Blackheart Man, page 19
“You are Samra? Who works for Yaaya?”
“The same. What happening with your daughter-to-be?”
“Two days now Kaïra hasn’t come home,” Gombey replied, “and no word from her.”
“So that was your Lev, then?” Veycosi asked Samra casually. “A comely soul, he.” He lied. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the man.
Samra gave Veycosi an irritated look. “Hush little bit,” she said, “so I can hear the mestre.”
“Some of Kaïra’s young bannas are missing, too,” Gombey told her.
“Some kind of picken Mamapiche game, then?” asked Samra.
“That’s what I was telling Thandy,” replied Gombey, “but one of Kaïra’s bannas come back yesterday; one little girl picken.”
Veycosi’s skin started crawling, as though in prescient fear of what Gombey was going to tell them.
“Her elder brother saw her first. Domingus, that’s his name.”
“And?” said Samra.
“She bit half his little finger off before anybody could stop her.”
“Swive me,” Veycosi whispered. Samra gasped.
“Domingus say she just set upon him. That she was fighting wild. ‘Like a thing that don’t know it could die,’ he said. We have to find Kaïra now-now!”
“Shite,” Veycosi muttered. Then, more loudly: “And what happen to the little girl picken? Where she now?”
“Home,” Gombey answered. “Under lock and key. But she not violent no more. She not anything.”
“How you mean?” asked Samra.
“She won’t mind anyone. She won’t speak, she won’t move from one spot. If you don’t feed her, she won’t eat. She heedless as any rockstone.” Gombey closed his eyes. Opened them again. “Cricket, what if the same thing is happening to Kaïra?”
Veycosi reached for the comfort of his obi bag at his neck, but it wasn’t there. He must have left it home. “We will find her” was all he could say. “Soon.”
They rumbled on in the dark. Why Samra was being so cool with him? She gave him a look he couldn’t read, then edged closer to him, put her lips near his ear. She smelled of sweet passiflore. “Two days,” she said. “You never met me to train, and for two days I couldn’t hear from you.”
“So I come to find out,” he replied. “Samra, I tell you true, I don’t know where those two days went. I don’t know where I went.”
“Drunken? Too much Reverie?”
“I don’t know,” he said glumly. “Let we talk on it once we find Kaïra, nuh?”
She frowned, then nodded. She said, “So I finally going to meet your Thandiwe?”
“Yes. I wish at a happier time.”
Samra said, “Siani Yaaya plenty vexed with you.”
Mama’s tits, what now? “Why?”
She drew back, puzzled. “You and I were supposed to visit her compong yesterday, to continue helping with rebuilding her home.”
Oh, yes. The privies needed re-digging. Veycosi wrinkled his nose and closed his eyes. “Not tomorrow?”
She leaned towards him again. He tried not to contemplate how close that brought her bare and bouncing tetas to his arm. “We waited for you there. In that stench and rankness. Then the siani sent me to fetch you, but you didn’t answer to your door. That was the second time you let me down in two days.”
“Oh, Mama.” Wrong building upon wrong. Piche flowing over his head like cold molasses. “You’re sure this isn’t Zemi night?” he asked, hoping beyond hope.
Too loud, again. Gombey raised up his head at the sound of Veycosi’s voice. He looked curiously from Veycosi to Samra.
“This is Firth night,” he said. “Morning of Penth, to be exact.” Then he rapped on the ceiling of the carriage to get the driver’s attention. “Turn left here!” he yelled. The driver slowed the horses and turned them down the lane that led to the compong where Thandy’s house was. Veycosi hadn’t even marked that they were close to it. He stared through the window of the carriage at the flickering lights of fireflies. He wrapped his arms around his chilled self and tried to think on why time had run amuck on him.
Samra reached over him to give Gombey’s hand a comforting pat. “Try not to fret,” she said to him. “You need your head clear now.” As she settled back beside Veycosi, she murmured in his ear, “Lev is my brother. Can we have done with your sulks about him?”
Sheepishly, he nodded. That netted him a small smile, for which he was grateful.
* * *
This fore-day morning, Thandiwe’s house was still as the river at dawn. No lamplight dancing in the windows, no smell of cooling ash from the barabicu out back. Gombey clanged the latch of the metal gate. “Inside!” he called. “Thandy, you deh-deh?”
