I GAVE RAHVEY HER money while the children were about their games, and she vanished it into her purse.
“Aab is still playing with Radesh,” I observed, watching the disconcerting deaf girl. There was a lack of self-consciousness about the child that felt wild, feral. Rahvey shrugged wearily.
“Nothing else for her to do,” she said, adjusting Kalla who was nursing.
“They come down here most days?” I asked.
“Yes. Why? You think they should be in school learning about Panbroke and reading books?”
“No,” I said, ignoring the edge in her tone. “I just wondered if they had seen other children. Not Lani. Maybe on the other side of the river.”
“Over there?” asked Rahvey. “What would anyone be doing over there? Where the old temple is, you mean? No one in their right mind would go over there. You know there’s a clavtar? Been there at least a year. We hear it roaring at night all the way across the river.”
“Do you mind if I ask the children?”
Rahvey shrugged. “Why would I mind?” she remarked. It was a challenge rather than a real question.
“Wouldn’t want to intrude,” I said.
“Just because you pay me doesn’t mean we’re not sisters anymore,” she remarked stiffly, avoiding my gaze.
I smiled and, emboldened by her concession, said, “I hear Tanish has been visiting.”
“Always under my feet, he is,” said Rahvey, though she couldn’t quite suppress a grin. “Still, makes a change to have a boy around. So long as he doesn’t get ideas about my girls. I don’t want Jadary marrying some two-bit steeplejack. No offense.”
“None taken,” I said. I bit my lip. This seemed as good an opening as I was going to get. “You want good things for your daughters,” I said. “I understand. So how would you feel if I brought a teacher here? Paid her myself. Just for a couple of hours in the evening. You wouldn’t mind that, would you?”
Rahvey got that watchful look of hers, as if I might be up to something, but she shrugged, still looking away.
“I don’t see why not,” she said, her eyes on the infant at her breast.
I nodded, then stood up and waved up to what passed for a road so close to the Drowning’s uncertain ground. Bertha got to her feet and began to plod her way toward me.
“You brought someone?” asked Rahvey, turning back to me aghast. “Today?”
“I thought you wouldn’t mind,” I said.
My sister was flustered, torn between indignant speeches about how it was her job to make decisions about what was best for her family, even about involving non-Lani in the life of her children, and something softer, something grateful and pleased, even thrilled, which flashed through her unwary eyes. Before she could resolve the conflict, Bertha was there, and she was big and beaming, and Rahvey was embarrassed into nodding and smiling graciously.
“I am Bertha,” said Bertha, so loudly a bittern that had been motionless in the reeds took startled flight.
“Her hearing is not the best,” I said quickly to Rahvey, who had nearly fallen off her rock, “but she has training and she speaks good Feldish. She reads and writes. Knows math and geography—”
“Rahvey,” said my sister, offering her hand.
The black woman shook it once.
“Where are the children?” she roared, loud as the putative clavtar.
Rahvey nodded down the bank, and as Bertha followed her gaze, she gave me an uncertain look. I shrugged and left my sister sitting on her rock with Kalla, and Bertha followed me down to the other children.
The four of them, made five by Tanish, who had been half adopted by the girls as a kind of strange, dashing brother, were in a sandy hollow surrounded by long grass. Radesh was singing to the rest, and her sisters were clapping along, laughing to themselves. Aab was fiddling with something in the sand, barely aware of the others, as if trapped in a bubble of glass.
They gazed at Bertha wide-eyed when I introduced her as Miss Dinangwe, but she showed no self-consciousness or irritation, even when they giggled at her booming voice. In fact, she seemed to expand with patience, generosity, and goodwill, and it occurred to me how hard it must have been for such a person to spend her days slaving over a loom.
When they had introduced themselves, I said that I would leave them to get to know each other. While Bertha was producing a few ragged picture books from her bag, items which the children treated as exotic treasures from some distant land, I asked them if they had seen any black children in the area. The Drowning was exclusively a Lani district, and it was a matter of some concern on the rare occasions that Mahweni were glimpsed near the shanty. The girls shook their heads.
“On the other side of the river?” I tried, dropping to my haunches so I could look them in the face.
They stared at me.
“In the haunted place?” asked Radesh, standing up and turning to stare across the river. On the far bank you could just make out the rough stone top of an ancient, moldering structure through the marula trees. “No one goes there.”
Bertha was watching closely, studying our lips.
“Sometimes we see baboons or hippos,” said Jadary. “They come down to the river to drink, but we tell the village if the water is shallow enough for any to come across. The hippos, I mean. The baboons don’t cross, but we have them on this side too.”
