Heart of Light (11 page)

She crossed her arms and waited, having given him the power, but also the unavoidable duty, to reply.

But he looked bewildered and sighed, and ducked his head. “I must go,” he said. “I must go ask someone.”

“Someone?”

He shrugged. “I will return shortly.”

Leaving her in the narrow little room with its British trappings, he made his way through the hallway to the back of the house, where she could dimly see, in the gloom, a spiral staircase climbing upward.

“Do not follow me,” Kitwana said. “We must keep levels of secrecy amid the Hyena Men, so that if one is caught the whole organization doesn't tumble into disarray.”

She nodded and frowned, because she'd never had any intention of following him.

Instead, she stood in the living room and imagined her father's house, her mother's face. She imagined how her mother would look, happy and relieved to have Nassira back when she returned.

Afraid of what the colonial authorities might do to her family, Nassira had just disappeared, without telling anyone where she was going or giving them notice once she'd gone. She wondered how her father had taken her disappearance. With a pang, she remembered that her father counted on her to marry and give him a son by marriage who might then pronounce the proper rites at his death.

Nassira had long passed marrying age. And what Masai man would offer for a woman who'd lived almost a year in London?

From outside the house, the sounds of Cairo disturbed her thoughts. A thin chant, calling the faithful to prayer, intruded on her recollection of her mother's soft, welcoming voice. A noise of footsteps, a woman's voice calling a stray child, interrupted her thoughts of home.

Then loud voices echoed from upstairs, men's voices yelling at each other. They sounded angry, yet at a distance and separated by a floor, she could not tell what language they spoke, much less what they said. All she knew was that two men were arguing and she would wager one of the men was Kitwana. His rumbling tones came through, irate, full of certainty.

Something crashed, like a piece of furniture pushed down, and then both voices started up again, loudly.

Afraid they would kill each other and leave her not knowing where to go or to whom to take her hard-earned intelligence, she started toward the stairs. But before she reached the first step, a door slammed upstairs, and fast steps echoed, descending.

Looking up, Nassira saw Kitwana. He was frowning like someone who was being forced to take bitter medicine. Footsteps upstairs reassured Nassira that no murder had occurred. And then Kitwana came face-to-face with her. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“It sounded like you needed help up there.” She gestured with her head toward the upper floor.

He composed himself. “I was only discussing . . . er . . . what to do.”

“I've done what I was sent to do,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“You cannot leave. Oh, you've fulfilled what we first asked of you, but times have changed. Our numbers have been reduced. We need everyone.”

“If it's the compass stone you want, I can steal it before I go. I've seen the trunks Oldhall keeps locked with magical seals. I could break into them.” Warming to her subject, she continued eagerly. “And then you could find the ruby yourselves. No fight, as the Englishmen would still be fumbling in the dark looking for the compass stone. And you could concentrate the power of all of Africa onto the Hyena Men. Then you could rebuild the continent, present a credible opposing force to the invaders. I could be free. Now.”

Kitwana looked at her and frowned, not as if he were angry but as if he couldn't quite understand her words.

“No,” he said. “There are . . . uh . . . we've made other plans. Different plans.” He pointed upward. “He says we must keep the British group intact and follow them, without their ever being sure where we are. He says if we interfere with them, chances are the British will crack down on us and that would be disastrous, weakened as we are. We'd lose and Africa would lose. All hope would be gone.”

“What plans?”

He looked cowed, like a beaten dog. Or like a man with an unbearable headache, which would explain the way his fingers kept massaging his forehead. “Plans that he's outlined. My superior in the organization,” he said. And then, defensively, “Hyena Men have been killed by a strange force both here and in London. We don't know the force, but we think it's the work of the white men who are afraid of us, as the lion who wins by day is afraid of the hyena that moves in the night.” He looked up at her and, despite the force of his words, his almond-shaped eyes looked apologetic, as if he knew he spoke nonsense. “I've been told I cannot tell you the whole of the plan. There is a traitor in our midst and we don't know who.”

Nassira drew herself up. “I am no traitor.”

“I tried to tell—” Kitwana started, then sighed. “I don't think you are, else why bring us this intelligence? But there are others who do not believe as I do. For now your orders are to keep watch on the white man and his wife, and come back here tonight. We'll let you know more later.”

“I should go home,” Nassira said, half in pique, half in earnest. “None of you have the authority to stop me. I must go home. My father has a hundred cows and I used to know them all by name. Now I do not know which have died and which new ones have been born since I've been away.”

Something like overwhelming sadness crossed the man's eyes. It was as though a large, dark bird had taken flight between his eyes and his mind. And what he felt made his voice tremble as he said, “I'd like to go home, too. But we neither of us can go home until we free Africa. As we speak, our brothers are being killed in Congo, massacred throughout this land that once was ours. And all so that the Europeans can find new places to grow their cotton and their coffee—to plant their luxuries and improve their commerce. We owe it to our brothers to free them. We who can.”

He swallowed hard and Nassira would swear he was fighting not to cry.

As she walked to the door, she wondered what homeland in his memory called forth such emotion and longing.

HOMESICKNESS

Kitwana shook his head as he closed the door.

