Muezzinland (11 page)

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Authors: Stephen Palmer

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BOOK: Muezzinland
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Nshalla considered what to do. That he had not killed her in these first few moments meant he wanted to gloat, to extend his triumph. This was in character. Nshalla could use it against him.

She said, "I saved you from the hyena men. Doesn't that deserve something decent in reply?"

"I saved you from the illusionist on the riverboat."

Quits. "But you broke my trust with the hyena men. One up to me."

"But I saved you from the man on the boat."

Nshalla tried to laugh. "That doesn't count."

He smiled his oily smile and replied, "You owe me two. I saved you from the attacker on the riverboat,
and
I rescued you from losing the trail in the savanna."

"You liar. Besides, I brought back your soul in Ouagadougou. I saved your life."

"It would have come back by itself—"

"And you attacked us with that static-box outside Ashanti City."

"I, Msavitar, did no such thing."

Nshalla scoffed at this. "By my reckoning that makes me two up."

Msavitar hissed and his eyes became slits. "Who cares what the score is? I have the knife. You will die."

"So the Empress gave you permission to kill her daughter?"

He hissed again. "No."

"Ah, so—"

"I am now a free man."

Nshalla mocked him. "So you
were
an agent of hers. I thought as much right from the start."

Enraged, he attacked. Nshalla, sensing his mood, had expected the lunge and dodged with the grace of a cheetah. As she had planned, the knife plunged into the wood of the door behind her. Msavitar spluttered, caught off balance. In three precise movements Nshalla kicked him in the groin, struck him to the ground and grabbed the dagger.

She crouched at his side, the blade at his throat. He groaned, clutching his balls.

"Move and you're dead," she whispered in his ear. He went limp. She could smell beer on his breath. And fear.

"Don't kill me, gracious royal petal," he whimpered. "Don't kill me. We'll balance the day. We shall call it quits, on the honour of my grandmother's dear memory. Only, please, please stay your gracious royal hand."

Nshalla pressed harder. He choked. "Answer some questions, then. Did my mother employ you?"

"Yes, oh yes, I swear it. She told me to bring you back to Accra. When an accident befell me with the static-box I was dismissed. It is the truth, I swear it."

"And did she send agents after Mnada?"

"Yes, yes. I overheard much—"

Nshalla bent lower. "Overheard?" She pulled the dagger across his throat, drawing a line of blood. "
Over
heard? You know what's going on, don't you?
Tell
me."

He could hardly speak for terror. "Mnada is making for Muezzinland. The Empress knows where it is. She said Mnada mustn't get there. There is a royal plot. Terrible things are afoot in the world, and the Empress is frightened of something. It involves the gods. Mnada was prepared from the day she was born. They put biograins inside her brain then. She must be caught."

Though shocked, Nshalla kept her grip. "Prepared? How do you know this? Prepared for what?"

"I overheard. She is to be her mother's psychic image. That is why she must be caught. I swear I know nothing else!"

"You knew all this and you didn't tell me? You fiend. You've got the brain of a louse."

"Don't hurt me—"

Nshalla pressed and sliced, then stabbed him in the chest.

He gurgled and fell back, arms aloft trying to grasp her clothes, an expression of horror upon his face. Nshalla bent and stabbed again, and again, and again.

Terror made him cough a bloody cough. He grabbed her feet and tried to pull her down, but he was too weak. Nshalla kicked him aside and stepped back.

The aether was transforming his death. A great fury made his face turn scarlet. Black motes of aether information radiated from his head while yellow motes smashed in, until only his staring bloodshot eyes could be seen, locking Nshalla's gaze into his own. There was a charnel smell in the air, and Nshalla retched. With the dagger still in her hand, she ran.

An alley led off the further end of the passage. Nshalla saw people. She put the dagger in a pocket.

She stumbled back to the Cocoa-Gold Inn.

~

In the morning, she confessed to Gmoulaye.

It was over in seconds. She had not meant to say anything. It was as if she had vomited the words. Her confession was a gut reaction.

