Blackheart Man, page 9
“No!” said Kima. Then reflected. “I don’t think so. We didn’t expect to live out this day. Didn’t make a plan for what to do if we won.”
“May I bring my camel?”
“I figure so, yes.” Kima was no more sure of this road she’d started them on than the woman was. One step at a time.
“Richard is under there,” said the woman, nodding to the piche road.
“I’m sorry.” Kima found she really was.
“He was seven,” the woman said, her voice breaking. “One of the musket boys.” Her face crumpled. “He was my son.” The tears came again, but silently this time, with no sobbing.
Kima watched at her and tried to figure what to say to a loss so terrible. Could only think of one thing. “Come,” she said to the woman, reaching her hand out. The woman’s camel bent its head down and snuffled at Kima’s palm. It gave a strange moan, like a wail of despair mingled with a disdaining huff. It straightened its head and sighed.
The woman said, “She likes your smell.”
That bloodcurdling whinny had been an expression of approval? What would the camel have done, then, if it hadn’t liked her? “My name is Kima.”
“Hight Josephine. And the answer is, she’d have bitten you.”
Seemed like Maridowa wasn’t the only one who could hear questions that hadn’t been asked. Josephine continued, “Take us where you mean to take us.”
Kima led Josephine and her camel back to the village.
* * *
Mama-ji. A mere picken, an enslaved mother’s child, drowned in the piche. The stories of the witches weren’t so much sport when you imagined the fairy story as real. “Thank you,” Veycosi said to the girl. He returned his table-book to his robe and pulled out the two wrapped paan leaves he had in there, filled with toasted coconut and folded into triangles. He took one for himself and offered one to the driver.
“Thank you, mestre.”
“Warm day today.”
“But not too warm.”
“You think it might rain?”
“No, mestre. Too early in the season.”
“Ah-hah.”
It was the prattling of two people who didn’t know each other but were forced into each other’s company for a bit. They spent the rest of the trip chewing their paan and chatting awkwardly of nothing. The driver dropped Veycosi off by the Lower Piche Lake, at the foot of the Dead Men’s Teeth Cliffs. Veycosi still doubted this was the right place. The other piche, the Upper Piche Lake, was on the flat atop the cliffs, was where the escaped slaves were supposed to have made the road that became the Upper Piche Lake in a trice and drowned a small army. Yet, by the press of people at the gates of the Lower Piche, there was something going on. Veycosi nudged his way through them to one of the gates. The guards, seeing the Colloquium braid in his hair, waved him through.
The place where Chynchin produced its major export was like a phantasm of the Crucians’ Hell: the asphalt reek of it was vile, and worse in the day, when the sun softened the top layer of piche slightly. There were even two hell-like furnaces: big stone tanks full of burning coal, stoked the while by two teams of blackhearts, Deserters as they were wont to be, their heavy leather vests smeared over the chest from them scraping piche off their hands against them.
Iron bins were suspended above the furnaces. Slabs of piche hacked from the lake were being melted in those. The “lake” was solid in most places, except for the warm, syrupy “Mother Lake” at its centre. Blackhearts were mining hardened piche from the lake with pickaxes and shovels. Putting it into hoppers pulled by donkeys and cud-chewing camels, and guiding the animals over to the furnaces. Fetching the chunks of piche out from the hoppers and loading it into the cauldrons that sat above the furnaces. Others were turning the big iron cranks that stirred the melted piche. They held long hooks for fetching out the bigger detritus from the piche; branches, the mummified bodies of small beasts that had become mired and so had met their deaths. Maybe it was one of the workers who had found the first bodies of the soldiers. More blackhearts minded the big strainers through which the pitch filtered into the large molds that would form cords of solid piche the size of three men standing together. Others were setting the molds to cool in stone huts all along the shore of the piche lake. And breaking the cooled piche out of the molds. And packing the cords of piche into crates lined with waxed reed paper, sealing the crates, packing the crates into hoppers, riding the camels and donkeys pulling the hoppers down to the docks for use in Chynchin or to export to foreign for caulking ships and building roads. Shouting and movement. And the stinking smoke from the melted piche drifting over the whole scene. It was a thick smell, like the one at the very back inside of your nose when you have a catarrh, but magnified manyfold, especially to the senses of one who had been far into his cups the night previous. Veycosi’s mouth made hot spit. But he refused to puke. He pulled a corner of his sleeve over his mouth and nose. It helped little bit.
