Changer's Daughter (13 page)

Aduke replies with a calm that amazes even herself.

“It seems, brother, that we have been evicted.”

The children begin to cry again. Bending to comfort one, Aduke takes a peculiar satisfaction in seeing that her educated and sophisticated brother-in-law looks like little more than a child himself.

5

It seems as though I had not drunk from the cup of wisdom but had fallen into it.

—Soren Kierkegaard

S
obering up Dakar Agadez proves to be more of a job than Eddie and Anson had bargained for. The morning after they carried him from the bar, he awakens with such a hangover that Anson carefully measures out just enough palm wine to take the edge off Dakar’s headache.

Later, when he and Eddie leave to talk with one of the street children Anson had paid to find news of his missing friends, Dakar locates the rest of the palm wine and drinks it. After that, they are careful not to leave any alcoholic beverages in the hotel room.

They thought they had taken all of Dakar’s money, too, but apparently he had stashed a few
naira
. When Eddie and Anson return from tracking down the useless lead they find Dakar out cold, reefed about with beer bottles. After that, Eddie stays with him and Anson goes out alone.

Dakar is no great companion. At first he is nearly unconscious. When the hangover claims him, he huddles on one of the beds, his face to the wall, whining whenever even the slightest amount of light is shown. Eddie humors him, curtaining off the bed with a sheet and reading local newspapers near the window where a small amount of light penetrates the closed Venetian blinds.

What he reads is no great comfort. Apparently, some government official has declared a news blackout regarding the smallpox epidemic, but the evidence of its effects is there in the length of the obituary columns, notices of shop closings, and advertisements for patent medicines. However, disturbing as the news is, it is preferable to Dakar’s company, especially when, after two days, he quits sulking and starts fuming.

Eyes ruddy as old coals gleam demoniacally against the deep blue-black of his skin when Dakar emerges from behind the makeshift curtain. His huge fists are clenched: massive bludgeons of meat and bone anchored at the end of arms muscled not from working out in a gym but from swinging a hammer in war or in peace. Naked except for a pair of khaki shorts badly in need of a wash and mend, Dakar looks like what many have called him, a god forged of black iron and polished with oil.

Folding his paper and leaning back in his chair, Eddie is glad that he and Anson had anticipated this reluctant resurrection and had taken steps to prevent Dakar’s departure.

Dakar glowers at Eddie. “I’m going out.”

“If you say so,” Eddie says, a small teasing note lurking beneath his level tone.

“I am, and you’re not going to stop me, little man.”

Eddie is hardly a “little man” by most estimations. Although not strikingly tall, his natural build is thick and solid, almost blocky. Since the Yoruba are also a solidly built people on the whole, he had not needed to trade his preferred shape when designing his disguise. Moreover, Eddie has been a warrior from his earliest years—for so long that it takes more than taunts to fire his blood.

“Go then,” Eddie says to the glowering god, and leans back in his chair to watch the fun.

Somewhat unsteady on his feet, Dakar goes over to the door. He wiggles the knob to see if it is locked. It is.

“Give me the key, or I shall twist the lock out of the door.”

Eddie digs the key from his pocket and tosses it to Dakar.

“That would be a pity,” he says. “Good locks aren’t easy to buy these days.”

With some effort, as if he is still seeing double, Dakar fits the key into the lock and turns it. There is a click as the mechanism releases, but when Dakar tries to pull the door open it won’t budge.

Sweat streaming down his face—the temperature is in the nineties although the dry season humidity is barely above fifty percent—Dakar pulls again. The door remains not only closed but immovable. Dakar tugs, the cables of muscle in his back standing out in high relief. He applies enough force to lift a bull out of a mud wallow, to raise a truck off a flat tire, but the door does not move.

He stomps around to face Eddie and the Summerian-born athanor shrugs.

“Maybe it swelled shut in the heat?”

Dakar actually considers this for a moment before realizing that he is being twitted. Then he smashes his fist against the door panel. The force of that blow should have shattered even the solid, well-seasoned hardwood. Instead, there is a dull thud followed by the snapping of teeth meeting as the force of the blow communicates itself up Dakar’s arm with sufficient energy to force his head back.

Angry now, Dakar tries to pull his hand back for another strike, only to find that his fist remains stuck to the door.

“Africa has its ‘Nansi stories, doesn’t it?” Eddie asks conversationally. “Some of the same ones that found their way to America as the tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. I think Caribbean folklore has them, too, or am I mistaken?”

His fist still adhering to the door panel, Dakar turns his red gaze on Eddie.

“Spider.”

“Yep. He didn’t want you leaving before he had a chance to talk with you, so he sealed the door with webbing and left a bit to hold you.”

“How dare he!”

“He’s only thinking about your well-being,” Eddie replies. “You were in pretty bad shape when we met up with you.”

For a moment, the anger fades and is replaced by sorrow.

“I found death in the streets and my shrine covered with prayers I couldn’t answer.”

