Sarah scanned the scribbled notes and charts. “You’re sure about this?” she said. “You can prove it?”
“The original documents are sitting in the library, where anyone can check them,” I said. “Or they are at the moment. I would move quickly if I were you.”
She thought, but quickly, and then she was packing up her stall, hands quick and efficient, eyes wide with the thrill of risk and the gleam of determination.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked as she finished and stood ready to go into whatever adventure awaited.
There were lots of answers I could have given. I could have said she was my friend and I was trying to help her, or that a great wrong had been perpetrated on her people and it should be brought to light. Both were true, and there were other things—things to do with Berrit, and with Billy, and with the collared weancat—that I couldn’t put into words but that were also true.
“Until this gets printed,” I said, “I’m a target.”
She nodded, turned, and broke into a run.
*
I FOUND MNENGA SLEEPING in the old Lani cemetery beside a weather-beaten shrine decorated with clumsily carved monkeys. He opened his eyes, one hand flashing toward the short-shafted spear on the ground beside him, but he knew me before his long fingers had closed around it. He blinked, then smiled his radiant and uncomplicated smile. He sat up. He did not reproach me for how long I had been gone.
Before the conversation could go somewhere that made me uncomfortable, I asked the question I had been mulling since I left Sohwetti’s house in flames.
“Why are you in Bar-Selehm, Mnenga?”
“I told you,” he began, “the nbezu—”
“Forget the nbezu,” I said. “Tell me about the old man.”
He grew still, his face setting. “Ulwazi,” he said at last.
He read the confusion in my face.
“The old man,” he said. “The one who is—” He gestured with his hands: Gone, like smoke blowing away.
“He is why you are here, and you fear he has come to harm at someone else’s hands.”
For a long moment he said nothing, and I wondered if I should clarify my phrasing, but he understood me perfectly and eventually nodded. “I am herding nbezu,” he said. “But that is not all of the truth. The elders of my village sent me. Ulwazi said white men wanted to buy land from us, but he did not know why. He said he would find out, but then he disappeared. I have been trying to find him or learn what happened to him, but I do not know how to be in the city. My own kind—the ones who live here, the Assimilated—do not want to talk about old men from the bush. I did not mean to lie to you.” He shrugged, and his smile became bleak and knowing.
“Mnenga,” I said, deciding on impulse to trust him as I once had. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think you will find him.”
His face tightened with doubt and wariness.
“I think he is dead,” I said. “I think I saw him.”
“Where?”
“At the Old Red Fort,” I said. “He may have been imprisoned there.”
For the first time since I had known him, the Mahweni boy’s face hardened and his smile vanished entirely.
“You know the place?” I asked.
He nodded slowly and emphatically twice, and at the end of the second, he hung his head, teeth gritted and eyes closed.
“What have you heard about it?” I asked.
For a while, he said nothing. Then he opened his eyes and shook his head. “Bad things,” he said in a low voice, thick as the darkness gathered around us. “Old things about the war, but also new things. There is a man there, or there was. My people call him Tchanka, an old name for a kind of devil. He has the head of a jackal. Comes to your hut at the darkest part of the night, when the moon is down. Gets down very low on his belly and comes in under the door. He takes your children. Eats their souls.”
I swallowed. “Do you know the man’s real name?” I asked.
Mnenga shook his head. “Only Tchanka. He was a soldier, perhaps still is.”
I thought for a moment, and an idea that had never occurred to me before spilled out. “If there is a war with the Grappoli, Mnenga,” I said, “would you fight?”
He frowned. “The bush tribes would not be forced,” he said. “Not at first. But we would be stupid to think that war between the Grappoli and the Bar-Selehm would not come to our villages in the end, and I think I would probably fight sooner than that.”
Something in his eyes gave me pause.
“How much sooner?” I asked.
“They say Mahweni stole your Beacon to sell to the Grappoli,” he said bitterly.
“They?”
“The white people in the city,” he clarified. “They say if there is a war, my black brothers in the city will have to decide which side they are on. They say it like the choice should be easy, but I do not think it is, and I think for the bush villagers, the herders, the Unassimilated,” he added, pulling a sour face, “people like me and my brothers, who the city ignores till they want our land, we will also have to make a choice.”