I WAS NOT ALLOWED in the Drowning, so after my visit to the hospital, I took my weekly meeting with my sister Rahvey at the old monkey temple where my father’s remains were buried. I waited for her under a sambar tree a few yards from where I had first met Mnenga, the Mahweni herder who, with his brothers, had saved my life only three months before.
I had not seen him since. Though I had sat down to write letters to him twice, I never sent them. Where would he be? Would he even be able to read Feldish? His absence felt the way I imagined a much older, dearer friend’s would. My forced separation from the Drowning was doubly hard without him, and underscored my isolation—something which normally suited my temperament, but now felt strangely disorienting. I had never been one to find much comfort in community, particularly when I felt constrained by it. Not long ago, I would have imagined my current independence from the gang and the Drowning as a kind of paradise. But perhaps because the Drowning was now forbidden to me, I found that, for the first time I could remember, I actually missed it.
If so, I told myself, it is because you’ve forgotten what living there was really like.
I breathed in, catching the edge of spice on the air drifting up from the shanty’s cooking fires—cardamom, I thought, and something sweet and woody like cinnamon. I frowned, considered sharpening my kukri, and cursed when I remembered that it had been lost in the river. I would need to get another.
The summer seemed to be already upon us. The land lay under a dry, searing heat, which built as the day went on, broken only by afternoon storms that blew in like angry gods, railed and stamped for an hour or two, and then vanished. Nights remained warm, and the temple air held a sweet rankness that hung about the trees and flowers thick as incense. It smelled of life, which was quite an achievement for a cemetery.
It was all very Lani: circular and timeless, balanced, bittersweet, and unchanging. Or rather, almost unchanging. I was not welcome in the Drowning because I had caused the death of my eldest sister, Vestris, and broken my blood oath: in the right light, the traces of that promise could still be seen scored into my cheeks. Rahvey had four daughters living with her now, and that had been my doing too. More balance, more tears blended with the laughter. I had wept for Vestris, even though she had tried to kill me and had killed others. I knew as I dried my eyes that I was really weeping for myself, for a version of my past, an image of the world which had turned out not to be true. Maybe grief was always like that. I had lost a sister, but Rahvey got to keep a daughter who would otherwise have been given up to the hard life of the Pancaris orphanage. I took that as a kind of victory, even if my banishment meant that I was now the orphan.
Balance, I mused, one child finding a home while I was cut adrift, sent to stay in rented rooms paid for by somebody else, no longer even the steeplejack I had been in the gang on Seventh Street. For a moment, I almost missed that too. Not the place itself, dirty and teeming with noisy boys as it always was, but a sense of belonging and a corner of the old weavers’ shed which, however fiercely I’d had to protect it, I had called mine.
Home.
I brushed the thought away like a hogfly, seeing it for the absurdity it was. If I could get nostalgic for Seventh Street and the brutal life I had endured there under Morlak, I was getting soft and stupid.
I spat into the dusty earth and rubbed the soot-speckled wetness in with the toe of my boot.
Normally I would have done my Kathahry exercises as I waited, but just walking there had taken me twice as long as usual, and every part of me ached and throbbed. My shoulder, painfully wrenched into place by a burly doctor at the hospital, had been strapped up in a sling. It could have been much worse, they told me, as if I had won a prize, but it would be days before I could get rid of the sling and weeks before I got a full range of motion in the joint again. At any other time, I would have resented their diagnosis: I lived, after all, to climb, to test my muscles and sinews till I felt my blood sing. Yet the man with the pick and the smile had scared me. I had been utterly powerless, incapable of defending myself against someone so skilled and so deliberate, and I had retreated into my head. My body could not be trusted, and I was glad of the excuse not to use it. Instead, I lay on the dusty ground on my back, my right hand palm down, my left crossed over my chest, eyes shut, listening to the vervet monkeys chattering in the treetops and feeling the earth breathe.
“Auntie Ang!”
I opened my eyes and lifted myself up onto my right elbow. I tried to keep the hurt out of my face, but Jadary, Rahvey’s second-youngest daughter, gave my sling a shrewd look.
“What happened to you?”
“I had a fall, but I’m all right,” I said.
Rahvey looked me up and down, refusing to give away any sign of concern as she cradled Kalla in her arms. I got to my feet.
