I SAID HIS NAME, then broke from the embrace and gazed at him, smiling.
“How are you?” I asked.
He shrugged and beamed, his face alive with joy as he took my hands and gazed at me.
“Well,” he said, “we had good rains and there is new grass, so the nbezu are very happy.”
He laughed then at the absurdity of what he was saying and hugged me to him again. I was overcome with relief, not just at seeing him, but at his easy acceptance of me, his pleasure that we were together again. I had feared he would be indignant, even angry with me, after our long silence. Now, feeling the warmth of his arms, his smile, I closed my eyes and clung to him.
But that was too easy, and I did not deserve easy. Not yet.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling away once more. “I meant to write to you, started to, but I couldn’t think what to say and wasn’t sure how to reach you so…” It sounded so stupid and ineffectual that I fished desperately in my pocket and pulled out the sorrel nut, showing it to him as if it was some luxorite gem encased in gold and crystal.
He frowned, baffled.
“Thank you,” he said. “I have some.”
“No,” I said. “This is one you gave me. I saved it to remind me of you. When I felt lonely or was missing you, I would take it out and hold it.”
“This nut,” he said.
“Yes,” I answered, feeling more idiotic by the second.
He tipped his head on one side thoughtfully, and we were suddenly conscious of his brothers watching.
“That is…” He sought for the word. “Nice?” he said. “Sweet. Yes. Sweet. Thank you.”
His gratitude pained me, his very kindness exposing my paltry gesture for what it was. I was getting it wrong again. The disappointment showed in my face, and he put his palm against my cheek. Tears of frustration were gathering in my eyes, but his touch stilled them, and I realized with a shock that he was smiling broader than ever. He leaned in close.
“You know,” he whispered, “that you can find these nuts everywhere.”
“They are not rare?” I asked, stunned out of my other confused feelings. “Hard to find?”
He took his eyes from mine and glanced quickly round, his gaze alighting on a shrublike tree covered in new leaves.
“Some there,” he said, turning and nodding to his left. “Another bush over there.”
I frowned again, eyes brimming, and then he was holding me again and laughing till I joined in, till my guilt and anxiety melted in the simple joy of being with him once more.
“Better?” he said at last.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Now,” he said, “tell me why you are here.”
I hesitated, but there was no critique, no judgment in the remark, so I took a breath and told him about the refugees, who they were, why they had come here, and how I had tried to find them. He nodded gravely without asking why I was looking for them. That accepting disinterest was part of his special kindness and grace, and feeling it, like the warmth of his smile, I experienced another ripple of shame that I had—again—sought him out only when I needed his help.
I took his hand, smooth on the back, calloused on the palm, as if he were the brother I never had, and in doing so, I remembered wondering if for him home was less about place and more about people. I could not read his smile for subtleties because it contained nothing more than happiness that I was with him, and for a moment—a wonderfully content and uncomplicated moment—I felt the same.
At last, I released his hands.
“We have heard of these people, or some like them,” he said, after consulting with his brothers in their own language. “Quundu, I think. We think they are closer to the river that way.” He pointed east, back toward the city, toward the ancient temple over the water from the Drowning.
I nodded grimly. The haunted place. For all his pleasure at seeing me, he couldn’t hide the ripple of unease that thinking of it gave him. It was at least as dreadful for him as it was for me.
“I need to go and look for them,” I said. “But I cannot speak to them. I was hoping—”
“I will come,” he said.
And that was Mnenga. Whatever fear of the place he might have, however inconvenient it would be, however dangerous, he would come. No hesitation.
“Thank you,” I said. “I do not deserve your friendship.”
Rarely had I said anything that felt more deeply true, though he rubbished the remark with a wave of his hand.
“My brothers must stay here with the nbezu,” he said. “They are too stupid to leave alone. The nbezu,” he clarified, “not my brothers. Although…”
His face split into that wide grin of his, and he turned to Embiyeh, translating quickly till they were both laughing, heads thrown back, roaring with delight. Wayell just smiled, and when he spoke, he looked concerned. Mnenga answered him shortly, again waving away whatever concerns his brother had raised, touching him on the shoulder and speaking slowly into his face, till Wayell pursed his lips and nodded with solemn acceptance.
