Last Plane to Heaven (19 page)

I wonder what could be so important to him now, though it would not be too difficult to guess.

“With all the unimaginable power you commanded, why did you lay waste to the moon? If you'd wanted to free the nations of the tropic world from colonial bondage, why not destroy London or Paris or Berlin, or sink the fleets of the world powers?” He sounds almost apologetic.

The question makes me laugh. A full-throated laugh, the delight I'd once taken in powering up a new machine, in uncovering a novel physical principle of material progress and destruction, in arranging a particularly baroque and painful fate for some interloping spy or traitorous servant. I'm certain it makes me sound mad to him, but what do I care now?

Finally I regain control of my voice. “Believe me, Colonel, once I'd perfected my gravitational gun, I considered those other targets and more. I could have altered the balance of the Great Powers in a single moment. But for every city destroyed, every ship sunk, every army brought to its knees, three more would have sprung up in their place. You Europeans are like the god Eshu, sly tricksters who make a lie of the world with the strength of your guns and gold. In a dozen years, you would have rebuilt and remade and convinced yourself my strike against you had never happened, or had been of little consequence. But who can deny the loss of the moon? So long as men and women live in the world and lift their eyes to the night sky, you will be reminded that at least for a while, there was a power greater and more fearful than even your own.”

“In other words,” he says quietly after a thoughtful silence, “you destroyed the moon because you could.”

“Well, yes.” I smile again. “And if my gravitational gun had not imploded, I might well have gone on to destroy London and Paris and Berlin. I chose my most lasting target first.” I lean against the table, almost pushing it into him. “I
will
be remembered.”

*   *   *

When I walk out of the prison, the daylight is blinding. I have not seen the sun in over forty years. I stumble against the physical pressure of its brilliance. Guards flank and support me, corporals in the same uniform that Colonel Loewe wears.

I'd never known where my prison was. They had brought me here by night after my trial in a secret courtroom in Brussels, the capital of that mad despot King Leopold. Now
there
was a city I should have destroyed. I was brought not just by night but also blindfolded, as I'd been moved from armored omnibus to sealed railway carriage to a cabin on a boat or ship.

England, almost certainly, for where else would one take ship to from Belgium, at least for a short voyage? And English had always been the language of my imprisonment. Still, I am surprised to find myself on the verge of a busy city street amid scents of petroleum and cooking oil and hurried, unwashed people. Gleaming horseless carriages careen past with a clattering of engines and a blaring of claxons. Men and women wearing unfamiliar fashions throng the pavements alongside the roadway. Airships and aeroplanes dot the sky.

My breath grows short and hard as a headache stabs through my eyes to interrupt my thoughts with vicious distraction. Dizziness threatens, and despite my best efforts, I feel perspiration shivering on my face and about my person.

“'Ere you are, missus,” says one of the guards. He presses a cheap cardboard suitcase into my right hand. “They've put your walking money inside. I'd be careful of snatchers.”

With that, I am alone and free for the first time in more than half my life. I take a deep breath, look up into the harsh, brilliant sky, and see a silvery band stretching from horizon to horizon. The Ring of the Moon, they call it. My signature upon this Earth.

Even amid the pain and panic of the moment, my smile returns a thousandfold. Then I set out to find my way home.

*   *   *

The borders around the Kilima Njaro Preserve are secured by soldiers from a number of European states. It seems that Africans cannot be trusted to protect our own. There is a wall, as well, topped in places with electrical wires and brass light pipes through which guards might spy on distant locations. Still, it is not hard to find men among the Kikuyu who know how to slip through the animal gates. They poach, and gather from the forests on the lower slopes of the mountains, and generally show the white men their asses.

These are not my people—I was born half a continent away—but they and I are of one mind when it comes to the British, Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians, Russians, and others. Joseph, my guide, has been engaged for a quantity of silver rupees I earned through various chicaneries and the sorts of petty crimes open to a woman of advancing years. Once I'd gained my needed funds, it had not been so challenging to slip away from Colonel Loewe's watchers in Mombasa, where I was but one among many thousands of old African women.