“Let me see her,” I said, stooping to the warm bundle and kissing the child on her forehead. She squirmed vaguely in her sleep. She wasn’t a person yet, or at least not one I could see, but she was also not the helpless infant she had been during my erratic and incompetent “care.” Before, she had been all fragility and potential. Now, she was a stirring, curious awareness that seemed to age and mature before my very eyes. Her growth was beautiful and terrifying and felt both right and sad, in the best Lani tradition. “And the rest,” I added, going from daughter to daughter and kissing them each in turn. Lastly, on strange impulse, I did the same to my sister, who stepped back with a quizzical look.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head at my obvious injuries, and pushing away the image of the weeping black woman straining to get to her dead child on the raft. “I’m just glad to see you all. Here.”
I fumbled in my pocket for the purse of coins I had brought, but Rahvey glared at me and shooed the three older girls away.
“Go and play,” she said. “See who can find the oldest grave.”
“What?” I said, as soon as they were out of earshot.
“I don’t want them to know you are giving us money,” she said, still frowning as if I had done something wrong. “I don’t want them thinking they are living off charity.”
My turn to frown. This was typical of Rahvey. She didn’t want handouts, but neither would she acknowledge that her husband was shiftless and qualified for nothing that would put food on the table.
“This was part of the arrangement,” I said. “So no one can complain that a fourth daughter is too much of a drain on your household.”
“You don’t have to wave it like a flag,” she shot back. Her pride was stung.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe one day the girls will find work of their own and you won’t need my … whatever I can bring.”
Rahvey harrumphed and sat on the ground beside me, gathering her skirts. Maybe her annoyance wasn’t really about the money. I saw the way her eyes lingered on my sling.
“Doing what?” she said, as if to make sure I hadn’t guessed she was concerned about me. “I had thought that Radesh might find a place at Sorenson’s, but they are saying that no child under ten can work there anymore. Is that true?”
It was. The law was newly passed, pushed by a bipartisan committee on which Willinghouse sat. He said this was a breakthrough in labor law designed to prevent the exploitation of the poor. I didn’t know about that, but a lot of families in the Drowning counted on the meager income from positions that would now be closed to them. I shifted in my seat and just said, “That’s what I heard too.”
“Mrs. Singh’s girls both lost their jobs,” said Rahvey. “They don’t know what they will do. You can’t blame Sorenson’s. They have always been a good employer. It’s the government.”
“Weren’t the children being paid a fraction of what adults would get for the same work?”
“So? They were being paid. That’s the point,” said Rahvey. “Now they have nothing. Mr. Singh hasn’t been able to work since the accident, and Mrs. Singh was already working at the fruit stall on the Etembe market and cleaning houses. In Morgessa,” she added, as if that showed the full indignity of the situation. Morgessa was a respectable working-class district in the northwest corner of the city, but it was also largely black. “And her with mouths to feed and a house to keep. It’s scandalous!”
I watched a red hornbill, its beak as long as its body, take flight across the cemetery and alight on a roughly carved grave marker. I didn’t know what to say to Rahvey. The thought of trying to talk to her about the city’s various ills wearied me. But there was something I wanted to discuss and now seemed as good a time as any.
“The other part of the arrangement,” I said, “when I brought Kalla to you, I mean, was that she would one day go to school.”
Rahvey was immediately on her guard. She turned to watch the laughing children as if suddenly concerned for their safety.
“Yes,” she said. “So? Not now.”
“Well, obviously,” I replied, “but maybe, since the older girls can’t work, it might be worth considering for them.”
“Send Radesh to school?” she repeated, incredulous. “Where?”
“Hillstreet or Truth Mountain,” I ventured.
“Black schools,” said Rahvey dismissively. “And Truth Mountain is run by Pancaris. I thought you didn’t like them?”
It wasn’t a real question. She was merely throwing up roadblocks.
“If the girls were educated, they would have more options when they are old enough to work,” I said. “In the process, they are off your hands, learning about the world, learning to read and do math—”
“They can learn about the world right here,” said Rahvey, her faced closed. “Or is that not the world you want them to learn about?” I couldn’t think of a response to that. Rahvey nodded thoughtfully as if I had said something hurtful. “Right,” she said. “You just keep the money coming, doing … whatever it is you do, and I’ll look after my daughters.”
“I’m not trying to take them away from you, Rahvey,” I said.
“You couldn’t,” she snapped back.
“I know that,” I said. “You are a good mother. I’ve told you that before.”
“Then why do you always question the way I raise them?”
“Because you are too much a slave to habit,” I said, my anger blossoming suddenly. “Because you still assume the old ways are the best even as the world changes around us. Some people travel halfway across the country to be in the city specifically so they can send their children to school and build a better life for them—”
“Different,” said Rahvey. “You don’t know it will be better.”
