Heart of Light (25 page)

“Out, now. Out everyone,” Kitwana said. “Out. They're
coming.”

One by one, twenty Hyena Men—Nassira the only female member present—filed silently from where they'd been lurking, in the shadow between two tall, white buildings. They'd not wanted to call attention to themselves, in case any other Europeans appeared to hire African carriers to go into the bush.

No Europeans had arrived yet in this lukewarm morning fast turning to sweltering midday. However, the large number of natives of as disparate origin and mode of dress as the Hyena Men themselves spoke to the fact that Europeans often came here to traipse into the bush. To explore or meet new cultures, or to spread their religion. To hunt, or in hopes of finding great riches.

It seemed like a strange thing to Nassira that the Europeans should come with such intents. No African—or at least not enough to note—had ever gone to Europe to experience the different climate, catalog its mountains and valleys, rename its cities or bother its natives with theology or philosophy. But it was all a part of Europeans' considering Africa their own. And, in thinking that, she felt her resolve firm. She'd only come because Kitwana had pressed her to. Now this large assembly of Africans ready to sell their services to Europeans who wanted to penetrate deeper into the continent they believed they owned made Nassira's blood boil.

She stepped forward, after Kitwana, into the plaza. He had dressed in European attire today, unlike the African dress he'd worn on the train from Cairo or on their way here by camel and boat. It seemed to Nassira a bad idea. Shouldn't they look as African as possible, since what they were selling was their expertise of Africa? She'd asked Kitwana, but he'd only laughed and said Englishmen tended to trust best those who looked the most like themselves.

The English party entered the plaza, coming out of the tall gates of the garden that surrounded their hotel. Nassira wondered if they'd be going into Kenya. She pictured herself walking over the life-rich slopes of her homeland.

To distract herself, she stared critically at the English party. A dark-haired man had joined Mr. Oldhall and his wife. His skin was almost as pale as Oldhall's. He wore a pale linen suit, well cut and quite expensive. He wore it as though he was used to expensive things, too, striding into the plaza as though he'd just purchased it at a good rate and was only waiting for them to wrap it up.

Behind him came Mr. Oldhall. He looked deflated. Nassira had last seen him aboard the carpetship where he'd seemed worried and scared, but also excited, filled with the certainty that he was doing something of great importance. And before that, in London, he'd looked happy, excited and very much like a man in love. Now he looked as if twenty years had passed over him in the last few days.

As they walked closer, Nassira looked toward Mrs. Oldhall to see if perhaps her husband's mood had to do with strife in their marriage. Granted, Emily Oldhall appeared less fearful than she had been in the carpetship dock. Here she was near her husband, protected by males as Englishwomen were used to being. She would look more confident. Though she also looked puzzled and out of place in a dress that, though less adorned than the one she'd worn before, yet showed enough lace at cuff and skirt to attire most maids in England. She clutched, over her head, a little white lace parasol, which seemed strange in one certainly dark-skinned enough to withstand the sun of Africa without help.

The dark-haired man led the other two around, and moved—darted—here and there, curiously, full of energy. He seemed to speak several African languages, and to engage each of the various groups in its own dialect.

But while his dark friend was talking to a group some steps away, Oldhall broke away and made straight toward Nassira's group and Kitwana.

He looked them over approvingly, then addressed Kitwana. “These your men?” he asked very loudly, pointing to the group and then to Kitwana, as Englishmen usually did when speaking with those they thought understood no English.

Kitwana smiled, an ingratiating expression that Nassira had never seen on his face before. “Yes, sir,” he said, speaking in his excellent English, but infusing his voice with great humility. “Yes, sir, they are.”

Oldhall looked Kitwana up and down with a faintly approving look. “Good man.” He peered over the ragtag group, most of them dressed in cheap, secondhand European suits, wholly unsuited to carrying burdens through the jungle. “Do all your men speak English?”

“Only a few,” Kitwana said.

“You speak very well.”

Kitwana nodded but didn't say anything. Oldhall looked at Nassira, and for a moment, their eyes met. She'd never looked him in the eye before—her position in England required that she look down when she met with a gentleman. But now she looked at Oldhall's eyes, and caught her breath. They didn't look human. She'd never seen such pale blue eyes before, even among the blue eyes of the Englishmen.

And yet, as she looked at them, she realized that for all their paleness, they looked very familiar.

She could not remember exactly of whom Oldhall's eyes reminded her, not when they were set amid that face so pale that its owner might well have lived, lifelong, under a rock. And yet something in their forlorn sadness, their look of being lost in a world they couldn't quite take in nor understand, called to Nassira.

Oldhall looked away first, then back at Kitwana. “Your wife?” he asked, gesturing with his chin toward Nassira.

Kitwana shook his head. “No. Just a worker in our group. She's a good cook.”

Oh, was she? Nassira had trouble not giggling at this information, which would have been very surprising indeed to her mother, her stepmothers and her father—who were justly proud of all her achievements and accomplishments, but never counted cooking among them.

Oldhall looked both of them over again. “Well,” he said. “We'll need a cook, I suppose. Very well. I'll hire you. We want to go some distance into southwest Africa for— To look for ancient artifacts.” He'd raised his voice when saying it, and there was in it, Nassira judged, the defiant tone of a little boy doing that which he knows is wrong.