Gmoulaye astonished her. "Well done! So the little, squirming, foul little rat is dead. Well done, Nshalla. This changes everything. I will go with you. I could not leave you to cross the Sahara alone. Last night I realised that, but this makes everything easier."

"Murder?"

Gmoulaye scoffed at this tremulous word. "Justified defence. He admitted he wanted to kill you."

Nshalla did not see it in quite those terms. "What shall we do?"

"Leave Timbuktu today. First, we need clothes. I suppose I shall have to cover myself. Then we shall locate Moustapha Cisse and head off into the sands."

Gmoulaye took charge. Before Nshalla knew what was happening she was out in the streets. They skirted the edge of the Dyingerey Ber District, where Msavitar had met his end. Nshalla felt a consuming paranoia. Everybody by now would have heard of the night's murder. People might remember that Msavitar entered town with two foreign women. "I feel terrible," she said. "We've got to leave, quick. I feel so
naked.
"

"I know how you feel," Gmoulaye remarked.

In Yobu Keyna, Gmoulaye bought desert robes dyed with indigo such as Tuareg nomads wore, along with headscarves, belts, and other garments. She also bought new waterskins, rations, and small bars of salt for bartering purposes. In a GloboMacintosh franchise she spent most of the remainder of her money on two new transputers, each with 128 Tb RAM, optical Q?Byte Store-U-Like drives rated at 800 Pb, both running fuzzy-meaning crunchers alongside vat-grown universal bioconnectors. From a back alley stall she bought two knives and two dart pistols.

Back at the Cocoa-Gold Inn they avoided Kemou, packed their meagre belongings, then departed dressed in their new clothes. Gmoulaye complained all the way to the mosque. "I am suffocating, I shall never survive. How can people wear all these clothes? It itches."

Nshalla asked a youth to fetch Moustapha. When he arrived he seemed to have forgotten who Nshalla was. "Ah, the young woman," he said. "Are you ready to go? I didn't think you were coming back."

Nshalla introduced Gmoulaye, then said, "Are you ready? We can go straight away."

"I'm afraid I'm not," he replied. "We'll leave in the afternoon." He pointed around the side of the mosque, gave them an antique steel key, and said, "Stay out of the sun awhile, in the Hole. It's the big white building. I shall see you later."

With trepidation Nshalla led the way. The building was a detatched structure of white mud. Inside lay a few pallets, some bales of fodder, and a few tankards. But at least it offered them a place to hide.

Nshalla now feared for her life. She could not believe what she had done. Like as not all the local aetheria members would be moslems and they would want to apply moslem law, which could mean the death penalty. By now a hunt would be in progress. Kemou might be questioned, and possibly Okonkwo.

Time passed with viscous slowness. At every footstep Nshalla checked to see if it was Moustapha. It never was. Only when the sun fell behind the roof of the Sankore Mosque did he appear, carrying waterskins, a cloth roll, and leather saddlebags.

He knocked on the door. At least he was polite.

"Nshalla? Gmoulaye? Time to depart."

Along the edge of the Bufurey District he led them, until they were walking through the huts and scattered dwellings of the Abaradyu area. Nobody paid them any attention. At length Moustapha stopped and pointed at a pen in which three groaning camels stood.

Through the slit in his headscarf he grinned at them. "The ship of the desert," he said.

Gmoulaye did not improve her standing in Moustapha's eyes when she asked, "Yes, but what are they?"

Interlude One

Twenty Six Years Ago…

The artificial womb had become opaque over the last few months, as it struggled to deal with the waste products of the child it carried. The Empress would come less often, since there was less to see; just a plastic lump now, brown like old blood, held by a framework of gleaming metal tapes and perspex rods dotted with dual New-Oriental/ Vietnamese pictsym. A midwife chosen, so it was rumoured, by the aetherial finger of Ataa Naa Nyongmo stood ready to manage the delivery. Any day now the womb would send out subtle emanations into the aether, then wait for a reply, and when that reply came, from a transputer loaded up with a natal database, Mnada would be born.

That was the theory. Since it had never been attempted before, nobody knew if it would work.

Today the reply came.