Something in her tone stripped me of my fury. She looked down at the sleeping baby in her arms, and her face held not defiance, but doubt and fear.
“That’s true,” I said, softening my voice. “Different is not necessarily better. But when what you see ahead is—” She shot me a warning glance, and I changed tack. “Sometimes a change is worth the risk.”
No reply. She seemed to think about this as her gaze slid back to Kalla. She smiled faintly, like someone catching the distant strains of an old, familiar song.
* * *
THE CITY PROPER WAS packed with factories where the Lani girls could work one day. I was wary of being seen there, around my old stomping ground, and decided to cross the river using the incomplete suspension bridge. Under a sooty pall that hung over the riverbank like a shroud, I walked up to Dagenham Steps, almost directly across from the spot where I had been attacked the previous evening. I looked out toward the city side, scanning the bank with my pocket spyglass. The fog hadn’t thickened yet, but I could make out a pod of about fifteen hippos, one of which may have been the one that had menaced me the night before. Down by the jetty, the coast guard boats were moored and quiet. There was no sign of either the refugees or the makeshift vessel they had arrived on, and I wondered whether they had perhaps crossed over to this side. Considering this as I looked up and down the south bank shingle, I saw something out of place. Three pairs of water-stained sandals were lined carefully up on the shore, as if their owners—children, judging by the size—had just gone swimming. But no one was in the water, and the sandals each had a clutch of flowers in them.
I wandered to where a lone, helmeted white police officer kept watch over the scene. He ignored me till I spoke.
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The people who arrived this morning.”
“Friends of yours, were they?” he said. A joke, of sorts. “Rounded up and ferried over to this side and a camp in Blackstairs till the politicians decide who’s going to pay their transit back. Well out of the way so they don’t stink up the city.”
“There was a woman,” I said, not sure how to phrase it. “She seemed … I think her child … Did any of them die?”
He looked at me directly then and shrugged deliberately, defiantly.
“Rusty pieces of kanti,” he said, daring me to argue. “What kind of idiot would think you could go hundred of miles at sea in those?”
“I don’t suppose they get a lot of boat choices,” I said.
The policeman flexed his back and tipped his head from side to side. His neck made a sharp popping sound while he thought of a witty comeback.
“Should find better travel agents, shouldn’t they?” he said, smirking.
I bit the inside of my cheek till I could taste blood.
He glanced down at me. “What?” he demanded. “I don’t recall inviting them, do you? I don’t see why law-abiding citizens of Bar-Selehm should have to deal with the likes of them. Coming here,” he muttered scornfully, “taking our jobs, bringing their drugs, their thieving, hooligan children—”
“Maybe if you knew more about what they were running from—” I began. He stepped toward me, one hand dropping to the truncheon he wore on a leather thong at his waist. “You questioning the judgment of a uniformed officer?” he asked with studied pleasantness, as if I was fulfilling something he had dearly wanted to do for weeks. “A Lani street urchin—or worse—with the brass to contradict a member of the city’s constabulary! Tempting fate, little girl.”
“Is there a problem, Constable?”
The voice—male, authoritative—came from behind me. I turned to see a black man in a navy blue soldier’s uniform trimmed with gold and crimson. He did not smile when he saw me, but that was because of the policeman. He knew me well enough. His name was Tsanwe Emtezu, Corporal in the King’s Third Feldesland Infantry Regiment, and we had had dealings before.
“No, sir,” said the policeman, slightly discomfited. “This girl was being a mite impertinent, but I see no reason to pursue the matter.”
“Really?” said Emtezu. “In my experience, Miss Sutonga has been nothing but respectful.”
“You know her?” he said, his voice mixed with incredulity and a disdain for the soldier as well as for me.
Emtezu’s chiseled face tightened as if he had bitten down hard, then flickered into the briefest and most knowing of smiles.
“I have that privilege,” he said.
The policeman’s smirk was barely concealed. “In my experience,” he said, “getting to know a Lani street whore doesn’t take much privilege.”
Emtezu didn’t speak, and his face did not change. He took a single long stride and, with an extraordinary economy of movement, gripped the policeman by the throat with one hand and twisted his truncheon arm up behind his back with the other. The constable’s eyes widened like dinner plates.
“That,” said Emtezu, his voice low and conversational, “was disrespectful. I believe you owe the young lady an apology.”
“That’s not necessary,” I said, meaning it.
Emtezu glanced at me, held the helpless policeman for one long second, then released him. The man crumpled, coughing, and when he looked up his face was murderous.
