

  Words blanked in her mind. She went past, hoping he would follow, say something, anything, somehow make things normal between them again. Then together they could face everything else.

  He didn’t. She skirted gulls squabbling over fish-bones; they circled and screamed at her and she ignored them and marched on along the shoreline, conscious only of the sea to her left and the forest to her right, and beyond it the deepening shadow of a high coral bluff.

  She stopped, breath rasping. She’d been walking hunched, eyes on the ground, ploughing mindlessly ahead through soft sand. Now she took a deep breath, stretched arms above her head to ease the neck ache, and became aware that here no sickly stench of death had followed. And she’d left the forest behind, the beach narrowing sharply, fenced in by a tumble of rock from the cliff.

  She glanced back: canoes on the beach still in view; the fishermen, Ben and Huru and Leli too.

  She walked on. The wall of rock curved out of sight towards the bluffs that hid the cave. Only days ago she’d been high up there; anticipation of something unknown had filled her, frightened her. But she couldn’t have imagined anything like this – this butchering of animals. Or Kisiri stolen from the village. Or the street kids’ beating.

  Or this bleakness, the door slamming shut between her and Leli.

  She’d come up against a tongue of coral running out from the cliff into water. It was high, steep, but ledges and crevices gave foot- and fingerholds. She picked her way up till she could see the water beyond. It slopped and sucked in channels and cavities in the coral. Beyond, open sea. Two large boats on the horizon – faint through heat shimmer.

  She watched them, just in case. They didn’t move: fishing, she guessed. And Shanza canoes sculled near the mangrove creeks, watchful, their meanderings marked by white frills on the green water. From this high she could even see underwater coral patterning the burnished sheen of the sea.

  Though as she watched, it dulled. The sun was disappearing behind menacing cloud, the light yellowing, wind dropping, heat building.

  She looked back. Leli was trailing the grooves of her footprints in the sand. He raised a hand.

  Following her.

  Sudden recklessness spiked her. Rapidly she crossed the shell crusts and treacherous slithery seaweed at the crest of the coral. It rose in a spine to the summit of the cliff. She began to climb, fast. A chance to be with him beyond everyone’s eyes! Further up, further away – seize the moment before anything snatched it from her; even the rocks pulled her higher and further – when she got to the top, everything would be all right.

  *

  Storms fly towards us. A sulphurous light fills the clouds massing to south and west. I went and looked where the walls fall sheer to the spine of dark rock. Before my eyes the waves seemed to grow more frantic, hammering at the coral as if to wrestle it free, and a sudden hammering rose in my heart, as if there too something is wrenching free.

  Dizziness overcame me. I gripped the parapet and closed my eyes. I heard the keening of birds, a chorus of warning. And then for one long, frozen moment I felt myself released from this place, at liberty, and at peace.

  I knew beside me was the living presence of the One I have so often conjured. Certainty filled me: when I opened my eyes She would be there, real, of flesh and blood, signifying Life. I breathed the moment. I felt Her Life course through my blood.

  I opened my eyes to speak to Her. I was alone.

  Yet Her presence lingers. She is here.

  As if in answer, the wind lifted and spun Jabari’s talisman of the warriors hanging round my neck. I seized it and held it hard against me. There is a world beyond this place of death! I will find it, take it, take it for us all.

  *

  She scrambled the last few feet on hands and knees and stood up, heaving breath into her lungs. She was a very long way up. Beneath her was the echoing boom of water. She felt its thunder as if the cliff was a drum and was surprised at its power. She looked down. And was surprised too, her pulse quickening, that Leli’s shadow darkened the grass at her feet, that he could climb so fast and already reach her.

  Then she saw he was still on the sands below, not yet at the base of the cliff.

  She went cold. The dark shadow still spread beside her. And for one brief, suspended moment, a word hung in the air: the voice of a boy – not Leli or Jack or Huru or Ben, deeper, yet paler, as if flowing from a long way off, weaving round her, a whispering warmth, a breath.

  Then the voice was gone, the shadow too, there was only the flat grass of the cliff-top, Leli climbing towards her, and a lightness in her as if she’d been lifted somewhere, somewhere airy and wind-whipped, and then set down again, her body reclaiming itself, reclaiming her hold on the ordinary solid land beneath her.

  She stood frozen, half in fear, half in bewilderment.

  Then she backed away from the cliff and glanced round for somewhere to sit and pull herself together, wait for Leli. She spotted a patch of shade in a gully and clambered down to it.

  Only then did she realize that her eyes had passed something that jarred with the grey-pink of the rock and the green-yellow of grass and the blue pockets of flowers clinging to its rim.

  She looked back.