“These people,” Mnenga said. “The Quundu. We were also looking for them. The elders of my village have heard of them coming here from the north. Those who try to cross the desert die, so some have come by boat around the coast. But if they are caught by the city people, they are sent back, even though where they come from is very terrible, and many will die. You know there is a war there, yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But the city sends them back anyway,” he mused, shaking his head.
I nodded, thinking of the way he divided the world not by tribe, class, or race but by “city” and “not city.”
“If you found them, what were you going to do?” I asked.
“We were supposed to tell our village elders where they were. That’s all,” he said, dissatisfied. “I think we should do more. Help to keep them safe from the city.”
“Some people in the city want to help them too,” I said.
He gave me a doubtful look.
“Not many,” I conceded. “Some.”
He nodded at that and managed a smile, which said that was as much as could be hoped for. Then he shouldered a roll of fabric lashed with twine and suspended from a hide cord, and picked up his short-shafted assegai. I hovered awkwardly while he said his farewells, then I shook his brothers by the hands and followed Mnenga as he checked the position of the sun and headed east.
“They did not want you to go,” I said.
“The temple is an old place where many dead are,” he said. “We like to leave it to them. And to the animals.”
“I heard there was a clavtar in the area,” I said, hoping he would laugh the idea off.
“There is,” he said, hefting his spear thoughtfully. “We have heard it. Let us hope we do not see it.”
“And if we do?”
“We will die,” he said, with a shrug and a half smile at my astonished face. “Probably,” he added, as if that would make me feel much better.
“Probably?” I said, giving him a pointed look.
“Possibly,” he said. “We may survive. Only be very badly injured.”
“I think you can stop now,” I said, giving him a grin. “I missed you,” I added on impulse, realizing just how much even as the words formed.
“I also,” he answered. “Every day.”
He smiled, but sadly, and I had to look away. It was several minutes before I asked him to tell me about the temple.
“It is very old,” he said. “We call it Umoya ithempeli. Long ago it was a place of … like a village where everyone comes for festivals.”
“A place of community?”
“Community,” he said. “Yes. Before the white people came. The dead were left here.”
“Buried?”
“Only the chiefs of their tribes would go into the ground,” said Mnenga. “The rest were left to feed the animals.” He caught my look and smiled. “It is the spirit that matters for us. The body is just like a … embewini. The outside of a seed or fruit.”
“A shell? A husk?”
“Husk, yes,” he said. “It is not important.”
The idea was not so very far from those I had been raised with in the Drowning. We burned our dead, but sometimes the fire was only a token gesture, and there was a lot left for the jackals and crocodiles.
“So why does the place upset you?” I asked.
“We remember our ancestors,” he said. “We keep them in our thoughts, and we celebrate them in festivals. They watch out for us from the spirit world. But if we forget them, they become angry, dangerous.”
“The people buried by the temple have been forgotten?” I asked.
“Who is here to remember them?” he asked. “All the people here died when the white men came. Died, or were moved to other places, their dead left alone. For three hundred years, they have been left alone: no festivals, no sacrifices, no one to remember what they did.”
“This will make them angry?”
Mnenga shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps. Perhaps none of it is true.”
He looked sad and annoyed at himself, at his confused and diluted faith, as if he had lost something but was not sure how. Without thinking, I took his large hand in mine again, so that he gave me a quick, startled look, then nodded in acknowledgment, and walked in silence beside me.
It was over an hour before we began to cut north toward the river. I felt Mnenga’s unease deepen as we did so, particularly as the land began to descend and the vegetation grew thick, lush, and pulsing with the life of the wetlands below. Insects whined about our heads, and Mnenga paused to pick broad green leaves from an unremarkable-looking plant, which he crushed in his hands and smeared on my face and arms. The juice was slightly sticky and smelled of oranges and spice.
“Keeps the mosquitoes away,” he said. “Mostly.” He frowned as he looked about him, and I was conscious that he had raised the tip of his spear as if he might need to use it at a moment’s notice. “Stay close,” he said, “and stay quiet. There are many dangerous animals here as well as the clavtar.”