“I’ll report you!” he hissed, backing away. “You see if I don’t.”
Emtezu said nothing as the policeman finally turned from us and began a blundering retreat, massaging his throat.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said.
“The name of the Glorious Third still carries some weight,” he said with a half shrug. “He won’t report me.”
“I mean you didn’t need to do it,” I said, torn between pleasure at seeing him again and irritation at his high-handed defense of my honor. “I was perfectly fine.”
“He was rude.”
“If you arrest every man in the city who is rude to Lani women, you’re going to need a lot more prisons.”
“True,” he said, adding stiffly, “I apologize if I overstepped my bounds.”
I shook my head.
“It is good to see you,” I said, beaming. “How is your wife? Your children?”
“Well,” he said, stooping to brush a fine gray dust from his regulation boots, “Clara, my wife, is looking for work. That’s why I am here.” He paused and checked the stained clock on the tower of the Sarnulf paper mill. “She should be finished. Walk with me. I am sure you have many interesting things to tell me. I confess, I have looked for your name in the papers many times since we last spoke, but it seems you have managed to keep what they call a low profile. I doubt this means you have been inactive.”
I just grinned at him, matching his measured step as we moved up from the river and into the street behind the waterfront factories, which was choked with wagons pulled by blinkered horses and orleks. The river at our backs vanished behind ungainly brick structures. Once red, now tar-black with ingrained soot, uneven, and marked with clumsy towers and eccentric cupolas, the whole thing looked like a landscape thrown together by a child with blocks.
“I see,” he said, with a shrug and half smile. “I will let you keep your secrets. There is this,” he added, tapping the stripes on his shoulder. “Sergeant.”
“Everyone’s getting promoted,” I said. He gave me a sidelong look, and I shook my head, smiling. “Congratulations. It was well deserved.”
“Not everyone thinks so,” he said, “but it spares their blushes.”
The commanders of Emtezu’s regiment had been involved in some shady business, which had reflected badly on the outfit.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Certainly.”
“What do you know about machine guns?”
He gave me a curious glance and another half shrug.
“What do you want to know? We have four at the regiment. I do not like them particularly.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Wasteful weapons,” he said. “A rifleman knows he has one bullet before he has to reload, so he makes it count. Machine gunners think that since they can fire three or four times for the rifleman’s one, they don’t need to be accurate.”
“If someone was to make a better machine gun, what would they focus on?”
“Speed of fire,” he said. “You could make the weapon lighter, more accurate, or with greater range, but to make it fire faster without overheating or jamming is what the soldiers want.”
“Jamming?”
“The cartridges go into a hopper above the gun,” he said. “You turn a handle to feed each round into the weapon, but the cartridges get turned around or go in two at a time.… They lock up the mechanism and make it impossible to fire. Wait here for one moment.”
We were standing outside a great brick building with high windows and a tall, round chimney from which dark smoke drifted on the morning air, feeding the infamous Bar-Selehm smog. Emtezu had hurried to where his wife stood with another black woman, bigger, stronger looking. I watched the three of them talking, remembering that awful night when I had seen one of those hopper-fed machine guns in action, the noise, the deadly efficiency of the thing.…
And then Emtezu was hugging his wife and waving me over.
“She got the job!” he said. “Clara, you remember Miss Sutonga.”
“I do,” she said, offering me her hand. “And this is our neighbor, Bertha Dinangwe. She arranged my interview.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, offering my hand to the woman.
“What?” she shouted back.
“I said I’m pleased to meet you,” I repeated.
The woman looked vaguely at Clara.
“She says she’s pleased to meet you,” Clara yelled. Turning back to me, she said apologetically, “it is so loud inside. I hadn’t realized it would be so loud. The machines. You can’t hear yourself think.”
She ended with a look at her husband that was loaded with something more complex than the simple joy which had been there a moment before: resignation, perhaps, sadness? It was good that she had gotten the job, but she didn’t want it. Not really.
“What does the factory make?” I asked, trying to bring something of her delight back.
“Cloth,” she said simply. “Cotton cloth. In two weeks, I will be a weaver.”
“What?” asked Bertha.
“A WEAVER,” said Clara.
“No,” boomed Bertha, smiling. “You’ll be a WEAVER.”
“Yes,” said Clara, her smile tiring. “I will. It’s good to have work.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
I turned and caught Sergeant Emtezu watching me shrewdly, his eyes full of questions. He said nothing, but I knew he was thinking about machine guns.