Everfair (11 page)

Shouts interrupted his thoughts. Loud, unintelligible babbling from the Bah-Sangahs—it could bring the raiders down upon their hiding place! Shushed simultaneously by everyone else, they subsided to angry murmurs. Yoka, whom Thomas had lost track of in his woolgathering, came to join their talk, along with that interesting Chinese boy Tink—who before this would most likely have been huddling against the cave's lowest wall, over with the other runaways from the railroad. Who were also many fewer than he remembered.

Thomas, too, approached the Bah-Sangahs. “What is the difficulty?” he asked, though he knew he'd not be understood. Yoka attempted to translate.

“It is an issue of religion.” As was everything, even war. “The elder believes we should seek the guidance of the spirits. Seek it now. The younger insists that since they don't have the proper tools, asking for divine help wouldn't work.”

Thomas nodded. Primitive superstition often relied on quackery and showy trappings. “Please tell the old man I agree with him.” Yoka's short remark elicited an obviously gratified response from the senior of the two principal conversants. The junior appeared to acquiesce, though softly grumbling.

And in his way, the old man was right. In a crisis such as this, there was no one else to turn to but the Lord. Thomas cleared his throat and folded his hands before his heart. “Let us pray.

“O mightiest of comforters,” Thomas began. “Heavenly Father, protect your foolish children. Now, in our hour of need—” He broke off. Yoka spoke quietly under Thomas's voice, apparently rendering his words into the refugees' tongue. When the youth paused and looked at him meekly, he continued: “Show us plainly the path you would have us take to safety, that we may praise thy name and share the glory of thy wondrous light with all creation. Amen.” Far too brief, but it would have to do; at least it had been sincerely felt. Yoka ended his incomprehensible translation soon afterward.

But the Bah-Sangahs wanted, it seemed, to say something more. With eyes first cast down toward the cave's uneven floor, then turned to his Chinese friend and tutor, Yoka formed hesitant sentences of explanation. “They say,” the boy told him, “that your request of the sky—the sky king? That it is fine, but that we are under the earth. In the realm of another. The realm of theirs. No, of the one who is their owner. So that another pleading is necessary. To him. They want to add a petition to him.”

And without further preamble a frightful noise burst forth from the old man's mouth. A growling roar far louder than the yells that had previously erupted from these savages. A gibbering, a yipping, a howling like a pack of wild dogs: “Waow! Waow! Yee yee yee!”

Astonished, Thomas raised his hands again in supplication, but the horrible din refused to stop. Would no one silence these madmen? He made to move but his feet were rooted. He couldn't lift them. Leopold's police would come—but as the cacophony continued, he understood that they would not. That no one would dare approach such unholy,
unnatural
sounds, sounds it was inconceivable had originated in a human throat.

Silence. At last. Contrary to Thomas's expectations, though, none of the settlers were staring in the direction of the source of those weird cries. Mrs. Hunter glanced up at him curiously from her small coterie of converts. Half-healed casualties, nurses, porters—and that white boy who followed her everywhere, George—all seemed unperturbed. The faces of the Chinese were harder to read, especially in the lamp's uneven light, but they, too, looked calm enough.

Of the men standing nearest to Thomas, only Tink's face held anything like an expression, the boy regarding him as though he had just uttered a particularly sagacious pronouncement. Even the Bah-Sangahs were bland of aspect, as if they had not, only seconds ago, emitted those awful, baying barks.

“You are right, without doubt,” said Yoka.

Right about what? The crippled youth addressed the oldest of the Bah-Sangahs and received a reply accompanied by vigorous nods. He turned again to Thomas.

“They agree to your request. They will escort us to the mountains of their home and shelter us in their god's caves, since you have shown how he favors us.”

What had he requested? What had he ostensibly shown these—Thomas looked around him at the other occupants of this dark hole. Had no one else heard what he'd heard? Had they instead heard him say something? Something of which he, himself, had no recollection? He touched his brow as if he might detect a fever there.

But, no. No disease provided him a convenient excuse. And there had been earlier incidents, lapses of memory he'd confided to no one. Hallucinations lasting less than a minute. They had not seemed serious. There had been no witnesses.