“But no children in the last few days?” I said.
“There’s a clavtar over there,” said Radesh. “And ghosts.”
“Ghosts aren’t real,” said Jadary.
“The clavtar is,” said Radesh, as if that closed the subject.
“What about Aab?” I asked. The girl was watching me intently. “Have you seen anything?”
The child looked to Radesh, who was gazing across to the fragment of temple on the far side of the river looking fearful. Bertha extended a hand and touched her gently on her shoulder so the girl turned and looked at her.
As Bertha repeated my question, she gestured with her hands, making pictures and symbols with her fingers, which the girl considered seriously.
Small person. Over there. Seen?
Gazing at Bertha with a kind of wonder, Aab nodded once.
“You saw someone?” I asked.
The girl pointed emphatically over the water.
“She doesn’t know what you mean,” said Jadary. “She can’t hear, and she gets things confused.”
“No, she doesn’t,” said Radesh. “She’s not stupid.”
“She understands,” said Bertha, loud as ever, but soothing. “Don’t you, sweetness?”
Aab made a noise and pointed again at the distant temple, then stabbed with her index finger at each of her friends in turn.
“Children?” I said. “That’s what you mean, right? You saw children over there?”
“It was probably just monkeys,” said Jadary, sounding uncannily like her mother.
“How many?” asked Bertha, holding up her fingers to Aab and counting them off. She had gotten as far as six when Aab reached forward earnestly, her eyes serious, her body uncannily still, and grasped her hands.
“Six?” I said. “When?”
Bertha repeated the question carefully, signing instinctively, indicating the sun and then thumbing over her shoulder. The past.
Aab nodded, fascinated by the woman’s hands.
“One day? Two?” I tried, holding up my fingers as Radesh had done.
Aab reached forward and bent one finger back into my fist.
One.
“Yesterday,” I said.
* * *
I DID NOT KNOW the south bank side of the river once you left the docklands, and I set out uneasily, beginning with a railway journey by Blesbok class locomotive with nothing but third-class carriages and half a dozen open haulage trucks. I sat in the rearmost car facing backward, scarf bound round my head, and my old work satchel in my lap with the strap looped over my head and one shoulder for safety. There was an old Lani man who I thought might have been a village elder sitting up front, two white ranchers, and a dozen Mahweni laborers, most of whom slept the whole way. No one spoke, and everyone ignored me, which was how I liked it.
We went directly west, crossing the river at a narrow canyon four miles from Bar-Selehm on a single-track girder bridge, arcing south for another mile before I disembarked at a platform that hadn’t so much as a canopy to shade travelers from the blistering sun, but that did have a small steam crane with its own coal bunker for loading freight. The place was named only by mile marker, and I was the only one to get off there, startling a pair of female nyala grazing on the weedy ballast beside the track.
I took a path east past a cotton field and a ranch where tsobu grazed and then there was, for a while, nothing. On either side was tall, wild grass and stands of acacia and nikorel trees throbbing with hummingbirds. I moved carefully, quietly, constantly looking about. There could be all manner of animals in the area, everything from elephants and one-horns, to weancats and hyenas. Birds whose names I did not know swooped and called overhead as I plodded on, sweating heavily, feeling the weight of the pistol stowed in my satchel but knowing its single shot would be of little use against anything large that decided to investigate what I was. Or tasted like.
Not helping, I thought.
In fact I saw nothing but a pair of giraffes in the distance and a single mud-caked warthog, which minced away when it caught wind of me, its tail in the air, indignant and absurd on its little trotters. It reminded me a little of Agatha Markeson in her high-heeled shoes.
I didn’t know how far I would have to go exactly. I was following little more than a hunch bolstered by the reports Sureyna had shown me and what I could glean from her office’s maps about the land this side of the river. I didn’t know I would find what I was looking for, and a part of me wasn’t sure I wanted to. But about a mile from the railway, I came over a low rise and saw, off to my right in an open swath of wild grassland dotted with thorn trees, a flock of nbezu.
There were perhaps fifty of them, smaller and more goatlike than antelope, and they were tended by three men and a small dog, which patrolled the group watchfully. The men were young and black, dressed in the traditional skirt and shoulder-draped robes of the Unassimilated Tribes.
They were brothers, men who had saved my life once before. One was called Wayell, the other was Embiyeh, and the third, the one who came striding toward me and clasped me in a strong embrace to his bare, smooth chest while the others bowed and smiled as to some foreign dignitary, was Mnenga.