  The creature was in the gully. It was snarling and its head was turned so that for a split second she thought it was looking at her and fear jabbed – the cheetah was gathering itself to leap. Then she took in how its head was thrown back, the vicious twist in the torso, the peculiar angle of its legs, that the snarl was the fixed grimace of another dead thing. Its coat had not dulled, and there was no smell, no predatory koho near it. She saw this, and understood that the animal had not been dead long, that perhaps it had only just, only moments before, breathed its last.

  I came down from the walls elated, filled with Her hope, to find Badru and Jabari calling us all urgently. I reached them, and Badru at once spoke.

  He did not wish to raise our hopes, then shatter them. So
he kept something from us until he could check his reckonings.

  This is it: returning from the town at dawn and reaching the deeper recesses of the cave to hide the canoe, it had come to him that the space held more light than could be from rays of early sun through the distant cave-mouth. Being fixed on leaving the cavern and reaching the fort before enemy patrols might see him climb, he probed no further.

  But he suspects two things: that there is a fracture in the roof of the cave, a hole or crack that allows some light to pass down from the surface of the rock above. And that the line of the cave brings those deeper regions, and perhaps this fracture, somewhere below this fort, below our court. With a meaningful look he glanced at Jabari and Rahidi.

  I had no need of their sudden delight to remind me. I saw: myself, six years old, Jabari proudly showing me Mwitu’s wonders, together running through the inner town and plunging between houses into a tiny stairway bored through rock. To my joy we emerged far below in the harbour. Mwitu’s passage that affords the people safe and secret passage between the high town and the ships, in times of storm – or war!

  It cannot be chance! I relived that moment on the parapet. It spoke of escape. It spoke of life beyond this place – and now we think what plans may be devised if Badru has truly seen a cleft in the roof of the cave below us, and if it be wide enough to take the shoulders of a man, or we can make it so!

  eighth day

  storm

  Twenty-two

  The storm came in with a shriek: rain billowed white across the house, trees whipped low, shutters banged like gunshots. As if the torrent was trying to rinse Kisiri clean.

  Ally woke into the ceaseless, driving downpour and everything else poured into her head, all the ugliness of the animals’ deaths, and Collins’ and Dedan’s beating, and the strangeness of that moment on the cliff, the certainty that someone stood beside her. Even the thrum of the rain against the house became the drumming she’d felt, and that sense of something swirling through her – moments before she saw the cheetah. Like a premonition – a signpost – to the creature’s death.

  Her frantic shouts to Leli, Leli racing up the rocks to reach her. Their headlong scramble down the cliff again to tell the fishermen. Leli stalking about stiff with fury till the police launch surged into sight carrying Jela. Leli sucked instantly into all the police said and did. The baffling clamour of discussion, Leli in the middle, she trapped outside because she couldn’t understand his language, and didn’t want to be in the way.

  She tossed fitfully in twisted sheets, at dawn falling asleep to dream of Leli striding away through towering dunes, so high and so soft that however hard she struggled, she sank, her legs like lead weights, and never reached him.

  She woke to sudden silence. The deluge had ended as abruptly as it came – just high racing cloud and flickering sunlight. The lull only fuelled her sense of a void, away from Leli.

  She went out, stepping across bruised litter of bougainvillea blossom and casuarina cones into air glittering with brittle clarity. Jack was on the roof checking Kisiri through bino­culars. She rushed up to join him, away from Carole’s voice inside the house. Last night’s argument with her aunt was still raw. Carole emphatic, anxious: ‘Ally, listen! To lots of people in the village, people like us cause these problems—’

  ‘But we don’t! They know we wouldn’t!’

  ‘Do they? Mzee Shaibu, Leli, your friends, Rutere . . . I’m sure they know that. But others? Why would they? How would they? We need to be cautious, not meddle in discussions and decisions that aren’t our business. We can try to find a way to help, ’course we can – but only if Shanza wants us to! People need space to figure out what to do, not us plunging in to interfere!’

  ‘I don’t want to interfere, just help!’

  Carole’s sigh. ‘You do understand, Ally, I know you do! You just don’t want to hear it because it means staying away for now, not seeing Leli.’

  And it was true. I do understand. How could I not? It had shown in the heated tones all around Ally, the long discussions among Elders in Mzee Shaibu’s yard, the rushing to and fro in the village, the young men already patrolling the boundaries of the village, families worrying when little kids couldn’t be seen. In Leli’s absorption with it all.

  But I don’t want to be here, looking through binoculars from Carole’s roof! I want to be there, with him!

  She couldn’t tell if she was angry with her aunt or frightened by what she said. Or angry with herself, for her fear – the wedge hammering down between her and Leli.

  ‘No police boats there now.’ Jack offered the bino­culars. She shook her head. She could feel his edgy mood, echoing her own, fed further by Ben’s shrill, endless speculation about Kisiri, floating up from below.

  ‘So they’ll search everything for clues, Carole! You know, guns and people and stuff, so they know who did it. I saw it on telly. Maybe they’re catching the killers now! What if rain washed all the clues away?’