But this was worrisome.

Unsleeping, Thomas comforted his motley flock as best he could while the long hours passed. He told them they would build again, a better home than this, in a new, safer location. And when morning broke, and the scouts he sent out returned announcing that their attackers had fled like the black night, he did his best to act as though leading the remaining colonists' coming retreat eastward was a choice he had made.

 

Kamina, Everfair, December 1896

Daisy had been away in Kananga when the raid occurred. She would never forgive herself. True, she'd brought Lily and Rosalie with her, thus sparing them the brunt of the violence. But her quest for representation in the custody battle had proved fruitless. Neither of Kananga's two legal gentlemen had been prepared to travel to Britain and plead for Laurie Junior's return. When they heard it was Ellen who had given birth to him, they refused to consider Daisy his mother.

The caves were a little bit damp. Everywhere was, this time of year, in what would have been winter back home.

No, this
was
home.

She patted Rosalie's feet dry using what was once Lily's second-best frock. Both girls had grown out of their shoes earlier that year. Her fault for letting the two run unshod like wild things? No matter. Done was done. Soon enough Rosalie would fit into George's abandoned brogans.

Satisfied with her ten-year-old's cleanliness, Daisy pivoted to drop her from her lap onto the chamber's main mat. “Next time I'll let you wash yourself,” she promised.

Rosalie nodded. “And Mama, will you let me work in the hospital like my brother, too? Et comme Mam'selle Toutournier?”

“Like your
older
brother,” Daisy corrected her. She would not let the baby, Laurie Junior, be forgotten. “No; you're still too young.”

“But Fwendi works in the—”

“Fwendi's mama and papa are dead.” Perhaps that was too harsh a statement. “We believe so, at any rate. But I am quite alive, and doing my best to keep you alive also. Now, go eat your porridge before it becomes lumpy and cold.”

Lily had not yet risen. The chamber allotted to Daisy and her children was situated far from the caves' entrance, and correspondingly dark. How she missed her light, airy house in Mbuji-Mayi—or Bookerville, as the Americans had called it.

Standing, Daisy took the oil lamp from its niche and went to wake her oldest girl. The caves' darkness was no reason to sleep the day away.

Lily had claimed a high, deep shelf as her bed, then plaited a rope ladder to give access to it. Daisy's heart misgave her when she saw a pair of rough workmen's boots waiting next to the ladder's dangling end. Had some male sneaked in to lie with her fifteen-year-old? Daisy had heard no one, had not been wakened by any noise.

She lifted the lamp. “Lily? It's morning, dearest.”

A round, tanned face topped by boyish brown curls leaned out into the light. “Really, maman?” Her child. “What hour?”

Daisy wore a repeater on a ribbon round her neck, a chiming watch Tink had repaired and improved so it told seconds as well as hours and minutes—though the lamplight made it unnecessary to set off its tiny bells. “It's just thirty-one-and-a-half past seven. Are you—” She hesitated. Did she betray her principles by asking questions rooted in bourgeois morality? “Are you alone up there?”

Innocent laughter was Lily's gratifying response. “Maman! How silly! Of course! Why wouldn't I be?” As she spoke, the girl swung her loosely trousered legs onto the ladder, turned to grasp its two sides, and began climbing down. A wayward air current caught George's shirt, making it billow on her slender frame.

“It's only—the boots—I thought they belonged to someone else—”

“They did. Tink gave them to me when he got better ones. I took care to scrape all the mud and ashes off—nothing objectionable on them, is there?” Picking up the boots, Lily looked them over quickly before sitting on the main mat's far edge to slip them on and tighten their laces. In a trice they were tied and Lily striding to their family chamber's exit.

“Wait! Your porridge!”

“Maman, there's no
time
. Tink has a demonstration!”

“Yes, and I am going to see it, too. And Rosie.” On the mat, the younger girl looked up from her gourd and began to try to say something. Daisy cut her off. “There's plenty of time for us
all
to eat; they won't start for half an hour yet.”

