The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (14 page)

Tendai had a cold feeling she was right. "We'd better go before our luck runs out."

Now the edge of the
vlei
was very near. They could see tall buildings and streets. A supermarket bore a sign that said VAINONA GROCERY in bright red letters. The world they were approaching was like a dream. Tendai heard music, traffic, lawn mowers. Even a jackhammer trilled like a distant woodpecker. It was all so beautiful! He was dangerously close to tears.

"Listen!" cried Rita, clutching his arm.

Out over the
vlei
came a distant cry. They couldn't hear the words yet, but Tendai knew what they said.

"Run!" he shouted. They stumbled on. The cry approached them, speeding under the earth, echoing out of the mine shafts.

"Find! . . . Bring! . . . Meeee!" Rita fell and Tendai hauled her to her feet. The streets of Vainona were only a few yards away. The She Elephant's commands burst out of the ground. Bits of the hills began to detach and creep after them. "Find children! Bring them to meeee!"

They reached the cement walk surrounding the suburb. Tendai dragged Rita over it. They fell to their hands and knees and continued crawling on all fours. Rita was sobbing with terror. Tendai urged her on until they collapsed onto a neat green lawn bordered with daisies. He couldn't move anymore. If the She Elephant herself charged after them, he couldn't react. He watched the
vlei
with a kind of numb despair.

The edge of the wasteland humped up. The
vlei
people gathered, shifted, turned. They were unwilling to pass beyond their domain. They hovered in a gray tide, watching the children. Then they simply melted away. Tendai didn't know whether they were waiting or had gone back to their burrows. He could see Rita clearly now. She was a horrid patch of mud on the beautiful lawn.

"You! Tramps! Get off my property!" a woman shouted. The children sat up. The woman stood in the doorway of her house and shook a broom at them. She was neatly dressed, with a flowered
doek,
or scarf, tied around her hair. She was so tidy, both Tendai and Rita laughed for pure joy.

"Go away before I set the dogs on you! Crazy," the woman muttered to herself as they left the lawn. "Laughing like little maniacs.”

"Look, there's Kuda," Rita said, pointing at a bus platform. A border of zinnias surrounded an oval parking area. At one end were several benches shaded by a sprawling rose tree. At the other was a drinking fountain. Kuda and Trashman were taking turns squirting each other. Trashman babbled excitedly as Tendai and Rita ran up.

"He says the bus is coming," translated Kuda, and so it was. A silver gray dot in the sky settled down toward the landing pad. The bus let off two men, who frowned at the collection of tramps in their suburb. Then the bus was empty.

"Hey, Trashman," called the driver. "Where did you get those kids? You're not old enough to be their daddy."

"We were kidnapped by the She Elephant," Tendai said. "Please. We want to get away, but we don't have any money."

"I heard the She Elephant was into nasty stuff —
and there she is!"

Tendai saw the big woman charge out of the
vlei
with Knife and Fist behind. They must have followed on one of the handcars. She was roaring drunk. She staggered down the street, brandishing an ax. "You filthy brats!" she screamed.

Tendai, Rita, Kuda and Trashman jumped into the bus. The ax clanged onto the front window and cracked it in two. The driver took off. The She Elephant lunged for the door and fell heavily to the cement.

"You poor kids!" panted the driver as he maneuvered between the buildings. "I pressed the panic button. The cops'll be on her in no time."

But Tendai doubted very much that the police would find anyone when they arrived.

"Well. So you're kidnapped. What are your names?" the driver asked.

A few weeks before, Tendai would have given him the information without thinking. Now he no longer trusted the outside world. Fuzzy blue monkeys turned into vicious brutes. Sweet old ladies turned out to be Grannies. And the Masks would soon be hunting them. Who knew who their allies might be? "I'm Jiri Ndlovu," he said, giving a common name. "That's my sister, Rose, and my brother, Jabu. You already know Trashman."

"I see him all the time," said the bus driver, smiling. "Listen, why don't I drop you where he always goes? The people there take care of him, so they'll certainly be nice to you. I'll make a special stop outside Resthaven."

Tendai looked at Trashman, who was holding Kuda as though he were a large teddy bear. Trashman smiled and said, "Mama." It was the first word Tendai had been able to understand.

Fourteen

The driver brought his bus to a landing outside a high gray wall. "I'm not really allowed to stop here," he explained. "See, this is a taxi stand, but it's as close as I can get to Resthaven."

"Thank you," said Tendai. "I hope the She Elephant doesn't hurt you."

"Don't worry. My vacation is due to start tomorrow. I'll find someone to cover my route the rest of today." The driver closed the door, and they watched him maneuver out of the narrow taxi landing.

It was an impressive wall, higher than Tendai could see. It curved away without a window or opening except for a single gate directly in front of them. "Who lives here?" Tendai asked.

"Mama," replied Trashman. He yanked on a chain hanging by the gate, and a bell rang somewhere inside. It wasn't a mechanical sound like the ring of a holophone but a real bell with a metal clapper. It rang deeply, sweetly, dying away like far music.

"Oh!"
  
said
  
Rita.
  
"Do
  
it
  
again."
  
So Trashman rang it several times until Tendai caught his arm.

"He might make them angry," he said.

And indeed, the face that showed up at the peephole did look angry. "What do you want? Go away!" it said, but then it recognized Trashman. "Chedu!" it cried in a pleased voice.