No response. Gombey crossed his arms, his shoulders hunched as if to ward off blows. “I know she’s in there,” he told Veycosi and Samra. “Tonight, she would usually take”—his voice hitched slightly—“Kaïra to help with the lamplighting.”
If Kaïra’s future hadn’t been already laid out for her, she would likely have become a lamplighter. She’d taken to it last year, and hadn’t lost interest since. She was on the roster in her parish to help once a week with lighting the lamps in her block of streets. She was apprenticing to learn how to build and maintain streetlamps.
Gombey said, “Thandy had been working at the saltwater fish pens. She told me she went home like usual, made Kaïra’s supper, and waited for her. Sun went down, and she never came home.”
“Maybe nobody took her?” asked Samra. “Maybe she’s liming by someone else’s house in the compong?”
Veycosi shook his head. “Nah. Kaïra love the lamplighting can’t done. She never miss her turn on the roster.” Kaïra had even made Thandy go with her on Veycosi’s naming day fandango the year previous. The work had finished too late that night for them to come and celebrate with Veycosi and Gombey.
“Besides,” said Gombey, “we asked through the whole compong. Nobody seen her. And her alpagats gone. If she was still in the compong, she wouldn’t be troubling herself to wear shoes.”
Kaïra’s favourite leather sandals; actually, Gombey’s. Kaïra had her own, but she wore an old pair of Gombey’s as often as Thandy would allow. Veycosi’s skin prickled. Caiman eyes, rising up through murk. You threw the bones and worked the odds, but you never knew when fate would take you in its jaws and pull you down.
More time, Veycosi could see a candlelight through the wooden jalousie windows, progressing from the bedroom to the drawing room, flickering from one window to the next like a jumby. The front door opened and a candle flame floated forth from it. Behind it, a dark form was outlined against the black of night, holding the candle aloft. Veycosi hesitated, but Gombey ran in ahead of Veycosi, calling out, “Thandy!” The candle flame dropped to the ground and went out. When Samra and Veycosi followed, they found Thandiwe and Gombey, forehead to forehead, holding each other’s hands. Thandy spied Samra. She looked startled and broke the embrace.
“This is Samra,” Veycosi said. “Councillor Yaaya’s chatelaine. She and Kaïra been helping me collect tales of Chynchin.”
Smiling a thin welcome, Thandy said, “Well met, Samra. Veycosi has told me wonderful things about you.”
Samra took Thandiwe’s hand. “You have a fine child, sestra. And we will find Kaïra. Belike she’s off playing jackanapes with some of her fellows. Anywhere she’s biding, we will find her.”
“Gods willing,” Thandy replied. She held tight to Samra’s hand.
Part of Veycosi’s mind noted how Samra switched into Mirmeki tongue when she wasn’t minding her words. The other part ached at Thandiwe’s misery. Her one picken, gone. Mama-ji. Beg you they find Kaïra soon.
The dark of night was blueing into morning light. Harder to see the fireflies, easier to see the leaves on the tamarind tree in Thandy’s yard. Veycosi squeezed his eyes shut tight, then opened them again, trying to blink away sleep. Taste of drink sour in his mouth. Fatigue making grit in his eyes. One-a-quattie, two-a-quattie, round and round in his head. What a night, ee?
This was Kaïra’s favourite time of morning. Plenty times she would be up before the sun, make her way down to the river to watch for Mamagua. Two-three times when Veycosi had stayed the night, Kaïra had woken him up with scuffing around the house in those blasted over-big alpagats, getting dressed to dash down to the river. Thandy never scolded the child. Spoiled her instead. Let her pretend she really did see Mamagua sitting on a big rock in the river in the early morning, combing her hair and slapping the surface of the water with a caiman tail a mile long.
“Maybe she went down by the river?” Veycosi asked.
Thandy lifted her head and stared at him, hope making her eyes wild. “The river…,” she whispered.
“No,” said Gombey. “Down by the river for two nights now? That don’t make sense. Even Kaïra wouldn’t want to spend two nights wandering around down there with the mud and the caimans and the mosquitos.”