I have not told my guide who I truly am, and I am certain it has not occurred to him to guess. If nothing else, he was not even born when I shattered the moon. Tales of Madame Mbacha and her gravitational gun are surely just as legendary and improbable to a young man as are his parents' stories of the days of their own youth.

Still, whether he thinks me mad or simply lost in the world does not matter. Joseph smiles easily, his teeth gleaming in the dark. His ragged canvas shirt and duck trousers are sufficiently reddened with the ground-in dust of the savannah to keep him unobtrusive in these grasslands below my mountain. I myself am equipped with tropical-weight camouflage which Joseph finds an endless source of amusement.

“You are an old woman,” he declares, his Kikuyu accent inflecting his English in a way I had not known I'd missed during the years of my imprisonment. “Why do you want to look like a German bush ranger?”

“For the same reason German bush rangers dress like this. To not be seen.”

He shrugs eloquently. “You do not come to fight. There is nothing to see here except what is here.”

True, I carry no firearm. I never have. There were always others to do the shooting for me. Joseph has a rifle, an old bolt-action Mauser that I suspect is more dangerous to him than to any lions or soldiers he might shoot at. “Sometimes seeing what is here is enough,” I tell him.

He does not need to know.

We take our time, moving by night and sleeping by daylight against clay banks or hidden in low-lying hollows. The guardians of the Kilima Njaro Preserve fly overhead periodically in small aircraft that drone like wasps. Twice we hear the chuffing clank of European steam walkers and even catch the scorched metal scent of their boilers, though we never actually see the machines. Neither do they see us. Joseph and I are small and hard to find, as if we were beetles on a banyan tree.

My only complaint, which of course I do not voice, is the heat. I, who once worked with great gouts of steam and the fires of a foundry to build my ambitions. I, who was birthed amid the parched plains of western Kamerun. Slowly I come to admit that the years spent entombed in cold British stone have sapped my bones of their youthful fire.

After four days we gain the slopes of the mountain. I am on my home ground now, and have begun to see traces of my old roadways, the supply lines that brought game meat, grain, and other supplies from the surrounding countryside up to my stronghold. The heat seems more bearable up on the slopes, where the breezes can more easily reach us and trees spread shade from time to time.

“There is nothing here,” Joseph says uneasily one evening as we break our camp. A collapsed, fire-scarred stump of one of my watchtowers stands close by. “I do not think we should go on. Haven't you seen enough?”

“I can find my way from here,” I say politely. Back in my day, I would have had him whipped for cowardice and sent to take a turn stoking the fires of my industry. Now I must rely upon this man to stay alive. I press another sack of silver rupees into his hand. “Give me a water gourd and wait in this place for two days. If I do not return, make your way home and forget you ever saw me.”

“There are ghosts here,” he says uneasily. Then: “I will wait.”

Perhaps he will, perhaps he will not. I tell myself this does not matter, that I am almost home.

*   *   *

I hike the last few kilometers alone. Even in the evening, the heat persists in bothering me, so to put my mind at ease I review the triumphs of my life. The moon, of course, first and foremost. But also how in my youth I bested the chief's son in my home village and left him crying for his manhood, which I took away in a
muti
pouch. How I'd learned the physics and chemistry and mathematics of the Europeans while working as a cleaner in the universities at Heidelberg and Cambridge. How I'd carved out my own domain in the savannahs of Kenya and Tanganyika, laying the foundations for what would become my stronghold on Kilima Njaro.

Madame Goodwill Adeola Mbacha, scourge of the white race. When my resolve falters or my memories fade, all I need do is lift my eyes to the Ring of the Moon and I am reminded of all I have accomplished.

I come across the outer gates by starlight. They are shattered, their tumbled ruins covered with cloying flowers and acrid-scented shrubs. Vividly I recall the cannon fire that laid waste to my defenses. I walk past a row of nearly vanished graves, surely guards and servants of mine buried where they fell.