The cooked grains were thick and, she hoped, nourishing. Strange food, strange lodgings, strange weather—even the stars were different here, so near the Equator. And then there was the divorce. But that, she thought, was nothing she hadn't expected of her husband eventually. Ellen, whom he found so fascinating, was much too conventional to have put up with Laurie's romantic and sexual arrangements for long.

Daisy ate her own porridge swiftly and tucked her notebook and ruling pen into one of her smock's capacious pockets. The pen, also, had been a gift of Tink's. He was turning out to be a good friend to the family, though of course not enough of one to make up for Jackie's departure to attend to the Fabian Society's affairs. Or Lisette's.

No one could make up for Lisette's long absence, nursing in the field. Daisy would not even have had to pretend to like the cave—one of the things she'd done to satisfy Jackie—if Lisette had been here. With Lisette present, it would have been a paradise.

She had promised to return by Christmas. Sooner, if she could. Daisy would do her best to wait patiently.

She carried the lamp to their chamber's entrance. “Are we ready?” Lily, who had been in such a rush, suddenly realized she had left some vital piece of equipment in her sleeping niche. The repeater's wire gong struck the three-quarter hour while Daisy waited for her to retrieve it.

They walked toward the caves' largest chamber, cautiously at first. Shattered stalactites had left sharp rubble where they fell, which the colonists pushed to either side, but which kept accumulating. In the worst spots, Daisy made Lily help her barefoot sister along. Gradually, sunshine filtering in from the outside overcame the lamp's little brightness.

People filled the huge cave, their murmuring voices echoing off its lime walls, pale with indirect light from the nearby entrance. Smokeholes pierced the ceiling and let in even more sunshine, though this was tinted green by sheltering vegetation, and supplemented with the faint illumination, in the shadows, of other colonists' lamps.

Tink knelt before the crowd, eyes focused on a glinting object about the size of a dog. If a dog were made of gold. Chester knelt beside him. Winthrop, Chester's brother, stepped carefully backward behind them as he uncoiled a length of something brown and black—rope? No, this was much wider—flatter, too—

Lily made a sudden movement, drawing Daisy's attention to her. She dug a large brass screw from her trousers' front pocket, then ran ahead to hand it to Tink. The youth smiled and took it, and Daisy had a sudden presentiment of trouble.

A romance between these two would never do.

She arrived as quickly as possible in Lily's wake. “What's this?” she asked, pointing at the device on the cave floor between Tink's knees.

“I call it—” He spoke a few Chinese words. “Or, to translate, ‘Littlest Heater.' It will drive the balloon once we've got it lifted high enough.”

“In here?” Daisy glanced up at the chamber's ceiling. It was perhaps fifty feet above their heads, on average. “I suppose there's room.”

Lily rounded on her mother. “Of course there's room, if Tink says there is!”

Bad. Very bad. How had Daisy not noticed this problem developing?

The balloon bag was sewn together out of lengths of barkcloth lined with the rubber brought to Everfair—stolen—by refugees. Winthrop attached the canvas and rubber hose he'd been unrolling to a valve on the lid of a stone cask. He opened it. Gas hissed and the bag filled and rose. Daisy judged its length as about the height of two men: ten or twelve feet. When fully distended, it could have been encircled by four men holding each other's hands.

Now she saw the basket that was made to hang down below the bag. It, too, was undersized, and also of a curiously open design. Tink and Chester lifted the miniature engine—she was sure it was an engine; it had a chimney and a boiler box like the larger ones she was familiar with—as if it were much heavier than it appeared. They set it into the basket. A shaft protruded through a gap in one side. Chester and Winthrop held a propeller with five blades, which Tink attached to the engine's shaft using the screw Lily had brought him. Each time he gave it a twist he bowed ceremoniously to the individuals Daisy had determined were the Bah-Sangah's priests.

By this time, the ropes running between the bag and basket had grown taut.

“The ‘Littlest Heater' is based on the deepest principles of Bah-Sangah cosmology,” Daisy's daughter informed her officiously. “I can't tell you anything more than that. Tink had to swear not to reveal the secrets of its operation, but he says it is the most powerful—”