Thandiwe took a shuddering breath. “You never know. She’s own-way enough to do something like that. We should check. Just in case.”
Thandy’s front door opened and her mother, Filiang, came out of the house. She called, “What allyou doing out here, propping sorrow in the front yard? Thandy, bring them inside and make them break fast!”
“Not yet, Ma. We going down by the river to look Kaïra.”
Filiang frowned. “The river? No, let someone else go.” She shouted past them, “Cuffee! Come over here, nuh?”
A man who had been walking past the yard, hoe over his shoulder, stopped. He opened the gate and let himself in. Thandy looked irritated. “We can go, Ma. We can break fast later.”
Filiang shook her head, then reached to take the hand of the man who had joined them. Cuffee was tall, dark brown with Ilife features, like Veycosi’s ma and his da Kola. Cuffee clearly ate well. He had springy salt-and-pepper hair and a jolly face, though it was serious this morning. Veycosi had seen this Cuffee around the compong one or two times when he was visiting Thandiwe.
Cuffee nodded to Thandy, Filiang, and Gombey. “Morning,” he said. “Morning, everybody. Kaïra home yet?”
“No,” replied Gombey. “I took the day off work to help with the search.”
“They want to go and look by the river for her,” said Filiang. “But Thandy need to eat, and to rest. She didn’t sleep all night. You and some of your bannas could go and check the river? See if you find her?”Check the river, she was saying. Not check by the river. Now Veycosi understood why Filiang didn’t want her daughter to go down to the river. “Thandy,” Veycosi said, “your ma’s right. You have to eat. I will go with Cuffee. Me and Gombey.”
By now, more of the neighbours were waking up, wandering by to see if there had been word of Kaïra. The child was popular even though she could be so pesky, Veycosi thought, then felt shamed of himself. Cuffee and Gombey were organizing two groups to search. Thandy stood and watched them, her eyes brimming. Veycosi made to join the searchers, but Thandy grabbed his hand. “I’m going with oonuh,” she said.
Filiang began to protest. Thandy replied, “No, Ma; I’m going.”
* * *
The search party went round the back of the compongs on Coral Lane and along the backdam strip of land between the river and the garden plots. The Iguaca flowed not far from Thandy’s compong. The back garden plots of all the compongs on her street had been marshland, drained from the Iguaca while Veycosi’s da Woorari was a boy. Da still talked about the fine spectacle of the twelve windmills and the water screws, pumping for ten years to make fertile land.
The sun was up. A few early risers were already out minding their plots. The back gardens were laid out in rough squares, marked by lines of raised earth between them, tamped down into narrow walkways kept in place with scrub grown over fishnet. The party picked its way along the walkways. Thandy held fast to Veycosi’s hand, like she hadn’t done in weeks. Couple months now she’d been drawing away from him. She’d told him she was just setting her mind to the knowledge that he would be gone for months. But it still had been making his heart sad. Even sadder now, since it had taken Kaïra’s disappearance for her to seek to lean on him again. Veycosi didn’t understand what had been making her chill towards him. It felt as though there was more than she was saying.
Tears were glistening in her eyes. As they walked, she sadly hummed a little ditty, wordless. She reached the refrain:
“One-a-quattie, two-a-quattie…”
Veycosi shivered and fought the urge to drop her hand and move away from her.
She murmured to him, “I know we not wed yet, so you can dally as you like. But you had to go and thin your molasses with raw honey?” She jerked her chin in Samra’s direction.
“I—”
“Maybe is for the best,” she said.
“Samra and I didn’t—we not—”
“Is my fault. I made you and Gombey wait too long. And I pushed Kaïra into this Mamacona thing. All this is at my door.”
“Don’t say that!” Never mind Veycosi’d been thinking the same things all this while, it tore at him to see how much pain they caused her. “Neither me nor Gombey mind waiting. Kaïra don’t mind becoming Mamacona. Look how much she love Mamagua.” The bit about Kaïra was a half-truth. The picken did mind, and he knew it, but he wanted to give his woman comfort.
Thandiwe dashed Veycosi a look so full up of hurt and regret it was like a knife through his breast. “I think I like Samra,” she said. “She seem to have a solid heart. Not flighty, you know? Like those people can be.”
“What people?”