I had never seen a clavtar and knew few of my age who had, though some of the Lani elders had stories of days before they had been confined to the south bank of the Kalihm. I had seen pictures, of course, but the animals themselves were rare, hunted close to extinction during the initial conquest by Belrand when Bar-Selehm as it was today had first taken shape. They had retreated into areas where people were few and game was plentiful, but their names were still whispered with awe and horror throughout the city. The clavtar is a kind of lion unique to the region, gray as steel and very large, three or four times the body weight of the most impressive weancat. Exotic though they were, I could live a lifetime without seeing one in person.
The first sign that we were entering what had been the old temple grounds was a collapsed ring of stone that looked like it may once have been thatched with reeds from the riverbank. The ground was scorched in parts as if by lightning strikes or brush fires, and the whole had an air of the desolate and abandoned. The air was still, and I heard no birdcalls, so that the silence felt weighted and significant. I drew the ornamental pistol from my satchel and checked that it was loaded, drawing a doubtful look from Mnenga. I shrugged, but—feeling no more comfortable for holding the weapon—said nothing. We both knew it wouldn’t stop a clavtar.
The temple itself, if that was what it was, was an uneven stone pyramid made of steps, rounded and irregular on the sides. It was flanked by tumbledown alcoves sporting roughly carved faces, all eyes and teeth. It wasn’t clear if they were human or animal, but they leered with undeniable menace. Mnenga made a private gesture, both ceremonial and fearful, an instinctive flicker of the hands to ward off evil. If it was intended to make me feel better, it didn’t.
The place was eerily silent, the air itself dead, though I also felt an unsettling presence as if the very stones had eyes. With each step we took, the quiet menace of the place swelled, but I heard nothing beyond our own footfalls in the dry grass, as if something was holding its breath, waiting. Maybe it was the wildness of the place getting to my urban heart. Or maybe it was the past, all that had once been here before the whites came and reduced it to ghosts and echoes. Whatever it was, it was dreadful, and I stayed close to Mnenga, wishing I could hear his breath, his heartbeat in this strange dead place.
The top of the pyramid was a crag so that it was almost possible to believe that the structure had not been made by human hands at all, but was an accident of geology, a part of the earth that had speared up through the ground. It was the portion of the temple visible from the Drowning. If the lost children were still in the area, this was where we would find them. I felt a sudden and powerful urge to get them and go, run back to the city and never look back. Mnenga’s tales of angry spirits haunting these stones seemed far more plausible now that we were among them, the light softening as the sun began its descent in the west.
Should have set out earlier—
Somewhere off to our left, a twig snapped.
Mnenga stopped in his tracks, hefting the spear. I froze, the one-shot pistol in my hand feeling dangerous, like a badly trained dog as likely to turn on me as it was to protect me. For a long moment, we waited like that, feeling the standing heat of the day singing in the dry bushes, and then I caught movement in my peripheral vision, a slight and cautious shifting followed by a sudden stillness. I turned slowly toward it, feeling the sweat running down the back of my neck, and looked.
It was no larger than a jackal, but stood on spindly legs, tan striped vertically with thin white lines. A nyala female, lacking the male’s powerful neck and intimidating horns.
I breathed out with relief, and the nyala walked on, revealing, behind it, a motionless black boy who was staring directly at me. He was wearing a ragged, dirt-streaked smock, and his feet were bare. He might have been eight or nine, though his eyes were older. He was gaunt, the skin of his face tight so that the skull showed through, and he was watching me, not moving one iota. He stared as the nyala had, gauging the threat, poised to leap into sprinting retreat.
Slowly I reached behind me and pushed the pistol into my waistband, bringing my empty hand back where he could see it, fingers spread. Following suit, Mnenga lowered his spear and raised his free hand in a gesture of calm.
The boy still stared, eyes moving between us, then widening with horror.
“It’s all right,” I said soothingly. “We’re here to help. Mnenga, tell him.”
But Mnenga was processing what I had missed, that the boy’s terror was not about us. It was about what was behind us. With a surge of dread, I forced myself to revolve and look into the face of the clavtar that was stalking toward us through the grass.