The dark-haired man had been some distance away, talking to a tribesman who wore a loincloth and a profusion of multicolored bead necklaces. And the English lady had been halfway between the two, as though sensing a rift between the men and neither knowing what to do about it nor to whom she should pledge her allegiance.

Both of them turned to stare at Oldhall as he spoke, and the lady walked in the mincing fashion of the English gentry to stand a step behind her husband. As for the other man, at first he looked shocked, then angered. He ran across the short distance between them and stopped short, one hand raised toward Oldhall. “Nigel, old man, you can't just hire someone. Not without questioning him. What does this man know about the jungle? What experience does he have living off the land? What parties has he led? Anyone we know? Any references?”

Oldhall looked confused and lost for a moment, like a child caught in error. Nassira could see his lips trying to shape an apology and she was sure he was about to say something to excuse himself.

But before his lips opened, his features hardened. “What? Are you going to write to England to confirm those references, Peter? Anyone can tell us he led Lord so-and-so and Lord what-not, it doesn't mean anything.” He looked at Kitwana, then hard again at his companion. “I like this man and his group. I have a good feeling about them.”

The dark-haired one's face closed, like a stormy day. Nassira could practically see the clouds gathering in the swirling green eyes. He opened his mouth.

“I agree with Nigel,” the lady said. “I like this group. This man here,” she gestured toward Kitwana, “tried to rescue me in the train. A much more gentlemanly behavior than that granted me by the members of Her Majesty's militia.”

Oldhall looked down at his wife and some of the tension seemed to flee his features. “It is decided, then,” he said. “You will lead us into the jungle and southwest into Africa.”

“Where, precisely?” Kitwana asked. “Where precisely southwest?”

“We don't know,” Nigel said. “We're looking for some old ruins, an old city. When we find it, we'll know. Till then, we'll follow any clues we find.”

Kitwana frowned at first, as though thinking, then nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Right,” Nigel said. “We'll leave tomorrow morning, then. We're staying at the Gordon Hotel. Please be there, ready to depart.”

“What wages will you pay?” the dark-haired man asked, his withering scorn audible in his voice.

“Oh, customary wages,” Oldhall said, and looked hesitatingly toward Kitwana with an expression that said he had no idea what those might be.

Nassira wondered who had let this poor innocent come exploring in Africa with his wife, when it was patently obvious that he should not be allowed to cross the street on his own.

“Customary wages will be fine, sir,” Kitwana said, managing not to betray the slightest bit of irony.

The dark-haired man rolled his eyes. And Nassira looked at Nigel and realized of whom his eyes reminded her. Her first lover. When Nassira had first gone to the Masai adolescent camp, the Maniata, she'd fallen in love with Kume ole Lumbwa, a tall, muscular, straight-backed warrior, the oldest son of the left- hand wife of a rich man. It had taken her only a month, though, to realize that her lover, smart and kind and handsome though he was, lacked a belief in his own qualities.

In Nigel's eyes she saw the same mixture of confusion, fear and attempted self-sufficiency, and a wave of sympathy for this enemy of her people swept over her. She had to fight hard to remember that these were intruders in Africa; that these people were destroying her land, her birthright, and planning to steal the magic of the world for their queen.

She might be lying to this helpless man, but she was doing it for Africa.

She summoned her anger, but she couldn't help still feeling protective and maternal toward the tall, pale alien walking away with his wife's hand upon his arm.

DAWN IN THE JUNGLE: NATIVES AND OTHERS

After days in the jungle, Emily woke to the roar of a
lion. It was a soft roar, like distant thunder, and yet threatening. They'd been hearing it for three days now—never getting nearer the expedition, but never going away—lending a permanent aura of menace to the terrain they traversed, which was itself strange and menacing.

This was a land of valleys and sudden peaks, of scarps and jagged ravines, all of it punctuated with craters, some of which harbored deep blue lakes. Dotted here and there were the beehive huts of the Masai and their herds, which, like the lion, they'd not yet seen but had heard and smelled from a distance.

All sorts of wildlife lived in this area, too—a profusion such, Emily thought, as must have been in Eden. She felt as if they were in deepest Africa already and wondered how long till they reached their objective. Surely it couldn't be far now. They'd walked for days and days. Emily must consult the compass stone soon, much as she wished she could avoid it.

Nigel had been postponing it, too. He also feared that her touch upon the stone would call the attention of the Hyena Men again. Peter Farewell disagreed. He said activating the stone had been powerful enough to call the Hyena Men, but now that it was bound to Emily, it would require but the smallest of magic, not enough to awaken vigilant enemies. And most of all, the men seemed to be fighting over her without even admitting it. Nigel seemed at every step to accuse Farewell and Emily of improper and improbable behavior. Emily could neither resent Farewell's anger at this, nor in truth master her own. How could Nigel think that of either of them?

She sat up in bed in her tent. That she had a tent all to herself was another of the puzzles of this expedition. It would have made sense for her to share a tent with Nigel, since she was his wife, but such a thing had never been mentioned. The day they'd left their hotel in Khartoum, Nigel and Peter had struck a deal for three tents with the amiable hotel manager, who seemed to have a great supply of such accoutrements laid by, just against such an eventuality. Three tents, and Emily had not dared protest it. For all she knew, it was customary for people going into the wilds of Africa to sleep one to a tent.