Two of the blackhearts were carrying something long and heavy from out of the piche to a stack of other big, tarred objects over to the side.
Veycosi picked his way over to them. Couple times, he stepped in lumps of piche whose surfaces had begun to melt in the sun. They stuck to the bottoms of his new alpagats, bringing dirt and mud with them. Made his feet feel heavy and slowed him down. He was going to have to replace those sandals, too, for they would never get clean again. When he was a smallboy, he and his bannas snuck down here one night. No plan, just boys making mischief. They had made their way over the hardened piche in the dark to the Mother of the Lake, that one spot in the middle that was always soft. He had dared Gombey to throw his lamp into it. Veycosi still thanked his stars their mothers never found out it was them who had set the mother of the piche ablaze that night. Gombey’d lost his eyebrows when the flame sprang from Her centre, and for a fortnight, his hair smelt like farts. His eyebrows had taken a month to grow back again. Luckily, they’d been sparse to begin with, a mere sketching of black hairs on his forehead. Against his swart skin, his parents had never noticed the difference.
When Veycosi reached the gang of workers, they touched their caps to him and murmured shy greetings. Hard by was the stack of big, tarred lumpish logs, most of them the length of someone grown. Veycosi’s heart started a rat-a-tat inside his rib cage.
A woman from the gang was on her knees by the pile. She was using an edge of an old rag on one of the logs to gently wipe away the excess piche. As Veycosi watched, she rubbed the rag as clean as she might on the leather vest she wore, where she already had a patch of old, crusted pitch on the left breast. Right-handed, then. Many who worked the piche wore heavy leathers the while; piche burns were nasty. And when they got piche on their hands, they wiped it off against their vests. That black crust over their hearts was where they got the name “blackhearts.” It was a Chynchin type of jest, to call them after the man in the tale parents used to fright their pickens into behaving. Eat all your dukunu, or the Blackheart Man going to come at night and steal your heart from out your chest while you sleeping.
The woman looked up when she saw Veycosi. She shaded her eyes against the sun.
A worker nearby said to her, “Sally, here’s a mestre come to learn aught about these folk.”
Veycosi said, “I’m not a mestre yet, goodman.”
Sally pulled away her hand with the rag in it. She cocked her head and gave a considering look at the thing to which she’d been tending. “This’n has a look to him like my da,” she mused.
Veycosi knew what the object was that Sally was cleaning, but knowledge was one thing; truly seeing was another. That latter one came on as though Veycosi were waking up slowly, his eyes unblearing bit by bit till he could see clear. The thing between Sally’s hands resolved into wizened features, and he understood for the first time that he was looking’pon one of the smothered from ancient times: a Mirmeki soldier man, piche-darkened face still grimacing in the agony of his death throes. If he resembled Sally’s father, then her da must have a fierce gaze for true. Even with his face wrinkled like a jamun berry in the sun, the dead soldier’s grim aspect held Veycosi’s attention.
On that rock over there was another, bent right in half sideways, and another, or a piece of one. Over there was a little musket girl, one arm stretched above her head, probably to the living air that had forsaken her two centaines ago. Her other arm was broken raggedly off. The piche had turned every last member of the army into statues with cobbled skin, black and dull. There was even a camel, frozen wide-eyed in panic. Its rider was glued to its side in the act of trying to dismount his camel to perhaps save himself. Veycosi gazed upon the pruneate face of the camel rider, and his blood congealed in his living veins.
He knew that face. Had encountered it before, though he had believed it unreal. And now, after all these years, it had finally come for him, as he’d always feared it would.
Veycosi hadn’t broken fast this morning. Not much in his stomach save the small johnnycake and paan. Now he gave even that up to the oily ground beneath his feet.
“Is guilt making you take so poorly, Maas’ Cosi?”