The Empress was called when faint nebulae were seen falling into the aerial complex at the top of the womb. These nebulae were in the shape of animals, elephants, monkeys, termites and others of Ghanaian origin, and so it was known that a cultural event was about to happen. This could only mean the birth of Mnada.

When the Empress arrived the womb was broadcasting aetherial material, as the source-identity of its control transputer awoke from a nine month dream to realise that a zygote had become an infant. Culling feminine wisdom from the natal database, the womb prepared to expel the life inside it.

Mnada was born with the minimum of fuss, examined by the midwife, then,  wrapped in simple cotton, handed over to her mother.

I-C-U Tompieme stood at the back of the chamber. The Empress took Mnada for him to see. "What do you think?" she asked.

"Your majesty, the infant takes after you," he replied. This made the Empress laugh out loud.

"There are others in this room who know about this," she said, a serious look coming to her face.

"Yes, your majesty. Unfortunate."

"See to them."

The Empress took Mnada away to make some videos of her, that the general populace know there was an heir to the throne of Ghana. These were broadcast dusk to dawn in rotation over the local optical web. Images were printed up from the best video shots and distributed to every door in the city. A few were made for distribution in outlying villages.

West Aphrica 13-04-2130

The Empress sat silent in the audience room of Accra palace as I-C-U Tompieme stood, head bowed, waiting for her to speak. Judging by his compressed lips and rigid body he was suffering from the artificial equivalent of a fit of nerves.

"So all three agents failed," said the Empress.

"Yes, your majesty."

"There is only one course of action, my transputer-shaman. You must go north to deal with this crisis."

"I shall leave immediately, your majesty."

The Empress continued, "Mnada must be captured at all costs, and Nshalla said she saw Mnada in Timbuktu. Without Mnada, Muezzinland is nothing, and that means our method for controlling the gods is also nothing. As for Nshalla, she should be captured or killed."

"Your perspicacity is legendary, your majesty."

"So is my quick temper. Your mission must not fail. You will return here only with Mnada. No other outcome will be satisfactory."

I-C-U Tompieme paused, then said as if thinking deeply, "At least there is a clear method. I shall have to reside temporarily inside an external soul. I can last for some weeks in such a state, before the aether claims me and I become a corporeal entity again."

"What form will you choose?"

"Something Ghanaian, that Nshalla will recognise as a good omen. But nothing too ostentatious. I shall take the symbolic form of the goddess Ashiakle—a canoe of gold, decorated with red copper and white neoprene. For as long as Nshalla keeps this object I will be able to influence the affairs of the vicinity, and so capture Mnada. Once she is secure, I will call for a psycopter, and in scant hours she will be here at the palace."

"That seems good," said the Empress. "As for the gods themselves, do nothing to undermine their appearance."

I-C-U Tompieme bowed. "I shall communicate through the aether. Keep a suitable aerial in this room, that my thoughts do not go astray."

With that, he departed the audience room. At the end of the corridor outside he saw a palace servant sweeping the floor, an old negro from downtown. He approached. She looked up at him with fear in her eyes.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Just sweeping the floor, sir."

I-C-U Tompieme lashed out with one arm and crushed her against the wall. She collapsed. With his razor thumbnail he slit her throat, then pulled down a wall hanging and laid her on it, that the floor not be needlessly stained with blood. The woman gurgled, and the blood leaked out of her body until her heart stopped pumping.

I-C-U Tompieme surveyed his work. He spoke to the corpse, saying, "This is what I shall do to you, Nshalla. You have shamed me before the Empress. I will be avenged. Through the aether I will control your surroundings, until you are in my net and I can pounce." Contemptuously he kicked the corpse. "You are nothing. You are nothing compared with your superior sister. Hah! You are not even fit to be called her sister, because you partake of your father."

He paused, then glanced up and down the empty corridor. Quickly, he fetched plastic binbags and wrapped the body, before dumping it on the rubbish heap outside.

Chapter 9

Moustapha led them without complaint through the gravel desert north of Timbuktu, and while he did not enthuse about them and their 'difficulty', by which he meant journey, neither did he seek to abuse or even discredit them. He treated them as relations. The name Muezzinland meant nothing to him.