I am Nassira, daughter of Nedera, of the Masai
, she'd said. He smiled at the memory, then flinched, as he thought that he could never introduce himself that way. Oh, he could give his father's name and the name of his village. But what would people think if he said, “I am Kitwana, son of the priest-chief Wamungunda, of no people, from the village with no name”?

Ever since he'd left at thirteen to live with his mother's brother, amid his mother's people, the Zulu, Kitwana had doubted what he had learned as a child—that his native village stood at the center of the universe, or that his father was the great priest of an ancient god.

For one, he didn't remember discerning any great aura of power around his aged father's head. He didn't remember his father performing any miracles or using magic in any great way. He lit the fire, yes, and he called the rain, and sometimes he healed cows or helped them to a speedy birth. But sometimes the cows still died and sometimes so did people, despite his father's ministrations.

The village was a poor assemblage of fifty houses—built of stone, granted, but more comfortless inside and colder than the Masai constructions of cow dung and branches. They'd colonized a plateau atop a tall mountain and there they resided with their cows and tended their fields.

His people had survived untold centuries, sure—long enough to have a language not related to any of the other languages in Africa. But it was not, as Kitwana's father claimed, because some great power had protected them. They survived, Kitwana knew now, because only one road provided access to the village, and it was narrow enough to be blocked with a giant boulder. And because there were both pasturing fields and freshwater springs atop the plateau.

Invaders usually didn't even attempt to climb to the village, reading the situation as impossible. In the consolidation wars of the Zulus—and the Zulus' fights with English and Boer—over the last generation, refugees had been swept up to the village's doorstep. But no one had ever attacked the village. Not successfully.

Kitwana thought the village survived only because it was well protected by geography and it didn't fight or take sides in wars. They only subsisted by being cowards and not fighting. Kitwana had chosen to fight.

“Kitwana,” Shenta called from the stairs. His ponderous steps sounded on the way down.

Shenta was an older man—thirty or so to Kitwana's twenty-two. Though he remained strong-looking, with broad shoulders and a look of authority, his age showed in the weight around his middle, his sagging cheeks, his sunken eyes. It made him look like the bulldogs that white men kept and that Kitwana had seen in his travels through England. And, like a bulldog, Shenta could bite down and never let go—of an idea, a concept or a plan.

“Is she gone?” he asked.

Kitwana nodded and Shenta came all the way down the stairs and into full view. He wore an old shirt, a pair of ragged green shorts, and a pair of cheap loafers—doubtless the discard of some European functionary—cut down into slippers.

“What did you tell her?” He had the sort of low, raspy voice that held a menacing tone in everything he said, even the most casual of his pronouncements.

Kitwana shrugged. “I told her to go back and follow the white man and his woman, and make sure they are at the hotel. Then to return here tonight for a great magic ritual.”

“Good,” Shenta said. “Good.”

Shenta was an enigma to Kitwana. Like Kitwana's father, he didn't seem to have as much magical power as it would take to rule over such a complex organization. Yet Shenta was the highest Hyena Man that anyone knew.

“I don't know what you plan to do, either,” Kitwana said. “She offered to steal the compass stone and I thought this was good, because—”

“Nonsense,” Shenta interrupted. “I told you that if we stole the compass stone, then the Englishmen would know that we're after the ruby. Then they could ambush us and use our supposed theft to come after all the Hyena Men till they eradicate us.” He glared at Kitwana. “You keep forgetting, pup, that we're hyenas and not lions. The strength of armies and an organized force is not with us. The greater strength is the enemy's, and they're the ones that rule by day, the ones that fight openly and in full light. We're the small ones, the cunning ones, who fight by night and stealthily.

“We'll not steal the stone,” Shenta continued. “Instead, we'll do something so secret that though they know it's been done, they'll never be able to trace us. The only way the Europeans would then be able to bring justice on us would be if they admitted their mission and laid out their secret ambition for all to see.” He paused as if for effect and stared at Kitwana with something like pride in his gaze. “We'll set a magical bind onto the Europeans. And then we'll be able to follow them without their knowing we're following.”

“A bind?” Kitwana asked. His headache was worse, pounding in thick pulses, almost visible like a smoking fire beneath his vision. He must have heard wrong.

Magical binds were dark magic, illegal in most of the civilized and, for that matter, the uncivilized world. A magical bind was an invasion of someone else's mind, stripping it of its natural defenses, a layer of what made them individuals. While it allowed the setter to follow the recipient everywhere, it also allowed him to enter that mind, to take it over, to erase it, to make it his. It made the victim little more than a walking corpse with little awareness of himself. Someone under a magical bind would eventually become the helpless slave of the person or group who'd set it.

Among the Zulus, the setting of magical binds was punishable by death. And even in Kitwana's village, it was the only death sentence that Kitwana ever remembered his father supporting. Kitwana's father had disdained the use of force to punish theft, or murder, or even genocide, and had been known to offer refuge on his mountain to deposed tyrants and infamous killers. Yet he had turned away a witch doctor accused of mind-binding his wife. And he'd told Kitwana such people deserved to die because what they did to their victims was worse than death and it reduced the victim to something nonhuman.