He looked up. Yaaya stood over him, leaning on her cane. Beside her was the pretty maidell he’d met some minutes ago. She couldn’t possibly be impressed by him now, with vomit smearing his lips. He hurriedly wiped his mouth and stood up. “Siani Yaaya, maidell; I was coming right to meet you. Right after I saw—”
Yaaya’s companion interrupted him by walking over to the growing pile of preserved soldiers. She bent to one of the lumps of piche, then to another. Reached out to touch a stone face, a petrified hand. She knelt right down on the ground, without a care for her clothing. He wanted to call out to her that she would bruise her knees on the hard, rough piche, but for once, he held his tongue. That pretty fabric would be ruined, though.
“Samra?” called Yaaya softly. The maidell glanced briefly at her but didn’t seem to see her.
Samra stroked a pitchy arm. The girl Sally, who’d left off her cleaning when Samra went over, said again, “He looks like my da. I was just telling the mestre.”
Yaaya snapped, “He not a mestre.”
Samra gazed into the face of the piche-drowned one closest to her. Then she murmured something to Sally. Veycosi couldn’t hear the words, but Sally hesitantly reached out her hand. Samra clasped it. They bided so some few moments. Then Samra stood, patted Sally’s shoulder, and came back to them. Sure enough, there were two patches of piche fouling her skirt at the knees. She resumed her place beside Siani Yaaya, standing straight as bamboo. “He could be my Lev,” she said. A quiet tear climbed down her cheek.
“His Malaika should have calved by now, nah true?” asked Yaaya.
Samra regarded her like a woman being pulled half drowning from the water. She blinked. “Lev’s lead camel?” she replied slowly. “Twins, she had.” Her voice still sounded far away.
Yaaya put her arm through Samra’s, resting on her cane as though she needed the assistance. Veycosi surmised she didn’t. “Come,” said Yaaya. “Let we find a carriage.”
Samra seemed to come back into herself. She looked down at Yaaya, who only reached to her shoulder. “Yes, siani.” She dashed a tear off her cheek and began to lead Yaaya away. The maidell had let herself have a moment of emotion, but was recovering quickly. Bamboo bends in the hurricane, the better not to break. Oh, that was good. Proverbs were a kissing cousin to old people’s tales, nah true? Veycosi jotted the saying down in his book.
The siani turned to Veycosi. “Come along, Cosi.”
“Me? Why?”
Yaaya’s scolding gaze made him feel like a puppy that had widdled indoors. “We going to the ship. Don’t tell me you forget.”
“But I thought you already went,” he replied. He’d hoped, any road.
Merriment deepened the lines on Siani Yaaya’s face. “We were on our way there,” she said. “Then we heard tell of the old-time soldiers being pulled from the piche. Had to come and see that, nah true?”
So it was well for the two women to be diverted a moment from their task, but when Veycosi did the same, it was down to a flaw in his character? It was all Veycosi could do to keep from kissing his teeth in vexation.
Yaaya and Samra headed for a break in the clamouring crowd. Veycosi followed. They had to elbow their way through. Veycosi saw a woman, standing with feet stoutly apart, fanning herself. “Mercy,” she said. “I don’t know which smell worse; Maas’ Veycosi’s flood, or the piche lake.”
Veycosi sighed. Would they never forget? He put his head down and bulled through.
* * *
Trapped in the hardened rock that his body had become, Datiao lay near the kneeling girl—Sally—and seethed. The people milling all around them; their speech was little bit strange to him, but not so very changed in two hundred years. He could scarce believe it, but from what he could hear them saying, he had lain mired in that hell for two centaines! All this time he’d been fighting to get free, to return to his home and his bannas in the compong. He’d been hoping they would win the day. He’d felt proud of doing his part. He’d been ready to do more, to throw himself into the fray for their freedom, whatever might come.
Yet he’d surfaced to find this horror. The battle won, but two hundred years ago. He should have heeded Acotiren when she signalled him to get off the piche road. And he should have kept saying the spell they’d given him to protect him from harm. The three witches were dead and dust by now. His time, his world, his friends all fled from him. And he, what was he? Not entirely dead, not alive.