"Mama," said Trashman. The gate opened after many locks and bolts had been undone, and an enormous woman stood before them. She was fully as large as the She Elephant, but where the queen of the
vlei
people had been coarse, this woman was dignified. She was wrapped in a rough bark cloth and wore no shoes; yet she did not look poor. She had a handsome, intelligent face.

"Oh, Chedu, what have you done?" she said. Trashman held out Kuda and babbled happily. "I can see he's cute, but he's not one of us. You can't bring him in."

"Please,
mai"
Tendai said politely. "We were kidnapped and Trashman rescued us. We're awfully tired. Can't we come in for a while?"

"Chedu is always welcome, of course, but we don't like strangers. They bring contamination."

"I know we're dirty, but we can wash," said Rita desperately.

The gatekeeper looked at her. "I wasn't thinking of the kind of dirt that can be washed off. You bring with you evil city ways."

"Oh, please," cried Rita, bursting into tears. Kuda, catching her misery, began to cry, too. Trashman's face screwed up when he saw Kuda's distress. He sat down on the cement and howled.

"Stop! Stop!" cried the large woman, covering her ears. "Very well, Chedu! They can come in — but only for a while." Trashman's tears dried up at once, and he beamed happily as though nothing had ever been wrong.

Grumbling and complaining, the woman led them inside and slammed the gate. She began to fasten the many locks and bolts, but Tendai had no eyes for this. He was far too surprised by the scene inside.

They had just left a tangle of apartment buildings in the year 2194. They had stepped into a vanished world from the distant past. A trail led down a hillside past
msasa
trees to a small village. Down the middle of the valley ran a stream with marshy paddocks on either side. Goats and cattle cropped the grass, while small boys guarded
  
them
  
with
  
switches.
  
Someone played a drum in the distance. Nearby, a woman sang a lullaby to a baby.

Tendai thought he had never seen anything so peaceful. "What happened to the city?" he whispered. All traces of the world as he knew it had vanished. Even the wall seemed to disappear, and he saw it was a giant curving mirror on the inside. The effect of this was that the land seemed to go on forever.

"We do not speak of the city here," said the gatekeeper, "and I warn you not to do so either. I am the only one who deals with the outside. Forget your robots and traffic, your crime and drugs. This is Resthaven, the Heart of Africa." She led them down the path. Trashman bounced along, chattering happily and holding out Kuda as though he were a trophy.

"Very nice, Chedu," the woman said.

"Is that his name? I thought he was called Trashman," said Rita.

"That is what we call him."

"Are you his mother?"

The woman laughed. "He calls everyone here Mother. He has belonged to the whole village ever since we found him abandoned outside the gate. At first, no one wanted him."

"Why not?" asked Rita.

"He was a
muramwiwa,
a child whose mother had thrown him away. His ancestral spirits might have brought us trouble."

"You mean, you might have left him to die?" Rita cried.

"It's very foolish to neglect the ancestral spirits," said the gatekeeper. "Just look at the world you come from: gang warfare, drugs, crime, broken families. Your people have forgotten about the ancestors, and the spirits are angry with you. But as you can see" — she led them past a group of children who clapped politely to greet them — "we
didn't
leave Chedu to die."

The children stood respectfully to one side as the visitors walked down the trail. Tendai was struck by their good manners. In Mazoe, a stranger would have been greeted with suspicion, if not fear.

"We decided that no one should adopt him," the woman went on, "but that all of us would feed him if he came to the door. He has a wandering spirit, though." She sighed. "He can't stay anywhere more than a few days. I suppose it's because his mother threw him away."

"I think it's because he had to wander from house to house here," said Rita.

They came to a collection of huts set around a neat courtyard. Tendai saw with delight that it was exactly like the villages in his history books. Separating the huts from the trees was a wide stretch of bare ground, which he knew would be inspected each morning for the footprints of rodents or the looping trails of snakes. The grass roofs of the houses extended out from the walls to be supported by a circle of poles. This provided an attractive area of shade.

All the entrances faced west, and each door consisted of a wooden panel hung on ox-hide loops. These panels were propped open in the heat of the day. The walls of the huts were decorated with black, red and ocher designs, while the doors were carved with crosshatched decorations.

The finest building was, he knew, the kitchen hut, but the cook fire had been moved outside for the summer. Beside the fire rested a drying rack for wooden bowls. But the thing that struck Tendai most was the smell.

The She Elephant's cook fires always had something vaguely unpleasant about them. It might have been the mixture of twisted
vlei
bushes and peat she used for fuel. Or it might have been the plastic-filled soil of the
vlei
itself under the fires.

This fire was of natural wood. It called to something deeply buried in Tendai, an ancestral memory of sitting by such a hearth and letting the smoke wash over him. Rita noticed it, too. "Ohhh," she sighed. "Just smell that. It's so
right.
" And that was it, of course. There was a feeling of righteousness about the cook fire. It must come from paying attention to the ancestors, Tendai thought.

A small, heavily pregnant woman came out of one of the huts. "Greeting,
vakoma,
elder sister," she called.

"Greeting,
mununguna,
younger sister," replied the gatekeeper. "Behold, Chipo! We have visitors from afar."

Tendai noticed she didn't mention the city outside the wall.