“So you got drunk.”

Eddie’s evident scorn reawakens Dakar’s rage. With a tremendous effort, he wrenches his hand free from the door.

“I’ll go out the window if I must!” he roars.

This is not a contingency either Eddie or Anson had anticipated. Rising to his feet, Eddie moves to intercept Dakar. “We’re five stories off the ground, you ass!”

Dakar roars inarticulately and charges.

Eddie has little choice but to intervene. Even an athanor can be killed by a five-story fall. Dakar may have some trick of which Eddie is not aware, but Eddie isn’t going to gamble. Right now, the African athanor seems enraged enough to jump out a window without considering the consequences.

All of this flashes through Eddie’s mind in the space of time it takes for Dakar to roar his challenge and lumber forward. Unimpeded by his thoughts, Eddie lifts the small table on which he had been resting his newspaper and flings it into Dakar’s gut.

Dakar fails to block and bends in half, his breath knocked from him. Unfortunately, he recovers before Eddie can do more than take a few steps toward him. Now Eddie must dodge as the same table comes toward him. He does so and there is the sound of breaking glass as the window behind him shatters.

“Damn!” Eddie curses under his breath. Then he does what might seem foolish to those who do not know him. He charges directly at Dakar and wraps his arms around the larger man’s waist.

Dakar is taller than Eddie by as much as five inches. However, in build they are alike, though again Dakar both out masses Eddie and is in better training.

Eddie, however, is very old. When civilization was young he had come forth from the wilds to challenge and later befriend a king called Gilgamesh—known also as the Wrestler. Arthur might have left those days behind him, but something of the Wildman lurks behind Eddie’s reasoned exterior. Indeed, one of the bonds he shares with Anson is a passion for professional wrestling.

Moreover, Eddie has never ceased to study hand-to-hand combat. He views himself as Arthur’s bodyguard, and in modern days he cannot always carry a weapon.

Dakar breaks from Eddie’s hold. Then he swings his fists with such force that more than one missed blow (for Eddie wisely chooses to dodge rather than block) leaves a hole in the wall. Running with sweat, he begins to pant but his fervor is undiminished.

From outside the door they hear shouting. Eddie, dodging blows and landing an occasional one himself, all the while keeping himself between Dakar and the broken window, manages to shout an answer to the queries.

“No, no. We don’t need help. Everything is”—he dodges a fist and slows Dakar with a kick to one kneecap—“under control. My brother has had too much to drink, and the wine demons are chasing him.”

Eddie hopes his explanation fits the local mythology. He doesn’t really have time to look things up.

“The window? Oh, we’ll pay to repair the window!”

His words remind Dakar of that potential exit. Eddie curses himself and flings a heavy leather-bound chair at Dakar. There is more shouting from without.

“Yes, yes! And the table.”

Dakar hefts the leather-bound chair in preparation for a throw, but its smooth upholstery slips against his sweat-slick skin, and he drops it on one foot. His howl of pain seems to intimidate the interrogators, or maybe they have been satisfied by Eddie’s answers for the hubbub without falls silent, and Eddie is able to concentrate on Dakar.

Taking full and unfair advantage of Dakar’s smashed foot, Eddie knocks him down. He stands with a foot on the other man’s broad chest and makes a pointed poke at the injured member.

Dakar growls but seems almost grateful for an excuse to stop struggling. He doesn’t surrender, however, and it is in this pose that Anson finds them when he dashes in a few minutes later.

“I was only a few blocks away when the table came out the window,” he explains, shutting out the curious onlookers who have followed him up, “but I gotta fight through the crowds downstairs. You are lucky that the manager is greedy. He doesn’t want to share the dash we gotta pay him with the local police or right now you’d both be on your way to prison.”

“I’m already a prisoner,” Dakar rumbles, but the fight has gone out of him. “Let me sit up.”

Eddie does so, keeping a wary eye on him, but Dakar only leans against a wall and shields his eyes from the sunlight pouring through the damaged window.

Shaking his head, Eddie goes over to the window and pulls in the curtain that had been carried out along with the table, making the room somewhat darker.

“Thanks,” Dakar says. Then, after a moment’s thoughtful reflection, “I could really use a drink. Anything. Cola. Tea. Even water.”

Eddie brings water and Dakar accepts it. While he sips, he studies Anson.

“You’re too quiet, Spider. You should be joking with me, teasing me about being beaten by a smaller man—or by a bottle—but instead you sit there with your face long and your big mouth closed. What is wrong?”

Anson looks out from wherever his private meditations had carried him.

“I think I must stop looking for Adam and Teresa,” he says after a long pause. “Today I finally found the house where someone told me they were staying. I was certain that I would find them there. Instead, I found an empty house. Inside I found this.”

He holds up a small metal badge, the type of bright gewgaw with which the local constabulary is wont to reward its rank and file.

“By now,” he continues, “they are either dead or imprisoned. If I continue to look for them too publicly, I can only do them harm.”