“How you mean? Nah Deserters? You know how they stay.”
Veycosi blinked at that, not sure what to say. They had reached to the river. The others were spreading out to search for Kaïra. Gombey started picking his way through the tall reeds to get right to the edge of the river. Samra, who was farther off with Cuffee, waved at Veycosi and Thandy, then followed Cuffee. Thandiwe watched her go. “She’s good to you?” she asked.
“Thandy, stop talking like that. Is you I’m betrothed to.”
She gave a shuddery sigh. “Cosi, please just help me find Kaïra.”
Veycosi started forwards to go with her. She shook her head. “You and Gombey search together, all right? I need to have some time alone to clear my head.”
Veycosi nodded. He removed the hand he’d put on her shoulder. “Gods willing,” he said, “we going to find her.”
She twitched. The look on her face: Hope of finding her daughter? Fear of what state she might find her in? “Gods willing,” she muttered in answer, her teeth locked. Anger, then? Nowadays, Veycosi could scarcely reckon her.
She took her hand back from him, dashed her tears away with it. She headed through the mangroves, away from the sounds of the others’ voices who were searching.
Gombey’s voice over Veycosi’s shoulder said, “You don’t fool her with your ‘gods willing,’ banna.”
Veycosi whipped around. Gombey was right behind him. He continued, “She know you not a gods-fearing man.”
Veycosi sat on a nearby rockstone. “A-true, I’m not. But she fears the gods.”
“Only one: Mamacona.”
“I just wanted to give her some little comfort. Is the kind of thing everybody says.”
“You ever know Thandy to take easy comfort yet?”
Veycosi shook his head. “Seems I can’t please her at all nowadays.”
“You can’t study that right now, Cosi,” Gombey said. “Neither that, nor some pretty little Deserter bit.” He pointed towards the river. His hand trembled. “Come,” he said, his voice breaking. “Let we look for our daughter-to-be.”
Gombey loved Kaïra, too. “Of course,” Veycosi stammered. “I sorry, man. I didn’t mean—”
Gombey grasped his hand and pulled him up onto his feet. “Is all right, banna. I know your heart.” He tried on a smile. “We going to get Kaïra back safe, and she will become Mamacona come Mamapiche time, and Thandiwe going to wed us both. Just like the three of us been planning from since.”
Veycosi swallowed. He nodded. Unlike his own das, he and Gombey felt no pull to bed each other, beyond boyhood investigations many years ago. Gombey’s tastes really only ran to women. As Gombey said, he and Veycosi were the beads on the thread, Thandiwe the needle. That was well by all three of them.
Gombey and he began their search. As they came near one reed patch, the spring chickens hiding inside it stopped croaking. Gombey said, “Remember hunting for frogs?”
Veycosi smiled. “Yes.” Plenty nights when they were youngboys, they and their other bannas would come down to the river with lanterns. They would cut sticks from the nearby trees, sharpen them with their knives. They would run barefoot through the swampy ground, laughing and shouting, vying for who could spear the fattest frogs on his stick. Then they would make a fire, gut the frogs, and stuff them with wild garlic and mint growing right there-so in the marsh. Little bit of salt, if anyone had remembered to bring some screwed up in a piece of paper. They would have a spring chicken roast by the riverside; gorge themselves till their bellies were round like gourds, telling each other scary jumby stories the while.
That brought to Veycosi’s mind the one about the headless witch in the tree, how she was supposed to look for people out alone in the bush at night, and steal their heads to replace her own. He hadn’t heard that one in years. He made a mental note to scribe it down, add it to his growing compendium of tales. Any story at all would add pages to his work, make it look like he was really trying.
Gombey parted some of the reeds. “Kaïra!” he called. “Kaïra-girl? You deh-deh?”
Silence, pressing down like the heat. Clinging to a reed, a little brown grass lizard puffed up the orange half-disk of its throat, bucking its head as it did so.
“Hey,” said Veycosi, “you heard from Gunderson? How the negotiations going?”
Gombey shook his head. “Not so good. Now the Ymisen heir is demanding regular visits to Chynchin, with admission to the Colloquium’s archives. At least it’s better than war. But the Colloquium is not pleased to be forced to let the heir in.”