As for the camels, they plodded across the desert at their standard speed. Their saddles were high prowed affairs, set with red and yellow cloths and carrying leather bags. Nshalla soon got used to hers. Gmoulaye found her clothes more of an irritation. If Moustapha wore his long gandurah robe with flair, Gmoulaye wore hers with petulance, complaining when the indigo dye came off on her skin, constantly at war with the sand that tickled her flesh and set her teeth on edge, kicking the camel with bare feet if it did anything to upset her.

Moustapha took it all in his stride. An old man, he had seen his fair share of discontents. "The sand is like a bed at night," he said. "The ships of the desert are like oases. We will eat dates."

To which Gmoulaye replied, "Do you serve them with anything other than sand and grit," which made him laugh out loud.

"I am more stolid," he replied. "My home is in Aoulef el Arab, in Algeria Centrale-Sable, and there we accept the inevitable."

"Then you travel the desert alot?" Nshalla asked.

"As a marabout it is my sacred task to spread the word of Allah far and wide."

"Have you heard any reports of shapeshifters?"

Through the slit in his headscarf he stared at her. "Why do you ask?"

It sounded as if he had seen something. Nshalla had intended explaining her reasoning, as she had to Captain Nfor, but instead she said, "I'm expecting to hear about one."

"There is more about you than meets the eye," Moustapha said. "There have been reports of a rogue shapeshifter around Timbuktu, but it is said the creature left yesterday."

"She made north, I think."

He seemed intrigued. "Correct. How do you know all this?"

"I suspect the shapeshifter is my sister. That's who I'm trailing. We've got to find her. It's a long story, but she's been released—or she's released herself—from a stifling place. Her identity crisis will manifest itself as chaotic patterns of personality. She'll assume many different identities." Nshalla shook her head. "Shapeshifters are always damaged people. We have to find and heal my sister."

Moustapha gazed north. "There are clusters of aether aerials at oases and palmeries, but little else in the desert. She will most likely make for more concentrated aether radiations. The reports I have heard speak of a shadow, a ghost in the night, stealing food and water, disturbing camels, shrieking and wailing."

Nshalla smiled. This desert shapeshifter could be some local, some mentally ill patient escaped from a padlocked room, but, in her heart, she knew it was Mnada. The facts fitted. The timing was right. Mnada had not yet found Muezzinland.

"Will she make for Sidi Maktar oasis?" she asked Moustapha.

"I cannot say. She is human. She will need to drink."

Nshalla said nothing more. Their first stop, Dayet en Naharat Oasis, was still two days away. As the sun set they made camp in a hollow.

The temperature dropped rapidly. The camels only carried tinderwood for cooking since it was not yet the season of nocturnal frosts, but even wrapped in her bedroll Nshalla was cold. Above her she saw for the first time the true colours of the stars, twinkling with subtle hues, every one different; and she understood why the Arabs loved astronomy. The clear air of the desert seemed to bring the stars closer. She could almost grasp them. To the sound of gurgling camel stomachs, she dozed off.

When she woke at dawn the end of her nose was cold. Her face ached. Moustapha was up, checking his camels, but Gmoulaye was still asleep. For breakfast they ate sweet olives and bitter pancakes, and brewed a can of coffee. Moustapha was good manners epitomised. He smoked tobacco, standing well away from them and looking in the other direction, which allowed them to complete their toilet without embarrassment.

The day passed as had the previous one. After a quiet night they carried on. Evening brought them to the first eyes planted in the semi-soft ground, set alongside clusters of aether aerials emerging from brown orbs like shoots from a coconut. A kilometre away, Nshalla saw glimpses of green.

Dayet en Naharat Oasis was a sunken area, a palmerie, and from the desert, even perched on their camels, they could only see the tops of its date palms. This was a Tuareg stronghold. Negro imrad vassals carried baskets of dry sand from the depths of the oasis and emptied them at the circumference. A few nonchalant Tuareg guards stood watching. Inside, through the lush foliage, Nshalla could see camels, houses, huts and dogs.

Moustapha turned to them. "You are black people," he said, "and will be treated with less respect than you are used to. Keep yourselves covered. If you are frightened, invoke purdah. But I am your guardian and as long as these people know that they will leave you unharmed."