Ahead, where the walls of my stronghold should have risen, there is only a larger, night-shadowed heap of rubble. No flowers there. I wonder if my enemies salted the ruins to keep them barren. Slowly, still sweating profusely, I make a deliberate circuit of the destroyed fortification, taking 4,127 paces to do so.

It is all gone. My laboratories, the refineries. The little railroad that brought in wood and ore for my smelters has been ripped up completely and the bed trenched so it would erode.

Somehow, I'd thought there would be something more of home here. A doorway, a room, a place to start again.

My aching bones and shaking hands tell me that I am old. The heat tells me this is not a place to rekindle forge fires and drill anew for steam vents. The dusty, bitter air tells me I do not belong here.

For a while I sit on tumbled, fire-blackened stones and weep. I, who have not wept since earliest childhood, let the tears flow unchecked. Even the Ring of the Moon seems a mockery, my lost power glimmering in the sky day and night as the world rearranges itself around missing tides and deeper nocturnal darknesses.

*   *   *

In the morning I walk back down the mountain to where Joseph should still be waiting. I bid the graves farewell as I pass them. The slope is hard on my hips and knees. My mind should be awhirl with plans and possibilities, but I cannot summon the energy. It is too late in my life to start over.

I just want to go home. Is that giving up? The world lives with my mark. I've accomplished more than they can ever take away from me. Now I can return to Mombasa and allow Colonel Loewe's agents to find me. Since I have broken my parole, they will remove me once more to my cool, stone-walled room in the depths of London.

Home is where you live, after all. I have lived most of my life there, and there I will live the rest of my life.

“Colonel,” I tell the uncaring thornwood trees and the bone-dry wind, “I am coming home.”

 

The Blade of His Plow

The Wandering Jew is one of my favorite pseudohistorical characters. I usually ignore the poisonous ethnic politics of the legend in favor of the haunting image of a man who long outlives love and life itself.

They tell stories about me. A lot of those are wrong. I was never called Ahasver. I wouldn't know how to make a shoe if you paid me. No one cursed or blessed me. Really, I just am.

When you realize you are deathless, you gravitate to certain lines of work. Not a lot of call for immortal bricklayers. Doesn't take much luck or skill to follow a plow, beyond knowing the business of your own fields. Standing behind the sharp end of the sword is what I do.

Used to be I kept count of how many men I'd killed. Then I just counted the battles I'd been in. After a while, I lost track of that and started counting the wars. Now, well, they count the wars for me. Finally, you people are finishing the job that Yeshua Ben Yosef started all those years ago on top of a dusty hill too far from his home or mine.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Blessings upon you, all that are in my power to give. I know God has an eye on me, lets me direct His gaze to your heart.

Well, maybe not that last.

*   *   *

Longinus had already walked the earth six times longer than the life of mortal man. He had fought in Syria, in Scythia, among the Parthians. He'd changed his name a dozen times. No matter how far he ranged, he eventually found his way back into the legions.

He'd settled on the rank of
tesserarius,
always being vague about his exact history while showing enough of his experience with weapons and maneuver and the business of wrangling men to be convincing to a
signifer
or
centurion
desperate enough for skilled bodies to ignore the irregularities. The older the empire grew, the easier this became. There were always men discharged for drunkenness or brutality who drifted back into the ranks.

And by the gods, Longinus knew one end of a spear from the other.

This time, though, he could see the end coming. Not his own end. Not anymore. He'd taken enough blows, caught enough arrows point first to know what would happen to him. It hurt like crazy, but the wounds always closed up. So far no one had tried to cut off his head. He wasn't looking forward to finding out how that went.

This time it was not his body absorbing the blow. It was the Eternal City herself. Alaric's armies were at the gates for the third time in two years. The Emperor Honorious was long since decamped. Everyone of consequence in the senate and the army had gone with him.