  ‘We’ll go over to Shanza later and find out, Benjy.’ Carole was trying to calm him. ‘But they won’t really want us around for a while—’

  ‘Hey, look, Ally – smoke on the island!’ Jack said sharply. ‘Thought it was cloud, but it’s smoke!’

  She grabbed the binoculars from him. Spirals rose from several places. Rapidly, she scanned.

  Below, out of sight, wheels squelched to a halt by the house. Then Inspector Rutere’s voice. ‘Hodi! I am glad you are here!’

  ‘I’m on late shift at the hospital,’ Carole called. ‘Come through, we’re out front.’

  Ally went swiftly down the roof steps, Jack close behind.

  The policeman appeared on the veranda, took the offered cup of tea from Carole without noticing, and said quickly, ‘I thought you would like to know developments. A motorboat near Kisiri in the night triggered . . . well, how can I say . . . Shanza has moved to the island! Everyone in residence on Kisiri!’

  Ally stared at him. ‘Everyone? Camping? Is that why there’s smoke?’

  ‘Cooking fires. They build shelters. Just a few people left in Shanza to guard it—’

  ‘Let’s go too, Carole!’ Ben shrieked. ‘We can go now!’

  ‘I regret,’ the inspector went on to Carole, ‘that I ordered my sergeant back to Tundani last night. My superiors are angry that I left the situation in Shanza untended. I did not prevent this crossing to the island. Now I am not their favourite person.’

  Carole gave a snort. The policeman smiled faintly at her, and registering the tea in his hand, took several sips. ‘Of course – young children and mothers there on Kisiri now, the police cannot move them off without a scandal. I am instructed that scandals are to be avoided.’

  He’s not regretful. He meant to let everyone go to Kisiri! Ally gazed through the binoculars. The plumes of smoke above the island, nothing more: the sea empty of the usual flotilla of boats heading to the fishing grounds, waves choppy, white-capped. They surged round Ras Chui and ran wild across the bay, restless beneath ominous ridges of cloud, even though shafts of misty sunshine still speared through.

  ‘What if there’s a storm again?’ she appealed to the policeman.

  ‘Their shelters are strong,’ he replied. ‘Do not worry . . .’

  But they’ll have to bring everything in boats from Shanza! On Kisiri there’s no fresh water. The boats’ll be tossed about by this kind of sea!

  ‘Will it fix anything?’ Anxiety made her voice sharp.

  The policeman frowned. ‘Sadly, the sale of Kisiri is in its final stage—’

  ‘What about those dead animals?’ Jack persisted.

  ‘Huh!’ the policeman snorted. ‘I am instructed there is no evidence of connections between the killed animals on the island and the purchasers of the island. These events must not be allowed to delay the sale—’

  ‘It can’t happen!’ Carole said. �
�Shanza needs a lawyer, Rutere. Can we help get one? What can we do? Tell us what Mzee Shaibu’s planning—’

  ‘That chopped-up thing was a lion!’ Ally burst out. ‘Wasn’t it? That’s . . . horrible! Lions are protected! Cheetahs are protected.’ Ridiculously, she was close to tears, which made her angry. She thrust the binoculars at Jack and turned away to hide it.

  ‘Horrible, wrong, yes. Illegal, most definitely,’ the policeman responded to her turned back. ‘The cheetah you found, Ally – it bled to death from a gunshot wound. Only a short time before you came there. A slow, painful death – a very incompetent hunter, this one! All these motorboats around the island – probably to retrieve this animal. It escaped to die alone. Not allowed – no trophies for hunters!’ He went quiet for a moment, drinking the tea.

  He resumed, ‘Yes, the first carcass was a lion. The poaching squad tells me a very nasty thing. Here is what happens. First, trap your animal – illegal – drug it – illegal – transport it somewhere else – illegal – some secret place where the animal cannot escape. An island is good! Give some rich person a big gun and ‘professional’ help to track the weakened animal. Kill it, cut off parts – head, feet, skin – as trophies. Illegal. Some visitors pay a fortune for the thrill of a “real” hunt and a “real” kill.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ Ben spluttered. ‘Animals can’t even try to fight back!’

  ‘But much money for people who arrange it,’ the policeman answered flatly.

  ‘So that’s why they want Kisiri . . .’ Jack said. ‘They think no one here’s important enough to see them hunting big game animals there!’

  ‘And no one to stop them,’ said Rutere. ‘Poaching, smuggling – we think linked with gangs, well-armed, indulging in piracy, capturing boats on the northern coast. Certainly someone is moving ivory, skins, animal parts that sell for much money, shipping them from isolated beaches north of Tundani. Very profitable—’

  ‘So I was hearing them bring animal victims down through our creek the other night?’ Carole muttered.