Approaching, Moustapha called out in the Tamasheq tongue. The Tuareg seemed unconcerned, letting them enter the oasis without so much as a glance.

Nshalla felt nervous. This was an almost Biblical society. In the north it would be different—there would be cities—but here all was sand and harsh words and tough men smoking tobacco. Not a good place for Ghanaian women.

Moustapha found them a bedding place in a hut owned by an acquaintance of his. He advised them to bar the door. Nshalla felt like the enemy, but the night passed without incident. She heard guffawing men, crackling fires, and the plunking of cow-skin lutes, the swishing tico tioco, hand drums, and warbling flutes mixed into an exotic music.

They discovered next morning that nobody would even consider acting as guide to Sidi Maktar. "I fear you are own your own," Moustapha told them. "Go back to Timbuktu. A detour around the oasis would be tricky, and nobody here will attempt the open desert, full as it is with ghouls, voices, and other insane denizens."

"Are there no other options?" asked Gmoulaye.

"It's Sidi Maktar or a detour through the paltry oases of Eastern Mauretania."

Nshalla shrugged. "We're not to be put off."

Moustapha shook his head. He seemed upset. "I will lead you to Touerat Oasis, but you will never find a guide. I won't like to see you walk to your deaths."

"Just don't stop us," Nshalla warned.

"Is there an optical link from Touerat north to Araouane?" asked Gmoulaye.

"None," Moustapha replied. "Few oases of Dogon Mali are linked to their neighbours. You were thinking of calling for help? Touerat is linked back to this oasis, and this oasis back to Timbuktu, but other than that…"

They returned to their hut. On the way they passed the open window of a hut, and Nshalla was stopped short by an object entirely unexpected. Gmoulaye saw it too, and approached in amazement.

"Is it?" asked Nshalla.

"It is," Gmoulaye replied. "Ashiakle's canoe!"

The fifteen-centimetre canoe had been placed on an exposed ledge by the owner of the hut, along with local fetishes and some stone bowls.

"We must have it," Gmoulaye insisted, "it is an omen of good luck."

The owner of the hut, an old woman, told them that it had come to her in a bundle of trading objects, but she could not remember if it was recent. A price was agreed and the canoe was bought. It was gold plated, decorated with red copper and white neoprene. Gmoulaye carried it, vowing it would never leave her pocket.

A hot day led to a cool evening. Tired, lying on her back next to a camel, for a wind was blowing as if whisked up by a distant duststorm, Nshalla toyed with one of the transputers, protecting it from sand by putting it into its polythene bubble.

"Hawatif!"

The voice whispered close to her left ear. She jumped, startled. Nobody there.

"Hawatif."

Right ear.

Nshalla lay on her back with her eyes open, waiting.

From the air a shape materialised. Nshalla shrank against the camel.

The figure held out one hand. "Don't be afraid. We are with you, Nshalla."

It must be a dream. Nshalla waited for more. The figure, a slender man, was becoming solid even as she watched, rippling slightly like a defunct video screen, colours interlacing. He was tall, faint as if he was some metres distant, and he danced without ceasing to the beat of an inaudible djembe. Yet Nshalla could hear his whispering voice perfectly. Behind him rippled the form of a rainbow-coloured snake.

"At last you've come into short range," he said.

"Who are you?"

"An aetherial friend. Don't be frightened."

Nshalla saw nothing to be frightened of, though she was tense. "Don't make sudden moves," she said.

He danced on as he spoke. "I won't. I am a hatifa. I have been waiting for you. It was I, clothed as Anansi the Spider, who saved you from the static radiation at Ashanti City—"

"You? Saved?"

"Yes. And I distracted the aether locusts. There is much we hawatif want to tell you. A struggle is in progress, and you are on our side."

Nshalla felt this to be a little forward. "So you say. What is a hatifa exactly?"

"A voice in the desert, whose zone you have entered. The aether is changing. Your mother has a plan and we think you can discover what it is. It involves your sister. That is why you must find her as soon as possible. She must not be allowed to enter Muezzinland—"

"You know where it is?"