Datiao mentally swatted aside the common sense that was trying to remind him that he’d chosen this path against Acotiren’s advice. That none from his compong could have known his plight below the piche, that in the melee of battle, they almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to fetch him out before he suffocated. That in fact he had suffocated, and died, and the world had changed, and he was now an unnatural creature.
He could grieve his loss, or he could rage.
He chose the enlivening heat of fury. He’d done what had been asked of him. And for his troubles, he told himself, the ones he’d trusted had left him for dead.
He let anger enflame him, lend him a semblance of the fire of life. And he bethought him: dead he might in some wise be, but he wasn’t yet dust. Not so long as he gripped his prize, at which he’d not yet been able to gaze, sith he couldn’t bend his head.
He could, however, tell that he was not the only nonliving being that had been dug out of the piche. The Mirmeki soldiers who’d died with him; he was still among them now. The object in his hand that was preserving him; it must be preserving them all. Wherever he went, so long as he was holding the thing, those others went, too. He had risen up from the piche, and with an army bound to follow him!
The sun had softened a little the piche covering him. He could feel the slightest suppleness returning to his limbs. There was so much commotion going on that no one noticed his small twitches; a finger unkinking, a shoulder joint slipping back into place with little jerks and cracks. He was even able to draw small sips of breath. Sunlight was truly his friend. A woman of the piche army rolled an eye his way, the wetness of its white a sharp contrast to the dull wrinkles of her dry flesh. She closed the eye again.
A woman? A woman soldier? He hadn’t marked any such on the day they attacked. Who sent women into battle? Except for the compong, of course; they’d needed all the fighters they could muster.
And what would happen as the day cooled towards evening again? Datiao needed a way to keep the piche from hardening on him. He needed protection.
He needed the witches’ chantson.
With the earnestness of a prayer, Datiao began to mutter, very softly, the words of the protection spell the three women had devised for him. His lips scarcely moved. He kept saying the chantson over and over again, even as he and his fellows, plus the piche-imbued camels and horses, were loaded onto donkey carts and trucked away from the Lower Piche Lake.
* * *
The Ymisen trade ship, a galleon, bobbed on the water by the docks. She was, as Chynchin trading vessels were, roundish with high sides. Her hull had been painted with yellow and black stripes. She was a three-master; give her a good wind, and she would skip gaily over the seas to her destination. Her gangway had been let down onto the dock. Ten Chynchin guards stood there, at the foot of the gangway. At its head, on the ship, the same number of Ymisen guards.
Yaaya muttered, “Is time to begin this pantomime.” She leaned on Samra’s arm, feigning feeble. Together, the two women toddled up to the guards, Veycosi trailing along.
Yaaya peered up at the galleon. “Lawdamassy!” she said in a wittering voice. “Such a big ship! I hope it won’t pitch too much. I might get sick!” She winked at Veycosi. One of the Chynchin guards shot her an astonished look. Siani Yaaya came from a long line of fisherfolk, and everyone knew it. She could probably have steered this bark single-handed. Samra approached the guards and showed one of them the cacique’s official seal, which deputised Yaaya to seek entry onto the ship. Four guards escorted the party up the gangway, Yaaya going on the while about how much she hated to be on the water. They showed Yaaya’s pass to the Ymisen soldiers. Two of the Ymisen guard left to fetch somebody or other. And during the wait, didn’t Yaaya go on about how over-warm their soldiers looked in those wool suits, poor dears, and she wondered didn’t they miss their families something dreadful? She feigned alarm at the ship’s rocking, and bade Veycosi and Samra bear her up, and generally played the biddy.
Veycosi’s stomach had settled. He closed his eyes, the better to feel the movement of the ship in the water. Where had she wandered? What shores had she touched? Had she been to Ifanmwe? Would he ever get to go there now?
Little more time, a couple sailors came above decks, bearing wooden benches and a table. Behind them came the functionary. He hemmed and hawed and directed the sailors to place the furniture now this way, now that. Finally satisfied, he reached for Veycosi’s hand. “Gunderson,” he boomed.