"We can only manifest in the Sahara," said the hatifa, "where our aether is located. We have some influence outside—"

"In other words no."

The hatifa smiled. "Mnada is not so far away."

"Who are you exactly?"

To this the hatifa replied, "Symbols cannot exist in a vacuum. When the aether appeared almost a century ago it was a vast tabula rasa, weak, yet able to accept hierarchies of meaning. Now it is full, full to bursting. Those hierarchies of meaning are evolving, because now they experience, not a tabula rasa, but a vivid, intense, cultural environment. A virtual evolution is in progress."

"But you?"

"We are virtual people. We are not like human beings, but we can simulate you very well. In fact, we can simulate you so well that we can deceive both you and ourselves. By experiencing this conversation I am deceiving myself into believing that I am real. That in essence is my function. If I do not deceive myself into believing that I am experiencing existence, I dissipate into the aether. My motivation comes from this deception. So perhaps I am real."

Nshalla said, "Go on."

"That is all. We perceive a threat to our environment. Your mother is part of that threat."

"How?"

"That is what we want to know."

Nshalla considered this revelation. It could be a trap. But the man seemed sincere, guileless. Transparent. Nshalla, remembering what Msavitar had admitted, felt that the man was telling the truth. But she wanted far more information.

She said, "A bad man told me that my mother wanted to make Mnada into her heir—her psychic image."

"That is a foul, immoral thing to do."

"And this man said that mother's plot was to do with our Aetheria."

The hatifa nodded. "This we suspected. Prepare yourself for a shock, daughter of the Empress of Ghana."

"What?"

"Your mother is very, very special. She is one of the five Aetheria members comprising the Aetherium. With them, she is reorganising the civilised world."

This was too much to believe. Nshalla could not comprehend it. She shook her head, looked away, then stared down at the sand. "So you say," she said. "So you say."

She looked up to find that the apparition had faded to leave just a name floating like black leaves in the wind: Assane Atangana. Her eyes ached. She was lying against the camel. Had it been a dream?

She felt as if she was in a fantasy. For years she had seen the Aetherium as a fabulous company of myth, hidden, shrouded by secrecy, directors of the Pacific Rim world and scourge of the rest. That she, Nshalla, should be so intimately related to the sanctified centre was too fantastic. She could not take it in. To accept it as a truth she would have to become part of a myth. Yet she was real. Normal. An ordinary woman from a backwater…

The rest of the night passed peacefully. The wind abated and the desert became silent, except for the yelping of sand foxes and the hissing of innumerable grains across one another. In the morning Nshalla saw hopping jerboas, and a lizard.

She said nothing about virtual Assane to the others. Still numb from his words she pondered in silence what he had divulged.

In the afternoon they reached Touerat Oasis. Moustapha found them safe accomodation in a store hut; situated next to an artesian well, it lay away from living quarters, and thus was quiet. They waited for Moustapha to return. From the back of the hut Nshalla could see the extent of the oasis. Not so large as Dayet en Naharat Oasis, it nonetheless seemed greener, and amid the date palms she could see cereal crops and ground-hugging cacti.

As dusk swept over the desert, Moustapha came to talk with them. "It is not good," he said. "Nobody will risk Sidi Maktar Oasis. They talk of mad voices, desert mirages that entrance and kill, and razor-beaked vultures. Everybody says it is insane. Please don't go, for you will become lost in the desert and die quickly."

Nshalla shook her head. "We have more desert lore than you might imagine," she said.

"This I cannot imagine," Moustapha replied. "You are foreigners. You are throwing your lives away. Nobody will pity you and relent. Nobody will be a guide."

"We have guides in unusual places," Nshalla said. "Don't stop us. We know what we're doing."

Gmoulaye glanced at her, and Moustapha caught something of her feelings. "Your friend thinks not," he said. "You are headstrong, Nshalla, imagining that you can do what the Tuareg can do."

Nshalla shrugged. "In the end, it's none of your affair."

"That is cruel!" he replied. "I helped you from the goodness of my soul. You owe it to me not to do this rash thing."

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